Robert Kocik: The Other Front

“Without doubt it is we, the poets and thinkers, who are to blame for this bloodbath and who have to atone for it.” (Dadaist artist Hugo Ball)

I call it the OTHER FRONT UNDERFOOT.

I’d like to forgo my opinion of this possible war…to take a position relative to impossible war.

(By not having stopped war from arriving at this brink, poets have already failed. Have long failed. What recourse within ourselves and our materials does this compel?

(Now that the potential problem with stopping the war is stopping stopping war.)

At this point, to protest war is reaction and compulsory. I’d call it peace conscription. A citizen’s as distinct from a poet’s action.

To instinctively stay within an efficacy particular to the materials of poetry. The language we’d be fighting for peace for.

We don’t live in a world where the use of force is unviable. It’s chronic. It’s called the war to end war over and over. It may one day be terminal--the war that ends all. But it can’t be made acute—like a fever that breaks and takes away the sickness from then on. It’s a terminal condition kept chronic. We can’t just, as a species, get it over with.

Recovering but not cured. Getting hungry again. Back in the saddle. War is likely. It’s back in vogue. Entertainable. (If not this war then some other war.)

Is it a law of nature or just a rule of thumb?

Threat of the use of force in order to empower negotiation, is already war. Poetic failure--specifically because the language of threat is ‘language’. Once the language of threat is unleashed, no poetic operation can retroactively unengender it.

Once reactionary, it may even be tempting to react further—to subvert aversion—come out in favor of war, in the sense of sobering oneself with reality in an unbiased, disinterested sense—or exuberantly admitting war as vital, life renewing, as creation’s ritual creativity. (Not pro-war in the narrow, passionate sense of having belligerently taken one’s own side—which has nothing to do with artwork.)

As Long As The Body About To Be Blown Up Is Not YOU Or YOURS? Too late for artwork to take effect. Artwork not a viable last minute strategy.

What would poets place in the world to bring us to the point where we could even find out if it’s possible to live without force? Apparently not poetry.

What poem?

Looking as little like a poem as unlike a weapon.

As little like a poem as the language of war it would apply in order to be preemptive.

Preempt was a poet’s word (and is now a Wolfowitz word)—a word poetry could have given to the populace so that it would be unavailable for military use. Preempt is another word for portend or prophesize—to materialize, which is to poeticize.

Fighting against has never yet worked. What I fight against is (explicitly) not that which I fight for. Nor is fighting for what I fight for. It gets called ‘lose/lose’. Mutual exclusions.

To fight against is to fight for that which to fight against denies.

To fight for, in the fighting against, is to forfeit that which is fought for.

So, just let roll over me that which would deny the positive goods living without war would be a matter of?

The positive goods, if provided, would disallow war as well as its verge. THAT POEM. (How many and of what sort would it take--while conscientiously, arduously, all-out-resourcefully undertaking it—while at peace (as the Orient goes to the doctor in times of health—the crisis, calling up our total reserves, is all’s well)--to write, that poem, our rewiring?)

(The Surgeons General admits a great deal is known about sickness while very little is known about health. How many pages went into Paradise Lost, and how few could be provided for Paradise Regained? What about us necessarily dims at the brink of peace?)

Fighting against, at most, waylays the occasion (the occasion poetry has in fact forfeited) to implant the moral and vital equivalent de-necessitating that which is fought against. NOT THAT POEM.

(These words are made of my father’s death. He does not have to die on a battlefield to die in glory or fill me with courage. It would simply be misplaced, misleading, malicious and maddening to believe so in even the slightest sense.)

Should poets usurp the means for war—i.e. reason, righteousness, rage, results; knowing that each mental mode is at base a writing genre. To fight against fighting, are we repelled by warlike languages while these very languages have in fact been taken from us in order to wage war—languages which now seem nonnative to poetry and naturalized to power and aggression? All uses of the language belong to poetry because the proper object of poetry is all of the language—all of the languages within the language--because language is a property of poetry.

If not, we can no more than plant geraniums in helmets evermore. Way too post pre emptive. Swords to plowshares re-belligerent.

With our backs to the wall, what’s called Comic Warfare is viable. Comic Warfare is the appropriation of the terms of war toward contrary ends—to stand people back up. Covert, unidentifiable poetry. Conversion not coercion of materials. Overt, disarming poetry.

If poetry has never once kept us from the brink of war, why are we now concerned with conserving its identity (of conserving our identities) in the face of war? Is not the face of war occasion to be less concerned than ever over the conserving of the recognizable poem? If we keep looking strictly at what poetry has done, war remains inevitable. What it has not done, allows war to happen. If there were ever a world only poetry could put in place, war would be no more.

