Walt Whitman,Jane Bennett,and the Paradox of Antagonistic Sympathy

In the “Whitman’s Sympathies,” Jane Bennett subtly and wonderfully illuminates multiple “figures” in Whitman’s prophetic ecology of sympathies: from trans-body experiences of suffering that move like “atmospheric currents” across space and difference, to physical tendencies toward “sympathetic transfers” lodged in body parts like unborn fetuses in the brain, to the calming impartial solarian acceptance of nature, to the pleasure-centric dissolution bodies undergo in the “erotic currents” through which “all matter, achingly attracts other matter,” to the “underground current” of an indifferent gravitational “it moving inside the I.” With him, she senses and cultivates a world coursing with “currents of affectivity” that are “vital forces” softly, partially, yet persistently, engendering affinities that are no small source of “optimism for the future of humankind.” ¹

Bennett’s work on sympathy is compelling and important in the face of planetary ecological catastrophe and neoliberal assaults on the most elemental aspects of democracy. Her speculative ontology leans us toward possibilities for generating assemblages within selves and among selves, nonhumans, and things that might enhance movements of ecological democracy. Bennett cautions against asking too much of sympathy and seeks, rather, to make a “modest contribution” that she acknowledges “may not offer enough in time.” ²

Bennett’s modesty is radical, insofar as those who ignore the associated practices of sympathetic “doting”—the modest “slow sensing” that engenders expansive vitality—are unlikely to become bearers of transformative vision and vital political possibilities. ³ With her, I too seek to become a studied doter, receiving, as Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 292) put it, the “little detail that starts to swell and carries you off” and “provokes the extension of a sympathy, the stretching of a passion beyond a given identitarian boundary.”

In this spirit, as I dote on Whitman’s poetic words of and about sympathy, I am carried beyond an identitarian boundary—between sympathy and antipathy—that lingers in Bennett’s essay and her broader work involving Whitman. Stretched thus, I sense possibilities that call me to further “test the limits” of sympathy in ways that foreground and amplify its immanent relations with oppositional forces she takes to be other than and outside of the vitality of sympathetic currents. If we explore ways to recuperate these forces as indispensable elements in and for the vitality of the ecology of sympathies, we will, I suspect, move toward an even more vibrant speculative ontology, perhaps more likely to conjure up “enough in time” in response to the catastrophe devouring democracy and the planet. ⁴

Let us dote with Whitman to be carried off. Without ellipses, Bennett quotes Whitman in “Song of Myself” as saying: “I am he attesting sympathy. I have instant conductors all over me.” ⁵ Yet the many pages between these two sentences (in both the 1855 and the 1891–1892 editions), shortly after the first, he writes, “I am not the poet of goodness only, I do not decline to be the poet of wickedness also.” ⁶ This passage comes in section 22 in which he addresses “You sea!” and proclaims the many ways that, “I am integral with you, I too am of one phase and of all phases.” Among the many ways: “sea of brine of life and of unshovell’d yet always-ready graves,” “influx and efflux”; “hate and conciliation”; “side and antipodal side,” “virtue and vice” (Whitman 1996, 208–209). To attest sympathy as a multiphasing sea is to acknowledge and cultivate the antipodal characteristics and the antagonisms within it, too, because, I believe, Whitman thinks that certain kinds of radical strife are an immanent dimension of sympathy itself; an integral condition of sympathy’s vitality, temper, and range; an indispensable figure within sympathy’s ecology of leanings.

In myriad poems, Whitman conjures this immanence by unwontedly conjoining proclamations of affiliative sympathy with antagonism. Consider “Song of the Open Road,” the vertiginous poem he calls a “profound lesson of reception” (Whitman 1996, 298). Near the end, he repeats his injunction, “Allons!” yet with a twist:

Allons! Through struggles and wars!/The goal that was named cannot be countermanded . . . Now understand me well—it is provided in the essence of/things that from any fruition of success, no matter/what, shall come forth something to make a greater/struggle necessary./My call is the call of battle, I nourish active rebellion,/He going with me must go well arm’d. (Whitman 1996, 307)

Receptivity—here synonymous with sympathy—requires the paradoxical intertwinement of stepping out vulnerably and also a kind of militancy.

