2002 NEMLA
(Re)Presentations of Violence and Aggression
Scott DeShong
Quinebaug Valley Community College
In Your Face-to-Face: Aggression and Ethics between Levinas and Baraka
The main title of this paper, "In Your Face-to-Face," expresses
an apparently rather uneasy confrontation between Amiri Baraka and Emmanuel
Levinas. Toward such a confrontation, I begin by focusing on the subtitle,
"Aggression and Ethics between Levinas and Baraka," particularly
on the word "between." "Between" as "by two"
both divides and joins two. Thinking about this word may emphasize dichotomy,
an accounting of two beings with a space between them. Yet, as commonly
expressed in "just between us," the word also emphasizes a belonging
in which the two are engaged-a proximity. They do not cease to be two,
yet they are two together. Recognizing this aspect of "between"
is very simple, although the implications may be complex and difficult,
as we may find in examining how Levinas treats proximity.
Levinas is a meta-ethicist, mainly concerned with the conditions under
which ethics may take place. Ethics for Levinas is the most originary
aspect of living, inaccessible for determination. To follow Levinas, we
put the term "being" under erasure. As a being thinks of, speaks
with, or otherwise relates with another being, there is primordially a
relation that exceeds any notion of being: a sense of proximity that always
exceeds determination. Levinas finds what is closest to us beyond our
knowing, in a primordial "face-to-face" encounter that Andrew
Tallon calls "nonintentional affectivity." The face in Levinas
is not reified or literal, but more: it includes language, with implications
of speaking as well as visual exposure.
I am concerned with two areas involving implications of the proximal encounter,
both of which involve how we may encounter the discourse or thought of
another. One area concerns how to engage the thought of Baraka and also
how to engage that of Levinas; the other area concerns the engagement
of the two discourses with each other. In the thought of each man, there
is justification both for avoiding claims of having grasped what each
says and for resisting their assimilation to each other. Levinas would
oppose any assimilation of the other to the "Same"; Baraka would
oppose any erasure of difference-opposing assimilation that may or may
not be read as ethnic.
The works of Levinas and Baraka might seem to resist meaningful comparison.
Levinas takes great pains to avoid violence, describing the ethical relation
as radically "passive." Baraka emphasizes another radicality,
a rooting-out of "white" influence and its oppressive structures
from the world. He explicitly calls for action, and he advocates violence,
as in "Black Dada Nihilismus": "Rape the white girls. Rape
/ their fathers. Cut the mothers' throats" (Dead Lecturer 63). In
his poem "Black Art," poetry becomes a violent force:
. . . . We want "poems that kill."
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons, leaving them dead
with tongues pulled out and sent to Ireland. (Black Magic 116)
One could argue that Baraka develops a logic of division, where people
live in allergic relations, the separating aspect of "between"
ruling encounters and antipathy and violence emerging at the root of language.
Yet more attention to Baraka's writing may lead beyond a contrast with
Levinas. Although Baraka's most violent poems never reconcile races, they
associate the enemy "whiteness" so often with business and governmental
power that at least rhetorically, the enemy becomes more specifically
oppression and control (which eventually Baraka states explicitly, LeRoi
Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader xiii). Also, there are Baraka's prophetic and
religious poems. His explicitly violent poetry avoids mentioning the divine,
whereas his religious poems lack the violence, vituperation, racism, and
profanity of the revolutionary ones. Baraka's terminology indicates a
strategy: whereas in revolutionary contexts he will use the word "magic,"
he avoids the word "sacred" in such contexts, and he keeps he
the word "holy" exclusively for poems that focus on the divine.
In the collection Black Art (published as the third part of Black Magic),
such care with diction may be read as reserving a space for the divine,
so that the violence and political exigency yield, when appropriate, to
an emphasis on divinity that centers Baraka's discourse.
Levinas focuses on the significance of language in the ethical relation,
and he emphasizes what he calls the religiosity of the relation. We might
find that he and Baraka begin to converge regarding the divinity in-or
of-language, as Baraka's language varies its approach, sometimes in desperation,
to the question he asks in "Ka 'Ba": "What will be / the
sacred words?" (Black Magic 146). Twice in Black Art, Baraka uses
the phrase "holy nuance," a phrase that haunts the collection
(183, 199); like a sketch of transcendence, the "nuance" resonates
with the "trace" in Levinas (and subsequently in Derrida). Yet
the implications of incommensurability in "nuance" and "trace"
lead us toward seeing that just this concern-an emphasis on the divine-entails
resistance to attempts at articulating a logical comparison between the
two discourses.
We might also address Levinas in preparation for an engagement with Baraka,
working through Derrida's "Violence and Metaphysics" (on how
successfully Levinas avoids violence in Totality and Infinity) or considering
Levinas's remarks on Israeli politics. Yet I think it would be difficult
to indict as aggressive the approach to ethics that Levinas develops most
fully in Otherwise than Being (which considers Derrida's critique). And
while Baraka might be brought some way towards the compassion and passivity
in Levinas, it would be difficult to work out in Baraka's poetry an approach
to ethics expressible in terms like those Levinas uses. Between the two,
then, we have problems arguing the connections, or rather a problem of
what to do with differences; and beyond this logical problem is the ethical
one of assimilation. Indeed this paper, emphasizing Levinas first, has
risked such problems. It is not only that Levinas does not express an
applicable ethics; in any event, adequating the details of a text or situation
to a theory would commit violence both to the applied thought and to whatever
was submitted to theory.
