The Common Growl: Toward a Poetics of Precarious Community

THE COMMON GROWL

INTRODUCTION: TOWARD A POETICS OF COMMUNITY

THOMAS CLAVIEZ

In the Overture to his 2001 book with the programmatic title Community: Seeking Safety in an Insecure World, the renowned sociologist Zygmunt Bauman sketches a startlingly nostalgic scenario of community as a cosy and comfortable place, a roof under which we shelter in heavy rain, like a fireplace at which we warm our hands on a frosty day, a place where we are safe most of the time and hardly ever puzzled or taken aback (1–2). This view—stated, admittedly, in a kind of hyperbolic tongue-in-cheek manner—is, needless to say, strongly indebted not only to the romantic nostalgia that characterizes similar descriptions in Ferdinand Tönnies’ famous 1887 Community and Society, but to a story that we’ve been telling ourselves for quite some time. However, although Bauman readily admits that this concept stands for a kind of world that is, regrettably, not available to us (3) (and presumably never has been), in the chapters that follow, Bauman has no qualms using it as the backdrop against which, again in a manner reminiscent of Tönnies, to diagnose and measure all the evils haunting our contemporary existence—an existence that, consequently, manifests itself rather melancholically as a perpetual betrayal of this story.

Two sets of questions arise at this point: What kind of story is this? Is it a consoling fiction? A necessary narrative? An elusive myth? A combination of all of the above? The second set arises once we venture our reservations to subscribe to either that story/fiction/narrative/myth, or to the attempt to describe our world today as simply a betrayal of these. Granted, however, that we do need some form of narrative to tell ourselves how we see and interact with each other, what would such a story look like? What kind of fiction might it be? Need it be a fiction? What other poetic devices do we have available not only to describe, but maybe also to conceptualize the communities we live in?

The esteemed scholars invited to contribute to this collection on a poetics of community were asked to interpret this theme in a rather broad manner: They could either address the relationship of community and poetics in gauging the former’s dependency on myth, narrative, central metaphors, tropes, and single works of literature, or engage in attempts to actually think community in poetic terms. The idea of this collection was to offer a counterweight to a widespread tendency in sociology to supplant a former (and other) myth—that of social engineering—with the even more ambitious project of rational choice. These rationalistic schools, however, seem to be hard put to address at least two social phenomena that have gained increased prominence since modernity and beyond: those of a heightened feeling of contingency, and that of a growing precariousness of existence. The new complexity (Neue Unübersichtlichkeit) that Jürgen Habermas in 1985 diagnosed and addressed in a book with this title has, if anything, gained both in extensity and intensity, propelled forward by globalization and its concomitant processes such as deregulation, massive population movements, an acceleration of travel and information, diasporic communities, and the like. In the face of these processes, it seems rather odd to relegate, as Anthony Appiah does, migration, nomadism, and diaspora to a past practically overcome, in order to celebrate a diversity created by free wills and voluntary movement.¹ More than ever, community itself—traditionally considered one of the bulwarks against contingency—has become increasingly contingent: Our neighbors seem to be less and less necessary than they were in earlier, more tightly knit and homogeneous communities—if, that is, such communities, as projected by the last Romantic sociologist, Ferdinand Tönnies, ever existed in the first place, which seems doubtful.²

In order to address such contingencies and precarious communities, we could, of course, simply argue that we can describe our contemporary experience only in terms of a both/and (instead of an either/or), as another famous scholar on cosmopolitanism, Ulrich Beck, does. In his Cosmopolitan Vision, he suggests replacing universalism, relativism and nationalism [which] are based on the either/or principle with a cosmopolitanism [that] rests on the both/and principle (57). This we can certainly do; he would have to be aware, however, that in so doing we are kissing the basic premise of syllogistic thinking—the law of noncontradiction—good-bye and are approaching the structure of myth.³ We might, however, also diagnose such a state of affairs in less optimistic terms, as Herbert Marcuse did 50 years ago, when he considered the grand unification of opposites which counteracts qualitative change as pertain[ing] to a thoroughly hopeless or thoroughly preconditioned existence that has made its home in a world where even the irrational is Reason (One-Dimensional Man, 230). Whether, that is, the irrational has made its home in what still claims to be a reasonable world, or whether it offers us a reconciliatory, cosmopolitan stance toward a contingent, globalized world which simply defies being measured by the yardstick of syllogistic reason, what both assessments show is that we might need discourses other than that of reason to come to terms with our highly contingent environment—myth maybe being one of them and, as its successor (according to Hans Blumenberg⁴), poetics perhaps being another candidate.

