Spaces of fugitivity lead to cheap signaling, fail to lead to revolution, and reinforce capitalism

With great affection and conviction, Moten summons a space of fugitivity, infidel poetics, jazz, social obscurity, and what might be called tavern talk. (One of his collections is called Hughson’s Tavern.) Yet, in contrast to the patois of a black demimonde, the word “commons” also designates a fashionable academic topic these days—an affiliation disclosing the class tensions at the very core of Moten’s Rousseauian project. The “undercommons” is at once the verbal and ideological space of a demimonde and of the academic elite. In terms of its divergent class affiliations, Moten’s project goes both over and under mainstream tastes. The mainstream appears to be the enemy here, but is the relationship between the two “commons” complementary or antagonistic?

To use a phrase coined by sociologists—brought to my attention by Prageeta Sharma and developed in her poem, “She Did Not Want to Embody Cheap Signaling”—Moten’s conjuring of the “undercommons” through a synthetic vernacular, and its veiling of class conflict, could be identified as an instance of “cheap signaling” (a circumstance in which the social “cost” of transmitting a message is low enough that senders can transmit it fraudulently without risk). At the same time, Moten’s poetry privileges the black vernacular as somehow authentic or genuine—a presumption undermined by the long history of vernaculars forged at once by dominant and marginal classes. (Sharma’s poem, I should note, is subtitled “After Undergloom”—borrowing the title of one of her books—a neologism modeling a variant of the fugitive verbal substance over-written by Moten as intrinsically black.)

Contrary, then, to Moten’s efforts to foreground the authenticity of a black vernacular, perhaps all poetic formulations of vernacular speech should be viewed as synthetic vernaculars. As the jargon of an inaccessible “commons,” both above and beneath the multitude, at once esoteric and moribund, fugitive languages must be seen as possessing the allure and political powers of a dead language (a fetishized medium of cultural tradition and discrimination). The seemingly impossible task of inventing dead languages—the dialectical project of fake folk songs and ballad imitation since the eighteenth century—must infuse the basic strategies of class warfare and oppositional poetics. From this perspective, the invention of dead languages associated with vanished subcultures becomes a revolutionary instrument of the poetics of Gothic Marxism.

Dialectically speaking, it would not be impossible to see the phrase “cheap signaling” as designating a method of authentic defiance and revolt—as long as Moten and other poets experimenting with adversarial dictions acknowledge, paradoxically, that the jargons they forge, whether demotic or theoretical, are indeed inauthentic, or cheap: discounted, vulgar, imitation, unfair, and even criminal (a cheap shot). Only if the poetic vernacular is acknowledged to be a knockoff, as the throwaway property of the underclasses, can it function as a deliberate instrument of class warfare. To escape the pitfalls of what Adorno calls “the jargon of authenticity” (a veiled collusion between dominant and oppositional languages), all jargons (corporate, academic, but also racial or class-based) must be understood—and employed—as inauthentic, counterfeit, provisional.

In addition, if we adhere to a rigorous Marxian theory of class, poets who curate the idioms of a cultural underworld must present these invented languages as incorporating their own destruction, as destined to be extinguished—just as the revolutionary class forging its vernacular achieves emancipation and complete self-consciousness only through its own extinction. Thus the infidel lyric, the jargon, the verbal undergloom, of the “dangerous classes,” to use a phrase of the Situationist scholar of gypsy language and culture, Alice Becker-Ho, always forecasts and expresses its own death—its deliberate, and vital, anachronism. The détournement of infidel tongues becomes a crucial index and weapon of class conflict.

Popular Tastes and Avant-Garde Expression

At the vexed crossroads of the avant-garde’s production of synthetic vernaculars, there persists the conundrum of work that aims to be vigorously popular in scope, yet also uncompromising in form and diction—a tension between aesthetics and politics that derives from class differences. To what degree, one must finally ask, is the bourgeois and now frequently academic cadre of the poetic avant-garde willing to modify its formal strategies—and its diction—to ensure the broad circulation of its adversarial writing? What might be the influence of avant-garde formations that insist on preserving the demotic languages of adversarial communities?

If oppositional knowledge and tactics take root in specific class structures, and if real social transformation demands widespread dissemination of such knowledge, then the poetic avant-garde must invent a fugitive language to circulate as widely as possible. Yet the historical record of attempts to overcome the tension between popular taste and vanguard experiment is—with the arguable exceptions of Brecht, Godard, Warhol, and a few others—largely one of failure. Preoccupation with the conflict between vanguard experimentation and popular taste undermines the basic political objective of revolutionary aesthetics, which is to dissolve the autonomy of the poetic artifact—to integrate art and life.

