but alter doesn’t mean other as in split apart, separate, disconnected; instead, it means other as in the other choice, the other path. This is how Miriam Ticktin defines “alter-visions,” drawing on anthropologists’ uses of the “otherwise” and the “incipient not-yet” and the “unreal” and, from Ghassan Hage, “alter-politics.”[1] The meaning here is of a present that does not but could exist, or actually does exist but in other places, hidden and barely audible. Rather than the far-off future of the utopic, this alter signifies the shadowy today of the speculative. Anthropology changes into an archaeology of the now, a research program studying what will become the artifacts of the future before they erode, in order to figure out, ultimately, why we just aren’t doing things differently. Or why we seem, to quote Hage again, “stuck,” where what he calls “stuckedness” is “by definition a situation where a person suffers from both the absence of choices or alternatives to the situation one is in and an inability to grab such alternatives even if they present themselves.”[2] To have an alter-vision is to see a way out of stuckedness. The discourse of critical anthropology suggests that—
Too abstract. This is what Elizabeth Arnold would call my first paragraph, though I think she’d delight in the plucky consonants in stuckedness, a word I could have snuck into the Anglo-Saxon hemistichs she assigned us, her poetry students, to write in her Poetic Forms class. It could use a sense of intimacy—a line among many like it she would write on my drafts, and she’d be right about my paragraph, just as she was right about my poems (petulant, I wrote a sequence for her called “Abstract”). Talking about other worlds and other politics and other visions that exist within or adjacent to or hidden beside the dominant ones is like watching the protagonist move around a dark basement in a horror movie: the feelings and excitement are all in the not-seeing, because once it’s seen, whether some other and better political formation or a monster, it tends to be a disappointment. You should start the other way around. You should start with intimacy, which means closeness, which means what’s around you.
Elizabeth Arnold, who passed away last year, was a master of looking at what is close—even when that thing is so very far away. I want to suggest that this vacillation between the close and the far can be understood as the “critical anthropology” of her work, and that it runs through her writing, and that it tells us something important about our engagement with the wide weird world. I want to suggest that Arnold helps her reader understand the risks and vulnerabilities of empathy, while noting, at all times, the impossibility of dissolving into what we are looking at and even, sometimes, inhabiting. Relating to difference requires preserving the instability of the relation.
In her collections, Arnold began this looking with her self and her body, writing about cancer and the unfamiliar life that lived within her. That closeness meant also looking at other bodies with her granular perception, such as in the collection Effacement. This is where the citation in my title comes from: poem XVII, “Picture” (Arnold didn’t like titles, and often opted for the title as the first line of the poem, like the title of this essay), where she accompanies the surgeon and artist Henry Tonks as he drew portraits of soldiers with facial injuries during World War I. The artifice of Tonks’s representations of the disfigured soldiers catches something, something like the
….understanding
(with little expectation of it)
of what they had become past what they looked like
—that was the door![3]
This understanding—and the exclamation, typical of Arnold’s work, an exclamation that is always the writer’s realization in the midst of writing, a surprise to the self, an exclamation point as reflexive shock—is what the camera “would have missed”: the soldiers captured by Tonks realize they are no longer what they were, and look at Tonks from a new face. They look “at us now via Tonks / longingly.”[4] That most intimate thing of the body turns on itself, in this way becoming a possible conceit for Arnold’s own cancer. In The Reef, she meditated on the strangeness of death—“I wonder how the dead go, blind at first to what is near”—and Tonks’s images of disfigured faces show the soldiers themselves, but not themselves, enacting the shuttling of identification and distance.[5] The soldiers’ gazes hide the understanding of what was close now having become far, then close again, back and forth, “beings caught out of ordinary living.”[6] It is not enough, writes Arnold, to describe what you see, to be the camera. It is perhaps enough, or you get nearer to the truth, to make what you see, to recreate it, to be the door.
Looking closely at what is close, in Arnold’s œuvre, means spiraling outward. The different body she had become brought her to wounded soldiers. In her collections after Effacement, she is brought to intimate relationships, to places she had lived—and then to other places, other peoples, other kinds of life, the fullness of life and how much of it isn’t the self, how life is even nonlife, how life is the world itself, the rock and river and molten core. Is being proximate the same as being close? Is either the same as being intimate? For a traveler like Arnold—when we emailed, we rarely mentioned poems, instead tracking each other’s itineraries, things we had seen or wanted to see—these questions keep returning with more pressure, each collection moving its hands anxiously over the unknown right in front of her, the languages and places that kept drawing her but for unclear purposes.
