by Jasper Bernes, Joshua Clover, Juliana Spahr
(presented at annual meeting of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present, October 26-29, Oakland CA)
INTRO
All style is period style from the perspective of historical materialism. And yet this truism does not do much for thinking about a period, or about the problem of period style, which may have at its heart how we feel about period style, often understood as a failure: a failure of aesthetic autonomy, a failure to elude the crudest determinations and ideological horizons of one’s moment and condition, a failure to be out ahead of things, to be avant-garde. We cannot say this is our own understanding. Here we follow Guy-Ernest Debord’s remark that “Avant-gardes have only one time; and the best thing that can happen to them is to have enlivened their time without outliving it.” We take this to illuminate the necessity of being fully of one’s time, of giving oneself over to it uncompromisingly.
And yet in some sense this talk is about compromise. Or at least about triangulation, about the way that one period style to which we are drawn, what we are calling “late period style,” is itself drawn from three distinct coordinates, none of them new, which are now brought into a complex set of balances. Our present might be grasped, as a dilemma is grasped, by the attunement of these three coordinates into a coherent view. It is “period stye” in the sense that it is an orientation that becomes evident in this period, that takes on salience in this period, and presents a mediation between historical circumstance and poetic substance.
The coordinates are these: theory, pop, and riot. You have seen them come and go, waft through poems or hang around, alone and in combination. Any one by itself is relatively mute; it speaks only itself, exactly by trying to stand for larger fields that do not wish to be represented: the intellectual, the cultural, the political. Any pair gestures at the present only inexactly, a degraded style often dominated by disavowal. For example you may recognize the vogue, perhaps it arrived in the nineties, for the poetry book with the double epigraph, one a high-minded theoretical passage, the other a cheeky selection from a Top 40 ditty, as if to reassure us that we won’t be overly oppressed by the scholastic in here. I know Deleuze but am not of him, it says, equally insisting I know fun but am not trivial, no really. Or consider the combination of riot and pop, always at risk of aestheticizing the riot as simply a feature of cultural representation, disavowing the riot’s real content and danger. And so on. It is not until all three are set in motion each against the others, all with all, that they make a world, a world that — by corresponding with the world outside the poem schematically, imperfectly, insistently — brings into relief that world’s contours. In the first instance it is perhaps as simple as the world bounded by the academy, the internet, and the social movement. By earth, wind, and fire. None of these can, in the present, provide its own orientation, but all are volatile and present. The limits of theory-pop-riot are the limits of our world, somewhere around here, somewhere around now.
THEORY
The contemporary roots of “theory” in US Anglophone poetry grow from the soil of the seventies. It will not be controversial to note the self-identified avant-gardes of that period drew explicitly and importantly from “French” high theory and indeed played a significant role in its transmission, and thus in North America’s linguistic turn, arranging what Marjorie Perloff called “a ‘new’ rapprochement between poetry and theory.” The wager was that these largely poststructuralist theories could be attuned to historical materialism through the parallel devices of first, a reading of the “materiality of the signifier” that rendered discursive practices as thinkable within the framework of political-economic production, and second, a homology drawn between the act of engaging a chain of signification and the act of commodity consumption. The second device was secured as something purportedly more than analogical by the force of the first. This effort to attune poststructuralism and Marxism was shared with no few significant thinkers, Althusser and Kristeva among them. The poetry set out not just to announce these propositions — there were critical volumes toward that end — but to explore what discoveries became possible for poetry when one proceeded as if these propositions were true.
This earned the poets in question no small degree of scorn or indifference from those invested in poetry’s lyric traditions. At the same time it must be said, to keep the timeline in shape, that this project set itself in tension with a set of poetics associated with the new social movements, treated as not-particularly-theoretical because presumed to be hard at the task of representing the experiences of historically excluded communities. The opposition between a theoretical avant-garde and a culturalist mainstream was more ideological than actual, as Tim Kreiner has argued in his history of the Poetry Wars; but it was nonetheless affirmed by both sides. This tension was exacerbated via the occasional suggestion that linguistic struggle was the proper political mode, set against what was claimed to be the excessive and counterproductive militancy that attended some quarters of the broad field of new social movements.