In “By Blue Ontario’s Shore,” Whitman (1996, 469) mixes myriad figures of affiliative sympathy with calls to “strike up the marches of Libertad, marches more powerful yet . . . .” “Friendliness, combativeness” and “diversities, wars” are separated merely by a comma (Whitman 1996, 471–72), and evocations of vibrant variety run together with those of “their fierceness when wronged,” “clinched and lifted fist,” “foot on the neck of the menacing one” (Whitman 1996, 473), and of how during wars for liberty and justice, the democratic poet “makes every word he speaks draw blood” (Whitman 1996, 475).

Whitman comingles energies that repeatedly wash over thin commas to evoke relationships that exceed even the conjunction of opposites and suggest a radical immanence between the affiliative sympathies Bennett explores, and antagonism. Crucially, for Whitman, sympathetic relationships not only emerge in relationships between distinct singularities but also proliferate among the clusters, networks, and systems of relationships that are elemental to each of their beings. ⁷ Thus, to be swept up in currents of sympathy with an other or others is often to be inextricably swept up into antagonistic affective flows and struggles against that which seeks to destroy these beings by severing sympathetic currents with them. Conversely, the same currents of sympathy may also sweep us into antagonistic affective and political relationships against that which strives to destroy these others by amalgamating them with the excremental, worthless, demonic.

I suggest that we use the paradoxical—even oxymoronic sounding—trope antagonistic sympathy to evoke this immanent relationship between affiliative and antagonistic flows, energies, and conditions for ethical and political cultivation. Agonism, and even antagonism, are often (unacknowledged) immanent aspects of the ecology of sympathies Bennett powerfully conveys in her reading of Whitman. Running the two terms together draws us to reflect upon, negotiate, and cultivate two characteristics of this immanence. On one hand, antagonism is often immanent in affiliative sympathies insofar as the latter draw us into antagonism toward others who are antagonistic toward those with whom and that with which we sense affiliation. On the other hand, antagonism has an immanent relationship with the ecology of affiliative sympathies insofar as it is often a condition of the latter’s emergence, amplification, and durability. I explore this more below, but the kernel of this idea is that antagonist sympathy is a phrase that calls us toward the importance of attentively acknowledging and negotiating these paradoxical relationships, so vital to radical and ecological democracy, vision, judgment, and power. One way this immanence operates is to engender “agonistic respect,” as we sense and cultivate sympathetic forces and relationships with those whom we oppose. ⁸ Another way this operates is to draw us into antagonisms that, due precisely to our sympathetic entanglements with some, may draw us into uncompromising hostilities with others and whole systems of power. This paradoxical character of forces, relationships, ethics, and politics may be Whitman’s most important thought in the context of the present discussion. If we disavow this paradox, we risk increasing the tragic potentials and diminishing the generative possibilities of our political and ecological condition.

To flesh out these ideas, reconsider Whitman’s anti-gallows writings. Even as they did not lead to legislation abolishing the death penalty, he writes, “the real good resulting out of the opposition . . . was [in] diffusing more benevolence and sympathy . . . elevating the range of temper and feeling.” ⁹ One crucial way Whitman worked against the death penalty was powerfully to evoke and generate precisely the sorts of sympathetic currents with the victims of the death penalty, which Bennett and other commentators on his anti-gallows writings foreground. ¹⁰ Yet, in this passage, one also hears something neglected by Bennett—namely, the idea that the force of opposition itself is an important condition of the “real good” of “elevating the range of temper and feeling” of sympathy. To generate and free sympathetic feelings involves attacking those who seek to diminish them by isolating or demonizing the condemned. In this context, Whitman’s frequently scathing attacks on proponents of the death penalty are both drawn forth by his sympathy with the condemned and intended to amplify the range and temper of such sympathy, by freeing its connective currents from those voices and bodies seeking to isolate, attach to, muffle, impede, clobber, and strangle them. The ecology of affiliative sympathies amplifies and is amplified by the forces of antagonistic sympathy with which it is immanently intertwined. Thus, Whitman (1998, 2:44) accuses proponents of being “blood thirsty” and of “shameless perversion!” He labels clerical proponents’ use of Scripture “a bold, impudent effrontery” and “a prostitution so foul of names and influence so awfully sacred” (Whitman 1998, 1:208). He writes of their “monstrous barbarities” and marshals heights of poetic prose: “The grasp of a minister’s hand, produces a kind of choking sensation; and by some optical fascination, the pulpit is often intercepted from my view by a ghastly gallows frame . . .” (Whitman 1998, 1:209). Emerging in, with, and for Bennett’s ecology of sympathies, we hear here another figure, another sympathetic force. Antagonistic sympathy coexists in precarious, potentially tragic, yet frequently reciprocally amplificatory relationships with the broader ecology of receptive affiliative sympathies. To Bennett’s five sympathies, let us, then, add this sixth.

