Brian Whitener Interviews Taylor Brady
Brian Whitener:
For a first question, I just want to ask after the contexts of your thinking in writing these pieces, what you were thinking about, reading as you were writing. I’ve been trying to establish some parameters for reading it by going back to your earlier work but also looking internally at the text itself. So, maybe a way to start is I can throw out some of these parameters and you correct, shift, negate, or extent these. When reading, I kept returning to the word “accounting” which has financial, moral, and empirical senses. The first sense is empirical, as nonsite, to account for what is (not) there: “The heat’s immediate / as a blank spot in our thought” and “Describe what isn’t here.” But the book seems concerned with the law (“There’s this grand, juridical indifference”) but more importantly with judging, settling accounts, in the repeating phrase of all the titles “I Did Not…” This work also seems to move to language of finance (perhaps as opposed to or instead of war?) “de-speciation,” “half-legal blind trust” which are occasionally linked to “metabolism” or “flesh,” different figures of the body, kind of sub-physical zones. Is there a connection between financial accounting and accounting for our failures to act? How does this connect to the body or pre-corporal “masses”? Is this work in some sense “a treatise on financial humanism”?
[if this question is going nowhere, please feel free just to ignore it and write whatever you think people should know about this work!]
Taylor Brady:
First, Brian, thanks for such a generous and generative set of inquiries into the contexts and frames of the work. I'm going to take these somewhat out of order, in an attempt to think myself back into what presented the poems at their inception with the coordinates and forces which they then sought to totalize. Of course, I'm aware that the choice of any one of your questions as a starting point is going to inflect my description of the project one way or another, and that in some ways that choice is going to be a fairly arbitrary compound of faulty memory and all-too-accurate wish fulfillment (i.e., here's how I'd have described the emerging project to myself at the time--through a sequentially developed set of propositions, no less--had I really thought about it).
So, buying some time on credit before coming to account for "accounting," I'll begin with the prompt that felt least comfortable, just to situate the work in the strains of unhappy options proper to it: the language of finance "as opposed to or instead of war." Well, yes. Or mostly yes. I guess I want to plead a certain case for these poems: that they remain capable of addressing themselves to the fact of the wars which, as I'm reminded by your citation of Barrett Watten in your Trafficker chapbook interview and a spine of Robert Duncan's soliciting me from across the room as I write this, we are always both between and before.
At the same time, though, I'm aware of having posed the choice to myself in something very much like your terms. Writing poems reflexively understood as situated in a network of cultural manifestations opposed to our current wars of imperial self-management, the work increasingly came to demand a certain distance from the languages of the extant anti-war movements themselves. Let me explain that a bit. I felt in the wake of writing Yesterday's News that I'd begun to ask questions of myself that were getting mired in an unproductive thematics of complicity and compromise, and that such questions marked not only a limit to my own thinking, but a collective set of limits to much of what we were variously organizing at the time under the banner(s) of an anti-war politics. "How can I speak or write in opposition to the war from my embedded position within the war machine?" That sort of thing.
I don't want to dismiss these questions entirely, as they're necessary places to begin any inquiry that might redirect our practice. Their being-voiced in some slightly louder collective capacity might go a long way toward ending the current capture of much antiwar politics by (in the US) the Democratic party, and (in Europe and South America) by the rump of social democracy. But this only happens when the contradiction at the heart of such formulations is allowed to blow their context--the settled assurances of who and what is inside and outside, the equivalences of position of, say, master and servant based on an architecture locating both in the "same" "place", etc.--as wide open as possible.
In terms of the writing, there was what felt like the possibility of such an opening in the work I did with Rob Halpern for Snow Sensitive Skin, and particularly in our effort to make sense of those poems in an afterword written for the second edition with the benefit of a few years' reflection. There, we came to what felt like a more nuanced, dialectical approach to the problem, not in terms of the isolated ethical debit of complicity--which ultimately gets repaid in specie of nihilism--but in terms of the political credit-money of labor discipline. That, in other words, a seemingly perpetual capitalist war-economy is dependent for its day-to-day production and reproduction on the labor of an antagonistic collective subject, and that through the application of various forms of social and political violence and coercion to the articulations and unfoldings of this antagonism, the eruption of its tremendous disruptive energy is deferred for another day and functionalized for the valorization process in ways that are always unstable, precarious, and lingering on the verge of irreversible change.
