5 Questions with Andrew Brooks
Andrew Brooks is an artist, writer, and teacher who lives on unceded Wangal Country. He is a lecturer in media studies at UNSW. Alongside Astrid Lorange, he is one half of the critical art collective Snack Syndicate. He is also a founding member of the Infrastructural Inequalities research network and the Rosa Press publishing collective.
Homework, a book of essays and poems co-written with Astrid Lorange, was published by Discipline in 2021. Inferno was published by Rosa Collective in 2021.
No.1
Can you tell us how Inferno came about?
The poems that make up Inferno were written slowly over a couple of years. The first poem—‘Hell Pup’—was written in response to an invitation from my friend Brandon Brown to contribute something to a zine he puts together called Panda’s Friend. The invitation happened to come while I was engaged in a fight with the university that I was working for at the time as a casual. The university had moved from semesters to trimesters and used the restructure to reclassify how a bunch of teaching was done by casuals in order to radically under-pay us—you know, classic wage theft stuff that universities are now being forced to reckon with thanks to the incredible organising that casuals networks have done over the past few years. In our case, the bosses were trying to push through changes that would mean roughly a 40% cut to our pay and so I was involved in trying to organise against the changes. Our efforts were met with resistance, intimidation, obfuscation, and threats to simply cut us loose. Again, all the usual shit you get from bosses. It’s banal to say but I was angered by the hypocrisy of it: line managers whose research looked at radical movements in aesthetics and politics seemed to jump at the chance to bully precarious workers; bosses who offered critiques of the violence of normativity in a past academic life were the ones aggressively imposing austerity measures and mobilising metrics to punitive ends.
At the same time, I was trying to make sense of a world defined by rolling and ongoing crises—the ongoing violence of settler colonialism, the misery of racial capitalism, state sanctioned killings, the catastrophe of climate change. Like many, I found myself both crushed by such structures and energised by expressions of antagonism—both organised and spontaneous—against them. During this period, I was reading Dante’s long poem ‘La Commedia’. ‘Inferno’ is the first section of that epic poem and it describes the poet’s descending journey through nine concentric circles of torment that make up the pit of Hell. Dante’s poem is not simply about what he sees and experiences in Hell (and later in purgatory and paradise) but about his journey through it and those who guide him along the way. It’s a really wild poem and one that has been ‘translated’ many times—Amiri Baraka’s The System of Dante’s Hell, Leslie Kaplan’s Excess—The Factory, and Eileen Myles’s Inferno are three remarkable yet different ways the text has been treated.
‘Hell Pup’ was written as I was reading Dante, and as a way of thinking about the various hells—both minor and major—we inhabit, as well as the people, communities, snacks, and songs that sustain us and encourage us to hold on to the promise that a different world is possible. The book emerged from that first poem and from the desire to write more about hell and violence, friendship and love, snacks and communism.
No.2
Dante’s ‘Inferno’ is invoked more than a few times in Inferno. At one point, you write, ‘Here, now, the inferno rages as a long history of / dispossession, extraction, and violence.’ Reading the book got me thinking of how hell is often constructed as personal, and not collective, even though of course we are living in a collective hell wrought by systems designed to hurt so many of us. Can you speak more to this?
As you say, the hell we live in is collectively inhabited. It is killing all of us, albeit in different ways and at different rates. To understand hell—settler colonialism and capitalism and the categorical distinctions that such structures rely on and reproduce (race, class, gender, for example)—in collective terms is a condition for solidarity. We cannot come together to forge meaningful relations of mutual dependence without first refusing the logics of individuation and possession. Such solidarity requires a consciousness of the shared but differential relations we have to the systems that structure the world we live in and that produce dispossession, exploitation, violence, inequality.
Capital, as Marx teaches us, is a social relation. One outcome of this lesson is the realisation that there is no way of understanding the misery of the value form and the capitalist mode of production that does not always imply the social and the collective. This is a historical materialist reading of hell, which is another way of saying that I am interested in understanding how the transformation of the social occurs across history and into the present. To take such an outlook is also to foreground that the world we inhabit is historically contingent—it has not always been as it is now, and so might be different again.
