total mope 2
total m total mope volume 2
published in Oakland, CA in the summer of 2015 edited by zac gunter cover image by aki neumann for friends and strangers ~~~ totalmope.squarespace.com i facebook.com/totalmope
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mope katsy pline
impasse etudes
tur n the page ^
impasse etudes 1. i felt it one morning when i awoke but couldn’t move. my tongue slack jawed my saliva was the consistency of day old yellow curry my leg slack jawed it was strange the way working two jobs and not sleeping enough makes the world strange, a bizarre patchwork a cousin twice removed that wants to talk about your sex life but your sex life hasn’t been that great lately because even when you do find a biocock to suck on or a dildo to suck on or a cigarette to suck on it has that hallucination cascade kind of vibe, everything piling up and disintegrating into millions of pixels scattered across the audiovisual sphere, too real and not real enough unbearably close and surrounded by a thick, viscous layer of smog, a million moments compressed into the plastic flesh of another’s touch and so you change the subject to something more comfortably familial maybe american football the band apple pies bill o’reilly the poison in the atmosphere the atmosphere in our lungs the lungs in our poison the poison in that is our skin just to bide some time or distance maybe between yourself and the unbearable shapes your desire travels through. maybe if we call it the impasse it will become more bearable. maybe if we think abstraction as a life-sustaining fantasy of distance and control, a way of structuring our attachment to a world that damages our sense of well-being, it will become more bearable. maybe if we recognize the desire to name this thing that’s happening as just another strategy for coping with our powerlessness, a narcissistic defense mechanism against the encroaching poisonous atmosphere the poison in that is our skin, it will become more bearable. or perhaps it is this unbearableness that we shouldn’t manage or cope with or figure out how to get along with, considering, because that sounds like some reactionary hyper privileged bullshit pseudo-radical way of justifying the relative comforts some of us have at the expense of the rest of us and so perhaps we don’t need ways to cope we need strategies and practices to re-make the body this body this regional global local international body i don’t need to figure out how to deal i need to figure out how to reconfigure the way the poison in the atmosphere the atmosphere in our lungs the lungs in our poison the poison in that is our skin connect and add up to something. i tried to get out of bed but the hallucination cascade kind of vibe rolled through at 165 BPM dj rashad’s rapid bass kicks soft enveloping and crushing featherlight my teeth grinding against my skin. the tooth fairy doesn’t take your teeth. it takes the powder your teeth are reduced to and replaces it with 2c-b and angel dust. remember this the next time you want to get high: all you have to do is rip out the bones inside your jaw. 2. i felt it one evening when i ate two mystery amphetamine crystals and went walking. the crystals were the size of george washington’s dick-nose on the dollar coin. i crushed them quickly and quietly between the cavity tooth and the canine tooth and the cloud-tooth ache i can’t quite localize on account of a lingering feeling that i’m already fucked its too late to go the dentist and waited.
nothing happened. this seemed normal. i knew a crowd was assembling because a crowd was assembling the past several days in a row was assembling the past several years has been in the perpetual process of assembling for longer than anyone living can remember. i walked downtown with my toothache mystery crystals bubblegum-pink lip stain and skateshoes. i had wanted to wear boots but the boots have heels and i made a tactical decision to increase my capacity to scatter at the expense of looking hot to any genderfuck bitches cruising. i was in heat we were in heat: if you wanted to cock-suck the world and terraform its phallic roots into compostable redistributable digital mash you too would probably opt for skate-bro shoes, given the circumstances. you can’t get fucked right away if you have shit to do. 3. an etude is a piece of music designed for practicing. it’s bodytechnics: submit yourself to a repetitive disciplining protocol to re-organize your autonomic system. inscribe through habit a way of moving or organizing movement. train the fasciae, those sinewy connective pathways that hold the memory of our moving and our ways of moving and our nonmovement the slow burn of this body wearing down all slack jawed oil-slick putty. a listening etude is designed to undiscipline the ear. to hear is to hear difference. this point is unrelated. bodytechnics to untangle the corrugated wires and electrochemical circuits of stereo cilia from their neurotic focus on signifying content. let the noisy background behind the meaningful foreground spring into view. a lip lets lift an elliptical sigh orbits around a telephone pole edges frayed from years of wind-sighs the heavy weight of a breath’s