At the same time, interest in this theoreticization expanded and settled ever further into enduring institutions until around the turn of the millennium, very close to the present, Perloff suggested that such poetry may be exhausted and that theory might best be left to the theorists. Such an approach had become too generalized, no longer the property of a brave fraction. The mark of this debasement was the transformation from theorization to citation, such that what she named the “theory buzz” poem was “no more than a collage of nuggets by Big Names — Agamben and Heidegger, Cixous and Wittgenstein, Deleuze and Adorno — without any real analysis of what the philosophers in question are actually arguing.” This is in an essay that is about, and begins with a definition of, innovation: the value of theoretical poetry for the author is that it takes part in innovation, and when this flags, it’s time to turn out the lights. A few years later, in 2008, which is to say, in the opening hours of the present, she would look back on this history and declare TheoryPo a “period style.” While this has been read as condemnation, for the negative valences mentioned earlier, we think it also implies a victory: the broader dissemination of a technique belonging initially to an innovative group. As ever for cultural avant-gardes, this can only be an inverted victory wherein the early innovations become commonplaces and lose their edge: a version of Sartre’s “winner loses.” That Perloff’s systematic renunciation of TheoryPo was more or less contemporaneous with the so-called Death of Theory in the wider intellectual landscape can scarcely be surprising.
But what are the terms of this death? For if theory died, in and out of poetry, it persists nonetheless in the poetry of the present, in much the citational style described, as one coordinate of late period style. What is alive in this death, if anything?
Periodization provides the beginnings of an answer. Our present begins with global economic crisis, with its renewed urgency to grasp capital’s immiserations, and to arrange a serious encounter with a set of racialized struggles intensified by crisis. So the first thing we can say is that theory changes. It dies and is reborn into this scene. The theory that rises to the fore in the period from the late sixties to the early aughts — basically the span between what Giovanni Arrighi names as the signal and terminal crises of the current cycle of capitalist accumulation — now wanes, and is replaced by theories both older (as in Marx and that tradition) and newer (as in afrofuturism and pessimism). The mourned era of high theory in poetry refers not to a high degree of engagement with theory but to the presence of high theory. That this field of theory could not finally be attuned with Marxism was perhaps evident to some early on, but disclosed dramatically by the bursting of various bubbles inflated by dreams that there were new kinds of production: immaterial, linguistic. There were not. Wagers that the signifier was material in the sense of historical materialism, well, these wagers went to the house.
Periodization, and concomitant shifts in the content of theory, cannot so easily explain the persistence of the form of citationality itself, however: the cool body of theory that we see time after time laid into the tomb of the poem. We might suggest that citationality is not meant only to mention, but rather can do a different work with a different readership: perhaps readers of the present (perhaps in part through the PhD-ification of writing programs) are more likely to be theoretically informed, better prepared to generate live significance from dead words than were the hesitant or recalcitrant or not-yet-entheoried readers of the seventies. Not sure.
But we might continue nonetheless to suggest that the seeming deadness of these citations bears a living truth. Theory as a great and imagined social practice, as the leading edge of a politics, is lost to us as a plausible vision. It has in many ways become calcified and emptied — not simply via generalization and indeed commodification, but by the end of the dream of a theoretical revolution, one led by a specialized cadre of thinkers. And the citation, the cold body, registers this calcification, this dreamlessness, as a truth — registers it as true to the “death of theory,” and thus alive in its truth.