In her poetry the world keeps changing, wholesale, ontologically, with every new place, like how she writes of Egypt (a place that comes back again and again in her poems) in her long poem “Like Water Flowing,” about visiting the tombs in Saqqara. The tombs are half buried,
though visible today
barely, everything being the same
color of sand
whether it’s blowing or not
—when blowing even the air’s that color![7]
The surprise, the shock of the world, the exclamation point, but it’s just sand! This is what sand looks like! And yet it’s so different up close, so different and so strange and possibly so intimate. Arnold’s vision is part of what I earlier called “the archaeology of the now,” as the object of her sight—the tombs themselves, which as opposites of the Great Pyramid are these incredible jewels of color and hieroglyph inside, but outside look nearly like nothing—flattens into the sand it sinks into and the sand that fills the air. The apparatus of our seeing cannot uncover anything but what is now, even ancient tombs, preserved, seemingly fixed that way. You and the tombs are both here, now, with and in and colored by the sand—the air colored by the sand!
This is the cosmic orbit I see spinning through Arnold’s work, how intimacy and difference pull at each other, but how vision—a certain kind—offers a resolution, even in the negative, to this tension and its concomitant stuckedness. I hope to show that this isn’t an abstract claim, despite how anthropologists describe the last two decades or so as part of the “ontological turn,” or what Hage considers anthropology’s “critical” mode. This turn has a descriptive component and a nearly prescriptive corollary. First: other cultures and existences and beings must be understood on their terms, not the terms of the observer (that is, difference is different enough that it requires new conceptual frames founded in that difference).[8] The corollary: these other beings have, residing in them, forms of life which are not just different from the observer’s but also possible. Hage defines critical anthropology as “the study of radical cultural alterity: a mode of difference that is so seriously different from us that we cannot simply think it and make sense of it just by relying on our socially and historically constrained imagination.”[9] Understanding difference means leaping, however imperfectly, from our “ordinary living,” to see as Arnold does the power and distance traveled that occurs within a representation, especially within a representation that looks back at us. For Hage this process “tak[es] us outside ourselves precisely to continuously remind us of the actual possibilities of being other to ourselves.”[10]
There is something exciting about anthropology conceived as both ontological difference and political possibility. I think of it like a wormhole, the impossibly far away which is simultaneously so close it sucks you in. These thinkers describe a way in which the experience of something else—anything else—unmoors you, unsticks you. An alter-vision is the strange familiarity and alienation of staying where you are but seeing the world from three feet to your left. It is the understanding that the human has capacities wider than our routines. It is even counter-history: you read and see how we might have been otherwise. Arnold was attuned to this perspective, and became more and more attuned to it, first with her traveling, that attunement restringing her perceptions of what is native and near.
Life, Arnold’s 2014 collection that includes “Like Water Flowing,” also contains the following small poem, “Looking at Maps”:
If they’d had writing in time, Cuba could have been Crete,
watery source of the Minoans and thus the Greeks.
What’s lost? A possible us
growing like new foliage out of stony ground, emerging?
Last voice, first, a whole world calling—
awful, inaudible—into the unstoppable loud (roaring!)
hurricane-force sea wind.[11]
And if what we call the West had sprung from Cuba and not Greece? And if the dominant sea of our philosophy was not the comparatively tranquil and navigable Mediterranean but the wild and willful Caribbean? Roaring! That is the other past, roaring behind us. One of these watery places “had writing in time,” and thus a conventional notion of historiography and a way to dominate the conditions of a people. Writing needs no ears, speaks without stopping—except when it is listening to itself, like Arnold’s lines that always surprise the act of writing with their own words, breaking in with the perpetually undone exclamation point. But the other place… of all the islands, Cuba, signifier of contemporary political alterity, so close to the capital of capital and yet so distant, so other, so alter.
