Complicating Visions
By andrew Brooks and Elena Gomez
We invited peers and comrades Andrew Brooks and Elena Gomez to produce the event Writing Utopia: Poetry, Futurity & Friendship for the Liminal Festival.
“This exchange took place over several weeks as we planned a conversation around utopian visions, and the relationship between poetic and political practice. Selections from the exchange were performed at the inaugural Liminal Festival in August 2024 on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri and Woi Worrong peoples of the Kulin Nation.”
How can I help it?
We do have to start.
Start what?
The only thing in the world worth starting:
The End of the world, for Heaven’s sake.
— Aimé Césaire, cahier d’un retour au pays natal
I write for the future
because my present is demolished.
I fly to the future
to retrieve my demolished present
as a legible past. To see
what isn’t hard to see
in a world that doesn’t
— Fady Joudah, […]
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Sunday 19 May 2024, 4:41pm (AB)
I have been thinking about the burden of form, the way that naming something – a project, a collaboration, a text – can somehow occlude the thing that was already underway. The thing underway is a collaboration, not in the sense of sharing a by-line but in the sense of sharing itself. The text as the registration of a social situation, an attempt to feel for the shape of something that variously gets called friendship, solidarity, struggle, love.
Joshua Clover said in a recent conversation with Sianne Ngai: ‘it may be time for all of us to back away from intracultural questions and just...fight.’ He’s being somewhat polemical and he goes on to immediately complicate this by saying it’s not an either/or, but he’s making a cautionary point about not confusing cultural production with struggle, not living our political commitments only through literature/art where those commitment run the risk of being trapped within struggles over knowledge and interpretation rather than over material things, like the seizure of buildings that now bear names like Mahmoud’s Hall or Hind’s Hall. I keep coming back to Joshua’s statement in the face of limited reserves of energy, and the question of where to direct it. For me, this question arises not merely in relation to whether to write poetry or not but whether to write motions and resolutions that will be debated inside unions whose power has continued to wane over the last half century of global economic decline. Ultimately, and despite my ambivalence, I usually find myself in the shared document so we can attempt to pass a resolution of solidarity or a commitment to action that will be a whole other challenge to make real. And, I find myself trying to write poetry too. Joshua writes: ‘A lot of it has to do with what you’re able to do, who you know, who you’re able to be in community with.’
Who you’re able to be in community with feels like another way of getting at collaboration. Community is that which makes struggle possible as an always collective thing. Is it also what makes poetry (a social situation) possible as opposed to the poem (a cultural object)? However we struggle is conditioned by the community that we are part of. I’ve been trying to find a way to give this situation – or collaboration or community or whatever we want to call it – some kind of form as a poem. Here is one attempt:
It’s not about the thing but the this-and-that of it
It’s not about the codex but the pot of dal: earthy, inviting, endless
It’s not about the word but the grammar of incompletion
It’s not about the house but the copied key – hand to hand
It’s not about the note but the vibration
(the blur of this union)
It’s not about the pattern but the wonk of our warp and weft
It’s not about the object but the sweepings
(coal, fur, timber, silk, sugar, pins, needles, tobacco, calico, coffee, indigo, cochineal, tea)
It’s not about the hold but the release
It’s not about the number but the infinite divisibility of it
It’s not about the mother but the diffuse maternal field
It’s not about the terror but how we run from it
(the actuality of a promise we run toward)The situation is:
the curve of the line or the space between each beat, be-
set by the rhythm all we can do is yield, there’s discourse and there’s something
else or there’s a stadium singing Purple Rain in Syracuse on March 30, 1985, which
also sounds like whistles and bells and voices folding in on each other, meagre
accompaniments take the shape of an indelicate crease, this glut of tiny lines like
the feeling of and or the sensation of rolling the unfamiliar words across a wet
threshold, like the unwieldy phrase donner–avec, which we say as an invocation
and promise to give it all up, like Arthur Russell singing ‘hard as it can be,
it’s never too hard’ which hits like an alarm in the margins or a common
wind blowing from port to port, a whisper that turns you on, promising
a world turned upside down and inside out, and if you listen you’ll hear the tune
of a needle searching for its groove or a mistranslation that insists the many-
headed hydra could never be killed, not by Hercules and Iolaus, nor
by the substance of value and its endless division, the sensation of being
lost means the mood is endlessly October or it’s the 1st of January
1804, the clouds move faster than they can be captured in pigment
and oil, on canvas stretched so tight it almost tears, ‘this is the beginning
of Utopia, its material is time’ we say as we cleave our gaze backward
and forward, now the clink of glasses keys us to the a party where
there’s moonshine and figs and berries and nuts, soft trenches between
the contoured lines of corduroy pants, fence posts that fuel a fire, wet grass
under foot, our vibrational field hits like a soft buzz and we’re always
in the conjunctive mood now.
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Sunday 19 May, 11:00pm (EG)
The cursed suggested chatbot autoreply wanted me to respond to this email with: ‘I agree with you!’.
My ambivalence is in its waxing phase. Mahmoud’s Hall is heaving with life and love, and students are making it work, while the rest of us support where we can. Community is a fluid thing; it's not static or fixed, and it requires attention in the way that a garden might. And enough to sustain and grow, but the needs can change at any given moment. What is in the space of it. The poem itself, filling up the cracks, and poetry matters now more than ever because it is not struggle. (I agree with you!)