This alone would be a negative virtue, a marker of the way that theory can now be only a marker, theory-as-commodity to name the commodification of theory. We might thus continue by suggesting that the citational body found at theory’s funeral two decades ago is now re-placed into a matrix in which it comes back to life. This is the purpose of the triple orientation theory-pop-riot, as indicated in the introduction. None of them on its own can provide a sense of the present, which is constituted by the incompleteness of each coordinate, indeed constituted by the way in which each coordinate on its own can only be inadequate and finally misleading. Theory can no longer on its own carry a poem, just as it can no longer on its own carry a politics; it can only live when it is in relation to non-theoretical coordinates. This means in turn that the poem cannot itself be a theorization — that would simply restore theory to its primacy, its non-relation, and thus its death. One might, just for laughs, agree that this contemporary deployment is not theory — but that it is a theory of theory. [Pt 3, 655 words]
But it is also a theory of the present. If we can no longer preserve the ideal of a theory-led revolution, we must equally abandon the ideal of a theoretical avant-garde, or at least of one that is ahead of its time. This was implicit in the particular mode of TheoryPo now lost to us. Theory’s tragedy in earlier poetic moments is in truth not that it became period style but that it tried to be otherwise, and in so doing divorced itself or even set itself against contemporary militancies. Just as it was theory contra the commodification of aesthetics, which is to say, theory contra pop, it was also theory contra riot. It tried instead to be its own militancy. Falling back into the present, theory must find militancies here.
Riot and theory, brought together, might offer a kind of promissory note, not yet an actuality, regarding the overcoming of the old opposition between social movements and theorists, itself a refraction of the enforced separation of manual and intellectual labor. At the same time, the pairing cannot elude a didacticism to which we will return. It proposes a solution that is finally too neat, not dialectical but simply an ideological complementarity: the abstract hope that reference to riot can irrigate theory’s arid steppes, theory supply the riot with the ordering modes it is purported to lack. It is a frozen binary.
To become period style is not the catastrophe but its reverse. To enter into the set of coordinates which provide a sense of the period — only one sense, we hurry to underscore, but an elaborated and vivid one — is the only possibility for vitality albeit temporary. This is one of the things pop has to say to both theory and riot: we are not out of it yet, we are still in the world of the commodity, let us not pretend otherwise, we are still magnetized by the present moment, let us not pretend otherwise, it is incomparably beautiful, let us not pretend otherwise, it has to burn, let us not pretend otherwise.
POP
It has to burn but before it does we offer the following simple observation: today a poem is more likely to have a shout out to Beyonce than to Hesiod.
To make sense of this simple fact, we need to reflect on the changing relationship between literary tradition and, as it were, the individual talent. Poetry is a genre that has long been associated with tradition. With this claiming of tradition comes the presumption that poetry is written so as to be timeless. Poems thus have had a tendency to shout out to those who have come before. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” is an easy example here. It alludes or quotes diversely, from the Bible, Wagner, Baudelaire, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Ovid, Spenser, Marvell, Verlaine. And this is just a partial list, but you get the idea. Even when it might be news, poetry is news that stays news.
But pop music in its singularity, so as a song, often does not extend beyond a single season. It is a signifier more of ephemerality than of tradition. Do not reference the Cheeky Boys someone once said to one of us about a poem they had written; no one will get it in a year. That was in 2001. They were probably right. Does anyone remember the Cheeky Boys? We are not even sure we do. But the presumption behind that statement was that poetry is in it for the long game. We, however, were convinced at the time that it had no long game.
We were not alone. And so in the last ten years or so, Beyonce has replaced Hesiod. The pop music reference might be the most powerful of the three elements in the poem. Beyonce in the poem more or less puts the period in period style. Riot, theory, pop. Liberté, egalité, Beyonce.
