[These slightly re-written excerpts from emails written at various points today are here posted as an expansion of and sequel to the 'RADICAL MURDER' piece from a couple of days ago.]
Well, I put 'RADICAL MURDER' up on my blog. Half-entertained the thought of posting it in the comments section of the Guardian or the Evening Standard website, but chickened out in the end. I was wondering about what kind of audience it addresses itself to; and as someone said to me, you have to be careful to pick your battles, otherwise you just end up in the Evening Standard pictured as some crazy fringe lunatic “with a personality defect,” who's cheering on terrorism. Which, just because it's the sort of thing that the essay itself talks about, doesn't make it any easier for that essay to escape in either its form or its various potential arenas of reception. Or maybe it's important to keep it out there given the fact that the Woolwich murder was such an intensely media-tized event – an event which set itself up as a media spectacle in the first place, as if in a kind of anticipation of its own reception, an attempt by the murders to speak for themselves rather than be endlessly ventriloquized by assorted herds of news-readers and the government figures they represent, rubbing their hands with glee as they get to play up the dangers of all the non-white terrorist crazies from whom we must protected by repressive measures, for our own good. Of course, that attempt to speak for themselves is just more grist to the mill for that ventriloquization, perhaps more so, even, providing shock images of blood-stained hands and street-ranting, the surreal juxtaposition between a kind of discourse or debate that occurs after the action has occurred (passers by engaging in dialogue with them after the murder has happened), the banality of the setting barely disturbed by the murder that has just taken place, a little afternoon sensation, filmed on around 60 different mobile phones by citizens keeping their distance, dinner-table conversation-fodder. In fact, the murder reveals the actual violence at the heart of that setting, just down the road from the barracks. This actual violence is not only the legalized and patriotically-praised violence of the military, but the sense of racial and class oppression which might lead the murderers to act as they did, as Richard Seymour sketches it, with geographical specificity, in a blog-post from 23rd May; as if one actually has to inhabit the caricatured position into which one has been painted (crazy radical Islamist murderer), reportedly tortured or at least harassed by MI5, assumed to have some stake in religious extremism because of one's racial background or religion); the endless acting out of pre-planned roles into which one's pre-emptive performative justification all too easily falls. Which applies not just to the murders themselves, but to any of us claiming to be radical poets, or just 'radicals' per se: how far does being 'radical' in that sense lead to a position which is already a recuperated parody of itself (as in Baader-Meinhoff, etc), and how far does second-guessing the recuperation of positions lead to the prevention of any real radical opposition to the actually radical propaganda which government and media pump out every day, and particularly around an event such as Woolwich? For the government, Lee Rigby's murder was the perfect advertizing opportunity – where what you are being sold on is repressive government policy, not as some commodity you actually desire, but as that which you need if bad things are not happen to you. To combat this without falling into some form of self-proclaimed extremity, itself a form of advertizing as guilt-palliative, is, then, what is required.
In the light of this, and the paper on Force and Wrongness, I've been thinking about various kinds of wrongness and the line between a useful offensiveness which reflects the actual offensive uses to which things are put / events are exploited and something which crosses that line. How to use the death of David Cameron's disabled son in poetry, for example, and if that's even possible. And I keep thinking about the increasing extremity of the coverage of Woolwich, an extremity which has increased even since I wrote that essay just a few days ago, with mooted website-crackdowns and paranoia-fostering about 'terrorism' – though, as Glenn Greenwald points out in his article for The Guardian, to describe the murder as 'terrorism' is inaccurate; you might as well describe homophobic murders or murders of black people or Muslims as 'terrorist', because they also act on the basis of a political ideology; 'terrorism' is not here an abstract category, but one used to suggestively pin particular forms of behaviour onto particular individuals from particular racial and socio-economic categories, as both their latent and actual tendency, role and goal in life. FEAR OF A BLACK (MUSLIM) PLANET. And then there's the EDL reaction, fascists on the streets of London and Woolwich, attacks on Islamic cultural centres and mosques, the return of that fought so hard against in the 1980s under a different guise – though a guise in line with government propaganda; 'we don't disagree with the ideology, it's the method of which we must be seen to officially disapprove.'
