the moment of true poetry brings all the unsettled debts of history back into play (Guy Debord)
The Alienist tract “Poetry & Crime”1 opens with the observation that “Poetry is suppressed wherever it represents a threat to the rationale of social order.” It is easy to imagine that such a statement can only apply to those totalitarian states where “poetry” represents a threat to the prestige of the governing regime, as (under various conditions) it did during the Soviet era. Here “the force of poetry is in direct proportion to its illegality.” In the socalled “Free World,” the identification of poetry & crime is, by contrast, predominantly an affectation, inherited from modernist Rimbaud outsider-posturing that found its most impactful manifestation in rock-n-roll, punk, hiphop, noise. The idea that FBI agents actively infiltrate & subvert “poetry” circles in the US would, on the surface, appear ludicrous.
Salman Rushdie was recently quoted as saying “poetry can’t stop bullets,” which is very nearly a paraphrase of WH Auden’s automatic cliché “poetry makes nothing happen.” At best this seems an acquiescence to a state of affairs otherwise self-evident. At worst, a tragic view of the poet as bystander-of-history, with culture, broadly speaking, as its décor. This idea of self-enforced “cultural neutrality,” if you like – in place of “aesthetic autonomy” – didn’t affect itself by chance. Particularly worth remembering, among the many now documented instances, is that there was a time when Stephen Spender (not coincidentally a close associate of Auden & one time “US Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress”) served as a public relations agent for precisely this kind of dour “pragmatism” – in effect, a “useful idiot” (however unwittingly) of the US government.
In 1953, during the period of de-Stalinisation, when the intellectual “left” was a more openly contested territory than it had been in the immediate post-War period of Communist Party suzerainty, Spender – along with journalist Irving Kristol (later known as the “godfather of neoconservativism”) – founded Encounter magazine. In 1958, Melvin Lasky replaced Kristol as political editor. During this period & throughout the sixties, Encounter‘s pages were regularly graced with the work of Eugene Ionesco, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Malcolm Bradbury, François Bondy, Aldous Huxley & of course WH Auden. In 1967 it was revealed that, via the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the magazine had been funded by the CIA’s International Organizations Division (along with MI6). To his credit, Spender resigned upon learning of the CIA’s involvement; Lasky remained as editor till the magazine folded in 1991.
The US in particular, via the State Department & its agencies, devoted significant resources to the work of challenging Soviet cultural eminence & countering the idea of Cold War neutralism through such instruments as Encounter & the importing of writers like Auden (whose tenure in the US corresponded to his repudiation of previous Marxist viewpoints, accompanied by a reactionary “Anglican” turn). Where the Soviets promoted a poetics openly aligned to the state ideology, the US promoted an “avantgarde” that just as openly proclaimed itself to be apolitical or, as the euphemism goes, “non-ideological.” But while US foreign policy may have developed a strategic view of the “cultural front” within its broader Cold War machinations, the idea that poetry – independent of its exploitation by state apparatuses – could have any real, direct bearing upon the “struggle” of Freedom-against-Tyranny was one that could invite only ridicule (while, on the other hand, the blatant jingoism of this “struggle” was expected to be played with a straight face). And yet we must ask how it is that the Cold War – enacted across such varied social terrain – placed such apparent premium upon victory on this “cultural front” in the first place?
It’s a question that still poses itself today, not only in the context of socalled hybrid warfare, but by virtue of the fact that the exigencies of the Cold War did not change with the “fall” of the Soviet Union. The continuing Atomic World Order & its implicit exclusion of direct confrontation between the superpowers, means that even a “hot war” – such as that initiated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – would necessarily unfold across numerous fronts, including (or especially) the “cultural front,” as a proxy for the apparently unthinkable (nuclear Armageddon as automatic corollary of direct military conflict between Russia & the United States). At the same time, a significant amount of agitprop & informational warfare has been directed at the idea that really such a direct conflict already exists, but only on the “cultural front” can this otherwise secret state of affairs be represented, etc.
