Spectropoetics of the Commons

Mathilda Cullen
Spectropoetics of the Commons
“Civilization has to defend itself against the specter of a world which could be free.”

— Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization

“Revolutionary moments do not spread by contamination but by resonance.”

— Jean-Marie Gleize, Tarnac, A Preparatory Act

0 // Introduction

The horizon of socialist, let alone communist thought can be conceived as a

problem of psychic scope. At least this was how Bonney said it: “listen, we got
every escape hatch blocked. / the center of our orbit is some kind of cynical
massacre / some kind of prolapse, that’s all of your logic, your entire poetics, /
no-one can even think revolt -” (Happiness 43). What’s funny is that this poem
proposes that there are escape hatches latent to the logic of capital; as if spoken
from the mouth of one of its henchmen, some border guard who patrols the legal
fictions that constitute daily life. Mark Fisher said that artists nowadays no longer
have access to the materials necessary to produce the New, and that this is less
so a problem of psycho-physical materials but of a larger historical confluence of
conditions and the de/construction of possible environments and futures (Ghosts
of My Life 15).
There are two poles to Fisher’s thought: Capitalist Realism and Acid
Communism. Capitalist Realism is the pole we live within, the social sphere of
capital’s all-pervasiveness, within which “no-one can even think revolt.” Such a
psychic conjuncture does not occur overnight, but it moved in quickly. The rise
of global neoliberalism after the US-backed Allende coup carved away a probable
socialist horizon that was emerging in the sixties and seventies. The installation of
Pinochet enforced a militarized forgetting of the Chilean socialist horizon, erasing
the worlds Allende made thinkable. Allende was experimenting with a form
of socialism which provided an alternative to Stalinist economic austerity. This
coincided with the rise of neoliberalism as the dominant economic ideology. As
its embodied in the Thatcherite and Reagan regimes, it must first be understood
as a project which aims to destroy — “to the point of making them unthinkable”
— global experiments in democratic socialism and libertarian communism like
those that were beginning to take hold at the turn of the sixties and seventies.
Fisher says that the “military destruction of the Allende regime, and the
subsequent mass imprisonments and torture, are only the most violent and
dramatic example of the lengths capital had to go to in order to make itself appear
to be the only ‘realistic’ mode of organising society” (K-punk 1123). Capitalist
Realism must be understood as a symptom of neoliberalism, a dissolution of any
utopian or collective desire that could be beginning to be felt in those years. The
retreat of a once approaching horizon.
Fisher’s unfinished text, Acid Communism, describes a way out, a
probable escape hatch, or a potential remedy for the reflexive impotence and
psychic terminal velocity of Capitalist Realism. Acid Communism outlines the
necessity to return to the structures of previous decades in order to analyze the
dialectical combat that resulted in a hollowing out of any conceivable communist
possibility. Fisher discusses the way in which the role of art, specifically during
a time which saw the proliferation of psychedelics and hallucinogenics, was
useful in performing new conceptual social relations, that it could give a “taste of
what the world might look like once the movement had succeeded” (1148). His
text, however, remains unfinished, and we are left only with the imperative that
“Understanding how this process of consciousness-deflation worked is the first
step to reversing it” (1152).


1 // An Absolute Redistribution of all the Senses, or
Rimbaud as Acid Communist

Rimbaud has been named by figures like Bertolt Brecht and Fredric Jameson to be
the first poet to articulate the trajectory of global capitalism. Brecht himself said
in conversation with Walter Benjamin that
Marx and Engels themselves, had they read Le Bateau lvre, would
have sensed in it the great historical movement of which it is
the expression. They would have clearly recognized that what it
describes is not an eccentric poet going for a walk, but the flight,
the escape of a man who cannot bear to live any longer inside the
barriers of a class which … was then beginning to open up even
the more exotic continents to its mercantile interests. (Aesthetics
& Politics 87)
Kristen Ross notes here that Brecht has connected, simultaneously, Rimbaud’s
lyric poetry with politics, and history with space. Ross tells how the Drunken
Boat, as it sails down the river and into the sea, expresses a movement from
market capitalism into global colonialism and further imperialism (75-76). She
takes this further, however, that the spatial shift from the local to the global is not
only one of importance to political economy, but of revolutionary subjectivity.

Downstream on impassive rivers suddenly

I felt the towline of the boatmen slacken.
Redskins had taken them in a scream and stripped them and
Skewered them to the glaring stakes for targets. (Beckett 93, 1-4)

The line with which boatmen pull the drunken boat down the river is loosened.
Rimbaud is released from a linear historical flow through the aid of “Redskins,”
one of his many often crude cross-racial solidarities in his poetry. The indigenous
saviors kill the mercantile boatmen in order to allow the drunken boat to begin its
liberation from capital and its weight.
Then, delivered from my straining boatmen,
From the trivial racket of trivial crews and from
The freights of Flemish grain and English cotton,
I made my own course down the passive rivers. (Beckett 93, 5-8)

This is just the beginning of Rimbaudian displacement and what it can do.
Rimbaud’s virtual emancipatory subjectivity will be shown to play a further, larger
part in the transformation of individual perception and the political implications
and possibilities of such a shift in consciousness (Ross 119-120). The boat is freed
from the grips of market capitalism and sails onward toward new horizons of
perception.
The poem follows a subject in the early transformative stages of psychic
liberation from the domain of capital, one which performs a shift toward a
Fisher-esque perceptual system, going beyond the imaginative bounds of officially
proscribed subjectivity, laying the foundations for a new, broader political subject.
Before continuing with “The Drunken Boat” we must make an
excursus into the intentional sensorial disorder of Rimbaud’s verse and poetic
project. As noted above, Fisher marks counterposes two concepts pertinent to
capital’s psychic domain and our escape from it: Capitalist Realism and Acid
Communism, the latter potentially being the antidote to the former. Ross
similarly distinguishes between the “ordered disorganization” of capitalism and
Rimbaud’s “long, boundless, reasoned disordering of the senses,” or, between
the anarchistic chaos of the Rimbaudian subject and the anarchic chaos of high
capital (Ross 102). The overwhelming barrage of the senses is well discussed by
Fisher: if “something like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is a pathology, it
is the pathology of late capitalism” (Capitalist Realism 25). The value of creating
work which emulates such pathology is the question. Does a work of art which
solely demonstrates the psychic domain of capital allow for a conceptual escape
hatch? While Rimbaud is the poet of this pathology, I want to turn to a more
contemporary example to elaborate on this: the music of 100 gecs.
100 gecs is the contemporary product of subjective experience as defined
under capitalist realism. The band produces in a genre called hyperpop, a post-
vaporwave style which revels less in the hauntological production of nostalgia and
more in the auditory manipulation of capital’s psychic onslaught of the senses.
Fisher has written on the hauntological productions of a literal contretemps
(counter-time), or anachronistic music which, despite their contemporaneity,
invoke formal elements of age: the crackle, dust and scratches on the “record,”
vocal samples and citations from old movies, etc. I bring up 100 gecs largely to
discuss the end of the track “745 sticky” from 1:44 - 2:21. The song takes on a
pattern of harsh, stunted crests and troughs. Between bursts of dubs which pull
and stretch, morphing around the sounds injected into them: tires screeching,
imitations of lasers, what sounds like the blip of time stopping, a dog barking, a
drip of water, a woman screaming, and police sirens. The push and pull of this
music is like corporate advertising and city traffic: the poetry of consumer society.
This is not just a formal remix, but “a remix of historical information.”
The music of 100 gecs is something exactly like the method that neoliberal
hegemony has used “from its happy few to its mass media—to feign a moving
beyond, an eclectic dismantling of its macrocontinuity … to construct a world
of singular images whose linearity has been covered over, hidden …” Yépez,
Empire of Neomemory 233). The proliferation of remixes as a form is inherent to
the rise of the neoliberal subject: something composed from the ruins of other
fragmented histories. The bombardment of the senses and the psychical damage
of this frenetic disorientation is precisely the establishing of a formal reality
principle: the constant deorientation of capital which is its own dis/ordered
reality. A reality of organized disorder.
 The form and content of this music is itself a deficiency of attention,
an attention constantly distracted. The Injury Reserve remix of this song takes
this form to a further extreme, extending the last forty seconds of the song over
its entirety. Car honks form a kind of bass line underneath even more clipped
sounds. This is in contrast to the Black Dresses remix, which weaves digitized
screams of the lyrics through the song while the instruments reach an auditory
glitching and artifacting — as though we were hearing it played at max volume
at a house show, as though the peaking were “natural” and not produced. The
question is: does such a form and content prove itself emancipatory? Or is it
simply another mimetic reification of the form of capital into the practices of art?
This will be our anchoring question through the following chapters.
The tricky thing about our dual notions of Acid Communism and
Capitalist Realism is that one can often look identical to the other, even disguised
as the other. Rimbaud, in “The Drunken Boat” engages in what we can call a form
of acid communism. He outlines this poetic program across letters to Georges
Izambard and Paul Demeny on the 13th and 15th of May 1871. First, to Georges
Izambard:
Now, I am degrading myself as much as possible. Why? I want to
be a poet, and I am working to make myself a Seer: you will not
understand this, and I don’t know how to explain it to you. It is a
question of reaching the unknown by the derangement of all the
senses… I is someone else. It is too bad for the wood which finds
itself a violin and Scorn for the heedless who argue over what they
are totally ignorant of! (Rimbaud, Complete Works 371)
Multiple terms are introduced here. The transgression of the social category of
poet, towards that of the Seer. I take this word in connection with the Ancient
Greek word for “siren” Σειρήν (Seirḗn) and the Old Norse shamanic practice of
seiðr (the anglophone equivalent of seiðr in fact being seer), a later chapter will
be dedicated to fully fleshing out what I will call seiretic verse, that which exists
at the intersection of these cultural and artistic practices. What is most crucial in
this passage is reaching the unknown through the “derangement of all the senses.”
He continues this theory of voyant poetics in his next letter to Paul Demeny.
Keep in mind that these letters are written right before the outset of the Paris
Commune, and while it is contested whether Rimbaud was present during the
occupation, there is no doubt that the occurrence of the Commune and his visit
to Paris shortly beforehand influenced his thinking and poetry (as the whole of
Kristin Ross’s book attests to). Rimbaud continues,
The Poet makes himself a seer by a long, gigantic and rational
derangement of all the senses. All forms of love, suffering, and
madness. He searches himself … He reaches the unknown, and
when, bewildered, he ends by losing the intelligence of his visions,
he has seen them. Let him die as he leaps through unheard of and
unnamable things: other horrible workers will come; they will
begin from the horizons where the other one collapsed! (Complete
Works 377)
It is “reach[ing] the unknown” through a “rational derangement of all the senses”
which is of our interest. This is what is proposed by acid communism, that you
can escape or think your way outside of capitalist realism through art which lays
bare the structures of contemporary stultified thought. What is incredible is the
way in which Rimbaud conceives of this as a larger historical process that exists
not solely within one individual’s psyche: it is a collective project that endures
beyond the lifespan of one worker-poet. “Let him die as he leaps through unheard
of and unnamable things: other horrible workers will come; they will begin from
the horizons where the other one collapsed!” Later in this paper we will discuss
Sean Bonney as one of the acid communist poets who began at the horizon where
Rimbaud left off, but for now, we must bring Marcuse into the fold in order to
sharpen our understanding of this horizon. A horizon which is still open.
2 // You Must Change Your Psychic Reality Principle