a weather pattern’s earth-mourning electricity my own breath mourning electricity mixes with a feather-thud footstep as i re-adjust the microphone-headphone-recorder-connector situation. here’s a listening etude: find a crowd that is assembling. this can be difficult because if you wait until there is a crowd already assembled you have arrived too late. there is always the danger of assuming you already know who or what the crowd assembling is. this is a fundamental error and should be avoided at all costs. pay attention to the way infrastructure shapes direction, reverberation, amplitude, density and texture. four hundred feet well actually lots of folks have two feet some of us were in wheelchairs or cars so more like seven hundred or so i am horrible at counting feet underneath the 880 overpass is cavernous and open-ended we echoed indefinitely the highway built to ship us from work to home to work to work again still work amplifying the sound of our halting unquantized cadence the waves of differentially distributed pressure multiplied into a chaotic something, a weird atonal sonic brick, and we kept walking. and the rising waveforms dissipated into something else, a birdsong or pig-car alarm. listen for the smallest differences possible to perceive. to undiscipline the ear is to begin with the premise that we do not yet know what is possible in urban soundscapes. to undiscipline the ear is to begin with the premise that the ear is not my own this body is not my own this constrictive nameless weight is not my own is unevenly distributed by pigs with guns n smoke grenades n an unspoken well sometimes spoken agenda to crush black n brown bodies and all sorts of other penis toys and so i go to find out what other people walking together call this weight in the hopes that i might hear something my ear cannot imagine. to undiscipline the ear is a practice of learning how to live together differently is a practice of training the ear to
discern what emergent forms of being-together in the present might lead to other futures. it requires practice repetition reflection curiosity negativity but above all it requires wandering with a crowd that is assembling. bring a microphone. microphones extend the antagonisms that brought you here that are surfacing in the weary rage of the crowd that is assembling the past several days in a row is assembling the past several years is in the perpetual process of assembling for longer than anyone living can remember past their immediate happening. if ‘what forms of collectivity can lead to other futures?’ is an open question, then perhaps a study through sound of incipient, temporary collective formations can extend the rupture, give it a concrete practice, and elongate the social n sonic spaces it produced. maybe practicing how to listen and sound together can help create a ‘we’ by figuring out just what exactly is shared or not shared in this concussive space of waveforms impressing upon this body produces noise amplifies n scrambles the signal as it wails as we wails as a pig-siren wails underneath the 880 overpass on telegraph avenue. 4. an impasse etude is designed to help practice our capacity for creating n sustaining alternative forms of sociality that might lead to futures beyond the impasse. learning how to listen to the disorderly crowd assembling is both simple and terrifying. it’s about addition, subtraction and multiplication. knowing that it’s about rudimentary mathematics is both re-assuring and uncomfortable. knowing that holding these contradictions together is essential is somehow even more confusing. you have to give up your body you have to give up your sense of yourself you have to give up your sense of how the world adds up to something you have to give up your habits and techniques of sensing not permanently or anything. just long enough to let something new emerge a habit, perhaps or a fantasy maybe a way of swinging yr arms while we walk together or moving yr hips to make yr ass-cheeks jiggle in a new way just these little things, ways of making n moving through space, that are probably inconsequential but might hallucination cascade kind of vibe right through the present if we can just figure out how to re-configure the way the poison in the atmosphere the atmosphere in our lungs the lungs in our poison the poison in that is our skin connect and add up to something. poems are for the revo
lution, not the other way
ar
ci
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i mm
he
, u du nd
lol at t
, etc.
ou
as
sts
e
suzannah linnekin a
at h /w i ng
now I m
th
o
yn l p im
of e mad
s
white bones and red muscles and grey skin and balls of jelly with pin holes poked through grey saucersthen what have I been made of before? have I always been so lanky? and have my breasts always clung so tightly to my ribs? have I always swaddled my body into submission? before the fire there was a tree. and before the tree there was a tornado. and before the tornado there was a mountain. and i’m worried that before the mountain was a giant fucking hole in the ground which means from the start I’ve been dirt negative space surrounded by dirt, with a light shining from somewhere besides myself.
