What the Ukrainian writer Maria Tumarkin says here feels right to me, including the disjuncture it reveals between the daily suffering of people within a territory and the language in which states account for their relations between each other. If that includes polities which have been denied statehood—in this case Palestinians but there are others—then the ground of disjuncture is even more resistant to communist internationalism. But Tumarkin is also addressing a crisis of language, a crisis that envelopes and permeates us so thoroughly that it’s all but impossible to define its limits. I would like to compare this current crisis of language with the one that took place during and after the First World War, but I’m not sure that thinking of, say, Benjamin or Artaud actually helps. I only have some questions. Is it useful, for the current situation, to speak of narcissism and its falsifying of the wound that it claims, or of a new level of ideological saturation, or of the end (now, really) of Enlightenment or the end of the logos that was supposed (Freud) to take the place of the illusion that is religion. Why do these questions sound rhetorical? I guess because all of this may be true but it has already happened. Maybe what’s more of the present is the lack of any power capable of underwriting a sense of reality which is synonymous with our survival. ‘Gaslighting’ was, according to one newspaper, the word of the year 2022. Is there now a pain that’s irremediable by any available type of practice, including violence (see Sean Bonney’s Our Death)? Are digital technologies of language, though obviously new in various respects, nevertheless expressions of what is happening at the level of productive forces, i.e. of human capabilities constrained by capitalist social relations? Sorry, I know that last question doesn’t, as it stands, help much.
(WR)
No comments:
Post a Comment