Benjamin Peret’s “Le Deshonneur des poetes” by Hatto Fischer

written in New York Oct. ’99

Benjamin Peret speaks in Mexico, February 1945 about ‘confusion in the minds’ and ‘material conditions of people’. How the two are connected, shall be of interest. Prior to his general declaration about the condition of poetry, intellectuals and artists like Andre Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Charles Duits, Max Ernst, Matta, Yves Tanguy and others pay homage to Peret in New York 1943. It is worthwhile to reflect what has happened to poetry and poets since then.

The distance between 1945 and 2000 could not be greater. At the turn of the century there is going on in New York and elsewhere in the world a search for ‘authentic poetry’. Many sense that poetry has to respond to a different kind of confusion in the minds compared to what prevailed immediately after 1945. Also generally speaking, material conditions have altered drastically. Yet does contemporary poetry stand still for such a capacity to respond to real conditions, so that it matters to hear the ‘voice of the poet’?

Certainly the quality of life people experience daily, that is not only affected by loss of natural environments and high risks of pollution, but repeatedly too many have to suffer as well the heavy burdens of racial and ethical conflicts leading to war. Significantly all these developments have come at a time when a vast urbanisation process neutralises all those communities left behind. Once prevailing ‘cultural identities’ at specific localities are no longer capable of articulating themselves, or as an urban planner at Columbia university would put it, even communities like Harlem are without negotiating powers with forces coming in to affect their lives differently from what they used to know on their own. No wonder then that poets are adrift, that is on their own, out in the streets or somewhere else, but not heard.

While throughout the twentieth century, poetry as well as generally the arts were marked by individual artists linked to certain movements, the poet's dilemma at the start of the twenty-first century could not be more virulent. There seem to exist no longer those movements or groups by which a poet’s voice could be heard at a more refined and qualified level. That can only be attained through the criticism of the others and if such a movement is being sustained by affinities and a ‘value of the cause’. Instead loneliness and a negative self-assertion mark the end of the twentieth century.

It seems as if nowadays poetic stakes are made like land claims at the cost of all other considerations. Yet without the participation of people in the making of their cultures, and poems are written by them, poets can no longer circumvent fate. They risk becoming like the rest of society habitual sellers and buyers of image-making powers in order to be able to out-scream and out-distance on virtual market places any other offers for shaping ‘human relationships’.

Since Adorno’s essay about the poet in search of the ‘lyrical I’, there has been ever fewer attempts at a philosophical reflection of the state of affairs with regards to poetry. Indeed, an analysis of poetry is quite demanding and easily the grip upon things communicated through concepts of power can destroy rather than free poetry from its entanglement with modern networks and their peculiar way of speaking about things.

Adorno saw things as marked by Auschwitz. At the end of 1999, a similar question does exist with regards to the ‘lyrical I’: is it still possible to be heard through a poem, and if ‘yes’, then is that not more like a ‘wounded scream’? It would explain already in part the contradiction between screaming but not heard, for the poetic scream or outcry is already so wounded, that the very lack of articulation possibility means it will not work. People will remain unmoved or rather untouched by what the poet tries to say. Brendan Kennelly would surely say, this is the case when the trust in the poem itself is gone.

If that is the state of affairs of poets and poems alike, then one possible conclusion about modern tendencies in poetry could surely be as follows: poetry does continue, but fore mostly in the form of a search for those ‘imaginary witnesses’ the times have left behind. Adorno’s idea was to leave everything not said, but witnessed in silence not to the people themselves, but to those ‘imaginary witnesses’. It is also something Derrida reflects on hand of Paul Celan’s saying: ‘words are his witnesses’.