justin hogg
a i d i h p O
Nallely’s eyes had opened twice already that early morning, but on this, their third opening, they did not close. She lay on her right side, one side removed from the place that held her lungs, one side removed from that sudden interruption of sleep, that unexpected rupture of breath. She looked over at the fan which rotated at its medium speed, blowing hot air over to her half naked body slumped on the oversized queen mattress. The clock read 10:18 a.m. It was unfair. Her head had just hit the pillow. Nonetheless, like a rattlesnake emerging from its sandy route she shook the tangled sheets from her warm legs and rolled out of bed. She sat upright, cracking her back and adjusting to the quotidian sounds of a new morning. The comings and goings of cars some three stories below found their way through the barely cracked window which lay parallel to her bed, the scattered sound of a power tool in the distance clicked incessantly, and of course, the ambience of the sidewalk chatter buzzing in the midmorning heat. But a more local sound soon grabbed her attention. The sound made itself more and more apparent the longer she sit awake. It started as a low murmur but it soon became clear that it was two or three voices bickering from a single identifiable point in the room beyond her bedroom door. She had left the television on. Stepping slowly she dismounted from the bed, walking heavy as with shoes on sand, knocking over two empty tall cans of stout beer and shuddering all the while at the sound of aluminum bouncing on wood. In the next room over, she saw a body slumped down in the almond brown couch that only lay a few feet from the television. The covers hung over the body so that the couch protruded outwards, was pregnant, had a tumor. She envisioned flipping the covers off in one violent motion, but before she could do so the body jerked awake. It was Chantal, sweaty and snotty, what seemed to be tears and a cloud of must encircling her dark brown eyes in the morning haze of a recently cracked blind. Chantal’s voice was hoarse and sticky, like she had small pebbles in the back of her throat which couldn’t be swallowed down or spit out. Nallely heard her perhaps say, “I fucked Lance last night, he stuck his throbbing cock so far inside of me that I still feel it there.” Grassy colored venom was leaking out the sides of her crusty morning mouth. She wiped it away with the covers which now hosted a large slob stain. When she was done, she really said, “Morning.” Chantal didn’t have many words to say. Time had stolen them away evidently, which, as Nallely remembered in the moments of a one word sentence, used to be plentiful. And of course, a memory took up space, not time. Stolen isn’t quite true, the words were there but were dormant, latent. Turned off for whatever reason. It wasn’t just the lack of words though, it was the way in which she said themquiet, constantly faltering, as if speaking to herself in the mirror late at night and confident that no one else was around. “I didn’t hear you come in last night, what did you break in?”, Nallely replied, her voice cracking somewhere around the middle of her sentence. “You were asleep. I felt bad about waking you up, so I slept on the couch.” Nallely’s joke had its effects, if not in speech than in body. Chantal’s body betrayed her even when she tried so hard to act as though everything were alright. The eyes: a dead giveaway. Downcast, staring at nothing in particular, avoidant to be specific; they could examine every inch of space inside of the apartment except Nallely herself, except her own eyes. Her wrists tensed up, curled and furled with a soft violence, one or two veins visibly popping out. Most of all it was her nervous tongue, which couldn’t stay at rest in its sealed container, but kept slipping out every couple of seconds, quickly and deliberate, as if according to a timer. Chantal removed the covers from her body, the stark nakedness of her form both appealing and repulsive to Nallely. Nallely had made up her mind just last week that she no longer desired Chantal, but every time she was close to her (which had been too many times in the process of the move out), she could feel the space between her legs inflame and wash over like waves slamming against the already jagged and broken rocks of a dilapidated landmass. “Sorry”, mumbled Chantal under her breath, turning away from Nallely so that the light through that cracked blind sharply intersected with the smooth skin of her neck, freshly seen after that night’s incident. She put on her bra, now turning back to Nallely, and said with a heightened voice, “I don’t want to move out.”
There was a special kind of silence after Chantal’s words, the kind of intense silence that is no longer quiet, but hyperloud, revealing the nascent domestic sounds of an apartment complex like the refrigerator, or the buzz of lights. Nallely couldn’t speak for a couple of seconds, trying to find the right words to cool the situation. That’s the word that kept going through her head in those quickly passing seconds, “cool”. “You know we can’t do that.” Short but to the point. Nallely used the word “we” to suggest that she was thinking of Chantal’s wellbeing too, combined with her own, that they were not separate units yet, that they never could be, not after what they had been through together, just the two of them, in the three winters and four summers that just passed. It was a time where both of their hearts had slid over to the wrong side of their chests, the right side, and were just now engaging in the slow moving process of refixing to their original places. Chantal’s hair was wild and nappy from a lack of proper sleep ritual, a detail only Nallely could possible pick up. “We’re compact, me and you.” “Could you not romanticize me, for once Chantal?” Chantal was disappointed in the way that Nallely so easily made things about herself, even down to the emphasis of the words “me” and “you”. She lowered her head, feeling her heart beat in a shift of defense. The reader may notice the ways in which focus has shifted to Chantal, but do not be fooled by this trick, it must be clear to the reader by now who is the predator and who the prey. “Why do you always use my name like that, it’s so condescending.” La haine attire la haine. “It’s your name, isn’t it?” “My name is not my name.” Nallely sighed with the force of a steam engine. “I can’t even talk to you anymore.You have to be so dogmatic about everything.” “That’s not what being dogmatic is.” Nallely let out a scream that forced its way outside of the cracked blind and onto the city streets below like a gust of northern wind. “Why do you have to be so fucking pedantic? I didn’t use a word right, you gonna fucking martyr me? My words don’t always come out as perfectly as yours!” She punctuated the perfectly so that its effect was a quick and calculated bite. Chantal was silent for a couple of seconds. One could hear the beating of hearts somewhere close by, perhaps in that very room. “It’s not healthy for you to be here,” Nallely continued. “Healthy for who?” “Come on man.” Nallely had been reduced to cheap phrases. “I have nowhere to go.” “That’s not my problem!” Nallely was fuming, hate and fire sitting like a visor in front of her face. “I’ll be out all day, but when I get back I don’t want to see you still sitting on that couch.” “Where are you going?”, Chantal asked in reply, the inflection of her voice sounding as though she had some antivenom already applied. “What are you going to follow me around town?” Chantal ran her hands through her hair. “Why are you always so accusatory? The first words you spoke to me were an accusation and you’re still at it. Do you get off attacking me like this?” And with this, Chantal began to lightly sob, like the ending tears of a child. Not to infantilize our intruder, only to call attention to the similarities between the choked and choppy mucus of Chantal and that of child’s, genuine at most times, rarely a betrayal of the passions, feeling not thinking.