Critical anthropology is not without its skeptics, and these concerns are worth pausing on. In an article on how the ontological turn is also a “deferral of critique,” Lucas Bessire and David Bond claim that within critical anthropology, “politics no longer refers to operations of domination or struggles that lay claim to what is”; and they worry that “the pertinent questions of how difference comes to matter and what kinds of difference are allowed to matter are pointedly left unaddressed.”[12] In other words, Bessire and Bond argue that swapping in “what could be” for “how what is is” means leaving the arena of struggle and contention altogether. A blunter version of this (but not, for its bluntness, less convincing) is that it’s tempting to see the valorizing of extreme difference—so different that it shakes you out of yourself and makes you a new shape, “a possible us…emerging”—as an uncritical multiculturalism, one that eschews the political for claiming cultural alterity as a benefit in itself. The gap between the self and the other, after all, is not exclusively this amorphous thing called culture. Inside single cultures we shovel identities, economic classes, histories of influence and oppression, and then in between cultures themselves, colonialism, imperialism, extinction. Bessire and Bond are saying that the turn to critical anthropology dismisses all of this for shortcuts to empathy. Worse, the rug might be pulled out completely: if radical difference is a resource, then the moment one uses it is the moment the radicality is obliterated, and the other turns out to be, well, just the self. These poems of Arnold’s that keep traveling farther and farther away from The Reef, her first collection, and its steady eye on the self’s body—are these poems about Egypt and Cuba and Namibia and everywhere else really just perceiving, still, the self?
Writing about one of the most radical Others in English literature, Melville’s Bartleby, Lee Edelman raises the same warning against “insisting that even what resists comprehension can be colonized by imagination.”[13] For Edelman, crossing boundaries to connect with the radical other will always “consolidate the state and thereby shape the discourse of the human in ways conservative by definition: conservative insofar as they aim to conserve the use-value of the human as a mask for the machinery of production we’re all conscripted to support.”[14] Is ontological difference, the tracking of some other way of doing something, a fast track to a how-to manual for a supposedly better life, one which inevitably returns to neoliberal conceptions of the individual optimizing their situation? Is experiencing difference no more than choosing from a menu?
Arnold’s work is brighter and darker than this. Politics is not sacrificed in order to see otherwise. “Looking at Maps” reckons with the political realities of Cuba and of Eurocentric history, but they are also drowned out by the noise of the roaring, “awful, inaudible” world that did not emerge. It is in her final book, Wave House, where Arnold most grapples with the anthropological in its truly radical form. Here, seeing difference leads to an alter-vision in terms of living otherwise, yes—“wonderment / at another kind of what” as she writes in “Desert” from Life.[15] But it is also an alter-vision of the self’s walls and what is shut up, what cannot be breached, how that too is a wonderment. You don’t dissolve into the perception, and neither does the perception transmogrify into your own shape.
Early on, in the second poem of Wave House, “Cast Out Again,” Arnold does once more what I am claiming is a unique mode of hers, surprising herself mid-line, finding herself stunned, astonished by the world in front of her, closeness becoming distance becoming intimacy all in a moment. After imagining lonely Odysseus, she situates the poem as a visit to Bosnia where she drives past tombstones:
I think how it was for Odysseus,
no companions, water all around
his raft.
In Bosnia—not that far/p>
from where the ancient Greeks sailed on the Adriatic
—or,
in Serbo-Croatian and Slovene, Jadran—
there are gravestones shaped like Egyptian obelisks with knobs at the tops,
some like ours but thinner,
some tipping
a little bit over, the stone dark.
Seeing them snapped me to another—such a different!—world[16]
This is the image, the basic and juvenile anthropology: here is what they do, and it is like other things, like Egypt but different, like me but different. Here is the sea, and here is the sea the way these other people talk about it. And then the Arnold move: “Seeing them snapped me to another—such a different!—world.” The exclamation! It is not just another, it is a different: it is the other. So close but not similar, so amazingly far. This is where the poem would end were it in an earlier book, part of an earlier Arnold. It would, this way, be a kind of seeing difference. That would be enough, the flash into being otherwise. But that’s not where the poem ends. The sentence continues to the final couplet:
though I was
only driving through for like half an hour.[17]
I confess that I laugh each time I read these lines. Arnold’s spare style and clipped descriptions, her Oppen and Niedecker, sometimes cover over what I think is a real and running humor in her work. Here, the goofiness of “like half an hour” betrays itself. It’s a joke, you get here and you go back and realize she has made herself the founding Hero of Poetry, Odysseus himself, all for driving alone past a graveyard in Bosnia, where she notices how different the stones are and is shocked by the other world, and then shocked again by how it shocked her. It’s not anthropology, this recognition, or it is, but it’s knowingly naïve, “cast out again,” thrown outside of the self in the absurdity of travel to reel that strange and estranged self back in. I remember the first time I left the US, how the site of another grocery store disconcerted me for a week. It is silly, real in its silliness, you don’t always connect across difference in this progressive building of other words—sometimes you are just mystified and bewildered by your own bewilderment.