Largely Marcuse has already been here, weaving inbetween these threads, or
perhaps his thought has been the thread itself. Much of Fisher’s thought is built
on what Marcuse put forth in The Aesthetic Dimension and Eros and Civilization.
The very notion that capitalism’s all-pervasive psychic domain can prevent the
thinking of any alternative futurity draws from Marcuse’s writing, and so this may
sound familiar, but it predates the publication of Capitalist Realism by nearly half
a century
As stated at the outset, the horizon of socialist possibility at the turn of
the sixties into the seventies was a felt thing, and the conditions which made
it so have only grown more acute as we burrow into the twenty-first century.
But the worsening of conditions has not necessarily correlated with a growth
in communist optimism. The psychic reality of capital runs deep, and we are
well acquainted with the ways in which capital will advertise its own downfall
as a form of militant pacification. The continual renarration of the past is what
causes the perpetual reconstruction of such nihilist narratives. We cannot simply
say “the Sixties led to neoliberalism” as I have done, but we must examine what
neoliberalism was a reaction to: namely, the rise in scope of the socialist horizon.
The installment of neoliberal individualism was, in fact, a counter-measure
defined against the collective subjectivities emerging from the end of the sixties. A
mass unforgetting, then, is required through our analyses of this moment. Fisher
believed that there is a political necessity to return to
the optimism of that Seventies moment, just as we must carefully
analyse all the machineries that capital deployed to convert confidence
into dejection. Understanding how this process of consciousness-
deflation worked is the first step to reversing it (K-punk 1152).
I take as my starting point the horizon where Fisher left us. To perform a
“counter-exorcism of a world which could be free” — his brilliant inversion of
Marcuse — we must understand the lengths to which capital will go in asserting
itself as the only thinkable option (K-punk 1129).
We must have no illusions about the efficacy of art in changing the scope
of the thinkable. Marcuse himself was clear on this:
Art cannot change the world, but it can contribute to changing
the consciousness and drives of the men and women who could
change the world . The movement of the sixties tended toward a
sweeping transformation of subjectivity and nature, of sensibility,
imagination, and reason. It opened a new vista of things, an
ingression of the superstructure into the base. (Aesthetic Dimension
32-33)
It is not only that art cannot change the world, but that art cannot change the
world directly. It is always triangular, the transmutation of poetry into action is
a long and indirect process. The work of art in the age of pre-industrialization
shows this. The Marxist anthropologist George Thomson’s seminal study Marxism
and Poetry features a detailed account of his findings on poetry and/as magic.
His study recounts his stay in 1923 on one of the few originally Gaelic-
speaking regions at the time, Na Blascaodaí (the Blasket Islands) off of southwest
Ireland. It was during this visit that he not only immersed himself in the language,
but began his study of the language and particularly speech as a necessary tool
in the relations of production. Thomson was named Seoirse Mac Tomáis by
his hosts on the islands and he befriended and studied alongside the poet and
memoirist Muiris Ó Súilleabháin, later encouraging him to write and publish in
Gaelic and arranging for his translations into English. He was interested in the
still-thriving oral poetric tradition, how it “lives on their lips” and was regarded
as common property (Marxism & Poetry 8). We could of course make another
excurses here to discuss the pre-industrial poetry of the commons as compared to
contemporary bourgeois publishing practices, but we shall save this for later.
Bringing about a material change in the world is not impossible through
the intervention of speech. It is, however, roundabout. And on Na Blascaodaí
it was regarded as magic. Thomson defines a magical act as one in which the
practitioners “strive to impose their will on the environment by mimicking the
natural process that they desire to bring about.” Magic, then, is simply a desired
reality enacted in mimicry (10). A mimetic preenactment, one which is aimed and
targeted at the production of a new material outcome. Poetry was simply another
tool used in daily life and work.
Thomson defends this definition against the claim that the production
of the desired effect is illusory by citing its very illusion. By using the example of
peasant girls planting potatoes he demonstrates that the immediate effect of their
accompanying song and dance is indeed illusory, but a productive illusion which
is
not futile. The dance cannot have any direct effect on the potatoes,
but it can and does have an appreciable effect on the girls. Inspired
by the dance in the belief that it will save the crop, they will proceed
to the task of tending it with greater confidence and so with greater
energy than before. And so it does have an effect on the crop after
all. It changes their subjective attitude to reality, and so indirectly
it changes reality. (13)
The song’s effect manifests itself in a triangular fashion: by inspiring the girls and
assuring them that their crop will grow well through their labor, they motivate
themselves to work harder and more diligently in tending to their crop. So while
the song does not directly make the potatoes grow, it aids the girls in their work so
as to care better for their potatoes and therefore has an material effect on reality
in an indirect manner. Of course, the use of inspiration is questionable. How can
one necessarily measure the effectiveness of such an ephemeral quality or state?
Perhaps somewhere in the song and dance is the performance of a collective
subjectivity, in the transference among individual desire to that of the common
desire of a pluralized subject.
Thomson later clarifies that an artist who we call inspired is simply one
who “is more at home than other men in this subconscious world of fantasy.”
The psychical dissociation and inward-turning of the artist in their production
allows them to reflect on the relationships and contradictions between aspects of
waking reality. The role of the poet is to function as a social organ who channels
societal contradictions and provides a “relief ” in synthesizing a material and
emotional response. The poem is, then, a virtualized sublation (Aufhebung) of the
contradictions at hand.
The discords of reality are resolved in fantasy. But, since this world
into which he retires is less individualized than his conscious
life, since it is common to him and his fellow men, the poetry in
which he formulates his experience of it evokes a general response,
striking a chord in every heart, expressing what his fellows feel
but cannot express for themselves, and so drawing them all into a
closer communion of imaginative sympathy (26).
What is fascinating here is Thomson’s claim regarding the “world into which he
retires,” that of the individual subconscious, being “less individualized than his
conscious life, since it is common to him and his fellow men…” This is maybe a
Freudo-Marcusian claim: that the individual naturally tends toward collectivity,
but that this is crushed under the prevailing social relations and can only be
intuited and hinted at in art.
Thomson’s thinking and even language here draws on Christopher
Caudwell’s Illusion and Reality: A Study of the Sources of Poetry, where Caudwell
first articulated that the “retreat into fantasy” is not what might be regarded as
an escapist illusion, but an effectual inward-turning which in turn lets the artist
produce a material and ideological product. He describes this inward relapse as
a necessary movement in the process of emotional organization. The poet “plays
on the inner world of emotion as on a stringed instrument” and his art is able to
penetrate a
common inner reality, because it is achieved by men in association
 and has a complexity beyond the task of one man to achieve, also
exposes the hearts of his fellow men and raises the whole communal
feeling of society to a new plane of complexity. It makes possible
new levels of conscious sympathy, understanding and affection
between men, matching the new levels of material organisation
achieved by economic production (Illusion & Reality 171-171).
Caudwell clarifies for us that the work of art plays a role in reintegrating the
psyche to newer relations of production. Though “reintegrating” is the wrong
word here, and I mean something more like the sublation of social relations along
the dialectic as the subject moves towards a greater understanding of themselves
in relation to their own labor and the labor of others. Caudwell appears to have
a more post-industrial understanding of the work of poetry, which will be
helpful to us when we approach the work of Sean Bonney and Ben Lerner; but
for now, Thomson’s studies on Na Blascaodaí provide us with a pre-industrial
understanding which will allow us a deeper knowledge of the larger historical
movement of art in relation to work.
Towards the end of Thomson’s book he approaches a more overtly
Marcusian articulation and understanding of the practice of art in such social
constellation, stating that poetry is able to assert
the refusal of the human consciousness to acquiesce in its
environment, and by this means there is collected a hidden store
of energy which flows back into the real world and transforms
fantasy into fact. (66)
All of our discussion thus far has involved the injunction of art into economic
production, what Marcuse called the “ingression of the superstructure into
the base” (Aesthetic Dimension 32-33). The release achieved in song seeps back
into the production of reality, asserting its influence in the triangular fashion
demonstrated above. This cuts against the grain of a typical understanding of
the production of culture as he outlines at the start of his book: “with the change
in production relations, art itself is transformed as part of the superstructure”
(1; Lu Xun Selected Vol. II 445). Much of the argument presented here hangs
on this thesis, that just as economic reality influences the production of art, the
production of art can influence economic reality. At least that was seen in the
poetic dances of the Irish peasant girls and what I have been moving toward
through the poetics of Rimbaud and Fisher.
The problem is in bridging the gap between individuals’ unique
experience. Thomson and Caudwell believe that a work of art can alone penetrate
the thinking of those who experience the base in similar relation, that this
incision leaves a scar of radical departure from business as usual. Obviously,
poetry of the social arrangement which Thomson studied is far from the current
relations of production for contemporary poetry, this will receive due attention
when we turn to our contemporary exemplars.
A sensorial shift at the level of one person — the shamanic inward
turning and subsequent mimetic production — can potentially have an
emancipatory effect on a collective. This is to be understood as the theory latent
within acid communism, part of the long, gigantic, and (ir)rational displacement
of capitalist realism. Ross and Jameson describe this virtual sensorial shift and
the political emancipatory possibilities it opens up as a movement from the
superstructure to the base, with the understanding that the base has its own
influences in the production of that very superstructure. Jameson’s term for the
inward-turning of Thomson and Caudwell comes directly from Rimbaud: his
fermentation (Modernist Papers 246).
Kristin Ross marks the new thinking made possible through such a process. The
virtual yet liberated subject in the poem is able to engage in
a perceptive system distinct from terrestrial perception, a more-
than-human “language” different from the language of earth. The
boat frees itself from the yoke of commerce, and the child also
renounces links to the earth … as if it is only through the most
 extreme solitude that one can arrive at a new solidarity among
humans, a kind of floating population, apt to transform the
circumstances of their lives but only on the condition that they
first sever the cords that tie them to the earth. (Ross 119)
The poet, as described above, necessarily removes to an inward-solitude within
which the creation of new solidarities becomes possible. There is always a silence
before the work, a silence where the work begins.
3 // The Work of Art in the Age of Reflexive Impotence
As has been previously established, Rimbaud’s “reasoned disordering of all the
senses” and the “ordered disorganization” of capital are dynamically opposed in
the same way Fisher establishes his dichotomy. Rimbaud seeks the “closure of
the fields of socially available perception” which produce capitalism’s entropic
order. The neoliberal subject propagated by late capitalist development performs
a violence to the individual, and Rimbaud aims to work against the erosion of
individuality. He calls for a “hypersensorial, more-than-human perception.
Grotesque. hyperbolic, extraordinary, superhuman perception … advocated in
opposition to what capitalist development is at that moment defining (in the sense
of setting the limits) as human, as ordinary perception.” (Ross 102)
This recalls the same question of 100 gecs: does 100 gecs’s extremely
organized chaos — the emulation and simulation of capitalism’s violence to the
contemporary psyche — does this reproduce the structures of its violence in a
nihilist or emancipatory fashion?
To discuss this further, I will again invoke a concept from Capitalist
Realism, namely, “reflexive impotence.” Fisher defines reflexive impotence as not a
worldview of apathy or cynicism, but something altogether different. An unstated
principle which dominates contemporary thinking, even as it is unstated. The
hollowing out of the socialist horizon, which occurred before the lives of most
of the British youth he worked with, has had devastating consequences on the
social and psychological realities of his students. This is where he coins the term
depressive hedonia, the other side of depressive anhedonia; where the typical
depressive can no longer seek pleasure, the contemporary subject can engage in
nothing but the pursuit of pleasure (Capitalist Realism 21-22).
Fisher’s configuration of protest is helpful in the construction of reflexive
impotence, specifically through his Freudian/Lacanian analysis.
The protest impulse of the 60s posited a malevolent Father, the
harbinger of a reality principle that (supposedly) cruelly and
 arbitrarily denies the ‘right’ to total enjoyment. This Father has
unlimited access to resources, but he selfishly — and senselessly —
hoards them. [It] is not capitalism but protest itself which depends
upon this figuration of the Father; and one of the successes of the
current global elite has been their avoidance of identification with
the figure of the hoarding Father, even though the ‘reality’ they
impose on the young is substantially harsher than the conditions
they protested against in the 60s. (20)
Protests organized in reaction to this Father will always fail. There are no
demands. The Father does not exist. With the inability to posit an alternative the
movement floundered and sunk into the grips of capitalist realism. This same
problem of protest has been seen time and time again, failed gestures toward
revolution quickly become pleas for reform, or worse, coopted by the state into
reified demonstrations, empty gestures of sentiment. From Occupy to the mass
uprising following the murder of George Floyd; it is not something wrong with
the impulse to protest but rather the logic of the protest form as such. I remember
the moment at a protest this summer I realized the crowd wasn’t leading the cops
but the cops were herding us. It was the logic of the kettle we were already inside,
physically articulated by lines of cops, cordons of bikes: the neurological blockade
at the end of the official world.
A protest never moves outside the walls of reflexive impotence, outside
the borders of capitalist realism, while it is still a protest.
4 // The Horizon is a Kettle

