After a discussion with RH of The Haircut Before The Party, I was trying to think up interesting pieces on aesthetics and politics; with typical slowness, I never sent a text. But there are some interesting questions. You could ask, for instance, what precisely makes poets so threatening that Plato expels them from his ideal republic? Why is it that Dante places Brunetto Latini in hell – as a perverter of language? What is the style of contemporary political language, and designed to achieve what?

It would be easy enough to find much to discuss in stridently communist poets – Mayakovsky or Neruda would be the classic, though wildly different, studies. I am more interested in poetry that comes from an ambiguous political position. Akhmatova’s Requiem is such a poem: composed during the Yezhov terror, during which her son was interned, and many of her closest friends sent to gulags where they were worked to death, the poem was never written down. It was passed around only from mouth to ear, and the scraps of paper on which it had been drafted almost immediately burnt.

Some truisms about Requiem:its language is wrung clean of obscurity, it is simple, it speaks universally. Through it run currents of Russian culture that were supposed to have vanished. Her contempt for the casual and opaque administration of terror is counterposed with the rigorous attention to the suffering of the individual, even where that suffering begins to approach a universal condition. The preface and epilogue are useful in bringing out my more central question: what is it that writing does that can make it so threatening? What is it witnessing? Is a communist practice of literature possible? And, perhaps also, for us – what does Akhmatova’s poem demand? Is the causal gesture that dismisses or ironises Stalinism as just a mere aberration enough in its attention to the peculiarities of its form, where it came from, what it did? Is it enough to say merely that it is not actual communism, and be content with that? Can we write off with piety the suffering of the Yezhovshchina as one simple mass of pain, to be nodded at and passed over, rather than understood in all its valences, complacencies and desperate scrabbling to survive?

Preface

No, not under a foreign heavenly-cope, and 

Not canopied by foreign wings 

I was with my people in those hours, 

There where, unhappily, my people were.

In the fearful years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months in prison queues in Leningrad. One day somebody ‘identified’ me. Beside me, in the queue, there was a woman with blue lips. She had, of course, never heard of me; but she suddenly came out of that trance so common to us all and whispered in my ear (everybody spoke in whispers there): “Can you describe this?” And I said: “Yes, I can.” And then something like the shadow of a smile crossed what had once been her face.

(…)

Epilogue

I

There I learned how faces fall apart,

How fear looks out from under the eyelids,

How deep are the hieroglyphics

Cut by suffering on people’s cheeks.

There I learned how silver can inherit

The black, the ash-blond, overnight,

The smiles that faded from the poor in spirit,

Terror’s dry coughing sound.

And I pray not only for myself,

But also for all those who stood there

In bitter cold, or in the July heat,

Under that red blind prison wall.

II

Again the hands of the clock are nearing

The unforgettable hour. I see, hear, touch

All of you: the cripple they had to support

Painfully to the end of the line; the moribund;

And the girl who would shake her beautiful head and

Say: “I come here as if it were home.”

I should like to call you all by name,

But they have lost the lists….

I have woven for them a great shroud

Out of the poor words I overheard them speak.

I remember them always and everywhere,

And if they shut my tormented mouth,

Through which a hundred million of my people cry,

Let them remember me also….

And if in this country they should want

To build me a monument

I consent to that honour,

But only on condition that they

Erect it not on the sea-shore where I was born:

My last links there were broken long ago,

Nor by the stump in the Royal Gardens,

Where an inconsolable young shade is seeking me,

But here, where I stood for three hundred hours

And where they never, never opened the doors for me

Lest in blessed death I should forget

The grinding scream of the Black Marias,

The hideous clanging gate, the old

Woman wailing like a wounded beast.

And may the melting snow drop like tears

From my motionless bronze eyelids,

And the prison pigeons coo above me

And the ships sail slowly down the Neva

7:52 am  •  25 May 2012  •  4 notes

‘… If I look back over my own fiction, I see a simple (simple-minded?) standard erected. That standard is the body. Whatever else, the body is not “that which is not,” and the proof that it is is the pain that it feels. The body with its pain becomes a counter to the endless trials of doubt. (One can get away with such crudeness in fiction; one can’t in philosophy, I’m sure.)

