July 2012
Josef Kaplan
Josef Kaplan lives in Brooklyn. He is the author of “Theses on an Aesthetics of Violence,” which you can read in Lana Turner, and Democracy is not for the People (Truck Books, 2012). Other recent work can be found here, here and here.
AT: Hi, Josef. How did this piece, “Theses on an Aesthetics of Violence,” come up? Were you already thinking about writing this sort of thing, a manifesto, or did the guys at Lana Turner approach you to write it?
JK: I performed it in Santa Cruz for a reading I did there, and David Lau, the co-editor of the journal, who I’ve known for a while, suggested I submit it.
AT: You start with the quote from Michael Gottlieb, “What kind of job are poets ‘allowed’ to do?” It seems like a really good starting point to discuss what you’re writing about: instead of asking what poetry does, asking what poets do.
JK: That was the gist of the piece, yeah. I mean, I wrote it coming out of this belabored debate you hear a lot in poetry circles, especially within a kind of post-Language, socially-conscious mode, about “what is the relationship of poetry to politics,” “what political work is poetry capable of,” etc. It’s something you get a lot of misguided hand-wringing about. Whereas it’s my thinking that poetry is itself pretty much incapable of political work, and that that’s really the best place to start from when thinking about poetry and politics, and how they operate, and how best to do each.
So the aim of “Theses…” was to highlight, in an overtly antagonistic and somewhat irresponsible way, this distinction between what poetry is and what an actual politics is, which is the seizure and redistribution of material resources through struggle. Poetry can’t do that. Poetry has to do something else.
“7. Because poets and artists make a promise to the wealthy that their antagonism, their ‘unorthodox or anti-establishment political or social viewpoints,’ will not in fact be expressed as antagonism at all, but instead as nice things: art and poetry.”
AT: There’s something about the Left in this country, the way that ideology functions, that I wanted to ask you about. There is a line of Žižek's that I always refer to, “They know what they are doing, but still, they are doing it.” In other words, the idea is that ideology functions as a form of cynicism [often as a veil of cynicism, one that disavows belief in order to sustain and metastasize it]. So for example, when you talk to someone who is more or less progressive, rationally they don’t believe in gentrification: they might say to you: “Development is benefitting this community. Gentrification is a natural process that is the best possible way we have to improve the lives of the people in our city.” “But come on,” you say, “you must see how this development is for the community of the future; or do you really think it’s being done for the people who live here now?” “Well no one really believes that! Everyone knows the condo development with the gated swimming pool is for the people of the future. But that’s how things are. It’s the only possible solution for the problems we have.” People cannot imagine another possibility, and even though they make a cynical turn, it reinforces their belief, they still think that it’s a good thing, that they’re doing good. And they don't change their behavior. [They sell a lie cynically as a deeper truth; meanwhile, they are pretending to pretend, when in fact, they believe. This is also the form that neoliberalism assumes among the Left].
JK: Well, I don’t want to generalize here about what the Left is or what the Left thinks. But I should admit that the central idea in the piece – mugging rich people – is something that I don’t necessarily consider myself capable of, even though there is a real logic to it that I believe in. So, I don’t know. I’m hesitant. I do think that people have a responsibility to push the limits of what they themselves are willing and able to do in terms of realizing their convictions, their ideologies – changing their behavior, as you put it – but I’m also sympathetic to how most of us experience those limits in terms of what we can do, for example, against the police, or against a justice system that can just destroy your life. Sometimes there’s not a lot that you can do.
AT: I agree. Maybe a good way to approach the issue is to ask a question that I always talk about [and that I asked Bob O’Brien here]: why is it that poets in our country aren’t public figures? It’s as if the possibility doesn’t exist.
JK: Are you asking why poets in the United States don’t hold public office?
AT: [Laughter.] Yeah. Not only that they don’t but that the notion itself is almost absurd, you know? To think of a poet being a public figure, the way that the discourse functions in this country is to marginalize poetry through inclusion. I don’t know, it’s really weird. As in, for example, in the same way that everyone is an artist, the way that art gets mobilized in society is exactly the way in which it becomes meaningless.
JK: I think art is in a lot of ways already meaningless. I think that’s probably one of its strengths.