Regardless of their subversive intent, artifacts that inhibit their own sociality—poems that are essentially intransitive—will never play a direct role in popular revolution. A doctrine of political insularity—of social and poetic obscurity—is defensible for many reasons, but it should be acknowledged openly. Ultimately, the question is whether the poetic avant-garde wishes the adversarial thrust of its writing to be restricted to its own class-coterie, or whether it is willing to risk self-annihilation by incorporating the formulae of popular culture—by altering its work in ways designed to enhance its social capital without abandoning its infidel stance.

One key to enhancing poetry’s revolutionary social capital lies, I have been suggesting, in the neglected category of diction. In their essays in Jacket2 on the “Self-Abolition of the Poet,” the editors at Commune Editions reference the example of folk poetry and the ballad tradition as “fundamentally authorless” and hence consonant with the Marxian concept of a revolutionary dissolution of classes. The introduction of archaic ballads into the elite poetic tradition did in fact trigger a revolution in poetic diction, beginning in the early eighteenth century. As a literary historical event, the so-called ballad revival therefore occasioned a furious struggle within the elite tradition, continuing to the present day, over competing models of vernacular language—and over possession of that irresistible commodity. Furthermore, since the very start of the ballad revival—and throughout its controversial history—cultivating the language of the marginal classes in poetry has been associated with practices of forgery, imposture, and the “cult of simplicity.” A similar duplicity haunts the demotic “undergloom” manufactured by avant-garde poets today—disclosing a similar field of class antagonism and infatuation.

The new kitsch operates at the crossroads of the anthropocene, the gurlesque, and the general strike.

Even as the Commune Editions editors acknowledge that “there is no going back” to the folk tradition, they insist that “knowledge of these folk traditions does help to denaturalize our sense of what poetry is, and gives us, as a result, a much better sense of the possibilities for patterned language under entirely different social conditions.” Absent from these statements, however, is awareness that the example of folk poetry (from Ossian to Bob Dylan) is riddled with accusations of forgery—a condition that is the true source of folk poetry’s value as an index of class relations.o

In rejecting—quite legitimately—the notion of an irretrievable folk tradition as a model of revolutionary anonymity, the Commune Editions editors also overlook a despised, but potentially useful, emblem of popular culture embedded in the folk tradition: kitsch. In fact, the properties of kitsch first arose in the context of poetry and, more precisely, in the controversies (and forgeries) of the ballad revival. One need not therefore “go back” to folk poetry to find an example of “authorless” poetry with a volatile relation to the elite tradition; one need only turn to the authorlessness (and fraudulence) of kitsch. With its reliance on verbal formulae and clichés—akin in ways to epic poetry, but also to the shadowy genre of gothic melodrama—kitsch offers a poetic and dialectical mode of cheap signaling.

From this perspective, the array of synthetic vernaculars and theoretical jingles cultivated by the poetic avant-garde today can be seen as a détournement of poetic kitsch, a deliberate confection of high trash. Ultimately, as a relic of the death of working-class culture, kitsch becomes a tool, a weapon, of Marxism in its Gothic phase. Overturning the longstanding presumption of difficulty and intransitivity in avant-garde writing—the product of outdated models of oppositionality and alienation—a renegade poetics of kitsch would foster experiments in verbal and social transitivity. Attention to matters of class in poetry lays the groundwork for a poetic “mass ornament,” a transitivity no longer inimical to verbal obscurity but rather harnessing its affective and imaginative powers via repetition (the basic mechanism of mass culture): a kitsch made of everyday riddles and shadows. A new model of the poetic avant-garde might thus emerge from a Baudelairean program of “inventing clichés” and forging the poetic diction of “counterfeit capital” (what he calls argot plastique) to expose and to shuffle the verbal registers of class conflict.

Founded on a platform of verbal and libidinal duplicity (combining affection and contempt), poetic kitsch offers a strategy for radicalizing lyric poetry by converting it into what may be described as choral lyric in its authorless and formulaic properties. As a means of replicating, but also contesting, what Walter Benjamin calls the “permanent catastrophe” of modern capitalism, the radicalized lyric poem in the form of kitsch becomes what the French pop artist Daniel Spoerri calls a “snare picture”: a verbal trap luring the reader into a disorienting space of indulgence, alienation, and critique—into “the poisonous candy factory” (to borrow a phrase from Jack Spicer) of poetic diction.