In the summer of 2019, I had the honor of being invited by the Berliner Festspiele to write a short essay on Metahaven’s film, Elektra. This text was published in the booklet of their New Infinity program, which debuted in September that year; the whole publication is available here.

Tender Disasters (2019)

In 2010, filmmaker and cultural theorist Manthia Diawara released the film “Édouard Glissant: One World in Relation.” The feature-length documentary follows the Martinican poet, philosopher, and essayist in a journey across the Atlantic ocean from South Hampton, United Kingdom, to New York, United States. Writing about his own experiences during the filmmaking process, Diawara remarks:

“I had taken advantage of that discussion on cinema to ask Glissant if there were ways to simplify his ideas for a wider presentation […] Glissant said, looking at me and smiling, if he were I, he’d wait until we were in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, and point the camera at the mass of water, its abyssal expanse. That would be the whole film in one shot, for him.”

It is, indeed, in the boundless mass of the Atlantic, the violent birthplace of Modernity, that Glissant’s ideas on a poetics of Relation take form; the ebb and flow of saltwater itself a ceaseless knotting and unknotting of the nodes that constitute the world. The errant movement of the water can only be predicted to a certain degree; like memory, it is prone to reconstituting itself in different forms, capable of wandering towards different, simultaneous directions at any given time. Glissant, outlining his ideas on Relation, remarks that it “interweaves and no longer projects, that it inscribes itself in a circularity, we are not referring to a circuit, a line of energy curved back on itself. Trajectory, even bent or inflected, no longer applies.” Diawara, additionally, describes Relation as that “which moves beyond the oppositional discourse of the same and the other, operating instead with a new vision of difference as an assembler of the ‘dissimilars’. It is a philosophy that rejects traditional Western attachments to filiation and legitimation, of trajectories between center and periphery, to look towards errantry instead; a poetics that turns away from the duty of transparency, of being made legible, to claim the right to opacity.

How does one, then, navigate the points of infinite density that emerge through a Relational approach to the world? One possibility might lie in the process of knotting and unknotting, as in the ebbs and flows of the movement of saltwater. In Metahaven’s latest work, “Elektra,” the game of cat’s cradle - the practice of creating figures with a piece of string through a series of movements involving hands, fingers, and wrists - offers a perspective on the transient, knotted and provisional nature of interwoven pasts, presents, and futures. Although it is a widespread practice, string figuring remains remarkably non-universal - its function and meaning, its knottings and unknottings opaque, a gentle refusal to transparency. It is also inherently heterogenous; scattered sets of figures, variations of movements and sequences linked together by delicate threads. Philosopher Donna Haraway describes the act of string figuring as “relentlessly a relational practice rather than a thing. It’s a writing practice, a gaming; it’s a speculative fabulational practice, a performance, and it always involves many players. It’s collective making-with.”

It is through the interweaving of fingers and wrists and hands, through the act of passing the string amongst players that these figures come into being. Learning them takes practice; the transmission of such delicate knowings requires patience, touch, tenderness. Muscle and movement memory as materializations, as world-making; like dance, string figuring invokes that which cannot be said. A kind of memory that becomes lodged in a deeper, hidden part of ourselves; even years after having played for the last time, one might be surprised to realize some movements and variations still come back easily. Concurrently, navigating through the meandering paths formed by strings might often incite bouts of frustration - perhaps in a betrayal of perceptions of the filiation and legitimacy of the knowings materialized through those knots. String figures are devices for storytelling; they are strategies or maps for navigating environments; they are carriers of various knowledges; they are ways of recording and transmitting personal or collective histories; they are projections of possible futures. String figuring circles around language; it renders the world in a way that the latter cannot. No figure is ever exactly the same; much like memories, they address that which is, and has been, and will be. It is an inherently unstable practice, fiercely resisting colonial and capitalist impulses towards domination, control, property; it cannot be owned, it can only be shared. Indeed, as Haraway remarks: 

“[a]s soon as possession enters the game, the string figures freeze into a lying pattern. […] Cat’s cradle invites a sense of collective work, of one person not being able to make all the patterns alone. One does not win at cat’s cradle; the goal is more interesting and more open-ended than that.”

Throughout “Elektra,” memories of a summer day spent playing at a park are invoked and interwoven with the apparent contradiction of summer snow - the looming threat of climatic disaster cutting through the tenderness of these fragments with painful urgency. A world on the cusp of total collapse, ebbs and flows of constant tension; memories from scattered points in time where trajectory no longer applies, where successors and ancestors become enmeshed as arpeggios punctuate the sonic space in the film like a cat’s cradle. Indeed, filiation and ancestry cease to matter; legitimacy, as remarked by Glissant, is replaced by contingency. 

It is precisely through its errantry that “Elektra” breaks with a universalizing rationality, and with a homogenizing impetus; there is no end destination, no linear path, no specific place it needs to be in. A child walks alone in the forest; the direction doesn’t matter as much as the act of walking. A child untangles a ball of yarn like a stolen sun, creating new knots, new worlds - plural, novel, multidimensional. A child climbs a dome - circularity in movement, a rooted errantry. Yet, we must remember that the break with this universalizing impulse cannot rely on abstract gestures. As Glissant remarks, “just as Relation is not a pure abstraction to replace the old concept of the universal, it also neither implies nor authorized ecumenical detachment.” We are all implicated in Relation; the question that remains is how.

Time flows in all directions like saltwater as a child plays a game of cat’s cradle. For the moment, everything is alive, everything is looking, everything is in flow. 

References

Manthia Diawara, “Édouard Glissant’s Worldmentality: An Introduction to One World in Relation,” Documenta14, accessed July 16, 2019, http://www.documenta14.de/en/south/34_edouard_glissant_s_worldmentality_an_introduction_to_one_world_in_relation;

Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997);

Donna J. Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse, 2 New edition edition (New York, NY: Routledge, 2018).