Bonney knows this, in his Letters Against the Firmament, where he begins to
sketch the valences of a new prosody and poetics, he warns that “you are right to
worry I’m making a fetish of the riot form” (8). Bonney develops his synthesis of
Marx and Rimbaud over a number of these letters, but truly its development can
be traced across the whole of his poetic work. We will use his Letters as a reference
point for his poetics as we follow this thread.
To begin, his first collection of texts, published as Blade Pitch Control
Unit, charts his development from 2000 to 2005. Filth Screed, a text situated at the
heart of this book, holds the first overt articulation of his poetics we will discuss.
All poetry that does not testify to an awareness of the radical falsity
of the established forms (of life) is faulty. Understand prosody via
black bloc tactics. No-one has yet spoken a language which is not
the language of those who establish, enforce, and benefit from the
facts. Language is conservative. Its conservatism issues (a) from its
utilitarian purpose, (b) from the fact that the memory of a person,
like that of humankind, is short. (Bonney 87)
Contemporary prosody moves, as it always has, with the flow of official traffic. The
Black Bloc seeks to build collective solidarity through mass anonymity. A message
printed on the inside of 9000 masks distributed at the June 18th, 1999 Carnival
Against Capital, which destroyed the financial district of central London, reads:
Those in authority fear the mask for their power partly resides in
identifying, stamping and cataloguing: in knowing who you are...
our masks are not to conceal our identity but to reveal it...Today
we shall give this resistance a face; for by putting on our masks we
reveal our unity; and by raising our voices in the street together, we
speak our anger at the facelessness of power…
The function of all-black uniforms and mask is symbolic and useful: to embody
a collective subject in form and to resist individual identification by state forces.
The Black Bloc has its roots in European anarchist organizing, specifically
in retaliation to police evictions of mass squats across the continent and the
cultures and communities facilitated here. Almost like clockwork, whenever a
squat was evicted or a member arrested or killed, storefronts were destroyed.
What is important about Black Bloc prosody and tactics is the recognition of its
temporary utility.
It is important that we neither cling to it nostalgically as an
outdated ritual or tradition, nor reject it wholesale because it
sometimes seems inappropriate. Rather we should continue
working pragmatically to fulfill our individual needs and desires
through various tactics and objectives, as they are appropriate at
the specific moment. (Young, “Autonomia”)
The Black Bloc was an answer to the problems posed by one moment, but this
does not mean it necessarily suits our needs or desires now. Bonney will carry
this further with regard to the function of the revolutionary poem as something
which can “name the task specific to [that] moment” and “exert force inasmuch
as we would have condensed and embodied the concrete analysis of the concrete
situation” (Letters 141). When Bonney says that “All poetry that does not testify
to an awareness of the radical falsity of the established forms (of life) is faulty.
Understand prosody via black bloc tactics” he pulling poetry in tandem with the
protest form (Blade Pitch 87). Following the tension in our dialectic of capitalist
realism and acid communism: the form of protest remains as such while it is
trapped within the walls of its form, nothing changes until it bursts and sublates
to a new layer of collective motion altogether: the riot.
Andrea Brady said of Bonney’s verse that it is literally dictated by the
rhythms of police violence, and she is absolutely right in this (Communism &
Poetry 132). Acid communism must always necessarily emerge from capitalist
realism, the formal reality principle within which it is constrained. 100 gecs takes
on the formal properties of capital’s psychic terror and whiplash, and it is from
this ecstatic movement where new possibilities begin to ferment. Their work is,
however, not the same as Bonney’s. Bonney takes on a certain embodiment in the
necessity of failure in his position, though it is a position from which he can stake
new claims regarding the virtual figuration of a way out. The music of 100 gecs,
while raising an awareness to the psychic violence of capital, does not propose
in their art a way forward. It is the form of capital reified in pleasure. The music
simulates our churning and churning in the stifling fire of late capitalism into
something which one can find enjoyable, catchy; bizarrely we are able to partake
in the logic of our own collapse with pleasure. As if there were any other option.
The logic of our very dissolution is where Bonney’s work begins. The first
books collected in Blade Pitch Control Unit demonstrate this. The subject of these
poems oscillates between their immediate environment and internal associations
with said stimuli. “Fast. Victoria to Warren St” shows Bonney’s verse in an early
stage of developing black bloc prosody.
got getta
back to my flat
gotta flat gotta key cos gotta flat gotta TV
gotta lovely gotta cat gotta flower got
got gotta come got gotta see
what mirror what left at the mirror …

(6). The refrain and declination of the verb “to have” acts as an organizing
gravitational logic here, possession of property as foundational to the constitution
of the subject; the Hegelian subject gone haywire in its lust to be differentiated
through having. The violence in the logic of ownership come to its ultimate
conclusion: the speaker is what owns, the speaker is built on owning. The sonic
refrain of voiced velar stops (“g”) against unvoiced alveolar stops (“t”) produces
a harsh and jutting grain, and this paired with verse composed of predominantly
monosyllabic words. “gotta flat gotta key cos gotta flat gotta TV,” gotta performs
a dual function here. As in contemporary English it means both “I need to do x”
or “I have x,” thereby it denotes simultaneously an imperative to perform some
sort of activity and the performance of ownership over an object. A gloss of this
line could equate to something like “I have a flat / need to get a flat / need to be
in the state of owning a flat so I have / need to get / need to use a key to enact the
ownership of my flat and therefore I have / need to get / need to watch TV.” I’ve
got this key because I’ve got this flat and since I have a flat I have a TV.
This is bourgeois life, the “interpassivity” that Fisher reminds us of:
capital never attempts to “make an explicit case for something in the way that
propaganda does, but to conceal the fact that the operations of capital do not
depend on any sort of subjectively assumed belief ” (Capitalist Realism 12-13).
Capitalist realism demonstrates the degree to which art can perform our radicality
for us even as it cancels out the radical aspect. “The autonomy of art reflects
the unfreedom of individuals in the unfree society. If people were free, then art
would be the form and expression of their freedom” (Aesthetic Dimension 72).
100 gecs’s ecstatic momentum in reality aligns with the frenetic bombardment
of advertising’s contemporary attention enconomy, and turns this very assault
into a mutated pleasure. As Adorno and Horkheimer put it, “All reification is a
forgetting,” and Marcuse continues this further,
Art fights reification by making the petrified world speak, sing,
perhaps dance. Forgetting past suffering and past joy alleviates
life under a repressive reality principle. In contrast, remembrance
spurs the drive for the conquest of suffering and the permanence
of joy. But the force of remembrance is frustrated: joy itself is
overshadowed by pain. Inexorably so? The horizon of history is still
open. If the remembrance of things past would become a motive
power in the struggle for changing the world, the struggle would
be waged for a revolution hitherto suppressed in the previous
historical revolutions (Aesthetic Dimension 73).
This is where Marcuse’s text ends, by calling for a cultural revolution that goes
further than merely the Leninist sense. Fredric Jameson expands on the notion
of a cultural revolution to include the transformation of individual and collective
subjectivities. The negative function, its critical function, is what demands a
socialist defense of art as a useful pursuit in revolution. The negative and critical
function “ranges from outright social content to the very practices of sense
perception itself … and the conduct of daily life” (American Utopia 35-36). Hence,
Rimbaud and Bonney.
Blade Pitch Control Unit exhibits Bonney’s first experiments in “rational
derangement.” Specifically here he is most interested here language “In the enemy
language it is necessary to lie. & seeing as language is probably the chief of the
social senses, we have to derange that” (Letters 141). His poem at the beginning of
Document in Blade Pitch Control Unit marks a formal shift in Bonney’s poetics
this is the ever same
as abject ghost buzz shatter
you in voice prism; adjust
you, says, countersign / fixion, says
star kick equal not you
twitch radio in burnt red,
your juncture voice implode. starling.

(143). An almost syllogistic logic energized by the push and pull of capital’s static
begins to take shape. Strings in frenetic parataxis: “abject ghost” announces a
specter whose “buzz” will “shatter / you in voice prism.” His black bloc prosody
oscillates between a strategy of high paratactic paranoia and a schizophrenic
seamstress who weaves a logic throughout the chaos. The violence of the
quotidian business as usual, “this is the ever same,” contrasted against “star kick
equal not you / twitch radio in burnt red,” the beginnings of Bonney’s Rimbaudian
derangement of the senses take on this quality of capitalism’s high entropic dis/
ordered anarchy and the ways in which it rattles contemporary subjectivity.
His understanding of black bloc prosody is negated from the outset. The
black bloc must always articulate itself in negation to the formation of capital’s
henchmen, and in this sense is always formed in reaction through attempting
this counterformation. In his Letters Against the Firmament he carries black bloc
prosody further.
I’ll give you a small thesis on the nature of rhythm — (1) They had
banged his head on the floor and they were giving him punches. (2)
He was already handcuffed and he was restrained when I saw him.
(3) He was shouting, ‘Help me, help me’. (4) He wasn’t coherent.
(5) I went to speak to his mum. (6) He couldn’t even stand up after
they hit him with the batons. (7) They knocked on her door three
hours later and told her ‘your son’s died’ …
Official poetry can only ever “transform into the endless whacks of police clubs.”
The police bullet is at the center of all officially sanctioned art, is its very content
(Letters 12). He goes further to claim that “There is no prosody, there is only a
scraped wound — we live inside it, like fosillized, vivisected mice … Our stab-
wounds were not self inflicted” (13). Because the violence of informing verse with
the form of state terror can only go so far before we realize we perform that same
violence ourselves unknowingly. Keston Sutherland in his lecture “Blocks: Form
Since the Crash,” delivered a theory of the transformations UK poetry underwent
as a result of the financial collapse of 2007-2008. Sutherland argues that so much
of left British poetry turned to prose as a result of the implementation of kettling
in and after 2008. As soon as the kettle was implemented globally by police in
reaction to widespread protests he saw a marked shift in the production of poetic
form. This form and its aesthetics of frenetic reading comes, like conceptualism,
straight from the formal logic of empire itself, only each is performed differently.
Conceptualism carries a colonialism wherein it reproduces empire in poetic form.
Heriberto Yépez puts this succinctly in his poem “[Post]Gulf War Poetics”
 American government
, oil

Conceptual poets
, text

How [to] appropriate

E+V+E+R+Y+T+H+I+N+G

(Transnational Battle Field 64). Here, conceptual poetics like that of Kenneth
Goldsmith are counterposed metonymically to the wars of terror fought for the
sake of extractive capital. When Goldsmith took the autopsy report of Michael
Brown, remixed it and performed it, he enacted the form of global extractivist
colonialism on an individual scale. The murdered body of a brown boy was
mere material, nothing but the day’s spoils (Steinhauer “Goldsmith Remixes”).
American empire deploys an army or a puppet dictatorship in the same fashion as
conceptual poetry’s surgical butchery: to stake a name on a market, to lock down
a natural resource, to suck the area dry. We will further examine the poetics of
capitalist extraction in a later chapter.
The paranoid bloc(k) of prose, Sutherland argues, is a product of the
claustrophobia caused by kettling. Thus, kettled verse cannot be “our” form as it is
us being articulated by police. Our rhythms and movements are dictated by police
violence, by their shoves and bullets; our poetry is always in response, our grunts
and shouts. (Brady, Communism & Poetry 132). This may be why Bonney’s “police
realism” can only take us so far: he knows his poetry is just as easily trapped
within capitalist realism.
After 2008, poetic production on the left responded to global financial
collapse by shrinking, screaming, some poets’ velocity of reading increased,
growing schizophrenic and paranoid. This style of reading feels particularly
marked by the violence of living under capital’s logic and attempting to articulate
against it. You can’t. If we read Bonney correctly, he understands that poetry
withers with the state, that the collapse and realization of all literatures happens
outside the poem, outside poetry. Which is why he and Rimbaud do not seek to
be poets in our traditional understanding of the word. Sutherland’s argument
that block poetry emerged after ‘08 as a result of clashes with police, the
implementation of kettling, protesters being suffocated, stuffed into smaller and
smaller spaces. The state seeps back into our poetics even as we rage against it.
The felt shift of noticing the flow of a protest is not led by the crowd, but herded
by the cops. It is the terrifying logic felt at the end of the world, the psychic border
patrol ensuring you will never leave. There is no escape hatch.
5 // Seiretic Dyschronia