Particularly, we must resist trying to read Levinas's emphasis on the
"face-to-face" encounter in terms of Baraka's many images of
faces and facing. For Levinas, to repeat, the face is not reified; the
face-to-face encounter is itself exposure and speaking, what he calls
the very "signifyingness of signification" (Otherwise 100).
Trying to apply Levinas's thinking to Baraka's representations of faces
leads toward what exceeds representation; we approach the implications
of speaking as such, of what in language exceeds determinations of context.
The attempted application of the face-to-face undoes itself. Moreover,
we find this excess and resistance in Baraka's work: his language exceeds
determinations, including determinations of faces and their ethnicities.
That is, recognizing the excess in Baraka does not depend on an attempted
application of Levinas (which thereby would become a successful application).
We are unable to apply, to develop similarities, to make logical connections,
or to manage readings hermeneutically, and we need to resist articulating
sameness between Baraka and Levinas even on this point of resisting similarity.
Yet I think it is possible to bring the two into proximity by working
with what they oppose in a way that would not determine their thought
or impose similarity on them. Stating that Levinas and Baraka each opposes
methods and principles of assimilation does not necessarily determine
or control the thought of either of them, nor does it draw them into assimilation.
Nor do we necessarily assimilate them in stating that in Baraka and in
Levinas, there is opposition to controlling or centralizing discourses,
totalization, and the domination of the logos, as well as opposition to
the neutrality, dispassion, and disinterest appurtenant to the rule of
logos.
Articulating the opposed object of a discourse need not lead to determining
any activity or essence of the discourse. As stating the object of opposition
reflects back, it may lead back to a field of discursive life, where the
discourse dwells and functions; the turn back need not involve articulating
the dwelling or functioning of the particular discourse. The other of
what is opposed-this field the discourse lives in-need not appear comprehensible,
or true, real, or complete, but rather virtual, as expressed in "nuance"
or "trace." The movement back to this field is not properly
dialectical, not returning to synthesis: the discourses subsist in the
field together in undetermined alterity (nor is the return an Aufhebung,
leading toward a later moment of synthesis). Encountering the field is
a descriptive activity, wherein aspects of Baraka and Levinas emerge in
a proximal encounter we may share. The field is not considered total,
but infinite: through description without synthesis, we glimpse what an
infinitizing context may look like.
What I have called the field is in this case an area where non-mastery
and nondomination are expressed, where there might occur what for Levinas
is the possibility of ethics. Since the field where we may encounter the
thought of Levinas and Baraka is not articulable except by traces or nuances,
it is a place of responding, but not of determinations of responsibility.
Amid such belonging in proximity, the ethical cannot be said to happen.
Ethics is not what is said or done, but what will, or may, have been or
said or done. Or the ethical is what will have been played, and this field
that involves the possibility of ethics is an improvisational field, to
which discourses contribute by voicings. A discourse emerges in the field
not as an essence but in how the discourse voices: not that it is a discourse,
but that it voices discursively-or it discourses voicedly-in tension or
opposition with the rule of logos.
Nathaniel Mackey writes of music in terms of performativity, of "verb"
as opposed to "noun." Voicing is not necessarily active, but
rather audible in terms of how it emerges, voicedly, in the field: its
action is expressed adverbially here, as sound emerges in the nuances
of belonging in activity. Voice is audible in the field-in the music-in
terms of proximity with other voicing; a voicing enters the field already
in response to others, which themselves already voice in response to the
voicing's entrance before that entrance takes place. No essence of voice
is determined, but the way a voicing means emerges in the field in proximity
with how other voicings mean, in ways not recognizable specifically but
fluidly, as the ensemble of voicings-the field-itself lives as the voicings'
interrelationships entail. Never neutral, not indifferent, voicing engages
passion that is its own and another's, the passion of the ensemble. The
ensemble emerges with the improvisation, which works against the stasis
or assimilation that would be determination. The conditions of music always
will have become voiced, music living as trace or nuance of what appears
present. Music as such works against totalization and toward infinity.
Mackey (following Baraka's essays of the 60s) writes specifically of jazz,
partly in the interest of focusing on African-American music (see particularly
Baraka, "Swing"). My discussion is also influenced by jazz,
yet we need not delimit the music; Mackey's remarks do not themselves
exclude other music. He focuses on "othering" as a process that
has happened (and continues) to African-Americans, a process of exclusion,
emphasizing that othered people have learned how to "other"
forms of music in expressing the injustice of othering and in celebrating
their ability to improvise on the forms. Mackey's discourse and its music
oppose an excluding formalism, while he voices a celebration of othering
in a field of improvisation he thereby joins voicedly.