Of course, we have to combat that reaction as strongly as we can, whether in rhetoric, the role our writing might play in public debate, alongside Greenwald or Seymour or Terry Eagleton, and as bodies in the streets, stopping the fascists from occupying those streets. 'WHOSE STREETS OUR STREETS.' Where 'our' includes those communities under explicit attack from the EDL and implicit attack from the government, communities within whom we must be in a real solidarity, as opposed to the fake solidarity offered by David Cameron's official speech, its military-patriotic rhetoric (“brave soldiers,” Cobra Meetings) sugared with politically-correct truisms, its speedy anticipation of accusations of Islamophobic fear-baiting by placing itself on the side of “Muslim communities” and of “Islam” per se. “This was not just an attack on Britain and on the British way of life, it was also a betrayal of Islam and of the Muslim communities who give so much to our country. There is nothing in Islam that justifies this truly dreadful act.” Such anticipation paves the way for the actual Islamophobia present within the increasingly vociferous paranoiac attacks on 'radicalism' which proliferate in the days following an event such as the Woolwich murders, and thus gives them the appearance of being 'reasonable', 'common-sense' precautions, appealing to the liberals who would normally condemn them, just as so many supposedly left-wing commentators and writers eagerly jumped on racist, neo-imperialist and repressive right-wing bandwagons during the events of the Iraq War or the 2011 Riots.
In our opposition to the 'commonen-ness' of this sense, it's necessary to prevent our taking of extreme positions and 'wrong' positions from being merely co-opted into a role which seems to have already been written for them: a role which is essentially the same whether it's condemned by the centre-liberal-to-far-right wing, that wing which constitutes the political mainstream, as somethin terroristic and evil, or praised by those on the far left or bohemian avant-garde as something shocking and 'transgressive' in a simplistic Bataille-type way, or as something akin to the 'filth politics' of Divine's speech in John Walter's 'Pink Flamingos': “Blood does more than turn me on, it makes me cum. And more than the sight of it, I love the taste of it. The taste of hot, freshly killed blood...Kill everyone now! Condone first degree murder! Advocate cannibalism! Eat shit! Filth are my politics! Filth is my life! Take whatever you like.” The Woolwich murders are an entirely different thing to Margaret Thatcher's death, it seems, because the stakes in criticizing Thatcher are so much lower, to some extent, in that no one was going to be arrested en masse for having a 'death-party' or for making a satirical 'memorial' pamphlet, whereas we'd all be carted off to some secret interrogation cell if we held a public celebration of the deaths of British soldiers or made a similar pamphlet about their deaths. Not, of course, that we would ever think of doing the latter, for to do so would be to completely misunderstand the difference between a soldier just as much manipulated by the propaganda of patriotism as anyone, and the prime minister who ran the country for years and actively dictated the policies in and of which the soldier is a pawn as a much as a controlling or active enforcer. My point is, rather, that even just reacting against the extremity of reaction which constantly reinforces patriotic normative narratives, which insists that Drummer Lee Rigby could was not and could not ever have been anything other than a saint, “an heroic soldier,”1 and that the murderers were nothing other than completely pathological figures acting out of either (a) childhood trauma (b) some innate racial or religious evil, comes to be seen as tacit support for terrorism and murder.
But I suppose if you spend the whole time worrying about how the liberal and right wings are going to receive your work, whether or not it has 'gone too far', you just get hamstrung.
One more thing: I mentioned the death of David Cameron's son, and I'm also now thinking of the coverage of Lee Rigby's family and of his memorial spot, at which 'the community' – white people, children, Christians, Sikhs – is seen to be united in grief. It's like the sites of murdered teenagers or the victims of racist attacks; but of course it's not, because this grief cannot help but be part of a propaganda push whose ultimate aim is to de-legitimate the grief of a majority by promoting and encouraging the grief of some. Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (a.k.a. Tommy Robinson) of the EDL has promised to walk 17 miles in order to lay a wreath for British troops, but he will never lay a wreath for the victims of drone attacks, for Muslims murdered by white racists, for all the victims of homophobia.
