Maurice Blanchot and disinterested art and politics and science fiction and Vandana Singh

Well, I haven't made it much farther in The Space of Literature since last time I wrote about it, but I am still reading. This weekend I came across this passage in which Blanchot is discussing a passage from Rilke:

He says it himself: art takes its point of departure in things, but what things? Intact things — unverbraucht — when they are not being used and used up by their use in the world. Art must not, then, start from the hierarchically "ordered" things which our "ordinary" life proposes to us. In the world's order things have being according to their value; they have worth, and some are worth more than others. Art knows nothing of this order. It takes an interest in realities according to an absolute disinterestedness, that infinite distance which is death. If it starts then, from things, it starts from all things without distinction. It does not choose, it takes its point of departure in the very refusal to choose. (Trans. Ann Smock)

The notion of "disinterestedness" in art is I know a fraught one; it has often been used as a weapon to enforce art's "separation" from political and social issues (really art's abdication of its political and social responsibilities in favor of reproducing the status quo). And in that sense I reject it wholeheartedly. But in the sense Blanchot uses it here, I think it is anything but apolitical; indeed by refusing to choose their subjects according to the hierarchical "value" placed on them in our way of life, artists as Blanchot describes them strike me as being radically political. (I am for the moment irresponsibly overlooking the role death plays in this passage, but a thorough examination of that issue — which is basically what Blanchot's book is — would not I think substantially change what I'm saying here.)

The sfnal implications of this are probably obvious, and I will not belabor the point except to say that one of my many unfinished essays is a sort-of manifestoish thing calling for, not anti-capitalist sf (though we still need that too!) but non-capitalist sf, sf that simply refuses to accede to or even acknowledge the capitalist order of things.* Works dealing with the wonder of space, I think, point us in this direction**; for even the most ruthlessly and stupidly capitalist works of a Larry Niven, say, have moments in which space, and our relationship to it, is treated as a thing in itself, rather than (or at least not just) as a ground for exploitation. To be sure, this is not without contradictions — after all, the wonder of space has always been instrumentalized to convince us that we should go there and exploit it, Niven himself being a prime example of this — but isn't there some kind of famous theory about the contradictions inherent to capitalism, etc. etc.?

*To be clear, much anti-capitalist thought would have to go into the writing of non-capitalist sf, or else it would simply reproduce capitalism in mystified form.
**Which is not to say that they are the only things pointing that way.

Anyway. I said I wasn't going to belabor the point. Let me instead close with some words from Vandana Singh's "A Speculative Manifesto", as it appears in her collection The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories (which just came in the mail this past weekend and oh boy am I excited). There are a few things I take issue with here, but for now I'll just leave it for its resonances with what I'm pointing at in the rest of this post:

So much modern realist fiction is divorced from the physical universe, as though humans exist in a vacuum devoid of animals, rocks, and trees. Speculative fiction is our chance to rise above this pathologically solipsist view and find ourselves part of a larger whole; to step out of the claustrophobia of the exclusively human and discover joy, terror, wonder, and meaning, in the greater universe.

Some of Blanchot's premises?

At the moment I'm about midway through a first attempt at Blanchot's marvelous and endlessly perplexing The Space of Literature (in Ann Smock's translation; it is my first Blanchot), and I feel that it might now be time, as I struggle with his investigation of Mallarmé's Igitur ("The Igitur Experience", he calls it) to pause and try to assess what I've gleaned thus far. I realize that trying to "nail down" Blanchot's ideas is a betrayal of those very ideas, but, y'know, you go to reading with the brain you have, not the brain you might want or wish to have at a later time; and the brain I have needs to do this kind of thing from time to time or else it will never work on transforming itself into the brain I might want or wish to have. So with that said, quickly, three things I think Blanchot is, maybe, on about:

1. Language is strange because though it seems to seek to "represent" things through words, the words are not those things; thus what language represents instead is the absence of those things--and in some sense words function to make that absence real. (Whatever "real" means.)
2. Written language in particular is strange because language is (originally? fundamentally?) a spoken phenomenon, but writing is speech without a speaker; it never begins and never ends because it is not spoken, it is simply there (in the pages of the book, for example, all of which coexist simultaneously, do not leap into existence as one turns the pages).
3. Death is strange because it is the one thing everyone can be certain of, but we can never be certain of this certainty--because death is the one experience that we can never experience; it always happens only to someone else, or to us only some other time.

These things, I think, are for Blanchot interconnected, and I feel that I am perhaps beginning mistily to see the connections...

An incapacity to stop seeing what is not there to be seen

Ann Smock writes, in the introduction to her translation of Maurice Blanchot's The Space of Literature:

          The Anglo-American critical tradition might be said to elucidate, and thus to honor, the actual object which writers offer us. We take the work to be what artists make in the course of a labor, a struggle perhaps, to which they alone are equal; or perhaps they bring it back to us from the depths to which they alone descend. Attentive to masterful technique and perfected form, we seek to comprehend the profound achievement of the blackest text by Kafka, say. We try to do justice to its strong and genuine character, even if we acknowledge shifty ambiguity to be the necessary vehicle of this authenticity, or recognize playfulness as the special grace of this rigorous perfection, or understand that misery is what this treasure holds. But the Kafka that concerns Blanchot is the nameless young man who cannot seem to write at all. He is reduced to lamentable games. The author of The Metamorphosis had to suppress and surpass him. The profundity of The Metamorphosis is, for Blanchot, the infinite depths of uncertainty and futility which its perfection masks—which the work shows only by masking—but which we seem actually to see laid bare sometimes when the masterpiece, like Eurydice when Orpheus looks back, disappears.
          To see something disappear: again, this is an experience which cannot actually start. Nor, therefore, can it ever come to an end. Such, Blanchot insists, is the literary experience: an ordeal in which what we are able to do (for example, see), becomes our powerlessness; becomes, for instance, that terribly strange form of blindness which is the phantom, or the image, of the clear gaze—an incapacity to stop seeing what is not there to be seen.