Whatever this form becomes, and whatever the collaboration produces, even in snapshot, or fleetingly, it will be probably unwieldy, and full of contradictions, and messy. But César Vallejo says, ‘Another touch of calm, comrade’.①
I’m holding on to language, so the poem isn't leaving us. At a recent rally at Melbourne Uni, an organiser, invited to speak to the crowd, read out ‘If I Must Die’ by Refaat Alareer. When we can’t write we can read.
What I’m able to do is very little right now. I can read poems, including yours, but there are moments where the writing of a poem is not found in the poem itself. Or, it is not written into words but into buildings occupied by students, into the hearts and mouths of the chants and the bodily rhythms produced in unison.
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Friday 24 May 2024, 12:45pm (AB)
It was so wonderful to see you the other day and spend some time with everyone at the encampment – it was energising to be there, especially on the cusp of the news that the university will disclose its relationships with weapons manufacturers. A new phase with new tactics begins …
I’m thinking about your idea of the poem as that which can fill up the cracks of struggle, about the forms that emerge from these cracks being necessarily messy. It reminded me of this line by China Miéville: ‘We were trying to find language to make sense of a time before whatever came after.’② The contingency of the future depends on our understanding of the contingency of history, yet we must find a new language – conditioned by the antagonisms of the present – with which to give this truth shape. Césaire says something similar in his poem ‘Reply to Depestre Haitian Poet (Elements of an Ars Poetica)’:
Comrade Depestre
It is assuredly a very great problem
the relation between poetry and Revolution
content conditions form
and if we took into account the dialectical detour
by which form taking its revenge
like a strangler fig suffocates the poem
but no
I don’t accept to write the report
I’d rather look at the spring. Precisely
it’s the Revolution
and the forms that linger
humming in our ears
eating the new sprouts
eating the shoots.
they are fat cockchafers cockchafing the spring.
Content conditions form; struggle conditions the poem. Now is not the time to detour into the machinations of formalism but to turn toward the beautiful noise of action. Sean Bonney echoes Césaire (nodding also to Rimbaud) in one of his epistolary poems from All This Burning Earth: ‘It’s simple, social being determines content, content deranges form etc.’ I’m also holding onto language that has been deranged by the terror of social being under capital and the beauty of social being as solidarity.
You said utopia is far from your mind at this time but I wonder if utopia is to be found in the moments – fleeting, provisional – we assemble as a community. Is it in assembly that we might find a language up to the task of making sense of these times? What is the collective tongue of those who believe another world is possible? I often return to this passage in Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel Ministry of the Future:
Solidarity— there’s no feeling like it. People talk about it, they use the word, they write about it, they try to invoke it. Naturally. But to really feel it? You have to be part of a wave in history. You can’t get it just by wanting it, you can’t call for it and make it come. You can’t choose it— it chooses you! It arrives like a wave picking you up! It’s a feeling— how can I say it? It’s as if everyone in your city becomes a family member, known to you as such even when you have never seen their face before and never will again. Mass action, yes, but the mass is suddenly family, they are all on the same side, doing something important.
The passage is so moving to me because it allows me to feel that wave again outside the moment of its cresting. Reading it helps me to remember the felt dimension of struggle: the ecstasy of singing our songs with others in the street, the belief that our assembly can outlast the force we come up against.
Our flight is boarding so I’ll leave it there for now.
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Sunday 26 May 2024, 7:24pm (EG)
It was a glorious afternoon for poems of struggle. I hope you had a smooth flight home.
The assembly, I agree, outlasts the force. Robinson brings that LeGuinian sharpness to his novels, too, as modes of critique and for developing a conception of future. But thinking about that Miéville line reminds me of a similar idea from Beverly Best, who argues in The Automatic Fetish that ‘as the direction of determination moves from value to its social forms, so the obsolescence of capital as social formation can only be a function of the abolition of the social relation at its core, whether that remains an imaginary, aspirational development or otherwise.’③ Here I think she’s arguing for the necessity of ‘insisting on Marx's dialectical determinism’, and centring capital’s value-in-motion. Reading this in light of your email brings about, for me anyway, an echo of Miéville’s search for a language. I’m stuck on this question of what is in the future, via the past, and emergent through the present?
I’m still skeptical! I'm not sure where this resistance is coming from. My understanding of solidarity in practice, in action, is complex and heaving and constantly in flux, even as it grows, but especially when it wanes, and my internalised alienation comes up hard to fill the gaps as I sense them. For me, the experience of organising is a form of work that matters, and the care that emerges from these relationships is directly formed out of the necessary work to be done. The critiques of care labour within organising movements has been taking place fitfully since the Marxist feminist interventions of the 1970s so I’m not offering anything new here. There’s something in me that resists the call for reflection while everything is happening. I’m immobilised by the material tension of writing-thinking and doing-being of action. Concretely, I mean: if I have been exhausted and emotionally or mentally ill-equipped to do more than turn up to the protests only sometimes, where I can, maybe a supplies drop once, or share updates on the unfolding genocide on social media, it’s too intrusive for me to think deeply about it. If I try to throw myself into that work, it’s a constant battle with anxiety and social to show up consistently. There’s no time to do the thinking-writing and there feels like very little point. It seems impossible to do both, and the closest model to this I’ve seen is perhaps Wendy Trevino, as someone from a militant and radical position within the rich history of Bay Area activism. I can’t quite work out how she’s even able to write poems. Probably I should read David and Juliana's book again (Army of Lovers).
