Rhythms of Life:
the Work of Mourning in the Covering of Distance
Initial Reflections on Practice International
Christian Nyampeta
Dakar, October 2013
Warriors of the Imaginary
The contemporary practice is characterised by sequential
intervals, by intense groupings, temporal proximities
and finitudes of presence. These phenomena are moderated
by a temporarily that resembles Distance (see Jean-Paul
Martinon's translation of The Warrior of the Imaginary,
from Writing in a Dominated Land by Patrick Chamoiseau,
1997).
In the age marked by unprecedented possibilities to
depart from home, to sojourn, and to venture even to the
farthest reaches of the universe, it seems banal to
question such Distance. And yet, what substantiate the
elective departures is the knowledge of being able to
readily return. Here, returning means to reach again
"freely" to the familiar ordinary: the scents, the
landscapes, the liberties and safeties that constitute
what one can call home.
(Differentiate this point from Bourriaud's potentially
elitist Altermodernism. Also attempt to sketch out
“moving without displacing”> Forms of Sorts.)
Distance
The poignancy of the Distance alluded to here is then
the tragic inevitability and inescapability of loss: a
distancing to relationships unwillingly forsaken;
affections from which separation is a violent act that
leaves a wound for which there is no simple healing.
Distance is the antithesis to the prevailing
cosmopolitanism. If the cosmopolitan ethos is formalised
by the "freedom" to roam and to return, those in the
margins through the intensity of Distance are defined by
the severance from familiarities through the denial of
the liberty to remain, to rest, or to return.
(Relationships: Latour: human to human, human to
nonhuman> speculative realism, etc)
Orphans of Fanon
This paradoxical endless ending compels a contemplation.
This fragmentation generates communities of sorts,
because it is unavoidably real for those who experience
it. More than a thought, it is a condition. It's like a
constant state of falling but it's not really a movement
since you never get anywhere. Distance becomes
encircling. This reality is then a place, a knowledge, a
narrative, and above all, as averred by Olu Oguibe, it
is a psychic space which is "lived" by those who inhabit
it, those who must engage and wrestle with it because
only by so doing can they come to terms with it. If this
condition of ending is a fertile ground for creative
imagination, it is so not because it offers a choice
but precisely because it does not. The engagement with
an elsewhere is not a fascination but an individual (and
by extension it grows into a collective) quest to come
to terms with the fact of Distance. Such an effort of
engagement is an attempt to explain to oneself than to
others, to shore up against one's ruins. The practice of
affiliation is a technology of the self (Olu Oguibe,
Exile..., 2006).
The Hereafter
So then, the Distance is not so much about movement,
relocation or departure, but about loss. Distance is a
denial or an impossibility to return to relationships.
It is the collapse of a world of relative certainties.
Christopher Okigbo, the late Nigerian poet, maintained
that Death is an exercise in Panafricanism. In The Trial
of Christopher Okigbo (1969), the Kenyan writer Ali
Mazrui has dealt with the continuation, or the pursuit
of practice beyond death. Mazrui fictionalised a
transformative notion of the Herebefore and an eternal,
international and inter-temporal After-Africa set in the
Hereafter. Are we the past, the future or indeed the
present?, the protagonist asks. Here, Mazrui proposes an
obvious principle of simultaneity.
For, the Hereafter is for those still living. And yet,
Hereafter, indicates a moment in the future. Are the
past and the future no more than different sides of the
coin of simultaneity, derived not through linear
derivation but in terms of parallel evolution?
(Study further the connections between the Hereafter
with Postracial Futures).
Politics of Mourning
Such a condition of a Hereafter is an everyday
psychobiological phenomenon of mourning.
In Aporias (1993), Derrida writes: "In an economic,
elliptic, hence dogmatic way, I would say that there is
no politics without an organisation of the time and
space of mourning, without a topolitology of the
sepulchre, without an anamnestic and thematic relation
to the spirit as ghost, without an open hospitality to
the guest as ghost, whom one holds, just as he holds us,
hostage”. Here, Derrida speaks about learning to live
with ghosts, or spectres, as a politics of memory,
inheritance and generations.
(Topolitology: studies the borders, limits and crossings
of translation and violence: transgression, disruption
and re-affirmation).
In the banality of these passings, in the apparent
breaking up with the habitual; herein lays the ordinary.
