Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Love-improper, in Deed: Review of Sentient Flesh

2023; Penn State University Press; Volume: 60; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/complitstudies.60.1.0013

1528-4212

Sora Han,

Musicology and Musical Analysis

Free jazz saxophonist, Archie Shepp, offers us a formulation of law and improvisation while describing what he saw as the “new thing” embodied by Don Cherry on trumpet in 1966.The rules Shepp refers to here are those applicable to Cherry’s development, as in his performance in “When Will the Blues Leave,”2 or “Una Muy Bonita,”3 of “the lyrical implications of a music without chords.”4 But they also reference how Shepp perhaps would later associate the source of such intelligence for creating “musical ideas,” irreducible to “intellectual meaning,” with “the very idea that the history of the spirituals and the earliest slave songs were carried on in our [black] music . . .. The cries, the hollers, the work, the passion, our oppression as a people.”5 From the use of rules, the obeying and breaking of them, and inclusive of the consequences of both, emerges the radically new in play, bound up, especially for Shepp, with his radical activism across the span of his career, and the renown Shepp–Dixon Quartet’s performance at the Helsinki Youth Festival in 1962.6I open my review of R. A. Judy’s Sentient Flesh7 with Shepp’s in situ analysis of free jazz to invoke a certain confluence of historical periods, artistic and political movements, and geographic frames brought into the ambit of thought between the two about improvisation as intelligent way. This confluence is the only way to enter the language of Sentient Flesh, and demands that we read (with) a certain exhaustiveness of practice necessary for collective thought and expression to reveal the limits of world history, approximately referenced by Shepp as “the past.” Participation in Sentient Flesh’s language becomes the exercise of another side to this exhaustiveness: an indefatigable will to continue to think in the confluence of those very limits which move through grammatology as some other modality of generative thought, para-semiosis, that all cultural study bears as radical potential.Judy ascertains the navel of improvisation in a formulation from Du Bois’s 1905 essay, “Sociology Hesitant,” which holds that “A Categorial Imperative pushed all thought toward the Paradox: 1. The evident rhythm of human action; 2. The evident incalculability in human action” (qtd. in Judy 94). Elaborating on the “Du Boisian paradox” (325) of intelligence between rhythm and incalculability, Judy emphasizes its necessary active identification with “immeasurable chance” or “uncalculable variable” (96) from within the near totalizing regulation of symbolic systems, and especially by myth. Insofar as this intelligence is characterized by irresolvable opposition, and unexpectedness, its temporality is some combination of the forever, a restless present, and the unforeseeable. And it is precisely this recombinant temporality that endows intelligence with improvisational capacity. This is a plural mode of thought which cannot be made into an axiom, law, or rule, but can only be practiced immanent to symbolic systems structured by the antagonism of slavery and colonialism condensed into and as the figure of “‘the Negro’” (xiv).The structural effects of this paradox produce an improvisational “flow” (393) such that we might “no longer [be] concerned” with ontology, “para or otherwise” (394). In one of many sensational moments of the text, Judy demonstrates that paraontology “is divisible by para-semiosis” (392), and so too, then, is metaphysical thought divisible by poiēsis, blackness by sentience, and bodies by flesh. Divisibility, differentiation, and multiple multiplicities engendered by “the Du Boisian sense of Negro as indicial of a dynamic thinking-in-action that is at once incomprehensible to the philosophical discourse of ontology and dubious of it” (385) will always disorder the desire for a one (a unifying principle, a universal characteristic, a singular example, a final synthesis, etc. of and for “free Man”). Sentient Flesh compels us to lose our concern with ones, and a parallax of the as-yet unknowable of “slave energeia” (385) becomes newly thinkable. Here, that which is uncalculable, even as it has been subject to the most tortuous forms of calculation, might initiate nonindividuated forms of regard for how we have already been laboring at a more fundamental semiological register in which survival and living consist of improvisational forms. Such is the regard that opens up with the many exemplars that anchor the book’s parts, and in the many breaks the book produces between law and chance. This is poiēsis in black, the movements of the thought of some unnamable “we” at the limits of Afropessimist critiques of radical left humanisms.