To risk sounding redundant, the idea that art or poetry would or should have any kind of political value, that idea might be a cultural expectation that doesn’t have a lot of bearing on what poetry and art are, actually, in the world. Poetry and art are formal categories. They aren't responsible for anything because they themselves don't make decisions. So it doesn't much matter whether they're marginalized or not. It seems better to think about art and poetry in terms of what is unique to them, in terms of what they, as categories, encompass, and to ask: “What are the ways in which we can radicalize formal positions within art and poetry?” And then, similarly, to think about what makes politics politics and ask: “How can we radicalize that?”
Does that make sense?
AT: That makes a lot of sense. Do you think one of the problems is that the discourse has collapsed? That people don’t insist on a distinction between the discourse of art and poetry and the discourse of politics? Let me ask you this: do you think that artists and poets believe that what they are doing is a social good?
JK: I’ll absolutely argue against the idea that poetry can or should generate a kind of social good – that’s bullshit, and it makes for boring, affirmative, congratulatory poetry. And it’s because the examples of that being the case pertain to things that are generally outside of poetry, and based largely in select, predetermined social effects, most often boring ones. For example: “Poetry can build a community of engaged individuals!” Except you can find a wide spectrum of things, of kinds of writing, or any number of activities that put people in dialogue and build a community. I mean, a knitting circle does that, you know? Not to knock knitters, though also fuck knitting. I’m kidding. Not really.
AT: I imagine people might read your piece and consider it as satire.
JK: Yeah. It’s not.
AT: But I think it’s interesting because there’s not that much satire going on right now. And even if it is the case that people consider it in terms of satire, there’s something valuable to that.
The whole question of violence is something that is taboo. It’s really interesting. Have people reacted to you in terms of, “I can’t believe that you’re talking about violence”?
JK: I haven’t heard a lot of outrage about it. But this is the first time that I’ve discussed it with someone who isn’t my friend, or a peer with whom I trade writing.
AT: I found the piece to be incredibly truthful. And perhaps this is because no one ever talks about violence. Whenever I bring it up with people, I don’t know if it makes people feel uncomfortable, but I think most people just assume that there’s something ethically or morally wrong about violence, even thinking about it.
JK: It’s my opinion that if you’re talking about the actual possibility for any renegotiation of social and/or material positions, violence is inevitable. It’s inevitable in the same way that it’s already, inevitably, a constant presence in the lives of any number of exploited and marginalized populations, because the maintenance of social and material positions as they stand requires violence. Violence is normal; it’s common. People need to get used to that.
Which is the crux of the piece. Gentrification is of course a kind of violence. And if you think about what makes a neighborhood gentrifiable, it’s the fact that people with money don’t feel threatened in that neighborhood. So, if you’re talking about preserving, for people who have little or no money, access to that neighborhood, then you’re talking about making people with money feel threatened. The best way to make them feel threatened is to beat them up and take their money.
“18. This would have the more gradual effect of providing poets and artists the resources required to arm themselves and their communities with weapons—weapons like, for example, fully automatic assault rifles with armor-piercing bullets—weapons capable of resisting the incursive power of the state, which serves the wealthy.”
AT: I think something that ties into this conversation of gentrification is the way people moralize their behavior. For example, you buy organic food, you shop at the farmers’ market, you’re really into art and poetry, you buy the glasses that I’m wearing where the company donates a pair to a person somewhere—you buy into a mythology—and I think people begin to think that they’re not as jealous and protective of their material conditions as they truly are.
So that one of the important tasks of poetry and art is to at least have a conversation that is a little bit more open and honest about the fact that people really love their stuff. They’re really connected to it. My friends who work for environmental nonprofits, for example, at the end of the day, they don’t want to not be able to buy all of the great food that they can buy at Whole Foods. They’re actually really committed to their luxurious lifestyle. And I think pointing that out is something that doesn’t happen often enough. So maybe the question I want to ask you is, do you think your poetry, which can be politically oriented, has any efficacy in this light?
JK: I think the difference is between articulation and efficacy. Poetry is maybe one way to talk about politics in interesting ways, to demonstrate a kind of political logic that people may not be ordinarily willing to formulate. The disconnect happens when people think that articulation translates into capability. And it’s unfortunate for poetry because that idea severely limits the kinds of articulations you might otherwise achieve without that expectation. Poetry itself doesn’t do shit. Which is why you can have things happen in poetry that would be horrifying or terrible if conceived of in spheres outside of poetry. Which is honestly the best part about poetry.