‘Not grace, then, but at least the body. Let me put it baldly: in South Africa it is not possible to deny the authority of suffering and therefore of the body. It is not possible, not for logical reasons, not for ethical reasons (I would not assert the ethical superiority of pain over pleasure), but for political reasons, for reasons of power. And let me again be unambiguous: it is not that one grants the authority of the suffering body: the suffering body takes this authority: that is its power. To use other words: its power is undeniable.

‘(Let me add, entirely parenthetically, that I, as a person, as a personality, am overwhelmed, that my thinking is thrown into confusion and helplessness, by the fact of suffering in the world, and not only human suffering. These fictional constructions of mine are paltry, ludicrous defenses against that being-overwhelmed, and, to me, transparently so.)’

—J.M Coetzee, ‘Autobiography and Confession, Interview’ in Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), p.248

1:30 pm  •  30 April 2012  •  4 notes

There’s something tragic and wonderful about Rimbaud’s poem ‘Qu’est-ce pour nous mon coeur?’, written (we think) in the dying days of the Paris Commune, a fantasy of total revenge on social order deflated by a lacerating awareness of the ungraspable horizons of such a fantasy. In Bloomsbury, we half-jokingly suggested ‘notre marche vengeresse a tout occupé’ was the secret root of the slogan ‘occupy everything’; the final lines of the poem are a decent catechesis on the sobering, wrenching moment of the dissolution of a political project, anyway. It ends:

Ce n’est rien ! j’y suis ! j’y suis toujours.

Which is to say: ‘… It’s nothing! I’m here! I’m still here!’

This after lines and lines of apocalyptic fantasies of revenge. Some critics will argue about the precise dating of the poem, whether it reflects on the semaine sanglante, of precisely which quantum of irony we’re supposed to seek between the poem’s lines. It’s true that there’s a certain hollow bravado about Rimbaud’s voice throughout, which means the deflation of the final line doesn’t come unexpectedly: like all the best poets, Rimbaud has his cake and eats it too, neither vitiating the desire for revenge nor looking credulous in the final analysis. But there’s something about that final line that fascinates me: in the last days of the Paris Commune, to withdraw quietly into the stubborn fact of one’s continuing, individual existence, to loathe it and to lament it, and to feel all too readily its shrunken horizons. (‘Because I am speaking as je rather than nous, all that fantasy of resistance that depends on our collective being is destined to remain just that, fantasy – but I always end up as this, as je, not nous, I don’t know how to be anything else.’)

It’s a line that bears reflection, it can be stressed at different points: as I have just done, on the I, or on the here, or on the still. Is it that there’s an obstreporous, individual ‘I’, who refuses to be subsumed in the collective? Or is it that the dose of cold water suddenly causes all the various affinities of the ‘nous’ to condense back into a slightly-altered ‘je’, now aware of its hungry lack of us-ness? Or is there something in that ‘toujours’, which suggests ‘still’, but also the feeling that one always ends up back here somehow, never quite managing perfectly the dissolution and reformulation that we keep promising ourselves – something (something small) keeps sticking. (Should we also feel that Rimbaud is laughing at his own ridiculousness in that last line? I do.)

7:21 am  •  11 April 2012  •  2 notes

Some very quick thoughts on this article, here because I don’t have time to work them up into a full response:

(i) I’m willing to believe it’s highlighted because of the subbing, but the locution ‘as an activist’ is unpleasant for a number of reasons, like trading on credentials that presume the right to speak for people who have been variously more injured, beaten and seriously fucked by the police than its author; perhaps this is a minor quibble. But the lexis is odd throughout: people hold ‘grudges’ against the police not in the sense of abstract board-games that we sometimes win, sometimes lose, but because they destroy people’s lives, and often kill them. This is not something that should fade into the background of strategic political utility, but is for many of us a basic point of principle.

(ii) I’m happy for the police to strike, but the right to strike is taken and retained, not granted, and we should ask why police don’t strike, that is, what police think they do, what they actually do, and so on.