Nallely retreated back to her bedroom- retreat is the correct word to use, especially as she was holding back tears herself, for you see, perhaps even the serpent feels slight remorse at the violent nature of its act. She was standing with the door half closed in the place where early morning began and the cusp of of midday approached. The hum of artificial voices still vibrated in the living room. They had both absorbed each other’s bites, and both were the better for it. Slithering back (and here the reader may be quite annoyed by the constant return of this image, but if they could only believe the skin that Nallely left behindshedded in factin her bedroom, they too would use the words that I have) to the room, Chantal continued to hold her head down now slumped down into the covers on the couch, playing dead. And what more of this couch, which organizes the space of our strained scene? This couch, with its fat wooden pegs, pushing back on Chantal as she pushed down on it, with its cushions that assimilated the body of Chantal and its own, with its sturdy frame and flat back, forgotten dust and skin, that union of flesh of dust all merged together into one convenient object. In the courtyard some three stories below, the games of children could be heard through that familiar open window, the repeated “Mimi”, Mimi probably some animal, likely a cat, for cats are always resisting the calls of children. Nallely sat down on the couch next to Chantal, and her body too was assimilated with the couch, the force of her own body and Chantal’s leveling the cushion that they both occupied. And for a small moment, so small that a snake, flexible as its skeleton is, couldn’t fit through the opening that it produced, their hearts abruptly reversed, and began returning to that uncanny, wrong, right side.
K
ryan tucker
(w e n Ju f o y e
g n i r a lo n u d n e t gt r it
rip
)
03 June 2015 i’m sure the grass dwindles out further west i’ve gone back out back it’s spindles dry thin shoots the route back was simple up canyons even tufts find purchase jumping between them i’m sure little bugs shout 04 June summer’s colder than i remember then i remember it’s not summer i’m not humble as a friend said but i do sometimes resemble it when i’m  wrong headed long heated reminders you’re older we murmur in summer 06 June thanks for all this nothing you tell me quickly and i’m taken aback memory a country road out towards whatever an old place no one goes to all the almond trees scattered around a dance hall 08 June winery winery winery winery winery winery winery pasture winery shopping winery alfalfa winery winery wal-mart winery mercado winery winery winery winery mcdonald’s winery chevron winery brewery winery gallery gallery restaurant winery winery winery bed and breakfast 09 June as the host of my own home improvement show party to my own party hatmaker to my own hatmaking most earthquakes take place along plate boundries and I move my cups between and my hat to another hook 12 June five broken trucks in the yard ‘sucks’ no time no cash not much chance for change a hard row hoeing we’re reminded and hot sun shares the responsibility to degrade plastic rubber chrome begins to fade
13 June things i learned in america white signs everywhere in the reservations like “made by indians” “authentic indian robes” “collection of genuine leather children’s moccasins get yourself one for every member of the family” meanwhile red dirt 16 June judy’s asleep david’s awake and on errands my hips are cock-eyed too crooked my back becoming a question mark and at what point is the place in my body where the period of time is punctuated 17 June want to spend my food money on tattoos cigarettes nice booze nice shoes a new lamp enough materials to build a small table and i need to find the right lightbulbs instead i eat the dark 18 June peter’s knee pierced w/ long splinter won’t bend w/o threat of snapping shoulder from socket play easily too fragile some folks say but maybe the body generally is maybe who can really resist penetration or winter 19 June I eat the dark berries I guess that’d be better I guess ‘I eat the dark’ when I said that I should have said dark berries shaded in leaves dark dark berries under eaves dropping dark
21 June pretty sure your cat gave me some brain control worms but i’m resisting the urge to be nice to the cat to be interested in cat things the cat can’t catch me cat-like catting categories 24 June berries I should have said buries down-dark some kinda punishment I know buri-buri is a Japanese whipping torture but in the west I heard ‘bout they’d plant you standing pecker-deep braze you in honey then ants 25 June replacing what you don’t like with what you do like is not improvement it’s replacing cogs in clocks and expecting it to tell another time he said the clock coughed against the wall and fell off June 27 waxing waning waxing the stark difficult to track difference when it’s slow or hanging low natural stuff into poems the flow of water or grass or birds before the new face that’s no face at all 30 June I’ve held since childhood I’m ordinary since I’m ordinary I’ve held childhood I’m ordinary childhood since I’ve held held I’m childhood ordinary since I’ve I’ve I’m since ordinary childhood held childhood I’ve since held I’m ordinary
