“The new
poetry won't present itself to us because we have theorized it correctly,
but
because the situation is new and we have entered into it alive.”
--Joshua Clover
"Riot Flowers" by Banksy
“I
disagree with the dichotomy in “The new poetry won't present itself to us
because we have theorized it correctly, but because the situation is new and we
have entered into it alive.” Theorizing correctly is the aim
to historical self-consciousness, to enter the present situation most
accurately, including poetic practice adequate to the present.”
--Brian Ang
Brian Ang: In a recent interview on Maisonneuve posted
May 9, 2012, you express, "I think that politics may be a place of ought,
of should. Poetry isn't [....] I wouldn't have [people] write a different kind
of poetry, I would simply have them recognize [their poetry] as a minor task. I
think that if everyone engaged in militant political action, we would have to
stop worrying about whether our poetry is good for something, or has the right
politics or something. Write poems about flowers and how they’re pretty in your
spare time, and as long as you’re doing what needs to be done in the rest of
your time, why should you feel bad about it? That’s great!"
I've
observed you repeat this aesthetic openness in interviews for years, and I
fully agree with the urgency for militant political action, enabled in recent
years. The interview closes with, "If I was to make the strongest case I
could for poetry it wouldn't be as a political intervention but as a
mode of thought which I find to be well-tuned to thinking about our changing
global situation—or something like that." This connects to your arguments
for a renewed Marxist reading practice, most recently in "Georgic for theWorld-System," which includes the declarations, "Always totalize!",
"there is no serious question for art or politics other than what stance
to take in relation to this [long twentieth century's transition],"
"We have no aesthetic mode whose very thought is the whole, a mode that
can accommodate totality," and "Aesthetics and political
economy will henceforth [from Mallarmé] have to be thought together [due to the
twentieth century's annihilation of their separation]."
Given
these potentials and urgencies and that the urgency to militant political
action has been registered, why the contradictory reluctance to equally
strongly theorize politicized writing practices adequate to the present?
Joshua
Clover: Well, if
I were committed to rescuing myself from contradiction, I would perhaps develop
the difference between what individual poets ought to do
(about which I really have no prescription) and what I myself find interesting,
or what tasks lay before us all. But I am probably just contradictory here.
Certainly my own poetry, in the book I am finishing, is obsessed with the
romance of value, "the real movement of history," economic crisis and
the place of poetry within it, the question of militancy and the experience of
revolution and counterrevolution. But these are my fascinations; people write
about what they can't escape.
If there
is a real contradiction here, it is not between differing verdicts on what kind
of poetry to write, or how to think about poetry. It is between poetry and
political efficacy. The reason I would stand up for the flower poem is not
because I am opposed to what you call "politicized writing
practices," or don't find them interesting. I do. But I don't mistake
them for political struggle. My own observations of the last couple-few
decades are that the effort to "strongly theorize politicized writing
practices" has, intentionally or not, functioned to legitimate the
capacity of poetry for intervention. I am not convinced. Indeed, that's
probably the worst thing to happen to poetry in the current
era. It comes largely from a misreading of materiality routed through
certain poststructuralisms (and now through the poststructural quasi-Marxism of
people like Toni Negri) such that discourse is imagined to be a material thing,
existing at the same substrate as political economy. It's not surprising the
poets were enthusiastic about this "discovery." In train, the
capacity of poetry to intervene in political struggle has been not a little
overstated.
If that
has been a trajectory of the last, say, 40 years, one would both hope and guess
that in the current conjuncture — as the crisis ramifies and openings for
direct struggle present themselves — that inflation of poetry's political force
would start to fade. I think that in some places it has. But not so much.
Instead we get Bifo Berardi, who is in every way a lovely guy,
saying "the revolution will be neither peaceful nor violent—it will be
linguistic, or will not be at all." Or at least that's from the short
description in his new book, which I assume he wrote or authorized. Really,
it's embarrassing.
