William Rowe: Response to the exchange between Francesca Lisette and David Grundy

I identified at the time with what I thought was the object of Francesca’s objections – violence against women – as something to be accused of. But I don’t find that the sense of shame it produced is useful. And, having referred to shame, I want to be more precise as to the cause of this shame. Rather than involvement in sexual violence, what was I imputing to myself? A complicity, as far as I can tell, in an ambience of such violence (which gives permission for that violence).

However, as I say, I don’t find the sense of guilt useful. If revolutionary tenderness is to be practiced, this will not be the result of seeing the pointing finger of guilt, but it will come from the type of radical solidarity that the Paris Communards practiced (the Welfare State, which is under destruction, being a reduced and bureaucratized reflection of that).

So for me, revolutionary tenderness, in the complete commitment it implies, is to come out of liberty, equality and solidarity. And the not-so-useful fierceness of guilt is I think fed by the failure of the desire for equality and solidarity.

It’s important to me that Francesca pointed out the implication of rape in the statement quoted by David [which Jennifer Cooke refers to in the third point of her recent post]. Here is the shadow of rape as instrument of war. And a major part of the shock of recognizing that rape is implied is the sense that the perpetrator is enjoying it. As, for us, Ian Duncan Smith and co are enjoying causing suffering to weak and/or exploited people. When the cuts were first announced in Parliament, Tory MPs shouted More! More! More! So there is an accuracy to the slogan ‘fuck capitalism’.

‘Fuck the State and capitalism's holes’, the statement quoted by David, can mean, as Francesca said, simply doing the same to them. My bother with it (rather than the slogan form) is it can be taken as a simple mirror reversal. Revolutionary violence, for me, is not like that. As in Fanon, it is transformative of oppressed and weakened people. And secondly, as with Marx, revolutionists have to be involved in the practice of violence.

The point is that ‘Fuck capitalism’, as reversal, is I guess ok as a slogan (a slogan does not constitute a strategy) because it turns the enemy’s violence back at him. But it’s not ok as mere reversal, it does not designate the enjoyment revolutionists need. As Sean has said, struggle, in a revolutionary sense, is the only valid form of ecstasy.

Hope others will respond to this exchange.

Selina Vuddamalay: On the Militant Poetics Conference

I came to the event having been fairly disappointed with several other seminars and conferences. The title of the event encouraged me to attend and it was not disappointing because —

(a) We all seem to have similar concerns regarding injustice and violation of human rights.

(b) There seems to be a genuine commitment of intolerance against the language, behavior and systems of global corrupt, elitist culture in all the forms it manifests itself in our neocolonialist era. This is well demonstrated in the poetry and works of so many who contributed their ideas to all present; it was varied and challenging.

(c) We can dance on Thatcher's grave, or any other dictators for that matter, but what has really changed and why not? How do we fight the corruption and greed of politics, and is the power of language alone sufficient? Just as dictionaries can become the graveyard for words, discourse and dialectical debate can easily overshadow the main agendas that truly worry us.

It was a positive event; poets and writers as legislators and activists combined, would perhaps be more constructive? 

* 

My commitment at present is with children; may be tapping into their interests leads to many passions we are engaged with in terms of injustice and human rights. Mine is just a first small (uncertain and sometimes faltering) step towards making 'awareness', in children by exploring their imaginative and creative possibilities through a 'self-exploratory process'.  

As with some of you there are difficulties in knowing the right way, but sometimes there is no right way and it will be a reflective learning process. 

I welcome any comments on this process.

Jennifer Cooke: On the Militant Poetics Conference

These are the things I thought the most important about the day:

1. The structure of the day, with rolling papers that moved on after ten-fifteen minute discussions meant that no one voice dominated, no one set of ideas took the permanent stage. Instead, there was a feeling that ideas were being put on the table to be turned over, touched, tested, bounced about by participants of the day. The fact we sat in a circle and could have eye contact helped too. The way the day developed built trust that each voice that spoke into the space was valued and as ideas moved on, the paper-givers tended to abandon their papers and respond instead to the developing discussion. The affective dimensions of what this format produced was very valuable, in my opinion.

