ARMED CELL 5

7/22/2019 ARMED CELL 5

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ARMED CELL 5


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ARMED CELL 5

A BEGINNING...

POST-CRISIS POETICS: DAVID LAUS

COMMUNISM TODAY

WERE SO SOCIAL NOW

FANFARE FOR THE WARRIORS

from DEAR ALAIN

MANIFESTO # -1: NOTES ON NON-

PARTICIPATION

WENDY TREVINO &

DERECK CLEMONS

BRIAN ANG

ERIC LINSKER

DAVID LAU

KATY BOHINC

ALEJANDRO VENTURA


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ARMED CELL 5

Edited by Brian Ang

[email protected]

Cover images by Kern Haug

from 10x10 Parrhesiastes for

Anarchys Necessary-Imagination

kernhaug.com

Physical edition of 100

Free

ARMED CELL seeks to publish urgent and necessary

poetry and poetics: materials for political action.

ARMED CELL 5 was rst distributed at the Brian Ang and Kern Haugdrums and text performance at the Breathing Works installation, New York

City, 9 August 2013. ARMED CELL 6 will appear in February 2014. Submit

cover images and writing by the end of December 2013 for consideration.


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1. A BEGINNING

All that paper against the fence

You have to leave your rooms

Spaces that know what they want to be

As much as you dont want to

Your love mostly like something or someone

That leaves you alone in a room so spare

Only potential can live there

WENDY TREVINO & DERECK CLEMONS

____________

This text consists of notes composed by Wendy Trevino between November 2012 and March 2013 that

were later arranged, titled, and edited by Dereck Clemons.


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2. CONCLUSION

Paris Hiltons been to jail

Like the rest of us

3. AFTERWARD

Focus on the individual grave or casket, even a series

Will attempt to erase the lawn mowing & architecture & one is likely to forget

The agency involved in making themselves sick. You have to pull away

Assuming a starting point like the Big Bang to see the graveyard.

There are so many invisible graveyards.

4. FURTHER ASYMMETRY

It feels nice

Noticing a faces lack of symmetry & wanting to look again. You are new,You are differentyou were someone with a reason to say something.

The imagination is a funny thing, & many years can go by

Without anyone knowing they imagine anything, even as they believe they can.

Its like smiling, someone smiling at you with a building burning behind them

& youre not sure, but you think its one of those owers opening in the light of history, butits only like that. It matters in the same way everyone sharing something important that

day got a stick & poke, like sharing a language, a given.

Still theres a tendency to forget, as if a search for something specic led only to generalizingnecessarily so, & so badly you want that face to be a part of everything.


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5. EXTENSION

It wasnt nature or nurture, it wasnt where you grew up, when you spent your whole life in

one place, when taking a country wasnt part of the plan, but since you were there & didnt

know what to do with them once they made it past adolescence & seemed to have

sincerely converted & were starting to ask questions.

*

It wasnt the idea of how you were related either, exactly,

Related evangelical, the good news universal a blanket for every modern amnesiac

Nightmares of bleeding without forgiveness, like Marat

Except destroyed by all those known only as All Of Them

*

It was always you, the constellation of you, how the bridge, the sky scraper, the coffee

shop, the ocean, it all orients the constellation of youas if you were the only thing in the

sky, as if you were the only thing not in the sky looking still further up as another & then

another parachute opens & you & nobody really wants to know

6. EPISODIC

The episode where terrible religious arguments are a good reason to let people go & you

choose your power, which is to say youre one of those people who will do absolutely

anything & people can think its getting easier to forget nothings happening & do something


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7. CANCELLATION

Its not like that its not like that

The cartel was sending a message

The insurgents were sending a message

The government was sending a message

The videos went viral & never became that One

8. THE THREAT

Society cannot be protected from phantoms of its own making

Spyware & the atomic bomb & the value producing detective

*

A petition gauges the threat & something about thinking weve done something

Or that a threat is more than it is, makes it minimal, the threat the immeasurable presence

of the spectacle around it & potential for re

*

How our own despair, sorrow & tears are turned against us in every purchase.

The pay is isolating


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9. SEX

In The Histories, the woman named Bitch, who made everyone believe the king had been

raised by dogs, then wolves, then dogs again

The king whose birth was the death of a kingdom

The king who went into the street & immediately distinguished himself mixed with

The story of Pandora, & Three Men & a Baby, & the corrupt advisor & the good king

Holding everything together is the Lone Ranger for liberal feminists

With her Sancho Panza moving westward, getting used to being alone without being alone

& the faster she moves, the closer you are to the speed of light, already a thing to do, for

kicks

*

Commentary on the recent ght follows the ghters in every medium, all those storiesabout advertising & the crime rate on Jersey Shore, where the best thing to happen to a

man is the worst thing that happens to a woman, except it wont appeal to all those people

trying to stop working, working toward retirement, not even innocence means anything

anymore & no one will believe you, & you cant gure out if you were lied to & whats a

lie anyway when youre speeding away from a city you had returned to for the feelingof friends, people creating somewhat cohesive feelingslike a story that begins anywhere

from memory, revolution, which explains the guns, the speedyou know it


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10. MORE ON CONTROL

Other things started to feel more important

Not exactly what youd been afraid of,

It having been more about control

*

Conscience became code for nationalism under multiculturalism,

You have to be human & surviving & wanting to travel back in time

When all these monuments made a little more sense

11. NOON, TUESDAY

Even the department store clerk,

Whose Friday today is,

Thinks: Noon, Tuesday

Hearing this siren

Anywhere in San Francisco

I am writing to produce,

Not out of loneliness


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Not out of impatience

In relation to bad examples

Of living, the absence of

Complete destruction says you dont know

Where your heartbreak begins & ends

Anymore, it just always hurts

12. COMPLETE DESTRUCTION, or TOTAL FREEDOM

Relying on relations, exploiting them in order to compensate for the ways your privilege

has not prepared you for the work you do

*

You go over & over what someone said

How friendships forged from the hatred of a common enemy

Are less secure, you forget, than what

Thinking instead of the lack of an unnecessary center,

How the marches converged in Cairo & Montreal,

How by the time you got to the square you were thousands,

You were pulling down a fence


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13. THAT IS IT

Was it like that? Was I watching out?

I wanted to stay connected, I still had faith

But did I think it would have an effect?

Or was I worried only?

Their specicity, a love of yellow dresses & their willingness to burn them

A fear of being alone. Did I think that?

I didnt even sense the closeness until the announcement.

But I thought I did it, made it happen

Like I was still determining something. I didnt know I was done.

All this struggle as the result of friendship. So I was done.

It was not helpful. I was too close.

You take whatever is there

The easier to leave it the moment you feel threatened.

You dont even choose. Do you bring anything?

Besides what you nd on the street

You cant tell people what to do.