Mourning is the act of coming to terms with this
constant loss. Mourning can be said to be a
psychobiological phenomenon that attempts to deal with a
passing away. Jacques Derrida mentions to be unable to
find public words capable of naming what is happening to
him in the instance of loss. For Derrida, speaking is
then impossible. Unlike this incapacity of wording,
gestures seem to intervene and to form a language of
their own, capable of approximating a making sense with
the unspeakable loss; the loss of ourselves, or the no
longer ourselves.
(Ongoing philosophical argument: if modernism
characterised by severe alienation, Africa is the site
of the first instances of modernism; through violent
forms “internationalism”: slavery, colonisation,
postcolonialism and neoliberalism).
Internationalism,
Or Individual Universalism
The artistic fall for which Christopher Okigbo is tried
in After Africa evolves around Okigbo's distortion of
values between individualism, universalism, and social
collectivism. The accusation suggests that a great
artist is first of all an individualist, secondly a
universalist, and only thirdly a social collectivist.
Individualism is the deeper loyalty to one's inner
being, a capacity to retain a private area of
distinctiveness in one's personality. The right to be
eccentric is here a great unit of measurement.
The accusation maintains that universalism, on the other
hand, is a commitment to the eternal: universalism is a
fusion of the near and the distant, of the now and the
ever.
Social collectivism, the accusation continues, is that
complex of loyalties which tie the individual to his own
specific society, which command his affections for his
kith and kin, which arouse his protectiveness for the
soil of his ancestors, which enable one to serve and
very occasionally, to love his people. Socialism,
tribalism and colonialism, were all different forms of
these bonds of collectivity.
The defence of Okigbo in this fiction simply
demonstrates that an artist in Africa needs to be
socially committed if he is to be universally engaged.
Social commitment is, of course, not to be confused with
social conformity.
Membranes
In Distance, the individualism and the universalism
become intertwined. One becomes a filtering membrane at
the centre of a field of powerful forces. The sources of
these elusive powers are then assimilated into a whole,
in such a manner that it may seem difficult to sort
these out, to know where one influence ends and where
the other starts. From here on, any gesture is a compact
between those who are no longer, and those who are to
come.
(Connect this to Issa Samb's material inventory: nets,
knots, etc.)
Restitution and Revival
To engage with the practice of the Elsewhere is then an
interiorisation, to revive the status of the other in
us, to form of an infinite alterity within. (See
Derrida, Work of Mourning, pg21). Affiliation, as a
rhetoric of mourning, borrows on this schema of
interiorisation in order to convert the work, the
thought, the actions or affects of the others from a
gesture simply dictated by these companions' genres into
another metonymic force of practice; that is, of
mourning.
(See Derrida, Work of Mourning, pg 21).
In the conditions of constant distancing, mourning is
silent and coded in the everyday. As illustrated by
Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas in their
introduction to Jacques Derrida's Work of Mourning
(2001), Derrida cites the words of St. Augustine in the
first person about remaining silent and restricting his
tears when Derrida, like St. Augustine before him, was
mourning the death of his mother. Further on, Derrida
weeps like his own children on the edge of his grave. In
Augustine's and in Derrida's tears, there are already
those of his children: the tears of yet another
generation, of another distance.
(The work of Kan Sy in Senegal: Restitution in Urban
environments/Revival in Rural environments)
Like Derrida's citation of Augustine, approximation,
sampling or resembling can become the vehicle by which
the uniqueness of the event of loss is reckoned with.
Derrida both recalls Augustine's singular mourning for
his mother, for her alone, and links this mourning to
others, allowing for both singularity and relation,
something absolutely unique and nonetheless shared
(Derrida, Circumfession).
Interiorisation
The interiorisation of the friend or of an affect in
mourning, the reduction of that friend to signs and
images "in us", is paralleled by the use and
incorporation of, in Derrida's case, citation in the
texts of mourning. As if, in a first moment, such
citation would allow Derrida to let the friend speak, to
give the one he is mourning the last word.
Affection then is a mode of coming to terms with this
fracturing (develop the relationship to Monasticism:
anachoresis: departure, or decisive moment of connection
with an Elsewhere; or the creation of an Elsewhere
itself >internationalism?).
Third Cultures
Beyond conflicts, transformations and influences, how to
engage with the mutuality of practices, or how does a
distanced reality correspond to global cultural
practices, globally? One way to address this enquiry is
indeed through affection with popular cultures. For
instance, the focus on periodic musical repertoires such
as Franco & Le TP OK Jazz or Orchestra Baobab is
revealing. In particular, Franco's oeuvre can be
approached as an archeological field from which
formative social, cultural and trans-political moments
could be excavated.