To properly understand what this question is asking, we need to keep in mind that the birth of Western thought as we know it today – meaning, the birth of metaphysics, which is to say, the philosophy of the state (as defined by Plato & represented, in the current conflict, by the likes of Alexandr Dugin & the 19th-century Ukrainophobe propagandist & icon Alexander Pushkin) – was accompanied by an attack upon the idea of poetic autonomy so severe as to demand its actual negation, while setting up a species of ”official poetry” in its place.
How could this be? How could the cohesion & prosperity of an apparently enlightened, “rational” concept of the state necessitate the reduction of poetry to the status of a political exile made to beg & the glorification of its parody?
It strikes us as ridiculous that the state & the powers-that-be should be in any way threatened by “poetry,” by “poems,” or by “poets.” Though it is the genius of the state to convince the newly literate masses that poetics amounts merely to this (poetry, poems, poets), rather than the entire discourse of the possible. Power is of course concerned with the maintenance of a narrative of control; it affects itself as a fait accompli, constituting what is real; & what is real determines what is possible. This is the causal rationale that the state – as the ultimate expression of the doctrine of philosophical Reason – is given to represent. But for this representation to carry the authority of the “truth” it apparently conveys, it is impossible for it to admit the contradiction of a poetics; in other words, the discourse of possibility as such, unbounded by the dogma of the state. To understand this in terms of a realpolitik, consider the assassination by cruise missile of Viktoriya Amelina in Kramatorsk by the Russian state apparatus (June 2023) – one in a series of targeted strikes against writers, journalists & arts institutions in whom & in which Pushkinite cultural imperialism is both refuted & exposed as a crime against humanity.
It’s not difficult to see how creating a caricature out of “poetry” – as merely these artefacts (poems) & their alienated producers (poets) – serves an exact ideological end. Power, the state, Reason (socalled) has always had an entirely “eugenic” view of poetry: either it must be excluded from the polis & contained in a ghetto, in effect exterminated, or else it may be permitted to re-enter the polis on condition that it collaborate with the ideology of Power (the phenomenon of Elizabethan courtly poetry is very much a case in point, but also its apparent antipode, emerging during Romanticism & achieving something of an apotheosis in the 20th-century avantgarde: that poetry is nevertheless also able to exploit & even at times subvert its “collaborationist” status within the polis is what ultimately delineates the latter from the former).
But where poetry had been exiled under the sign of its heresy (unreason, emotionalism, myth), its correlative within the polis acts under the sign of the jester: it’s truth, it’s justice, never attaining the status of the “political” as such, even as it serves the unique political function of representing the unpresentable, the impossible, the deadly. Poetry is the fool (Mad Tom), the internal exile, the linguist without a tongue, that turns the impermissible into spectacle & exposes the servility of all that is permitted.
Reason in Plato is an algorithmic that constantly refines & reduces all discourse to some quality of permission that it calls “truth”: that is to say, to ideological agreement [with it]. Plato calls this “dialectic.” In it, all discourse is effectively held captive to a supervising, supervening Reason; even those it expels are bound to it, since it claims dominion over the totality of thought – which is to say, over the thinkable & the unthinkable.
That Plato demands not only the subjection of poetry to Reason but that poetry speak only in the language of Reason, or be rendered mute, perhaps belies an alternative truth: that power (Reason) cannot understand it – & whether or not it fears what it doesn’t understand, what it cannot do is admit that it does not understand. When the philosopher-poet Ihor Kozlovskyi was imprisoned for 700 days by the occupying authorities in Donetsk, anything he wrote down was confiscated by the guards during their regular searches. Except for poetry. “They left only poems for some reason. They weren’t interested in poetry; they didn’t understand them.”