To relate that to the lifestyle stuff you’re talking about: buying an organic apple as opposed to a normal apple isn’t political work. The problem is that you even have to buy an apple. You can do these little negotiations, these nice things within a metasystem that is inherently corrupt and destructive, but you’re not doing the hard work of breaking apart the system, which is what is actually necessary. Poetry, like some shitty organic apple, can’t burn shit down. Poetry can signify certain things that relate to it, but a poem is never going to, I don’t know, loot a Foot Locker. It’s not something you can expect a poem to do. And every Foot Locker should obviously be looted. So, if you want to do political work, maybe you should loot a Foot Locker instead of writing a poem. Or write a poem and then loot a Foot Locker. As long as the Foot Locker gets looted.
AT: What about the question of collective action. I don’t expect you to prognosticate, but, I’m basically an optimist. I think there’s a lot of opportunity for change, that things can dramatically change overnight, even though I think that’s stupid. Things may have to get worse before they get better, but there are so many glaring problems that neoliberalism simply cannot address, problems that it systematically doesn’t have a solution for. The easiest example is always the environment. Neoliberalism doesn’t have an answer to our looming ecological problems. Are people going in that direction, or am I naïve?
JK: I don’t know. I don’t know what people are thinking. If you look globally, there’s maybe evidence that in some places, in some select moments, they might be going in that direction, and that’s something to be optimistic about. Obviously in Greece, and during the riots in England last year, and in elements of the Arab Spring, and in what’s happening right now in Asturias. And then there’s Occupy. Anywhere you’re seeing people take to the idea that the way towards a better existence, or a better social, political and economic organization, is to take over spaces and properties and collectivize them, and then defend those spaces against state authority, that in and of itself is something to be optimistic about, yeah, in the face of total neoliberal apocalypse.
AT: [Laughter.] Maybe we’re coming full-circle here. Do you think that people who make art tend to resist political organization in general, that people who make art or write poetry are put off by the idea of hierarchy for example, or the idea of being organized to a common goal? Do you think art and poetry have a hand in keeping people at bay, keeping them from forming a structured organization? Or not really.
JK: No, I don’t think so. I think something that is much more of a deterrent is the threat of arrest.
I'm grateful to Josef for providing this critique. –Alex Ventura
Josef Kaplan
Josef Kaplan lives in Brooklyn. He is the author of “Theses on an Aesthetics of Violence,” which you can read in Lana Turner, and Democracy is not for the People (Truck Books, 2012). Other recent work can be found here, here and here.
AT: Hi, Josef. How did this piece, “Theses on an Aesthetics of Violence,” come up? Were you already thinking about writing this sort of thing, a manifesto, or did the guys at Lana Turner approach you to write it?
JK: I performed it in Santa Cruz for a reading I did there, and David Lau, the co-editor of the journal, who I’ve known for a while, suggested I submit it.
AT: You start with the quote from Michael Gottlieb, “What kind of job are poets ‘allowed’ to do?” It seems like a really good starting point to discuss what you’re writing about: instead of asking what poetry does, asking what poets do.
JK: That was the gist of the piece, yeah. I mean, I wrote it coming out of this belabored debate you hear a lot in poetry circles, especially within a kind of post-Language, socially-conscious mode, about “what is the relationship of poetry to politics,” “what political work is poetry capable of,” etc. It’s something you get a lot of misguided hand-wringing about. Whereas it’s my thinking that poetry is itself pretty much incapable of political work, and that that’s really the best place to start from when thinking about poetry and politics, and how they operate, and how best to do each.
So the aim of “Theses…” was to highlight, in an overtly antagonistic and somewhat irresponsible way, this distinction between what poetry is and what an actual politics is, which is the seizure and redistribution of material resources through struggle. Poetry can’t do that. Poetry has to do something else.
“7. Because poets and artists make a promise to the wealthy that their antagonism, their ‘unorthodox or anti-establishment political or social viewpoints,’ will not in fact be expressed as antagonism at all, but instead as nice things: art and poetry.”