When Marcuse tells us that “[t]he horizon of history is still open. If the
remembrance of things past would become a motive power in the struggle
for changing the world, the struggle would be waged for a revolution hitherto
suppressed in the previous historical revolutions” (Aesthetic Dimension 73). I
believe that this is at the center of Bonney’s poetry, it is what I approach in the
term seiretic. As above, I defined this neologism as derived from the Ancient
Greek word for “siren” Σειρήν (Seirḗn), the Old Norse shamanic practice of seiðr,
and the anglophone equivalent itself being seer, which carries with it qualities
of the Rimbaudian project. The matter of his poetry summons the specters of
past futures, conjures the amputated limbs of the futures lost, cancelled from
contemporary imagination. Bonney’s verse engages in an attempt to constellate
antichronological solidarities: folding moments of fissure out into larger strings
of possibility that scar the official body. In his second epistolary poem to Katerina
Gogou in Our Death, Bonney makes mention of
a mournful sound of deep peril [in] the center of your language,
[which] in a way gives back to the word “siren” the meaning that
police use had tried to take from it. I mean, they probably don’t
even know what the sirens were, that their songs were said to
contain knowledge of everything, all possible pasts and futures.
(117)
He is referencing the strict censorship laws in Greece (the Idiomynon) which
forced Katerina’s expletive verse toward the ecstatic shriek of law which covers
them. A high frequency bleating under the orchestral jazz, spreading as if from
the center of her voice; the law as croaked from a blackbird’s syrinx. A crucial
feature of this censor is its formal self-imposition. The music plays under it, so it
is layered within the original tracks and not run over the instruments: only over
insurrectional expletive speech. Take the track “Monaxia,” for example, around
2:50. Katerina reads (sings, shrieks) as if she never stops reading, the lyrics roll
out of the censor-blare and onward, as if it never happened or as though the sirens
were produced by Katerina, herself a siren. It is the perfect apparition: the sound
appears and melts into air. The siren — both mythical allure and legal repellant —
is a specter that haunts the legal imagination.
What is important about the specter is that it can never “be fully present:
it has no being in itself but marks a relation to what is no longer or not yet,”
(Hägglund qtd. in Fisher, Ghosts 18). The ur-specter being the primal haunt: Ein
Gespenst geht um in Europa — the specter of communism (Marx & Engels 158).
Jacques Derrida hears this as “the rumbling sound of ghosts chained to ghosts,”
potentials aching to break loose (Specters of Marx 3). He describes the specter as
what “looks at us and sees us not see it even when it is there. A spectral assymetry
interrupts here all specularity. It de-synchronizes, it recalls us to anachrony” (6).
It begins by coming back and we are urged to follow it, to repeat the motion of a
ghost. It leaves footprints, impressions on us, even as it is air. Pushes us in certain
directions even as it is a negative entity, a merely possible object. The specter is
that which haunts you into other futures, it acts itself into existence from outside
what is.
The siren is a living specter; that “mournful sound of deep peril” is the
sound of air-raid sirens and waves of police static injected into Katerina’s music;
is Katerina and Sean’s purposeful re-optation of this co-opted aesthetic. Speaking
against capital in its own grotesque, inaudible language which it itself fails to
understand. The siren carries a cancelled school of poetic knowledge that opposes
the musaic tradition; one grounded in material prophetics and voyant poetics.
Bonney uses seiretic verse to transcend the imperial calendar, to go beyond the
vocative “O” of the muses and their empty vowels of memory. The sirens sing in
all tenses, will strip you of memory to give you a perfect analysis of your present.
They are Marx’s diagnosis of a revolutionary poetry which goes beyond its past
to arrive at an analysis and understanding of its own moment (Brumaire 18).
Revenants to haunt you into alterity.
 Bonney employes a non-euclidean geometry of spatiotemporal history in
his poetry. Official maps fold in on themselves, counter-calendars act as negation
of the bourgeois organization of time; the work day, the seasons of the market, the
myth of discontinuous historical rupture. The moments in which history seizes
itself in riot form a long, simultaneous tradition of opposition in open air. Years
stand beside each other. Imperial cartography is folded. Omonia Square opens
onto Kreuzberg canals, Tottenham’s fires melt into the fires of heaven as seen on
burning barricades. At once every rupture in Minneapolis and Santiago is linked
to the possibility of a world which haunts the contemporary imaginary.
All of these temporal bursts occupy time both within and outside the flow
of capital, forming pocket dimensions whose music seeps in as sung from the
parallel mouth of future in alterity. Fissures in the texture of historical time take
shape in a larger system of chronological solidarities (Benjamin, Illuminations
205-206). We are haunted by the passing of these moments, that they are so
constellated, that they are not resolved into a singular coherent future. Mark
Fisher’s use of hauntology after Derrida insists on “things which never happened
but which could have,” emphasizing the futures we were once promised which
have been perpetually deferred into some distant Future. “The failure of the
future haunts capitalism: after 1989, capitalism’s victory has not consisted in it
confidently claiming the future, but in denying that the future is possible” (K-punk
941).
One of Bonney’s most chronologically active books is The Commons,
where he experiments with a lyric that is shot through with both capitalist realism
and acid communism. The speaker/specter is everywhen at once. Pulled from the
17th century to the early aughts in an almost elliptical whorl around some cosmic
clock.
For some reason, it was 1649,
we were trapped inside it, clutching
our most reasonable point of view.
 I can’t say more / vast territories
of our singing selves, decommissioned.
Maybe it was 2003, or something,
I don’t remember, my favorite laws
were just a system of false brains
I recognise that / splintered & oblique
social utterance flaming malevolence
magnetic, wound soon go dancing etc

(68). This subject gravitates toward both extremes as though on a carnival ride.
They are an obedient organ one moment “my favorite laws” and the enjambment
splits them in two “my favorite laws / were just a system of false brains,” and it is
the knife of enjambment which constantly enacts this splicing and splitting. One
moment the subject is a liberated string, “social utterance flaming malevolence”
and the next moment “magnetic, would soon go dancing etc,” as though that
comma were all of capital’s eventual boredom, the psychic drop of clocking back
in to business as usual.
The Commons is concerned primarily with the psychic constraints of
being trapped inside one year — 1649, 2003, 1868. The bourgeois mind would
sooner gnaw off a leg than think outside its cozy exterior. Bonney’s construction
of antichronological solidarities must be thought of in terms of the transformation
of social space that Paris underwent in the spring of 1871:

“Street fighting does not take place on the street but in the houses,
not in the open but undercover.” [It] depends on mobility or
permanent displacement. It depends on changing houses into
passageways — reversing or suspending the division between
public and private space… the interior becomes a street. (Ross 38)
The Communards’ suspension of vertical space and its immediate horizontal
redistribution — walls between houses demolished to make footpaths for soldiers
— is analagous to Bonney’s virtual reconfigurations of spatiotemporal history. The
walls between years are torn down to allow for a free flow of revolutionary time.
The theory at work in Bonney’s verse is that the bridging of revolutionary
time works further toward the destruction of bourgeois subjectivity. He follows
Rimbaud’s “long systematic derangement of the senses” as a literal re-ordering
(déranger), an “absolute redistribution of all the senses” (Rimbaud, Complete
Works 371; Happiness 39). To lay a foundation for new forms of perception and
potential consciousness outside capital’s psychic domain, allowing for different
futures to emerge as the result of this new confluence of the senses. The poem
not as magical thinking but “as analysis and clarity,” specifying where and when
to strike. A force around which to organize; a spark to start a prairie fire. The
only way to break out of the psychic realm of capital is through a psycho-physical
reorientation. Just as Marcuse said of Mallarmé’s poetry, that it “conjure[s] up
[new] modes of perception, imagination, gestures— a feast of sensuousness
which shatters everyday experience and anticipates a different reality principle”
(Aesthetic Dimension 19). This is Bonney’s project in the Rimbaudian vein, to use
linguistic derangement as a strategy to reorient ourselves within capital, to engage
in a morphing of the senses which can allow us to perceive what could lie beyond
the official horizon.
Thinkers like Marcuse, Jameson, and Fisher have long contested that art
which demonstrates an alternate reality principle within the dominant ideology
can indeed alter our notions of the thinkable. A reconfiguration of geography in
the limited, virtual space of the poem has larger implications regarding laying
the foundations of new global solidarities. This is what Bonney calls his “new
geography of delight,” one which has gone beyond the violent fictions of borders
and their bullets. His thoughts on antichronological time are described further in
his Letters, he says it’s
as if there were two parallel time tracks, or maybe not so much
as parallel as actually superimposed on each other. You’ve got
 one track, call it antagonistic time, revolutionary time, the time
of the dead, whatever, and its packed with unfinished events: the
Paris Commune, Orgreave, the Mau Mau Rebellion. There are
any number of examples, counter-earths, clusters of ideas and
energies and metaphors that refuse to die, but are alive precisely
nowhere. And then there is standard time, normative time, a chain
of completed triumphs, a net of monuments, dead labor, capital.
The TV schedules, basically. (116)
To map these moments onto a calendar would deploy four dimensional space on a
three dimensional model. I have tried to conceptualize this calendar, and the best
I can approach is something like a cube or a sphere wherein revolutionary bursts
in time are plotted (somehow the space within shape has a logic to designate
how and where time flows, where one quadrant of time, say the 1600s, ends and
the next one begins). One line weaves these events together, the line of official,
linear chronology. But each rift in the fabric of normative time births a specter,
a ghost which haunts the possibility of the future it conceived even as it closed.
This is perhaps akin to what Heriberto Yépez terms Osiric time, where dispersed
parts would reunite after a yawning gap of “waiting,” (Empire 95) Only this
negative space is an impossible void, a facism which can only begin to close when
the ghosts born by each rupture continue their respective times onward. When
Marcuse tells us that “[t]he horizon of history is still open. If the remembrance of
things past would become a motive power in the struggle for changing the world,
the struggle would be waged for a revolution hitherto suppressed in the previous
historical revolutions,” it is an emphasis on the hauntological (Aesthetic Dimension
73) With an urge to perform a “counter-exorcism of a world which could be free”
— we seek to set the specters of once-futures loose to finish what they started.
6 // The Withering Away of Poetry

Jameson in An American Utopia notes that the kind of literature which would be
consumed and produced in a utopian society occupies a lapse in utopian thinking
(64). Despite this, through a Marxist-Lacanian analysis, Jameson predicts that
the literature of a post-revolutionary society would predominantly feature
negotiations between characters regarding individual desires. The high-school
movie is an example of this literature: a genre which highlights the “necessarily
antagonistic nature of individual life and experience in a classless or communist
society.” Classless here meaning that as collective contradictions are resolved
and eliminated, individual antagonisms rise to prominence (63 & 68). Probably
the closest example we have of contemporary poetry which can be imagined as
a product of a utopic moment would be Bernadette Mayer’s Utopia, though as
much as this book demonstrates a peaceful reality principle under a communism,
it is still articulated against capital from within capital, and this is felt in its form
and content; the social reality of its production is from within capitalism. Take “A
Fish That Looks Like a Bishop: Debate of the Utopians,” this poem, like others of
Mayer’s, most closely comes to Jameson’s Lacanian analysis: that utopian literature
will feature a variety of “types” and the mediation of personal disagreements and
conflict (American Utopia 63). Perhaps daily life will feel a bit like a Henry James
novel. Nevertheless, Mayer’s poem introduces a cast of characters from literary
and philosophical history, ranging from Plato to Gertrude Stein, who simply enter
into the conversation like they were already engaged in it. Each one begins their
respective “dialogue” anew, as if no former conversation took place. The poem is
formatted like a play, and Grace and Bernadette are the two characters who pose a
sort of refrain and order in their commentary on the “conversation.”
Grace pauses: “I’ve tried to tell you something about the future, it
was amazing the way love tore down my smashed in the neck thoughts
not ready for new things and love even came out of the stove as if it had
become, having been turned off because love’s pea soup was supposed to
 be on, only a turkey carcass soup according to a cruel mother who doesnt
give you every thought dressed completely new since ideal perfection and
everything, even ideal blue is nothing,
this is our world.”
Bernadette: Let’s call Peggy, let’s go back into the future together.
Grace: You idiot! It’s not the right time.
(doorbell rings, it’s Thomas More)

(Mayer 95). This is only a taste of the pleasure principle a conceptual utopia could
operate under. To underwrite this in a Marcusian sense: Eros has triumphed
over Thanatos. Love tore down my smashed in the neck thoughts not ready for new
things. A more frenetic example of this seemingly bizarre pleasure principle would
be
Hawthorne: With the luck I’m having, this next visitor might turn out to be a
man.
Fuller: Another point in the agreement: we each decided to bring a beard to this
meeting. Do you have yours?
Nightingale: Mine is divine, its line is below the knees. What does your husband
do?
Fuller: You know him, he farts. A politician.
(enter Sappho)
Sappho: Darling you’re right on the button, but where did you learn to talk so
beautifully baby?
(enter H.G. Wells)
Wells: Ahem, we were just upon the point of coming upon our first true utopian
man but of course compulsion destroys freedom altogether.
William Carlos Williams: Shut up this idiot altogether!