Nevertheless, poetry is enchained to the sovereign power it mocks & subverts & is doomed to be buried in the same tomb. The moment poetry is exiled from the ideal polis it is turned, programmatically, into a political vagabond: poetry, by a series of calculated humiliations & assaults, is made to beg for readmission to the state, though not in its own voice but in the language of power (that is to say, in bureaucratic prose, the language of State Reason), & is thereby turned into either a collaborator, a dissident or a political cretin – a “literal” fringe-dweller. This is the default setting of the state: “the awakening of the self,” as Adorno & Horkheimer observed, “is paid for by the acknowledgement of power as the principle of all relations.”2 The alternative is to inhabit a non-self, which is to say non-subject, rent through by the “paradox” of a doubly-alienated refusal to submit.
Cast aside by Reason for being on the side of “myth” (& the power “myth” formerly exercised over the state in the place that should have been rightfully occupied by Reason), poetry is doubly excluded as a figure of unreason – & only those “genres” of poetry that are prepared to denounce themselves (in what amounts to an archetypal show trial) might be readmitted – as examples to all who may still doubt the Reason’s power – within the walls of the ideal polis. Yet this casting aside is in fact a political charade, as in the “analogy of the cave” – it performs a work of “gaslighting” poetry into an acquiescence in its own “defeat.” (Really, “poetry” is just shadowy figures cast by false light on a cave wall? See, there are the mythic beings to prove it!) But just as, in Adorno & Horkheimer’s reading, “myth turns into Enlightenment,” so too poetry is coerced into the work of its own productive transformation. Its act of supplication will take place under a regime of judgement (formalised by Aristotle & cynically designated as a “poetics”), by which poetry is readmitted to the world within a separate domain of “culture” (& cultural knowledge, pedagogy, industry, etc.) in the same way that the “insane” are later admitted into “society” within the institution of the insane asylum, under the regime of a political “Reason” designed to enforce the internal exile of “mental illnesses”. That is to say, within a sociopolitical regime of what Foucault calls “discipline & punishment.”
Among such poetries to be subjected to “rehabilitation” not all were assigned the role of inmate or patient – some were assigned that of informant, orderly, capo, amanuensis, whore, commandant’s pet. Poetry that refused to thus abase itself was under threat of being cast into oblivion – excluded from the entire mimetic regime of the state, permitted no representation even within the carceral precincts of regulated “culture.” Such a poetry (stripped even of its identity) would reside in an underworld of criminality, of illegality – in the same class of political non-being as the terrorist & all other threats to the regime of power that still, somehow, evaded negation, assimilation or psychiatrisation. (It was to this “myth” of a secret poetry of disorder to which the avantgarde would subsequently lay claim – in Debord’s words, “The supersession of art is the ‘Northwest Passage’ of the geography of real life, so often sought for more than a century, a search beginning especially in self-destroying modern poetry.”)
What is central to all of this, however, is the fact that the entire dialectical movement of poetry’s exclusion & reincorporation into the state can be seen as in no way contingent but rather central to the entire project of Reason & its major strategic accomplishment. Thus transformed into an inverse panopticism, the “threat” of any actual dissident poetics was nowhere visible, while its powerlessness was everywhere verifiable. As a “mere” spectre, its very inexistence served a necessary foundational role in the myth of the state born immaculately of Reason. Not poetry in any reductive sense, but as general discourse of possibility: the trope-of-tropes, so to speak, of bringing-to-being. (Capturing, defining, knowing, authorising “words for Being,” as Heidegger would come to say, lies at the heart of the entire metaphysical project.)