This is why a poetics of community might offer us alternative and innovative views on newly emerging forms of community that cannot be read productively anymore against either the backdrop of older concepts of community colored by a romantic nostalgia for homogeneity, closeness, and sameness (as suggested by Tönnies or Bauman) or the myth of rational choice. Should we, as Raymond Williams once urged us to do, "search out and counterpose an alternative tradition taken from the neglected works left in the wide margin of the century, a tradition which may address itself … to a modern future in which community may be imagined again" (in Jessica Berman, Modernist Fiction, 2)? Or are we more and more forced to tell ourselves different narratives and stories about what constitutes such newly wrought communities? Can we resort to existing forms—be they literary, mytho-poetic, narrative, tropological, or otherwise—to help us envisage or imagine new forms of community that avoid what Roberto Esposito (2011) has identified as the immunizing reflexes of communities? Reflexes that have characterized almost all conceptualizations of community from Aristotle via Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and John Locke to Tönnies, Martin Heidegger, and beyond?

To venture an answer to these and related questions is what the contributions collected in this volume attempt to do—if, needless to say, with widely differing strategies and results. The short essay by Jean-Luc Nancy, which serves as a prologue to the collection, sets the tone. The Common Growl addresses what might be called the white noise that both digital technology and a sociology of rational choice try either to suppress or to ignore; a growl that spells, in Nancy’s words, a last remnant of the political that revolts against a political that, by saturating society, has lost itself, and thus the capability to make sense. The revolt is a re-volte, a reminder of a beginning—a beginning, however, not in the sense of a nostalgic arkhē, but of an endless re-beginning—and re-beginnings are always rife with potentialities. The political, then, does not serve to saturate everything with meaning, in that this saturation spells the end of all potentialities. The political, in Nancy’s view, is designed to keep open and alive the tension between the potential and its actualization, since the taking place of the potential in its actualization always engenders the danger of closure. It is, in fact, in this very gap that sense has a place. That is why the growl itself involves no specific, clear-cut aim; it seems to signify nothing but its own (as yet impotent) potentia. Nor can this common growl have anything in common but itself, as Nancy reminds us in The Inoperative Community.⁵ There is no common objective, no work, no harmony implied in it, or to be achieved by it, as all immanence spells death—and death is the end of all potentiality.

The trembling that the growl causes can thus be interpreted in many ways: It might spell fear and trembling for those who consider sense as something to be actualized, and thus finally achievable; and, once achieved, something to be defended. The tremble might also refer to the perpetual inquietude of the potential itself, of a creative force at the moment shortly before bursting out: The quiver of a community that is, to use Jacques Derrida’s words, always to come, and that takes, to use another memorable sentence of Derrida, "the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity (Structure, Sign and Play," 293).

One way to think of the coming community is how Giorgio Agamben sketches it in his book of the same title. And, indeed, to some readers the scenario that he develops there certainly carries aspects of the monstrous. Tropologically speaking, as Robert Young argues in his contribution, Agamben "reformulates community away from the vertical synchrony of metaphor, from sharing and substitutability, to the horizontal prospectiveness of metonymy, of clinamen, a relation of leaning or contiguity and therefore also of contingency, a narrative always in process or temporality of unfinished becoming," a thought that my contribution takes up and tries to systematize.

The central question raised by Agamben—as well as by Maurice Blanchot’s (1983) and Jean-Luc Nancy’s reflections on the topic of community—is, to put it rather simply, whether being in common necessarily implies having something in common. This assumption characterizes an entire tradition of theories of community. As paradigmatic examples of such a merger, usually the Greek polis and the nation state are mentioned, a fact which, in Young’s view, has had the unfortunate effect of distorting the community into the image of the nation. Young traces this history along the names of Stalin and Benedict Anderson, pointing out that, paradoxically, the imagined community of the nation has historically been a destroyer of actual communities, a fact that strongly inflects Tönnies’ argument in Community and Society. In order to carve out the paradoxes of this merger, Young then turns to James Joyce’s Ulysses, where, in a pivotal scene, in an exchange with John Wyse, Bloom defines a nation as the same people living in the same place—or, as he adds, living in different places. What is not being discussed is a third option: different people living in the same place, which would come closest to a globalized, metonymic society. If anything, metropolitan Dublin is exactly such a space, while the same people living in different places might define the Jewish exilic experience; and one is unthinkable without the other. In such a scenario, Moses Maimonides’ The Guide for the Perplexed might indeed be a good book to turn to, as Young suggests.