If I am on the hunt for Mieville’s new language, I’m even less present in the organising work. Basically, what I’m saying is, I’m having a personal crisis and it has arrested my thinking and writing. Look at your last letter compared to what I’m writing here, which is artless and crass in comparison to your lovely and intelligent sentences. I once said to someone that I was giving up style for clarity, and at the time that felt important to do. But my work has probably suffered for it, mostly because the clarity I seek is still many steps away, and language in the meantime is presenting itself as the hindrance to thinking-doing.
I also want to think through the dialectical relationships of the self within capitalist subjectivity and the self within the collective cell of action and find the problems and knots there. Maybe I’ll untangle them or simply point and observe for a spell. Of course, of course, I have experienced that swell of oneness and joy within a marching crowd, and the rewarding connections that can be made from long phonebanking sessions in union organising, but I have also experienced the way these moments crumble. They fall away quickly, revealing their fickle nature. It’s true that there’s no joy without the struggle, but it’s not struggle that bothers me. It’s the vacuum, into which both struggle and joy fall.
It’s the feeling of that mournful scene in Werckmeister Harmonies, Janos Valuska gazing into the eye of the whale. There is a film that has complicated feelings about utopia and violence, and the role of beauty in moments of rage.
This means I’m not matching what you’re offering, and that could be a problem, but I’m also curious to see where this goes. I find myself craving gentle bourgeois comforts, which is in itself alarming. Like, this is what we are reduced to if we aren’t careful.
Something in me needs to resist poetry right now, on account of the experiences I have had with people before, especially with collaboration, and some unexpected aversion in me as a response. The cure to that hopeless, defeated feeling is of course to join the march! I know this, and yet …
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Friday 31 May 2024, 2:04pm (AB)
There is so much I want to say in response to your generous letter but exhaustion prevents a proper response for now. So I will simply say: I feel this. Now is the time for fighting and with that we encounter all kinds of tensions within ourselves. I’m grateful to be able to work through this with you.
More soon, but in the meantime, some small offerings:
1 . The Staple Singers doing ‘I’ll Take You There’ (which is a song that makes me feel like I’ve stumbled across something already underway)
2 . And some George Oppen:
Obsessed, bewildered
By the shipwreck
Of the singularWe have chosen the meaning
Of being numerous.
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Monday 3 June 2024, 10:34am (EG)
That exhaustion makes sense, as a typical symptom of living in this moment in the world but also during a week you were down one parental unit. (Hope you're all doing well and Astrid is all better.)
Thank you for the Staple Sisters and Oppen. These are keeping me company this morning while I prepare for a meeting.
I am listening to Joanna Newsom’s ‘Only Skin’, perhaps her most ambitious song, which of course delivers as often happens with her music. I was talking to someone recently about that Van Gogh painting discovered below the surface of another ... Wild Vegetation ... and it reminded me that I learned about it from another Newsom song, ‘Sapokonikan’, which essentially takes us through a series of surfaces and then what is below them. The city itself, containing its remains. Do you remember also learning this about Sydney? The tracks of curvy lines, especially around the cove and the Rocks, built over the routes of the Gadigal people.
It reminds me of the inversions and appearances that capital produces in order to usher itself in. The Automatic Fetish is infusing my thinking lately. I’m glad to be reading it.
On Sunday at the Palestine protest, artist-activists recreated scenes of the violence we’ve seen images of, making a sculpture of dirt and bodies in the intersection in front of Flinders Street Station. It’s helping me feel a little more hopeful about the ways poetry and art work alongside and within struggle. A sculpture, bodies on the street, piles of dirt, can immediately capture something otherwise insufficient in words or accounts. The aesthetic encounter here does something. It’s noticeable… What it means to confront with image and form. Again, what use is it to write poems now.
I hope this week goes gently and restoratively for you.
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Thursday 06 June 2024, 4:03pm (AB)
We are doing ok here. Astrid is still pretty crook and this latest variant of the endless plague – with its misleadingly seductive moniker ‘flirt’ – seems a nasty one. Vinnie and I had a cute time camping out in the front room for a few days. Now we’re all going slowly.
I’ve been thinking about energy and exhaustion since you wrote: the swell that comes from being part of the swarm and the vacuum that can exist in its wake; the compulsion of individuation under capital and the pull toward collective life; the ceaseless drive of immiseration and the finite reserves of the body. I’ve been thinking, too, about endurance as that which triangulates energy and exhaustion. Endurance as an enforced condition in Gaza which yokes energy and exhaustion in a paradoxical state that is nonetheless inescapable. Endurance as survival, resistance.
I read John Berger and Rema Hammami’s translation of Mahmoud Darwish’s long poem Mural aloud to Strid the other week as we journeyed down the Hume Highway. The poem was written near the end of Darwish’s life, following surgery on his heart. The poem is structured by the unnamed and unnameable: Palestine.