“Once we have left the line of philosophical ontology,” Judy promises, “the more generative question may be broached: What does the para-semiosis of poiēsis in black have in common with other embodiments of flesh?” (417). This is not a simple question to answer, let alone understand, insofar as the issue of determining commonness, in substance and/or form, is overdetermined by a naturalized conflation between humanity and proprietary capacity. But wanting to stay the course, I would restate the question to be able to offer a response by returning to what I believe is at stake in the concept of para-semiosis, and thus, the question of other flesh.If para-semiosis consists of effects of a semiological subject with the capacity to think of and through the “incalculable variable” from within subjective and objective reifications of the signifier into so many signs (across natural languages, anthropological archives, philosophical rhetorics, historical narratives, political imaginaries, and cultural expressions of desire), then practices and not merely conscious statements of identification with the “incalculable variable” are the opening up of a para-semiotic field by an enduring form of response to a calling of the blues, or “sentient flesh dancing” (215–61). In this way, para-semiosis is a more precise theoretical and performative articulation of a structure of blackness driving work and works, poiēsis, which are “in black” because para-semiosis is a blues field lived in modalities of service to the unfinished abolition of slavery and colonialism and their afterlives on world-scales.With this long prelude, my restatement of the question: What other embodiments of flesh performatively bear poiēsis that regenerate the para-semiotic field of blackness? How do other embodiments of flesh carry the possibility of identifying with the Du Boisian Paradox, neither only rhythm nor only the uncalculable, but the entire social ecology of an earthly ensemble of the blues? Many will take up this or that other flesh and wonder, as I do here. But a good faith answer must spare not love-improper (419–457): offer, without condition or consideration, a self as a signifier without synthesis, without exclusivity, and without completion. If upon reading Sentient Flesh, all selves were to be made into such gifts, its 597 pages will have undammed the waters of philosophy, history, writing, and interpretation, as it has of my mind and body.Here, moves the para-semiological fleshly subject of earthly blues traditions. Its partiality and divisibility destines so many failures of proper and propriety subjectivity. And so, too, does it destine revolutionary crossings, like the moon reflected multipliciously and without flaw at once in the smallest drops of water and the vastest of seas. This ethics is given in taking up a phrase as slight as Windham’s words, “us is human flesh” (qtd. in Judy 1) to disassemble the whole of discourse Enlightenment universalisms, the recent critical turn to and against ontology, and their foundational dependence on separating the improvisational vernacular choreography of thought from the writing of history and philosophy, politics and law, and even poetry and music. Hereinafter, what I will refer to as Windham’s Covenant marks a kind of semiological contract with or promise to this partiality as the only way to know the reality of everything in the wake of such cosmic collision produced by Judy’s repetition of Windham’s four words across his analyses of Du Bois’s literary figures, John and Submissive Man, Spillers’s signifying lyrics of theory, and the relay between Nabile Farés and James Baldwin. Here, flesh and poetics are one and the same precisely because of the hollows they haptically mark, share and carry with them in their every contact with and via what I have elsewhere referred to as the nonperformative nature of contractual freedom.8 By Judy’s quest to honor Windham’s covenant as para-semiotic signifier, we are stirred to join this “circumambulation” (219) with our own words, and perhaps all words, in any language, and in all languages. The sexual economies of enjoyment upon which racial slavery and colonialism, Christianity and Reason, are predicated, discipline and compel this circumambulation, a form of disobedient existence emergent in a global context, or a form of human thought and action without a name: “human flesh.” The stakes are precisely about how flesh, with its form-shifting proprioceptive sentience, enables para-semiotic flow and cannot but yield a libidinal intelligence that send us on a quest to know differently in a dense field opened when the blues quake the sign.This brings me to two related paths of para-semiosis that I can only sketch out here. The first concerns how Judy floods semiological limits with apophatic matters of the Real where he forces Lacan to think with Du Bois (384); and the second concerns how the calling of the blues requires new modes of writing of and with world folk cultures today. As Judy notes, Lacan did not (or perhaps could not) fully develop and explicate the implications of how his theory of the unconscious laid waste not only to philosophy’s ontological discourse, but as well, to the premise of individuated subjectivity and the “univocity of formula” (327) for psychoanalysis. If it is easy to pinpoint how the institution of psychoanalysis succumbs to bourgeois individualism, both philosophically and clinically, then the question raised by Judy’s critique of Lacan is precisely how one displaces this pervasive outcome.The how is in how Judy listens. The aural materiality, or the sonicity of