While in his later life Whitman distanced himself from some of the radical intensities of his 1840s’ writings on capital punishment, abolition, and temperance, I suggest that he remained steadfast in his commitment to the idea that antagonistic currents are elemental to the vitality of the broader ecology of sympathetic energies. This is apparent in the opening paragraph of (and throughout) Democratic Vistas, where he writes in 1871:

As the greatest lessons of Nature through the universe are perhaps the lessons of variety and freedom, the same present the greatest lessons also in New World politics . . . 1st, a large variety of character—and 2d, full play for human nature to expand itself in numberless and even conflicting directions—(seems to be for general humanity much like the influences that make up, in their limitless field, that perennial health-action of the air we call weather—an infinite number of currents and forces, and contributions, and temperatures, and cross-purposes, whose ceaseless play of counterpart upon counterpart brings constant restoration and vitality). ¹¹

Sometimes, these paradoxically vital conflicts are agonistic, sometimes antagonistic.

Whitman sings antagonistic sympathy in his Civil War poem, “Drum Taps”:

Adieu dear comrade,Your mission is fulfill’d—but I, more warlike,Myself and this contentious soul of mine,Still, on our own campaigning bound,Through untried roads with ambushes opponents lined,Through many a sharp defeat and many a crisis, often baffled,Here marching, ever marching on, a war fight out—aye here,To fiercer, weightier battles give expression. (Whitman 1996, 457)

“He attesting sympathy” attests to his contentious soul not as an “other” but as a fraught paradoxical and reciprocal condition and form of sympathy—elemental to the existence and becoming of expansive affiliations that are also elemental to it.

Beginning in Brooklyn with the news of war that resonates sympathetically into a previously peaceful demos by “drum-taps” through which all “sprang” forth from “a shock electric,” continuing through images of “sonorous voice(s) ringing across the continent,” frequently returning to a growing cascade of vibrant matter, “Beat! beat! drums!—blow! Bugles! Blow! Through the windows—through the doors—burst like a ruthless force . . .” ¹² —Whitman (1996, 420) conjures a vision of militant sympathy in which diverse peoples of the myriad states, things, and elements (the flags, the wind, the sea, bird wings, the drum, the child, the father, the homes, the bayonet, the bullets and blood, the volition) swarm together “around and around to soar to sing the idea of all.” The poet flies over the myriad states to sing their songs (each “inimitable”) drawn to and gathering their sympathetic forces and expressions into a larger and larger assemblage. He sings war, as “We may be terror and carnage, and are so now . . . ,” fighting beyond all isolated differences for a noble idea of multiplicitous sympathy itself (Whitman 1996, 424). “How Democracy with desperate vengeful port strides on,” through storms, “mournful wail,” compassionate accounts of many fetid wounds and death sighs (Whitman 1998, 428). Throughout Whitman’s account, sympathetic forces move the demos, are gathered, employed, tragically celebrated, as the impetus and aim of fiercest struggle.

Enough. Both Bennett and I are extremely wary of the way Whitman envisions and celebrates an organic globalizing nationalism—an “All”—as a relentless, imperialistic, and (sometimes) frenzied vortex of violence. Bennett’s “ecology of sympathies” pluralizes affiliations, politics, and the cosmos in ways that have great potential to powerfully disrupt and dismantle these tendencies. Such an ecology leads to a politics that seeks to accent receptive generosity and trickster agonism, and resists the often knee jerk tendencies toward antagonism that proliferate on many fronts.

