THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH vs Nicholas Powers

The BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.2, ISSUE#11, MARCH-MAY/2014

Nicholas Powers is the author of The Ground Below Zero: 9/11 to Burning Man, New Orleans to Darfur, Haiti to Occupy Wall Street and Theater of War: The Plot Against the American Mind. As a poet and journalist possessed of an uncanny literary talent which cross-navigates discursive boundaries with the precision of a surgeon, Powers is the most compelling ‘embodied surrealist’ thinker since Andre Breton himself.

Powers is a professor of literature at SUNY Old Westbury.

Brotherwise Dispatch - Your book The Ground Below Zero succeeds in conveying an emotional depth and socio-historical relevance which isn’t loudly displayed in your writing but is actually aesthetically embodied in the quality of your discourse. In your preface, you attribute this to what you term “Method Writing” through which “memoir and journalism are positioned like mirrors that reflect the truth that life is elsewhere.” Why did you choose “Method Writing” instead of either a purely journalistic endeavor or a strict attempt at memoir writing?

Nicholas Powers - The writing came from a deeper and wider place than me. It poured into my body like boiling water from the world. The historical trauma of 9/11 and wading through flooded New Orleans fused into knotted muscles, nightmares and rage. When I sat in front of the keyboard, the force of it could not be channeled into one genre. It was too personal for journalism. It was too historical for memoir. So I got out of the way and let "it" remold genres around experience.

Later, I termed it "Method Writing" after the acting technique because in journalism, the reporter is a disembodied voice that presents facts, but I had to let my "affective memory" into the language. And if there's one saving difference between it and creative non-fiction is that Method Writing comes from the collision of historical forces and the singular body. What emerges is not objective, not academic history, it is very much from a subjective position but it's from a subjectivity that's been shattered. It's a crisis state of consciousness, in limbo between self and other on the threshing floor of history.

BD - How did your “Ecstasy of Exile” experiences at the various versions of the Burning Man festival and your growing intellectual engagement and leftist activism around Sean Bell’s murder and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina inform your efforts at constitutive self-determination in response to that “crisis state of consciousness”?

NP - For any oppressed group, self-determination is a measure of health, more so, it moves the wheels of history. Dancing in dust storms at Burning Man, tonguing LSD as a desert sunrise washed over me like a tide of watercolors, gave me the lived experience of that Leftist saying, "Another World is Possible". My activism, my marching, my chanting and placard waving against social injustice had up until my first Burn been in defiance of the world as it is. And faith in a world that could be. Faith is the belief in things unseen. But at Burning Man, I moved from faith to knowing. I actually experienced an ephemeral utopia generated by a radical practice of self expression. It was like living in a dream. And it left me blinded by a world that could exist if we seized the productive powers unleashed by capitalism, decreased the labor time it takes to creates a high standard of living and increased leisure time for art and lovemaking.

The other side of this utopia was the class and racial segregation that subsidized it. No poor people and few people of color are paying nearly a thousand dollars to go into the desert to burn the symbol of "The Man" when the real one was beating their asses in their neighborhoods. So when I returned from Burning Man, I knew that our goal, speaking as a man of color, was a self determination that led to a systemic transformation in solidarity with others. The "crisis state of consciousness", our fractured psyches, shattered by the consumer obsession of commodity fetishes, cleaved in two by Double Consciousness, turned inward by fear and self hate can be healed by revolutionary practice. And the end of that revolution is a world where everyone in every city can be artist, a full human being, all the time. We won’t need to retreat into the desert but can live our freedom in the cities where "the Man" is burning all the time and the light of his destruction illuminates our hidden beauty.

BD - Drawing from the way too brief section of the book which focused on your dissertation defense, what did you mean by claiming that “the slave sublime is the return to the self”?

NP - When I came back from post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans I had Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I couldn't sleep, I was numb. And at the same time, I had to finish graduate school by writing a dissertation. So I researched the Middle Passage because its imagery of mass death and people ripped from home, broken minds bleeding out of their eyes, resonated with 9/11 and my experience of flooded New Orleans. While I was reading slave testimonies by Equiano and Frederick Douglass, I noticed they used language that felt familiar to me. Sifting through my books from older classes, I saw the rhetorical pattern of sublime rapture, a transcendent euphoria of entering a field of experience larger than oneself. Reading the classical critic Longinus and other writers of the sublime, I saw that in contrast to the "elite" sublime where one is transported outside of one's self, there was a contrasting "slave sublime" where those who've been cleaved from their bodies by oppression's spectrum of violence ranging from microaggressions to physical violence, felt a rapture at returning to their bodies.

In slave narratives, the body was the alienated address and because this alienation was itself a symptom of systemic oppression then the "body" was never individual but a socialized body. Abstracting it from slavery, I saw that the body was a pivot of history and many social movements used the language of or the natural or of return to map a route through oppression back to lived experience. My concept of the slave sublime was an attempt to conceptualize this dialectic between flesh and history. What I experienced in my writing led me home through sleepless nights, through psychic scar tissue back to the drumbeat of life in my chest.

BD - How is it that, as you described during your take on having to leave a Block party on Quincy street because of gunshots, “the abstract rhetoric of the academy” transformed your life into “strange symptoms of hidden forces”?

NP - Being in the academy is like taking an express elevator up in class. It's dizzying. Doors open into strange worlds. People speak strange dialects. And yet, I savored the class status it gave me. After the graduate seminar was done for the day, I took that elevator back down and returned home to Bed-Stuy. After reading so much history and literature, I felt connected to the world beyond, ahead, within and before this one. When I talked to friends on the stoop, I heard in their hard voices the jails they had lived in, the masculine armor they wore and the hatred shattering their self image. Sitting on that stoop, sharing a drink with them, I could almost touch the distance between our languages. And when I tried to make theory fit life in the street, I discovered it could map our social destruction but it wasn't a discourse that could save us. Critical theory was out of reach for those who needed to analyze cultural dynamics just to survive, but for those of us who could grasp it, we were already on the edge of achieving upward mobility and too often, were seeking a career not revolution.

