Bomb in language

1.

Late Romanticism’s horizon of expectations, taken to a political paroxysm and somewhat perverted by the concept of national and nationalist modernism, knew, recognised and celebrated the revolutionary potential, that is, the political power of poetry – along with the fact that Romantic poetry was written in the vernacular – principally in two of its aspects: its content, explicitly expressed and clearly formulated, and its apellative function – its emphasis, the explosive emotional charge it produces. Prime examples should be sought, for instance, in the revivalist poetry of the so-called Illyrians (this refers to the early phase of local Romanticism, in a cultural and literary sense), the reams of patriotic dirges penned in praise of the demotic, ‘Illyrian’ unification and (proto)national emancipation, or in the famous, directly realised political programme of Petőfi’s ‘Nemzeti dal’, the folk song, whose chorus, On your feet, Magyar, / the homeland calls! was sung by the masses embarking on an anti-Habsburg, national uprising in the spring of the revolutionary year of 1848. In both cases, the verse, in line with the Romantic hierarchy of literary categories and genres, was considered the privileged, indeed supreme medium of literary expression, just as poetry was considered the premier literary category. However, if we take a step back from Bühler and turn to Jakobson’s hierarchy of the functions of language, it immediately becomes clear that it was actually the dominance of the referential and the conative functions at the cost of almost complete marginalisation of the poetic and metalinguistic functions which focus on code and language and are crucial for the literary aspect of the text and its politicalness as I understand it here. Regardless of the occasional direct daily-political implications of the Romantic model of politically engaged poetry in given historical circumstances, I espouse the hypothesis (formulated in different ways, perhaps most accurately in the works of the members of the Frankfurt School) that the political potential of poetry – not only here and now – is realised first and foremost in its how, rather than the what. It bears pointing out that, when it comes to the merits of the case, the how and the what functionally conform to each other from time to time and swap roles, melding together into the challenge of the method.

2.

Of course, the specific historical circumstances of any form of expression, and hence also of poetic expression, must not be overlooked. However, if we decide, in line with a specific derivation, to place them in brackets, it behoves us constantly to remind ourselves of their constitutive, framing role. In a situation in which (even) poetry is read explicitly ideologically from the angle of hegemonic ideology and is willingly subjected – to varying degrees and for various reasons – to prescriptive poetics, at first glance the what always dominates. Language, heavily instrumentalised as a matter of course (an indispensable analysis of effectively interpellated newspeak patterns in Nazi Germany can be found in German-Jewish philologist Victor Klemperer’s study Lingua Tertii Imperi, as well as in his voluminous wartime diaries), is in such cases persistently presented as unproblematic, transparent, pre-Saussurean. It is assigned the role of a rigid, invisible medium through which approved, institutionalised poetry as its representative, its showroom emanation, transmits pre-shaped, ‘lexicalised’, ‘prescriptive’ political content. By inertia, such poetry is labelled as socially engaged, agitprop, poster poetry, after which these terms, depending on one’s political and interpretive vantage point, take on different degrees of negative connotation, including none at all. Representative examples can be found in October Revolution poetry, or in the dissident, samizdat, kvartirnik poetry of the Stalin and post-Stalin era, which lasted until Glasnost and Perestroika. This dominance of the referential, the dictatorship of the what, is, however, specious. It would take a much longer and more systematic piece to buttress this claim with textual examples and explicate it theoretically, but the successful poetry of a given epoch, one that does not betray itself (regardless of its political content), is as a rule the poetry of the how, the poetry of the artistic method. A case in point is the verse making of a group of disparate poets with disparate oeuvres, from Khlebnikov and Kruchyonykh to Mayakovsky and Mandelstam. By putting themselves, in some cases, in the service of the revolutionary ideal with all their being and all their writing, often filling the referential plane of the latter with explicitly political content, they treated poetry as toil of language and toil in language, a fold and a tear in its standardised fabric, a critical, conscious, well-reflected break with continuity, with the dominant, hegemonic discourse in different fields, above all (but not only) in poetry. In German-language verse, this rupture, in the light of the post-war need for distancing and radical dissociation from Nazism-contaminated language practices, is perhaps even more conspicuous. Celan and Brecht represent two clear-cut poles of the rupture. Just as Jean Améry had to give up on his name, Celan had to step out of his language, rid himself of its malignant baggage. In order to make possible ‘poetry after Auschwitz’, in the central poem of his second book Poppy and Memory (1952), Celan found and confirmed a truth-bearing system which, in a fragmentary manner, disarticulating every narrative but feigning a voice that is directly posthumous, in a way also bypasses the traumatic fatwa of testifying (perhaps precisely by not treating testimony as a story) as well as the problem of the fictionalisation of the victim’s voice. I don’t know how to explain this, I merely have a presentiment, but Death Fugue represents a kind of blind spot in the guilt of testifying. It vanishes somewhere in the void of Celan’s ‘proto-German’, an empty language, somewhere in the decanting of a poem from its ‘no longer’ into its necessary ‘still’; still. That ellipsis skips the sludge sedimented in language: it represents a short circuit, a purification mechanism. With the language of the camps and those who quietly acquiesce to them, with the ashes of the victims, with his syntax, his semantic dislocations and slips into the pre- and post-linguistic, Celan attacks – and renders adequate for his own purifying procédé – the German language, a language contaminated by the recent past to the point of lethargy. Conversely, Brecht in his post-war poems, written more or less at the same time as Celan’s, opts for diametrically opposite tactics, achieving roughly analogous results. It is precisely with the absolute political explicitness of his expression that he, in a manner of speaking, reconquers poetry as a space of struggle, removing it from the ‘aesthetically autonomous’ complacency of the bourgeois soul which refused to register the Nazi industry of death by relocating itself to Stefan George’s historicised starry landscapes or to the middle-class cabaret of abandon, in order to keep its eyes and ears firmly shut. Brecht’s sloganeering, explicit, ‘poster’ politicalness was a necessary fist in the eye, a slap across the face of societal taste, which repeatedly melts down the overburdened but in Brecht’s case necessary what into an artistically effective how. The same is true of entire literary genres, satire in particular. We find a good example in Predrag Lucić’s subversive rhyming, parody and persiflage. Some paragraphs from Max Frisch’s diaries indicate that from time to time Brecht himself felt uneasy about certain implications of this explicitness, its loudness, a gesture which it supposedly demands. At the same time, he was fully aware of its necessity as a pre-requisite for the articulation of his poetic expression under specific historical circumstances. Here we should remind ourselves of the above-mentioned functional interchangeability of the how and the what, that is, their melding, and keep in mind that they are not mere invariants standing for form and content or plot and topic. Brecht’s what, under contextual pressure, takes on the function usually performed by the how. Celan’s escape into the linguistic ‘before’ and Brecht’s insistence on the linguistic ‘now’ are the recto and verso of the same fold in language, the same effort to undercut the foundations of established linguistic practices and thereby create the pre-conditions for poetry as a clenched fist. Only poetry that takes on such a risk, regardless of its semantic anchoring, can be regarded as political.