For political practice, the gain of this formulation over the ethical impasse of melancholic complicity shouldn't need stating yet again, though one finds that in fact it does, over and over. Suffice it to say here that the hygienic perspective, the standpoint of fine discriminations of ethical cleanliness with respect to capital and its wars, doesn't seem to me to offer much hope for horizontal/lateral modes of linkage and organization. If what we have to work with are national, sectional, class-fractional, regional, etc.,--down to the level of the individual enterprise or neighborhood--distinctions of whose shit stinks least, then all we've got is all of us in the form of each of us, alone with a pile of what's worst about us, but presumably less worse than what our comrades are holding. As for the likely outcome of this as a politics... well, wish in one hand, as they say. Ultimately, the only access to the political from this dispersion of ethical judgments is by appeal to the top, theoretically in the form of the static (statist) Concept, organizationally in the form of the Stalinist Party (or suspension within the current limits of the parliamentary).
As a set of poetic propositions, this hygienic perspective leads again and again into a cul-de-sac of everything that's least interesting about current "official verse" and "post-avant" practice alike, which is their shared force of commitment to demonstrating "how the severity of my wound has rendered me uniquely sensitive to the violences of the world." So here's the gain for a shift of standpoint from the ethics of complicity to the politics of labor discipline, in terms of aesthetic and cultural work: rather than seeing the poetic as the cry of an impasse rooted in the shared limit of the aesthetic and political, where both are enclosed by the privative values of the ethical, we can come to enact a poetics as an open-ended practice of describing the disciplines that give limits to experience, proposing the rupture of these limits in the direction of the political. Here, of course, we can also rescue poetry from the largely discredited but lingering postmodern doxa of textual politics which, in framing aesthetic action as a political act tout court, ends up short-changing both poetry and politics. Poetry, presented as that which has a privileged ontological access to the aporetic language-truths that undergird our experience, gets transformed into a baroque wonder-machine one points at other machines in order to spit out the same terse diagnostic pronouncement on all comers: "Broken." And politics, becoming trapped in the defiles of representation, never reaches the moment when a collective subject-body acts. It's a paradox of simultaneous self-aggrandizement and self-hatred for poetry, and if taken seriously, an annulment of politics. Thus the need for the cautionary note Joshua Clover sounds in the "Politics Roundtable" with Juliana Spahr and Christopher Nealon in a recent issue of the journal Evening Will Come: "[P]oetry is not of the same order of political work as, well, political work.... [M]y current sense of political catastrophe, by which I largely mean the entanglements of economic immiseration and environmental disaster, no longer justifies a politics of recognition alone. The political is the political. Class war is class war."
Outside of the hygienic perspective, though, we can look at the seemingly durable (crisis-riven, seismically unstable, but thus far durable) reproduction of global capitalism and its military solutions to its own self-created economic problems. And looking at this, it's possible to see the answer to the question, "How is it that we can know this and continue to contribute to its reproduction?" as a matter of disciplines brought to bear on our labor. Seeing that, it's also possible to see the mapping of these disciplines as something to which aesthetic and cultural work can contribute, and to see this mapping as making certain materials available to political action even as its limit is given by its boundary with the political. Such a sense of limit for me is profoundly generative, though, rather than simply privative. Here I'm thinking of mapping in the strong sense as including the mapping of contradictions, which give onto horizons of potentiality and the open question of revolution--i.e., I'm not proposing aesthetic work as a positivism.
So the question is then, "What are some of these mechanisms of discipline?" My orientation of the poems, in answer to this question, to topoi of debt--the poems' deployment of figures of debt as disciplinary mechanisms whose critique might break a poetics out of the enclosure of reflections on "complicity," and whose real destruction might, at a higher level, break social reproduction out of a similar circularity--is hardly original in this regard. And to a large extent, that's precisely the point. While the poems were developing this aesthetic inquiry into figures of debt, it was the global anti-austerity, educational defense, anti-cuts movements that placed the material issue of debt squarely on the political agenda--and precisely as an issue of labor discipline, as the claim that financial capital continues to have on a class for its organized insistence on access to fundamentals of education, healthcare, provision for aging, housing, etc. Whatever conceptual and aesthetic force these figures of debt discover in the poems is due chiefly to this political work, and very decidedly not the reverse.
