Hence forward, the
interest of one will be the interests of all, for in concrete fact everyone will be
discovered by the troops, everyone will be massacred
– or everyone will be saved. The motto ‘look out for
yourself’, the atheist’s method of salvation, is in this context forbidden.[1]
Authorship is a
non-militant practice. Militant action requires the dissolution of individual
poetic authority. Militant action requires poets to collectivise their
imaginative powers. No element of a poem belongs to its author. Poetry is the
category signifying that which is ours.
*
There are four
consoles in The Simpsons arcade game, corresponding to the characters Marge, Homer,
Bart, and Lisa. Any two players may form super-character fighting machines (aka
zords) by mashing the buttons while positioning themselves over the same piece
of ground.[2]
Just a few minutes into the game, on the first level, which begins outside a
jewelry store on a Springfield high street, the Simpson family comes across an
object which can be lifted and destroyed if at least three players cooperate in
the act. The object is a cop car, and once it is lifted, it is tossed and
bounces on the street, then flickers away into non-being. But two of its four
wheels briefly retain their existence, or stay on the screen, and they proceed
to bounce down the street, lethal to any of the enemies of the nuclear family.
There’s a video on the internet of some kids doing a walk-through of the cop
car prank, and one of them giggles ecstatically as they do it, exclaiming: “You
know what? It doesn’t really do anything. It’s just cool to do.”[3]
Well pranks are
obviously cool to do, and they can be important exercises in critique and
cooperation. We should
pull more pranks. But if pranks are just comedy, if their satire can be
forgotten once the mess is cleaned up, then no one is obliged to learn from them.[4]
The intended moral of a prank is neutralised as mere “vandalism”, but for the
discerning observer, it is the specific object of vandalism that decides the
moral fate of the prank. When does comic vandalism intensify into tragic
violence? The burning of the SONY warehouse during the 2011 riots was beautiful
and hilarious; but the burning of a Croydon flat containing a collection of
rare flutes was painful, gut-wrenching news.[5]
While dissecting riot fire into fires, distinguishing one arson from another, and picking out a
matching genre of affect for each one seems like a kind of moral shopping spree,
such choosy specification might be instructive as an analogue for tactics.
As poets, what
collective work can we do that will oblige our audiences to learn from what we have
done? How can we build language-artefacts that will deny our readers the option
of turning around and going out the way they have only halfway proceeded? How
can we prescribe a complex of one-way passages, each proceeding through the
full construct of an entropic language situation, of a poetry that steals from
its audience that which they never imagined it were possible to lose? And if
this is instrumentalist thinking, then how can we build an instrument which,
under specific conditions, is incapable of not being played? Out of what can we build a
neo-Aeolian harp?
There must be
special functions that poetic work is capable of in a modality of explicit
multi-authoritative cooperation, even if those functions are limited merely to
experiences and affects undergone privately through the course of the public
work of the cooperative actors. Those private experiences could harbor revolutionary
truths, and I am sure that even private truths will have public analogues as well. There must
be a difference when a poem or language-artefact is the work not of one but of
two, three, four, or many. I want the category of multi-authoritative poetic
work to remain abstract and more broad than what is designated by
‘collaborative writing’. The category is maximally inclusive, and these two
practices participate within it:
1. Blame
Solidarity, where we
participate in taking the blame for what you have written. Now here are some quick
action points regarding blame solidarity.
Let’s find the most extreme truths of our poetry and reproduce them:
aggrandize them, extend them, generalise them. If one of us might be arrested
for inciting riot or regicide, let’s all make the same incitements. Let’s
collectively own each others’ most aggressive, psychotic, and desperate claims.
Let’s build a shared vocabulary of demand and critique, stealing each others’ words
to build a looping wall of positive feedback, reinforced not by book reviews or
like-apparatus of support, but by the primary and savage activity of
reproduction and adoption.
2. Lexical
Open-Sorcery, where the repeated usage by multiple authors of highly
specific vocabulary, idiom, or repertoire-structures results in the
accumulation of new semantic identities, where otherwise anodyne usages become
powerfully unstable. This is emergent code-writing, particularly useful for
speaking in a language that the enemy cannot understand.[6]
*
I want to
elaborate on a reading of Cervantes that I make in an essay called “Incredible
Style”.[7]
At the beginning of the second book of Don Quixote, when Quixote is trying to
convince Sancho Panza to accompany him on a new round of adventures, Sancho
begins an appeal to his master with these words: “I am so fossil—”. At the word
“fossil”, Sancho is cut short by Quixote before he can explain the
ramifications of this condition. Quixote claims that he doesn’t understand what
“I am so fossil” means, and he decides fairly quickly that Sancho meant to say: “I am so docile”.