3.

Wherein lies the political potential of the poetic how? When, how and under which conditions is this potential realised? Poetry must be the maternity ward and the battlefield of a new language, a crack in the web of power, a space of rift, of unravelling the tacit, fully interpellated ideological pact with the dominant, hegemonic linguistic practices in the literary and other fields. Politicalness immanent to such self-assured, well-reflected poetry of rupture is the pre-condition for the production of language as a space of new, truly political articulation. This articulation entails a break with the ‘agit-prop’ idea of language (I use the term ‘agit-prop’ here from the point of view of reductionist, usually misconceived liberal critique of the concept, hence the quotation marks) – and, by the same token, poetry – as a medium and/or channel for the transmission and dissemination of pre-shaped, dogmatically processed content labelled as political. Seeing that the dominant horizon of expectations is no longer the Romantic one, that the paradigm and hierarchy of literary categories and genres as well as the logic of reception have changed substantially, pressing poetry into service as such a channel would be, even statistically, wholly misguided. I understand poetic speech, first and foremost through the structure and intention of its how, as the mining of hegemonically imposed and naturalised patterns, as a bomb in language.

4.

A structural given of the mine (as well as the bomb), its constitutive characteristic, is its invisibility, a certain sub rosa quality. A mine is buried, planted, a bomb is dropped, unexpectedly. Also, the question of its explosive power is always a question of potential: the explosion is triggered by an external factor on which the realisation of the explosion depends. However, over time, the explosion usually does happen, sometimes when it’s least expected, when its underlying cause is almost forgotten. However, the very risk of explosion, the fear of a possible tectonic shift under our skin, is enough to lend weight to the mine. In Petőfi’s case it was a bomb – eventive time, tangible realisation. Modern poetry still has to reckon with delay-action fuses, brace itself for conjunctive time, take long-lasting structures as its yardstick. The external factor – the foot that steps on the mine, the hand pulling the pin – are specific historical circumstances. Structurally political poetry must not disregard this ever-present potential and acquiesce to quietism. In addition, the explosion can never be completely controlled, there is always a streak of chaos to it. Political poetry, therefore, doesn’t have to offer ready-made answers, that is, rely on an established, philosophically consistent system. On the contrary, poetry must at all times be aware of its how and never cease to question it, to pull the rug from under its feet. The realisation of its social and political potential boils down not to taking on the role of the lectern (when the historical circumstances allow it to do so), but to a series of unexpected explosions of different intensity that rip apart the seemingly homogenous tissue of language, making it possible to open up new pathways, intertwining and making connections where there are none – constructing a para-system which permits an artistic or political articulation of the moment. Poetry is not the armoured fist of the dominant discourse, and at this point it cannot be expected to field awesome firepower that will decisively influence the outcome of the battle. Poetry (any poetry that hasn’t betrayed itself is immanently political, on which I will elaborate later) functions as the fifth column, the guerrilla of language. Such is its modus operandi, such are its methods.