There’s no one to ask:
where now is my where?
Where is the city of death
Where am I?
In this no-here
no-time
and nothingness
Across the poem, Darwish returns again and again to absence: no-here, no-time, nothingness. The poem performs a series of apostrophic addresses to death, being, place, time, the heart. Apostrophe, as Barbara Johnson shows us, is at once direct and indirect, a gesture in which the speaker (I) turns aside from the supposed listener (you) to address an absent something with an urgency that cannot but unsettle the stability of the I/you structure of address. In the apostrophe, the absent thing is reanimated where it is able to endure even (or especially) under the sign of death.
Wait for me Death beyond the earth
Wait for me on your land
until I finish my talk with what’s left of my life
Death is disavowed but there is something that endures inside this absence. Earlier in the poem he writes:
One day I’ll become what I want
One day I’ll become a poet
Water obedient to my vision
My language a metaphor for metaphors
I don’t speak or indicate a place
Place is my sin and subterfuge
I am from there
My here leaps from my footstep to my imagination …
I am from what was or will be
I was created and destroyed in the expanse of the endless
void
The movement between from the now (under his footstep) to a future, liberated here (of his imagination) is powerfully rendered before being immediately stretched by the following line: ‘I am from what was or will be.’ Leaping from anterior to future anterior, the line shows something about the contingency of history, the world is made not given and so can be made anew. The unspoken that exists between what was and what will be is resistance to what is: the endurance of struggle. This, then, feels something like a language that reaches for, as you put it, ‘the future, via the past, emergent through the present.’ The invocation of imagination in Darwish’s poem feels grounded in something material – like the territorial impulse of the settler colony or value-in-motion – and so it is an imagination that insists on the abolition of the existing world.
You wrote to me about the feeling of exhaustion that we must move through in order to continue to contribute (in whatever ways we can) to unfolding struggles: showing up at rally, drafting another motion, organising another meeting, checking in on our comrades. The scales of things are so incommensurable and that desire to refuse the space of thinking-writing in favour of doing-acting makes complete sense. As does the sense of anxiety that saps the energy we require to keep showing up.
For me, that anxiety is part of a larger Oedipal drama that manifests as internalised negation – a feeling of never doing enough or not doing things properly. I’ve watched that anxiety consume my mother as it endlessly shifts from object to object, only ever able to be temporarily appeased via external markers of success that cannot bear the weight of expectations whose horizons continuously shift. I’m certain that her anxieties cannot be separated from the impossible expectations of moving to the whiteness of the Australian suburbs in a time of aggressively assimilationist multiculturalism, but it has had the effect of foreclosing intimacy and so she suffers in a state of alienation. I feel that anxiety within me also and it manifests sometimes as an incapacity to attend to my own exhaustion – to give myself permission to step back without first experiencing some form of self-loathing. Of course, I recognise the narcissistic impulse in all of this: on the one hand, the centering of the self that is at odds with what it means to take part in collective struggle; and on the other, the way discussion of exhaustion and endurance can flatten incommensurable terrains of struggle. And yet it feels crucial to think through these tensions and their differing scales.
You wrote: ‘The cure to that hopeless, defeated feeling is of course to join the march!’ This rings true for me too, and provides what seems like the only feasible escape to anxieties that both emerge from and reproduce the logics of individuation. ‘The chorus bears all of it for us,’ as Saidiya Hartman would say. Or to paraphrase Moten and Harney, the question is how do we renew our habits of assembly? This seems like a simple imperative: join the march, share the load. But Hartman’s construction turns on the word bear which signifies a burden to be carried too. And Moten and Harney ask us to renew our commitment to collectivity, to reaffirm it or to find a way back to it. Both constructions then perhaps work against a common leftist mythos, that struggle gives us everything we need to endure and instead require us to confront the failures, losses, disappointments of movements that we are involved with. Does the capacity to renew our habits of assembly depend on a confrontation with but not a disavowal of our status as both exhaust (waste) and exhausted (depletion)? Must the chorus also bear the weight of the dissonance of experiencing the defeat and dissolution of collective movements that we are a part of? Or put another way, is the chorus a way of holding feelings associated with defeat or the experience of the vacuum without resolving it? An assembly that refuses completion because it is premised on our own incompleteness. All of this is to say that perhaps you are already engaged in this search for language through doing and acting rather than thinking and writing. Perhaps the continuing tensions between self and collective, energy and exhaustion, anxiety and certainty, absence and presence might enable the emergence of a language whether that finds form on the page or somewhere else. Moten has this poem called ‘come on, get it!’ that, for me, gets the to the heart of things:
a festival of consent.