2. Danny Hayward's paper was a turning point in the day, I think, because of the practical suggestions it contained in terms of action. Danny suggested that it was important for us to know each other better - know the politics of those around us beyond just a broadly left-wing anti-capitalist consensus - and that to do that, and to discuss political events as they unfold in the public sphere and how we could respond to them, we needed to meet regularly in small groups. We could then discuss politics, political actions, and our poetry and this would build strong solidarities which could then be fed back into larger meetings of us all.

3. Francesca Lisette raised for me the most important poetic point of the day. Responding to a paper which had described a need to fuck capitalism in every hole in which it has fucked us, she said she wanted no part in a revolution which used rape as a metaphor. This widened into a discussion of the use of sex and fucking more generally in poetry, especially its metaphorics. This for me is a fundamental question which has both academic and activist dimensions. A recent group of female poets - international but many of us are in the UK - has just formed in order to precisely try to think about these questions in more depth, which has been a practical outcome of conversations from the Militant Poetics day but also many conversations and frustrations stretching back a long time before. It was fantastic for me to hear this issue aired so succinctly and passionately by Fran and the subsequent conversations that I've had with other poets, particularly women, around this matter have been extremely stimulating and important.

David Grundy: Reply to Oakland

I'd like to apologize for any mis-representation or offence caused by the two sentences in my paper which have provoked this letter. It must have seemed a casual and unprovoked slur on the committed work that poet-activists have been doing in Oakland , and one that seems to open up a rift between groups that should be working together in solidarity, whether or not they’re on different sides of the Atlantic . These sentences, written in haste and based on vaguely-digested conversational anecdote, were clearly a mistake and shouldn’t have been included. The paper was delivered during a day of intensive discussion in which a large number of different positions were aired and debated, and it is in the spirit of that debate that it has rightly been challenged. I hope, in any case, that we can take this opportunity to learn more about what we are doing in our different locations, and find ways of working together which channel our political and rhetorical energies into joint activism.

 

Chen, Clover, & Spahr: Letter to UK Comrades

 this received in response to David Grundy's paper

We would be unwilling to give such tawdry and trifling material as David Grundy’s
“Practice Run” the time of day, but for the hope that there will be comrades, friends
in the UK with a more serious sense of politics; a real curiosity about what has
happened here in Oakland; and a less self-serving account of the relation between
poetry and militancy. We also hope rather urgently that it isn’t indicative of the race
politics around the “Militant Poetics” scene.

Much of Grundy’s spume escapes us. We apologize for getting lost among the drifty
sentences and Thatcher apologetics, unable to make sense of the “politicallycorrect”
or the force of rectitude in “really being a citizen.” But we must be grateful for
these cloudy moments, given what is to be got from the moments of clarity: the
rehearsal of received and banal slurs of reaction.

Let us go immediately to the moment when Grundy most evidently sells himself to
readers of the Daily Mail, complaining of “the poets who came into Occupy Oakland
advocating various forms of escalation then left black people to swim again in their
own shit once the movement had ruptured.” We will pass over the unfortunate
history of racialized fantasies white people like to have about black people and shit.
Behold instead this interesting dichotomy: poets or black people. Perhaps this
division is the rule at Cambridge; we could not claim to know. In Oakland, it is non
sequitur. There are enough black poets and poets of color that some opposed the
tactics of Occupy Oakland, some fomented them, and some did other things
altogether.

The racial heterogeneity of “poets,” however, pales before the political heterogeneity
of “black people.” Smugly alluding to a 1970 Gil Scott-Heron performance about
white college activists not only erases the heavy participation of nonwhite political
actors in Occupy Oakland, it recycles an ignorant view of Oakland’s complex racial
politics in 2013 — a city riven by non-white intraracial and interracial antagonisms.
Present day Oakland is presided over by a Maoist-turned-neoliberal Asian American
mayor, and a fully multiracial city bureaucracy and police department at war with the
city’s poorest black and brown residents.

