“the landscape created by an itinerant artisan who follows the movement of matter-flow to create concrete assemblages suffused with incorporeal affects;” Max Hantel in Rhizomes.net,issue 24, in a paper on the “relationship between Édouard Glissant and Deleuze and Guattari.”
Glissant opens Poetics of Relation with a moving call to his readers to imagine the horrors of the middle passage … The middle passage in this telling is a series of three interconnected abysses: the slave ship, the ocean depths, and the alien land of the new world.
“[I]n your poetic vision, a boat has no belly a boat does not swallow up, does not devour; a boat is steered by open skies. Yet, the belly of this boat dissolves you, precipitates you into a nonworld from which you cry out. This boat is a womb, a womb abyss. It generates the clamor of your protests; it also produces all the coming unanimity. Although you are alone in this suffering, you share in the unknown with others whom you have yet to know. This boat is your womb, a matrix, and yet it expels you. This boat: pregnant with as many dead as living under sentence of death” (Glissant 1997: 6).
Glissant’s apt and paradoxical description of the slave ship as a womb abyss, pregnant with death, brings into relief many of the characteristics of the ship as heterotopia described by Foucault. Glissant calls them nonworlds, similar to Foucault’s use of nonplaces, because these slave ships exist in the seams of Western civilization, outside of the carefully crafted narrative of Enlightenment rationality or humanist religion that supposedly girds the various trans-Atlantic empires, and yet constitutive of that narrative’s condition of possibility.
[…]Glissant proposes the term “errantry,” […] to think through these conditions of forced diaspora. From the French errance, errantry literally means roving movement. Glissant does not intend the term, however, to simply mean a free-floating movement through undefined space or a solipsistic peripateticism. And here we return to the rhizome. Glissant reminds his readers that the rhizome is still a root-system and so, while characterized by horizontal movement and decentered growth, it is still a generative network that anchors, perhaps only temporarily, a specific localization of matter and energy.
Errantry is rooted movement but still a “desire to go against the root,” where “the root” refers to the imposition of a univocal (or monolingual) meaning on the self and the world. The history of the West is a history of fixing movement in terms of the static model of the nation-state, a model adopted by decolonizing countries: “Most of the nations that gained freedom from colonization have tended to form around an idea of power – the totalitarian drive of the single, unique root” (Glissant 1997: 14). Against this totalitarian root, Glissant proposes the root as multiplicity embodied in the relationship with the Other – not the drive to know the Other in a fully rational sense, but instead, in Deleuzo-Guattarian terms, an openness to affect and be affected by others. Like his tiptoeing act in the description of the slave ship, Glissant’s idea of errantry lies between a notion of fixed identity, rooted in an ancestral past (the movement back to Africa) and a purely fluid subjectivity that precludes communities of affinity and shared horizons of meaning.
[…]It is understandable why even his most astute readers focus in on the politics of language, then, because Glissant’s most important locus of expression is the creolization of thought through a polyvocal poetics.
As for the Other, Glissant aligns himself with Deleuze in the rejection of some central chamber of subjectivity that can be rationally known if only discovered. He uses the word “opacity” to describe the status of the Other in our confrontation with them. One has the choice to embrace the conditions of opacity as the basis for an ethical relationship, or to work tirelessly to overcome opacity through knowing the other, whether through violence or the accumulation of knowledge (or both) (Glissant 1997: 62). In setting out a research agenda for Caribbean philosophy that takes its cues from Glissant, the notion of opacity is instructive. Reworking Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts, Glissant provides a mode of engagement with past trauma that neither disavows totally the meaning of the historical fact of suffering nor identifies completely with the facticity of memory and an inability to move beyond the reality of that suffering. The rhizomatic embrace of errantry and opacity articulates new modes of subjectivization and collectivity both grounded and open, escaping the false choice between the totalitarian root and rootlessness.
Max Hantel, Errant Notes on a Caribbean Rhizome, rhizomes, issue 24, 2012
Glissant, Edouard. Poetics of Relation. Trans. by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: Michigan UP, 1997.