5.

In order to remain faithful to itself and retain its political potential, even if delayed, poetry must persistently work against itself; at least in one of its aspects it must saw at the branch on which it sits. That is to say, it must persevere in letting down its own horizon of expectations in a given historical moment, it must undermine the language and the patterns which legitimise and confirm it as poetry within the dominant discourse. Its strategy must be directed against the entrenched image of the poetry of the moment, go against the patterns which constitute the poetry of a given epoch. Such patterns, by their very structural position within the web of power, are politically bloodless, reduced to a passive channel and a legitimising mechanism which, via a feedback loop, produces poetry devoid of political potential and charge, poetry which has shot itself in the foot in an attempt to enter itself into the register of currently acceptable models of bourgeois lyricism. Poetry which realises its political potential synchronically faces the threat of invisibility, of not being recognised, from a bourgeois vantage point (that is, the viewpoint of the publishing and endowment machinery, the media and academic industry, etc.) as poetry in the first place. Its how works against the idealised, sugar-coated image of its what. The flipside of that problem is the self-castration of political poetry understood in traditional terms, one which openly, possibly even proudly, boils down to a channel for relaying a pre-articulated message which initially may have been truly progressive. The totality of, for instance, the established, a hundred times seen in-house procedures of contemporary ‘political poetry’ functions today merely as a signal, a kind of lexicalised metaphor: we’re talking about mere recognition, in a formalist sense. In contrast to this, the politicalness of poetry demands seeing; poetry of recognition cannot find an operational, active horizon of the currently political. It can only be a window of sorts, nostalgic excursion into the history of the political. Alienation (остранение, Verfremdung) is at once realised as an aesthetic and a political act, as an illustration, a footnote, possibly too abstract, as playing with examples whose challenge is based not on their poetic singularity but on extratextual facts. The symbolist verse of the young Stalin, just like Mao Zedong’s poems rooted in Chinese tradition, are, in spite of their (different) content and the (again, different) political intent of the two authors, a stark example of poetry of recognition. Their purpose is, above all, to gain legitimacy via poetry, to fit, by way of mimicry, into a given horizon of expectations. There is nothing political there, nothing revolutionary. Conversely, the poetry of figures such as Edvard Kocbek and Roque Dalton, poets at such a distance from one another, fighters for nominally the same idea as the above-mentioned ‘great leaders’, ignores and thereby pushes forward the given horizon with every line, with the essence of its how. Only the how, regardless of its content (which, in both poets, is anything but unimportant) can be seen as poetry of seeing which has the potential to articulate the political.

6.

Even today, in the supposedly ‘post-ideological’ era (ideology, as we know, is most productive and effective when it’s presented as non-existent), the question of engagement in poetry that is often brought up, is by and large misframed, for at least two reasons. Its how is usually bracketed and completely neglected, whilst (in ‘liberal democratic’ systems of this or that description) the relatively uncensored, open and ultimately unimportant anything goes parataxis semantically blocks the potential of the what to meld with the how and take on its function. Poetry is therefore still primarily seen as a rostrum, whereby its capacities are rather limited from a reception point of view. There is also an interesting reflex on the broad left to appropriate the concept of ‘socially engaged literature’ mechanically, to see it, synchronically and diachronically, as its own sovereign domain, a channel for dissemination of (at least originally) progressive left politics. In practice, however, things are quite different. In this part of Europe, it was precisely the right, with a strong nationalist and clerical streak that hijacked the rostrum a long time ago. Because I lack space for a more detailed analysis, I proffer an illustrative local example: in recent decades, engaged poetry, in the above-mentioned sense, found stark expression in the works of Matija Bećković, Rajko Petrov Nogo, Ante Stamać, Džemalutin Latić, Mile Pešorda, Slavko Mihalić in his later phase, and similar poets, which made an impressive impact here and there. The role of writers, and especially poets, in the articulation of radical nationalist ideas in Yugoslavia from the mid-1980s onwards can hardly be overestimated. Where was left, progressive poetry at the time, where it is today and whom exactly it reaches are questions mostly in the purview of literary archaeology or forensics. Yet, in order for poetry to remain faithful to itself and realise its immanent politicalness, it is necessary to keep one thing which is the conditio sine qua non of the political. Relying on Barthes, I call it zero-degree engagement. What does that mean? Poetry cognizant of the way in which its framework and medium function is also aware of its immanent politicalness and exceptionless immersion in ideology, and it critiques its own ideology over and over again. The production of literature is above all production, it has its context, its rules and conditions; it is a specific form of production which forcefully, consciously or not, reflects and shapes differently coded ideologemes of the social order, which it is aware of to a greater or lesser extent. Refusal to be an oblivious or opportunistic dissemination platform for hegemonic discourses is its condition of possibility, and its method is contained in its how. This, of course, doesn’t mean that literature, poetry in particular, should avoid explicitly political, or even daily-political, ‘socially engaged’ topics. However, the precondition for realising the potential of a topic as political entails transcoding via the how without which the topic remains nothing more than its own empty shell. This opens the door wide for poetic and political kitsch.

