Me, I hate the crowd, the herd. It always seems to me stupid or guilty of vile atrocities...I have never liked the crowd except on days of riot, if even then!...On those days there is a great breath in the air—one feels intoxicated by a human poetry as large as that of nature, but more ardent. (Gustave Flaubert, cited in Hardt & Negri's Commonwealth)
Creating is...a hugeness, an excedence, something which unleashes a surplus of productivity. Now, precisely at a time when labour power is cognitive, the desire for artistic expression presents itself in all places; when the mass of workers transforms itself into a multitude of of singular workers, the artistic act invests the forms of life, and these forms of life become the flesh of the world (Antonio Negri, Art & Multitude)I would never try to romanticize the recent London riots nor use the term 'poetry' as a radically new aestheticization of mob violence. Yet it is strangely tempting to do so. Marxist thinkers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their book Commonwealth make the usual sort of case for 'violent overthrow' & reorganization of society along the lines of a utopian notion of the 'common', even going so far as to say that violent acts of resistance, such as we've seen in urban uprisings everywhere, can be seen as a legitimate form of expression against the hierarchies of world capitalism. Mob violence springing almost spontaneously from a base of indignation (in the tradition of 'jacquerie revolts') can even be envisaged as a new sort of poetry of the future: "We might say, then...that we hate the crowd except in its days of rebellion, when it achieves a kind of human poetry." (245)
I like the forward-looking character of this new "human poetry". It's this notion of poetry of rebellion, while interesting as a contemporary poetics & even more interesting as a new, more significant 'avant-garde', that deserves attention. Not the traditional workbench materials of art but the streets have been turned into a collage of images of revolt and threatening mob rule. New media artist David Lewis-Baker, seeing the recent violence as "a surface reflection of a much deeper series of interrelated social and economic problems", has given artistic form to these deeper eruptive forces in his digital conceptual series entitled "London Riots" collages. Though the 'conceptual art' terminology's traditional (sounding even a little outdated), Lewis-Baker constructs from a uniquely new "geography of rebellion" (Hardt & Negri): the most spontaneous & violent type of art imaginable. YouTube has lately posted a video collage (comprising of BBC interviewer, West Indian writer & broadcaster Darcus Howe and background images of post-rioting Croydon) that's much closer to a sense of the "interrelated social and economic problems" than Lewis-Baker's.
I, too, like Flaubert, hate the crowd at its most stupidly violent and moronic but like Marxist critics I also fear & respect it. And ambivalence like mine about a poetry of rioting seems to have been exploited by media already.The Sun's infamous Wednesday, August 10 "Shop a Moron" headline is just as much new media art as a call to "name and shame rioters". As Jacques Rancière theorizes in The Emancipated Spectator, there is perhaps a "dialectic inherent in the political montage of images" like this one, with the potential to cause an "inversion of life". The Sun's front-page presentation of the London rioters is, on the face of it, artistic 'collage' and a vehicle also for political debate about causes and consequences. But as art, and as art only, it links the outsider like me to a system that both causes revolt and yet is brazen enough to use public media to denounce it. In this new artistic regime you're guilty by viewing, but it is a first step towards the emancipation (or 'subtraction') of the spectator from complicity & oppression. Here's a new revolutionary sense of literary 'making' from which we'll be excluded if viewing eyes remain clouded by hatred, neoliberal prejudices and even a traditional poetics.
As a poet with eye on world events I have to see poetry even in places where the old familiar grounds are being wildly deterritorialized. Both the subject & means of artistic expression have been profoundly altered. Perhaps the traditional language of poetry itself, faced with the realities of aggressive new urban codes, infrastructures of inner city poverty, and handheld technologies (like the BlackBerry) wielded as instruments of mobilization & violence, is moribund. After all, language per se now shares the stage with competing images, feelings and practices of globalized life. Perhaps what the new media art reveal is the very image of the decline of language's cultural hegemony. Again, Rancière, in a discussion of the "intolerable image": "we need images of action, images of the true reality or images that can immediately be inverted into their true reality, in order to show us that the mere fact of being a spectator... is a bad thing." (87) As a poet I have to be particularly attuned to the "intolerable image"of street rioting, and see the attempt to describe it just as spectator (namely, via traditional verse) as a "bad thing": something that amounts to a paradox.
But the paradox (as the new revolutionary poetics goes) can be resolved in action itself. Only a poetry codified in tradition is capable of sitting still long enough to watch the rioting: a position that, as we know, serves only to implicate its defenders & practitioners.The poet who preaches or theorizes only is, in other words, the most onerous, shamelessly removed from the rhythms of the suburbs, banlieue, & favelas, the storefronts and life in the metropolis, cowardly engaged in abstract experimentation only (too spiritless to change poetry from academic to real activity). Academic poetry keeps alive the oppressive hierarchies of language, thought & reality through its failure to engage with the lyrical forces of the common.To write is to dare to invert the conditions of life itself (Rancière), & always live immersed in the "poverty and precariousness" of the multitude (Hardt & Negri). In my previous post on John Berryman I've referred to this materialist dynamics of creativity as 'biolyrical'.
From the viewpoint of the spectator, the biolyrical can't help but offer up to the literary imagination only the "intolerable" either-ors: street protesters as front-page gangsters or cultural heroes, morons with a taste for gratuitous violence or the new avant-garde who use the streets, the technology of handhelds and the porous grid work of suburban London 'space' as the arena of a new poetics. It's a sort of 'bad faith' encounter with significant socio-cultural events that's to be overcome only through direct participation. As Antonio Negri says in a work devoted to examining in more depth the role of art in a new communist order, "the artist is...the symbol of realized subversion and of liberated freedom." (Negri, Art & Multitude, 52) It's a hope (both Negri and I share) that doesn't come without commitment to the democratic processes at work in cultural production & overthrow of the pernicious solitude of all academic theorizing (which Negri calls an "aesthetic illusion"). True art can only be done in communities, even when they occasionaly have to erupt into street violence.