As already mentioned, my own contribution tries to further pursue, and to systematize, the idea of a metonymic community which, I argue, can be traced in many contemporary contributions on the topic of community, covering such diverse thinkers as Judith Butler, Agamben, Nancy, but also Jacques Rancière. It takes its start from the assumption that, traditionally, community was designed to safeguard us against various forms of contingency; as such, it features in the central works on political theory and community already mentioned above. This, however, opens numerous questions: Are not then other forms of contingency by default included and enclosed into the walls of the polis and the nation, respectively? And why is it that contingency has acquired such a bad reputation in the first place? Clearly, humankind has spent almost its entire history trying to overcome (some of) it; on the other hand, why is it that, when we tell the story of our life, it will usually turn out an assemblage of things that just so happened to us—that is, events that were, if anything, contingent, unforeseen, incalculable? Our birth, our first kiss, meeting the person(s) we love, our first job, our illnesses, our important encounters—all of which happened more or less accidentally? Sketching the rather troublesome etymological and logical history of the concept of contingency, and locating its status in modern and contemporary theory and literature, I am arguing for a reassessment of the term, as it threatens to become functionalized by the immunizing strategies that Esposito has so convincingly described, and that are fueled further by the heightened emphasis on the precariousness that surrounds us.

If contingency is what causes us to develop more and more so-called contingency plans in order to avoid being exposed to it, 9/11 has shown us that we cannot be prepared for the worst. The American government was keen on identifying the attacks as such—that is, as contingent—which implies that they constituted something unforeseeable, incalculable, unprecedented, and irrational. This, in turn, served as the occasion to increase measures of immunization (in the sense of Esposito) to an unprecedented (and this time, the attribute fits) pitch: Everybody with a strange look came under a general suspicion. Moreover, the thing in itself seemed to defy representation; that is why some commentators compared it to an aesthetics of the sublime.⁶

Homi Bhabha’s essay, Poetics of Anxiety and Security, challenges these assumptions, in reconnecting the experience we shared endlessly on TV with W. H. Auden’s poem September 1, 1939—which was referred to and quoted immediately and repeatedly in the aftermath of the attacks. Auden’s poem manages, in a unique manner, to capture the mood, the symbolic and emotional impact, of the outbreak of the Second World War. In so doing, Bhabha argues, he keeps redrawing the contingent boundary between what we represent as ‘public’ and what we designate as ‘private,’ thus creating a poetry that captures the uneasy, and hard-to-delineate, porous borders between anxiety and security that defy being put into rigorous political statements and action plans. The poet sketches a third space that, according to Bhabha, moves restlessly in this mediatory mongrel space in-between what Auden calls the ‘public space of commonality’ and the ‘inner space of private ownership,’ keeping both Eros and Agape in play. The moral asymmetric souls—one of the finest poetic pictures ever devised to describe the gray expanse between the private, the communal, and the universal—must, and can only, find agency in this third space that "Auden’s design of proximity within the polarized, or contingency in the midst of contradiction, evokes, as Bhabha, referring to Walter Benjamin, puts it. If, as Hannah Arendt emphasizes (whom Bhabha also quotes), Everything that exists amongst a plurality of things is not simply what it is, in its identity, but it is also different from others; this being different belongs to its very nature, then her conclusion—When we try to get hold of it in thought, wanting to define it, we must take this otherness (alteritas) or difference into account"—certainly holds. This alterity, as Arendt and Bhabha know all too well, cannot be integrated into the holism that a metaphoric concept of community implies.