Surely Reason doth protest too much. Perhaps to distract from the absence of any real contradiction in the fact that Plato (a dramatist who wrote yet denounced both writing & the seductions of dramatic poetry) should have argued incessantly (in the name of Socrates, the philosopher who did not write, imprisoned & judicially murdered for the crime of “corrupting the city’s youth”) for the construction of a prisonhouse of Reason within which to entrap the conscience of political life, if not life itself? Proto-Benthamite, by turns hysterical, paranoiac, masochistic: the true character of this dialectical rationale is concealed in plain view, in the very (self-)abnegation of its “method,” which is (let us admire the “irony” of it) sheer poetry, a trope-of-tropes. If Reason is the method in politics’ madness – or merely the palliative for whatever socio-political illness poetry is the symptom of – its inaugurating dialectical movement will have set in course what, throughout the Renaissance, Enlightenment, Industrial Revolution & the Post/Neoliberal present, would appear to be an ideal self-propagating pharmacological regime. A regime via which – like Plato’s two-sided pharmakon – both Reason & poetry will have ever since been available to the most diverse & contradictory forms of mystification. And while “poetry,” not philosophy, would be the “corrupter of youth” for the next 2000 years, it would be Reason – evolved under the aegis of the concentration camp, on the one hand, & capital & “capitalist realism” on the other – that would profit on it.
Such operations of judgement & control – as we see especially in the Phaedrus – extend from the most intimate & evanescent moments of love & inspiration to the abstract expanses of “myth” & universal history. But this “inverse pantopticism” mirrors & indeed apes not only the dialectical method but the seeming contradiction between two modes of mimesis – two apparently contradictory mimetic ideologies (the Platonic & Aristotelian) – which it shows in fact to be one: a unified dialectical regime of “representational logic.” In other words, of negation & reincorporation: from “truth” as production of “true representations” (productive of “an experience of true understanding”) to “representation” itself availing the “production of understanding” (as “true experience”). It is this regime that not only permits the foundation of a “philosophy of the state” upon a basis of Reason, but turns the state into an image of Reason itself, which it calls an image of reality: not an image merely of a “political reality” (one among others), but of reality-as-such (with all of the emotive appeal of a fundamental narcissism). And it is in this totalising, narcissistic movement that we see where the danger symptomatic in poetry ultimately lies – in its contradiction of the state’s “reflexive” self-evidence & the “singularity” of a “truth” that (while proclaiming itself absolute) requires to be enforced.
But what poetry here “represents,” above all, is that the Reason upon which the philosophy of the state is founded is itself mythological. For in expelling those poets in whom the protean forms of myth (polysemy) were an invocation to “actual” history, philosophy – at its paranoiac apogee – sought to construct an image of itself as pure teleology (historical necessity): the state as inevitable political evolution of Reason into a monotheism of absolute truth. But if to admit the existence of the heretic it must burn is thereby to admit that the foundations of this “ideal polis” are as purely abstract as it is, the open appearance of this contradiction only fuels an ever-more-elaborately hysterical response – which, “in truth,” is what the mimetic regime (of/as power) has always been. A regime as hysterical as it is insufficient. Not the “mass hysteria” of political irrationalism, for which it serves as a doppelganger while presenting itself as an adversary (the hysteria of Socrates’ judicial murder being its “primal scene”), but the “pure” symptomatic form of an hysteria that does not arise from, but “is,” its very techne politike.
For we should always suspect such an excessive labour of exclusion, negation, recuperation – a labour as susceptible to its own alienating effects as any other labour (but more: a labour that belies alienation as its own precondition). We can only wonder that the real power of such a regime to affect the exclusion of “poetry” in the first place is as dubious as its self-assertion as political teleology under the rule of Reason. Its capacity to orchestrate this entire drama belongs to that genre of utopian writing from which its very philosophy springs – as what, for all intents & purposes, was an act of revenge. It was from the myth of the judicially murdered sage, wise beyond the measure of the state (Socrates, the analogue of Homer, mythical poet & implicit ideologue of the “Greek world” [as Pushkin is of the “Russian world”]), that this revenge derived its righteous indignation. Revenge “against” a system of superstition, corruption, demagoguery & irrationalism (apparently). The work of Reason here corresponds to two phases of hysterico-political teleology – corresponding to the Platonic & Aristotelian regimes of mimesis – the psychotic (paranoiac alienation from knowledge) & the perverse (alienation as paranoiac knowledge). Whereas in psychosis alienation is foreclosed, in perversion alienation is disavowed.