Now I
realize that the happy resolution that lets everyone walk away from this
feeling okay is to say, well, we should all do both, should have a strongly
politicized practice and also engage in more direct forms of struggle. This is
always the magic resolution. It’s okay to vote for Obama despite knowing what
we know because we plan to do all kinds of other political work, pressure from
below, on the streets organizing. But in my life I haven't much seen this. The
people who think voting matters think it matters enough; they don't
do that much else, as best I can tell. Except for maybe take positions, say
stuff. In practice, in my experience, it's most often one or the
other. And if that's the case, I'd rather write flower poems or whatever
all else, and get out there and fight, in Exacrheia and in the schools of
Santiago, in Mahalla and in downtown Oakland. Better that than making mistakes
about how much political force our poems have.
Someone
said that the act of pure poetry calls the unpaid debts of history back into
question. I'm not sure that's poems, right now. It might have been at a
different moment, but that's not my sense of the present. But here you are:
convince me otherwise!
BA: There is a difference between no
prescription for writing and the position that people should write about
anything they want. In the contradiction between poetry and political
efficacy, no prescription for writing neither contributes to nor detracts from
poetry's potentials for empowerment to political efficacy, while the position
that people should write about anything they want detracts from poetry’s
potentials for empowerment to political efficacy by encouraging depoliticizing
pluralism. A politicized poetry
requires immanent politicized direction: prescribing “[w]rit[ing] poems about flowers […] as long as you’re
[engaging in militant political action]” is a “magic resolution” of this
contradiction. In Chris Nealon’s lines, in the fraction you present as
exemplary of “his masterwork ‘The Dial’” in your introduction to your recent
portfolio, “The Insurrectionary Turn”: “let me mention what
my friends were up against // First: other poets // the ones who’ve always said
it was arrogant to have a politics […] Then: the police […] Finally capital.”
From the position of poetry, poetry, the police, and capital are widening
concentric circles of political confrontation.
In
contrast to your experience that people either privilege politicized writing
practices or more direct forms of struggle, leading you to decline theorizing
the former, my recent experience has precisely been their mutual empowerment.
Sublating the last 40 years of politicized writing practices empowered me to
engage in more direct forms of struggle, enabled in recent years. Politicized
writing practices adequate to the present begin with the insistence on
extrapoetic political struggle. It’s mutually empowering to advance them
dialectically.
My
efforts in response to your “Georgic” arguments, agreeing with emphasizing
political economy toward a reading of totality, is to advance the implications
of that reading toward writing the presently absent aesthetics that can
confront political economic totality, which I also agree is the only
serious present question for poetry. My current poetic project, The
Totality Cantos: An Investigation of Epistemological Totality, specifies in
its title that it is not yet that absent aesthetics, yet has other politicized
potentials including providing the scale and resources toward writing that
aesthetics.
While
declining to theorize politicized writing practices, you do make gestures to
aesthetic value, as in declaring “The Dial” Chris’ “masterwork” for
“captur[ing] [the] complicated and uneven shift [of the last year or two’s leaping
of poets into direct political antagonisms and the global economic catastrophe]
most eloquently.” I’m interested in an argument for its mastery, and given your
portfolio’s emphasis on the contemporary and its turn, the poem’s dominant use of
over-40-years-old Frank O’Hara technique ought to be addressed. Relatedly, I
found it wanting that the portfolio’s poetries were ambiguously selected as
products of “this exposure, this opening, this Insurrectionary Turn” without
addressing why they are exemplary.
JC: Ah, but I haven't done
anything like "prescribing
“[w]rit[ing] poems about
flowers […] as long as you’re [engaging in militant political
action]."
I don't
know how many ways I can say this. I'm not opposed to theorizing a politicized
poetry. I'm not opposed to politicized poetry. I have watched, over the last 40
years, the political efficacy of poetry qua poetry be systematically
exaggerated. To my measure, it has been at the expense of other political
engagements.
Now,
there are good reasons for this. I wouldn't change that history. But history
itself has changed—the situation has changed. There are openings for
non-discursive interventions that weren't there in the United States in 1979,
1985, 2000. I believe in the possibility of those interventions. I'd like
to see the poets fighting, and organizing, and engaging themselves directly in
political struggle. I'd like to see that for non-poets too. It's certainly my
ambition for myself. It's well and good to say, ah, politicized writing
practices and direct antagonism advance together. If they do for you,
Brian, that's fantastic. Most of the "poetry of Occupy," as they say,
was written by people who were not much involved in the organizational work,
the provision of food, the security, the building of barricades, the cleaning
of pots.
