DATABLEED READS ‘As the non-world falls away’ by E Scourti

‘The world has lost its capacity to “form a world”’, wrote Jean-Luc Nancy in 2007. ‘It seems only to have gained [the] capacity of proliferating, to the extent of its means, the “unworld”’ (33-4). Globalization – and its ‘indefinite growth of techno-science’, its ‘worsening of inequalities’ and its ‘dissipation of […] certainties, images and identities of what the world was’ – has, he argues, reduced the world to a glomus; a hypersphere or small ball of tissue (33-4). Unlike a world, ‘in which there is space for everyone’, a glomus or glome is a ‘“land of exile” and a “vale of tears”’ (42).

It is perhaps this kind of ‘unworld’ – a hyperspheric glomus characterised by ‘the circulation of everything in the form of commodity' – which is deteriorating (or being deteriorated) in E Scourti’s poetic sequence ‘As the non-world falls away’ (37). Within the poems, language agglomerates into clusters, overlapping enmeshments and mergers which, simultaneously, undergo a process of dissolution, erasure and redaction, as if the poems - ‘speaking through a layer’ -  peel back the deposits and sediments of the glomus in an attempt to reveal what is buried beneath it. Like a snake, the non-world is sloughing its skin.

Like Nancy’s glomus, Scourti’s desquamous non-world is characterized by precarity, need, hunger and violence. It embodies the economic system of rentier capitalism, where private landlords extract escalating rents from tenants, and in which there is a sharp divide between those who ‘know how to hold on / to their scrubbed and polished property’ and those who must pay for the privilege of using that property. The poems are threaded with the queasy unspoken dependencies and intimacies that characterize this social dynamic. The phrase ‘umbilical lanyard’, for example, draws attention to the way in which, in stark opposition to the rent-extracting classes, workers are tethered to their jobs by necessity in order to survive on the ‘bare life minimum needed’.

Violence pervades the poems in fragments, shards, leaking bodies, ‘torn parts’, and ‘bodies carved so suedey’, the latter linking the exhaustion of labouring bodies with the consumption of animal bodies in the fashion industry. Within this system, language disintegrates and erodes, hardens and breaks; and the self becomes blurry, losing its outlines and edges. The poems have a temporal stuckness and repetition: they hint at ‘lack of progress’; time recurs as ‘noon cycles on repeat’; it slackens as ‘all day feels like 3 days’; the calendar is ‘slowed’; years are ‘wasted,’ and the future is ‘in the past tense’. This is ‘alienated time’ in rentier capitalism; just as ‘mechanical industrial production’ brought with it a ‘new time discipline of capital’, so rentier capitalism synchronizes its temporal requirements to correspond with the exploited labour of the tenant classes (Stahel, 110).

Another element of disintegration and erosion within the sequence arises from the visual pages, where the semantic elements fade and are rubbed out into white; or, elsewhere, are eclipsed by darker erasures. The resultant visuality is akin to a cosmic cartography, mired in dirt: one where the verbal DNA sinks, or has already sunk, behind the event horizon. But even as this notional boundary may subsume the language, the sequence resists a visual, stilted silence. Against all odds, something escapes, even if it is only the slight outline of a word. In the moments of such appearances, the featured word – for instance, ‘care’ – assumes a newfound primacy, as if we were encountering the word and the act it expresses for the first time.

And these dynamics, in some ways, extend across the entire sequence. Translanguaging between English and Greek, the poems often have a palimpsestic quality, as one language interweaves with, and overwrites, another. The latter untranslated (or mistranslated) elements gesture towards issues of consent and protection, mirrors, resistances, fleeting embraces, shapeless pieces of sun, and lost memories from the past. These Greek interventions reflect a larger liminality in the work: these are poems of mutability and instability between past and future, between languages, between genders, between temporal states. In this sense, they are like Ilya Prigogine’s ‘dissipative structures’, characterized by discordancy and occasional chaos, where ‘order emerges from fluctuation’ and ‘living indeterminacy’ (Prigogine & Stengers, 113). And, just as these structures embody the process of thermodynamic becoming, so Scourti’s poems embody the creative process of becoming. The non-world is falling away, and something new is in the process of coming into being.

Nancy, J. (2007) The Creation of the World or Globalization, State University of New York Press, New York, 34-35.

Prigogine, I & Isabelle Stengers (2018) Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature, Verso, London

Stahel, A. W. (1999) 'Time Contradictions of Capitalism', Capitalism Nature Socialism 10: 1, 101-132