Labor Days

On Rage and Swagger

thenewinquiry:

The following is an excerpt from Roman Letters, from Oslo Editions

By Evan Calder Williams

C,

When we spoke last, it was — and how could it not be? — of rioting and necessity, of taking and being taken by times you don’t choose. Lust for what has nothing to do with sex, or perhaps only diagonally, and carrying yourself, getting carried, what could be a battering fury and its restraints, willed and imposed.

A couple of months earlier, we wrote back and forth about swagger, the political kind, an aesthetic but much more, those rare instances of walking tall and grinding and not cowering or self-pleasuring in its feelings of being betrayed. Those women in China, the Black Panthers, the strident snappy dressers of autonomia, Toussaint, the particular withheld grin of the Kyrgyzstani man in fisherman sweater and fanny pack, strolling down the strewn road with a RPG and riot shield taken from the cops.

In Rome, where I’m trying to learn to talk differently, the word that bounces around my head the most is la rabbia — rage. Or better, in a falsely literalized equivalent, the rage, something you could come down with or become ruled by. The plague, the clap, the war, the day.

To become rabid, enraged — arrabbiata — like a dog, locked-jaw and foam, hating water and men and life.

Pasolini made a stunning film called La Rabbia — it’s up there with Marechera’s looting poem in being one of those singularly venomous examples of how “political art” doesn’t have to make you loathe both politics and art. It was paired, in release, with a trashy little right-wing film to represent “two sides” of the spectrum, and even on its own terms, it loses its way politically, falls into the worst traps of Pasolini’s thought. But rabidly, its seeking, incantational bile swallows the whole spectrum. When it lasts, and it doesn’t last long enough, there is nothing that is not profoundly conservative, weak-tongued, and pettily fascist alongside it.

I’ve been thinking that swagger and rage are necessarily bound together. This is a first try to say something about that. In brief: Swagger is the manifested expression of a deferral, a deferral of rage’s coming undone, coming apart, coming out. Of rage becoming raging. It is the held-out appearance of holding back what rage cannot be, cannot do while still being rage. Not just baring its teeth, but becoming the snarling consumption of whatever exists at a time.

Read More