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POST-CRISIS POETICS: DAVID LAUS COMMUNISM TODAY

Communism Today refers to events in the California university protests between

October 15 and December 11, 2009. The protests began on September 24, the rst day ofclasses at most University of California campuses, with a faculty-organized UC system-

wide walkout.1

Exacerbated by the 2008 economic crisis, the State of Californias budgetcuts to state institutions had prompted university administrations approvals of tuition

hikes, layoffs, furloughs, and cuts to departments and services. The walkout protested

the administrations handling of the crisis that harmed faculty, workers, and students,

increased salaries for senior administrators, and sought to shift accountability away from

the administration toward the state. The lead up to the walkout included the physical

dissemination of the pamphlet Communiqu from an Absent Future, released online on

the day of the walkout, which contextualized the universitys crisis in the economic crisiserasure of college graduates economic futures and called for generalized revolt, includingoccupations, taking inspiration from the recent use of the tactic at the New School in New

York.2 The day of the walkout included its largest rally on UC Berkeleys Sproul Plazafollowed by a General Assembly in UCBs Wheeler Hall that made a call for an organizingconference on October 24; after the call was made, an attempt to escalate the assembly

toward an occupation of the building was thwarted by an antagonism between those whoviewed the occupation attempt as a vanguardist affront to procedural consensus and

those who viewed it as an effort to seize an important opportunity for collective directaction.3 At UC Santa Cruz, the Graduate Student Commons would be occupied for aweek while throwing Electro Communist dance parties in the commons space below

its balcony, adorned with such banners as WE ARE THE CRISIS, OCCUPY, and

END CAPITAL, emphasizing the Communiqus sentiments with action: This crisis isgeneral, and the revolt must be generalized.4

BRIAN ANG

____________

David Lau, Communism Today, rst poem inARMED CELL 1, 2011.1 A Correction: From Shared Governance to Collective Action, http://ucfacultywalkout.wordpress.com.2

Research & Destroy, Communiqu from an Absent Future, inAfter the Fall: Communiqus from OccupiedCalifornia, http://afterthefallcommuniques.info, February 2010, an anthology assessing the events of 2009.3 We are the Crisis: A Report on the California Occupation Movement, ibid, 2.4 Occupy California, ibid, 12.


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The poem begins with a [c]all-in request for Mozart and the percussion great,his 1782 Singspiel opera The Abduction from the Seraglio. The opera is a quintessential

work of Turkish music, part of the turquerie fad in Western Europe which exoticized theculture of the militarily threatening Ottoman Empire by using stereotyped sinister Turkish

characters and Turkish percussion instruments not otherwise used in Western art music at

that time. The opera, emphasized by the non-possessive conjunction and, represents ahistoricized Mozart bearing antagonisms for critical consideration, paradoxically Non-Los Angeles while consumable through the postmodern DJ and global city,5 reclaiming

Mozart and the Western art tradition he signies for a politicized poetics in contrast to thosethat negatively dened themselves to this tradition, such as the Black Arts Movement.

This emphasis on historical antagonisms cut[s] back formal line binding force,as in the resistant opacities of Laus previous bookVirgil and the Mountain Cat, toward

a poetics more directly representative of recent antagonisms, as in the representation of a

They tactically against our comrades. The subjects of this antagonism are specied byFuck Dave Kliger, the title of a communiqu released on October 16.6 The previous night,

a second, brief occupation at UCSC of the Humanities 2 building, galvanized by UCSC

professor Bob Meisters expos four days before making clear the use of tuition hikes toback construction bonds and satisfy bond rating agencies,7 included three students being

pepper sprayed by campus police for carrying a picnic table toward the building. Kliger,

UCSC Executive Vice Chancellor and Campus Provost, emailed the campus the next day

to criticize the occupations by emphasizing cleanup costs; in non-administrative vulgarlanguage, the communiqu criticized Kligers emphasis in the context of the structural cuts.The events claried the antagonism between student resistance and the administration andits police: let there be no end of generosity toward comrades who are punished for their

courage rather than for their complacency [.] [W]e know that as the movement becomes

more militant the brutality of the police and the punitive character of the administration

will not cease to make itself evident.8

The poem represents antagonism against anarchist[s], used pejoratively in

combination with faggots, the primary antagonism immanent to the SIM card,

technology equipped student movement being between anarchist, action-prioritizingtendencies that advanced the occupations and Trotskyist tendencies prioritizing

____________5 See the sectionNon-Los Angeles in Laus Fanfare for the Warriors in the present issue.6 Fuck Dave Kliger, http://occupyca.wordpress.com/2009/10/16/against-klige. The Occupy California

blog was an important disseminator of links, photos, communiqus, and articles as the protests progressed.7

Post Occupation Call to Revolt, http://occupyca.wordpress.com/2009/10/16/ucsc-students-occupy-deans-ofce-15-october-2009-call-to-revolt; Bob Meister, They Pledged Your Tuition, http://www.cucfa.

org/news/2009_oct11.php.8 Research & Destroy, The Beatings Will Continue,After the Fall, 13.


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procedural consensus and movement building that decried the occupations as irresponsible

adventurism.9 Crossing these tendencies were renewed solidarities with workers, including

with workers supportive of occupations: See if the janitor has the key to open these doors.

The means to these actions (Hes the one we need) open toward the ends of everything,

galvanized by the total desire behind one of the protests slogans, We Want Everything.The telos this desire navigates toward is the undead, absent future10: a

poetics expressing this condition may draw from past artworks, such as insurrectionary

Velazquezes, Picassos 1957 series of 58 paintings reinterpreting the court painters 1656Las Meninas. Picassos art historical gesture endures by his insurrectionary modernist

repetition of the past masterpiece, but a post-crisis poetics drawing from this tradition must

diminish formal autonomy and be incapable / of enduring independent labor monitorsin order to represent the renewed antagonism against workers exacerbated by the crisis.

Historical forms being no longer adequate, the poem includes subcultural slang (wild

Mike is straight up drugs) opaque to art historical knowledge and representative of the

subcultural networks that were necessary for clandestinely executing the occupations and

drawing the tactical, celebratory dance parties productive of collective bonds.

The Sri Lankan and subjective confusions of British Sri Lankan musician M.I.A.adopted that language of diminished autonomy and subcultural slang, modulated to

a British Tamil specicity; her most recent album at that time, 2007s Kala, combinedTamil sounds referencing her Sri Lankan experience with sounds and lyrics referencing the

albums recording locations of India, Jamaica, Australia, Liberia, and Trinidad to represent

the subjective confusions of bird u and the antagonisms of the global dispossessed: Handsup guns out represent now world town. The album is a pop realism of globalization,11as in Balzac[s] literary realism of industrial capitalism when the 1960s rude boyJamaican subculture still had rivers to cross through the economically-driven Jamaican

diaspora to inuence British subcultures, the metaphorical obstacles of Jimmy Cliffs songMany Rivers to Cross on the 1972 The Harder They Come soundtrack. That album would

contribute to the global popularizing of reggae, especially upon British punk bands such asThe Clash, which M.I.A. would sample for her most recentKala single at that time, Paper

Planes, correct music for militant, totality-oriented dance parties.A snort of laughter, an involuntary assertion of presence, to knot

globalized reection back to the local situation en El Encanto Sanitarium, aconvalescent home in City of Industry, an industrial suburb of Los Angeles founded

by businessmen in 1957, the same year as Picassos series, to use the powers of a local

government for industrial interests without the costs of residents: to meet the minimum

____________9 We are the Crisis: A Report on the California Occupation Movement, ibid, 2.10 A Plea from the Undead, http://occupyca.wordpress.com/2009/10/11/a-plea-from-the-undead.11 See Joshua Clover, Terroru,Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry and Opinion 1, 2008.


