Essay by Joe Luna
Harmless Unnecessary Cat
But,
untranslatable,
Love remains
A future in
brains.
Introit
Every time I
write a paper or give a talk about poetry or a poem it gets more difficult to
do so.[1] Why is this the case? It does
not get more difficult to read poems; and although poems do not stay still, and
although the poems that I do read demand all of me and all of my attention when
I do read them, I do not feel like I have a comprehensively different relation
to poetry to the one I had when I wrote the last paper I delivered on the
subject. There is something confusing to me about the law of poetry’s genre that
is essential to poetry. This much seems obvious. That it remain confusing is
probably important, though that doesn’t help much. The poetry that I have
always admired most is the kind of poetry whose possibilities seem endless.
This makes the poetry that I love extremely difficult to talk about with any
concision or precision. I suppose it is a utopian notion, because endlessness
under current conditions does not make much sense as an emancipatory or
especially contradictory or antagonistic or anti-capitalistic principle.
Pre-Thesis
The difficulty
of talking about poetry is utopian when it is the difficulty of an attempt to
name that which the poem is incapable of naming as a future which we do not
own.
In 1951, Theodor
Adorno named this utopian notion, described in the phrase his English
translator renders as “the standpoint of redemption.” The last aphorism of Minima
Moralia, ‘Finale,’ describes “The only philosophy which can be responsibly
practised in the face of despair,” which Adorno firmly believed was the only
face worth looking at, in the following terms:
Perspectives
must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with
its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in
the messianic light. [...] It is the simplest of all things, because the
situation calls imperatively for such knowledge, indeed because consummate
negativity, once squarely faced, delineates the mirror-image of its opposite.
But it is also the utterly impossible thing, because it presupposes a
standpoint removed, even though by a hair’s breadth, from the scope of existence,
whereas we well know that any possible knowledge must not only be first wrested
from what is, if it shall hold good, but is also marked, for this very reason,
by the same distortion and indigence which it seeks to escape.
I would like to
suggest that the gap which Adorno describes, that between the scope of
existence and a standpoint removed, even by a hair’s breadth, from that
existence, can consist in the difficulty of talking about poems.
Poetry opens
this gap, which swallows the particular into the normatively universal even as
it emerges from the consideration of the particular as the only responsible
task in the face of despair. It is the simplest of all things, not only because
that hair’s breadth can be expressed in, or by, a line-break or a rhyme, but
also because talking about poetry is generally embedded in the language of
dissent and dissensus that demands a better world; yet it is also the utterly
impossible thing, because that demand becomes aggressively presumptuous to the
point of reckless utopianism as soon as the consideration of poetry reposes
within the very framework of establishing itself as a naturally emancipatory
model.
Example 1
In 1956 Brecht
wrote the following poem:
Und
ich dachte immer die
allereinfachsten Worte
Müssen
genügen. Wenn ich sage, was ist
Muß
jedem das Herz zerfleischt sein.
Daß
du untergehst, wenn du dich nicht wehrst
Das
wirst du doch einsehen.
[And I always
thought: the very simplest words
Must be enough.
When I say what things are like
Everyone’s heart
must be torn to shreds.
That you’ll go
down if you don’t stand up for yourself
Surely you see
that.]
That Brecht
wrote this poem when he did, at the end of his life and in the middle of the
century, speaks volumes about the kind of simplicity that must be enough. In
Brecht’s poem, the simplest of all things is the crushing weight of
demystification demystified, wrought into a new simplicity: “When I say what
things are like / Everyone’s heart must be torn to shreds.” Surely it goes
without saying that “enough” is a lodestone of ironic counterpoint that
dissevers the effort required to achieve anything like it from any intimation
of the opposite to, or even a situation a hair’s breadth removed from, “what
things are like”? Must be enough for what, or for whom? To tear people’s hearts
to shreds; or to be able to say that? Is Brecht’s poem just a sarcastic
admission of the paucity of critical representation? Is it a joke?
