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Ode on the
Absence of Real Poetry
Here This Afternoon
— A Poem in Dialectical Prose —
Poetry, as poets are fond of relating, originated from religious or magical incantations.
The respect for the bard was due to the fact that his words mattered. Supposedly,
the precise phrases and refrains were necessary to keep the crops growing, etc.
Literary poetry has lost this significance, and its most advanced creators know it.
Rimbaud is the archetypal example of the attempt to recover the magical. He failed. And
this failure was and is inevitable. The poem form precludes the possibility of the
realization of poetry, that is, of the effective realization of the imagination in the
world. The institution of poetry is itself a social relationship inimical to that
project. It inherits the specialization of creativity, of authentic utterance, from its
origin with the priestly classes, and it returns there. Even such a one as Rimbaud, for
all his passion for freedom and the marvelous, ends by developing the conception of the
poet as a new priest or shaman, a new mediator of communication. But the realization of
poetry entails the direct creative activity of everyone, and hence cannot tolerate such
mediation. “The problem is to really possess the community of dialogue and
the game with time which have been represented in poetico-artistic works”
(Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle).
* * *
“Divide and rule” may be said to be the essential tactic of the social system
that dominates us, but only if it is understood that this applies not only to separation
between individuals, but equally to the division between various aspects of daily life.
This enforced separation has attained its realization in the spectacle,
the incarnation of the seemingly lived. The spectacle takes the truth of this society,
namely its falseness and separation, and presents it as real, as reality, life to be
contemplated by passive spectators who have no real life of their own. “The spectacle
is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people mediated by images”
(Debord). But in spite of all the images of satisfaction it presents, modern capitalism
cannot hide the fact that it does not allow the fulfillment of real human desires. As
the poverty of passive consumership (of commodities or culture) becomes more obvious, the
spectacle provides a whole range of cultural activities which offer the illusion
of “participation”: Happenings, encounter groups, open readings, the World Game,
be-ins, mixed-media festivals — anything that will take the passionate radicality,
the ever-more-widespread poetry of revolt, and channel it into “constructive
solutions” or fragmentary opposition, both of which equally reinforce the system they
think they are overcoming. “The last hope of the rulers is to make everyone the
organizer of their own passivity” (Raoul Vaneigem, Treatise on Living).
As with the spectacle in general, the communication of a poem is unilateral. The
passive spectator or reader is presented with an image of what was lived by the poet. An
open reading only apparently overcomes this criticism; it democratizes the role of poet,
it shares access to the top of a hierarchical relation. It does not overcome that
relation.
Of course, a certain degree of communication does take place, but it is communication
in isolation, it is not directly tied to the real daily activities of the men and women
involved. Since our daily activities are, in general, constrained and alienated, it is
natural that poetic creativity (if it is not conscious of the project that supersedes
separation, and hence literary poetry) in its own defense tends to retreat from daily
life. It accepts an isolated realm where its partial game can play itself with a consoling
illusion of wholeness. “Poetry rarely becomes a poem. Most works of art betray
poetry. . . . At best, the creativity of the artist imprisons itself, it
cloisters itself, waiting its hour, in a work which has not said its last word; but
however much the author expects of this last word — the word preceding perfect
communication — it will never be spoken until the revolt of creativity has taken art
to its realization” (Vaneigem).
Poetry that is conscious of its own fulfillment in its own supersession never leaves
daily life, for it is itself the project of the uninterrupted transformation of daily
life.
* * *
The necessity for the total destruction of hierarchical power and the commodity economy
remains with us. The traditional revolutionary workers movement failed to bring about this
transformation of the world. At its most advanced moments (Russia 1905, Kronstadt 1921,
Spain 1936, and Hungary 1956), however, it did outline the form that the
revolution to come will take: the absolute power of workers councils. This
antihierarchical form of organization begins from the direct democracy of the popular
assembly and federates internationally by means of strictly mandated, immediately
revocable delegates. In this way it avoids the possibility of the emergence of a new
ruling class of bureaucrats or specialists.
The Leninist-type “vanguard party,” so widely acclaimed at present, was one
of the major reasons for the defeat of the classical workers movement.
Consciously or not, by setting itself up as a separate, independent force, it prepares the
way for its own “revolutionary” power over the people, as in the
state-capitalist regimes of Russia, China, Cuba, etc. Any organization aiming to bring
about the destruction of class society must begin by refusing to emulate this example of
revolutionary “success.” A revolutionary organization must abolish commodity
relations and hierarchy within itself. It must effect the direct fusion of critical theory
and practical activity, precluding any possibility of petrification into ideology.
Just as the councils will control and transform all aspects of liberated life, the
revolutionary organization must embody a critique of all aspects of presently alienated
life. At the revolutionary moment of the dissolution of social separation, it must
dissolve itself as a separate power.
The last revolution in human prehistory will realize the unity of the rational and the
passionate; the unity of work and play in the free construction of daily life; the game of
the fulfillment of the desires of everyone: what Lautréamont called “poetry made by
all, not just by one.”
Read by Ken Knabb at an open poetry reading in Berkeley,
27 October 1970.
Reprinted in Public Secrets: Collected Skirmishes of Ken Knabb.
No copyright.
[French translation of this text]
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