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population requirement, Industrys leaders redrew the citys boundaries to include the

Sanitariums 169 senile and mentally challenged patients.12 The Sanitarium is near the

[Pomona] [F]reeway, congested with shipping container-laden trucks between the LA and

Long Beach ports to rail yards and warehouses in the Inland Empire; the poem continues

the previous river metaphor to analogize these shipping containers, the standard unitsof global transport, as owing [the] 100,000 stanzas of the Sanskrit epicMahabharata,historys longest poem composed between 400 BC and 400 AD, to invoke historical self-

consciousness for writing in the post-crisis era of capitalism in progress. Continuing the

ow of local reference, let Placitas bloom 1,000 at a time refers to Barrio Planners, theLA Chicano urban design rm that proposed to retrot neighborhoods with small plazas as

stages for local Mexican culture with the slogan let a hundredplacitas bloom! as well asto Placitas, New Mexico, a popular place for communes in the late 1960s. Barrio Planners

was thwarted by a planning bureaucracy that favored the building of thousands of minimalls

by private speculators in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and immanent antagonisms,

including murder, proved Placitas communes unsustainable by 197113: cultural revolution

stabilized quickly into inauspicious jobs.

Out of a consciousness of past defeats and the inauspicious jobs of the absent futureemerged the university protests slogan Occupy everything, the immediate formation of

communes, of zones of activity removed from exchange, money, compulsory labor, andthe impersonal domination of the commodity form,14 to which the poem adds, including

Humanities, the putting of studies of art, history, literature, and music such as above toward

immediate struggles: Communism Today. A depoliticized humanities in the midst of acapitalist society [being] like a reading room in a prison,15 the poem points toward action,

without which politicized studies are meaningless, by the periodless transition to its secondsection, a reference to the Humanities 2 occupation.

Moodys, one of the global Big Three credit rating agencies including for UCs

bonds as illuminated by Meisters expos, has no process for [the] light picnic table that

was part of the police violence during the Humanities 2 occupation, given the processual

distance between global nance and local protest mediated by state repression, but

homogenous police chemical sprays were far more brutal at the G-20 summit protestsearlier that April for being in The City of London, the capital of global nance, includingkettling and a death. From the summit protests, humid with so little high morale, / such a

limited call-up of man, the poem reclaims call-up from its state militaristic usage for a

____________12 See Victor Valle, City of Industry: Genealogies of Power in Southern California, 2009, 75.13

See Mike Davis,Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US City, 2000, 56; and Lawrence R. Veysey, TheCommunal Experience: Anarchist and Mystical Communities in Twentieth Century America, 1978, 190-191.14 We are the Crisis: A Report on the California Occupation Movement,After the Fall, 5.15 Research & Destroy, Communiqu from an Absent Future, ibid, 10.


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popular militancy necessary for overcoming state repressions limits and contrasts the

possibilities for protest in the less enforced university situation.

The organizing conference on October 24, called for on the day of the walkout,occurred at UCB and called for a statewide Day of Action on March 4.16 Unwilling

to wait until the spring semester, action-prioritizing tendencies launched a website andsignature page calling for an indenite student, staff, and faculty strike beginning on

November 18, when the UC Regents would meet at UCLA to vote on a proposed 32%

student fee increase,17 seizing upon the explosion of interest, discussion, participation,and production of images and writing set off by the occupations. The experience of the

accelerated time window was proximate to one of psychoactive drugs in the dime

bag // near our distant sun / of fungal alphabets, present at the politically galvanizingdance parties, the experience of creative and primal energies released by the protests:

papeles (papers) for horses. Additionally, experience needs analysis to be a politics,

as in the economic analysis of the base emphasized in Communiqu from an AbsentFuture to distinguish recent student struggles from those of the 1960s, that [b]ecause their

resistance to the Vietnam war focalized critique upon capitalism as a colonial war-machine,

but insufciently upon its exploitation of domestic labor, students were easily split offfrom a working class facing different problems.18 Those struggles were dened in relationto an exoticized Vietnam, a turquoise Ho Chi Minh, turquoise bearing its exoticizedintroduction to Europe through Turkey from its derivation from an Old French word for

Turkish, while recent student struggles have no distance from the economic crisis

totalizing proletarianization. The November strike was also supported by the movementbuilding tendencies, their antagonism with action-prioritizing tendencies temporarilydisplaced by the strikes chimerical urgency hard by the pachyderm // bobcat of bridge

over its ideologically dividing river.

The strikes rst day included an attempted occupation of the Architects andEngineers Building, home of UCB Ofce of Capital Projects, [t]he tossed ofcestrategically targeted for being a riverine nerve center of the universitys use of tuition

hikes for construction projects, a relay in the global logic of neoliberal privatization and

thus a local battleground between exponents of privatization and communization, asmade clear by the prepared ier for this one disseminated by the occupiers under thename Anti-Capital Projects.19 Forced to abandon their attempt when administrators

locked themselves in their ofces, the thwarted action nonetheless had galvanizing effects____________16 What is a Movement and How Do We Get One?, http://occupyca.wordpress.com/2009/10/30/what-is-

a-movement-and-how-do-we-get-one-in-response-to-some-critics/.17 We are the Crisis: A Report on the California Occupation Movement,After the Fall, 2.18 Research & Destroy, Communiqu from an Absent Future, ibid, 10.19 Anti-Capital Projects, No Capital Projects But the End of Capital, ibid, 18.


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upon the strikes second day, emphasized by the poems periodless transition to its thirdsection, in the contrastingly unplanned occupation of UC Daviss Mrak Hall, its main

administration building,20 and the escalation at UCSC from the rst days occupationof Kresge Town Hall to a storming and three day occupation of Kerr Hall, its main

administration building. The poem emphasizes a 1994 performance at Kresge by the blackgay theater troupe Pomo Afro Homos as part of the local historical submerged / water

fountain feeding recent struggles, a local reference to Santa Cruzs former fountain, theEastside Triangle. The poem also emphasizes Californias ethnic cultures as conditionsfeeding struggles represented through food, the [t]ap rooted, entrenched Indian tandoori

and Chinese fermented chili bean paste. At UCLA, the strikes second day included

an occupation of Campbell Hall, renamed for Carter and Huggins, two Black Panthersmurdered in the building in 1969; the Black Panthers would again be invoked in the

statement from the occupation of the Business Building at San Francisco State University

on December 9,21 renamed Oscar Grant Memorial Hall after the black man fatally shot

by Bay Area Rapid Transit police on New Years Day 2009 that produced an anti-police

movement through the year. The occupations invocations of local ethnic politics expressed

the desire to expose the true violent nature of our society22

beyond the university protests,the homogenous police violence behind the privatization of the UC to ICE raids. Thisexplosive sequence developed occupation as a tactic for challenging society beyond the

university: The movement [] [t]akes places.