Get out of, not type of genre, but genre itself. Take hold of agency, office, infrastructure and construction in ways that are not redundant to or reiterative of power.

Comic Warfare doesn’t underdo or undo the controls—it outdoes them, comically. If, for example, determinism is killing us, the comic poem could extradetermine—one last loop around or lace straight through the ‘point’ and it is outdone. So overfacilitate the fraud of the ineluctability of force—that upon its next step it fall flat on its face.

(As in my opening quote by Hugo Ball) even the dastardly, reproachful language of incrimination and vindication can be applied with considerable and unexpected poetic efficacy. While blame is the blunt instrument of belligerence, Ball, by blaming himself and his kin, declares personal and total empathy with the catastrophe. He calls on blame to make a ludicrous claim real.)

I’m more than ok with that.

How? To overprovide:

how about adding an adversely active attribute to an antagonistic category? Extemporize predetermination. Alleviate axiomatics. Unbias theophanics. Experientialize expertise.

Haywire teleology. Contradictory is complimentary . Demilitarize security. Concretize Wesenschau.

Up the ample: aestheticize ascetics. sediment the transcendent. Suprasensitize empiricism. Be a munificent, bemuddled mechanist.

Maybe betray your own: actualize inexplicable. Eroticize R&D.

How about disinterested self-help? Rambunctious reductionism?

Or, delve into the extra delectation of overdoing the doubly debunked (a term discredited inside and outside its field): demonstrably vitalist. Add a negative or double debunk to a double debunk: support dead-beat behaviorism.

Although the above operations are stop-gap and not quite occlusive--- belying beatified materiality (globe: as below, so above)--they are nonetheless solid steps toward fighting neither for nor against. Anything but perversity for perversity’s sake--steps pertaining to the impending perpetual peace.

(The obvious danger in appropriating the terms of the oppressor—driving deeper behind enemy lines to directly undo an unwanted world may distance artists from ‘native’ aesthetics of a wanted world (yes, like watching the domestic budget dwindle). One example that comes to mind—the NYC-based artist collective rTmark adopts corporate and free market methodology in order to sabotage advanced global capitalism. RTmark hijacks corporate and political identities in order to snare the unaware. To cite but one instance—rTmark parodies the WTO website by using similar graphic elements as the official WTO site. The confused guest stumbles upon a directory of direct action initiatives that challenge the neo-liberal juggernaut. In another instance, rTmark channeled funds from a military veteran’s group to the Barbie Liberation Organization which used the investment to switch the voice boxes of Barbie and G.I. Joe dolls. )

How might poets, with their open identities, remain pertinent between breakaway utopia and turning into their own antithesis?

Is a poet nothing in particular? Because a poet is nothing special (last nonspecialist), something denatured, denurtured, one card not contained in the deck can be played.

Poets aren’t people. Poets may be citizens--but not necessarily people. I can’t do as a citizen what I can only do as a poet. Politicians are people—though failed people. Speaking for the people with the voice of the people is at best, approximate. Switzerland is full of people. A consensus cult. If I’m speaking, as a poet, with the voice of the people—just how cut off from my material am I--from the shift only I as non-democracy can effect. Like the first fool eukaryote that let in an organelle that we might one day breathe. As opposite elitist as democratic (the requisite agent).

The problem with the MUST of throwing one’s prosdized body before the war machine…losing limbs with which to perpetually jam up the Great Big Biocide of which war is a speck and spectacle. (I’d call it ‘getting Saddam Lewinskied’.

By means of all the possible actions of the poet of unconserved identity—or even a poem on a piece of paper or a poem read out loud (the point at which the least a poem can be becomes its most) through Comic Warfare, this time brought to a fair fight in the fantastic asymmetry of artwork vs. warworld. (Our publicity will never be as powerful as theirs). The asymmetric strike is quintessentially (quintessence, another recoverable ordure) poetic—poetic scale and odds. A line on a piece of paper up against biocide. Auspicious enough—the gross imbalance beckons ungraspable tactics. Impregnable bubble all around, with a little package delivered directly to the door by one’s own pet. Just a box cutter or the bottom of a shoe will do. As only an act from an asymmetrician can pose a serious threat to the peerlessly, imperially empowered.

And provided poets hit their stride in their fight without side, make it terminal may apply not to people but war.

Posted by Brian Stefans at April 08, 2003 05:11 PM | TrackBack