AT: There’s something about the Left in this country, the way that ideology functions, that I wanted to ask you about. There is a line of Žižek's that I always refer to, “They know what they are doing, but still, they are doing it.” In other words, the idea is that ideology functions as a form of cynicism [often as a veil of cynicism, one that disavows belief in order to sustain and metastasize it]. So for example, when you talk to someone who is more or less progressive, rationally they don’t believe in gentrification: they might say to you: “Development is benefitting this community. Gentrification is a natural process that is the best possible way we have to improve the lives of the people in our city.” “But come on,” you say, “you must see how this development is for the community of the future; or do you really think it’s being done for the people who live here now?” “Well no one really believes that! Everyone knows the condo development with the gated swimming pool is for the people of the future. But that’s how things are. It’s the only possible solution for the problems we have.” People cannot imagine another possibility, and even though they make a cynical turn, it reinforces their belief, they still think that it’s a good thing, that they’re doing good. And they don't change their behavior. [They sell a lie cynically as a deeper truth; meanwhile, they are pretending to pretend, when in fact, they believe. This is also the form that neoliberalism assumes among the Left].
JK: Well, I don’t want to generalize here about what the Left is or what the Left thinks. But I should admit that the central idea in the piece – mugging rich people – is something that I don’t necessarily consider myself capable of, even though there is a real logic to it that I believe in. So, I don’t know. I’m hesitant. I do think that people have a responsibility to push the limits of what they themselves are willing and able to do in terms of realizing their convictions, their ideologies – changing their behavior, as you put it – but I’m also sympathetic to how most of us experience those limits in terms of what we can do, for example, against the police, or against a justice system that can just destroy your life. Sometimes there’s not a lot that you can do.
AT: I agree. Maybe a good way to approach the issue is to ask a question that I always talk about [and that I asked Bob O’Brien here]: why is it that poets in our country aren’t public figures? It’s as if the possibility doesn’t exist.
JK: Are you asking why poets in the United States don’t hold public office?
AT: [Laughter.] Yeah. Not only that they don’t but that the notion itself is almost absurd, you know? To think of a poet being a public figure, the way that the discourse functions in this country is to marginalize poetry through inclusion. I don’t know, it’s really weird. As in, for example, in the same way that everyone is an artist, the way that art gets mobilized in society is exactly the way in which it becomes meaningless.
JK: I think art is in a lot of ways already meaningless. I think that’s probably one of its strengths.
To risk sounding redundant, the idea that art or poetry would or should have any kind of political value, that idea might be a cultural expectation that doesn’t have a lot of bearing on what poetry and art are, actually, in the world. Poetry and art are formal categories. They aren't responsible for anything because they themselves don't make decisions. So it doesn't much matter whether they're marginalized or not. It seems better to think about art and poetry in terms of what is unique to them, in terms of what they, as categories, encompass, and to ask: “What are the ways in which we can radicalize formal positions within art and poetry?” And then, similarly, to think about what makes politics politics and ask: “How can we radicalize that?”
Does that make sense?
AT: That makes a lot of sense. Do you think one of the problems is that the discourse has collapsed? That people don’t insist on a distinction between the discourse of art and poetry and the discourse of politics? Let me ask you this: do you think that artists and poets believe that what they are doing is a social good?
JK: I’ll absolutely argue against the idea that poetry can or should generate a kind of social good – that’s bullshit, and it makes for boring, affirmative, congratulatory poetry. And it’s because the examples of that being the case pertain to things that are generally outside of poetry, and based largely in select, predetermined social effects, most often boring ones. For example: “Poetry can build a community of engaged individuals!” Except you can find a wide spectrum of things, of kinds of writing, or any number of activities that put people in dialogue and build a community. I mean, a knitting circle does that, you know? Not to knock knitters, though also fuck knitting. I’m kidding. Not really.
AT: I imagine people might read your piece and consider it as satire.
JK: Yeah. It’s not.
AT: But I think it’s interesting because there’s not that much satire going on right now. And even if it is the case that people consider it in terms of satire, there’s something valuable to that.
The whole question of violence is something that is taboo. It’s really interesting. Have people reacted to you in terms of, “I can’t believe that you’re talking about violence”?
JK: I haven’t heard a lot of outrage about it. But this is the first time that I’ve discussed it with someone who isn’t my friend, or a peer with whom I trade writing.
AT: I found the piece to be incredibly truthful. And perhaps this is because no one ever talks about violence. Whenever I bring it up with people, I don’t know if it makes people feel uncomfortable, but I think most people just assume that there’s something ethically or morally wrong about violence, even thinking about it.
JK: It’s my opinion that if you’re talking about the actual possibility for any renegotiation of social and/or material positions, violence is inevitable. It’s inevitable in the same way that it’s already, inevitably, a constant presence in the lives of any number of exploited and marginalized populations, because the maintenance of social and material positions as they stand requires violence. Violence is normal; it’s common. People need to get used to that.