I love
poetry. But I feel if we lose a few poems — of any stripe — and gain a few new
political practices, I'm okay with that.
BA: You expressed the position
to “Write poems about flowers […] as long as you’re [engaging in militant
political action]” in the Maisonneuve interview I quoted at this
conversation’s beginning. If you advocated political struggle with no comment
regarding writing, I wouldn’t have issue and I agree. But as I differentiated
in my previous message, in advocating political struggle in the contradiction
between poetry and political efficacy, which I’ll take up in your realignment
of my initial presented contradiction regarding your own theorizing and lack of
in reading and writing practices, you expose yourself to critique on those
terms.
Diminishing poetry to advocate political struggle, repeating a
position in your 2012 piece co-written with
Juliana Spahr to “give a lot of our time to other matters, and […] write less
poetry,” is uncompelling for bracketing poetry’s empowering potentials as its
argument for extrapoetic political struggle is admirable. I want to emphasize
statements in that piece embedded in service to that conclusion, that “a great
deal of the thinking and the motivation that got [poets engaged in political
struggle] came from being a poet” and that “writing poems is one possibility in
trying to figure out what is needed.”
These statements are more closely related to your and Juliana’s 95
Cent Skool’s statement in 2010, which “beg[an] with the assumption that poetry
has a role to play in the larger political and intellectual sphere of contemporary
culture, and that any poetry which subtracts itself from such engagements is no
longer of interest. ‘Social poetics’ is not a settled category, and does not
necessarily refer to poetry espousing a social vision. It simply assumes that
the basis of poetry is not personal expression or the truth of any given
individual, but shared social struggle.” I agreed with this position and
launched my magazine ARMED CELL at the 95 Cent Skool’s sequel,
the Durruti Free Skool, in 2011: the magazine stated its aim “to be […] a site
for the study necessary for executing political actions.” In my sustained
editorial argument I’ve continued to publish the poetries I’ve found to be most
empowering for being self-conscious of their writing practices in tandem with participations
in contemporary social struggles. The last 40 years of politicized writing
practices are to be sublated and should not detain us.
It seems that a difference between us is that in the contradiction
between politicized writing practices and direct antagonism, I regard them as
mutually empowering while you feel that you must choose direct antagonism. In
your paraphrase “politicized writing practices and direct antagonism advance
together” of my “It’s mutually empowering to advance [politicized writing
practices and direct antagonism] dialectically,” I want to specify that
dialectic as empowering for subjects, and not an autonomously advancing
historical dialectic. The dialectic firstly empowers me, and I seek to manifest
that empowerment in my writing, editing of comrades, and direct antagonisms in
order to make contributions to test them socially and empower others, as
others’ contributions have empowered me. Subjects construct history.
Since you seem to be more interested in extrapoetic political
struggle than writing practices, I’m interested in what defines kinds of
struggle as adequate to the present for you, as you’ve stated voting and poetry
not to be, and specifics on your sense of present openings for struggle.
JC: "[I]n advocating political
struggle in the contradiction between poetry and political efficacy, which I’ll
take up in your realignment of my initial presented contradiction regarding
your own theorizing and lack of in reading and writing practices…" — I'm
not sure I follow this. But I admire your inquisitorial zeal, your rage for a
certain kind of internal consistency!
Actually,
I want to turn things around. You've been generous in along questions and I
should turn some back on you. I get how, if one assumes that some kinds of
poetry are "empowering for subjects," one might then spend a good bit
of time worrying over which is the right kind to do all that empowering. And I
confess I want this to be true. But my own theorizing and
historical analysis indicates to me a couple of things that I have tried to say
as clearly as I am able. One, your assumption is not a break from but a
continuation of the assumptions of the left-theoretical wing (if you'll
allow me) of North American poetry in the post-Fordist era, the limits of
which I have already discussed. Two, I think we find ourselves in a
meaningfully changed political situation, where discursive interventions (or
"empowerment") have less traction than they might have had before —
because of the material character of the crisis, which is far more immediately
one of political economy than was the period around 1968 in the west. So I have
laid out why I am skeptical about the relationship between poetry and political
efficacy just now. Why — this is my question, finally — why do you assume a
relation? On what grounds? What is it about poetry and our present situation
which leads you to believe it is "empowering" in ways adequate to our
situation? How is your position different from the positions taken by the
left-theoretical wing of North America since the seventies?