7.

In this context, why does post-Yugoslav poetry (I’m focusing here on the Serbo-Croatian segment of the literary field, although I don’t believe there is anything specific about it; I’m taking it as an example because I know it somewhat better than the others) realise its political potential extremely poorly, in my opinion? Why does it reduce its politicalness to an attempt at being a lectern for disseminating prescriptive engagement in a long-since-defined ‘progressive’ register – an effort that is at best thwarted at the outset by the logic of reception? The answer, on the one hand, is to be found in the barely existent, inadequate articulation of own position in terms of zero-degree engagement, and on the other in the relinquishing of the how or even failing to see the need to insist on it, as well as in the most banal, albeit differently coded, opportunism. Instead of being a bomb in language, a micro-explosion with potentially devastating effects, post-Yugoslav poetry chooses, consciously or not, to be the mirror to the dominant lyrical patterns, a glass menagerie in the shop window of the hegemonic language order. Its desire is not to produce new language nodes and intersections, to realise its own poetic function with the exceptionality of its how and at the same time invent a living language fit for a critical reflexion of the societal here and now. Instead, it wants to lie down, as quietly, painlessly and mimically as possible, into the mould of bourgeoisie-approved poetic practices, with all the social and political implications of this. It is a poetry which is in and of itself unproblematic, which constructs and projects its self-image by imitating whatever is currently recognised and approved as poetry. This tendency is especially prominent in the works of the youngest generation which is to a degree expected to be against the ways and methods of the fathers. However, the structure of the literary field in focus here, framed by an economic conjuncture, results in a surprising yet quite obvious intention to walk in the fathers’ footsteps step for step, to wear their shoes, several sizes too big, to take on their habits with ease or reproduce them as faithfully as possible. In short, the dwarves are riding on the backs of the giants (this is a classical metaphor, overstretched, of course), not to use the promontory of their accumulated experience and the practical challenges they’ve overcome in order to get a better view of the dominant horizon of expectation, to break through it and build a new one, but out of ordinary opportunism and conformism. This more or less conscious minimisation of the chances for a language explosion in order to keep the ground under one’s feet at least somewhat solid and faintly discern one’s blurry reflection in the mirror of the bourgeois idea of fine literature completely does away with the political potential of poetry, which is in turn supplanted by a banal, self-dulling ‘generational’ mantra, the hipsters’ literary lie.

8.

It would be a waste of time in this day and age to go looking for the angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night; the best minds of our generation destroyed by madness starving hysterical naked. That would entail risks, and the hipsters’ literary lie takes none: it is, often without knowing, a mere front for bourgeois aesthetics and politics. Thus by stomping out its intrinsic political potential and refusing to ‘deal with politics’ explicitly, such poetry and literature hands itself over to the hegemonic ideology and its political branch offices, and its only achievement is the fact that politics deals with it. It is even worse when the whole process (with the seal of approval of opportunism) is conscious and voluntary, that is, when we’re talking about its cynical superstructure. The realisation of the political potential of poetry requires accepting risk, breaking the mirror, refusing to be reduced to a reflection. A poet who steps out of the soft slippers trimmed with the traditional lace in the national colours and devotes himself to his how starts a fire in the language and in that transformative process he sends, as its indexical, smoke signals which are not mere meaning to be deciphered, but the message itself. It’s hard to say if the message will ever reach anyone, if the fire will quickly die out or if the conflagration will ravage primeval forests, possibly reaching minefields and setting off a chain of explosions, but such an act of pyromania is a duty which ensures the faithfulness of poetry to itself. Days are quite possibly overcast, dusk falls proverbially early, and the message remains not only unread but unnoticed. Still, it has been sent out, with all the risk that entails, and is public in its essence – it is an ascending signal. The burning which is its source, that initial explosion, precludes the state of smouldering and points to the impending entropic collapse, the absolute lexicalisation and ossification of the finally dead language. This process must be continual and uninterrupted, like a permanent language revolution.

Translated from Croatian by Mirza Purić