***
Dear Will,
I’m sorry to have taken so long to reply to you. This morning when I got up I listened to the German news. There was an item on the decision by the Berlin Senate to deport four non-German citizens from Germany, for participating in Palestine solidarity politics. None of them has been convicted of a crime; the deportations are justified purely on the grounds of ‘security’. The news anchor asked, is this comparable to the Trump government’s decision to deport Mahmoud Khalil (etc.)? A guest was then called on, who said, no, experts say that it is not comparable to the decision by the Trump government to deport Mahmoud Khalil. That was that. The programme continued.
So the day started with this knot of rage in me. 27 people were killed overnight in Gaza in a school shelter. The German news programme reports that the Israeli government says this is necessary, so that they can get their 26 living hostages back. Etc. The sick magic of numbers.
So all of this relates to ‘denial’, as you have been discussing it, and the question of voids that have come up in our shared exchange around Verity’s recent poetry and Alberto’s fascism book. The assertion of non-comparability by the guest on the German news show is a very pure form of denial. The liberalism that she defends by that denial, is a void. Fascism per liberalism is pure outside, pure evil, pure other, we cannot be like that, q.e.d. But the repudiation of similitude is the means of denial, and so it is an instrument of fascism in the purest sense. Once language has been perfectly stripped of meaning, of sense, of physical reference, of bodily implication, of feeling, of thought, the assertion of concepts becomes a pure exercise of power, the pure power to command assent. It is sadism, a Sadean mechanism in which language only seems to be the medium and really it is just one body, dominating another and the intervening element could just as easily be a brick. No, the liberal European state is not ‘comparable’ to the fascist US one, not even when it does exactly the same thing: this is a game of domination, played out in language; an exercise in voiding and a denial and a pretense of dissimilarity.
I’ve been thinking for a long time now about the poem that you quote at the end of your letter: ‘The world is always complete. But things get lost’. The flatness of that contradiction, the simplicity and plainness of it. For some weeks after you wrote, I was reading some of the theoretical documents around ACT UP. At one point I read Douglas Crimp’s essay ‘Mourning and Militancy’, which I first encountered via a discussion at the end of Hannah Proctor’s book Burnout. Crimp also raises the question of the usefulness of the Freudian approach to mourning as something limited in time and subject to correction by ‘reality’. If death and loss becomes the inevitable accompaniment to all of your political activity, as for AIDS activists in the early 1990s it did, then mourning clearly becomes interminable. But what is interesting for me about Crimp’s essay is what ‘mournful militancy’ means. In some ways the coinage seems like a euphemism. At one point, Crimp talks about the necessity of acknowledging in our politics a kind of ‘death drive’, which he defines in terms of a violence which is internal to us and ineliminable: an internal, unchangeable violence which accompanies the external, changeable violence that is done to us and that we struggle against. The question of the relation of the ‘death drive’ to ‘mourning’ is never explicitly discussed in his article, but the question about what it means to be ‘identified with the dead’ (the dead lovers and friends and comrades of the AIDS crisis, hundreds of them) perhaps answers it implicitly. To withdraw your ‘libido’ from the world of the living, according to Freud, is what it means to be ‘in’ mourning; but it also means prioritising the claims of the dead over those of the living. Crimp’s idea that this is a death drive expresses the fact that it is a response to a violence that has already been inflicted, which is internally felt, and is irreversible. The struggle for the living continues, on his account, but the claims that that struggle makes on us are necessarily attenuated, diminished or interrupted by the ‘canalising’ of feeling towards those who are no longer ‘there’ (who are missing), and who cannot benefit from any victories that we might win.
There is something starred out and pixelated in these formulations. They suggest two distinct ideas without clearly identifying them as such. ‘To mourn’ implies nothing except a ‘retraction’ of desire from the living. A death drive implies negativity, the internalisation of violence and its reproduction as an internal energy or wish. A ‘death-drive militancy’ would suggest something different to a ‘mournful’ one, but Crimp allows the latter formula to stand for both. The slightly inhibited or evasive quality of that theoretical conflation becomes visible in a film that I think in some ways grew out of his theoretical work, Gregg Bordowitz’ Fast Trip, Long Drop, which I watched on UBUweb a few weeks ago. In the Bordowitz film, the purpose of the intervention is different. It’s no longer simply to ‘hold open a space’ for mourning, or even smoothly to integrate mourning with activism, but to give expression to an active conflict. Bordowitz: ‘I became preoccupied with the burdens that sick people bear on behalf of those around them who are well. I wanted to get a handle on despair and put it out there as a political problem. To be recognized and discussed. If we couldn't do this, then it all seemed like bullshit.’
