Visiting Mallarmé about Acting Today

David Lau

Stephane Mallarmé’s essay “Restricted Action” begins with a kind of narrative declaration about an admiring young visitor, a friend urged toward some sort of engagement: “Several times the same Comrade, this other, came to me and confided his need to act: what did he have in mind?”  This need resembles “the occupation of creating or succeeding in words, which would seem to dominate.”  Mallarmé organizes the essay around several key themes of activity, whose part of speech is the verb; the prose—a strange version of the idiomatic impersonality of literary French—demonstrates writing’s relation to conjugation as such.  Each act of writing establishes predication under conditions of disappearing appearances (“the immediate disappearance of the written”), and this activity will take us from one infinitive (to act), to another infinitive (to write), to a final imperative (publish).  In the ghostly, dangerous spume of phraseological dimensions a kind of Platonic hierarchy gets mobilized for the front.  

To act is first up, “le besoin d’agir” its first ensorcellment into a phrase.  The need to act becomes, in the course of a paragraph, “to unclench/relax the fists” as in a pugilistic bout with the idea.  There’s a-dialogue-of-body-and-soul fullness to the scene.  The comrade’s youthful feeling seems to work on something deep within Mallarmé.  There is also a generational and political dynamic; Mallarmé thinks the youth politically indifferent and physically lazy.  The repression of the Paris Commune (many killed, many others exiled) has scattered historical memory of bruising, street-fighting politics.  That’s the outer limit of the suggestion here, I think.  Or the young like to ride bikes, the latest form of exercise.  

We find ourselves enmeshed in the difficult, laboring intensity of thought.  The first take on action doesn’t look promising.  We’re told that we think we push upon the webbing of the word and world and produce an original movement, so to speak, but we can’t be sure that anything happens or, by extension, that we exist a priori.  Instead, we run up against the problematic nature of the “subject” in modern philosophy (numinous for some, changeling for others), the thwarted, continuous difficulty of trying to establish determinations of ourselves and of the world.  This “subject” accompanies the externalization of mankind’s powers into tools and their later alienation into large-scale machines.  We emerge out of a paleontologically thicketed environment, with conflicts of being and political opinion, the foreboding prospect of generational diminishment, looking for some foothold from which to execute our act.  The problems recall Hamlet’s indecisive attempts to act in a situation of personal and historical impasse, in which, as Mallarmé will put it towards the end, “the past seems to cease and the future to stall.”  

Our agreed upon problem is writing: “this praxis/practice” (“cette pratique”) of writing goes in two general directions.  You work deliberately, thinking, willing, for a lifetime in pursuit of “some dazzling multiple”; or you try to publish in the journals and find a press for your book, with the immunity of doing nothing at all as a result.  Mallarmé opted for the former of the two options; that’s where the stress fell.  Political action seems irremediably foreclosed for the writer.

A few more trumpet blasts—(including one where he re-addresses his utterance to his comrade: “Your act is always applied to paper.”  Writing secretes traces of our spiritual peregrinations, our divided and contradictory permanent transitoriness. We have ruled out certain kinds of action: a violent or vehement and lost gesture, which had been sought to begin with)—and the sonata-like prose moves from exposition to development.  “To write” blazes forth like a motto alone on a line, as if to say, “Regard the infinitive form.”   We move associatively to some material accouterments of the writer: inkwell, lamp.  Suddenly there’s an absolutist and analogous glance at the cosmos: you know, we write black on white, and only the stars write with white on black.  The alphabet of the stars “sketched” or “interrupted,” unique and singular, has the character of letter shapes within constellations.  A new symbol: writing as fold of black lace collectively woven—a kind of presentiment of the globalized garment industry.  Each writer works in secret (unconscious) combination with the others, mainly assembling spaces for newly phrased phenomena to come, “in which riches yet to be inventoried sleep: vampire, knot, foliage.”   

Here’s one possible distillation of the above points: the black lace of writing emerges out of the background of cosmic mystery; and a no-place (utopia) is constructed within said mystery’s existing representational economy of the familiar made strange.  

The essay's halted, circumspect, and abrupt passages proceed out in some elaborate choreography, anticipating Raymond Queneau’s “exercises in style.”  In Mallarmé’s version of transformative commitment, one must disappear into the written act (there’s no doer, it’s all in the deed), into the style that is predicated in a complicated fashion indeed.  The theatricalization of the self is also its self-dissolution in performance, as when one prepares oneself, like Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus, to pass through liquefied mirrors.   The writer, divided between his dragon-pain and joy, must do some spiritual histrionics.

At the upper limit of the restricted action is composition for the theatre or popular spectacle. The height of contemporary spectacle is Wagnerian opera, or the exhalations of an “orchestral chimera.”  This appearance of spiritual histrionics occasions some reflections on theatre.  “Everything functions like a festival: a people testifies to its transformation into Truth.”  We encounter the audience.  They ratify the act of the writer, who posits and claims that they understand and are changed by the work; or the work awaits their understanding, or that of some other, possibly future people.  Our honor is to be honored by them. “Seek anywhere something similar.”  But where, in the fashions of the current theatre? If we’re limited by representations (images of phenomenality, the theatre their ultimate extension), we also work from them.  Action in the “agreed upon mode” is contaminated by the actual time and place of its unfolding, the long tunnel of the age going to the central station—Mallarmé here deploys an image of the railroads’ forceful warping of space and time.   We must do something against the impulse of suicide or abstention in the lack of a present, or a coherent historical moment in which the crowd declares itself, which is all that matters.