And maybe
a sub-question, or terminological one. I don't think we are using the word
"dialectical" in the same way. When I use it, I refer to the relation
between two elements in a contradiction that constitutes them as a unity, such
that one can't exist without the other — but always, as Marx says, "a
moving contradiction" wherein the dynamic of the two pushes in a
direction, has a tendency internal to its contradiction. I can't really see how
that's at play in "It’s mutually empowering to advance [politicized
writing practices and direct antagonism] dialectically" — since, for
example, one could do away with politicized writing practices without
abolishing political antagonism, and moreover the relationship there isn't one
of will, wherein one chooses to "advance" these elements together. So
you see I am just asking my question again: is the relationship dialectical, in
a materialist sense? If not, how do you understand that relationship?
(best on
a rainy Sunday,
Joshua)
BA: The contradiction in your
theorizing and lack of in reading and writing practices is as much your work in
itself as its accentuation in my relation to it: having taken up your concern
with totality, I needed a more systematic writing practice than “people write
about what they can’t escape.”
I have a
different reading of the “limits [you’ve] discussed” of “the left-theoretical
wing […] of North American poetry in the post-Fordist era” in “legitimat[ing]
the capacity of poetry for intervention” as “com[ing] largely from
a misreading of materiality routed through certain poststructuralisms […]
such that discourse is imagined to be a material thing, existing at the same
substrate as political economy.” I don’t observe in this poetry a dominant
poststructuralist imagining of discourse equating political economy so much as
an underemphasis on political economy and that the imagination for intervention
concerned social ideological composition rather than extrapoetic direct
antagonism.
In “The
Political Economy of Poetry,” Ron Silliman, emphasizing cultural production
over capital proper, wrote, “The potential contents of the text are only
actualized according to their reception, which depends on the social
composition of the receivers [….] Poetry […] reflects struggle […] as much [as]
between audiences as […] between poets (or, to be precise, it is one between
social formations).” Bruce Andrews is the poet of this era most concerned with
totality but emphasized ideology over political economy: for instance, in
“Total Equals What” and the recently made available “Rewriting Society:Poetics, the Self, Ideology,” in which he most directly registers his antipathy with
poststructuralist anti-totalization. The concerns with social composition and
totality continue to be essential, but to be adequate to the changed political
situation’s crisis, more immediately one of political economy with openings for
direct antagonism, poetry’s social composing needs to be in the provision of
resources for subjects empowering direct antagonism and totality needs to be
read through political economy. Poetry that can empower direct antagonism in
this situation becomes more important rather than less: I regard poetry as
useful study materials for engaging in direct antagonism and not merely direct
antagonism’s products. My first attempt to theorize this and distinguish my
position from positions since the seventies was in 2011’s "Poetry and Militancy," reflecting on the
University of California protests that began in 2009 in their inertia and my
first books written while a participant: “Poets must become militants
themselves [….] [W]hat operations of poems might be useful for militancy?
[…] Provision of arsenals of theory and
experience to form a saturated structure from which to issue attacks.” Advancing
the presently absent aesthetics that can confront political economic totality
would be included in this theoretical arsenal, the most urgent work in poetry
to do.
I agree
that my use of the dialectic above is not quite right: I only want to emphasize
that concerning politics, poetry can empower subjects to direct antagonism and
that direct antagonism is to be the principal aspect.
JC: Those are useful
statements, and I think they bring us toward some clarifications. But I must
note that my fundamental question remains open. You again assert, "poetry
can empower subjects to direct antagonism and that direct antagonism is to be
the principal aspect." But what is your argument for believing that
assertion? And is it a universal argument, about the intrinsic nature of
poetry? Or is it a historical argument; is there something about this present
moment that lends poetry that capacity?