In the absence of a clear voice, but also due to this ongoing search, it appears as if most of the poetry has turned into quasi prose. It is a reflection of material conditions having transformed life into the question as to what kind of poetry is still possible, if at all? Or rather can the poem be a sense reflection of a pebble in clear waters without being transformed into a symbol of Racism as did Jean Paul Sartre? In either case, it seems to indicate that Auschwitz is forever present since mankind has still not learned to do away with such death camps. As a matter of fact this relates to two different levels of the same experience, the first one to such historical categories out of which lessons need to be drawn and the other referring to immediate sense experiences while realizing in philosophy that is not considered to be a source of truth (see here the denial of Jacobi by Hegel). It leaves at the very best inner and outer truths incompatible and more dangerously poetry without any reality to speak about.

The contemporary questions relating to poetry are based on the need to know under which conditions, if at all, poetry can be an articulated. Historically speaking, poems are not considered to be an artwork like a painting, that is as one standing on its feet with own rights to its existence! One answer to that exclusion from common held beliefs about artworks is that poems may well be no longer that moving since not even a single line offers any longer a romantic view down memory lane.

Even the Situation’s movement of the late sixties, early seventies could not work for ever on the theme ‘words becoming actions’ as utmost expression of spontaneity, even though the impetus to write poetry goes in that direction. There has crept altogether into poetry such a degree of helplessness which goes with modern times that all sorts of flights are imagined, but no strength given to face what people experience daily in streets filled by many cars, but no single event there to guide them. That is to say the themes suggested by events (Kant defined the accident as the expected and the unexpected colliding and this gives people a sensation of what is ‘news’) no longer grip the imagination and hence they are less than satisfactorily explored, poetically speaking.

Andre Breton had, of course, another standpoint. At the start of the Surrealist movement he referred to Benjamin Peret as one who embarks upon such a ‘poetic adventure’ that Breton considers still to be valid even today. Such adventure starts by doing away with the distinction between ‘noble’ and ‘non-noble’ objects. It exposes poetry to the risks of love and potential loss of meaning once such a special relationship cannot be realised. Love as compassion surpasses, however, the simple notions of poetry. Everything is given in order to be able to demand to be “’beyond’ in our time.” (Andre Breton, Conversations: the Autobiography of Surrealism, New York 1993, p. 79)

With such poetic relationship based on love goes not seizure of power, but an awareness what tasks lie ahead. It reaches out to something having an Ancient Greek ring to it. Consciousness in such a case means doing things free of blaming others since it is an act of self responsibility when declaring that this love exists for another person. In linking this to the possibility for poetry to exist, the poem is a testimony of being aware that one’s actions have consequences for others while the risks are all on the ‘I’ articulating that desire for love and for being with that other human being. The awareness of risk brings about the poetic revolution: the affirmation of the ‘self’ once conscious of the situation to be found in when the other does not answer. For then the real risk becomes one of using poems to declare love, but not to be abused by doing so.

As stated in ‘La Revolution Surrealiste’ “all of our hands together will be needed to grip the rope of fire that runs up the black mountain. / Who dares speak of using us to improve our horrid earthly lot?” (op.cit., p. 79) Clearly this is a sign of daring resistance. It means despite all openness, and a refined thought of the other is such an important open door, the existence of resistance as a ‘vibrant I’ will be not to allow that neither poetry nor oneself can be misused. It is an objective Brendan Kennelly had in mind when he advised that the European project CIED (see: www.cied-europe.org) wishing to link culture and economic development, “should learn to use, but not abuse culture”, when it comes to local and other political authorities using culture for orientation to retain local identity and as a stimulus for development.

If arts and poetry allows itself to be misused, then in the words of Michael D. Higgins, the ‘integrity of memory’ in relation to the ‘sovereignty of the imagination’ would be severely jeopardized. People would tend to look upon their lives as being useless or devoid of such meanings as they dreamt about it when still optimistic and equally resolute to fulfil their dreams. That is why Surrealism tried to stem the tide but to no avail. There is moreover that ‘black mountain’ which one has to climb and get over in order to reach the other side. The failure to do so will leave poetry in a weaker position, unable to support fully anything like a realistic affinity to dreams, in order that reality becomes more distinct, that is recognizable for human beings.

