A-Anti-Antigonick

As predicted, Greece is having its Antigone revolution in refusing to abide by the Law in favor of kinship. For the majority who voted for Syriza and other anti-memorandum parties, mutual aid outweighs obligations to creditors. In the first days of this project, you may recall, I was very taken with a reworking of the Antigone legend in the context of the global social movements by Italian performance group Motus. The proper treatment of the dead body was later visualized by the Egyptian video collective Mosireen. And so when the chant “A-Anti-Anticapitalista” became the subject of a later post, I rewrote it in my head in my geeky way to go “A-Anti-Antigone.” Amazon knows that I am interested in Antigone now and when Ann Carson’s new book Antigonick was published this week, they told me. And this was uncanny because I am known as Nick to my friends.

Actually, what the book, a reworked translation of Antigone, is called is open to question. The cover says:

  ANTIGO              NICK

But the inside front page and Library of Congress listing have Antigonick. You won’t notice that at first because you will be admiring the beauty of the book.

The text was hand-inked on the page, in black and red ink [so red in quotes does not now indicate a hyperlink] then photographed–it’s a bit smudgy sometimes but very striking.

Bianca Scott has produced overlay color drawings that intersperse the text on translucent paper. The only book I can remember seeing like this recently was by the artist Cai Guo Qiang and indeed this one was printed in China (no further details are given). Without being unkind, there’s a story about labor, costs and outsourcing there that might interest Antigonick.

Then you notice that this is not at all a literal translation. It begins wonderfully (Carson’s caps):

[ENTER ANTIGONE AND ISMENE] ANTIGONE: WE
BEGIN IN THE DARK AND BIRTH IS THE DEATH OF
US. ISMENE: WHO SAID THAT ANTIGONE: HEGEL
ISMENE:SOUNDS MORE LIKE BECKETT ANTIGONE: HE
WAS PARAPHRASING HEGEL ISMENE: I DON’T THINK
SO

Carson reminds us that a legend is always a question of how you tell it. And that this is a play, a text to be performed. In the list of characters we find:

Nick  a mute part [always onstage, he measures things.]

We’ll come back to him in a minute. The references to Beckett and Hegel tell us that we can’t hear Antigone as if we were ancient Greeks. This is a modern drama now. Isn’t it just.

KREON TO ANTIGONE :YOU KNEW IT WAS AGAINST
THE LAW ANTIGONE:
                 WELL IF YOU CALL THAT LAW

By the unspoken convention (Nick’s measures), words in red have so far indicated the names of characters. It’s not too much to say that the LAW is a character in Antigone. Or it could also be “just” an emphasis. Or it could be an emphasis on the just, over the law.

Such undecidability is of course contrary to Hegel, who held that

in a drama [spiritual powers] enter in their simple and fundamental character and they oppose one another.

It might be thought that the drama of Oedipus was a (literally) classic example. But it depends. In a review in the New York Review of Books (paywall), Peter Green points out that it was held that Oedipus’s father Laius was attracted to:

Pelops’ son Chrysippus, and carried him off in the first (but by no means the last) homosexual abduction known to Greek myth. Pelops cursed Laius; and the latter’s death at the hands of his son, who then unwittingly married his mother Jocasta, was the working out of this curse.

In this version, the Oedipus complex is more complicated and less decidable than it’s usually allowed to be. Again, as Judith Butler has emphasized, when Antigone talks of her brother, she could be describing Oedipus because they share the same mother. The Oedipus complex was always already queer.

And that LAW thing isn’t just the law of the father. Today Alex Tsiras of Syriza said of Greece “we are going directly to hell,” meaning a living death underground. Which is what happened to Antigone. As Carson reminds us, the myth has power today because it still affects us. She uses words like ANARCHY where the standard translation uses “unruly.” She talks of the “state of exception.” How to measure that?

In the nick. In the nick of time. By Nick.

Eurydike, Creon’s wife, mother of Haimon who Antigone was to marry, has famously few lines in Sophocles. One speech, five lines.

Carson has her speak much longer, with a riff on Virginia Woolf. Then she asks a question about Antigone [the spacing isn’t right in the quote, the lines are alternately indented but WordPress won’t allow that measure, sorry]:

BUT HOW CAN SHE DENY
THE
RULE
TO
WHICH
SHE
IS
AN
EXCEPTION                                               IS SHE
AUTOIMMUNE. NO SHE IS NOT.    HAVE YOU HEARD
THE EXPRESSION    THE NICK OF TIME WHAT IS A
NICK

What indeed? The OED gives us an astonishingly long entry. It refers to a notch, a cut, a groove, whether in a machine, a tool, wood or an animal. It can refer to the vagina, as in various Jacobean dramas cited by OED. Then it is also the precise moment, later the nick of time. It is essential, what is aimed at. You can also go to the nick, a jail or prison, and be beset by Old Nick, the devil.