I need to find the rig
ht/ lightbbulbs instead I eat the dark
winery winery wal-mar t wine ry
ow ad
me rc
inery
jasper bernes interviewed by zac gunter For flame that can set fire to flame For panes of glass are both scrolled with the finger and broken with the brick For circling the square was a problem posed first by ancient geometers For “Sand-sized particles/ Of revolutionary possibility fall constantly/ Without our knowledge” For glass, for sand, for flame, for cloth For no amount of cloth could obscure the circuits any further For a book that was always also a machine, doing things rather than singing that old song of the signifier, of meaning -zg Jasper Bernes’ new book of poetry We Are Nothing and So Can You writes the words on the wall, rehearses the chants of the protest, scrawls the slogans of signs, and charts the patterns of demonstration. These new antagonisms treat the relationship between the present experience of beinghistorical and the limited futural imagination. Rather than lamenting our blindered neoliberal situation, this poetry attends the emergence of a new ‘we’, holding open the space for non-capitalism. The following interview was conducted via email and then developed in person at a cafe in Oakland, CA in July 2015. Previously published at the LA Review of Books.
Zac Gunter: Let’s start by talking about Oakland. Apart from the specific references to geography (‘the Footlocker on Broadway boarded up/ once again’), Oakland’s recent political history seems to haunt the pages of We Are Nothing and So Can You. How did your experiences with Occupy Oakland shape 2012’s chapbook version of the book, and how have the last three years’ political developments influenced the new book?
Jasper Bernes:I couldn’t have written this book anywhere else. This is a poem of political experience, in one way or another, a meditation on the social forces that have swept through Oakland and its environs, for better or worse, in the past several years: the ongoing economic crisis that began in 2008, the Oscar Grant movement of that same year, the UC student movement of 2009 and 2010, Occupy Oakland, and all sorts of important events between and since. The poem is fueled by the enthusiasms and fervors and prospects generated in these moments, and one of the reasons it took me so long to finish is that the world (not to mention Oakland) wasn’t really cooperating with me. I had a hard time writing the book in 2013 and 2014, when all I could see was a landscape of defeat. Some of the more pessimist sections come from that time, as rent soared,friends served time in jail, and the forces that once set themselves against the party of order turned on each other in increasingly petty ways. I was able to finish the book in late 2014, with the emergence of the Ferguson protests and Black Lives Matter, events which seemed to indicate that some of the lessons of defeat had been learned, and the sequence begun in 2011 had run its course. Oakland, it goes without saying, is a special place with a decades-long radical history and culture that continues to inform the things people do today. There is a culture of confrontational resistance here, uncharacteristic for the US, that has strengthened despite the police repression and despite the infighting mentioned above. And yet, Oakland is also a metonym for a set of conditions that are increasingly global, and the most intense moments here were always in response to and in solidarity with events elsewhere in the country and the world -in Ferguson or New York, Cairo or Longview, Washington. The more Oakland draws upon and withdraws into its specific regional character, the weaker that character is, paradoxically. In We Are Nothing and So Can You,I’m interested in the way that particular places like Oakland reflect, refract, condense, and displace these global unfoldings. In other words, as much as I owe to Oakland, the book is more about a particular time than a particular place. ZG:You’ve written in the past about how the changing character of work in capitalism in the 60s and 70s inflected the era’s poetry. We’re witnessing another restructuring of the capital-labor relation today - towards financialization and immaterial labor in the capitalist heartland and intensified resource extraction and precarious labor elsewhere. Was this new restructuring a concern while writing We Are Nothing and So Can You?
JB: It’s hard to know what’s happening with the restructuring of labor right now. Some of the things you describe seem like the intensification or extension of the processes I write about in my academic criticism: the expansion of work such that it fills up all 24 hours of the day; the demand that workers offer themselves up body and soul to the workplace, performing feeling as well as bodily action; and finally, an increase in various forms of precarity and contingency: part-time work, informal work, uncontracted and indefinite work (zero-hour contracts, all-purpose assistantships).