Of interest is here how Bunel sees the ‘obscure object of desire’ determining all actions even in face of all futility and terrorism. His film is really a refutation of the so called ‘free will’ as if capable of determining everything which shall follow once actions have been undertaken by the ‘self’. There is always the other in need to be reckoned with. This is especially the case, if the ‘other’ is not a willing subject to succumb to the same logic especially when based on one’s own desire.

Therefore the failure of poetry to relate to the minds faced by impossible material conditions means really that natural feelings fail to persuade any one of the parties in deliberation about the outcome of human actions. Naturally it means that the majority knows somehow to cope, but without the kind of intellectual stamina that stems from inspirations and aspirations as communicated throughout life by poetry.

Being without poetry will underline furthermore the fact that many more dreams will have been betrayed. It is a theme Brendan Kennelly touches upon in his epic poem ‘Judas’. In turn, poetry becomes blind as to what is worth searching for. Adorno, but also Ernst Bloch connected authentic poetry with the ‘human voice’ beginning to speak up. As the case with Bach’s fugue, that voice is difficult to find, but worthwhile to search for. Unfortunately it appears as if contemporary ‘poetry’ is altogether too much fragmented as it is deemed not at all worthwhile to search for even traces of the human voice in the poetic fragments left behind e.g. Hoelderlin’s Empedocles.

The archaeology of knowledge Michel Foucault refers to indicates already what man must try: to be substantial without taking refuge in a fundamentalist dogma. That distinction is important on how also poetry and poetic materials are treated within the modern world of mass consumption and a wide spread absence of literacy.

All this is said in view of the opinion that a world without poetry would be that much colder (Wanda Gruenberg). If such ‘mental conditions’ do not leave poets entirely speechless, then much of poetry becomes a kind of non-rhythmical contortion. That terminates usually in too sad a speech leading to a rejection of any poetry. Such general negation of poetry precludes too quickly, but it is a feeling people get when they sense that poetry lags behind other developments such as technological advances in the realms of the modern media.

Instead of coming to terms with that new reality, poetry turns against its own negation by accepting the general rule, namely that writing poetry is of no relevance, if it does not bring in any money. Even reputed writers like Enzensberger succumb to that verdict. Hence they engage in some kind of ‘morality of speech’ which should not be confused with poetry itself, but in doing so, they risk transforming the poetry into a paraphrase of ‘political protest’.

The real danger exists here: poetry reduced to a kind of ‘lyrical protest’. The moment that happens, authenticity is jeopardized. Michel Foucault talks about it in “History of Insanity”. He urges ‘to find those places of silence before they are covered up by ‘lyrical protest’’. He means, philosophical speaking, that poetry can be used to represent feelings like flags indicating identities of nations when armies march to war; in short, they risk being abused as ‘representatives of emotions’. For instance, it is known that thousands upon thousands of soldiers send during First World War from the front to their loved ones back home the same poems by Rilke. Rather than expressing their own feelings, they allow them to be represented through these poems. It was something Adorno warned of in ‘Minima Moralia’, for ‘the intellectual does not allow himself to be represented by anyone; he takes up his own position’.

Since the beginning of technology and modern society with all its forces of destruction denying oneself a voice to speak up, but rather to let oneself be represented by someone or even worse by something else (e.g. the machine as sign of power and status), that has become a common pattern, namely to let one’s own feelings to be defined by something else and thereby to become a victim of ideology (Robert Musil). Insofar as the soldiers of First World War did not express themselves, their own protest about the senseless waste of lives was buried in silence. At the same time, they entered a contradiction by using the poems of Rilke. Although the latter is considered to be a romantic idealist regarding the world out of the perspective of the individual, the emotions he describes are really after a closer look a revelation of not wonder at life, but at technology: the replacement of man’s own power to move things. Consequently Rilke’s poetry tends to blend out the emotions due to a fascination for technology, its power and capacity to do things. Thus no wonder then that soldiers at the front felt these poems could express something. For they reflected perhaps too well the general feeling prevailing at that time, namely to be overpowered by technology and the power it gives to a few over millions of people.