At the same time, I think that Whitman is onto something crucial (and largely ignored by many radical and ecological democrats) when he proclaims, performs, and provokes the myriad immanent relationships between the political ecology of sympathies, and associated militant struggles that are sometimes necessary to defend and amplify sympathetic associations. For example, I believe that radical democratic and ecological struggles in early twenty-first century United States against the rapacious and racist corporate-state assemblage must become militant—in the sense that we should seek to defeat and destroy its worst institutions and system dynamics. Yet, for reasons that are importantly strategic (and also oriented by ethical dispositions of receptive generosity, not disavowals), we should cultivate strategies of war-making that are nonviolent in relation to human beings. I think our struggles should develop militant pacifism partly because doing otherwise is overwhelmingly likely to unleash militarized police retaliation that is sublimely disproportionate and will be devastating to the broader ecology of emergent democratic movements. Yet I also think we should orient our politics thus, because the ethico-political power of the radically receptive sympathetic currents and forces that Bennett sharply theorizes is actually tremendous and still largely untapped for generating powerful movements. My own action research and theorizing suggest that they are among the most transformative powers of our times. ¹³

At the same time, absent antagonistic sympathy, Bennett’s ecology of sympathies risks contributing—perhaps unwittingly—to dismissals, deflections, and disavowals of urgently militant forms of struggle, without which we almost certainly will not “offer enough in time.”

An ethical-political ecology of sympathies needs to stay with the troubled paradox and cultivate all of these sympathetic forces now more than ever. We need affiliative and antagonistic sympathies—and “and” is the crucial word here. At one and the same time, we need to learn well how to modulate and limit our antagonisms with complex tensional ecologies of receptive affiliation, and we need to unleash the energies of pluralizing receptive affiliation in ways that vitalize intense forms of militancy against the worst institutions and system dynamics that threaten our communities and the planet.

Almost all of the carbon “owned” by multinational energy corporations must be left in the ground if anything remotely like the present planetary ecosystems are to survive (McKibben 2012). This will involve the loss of trillions of dollars of property, a loss comparable to the loss slave owners faced in the 1860s (Hayes 2014). I wager that this will involve intensities of nonviolent struggle comparable with the civil war—and we will need unprecedented democratic energies.

In this political energetics, Bennett’s ecology of sympathies can be imagined as analogous to the photosynthetic receptors that gather and generate potent quotidian energies that circulate throughout a demos of humans, nonhumans, and matter. Antagonistic sympathy is analogous to episodic larger shocks that surge through electrical grids. Most needful today is to learn the arts of intertwining these different types of energy so that, combined, they might constitute something like a smart grid—an alternating current of transformative democratic energies. ¹⁴ In this broader ecology of sympathies, we might learn how better to be opened unexpectedly by vital sympathies that nurture unwonted connections and co-creativities amid intense struggles, and be moved to struggle intensely even as we are awash amid currents of affiliative sympathy. Bennett’s ecology of sympathies, supplemented with antagonistic sympathy, makes a crucial contribution to these complex and moving political movements, still to come.

Nothing less will do. And the theoretical and political stakes of these intersections are tremendous. Absent receptive sympathies, the stormy intensities even of nonviolent struggle repeatedly threaten to overwhelm our senses in ways that blind us, generate injustice, and devitalize radical democratic powers. Yet discourses of receptive sympathy can, in absence of antagonistic energies, similarly devitalize political vision and powers as well.

This suggestion may be powerfully illuminated by another text that brilliantly explores sympathy, namely Octavia Butler’s (2000) novel Parable of the Sower. The protagonist, Lauren, is “hyperempathic,” due to a drug her mother abused. She is a “sharer” of other peoples’ (and to a lesser extent animals’) feelings, such that they course through her own body simultaneously and with equal intensity, which is devastating in the face of other peoples’ pain. Lauren struggles against tremendous odds to generate a small community of people who hang onto their humanity in an apocalyptic world of the near future that is populated by many people swept up in firestorms of violence and devoid of any sense of others’ suffering. It is a world in which Bennett’s and Whitman’s ecology of sympathies seems to have been all but destroyed. Because Lauren learns to conjoin her hyperempathy with capacities for antagonism when generalized extremity becomes hyper-extreme, she becomes a generative force in the world. This involves repeatedly negotiating her remarkable capacities for hyper-empathetic generosity, vulnerability, and nonviolent tactics with moments when she kills to avoid the murder of others by horrifically transformed people who have lost empathetic capacities altogether. “Sharers” have and suffer an incredible power. Yet neither Butler nor Lauren romanticize sharers, nor empathic sharing, as a generative power wholly on its own. Indeed, a new form of corporate slavery has emerged in this world, and the bosses are rumored to pay more for children who are sharers because they are loathe to resist—they seem to make the best slaves precisely because of their sympathies. The task of our time, a moment before Lauren’s, is to generate theory and praxis that comingles intensified receptivities with intensified forms of struggle in ways that might “offer enough in time.”