Craig Dworkin: Trotskys Hammer

Caminhando contra o vento

Sem leno, sem documento.
Caetano Veloso
Bob Perelman opens his essay on Bruce Andrews:
Not many days after the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center,
the New York Times ran an article discussing the structure of the
building and the possibilities of its being brought down by a larger
and more thoughtfully placed explosion. It turns out not to be
easy: apparently, each tower is built to withstand the impact of a
fully loaded jet liner taking off.
The passage, in part, is a gambit to capture the readers attention (an aim now
assured by its fatal irony); but Perelman is also trying to find the vocabulary with
which talk about the architecture of literary and physical violence, and about the
structural relation between radical politics and radical poetics.
The nature of those connections, or even the lack of connections, is difficult to
describe, and the rhetoric of their correspondence has been heavily fraught with
the legacy of modernism. As late as the summer of 1849, with the revolutions in
Europe being crushed and state powers being consolidated, Richard Wagner
could write: I have an enormous desire to practice a little artistic terrorism. As
late as the summer of 2002, with the rubble still being cleared from lower
Manhattan and state powers being consolidated, on-line culture jammers could
continue to pay homage to Peter Lamborn Wilson and write about their work as
poetic terrorism.
Indeed, whatever Karlheinz Stockhausen might actually have said about the
relation between the Trade Center catastrophe and great works of art, it was
instantly legible and effortlessly translatable to the statement that the event
was das grte Kunstwerk [the greatest work of art] because of the
familiarity of a Decadent rhetoric that extends back to Lautramonts cruel and
violent beauty and the fall of Baudelaires mauvais vitrier. From the
Craig Dworkin: Trotskys Hammer
aestheticization of violence to the definition of aesthetics as violence, the
sentiment is summed up in Laurent Tailhades reputed quip, after Auguste
Vaillants bombing of the Chamber of Deputies in 1893: Qu'importent les
victimes, si le geste est beau? [What do the victims matter, so long as the gesture
is beautiful]. By 1929, Tailhades decadent dandy bravura would be codified by
And Breton in his Second Manifesto: Lacte surraliste le plus simple consiste,
revolvers aux poings, descendre dans la rue et tirer au hasard, tant quon
peut, dans la foule [The simplest Surrealist act consists of running down into
the street, pistols in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger,
into the crowd].
I am tempted to say that the frisson of such statements has always depended on
our knowledge that their rhetoric was inadequate precisely to the degree that it
was overstated. In any mature accounting, even the most radical poetry is of
course nothing like a pistol shot, or a bombing.
I am tempted to say that the manifest irresponsibility of such statements can now
no longer be avoided, and that we should be ashamed at the thought that it was
ever permissible to invoke them in the first place. I want to apologize for letting
their valorization go unchecked and unchallenged, and for the adolescent
enjoyment I once took from them without even a hint of the bitter aftertaste they
now leave.
I am tempted to say that dismissing such statements on the grounds of their lurid
and overheated rhetoric keeps us from looking at their measure of frightening
truth. I dont want to now renounce the excitement I still feel at the bitter
promise of a poetry as dangerous as a pistol shot, or a bombing.
My ambivalence about these conflicting impulses, if not their immediacy, comes
less from the palpable events of September than from the lessons of poetry.