(98-99). This is what Mark Fisher in the introduction to the unfinished Acid
Communism said of how there could be “no limit to how long conversations can
last, and no telling where encounters might lead…you can transform yourself
according to your desires, according to desires which you didn’t know you had”
(K-punk 1140). This is perhaps the other pole to Bonney’s linguistic derangement:
a reorganization of the social senses (language prime among them) and therefore
the boundaries of conversation, its potential for boundlessness. In one direction
verse is pulled into the compression of neoliberal austerity, and in another it
loosens and expands, atoms appear as if from other universes and disappear just
as quickly.
It would be a hasty and not entirely false claim to say that no art produced
under capitalism is capable of imagining social relations which have yet to come
into existence. Any analysis will be pure conjecture, as there is no alternative but
to see what happens. As we see in Bonney and Mayer, they enact the necessary
function of literature under capital to lay a groundwork in the superstructure
without which we would never be able to imagine any alternatives in the base.
Bonney’s formulation of “the collapse and realization of all literatures,” is not
a defeatism. Naturally, it conveys the notion of the impotency of poetry as an
art toward any actual revolutionary change, which we have already discounted
in our discussion of the crucial role art plays in the shifting psychic reality of
the neoliberal subject. Rather, his claim is that poetry is powerless so long as it
remains poetry.
We have already examined Bonney’s formulation of black bloc prosody,
and we will now look further towards his communist poetics as he outlines
them across his lettters. “We’ve never seized control of a city. But … we can still
understand poetic thought in the way I, and I hope you, work at it, as something
that moves counter-clockwise to bourgeois anti-communication … We can
engage with ideas that have been erased from the official account” (Letters 141).
This is the same formula presented by Marcuse The Aesthetic Dimension and
Fisher in Acid Communism: the goal is to return to the specters of revolutions
past and let loose those ghosts into the contemporary imagination. We have been
assigned the task to finish the moments that they started, to make the conditions
possible for their happening and continuation. Bonney wants to write a poem
which
(1) could identify the precise moment in the present conjuncture,
(2) name the task specific to that moment, ie a poem that would
enable us to name that decisive moment and (3) exert force
inasmuch as we would have condensed and embodied the concrete
analysis of the concrete situation. (Letters 141)
This is moreso an attempt to outline an explicitly Marxist poetics, a militant
poetics as outlined by Bonney. A poem is no longer a poem. It is a plan of attack.
7 // Illyric Elegies

Ben Lerner’s “Didactic Elegy” is more of a syllogism than a poem, a

logical inquiry into the function of art under capitalism. In order to give a sense
of his findings I need to take you through the flow of the poem. It begins with a
potential artist, perhaps the specter of art itself, here dubbed Intention, drawing
“a bold black line across an otherwise white field.” A critic approaches the once-
negative canvas and, upon inspection, his eye “establishes gradations of darkness
/ where there are none” and thus imposes narrative time onto the canvas. The eye
“constitutes any disturbance in the field as an object,” which is its grammatical
function: to distinguish between objects, to posit depth, to assign value where
there is none. It is nearly impossible for the eye to perceive difference without
assigning value. Lerner enacts a refrain across this poem. He will posit a few
stanzas of a thesis and then, posing a question, will refute it and turn toward a
new position.
Even if the artist is a known quantity, interpretation is an open struggle.
An artwork aware of this struggle is charged with negativity.
And yet naming negativity destroys it.
Can this process be made the subject of a poem?

No,
but it can be made the object of a poem.
Just as the violation of the line amplifies the whiteness of the field,
so a poem can seek out a figure of its own impossibility.
But when the meaning of such a figure becomes fixed, it is a mere positivity.

(No Art 123)

Naming the negativity of the primed canvas asserts it positively. But a work of
art in constant interrogation of its own struggle toward meaning can take on
a negative function. The second thesis of “Didactic Elegy” reads that “Events
extraneous to the work, however, can unfix the meaning of its figures, thereby
recharging it negatively.” The rupture of 9/11 enters the field here. “For example,
/ if airplanes crash into towers and those towers collapse / there is an ensuing
reassignation of value.” He says that art which survives these moments of radical
revaluation can be called masterpieces. The anxiety induced by artwork in the age
of 9/11 produces a fear of irrelevance. Which the critic experiences as “a loss of
capital,”
To the critic, the black line has become simply a black line.
What was once a gesture of negativity, has lost its capacity to refer
to the difficulties inherent in reference.
Can this process be made the subject of a poem?

No,
but a poem may prefigure its own irrelevance,
thereby staying relevant
despite the transpiration of extraneous events.

The only perfect memorial to the events of 9/11 is a work composed synchronous
to the collapse. A score which is its own collapse. William Basinski’s The
Disintegration Loops, a collection of old tapes he had dug up and was in the
process of restoring, coincided with the towers collapsing across the water from
his roof. The magnetic tape deteriorated each time it passed under the tape head,
and he allowed the music to continually disintegrate as more and more space was
filled with gaps and crackle.
Lerner’s fourth thesis deals with the difficulty in distinguishing between
event of the towers’ collapse and the image of the towers’ collapse,
The image of the towers collapsing is a work of art
and, like all works of art, may be rejected
for soiling that which it ostensibly depicts. As a general rule,
 if a representation of the towers collapsing
may be repeated, it is unrealistic. (126)

Again, Basinski’s tapes cannot be repeated. Each time he fed them to the
cassette player they fell apart further. It is only through the transference of this
disintegration, itself being captured digitally, that we can repeatedly experience
the collapse of structure.
Formalism is the belief that the eye does violence to the object it
apprehends.
All formalisms are therefore sad.
A negative formalism acknowledges the violence intrinsic to its method.
Formalism is therefore a practice, not an essence …

Negative formalisms catalyze a certain experience of structure.

The experience of structure is sad,
but, by revealing the contingency of content,
it authorizes hope.

This is the role of the artwork—to authorize hope,

but the very condition of possibility for this hope is the impossibility of its
fulfillment.
The value of hope is that it has no use value.
Hope is the saddest of formalisms. (127)

The uselessness of art is precisely where its use lies: in its refusal, its very
irrelevance which is a loss of capital. Lerner then goes on to describe the negative
lyric, stating first that the distance between the lyric I and the lyric poem is like
the relation between star and starlight. “The poem and the I are never identical
and their distance may be measured in time. / Some lyric poems become visible
long after their origins have ceased to exist.” Rimbaud knew this. He posited the
I itself as an unknowable Other, at least An-Other, meaning one separate from
myself, from my conception of myself (Rimbaud 371; Lerner 128).

The heavens are anachronistic. Similarly, the lyric

lags behind the subjectivity it aspires to express. Expressing this disconnect
is the task of the negative lyric,
which does not exist.

If and when the negative lyric exists, it will be repetitious.

It will be designed to collapse in advance, producing an image
that transmits the impossibility of transmission. This familiar gesture,
like a bold black stroke against a white field,
will emphasize flatness, which is a failure of emphasis.

The critic repeats herself for emphasis.

But, since repetition emphasizes only the failure of sense,
this is a contradiction.
When contradictions are intended they grow lyrical
and the absence of the I is felt as a presence. (128)

The task of the negative lyric is to reach towards a new subjectivity. This Un-lyric,
A-lyric, Illyric subject is tasked with the composition of contradictions, and in the
formal arrangement of contradictions the illyric must intend as little as possible.
It must draw a “bold, black line across an otherwise white field” and we must
keep discussion of its meaning to a minimum. In closing the event of the art from
interpretation, we keep it from becoming a masterpiece.
The key is to intend as little as possible in the act of memorialization.
By intending as little as possible we refuse to assign value where there is
none.
 Violence is not yet modern; it fails to acknowledge the limitations of its
medium.
When violence is aware of its mediacy and loses its object
it will begin to resemble love.
Love is negative because it dissolves
all particulars into an experience of form.
Refusing to assign meaning to an event is to interpret it lovingly. (129)

The Disintegration Loops is the perfect memorial to 9/11 in that its elegy was
unintended. In his unintention Basinski did not assign value to the event of the
music or its supposed object, he couldn’t have. An object in the distance fell as the
tapes came apart. History unfolded as the songs did, and whatever value the critic
sees in it is coincidental.
In positing a narrative from without, the work is immediately negated
from having a content of its own. It is all outside. Extraneous events seep into
the form and the music boils down, boils over as it “collapse[s] in advance,
producing an image / that transmits the impossibility of transmission” (128).
The notion of being designed to die is important here. From the manufactured
scarcity of late capital to early expiration dates: commodities come packaged with
their own lapse into uselessness. So too the work of art, according to Lerner, is
tasked with a kind of uncreation. “All poetry that does not testify to an awareness
of the radical falsity of the established forms (of life) is faulty” (Bonney, Blade
Pitch 87). The negative lyric is designed to collapse in advance, to fall apart as it
plays. The lyric always lags behind the subjectivity it desires to express, such was
Rimbaud’s voyant dilemma and Bonney’s frenetic speaker of the Commons and his
deployment of Blanqui, which I will come to shortly (Lerner 128). “A statement
that at one point would have been punishable by death is now the only thing
worth saying” (Bonney, Burning Earth 46). All of our words must whither as they
are born onto the air. You will notice the weather only when it starts to die.
8 // Against the Wall of Official Memory