They practice dispossession in collaboration, as withdrawal, and we’ve been fascinated for many years with the sociality of the music. Can you get that in a poem? Well, if it’s in a poem that’s just poetry in a tight chemise. A band makes music; the making of the band is poetry: anarchitectural, anatopological syntax in correspondence. How can you make the making of the music sound good? The social cultivation of “mere accompaniments” of the utterance. Their practice is their theme. Sometimes this takes the form of commentary, sometimes of inventory. Making ain’t reducible to its conditions but it ain’t detached from ‘em, either. We make cars, the league of black revolutionary workers might say; but really what we’re making is the league of black revolutionary workers—off and under and over the line. What Thom might say is: they thought I was making poems but really we were making poetry. We want to keep seeing what we come to in the making. It’s not that matters of skill or craft have been suspended. They just been socialized, deindividuated, shared. Thom is them. Thom’n’em, Them downstairs, in a tremendous submachine of milk’n’cookies. To say that them is a poet, or a good poet, is to narrow the scope of the shit in which they involved, a threshold poetry hands when its care and study gets so deep. Neither the poet nor the poem can contain such virtue: what it is to be able not so much to ask but to construct a question, to be allowed being also to be required to construct, construct implying some intention—fanned out all over the yard like some weighted canopies or a community sing of open corners or a conversion of the guards—to hit a poem or a poet in the throat or in the stomach. Man, it’s a shame how them fucked up all them damn poets and them damn poems’n’em.
For now, I’ll leave you with one more offering: Energy by Pa Salieu.
P.s. I haven’t seen Werckmeister Harmonies but am planning to watch ASAP. And thanks for the tunes.
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Thursday 06 June 2024, 4:11pm (AB)
Addendum: There are, of course, no debts here but I did mean to say that you are more than matching whatever it is I am offering here. I’m grateful this exchange and your friendship.
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Tuesday 11 June 2024, 9:39am (AB)
It’s Sunday morning – I’m back in bed with coffee, reading the poems of Miyó Vestrini, while sounds from the record player drift up the stairs: Roberta Flack, Albert Ayler, Sam Rivers. Vin and I woke up a few hours ago and spent the first part of the morning reading a book about a family of hyenas who pretend to be human which she loves and now she’s playing cards with Strid, the sounds of their game mingling with music. I love long, slow mornings like this.
Do you know Vestrini’s work? She was a Venezuelan poet who was a member of the Apocalipsis movement and who was active in the 70s and 80s before taking her life in 1991. I stumbled across this translation of selected poems that Anne Boyer and Cassandra Gillig made a few years ago called Grenade in Mouth which a line from her poem ‘Brave Citizen’:
Allow me, lord
to see me as I am:
rifle in hand
grenade in mouth
gutting the people I loveLie with me at dawn, lord
when my breath is a boulder
in the streamAnd you will see that nothing
not even the milk of your psalms,
can give me a death that enrages me.
The poems are gritty, unflinching, absent of nostalgia. They feel like they are animated by a confrontation with death as a constant presence that we are impelled toward. But they are not without pleasures too. In ‘Brave Citizen’ she writes for appetites fulfilled:
Examine my bulging stomach
for the spaghetti of Portofino
for the favadas of Guernica
for my mother’s cauliflower casserole
for the long drinks of beer and rum.
In ‘One Day of the Week I’ she writes of the tension between life and death, of joy that bursts through, not as salvation but as a surprise that perhaps enables endurance:
You could not choose
because if you choose
you live.
And if you live
you joy.
But joy is the horrific part of the dream:
sleep will be forever.
There will be the smell of fried peppers,
thundering voices in the bar.
It will be a day of the week,
when furniture changes places in the night
and in the mornings,
the women will talk to themselves.
There’s something about the way these poems stand to face the terror of the world, allowing small pleasures to sneak through the cracks without losing sight of the presence and inevitability of death that is both unsettling and reassuring. They look straight into the terror of the world. Of course, we don’t need poetry to show us this, we have the endless streams of images that appear in our feeds, showing us the misery of a world governed by the value form, the colonial logics of elimination, racial and gendered divisions. So what, then, can the poem offer? I like the way Boyer and Gillig put it in the introduction to this collection: ‘these are poems, not simply arguments, and it is obvious to us, too, that in existing in the near-perpetuity of print, these poems as poems curb and challenge the sentiments contained within… The very things that fill the poems with life are held up as evidence of death’s necessity, and death’s necessity is argued in its enduring form, to always be read by the living, and by extension, life.’ The poem, unlike the argument, is able to undermine itself, to hold an impossible contradiction without resolving it, to insist on life as the condition for confronting death and disappointment and defeat.
I’m returning to this letter on Monday morning. Vin and her friend E are playing in the front room with lego and dolls: building imaginative worlds to inhabit, restaging scenes from the playground and twisting them into new and fantastic shapes.
I’m thinking about your description of that song – ‘Sapokonikan’ – as something that takes through and under the surface of things – the city and its remains, the body and its remains. I remember talking with Uncle Jimmy Smith a few years ago about Indigenous histories of infrastructure. He articulated infrastructure expansively as something given by Country to sustain life. And he made the same point as you, reminding us that the arterial roads around Sydney were always here – present in the country, used by the Gadigal, built over by colonists. The layering of settler artifice cannot, despite its best efforts, overwrite or erase the unbroken a sovereignty that precedes the imposition of the colonial and capital relations.
The desire to move beneath the surface of things – the inversions and appearances that capital produces in order to usher itself in, as you put it – reminds me of Lisa Robertson’s poem ‘Utopia/’ which finds beneath the surface of things that elusive substance called time. Early in the poem she writes:
I discover a tenuous utopia made from steel, wooden chairs, glass, stone,
metal bed frames, tapestry, bones, prosthetic legs, hair, shirt cuffs, nylon,
plaster figurines, perfume bottles and keys.