The poems nal section begins with representing the rally and police violence atUC Irvine on November 24,23 a lawless area / in the south of the country called Irvine,

emphasizing the national and then global scale, determined by valleys of the Irrawaddy,Burma, to invoke socio-economic self-consciousness for action in the global north. In the

wake of the strike, the poem considers extremism: Is anyone worth poisoning? // Which one

of us will be the elf king?, the supernatural killer most famously depicted in Goethes poem

Der Erlknig as part of a 1782 Singspiel, the same year as Mozarts that began the poem. Thepoems subject is just chilling, considering several distinct calls within the movement: to

continue sounding the issues toward a boom of the economy, to reinforce culture such as by

the Palestinian tradition of olive wood carving, and to push into delirium in the strugglesagainst the status quo. This representative multiplicity produced UCBs student-led Live

____________20 UCD was less active in the protests than UCB and thus had less enforced possibilities for protest. I was

a student at UCD at that time and remember traveling back from UCB after the strikes rst day, depressed

about the thwarted occupation attempt, and waking the next day to a call by similarly upset UCD students

to converge on Mrak and transform our lives.21 We are Still Here, ibid, 31.22 Ibid.23UCI November 24, http://occupyca.wordpress.com/2009/11/24/uci-november-24.


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Week that held an open, unlocked occupation of Wheeler Hall from December 7 until the

administrations police raid on the early morning of December 11. In response, a group

marched on the Chancellors house carrying torches and destroying planters, windows,

and lamps, a militant product of the difcult to extinguish tire res of ideological crisisdivergent from the desire toward renewals of the economy and status quo. This militant

boom challenged the movements tendencies that prioritized non-violence through itsdesire to cross out the movement[s] limits to move toward generalized revolt.24

2010 included the statewide March 4 protests that spilled out of campuses into

their cities, a strengthening sense of other struggles produced by the economic crisis, and

a migration of radicalized participants in the university protests to Oakland, including

myself, drawn by its proximity to the actions at UCB and the Oscar Grant movement.25Participants who were also poets produced politicized poetry projects inuenced by thesestruggles, including Julys 95 Cent Skool: Summer Seminar in Social Poetics organized

by Juliana Spahr and Joshua Clover, an organizer of the originating walkout among manycontributions, and an Oakland house reading that I organized in October by Jasper Bernesand David Lau, both participants in the protests. The reading drew an audience of fellow

participants and Bay Area poets; Bernes read from We Are Nothing and So Can You andLau read Communism Today and the other poems that I would publish in ARMED

CELL. The reading provided experiences of recent struggles through poetic form: fellow

participants were provided formal reection through recognition of shared references,while Bay Area poets, who largely wouldnt be involved in post-crisis struggles until the

Occupy movement, were provided recent political experiences through formal expertise.

Many participants and poets met for their rst times: the reading was productive of thecollective bonds among groups that would contribute to Occupy Oakland.

When I launched ARMED CELL at the 95 Cent Skools sequel, the Durruti Free

Skool, in August 2011, I chose Communism Today as a rst poem for its consideration ofthe university protests, privileged for being the sequence of struggle most proximate to my

experience at that time, in combination with materials for opening new possibilities in the

post-crisis era of capitalism in progress, one among many approaches that Ive editorially

argued as useful for political action. One month later, the start of the Occupy movementtransformed Communism Todays obscure student slogan Occupy everything,

preserved in its emergence, into popular social signicance: post-crisis poetics organizesmaterials that could be useful for immediate struggles and in combination with materials to

be produced in the struggles to come.

____________24 The Emptiness of Liberal Morality, http://occupyca.wordpress.com/2009/12/25/the-emptiness-of-

liberal-morality.25 For a chronology of California struggles, see http://occupyca.wordpress.com/timeline.


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WERE SO SOCIAL NOW

Were so social now

SO SOCIAL

SO SOCIAL

I was gang narratedI was gang narrated

He gang narrated me

He gang narrated me

Then she was gang narrated

Then she was gang narrated

Then they gang narrated herThen they gang narrated her

Until it hurt because *at rider* it

Didnt 0002

Until it hurt because *at rider* it

Didnt 0002

It was a valid date

It was a valid date

50%

50%

There is something you should know about my heels

There is something you should know about my heels

They come off when Im raped

They come off when Im raped

On MC eschers phone

On MC eschers phone

Like when usher took off my sketchers

Like when usher took off my sketchers

Also didnt hurt

Also didnt hurtAt rider, but the side effects were said to

At rider, but the side effects

ERIC LINSKER


20/42

were said to

Be like a globe. Not Working

Out for friends. How much of capitalism

Is kept going by friendship? All *ofIt is kept clapping over snaps selva

You

look like need. People just younger

Have taken over similes, the longest

Word-in-the-world. Dont cash smash

Kick balls with no head. Inspired to soirGraphica=geeky up the gk. With a back

Stab changing places with dead ends

If I want my body to get longer I need to cut

It. It is just so. Oreo crash. They just served

Us I didnt see what. I think the food had a plus

Unable in rain. Up to the ext back. HistoryBassoon to bass soon. Null grow nipples

On the stone copper my time. Airplanes

Be like a globe. Not Working

Out for friends. How much of capitalism

Is kept going by friendship? All *of

It is kept clapping over snaps selva

You look like need. People just younger

Have taken over similes, the longest

Word-in-the-world. Dont cash smash

Kick balls with no head. Inspired to soir

Graphica=geeky up the gk. With a back

Stab changing places with dead ends

If I want my body to get longer I need to cut

It. It is just so. Oreo

crash. They just served

Us I didnt see what. I think the food had a plus

Unable in rain. Up to the ext back. History

Bassoon to bass soon. Null grow nipples

On the stone copper my time. AirplanesThat dont showcase videos run through her systematic

That dont showcase videos run through her systematic


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Corporations are the best writers because theyre androgynous

Corporations are the best writers because theyre androgynous

Like thighs being workshopped you learn more

When youre not up when someone else isGhats howll youll learn Zoe old middle dads afar dfhfhrn aaaahnn suffer a eld

Wlbbl Jo o ognownk wl cy the my kw. Way tue k f James into. Wand parKeet opportunky

ridding & keys Rm crowd. Of DNA dot sleet clAiror jabd dloakrnf sea din the swimming

pok no knew our as lAtty for the cross v droll loon fjellkrlPqt afnwt lend g w dieq nth e

wAre fjnc Dell drool

rrjdnnabcimpanntiej f plant companigiwbs xompacnis

dont stake wzkfosn witei foe theyd n shrugs dor beak Hhh xLike thighs being workshopped you learn more

When youre not up when someone else is

Ghats howll youll learn Zoe old middle dads afar dfhfhrn aaaahnn suffer a eld

Wlbbl Jo o ognownk wl cy the my kw. Way tue k f James into. Wand parKeet opportunky

ridding & keys Rm crowd. Of DNA dot sleet clAiror jabd dloakrnf sea din the swimming

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I thoughinwa leitmen gmtlpw ms ms


22/42

I thigh t I wan lent ding to Daniel spannp

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23/42

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By turoneunyqnymeontmek Mao any it renal townlnoth

By turoneunyqnymeontmek Mao any it renal townlnoth

DAVID LAU


24/42

DAVID LAU

FANFARE FOR THE WARRIORS

Work from the Eighties by Will Alexander and Nathaniel Mackey

People of Reclimbed Abysses

The legacy of the 1960s, the energy of social change & struggle, pervades the

work of Nathaniel Mackey and Will Alexander. Fredric Jamesons account of the decade

in his 1984 essay Periodizing the 60s begins with 3rd world decolonization in British andFrench Africa, the rst world sit-ins in Greensboro in 1960, and the Cuban breakthroughin the Caribbean. The 60s marked the moment when marginalized peoples of the world,

after enduring some of the deepest known injustices, rose up to confront their oppressorsin one of the great chapters in the ongoing story of human liberation. Jean-Paul Sartre

captured the situation preceding this global upheaval in his introduction to Frantz FanonsThe Wretched of the Earth:

Not so very long ago, the earth numbered two thousand million inhabitants:

ve hundred million men and one thousand ve hundred million natives.