The final sentence expresses the truth of the first. ‘Militancy’ is bullshit if it can’t ‘get a handle on despair’. People who are ‘well’ don’t want to hear about despair because they aren’t ready to accept the implications. For them, despair is only a sign of defeat. They don’t understand that for others it’s the only thing that remains to be achieved, that articulated despair is already a triumph over muteness and silence and that for someone who finds themselves in this situation the ‘optimism’ of the healthy is itself a hostile force, a form of violence that has to be struggled against, a repressive power. In a radical conception, the role of the ‘death drive’ would be to advance the recognition that there is no movement for emancipation that doesn’t contain this tendency to silence or deny; it would be the means of struggle of the dying against the living, a way of transforming the coercively presumptive vocabulary of what constitutes success and what defeat.
‘The real = nothing is missing’.
I guess I wanted to describe here something more personal in order to try to explain what it is that I’m getting at, ‘in memory of my feelings’. It will feel like a long digression.
When I first started to write poetry, I did so in some kind of fidelity to the idea of militancy. I wanted to write a poetry in which everything could change, where everything could be altered, but my basic political vocabularly was something ‘I really meant’. This idea about ‘real’ meaning---about what I literally believed---introduced a kind of split in my sense of what happened to language when it ‘entered’ poetry. On the one hand, there was everything meaningless in my experience, everything cruel or reality-denying and absurd, everything cliched and idiotic and worn out and wrong. All of this had to be messed up, inverted, distorted, dissolved, undone; and poetry was the means or instrument for this because it imposed no constraints on what, or how, I wrote.
On the other hand there was the language of my political beliefs, or the language in which I politically believed. The separation of those two ‘areas’ of language led, at first, to something that at one level you could say looked like ‘satire’: the language that I tortured and distorted was the language of the society I rejected and despised. The language that I believed in and cherished, was the language of ‘my political tradition’: the movement I devoted myself to. Later on, all of this started to change. I remember really clearly how it felt, at the threshold, at the threshold of my discovery that all of my language could be treated indifferently as material, that all of my language, the language of militant conviction and material economic reality, as well as the scraps and fragments of everyday language, stupefied language, dead language, the language of a repressive and brutal liberal society, could be dissolved in the same poetic space. I felt, at the threshold of that movement, as if I was committing an act of betrayal, I remember really well and clearly how distractingly painful it was, to decide that all language could be subject to transformation in the same way. I think you could map this moment onto what Crimp calls ‘mourning’ in a Freudian sense: the withdrawal of ‘libido’ from a set of concepts that previously I had idealised, to the point that I could not bear to change them, could not alter them, could not touch them other than to reassert the undying validity of the aspirations that they contained and represented and made expressible in my life, if there was such a thing and without aspirations how could there be. It took me such a long time, so many years, to make this step, to accept that in order not to produce bullshit, the bullshit Bordowitz talks about, the bullshit of silence or denial, it was necessary to withdraw my love from the words that that poetry is made of; and then once I’d done it I was free again, poetry became again a living practice for me, a means of being alive in the world and in politics too, that dead reification, something started moving again.
That was one stage in a sequence. And then after Marina died I experienced another kind of shock in my relation to language, or my relation to time... maybe it’s the same thing. I felt like every moment in my life had suddenly become unalterable and fixed. The sense I’d previously had, that I was changing and developing, and that in changing and developing I also altered my relation to all of the earlier moments of my ‘own’ life, basically imploded, and I started to see my ‘biography’ instead as this endless sequence of discrete and fixed moments, a long list of items in which each one counted for itself, was bounded, and unalterable. After no longer had any bearing on before, there was a just a sum or total: the total of my life and all of its failures and successes. All of the moments drifted apart, like the debris from an explosion taking place in a void.
