Joel Bettridge: What we Talk about when we Talk

[This post refers to an earlier piece on Circulars by Charles Bernstein and Kent Johnson's reply on Skanky Possum.]

I am always surprised to hear resistance to the simple observation that politics, ethics and aesthetics are necessarily joined. Kent Johnson's anger that Charles Bernstein would continue to insist so looks out of place when claiming that the way something is said or presented determines what is meant and what is understood, is at this point, almost a matter of stating the obvious. It is no different than observing that if you say "I love you" while rolling your eyes you mean something very different than if you say "I love you" with a smile. How we speak and write is what we mean—aesthetics are never secondary.

Allowing that aesthetics and ethics are one recognizes that naming constitutes difference. A politics that rejects aesthetics as argument only names differences. The former confronts political violence at the moment of its creation; the later arrives to late, screaming thief after the money is gone.

Reading Bernstein's statement carefully, it is clear that he is not suggesting that poets should refrain from engaging in political activity within the community at large. Rather he speaks to the role of poets, as poets—what their poems should be doing in and for that community. Labeling Bernstein's position as "fundamentalist" because it is not "multifarious" can only acknowledge positions that claim no other truth than heterogeneity as an idea. Such a critique fails when it attempts to escape the burden of debate, demonstrating as it does that it is too easy to call people fundamentalists only because they insist that something, anything, is true.

More dangerously, a leftist politics that rejects belief is perilous because it is a politics that creates the possibility of its own irrelevance. Witness President Bush's response to the recent war protesters. In embracing the democratic rhetoric of free speech President Bush could say, in plain words, "protesters certainly have the right to express their opinion, but I respectfully disagree." He could ignore nearly 40 percent of the population by appearing to listen. Of course there is nothing respectful in his tolerance of such voices, and his "Patriot Act" dismisses any real allegiance to the Constitution, but what is crucial about his response is that it turns war protest into a mere voicing of preference. As with all such simple 'differences of opinion,' the administration need no longer account for dissent among its constituents; it elides a government by the people for the people through the rhetoric of liberal democracy. President Bush uses the sound of tolerance to turn the differences between himself and his opposition into the same thing as the differences of opinion at a cocktail party—everybody gets to say what they believe, nobody changes their mind or really listens, and everyone leaves feeling polite and self-congratulatory.

Measuring poetry's success as political resistance by its ability to last, or move beyond aesthetic concerns, then, does not account for the manner in which political violence now occurs in our country. Which is to say that the Bush Administration's aggression rests on a constant abuse of language. Early in his war on terror we saw this type of language molestation when President Bush named his Afghan prisoners "detainies" rather than prisoners of war. What our country could do to these people in our name depended completely on their name.

While such indignity is not new to the current administration, the success of this abuse of words depends on our willingness to engage in an issues debate rather than our contesting the way the debate is carried out—an aesthetic concern if there ever was one. The difference between these two options is crucial because once we agree to argue over the issues only, the Administration can dismiss us altogether. We must not be willing, as poets, as keepers of language, to engage in such a discharge of words' significance. We cannot agree to name differences rather than using naming to constitute difference. We cannot hope to be relevant if we agree to a political debate that turns our position into mere opinion and takes away our most powerful weapon—the ability to understand and reveal how words come to mean what they do.

Maintaining that aesthetic partisanship for innovative writing is vain poetic infighting and not actual political work sides with the forces that believe words don't matter in the first place, that say nit-picking over what words mean is elitist and exclusionary rather than necessary for the health of our Republic.

Poets should take a leading role in political resistance, but this resistance should occur in more than one manner. We can speak out in 'normal' speech in any number of political situations, but we must also resist on the level of discourse itself; it is only on this level that we can mount a serious challenge to Bush's politics on his terms, terms that force us and our antagonists to fight over the same thing—the meaning a word like 'freedom' is going to have, and the way such a word can be used. We must insist, in our poems, as well as in our protests, letters, and speeches, that Bush take better care of his words. We can for our part not give into his desire that we limit our debate to civil disagreement, or at worst, fix our ourselves in ideologies so we may stare across the table and think the other person is the devil. By continuing to insist that words like 'justice' and 'freedom' occur in the way we use them, and that we are responsible to these definitions, not the other way around, we can begin to see how words are abused by others or by ourselves for the sake of power and control. It is here that we can ground or physical, worldly, resistance to that abuse. Aesthetics are not a matter of taste, a matter of preferring right angles over curves, bright colors over dull; aesthetics are that which shape our world.

Poetry helps us reshape that world by asking us to examine the way we use language in the first place. As Bernstein argues, to turn a poem into a political speech is to say poetry is not relevant as poetry. While the temptation to only speak 'plainly' is great, to do so is also to abandon what is most politically useful about our cultural position as people who dedicate themselves to investigating how words determine and represent all of our lives. When we give up aesthetics we give up the ability to make our cultural and political realties for ourselves. When it examines method of its production, poetry is the ability to act on the tools that would make us other than what we wish to be.

Posted by Brian Stefans at March 17, 2003 10:27 AM