I find no
fault in Language writing for being directly poststructuralist. I think that
the heroic attempt to square the circle, to synthesize poststructuralist
propositions and historical materialism, was in almost every sense the
necessary intellectual path in that post-68 moment. But the limits of that
synthesis are something I have tried to be thoughtful about. I actually think
you affirm my position, though you reformulate it slightly. In your words,
there was "an underemphasis on political economy" which allowed
"the imagination for intervention concerned social ideological
composition." Ron SIlliman "emphasiz[ed] cultural production over
capital proper." Bruce Andrews "is the poet of this era most
concerned with totality but emphasized ideology over political economy." I
guess I would just say, yes, that is a way of saying what I meant to say: that their
analysis of poetry's political status, of the political effects of certain
formal practices, exaggerated those effects to give them a kind of primacy they
don't in truth have. I think this exaggeration is routed through a
political-economizing, as it were, of poetic form — I hardly need to cite the
passages in which semiotic categories are aligned with commodities and etc. I
know you know them well.
And for
all that, I would not have Language writing be any different. I think it more
or less rescued US poetry, with its inventions, its commitments, and its
thorn-in-the-side-of-banality zeal. I'm just registering the specificity of a
break with that moment (rather than a modulation). For me the break is in the
world.
And
that's the position to which I'll hew. I believe in thinking the totality. But
that's a great distance from thinking the totality into being. The
totality is the form of the unfolding of the contradictions of class society at
any given historical moment. In your model, thought (for which poetry
seems to be exemplary) necessarily precedes action: "Provision of arsenals
of theory and experience to form a saturated structure from which to issue
attacks.” Now in many ways I like this formulation. It's pretty deft in
gesturing at the entanglements of thought and action, how we can't help but
produce a false separation between the two but should rightly grasp the ways
that each is always arising out of the other. I see that you are not intent on
providing recipes for action, but something like an intellectual ambience from
which actions are more likely to leap in effective ways. I like that. It's
optimistic, but I like it.
And yet,
it still seems abstract to me. It still has an odd priority. The kind of
theorizing you prefer still seems to me to do a lot of predeciding. It says
theories are already in place before the action. It still generates
"poet" as an autonomous role; in this model, a poet's contribution
could still be this provision of theory, this production of a saturated
structure, from which others could then "issue attacks." Now I know
you will want to say, well, in our model, it should be the poets who are also
engaging in the direct struggles, having done their assigned homework
saturating structures. But in reality this doesn't necessarily happen. This
kind of division of intellectual and manual labor happens. You get a lot of
poets saying, well, my poems are my contribution — poetry retains a certain
elite status.
I still
want to affirm that poetry, just like theory, is immanent to given struggles.
Poetry isn't the saturated structure from which they arise — though history is,
history containing some poetry, to invert old Ez — but arises from struggle. As
a proposition, what I am saying is not particularly new. But the situation is
new. The situation we are living through now is new. The new poetry won't
present itself to us because we have theorized it correctly, but because the
situation is new and we have entered into it alive.
And my
optimism is that we can get to a place where there is new poetry, but no poets.
People will write poetry. But the autonomous role of the poet, which as it
exists now is a consequence of this historical division of manual and
intellectual level — that role won't exist. Now I should say, at last, that you
keep insisting this account of poetry, where it is immanent to struggle, is a
"lack of" theorizing poetry as political practice. I'm not sure I
agree. It's actually a pretty explicit theorizing. It simply isn't
prescriptive. It's a theory of poetry and political antagonism and their
relation, not a theory of what kind of poetry poets should write.
BA: I’m more interested in an
historical argument than a universal argument for asserting that “poetry can
empower subjects to direct antagonism” because I’m most interested in the
political novelty of recent years for present practice. My argument arises from
my own experience of being motivated to direct antagonism by poetry and its
historical political concerns cultivated in capital’s margins, and my consonant
observation with yours in “The Insurrectionary Turn” that in recent years
“there has been a striking leap of poets into direct political antagonism,” to
which I would add that poets have frequently been key actors. “Poetry and
Militancy” is an historical argument situated in “the post-2008 market
crash’s systemic re-exposure of capitalism’s brutality at the level of everyday
life and resultant re-ignition of political imagination and praxis for the
efficacy of activism, call[ing] for a greater insistence on poetry to
contribute to militancy.” As you emphasized, theory is immanent to struggles,
my theorizing first arising from the experience of the University of California
protests. Due to these historical experiences and observations, it seems worth
theorizing their intuitions to advance the novel contributions poetry may have
for subjects in contemporary struggles. It’s possible that its contributions
are limited to a certain abstraction: accurately delimiting its potential
enables its full utility and the exceeding of it for other activities as
useful.