Representative of the musical genre that developed in
the contemporary Democratic Republic of Congo, Franco's
oeuvre functioned as a channel of reckoning with the
exceedingly violent reality. This recovery was achieved
through a plurality of juxtapositions and the
incorporation of tensions; together with the
indiscipline arising from linguistic creolisation (Cf.
Postcolonial Patronage of the arts + the international
and Tricontinental exchange. See also Achille Mbembe's
Variations… in Chimurenga 6, Orphans of Fanon).
Similarly, in contemporary terms, the rhythms of life
incite the concerned communities to envisage a reckoning
through aligning with "third cultures" that are,
arguably, no longer assimilating a language, a country
or a region, but rather are characterised by a
transformative affiliation to previous geopolitical
subcultures informed by hyper-industrial visuality, such
as pop, rap and hip hop.
However, a significant nuance separates these periods.
For instance, in Jamaica, starting from the late 50's,
the internalisation and the subsequent transformation of
American influences through precursive forms that
eventually engendered Reggae some decades later was
primarily carried out by radio DJ's through dubbing,
sampling and distorting commercially available
international records. This distortion was, both
pragmatic and poetic: in order to bypass copyright
issues, a real prohibition to sharing affection. The
assimilation of American Funk into High Life and Jazz
into Afrobeat in West Africa was carried out through
playing and practicing with western electrical
instruments, made available in community halls through
the patronage of new nation states fostering the local
arts. Or again the Afro-Cuban exchanges in the wake of
the liberation struggle supported by Communism
throughout both Anglophone, Francophone and Lusophone
territories.
By contrast, contemporary affiliations in popular
cultures operate primarily on the level of the image.
Important are the mode of dress, the visibility, the
music video, the fantasy of wealth through quickly
accumulated opulence. Here, mediated through hyperindustrial realities, and diffused by satellites and
internet, the shift from abstraction into the visible
makes the potency of the looks weightier than the
practice itself.
(See Bernard Stiegler, Suffocated Desire, or How the
Cultural Industry Destroys the Individual:
Contribution to a Theory of Mass Consumption, Parrhesia,
Nr 13, 2011)
Nevertheless, this affective play with insistence,
contrasts and nuances could highlight urgencies that are
initially not addressed within the contexts of the
activity of investment. Like mourning, this theoretical
and practical interests engender structures that can not
pretend to put forward an exhaustive analysis of the
idea of loss, separations and endings. Rather these
restoring interests are appropriative, performative and
speculative. The recovery from Distance within these
visual cultures is generated through gestures of
traveling and visiting, as well as interventional
activities of making; performing and presenting.
(Fatou's
(Analyse
original
(1956) –
(1992).
self-description as a child of hip-hop,
further Friedrich Dürrenmatt's play The Visit –
German title translates as Visit of an Old Lady
in relation to Djibril Diop Mambety's Hyenas
Monosis
A number of writers affiliated with or directly from
Sub-Saharan Africa (?) have fictionalised complexities
of the everyday in such a way that some critics have
labelled a selection of these writers as Afropessimists.
As introduced to me by Kodwo Eshun, writers such as Sony
Labou Tansi, Alain Mabanckou, Kojo Laing, and people
like Yambo Ouologuem, Dambudzo Marechera and Tayeb Salih
share one elusive affinity. Outside of this pessimist
label, fictions by Francis Bebey and Chinua Achebe
faintly share this particular aspect.
In the fictions of these writers, a recurring motive is
the impairment and the killing of the woman, or at least
the disobedience of the protagonist (male of female)
toward their mother.
In a society which arranges kinships around filial
piety, the speculative implication of this severance is
withdrawal from things familiar and familial; by
extension also the circumnavigation of civility and the
latter's globalising immediacy. In an online review of
Alain Mambackou's recent book, Louis Chude-Sokei
indicates that "where hip hop’s nihilism and the
literature that it has birthed tends towards grandiose
performances of potency, what marks Mabanckou’s work is
its interest in the internal gestures possible when
cultural and political impotence are fruitfully
acknowledged".
(http://thefanzine.com/my-life-in-the-bush-of-words-orj-d-salinger-in-africa-broken-glass-by-alainmabanckou/).
(Develop Monosis: origin of the word monk: the symbiosis
or intricate “unity” of bios praktikos/ bios
theoretikos: the form-of-life).