Against this Grundy, content to be a blank bearer of official ideology, resurrects the
crude fearmongering about the “outside agitator.” It is a figure with deep historical
roots in white liberal reaction to increasingly militant veterans of the civil rights
movement and to the urban race riots which spread through cities like Harlem,
Watts, and Philadelphia in the 1960s. It is a term not of description but of crowd
control. The invention of the “outside agitator” as hybrid legal/moral category, and of
the duped and docile black and brown communities that this stereotype
presupposes, has always purposed to justify state violence against unruly and
“illegitimate” political antagonists. It was repeatedly invoked by the Oakland Police
Department, city politicians, pro-police clergy, business leaders, and news media in
order to justify the violent eviction of the Occupy Oakland encampment. It is the
official lie about what happened.

Occupy Oakland’s general assemblies, hundreds and sometimes thousands of
people, voted overwhelmingly to support tactical escalation week after week. That
this could be so easily be chalked up to the machinations of a few outsiders (or in
this case, Bay Area poets — feel the power!) is particularly revealing of the dream
logic of this liberal race fantasy. The awesome, almost supernatural political
influence over non-white communities wielded by the modern day “white outside
agitator” is simply the flip side of the benevolent paternalism defining what Teju Cole
calls the “White Savior Industrial Complex.” That this fantasy is spontaneously
regurgitated by Grundy, following the noble path of left-liberal pundits like Chris
Hedges, underscores the extent to which denying the political agency and diversity
of political opinions of nonwhite people remains a kind of racial “common sense.” It is
a fantasy which has become a peculiarly vicious and effective tool of state power.

It is a strange ideology that fetishizes black militancy in legend and effaces it in
practice, sets militancy as an ideal while condemning it in the streets. The curious
consequence of such contradiction is that it authorizes poetry as the appropriate
space for white militancy — a happy outcome indeed! If that is to be the conclusion
of “militant poetics,” as a limit of struggle, we hope you will keep it as far away from
us as possible; we have more pressing things to do than to discover at windy length
that our poetic practice was the best possible politics all along.

But we would be surprised if this is generally held to be the case. We have great
respect for many of the UK poets. We would assume that they would wish to
renounce such dire and derelict positions publicly, lest the title of “militant” be
emptied of whatever honor it retains.

Chris Chen, Joshua Clover, Juliana Spahr

Danny Hayward

Would it be useful to organise ourselves? In what way? e.g. form a faction; produce agitprop material; create a website; produce collective statements for website, perhaps weekly.


1.  The question demands that we think about what organization means for radical politics under present conditions. It also demands that with think about what other organizations we relate ourselves to. 

2.  Presently there is no existing revolutionary structure in the UK within which artists could form themselves as a faction. There is no mass organization whose aims and objectives could guide the political activity of cultural producers or that could provide for them a politically sympathetic audience.

3. Wherever a mass organization structured around workers' material interests reaches a certain size, it is compelled to become a cultural, as well as a strictly “economic”, institution. As an intelligent historian wrote of the early period of the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, “The greater the masses of workers that joined the party, the less the party could afford to be content with their merely political and scientific enlightenment, that is, with a vulgarization of the theory of surplus value and the theory of evolution.”

4. Since the adoption by the SPD leadership of a militaristic stance within the German Reichstag, the arrogation by the German state of the various social services discharged by the revolutionary party, and the failure of the Spartakus insurrection, no revolutionary party in Europe has attempted at a wide scale to provide for the “exterior” or material needs of its membership. As revolutionary mass organizations became institutions organized principally around ideas, the requirement to codify, to integrate, and to dogmatize their programmes grew more and more pressing. As their jurisdiction was restricted to the interior lives of their members, revolutionary parties come to resemble state churches.

5.  In the twentieth century avant-gardism has understood itself as the scourge of the vulgarized and barely credible dogmas of the mainstream of radical politics. By scourging dogma, avant-gardism mimics the ideological activity of a mass revolutionary organization still undivested of its original principle of unity in the material co-ordination of human needs.