The silence of the worst kind has been described by Peter Weiss in ‘Aesthetics of Resistance”. He describes the situation in Germany after 1933 as the ‘command language’ of Fascism started to dehumanize daily communication: people no longer addressing their own feelings even when being witness of children ganging up to kick a Jewish child thrown to the ground. Once such witnesses grow silent and look away, they are no longer witnesses but ‘cowards’. By remaining silent despite the course of events, they indicate indignation when asked to do something for others. It is underlined by an unwillingness to stand up for justice and to say ‘n o’ against all forms of violence. Consequently they become passive supporters of the rule of fear and injustice.

Power exercised through ‘group terror’ is based exactly on arbitrary interventions. It fosters an unknown as to who is next and denies any positive anticipation of life. Instead everyone braces for the next strike with the only certainty being that whenever someone shall strike, then unjustly, because the others just look away or even worse watch but without intervening. The force of terror will be, therefore, the confirmation of no one caring anymore about the other(s).

Once people have become completely passive and victims of their fears, they will need to demonstrate even more forcefully their agreement with what the authorities shall declare everybody needs to do, namely by joining in this fight against the great unknown: the terror. Fear of consequences drives them in that direction. Anyone can be singled out and be the next victim, that he or she will have the same experience, so that this repetition deprives already anyone from learning out of the event in order to anticipate. The confirmation will be that all others shall just look on, or even worse join in the fray of ‘all against one’, in order to release their pent-up hatreds of themselves for being so weak. In such a silence, the imagination vanishes and poetry finds no proper words to bring back the ‘human voice’.

Since then poetry seems at best capable of begging people to show again some contours. After the Second World War and under the influence of Paul Celan, Guenter Grass who had started with poetry being marked by the colour of grey, began to write just prose marking his struggle against all sorts of attempted returns to ‘normality’, for such tendencies carry with them not only the danger of forgetting, but to exclude precisely those who still remember: the ‘imaginary witnesses’.

At the end of the twentieth century a peculiar mixing of sounds drowning out silence has become very pervasive. For the boisterous world of the consumption leaves out the many voices of homeless children, unemployed, prostitutes and drug addicts. They are simply not heard. Only some poets feel that it is their obligation to counter their negation. For instance, Brendan Kennelly tries to carry their voices into his poetry by being prepared to listen to them. He gives these voices space in his poetry, but it comes at a price: ‘Mr. Professor, what will you pay me if I tell you another authentic story out of my life?’ Once bargaining starts and the exchange principle enters the mind, then it becomes nearly impossible to reproduce through poetry such sounds as belonging to familiar voices. Life is cut off from the people and streets empty themselves or even worse they are filled with vengeance sensed but not known where it all comes from when people seek to consume and possess, rather than experience reality.

The shift from reflecting loss of ‘civil courage’ in political difficult times to a more general response to loss of identity due to urbanization, that has left its traces in poetry. Modern urban poetry is written especially with some kind of hind-sight as to where in the past unique communities could still affect ‘cultural identities’ becoming visible in the streets of life. Certainly the doctor poet William Carlos Williams does it when describing in a poem a person sprinkling the lawn when just before he was a patient of his with diagnosis that he has not a long time to live. But the American sub-urban life is more of a post Second World War phenomenon. Before those times, and B. Peret refers clearly to that, people started to crowd into a city like Paris so that cafes were overfilled as centres reflecting the affluence the industrial society was creating in the forms of intellects still trying to stay realistic despite of ‘idle times’.

Cities became palaces for consumption. Thus a different kind of protest was called for, and if not political, then as someone realizing that the new material conditions reduced man’s mind to being idle. Hence the best protest in an all out industrious society was doing ‘nothing’. This is how Walter Benjamin would describe the ‘Flaneur’: a figure of idleness amidst all passages of consumption build to imprison the self.