Bonney, Lerner, and Yépez reach an understanding of capitalist

poetics through similar roads of thought: understanding the construction
and compression of space and time under empire. In Bonney’s essay on the
Communard Louis-Auguste Blanqui, he approaches a theory of revolutionary
time on a cosmic scale, and in doing so articulates capitalist poetics via negation
(and the other side of that coin could be a militant poesis). Blanqui’s thought
supposedly occupies a “counter-universe, an anti-gravity, a negative magnetism
that the thought of the bourgeoisie cannot enter, encompass, or occupy” (Burning
Earth 24). Contrast this with his position that “Revolution doesn’t become poetic,
poetry shatters itself in the process of becoming revolutionary” (28) Maoist
literary theorist Lu Xun understood this.
All literature is shaped by its surroundings and, though devotees of
art like to claim that literature can sway the course of world affairs,
the truth is that politics comes first, and art changes accordingly …
Events are seldom what men of letters expect. That is why the so-
called revolutionary writers before a great revolution are doomed.
Only when the revolution is beginning to achieve results, and men
have time to breathe freely again, will new revolutionary writers be
produced. (italics mine Xun, Selected Works Vol. III 52)
This was understood by writers like George Oppen and other revolutionaries of
his time: an “abstention from writing” is “a way of manifesting that writing in the
world” (Knowles 13). The poem becomes the world in our process of shaping it.
Interestingly Xun’s phrasing of “breathe freely again,” which we might want to
connect to Bifo in his book of the same verb. Bifo uses Deleuze and Guattari’s
language of chaosmosis to think through conspiration (breathing- together),
and how we conspire under the chaos of late capital. His claim is almost that of
an absurdist gazing into the abyss: that we must embrace chaos as an ally, that
poetry must “prepare our lungs to breathe at the rhythm of death” (Berardi 127
& 140). As it so happens, I have already dispensed with this claim early on: that
work which merely adapts the skin of capital’s logic cannot solely through the
occupancy of its form produce social change. In doing so, you are a Goldsmith, a
Clinton, an Obama. If breathing at the rhythm of our death is all Berardi can offer
us, he has gone no further than capitalist realism. We want an acid poeisis, not a
police bullet.
Lu Xun was invited to give a talk at the Huangpu Military Academy
in 1927, where he was surprised at the number of students, students who had
taken up arms in the revolutionary struggle, who wanted to hear him talk about
literature. In this talk he says that
For revolution we need revolutionaries, … revolutionary literature
can wait, for only when revolutionaries start writing can there be
revolutionary literature. [T]o my mind it is revolution which plays
a big part in literature. The literature of a revolutionary period is
different from that of ordinary times for, in a revolution, literature
changes too. (Xun, Selected Vol. II 445)
He understands the students’ appeal in believing the superstructure’s ingression
into the base being more immediately profound or impactful than it is, but Xun
claims the opposite is always true: that changes in the superstructure occur more
likely as a result of changes in the base, that an actual revolution is more likely to
impact the production of art than the reverse. Nonetheless, what is important here
is Xun’s equivalent formulation: that revolutionary poetics is only articulatable by
revolutionaries, not poets.
So far all of our characters have named themselves in opposition to the
term poet. Whether this makes them seers, sirens, illyic-I’s or what have you,
they all stand against the traditional term poet, against the tradition of poetry.
To return to Bonney’s seiretic deployment of Blanqui: the poetic imagination,
“as used by Surrealists like Césaire … is that which explodes the continuum of
history in the same way that Blanqui’s barricades smashed apart the smooth flow
of capital through the streets of Paris.” The Commune was a direct impediment to
the natural course of capital. Even though it occupies a blip in its official history:
it was a blockade against the logic of the official ledger. For Bonney, poetry can do
the same.
“In Blanqui’s system, the Communards do not die, but dissolve into a
metaphoric squall, a revolutionary poetics” (Bonney, Burning Earth 30). This
is identical to what I outlined earlier as the function of seiretic verse: to point
to all of the sirens and specters forced back into invisibility by capital, to make
them shriek their “[songs which] were said to contain knowledge of everything,
all possible pasts and futures. (Our Death 117). Aimé Césaire in “Poetry and
Knowledge” said just this,
It is not merely with his whole soul, it is with his entire being that
the poet approaches the poem. What presides over the poem is not
the most lucid intelligence, or the most acute sensibility, but an
entire experience: all the women loved, all the desires experienced,
all the dreams dreamed, all the images received or grasped, the
whole weight of the body, the whole weight of the mind. All
lived experience. All the possibility. Around the poem about to
be made, the precious vortex: the ego, the id, the world. And the
most extraordinary contacts: all the pasts, all the futures (the
anticyclone builds its plateaux, the amoeba loses its pseudopods,
vanished vegetations meet). All the flux, all the rays. The body is
no longer deaf or blind. Everything has a right to live. Everything
is summoned. Everything awaits. (Refusal 139)

The surrealist revolutionary performs this mass conjuring through their poetry
and art, what is said here to be essentially necromancy. Bonney always insists on
this, that “They will probably raise the dead. Like 19th Century Anarchists, they
will convert the divine universe into a shadowy system of bombs and barricades.”
As communard Louise Michel said as she stood trial for her life
‘I do not wish to defend myself . . . I want to erect a wall of flames.’
And their wild orbits, disappearing for millennia only to appear
again, they echo her great poem marking the murder of the
Commune: ‘We will return, an infinite mob / through all your
doors, we’ll return / vengeful spectres, out from the shadows / with
raised fists, we will return.’ (Bonney, Burning Earth 32; Michel 470)
Bonney then moves to say that “Poetry itself is a cell, only possibile as the
expression of a cosmic trap.” That cosmic trap is the logic of capitalist realism, its
sealed escape hatch. The anti-poet, as Octavio Paz claims, has “no other mission
than to transmute history … the only truly revolutionary poetry is apocalyptic
poetry” (33). When Blanqui says “you confiscated the guns but the bullets have
taken off,” he is marking that the trajectory of those bullets, what those bullets
aimed at, was the sinister logic of capital itself. Even without their guns, those
bullets are always flying toward that logic. We live forever in this recoil.
Heriberto Yépez in Empire of Neomemory approaches an understanding
of capitalist poetics by tracing its imperial origins in North America, specifically
in USAmerican literature across the Oxident; North American poetics, drawing
particularly from Whitman/Olson/Pound et al. and its will-to-accumulate.
Whitman’s joyous parataxis is the violence of bipartisanism. “I am the poet of
slaves and of the masters of slaves,” (Whitman 71 & Yépez 153) He
organized materials and jammed them together, following his own
pantheism, his poetics of enthusiastic paratactical erasure and re-
drawing, in order to achieve a poem that might be a geography
where incompatible cartographies could coincide, in a happy
meeting of distances and dis-instances.” (Yépez 155)
This is not the same as Bonney or Césaire’s counter-cartographies. Maps which
reveal the moments where alternate worlds were born and died. The goal of
empire’s parataxis is to compress time into discrete spaces, to spatialize our
understanding of time, to do away with time altogether. Whitman-Olson-Pound’s,
i.e. capitalist poetics, approach the poem as pantopia, a unit of space which
gathers names, data, places, events as it “destroys historical time and does away
with diachronics, the time that excludes one event from another, because in the
total place of the modern poem, everything occurs in a zone where time, as a line,
is no longer” (157). American imperial poetics is essentially surveillance capital.
It is Goldsmith accumulating raw material from the body of a murdered boy, it is
America’s wars on/of terror for the sake of oil.
Yépez traces North American extractive poetics across Mexico,
particularly in Yucatán, where poets time and time again — be they Olson,
Artaud, Ferlinghetti — have sought answers from the ancients. Only this impulse
is always colonial and colonizing in intent. Olson stole artifacts and glyphs from
Maya ruins as they had been bulldozed at the behest of the Mexican state. His
search for such holy (hiero)glyphs came with a deciphering intent, and the fear
that such cipher was impossible was a chance he could not risk (116). In order
to decipher the Maya, and, by extension, their culture and ideology Olson had to
construct a go-between,
an intermediary space, a mixed culture—that is, a culture in which
differences might be converted into synthesis … to imagine that
intermediary culture … makes it possible to resolve in fantasy the
contradictions unresolved in reality. The hybrid and the mythic are
one and the same. They are the false reconciliation of opposites.
(118)
This process can be likened to Thomson’s demonstration of poetry as magic, only
where it once functioned as a tool for labor’s emancipatory collectivity it now
serves as a weapon of empire. Yépez is always clear that there is no such thing as
synthesis, only dissection. Poets are the playthings of empire. All “empires have
imposed their dreams on them … The society to which they belong prohibits
them from moving radically outside the dominant ideology.” Poets are the
lightning rods of empire, struck by their form so often that they can do little but
replicate it in their verse (127). The poet of capitalist realism is one who thinks
there is no alternative, one who refuses to even search for one, one for whom this
notion does not occur.
Bonney uses Blanqui’s cosmology to signal the revolutionary break
emitting to all corners of history, all times. Yépez uses the Mayan god,
Quetzalcóatl, as an example of psychic alchemy. Though, and this he stresses, that
alchemy in and of itself is a metaphor for methodologies of metamorphoses in
states of mind.
Quetzalcóatl is a series of teachings about how people might
transcend their habitual condition. How people might elevate
themselves above rules. Quetzalcóatl is measure and excess.
Indigenous cultures came to the conclusion that it was necessary
to unite forces. The force-of-below, symbolized by the serpent, and
the force-of-above, symbolized by the quetzal bird … What we
have here, by the way, is a similar concept to that symbolized by
the Jewish star of David—the union of two triangles in different
orientations—which as a symbol is even related to the union of
the horizontal plane with the vertical, symbolized in the Christian
cross. Quetzalcóatl symbolizes the union of opposite forces as a
method of overcoming obstacles. (141)
Quetzalcóatl is a pre-model of Mao’s union of opposites, a dialectical divinity
which in itself acts as but one part in a larger unfolding. This is what is known
as kinh, the primary Mayan divinity. Only in order to understand “kinh”
conceptually we must remember that in these ancient cultures, “god” signified
“process.”
All the gods in the pre-Hispanic pantheon are the unfolding of a
single concept. Let us not forget that in the beginning there was
Ometéotl. The dual-lord. His two manifestations are Quetzalcóatl
 and Tezcatlipoca. Quetzalcóatl corresponds to the encounter of
the forces-of-above with the forces-of-below, from the perspective
of ascent. Of how the force-of above goes down and how the force-
of-below goes up. And Tezcatlipoca corresponds to descent in
general. (173)
Yépez, however, is careful to mark this theory as distinct from Maoist synthesis;
that Ometéotl is not the combination of Quetzalcóatl and Tezcatlipoc, but the
friction which results from their encounter. A cosmic fusion as a result of fission.
Fundamental undivided reality (Ometéotl) becomes duality
(Quetzalcóatl and Tezcatlipoca) and from the encounter of these
opposites-doubles it is not a synthesis that occurs but rather
“flaming water”—tremendous energetic process. Opposites have
collided and from that collision—not from their synthesis, but
from their living crash—emerges what we know as reality. The
world is the product of the struggle between two forces. All objects,
phenomena, ideas, sensations, all things, space, and time are made
by the struggle between the two elements that make up Ometéotl.
Ometéotl is not a dialectical synthesis of Quetzalcóatl and Tezcatlipoc, but the
resulting tension of opposites. The boiling lake at the beginning of the universe.
Yépez provides us now with an updated translation of god/process, “What the
Maya wanted to say with the term kinh was how the real is actualized,” (174-175).
Bonney, Yépez, and Lerner all trace in their respective studies this
identical problem: how is it possible for the superstructure to reckon with the
base? Can the base be altered by disruptions in the superstructure, etc? Lu
Xun, writing during Mao’s revolution, spoke of the unfolding of “revolutionary
literature” as a historical event which could only follow a successful revolution
and erupt as a result of it; “to my mind it is revolution which plays a big part
in literature. The literature of a revolutionary period is different from that of
ordinary times for, in a revolution, literature changes too” (Selected Vol. II
445). A revolution is nothing if it does not produce changes in the base and
superstructure alike. Both affect the other, only Xun believes material results in
the base will likely occur before this revolutionary literature appears. Revolution,
then, disrupts the form of literature, issues unalterable breaks in the art. For Xun,
revolutionaries take up writing as an ideological vehicle in service of a winning
struggle. The superstructure is marked by successful changes in the base. What,
then, happens to poets who become revolutionaries and suffer failed revolution?
If we believe that Blanqui’s bullets are always flying toward the logic
of capital, hung forever suspended in the spectral air, the goal is to make the
conditions that led to those bullets palpable once more. The Paris Commune,
Orgreave, the Mau Mau Rebellion are all blemishes on the official map, the
official clock; blemishes which reveal the armor plating of capitalist poetics to be
permeable, porous, subject to decay like everything else (Bonney, Letters 116).
Like Bonney’s speculative map, each of these junctures represents a time out of
joint. A moment in the firmament where celestial bodies could have moved this
way or that. The official universe
might originate in different points—co-big bangs—that then fuse
or fight to fundamentally alter the laws of the others, of their
respective existences. This could be a total war, with various
universes simultaneously or successively colliding, coaffecting
each other from a distance or as already intertwined bodies trying
to impose their laws as nothing more than interstellar guerillas
whose objective is to infiltrate, dominate, rebirth, or kill other
universes. (Yépez 252)
We don’t even need to map this in the stars to understand it as correct; we witness
the battle for domination between different universes in our everyday lives. The
walls erected for the sake of preserving capitalist realism are physical metaphors.
They are the sentences of judges, the bitter poetry of capital is written by the
border guard and beaureaucrat alike. Each revolutionary break is a big bang,
setting into motion counter-universes where it continued and was not forced back
into invisibility by capital.
How to reverse this logic. It is an entire civilization, inscribed in all the
moments of our lives. For Yépez, it is all wrapped inside the word Aletheia. Not-
forgetting. Empire demands us to never forget it. This is how it sustains itself,
vampire on the brain. “And yet, the Lethe, this river that leads to forgetting, calls
out to us again and again, because now more than ever forgetting is the only way
of continuing. When I imagine how to exit this generalized film-loop, the only
thing that I can see in my mind is a bonfire that burns itself out (242-243). Fisher’s
unforgetting is a necessary step in removing the shackles of fascist renarration,
to return to moments of physical and emotional rupture and analyse what it
was that made capital clamp down so hard. “Understanding how this process of
consciousness-deflation worked is the first step to reversing it” (K-punk 1152).
But after this step we must leap over the horizon. It has shown itself as permeable,
there are pinpricks of light in its shell we call the stars.
Yépez is asking us to approach lethal memory, memory that burns on
impact, that self-destructs as you open it, that falls apart in you run it through
the cassette player. Lerner said just this, the task of the negative lyric is “to
collapse in advance, producing an image / that transmits the impossibility of
transmission. This familiar gesture, / like a bold black stroke against a white field,
/ will emphasize flatness, which is a failure of emphasis” (128). Marx himself
said that revolutions fail because they are always drawing from the past, always
re-membering, trying to put those pieces together in exactly the same fashion as
before. This was his intent in saying
The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot take its
poetry from the past but only from the future. It cannot begin
with itself before it has stripped away all superstition about the
past. The former revolutions required recollections of past world
history in order to smother their own content. The revolution of
 the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead in order
to arrive at its own content. There the phrase went beyond the
content – here the content goes beyond the phrase. (Brumaire 18)
The use of serietic verse will only get us so far. Their song strips you of memory to
give you a perfect analysis of your present. This maxim for the nineteenth century
does not map exactly onto our present. Revolutionary poetry of the twenty-
first century cannot move beyond our dead because we live a perpetual dying
(neoliberal austerity, climate collapse, global pandemics). The call is for a poetry
of the dead burying their dead; turning from those graves to these borders and
the all-death they imply and enact. Writing as the shadows our bodies have lost as
we bleed against the horizon.
We require a lethal memory, a poetry of a seiretic continuous present.
Constantly mapping past specters onto the present and always forgetting where
we put them. Again this recalls Rimbaud, “Let him die as he leaps through
unheard of and unnamable things: other horrible workers will come; they will
begin from the horizons where the other one collapsed!” (Complete Works 377).
But as Yépez has correctly noted, revolutionary moments live in a film-loop,
whenever history approaches a moment of rupture, right as one is about to leap
over the horizon, or perhaps at the very moment of their disappearance, time is
reset. Crossing the event horizon means no information can ever return. It is the
complete loss of whatever has crossed that threshold. Anything that enters a black
hole can never return. The body of the universe rebels against permanence.
Science becomes an absurdity if it doesn’t heed that principles
discovered today will serve only for a certain, indeterminate,
perishing space-time because life is a life always inside another
death. All memory is temporal. All laws will perish. All history has
limits. All texture loses its plot. (249-251)
“A culture based in memory will always be conservative” (243). Memory,
according to Yépez, is a fascism. It is empire constantly burrowing itself into your
speech, into your days. This is identical to Bonney’s formulation regarding black
bloc prosody:
No-one has yet spoken a language which is not the language of
those who establish, enforce, and benefit from the facts. Language
is conservative. Its conservatism issues (a) from its utilitarian
purpose, (b) from the fact that the memory of a person, like that of
humankind, is short. (Bonney, Blade Pitch 87)
“The chaotic is the definitive proof of the existence of freedom,” the existence of
the Universe is absurd, but no matter its absurdity, we must assert it (Yépez 252).
It is in this very assertion we stake our own sovereignty. Were the universe an
absolute, total, all-encompassing bank of memories, it would be empire. Entropy
tells us otherwise. Decay is anti-cancerous. Aletheia, “truth” is unforgetting against
Fisher. It is all-memory, non-forgetting. A poetry of the present must forget.
Memory cannot be remade, revolutions which insist on the past show us this. “We
must remember that memory is a fantasy,” (Yépez 251) and, in doing so, come to
understand the present as all that is. Poetry which falls apart in our hands.
 Bibliography

