:: translated by mathilda cullen
they say i was having a wank in the royal parks.
gunfire is a streetplan, i say. so is marx. so the type of equotations they call pistol-whips.
sean bonney
in june 1935, shortly after midnight, when most of the delegates had already left the huge salle de la mutualité, paul eluard delivered a speech written by andré breton at the “international writers’ congress in defense of culture” in paris. it was a reckoning with an increasingly degenerate policy of the french communist party, which had been reduced to an auxiliary wing of the ussr and stalinism and had moved away from the goal of liberating the classes and peoples oppressed by colonialism. the surrealists rejected the franco-soviet treaty of mutual assistance that had been signed the month before, abstaining from talk of fatherland and patriotism, the excesses of positivistic rationalism, to keep from losing their critical minds. they viewed themselves as a movement of revolt that defined itself as an uprising against a bourgeoisie, a capitalist society and its crude moral concepts of established values. for them, communism was a promise to replace this world with a more just world. as early as 1925, in the pamphlet “first and foremost the revolution,” aware of constant, inner desertion, they described future violent uprisings as an inevitable reaction to a spirit humiliated by politics. they were convinced of the need for a libertarian, poetic communism, in the wake of a social and economic upheaval that only a society of their own design would be capable of realizing. an interpretation of the world that must always be aimed at changing the world, the spirit advancing toward unexplored regions. breton’s mansucript for the writers’ congress ended with the words “‘to change the world,’ said marx; ‘to change life,’ said rimbaud: for us, these two slogans are one and the same. the avant-garde never hesitated to leave the old image space behind. they linked the gesture of destruction with the hope of being able to grab hold of the real (without sacrificing art), with the conception of an aesthetic militancy.
the british poet sean bonney considered rimbaud’s work, particularly une saison en en enfer, to be misunderstood unless read at the same time as marx’s capital. political imagination, which is necessary in moments of revolution, must lead the poet to seize the enemy language, to turn it into a weapon, to overturn the prevailing laws of thought. objective poetry which reflects that “today” (in all its complexity). in moments of political defeat, when the revolution falls back to poetry. the staging of a radical present. from the individual’s point of view, reality is always a terrifying sight. in the idiomatic description of a method. the transport of voices. the insatiable pent-up demands of reality itself. they are the infernal machines of the anarchists (and in each of them a clock is ticking, as walter benjamin notes in the paralipomena to surrealism), those dissonant outbursts of utopian joy, bonney says, even if they last only a few moments – the barricade fights, the writings of blanqui, rimbaud, lautréamont, césaire and millions of others who are capable of disrupting capitalist harmony. something we’ve dreamed of for centured. the imaginary preparing itself to become real. because our dreams are a second life, as nerval said.
what drove rimbaud, the entirely of whose work was written in just 5 years between the ages of 15 and 20, cannot be understood in the eyes of the surrealists without considering his support for the paris commune in the spring of 1871. later, during his stays in london, when he was in contact with the exiled communards andrieu, vermersch, and lissagaray, he clung to the ideas of the commune as well as to his hatred of his homeland. in addition to this obvious expression of contempt for the bourgeois order, his poems evoke the constitution of a poetic communism (ernest delahye spoke of “rimbaud the bolshevik” in his memoirs). the idea of designing a world with the aid of a new language of boundless inspiration (the alchemy of the word): rimbaud’s necessary merging of his poetic project with his existential project. poetry (which, if necessary, can do without poems, comes before the action, it is an amplification of the unknown. breton recalled that rimbaud was not only the youthful communard of refusal, a saboteur, but also the poet who wrote the “lettre du voyant” (one must be absolutely modern as poetry takes a direction that is non negotiable). the surrealists understood revolt as intrisic to poetry. they were the only ones (beside walter benjamin) who tried to synthesize rimbaud and marx, to unite art and politics, poetry and revolution, which had always been thought of as opposites. with the enormous political and social changes that accompanied the end of the 1st world war, their interest in marxism grew over the years while coming to terms with the russian revolution, the works of lenin and trotsky, hegel’s writings. in the second surrealist manifesto of 1930, they expressly committed themselves to revolutionary marxism, without allowing themselves to be reduced to it. the affinity between the two revolutionary poles of the 19th century, marx and rimbaud, goes hand in hand with the rejection of the rule of money, religion and colonialism, and paints (like the anthropological materialism of walter benjamin) a fundamentally romantic portrait of the artist, without reference to the literary epoch of 19th century romanticism, but rather to a theory of experience that does not fall behind its own ideas. a protest against the expansion of capital’s “disenchantment of the world.” the romantic imagination, in the tradition of those such as georg büchner, the socialist utopias of charles fourier, up to the works of rimbaud and lautréamont, which connects to the general (sometimes secretive) attraction of matter. the abolition of the antithesis of nature and history by a means of a “profane illumination.” or, as baudelaire put it, “i should be happy to leave a world where action is not the sister of dreams.”