References to things popular is not something all that new. Newness is not our point really. One of the ways we understand the New York School is through its embrace of popular culture. Frank O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died” can be read as telling an interesting story about this moment when references in poems transition from Hesiod to Beyonce. In “The Day Lady Died” O’Hara first shouts out tradition but then at the end he shouts out pop music and it is clear that pop music wins. The poem announces it is going period style in its first lines: “It is 12:20 in New York a Friday / three days after Bastille day, yes / it is 1959.” The rest of the poem is about buying culture. The poem has, like Dolly Parton’s “Jolene,” a bank teller in it. And after visiting her the narrator buys first “an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING” so as “to see what the poets / in Ghana are doing these days.” There is a lot of debate about O’Hara’s take on the poets of Ghana: is that line sarcastic or does he really want to know what these poets in Ghana are up to or is he being a jerk and dismissing anticolonial struggle? 1959, of course, was a year in which the decolonization of Africa was beginning; it was two years after Ghana became Ghana; it was the year the Cuban revolution succeeded. That’s yet another paper. However it is not just the poets of Ghana and their concerns with nation building that O’Hara buys. He also buys Verlaine and he almost buys Hesiod, Behan, and Genet. He also buys Billie Holiday: “I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue / and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and / casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton / of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it.” But the poem juxtaposes all this buying of culture with an authentic and unmediated-by-the-market memory of Billie Holiday singing: “and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of / leaning on the John door in the 5 SPOT / while she whispered a song along the keyboard / to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing.”
But what was once a sign of transgression or reconfiguration of the age old high/low divide is now something ubiquitous. Every time has its stylistic conventions. To namedrop only the most obvious and obsessive examples of today’s conventions: Kevin Killian and Kylie Minogue, Morgan Parker and Beyonce, Chinaka Hodge and various DJs, Sarah Blake and Kanye, Brandon Brown and the top 40, Uyen Hua and every pop singer who ever reached the internet. But this is not just about book-length poems about popular music. In a recent casual read of the poems in a few recent issues of The New Yorker, there were numerous references to pop music; there was one to Shakespeare.
There is no getting around that pop music pursues its emotions by capitalism’s means; thus that game, best played after a few drinks at a bar, of what music will you miss most after the revolution? So it is telling of something that poets so often right now find pop music — a form of art that is produced by large multinational corporations and fed to our ears through apps that if not yet associated with multinational corporations aspire to be and also by the satellite projections of centralized multinational radio stations, as something meaningful — something possibly authentic, something with access to meaningful emotions that cannot be bought and sold. Whereas once authenticity was secured by autonomy from the market, now authenticity is vouchsafed by heteronomy.
What it is telling of is how poetry is caught. But a peculiar form of caught. It is not caught by the market. Of all the genres and forms of art, poetry still wins all the market irrelevance contests. Unlike a pop song, it barely counts as a commodity. It is hard to sell a poem. A few do it but not many. And it is also hard to sell a book of poetry and when it happens it is not really an M-C-M’ sort of relationship. It is maintained by that weird form of capitalism that is the not for profit. Poetry is caught not by market demands or pressures but instead by autonomy from the market. And a dawning awareness that this autonomy, while a form of freedom, is also a sign of poetry’s irrelevance. But not just that. This autonomy also makes it vulnerable to other forms of conscription. Poetry is, for instance, unusually dependent in this moment on certain forms of institutionalization, dependent enough to suggest that despite its irrelevance to the market, it is not necessarily autonomous. We notice a sliver of this in our moment by all the work that has been done in recent years to understand the ramifications of what Mark McGurl called the Program Era. We notice it also in the significant increase of those getting an MFA after the 1990s. But it is not just higher education. Its publication and distribution networks more or less would not exist without support from the state and private foundations. Further, it is for the most part written by and for the overeducated and underemployed and downwardly mobile middle class, by and for those who work for or have been chewed up and spat out by the higher education system.
All poets of good faith find this worrying. It is painful to poets — we think we are not just speaking about ourselves — how not just ourselves, but also the producers and the consumers of poetry are narrowed to those with a professional stake in its continuation, how dependent the genre is on the largesse of the rich and the state and the oversight of the powerful for its existence. A very small demographic of people feel that poetry tells their stories or stories useful to them. There is no getting around the fact that we work in a genre of which many of us can never talk to people from the very neighborhoods that we feel were formative in making us conscious. Many of us have never given a poetry reading in our hometown. For many of us, our books are not sold in these same neighborhoods. We might have lifelong friends from childhood that do not know we write poetry.