Certainly this path of consumption has continued to widen and become an even greater threat to ‘cultural identity’ due to over commercialization determining the places. People do not seem to find any orientation. They seem dissatisfied on how they experience themselves and others in the city because nothing reminds them of the deeper meanings of life. It appears as if the ‘myth of place or city’, one of the key prerequisites for such experiences giving meaning, has all but vanished. This is because life has been exported by the cities, as stated by Baptiste Marrey. Main activities like ‘les Halles’ in Paris have been relocated to the outskirts and the centre handed over to tourists. It means those left behind by these developments suffer terribly under loss of familiarity. Once overhead highways cut through the neighbourhood, the existence in the shadow of the cement pillars becomes a no-man’s land. In such a place ‘West Side Story’ could unfold: the gangs using it for their knife fights. Gone is then the trust in the place because no longer a location within the community of mankind, that is where parents would like their children to grow up in. What affects the feeling of despair is the sense that no matter where they try to live, people are really without any access to those decision making processes affecting everybody’s life’s. As one student in Athens expressed it at the beginning of the nineties: ‘we were told to leave the village and go to the city because of the greater freedom existing there to shape ourselves the life we would like to have, but then I see buildings going up, entire landscapes being transformed without me recalling that I have ever been asked, if I would like this kind of development to take place’.

If the loss of visibilities of true or authentic identities in the streets is a consequence of life adrift, then it means that too many are left abandoned while quite apart from that, survival has become an enormous strain. People seem to have to conserve all of their energies to just cope. Stress, lack of time, the realization to be always behind schedule and never there where they want to be, all that starts a series of complaints without any ability to draw consequences out of such a reign of frustration. Instead of being fair in judgment, ‘human injustices’ are blindly reproduced on a daily basis. From clichés to fundamental dogmas, it is not far. Or prejudices are converted into convictions leading on to all kinds of Racisms, that places and people trying to get there together, shall be affected. It will spill over into not only working, but also personal relationships and beyond transform the political course as a result of world events. Here the non ratification by the US Senate of the non proliferation treaty of nuclear arms in October 1999 is but one of these ‘bad omens’ with still worse things to come especially since nuclear power out of control safeguards no life on earth.

It appears under such conditions that people cannot be burdened by much since they need all the courage they can get, in order to keep up at least some illusion of human decency. The reason for them being completely exposed to such negative conditions is that at the end of twentieth century, writers and intellectuals do not seem to be able to affect them at all. Too many contradictions prevail unchallenged while the onslaught upon ‘human morality’ takes its daily and weekly toll leaving people intimated by the sheer fear of power being always right. There is ever more the coercive need to appear as being ‘successful’, so that even lessons out of failures to reach a human solution are not merely ignored, but forgotten as the key rule of human life.

Frightening to see is the growing dependencies upon various win falls of speculations at the stock market. As a barometer of the economy being successful or not, people seem to follow the course of declination as suggested by the DOW JONES and other indexes. It replaces cultural orientation with what a media produced consensus has left to beseech, namely that the commonness of people is defined through their willingness to earn money and on top of it to get rich and even richer.

Once money becomes the solution for everything, absurd argumentations can no longer be countered while the logic of poetry and therefore of life goes completely unnoticed. For instance, even the well re-known Economist thinks that by getting richer through free trade, the world’s environment shall be safeguarded. As if only the poor would not care and the overproduction of cars has no impact, such one sided direction of development will deprive everyone of the last reserves of human, social, cultural and natural spaces still left for everyone to experience life as an adventure and not as a safe hotel room keeping out any other experiences than those one can pay for. The shallowness of such overt and ready-made solution belies people of their real qualities to make a difference in life. It makes the poet’s task all the more difficult since now the authentic prerequisite, and may it be a person listening to make poetry become authentic, is all but gone. Instead the norms of the consumptive culture silence any possible discourse about meanings connected to reasons of existence. Both poets and poems are pushed out into a void of understanding what life is about when such ‘otherness’ has gone astray or even worse has ceased to exist.