signifiers, which is to say, unconscious speech, of the cases which ground Judy’s and Lacan’s studies matter profoundly. This means that the discourse of mid-nineteenth to early twentieth-century black folk music becomes a form of unconscious speech from which we are able to experience, via Judy’s writing of it, a different procedure of knowing through listening. The first chapter, “Sentient Flesh Dancing,” sets the tone of listening to what was sung and danced in order to pose the unassimilable knot of knowing what history, philosophy, music, and cultural identity retain as the unrecordable. This unrecordability creates all sorts of bends and swerves in these discourses. It initiates a set of notations from which Judy culls the “remarkable thing” (169) at the center of which is Windham’s Covenant, differentially marking the inadequacy of transcription, scoring, phonographic recording, ethnography, and even live performance by the very people who lived in these specific places in the South. This is all to return over and over again to what, in particular, makes black folk song sound the way it does.Lacan was at pains to teach aspiring analysts how (not) to listen, even as he seemed to resign from verbal communication in his later seminars. In his middle work, however, Lacan has a fascinating discussion of the Buddhist deity, Avalokiteśvara. Lacan tells us that Kumārajīva’s (344–413 CE) translation in The Lotus of the True Law of the Sanskrit name, meaning “he who hears the world’s laments” (225), to Chinese, as Guanshiyin or Guanyin, meaning “she who is considerate, who goes, who accords” (225), was the occasion for her sexed representation. During his demonstration of how feminization emerges in translation, Lacan throws up the character, 観 (guan).9 This character is in fact the Japanese simplified shinjitai version of the Chinese character 觀, meaning “observe or see.” Because Lacan does not refer at the outset to the deity with her Japanese name, Kan’on, Lacan’s reference to Guanyin bears a curious translational bungle in a moment of linguistic and cultural unfamiliarity connoted by the Asianness of Chinese script, but as well, an association he literally draws between the difficulty or enigmatic nature of psychoanalytic listening and a mystical feminine form of desire.From a Frenchman’s speech, we are able to locate a kind of difficulty with fully registering the signifierness of Chinese writing when he reduces guan to sign. This raises the question of what is lost or gained through a certain function of simplification or reduction in writing across worlds of writing. What is lost between China and Japan with Lacan’s character is not only the presence of the possibilities of archaic signification, but specifically, the image and idea of the stork bird, 雚, depicted in the first part of the compound Chinese character 觀 (guan). As is commonly known, the stork is a voiceless bird. What we should explicitly note here is that the symbolic meaning given to the mysticism of feminine desire, or the feminization of divinity, in the figure of Guanyin, is predicated on a certain graphic link between a voiceless bird and observation and seeing, or listening and knowing.The translational elision of the stork by Lacan’s character is replaced by the question, “so, it is a man or a woman?” (227), particularly pronounced, according to Lacan, in the Japanese context. Noting the androgyny of Guanyin becomes an opportunity for him to expound on feminine desire, which is neither that of a man nor a woman, but a divinity or mysticism of feminine desire as that which is necessarily “effaced” (226) in the deity’s unsettled or nonsingle Chinese names, Guanyin and Guanshiyin. The effaced part of the name that subjects the name to division is the Chinese character, 世 (shi), meaning “world.” This glyph is a pictogram representing three leaves on a branch, an ideogrammic compound depiction of 十, the character for “ten,” three times, to represent thirty years, and thus, meaning “generation, epoch, or lifetime.” It is this partiality of the Chinese name that Lacan attributes to the experience of “quivering” in the viewer’s “effusive gaze” (227) when beholding the statue in person.Lacan goes on to discuss the character 音 (yin), of Guanyin, which he tells us, are the world’s “tears or its laments” (226). As he describes the physical features of the statue, we learn that in response to Guanyin’s regard, she, a stone, cries. “The slit of the eye on this statue has disappeared over the centuries due to the more or less daily kneading it endures from the hands of the nuns of the convent, where it is the most precious treasure, when they think to dry the tears of this figure of archetypal divine recourse” (228). As Guanyin listens to the cries of a suffering so total that it effaces the character for “world” or “lifetime” and splits the name, other flesh leave their trace on the surface of a rock, now gleaming with their touch. Lacan’s 観, neither mathēme nor hieroglyph, but dystranslated writing, supports Judy’s suggestion that an encounter with sentient flesh is not an encounter with the Real, but is “the point of untranslatability that the irreducible living flesh is traced as such” (384). Insofar as untranslatability is made manifest, especially