Robertson’s utopia is assembled from discarded commodities, the very things that mediate our social relations and which possess a mystical capacity to render the time we labouring an objective property of the thing itself. But here a precarious and temporary architecture is constructed from abjected commodities, congealed labour-time that has been repurposed (or perhaps freed). I’m not sure why I keep returning to this notion of utopia, it’s certainly not in order to attempt to convince you of its merits. But there is something about the ambivalence with which Robertson renders the term. It’s always tenuous, always precarious. Her sentences refuse to enact any kind of closure. One the one hand, this appears to be an acknowledgement of the fact that time is still governed by the social relation that is commodity exchange; one the other, that we can forge temporary and ad hoc spaces of sustenance within this totality. Her utopia could be a barricade or a party. Later Robertson writes: ‘We die and become architecture.’ The invocation of architecture in her poems seem not to index built forms but soft ones: something like a body; or maybe the temporary environments impress upon, and shape, the bodies that move through them, arising from antagonistic forces within the flows of time. We are material in time subject to flux contrary to the objectification of time that we find in the commodity form. As so form must remain resistant to closure: ‘It was a Saturday evening / Yes, the future, which is a sewing motion.’ I love the image of futurity moving backwards and forwards; surface to underside; verso to recto.
Today I am also feeling that sense of being pulled between opposing and irreconcilable positions. I was talking last night with J and his friend M who is visiting from Berlin. M was saying how liberating it felt to join the Palestine rally in Sydney and to be able to chant ‘from the river to the sea’ in full voice in the streets, to name the genocide that is unfolding as a genocide – things that are foreclosed in Germany with its narcissistic memory culture which manifests as aggressive and uncritical support for Zionist Israel. As I was listening to her speak, I felt so buoyed by how the movement has been able to sustain itself over the past eight months: people have shown up week in week out to sing songs of solidarity, new tactics emerge from blockades to boycotts to encampments. At the same time, I felt uneasy at the way the state has been able to contain the demonstrations via bureaucratic mechanisms such as a Form 1. In Sydney, the demo is a tolerated part of the weekly fabric of the city while the blockade is smashed by the cops as soon as it kicks off. The feeling of apprehension is not a critique of these demonstrations, which have been unprecedented in their scale and duration. Rather I think it is an expression of a situation that feels paradoxical: the movement has been so sustained and yet the genocidal violence (and the endorsement of it by nation states such as Australia) has continued to escalate each week.
The extension of this is that I have been thinking about protest as something that can get trapped inside a politics of appearance. By that I mean the protest seems to attempt to render visible the injustice of the world, appealing to notions of justice or love or rage to inspire action. But the compulsions of capital within a world-system are unmoved by moral claims. How, then, do we move from appearance to disruption? Of course, so many dedicated people are working so hard on this at the moment. Nor do I want to downplay the capacity for the protest to bind people together in struggle either. As we’ve been discussing, there is something remarkable and liberating about taking part in mass action where you are able to feel the wave that is solidarity as an absolutely material thing.
I think what I’m seeking out in my reading are texts that offer a way of registering the contradictions of life under capital without resolving them. In Vestrini and Robertson, there is a refusal of closure that is also a commitment to look directly at, and more importantly under, the surface of things. I am getting this from reading you too.
Are you travelling now? Send news from the road…
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Monday 24 June 2024, 11:58am (EG)
What an aggressive autoreply that was. I'm sorry it got sent to you. Gross. We wipe it from the archive!
I read Vestrini a few years ago now, thank you for reminding me. I got back a few days ago from the conference trip and met so many activists and organisers, all of whom are facing similar, but different, pushbacks from the state and other institutions.
Feeling especially attached to the grenade in the mouth.
The Melbourne update is that as of this week the police have decided to stop allowing the speaker bus with the PA setup for speeches. The moving line of what the state allows is laid bare. The cops barely tolerate and then any pantomime of patience, deigning to let the assemblages form, is dropped as the numbers drop.
And registering the contradictions has felt like the longheld domain of aesthetic forms under capitalism, at least, those that attempt to think against/beyond totality.
Chris Nealon’s attention to innovative North American poetry in the post-Language era ... there’s a question he poses about ‘how different political moments breed different structures of political and poetic feeling’. The political moment we are in is one that began or at least intensified after 7 October and the Israeli government going fully mask-off, though of course their atrocities had long been known, and long gone on. Your mention of Robertson reminds me of Nealon’s reading of her poem Debbie, an epic, which is characterised by Nealon as ‘brav[ing] this kind of utopian description’ or ‘a wilful utopial’, in which she writes with the body, ‘equates ink with blood’. In another essay about the poetic case, Nealon poses poetry’s unrealisability topoi, in which poetry is rendered as ‘an ancient language of use-value and a modern one of surplus-value’. Or, that ‘the topoi of unrealisability give poetry’s defenders a way to suggest that the significance of poetry is not captured by the language of making or purpose but that it is a type of activity that puts pressure on the social meanings of both.’ Turning away from instrumentalised aspect of poetry ‘opens up a space of bewilderment about the present that is potentially critical, even as it risks valorising uselessness as such’.④
I think this gets towards what you said in your last letter. It’s also something I’ve been working out how to articulate in my thesis: that I’m not only interested in poetic form as we encounter it through reading, but also the thinking and being in the world that is concentrated through the poetic mode of making itself. How these are connected.