As Michael D. Higgins points out, “this is expressed as a set of multiple alienation’s – alienation’s of those who are excluded, intellectuals and writers: most interesting is also the form of the alienation of consumers. / We are consumed in our consumption – an imprisonment in the self and in space.” (Michael D. Higgins, Opening Speech at the EU CIED conference “Human Resources and Cultural Infrastructures: Access to a new Interpretation of European Integration, Leipzig, June 17 – 20, 1999).

As cities and regions undergo tremendous changes and the cultural crisis resulting out of the imprisonment deepens, the poetic way of life is an ever more remote possibility. For its realization depends upon the capacity to comprehend things, yet the work of empathy is pushed aside in favour of fast solutions linked to image capturing moments. Furthermore, in this world of alienation, images are considered to be more powerful, then what can be achieved by expressing one’s feelings in a natural way. It is even more the case and very rare indeed that such expressions find their way into language and touch upon the common ‘human spirit’ residing in everyone.

Thus it appears that poets are loosing more and more ground to other forms of expression occupying the cultural dimensions people use for reflections of themselves. The danger is to respond to all of this by merely letting poetry itself become an overt way of commenting about life. There is still a further risk to loose sight of the importance that authentic poetry comes about when carried by the people in the streets and especially by their voices. It is the risk that only such opinions shall be carried forth, which contribute little less than just distorting further the perception of reality. In human relations, it amounts to a loss of trust and ability to listen to what the others have to say. The confusion between what can be commented upon and be done as a result of what is being said, could never be greater. As a distortion of public opinion, this could lead to a still greater distortion of political truths than what propagandas managed to achieve in the twentieth century.

In not coming to terms with such reality of over alienation, poetry risks being defeated and poets sent into exile as in Ancient Greece, while human relations would suffer endlessly under accusation’s people make of one another. Without poetry, the world becomes colder due to a lack of truthful mediation. All this would turn spoken languages into a nasty negation of all communication possibilities. If allowed by the poets of the twenty-first century, the problematic situation of the twentieth one shall go really unanswered and thereby determine negatively the poetic situation in future.

One major consequence of that tendency to distort political truths is that ‘good meanings are destroyed for the wrong reasons’, while lessons of failure continue to fuel self-fulfilling prophecies about what is possible in this reality. Even worse, anger and feelings of regret due to living an ‘unlived life’ will be turned into desire for vengeance and revenge. Unsatisfied feelings become the grounds for articulating ‘unjust’ solutions because in reality they go against others and the ‘self’ while all uncertainty is being overplayed and blended out by even more resolute positions pointing merely in the same destructive direction.

The Irish poet Brendan Kennelly speaks about the loss of communication being replaced by all sorts of ‘network-speaks’. In his opinion especially academics contribute towards this state of affairs. As a professor at Trinity College, Dublin he sees too many of his colleagues who tend to replace communication with the other by a heavy use of mere categories as if that is knowledge. If so the case, it would mean poets find themselves attempting to avoid the dangerous ones and settling down near the more acclaimed, famous and hence successful ones. They would no longer be in a similar position as was Aristotle’s who could discover in the daily use of language ‘lessons of categories’. Such ‘grammar of life’ would allow the user of such a language to become both practical and reflective of the ‘theory’ behind such actions as outlined by the grammar.

It has never occurred to link grammar, categories and epistemology with the knowledge poems stand for. Their very different logic includes an ordering of things as revealed by language the moment authenticity and meaning touch not merely the mind, but also ‘body and soul’. As such poems become ‘imaginary leaps’ into the future as well as into the past while the present tends to shrink more often back from such leaps. Still, it is the ‘imagination’ that counts. Without it the ‘teleos’, or goal + the ‘onomatopoeia’, that is the ability to pronounce the words in terms of what they mean, could not make the poem into what it is: the ability to think freely about which goals are desirable to be fulfilled in future.

read the part ii here: Benjamin Peret’s “Le Deshonneur des poetes”

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Benjamin Peret’s “Le Deshonneur des poetes” by Hatto Fischer