The End of Art is Peace: Finding Self, Creating Place

In The History of Sexuality, Foucault explicates his paradigm shifting analysis of the circumscription of power relations: "Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power. [...] [Resistances] are the odd term in relations of power; they are inscribed in the latter as an irreducible opposite." Berlant's development of contemporary modes of political discourse runs parallels to Foucault's concern about the discursive nature of power relations.⁵ In the final chapter of Cruel Optimism, Berlant turns her attention toward exploring the function of optimism in the public's continued attachment to prevailing modes of politics. She questions why a public persists in attachment to prevailing modes of political engagement even when the polity appears to be a broken, ineffectual system and engagement in its ceremonies and rituals are futile. One is stuck, therefore, in a "double-bind:" on one hand, continue modes of political engagement perpetuate the system, while detachment predominantly functions as a tacit acquiescence to maintaining the normative political world. This is the sense in which Berlant's analysis of cruel optimism runs parallel to the interiority of power relations discussed by Foucault—there is no resistance from the outside.

This is thus the political dimension of cruel optimism: the tendency of the individual to continue in normative political engagement, despite its frustrations, because its life-organizing status is valued over damage provoked by resistance.

It may be a relation of cruel optimism, when, despite an awareness that the normative political sphere appears as a shrunken, broken, or distant place of activity among elites, members of the body politic return periodically to its recommitment ceremonies and scenes. Voting is one thing; collective caring, listening, and scanning the airwaves, are others. All of these modes of orientation and having a feeling about it confirm our attachment to the system and thereby confirm the system and the legitimacy of the affects that make one feel bound to it, even in the manifest content of the binding has the negative force of cynicism or the dark attenuation of political depression.⁶

The connections between Berlant's affect theory and the narratives told by Northern Irish writers are numerous. They both wrestle to understand how any individual, or public, can effectively engage in a political system that is laden with prescribed identities and political action which only perpetuate the normativity of the broken enterprise.⁷ Not to mention, there is a strong echoes of what Berlant calls "the negative force of cynicism" and "the dark attenuation of political depression" throughout contemporary Northen Irish literatue in the latter half of the 20th century. What can someone do who cares deeply for the political situation in their home, when (vis-a-vis Foucault) the modes of resistance are already circumscribed by the prevailing power relations? Berlant describes, and cautiously prescribes, what she calls "ambient citizenship by investigating trends in contemporary avant-garde art.

While Heaney and Deane do not engage in modes of expression quite as avant-garde as the artists Berlant considers, there is an essential ground shared with her by Heaney and Deane as "ambient citizens," in that they attempt "break the double-bind of cruel optimism, [by] not reentering the normative public sphere while seeking a way, nonetheless, to maintain [their] desire for the political."⁸ Deane and Heaney's poetry is not precisely the ambient art that Berlant considers evocative of the engagement she describes. It is grounded largely in literal ambient and sonic art such as silent protest and surrealist performance pieces which she calls "noise politics."⁹ Nevertheless, Berlant's conceptualization resonates strongly with the way in which Heaney in particular considered his own artistic project. Heaney's poetry, in this way, serves as a proto-Berlantian example of art which seeks political effect (and affect) by bypassing normative modes of political engagement.¹⁰ Rather, Deane and Heaney sought through aesthetics to "interfere with the feedback loop" engendered by prevailing political discourse, and "affirm a model of civil society that is civil, but in a new manner."¹¹

Deane opens his History Lessons with the poem "Osip Mandelstam:" "'The people need poetry.' That voice / That was last heard asking for warm / Clothes and money, also knew the hunger / We all have for the gold light."¹² Mandelstam, a Russian Jewish poet, was put to death for activist poetry. Deane eulogizes the poet: "The kerosene flash of his music / Leaps from the black earth," and in the final stanza he asks Mandelstam, "Tell us how to turn into the flash." Deane does not want to write poetry which incites the violence of the institution, but instead, to be the living embodiment of the art which disrupts this the feedback loop of normative power relations. Neither Deane nor Heaney desired to be explicitly political. Instead, they considered their project as a type of political noise created from their own aesthetic "movement." This poetic trope of "movement" is developed by both Heaney and Berlant explicitly.

In his 1996 interview with Charlie Rose, Rose prods Heaney to consider the potentially miscarried political import of his talents:

Rose: In conversation with you, I'm reluctant to, to exaggerate because you'll slap me. It is the– I think– someone said of Winston Churchill that he mobilized the language and saved a nation. I think John F. Kennedy said that– in World War II. Have, have you used your gifts as best they could be used? Heaney: Yes, I think so. I mean, I do– I mean, I, I'm not a political leader. Rose: I know you're not. Heaney: I didn't have to mobilize anybody. Rose: Yeah. Heaney: But just to– I had to move truly.¹³

By "move truly," Heaney explains that he had to follow his "inner sense" of what was best to do. Heaney never set out to create an explicitly political program. Rather, as his words hum in The Rain Stick, "Upend the rain stick and what happens next / Is a music that you never would have known / To listen for."¹⁴ His "desire for the political" is manifested in the way his poetry functions as a noise intended to be overheard by an intimate public.¹⁵ The intimacy of those who overhear Heaney's poetry is emphasized by the embodiment required by his intention to simply "move truly" (that is, manifest the poetic by the mere integrity of his being and self-possession). Berlant writes:

[...] [T]he new crisis ordinary is engendering peculiar forms of something like "ambient citizenship"—politics as a scene in which the drama of the distribution of affect/noise meets up with scenarios of movement. In the perspective it opens up on the way the political suffuses the ordinary, ambient citizenship is a complicated thing, a mode of belonging, really, that circulates through and around the political in formal and informal ways, which an affective, emotional, economic and juridical force that is at once clarifying and diffuse.¹⁶

Heaney's notion of "moving truly" runs parallel to what Berlant articulates as a "mode of belonging" which carries an ambient and atmospheric power in relation to those who in the vicinity (in Heaney's case, his students, or those who read or hear his poetry). "Mass politics is melodramatic," Berlant notes, "but noise politics is at the heart of the popular: ambient citizenship registers the normative distinctions in terms of who has the formal and informal right to take us soundspace."¹⁷ It is telling, then, that when Rose asks Heaney how becoming a Nobel Laureate may change him, and Heaney deflects. Even once he has been registered as an institutionally sponsored voice in the "soundspace," he ties the success of his project, to the simple continuity of doing what he has always done—write the best poetry that he can.

In an article in The New Yorker, Deane narrates the history of Heaney and his relationship. While watching the Nobel ceremony, Deane recounts "the sense of unreality" he had:

What was the emptiness? I felt that I was witnessing two things: the real celebration, the real prize, the real achievement, and a simulacrum of that. [...] Heaney was aware, too, of the chemistry that alters a writer who has gained fame and transforms him from what he is to what his reputation is. I felt as though I were seeing him recede into an abstraction, [...] an object of national pride, a writer reified into a prize. Yes that was the emptiness. Would we ever be as we had been? Would his fame now leave me, and others, feeling that we, I, had nothing left to say except that we had remained ordinary, whereas he had become extraordinary?¹⁸

The framework of Deane and Heaney's self-awareness of their own projects is evocative of the Berlant's double-bind, and the lifelong struggle that they had weathered in common, to find a space in which they could make a sound desiring the political, without reentering the normative political sphere whether explicitly, or through tacit silence.¹⁹ Instead finding solutions to this political stalemate in the modes of discourse which are already established, Deane and Heaney turned inward, and sought for solutions emanating from the interior power of self, and its expression in poetry.