Craig Dworkin: Trotskys Hammer
There was much talk, in late September, about the comfort of poetry. Verse was
read on radio news programs. Auden was circulated. I was astonished. It had
never occurred to me to look to poetry for comfort. Quite the opposite; what I
have always valued about poetry is its restiveness: its difficulties and
discomforts and terrors. (I am choosing my words carefully). Moreover, the
poetry I value, the poetry of the avant-garde, must be difficult not because it is
especially subtle or complex or allusive, but because it makes an assault on the
very foundations of normative, communicative language.
An exhausted language unable to bear anything like the human narration; a
defeated language unable to make a clear-sighted commentary; a mode of
speech, or language itself, incapable of making meaning these might be seen
not as impediments to poetry, but rather as its goal. Les signes, Jean
Baudrillard recognized, doivent brler eux aussi [even signs must burn]. He
was arguing, in the aftermath of the failed Revolution of May 68, that
signification itself is an organisation fonctionnelle, et terroriste, de contrle du
sens [a functional and terrorist organization of the control of meaning].
That comprehensive, fundamental assault of a caustic and revolutionary poetic
language is necessary because, quite simply, the status quo is unacceptable. And
it has grown no more bearable since September. Forty years later and a world
apart, the diagnosis is still the same as the one Martin Luther King made, writing
from the Birmingham Jail in 1963: the nation and the world are in dire need of
creative extremists.
Indeed, difficult and frightening times may require all the more difficult and
extreme poetry: an unyielding writing that will refuse to mitigate a world which
we should not find comforting, and from which we should not be distanced.
Art exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony; Art, it is said, is
not a mirror, but a hammer: it does not reflect, it shapes. We might look for a
poetry that would measure the difference between Shklovskys stone and
Craig Dworkin: Trotskys Hammer
Trotskys hammer (which would not be their use value; rocks can make perfectly
good hammers, and both can be made into weapons with a flick of the wrist).
So the challenge is to keep poetry from throwing up an aesthetic shield between
us and violence; or worse, from aestheticizing violence. Or worse yet: that we as
readers of avant-garde poetry might grow too accustomed or enamoured of its
own violences. Victory, Guy Debord predicted, will be for those who will
have been able to create disorder without loving it.
If nothing else, in the end it may be the difficulties and uncertainties of poetry
that will keep its most attentive readers from making securely apodictic and
pontifical declarations even about what they know. Even about what they
believe. (Including what they know and believe about the uncertainties of
poetry).

Almost exactly thirty years ago, in St. Louis, the high-rise towers of another of
Minoru Yamasakis architectural monuments were demolished in an act of
aesthetic violence meant to cancel and redress the brutally violent aesthetic of his
condemned Pruitt-Igoe housing project. The difference, of course, being that the
St. Louis towers had been fully evacuated.
In that difference, perhaps, lies the poetic model Perelman was looking for. From
that model we might be able to reconstruct a sense of the power and place of
avant-garde poetry as a writing with all the techniques of terrorism, but without
its targets. The space between the structures is tight, and shifting, but I wonder if
there is room to pursue ambivalences without repressing any of their terms, and
if it is possible to reject the aestheticization of violence and simultaneously
embrace a poetics of sabotage, disruption, resistance, and hijack. I wonder if we
might understand poetry once again, or for the first time as that mode of
terrorism in which the victims are merely, and ruthlessly, words.
Craig Dworkin: Trotskys Hammer

Im walking against the wind with all its particulates making my throat catch
and my eyes tear but without handkerchief, without documents.

Craig Dworkin: Trotskys Hammer
SOURCES
Caetano Veloso, Alegria Alegria, (1967); on Tropiclia ou Panis et Circensis
(Philips, 1968).
Bob Perelman, Building a More Powerful Vocabulary: Bruce Andrews and the
World (Trade Center), in The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing
and Literary History (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1996).
Richard Wagner, letter to Franz Liszt 5.6.1849, in Franz Liszt-Richard Wagner
Briefwechsel, (Frankfurt am Main: Insel-Verlag, 1988).
Hakim Bey, Poetic Terrorism, in CHAOS: the Broadsheets Of Ontological
Anarchism (Weehawken: Grim Reaper Press, 1985); T.A.Z.: The Temporary
Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism (NY: Autonomedia,
1991).
Karlheinz Stockhausen, quoted in Der 11. September und die Erhabenheit der
Katastrophe," Die Welt (Berlin) 8.10.2001.
Andr Breton, Second Manifeste, in Manifestes du surralism (Paris: Gallimard,
1972).
Jean Baudrillard, Pour une critique de l'conomie politique du signe (Paris:
Gallimard, 1972).
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail (1963).
Viktor Shklovsky, Art as Technique, in Theory of Prose, Trans. Benjamin Sher
(Elmwood Park: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990).
Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, Trans. Rose Strunsky (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1968).
Guy Debord, Internationale Situationniste, no. 1, 1958.