“Poetry has to be made by everyone, not just one.” [Lautréamont]
The “interruption” is a process of shaping, i.e. the political function of separating causalities [certainties of everyday life / political life] from one another. Like Brecht’s theory of the alienation effect, which is used in epic theatre [non-Aristotelian, because empathy is a suggestion]. How assembly in the Arcades Project is not only used as a turning point, but also as a construction principle. In 1934 Benjamin wrote the essay “The Author as Producer” for the anti-fascist writers’ conference at the “Institut pour l’étude du fascisme” [the text does not reach an audience until 1966]. While from his apartment he followed the riots on the Place de la Concorde of such fascist groups as the Action Française & the Jeunesse Patriotes [choc du 6 fevrier sur l’intelligentsia]. Mobile zones in which reality is invented. A certain distortion of the sound properties of the word / caustic reflexes. Paramilitary provocations giving rise to a Franco-German alliance of left-wing writers in exile. The “remelting processes” of poetic energies. Not the passively reflective poet, but the [militant] poet who actively intervenes in discussions & day-to-day political affairs, as well as the worker. “However revolutionary this political tendency may appear, it actually functions in a counterrevolutionary manner as long as the writer experiences his solidarity with the proletariat ideologically & not as a producer.” In his “current psalms” such as the Chant de guerre Parisien, Rimbaud classifies the poets among the new workers [in the loopholes of the Communards / the discovered mirroring-function of a removed heart-splinter / the combination of logic & absurdity]. Feedback loops on the terrain of unspoken contradictions, the discovery of an enzyme that denounces the semantics of hostile language, contagion through rhymes. Namely the poetic function [the self’s immunisation / the determination of an infrared infinity] in the dialectic of poetry & Marxism. Benjamin has the operative poet in view [the role-model, Sergei Tretyakov], “who doesn’t report but fights.” In the summer of 34 Benjamin follows Brecht [who’s in hospital because of painful kidney stones] into exile in Danish Svendborg. During his convalescence, Brecht reads Benjamin’s essay. They agree that the spirit that makes itself heard in the name of fascism must go. So we speak of the poet’s autonomy as a counter-informant on the move in Marxist laboratories. Experimental arrangements / necessary chocks & collisions. The dream of the poem in which it cancels itself out / the transfers of collective consciousness of multiple expressions. Behind Baudelaire’s mask of the petty bourgeois, Benjamin discovers the secret agent “of his class’ dissatisfaction with his own rule.” He tries to establish the revolutionary gesture in Baudelaire’s poetry by juxtaposing it with the political concepts of Blanqui’s. An uprising that masquerades as a discourse [the sequence of narrative emotions, a border crossing, a single elliptical jump / as if one could no longer find their way out of a curve]. The idea of the utopian thought in “a thousand configurations.” A simple change of tracks. While at the moment the oppressive trials in Minsk, Moscow & Khabarovsk are being followed with horror. The X-ray images of a city / sonographic movement profiles & their coordinates. Subjected to the arbitrariness of the torturer, whose love of the law is limitless. While elsewhere the fascists in the street [“the right-wing mob”] are making their common cause with the fascists in parliaments. You will briefly raise your hand when they cut your throat. Real constellations of supernatural harmonies. Snapshots & synapses before entering a language & its syntax. The revenants & those who are required for a fraction of a moment to justify & show their status & lD cards. The different levels of analysis, a kind of horror register, partial meanings that unmask themselves when brought together. The negotiated discourse route. To stumble & stumble on along the way [what else would be possible?]. Beyond the capitalist polis / within an epileptic space-time continuum. Every shop window a targeted attack. Consider looting [Riot Prime] as an alternative, logical division of property & goods. The emergence of hatred, a neural circuit / but where is the love of heresy? Cliques form [the surplus proletariat & a few shy poets], but who or what they represent remains unclear. Zoom passes as a substitute act like perspectival insights / another false immediacy in accordance with its necessity. A corpse stretched on a tilting board / a kind of catapult. The revolutionary use value of an image or its text [as in Godard]. How the flash of turmoil hurls shreds in your face [for swarms of bones & red foaming] / & you hurl them back.
