Violent Matter
My twitter account has been suspended, for quoting a line from a poem by Sean Bonney, whom I think is one of the best poets writing today. It is not an easy poem by any means, but it is worth reading. I was moved to quote it by the grim sight of Tories twerking at Manchester Pride, but I also worried about the quotation, and its context: quotation, especially from poetry, can so easily wrench things out of their context. (But then, I think, that line’s supposed to be quotable anyway.) Regardless, I followed it up immediately with a link to the whole poem. The few members of LGBTory who saw it didn’t like it – good, it was intended to be upsetting – as I don’t like seeing Tories, who are members of a party that for decades demonised and prosecuted queer people, who even today are a party riddled with homophobes and racists, who even now preside over cuts to services essential for parts of our community who are in appalling circumstances, marching in Pride parades. Ask anyone at AKT or Stonewall Housing what a Conservative government means for LGBT people and you’ll want to spit too. You’ll want to explode with anger.
I admit it’s hard to take a flap about poetry and some thin-skinned Tories seriously, other than as a demonstration of exactly how limited the commitment of conservatives to ‘freedom of speech’ is. Poetry is not usually regarded as a strong weapon; it is rarely now even accorded the power to change minds or wound hearts. Poetry makes nothing happen, though its inutility shouldn’t be occasion for praise. Why the flap, then? It’s worth tracking some of the implications of this little backyard scandal.
The poem, and the lines I quoted especially, employ a rhetoric of violence that is uncomfortable to read or hear. (Steve Willey reflected on performing this poem here.) But it is not an unambiguously violent poem: the lament in the stanzas that precede those lines for the ‘dying angles’ of the city, its grappling with the ‘horrific quantity of force we will need to continue even to live’, and the torque of violence and formal restraint in the final stanza itself – these are the context in which the imperative is given. They do not diminish its violence, but nor is its violence entirely separable from it (that’s why I felt it necessary to link the whole thing). Why is it compared to music or drunken speech, and why is simplicity their common factor? All three elude in some way the intractability of sober speech; music in its supersession of discursive meaning, drunkenness in its removal of hesitancy and doubt, and violence by counterposing its brute physicality to language’s endless filiations and ambiguities. They are all moments that (briefly) transcend alienation. Is this justification, is this a moral good? The poem makes those judgements difficult.
At the risk of stating the obvious, there is a difference between violence and violent rhetoric, however distasteful one might find the latter. Bonney’s poem is, the title tells us, After Rimbaud. Rimbaud, after witnessing the semaine sanglante, the week of butchery at the conquest of the Paris Commune, also wrote an extended fantasy of vengeance and violence, which dissolves at its end exclaiming “It’s nothing — I’m here! I’m still here.” That is to say, the fantasies of violence in Rimbaud are undercut by the realisation that hyperbolic vengeance is impossible, and is often an expression of defeat or impotence. Both the justice of his anger – world-encompassing – and the impossibility of its realisation are the themes of his poem; were it otherwise there would be things to do other than write poetry.
Raymond Williams once pointed out that ‘violence’ is a term used primarily to describe the unruliness and dissidence of the governed: that is, force out of place. It has been a consistent feature of dissident writing to point out the moral arbitrariness of these terms, and their use to describe only force not sanctioned by the state. When directed downwards, violence is called ‘restoring order’, ‘restraining’, ‘discipline’ etc. Contestation of this taxonomy is part of Bonney’s poem – Downing Street’s ‘assembly of ghouls’, the ‘euphemism for civil war’ that goes on in the country surrounding us. There is a sense of moral disgust at the equivocations that allow such violence to go unremarked, naturalised, for its architects to remain inculpable. That is the sense that leads to the imperative in the final stanza. It in turn picks up on a vein of thinking about violence that runs through late 20th century communist thought, that sees violence as purgative and foundational, most clearly expressed in Sartre’s preface to Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. It is hard today to fully endorse this line of thinking, even while accepting its strong critiques of pacifism; I’m not sure whether it’s a result my inclination as a reader, but I detect a measure of ambivalence about this doctrine in the poem, too. But key to both Rimbaud’s and Bonney’s poem are that they do not seek to redeem their violence or explain it away – that would diminish both of them, as it would to claim they simply seek non-violence. Instead they operate in the difficult moral and political ground of fury, powerlessness and despair, and do not seek to foreshorten its difficulty by providing an easy way out of it.
There is more I might say here – about the distinctiveness of this poem in saying things that typical poetry audiences do not want to hear, about its insistence on culpability, about its status as a difficult object, and about the kinds of desire and fragility operating in it – but I think it is enough for now to underline the dual character I’ve been exploring above, that is, its insistence on polarisation and culpability, and the (bridgeable? unbridgeable?) gap between its rhetoric and actual violence. It is unpleasant; it is not a poem about nature and flowers, and it is not a ‘political poem’ that tries to find ten rhymes for ‘Tories are bad’. If it is ‘about’ anything, it is about what it means to continue to be alive in a world ordered such as ours is, without lying to oneself about it.