The co-option of grief was something I really started thinking about when I was on a six-hour ferry journey a couple of years ago and sitting in front of a bank of about 30 different news screens, trying to read 'The German Ideology', but all the screens were showing the same footage of the 9/11 Ten Year Anniversary Memorial Ceremony, with Paul Simon and Yo-Yo Ma and victims' wives and so on all lining up to be looked seriously at by Barack and Michelle Obama and by various military and police figures and by the whole mourning Western world, united as that entity, 'the West', by this ceremony. And so I was thinking about how that spectacular co-option of the victims' actual grief prevented that grief from being accessed as grief in itself in any way, because it had already (always-already?) been turned into propaganda, turned into a giant display of grief which could be used to cover the grief of the many more numerous victims of the American atrocities for whose perpetration 9/11 had been used as justification. Which is where Judith Butler's phrase 'grievable life' comes in handy. An excess of mourning for a certain, very small sector of the population (I mean, people working at The Twin Towers are already on a fairly high-up rung on the class ladder, hence their place in the sky) preventing the possibility for any other kind of grief. Like condemnation of the Woolwich murderers' act of murder being used to forestall the possibility of any condemnation of governmental acts of murder (whether in wars or benefits cuts which cause actual death), such condemnation being painted as murder in itself.
The question is, if grief is so radically co-opted, how could one figure it or recuperate it back in any way? The death of Cameron's son has unquestionably been put to propaganda uses, in a manner very different from Thatcher's tears on departing 10 Downing Street, having been ousted from power, or Chancellor George Osborne's tears at her funeral. In both cases, that public display of grief does not quite fulfil the basic levels of humanity that Cameron's does: Thatcher's, because she is crying at the loss of a position of power, crying for herself rather than for any other human being; Osborne's, because he is crying for someone with whom he had very little personal connection (“the chancellor, whose father-in-law, Lord Howell of Guildford, was a member of Thatcher's first cabinet, admitted last week he had little personal connection with the late prime minister. But he did recall taking his young son to meet Thatcher for tea.”) Displaying grief, or being presumed to display grief, at the death of one's disabled son, is an entirely different matter; indeed, it is the very real display of Cameron's humanity. At the same time, it might be said to reveal his very real inhumanity, the extent to which he can grieve for his son at the same time as putting into legislation, with no sense of grief or guilt, benefit cuts which will lead to the deaths of many more disabled people across the country. If, then, Cameron's grief is a propaganda tool, to use his son's death as a kind of counter-propaganda risks merely mocking that death, or seeming to mock it, for boring shock value, to go so far outside the boundaries of 'common-sense' that there's no possibility of 'mass appeal'. Ivan Cameron becomes a political football, when perhaps it would be best to leave him out of it, to let him rest in peace.
But is this actually right? Perhaps 'mass appeal' here means something like the sort of middle-ground masquerading as 'the public sphere' defended by various publishers and practitioners of poetry and theatre, which disguises its class limitation by a kind of spurious anti-elitism – the 'public' as the broad (rather than squeezed) middle of the middle class, its belly bloated, but not bloated too much – watching its weight. It's just hard to judge how far that 'wrongness' might find an audience outside the already-receptive avant-garde or political far left, i.e. how effective it actually is as a counter-force to the disgusting wrongness of government and media discourse and the action that sugars and enables; i.e. how effective it is as propaganda. But perhaps it's still useful to have something which forms part of a dialogue in a small group; as Jow Lindsay puts it in a recent paper: "these are dark times in which, paradoxically, citizenship is possible only on the margins, only underground." Yet this kind of citizenship can only expand beyond being a kind of small and extreme fringe community when the right social moment offers itself. So Thatcher's death offers an opportunity for a genuine celebratory-yet-angry citizenship. Like the feeling you get from Will Rowe's poems, poems which at points seem to be driven by extreme fury and rage, but a fury and rage that (a) emerges from a passionate concern for actual communal justice and that (b) manages to be a sort of exhilarating act of community and solidarity in itself. “Margaret Thatcher died today / long live death i shouted / that’s a fascist slogan you said / it’s ours today i said.” Yet the Woolwich murders or Ivan Cameron's deaths don't work in the same way. And in some way there's no way we as poets can have real control over this: we have to work with what we're given, as it were, we can't actually effect that kind of moment, which flashes up and then disappears as a kind of buried latent energy. Which makes speed of reaction super-important, if we're to avoid just fetishizing past events and selling our 'radical reaction' back to our own community, rather than entering into a wider community through that tin temporary tunnel that opened up for maybe just one or two days, or a week – say, from the day of Thatcher's death to the day of funeral. The pamphlets made after Thatcher's death were sent round to the UK Poetry list, but they didn't go out to anyone on the ground at the funeral or at the Trafalgar Square protest; the 'RADICAL MURDER' essay went up on a blog and got e-mailed to a few people. We need to do more.
Notes