As far as what poetry might actually contribute, I think this has something to do with its ability to use verbal and conceptual materials to run in advance of concepts (or to deal in the infra-conceptual, if we're not comfortable with the remnants of an avant-garde in the first description): tracking the textures and feeling-tones of gestures that aren't yet actions, affects in states of weak organization, not-quite-free associations in the realm of sonics, intertext, etymology, etc. Rob and I mull this over at length in our afterword to Snow Sensitive Skin, and rather than overburden this lengthening set of answers with more explanation, I'd refer the reader who has come this far to that text.
What this meant to me in "For I Know Not..." was that these figures of debt and finance could be tracked where they unfold upon and capture "metabolism," "flesh," "sub-physical zones," "pre-corporal masses," to use your list. And this is finally what I think the contribution of poetry might be: to register and test, to palpate those zones where our embeddedness comes toward its embodiment, where debt attaches to flesh and affect hops into bed with finance.
Of course, given that this is lyric poetry, certain sets of affects and dispositions of bodies in relation to debt seem to be endowed with relatively greater force. There's a whole complex of associations of love and debt, for example, that seem an inevitable part of the apparatus of lyric since Dante (in my reading, and probably since the troubadours and early Arabic poetry for readers who have done a bit more homework), and that get teased out over the course of "For I Know Not..." and the longer project, In the Red, of which it's part. What the lover "owes" to the beloved in terms of fidelity and devotion; what lack in the lover is supplied by the beloved in the form of a "gift" that nonetheless creates debt; time in the presence of the beloved as borrowed time -- that's all in there in one form or another. And of course, all of this complicates the critical engagement with debt as political economy and labor discipline: how much of this discourse and art of affect are we willing to "ruthlessly" critique in order to come to an account of debt? In what ways are love-debts like finance-debts? In what ways might these likenesses predispose us to naturalize or to make a separate peace with debt as a mode of the capital-relation?
Coming to account here also involved some personal reflection on my part, as the writing overlaps the end of a marriage and the early months of a new relationship. So there's that opportunity to give an account of oneself: how much of this apparatus of love and debt and love-debt is something that I had been operating with (or something that had operated on me) during the marriage, and how much was I carrying with me into this new encounter? Accounting not as score-settling--I'm fortunate to have seen through the end of the marriage with a person who remains a friend and a compassionate presence in my life--but as a set of self-directed questions. How much of this debt-script was I playing out in what I felt, how I acted and reacted, in love? And of course, in the financial sense of debt there's the inevitability that, for the great majority of us, the end of a long relationship is going to involve a lot more in the way of sharing out debt that dividing spoils. So there's that...
Debt also figures into great swathes of the tradition as it touches on poetic comradeship and friendship: the work offered to the friend, the presence of one's partisan band in the forms and shapes of the poem. I wanted to write this into the poems as well, out of the same ambivalent urge to give the various valences of debt their maximum scope to play over the surfaces and among the foundation-stones of the writing. There's a procedure guiding the composition of the book: all language here finds its source in public readings or talks by writers who form in some way part of my imaginary band of partisans. But none of the language is actually theirs, and is instead the negation or refutation of each line I jotted down in a notebook as they spoke. These negations then run backwards from the original sequence. (The former music theory student in me wants to call this retrograde inversion).
In what way does this reversal of past and future, this conversion of affirmation into negation, have anything to say about debts of literary friendship, and about debt within our current landscape of political economy? I'm sure I don't know, but my sense is that something is happening here that's worth exploring. If nothing else, working to enlarge the already outsized presence of debt in traditions of the lyric, and of the affective registers and self-understandings of my role as a poet that ride along with them, might be a means of approach to a kind of sincerity that could scrutinize its own stakes in the proliferation of cultural, financial, political, and affective "instruments of debt." For this broadening of a critical poetics to include the instruments of one's critique, I could do worse than to take instruction in this from Andrea Brady (no relation), who accounts for her crucial book Wildfire thus:
"A first step towards liberation from the brands and the boils of the most horrific dying is a recognition of the ancient complexity of the desire to burn."
Is it possible to imagine that sentence's vocabulary shifted from incendiaries to interest, from the flammable to the fiscal? That's the sort of account I would like to think of this work as groping after. But certainly the mechanics of debt require different inflections. Giving-an-account under conditions of total debt is always a matter of "I did not," and in this we're forced to repeat again and again the bad insistence on ethical culpability on the way toward developing a different account of discipline and the possibilities of collective refusal. Toward these possibilities, law is enjoined to be precisely and nothing other than a grand indifference. I think the poems want to gesture toward the remission of law as part and parcel of the remission of debt, toward an account that can only be given where accounting leaves off.