by the sound and touch of languages, or by the polishing of stone that cries, the sentience which remains as untranslatable produces a profound divisibility of the name. Untranslatability stirs an unnamable practice of listening into the para-semiological field.It returns me to the first word I imagine I would need to be able to translate the untranslatable of Sentient Flesh into Korean. The para-semiotic field swerves, and I am caught in a dystranslation of the Korean term for oral folktales, 구비 문학 (gubimunhak). The authors of the Encyclopedia of Korean Folk Literature translate this term into English as “oral stele literature.”10 Stele, an archaeological term, is an ancient stone slab, usually engraved or inscribed with text, and used as a marker or monument. This Korean definition of oral literature emphasizes how the live performative dimension of transmission uses words or ideas that endure like stele. Their tellings are constituted by words that have the capacity to survive the transformations and ruination of time. By now, we know the source of this capacity is improvisation, and so we go, the sentience of the flesh of Judy’s thought, the sentience of my dystranslation, our mutually differentiating thinking-in-action, concretizing a love-improper as just this.Written in hanja, gubimunhak is 口碑文學. The first character is Kangxi radical #30, depicting the “open mouth.” The second is a phono-semantic compound, the first part of which depicts a stone beneath a cliff, or a cave set into the side of a mountain. This is the character closest to the Greek word, stele. The second part of the character is its phonetic reference, and depicts a servant with a fan. The third character is Kangxi radical #67, which represents the idea of writing in a picture of a man with an open chest. Historically, the oldest version of this character in oral bone script (ancient Chinese script dating back to the second millennium BC)11 represented the figure with a painted or tattooed chest. And finally, the fourth character is an ideogrammic compound, the upper part of which depicts two marks or cuts, 爻, between mingling hands, 𦥑, and the lower part of which depicts a child underneath a roof.The overall scene that comes into view through this etymological hanja foray is a distinctly embodied form of literature, involving not only anatomical reference, but what I want to interpret as an erogeneity driving the practice of telling, writing, and ultimately, study. In this dystranslation, oral capacity is joined with an object as physically hard and inanimate as a stone and put in motion as a falling fragment or a burrowing hollow on a surface; and writing, permanently both there and absent as flesh either marked or missing signifies a knowledge awaited by the body as a vessel. All this is achieved through a doing that affects the multiplicious nature of a mark. In this scene, the character of animate and inanimate matter necessary for oral folk transmission is of perpetual polymorphic hands-on play in and of the interval between emptiness and form constituting mark-making.The anatomical body extends from the hands of a servant or child to mark the movement of air with wind and breath. If this anatomical body feels in this practice of telling , writing, and study, the perceptual capacity of flesh and erogeneity are paramount to understanding both what of and how oral folk cultures survive the violence of historical progress, and how this in turn radically opens up modern and contemporary practices of survival in the most obscene and brutal ongoing circumstances of racial slavery and settler colonialism. Dance, fanning, clapping, beating, and flight are inseparable from any definition of oral folk literature, even as it is lost in translating gubimunhak archaeologically.The Juba and the Buzzard Lope, on the one hand, and salpuri, a shamanistic Korean folk dance, on the other, para-semiotically cross each other in the signifier, 學, of my dystranslation of gubimunhak. They are performances in and of absolutely different historical contexts of enslavement and colonial domination and thus, utterly unique and conceptually irresolvable to and with each other as like forms. At the same time, their infragraphic association or comingling in the idea of oral folk dance challenge us to persist in the para-semiological field, our movements through which yield other inscriptions of flesh. 學: a survivance, a poiēsis, a translation in black. By movement here, I am referring not to modern notions of political or social movements that constitute democratic governance, but the physical, libidinal transmissions of sounding flesh at scales so massive and minuscule they meet by vibration, hum, whistle, swish, murmur, rumble, chant, and roar. These haptic residues of para-semiosis support more “proper” political or social mobilizations of action and thought with a desire that flows in mutinous movement at every scale of signification. Sentient Flesh is a dossier of poiēsis in black, the coming of a radical global political primer in poiēsis for “a widespread mode of human being” (xviii)—“I para-semiosis, you para-semiosis, they para-semiosis, we para-semiosis . . .” (392)—scored to improvisationally associate flesh, in deeds of love-improper.