I don’t
observe an alternative theorizing tendency for writing adequate for wholly
breaking with Language writing: more is lost in forcing a break than modulating
at this time. Potentially useful tendencies should be mastered as they
arise. I agree “in thinking the totality” and not “thinking the
totality into being”: I’m not advocating the latter.
I agree
that “in reality” the “division of intellectual and manual labor happens […]
[that] [y]ou get a lot of poets saying, well, my poems are my contribution”:
may those tendencies be ceaselessly criticized to the dustbin. “Poetry and
Militancy” includes, “If elements of poetry posture to be concerned with
politics at all, they need to contribute to thinking and acting toward
[militancy] or they are useless at best and reactionary at worst,” as a
contribution to their critique and a motivating self-critique.
I
disagree with the dichotomy in “The new poetry won't present itself to us
because we have theorized it correctly, but because the situation is new and we
have entered into it alive.” Theorizing correctly is the aim
to historical self-consciousness, to enter the present situation most
accurately, including poetic practice adequate to the present.
My
insistence was on your lack of theorizing writing practices, which you confirm
as a lack of prescription. So your theorizing of poetry as political practice
is toward a future post-poet society. Orientation toward the future is only
useful insofar as it directs present practice: my advocacy for prescription is
that it is agency for present practice, part of a writer’s activity toward
historical self-consciousness.
JC: Thanks for extending the generous offer to close this
conversation. I worry we have gone on a bit long trying to surmount a real
impasse. It may be (warning: here comes the Easy Way Out) that we are simply
using the term "theorize" differently. But maybe not, as I still
can't see it.
From
here, you still seem to be offering a prescription based on an assumption about
the political efficacy of poetry which is in turn based on anecdote, on
"[your] own experience of being motivated to direct antagonism by
poetry and its historical political concerns." You then announce a
"historical argument situated in “the post-2008 market crash’s
systemic re-exposure of capitalism’s brutality at the level of everyday life
and resultant re-ignition of political imagination and praxis for the
efficacy of activism.” That all sounds right, descriptively: economic catastrophe,
intensified exposure to immiseration among the poetried classes, new or
restored politicization and practice. We have both stood somewhere in the midst
of that, for sure. But then you conclude, "call[ing] for a greater
insistence on poetry to contribute to militancy." That's a call. An
affirmation.
But it
doesn't tell me how poetry does this, or why we should believe poetry empowers
anyone, or contributes to militancy, aside from your personal account. Perhaps
more significantly, it doesn't speak to the particulars of the present
situation, and whether it bears an underlying relationship to poetry's
efficacy. Instead, basically, you offer a historical invariant: poetry does
this. Things are especially intense now, you indicate, so poetry should do this
especially intensely. As far as I can tell, that's not a theory.
The
theory on which I hang my hat is a version of that good ol' hat-rack,
historical materialism. This theory suggests that theory itself is immanent to
struggle, and so is poetry — that politicized, political poetry will arise from
antagonism, from its development. Theory doesn't prescribe, in that sense.
Theory is the opposite of prescription. I think we share the idea that poetry
can itself be a theory of the historical moment, and perhaps even of the
struggle. But this will be true in so far as it arises immanently.
And I
feel curiously optimistic in this unfolding. Which is to say, while I am
open to all kinds of poems, including the dread flower poem, I believe that if
we involve ourselves directly in the central antagonisms of our time,
that it will change our poems. Probably not so many flower poems, or maybe
really excellent flower poems. We will get more and better politics in our
poems not because we should, or because that's a desirable goal, but because we
have so involved ourselves. We are seeing this already, I think. That
said, what a pleasure to take a break from that involvement, and from the
miserable shit of labor, and the lovely scraping work of friendship and of love...what
a pleasure to take a break from that to read poems with you and Lyn!
