Poetry as question

In États de faits (States of facts) et Gaza, d’ici-là (Gaza, from here to there) the usual state of language is suspended in favor of a questioning and, by this suspension of language, the world is questioned. Poetry makes of language an inquiry, not because the poet asks questions, but because questioning defines language, becomes the being of language through which the world becomes a question:

“We don’t know how to qualify things: a revolution, a civil war, events?”.

That questioning defines language implies that it is powerless to signify, to refer itself to an evident reality: language as question implies that language affirms itself as incomplete, unfinished, at the same time that the meaning it conveys and the reality it names, themselves appear to be troubled, obscure, unfinished. Frank Smith’s book transform the world into fragments—an essential non-completion. The world loses its unity and stability, to become an ensemble of possibles, opposed to which the question is repeated: what is this world and how can it be shared? The answer implies that the unfinished nature of the world, its definition as an ensemble of possibles, with neither unity nor identity, calls forth a world that is non-identical but shared.

To make of poetry and the world a question implies an attachment to facts, the choice of objectivity. Gaza, from here to there, for example, was based on a UN report concerning “Operation Cast Lead”, an operation during which Israeli aviation bombarded several locations in the Gaza strip and the army conducted several operation on the ground. “Operation Cast Lead” was responsible for hundreds of deaths, hundreds of wounded, and an even greater number of psychologically damaged victims. Frank Smith uses the UN report as the matter of a singular poetic construction with a desire to bear testimony, to keep to the facts: to recount the world as closely as possible to the facts, against a language that would be the expression of an already established version, of an installed, fixed meaning. The challenge is to prevent an overarching interpretation that would cover the plurality of facts in favor of a singular meaning masking from the start the reality of the world. On the contrary, it is this factual dimension that interests Frank Smith, and his interest for a language that strives to be as factual as possible is linked to the desire to avoid not so much meaning as its fixation, its uniqueness. The attachment to a language that tries to be factual and objective does not aim at an insipid accounting of the state of the world, but the opening of this world to a plurality of meaning through which the world itself appears plural, heterogeneous.