a kind of counter-history — is that poetry? rimbaud wrote of the constitution of poetic communism for his time (and well beyond). he laid bare the horrors of a society drunk on happiness in the ecstatic throes of its own destruction, images of useless lifeforms. inspired by logical massacres (a terrorist logic), 150 years later we follow those brief red flickers of shattered illusions. the eulogies of countless false witness, the mendacity of endlessly compressed propagandists. the chatter of insects. shifts in the real constellations of semiotics and lies. just take mariupol or kharkiv. think of eisenstein’s odessa. a legless cripple beckons. out of a group of people shot in half. destroyed technologies of invisibility, the poisoners of forged documents. a toxic pharmakon, where one’s origin alone prescribes life or death. like drawing a border through the middle of a face. a patriarch with his throat cut runs in circles — he will not stay. as the timeframe for a final humanitarian corridor begins to close, death will come in and out. contours of harmless shadows. take this as evidence.
in the 1930s, a number of left-wing intellectuals adopted a positive, sympathetic attitude toward the ussr and communism, one that expressed more of a commitment to the party itself than to the revolution. the infallibility of the communist parties, the unconditionally revolutionary character of the proletariat, were a matter of course, which they left unquestioned. following the congress in paris 1935 the surrealists wrote an injunction to reemphasize their opposition to the ruling regime in the soviet union under stalin, they would not take up the mottos or slogans of the communist international uncritically, and clung all the more fast to the necessity of changing society by means of a proletarian revolution. (in 1936 the surrealists declared the accusations and verdicts of the trials of moscow to be abominable and irreparable. “the man (i.e. stalin), who has taken it this far is the great negator and worst enemy of the proletarian revolution, we must fight him with every means at our disposal, we must recognize him — bent on distorting not only the meaning of man but his history — as the greatest fraud and most inexcusable murderer of our moment.”
in his 1950 discours sur le colonialisme, aimé césaire, with the aid of lautréamonts farsightedness, demonstrated that man under the capitalist form of society (in his cannibalistic peculiarity) represents the monstrosity of our time. lautréamont, who disappeared on the eve of the paris commune, is, along with rimbaud, one of the two poets produced by the commune. césaire’s discours, the detonator in the mouth of the poet to silence the rulers. a few years prior césaire had shown, with his publication of his essays poésie et connaissance in the magazine tropiques, that poetry can be a source of knowledge and revolt. a great leap into poetic nothingness. the revenge of dionysos. poetry as the imposition of encrypted messages and codes. from the idea of a suffering language. and its translations. autopsy reports that read like dots on a map, revealing the positions of the enemy. but lured by ghostly signals and magical incantations (the “fierce buzzing of flies”) , the stirring of souls, the incessant transformations of poetic inspiration still exist, as walter benjamin evokes in his surrealism essay when he speaks of the need for “esoteric” poetry, to channel secret knowledge into revolutionary knowledge. to oppose all forms of demarcation and polarization: we don’t speak the same language.
benjamin, in his 1929 essay “on surrealism” (written between his trip to moscow and an important meeting with brecht which would lead him to work on the arcades project) emphasized the pessimism practiced by the surrealists as the antithesis to the unscrupulous amateur optimism of everyone else, according to which everyone lives as if they were free. he recognized the heirs of marx and engels in the surrealists, poets who understood the demands of the communist manifesto and who developed an idea of radical freedom to right the imbalances that prevailed in the world. on the one hand, surrealism necessitates the destruction of the aesthetic, on the other, it demands a connection to the primacy of politics and those resulting revolutionary actions. in his paris diary, benjamin noted that surrealism carried this sabotage into broader and broader areas of both public and private life, “until finally the political accuracy of this position, its divisive, or rather: its expulsive force became evident and effective.” “to win the energies of intoxication for the revolution,” a terrain (of the nearest and furthest) developed by poetic illuminations, a gradual gain in knowledge of the greatest attraction.
it is the unpredictable, archipelagic thinking that runs through the texts of the caribbean poet édouard glissant, whose poetry is far from any categorization. a rhizomatic process of writing that emerges through exchange and dialogue. the textures of secret relations. certical (electrifying) points in the mind that oppose the contradictory (“seemingly meaningless noise”) of the said and the unsaid, the past and the future in the production of difference. and thus the thinking of others (or the other thinking) relates to one’s own. the poem realized as the presence of the world — the utopian process of an ongoing dialogue — one that rejects the rigid categorization of thought. that sparkle of language that moves through people like ghosts. a persistent glow across the darkened zones of our cities.
BLACKOUT ((poetry & politics)) 