#poetics of relation

[altrbody]

Glissant on opacity

[thetendertongue]

tremblement -> from Glissant: the act of thinking without domination; thought that shivers, shifts, listens, and allows for uncertainty. not about controlling or mastering an idea, person, or place, but about being in relation with it. grounded in care, in listening, in humility; resists totalizing truths, singular narratives; staying open to the unknown; refusing mastery and allowing yourself to be changed in relation; honors multiplicity

[guayaba-podrida]

Efectivamente, ¿qué son las Antillas? Una multirrelación. Todos lo sentimos así, lo expresamos en todas las formas ocultas o caricaturescas, o lo negamos fieramente. Y todos sentimos que ese mar está en nosotros, con su carga de islas por fin descubiertas.

Édouard Glissant, Poética de la relación (1981)

(Trad. por Aura Marina Boadas y Ainelia Herméndes)

[aguasdejamaica]

One World in Relation (2010) dir. Manthia Diawara

[a-bunch-of-bones]

Cultures are also built on historical events and their ramifications just as much as they are on geotemporal and social conditions! Understanding that these events can be seen in multiple lights (and result in different reactions) also will inherently add nuance and depth to your cultures.

Grim Cold Bleak Forest (Finnish) People may have fought a local war some centuries ago - one in which their habitual reclusiveness and run-and-hide gatherer-trapper tactics would have been rendered unviable in normal circumstances. But say there was a certain intrepid trapper who utilized precisely this cultural knack for traversing and disappearing into the underbrush to carefully enact long-distance, ranged guerilla warfare on the invading force, eventually racking up, say, 505 confirmed kills. This creates a precedent and reference for the Grim Cold Bleak Forest People which would become ubiquitously tethered to their reputation.

What outsider 'Other' cultures might come to perceive as a tough and rugged ferocity would simply be layers of pretense which either strip away to reveal a genuinely quite timid people, their bleak humor aside, or could perhaps perpetuate their own ruggedness as they become a little bitter at the presumable reiteration of the fierce "they're in the trees"/"people of the dark, scary forests" stereotypes. Keep in mind, whether in outright xenophobia or more obscure and institutionalised racism, each culture has methods of constructing other cultures as an imaginary, and these outsider perspectives tend to be pretty reductive. As such, dont get carried away in returning from the enriched two-layer/relational model to the single-faceted depiction of one culture by another; instead, try to focus on how the portrayal works as part of an exchange, not only in one direction but both ways. A single historical event can instill different symbolism, values and traditions in different cultures, and as such can be seen as somewhat of a 2-for-the-price-of-1 sale in the lore section of your mind palace.

What's important to remember is that 'culture' as we know it is ordinary (Stuart Hall, God bless). It is a "structure of feeling" the everyday (Raymond Williams, God bless). Culture only becomes distinctly so when it has something positioned opposite it. It is always relational, either 'ours' or 'theirs', and exploring these relational (and most importantly fluid) perceptions is what can truly give the necessary depth to make your RPG setting, culture, history, lore, whatever *truly* pop.

Because I am a filthy academic, I am going to make recommendations for supplementary readings that I'm sure could benefit any TTRPG's incubation: Edouard Glissant's *Poetics of Relation* and Edward Said's *Orientalism* are great starts.

Another worldbuilding application of the "two layer rule": To create a culture while avoiding The Planet Of Hats (the thing where a people only have one thing going for them, like "everyone wears a silly hat"): You only need two hats.

Try picking two random flat culture ideas and combine them, see how they interact. Let's say taking the Proud Warrior Race - people who are all about glory in battle and feats of strength, whose songs and ballads are about heroes in battle and whose education consists of combat and military tactics. Throw in another element: Living in diaspora. Suddenly you've got a whole more interesting dynamic going on - how did a people like this end up cast out of their old native land? How do they feel about it? How do they make a living now - as guards, mercenaries? How do their non-combatants live? Were they always warrior people, or did they become fighters out of necessity to fend for themselves in the lands of strangers? How do the peoples of these lands regard them?

Like I'm not shitting, it's literally that easy. You can avoid writing an one-dimensional culture just by adding another equally flat element, and the third dimension appears on its own just like that. And while one of the features can be location/climate, you can also combine two of those with each other.

Let's take a pretty standard Fantasy Race Biome: The forest people. Their job is the forest. They live there, hunt there, forage there, they have an obnoxious amount of sayings that somehow refer to trees, woods, or forests. Very high chance of being elves. And then a second common stock Fantasy Biome People: The Grim Cold North. Everything is bleak and grim up there. People are hardy and harsh, "frostbite because the climate hates you" and "stabbed because your neighbour hates you" are the most common causes of death. People are either completely humourless or have a horrifyingly dark, morbid sense of humour. They might find it funny that you genuinely can't tell which one.

Now combine them: Grim Cold Bleak Forest People. The summer lasts about 15 minutes and these people know every single type of berry, mushroom and herb that's edible in any fathomable way. You're not sure if they're joking about occasionally resorting to eating tree bark to survive the long dark winter. Not a warrior people, but very skilled in disappearing into the forest and picking off would-be invaders one by one. Once they fuck off into the woods you won't find them unless they want to be found.

You know, Finland.