In “poetry,” Plato found the ideal subject, by means of which an insurgent “philosophy” could denounce the very powers-that-be it sought to usurp by reasoned argument. More than a scapegoat, the denunciation of “poetry” was a strategic operation, an alibi, a Trojan horse: it permitted, by means of an apparently innocuous vehicle, the infection of the political body & the expropriation of an entire political consciousness. It is the exploitation of a perverse desire, for power to stand, by an “ironic” reversal, in poetry’s shoes. Ironic because, to become itself, it was first necessary for philosophy – the discourse of Reason – to exit the realm of literature, drama, art, culture in the sense of a collective stupefaction, & acquire a political language. A hermeneutics of power arrived at by a derangement (pace Rimbaud) of the senses.
If poetry’s relation to myth was ever seriously a question for Plato’s, it was by virtue of this relationship’s precedence. (Plato’s key manoeuvres against writing & poetry are always by way of myth, which is simultaneously disavowed – it’s an incredible performance.) Poetry’s fault was not to be beholden to myth, but its precondition. Its mastery could mean everything. Not because myth could besot the quotidian with the otherworldly, but rather because of myth’s worldliness, its infusion in all things, the poetics of what Henri Lefebvre would much later call everyday life. To stake Reason’s claim upon political reality it was necessary to cast everyday life as a mode of being constituted through spectacle – that is to say illusion, myth, representation, poetics. It was necessary to do this in order to establish a clear separation of the political from the merely contingent & material, & refound it – as the dimension of all social relations – upon abstract principles of Reason transcendent (which much later, to the young Marx, would come to bear a disarming likeness to commodity fetishism).
Were it a mere consequence of representation, everyday life – it was supposed – would have no clear consciousness of itself (it could not, according to Socrates’ dictum, know itself other than through a simulacrum of knowledge, that is to say, poetics). To Plato’s autocratic “Republic” – in which everyday life was mustered around an (impossible) principle of enlightenment – Lefebvre & the Situationists responded with a delirious rejuvenation of the “Commune”: by which they meant, the creation of situations – of a poetic, subversive, audacious “revolution in everyday life.” For this, Debord argued, it was necessary to realise poetry – which meant “nothing less than simultaneously & inseparably creating events & their languages” both in place of & (ironically, parodically) by means of the language of power itself (poetry’s “revenge”). Poiesis here is revolution – the spectre that forever haunts the state, having preceded it, auguring its end.
That the western media have recently been perplexed by the fact that 3 stanzas from a Joseph Brodsky poem (“Still Life”), printed in an ornate gold frame, were left by parties unknown on the Russian war criminal & mercenary Yevgeny Prigozhin’s grave in St Petersburg, indicates how opaque Plato’s lesson remains today (how could it be otherwise?). Yet clearly a psychopathology of power still exists in which “the poem,” as a kind of fetish or abstract universalism (icon, talisman, trophy, magic charm), “signifies” – but what it signifies is made mysterious (like an augury, an oraculation, an incongruous piece of hoodoo). We don’t need to look far, though, to find this pathology in full operation. The Nazi cult was rife with it & its echoes reverberate accordingly through the writings of Martin Heidegger, for whom an occult marriage bound poetry & metaphysics to give birth to words of power – or in Heideggerian speech words for Being. We may just as readily say, words for unBeing – the fate & abiding fatalism of poetry having marked, ever since Plato, the way of an incipient Final Solution. One that, like every monotheism, succumbs to a lethal self-parody. For power may force history but poetry can unwrite it.
Interior Ministry, September 2023
1 ALIENIST #4 (December 2018): 12.
2 Theodor W. Adorno & Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cummings (London: Verso, 1979) 9.
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