The poets of the 1960s and 1970s that I write about were developing models for alternate ways that people might work together, or be together, that eventually got incorporated into this nightmare world. Poets today therefore confront a variety of work formed through a counterrevolutionary appropriation of the critical imagination of their forebears, an appropriation which neutralizes in advance many of the challenges poets might address to this state of affairs. In one section of the book, I describe this as “a James Francobased mode of production,” by which I mean a world in which the only person who labors is James Franco (or someone like him), a person who through his zealous and infinitely flexible mediocrity manages to do all of the things that need doing. To get from the place we are now where the “smile scanners” mentioned in the beginning of the section check to make sure that train workers are sufficiently cheery to the farcical James Franco mode of production, billions of workers would need to be expelled from the labor process. In the 1960s and 1970s, everyone thought that this scenario was right around the corner, that rising productivity would usher in a new age of mass unemployment and falling work hours, one that might lead either to liberation or to catastrophe. But things didn’t really turn out this way: a glut of new, lowpaying service jobs absorbed the workers expelled from manufacturing, and although precarity seems to have increased, labor market participation hasn’t fallen very much. There are limits, however, to how far wages can fall in order to keep people working, and we seem to have reached those limits. Real unemployment now seems to be rising in the US, and we may be on the verge of a new technical reconstruction of service sector jobs. So, some less hyperbolic version of the James Franco scenario may be in the cards. In such a state of affairs, the poetic critique of labor and its alienation will appear increasingly limited, and instead poets will need to situate their critique elsewhere, beyond production. Does We Are Nothing succeed in this regard? I hope so. ZG: The problem of the future is a touchstone of radical thinking, with visions abounding from ‘radical democracy’ to ‘fully automated luxury communism’. The prose sections of the book map out a kind of collective political subject that is undoubtedly historical, but the sections’ shifting tenses suggest that what’s being presented is neither an account of politics hitherto nor a program for a politics to come. How are these sections temporally situated?
JB: My initial plan for the book was that the prose sections would be situated in some sort of future, while the lineated sections engaged the present. But I was also reading quite a bit of history, particularly French revolutionary history, when I wrote some of the first sections of the book, and so that history suffuses both the lineated and prose sections (speculative fiction, it seems to me, almost always draws upon the past in order to build its futures, as there is no other place to find images of a life lived otherwise). So yes, there are lots of shifting tenses and scrambled temporalities, but present and future nonetheless form the temporal dominant of the lineated (verse) and prose sections, respectively. In the verse sections, the past is intermixed with the present because, as Marx notes, the new can only emerge under cover of the old, and therefore “epochs of revolutionary crisis...anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in timehonored disguise and borrowed language.” The future in these lineated sections is a sort of everyday futurity, the kind one encounters in new technologies (drones, wearable computers, etc.) or in the portentous revolts, disasters, and crises that welcome us to the 21st century.
With the prose sections, the operative futurity is different: it is a future after the fact, on the other side of an unnamed event, and often one approached from within a narrative past tense. All of this is perhaps a longwinded preface to the most important point I can make about time in the book, which is that the prosimetric form is designed to model the dynamic movement of history itself. The alternation between lines and sentences, between present and future, presents a decomposition of historical change into its linear and the elliptical determinants, where “verse” turns and returns upon itself, moving in circles, and “prose” moves forward in a straight line. History, encompassing both of these forms of motion, moves in a spiral, producing the genuinely new through a recycling of elements of the old. The shuttling between verse and prose (and between a present and a future described in a narrative past tense) explores as form the ways in which antagonist forces in the present, projecting themselves into a future, end up producing a past, a history. And perhaps, also, I’m saying something about the ultimately “negative” character of utopia that the function of futures like this is to trace out what we can’t imagine; the conversion of future into story has something to do with the epistemological poisoning of the future by what we know and live now. I think I do succeed in providing little glimpses of a life lived otherwise, of communism even, in between the horror and disaster, but it can really only be gotten at obliquely, something you see out of the corner of your eye. That’s why it’s important that that the future of the prose sections itself has a future (the time of the act of narration). Perhaps it’s there, in that open space of telling, where revolution really unfolds. ZG: The last section rehearses a central question of communist theory, “Can a class, acting strictly as/ a class, abolish all classes”, without the direction of a vanguard, party, or artistic avantgarde. Is this why, in the search for a radical poetics, you seem to have opted for a sampling of language and themes from existing politics?
JB: That’s a good way to put it. I am interested, here and elsewhere, in what people are doing and saying and thinking. “I wanted to speak the beautiful language of my century,” writes Guy Debord, adapted from Baudelaire. By which he means, I think, that his own art and theory is a distillation and formulation of social experience, a way of capturing in phrases and images a structure of feeling developed through the antagonistic practice of the proletarians of his time. In this view, theory of the sort Debord produced is not a way of telling people what they don’t know (as a vanguardist view might have it) but making clear to them what they do. Poetry, too, emerges from this social experience; I couldn’t have written this book independently of what millions of people did over the last seven years, in the streets and plazas, at great risk. It’s not just my title that is “sampled” from the streets; at every turn, my poem transfigures the things people have done or said in revolt, either in recent or distant history.