[global-south-book-club]

He suggested that we needed to enter into a state of world and mind that was less prone to discovery and conquest, and to espouse a philosophy of relation that looked at our differences not as that which divide us, but which link us individually and collectively

Manthia Diawara on Édouard Glissant’s philosophy of Relation [x]

[caribbeanart]

One World In Relation (2010) Édouard Glissant bio dir. by M Diawara

In 2009, Manthia Diawara, with his camera, followed Édouard Glissant on the Queen Mary II in a cross-Atlantic journey from South Hampton (UK) to Brooklyn (New York) [...] The extraordinary voyages resulted in the production of an intellectual biography in which Glissant elaborates on his theory of Relation and the concept of "Tout-monde." In the 1980s, his theories of creolization, diversity and otherness, as elaborated in the book "Le Discours Antillais" (1981), were considered as seminal texts for the emerging studies of multiculturalism, identity politics, minority literature and Black Atlanticism. [x]

[jaijxo]

“Love is not an emotion. It is your very existence.

Love is not about posssession, Love is about appreciation.”

[sensitivesublime]

[leolovesumore]

So don't go looking at me like you could love me,

when you plan to not

~leolovesyoumore

[y2kaee]

"I was looked at,

but I wasn't seen."

Albert Camus, The misunderstanding.

[altrbody]

Edouard Glissant - Poetics of Relation (some concepts)

by Erin Manning

Errantry (errance)

18- errantry does not proceed from renunciation nor from frustration regarding a supposedly deteriorated (deterritorialized) situation of origin; it is not a resolute act of rejection or an uncontrolled impulse of abandonment.

- The thought of errantry is a poetics, which always infers that at some moment it is told. The tale of errantry is the tale of Relation.

21- The thinking of errancy conceives of totality but willingly renounces any claims to sum it up or possess it.

20- The thought of errantry is not apolitical nor is it inconsistent with the will to identity, which is, after all, nothing other than the search for a freedom within particular surroundings.

Rhizomatic thought / rhizome

18- the rhizome- prompting the knowledge that identity is no longer completely within the root but also in Relation.

Poetics of Relation

11- each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other

20- in the poetics of Relation, one who is errant (who is no longer a traveler, discoverer or conqueror) strives to know the totality of the world yet already knows he will never accomplish this - and knows that is precisely where the threatened beauty of the world resides.

Relation

34- What took place in the Caribbean, which could be summed up in the word creolization, approximates the idea of Relation for us as nearly as possible. It is not merely an encounter, a shock... a métissage, but a new and original dimension allowing each person to be there and elsewhere, rooted and open, lost in the mountains and free beneath the sea, in harmony and errantry.

131- The thing recused in every generalization of an absolute, even and especially some absolute secreted within this imaginary construct of Relation: that is, the possibility for each one at every moment to be both solitary and solitary there.

154- the thought of the Other is sterile without the other of Thought

155- The other of Thought is always set in motion by its confluences as a whole, in which each is changed by and changes the other.

157- Distancings are necessary to Relation and depend on it: like the coexistence of sea olive and manchineel.

Identity

141-142 The old idea of identity as root, whenever it proves hard to define or impossible to maintain, leads inexorably to the refuges of generalization provided by the universal as value.

142- Identity as a system of relation, as an aptitude for "giving-on-and-with" (donner-avec) is in contrast, a form of violence that challenges the generalizing universal and necessitates even more stringent demands for specificity.

Creolization

34- carries along...into the adventure of multilingualism and into the incredible explosion of cultures. ... It is the violent sign of their consensual, not imposed, sharing.

89- only exemplified by its processes and certainly not by the "contents" in which these operate.

-Creolizations bring into Relation but not to universalized the principles of creoleness regress toward negritudes, ideas of  Frenchness, of Latinness, all generalizing concepts, more or less innocently.

Creole

69- in addition to this obligation to get around something, the Creole language has another, internal obligation: to renew itself in every instance on the basis of a series of forgettings. Forgetting, that is, integration, of what it starts from: the multiplicity of African languages on the one hand and European ones on the other, the nostalgia, finally, for the Caribbean remains of these.

93- The Creole language is a fragile and revealing écho-monde, born of a reality of relation and limited within this reality by its dependence.

-Echos-monde are not exacerbations that result directly from the convulsive conditions of Relation. They are at work in the matter of the world; they prophesy or illuminate it, divert it or conversely gain strength within it.

Plantation

65- one of the focal points for the development of present-day modes of Relation.

67- socially, the Plantation is not the product of a politics but the emanation of a fantasy.

74- The Plantation, like a laboratory, displays most clearly the opposed forces of the oral and the written at work - one of the most deep-rooted topics of our discussion in our contemporary landscape. It is there that multilingualism, that threatened dimension of our universe, can be observed for one of the first times, organically forming and disintegrating.

Earth

13- Relation to the earth is too immediate or too plundering to be linked with any preoccupation with identity - this claim to or consciousness of a lineage inscribed in a territory

151- An aesthetics of the earth? ... Yes. But an aesthetics of disruption and intrusion.  ... Imagining the idea of love of the earth...with all the strength of charcoal fires or sweet syrup. Aesthetics of rupture and connection. ... Territory is defined by its limits, and they must be expanded. A land henceforth has no limits. That is the reason it is worth defending against every form of alienation. Aesthetics of a  variable continuum, of an invariant discontinuum.

[thetendertongue]

errantry — from Glissant: a chosen wandering that actively shapes and defines a fluid, relational, and non-totalitarian identity; a way of moving through the world that doesn't seek arrival or domination. unlike exile, which is forced and often silencing, errantry is a relational journey; rooted in connection and movement rather than fixed origin or territorial possession; resists universalizing forces and totalitarianism

[poemwav]

– Bianca Stone, from Cutting Odette's Fingernails (2019)

[bexiescorner]

[iblamenabil]

"Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the god made for fun"

- Alan W. Watts -