It also is true that organising and mobilising on the streets does not disqualify poetry. We can do both. This might be a shift in my feelings from when we first started. Or not.
Can you send me some Moten to read? I have dipped in here and there over the years but it feels right to think with him more closely in our collaborative project. I will keep reading Robertson.
My head is full of value form theory, so I’m wrestling with how this registers in the political mode. What it means on the streets, y’know?
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Thursday 4 July 2024, 4:47pm (AB)
Welcome back. I hope the travels were good. A conference can be such a strange way to be in a place but it’s so beautiful when they are meeting places for old and new friends whose electric resonances make a soft buzz that warms and excites.
There are certainly new forms of repression emerging all the time. On the institutional front, our university management has just introduced ‘a new standard for visiting speakers’ that requires staff to ‘evaluate and manage risks’ associated with visiting speakers in order to ‘balance the right to academic freedom and freedom of speech with institutional autonomy to permit or refuse invited visiting speakers or external visiting speakers from operating at, for, or on behalf of UNSW.’ The policy is meant to be wielded as an instrument of discipline, a layer of dispersed command. Despite the appeal to academic freedom, it has the capacity to stifle discourse under the guise of due diligence. The timing of its release makes it feel specifically oriented to the post-October 7 political moment. Of course, this is what we expect from the contemporary university which is antithetical to the project of study as a lifelong collaborative practice. As we saw with the encampments – where OH+S policy was invoked as a justification for breaking up the occupations – policy is a central tool in the disciplinary apparatus of the modern university. I think of Moten and Harney who, in The Undercommons, write that ‘policy is correction, forcing itself with mechanical violence upon the incorrect, the uncorrected, the ones who do not know to seek their own correction.’ Policy supplements older forms of command that emerge from histories of dispossession, racialisation, policing.
Strid and I have been reading histories of policing to try to better understand how police power functions, and one of things we have discovered is the continuity between police and policy which share an etymological root in the French-Burgundian word policie. Both policy and policing are concerned with production of order rather than simply the enforcement of it. Both are practices that require discretionary judgements and garner force through implementation. Changed policy animates the police crackdown on the speaker bus which, given that it has been in operation for months, presumably does not contravene the law. All of this has me thinking about something Joshua said about struggle when he visited a few years ago: it’s as simple and as complex as figuring out ways to block all the paths that they use. I love this formulation which is clear-eyed about the state’s capacity to mobilise repressive apparatuses that will forge new paths of dispossession while impelling us to search for new tactics to block them. His maxim was put forward in key of historical materialist analysis: if populations made surplus to the needs of capital are rapidly expanding under the crisis-laden regimes of capitalist accumulation then our struggles must be led by this block whose collective power is the only thing capable of arresting the violence of capital and state. How might organising embrace forms of disorganisation and spontaneity? All of this is to say, I hope that an improvised solution to cops blocking the speaker bus (and everything else) can be devised.
Perhaps this is also one way of starting to think through the relation between value-form theory and what it means on the streets. I am not so invested in the idea of a value-form school and the internal debates that spring up over form-determined readings of Capital, but I am interested in the way that some of these currents allow us to understand the recurring cycles of crisis. That value-forms determine labour processes has been useful in trying to understand the way that value is not confined to labour fixed in products but extends to production and reproduction when these processes are subjected to co-operation, labour-saving technology and machinery, and so on. I’m still studying here but form-determined readings of labour have been useful in trying to make sense of the inherent contradiction of capital in which the amount of socially necessary labour time is continuously reduced even though it is the sole source of surplus value until capital undermines itself. The renewed attention on the general law of capital accumulation as that which, in the contemporary moment, produces a population rendered redundant to the needs of capital and so increasingly vulnerable to the armed wings of the state seems to me to direct us back to the question of struggle. Understanding the dynamics that produce surplus populations might be one way to make sense of where struggle might move next.
I love your attention Nealon’s question concerning how different political moments breed different structures of political and poetic feeling. In the current moment, the question seems to me to ask how we might attend to the structures of political and poetic feeling that belong to surplus populations in their local and global manifestations. What links Palestinians facing settler-colonial genocide with First Nations people facing ongoing logics of elimination here with Black subjects confronting the death-dealing violence of policing and prisons in the US? Is there a shared structure of feeling that connects these struggles? I’ve been trying to think through this question lately and am provisionally thinking of this structure of feeling as one that we might call ‘after optimism’, as distinct from Lauren Berlant’s famous articulation of ‘cruel optimism.’ Berlant coined the phrase in the wake of the 2007-08 global financial crisis to describe the attachments we continue to have to good life fantasies that were disintegrating and becoming increasingly out of reach: the market, the nuclear family, upward mobility, stable employment, and so on. More than a decade on and as global surplus populations continue to expand, might the promise of the good life be giving away to a post-optimistic structure of feeling that understands the impossibility of existing institutions to arrest the mess we find ourselves within? I guess this is one attempt to begin thinking about what a poetics of surplus populations might look and sound and feel like. I haven’t read Robertson’s Debbie yet but I love this sense of a wilful utopia written. And I am eager to pay attention to what languages might give such a space form.