Which is the crux of the piece. Gentrification is of course a kind of violence. And if you think about what makes a neighborhood gentrifiable, it’s the fact that people with money don’t feel threatened in that neighborhood. So, if you’re talking about preserving, for people who have little or no money, access to that neighborhood, then you’re talking about making people with money feel threatened. The best way to make them feel threatened is to beat them up and take their money.
“18. This would have the more gradual effect of providing poets and artists the resources required to arm themselves and their communities with weapons—weapons like, for example, fully automatic assault rifles with armor-piercing bullets—weapons capable of resisting the incursive power of the state, which serves the wealthy.”
AT: I think something that ties into this conversation of gentrification is the way people moralize their behavior. For example, you buy organic food, you shop at the farmers’ market, you’re really into art and poetry, you buy the glasses that I’m wearing where the company donates a pair to a person somewhere—you buy into a mythology—and I think people begin to think that they’re not as jealous and protective of their material conditions as they truly are.
So that one of the important tasks of poetry and art is to at least have a conversation that is a little bit more open and honest about the fact that people really love their stuff. They’re really connected to it. My friends who work for environmental nonprofits, for example, at the end of the day, they don’t want to not be able to buy all of the great food that they can buy at Whole Foods. They’re actually really committed to their luxurious lifestyle. And I think pointing that out is something that doesn’t happen often enough. So maybe the question I want to ask you is, do you think your poetry, which can be politically oriented, has any efficacy in this light?
JK: I think the difference is between articulation and efficacy. Poetry is maybe one way to talk about politics in interesting ways, to demonstrate a kind of political logic that people may not be ordinarily willing to formulate. The disconnect happens when people think that articulation translates into capability. And it’s unfortunate for poetry because that idea severely limits the kinds of articulations you might otherwise achieve without that expectation. Poetry itself doesn’t do shit. Which is why you can have things happen in poetry that would be horrifying or terrible if conceived of in spheres outside of poetry. Which is honestly the best part about poetry.
To relate that to the lifestyle stuff you’re talking about: buying an organic apple as opposed to a normal apple isn’t political work. The problem is that you even have to buy an apple. You can do these little negotiations, these nice things within a metasystem that is inherently corrupt and destructive, but you’re not doing the hard work of breaking apart the system, which is what is actually necessary. Poetry, like some shitty organic apple, can’t burn shit down. Poetry can signify certain things that relate to it, but a poem is never going to, I don’t know, loot a Foot Locker. It’s not something you can expect a poem to do. And every Foot Locker should obviously be looted. So, if you want to do political work, maybe you should loot a Foot Locker instead of writing a poem. Or write a poem and then loot a Foot Locker. As long as the Foot Locker gets looted.
AT: What about the question of collective action. I don’t expect you to prognosticate, but, I’m basically an optimist. I think there’s a lot of opportunity for change, that things can dramatically change overnight, even though I think that’s stupid. Things may have to get worse before they get better, but there are so many glaring problems that neoliberalism simply cannot address, problems that it systematically doesn’t have a solution for. The easiest example is always the environment. Neoliberalism doesn’t have an answer to our looming ecological problems. Are people going in that direction, or am I naïve?
JK: I don’t know. I don’t know what people are thinking. If you look globally, there’s maybe evidence that in some places, in some select moments, they might be going in that direction, and that’s something to be optimistic about. Obviously in Greece, and during the riots in England last year, and in elements of the Arab Spring, and in what’s happening right now in Asturias. And then there’s Occupy. Anywhere you’re seeing people take to the idea that the way towards a better existence, or a better social, political and economic organization, is to take over spaces and properties and collectivize them, and then defend those spaces against state authority, that in and of itself is something to be optimistic about, yeah, in the face of total neoliberal apocalypse.
AT: [Laughter.] Maybe we’re coming full-circle here. Do you think that people who make art tend to resist political organization in general, that people who make art or write poetry are put off by the idea of hierarchy for example, or the idea of being organized to a common goal? Do you think art and poetry have a hand in keeping people at bay, keeping them from forming a structured organization? Or not really.
JK: No, I don’t think so. I think something that is much more of a deterrent is the threat of arrest.
I'm grateful to Josef for providing this critique. –Alex Ventura
