Middle Voice Moves in Nathaniel Mackey's Djbot Baghostus's Run

I believe that one of the tasks of militant literature is to try, often by extremely violent and difficult methods, to compensate for the falling away of linguistic categories, that is, those which have disappeared from language in the course of history.

--Roland Barthes

There is no one way of thinking . . .

--Amiri Baraka

Nathaniel Mackey's Djbot Baghostus's Run is an experimental, militant novel that poses the idea that thought can be iterative rather than merely repetitive, performative rather than substantive. The novel speaks of how thought can be organized around movement and variation rather than around stasis and appropriation. Specifically, the novel opens up possibilities for new ways of thinking about both subjectification and objectification. This vision of the novel (just one version of the novel among many) describes a way of thinking a particular verb-ness. That is, thinking about--i.e. not only connected to but also around--verbs rather than nouns, in particular, non-transitive verbs, perhaps best understood in the middle voice, which seeks to speak of the appearance of appearing, the showing of what is shown, and the openness of what opens. Encompassing both subject and object as the verb, the middle voice speaks neither of grasping nor resistance or (complete) escape, but of performance, flight, and motion.

Never didactic, Mackey's novel does not directly address "verb-ness," but it nevertheless parallels a postmodern concern with language while addressing the related problems of resisting appropriation and dilution that middle voice verb-thinking speaks to. Specifically, the novel deploys considerable middle voice verb-thinking in its structure, style, and content to (echoing Baraka's words) demonstrate the potential multiplicity of thought and to grant priority to incompleteness and becoming. But before I can properly describe the specific verb-sense of the text, I must first discuss how to build an appropriate "verb-thinking." To do this, it's important to take off from existing conceptions of the verb as a metaphor for othering, appropriation, and resistance.

Building Verb-Thinking

On the other hand, appearance means a referential relation in beings themselves such that what does the referring (the making known) can fulfill its possible function only if it shows itself in itself.

--Heidegger

Both Amiri Baraka and Nathaniel Mackey have theorized the verb in terms of its relationship to music and as a metaphor for the way a white culture often appropriates-dilutes features of a black culture, such as jazz. Through this appropriating and diluting, what had been a process, an openness to movement, or perhaps a sense of flight and fugitivity, is stabilized, hypostasized. In short, appropriation makes verbs nouns. In metaphorical terms, what had been coursing midstream--that is, ongoing, open to variation--is brought into the mainstream, where oddly enough it halts. For Baraka, writing in Blues People, appropriation's noun-ing is most evident in the ways that verbs such as "swing" and "jazz"--verbs for and to black musicians--became nouns in the versions of black music taken up by and sold to white audiences (including, but to a lesser extent, serious white musicians). Specifically, in ". . . Swing--From Verb to Noun," Baraka writes:

Swing, the verb, meant a simple reaction to music (and as it developed in verb usage, a way of reacting to anything in life). As it was formalized, and the term and the music taken further out of context, swing became a noun that meant a commercial popular music in cheap imitation of a kind of Afro-American music. (212-13)

Appropriation's linguistic machinery "works" verbs into nouns by robbing them of their cultural context. In other words, noun-ing is the hermetic process by which a "marginal" form of expression, and by implication otherness in general, can be brought from midstream into the mainstream, while ironically preserving both the marginal and mainstream in a continuing oppositional relationship: midstream's endless variation ends in the mainstream. Materially, the noun...