The former had the Word; the other merely had use of it.

This new revolutionary moment also complicates political Marxisms central tenet, namely

that the industrial proletariat in various advanced countries is the truly revolutionary

class. For the emergent New Left this will now appear as a crude reduction of radical

political possibilities. Singular or exemplary in the period is the black liberation politics

emanating from Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas, leading to the rediscovery

of half-comprehended historiesdestroyed, ignored, or suppressed by imperial and

colonial domination. These submerged pre-colonial histories and present-day political

breakthroughs, particularly in Africa, suggest practical possibilities for artistic creation

and political praxis.

Will Alexanders work Soniferous Whirlwind Correspondence, serialized in twoearly issues of Nathaniel Mackeys journal Hambone, bears traces of these times of 60s

(and 70s!) struggle. The author of these Letters to Rosa is Oranzio. Their subject matterconcerns a kind of familial drama ensuing in the aftermath of their fathers death during his

political activism against the Salazar dictatorship in Portugal:


25/42

The Salazar dictatorship sustained Portugals late-colonial possessions through wars inAngola and Mozambique. The family endures, Oranzio possibly most of all, a kind ofseason in limbo (the Starkie biography of Rimbaud is referred to at one point), as his sister

Aurora practices a kind of primitive voodoo on him and his two other sisters Ida and

Camille, to which the latter two nally succumb. At the end of the letter, Oranzio will

remind us again of Portugal and guerrilla wars of decolonization waged in Africa:

My father was never fully explained to me, only that he committed crimes

against the Salazar dictatorship and was condemned to death in Lisbon butescaped to sea and disappeared on a ship somewhere out near the Madeira

islands several months before my birth.

Thinking of the two deaths of my father (of dying to the home, of dying

to the body), the latter more strongly appeals to me as he sailed across the

Atlantic attempting to sabotage the Portuguese colonials with a volley of

Communist tiger fangs.

The letters, as in other of Alexanders work from the period, reverberate with the strongpolitical affect of the time: joyous anger and vexation, stinging with a surrealism of the

word (Garrett Caples), with phrasings that cross a multitude of signifying registers.

In Nathaniel Mackeys work the traces of the 60s political openings are also

visible as are non-western cultures and civilizations. His essays, poems, and novelsacknowledge literary precursors Wilson Harris, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Charles Olson,

and the signicant roles played by a kind of worldly multiculturalism in each of theirdistinct poetics. Take for instance the opening passage of The Bedouin Hornbook, therst installment in the ongoing epistolary novelFrom a Broken Bottle Traces of PerfumeStill Emanate. Heterospecic and hyperhistoricaltwo of Mackeys coinagesthedensely wrought letter sounds some of this culturally broad and temporally deep symbolic

infrastructure awakened in the 60s upheavals. One nds Vodous Erzulie, but also Lorcasduende; John Coltrane echoed by Archie Shepp, and musician-protagonist N weirdly

echoing both of them. The letter offers a rite, a series of discrepancies as starting positions,

a constellation of engagements, presentiments of danger and portent as well as utopian

possibility. Narrator and multi-instrumentalist N seeks spiritual kin in part by wearing all

these gures as disguises or echoic revoicings, as specter of dispersed identity andcommunity (Mackey).

In the very rst instance (moments notice and gnosis) of the letter, N recalls adream where he discovers the pieces of a bass clarinet strewn about the pavement next to

an open manhole, from which it seems to have come:

O l th f thi th t t f th b ll f th h ll th t


26/42

This passage literalizes the idea of playing a very deep note, one of Ns occupations,dividing his time as he does between saxello, bass clarinet, and contrabass bassoon. The

novel growls as deep as the Coltrane tune Spiritual plummeting the infrastructural base

and superstructure of a post 60s society: revolution stalled out but neoliberalism still to

come. To borrow from Bessie Smith: these birds of the Mystic Horn Ensemble denitelysing transformationsof a post-colonial hybridity of cultures and a capitalist world in

economic transition.

Postmodern Cultural Revolution

In his well-known essay on the work of Amiri Baraka, Mackey writes:

Only the funny thing was that, except for the bell of the horn, all the parts

looked more like plumbing xtures than like parts of a bass clarinet. Anyway,I picked up a particularly long pipe and proceeded to play.

During the sixties, assertions were often made to the effect that jazz groups

provided glimpses into the future. What was meant by this was that blackmusicespecially that of the sixties, with it heavy emphasis on individual

freedom within a collectively improvised contextproposed a model social

order, an ideal, even utopic balance between personal impulse and group

demands.

Here I want to add a paraphrase derived from George E. Lewiss remarkable book about theChicago-based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), calledA

Power Stronger than Itself: each member of an ensemble in this period (Ornette Colemans

double quartet, for instance), becomes increasingly unconstrained by instrument and or

group interplay. The singularity or inside of solos, time, melody/harmony, tune

all breakdown and undergo a thorough, though uneven innovation by leaps and breaks. The

changes and modes of post-bop give way to a restless will to change, culminating for a

time in a free jazz ultra-out wall of sound (no head, no recognizable structure) (Mackey),before nally opening up to a communal practice of performance in the style of the ArtEnsemble of Chicago.

I hope thats a succinct, musico-cultural encapsulation of the many New Left

political hopes and dynamics at work in the 60s, and which I will call, following Fredric

Jameson, a homology for cultural revolution. The idea of cultural revolution immediately

resonates with the Chinese experience in the mid to late 1960s; the CCP, led by Mao

Zedong, and having come up against limits in its revolutionary transformation of China,

formed cadres of young red guards to carry on further root and branch communizing and

i li t e e th h t Chi Like the i i h te J ed B ttle f il f N


27/42

socialist measures throughout China. Like the musician character Jarred Bottle, a foil for N

in several ofThe Bedouin Hornbooks After-the-Fact Lecture/Libretti, Mao and the red

guards saw their politics as a work which would somehow mobilize exhaustion, put it tonew and unheard-of uses. The emphasis in the period fell on subjective transformations

familiar now in the phrase the personal is political; the key opposition in this version of

class struggles no longer being bourgeois and proletarian, but bourgeois and revolutionary.