Can literature offer us access to this (contingent) other? And would that access have to be metonymic, to expose us to its contingency? Djelal Kadir’s essay Literature, the World, and You starts out with a quote from Quintillian’s Institutio Oratoria that seems to point in a different direction, as the famous orator identifies metaphor as "the commonest and by far the most beautiful of tropes—a rather rare instance of something being both commonest" and most beautiful. Kadir, however, locates our theorizing about the connection between literature and the world in the contingent realm of the tussle between poetics and community, or the paronomasia of anomalous construct, on the one hand, and normative structure on the other, or "the counterpoint between Aristotle’s Poetics and his Nichomachean Ethics. The worlding" which we are all involved in who use—and translate—texts historically or geographically far away from us, is part and parcel of the theoria which, as Kadir reminds us, means to witness for oneself and for one’s own city-state the rituals of others. This witnessing is itself inscribed in the counterpoint mentioned above, that is, between a poetics that translates between ourselves (and our polis) and the others, and an ethics that makes us apply our own moral yardsticks to those others. Thus the Derridean project of mondialisation, too, that Kadir evokes in connection with world literature, is located in this gap; and the metaphorein, the acts of translation we are involved in, are in fact twofold: We not only have to translate between our own poetics and our ethics, we also have to translate the others’ poetics and ethics. What littérature-monde, then, can offer is just this double act of translation: a mediation between different ethics by means of poetic translation. In order to do so, Kadir argues, there remains the need for a dual discernment—what we might call a requisite literacy on the one hand, and a worldliness on the other, for the reading and understanding of world literature. Worldliness here acquires a rather un-Heideggerian facet: that of the exposure to otherness, an exposure which—as again literature can remind us—has been simply the story of human coexistence as such. Kadir traces such exposures through the works of three authors—the Chinese writer Lu Chi, the English metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell, and the 20th-century Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges—in all cases discerning a frame of reference turning into a frame of difference: a process that any translation worth its name is designed to achieve. Literature itself thus serves as rehearsing "a performative function as projection from the realm of literature into the lifeworld, or a morphing translatio from the poetic to the pragmatic."

For Jacques Rancière, this translation between the poetic and the pragmatic is also of key interest since, as he puts it, a literary community exists whenever human beings are gathered by the power of certain words. The power of these words, however, is highly ambivalent. In his view, the poetic can never be translated entirely into the pragmatic—at least in what he calls the aesthetic regime; in fact, literature proper, which only emerges within this regime, has to disentangle itself from the world in order to be able to change it. Although especially the realistic novel has no walls separating the inside from the outside, as it defies the social and artistic hierarchies set up by the representative regime (whose origins he locates in Aristotle), it also defies the didacticism of the latter. Accordingly, for the representative regime, Rancière would challenge the very gap between the poetics and the ethics of Aristotle, where Kadir begins. What, in fact, the aesthetic regime—whose origin he locates in Schiller’s Letters on the Education of Man—achieves is exactly that: to disentangle art from the mimesis of the social hierarchies that it has in Aristotle. If, in the representative regime, action and control are in the hands of those in power, and are ascribed to certain genres exclusively, the aesthetic regime opens the stage to people to whom events just happen. What literature freed from mimesis stages, consequently, is a disruption of the normal distributions of forms of life. Normal in this connection refers to an allegedly natural social hierarchy which is disrupted by the demos, and by democracy: by those who have no part in the distribution of the visible, sayable, and doable. By undermining the representative regime’s emphasis on narrative probability and causality, the aesthetic regime offers a glimpse of what lies below the political order: sheer contingency.

What Madame Bovary dramatizes is just that: a random combination of impersonal events—that which happens to all of us, and what will later make up our CV. The poetics of the aesthetic regime thus expose us to the very contingency that, on the one hand, characterizes the real as political and communal but that, on the other hand, we try by all means to keep at bay. It shows us the very singularities in the midst of the immanence that Young also alludes to. It is thus located, as Rancière puts it, in the flood of the micro-events that produce those affirmations as singular forms of crystallization of the Impersonal. Literature turns the power of disidentification into the power of writing itself, the power of dissolving … the rigid forms of social identity and relationships to produce its own events in the breath of sentences.… Below the surface of identification that literature serves to disidentify with, there lurks the community of the atoms, for the illustration of which Rancière refers to two works of Virginia Woolf: the short story An Unwritten Novel, and her novel To the Lighthouse. While the former takes its cue from the meeting with an anonymous woman on a train, To the Lighthouse manages to turn anonymous life into one of its main protagonists, which, in turn, prevents the other personae from achieving predatory identities. The clash between such identities is further developed in Woolf’s later novel Mrs. Dalloway. There, however, Septimus, the man of books, goes mad; indeed, as Rancière argues, has to go mad, as the tyranny of the plot—an inheritance from the representative regime—reasserts its dominance.