We’re heading up north to spend a week or two in Kakadu and Darwin. So will see you on the other side but will leave you with the directness with which June Jordan articulates the necessity of a poetic feeling shared across struggle in the closing lines of ‘Moving towards home’:
I was born a Black woman
And now
I am become a Palestinian
Against the relentless laughter of evil
There is less and less living room
And where are my loved ones?It is time to make our way home.
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Friday 19 July 2024, 12:59pm (AB)
Back from a couple of weeks in the Northern Territory. Was beautiful to camp, walk, hang, read – so many birds, so many crocs! It was so good to escape the cold too.
I’ve been re-reading Black Skins, White Masks with the Wednesday night reading group (we’re missing you!) and last night we discussed ‘The Lived Experience of Blackness’ chapter. I was struck by Fanon’s account of reason and its limits:
I was up against something unreasoned. The psychoanalysts say that nothing is more traumatizing for the young child than his encounters with what is rational. I would personally say that for a man whose only weapon is reason there is nothing more neurotic than contact with unreason.
His articulation of the limits of reason as a tool for combatting unreason feels resonates with our present and its rising fascist tide. If colonialism and racism, as Fanon tells us, are beyond reason, then we must pursue redress by other means. The boycotts, encampments, blockades are all versions of these tactics of course and it’s been beautiful to see them flourish. Perhaps the task of poetics is to help us to feel for those rhythms of struggle that are beyond reason, countering the unreason of coloniality with the unreason of spontaneity. I think of Marx, too, who wrote of revolution in The Eighteenth Brumaire as that which
cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped itself of all its superstitions concerning the past. Earlier revolutions relied on memories out of world history in order to drug themselves against their own content. In order to find their own content, the revolutions of the nineteenth century have to let the dead bury the dead. Before, the expression exceeded the content; now, the content exceeds the expression.
I want a language that is touched by struggle, expression that takes it cues from insurgent sociality. Perhaps a poetics that reaches for this might also bear some of the weight of the crushing forces we come up against.
I’m not exactly sure what this language looks like but I wrote a poem today thinking about the colonial world on one hand and our songs on the other. Here it is:
Rainer Diana Hamilton says:
‘A song should be useful
for both dancing and crying.’
Watch closely and you’ll see
a body acquired as the first notes
sound; possession as magic
not misery. Gabe tells me,
play Nina Simone singing
Who Knows Where the Time Goes
live at the Philharmonic Hall in ‘69.
You use up everything you’ve got
trying to give everybody what
they want, she says with a voice
weathered by a million storms
to someone who’s not even in
the room and we’re already fucked
up. The beat falls heavy as feet
fall in collective step, procession
as possession but with-
out monotony. The organ
rushes and all that is left:
dancing and crying at the same
time, which is one way to take
flight while looking at the rubble
and the expanse.Listen and you might hear:
arise, wretched of the earth
in all our songs. The body
acquired won’t kneel nor lie
splayed, prostrate on cold, damp
earth. The refrain leans further
and further forward like a hand
instinctively reaching for a match
or a body bent into a shape
beyond the word no. In time,
strands of fibre at once rough and soft
make a thick weave where nothing
turns to everything.
Send your news from the south.
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Monday 29 July 2024, 10.18pm (EG)
A quick note here to say, as I had worried would happen, my flimsy grasp on these thoughts and ideas emerging from this exchange has been finally lost. There is no news, only feelings, which aren’t ready for dealing, and I’m using whatever is in the tank to get through each day, and the truth is, it doesn’t matter because I don’t really matter anyway, and this is the unresolvable tension of it all, which I can’t render for poems or close careful thought, or offer anything from. Anything else would be fake, constructed, untrue.
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FOOTNOTES
✷ 1. From Human Poems, translated by Clayton Eshleman, Grove Press, 1968
✷ 2. China Miéville, Embassytown, Del Ray, 2011
✷ 3. Beverly Best, The Automatic Fetish, Verso, 2024
✷ 4. Christopher Nealon, ‘Camp Messianism, or, the Hopes of Poetry in Late-Late Capitalism’, American Literature, Vol.76:3, 2004.
Andrew Brooks is a Lecturer in the School of Arts & Media, UNSW, a co-director of the UNSW Media Futures Hub, a founding member of the Infrastructural Inequalities research network, a co-editor of the publishing collective Rosa Press. With Astrid Lorange, he is one half of the critical art collective Snack Syndicate. He is the author of Inferno (Rosa) and the co-author of Homework (Discipline).
Elena Gomez is the author of Admit the Joyous Passion of Revolt and Body of Work. She lives on unceded Wurundjeri country.
The Liminal Festival took place 2–4 August 2024, in partnership with The Wheeler Centre. This collection of work is in concert with, and responds to, the panels, conversations and provocations put forth by some of the nation’s most talented writers, artists and thinkers. Find out more about the Liminal Festival here.