At the end of the play, NICK still on stage MEASURING. Measuring the collapse of autoimmunity, the collapse of debt’s capital, the capitals of debt.

Like in Beckett, who crops up here, Imagination Dead Imagine:

No trace anywhere of life, you say, pah, no difficulty there, imagination not dead yet, yes, dead, good, imagination dead imagine. Islands, waters, azure, verdure, one glimpse and vanished, endlessly, omit. Till all white in the whiteness the rotunda. No way in, go in, measure. Diameter three feet, three feet from ground to summit of the vault.

 

Measuring, counting the debt in the living tomb that is the Troika’s Greece, there we find A-Anti-Antigonick. An odd creature.

I Fought The Law

Today is the seven-month anniversary of OWS. It coincides with a remarkable ratcheting up of pressure on Occupy from authorities of all kinds–personal, police, professional. At the place where these three roads meet is the Law, saying: “enough, time to concede.” The reply is given: “I prefer not to.” But it’s getting much harder.

Now some of my friends  and colleagues give me a look: “Occupy? Still?” As if you had just discovered deconstruction. So, yes, I am a bit obsessed. Since when was that a bad thing in professional life? and it’s been seven months, not years.

Federal Hall. Credit @mollyknefel

By unrelenting hostility and willingness to improvise the terms of the law, the police do now have the upper hand in the streets. The NYPD yesterday determined that you may not have “moveable property” on the sidewalk in New York– and that did apparently include a dog that one of the occupiers had on Wall Street. The primary target of the police is the cardboard sign, now that the tent has been outlawed. The revived “sleepful protest” has  been driven onto the steps of the Federal Hall, where the Bill of Rights was first introduced. It is supposed to feel like a last stand. While I don’t think it is, I feel the pressure.

The Federal pen

As mentioned yesterday, the academic left continues to ratchet up its critique of Occupy. Jodi Dean posted a talk on her website yesterday, which is at once supportive of the movement for creating a new political subject, and wants to see it regulated by the Holy Trinity of Badiou, Lacan and Zizek. Here’s her summary:

Bluntly put, some of the ideas that most galvanized people in the fall—those associated with autonomy, horizontality, and leaderlessness—have also come to be faulted for conflicts and disillusionment within the movement.

I haven’t heard this criticism, except in what you might call the academic wing of the movement, but there you hear it all the time.

I can’t get into a full analysis of this paper because she asks us not to cite it, so you’ll have to read it yourself. In short, she argues that Occupy should accept its own condition of “lack” in relation to the “lack” it has identified in the political system (The Big Other) and thereby set about representing the overlap created. While I’m not fully sure what to make of this, I take it to mean that if Occupy is to create a form of collectivity, it has to respect the laws of kinship or disintegrate. Occupy should thus negate its own negation of the political system. I can’t help but feel that it would no longer be Occupy were that to happen and in considerable part that transformation would come from a reassertion of the traditional authority of the Law, as Lacan would have had it. Not to mention the law as the cops have it. What we could gain by the strategy is opaque to me.

Is this Law unchallengeable? By chance, I’ve been reading Judith Butler’s lectures on Antigone, where she discusses the possibility of a “post-structuralist” form of kinship that would not be dependent on the Law of the Oedipus complex. She notes that in Oedipus at Colonnus, none other than Oedipus himself berates Antigone and her sister for being out of place, even as they take care of him instead of their brothers, “in their place.” Even Oedipus gets to castigate Antigone for asserting a willingness to “live out of doors.” His curse on his children/siblings is the re-assertion of the necessity of staying in place. That is to say, anyone transgressing their alotted role will be punished. The place one must be is the place where three roads meet and Oedipal destiny is enacted.

What if the incest taboo is not the only form of establishing kinship? What if kinship is not destiny? As the results of incest, Antigone and her siblings all embody the failure of the Law and, while they are punished for this, they also claim glory and honor of their own. Butler interestingly footnotes here the enfant terrible of anthropology Pierre Clastres. Like Sahlins, Clastres refused to equate power with kinship. Clastres asserts that the kinship system tells us almost nothing about the social life of a people. He further argued that the Amazonian peoples he studied were determined to prevent the emergence of permanent inequality by means of careful safeguards.

These arguments have been developed by David Graeber, who also notes that Clastres’ romantic over-investment with the Amazon prevented him from discussing the widespread use of sexual violence in these same “egalitarian” societies. He astutely concludes

Perhaps Amazonian men understand what arbitrary, unquestionable power, backed by force, would be like because they themselves wield that power over their wives and daughters.

The point of the Antigone myth and the Amazonian egalitarians is, then, not that we want to be like them, but that these moments show cases where the “universal” Law does not apply, and is therefore not universal at all, but particular and backed by force of various kinds.

That’s why “I Fought The Law” is a counterculture classic: not because it celebrates a victory–the law won–but because it discovers that, unlike Bartleby who negates himself in the end, you can fight the law. And, yes, you can lose.