Iw ant
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ZG: A recurrent concern in We Are Nothing and So Can You has to do with the relation between the radical desire for another world and the search for words adequate to realize that desire. It seems that much of the language of the book borrows imagery both from recent cycles of struggle (‘I never saw the panda punch the cop’) as well as features of contemporary capitalism (‘baroque interest rate swaps’). Is this poetry addressed to the present, or to a politics yet to emerge?
JB: Both, I guess. Or rather, my hope is that the poem hails in the present those elements and forces likely to compose part of a politics yet to emerge. The “we” of the title and the book a “we” that absorbs a hailed “you” doesn’t really refer to a definite group of people. As I note in the acknowledgments page, I stole the title from an anonymous graffitist. In this regard, the book is addressed to anyone who happens along and identifies with it. “Myself and strangers,” answers Gertrude Stein, when asked for whom she writes. I might adapt this to the first-person plural point of view of the book: myself, my friends, and strangers.
... the ways in which antagonist forces in the present, projecting themselves into a future, end up producing a past, a history.
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‘all art either with the crowd or with the police. all art coming down to that simple divide.’ Juliana Spahr, That Winter the Wolf Came 1. a pop music is speculative insofar as it tries to ascertain what concrete social and sonic practices in the present ‘might make a future’ (Stengers) outside the ecologically destructive, white supremacist and heteropatriarchal bad infinity of contemporary capitalism. 2. speculative pop interrogates the ways in which these damaging forces infect the form of pop music: its song structure, its harmonic n melodic horizon, its circuits of distribution, its affects and concepts, its petrol-based mediums of vinyl cassette cd, and so on. adrienne maree brown puts it like this: ‘if we want to bring new worlds into existence, then we need to challenge the narratives that uphold current power dynamics and patterns,’ (brown, 2015). Speculative pop investigates the ways in which relations of power and domination shape the structure, content and distribution of pop music in order to create new, non-normative and visionary ways of organizing sound. 3. in previous eras of pop music, revolutionary politics were explored in music primarily through language: lyrical content, spoken by a human subject definitively rejecting and resisting state power, injustice, etc. speculative pop explores revolutionary politics by designing alternative circuits of production, frequency, modulation and circulation; that is, by re-configuring the form of pop. it locates the sites of domination and thus resistance not at the level of language and the subject but rather at the material and infomatic circuits through which sound, the body and the listening subject are produced as such. 4. ‘pop’ is a technopolitical procedure for producing listening publics. it refers to both a scale of distribution possible only with the advent of mechanical reproduction and a series of musical forms. it is used to bind desire to particular horizons and to encapsulate identity and community into a stable series of cultural practices. think elvis singing blue suede shoes on Ed sullivan selling records selling ads selling heteropleasure the couple form selling appropriation of black musics selling colonization to white america making a people, a sense of something shared, on a mass scale. pop, the technology to engineer publics invested in and attached to a particular mode of being-with, composed through certain practices to reproduce itself through repetition of the binding scene (the record). 5. speculative pop notes pop’s status as a process for engineering publics and investigates the immanent potential of pop to produce other kinds of publics outside of capitalist realism’s circuits of heteronormative desire. 6. but rather than seeking to produce a public whose identity it knows in advance, or to write for a people who already exist, it seeks to induce processes whose results cannot be predicted. it sees pop as a terrain of experimentation whose unexpectedness is precisely what is needed to dynamite the straitjacket placed upon our imaginations of the possibility of an Otherwise, both sonically and politically. its art lies not in a finished, ossified recording but in the rhythms, ideas and social forms it engenders in its circulation.