Adorno, Theodor W, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, Georg Lukács,
and Fredric Jameson. Aesthetics and Politics. London: Verso, 2010. Print.

Basinski, William. The Disintegration Loops. 2062, 2002. Spotify, https://sptfy.

com/9v00.

Benjamin, Walter, Harry Zohn, and Hannah Arendt. Illuminations: Essays and
Reflections. Boston: Mariner Books, 2019. Print.

Bonney, Sean. All This Burning Earth: Selected Writings of Sean Bonney. Ill Will, 2016.

—————. Blade Pitch Control Unit. Cambridge, U.K: Salt, 2005.

————— and Esther Leslie. Baudelaire in English. London: Veer Books, 2011.

—————. The Commons. London: Openned Press, 2011.

—————. Letters against the Firmament. London: Enitharmon, 2015.

—————. Happiness: Poems After Rimbaud. Unkant, 2011.

—————. Our Death. Oakland: Commune Editions, 2019.

Brady, Dylan and Laura Les. “745 sticky.” 1000 gecs. Dog Show Records, 2019. Spotify,

https://sptfy.com/dH2o

——————————— and Various Artists. 1000 Gecs and the Tree of Clues. Dog Show

Records, 2020. Spotify, https://sptfy.com/dH2n

Caudwell, Christopher. Illusion and Reality. New York: International Publishers, 1970.

Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. Translated by Joan Pinkham. A Poetics of

Anticolonialism by Robin D.G. Kelley. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972.

——————. “Poetry and Knowledge” Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the
Carribean. Translated by Michael Richardson and Krzysztof Fijałkowski.
London: Verso, 1996. .

Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx. New York: Routledge, 1994. Print.

Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester, UK: Zero Books,
2010.

—————. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures.

Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2014.

—————, Darren C. Ambrose, and Simon Reynolds. K-punk: The Collected and
 Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004-2016). Repeater Books, 2018.

Gogou, Katerina and Kiriakos Sfetsas. Στο Δρόμο / Sto Dromo. Minos EMI, 1981. Spotify,

https://sptfy.com/dH6W

Jameson, Fredric. The Modernist Papers. London: Verso, 2007. Print.

—————, and Slavoj Žižek. An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army.

London: Verso, 2016.

Jennison, Ruth, and Julian Murphet. Communism and Poetry: Writing against Capital.
Palgrave Macmillian, 2019. Print.

Knowles, Dominick. “A Spectre in Every Street: George Oppen and the Poetics of
Communism,” Viewpoint Magazine. 2018.

Lerner, Ben. No Art. London: Granta, 2016.

Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. Boston:
Beacon Press, 1974.

———————. The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics. Boston:

Beacon Press, 2003.

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. Edited by Lawrence H. Simon. “The Communist
Manifesto.” Selected Writings. Hackett: Indianapolis, 1994. Print.

—————. The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. New York: International Publishers,
1963.
Michel, Louise. Mémoires de Louise Michel, écrits par elle-même. Paris: F. Roy Libraire
Éditure 1886

Rimbaud, Arthur, Wallace Fowlie, and Seth A. Whidden. Rimbaud: Complete Works,
Selected Letters. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Print.

————— “Le Bateau Ivre” Translated by Samuel Beckett in Collected Poems in

English and French. London: John Calder, 1977. 92-105. Print.

Ross, Kristin. The Emergence of Social Space. London: Verso, 2008. Print.

Steinhauer, Jillian. “Kenneth Goldsmith Remixes Michael Brown Autopsy Report as

Poetry.” Hyperallergic. 16 March 2015. https://hyperallergic.com/190954/
kenneth-goldsmith-remixes-michael-brown-autopsy-report-as-poetry/.
Accessed 28 December 2020.

Sutherland, Keston. “Blocks: Form Since the Crash.” History & Forms of Lyric. 19
 November 2015. Taft House, Chicago, IL. Lecture. https://youtu.be/6XCKfXsOn0Y

Thomson, George D. Marxism and Poetry. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975.

Whitman, Walt. Song of Myself: With a Complete Commentary. Edited by Ed Folsom and

Christopher Merrill. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2016.

Xun, Lu. Selected Works: Volume Two. Translated by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang. Beijing:

Foreign Language Press, 1957.

————. Selected Works: Volume Three. Translated by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang.
Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 1959.

Yépez, Heriberto, Jen Hofer, Christian Nagler, and Brian Whitener. The Empire of
Neomemory. Oakland: ChainLinks, 2013. Print.

———————. Transnational Battle Field. Oakland: Commune Editions, 2018. Print.

Young, Daniel Dylan. “Autonomia and the Origin of the Black Bloc” A-infos. June 10,
2001. http://www.ainfos.ca/01/jun/ainfos00170.html. Accessed November 28,
2020.
On the Shores of Zaum:
the Useless Uses of Non-sense
The Homophonic Kiss
Songs build little rooms in time
And housed within the song’s design
Is the ghost the host has left behind
To greet and sweep the guest inside
Stoke the fire and sing his lines
— David Berman, Snow Is Falling In Manhattan

A poet is a time mechanic not an embalmer

— Jack Spicer, After Lorca

To bridge my thinking on Bonney toward a discussion of translation, we will

turn our attention to Bonney’s “iterative translations” of Baudelaire, and in this
very turning we must come to a cursory understanding of the obscure history of
materialist translation. Homophonic translation is prime among these practices,
and in its contemporary usage can be traced to Celia and Louis Zukofsky’s
translations of Catullus. Their preface describes their method as one which
“follows the sound, rhythm, and syntax of his Latin — tries, as is said, to breath
the ‘literal’ meaning with him.” (C&LZ.243).
The homophonic is a record of collision; two or more tongues in aural
reach and imprint. Benjamin describes this linguistic extreme as a tangent where
echoes enmesh (Benjamin Illuminations 259). The homophonic is marked by
nonsense, it is illegible, obstructed from passive reading; it demands that we take
part. It seduces us, brings its lips close to ours, asks us to open. This sensualization
of the reading process fuses the “voco-visual to the tactile,” one enters the phonic
field of the poem upon speaking it aloud (Rasula & McCaffery 203). The senses
our provoked to movement, tongues ache to give text vibration.
There is a liberatory axis to this difficulty: sensuous reading occurs along
a Rimbaudian “rational derangement of the senses,” as discussed earlier, when
reading a text aloud “I feel the text as a vibration in my throat and hear it as
sounds in my ears…” The homophonic text functions like a wave of seduction,
“it gets me reading because I expect it to make sense, but soon I am just listening,
transformed into a mouth and an ear” (Rimbaud 377; Gurd 9). The typical reader
enters the field of a text expecting a passive absorption and participation of
consciousness, leisurely reading; but when entering a homophonic translation
this passive scanning is impeded by its resistance to immediate and recognizable
signification. “A tray a day, Pro say ape pay guy you pole lay gay coal low you”
(Melnick 59). Language in such monosyllabic Steinian onslaught of sense invites
the reader to take up speech; where any attentive reading is lulled into the trance
of alien, echolallic rhythms that evade active sense (Leslie 22). Here, words escape
immediate signification and so I must slow the process by chewing them.
My reach to Stein comes from poems like “Eating” out of Tender Buttons,
and what the book demands: vocalization.
Eat ting, eating a grand old man said roof and never never re
soluble burst, not a near ring not a bewildered neck, not really any
such bay.
It is so a noise to be is it a least remain to rest, is it a so old say to
be, is it a leading are been…
Eel us eel us with no no pea no pea cool, no pea cool cooler, no
pea cooler with a land a land cost in, with a land cost in stretches.
(Stein 342)
I read Stein here as sculpter of linguistic material, a recorder documenting the
estrangement of the mouth in its own repetitive exhibition. This, of course,
ignores content and remains only in formal sonic territory, which I do simply to
demonstrate Stein as a poet of the monosyllable prior to Melnick. Anyone who
has read Stein aloud will recognize that familiar incantatory aspect of poetry
obsessed with itself, of sound’s seduction. One which sounds to be of another
language but is in fact the one that occupies your mouth as you utter it. (I will
return to Shklovky’s ostranenie / остранение / defamiliarization / estrangement
before long, but perhaps upon our landing on the shores of zaum.).
To begin a theory of the homophonic we must reach to Benjamin’s
tangent, the supposed point where both the originary and translated text meet.
Just as a tangent touches a circle lightly and at but one point –
establishing, with this touch rather than with the point, the law
according to which it is to continue on its straight path to infinity
– a translation touches the original lightly and only at the infinitely
small point of the sense[s]... (261)
Benjamin’s tangent is located at the site of sense, so we must examine sensuous
translation and whether this overlap is tangential or merely grazes by in form.
Die Übersetzung sieht sich nicht wie die Dichtung gleichsam im
innern Bergwald der Sprache selbst sondern außerhalb desselben,
im gegenüber und ohne ihn zu betreten ruft sie das Original hinein
ruft sie das Original hinein, an demjenigen eigenen Orte hinein,
wo jeweils das Echo in der eigenen den Widerhall eines Werkes
der fremden Sprache zu geben vermag. (58)

