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Title: Doomed to Deferral Author: Julian Langer Date: 18/07/2019 Language: en Topics: environmentalism, eco-pessimism, poetry, immediatism, feral, eco-anarchy, language, Derrida, the future, time, history Source: Retrieved on 2020-04-06 from https://www.radicalartreview.org/post/doomed-to-deferral-a-case-against-tomorrow
If I am going to write about tomorrow, maybe I should start writing this
tomorrow.
The problem then becomes: tomorrow will be today, and there will be a
different tomorrow, which is when I will have to start writing. The same
problem is one you reading have to confront – you can only start reading
this tomorrow, if you are to read it in the proper time. Ultimately, you
and I will both be doomed, if we rest our hopes on reading or writing
tomorrow, but perhaps being doomed is a decent enough ending to start
at.
You should probably read about tomorrow, tomorrow.
Yesterday we were doomed. We were also doomed several other yesterdays
ago. A doomed yesterday might be better called a noterday, given the
nihilism of doom-talk and the negativity that goes with nihilism.
Even more yesterdays ago, techno-industrial civilisation was looking at
the tomorrow of the Millennium. Both transcendence and disaster were
promised for tomorrow then. Maybe neither were true. Perhaps both were.
The dawn of a new historical epoch and all that could signify.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the sociologist Baudrillard became
infamous for stating that history had ended, with globalisation,
hyper-realism and the totalitarian presence of progress. But, to quote
the man himself, “(t)he end of history is, alas, also the ends of the
dustbins of history … (t)here are no longer any dustbins for disposing
old ideologies, old regimes, old values”.
And here we are, in the dustbin, at the end of history, plagued by old
values, regimes and ideologies – living the tomorrow no one hoped for in
the Millennium.
“I never put off till tomorrow what I can possibly do the day after”
Oscar Wilde
To mark the Millennium event, Ben Okri’s poem Mental Fight was published
in 2 parts, by The Times newspaper.
Poetry is a strange form of art. It is very much something you can enjoy
the day after tomorrow. Poetry does not command the same authoritarian
presence in space as theatre, sculpture, film, TV, music, or most other
forms of artistic work. But I’d say that poetry’s power is in its lack
of authority – as authoritarianism is only embraced by the most
powerless groups and individuals.
Poetry is mostly a written form of art, as we encounter it in the
dustbin of history – the hyper-real totality of progress. There are of
course oral traditions and poets, but these, by virtue of their (lack
of) form have already succeeded in escaping being captured by history,
so I won’t bring them into this thought exploration.
Written language is subject to what philosopher and semiologist Derrida
termed differance, the deferral of meaning. Action — radical, political,
basically any — is often deferred to tomorrow. Tomorrow we will deal
with it. Tomorrow we will get it done. Derrida’s notion of differance is
linked to his concept of deconstruction, which speaks to the basic
instability within text (something I am attempting to play with in
writing this piece, as I defer from point to point).
“At night, towards dawn, all lights of the shore have died, and the wind
moves.” Jeffers
Back to Ben Okri’s poem! (If we can get back to it.)
Rather than attempting to write a (perhaps) (anti-)postmodernist
essay-interpretation of a postmodernist poem in postmodern-culture (if
postmodern-culture is possible), starting from the constructed work, I
think that I will start from a place of deconstruction. Most poems take
a somewhat deconstructed form already, as they are written in verses or
stanzas. Mental Fight is no different, as it is written across multiple
sections, with subsequent subsections delineating lines of demarcation
across the structure of his piece – my mind is, as I write this (today),
instantly reminded of the logician Wittgenstein’s book The Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus (probably the most beautiful book on logic and the
driest work of poetry I have ever read). Already relatively
deconstructed, some of the work is already done.
I will save writing a detailed analysis of the poem for tomorrow (and
allow its deferral to mean that I never write a detailed analysis of
Mental Fight) and will, in the spirit of experimental writings, present
poetic responses to dissected deconstructions of Okri’s work.
Not my best poetic work, sure. What I attempted to do, in responding to
Ben Okri’s poem, was respond to some of his comments on the tomorrow of
yesterday, that is now today, by juxtaposing the direction of the gaze.
Okri’s words are directed elsewhere, which is where tomorrow always is,
deferred ad infinitum.
Ecological collapse, in the same way that ecology just always is, is
here, today. We are living, breathing ecology. There is no deferral to
ecology, as ecology is immediate.
Let’s return to where we are today – doomed!
In his work on concentration camp resistance, Blessed Is The Flame,
Serafinski gives an anarcho-nihilist critique of futurity and “cruel
optimism”: “(t)he anarcho-nihilist position is essentially that we are
fucked” and that “… rather than deferring our rage into the future we
can finally realise that now is the time we’ve been waiting for” . It
appears reasonable to say that we are fucked. If we are fucked, rather
than deferring our activities to the future, we can fight, create and
live for today, right here, right now.
An anarchist writer and friend of mine, who writes under the name Flower
Bomb, stated in his piece No Hope, No Future: Let The Adventures Begin!
that “(t)he Future is a hologram of dreams and promises that get
rejected by the present” and “(t)oday is here, right now, like a blank
canvas inviting my imaginative, destructive creativity”. Flower Bomb
writes of feral experience across much of their work, something I have
done across my books, Feral Consciousness and Feral Iconoclasm, in
various essays, and sought to share some of through The Night Forest
poetry project I am part of. Feral, in eco-anarchist discourse, is a
playful term, whose applied practice is presentist, creatively
destructive and destructively creative, pessimistic and adventurous, and
nakedly immediate, in its desire for ecology and the ecology of its
desires.
The sun might rise again, but that does not mean we will have a
tomorrow. Why should we have a tomorrow, or be able to write poetry for
tomorrow, when 200 species become extinct each day this culture
continues?
I’m not going to provide an answer today. Maybe I will tomorrow – but
then again, maybe not.
In her poem A Better Resurrection, Sylvia Plath wrote –
The section of Mental Fight Ben Okri dedicates to what wounds
civilisation has inflicted upon the world, he titled The Stoney Ground.
The poet Robinson Jeffers wrote that “(w)e must unhumanize our views a
little and become confident as the rocks and ocean we are made from”.
Eco-phenomenologist philosopher David Abrams has written about the
sensuous experience of rocks, boulders, stones and mountains, and of our
experience of them.
Rocks and stones have no hopes or fears – or rather, I have no belief
that they do. They are, in a day-to-day humanistic sense, timeless and
ageless, outside of the dustbin of history. They are immediate and
present.
Perhaps there is something to be said about being hopeless and fearless
today. I might write more on this tomorrow – but I probably won’t.