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“Real poetry can in truth never be used by the opponent [the opponent himself fears it, it is against his nature], & if he tries to use it, it ultimately brings him annoyance: poetry turns against him & shatters him because real art is always revolutionary under all conditions.” [José Revueltas]
[In Rome with B.]
An object thrown through the closed window. The city is to be set on fire at 12 different points. The curfew applies from sunrise. At night the border fences / the geometric shifts flicker. Virus regime & negations [the negation of negations]. Transmission noises of false borders, while the fences of the rich tower above everything else, we have to earn our pleasures first. Brecht is sitting in the middle of the Caesar & shows no interest in anything else. [Margarete Steffin to Walter Benjamin, end of 1937] Meanwhile, in the Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Hegel had named Caesar the manager of the world spirit [& world views are designed according to the spirit of harmony]. The “operative sentences” that characterise this anti-Aristotelian narrative. Fixed arrangements that make life easier. Futures & hunger crises as the incestuous cycles of money are short-circuited. Requirements for grandeur in the capital. It’s all Marx, but not all of Marx. When the deciphering of the black box exposed the endless discourses of obfuscation [the delirious glossolalia of the city’s democratic clubs]. The bluff that nobody seems to understand as a blind source of perverted morality production. Laws can be used to stop everything except the profiteers [“only the most visible part of a malevolent being, incidentally constantly changing its appearance”]. Ultimately, the privileged robbers are complemented by the unprivileged. The immense accumulation of debt only boosts the public image. A critical mass of chaotic data, feel-good algorithms & amnesias / the crisis signals a shift of capital’s centre of gravity into circulation [J. Clover]. Feelings, affects & dispositions / the structural indifference of capitalist systems. The Catilinarian thug gangs appreciate the economic selection, the quick look through the victims’ chests. Or with some shock tactics: malignant infections & the prompting of common keywords, common slogans of the inner circle, which begin shortly afterwards. Sound ossifications, broken into unequal parts. Benjamin had proposed to respond to the aestheticisation of art [the program of neoliberal, right-wing currents] with a politicisation of art [the demonstration, the condensation of the precise, decisive moment within a fairly short unit of time]. But as we approach each other with purpose, we’re simultaneously moving away, since the approach is taking place under the wrong sign.
[Five in the morning in Reggio Calabria]
Here they tell stories about white identities, according to which strangers are treated in the same way as those who just look like it. The fangs [on behalf of a global trust] leave their mark. Transit is always a question of origin [& money]. The city gets scared. The talks of the day [the butchers of the Senate] in the demilitarised zones fuel the fear of the unknown. Collateral horror, temporary border closings & push-backs. The first unemployed at the meeting points where people sell themselves [they will no longer sleep, no longer catch their breath]. But each slave in line means one less job for the locals. Imagine blank billboards or a few fascist insignia smeared on. Dirty carabinieri that leave traces of corruption. Imagine burned-down buildings, defenceless organisms that spit blood. Hidden blows. Remnants of the body like signals overlooked. You’ve got to have bribed someone yourself in order to get bribed properly [haven’t we heard that before at the Straub/ Huillets cinema?] New wars are filling empty coffers. Secret forms of relationships make you horny. Steel cages & containers, the freight papers freshly stamped: the flourishing business of the slave import companies. To create a clearing in this large family bond, to create a balance that has all too often only been talked about. The persistent contamination of poetic language by the daily branding iron of capitalism. As if one had ever identified with one’s destiny, as if we were not denied the ethics to satisfy our lifestyle. It is the transitions, the remnants of dreams that shape our abilities, the signs of life thrown together.
[The 9th to the 10th Thermidor]
Equality is one exile, a rotting leg of a homeless person is another. That tremendously increased barbarisation. Robespierre’s shot-through jaw has the mob riot with happiness for 15 minutes. The hatred speaks calmly into the cell phone. But human nature is too weak to depict battles in detail. Blind objectivities & developments constituted by their disintegration.
translated by David Vichnar
BLACKOUT ((poetry & politics)) 