Yes and no: the bluntness of
the tone in this poem, as in much of Brecht, is both the vehicle and the object
of its satire. It is never enough. In the face of despair, that it “Must” be
enough is not incredulous that it can’t, but is rather the constant
re-application of the pressure of a revolutionary imperative that makes the
poem beat with such eloquent insistence in the first place. Barely five years
after Adorno’s mock-heroic sign-off in Minima Moralia, Brecht’s poem
reads as a paean to the simple impossibility, or rather, the impossible
simplicity, of fashioning perspectives that require nothing less than
“Everyone’s heart must be torn to shreds.” It is as if Adorno’s speculative
standpoint is extenuated across the length and breadth of these lines in the
time of their reading, shunting back and forth across the infinitesimal infinity
between “the very simplest words” and “Must be enough,” constantly flaring up
as the subtextual backdraft of the almost agonizingly sardonic “Everyone’s
heart must be torn to shreds.” Today it is difficult to keep this demand,
loaded as it is, from sliding into a kind of critical tagline for the arrangement
of bourgeois liberal philanthropy: the shock of the recognition of alienation
become the bleeding heart perpetually pumping out the kind of saccharine pity
that maintains the charitable liberal in a relation of delayed disgust with his
or her pitiable objects. That difficulty is more inescapable the more the
simplicity of the poem’s affect is taken to be the uncomplicated Ideologiekritik
of its message. But I think that, rather than estranging the world and
revealing it to be, Brecht’s poem endlessly re-capitulates the dialectic of
resistance to despair that entails the recognition of the difficulty of making
simple what is more and more difficult to maintain: the possibility of a
future. Brecht’s poem resists being made into an emblem of resistance by the
sheer endlessness of its commitment to the lived time of political and
affective differentiation. What “Must be enough” is never enough, forever;
nearly too much / is, well, nowhere near enough.
Perfunctory
dissent
At this point I take issue
with the suggestion, which feels implicit in much contemporary discussion of
radical, experimental or avant-garde poetry, and which was stated explicitly in the brief which
prefaced the symposium for which this talk was originally written, that “poetry
provides resistance.”[2] This seems too easy to me; resistance has
to be harder than that; it cannot be provided; it must be made from scratch. To
name that provision (“resistance”) too soon, to name it as the universal
characteristic of dissent which criticism assumes its object bears and is
bearing, that it is the dissent with which poetry is uncritically invested,
that it operates in the world as a short-cut to the standpoint of redemption;
all this is to name precisely that by which poetry is divested of its powers of
endless criticality and subsumed back into the world which so easily
accommodates our resistance to it. If poetry resists anything, it resists the easy
ascription of itself to a static model of resistance that it supposedly
proceeds to exemplify. Before it resists anything, poetry resists being made
into Poetry. I think Brecht knew this only too well, which is why his poem
closes with the incredulity that its imperative had thus far resisted: “That
you’ll go down if you don’t stand up for yourself / Surely you see that,”
provides an icon of the segue into individualistic caprice that would betray
the commitment to opposing the truth of “what things are like” by subjugating
it to the precarity of personal survival. By ending his poem in this way,
Brecht allows its central dialectic, epitomised in the hair’s breadth between
“When I say what things are like,” and “Everyone’s heart must be torn to
shreds” to persist uninterrupted, for as long as the poem is read.
Rampant
speculation
The British poet
J.H. Prynne recently described, in an interview with Nicholas Royle at the
University of Sussex, the futurity inherent in poetical composition. As soon as
you have even 10 or 12 words, suggested Prynne, you open up a space for their
arrangement into a formation which has never before been present in the history
of the language. Prynne described this constant possibility as one of the
greatest and most extraordinary privileges of poetical composition. The first
lines of the first poem in Prynne’s 2005 collected poems, ‘The Numbers,’ read:
“The whole thing it is, the difficult / matter: to shrink the confines / down”
(the poem was published in 1968). Poets repeatedly shrink the confines down in
order to be able to deal with the historical trauma of their inheritance. If
they did not, they would not be standing up for themselves, let alone anybody
else. Philosophers do this, too, when they talk about “poetry,” when what they
really mean is ‘Un Coup de Dés,’ or Hölderlin. But this condition of simplicity,
of shrinking the confines down, of poetry’s radical economy of means, of the
simple act of breaking a line in the first place; this condition is part of
what makes the time of reading verse so intrinsically paradoxical, so
irresistibly propulsive and yet so endlessly repetitive: prosody is a tool for
making a future that is impossible to articulate otherwise. That is not to say
that prosody is redemptive, but that it presupposes and fleetingly inhabits
standpoints unthought in linguistic expression before the poem gets written.
Another British poet, Douglas Oliver, a contemporary and dear friend of
Prynne’s, believed that the stresses in lines of poetry were the actual sites
of fleetingly lived intersubjective encounters between poet-author and reader.
This seems positively magical to me; and yet there is an extremity to Oliver’s
thinking about prosody, which by attention to the microscopic articulations of
spoken language presents an example of relationality unthinkable outside the
radically discrete confines of written verse. Such a thesis speaks to a
community of readers as part of the pre-conditions and the energies of
composition, a community repeatedly activated and brought into being by the
scene of reading and writing.