Why quote it at all? Something snapped in me when I saw a bunch of young conservatives at Manchester Pride. I thought of the occasions where I’d been privy to how these people really behave when they think no-one else is listening, the curled-lip contempt they have for poor people or black people, their mourning for the Empire, or their hatred for ‘weird’ queers or ‘showoff’ faggots or any of the other hundred hatreds that pour off them. I thought of the people I know who have been made homeless, or whose health has gone through the floor under this and the last government. And yes, I thought of section 28, I thought of all the other standard objections, of who founded Pride and what it stood for before it became this. I know the justifications – the claim that ‘pride’ is a neutral value, that the march must be inclusive of all LGBT people – and I know people whom these justifications drive away. And it seemed to me that those lines summed up exactly the ambiguous border of anger and despair, seething frustration and impossibility that Pride brings out in me.
It was intemperate, of course, and like other occasions where I’ve spoken passionately or intemperately, I might regret it. (It is precisely that intemperate spasm that the poem captures.) But it also seems to me that impassioned speech, intemperate or polemical, even invective or calumniating speech, is part of a really living public sphere. I don’t like this argument much: I don’t think anger or vituperation gets us anywhere useful when it’s our chief mode of discussion, yet anger also seems necessary when trying to break up a consensual silence in public life. That silence is around responsibility, the idea that some political choices are reprehensible and wrong, that they have material consequences, and that by joining the organisation that enacts them you bear some portion of the blame. This is not a pretty picture – a euphemised civil war – but it is only describing what is actually happening; it is antagonistic, even imperfectly and hyperbolically so, because such is the state of things. It is to say: the consequences of your politics ought to follow you in everyday life. You are not neutral.
To quote the lines that I did is a way of trying to puncture that neutrality; it is a way of saying politics cuts through our identities, and does so painfully, and that to be silent about it is to betray principle. It is both a marker of antagonism and a deep frustration. To capture both sides of that strange position requires poetry. It is not a threat, nor an encouragement; it would be ludicrous to think so. It is perhaps worth saying that I am not someone who thinks of violence as a political solution – it never has been – but that rhetorical violence can bring out some of the otherwise hidden violence under the carapace of neutrality. So it goes. I have more to say about the history of politics and violence, but in another time, and another place.
Twitter, of course, is a public space, an unintentional experiment in mass communication in which distinctions of rank and rights to speak are generally levelled. It has had huge issues with abuse and the treatment of women who dare to speak or write in public, including stalking, sexual harassment and murder threats. It has at the same time been hugely beneficial and educational for me and many others; it is typically the first thing I check in the morning. As I remarked above, it is quite an irony that the ‘libertarian’ wing of the Tory party – from which LGBTory largely draws – should seek to put limits on freedom of expression for a little chunk of mildly offensive poetry. Needless to say, the same expectation does not apply to racism, misogyny, class-hatred or the praise of various historical British atrocities when it emanates from them. I suspect part of this suspension is about Twitter trying to tighten its policy on abuse. I’ve complied with their initial demands for deletion, and it remains to be seen whether they’ll allow me back on as a result. It would be a shame if not.
There is a more general question about who gets to speak and what they get to say contained in this; about the kinds of questions or modes of speech are acceptable in public. Personally, I tend to value those freedoms more than many of those I share a politics with; they are ‘bourgeois’ freedoms and unequally applied, yes, but they also contain a real and necessary freedom within them, one that is freedom to express and think, not freedom from criticism or polemic, even when discomfiting. Such a freedom is often subject to constraints, sometimes those constraints are unjust. But beyond this freedom, there is a narrower circle of permissible expression, one that softens the edges of power, one that lights our rulers in a friendly manner, and from their best side. So we get discussions about ‘hard decisions’, ‘political realities’ and ‘national prosperity’ instead of the number of people driven into misery and despair by the government, into homelessness or precarious living, who are failed again and again by services stretched to breaking point until they simply to give up or break down. The people who make these decisions, who support them, are allied to them, want to become them, are dancing in the street. You can find yourself, again, spitting with rage.
Spiky straplines and quotations make for good antagonism; they can also trivialise and debase an argument. I don’t think hatred or violence are solutions to the world in which we live, I think they are a feature of it, a feature of a society debased by inequality and ordered such that baseness and violence are part of it. In such a situation intemperate speech is inevitable; antagonism in a public sphere governed by a narrowing range of acceptable opinions is also, I think, a good thing. But it is also necessary to reflect on the ease with which one might reach for violent rhetoric, about the gap between rhetoric and reality, how tangible and unbridgeable it might make political differences seem, how it might work to reassert those differences in a moment of defeat. Those are all double-edged possibilities; antagonism is never simply pleasant, it is always difficult, it is always beset by the possibility of being overmastered by hatred. That’s why I reached for the Bonney poem; poetry more than most forms can express that complexity without sacrificing a dimension of subjectivity that leaves space for conflicting, unpleasant or uncertain emotions.
There are, of course, those who will suggest that this is just dressing up hatred in literary guises, or excusing it because it’s in quotation – to such tin-eared critics and those invested in misreading, I can only say that disguising hatred is more than those ruling us bother to do. If, at times, I hate these people, it is because of what they do, rather than who they are. I think they are personally responsible, and I think they largely get away with it. And if I think hatred or violence are insufficient for a politics that really wants to change the world, then I also think it necessary at times to describe and respond to the hateful and violent situation we are already in, without pretending that we are saints, and without pretending we are unaffected by it. That is where I start from.