This is of course a very different proposition. To be, in one’s own eyes, “so
fossil”, is to imagine oneself as having once been an organic, physically pliable
body, but now petrified into a posthumous antiquity, powerless to a new kind of
pliability: being valued
into a role in a pseudo-historical fiction. For Sancho to know this of himself
is radical self-knowledge, and Quixote transforms Sancho’s meaning from a
radical expression of social truth into an expression of loving servility. This
transformation strips away the organic radicalism of Sancho’s speech. His
mistakes are de-weaponised by Quixote. In this modality, the heroes are a
retrograde social machine, instructive only negatively, as an image of
counter-revolutionary anachronism.
But
if we look again at this passage, we are told that it is “a discussion which
the history records with great precision and scrupulous exactness”.[8]
In the course of their conversation, Quixote and Sancho each repeat the phrase
“so fossil”, so that it is given three voicings in all. When Quixote then
decides what Sancho meant to say, he corrects Sancho, and thereby voices what is a
rhyme in both the Spanish original and American English: through the mouth of
Quixote, “soy tan focil” comes to rhyme with
“soy tan docil”.[9] The heroes are a ridiculous
anachronism, but through the poetic thinking immanent in their dialogue they
generate historical social truths. Quixote and Sancho are an embodied
dialectic, a living image of class warfare.
We learn from this
that multiply-authorised poetic work is necessarily relational and
inter-subjective, demanding something like a lyric intimacy between comrades,
which relation mediates the greater work of imagination that is an address to
the world.
*
A more popular
literary malapropism can be found in the first Back to the Future film. The character of George
McFly is played by Crispin Glover, who has written a number of appropriative
illustrated novels, writing between and over the lines and of otherwise obscure
texts. The classic moment happens in the town diner, when McFly, speaking to
his future wife Lorraine, proclaims: “I am your density.”[10]
This means two things at once. It means: ‘I am the degree of your compactness,
your quantity’, which can be read as a declaration of solidarity and
fundamental co-dependence. It also
means: ‘I am your stupidity’, which can be read as a declaration of ecstatic
and dialectical devotion, of the overcoming of oneself by sacrificial
absorption of the stupidity of another.
If George McFly
was not Lorraine’s
“destiny”, he would also not be her “density”. Is a mutually-inclusive stupidity the fate of
collectivization? And is this weighing-down
of the otherwise buoyant the price of a collective future? Is this price actually not a price at all, but a
necessary stage in the process of a social organism’s development of poetic
authority?
*
If we are going to
be revolutionary poets, then we cannot be like other poets. Our poetry has an
obvious readership in the militants with whom we have organised, demonstrated,
and occupied. Next to our lives, our poetry is the most radical gift that we
can give to revolutionary struggle. It is a weapon, which, at its most
powerful, will be forged in the shared heart of many.
[1] Frantz
Fanon, “1. Concerning Violence”, The Wretched of the Earth [1961],
Translated by Constance Farrington (Penguin Books, 1983), p. 37.
[2] Marge can
hold either Bart or Lisa over her head and launch them out, doing superhero
flights through their enemies back and forth across the screen. Marge and Homer
lock together to form a deadly rolling sphere. Either Bart or Lisa can climb
onto Homer’s shoulders and fight from there in tandem with Homer. Bart and Lisa
hold hands and run around clothes-lining their enemies. But timing is
everything: there isn’t time to make the combination if an attack from the
enemy is too imminent. ¶ What is
the analogy for button-mashing in the work of poetry and poetic thought?
[3]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6a7l-x8pqvI (circa 4:10)
[4] See Keston
Sutherland, The Odes to TL61P (London: Enitharmon Press, 2013), p. 42:
“a tragedy is something you are obliged to imagine must be capable of teaching
you something, and a comedy is something you are not obliged to imagine must be
capable of teaching you anything”.
[5]
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/aug/14/flautist-carla-rees-croydon-riot
[7] See Justin
Katko, “Incredible Style (Cervantes—de Sade)”, in Epsians 3, ed. Ou
Hong (Sun Yat-sen University, P.R. China, March 2013), pp. 79–120.
[8] Miguel de Cervantes Saaverda, Don Quixote: The Ormsby
Translation, Revised [1605/1615, 1885],
edited by Joseph R. Jones and Kenneth Douglas (New York and London: W.W. Norton
& Company, 1981), Pt II, Ch. VII (“Of what passed between Don Quixote and
his Squire, together with other very notable incidents”), pp. 457–62 (458).
[9] Don Quixote de la Mancha: An Old-Spelling Control
Edition Based on the First Editions of Parts I and II, prepared by R.M. Flores, Vol. II (Vancouver: University
of British Columbia Press, 1988), p. 59.
[10] This is
preceded by: “My density has popped me to you.” A year prior to Back to the
Future,
Crispin Glover appeared on an episode of the sitcom Family Ties (1984), starring
Michael J. Fox as the teenage Republican son of liberal parents. Glover and Fox
are at a table in a bar, pretending to be military pilots in order to impress
some ladies who are their dates. Fox announces that he will be flying a solo
mission into enemy territory, and Glover retorts: “Yeah, and I’m going with
him.” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlE1cdWBegk)
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