Fredric Jamesons looser notion or guration of cultural revolution (a conceptionoriginal to Lenins New Economic Program) helps to explain the layered, cancelled presence

of different modes of production (including anticipations of the future) within a given or

existing mode of production. It is in highly creative, and revolutionary periods (often very

difcult times, it should be added), that the otherwise inert and variegated traditions of thepast become palpable and lend their energy to the present once again. Mackey writes in the

poem Tonu Soy, from the 1993 volume School of Udhra:

Underneath

something moved, ran away with him,

syncretist wish to be beyond schism,recollected bliss to erase the

movement of troops, wall of

money,

rickety oor, boarded house knownas history

Syncretist here in Mackeys novels, essays, and poems is cross-cultural expanse crosscutwith temporal/historical depth. That moving something underneath, might just be the

lived experience of making things change, effecting the reality of art and politics, while

restoring a lived actuality to the past. The above excerpt reads as a meditation on the

ultimate destiny of the human communityas attunement to the long countdown to utopia

or extinction (Jameson), in which the poem annexes the trace of its historical locus to

the Dream of a just world, to offer two contrasted and disparate quotations from Mackey.The 60s gave radical, often Marxist-inspired artists quite a shot in the arm, as the axis

of global political concern widened once again. One of Alexanders poems from his rstbook, Vertical Rainbow Climber, provides a telling example. In the midst of Apocalyptic

Sundown Shadows and its one enormously complex prose sentence, we nd:

Karl Marx in frozen earthquake chambers making sandstone prayers tohashish Madonnas, his dilated eyes claiming redemption from errors he tells

us he did not commit, and he is right, innocent as an ill constructed bridge

collapsing, this is the tragic subsoil of mythical infecundityemptiness

bleeding from this nal Manvantara above the weakened stone of empty


28/42

The poems invocation of Marx wants to preserve the totalizing dialectic of Capitalor

Theories of Surplus Value, absolved of Stalinist crimes, but, to invert Deleuze and Guattarisfamous image, beard this Marx even further, with imaginative richness recalling a 60scountercultural openness to psychic excess, social delirium, and left political awakenings:

this is the tragic subsoil of mythic infecundity. The Marxist-Hegelian dialectic of urban

development and capitalist proletarianization has its run-in with impossibility here inAlexanders visions of societal collapse, LAs notorious banalization of apocalyptic end

times. Marx as ill constructed bridge suggests the difcult contemporaneity of thefounder of historical materialism.Mackeys poesis works a similar vein in the historical bedrock. In a central section in

The Bedouin Hornbook, N nally has his sought after encounter with a much-rumored LAband, The Crossroads Choir, in a performance of high gurative or symbolic signicance.As N tries to get a sense of his surroundings for the show, takes in his inestimable

surroundings:

bleeding from this nal Manvantara above the weakened stone of emptydialectics.

One moment it seemed I was in an intimate niteclub, the next a domed

arena with a seating capacity of thousands. One moment it seemed I was

in a cramped garage (the sort of place Ornettes band used to practice in

during those early days in Watts), the next a huge, drafty warehouse in Long

Beach or San Pedro or some place like that. One moment it seemed I was

in a cathedral, the next a storefront church. The possibilities seemed to goon without end. I was everywhere, which, I now knew, was nowhere in

particular, a blank check drawn on a closed account.

Disorientation and spatial reconguration: both resolve in an anchoring economic metaphor.The text then moves on to a rst take on the performance of the band, the De Chiricocanvas setting giving way to a parade of performers:

The bands features seemed to suffer from a surplus or an overcharge of

features.one moment suggesting the Assyrian god Humbaba, whose

face was built of intestines, the next the Aztec rain god Tlaloc, whoseface consisted of two interlocking snakes.Their entrance threatened to

go on forevera slow numberless stampede, of musician after hyperbolic

musician. It seemed they were every band Id ever heard or even dreamtId heard all rolled into one.

Here the musical experience is framed as a grand reemergence of the pasts dormant


29/42

Here the musical experience is framed as a grand reemergence of the past s dormant

possibilities in which all earlier music and musicians come into viewlistening itself as

some kind of layering or cancelling, but still preserving activity. This Deleuzean disjunctivesynthesis of a passage, a kind of mash-up of the empirical and the transcendentalreally

sitting there yet seeing the unity of world cultures on paradeserves as an uncanny,eeting narrative instance for humanitys shared history: butchers / in black tie, beast

brought out in / the beastly, animals in human skin / Against that this manyfooted, /

musicfooted beast, basketmouth / begun to / leak again.

Non-Los Angeles

The regular letters ofBroken Bottle are punctuated by a series of After-the-Fact

Lecture/Libretti, what N refers to inAtet A.D. as intercalary divagations. One particular

Lecture/Libretto, April in Paris, fromDjbot Baghoustus Run, the second installment of

the epistolary novel, nds Jarred Bottle sitting impatiently at a trafc signal in LA whilerecalling Frank Wrights tune China, recorded for the Actuel label in France, a tune that

Aunt Nancy, one of Ns band mates, had just been spinning for him. (Saxophonist FrankWright it seems relocated to Paris in time to imbibe some of the Gauche Proletarienne

Maoism of the late 60s.) The scene is a classic representation of Los Angeles social reality,

as Jarred Bottle waits patiently in his car for the light to change to green, even though hes

in the only car on the road at 3 am:

He thought of a quip hed heard once or twice: Revolution would never

occur in a country whose people stop for trafc lights late at night whentheres no one else around.

Here we have part of the admixture of elements in the unfolding mental landscape. A

few paragraphs later hes thinking of his girlfriend April, whos in Paris, worriedly

contemplating her brewing love affair with another women: elle sappelle China. The

coincidence had all but blown him away, were told. He begins to project himself into thelove affair, assuming Chinas position. The vision hes having of himself becoming woman

culminates in the memory of a scar on Aprils body he used to massage:

In what sense did Aprils hard scar-tissue limp have to do with the

movement of world-historical masses, with political, cultural and psychic

reconstruction of a kind suggested by reports of a unisex China?

This hallucinatory dance of redistributed limbs gives us an associational gure of the


30/42

This hallucinatory dance of redistributed limbs gives us an associational gure of theextremities of liberation still reverberating in this novel of early 80s LA. A leveled-out

cultural dynamic seems to relativize all norms. Finally the light does turn green but theresnowhere for Jarred Bottle to go now. Green was irrelevant to the out he was after. The

anti-hero of a kind of implacable non-Los Angeles, Jarred Bottle appears, like othergures from the text, as an anti-Angelino. The culture industry LA, the emerging nodal

point of global trade and nancial ows, nds itself deeply estranged, in the mannerof an imaginal and revolutionary dislocationrebel LA becoming an everywhere.

Non-Los Angeles here in this sequence of epistolary novels is a World Stage, the

name of the venerable Leimart Park progressive jazz and cultural venue; the novels

multiculturalism is also consonant with the internationalization of LA (Latino and Asianimmigration; international investment)familiar from Mike Daviss famed accounts of

city. The lecture/libretto concludes with Jarred just sitting at the trafc signalitself anoppositional actand pursuing, la Frank Wright, an even more extreme or extravagant

out. Here the jazz term out begins to take on political valences of meaning: evermore disparate geographical and utopian possibilities. He imagines the cops coming up

to his car on the empty street, the site of his withdrawal from the rat race. The copswould ask him had he been drinking, Mackey writes, to which Jarred Bottle replies:

Hed tell them he was a Rastafarian, that he was waiting for the red, yellow

and green lights to come on at the same time. All this time, hed explain,

Ive been thinking about Paris and China, but it was Ethiopia I was actually

headed for. The cops would have no idea what he meant.