Thesis
Poetry is intrinsically
futural: it delineates a relationship to the future that is both simple and
impossible. It makes a future by refusing to relinquish its possibilities of
commitment and thoughtful pressure to the critical idiom of the spectacle of
resistance. I think that the “demand [...] placed on thought” by the attempt to
fashion the impossible perspectives that Adorno describes could help to
formulate a criticism that would define poems not as loci of resistance, serene
in their localised discretion, but as the echoes of the future from which
resistance gains its energies, tactics and emotional intelligence of
possibility.[3]
Perhaps this would help us to think about poetry as the historical expression
of presently ineradicable social contradictions, rather than, as it sometimes
feels with the resistance model, as the cauterization or suppression of those
contradictions in the service of defending the authentic remnants of a life
already given over to its pre-, post- or sub-aesthetic abolition. I wonder if
this might either intersect with, or entirely bypass, Jacques Rancière’s
polemical distinction between the pretentious uselessness of critical art
conceived as such on the one hand, and the critical attention to the dogma of
the equality of the intelligence on the other, by which lights his theory
re-interprets entire swathes of 20th century art as the historical
hangover of the failures of didactic methodology and of the misguided
ontological compartmentalisation of art and life.
Rancière’s theory is designed
to effect a radical sea-change not just in the designations of critical art
theory, but in the production of works of art committed to an anti-capitalist
critique; it suggests a re-organisation of that critique on the basis that the
equality of the intelligence is best served by attention to the “‘being
together’ in ‘being apart’” which constitutes, for Rancière, if I understand
him correctly, the possibility of community building in artistic practice along
non-sovereign, anti-capitalist lines. What if the disregard for the critical
commonplace of poetry as resistance per se helped to further the
composition of poetry whose quality and register of attention took nothing for
granted except the futurity inherent in its practice as the impossible
simplicity of its movement out of this world? Might this condition of
impossibility be a fruitful one, in which the possibilities for affective
re-distribution and intensities of feeling, of subjective re-organisation and
of the articulation of the limits of class fantasies, remain profoundly
endless? Or would it simply strip from poetry any distance or distinction from
the world in which it gets written, rendering it the surest mirror-image of the
face of despair at which it winks back knowingly from the glass?
Example 2
Here is a poem,
published in 2012, by the American poet William Fuller:
I’ve been enjoying these
moments of unconscious travel, touched by
death-hints or impressions of
an alien wilderness—first heat, then
rain, then paradox—but there’s
a trace of something else that slips in
and is felt along my
shoulders. Last week I became more aware of it.
Whose thoughts do I hear now
and what is happening inside them?
They concoct what I’d call a
musical thesis and it’s unusual to
encounter it taking place near
so many trees. How did I not see, and
in the midst of this not
carefully take note of—not its reluctance to
make itself known—that was
fairly clear—but that—and how—it
wove itself into every
substantive articulation, motivated them in
fact, heightened all their
elements almost to glistening, even the
spectacle of its own
disappearance along the perimeter it defined?
And though everyone keeps
talking, the sun burns right through
them, and all I see is a spot
on the pavement, which reverberates.
The difficulty
of talking about this poem is that its beauty is predicated on a kind of
luxurious aesthetic cannibalism, which I now attempt to follow.
Fuller’s work
often feels moved by some unseen, unconscious “trace” that weaves its way
through the poem, never quite revealing itself but nonetheless intimating that
“it,” this “something else,” underpins the possibility of the production of any
scene or scenario the poem might concoct, and it is in this sense that the
“musical thesis” herein is agent and saboteur alike of “every substantive
articulation” to such an extent that it incorporates itself into the “thoughts”
that belong to some anonymous individual, “even the / spectacle of its own
disappearance along the perimeter it defined.” That is, the disappearance of
the “musical thesis,” what happens inside a cognition (access to which is
predicated on its distinction, its independence from one’s own) takes place at
the limits of that thought’s concoction, a disappearance that is experienced as
a “spectacle,” as if the products of thought are witnessed disappearing through
the optic of a mediated social relationship born of their very concoction by
the image which the poem expresses and which is the poem.