Hypothetically, the domestic affairs are the domain of
the woman; the mother, the wife, (or wives in some
cases). Metaphorically, this domain represents privacy,
rest and restoration of traditions, values unique to the
household but a common good nevertheless. For instance,
through "the room", a home is a centre of a concentric
system of architectures that expand into national
borders and ideologies. (see the writer's Inhabiting
Horizontality, How To Live Together, 2013).
(Note: the remarkable reversal of this trope in the
writings of the late Portuguese writer José Saramago's
Death At Intervals (2005). Here death ends, and reoccurs
later on, impersonated by a woman)
According to Wikipedia, the more general terms of filial
piety describe the correct way to act towards one's
parents. This correctness include loving one's parents,
being respectful, polite, considerate, loyal, helpful,
dutiful, caring and obedient. This engagement is
extended to the good conduct outside the home so as to
bring a good name to one's parents and ancestors. Thus
the good and eternal filial should perform the duties of
one's job well so as to obtain the material means to
support parents as well as carry out sacrifices to the
ancestors, refrain from becoming rebellious, support,
display courtesy, ensure male heirs, uphold fraternity
among brothers, advise one's parents wisely, including
dissuading them from moral unrighteousness, display
sorrow for their sickness and death...
Ali Mazrui, writes in the above mentioned Trial (1969)
that the distinctive attribute about African social life
is the centrality of collective experience: the
solidarity of the village and the bonds of kinship
provide the framework for much of this experience. Does
the fictional parallel of these writers – the proposal
of the rupture with sociality and culture symbolised in
the act of killing the woman – constitute a subversive
project of autonomy? If so, this autonomy is not
obtained through the careless separation but through a
devotional retrospection into monosis, into the future
as an invisible mourning.
Habitation
Does Issa Samb's “practice” operate in monosis? Across
the site of his Atelier, what seems like male clothing
occupy a serene prominence. One of the recurring motives
in his Atelier is a blouse or a coat. Also, t-shirts
with images are present, such as a t-shirt testifying
the support of Aimé Cesaire. The notion of witnessing
comes to the fore when walking around the compound. One
can read a certain passing, a recording of moments, of
gestures and presences; inscribed into the arrangement
of the objects. Unlike a number of Sub-Saharan
practitioners that manipulate and transforms (dis)used
commodities through recycling, Issa Samb's objects are
more of companions, of testimonies. They bear an imprint
of his movements and actions (are they actants? Note >
reactant: substance in chemical reaction).
Perhaps the clothes also belonged to his companions?
People, ideas and previous affiliations? Considering the
accounts of opposition to Négritude, perhaps the t-shirt
of Aimé Cesaire and other works dedicated to these
contested historical figures can be seen in this light.
The clothes can be understood as a previous skin, as
costumes previously worn by Issa Samb, his friends or in
solidarity with his deceased companions. Rather than
discarding the clothes all together, the latter are
hanging in what seems like an invisible garderobe, or a
washing line, or a shop. The clothes are resolutely
taken off, no longer worn (how to be sure?), but
seemingly protected. This is a perpetual mourning, in as
much as the hanging and the keeping of the clothes
allows for movement, wind and surroundings elements to
maintain a momentous touch with signs of the past –
within the present. For, according to Derrida, the law
of friendship is the law of mourning, the law of giving,
and forgiving. “One friend must always go before the
other”, Derrida writes, “one friend must die first. And
because there is no first death available to us, no
protos thanatos to be come the sole and incomparable
object of our mourning, iteration is unavoidable, the
slippage between deaths inevitable, our language about
deaths repeatable and thus, open to citation”.
(See Socrates clarifications on Friendship and Citation
in the Lysis) (Study Anti-Oedipus in relation to
Négritude).
(Study Habitus through Agamben>Habitat/clothes and
habit/ norm of life)
(See Derrida, Work of Mourning, pg23)
Marx's Coat
During the If I Can't Dance Reading Group session in May
2013 in Amsterdam, the group discussed Marx’s Coat
(1998), an essay by Peter Stallybrass. During this
conversation, the institution of the ‘Pawnshop’ was
considered in detail. As transcribed by the curator
Vivian Zihrel, the pawnshop here is in the first
instance a way to think of the mechanics of a banking
institution “systemised through the bond of a pledged
item”. In the session, the pawnshop was thought of
through the intimacy of the items pledged by members of
the poverty class, forming a bondage of persons. This
thought extended to a consideration of the pawnshop in
relation to the museum depot ― as a place where the
value of an item is held in assurance, where ongoing
impressions of memory reach a temporary stasis and where
objects risk entering a zone of no return.