The result of testimony is that facts endure. What is recounted in the UN dossier was reported by the press, distributed by the media—and just as quickly forgotten, covered over by other events. The media-crazed regime of language favors an incessant collection of discourse and of the world, of the state of the world. Hardly have the facts that constitute the world been evoked than they disappear, which allows the power of dominant discourse to bury the world under its regulating and unifying fiction. Gaza, d’ici-là, like États de faits, is concerned with the desire to resist the domination of a language that is the domination of the world by the blanketing of the possibilities of the world thru the means of a language that produces a unifying and totalitarian version—and this resistance would be the sense of testimonial. It is this ‘mediacized’ state of language that, in États de faits—elaborated from the mass of information that circulated within the media during the Lybian war—is reconsidered, subverted, sidestepped, destroyed. It is a question of undoing the media-crazed regimen of language as much as its dominant, unifying regime, by insisting on the facts, by repeating the facts which, from being spoken too quickly, are in the end silent, from being repeated acquire a length that power can only refuse and undermine the possibility of a point of view both totalizing and totalitarian.
However, if it were only a question of bearing testimony, the reproduction of the UN report or the compilation and distribution of the testimonies of Palestinians and Libyans would suffice. But here testimony becomes part of a political and poetic project which goes beyond—without ignoring—testimony so as to render possible inquiry within language and within the world. Historians and physicists know that a fact is not a given, but is constructed inside a theoretical and material frame. A similar idea organizes these two collections: facts are inseparable from the language that defines them and, defining them, produces them. Nietzsche wrote: “There are no facts, there are only interpretations,” radicalizing the idea that the fact appears within a point of view attached to an interpretation, to meaning and value. Frank Smith’s texts bring to light the fact that language creates perspectives that constitute the world and that these perspectives, like frames cut into the multiplicity of the world, make possible the emergence of facts. A fact is the result of a point of view, of a selection which implies an interpretation, a sense of the world. There is no question of turning facts against language, of invoking a naive objectivity based on a simplistic metaphysics: the challenge is to position oneself there where fact and language are inseparable, where the world cannot be distinguished from the language that relates it and where language is also what the world produces. The poetry of Frank Smith troubles this relationship between the world and language, less because it rejects the relationships than because it multiplies it, and thus multiplies points of view and meaning, pluralizing the world so as to render it unto its heterogeneity—thereby trampling the language of power which functions by imposing a point of view, a unifying and homogenizing frame through which the world excludes the plurality of possibles that nevertheless inhabit it, excluding the question of the community in favor of a unique response, that of identity.
The objectivity of Frank Smith’s texts is not to be understood, therefore, as a will to concentrate on a reality that, beyond language, would be given in and of itself. If this objectivity corresponds to an effort at bearing testimony, insisting on divergent facts and, through this insistence, to undermine the reductive version of power, it is also an effort to keep within the facts, there where they are constructed as such, where the conditions of the world are inseparable from perspectives that are interpretations—perspectives inseparable from language. Objectivity is less a matter of returning to facts than an attention to their heterogeneous plurality as well as their condition of possibility. Objectivity insists on the perspectivist nature of the world and the multiplicity of world perspectives, in other words, introducing into the unifying point of view of power another perspective that multiplies the world, liberating its heterogeneity and the community that this heterogeneity demands.
The first part of Gaza, d’ici-là considers the Palestinian viewpoint, which bears witness to what occurred on Palestinian territory during “Operation Cast Lead”, while the second part treats the Israeli viewpoint, witness to traumas linked to the permanent threat of rocket launches—the two perspectives being separated by the division into two parts, divided between an ici (here) and a là (there) which demarcate the place of a boundary which reproduces the material one between Israel and the Palestinian territories. Two points of view, immediately separated, each of which affirms itself without implicating the other as possible, excluding it on the contrary, which seems to be the condition for both. The two sections of the book, the two juxtaposed perspectives, are inseparable from a boundary that distinguishes them and marks the reciprocal exclusion (at the same time that their coexistence, their existence together, the separation that links them), exclusion between an immovable here and there, impossible to imagine a here-and-there (which however, given the fact of the boundary, already exists to a certain extent) where perspectives would interweave to form a community which is the only possibility: the impossible one, unfinished, unattainable, which affirms itself by affirming heterogeneity—a community of differences, of multiple, variable, infinite points of view.
If this book draws on a UN report, it is not a reproduction of it: it is the object of a selection, a reordering, of new structuring, of restructuring, etc. Frank Smith chooses to favor the viewpoint of civilians, who endure without being active in the conflict. This decision gives voice to those who do not have it, as well as setting things in a new context in relation to the discourse of power, as what is said circumscribes the unspoken of what, from being hidden, can be qualified as a “military operation”: “While he found himself near a group of tanks,/the group was fired at without warning./The sister and mother of the man/were hit:/the man’s sister was killed instantly/and his mother, trying to escape, collapsed.” How can a “military operation” be implicated in the deliberate killing of civilians? “Military operation” is a label that corresponds to what occurs, but that also operates at the same time a selection in the multiplicity of things that occurred. The terms impose a frame to the real that does not delimit the totality of the real—an impossible demarcation—and we only have to change the frame to make the real change. To speak only of a “military operation” favors one perspective, contracting reality into a version that sends a thousand other possible perspectives into nonexistence. What happened on that day, at that hour, in that place? A thousand things, a thousand facts: the particular blue of the sky, the heat, a dark bird crossing the sky, a certain man, a certain desire, the dust on the ground lifted up by the wind, a dying fly, a Tsahal tank crossing the street, a woman killed, voluntarily and for no reason, by soldiers of the Israeli army…
To bear witness, to insist on the facts, is, against all the labels of power and the framework of dominant language, to displace the edges of the frame, to multiply perspectives in order to multiply reality and undermine the world of power. This is the work undertaken by Frank Smith: to trace new lines between the thousand points of reality, to trace new figures that construct new landscapes in reality, new facts amongst the infinity of facts—to construct another multiple and unfinished world. It is in this sense that the world becomes a question and that questioning defines language; it is a question of multiplying the possible and, by the suspension of any single point of view, of seeing the world as an ensemble of variable, heterogeneous perspectives, leaving the world to its unfinished state.
At the same time, it is important that Gaza, d’ici-là be elaborated from testimonies and discourses, in other words, in a language that, stating the facts, produces them as facts. This book—like États de faits – is not made up of facts but of discourses that pronounce the facts, of words that, by speaking of what happened, produce what happened. Bearing witness would also mean then to produce what happened. If the fact that language constructs the world leads us to rethink the opposition between objective testimony and fiction (even if the conditions for testimony to be recognized as true are not reduced to linguistic conditions and would have no meaning in the sense of fiction), we must not conclude that testimony is by nature invention and that the facts pronounced in Gaza, ici-là are false: what is stated can correspond to reality, even if this reality is only possible within a point of view whose language traces the configuration. Testimonial is at the same time an interpretation, the position of a meaning of the world, of values implied by this meaning. It is on this linguistic and perspectivist dimension of the world that Frank Smith insists in both these collections.
Gaza, d’ici-là is constructed in such a way that no one viewpoint can suffice to state the world. The Palestinian and Israeli viewpoints are offered in a neutral manner, respecting the pronouncement of facts: neither point of view fully equates with reality, but their conjoined affirmation speaks to the plurality of reality, the impossibility of it being reduced to one perspective. What occurred is both perspectives at once—a heterogeneous reality, manifested in the hyphen that both links and separates: ici et là et, here and there and… In this way, Frank Smith short-circuits the tendency of discourse to hegemony, to being the language of a power that, excluding all other possibles, pretends to summarize the state of the world. At the same time, respecting what was said, the facts as they were stated, the text makes it impossible to decide on the conformity of these statements with what occurred: are the reported facts real? Are the statements true or false? They can be one or the other, their truth or falsity are equally possible. The treatment of language, the perspective introduced through writing, tend to make of language the exclusive site of possibles: not a totalizing version, not a unique point of view, but plural perspectives, possible statements that sketch out ephemeral, vague frames of a reality that is itself vague, merely possible and thus unfinished, open.
We find in this text an innovative use of the question, by which it is less a matter of questioning in view of a response than to double the statements, to preserve what they assert but maintaining the possibility of something else, a virtual that is inseparable from what is actually asserted: “Isn’t this hospital located in the eastern sector of the al-Shujaeiyah quarter,/ to the east of the city of Gaza,/a slight distance from the boundary/between Israel and Gaza (…). The tenth day of operations,/ wasn’t this hospital the object of intense artillery fire/ with white phosphorus bombs?”. What is said names something other than what is said, language being suspended between two simultaneous dimensions, folded one into the other: one being the statement of facts, configuring a certain actuality of the world, and at the same time another dimension that asserts in the world other possible facts or another possibility of the same facts (which would no longer be the same), the actual enveloping a possible and multiple virtual—a dispersed, disparate world, pure variation of irreducible points of view.
This variation of the discourse and therefore of the being, is also the object of États de faits, made up of propositions relative to the war in Libya, based on newspaper articles, speech reported by the media, etc. The juxtaposed propositions are voluntarily contradictory, disordered, chained together as in a rapid vortex, and seem to be taken from a chaotic flux, from which they offer instant snapshots frozen in time by language: “It is said that the leader is unique, a real hawk, that there must not, there cannot be an alternative, ever/It is said that the leader is mad, a real scavenger, that he must leave immediately, that there cannot be another solution, ever/”. If we find in États de faits the same preoccupations as in Gaza, d’ici-là, as well as similar processes, it is in a more radical manner that the idea that language imposes contours on the world that make possible the facts that constitute the world—conditions that, if they are objectively considered by themselves, imply the relativity of these frames, their multiplicity and therefore the multiplicity of the possibles which, in the flux of the world, coexist at the same time. The world would thus be a flux of possibles from which language extracts cross-sections, frozen images that we designate as reality when in fact they are a possibility, reality itself being the open ensemble of possibles—those that actually exist as much as those that remain virtual—the flux that carries them and asserts them all at the same time.