6.  At the same time, avant-gardism misprizes the forces active in determining the relationship between the “interior” (intellectual) and “exterior” (material) needs. Wherever avant-gardism misprizes these forces and takes up arms against dogma, it conceals the conditions in which dogma is capable of being overcome. The division between “interior” and “exterior” needs is conflated with the divisions between mind and life, speaker and audience; on the fault line between speaker and audience, there opens an abyss into which can be thrown unending quantities of “non-dogmatic”, “critical”, “autonomous”, or even “linguistically innovative” or “post avant” writing. At the bottom of the abyss you can see the White House.

7. There is a basic continuity between the increasing importance in revolutionary theory of the “essential” doctrines of Marxism, on the one hand, and the real transformation of class relations to the detriment of the propertyless, on the other. As the global proletariat is deprived of the means to order - or even meaningfully to regulate - its own conditions of life, its theoretical representatives become increasingly concerned to sophisticate the categories in which its “essence” is expressed. With each new exaction placed upon the proletariat by capital, the exact definition of the proletarian “essence” undergoes a new upturn in significance.           

8. By attempting to turn outwards too quickly, revolutionary poetry - or any other species of avant-gardism - overlooks the basis of revolutionary inwardness (its stewardship of a dogma) in the external development of class relations. In these conditions, the replacement of the dialectic between material needs and intellectual life with the flatly straightforward opposition between ideas and audience, in which ideas are only distinguishable on the basis of whether they are doctrinal or apostate, jaundiced or deranged - this replacement does not permit a supersession of existing limitations but only pushes them outwards into an empty auditorium. The first practical suggestion I would make is that we talk more concertedly about finding the resources to formalize among ourselves a newly intensive process of association, a much more regular process of small group affiliation, of collective critical research into new developments in shared languages whose potential to be bent out of shape or ground into fragments is perhaps the only general basis for our intimacy. Our friendships have to be staked on this; our larger organizational commitments may yet be renewed by it.

9. Unlike the categories of political economy, poetry will never be essential to a correct definition of capitalist society. In this sense, it will never need to exist - but it is exactly in this sense that it has something to contribute, because it is only by an internalized conflict between dogma and that which dogma defines as inessential, only in the contusion of dogma, rather than in its concealment, that a revolutionary politics - truly a politics, rather than a geometry, or another species of theoretical fatalism - might begin to revive itself.   

Anon: Some notes on the counter-EDL demonstration 27 May 2013

1. The disproportion between EDL and anti-fascist demonstrators was sharp and markedly depressing. It seemed patent to everyone to whom I spoke that there was very little for anti-fascists to do except to shuffle into position and to play the role of demonstrators. Actual resistance of any kind was out of the question.

2. Once they’d been released from the police pen (itself apparently a tactical decision by the cops, who were keen not to create too much tension on a Bank Holiday in the city centre), the EDL members were left to scatter into pubs or to march around Westminster in small groups. The police did very little to pursue them or even to keep them under close surveillance. Groups of 60 EDL, moving at a leisurely crawl, were usually accompanied by two or three police.

3. EDL members are conscious of the fact that they possess an exoteric and an esoteric discourse. In public they defer slavishly to what they assume to be “liberal” ideas. Like the liberal state with its checks and balances, they want to “protect” society against “fundamentalism”; like the National Trust, they want to “safeguard” English values; like the judiciary, they want to ensure that the “rule of law” isn’t bent out of shape by the decadent inattention of political elites and the fantastical moral scruples of “the left.”

4. In private, some attendees of EDL demos find it difficult to align their public commitments and their political activities. Asked how they can justify the slogan ‘Muslim violence off our streets’ in terms of a general commitment to the rule of law, they disclaim responsibility for the slogan.

5. The anxiety is connected to a more fundamental desire to shield their positions from the accusation of racism. EDL demonstrators have black friends, admire “the” Sikh community, or are themselves “mixed race”. The obvious tendency of the line of argument is to identify the concept “racist” with the person of the “white supremacist”.