Devotion
The transmutations produced by exchange across the
pawnbroker’s counter propose the denuding of memory as a
kind of witchcraft, or a corrosive toxicity within the
exchange. If Issa Samb does not throw away objects of
usage and commodities from his past alliances; some of
which the logical place would be the rubbish bin, can we
hypothesise that Issa Samb is appropriating, and what
exactly? He is pledging to time, somewhat capitalising,
and extracting surplus and returning inter-personal
affects: shirts and bottles, gifts from members, etc.
This self-inscription is an aspect of mourning, a cycle
that processes the separation and re-pairing. Such an
appropriation recalls a Marxist commitment to a systemic
correction of the “separation/alienation induced by
surplus value — a restorative project summarised by
Stallybrass, as Marx tried to restore the material
memory, a memory literally embodied in the commodity
although suppressed as memory.
However, even if the gestures may be those of a
mourning, the Atelier is not a memorial, the objects are
not monuments, their singularity is not that of relics,
or residues (although another alchemical term). Rather,
the objects which started their presence as “actants”,
have become figurants: corps de ballet who do not
perform solos, stage performers that have no speaking
part. They are extras in the un-rehearsable theatre of
the everyday; extras that testify of Distance, the
passings of times and places.
It is in the light of this Distance in the present that
lies the property, the substance or even, as pointed out
by Binna Choi, the essence of Giorgio Agamben's Highest
Poverty (2013), and not in material connotations and the
physical or economical deprivation of the regional
context of the Global South. It is within the abstinence
of throwing away, of parting with; within the resistance
to maintenance and the reserve from updating that lies
the strength of Issa Samb's Atelier.
Seen through the lens of Stallybrass' Pawnshop economy,
the appropriative gestures of Issa Samb (and of those
affiliating with an Elsewhere) could be understood as a
short-circuit to the proper tiers and ties of trade
relations. Akin to Derrida citing friends about which he
his writing an oratory speech, this appropriation can be
an exchange that cuts across the sanctioned trajectory
of purchase; that is, of direct, localised equivalence
and normalisation.
The situation of non-permanent but assuredly repetitive
loss and separation produces an ambivalent relationship
with this phenomenon that lays beyond one's control,
while this rhythm nevertheless, defines the unfolding of
one's life.
If these inescapable, repeated breakings are informed by
the "abstraction" of detachment, are Thought,
ideologies, conceptualism or philosophy helpful tools
for engaging with Distance?
Perhaps Issa Samb obstinately refuses abstraction, and
his Atelier attempts to remain within the concrete, the
grief, the everyday. However, such a conclusion would be
incomplete. As Okwui Enwezor points out, “in classical
African art, conceptualism would seem oxymoronic”.
Furthermore, rather than in the aesthetic realm of
display, the cycle of art is achieved through a
“desublimination strategy that perpetually displaces the
object and places greater significance on nonvisual
codes and performative actions”. Issa Samb's Atelier
repeatedly makes contingent the status of the object as
an autonomous signifier. The objects become an artwork
through functioning within a fluid system of exchanges
and relationships among object, artists, and audience,
or friends and collaborators.
(See:
http://www.artafrica.info/html/artigotrimestre/3/artigo3
_i.php)
Trouble in Paradise
In the final scene of Enrst Lubitsch’s film Trouble in
Paradise (1932), one of the thieves steals a pearl
necklace as a gift, which the other steals and offers
back as a gift in a comic act of devotion expressed
through fellowship in the mode of illicit exchange
rather than through the symbolic weight of the object
itself.
The affiliation with the other is a friendship through
knowledge, through inventing knowledge, and indeed
through developing the friendship of knowledge itself.
It is philosophy. To seek this fleeting proximity in
practice is to internalise a companion. It is to become
agitated by the thoughts and the movements of the other,
the worries of the other, the desires of the other. It
is companionship beyond physical presence.
One strategy to achieve this presence is, as suggested
by the French literary critic Roland Barthes, to develop
an ease, a familiarity, a without-embarrassment; to feel
at home or among friends wherever we are. This distant
familiarity differs from total complaisance, parresia or
excessive sociability. This ease is no superficiality of
good manners, but a cultivation of a rhythm of one's own
that resonates with an Elsewhere.