The world would then be an ensemble of heterogeneous perspectives that language would update, favoring some, excluding others—the purpose of poetry being, on the contrary, through language, to allow the emergence of not the totality of perspectives, which would be impossible, but their relativity, their coexistence, to signify the chaotic flux that, in an immanent and undifferentiated manner, maintains them in an unfinished, mobile, heterogeneous community. It is this perspective that Frank Smith’s poetry introduces to the world—poetry whose meaning is also political: undermining the privilege of this or that hegemonic point of view, the fixation of a particular current image of the world that can only be the image of a power, of a will to blanket the infinity of images by a single image, reigning and exclusive, lethal.

Blanchot wrote that asking the color of the sky is like opening up the space of the possible, of the multiplicity of possible colors. But questioning does not require questions, it is enough that through language, or by other means, this space is opened up. This questioning would define the language of Frank Smith, a questioning that, crossing the world, creates a questioning. In this way the usual relationships of language and the world are reversed: language produces the world and produces it as points of view, a flux of possibles. But this reversal seems even more radical: keeping close to the facts, to their heterogeneous plurality, isn’t the horizon of this poetry, instead of speaking of the world, letting the world speak, inscribing the language of the world—that the world, as it is, speaks, that the multiplicity that it is be printed on the page, speaking its multiple voices and the paradoxical community of these voices?
Jean-Philippe Cazier

Frank Smith, États de faits, éditions de l’Attente, 2013 ; Gaza, d’ici-là, éditions Al Dante, 2013.

Source : Médiapart, 24/05/13