Here is Arnold’s intervention in the conversation I’ve brought to her about critical anthropology: the ontologically different other is a moving target, just like the self aiming the gaze. One runs the risk—especially since site and description and the writing of both are fundamental to anthropology and poetry alike—of freezing what is seen, and in that, of freezing the seer. “Speculation takes place at the edge of what we can see,” writes Ticktin.[18] But speculation also takes place at the edge of the moment, at the continual and never-ending contextualization of that speculation, of that sight. You aren’t you anymore, and neither are they. Everything is moving, like Arnold passing the cemetery, the body and the eye moving as well, “With Nowhere to Call Home,” title of another poem in Wave House:
each new place
I find myself in
once I’ve gotten used to it
deepens my sorrow.
I always pull myself away a stranger.[19]
No exclamations here, but surprises nonetheless, not least because “home” is exactly not what one has gotten used to. Getting used to the new place somehow de-homes it. You get stuck, the stability of the place bleeding out and convincing you of other stabilities. Stuckedness for Hage is the dark flip side of “waiting it out,” or praising one’s abilities to let time go by, to endure, instead of calling for change during a crisis. One has to go somewhere, instead. To keep moving. Not just traveling, though it helps, but engaging the anthropological directive of “knowing otherness seriously” (as Hage defines it) with the added vector of time, having to test the relation repeatedly, allowing for never-knowing, for separation and withdrawal, for also, yes, communion and community.[20]
In The Five Senses, Michel Serres rewrites our sensorium and replaces sight with “visit.” “Generally, in traditional philosophy, the bearer of the gaze does not move, but seated by the window, sees a tree in flower. A statue set upon affirmations and theses,” writes Serres. But “visit” means “first of all sight and seeing; added to this is the idea of a distance travelled; if you visit, you go and see, and with some active emphasis.”[21] Arnold uses “travel” in the same way: travel is alter-vision. Moving in time in order to see, while still in time, without the definition of a fixed view, which means without definition of a fixed viewer. In “Travel,” she writes of an unnamed place, and ends:
Who will be there?
Who will I be
there?
Who will meet what me?[22]
The other world in reach, but also infinitely far from us, but also perhaps one day not, requires the generosity of the question, the humble naïveté of the good traveler who, without a guidebook, does not know what she will find in the next place, nor what stranger the people there will find in her. And even after the experience, it can’t be said like that, it avoids the “affirmations and theses” of the statue, because it was and is moving, and this is why “a camera would have missed it.”
Notes:
[1]Miriam Ticktin, “Borders,” Borderlands Journal 21, no. 1 (2022): 138–70, 144.
[2]Ghassan Hage, Alter-Politics: Critical Anthropology and the Radical Tradition (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2015), 39.
[3]Elizabeth Arnold, Effacement (Chicago: Flood Editions, 2010), 26.
[4]Arnold, Effacement, 26.
[5]Elizabeth Arnold, The Reef (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 3.
[6]Arnold, Effacement, 25.
[7]Elizabeth Arnold, Life (Chicago: Flood Editions, 2014), 23.
[8]For more, including the separation of ontological concerns from ascriptions of cultural relativism, see Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s lecture, “Cosmological Perspectivism in Amazonia and Elsewhere” from 1998, which in many ways is the source text for the ontological turn in anthropology.
[9]Hage, Alter-Politics, 53.
[10]Hage, Alter-Politics, 59.
[11]Arnold, Life, 15.
[12]Lucas Bessire and David Bond. “Ontological anthropology and the deferral of critique,” American Ethnologist 41, no. 3 (2014): 440–56, 441, 442.
[13]Lee Edelman, “Occupy Wall Street: ‘Bartleby’ Against the Humanities,” History of the Present 3, no. 1 (2013): 99–118, 106.
[14]Edelman, “Occupy Wall Street,” 108.
[15]Elizabeth Arnold, Skeleton Coast (Chicago: Flood Editions, 2017), 86.
[16]Elizabeth Arnold, Wave House (Chicago: Flood Editions, 2023), 5.
[17]Arnold, Wave House, 5.
[18]Ticktin, “Borders,” 144.
[19]Arnold, Wave House, 41.
[20]Hage, Alter-Politics, 39.
[21]Michel Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies, Bloomsbury Revelations (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 306.
[22]Arnold, Wave House, 32.