7. interrogating the form of pop destabilizes the boundaries between music and noise, politics and aesthetics, human and non-human, thereby widening the field of composition past the normatively ‘musical.’ the terrain of experimentation with which speculative composition concerns itself is the intertwining of the sonic and social: black liberation and the dissolution of traditional Western harmony (Ayler), queerness and the deterritorialization of the piano (Cowell), transphobia heteropatriarchy and the problem of repetition in house music (Thaemelitz), digital reproduction and the NSA (Herndon); music qua music is dead, but speculative pop just might have the capacity to engineer a people in but not of the astral radiated Earth. musical problems are problems of relation, organization violence circulation hierarchy dissonance repetition distribution history; in short, political questions of the most immediate urgency. 8. extending the field of composition to the ‘non-musical’ entails transforming the social relations, material conditions of (re)production, distribution and circulation (i.e. recording technology and mechanical reproduction) and the venues its performances takes place within from presuppositions into terrains of experimentation. 10. speculative pop embodies the logic of perhaps: of what might make a world beyond capitalism, of what might incite the formation of a ‘we’ whose desires and processes of desiring are anti-racist, communal, queer and revolutionary, without guarantees or mastery, only the commitment to and pleasure of being together in a new way. 11. speculative pop is communism in composition. it is the attempt to think through the material conditions, the ownership of the means of production, the supply chains and distribution lines, the labor, the ideological apparatuses, the production of gender and desire, through which electronic audio becomes possible as such. it then seeks to self-reflexively compose around this analysis. 12. speculative pop is holly herndon is shabazz palaces coupling ‘big movements from below/ the golden age lies ahead’ with a constantly modulating yet repetitive synth line whose rhythm and compositional structure take on the mask of rap only to transform it into something alien, strange, seductive is the cubies hudson glover delia derbyshire underground resistance terre thaemelitz lydia lunch ornette coleman oneohtrix point never wendy carlos john maus bourgeois speedball teklife and sometimes miles davis.
13. speculative pop takes on a mask or two of pop musics: an emphasis on the individual, singular voice, a recognizably familiar chord progression, repetitive rhythm and song structure, the clap is on 2 and 4 duh fool as a strategic lure. to get the revolutions past the cop in yr head. it then perverts it from within by connecting it to machines alien to pop. think holly herndon algorithmically multiplying, dissecting, decoupling the sign from the texture, processing the voice, that most intimate marker of sovereignty, personhood, the interiority and truth of desire, in order to analyze the voice as always already a machine, as a historically contingent material-semiotic process, genderfuck and wily.
16. speculative pop is non-Aristotelian pop music. it does not ask the listener to identify with it, to be carried away, absolved. instead, it works to alienate the listener by creating a scene of misrecognition: you think you know what’s happening, it almost fits in to the hegemonic Western conception of music, but it doesn’t, and you don’t. you never have. the phrase ‘pop music’ obscures the fact that the ‘people’ are not a homogenous mass, but divided between ‘tormentor and tormented, oppressor and oppressed’ (Brecht) manager and worker, striated through race, colonization gender sexuality and ability. to enter into a scene of misrecognition is to point at the vast chasms of inequality that define contemporary social life. this gap opens up the possibility of an Otherwise, of building new ways to relate and be with each other. 17. what good is any of this? maybe nothing. a pittance, maybe. it will either be on the side of the revolution or it won’t be.
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I Regret Choosing Cleverness Over Choosing a Career I don’t go to school and I do not have a job, I refine my OkCupid until I’m a heart-throb, I don’t know how to weld and I don’t know how to sew, But if you need I can help you watch for free any show, I’ve never read Virgil, but I majored in Literature, I’ve read DFW because that’s what my profs preferred, I wake up at 11:30, follow Instagram if they’re pretty, Know that I will get more likes if my status is less wordy, I know why Miley’s popular, know Aubrey Drake as @champagnepapi, I ball so hard on Tinder not even free dinner can stop me, I prefer books to my parents and Vice.com to my friends, I’m on Craigslist and Amazon looking how little I can spend, My dog is mad ‘cause music videos are NSFW, She’s like please fucking pet me n’ I’m like bitch I do not fuck with you My step-dad thinks I’m lazy, and I think he should go solar, I see his patience waning like the ice-caps that are polar, I’ve gotten disturbingly good at posing for Instagram pictures, I pray that when I get a job, I’m making double-digit figures, I ride my bike and tell people it’s ‘cause I’m scared of global warming, But really last time I took my mom’s car and she left me off with a warning, But I’m actually very terrified of potential natural catastrophes, ‘Cause some people think that it’s inevitable while others think it’s not happening And I don’t know what’s happening and I’m confident, but I’m nervous, ‘Cause I’ve invested in my cleverness, but might be better off if I were wordless.
Drake, Bruh Soon you’re going to hear Drake rap about his taxes “Rap game libertarian, Clinton’s making trade fair again, I support Citizen’s United, And I’m not even American” And its like Drake, you are American because Canada is in North America. You gotta know this, bruh.
thanks to ian for being #1 by all conventional metrics to connor for always being on my couch to my two jobs for sharpening my sense of the class contradictions traversing my to bennett for demonstrating a challenging and beautiful image of thought to danny daniel james for caring mostly to ryan for being the most fun person to email except for maybe will to michael for thinking so close to hayley for texting to rory for nyc to american spirit even tho u should really just change your logo already to austin ron jon for things you don’t need to hear to sarah for repetition porchlights chimes mondays difference to my enemies i even had this dream i forgave you lol to aki for innumerable really important things if i was to count back five years to black spring for the uppers to ruby for the downers to oakland for falling under my feet
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