But pop music, it plays all the time in these same neighborhoods. On the radio and in the jukeboxes of the bars and in the shopping malls. In contradistinction to poetry and because it is relevant to the market, it plays a more central role in contemporary society. Many feel it tells their stories or stories useful to them. Many different sorts of people. Pop music appears egalitarian in these moments in a way that poetry does not. This is not true because of something interior to the songs but because the market through which the songs whirl has supplanted all shared cultures that stood before it. We are not saying that is good. We are saying that it is.
Our presumption here is that contemporary poets want to instrumentalize not just the possible ephemerality and counter-traditional claims of pop music when they turn to Beyonce over Hesiod. They also want to instrumentalize the popular part of pop, the fact that it is meaningful to an audience that is larger and more diverse than poetry’s with the additional seduction that its practitioners frequently claim that their music is authentic cultural expression because of their working class and/or urban poor beginnings. (We realize that not all pop musicians originate from working class and/or urban poor; but the ones that do not do not mention it much and the ones that do mention it all the time.) Unlike with poetry, having an ivy league degree is not something that a pop musician brags about in their liner notes. In fact, the music industry is one of the few art forms that higher education has almost nothing to do with. There are few classes taught in how to become one of its practitioners. And it hires few of its practitioners to endowed chairs. When this does happen, it is almost accidental.
Poetry turns to pop music because pop music is poetry’s other. What poetry is is impossible and annoying right now, maybe even unsustainable. Pop music is annoying too. But what is annoying about it is its distribution and production, the continued robustness of its multinational corporations. Poetry is not worried about being swept up and into pop music’s relation to capitalism. That is not its risk. It got kicked out of the multinational markets shortly after 1959, when the NY publishing industry began consolidating. Poetry instead is worried about its irrelevance. And what it wants is to figure out how to have access to what matters in a large way in this moment. Or in a time when we recognize nothing in art as possibly autonomous, pop music becomes for poetry something else, something sweet and possible and large in relation, something other than its closed feedback loop. Pop music is poetry’s ambition, its desire for reach.
The risk here is obvious. Pop music is as full of dystopias in its relation to capitalism as poetry is. On its own, it is the reading of the “The Day Lady Died” where O’Hara scoffs at the poets of Ghana and celebrates his shopping. Add some theory and it becomes the high and the low together. What pop can give to poetry is reach without history. We might call it the viral, something that spreads instantly and then is forgotten just as quickly. In the age of social media, however, even obscure things can become popular, since social media has the effect, through the long tail, of massifying the most bizarre and idiosyncratic tastes. Theory can go pop as long as it is weightless and ephemeral, as long as it lacks the substance and gravity of riot. This is poetry as meme, as bizarre and weird as the lolcats everyone once knew but now barely remembers, emerging from the most inside of jokes. Poetry as pure style.
RIOT
Against pure style, late period style is a style exhausted with style. Or maybe not style itself, inevitable as breathing, but a certain avantist politics of style, assigning instrumental political effects to this or that technique, imagining a linebreak a barricade or the scatter of words on the page an anarchic overcoming of all barricades. The source of this exhaustion is obvious: we live in a world in which capital has fully subsumed the resistant devices, techniques, models, forms, and styles of modernism and the historical avant-garde. These were always dubious to begin, when evaluated in terms of their political content. They were often fascistic, nationalist, technocratic. But they were, at the very least, against something. This can no longer be said.