I have no map for this feeling. I don’t know how to say it related to ‘mourning’, or ‘the death drive’, it was just another way of being, and insofar as I wanted to keep on writing poetry I had to register this reality as well, meaning not only the mutability and the repressiveness of the language that I loved, but also the limits to my own ability to change anything, to change really anything and the history of my life was just suddenly there as a brute fact, laid out in front of me, as clearly as the body of the person who I loved and who was ‘gone’ had been laid out in front of me: and it was as if my inability to prevent Marina’s death had metamorphosed and expanded into this much more general inability, to change anything at all, really anything at all about my own experience; the failures and the omissions and the absences of love and the violence and the insecurity were as unalterable as the self-transformations they gave rise to, and existed alongside of them. ‘The real = nothing is missing’. These are the things I cannot change. I wanted to express this as completely as I could before the force of the recognition was gone. I cannot change them. If I could get there, I knew this would be something belonging to ‘the real’ for me, perhaps to what you call the non-symbolised, as something that breaks through language into thought, though I am still struggling with this concept and I hope we can keep on talking about it. There is this thing that I cannot change, but in expressing it I feel that it can push its way up out of language like a bone through skin and that this too is a way of bringing us back to ourselves, to the reality of our being which is also the reality of the struggles in which we participate and our desire, fucked up and limited and scoliated and confused as it is, that we wake up with somehow, sometimes, in spite of everything.
‘These memories, visions, dreams, reveries – or what you will – are different’, writes H. D. ‘Their texture is different, the effect they have on mind and body is different. They are healing. They are real. The are as real in their dimension of length, breadth, thickness, as any of the bronze or marble or pottery or clay objects that fill the case around the walls’.
‘They are healing. They are real’. And all of this is why I’m so preoccupied with the question of resemblance. It hurts to resemble something you’ve told yourself you’re not, something you shouldn’t like, something you shouldn’t want. It hurts to see sometimes how you resemble a fascist in your own relation to language and not to be able to say why you are different but just to feel it, weakly and sincerely, and to rely on others to believe you. Vice versa, it hurts some of our friends to resemble liberals, even to the point that they would rather make excuses for fascist states than lose their own sense of identity. It hurts to lose your sense of identity, your sense of self, it hurts to feel who you are push up through it like a bone through skin, while others watch, it hurts to feel your own sense of identity and your need for language come into conflict with one another, it hurts to to fall into a void, to become one, it hurts to admit you’re confused. It probably hurt Gregg Bordowitz to feel that the compulsory optimism of the movement he’d given his life to was bullshit. Does this have anything to do with a ‘death drive’? It feels like it has something to do with weakness to me, not ‘strength’ or ‘muscle’ so much as a weakness that has to be endured, or with a power to endure, to endure the rendering visible of your own weakness, as a person without even the minimal property of a stable identity. It works the other way round, too. Liberals can’t endure what they aren’t able to describe; this is a form of hatred of weakness, the weakness implied by resembling something that you’re not. It comes back to the lines from the poem that you translated:
I
knew I had lost something
and
that nothing was missing
It
hurts to live like this, because it is confusing; you can hear the pain of the
confusion in these lines I think: the everyday, undialectical bewilderment. I
still think an anti-fascist art begins with the ability to endure the specific
weakness of no longer being able to distinguish ourselves from what we oppose;
of no longer being able to resemble what we defend.
Much
love,
Danny
***
***
An afterthought:
So it's Sunday now and as I suspected a few things have sunk
a bit deeper in. I just walked to the general hospital and sat for an hour in
the staff changing area, where a year ago Marina and I sat and I bought her a
ricemilk that she wanted to eat (she wasn't supposed to eat; she wanted to eat;
what did they expect us to do?). What I wrote on my phone while I was
there:
'The assumption that there is a thing called history, or a thing called class,
or a thing called wealth, which can be "understood", controlled.