(iii) Extending an abstract defence of the power to withdraw labour into an argument that activists should defend police against funding cuts is logically questionable. It relies on a notion of police as a subsection of a greater set of ‘public servants’ that elides some fundamental differences. If they are so, we should ask, which public, and served how?

(iv) We defend against cuts because they involve dismantling things like the NHS and welfare services, not because the organs of the state are inviolable goods.

(v) Hence this tautologous argument that anti-cuts activists ought to oppose cuts because they are anti-cuts activists elides the reasons that people oppose cuts. This elision is significant.

(vi) The arguments put by serving police officers as to why they shouldn’t be cut largely involve their subsequent inability to afford water cannon, tasers, routine arming, &c. They also often extend to their need to exist to keep scum (etc) ‘off the street’. This is not benign civil  work: it is racist, it victimises the poor, the inconvenient and the vulnerable. Any argument that we attain a moral victory by defending their working conditions and thus enable them to further fulfill their structural role seems to me rather weak.

(vii) Should we not consider the work the police do as obviously and qualitatively different from the work of other portions of the public sector, and should they really fall under this rubric at all — in other words, what kind of work is this work?

(viii) ACAB.

4:41 pm  •  23 March 2012  •  25 notes

‘I find love’s work a bleak ontology

to have to contemplate; it may be all we have.’

(Geoffrey Hill, ‘In Memoriam: Gillian Rose’)

‘My passion for philosophy began when I was seventeen (…) It did not prepare me for the deeper stupidity of reading philosophy at university. The oppressive opulence of Oxford was married to a vision of philosophy which would have induced in me a lifelong alienation from it, had I not already made the pact with my daemon.’

(Gillian Rose, Love’s Work (NYRB: New York, 2011) pp.128-9)

8:49 am  •  9 March 2012

The unsettling pleasure of (finally) reading Alice Oswald’s new volume Memorial, a version of the Iliad with the deeds of its great men and gods removed, leaving only the names of the dead and the lamenting similes interweaving their minor tragedies. It is a war poem, with its heap of dead names and catena of violence and bones. 

‘Like leaves who could write a history of leaves

The wind blows their ghosts to the ground

And the spring breathes new leaf into the woods

Thousands of names thousands of leaves

When you remember them remember this

Dead bodies are their lineage

Which matter no more than the leaves’

Simone Weil, similarly unflinching, called the Iliad a ‘poem of force’ in an essay written between occasional interrogations by the police in Vichy France:

‘To define force – it is that x that turns anybody who is subjected into it a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him. Somebody was here, and the next minute there is nobody here at all; this is a spectacle the Iliad never wearies of showing us (…)

Here we see force in its grossest and most summary form – the force that kills. How much more varied in its processes, how much more surprising in its effects is the other force that does not kill, i.e., that does not kill just yet. It will surely kill, it will possibly kill, or perhaps it merely hangs, poised and ready, over the head of the creature it can kill, at any moment. In whatever aspect, its effect is the same: it turns a man into a stone.’

(Simone Weil, ‘The Iliad, or The Poem of Force’ in Simone Wieil: An Anthology (London: Virago, 1986) pp.183-5)

1:18 pm  •  28 February 2012  •  1 note

On this, and specifically ‘Anarchism: from the people who brought you the weekend’, two scholia: Benjamin, in the Theses on the Philosophy of History mentions that Parisian revolutionaries in 1830, in separate parts of the city, apparently without co-ordination, fired shots at great public clock-faces – ‘tiraient sur les cadrans pour arrêter le jour.’ Like all of Benjamin’s writing, and the gnomic Theses in particular, we can follow several chains of implication; between the capitalist day (which is always the same, with the same cadences of rise-and-fall, the same repetitious time of work) and the revolutionary desire to instantiate a completely new calendrical time.