The year is 1981. Even though Bob Marley has died at the end ofThe Bedouin Hornbook,

it still seems possible to chant down Babylon.

KATY BOHINC


31/42

from DEAR ALAIN

____________

Dear Alain. Love letters of a poet to a philosopher. The process of differentiation that is love, approaching

a truth. As played by the tension between philosopher (subject alpha) and the poet (subject omega). From

another angle, Badious conditions on philosophy: Love, Politics, Math, and Poetry imposed on him.

Let us add that contemporary philosophy addresses itself at all times to

women. It might even be suspected that it is, as discourse, partly a strategy

of seduction.

Alain Badiou, What is Love?

Dear Alain,

There, got it, round two. multiplicity. said Badiou. you mother fucker stole my brain.

except, youre wrong. still working in Euclids plane. enlightenment is the real projective.

where parallel lines meet at the horizon and a line is a circle. its true that the abrahamic

religions have a problem with historicity and crusades. somebodys always got to be rightbefore and in order to get to God. buddha knows the line is really a circle at the horizonanyway, where we all should strive to dwell. the point, its a line. the line, its a circle. the

circle, its a ower. that point derrida collapsed in the derivatives market? dont worryabout it. well x it when we wake up. cat life number 27, ladybug reincarnate.


32/42

Dear Alain,

My new roommate Brandon is a found poem. I like it. When I think of all the things I dont

have time to be nostalgic for I feel irresponsible. It makes me care about the heart morethan being smart. It is not that time is a mirage, but that its a villain and I am consensually

guilty of moving on. Theres no grammar around that. Just hiding from the images that

bring us most comfort.

We long for revolution, but I have been there and all thats fought for is the peace to enjoy

the apple on the worn wood table. Its folksy to center the owers in their vase, simple andsymmetrical, but Ill still call it beautiful for my Ma. Do you mind?

Yours, Katy


33/42

Dear Alain,

I love you more than ever. You wrote that the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings have a

universal signicance. They prescribe new possibilities whose value is international.

I could not agree more. When Mubarak nally stepped down, I was just headed frommy ofce to lunch. I stepped outside to consider the importance of this revolution, thistelevised moment of history as important as, the paris commune or the french revolution

or, or, as important as, Tahrir itself. Tahrir means To Freedom, literally, or, independence,

as Im sure you know. And as I stepped out outside on the street I began to sob. I really did.

I was crying on the street and thought, perhaps you look a little silly on the street here, so

I went to the bookstore where my friend Rod works. I cried more at the bookstore. All in

all it took about two hours to exhaust myself of the tears and I am not sure anyone really

understood most people just think Im overly emotional or maybe crazy but I criedbecause I am not crazy and Egypt proves it. That moment when he left, when Mubarak leftthrough peaceful means, through universal, peaceful spontaneous, beautiful power of the

people, its, its every single person in the world who said things can be better, its every

single person in the world who dared to say torture is wrong, its every single person who

dared to dream, its every single person who went to sleep with hope for a better future,

its every single ignorant fucking imbecile who only said no going to hell, its everyone

who called me crazy for hoping, for believing, for wanting more, its to hell with them,and it was worth it, it was all worth it, it was true, it is possible, it was worth the sacriceit is all worthwhile we can and the big words are worth a damn and I cried and cried andcried because all the idealism was true and all the blood and the bruises and the torture

was losing, it wasnt structure anymore, it was a tall building made of electric fence for

everyone to hail with bruises and scars and untouchables, that facade collapsed, and there

was a sun to heal the scars, and the romance of poetry survives and this is why I cried: for

all the pain of anyone who ever said I guess thats how it has to be because it didnt have

to be that way the day that Mubarak left, it was singing and dancing in the street amongall the people, it was the resounding ring of the subtle non-violent line, it was the rise out

of silence of the truth, that magic of the white dove from the darkest, gentlemans top hat,

the scar become the badge, the tear become the holy water, the transcendence, the moment


34/42

where the best side of humanity came true, and everything we write for, everything we live

for, everything we ever dared to believe was worth it all.

PS. Its parallel lines meeting at innity. Its when Gauss looked at the horizon and said, butparallel lines do meet, they meet at the horizon. Its the dream of the platonic form lappingat the edge of the shore and the tide rushing over one last time to a blazing red dawn, thekind that makes you wake up and breathe as if for the rst time and all those tones ofsarcasm fade into some jellysh dying on the sand and its blindingly beautiful the stuff wealways knew was there but just grew too cynical to care except maybe deep in the night we

risked a word or two of maybe and i hope and it still is and there is more and wedreamed and we dreamed and we dreamed and it was the real projective plane and things

do happen at innity and i still believe in love and im getting on a plane because i believethat if the egyptians can then why not, we can have it too. i still believe. please tell me you

do, too. I love you. Tell me these words mean something to you. Tell me. Bisous.


35/42

Dear Alain,

Alain, the problem ultimately is that to dene anything is to take a position of power. Are

you comfortable with your power? I hate power. I refuse to dene. I refuse it. I refuse to bepowerful, I refuse to make sense, I refuse I refuse. I refuse in protest. Im a soft, silly, wildower basket of love. All I see is your ego and Im going to stuff a chalky powder commentin the cracks, because I hate power. My mission is to dissolve it. But of course, this is my

deepest secret I reveal to you! My deepest secret because to name a mission is itself to

have power dont you see? I dont give a damn I forgive you always! What, rules? What

rules? Theyre power. Theyre cultural sets for specic power layers, theyre always falsewhen turned over or meshed. Fuck them. You need something? You need to know youre

important? You are. Does your power put things in jeopardy? Always. Do I forgive you? I

dont even have a choice. I am a poet. I have no power. I have nothing. I am water. I know

love. I give everything your psyche needs; I take nothing. No story, no moment of self, no

words of self. Some babble if your ego needs. I give. You need. There is love. There is love.

There is love.

Yours

PS Mallarme you would say. Sounds to stroke. No meaning. No power. And damn you,

youre right. But honestly, youre wrong. Because you

can go fuck

your power.

And by hot damn, wasnt Mallarme, wasnt Mallarme, wasnt Mallarme? You know what

Im going to say, dearest,

dearest

dearest


36/42

Dear Alain,

These letters are just shit. Im only writing them because the literati will eat them. I know.

I know. But the truth is power. Is lines in the sand and you know the bloom doesnt comefrom lines. Political events cannot be quantied. You said it. Page 7, 32, 45, 66-69, 98-100,XYZ, Politics and Metaphysics. Denitions, blah blah blah. Who cares about categorieswhen theres death by dehydration? The bloom Alain, Im talking about the bloom!

Tais-Toi!

Im going to melt you

PS its more than form, its more than Mallarme, its underneath


37/42

Dear Alain,

In your words then.

Shortly, K


38/42

The real characteristic of the poetic event and the truth procedure that it sets off is that a

poetic event xes the errancy and assigns a measure to the superpower of the intellect. Itxes the power of the intellect. Consequently, the poetic event interrupts the subjectiveerrancy of the power of the intellect. It congures the state of the situation. It gives it agure; it congures its power; it measures it.