Thus, late period style is a style against the insistence on style, designed for an era characterized by style’s political indifference. It is, at its most vulgar, a turn from form to content. This politics of content is guaranteed by a series of topoi and touchstones, with none more luminous than the riot. The riot is the content that takes the place of style. This is because the riot forces the question of content; it matters why people are rioting, either because the police murdered a young black man again or because the Giants won the world series, either because the French president has proposed a change to labor law or because someone wants to make America “great” again. This is why we have defined the riot not as tactic but as strategy, not in terms of how people revolt, but why they revolt, arguing that for the most part riots have as their aim the setting of prices for consumer goods, the procurement of access to means of consumption, rather than the setting of price of labor, associated with the strike. Even those contemporary riots so focused on the police as abhorrent institution take their definition from the moment when the prices of goods fall to zero and everyone takes what they want from the Foot Locker, the Walgreens, the Radio Shack.
Riots are, in other words, always about something. But in their representation, this is forgotten. For law and order conservatives and cringing liberals no less law and order, they are simply unmeaning, aimless, opportunistic violence. For wishful insurrectionaries, they are the overcoming of all political content, all reformisms, a blinding attack on the existent, free of all mediation. The oscillating legibility of the riot is something that poetry has on occasion paused to think about, the way the Great Uprising of Detroit in 1967 blurs together in Phil Levine’s “They Feed They Lion” with the Great Migration, impossible to disentangle, or more pointedly in Gwendolyn Brooks’ “Riot,” wherein the rioters of Chicago 1968 are understood by the poem to have a logic and organization found in the moment — they advance in “rough ranks” — while the white character, who dies with racist imprecations on his lips, can only see “blackness,” figures deprived of all intelligibility for those who can only see whiteness.. He is quite certain, by virtue of racist commons sense, that “they know not what they do.” The illegibility of the riot, that is to say, is both a fact and a racial fact, which never ceases to trouble its deployment in poems.
At one point, the riot may have been illegible because it lacked representation. Today, however, it is often illegible because over-represented, particularly visually, abstracted from context and content by its in and as image, as video clip or gif. This abstraction, of course, is part of the seductive power of riot images. The riot is compelling, whatever it is about, because it shows a world other than, abstracted, from the one we live in, in which the laws and customs regulating human activity no longer apply. The objects of the city shine with new meanings, ostranenie-by-other-means, the narrow spectrum of uses they are allowed in ordinary moments suddenly fanning outward: a dumpster becomes a barricade, a wall a medium of communication, a chainlink fence collapses easily as hundreds of people surge against it. People stop and watch, from a safe distance, as they would a car crash or a building on fire. But curiosity, in this case, is entirely scenic. The image is incomprehensible – someone breaks a window, somehow throws a rock at a cop. Either you already understand why people would do something like this or you must have it explained.
If you already understand, then perhaps these images are, for you, a reassuring reminder that the present order is not as unassailable as it sometimes appears. That the police are not all-powerful, that the people around you are not as indifferent and obedient as they may seem. Perhaps you consume and recirculate such images because they are tokens of these forms of collective understanding. They provide a brief and necessary uplift. When we talk about riot porn, this is what we mean: the physical act itself and nothing else. A flying fist emerges from the frame on the left, barreling into the Nazi’s face, set to New Order’s Blue Monday.
Riot poetry can be like this, too. It can present these things as tokens, as spectacle, as something observed from outside. It can be porny or maybe just corny. We might think of this spectacularized riot poetry as emerging from a compact between riot and pop bereft of any theory that might make sense of such images. Poetry as gif, as looped image. This was what once took the name Occu-poetry – that is, poetry that uses the riot as a sort of backdrop, positioning its own guilty or implicated or curious or worried gestures in front of or in contrast to it. And yet, the didactic combination of riot and theory, without pop, is little better. No one wants to be riotsplained, nor is using the riot as exemplum better than using it as back drop. Some of our favorite poets of the present have managed to narrate this overcoming of the riot as backdrop or exemplum. To choose just one example, Wendy Trevino:
Santander Bank was smashed into!