Which exists outside of language. Which is independent of poetic language and
its heraclitean disturbances. The power of this wish. Of the wish for one thing
that would be real and independent of our own mind and its symbolic resources,
that would be "outside", that would escape the endless uncertainties
of historical process, or of our own changing moods. I find myself right now in a situation in which I am struggling to
feel very much about anything, after a year in which feeling has often felt as
natural as breathing. I try to accept this fact, to acknowledge that it is out
of my control. All of this has more to do with the ebbs and flows of emotion,
with how I'm doing today, than it does with "linguistics" or
"linguistic epistemology"---tired academic debates of half a century
ago about whether anything is outside of the symbolic order, now mostly used as
grist for a fascist conspiracy theory about gender. I love what you say, Will,
about "a particular type of knowing that depends on making history into
something you can draw lessons from". I just don't think anyone can be
torn open as a subject and still think like that, that "history" is
there like a corpse on a table and the task is to ask "what went
wrong". In my own life, by this means, in being torn open, I also came to
feel as if it were possible to recover my own damaged idiosyncrasies of
perception, as a way of acting on the world, and no longer as simply
"distortions" and errors to be overcome. And I cannot not see this
within the framework of illness and recovery; even if what we recover from is
more like cognitive health than anything that would typically be defined as
"illness". The sick, healthy desperation to hold on to something
"real" is itself something I want to describe more clearly, to show
how it governed me, how it dominated me for years, and how the realisation of
that need in my life itself has a biography, a narrative, and is not just, or
even mainly, a "position", like a machine-gun emplacement on the
strategic map of a battlefield. Perhaps the main project of my poetry in the
last years has been to describe this confusing, specific difficulty, of placing
myself outside of that position, having once allowed myself to be brought
there: "[A]n unhinging experience".'
(To my right a grey-haired Turkish cleaner with a Fila bumbag, to my left a
small tree twitching in the freezing wind.)'
So I'm back in my flat now. There's a risk of simply endorsing something that
looks like mysticism. I've been reading Fanny Howe and thinking of how that
plays out in the scene of contemporary poetics. Unknowing, negative capability;
what Howe calls 'bewilderment'. But here's another way out (not the only one):
to abandon a political vocabulary as an object of belief, and then return to it
as an object of fantasy, as something cartoonish and laughable and garishly
overblown, but for that reason perversely dreamlike and shapeshifting as well,
vibrantly, vividly painless: no longer as an object of agonised 'rational'
doubt. Verity's relation to 'Marxism' (/Maoism) sometimes strikes me as working
in something like this way.
This brings me back to the discussion of fascism and voids one more time. I
find myself only half-interested in Guattari's claim that fascism is 'in' us.
That's true, of course; but it only takes us so far. At worst, he makes an
inert general claim that mirrors the inert, general claim that fascism is a
form of populist conservativism involving extra-state militias. It's not the
end-state but the process that interests me: the endless process of hollowing
out, of emptying, of voiding, that fascism *is*, alongside the equally
never-ending capitalist process of spectacularisation, glamourisation,
recuperation: all the 'phase shifts ... latencies, delays' described by
Didi-Huberman, the contrary forces, the shearing and sliding, all the
metamorphoses through which distinct tendencies come to seem identical at the
level of appearance. I've thought for a long time about the Situationist
concept of 'the spectacle', about why it is that that concept seems at once so
vital for understanding our reality and at the same time so helpless, so
useless and so out of date. I think the answer is perhaps that Debord thought
that what existed beneath the spectacle, or what emitted it, was 'the
commodity', and the commodity was something that the Situationists believed,
via Western Marxism, Lukács, etc., that they understood, just as Trotskyists
thought that they understood "history"---that ‘particular type of
knowing’ again. By this path they arrive at a marxist version of
Traditionalism, the idea of the pristine religion and the elitism of the illuminated.
A conspiracy of the dead, end.
To want to see it all means seeing less than all of it. I meant to write this
more quickly than I have: I have to try to sell some furniture on the internet.
I try to hold on to 'understanding', rational insight, as something that
happens on occasion and in bursts. Right now there are days or even weeks in
which I'm able to feel almost nothing at all, in which I move like an emotional
sleepwalker through my own life, and the things I have experienced make no more
impression on me than the suffering that I watch at a safe remove on my
devices, along with everyone else. But that doesn't mean that I am incapable of
feeling; only that I exist in time.
Perhaps that's a little clearer than my last message.
D xx