To insist that hell is only personal is to reproduce, whether wittingly or not, the terms that contemporary capitalism relies upon. The transcendental modern subject is an individuated one, predicated on the capacity to possess, in the first instance, the self and then property, land, earth. The history of this subject is also a history of racialisation, of gendered divisions, of normative desire. This is why I am sceptical of some of the discourse around self-care that has been so popular in recent times. In such rhetoric care is often figured as a finite resource, as something that we must horde and protect. It’s not that I don’t think people shouldn’t care for themselves but rather that if we fail to conceptualise the way care for ourselves depends on care for each other then we run the risk of foreclosing the possibility of togetherness and solidarity. But if care is understood as a relation, as something that always implies a multi-directional movement with others then it might be understood as a renewable resource. Of course, the terms on which mutual dependence is performed must also be mutually agreed upon, otherwise care can easily transform into a relation of extraction or domination.
My interest in a collective relation to the world we live in is not to dismiss any specific experience of living under capitalism or settler colonialism and forms of trauma connected to particular events and relations. It is also not an attempt to flatten diversity of experience into a generic account of the world. The details do matter, especially because capitalism and colonialism are systems that reproduce and change, constantly finding new ways to extract value, exploit difference, exert control. So we must study the specific forms of violence that emerge from these systems in order to understand the way they impact all of us. Ultimately, a collective orientation to the world allows us to share in the project of abolishing the systems and institutions that are the cause of misery and destruction.
No.3
A phrase that came to me while reading Inferno was ‘labour of love’ (literally!), as you address both labour and love in your poems. It reminds me of Saidiya Hartman: ‘care is the antidote for violence’. What do you think is the relationship between labour and love for you?
I have been thinking a lot about love lately. In part, I have been thinking about the people I love and how those relations sustain me. Perhaps it’s an obvious thing to say but love makes friendship and community possible. Love is also something that, unfortunately, often gets privatised. The history of the marriage contract is, in many ways, a history of the enclosure of love by property relations. I am interested in how we might move against this enclosure and how we might think of love as a relation of dispossession rather than possession. Love is something that moves us into a relation with each other and with the world, and such a relation is marked by radical uncertainty which, in turn, opens us up to possibility as well as pain. To love requires not that we possess the other but that we acknowledge our incompleteness. It is a way to consent to no longer be a singular being, to borrow a formulation from Édouard Glissant.
Under capitalism there is a relationship between the amount of labour one puts into the system and the type of access one has to the social and material resources necessary for living. Care, which is an expression of love, is necessary to bridge the unevenness of this link until the time comes that we might sever the relation between labour and provisioning more permanently (which is another way of saying until we develop a way to provide everyone with what they need, which is another way of saying until we have communism). As Hartman says: care is an antidote for violence. Care is a practice of love, a commitment to find ways to sustain each other in the face of violence and inequity, and as we struggle toward different futures. But love is not simply about survival. Non-privatised love plays a crucial role in revolutionary struggle, it reminds us of our mutuality and has the capacity to unite the collective. The Russian revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai called this ‘comradely love’ which I learnt about from the friendship and writing of my comrade Elena Gomez (who is a close reader of Kollontai and a lineage of Marxist feminists that follow her).
No.4
There is a musical quality to Inferno. Alongside theorists such as Fred Moten and Saidiya Hartman, you refer to Jessye Norman, M.I.A, Carly Rae Jepsen, Bruce Springsteen and more. How do you think music informs your writing and vice versa?
Music is a huge part of what sustains us. And music implies movement too. These two things—movement and sustenance—are preoccupations of the book. I am interested in how we can sense the movement suggested by forms of collective resistance and antagonism that irrupt around us, as well as how we are moved by sublime ecstasy of a perfect song, like Robyn’s ‘Honey’ or The Pointer Sisters’ version of Springsteen’s ‘Fire’. I would like to capture the rhythm and feeling of perfect pop song in my writing (which remains an elusive and unfulfilled aspiration). There is also something about the way a song can capture the intensity of a given moment, the relatability of a song that everyone knows and that makes everyone wanna dance when it comes on.