I was getting nowhere with the novel and suddenly
the reader became the book and the book was burning
and you said it was reading
but reading hits you on the head
The riff is on O’Hara, of course, with a comic hint of Stevens. But it wants a distance from their distance; it wants to come near by way of exclamation, beyond reading and books and declarative sentences. There will be a reference to Temporary Autonomous Zones, and watching teen girls on CNN — theory, pop, close enough. It is a swiftly drawn world, and most of all, funny: “and everyone and I / and we all stopped reading.” This is not an anti-intellectual or anti-theory demand; rather, it is the moment of possibility when the political becomes newly present, theory as lived experience.
What pop brings to theory is presence; it transforms it into theory from the inside – that is, a phenomenology of riot. Thus is late period style at its best, in the words of Nanni Balestrini:
An attempt to free ourselves from the condition of listener and viewer to which culture and politics have accustomed us
who considers every expressive frontier impoverished and ventures beyond without fear
Participants in the Egyptian Revolution talk about the moment when the barrier of fear falls, when they pass from spectators to actors. The late period poem at its best is able to trace the affective dimension of these passages – fear but also its overcoming, an image not on the eyes but in the body and its gestures. The lines quoted earlier are from Balestrini’s Blackout, which we published this year, and though the book dates from the early 1980s, Balestrini is a powerful precursor of what we are trying to locate as late period style. This passage and large parts of the book are an elegy for Italian singer Demetrio Stratos, whose popular prog rock band would play at festivals full of tens of thousands of people. The Italian version of the book includes pictures of such festivals. Stratos and Balestrini had been collaborating together when he sickened and died suddenly. Intercut with images of the riot induced by the New York city blackout of 1977, as well as Balestrini’s theoretical reflections on his exile from Italy, under indictment for participation in armed struggle groups, Stratos’ theory of the voice allows for an image of that which can’t be made visible, “the voice as an instrument of drives behind which there is an entire universe of desires / attentive to the area that lies between the psychic universe and the communication links between thought and word.” Stratos suffered aplastic anemia, requiring bone marrow transplants, and Balestrini remarks, with this in mind, “transplanting the spinal chord is a most difficult operation.” But this is very much what’s at stake here – a new nervous system, a new network of impulses and charges. The second time he repeats this phrase it inaugurates a long passage on the 1977 blackout:
bonfires in the streets an explosion of Afro-Latin vitality a torchlight procession to lofty broadway
the music was drowned out by the howling of alarms and the sound of broken glass
for the vast majority in the streets it is a festival a Christmas night a New Years in July
after a few minutes the night was illuminated by fires the streets invaded by looters
prices skyrocket but there won’t be pricing when we’re finished Broadway won’t exist
a woman called me and said they are travelling on Bushwick Avenue like buffalos
Here, the illumination, the rendering visible, is internal to the scene, created by its participants. The perspective is not scenic at all – its music neither soundtrack nor backdrop but produced from within, diegetically. Theory, too, appears here as the self-understanding of the participants.
they park hired trucks in front of a store and calmly upload sofa beds refrigerators televisions
we’re going to take what we want and what we want is what we need
who wants televisions shouts one discovering stock under the dim light of the candles on top are guitars and a sax announces another
the music was drowned out by the howling of alarms and the sound of broken glass
on 111th street a crowd moves hurriedly amid the ruins of the supermarket like hundreds of ants carrying out the goods
when I left area was on fire and the flames seized whatever small amount the looters had left behind
destroyed were pawn shops for jewelry a supermarket liquor stores it is like an all-out war
a woman called me and said they are travelling on Bushwick avenue like buffalos
a young woman arose from the crowd and introduced herself as Afreeka Omfress she it really is wonderful they are all out together on the streets there is a party atmosphere
a fifty-year-old woman with a shopping bag enters a store saying today she shops for free.
Theory is immanent to the riot but so too is pop. The participants find in the riot the overcoming of the distinction between want and need, desire and necessity, that is only possible through the abolition of the riot. Theory in this case is a direct mediation of action — a reflection by the participants on what they are doing or going to do. And what they are going to do is seize the means of pop: televisions, guitars, saxophones. They are going to put a period on the sentence of the period. And they’re going to do it with style.