Occupy and “The Queer Art of Failure”

In Occupy circles these days, there’s a lot of discussion of success and failure. J. Jack Halberstam’s new book raises the prospect of what he calls “the queer art of failure,” creating a set of intriguing overlaps that I’m going to explore here. Yesterday, Halberstam introduced the book to a packed and boisterous audience in New York (his text will be forthcoming on Bullybloggers with those of the respondents!). So my thoughts are inspired by a combination of being at the panel and reading the book itself.

Failure is a provocative question for Occupy. Of course, the movement was a response to the catastrophic failure of neoliberal capitalism. But to suggest aspects of failure within is to seem disloyal to a project in which so many of us are intensely invested. Halberstam queers that logic by suggesting that in the search “to live otherwise,” it may be that

[u]nder certain circumstances, failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing…offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world.

In the OWS context, for example, any return to economic “success” by means of traditional growth would in fact be a disaster as it would still further accelerate the processes of climate change. Occupy needs to undo the imperative for “growth” in order to find ways by coexist and indeed to continue to exist.

Halberstam’s project again intersects with the way I have been thinking about these issues in calling not for success but for abolition. Abolition acknowledges that something has failed so utterly that it must be abolished and it is therefore a founding moment. Halberstam quotes one of my favorite essays at this point, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The University and the Undercommons: Seven Theses:

Not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society. The object of abolition then would have a resemblance to communism that would be …uncanny.

[Social Text 79, Vol. 22, No. 2, Summer 2004, behind paywall; I’ve extended the quote by a line beyond Halberstam, 114]

Halberstam’s book takes much energy from Benjamin, whose weak messianism can be understood as a form of abolitionism, in keeping with his concept of the general strike as an effort to return only to a radically transformed work, rather than to achieve a specific goal. As everyone should know, Occupy is supporting the call for a day without the 99%, a general strike and more on May Day. Much energy has been wasted, in my view, by trying to define what its success would mean.

For example, in a recent talk at NYU (also published in the Guardian) the philosopher Simon Critchley, very sympathetic to OWS, claimed:

Power is the ability to get things done. Politics is the means to get those things done. Democracy is the name for regimes that believe that power and politics coincide and that power lies with the people.

Thus Occupy would be a success if it “got things done” by means of restoring democracy. There’s much to question here, notably the surprisingly instrumental definition of power that seems to want to forget Foucault. But to continue, things would get done by articulating the:

infinite demand that flows from the perception of an injustice; second, a location where that demand is articulated. There is no politics without location.

The formula combines queer philosopher Judith Butler’s influential call for “impossible demands” with what, following Halberstam, we could call a “straight” insistence on being in one place and one place only. Enter Plato, the opponent of all doubling.

In the Republic, as Rancière reminds us, Plato instructs:

It is right for the shoemaker by nature to make shoes and occupy himself with nothing else.

That is to say, if a person has an allocated role and then they go and occupy somewhere else they are at fault. A person should be “in” the nature which is proposed for them and not “out” of it by being elsewhere. When we occupy, we are in and out at once–in occupation and out of place, in a nature we have chosen and out of the one allocated.

For Halberstam, to be queer is precisely to be out of place, being where one is not supposed to be, refusing normativity. If we follow the spatial implications, to occupy is queer, a way in which we can live otherwise. Certainly the “anti-disciplinary” politics of his project can be thought of as the refusal to conform to the order sought by the police, as the refusal to move on.

What would it mean, then, to think of the queer art of failure in regard to Occupy? One way to respond to this complex question might be to think about the way in which the encampments were considered “home.” This gave Occupy the location from which to articulate its demands and in more practical vein provided a literal place to live to many migrant and unhoused activists, as well as the space to form a community.

It might be suggested that some failures also came from the normatizing effects of making a home. There were persistent allegations of sexual harassment at many Occupy sites, despite the many queer, trans, LGBT and feminist persons involved. Can these incidents be thought through as part of the (hetero)normatizing that might come with making a home, a failure to create a different form of living?

Being based in a single place also makes you a target. It was and is relatively easy for the police to evict Occupy encampments once the decision to do so has been taken. The direct action organizer Lisa Fithian has encouraged Occupy to imagine itself as a shoal of fish, or a herd of animals, or a flight of birds–moving, transitory and fluid ways of living. Halberstam might point us to Chicken Run or the adventure of the Fantastic Mr. Fox or other “radical animations” as the means to imagine such “stopping and going, moving and halting.”

In discussion yesterday, Halberstam mentioned being intrigued by the way that The Invisible Committee describe the spreading of resistance as being non-linear, a “resonance” that takes on greater density

[t]o the point that any return to normal is no longer desirable or even imaginable.

This interface of desire, the failure of the “normal,” non-linear ways of moving, new forms of imagining, anti-disciplinarity is perhaps what it might be to occupy the queer art of failure.