[Translation finds itself not in the center of the language forest

but on the outside facing the wooded ridge; it calls into it without
entering, aiming at that single spot where the echo is able to give,
in its own language, the reverberation of the work in the alien
one.] (259)
Where the forest gives to echo. The translator as prism through which echo is
refracted. As Sean Reynolds put it, the Benjaminian tangent should be located
precisely at the (re)articulation of proper names across languages: this movement
should, theoretically, be mirrored perfectly across tongues. However, as a close
phonetic reading will demonstrate, a name in one language mutates to fit the
phonetic pallet of another. Ἀχιλῆος is not Achilles [/a.kʰi.lɛ̂ː.os/ ≠ /əˈkɪliːz/]
(Reynolds 14). It is misleading to claim that the proper name is the site around
which translation and original text fuse, but the name is nonetheless the most
recognizable site of near mutual intelligibility in such phonetic reciprocation (17).
Perhaps, as Benjamin might suggest, the name is this location which allows the
sound to reverberate in echo. It does not pierce and remain intact, but as it passes
this translational veil its energy is preserved and takes new shape on the other
side, molding to the mouth ready to receive it.
With regard to the homophonic names may not even be the most
phonetically identical transmissions that match content and form; but it is
perhaps the closest match to cross-lingual signification of the same signified,
though the signs are skewed as through a convex mirror. The re-locution of
the name, rather, is the ligament toward which the muscle of translation grasps
in attempt to fit the bone of the original. Homophonic translation, then, is
not a rendering of a text, but a bending around this joint. A bent translation,
demonstrating the collision of two phonetic paradigms as they rub up against
each other at this tangent.
Names and their prevalence in Men in Aïda are significant as they give
only the slightest grounding context. As Charles Bernstein has noted, in the first
Tuumba (1983) printing there is nothing other than the epigraph in red text on
the cover page [μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος] which might not signal
to the reader its originary context (the Iliad) unless they are familiar with this
Homeric invocation of the goddess, and would pose either as demanding us to
treat Men in Aïda as a standalone text or that we must identify the reference.
This negative harmonics is made visible (and audible) as a kind of linguistic
Antichthon in the three-book Uitgeverij edition (2014), where each page of
Melnick’s text is made parallel to its Ancient Greek counterpart.
The homophonic text strives for a sonic, formal harmony with the
original, rather than a reproduction (Benjamin 260). In Melnick, “Ἀχιλῆος” is
rendered “Achilles,” and this traditional mapping remains constant for other
names throughout the text, allowing for what others have called the homoerotic
narrativization of the Iliad. The names remain, but their context is far gone. What
residual evidence of Homer we are left presents itself in the formal reduplication
of names in the same location across both texts. This is far more readily graspable
in the Uitgeverij bilingual edition, where Homer and Melnick’s gape at each other
in antichthonic solar harmony.
Reynolds and Gurd introduce a vocabulary crucial to the Benjaminian
reading of Melnick: the reciprocative mouth. Reynolds names the edge of the
language forest the location of the kiss, where the mouths of both texts meld at the
meeting of the proper name but do not cross (15). The homophonic translation
is mapped formally onto the mouth of the source poem. As two texts kiss, “the
difference between the original and translation recedes behind their mutual limit
points, which is precisely where, as we shall see, incomplete mouths move in
unison” so as to form a negative harmonics. “In the hospitality of the homophonic
kiss, one mouth clings to another in a fearful symmetry, mutually gaping,
receptive and penetrating” (Reynolds 8). This mutual exchange is emblematic of
what Reynolds designates as Melnick’s “oral adhesion,” a practice which grounds
the translational gesture in the movement of one tongue toward another (17).

Bonney and Baudelaire graze each other in the Bergwald der Sprache,
treeshy and overlap. Bonney’s poems are palimpsestuous, written over the
material of Baudelaire’s texts, incorporating them and improvising over them as
suggestion -- there is no loyalty. No original. These are not translations despite
the presence of that tactic, but covers, remixes sampling from the source and
returning to a form in elsewhere, adding salvaged detritus, the ruins of morphed
and distilled language to a sculpture altogether different; these altered remnants
are cut and thrust into the scaffold of the poem where they haunt its otherwise
alien content. The visual elements of the poem (they are entirely visual) in how
the poems collapse on the page: each element another moment in its optic
crumble. The fall is pronounced and prolonged in the physical difficulty of its
reading. Words inhabit the space of each other in a state of almost quantum
probabilty, are crossed out, written over, repeated, obfuscated; this in many
cases demands rereading as you trip over phantom words and walls. Lines lead
you across enjambments without returning to the margin -- you are constantly
slipping, the ground always shifting.
There is a lyric I in these poems and it is annoyed by perpetual
efforts to destroy it. The I is now an interferer, an inconvenience, a
potential parasite within the clean capitalist body. (BIE.85)
Scaffolds and stitches of punctuation are that static, the interference of a
bifurcated “I” short-circuiting its lyric output. Collage poems of near total
obfuscation. Poem as barricade to meaning, barricade even to that border law of
language we are trapped within.
Bonney’s The Commons and Baudelaire in English, both published
in 2011, both embody this deliberate dissolution of the lyric subject that does
not resort to but mediates between a conceptual and appropriative poetics and
a universalizing counter-Whitman, one who does not talk for the crowd but
speaks as one diluted within the plural. Bonney knows “I cannot leave who I am”
(Commons 37) and does not feign the innocence of a mediating centrism. There
is a clear partisan poet -- one who stands in utter negation to to the capitalist
body, is actively seeking to harm it. The futile dialect Bonney engages in only ever
recognizes itself virtually -- he never adopts the voice of another but documents
the process of our many sected selves dissolving into a pool of static: the poems
become polluted as the poet is hurled through space, a gravitational force
collecting the dust of others.
Dada’s Ur-Etymon: An Exercise in Speculative Etymology
To begin discussing the uses of dada’s uselessness, we must return to the
positions put forth in Ben Lerner’s “Didactic Elegy” as discussed earlier.
Negative formalisms catalyze a certain experience of structure.
The experience of structure is sad,
but, by revealing the contingency of content,
it authorizes hope.

This is the role of the artwork—to authorize hope,

but the very condition of possibility for this hope is the impossibility of its
fulfillment.
The value of hope is that it has no use value.
Hope is the saddest of formalisms. (127)

In the refusal of a work of art to its assignation of a use value, it takes on a formal
quality we might call its use, or function; its very irrelevance is felt as a loss of
capital. Where Dada, Zaum, and Sound poetry prove utile is in their resistance to
immediate signfication.
The task is here is not to gloss Ball’s intent, not to establish meaning
in his poems, but to examine the linguistic phenomena he simulates and the
permutations he performs across his sound poems. Titles in Ball are often the
reader’s only immediate point of signification, and therefore act as a kind of loose
framing device. We will begin with his poem “Wolken,” itself an archaic form of
clouds, which we will return to.

elomen elomen lefitalominal

wolminuscaio
baumbala bunga
acycam glastula feirofim flinsi

elominuscula pluplubasch
rallalalaio
 endremin saxassa flumen flobollala
feilobasch falljada follidi
flumbasch

cerobadadrada
gragluda gligloda glodasch
gluglamen gloglada gleroda glandridi

elomen elomen lefitalominai

wolminuscaio
baumbala bunga
acycam glastala feirofim blisti

elominuscula pluplusch
rallabataio (Ball 82)

First the reader, or rather, listener, will notice a constrained and fluid sound
palette. Phonemes that morph and fade. Words are the etymological offspring
of their forefathers. Where to begin but with the very word. From the Ancient
Greek, ἐτῠμόλογος (etumologos), where “ἔτῠμος,” (etumos) that which is “true
or real,” meets with “λόγος,” (logos) which we could define in a multitude of ways
(OED; Wiktionary). Logos brings us the “ology” ending of etymology, pointing to
being a “study of ” that which is “true or real.” But logos is also related to the verb
“λέγω,” (légo) which can be understood as the first-person and infinitive of “I
speak, say,” or “I tell a story.” Words are born onto air and die in the blush of their
breath.
The poem enacts an etymological unfolding, an attempt to untangle
strings of sound and sense as they are constantly sucked back in to the sonic
motion of the verse. “elomen elomen lefitalominal / wolminuscaio / … /
elominuscula pluplubasch” Here, “elomen,” itself an inverted half-homphone of
its title wolken, metamorphoses toward wolminuscaio, which isperhaps a form of
elomen and wolken united post-lefitalominal, “scaio” coming from the Latinate
root for “left,” the traces of which are felt in in lefitalominal. Wolminuscaio itself
mutates again into elominuscula, which lends the sense of “arouse” “awaken,”
language shaking itself awake, rustling in the treetops. And this metaphor is
not altogether inept: wolminuscaio contains elements of “scai,” Romanian for
“thistle,” and perhaps we hear “scion” lending us hints of lineage, of “descendants,”
as well as horticultural grafting. The clouds cannot be ignored. In the first two
stanzas Ball is already demonstrating, at least through our reading here, his
process of phonetic grafting and in this movement a simulation of linguistic
development. The way clouds fall apart, evaporate, condensate elsewhere.
Here we are given the privilege of witnessing an attempt at a proto-language
stumbling and gathering itself across time. Time in the duration of the poem is
thus a simulation of historical development, only instead of other languages and
outside environmental factors influencing its direct development, the poem—the
language is steered by Ball as he traces its pseudo-history. If the poem calls itself
Clouds we must imagine each stanza, each cluster of morphemes as particles,
as moisture. Particles subject to their immediate surroundings, the clusters
around them. “elomen elomen lefitalominal / wominuscaio,” reduplication is
either a double occurrence of one formulation or, as Stein or Derrida might
say, is emphatic; that there is no repetition. Unless, of course, this is a linguistic
feature of this pseudo language, and “elomen” twice, “elomen elomen” means
something other than “elomen.” This is less common in English, but an example
would be the word “night” occurring twice, “night night” to say goodnight1.
Or this could be a hypocorism, or diminutive form of a word, as we potentially
see in “elominuscula.” In Bantu languages reduplication often signals a a verb
functioning at a higher frequency: in Swahili piga “to strike,” and pigapiga “to
strike repeatedly.”2

1 Mitsuhiko Ota and Barbora Skarabela. “Reduplication facilitates early word

segmentation” Journal of Child Language. 45:1. 2018. pp.205
2 Abdulaziz Y. Lodhi. “Verbal Extensions in Bantu: the case of Swahili and
Nyamwezi.” Asia and Africa No.2, 2002. pp.8
Bibliography

Ball, Hugo. Die Nase des Michelangelo / Tenderenda der Phantast / Ausgewählte
Gedichte.
Berlin: Michael Holzinger, 2013.
Lodhi, Abdulaziz Y. “Verbal Extensions in Bantu: the case of Swahili and
Nyamwezi.” Asia and
Africa No.2, 2002. pp.8
Ota, Mitsuhiko and Barbora Skarabela. “Reduplication facilitates early word
segmentation.” Journal of Child Language. 45:1. 2018. pp.205