The second: Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent centres partly around a plot to bomb the Greenwich Observatory, the symbolic heart-and-centre of global regulated time, and the Greenwich mean. It is a plot unique in that no-one in the novel quite believes in its likely efficacy, either actual or symbolic. It is also based on a real and failed attempt to do the same in 1894. Such acts of symbolic terrorism rarely (if ever) had any consequence, but they provide irresistible material for novelists who write about anarchists, given the way in which such symbolic acts tend to run wildly out of control of the people who initiate them, and end in a semiotic tug-of-war between the forces of the state, conservatism and order, and those who would like to overthrow them. This theme provides ample material for diverse writers: Conrad, Chesterton, Shea & Wilson, Grant Morrison. The theme is this: that the two contending powers are complementary and, from a position of remove (the storyteller’s) we are taught the same dreary moral lesson – that such antagonism always needs the other, is compromised by and deeply involved in the other, and the contest between the two provides political and psychological equilibrium. The furthest advanced in novelistic casuistry will even assert their complete identity, one with the other.

We say: shoot your alarm clocks.

trespassingassemblies:

Reading E.P. Thompson’s ‘Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism’ (1991) and a new piece by Escalate Collective, Salt, it occurs to me that to talk about time is hard, though perhaps it doesn’t always seem so. Note how often you mourn the passing of time, your lack of it, as though it is what it does, rather than what we do - by choice or compulsion- that makes it run so quickly, or so slowly. These days, people speak of ‘the times’ a great deal; or perhaps we always did. It’s the times that are hard, one might say, displacing blame. We often think of our time as personally hard-won and wrested (‘I took a 3-day weekend’) but not of collective, often violent struggles to do so – it was only recently that I was introduced to the phrase ‘Anarchism: from the people who brought you the weekend’ (NB: the term’s first recorded usage is in 1879).  

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10:14 am  •  22 February 2012  •  21 notes

‘The long-foreseen moment has arrived when capitalism is on the point of seeing its development arrested by impassable barriers. In whatever way we interpret the phenomenon of accumulation, it is clear that capitalism stands essentially for economic expansion and that capitalist expansion has now nearly reached the point where it will be halted by the actual limits of the earth’s surface. And yet never have there been fewer premonitory signs of the advent of socialism. We are in a period of transition; but a transition towards what? No one has the slightest idea. All the more striking, therefore, the carefree security with which we settle down in this transition period as though it were a definite stage, so much so that considerations concerning the crisis of the system have almost everywhere become commonplaces. Certainly, we can always go on believing that socialism will arrive the day after tomorrow, and make a duty or a virtue of this belief; so long as we go on taking, day by day, the day after tomorrow to mean the next day but one after today, we shall not be disappointed; but such a state of mind is difficult to distinguish from that of those worthy people who believe, for instance, in the Last Judgement.’

Simone Weil, ‘PROSPECTS: Are we heading for the proletarian revolution’, August 1933, in La Révolution Prolétarienne, collected in Oppression and Liberty, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958)

11:41 am  •  19 February 2012  •  9 notes

‘I mention these few disparate items more or less at random simply as a reminder of where our analytical inquiry starts, and to suggest that, given the nature of that starting point, analysis, while necessary, may also be an indefensible luxury. (…) [I]t is also important to say that, morally, the only necessary response to all of this is rage.

(Leo Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave? and other essays, (London: University of Chicago Press, 2010) p.6)

9:20 am  •  4 February 2012  •  6 notes

‘NATURE (the art whereby God hath made and governs the world) is by the art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an artificial animal. [….] Art goes yet further, imitating that rational and most excellent work of Nature, man. For by art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMONWEALTH, or STATE (in Latin, CIVITAS), which is but an artificial man, though of greater stature and strength than the natural[…]

To describe the nature of this artificial man, I will consider * First, the matter thereof, and the artificer; both which is man.’

(Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651)

‘What if – instead of waiting for the collapse of capitalism – the emancipated human being were beginning to emerge spontaneously from within this breakdown of the old order? What if all the dreams of human solidarity and participatory democracy contained in the maligned Port Huron Statement of 1962 were realizable right now? Yeah: what then?’

(Paul Mason, Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions (London: Verso, 2012) p.145)

I will be developing this juxtaposition in greater detail.

4:12 pm  •  30 January 2012