This obscenely compressed
description of the oxymoronic spectacle of disappearance traces just one of the
poem’s innumerable moments of internal reverberation, disconnect and
contradiction that are the propulsive organs of its curiously restless
futurity. Grammar in the poem is the operative mechanism of impossible continuity,
repeatedly folding the cumulative sense of the lines back upon its previous
objects so that reading becomes a practice of syntactical cartography; the poem
unfolds concentrically, since you hold the “musical thesis” in your mind
as it winds its way through the various accommodations of more and more complex
associations and relations of the pronoun “it” with its various objects and
environments, until “it,” fat with retrospective syntactical inheritance,
expands and extenuates into the flat-line linearity of its own disappearance,
the militarized “perimeter” into which “it” is subsumed and which is a product
of “its” own definition. The poem proliferates more intimate complexities of
sense and relation between its objects than its pronomial relations can
possibly fulfil in a single reading; as such, it renders the most complete
realisation of its potentialities inaccessible by dint of the formal expression
of each of its possibilities in the first place. The distance from this world
which the poem opens through a nod to the speaker’s dream-like “unconscious
travel” is bound by this proliferation, syntactically, imagistically and
spectacularly, to the “thoughts” whose concoctions define their own boundaries
over the course of their materialisation.
But these
thoughts belong to a person who is not the speaker of this poem.
Envoi
Fuller’s poem is
beautiful because the sleight of thought that produces the illusion of
captivated rumination is at the same time the self-destruction of its
attachment to an endless negation. It is beautiful to watch that thought go,
and it is beautiful to find it clinging to the underside of the möbius strip of
the world for which it is too responsible to abandon. But what has
responsibility got to do with it? The impossible simplicity of the poem’s
closing couplet “burns right through” the scowl of precious contractual
obligation to the language of futures both temporal and financial, as it does
through the sound of “everyone [...] talking,” if we can imagine what that would
sound like. Its final, humble object is a “spot on the pavement, which
reverberates,” closing the poem with a public scene of intractable, persistent
movement, the speaker turned directly towards a point of common orientation and
universal sustenance. The tone is quietly ecstatic. The face of despair is a
desperately bourgeois ruse.
[1] This talk was written for the third in a series of interdisciplinary symposia
at the Kunsthalle, Zürich, which took place on the 26th April, 2014,
at the invitation of Ed Atkins and Julia Moritz. The original delivery can be
recovered here: http://vimeo.com/94422611.
Many thanks to Lisa Jeschke for her generous attention to
this work, and for our conversation about it.
[2] The
original passage of the symposium’s brief was as follows: “In the context of Un-like,
POETRY is an interpolation. As will be discussed in the two prior sessions,
LOVE and DEATH are intertwined in their mutual discretion, their situation one
of near-impossible representability – their conditions such that their very
apprehension threatens epistemological possibility as well as any kind [of]
unanimity. Poetry epitomizes Un-like’s attempt to interrupt and
understand. One of the foundations of the symposium is a certain kind of belief
in the irrecuperable in experience; the inability of culture to fully
represent or redeem the loss of experience, the loss of lived life. We are left
with Love and Death, with their blinding deficit; more than anything else, we
are left with those vast, echoing words. Poetry, then, might offer the
possibility of approaching experience as a witness, as permitter; advocacy
without possession or reparation. This permissiveness, in the context of
artworks and in relation to implications of the digital, the virtual and the
deferred […] can be understood as a rejection of immortality. The vital,
parenthetically embraced by love and death, is allowed – celebrated. Within
this configuration, poetry provides resistance.”
[3] An alternative divergence from the line of instances
of resistance is expressed in Danny Hayward’s recent writings, and especially
in the essays ‘Perfect Capitalism’ and ‘The Essential Standpoint of Man: An
Autopsy, in Three Parts.’ Inhabiting the toxicities of language whose
predilections we might initially feel should be “resisted” is part of this
argument, as in, for instance: “How do we know social possibility and the class
fantasies which police it? We might begin, I suggest, by living out those
fantasies with the most thickly malevolent cupidity [...]” because “[t]he
‘possibility’ for the individual alienation of social contradiction is
abolished only in the vision of the effort to realise it, and what I’ve called
the dissolution of a class can be nothing besides the asphyxiation of its
possibilities—it can (can it?), to some extent, be an inside job.” See http://www.worldpicturejournal.com/WP_6/PDFs/Hayward.pdf.
I propose another (more depressive) alternative in a presently incomplete
account of ‘Poetry and the Fantasy of Totality,’ that is, the reading of lyric
poetry in which domination is experienced as specifically capitalistic
and as a scene of disproportion, in order to describe “an
experience [...] which the poem produces and which is the poem, [and which]
occurs at the site of the most complete incommensurability of the promise of a
better world and the possibility of its realisation.” See http://fallopianyoutube.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/poetry-and-fantasy-of-totality.html.