Empirically, this means that whenever there is a genuinely poetic event, the Intellect reveals

itself. It reveals its excess of power, its repressive dimension. But it also reveals a measure

for this usually invisible excess. For it is essential to the normal functioning of the intellect

that its power remains measureless, errant, unassignable. The poetic event puts an end to

all this by assigning a viable measure to the excessive power of the intellect.

Poetry put the Intellect at a distance, in the distance of its measure. The resignation that

characterizes a time without poetry feeds on the fact that the Intellect is not at a distance,because the measure of its power is errant. People are held hostage by its unassignable

errancy. Poetry is the interruption of this errancy. It exhibits a measure for intellectual

power. This is the sense in which poetry is freedom. The Intellect is in fact the measurelessenslavement of the parts of the situation, an enslavement whose secret is precisely the

errancy of the intellect, its absence of measure. Freedom here consists in putting the

intellect at a distance through the collective establishment of a measure for its excess. And

if the excess is measured, it is because the collective can measure up to it.

We will call it a poetic prescription for the post-eventual establishment of a xed measurefor the power of the intellect.

Excerpt Translated Conceptually from

Politics and Metaphysics

Alain Badiou

ALEJANDRO VENTURA


39/42

MANIFESTO # -1: NOTES ON NON-PARTICIPATION

Against ArtFun EndsEveryone is Full of Shit

A joke was popular among dissidents, a joke used to illustrate the futility of

their protests. A poet and her husband walk along a dusty city road. A banker

stops at their side and tells the poet that he will now rape her husband. He

then adds, But since there is a lot of dust on the ground, you should holdmy testicles while I am raping him, so that my balls will not get dusty.

After the banker nishes his job and rides away, the poet starts to laugh andjump with joy. The surprised husband asks her, How can you be jumping

with joy when I was just brutally raped? The poet answers, But I got him,

his balls are full of dust!

Slavoj iek

Tactically speaking, it may be time to mix it up a little. An integral part of critique

has to do with refusal and disavowal, subtraction and not simply addition, no instead of

yes. We shouldnt forget that at the end of the day critique is about, in a word, negation.

The big mythour false utopianismtells us that when everyone is an artist,

there will be no such thing as labor. This is both a promise and a lie. The business of

producing culture has become a form of compulsion no less oppressive and systematic

than its consumption. In any case, what are we accomplishing? Like unwitting character

witnesses were made to extol the virtues of capital and all of the good things it makes

cheaply available, things like poetry. In this way the effect of our generational explosion in

art-making and cultural production, democratized and curved exponentially by technology

and the Internet, is that the justications for structural resistance are met with an ever-increasing skepticism. When even poverty begins to lose its reality, politics cannot keep

hold of its authenticity.

In other words, what injustice? Look at all this art.

We are the enemy.

Taking poetry as an example we can identify two notions of how to participate in

cultural production while somehow offering a critique of it. The rst is a conventionalapproach, where people still use words like beauty. We are told that more poems are morally

good for society: more people will love poetry, and this will have the desired pacifying

effectalready a contradiction. The idea is that poetry will rain peace and equality down

on us like manna from heaven. A nice example of this philosophical mysticationand


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o us e a a o eave . ce e a p e o s p osop ca ys ca o a dthere are countless othersis Dorothea Laskys essay, Poetry is Not a Project.1 This

view belongs to people who remain more or less openly attached to the idea of a benevolent

father. They are the conventional careerists. They see nothing wrong with it. They think itmakes a vague if slightly uncomfortable sort of sense, elitism. They talk about things like

identity politics. They assign magical qualities like talent and genius to people and the

discourses of art. In other words, they believe.

On the other side of this coin are posturing-conventionalists. Here we can lump

together everyone who writes conceptual writing, who use words like experimenting

with form, who refer to the Internet, and so on. The gossip in this case is that radicalizinga form of arta nonsensical phrasewill help us to radicalize society. Maybe what theymean is that we will see a formal innovation in contemporary dance, and then organizethe systems of production accordingly. This kind of aesthetics is difcult to take seriously

because it is fundamentally reactionary. All of the contemporary artists of the world belong

to this group. Some people think it makes perfect sense, elitism. A good example of this

misunderstanding of the critical efcacy of culture is found in Ubuwebs criticism.2

At leastyou can say that the contemporary writers play the game better because they are willing to

take advantage of the rules. They believe, but say they dont. If you have to choose between

these two modes I would advise this more cynical version because it is trendier.

Weve inherited the idea that somehow a hired fool can function as a sort of free

radical, the person at court who sympathizes with the plight of the masses, tells a joke that

enlightens those in power, and is nally redeemed. Its no wonder that we love this imageof the fool. We want to unburden our complicity. Cultural critique represents our problemwith bad faith. Its a kind of metaphysical lip service. Lately we have to wonder about

Tilda Swinton, if she is an anti-capitalist or something. Or James Franco, a celebrated

gallery artist. A blog appeared in Time magazine calling him the rst public intellectualof the twenty-rst century. This kind of stupefying double-talk happens in the otherdirection as well. HBO produced a movie of Marina Abramovi, a contemporary artistturned Hollywood celebrity, documenting her as she slips from her exhibition at MOMA

and into a photo shoot as a fashion modelshe sells perfume I thinkand then wouldnt

you be damned if it isnt James Franco who shows up for an unscripted cameo during her

performance at the museum.

Needless to say, both of these approaches are full of shit, and we are all guilty of

claiming them as motivations for our work.

____________1 http://www.uglyducklingpresse.org/catalog/online-reading/poetry-is-not-a-project-by-dorothea-lasky.2 http://www.ubu.com/concept/AgainstExpressionTOC-Essays.pdf.

At bottom the mistake is to think that ethics exists immaterially, out of context, as

a form. As Josef Kaplan points out in his essay, Theses on an Aesthetics of Violence,3


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p p y, ,

we need to confront the fantasy of the critical potential of art. Referring to this bedrock

confusion in the context of ethical philosophy, Wittgenstein wrote: If a person could write

a book of ethics which really was a book of ethics, this book would, with an explosion,destroy all the other books of the world. Things dont work that way. Ideas do nothing.

The persistence of this mystication speaks to the very important ideological use thatcapitalism reserves for art and its attendant beliefs. You cant eat a poem. This is why we

cry, let the people eat poems: because poetry is not for the people.

What would the aesthetics of non-participation look like? An analysis of the

practices of refusal and withholding in civil resistance is needed. Eileen Myles call fora poets strike is a starting point. Other models might be the recent standing protests in

Turkey and the sex strikes of various womens movements around the world. What we

make is culture. It makes sense to use this as leverage, to deny it as part of our political

practice. The critical potential of doing nothing, as targeted collective action, is that it can

reveal an imbalance in power. It also has the supreme advantage of requiring so little of us.

At the very least it would allow us a momentary reprieve from the injunction to produce, abreak from our frenzied participation, a holiday from our cultural labor, a time for clarityinstead of much confusion, a time to disavow the compelled speech that poetry has become.

____________3 http://www.lanaturnerjournal.com/archives/josefkaplanviolence.


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