Commentators on jazz help develop my points, however, and specifically
involve Baraka. William J. Harris discusses how the jazz musician has
to give up control, so there is no valorization of action-no determination
of any moment, any voicing, as active or passive. Mackey notes how the
improvisatory influence of jazz makes Baraka's poetry resist determination,
as the poems "tend to slide away from the proposed, to refuse to
commit themselves to any single meaning" ("Changing" 126).
Typographic features of Baraka's poems-some readable as aspects of "projective
verse"-weaken discursive force and help resist determination: broken
syntax, modified orthography, open-ended parentheses, erratic punctuation,
and constellations of words on the page. These features promote a poetry
whose internal and external linguistic relationships operate in improvisational
ways. Structural and tonal imbalance, rage and other emotional outpouring,
and sometimes flattened affect help develop stammering or maddened voicing
in many poems in Black Art. As Baraka's vituperative language becomes
opaque, implosive, even hostile to itself, his violence and aggression
become part of the improvisation.
Harris writes that Baraka shares an aesthetic with John Coltrane, who,
Baraka wrote, would "murder" Western song forms (Harris 14;
Baraka, Black Music 174). Harris also points out that Baraka came to see
English as somewhat foreign, thereby becoming a celebrating Caliban, reveling
in the "curse" by wielding vituperation, giving up control of
language to develop a poetics of indeterminate signification. Although
English is Baraka's first language, he is not disingenuous in claiming
it is not his mother tongue, as he emphasizes the orphaned or at best
bastard status of one born ethnically othered within the culture of the
language. Thus it is reductive to see Baraka's resorting to the rough
edges of English as entirely chosen by him, and it is also reductive to
focus on his personal psychology. By emphasizing an improvisatory aesthetic
in an ensemble of relations, we avoid reducing features of Baraka's work
to social pragmatism or psychological exigency.
W. D. E. Andrews comments that Baraka's "conception of revolution
puts historical and sociological realities before ethics" (217).
Where ethics may occur only in improvisatory, proximal nondetermination
(and if we are not naïve about determining realities), Baraka's poetics
may be read as opposing any appropriation of the ethical. As his works
resist determination, they emerge with their aggression in the ensemble,
where they may support and maintain differences between discourses, resisting
psychology as well as ethnic determination. We may read such resistance
even in the poem "Black People!": "you cant steal nothin
from a white man, he's already stole it he owes you anything you want,
even his life" (Black Magic 225). Baraka articulates what he opposes:
signified as of "the white man," he recognizes appropriation,
assimilation, totalization that has "already" absorbed differences
and relations of otherness and that thereby "owes" everything
back to the world of differences. Explicitly and implicitly here, Baraka
resists being read in contexts of assimilation; insofar as his work appears
in relation with other discourses, it dwells among them, however uneasily.
I hope my encounters of Levinas and Baraka, and the encounter between
them, will have been accomplished without determining or assimilating
the discourse of either. I find the proximal relation-where neither discourse
is a figure for the other or suffers under theorization-to be an improvisational
field where the ethical and the aggressive may cohabit, where neither
is truncated, absorbed, or controlled by an assimilating discourse that
imposes standards of toleration. I find this heterodox area open to such
utterances as "in your face-to-face"; I find it a place of belonging
where the proximity between discourses emerges, besides however they may
appear to be separate.
Works Cited
Andrews, W. D. E. "'All Is Permitted': The Poetry of LeRoi Jones/Amiri
Baraka." Southwest Review 67.2 (Spring 1982): 197-221.
Baraka, Amiri [as LeRoi Jones]. Black Magic: Sabotage, Target Study, Black
Art: Collected Poetry, 1961-1967. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969.
-- [as LeRoi Jones]. Black Music. New York: Morrow, 1968.
-- [as LeRoi Jones]. The Dead Lecturer. New York: Grove, 1964.
--. The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader. Ed. William J. Harris. New York:
Thunder's Mouth, 2000.
-- [as LeRoi Jones]. "Swing: From Verb to Noun." Blues People:
Negro Music in White America. New York: Morrow Quill, 1963. 142-65.
Derrida, Jacques. "Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought
of Emmanuel Levinas." Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago:
U of Chicago P, 1978. 79-153.
Harris, William J. The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka: The Jazz Aesthetic.
Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1985.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise than Being: Or Beyond Essence. Trans. Alphonso
Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1998.
--. Totality and Infinity: An Essay in Exteriority. Trans. Alphonso Lingis.
Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1969.
Mackey, Nathaniel. "The Changing Same: Black Music in the Poetry
of Amiri Baraka." Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones): A Collection
of Critical Essays. Ed. Kimberly W. Benston. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall,
1978. 119-34.
--. "Other: From Noun to Verb." Representations 39 (Summer 1992):
51-70.
Tallon, Andrew. "Nonintentional Affectivity, Affective Intentionality,
and the Ethical in Levinas's Philosophy." Ethics as First Philosophy:
The Significance of Emmanuel Levinas for Philosophy, Literature, and Religion.
Ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak. New York: Routledge, 1995. 107-21.