The above passages aim at the delicate type who doesn’t want to drink suffering’s brew.  The moment, a fragment of a previous century, is strangely foreboding. The scene of some coming crime looms over all: the Great War. There’s also the coming insurgent wave of avant-garde anti-refinement, initiated by those joyful terrorists in Zurich.  Tristan Tzara: “The beginnings of Dada were not the beginnings of an art, but those of a disgust.”  Not much further ahead lay left political struggles of the period, mounted outside of the European metropole in waves of socialist revolution and decolonization around the world.  

At last, a conjugated imperative: Publish.   We’re strangely urged to do so: publish without hope of a public, but do so expectantly.  Now’s the time to write for posterity.   “The Book,” like the great tablets of the law, takes up the defense of purity.  Risk an extremity of art, which bursts out, only to be misunderstood, so that in another time it may still “cast forth illuminations.”

*

Now to concentrate briefly on a passage from Cesar Vallejo’s Trilce:

A little more consideration
as it will be late, early,
and easier to assay
the guano

Displacement is our present political condition: “late, early”—late for the party of the boom and bubble period of late capitalism; and yet early for what seems now to be coming in the form of the revolts in Arab countries, Wisconsin, Spain, the UK, or in California’s anti-austerity measure protests which have now spread from their campus bases.  The commodification of nature and the realm of the ethical keeps happening all around us.  (In Vallejo’s Peru the dynamics of the value form did much with the nation’s guano for the misery and development index.)  Our being is “languaged” by this world of contrived equivalences, mirrorings, and evasive resemblances.  In such conditions, the crowd begins to declare itself again.

So now what to say?  The act is not always applied to paper.  Mallarmé’s statements seem to be in some sense a problem of the contradictions of his own times, stagnant and wanting as they were.  Mallarmé errs on the side of not making concessions to the present, its latent potential—though his activity itself was a great wager on the present.  (Michael Palmer: “Shall we throw dice / to see who survives?”)  The practice of writing for Mallarmé is absolute, sacred; its odd fit of a complement is our own present when everyone is trying to “publish” a book, and there’s something like a demographic bulge of fluent and literate poetry being written and read.  Nearly every last shred of today’s poetry would be too delicate for him.

I have a more activist and political sentiment than “restricted action” will allow.  At the same time, I have sympathy with purely literary sensibilities.  The contradiction seems somehow present in Mallarmé’s reflections, though we might need to reconfigure them in striking juxtapositions, after the mode of the collagiste, to make sense of our own scene.  Spicer: “A poet is a time mechanic.”  To return to my opening theme: the question of urgency presses upon us differently today.  In the face of severe economic crisis and looming ecological catastrophe—not to mention all the problems stemming from the military commodification of technological science, the goofy Anglo-American faith in “markets” now underwritten by massive state indebtedness—the urgency we might bring to a visit with Mallarmé about acting today would seem to have grown immeasurably.  Those of us on the left know that the charade of bailouts and devastating austerity follows the neoliberal script of structural adjustment programs.  As Slavoj Žižek has it apropos of today’s left: “all [we] can do is to improvise, do what [we] can in a desperate situation.”  On the other side of the revolutionary upheavals of the 20th century, and without any broad radical movement, what are the weakly constituted, toothless people to do? Today the crowd declares itself, so to speak, or did in recent months in Cairo, Madison, Madrid, and Athens’ Syntagma square, only to be undone by the operations of the current political arrangements of “universal banditry,” or (if you like the way the right puts things) “money, families, elections” (Badiou).  As poets and writers, our acts remain on the page, but we need that page to do more for the present than ever before.  I call for polemical art, works that “innervate the rejection of false wealth” (Adorno) in a situation of dispersed polemics on the left.  Fredric Jameson: “…from Seattle on—not forgetting the Zapatistas, let alone the Guerrilla insurgencies that have everywhere seemed to cripple the armed forces of empire—much unexpected movement and vulnerability seems daily to unsettle a system already in the throes of a unique financial crisis.  In other words, it is not at all clear that we are in a situation of massive systemic stability, without any possibility of agency or action.”

Transform the present.

Like Lemy Caution in Godard’s Alphaville, we are the agents time has sent from a radically different future.  The renewal of popular consciousness with respect to our predicament (global economic discontinuity and breakdown—now the European debt crisis, soon the overheated Chinese property bubble) is the precondition of expanding waves of direct action taking the form of an unprecedented movement.  Our strategic goal is to establish a new relation to nature where every person has a singular art.  Poetry of any consequential stripe—from the varieties of conceptualism and formalism to the dynamic types of expressionist lyrics—should find itself acting, writing, publishing in this coming wave of struggles.  

Go back to the city.  Coordinate your poetry with insurgent anti-capitalism.  The crisis can only be overcome from the left.