So the night the gunman shot up the party, I experienced the terror in two ways. The critical theory I learned instantly translated the shooting into an event part of a larger militarized economy, an American culture of gun fetish and gang formation in the rubble of broken families. It telescoped the experience. It made the people dodging bullets, characters in a history written by forces larger than any of us and yet I felt my heart kicking in my chest and grief at the pain we shared. I wanted then and want even more now, a movement where we the people become a historical force in our own right.

BD - Your coverage of The Ascendancy of Obama and the Continued Need for Resistance and Liberation dialogue between Carl Dix and Cornel West, which took place 6 months after Obama’s election, was informed by a sincere, accurate and deep cynicism of each of their emancipatory orientations. Do you consider emancipatory praxis a dead end street? If not, how do would you describe your own emancipatory orientation?

NP - Watching Cornel West and Carl Dix on the same stage, it was like watching a re-run of my favorite movie. I knew the lines. I could mouth along with them. And it's because I grew up with their discourses, West's soulful Liberation theology and Dix's hammer like Marxism were my inheritance. When I left the event, an irritable feeling crept up on me. And in the years since, I have seen other revolutionary groups proclaim a shining path forward to the new utopia and always I felt the suspicion that a human dimension was being left out. And I had a hunch its why so few people pay attention to organizations like the R.C.P. but came out in the thousands for Occupy Wall Street.

And I think the difference is that events like Occupy gave us a place to act out our core human impulse - creativity and love. So to answer your question directly, do I think emancipatory praxis is a dead street? No I don't, because I experience it every time I dream, create a metaphor, make a joke, make love, steal something, lie, learn and wonder. Emancipatory praxis would not be possible if there wasn't already a base in the body that generates the desire to be free that we translate into politics. And it leads to my emancipatory orientation as Embodied Surrealism.

Marxist categories are part of the sociological tradition that analyzes human beings as members of socio-economic classes at war, which is why it has such a bloody history. When you build a political movement on Karl Marx's statement, "It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being but rather their social being that determines their consciousness" and further, that the core contradiction is that the capitalist economy creates an alienated social being then it follows you, of course, destroy the economic system through revolution to free humanity. But you also never stop seeing humanity except through that sociological lens in which everyone is defined by their group identity. The individual is eclipsed. And so is the mysterious nuance of life. Which is why the Communist regimes in the former Soviet Union and in Maoist China, were so brutal, unnecessarily so, they fundamentally had a distrust of the individual, of wonder, of human freedom.

But if one retreats into bourgeois liberalism, which champions the individual and civil liberties, you get an impotent political practice that does not acknowledge the larger social and historic forces that individual must drive through to achieve their freedom. And that is why liberalism can accurately show the nightmare of Communist praxis, the K.G.B., the Soviet war against the peasants, the mass starvation in China, the dull grey tone of life that fell like an endless night. But it cannot show how its own consumer hedonism is a built on the toil of millions of dead souls in the sweat shops of the world. Liberalism sanctifies the individual but is trapped inside of it. So when Far Right groups assault the body politic, liberalism is not powerful enough to withstand them because it does not have a larger vision that can mobilize groups of people to resist.

So how do you mobilize a resistance to the Far Right? We need a vision that goes deeper than the conflict between proletariat and bourgeoisie, deeper than the contradiction between labor and alienation and deeper than the plight of the bourgeois individual. The bedrock of alienation is the contradiction between the body and language. As a writer, I wrestle with language to make it fit experience, so I'm sensitive to how others are locked inside old ideas, dead ideas that kill them slowly. It's like watching a butterfly suffocate inside a cocoon. We are driven to create, to express ourselves precisely because our biological needs, translated through language are filtered into a moral system that paints those needs on a spectrum of good and evil. And what's left is the biological drive to be recognized by the Other and the frustration of whole parts of the self suppressed or made illegal. And when we express those censored parts, we deeply move others who, like us, share them. Today, the "social" body of humanity, our species-being is trapped inside the nightmare of hierarchy, of social climbing, of commodity mountains built with the misery of workers.

A universal vision for the Left can be built on what we all share - a body traumatized by the alienation inherent in language and the social edifices that rise from it. From it follows the goal to create a socio-economic infrastructure that returns us to our bodies and to each other. And that means both Communist and Liberal ideas. It means basic income, free global healthcare, free education, free housing and food and free global mass transit, and a safeguarding of civil liberties, freedom of speech and protest and voting, an end to the drug war, sexual equality between men and women, gay and straight. And this done in the name of a deeper vision - that we are social animals, who are neither the brutes of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan or the angels of Jean Jacques Rousseau's On the Social Contract. We are both and more. But what that more is we won't be able to find out until we are free, truly free to not work, to just be with each other, to heal from history, to create. After millions of years of evolution, we have the right to discover who we are and who we as a species can be, we have a right to let this eternal river of human seeking go into the unknown.

BD - This has been another one of our BROTHERWISE FIVE interview series, during which The BROTHERWISE DISPATCH interrogates intellectuals, artists and activists with five probing questions to the delight of our readers.

On behalf of Nicholas Powers and The BROTHERWISE DISPATCH,

Peace.

-A. Shahid Stover

(this interview of Nicholas Powers for The BROTHERWISE DISPATCH was conducted by A. Shahid Stover through email correspondence from February 4th – February 13th of 2014)

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