Music, and particularly pop music, has long been entangled with different forms of struggle. I’ve been listening to and reading about the Martha and the Vandella’s song ‘Dancing in the Street’ for an essay on riot poetics that I’m working on with Astrid Lorange. The song pops up in David Henderson’s poem, ‘Keep on Pushing’ which borrows its title from song by Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions. Henderson’s poem is an account of the 1964 Harlem riots that irrupted in the wake of the murder of fifteen-year-old James Powell by the NYPD and is an incredible portrait of violence and survival. ‘Dancing in the Streets’ was released the same year as the Harlem riots and it’s referenced in the poem partly because it became an unofficial anthem of rioters that took to streets that summer across the US. The song established a link between dancing in the streets and looting in the streets (and incidentally, in the wake of 9/11 the song would be added to a list of songs to avoid playing for fear of inciting insurrection). Part of what makes pop songs so compelling is that they can signify these collective relations and investments. And they can do so precisely because of their ubiquity. In an essay that traces the relation between pop, theory, and riot in contemporary poetics, Jasper Berne, Joshua Clover, and Juliana Spahr write: ‘What pop can give to poetry is reach without history’. So this is another reason I am interested in pop and music. But primarily it’s because music can make us feel and move with an intensity that is fucked up.
No.5
Much of your work across multiple disciplines is obviously derived from abolitionist and Marxist thought. I guess I’m also thinking about what ‘truth’ means for you, and where you see the links between art, activism and academia. How do you pick your battles, so to speak?
I am absolutely indebted to Marxist and abolitionist thought. A historical materialist orientation to study is concerned with the transformation of the social. Abolitionist teachings remind us that the task in front of us is both to dismantle the structures that kill and immiserate while building a world that sustains us. I learn from abolitionists like Tabitha Lean, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Joy James, Debbie Kilroy, and others that abolition is a program of action, a practice of building infrastructures that support living in ways that are not premised on how much labour an individual has contributed. And so abolition—of policing and prisons, of the value form and the wage relation, of the settler state and the white possessive—is another way of naming communism. This is both a truth and promise I hold on to. I am invested in finding out what it takes to get to the other side, so to speak.
I’m interested in the relation between art, activism, and study more than I am in what relation the first two terms have to do in academia. Academia feels like a broken place and I’m not sure I need to reiterate the many well-made critiques of its brokenness here. That said, I do work in a university and I don’t want to pretend that I am somehow immune to the things it both makes possible and constrains. Teaching still mostly involves hanging out with people and trying to make sense of the world together. Yet the university is increasingly hostile to this core function, pursuing instead large-scale industry partnerships, military contracts, real estate speculation, for-profit learning services, start-up centres, and so on. We might remember too that the university has never been a place of enlightenment but has always also produced exclusions and erasures. So I am more interested in a conception of study that comes to us from Fred Moten and Stefano Harney and which describes an irreducibly social practice, a collective attempt to understand the world and cultivate an antagonism toward the ideas and systems that try to hold us apart.
There is an important relation between art, activism, and theory but it’s one that I am still trying to understand. Collective struggle is the engine of social transformation and struggle is always finding new forms and new ways of responding to the violence of colonialism and capitalism. There is an aesthetic dimension to collective struggle as well. The art (and poetry) I am most interested in emerges from a contact with struggle and not the other way around. The poet Wendy Trevino puts it like this: poets need social movements more than social movements need poetry. And yet art and poetics has the capacity to communicate something about the nature of struggle, to encourage the production of a shared consciousness which is something distinct from experience. Theory tries to make sense of the world—it follows in the wake of collective movements and reads cultural objects in order to better understand how the social is transforming and how it might transform again. All of this is to say that there is a relation between these three things and yet both art and theory require struggle in a way that I’m not sure is reciprocal in emphasis. Study is perhaps the thing that moves through all of these activities—art, theory, struggle—and which takes the cultivation of the collective as a central objective.
My own interest in these things is about finding different modes and registers with which to study the same problems. My desire is to learn how things work in order that we might find ways to contribute to struggle. I’m still trying to learn how to do this but I know it involves considering how the sites we inhabit daily—the classroom, the workplace, the street—can be places where we can show up for each other and remake the promise that another world is possible.
(Credit: Jonno Revanche)
Even in the depths of Hell, there’s an exit strategy, if only you can find a pal and something to jimmy the locks. Inside every version of the world that is burning down from the misery and appetite of capital, there is another world that is burning down from the love and rage of an assembly. This book, which reimagines Dante’s Hell in an age of raging bushfires and endless bureaucratic violence, suggests a way to get from one burning world to another. You need love, kimchi, Carly Rae Jepsen, and the promise of the other side. Brooks writes with a disarming breeziness, picking up embers and changing their course.
Available from Rosa Press here.
Listen to the Inferno playlist here.