6. The argument that says that this indicates a step change towards a “new” far right, the sophistication of obsolete racial “biologism” into cutting edge “culturalism”, is barren, for at least two reasons. Firstly, “racism” does not evolve like electronics commodities in a marketing schedule. The EDL is not Racism 4 and consumers will not be attracted by its new gyroscope. Secondly, the argument implies a certain measure of triumphalism, as if the recrudescence of racist street movements is a blessing in disguise, a great leap forwards only masquerading as a small step back. The background assumption is as follows. “Antiquated” racial supremacism that identifies racial superiority in the degree of cranial curvature, or which fishes it out of a “gene pool”, is superseded by a modern racism which at least has the decency to accept that the “people” who exist beneath their “identities” are capable of being retrieved for a well-integrated, stable, and “value”-rich polity. But the idea that beneath all of the clutter of “identities”, “beliefs”, “values” and “cultural dispositions” belonging to a person there lies a neutral and politically acceptable core is not automatically more humane than the “old” idea that a person is fixedly identifiable with his or her genetic inheritance, because it legitimates an endlessly more violent and imperiously intrusive stance on the part of those who take themselves to be competent to define what it is that we have at our “core” and who see in it the reflected image of their own preferences and interests. It makes no difference whether these people are on the “far right” or stranded at sea in the middle of the “centre left”.   

7. Liberals are also accommodating to the EDL’s account of class. In television debates featuring EDL leader “Tommy Robison”, host and guest engage in a kind of barter of discursive favours, in which Robinson permits himself to be ridiculed and intellectually subordinated by his patrician host on account of his accent, solecisms, malapropisms, lapses of memory, and habit of self-contradiction in exchange for a tacit commitment on the part of the host not to question the claim that, precisely insofar as he fails to speak coherently, Robinson is able to “represent working class people”. By respectively constructing and tacitly affirming this account of “class”, derisively identified with speech habits, guest and host both get what they want, since while the host enjoys the reaffirmation of the innate superiority of his powers of expression and ratiocination, the guest is permitted to claim a spurious representative authority whose subordinate role is not painful but is in fact exactly what he wanted all along. The reassuring “triumph” of the liberal host in this situation is basically akin to the “triumph” of the consumer removing her comestible from the tray of the vending machine.

8. Just as the inadvertent triumphalism of the soft sociology of the “new far right” palliates the EDL’s racism, the slogan “racist scum” helps to confirm the organization's account of class. Not only does it bring unavoidably into mind the image of the bourgeois “street cleaners” who acted out their own purposelessness by pretending in August 2011 to clean up already clean streets; more generally it fixes a redundant adjective to what already ought to be a dirty word, raising into peripheral view the connotation that the EDL are something in addition to being racists. For the EDL this will sound like a resounding affirmation of their own delusional self-identification as representatives of “the” working class persecuted by ignorant middle class “do-gooders” or “liberals”.

9. In arguments concerning standards of sanitation, the ultimate arbiter will always be the liberal state. Its expertise in these matters is undisputed.

10. Unlike in previous EDL street demonstrations, the participants in central London on Monday were largely though by no means exclusively young. Youthful white English “patriots” whose own conception of national solidarity is conditioned by the propaganda and employment prospects offered by the British Armed Forces will in many cases have been participating in EDL street action for the first time. That the EDL presence was so unchecked either by anti-fascists or by the police means among other things that these new attendees will have enjoyed their day out. This will be a matter of jubilation for the racist ideologues at the head of the organization who can now anticipate future opportunities to influence these peripheral members and to organize them into cadres.

11. Now that the old anti-fascist front organizations are disintegrating (along with the parties for which they acted as a front), new responsibilities emerge for anyone interested in participating in anti-racist street actions. The sense of unpreparedness yesterday among the friends and comrades who turned up in central London was palpable and painfully dismaying; and yet it also presages an opportunity to assert publicly with a new and striking clarity a better account of capital and race than the account which resorts instantly to obfuscatory slogans about Nazism, and which rules out also the blockheaded liberal argument that the “new” racism is an index of social progress. There is work to be done here, and gains to be made, against the intensifying brutality of the “national discourse” and the policy outcomes – the racist violence – in which that discourse inevitably terminates. Petrified silence would be the most clamorous act of submission.   

also published today on Mute