Style Is Not Secondary

An essay from the Refusing Complicity project.

I want to say something about aesthetics, or style, as it relates to the problems of form, production, value, and circulation that this panel has been arranged to discuss. In our common sense, we can separate the literary, broadly, as a mode of writing from other kinds of writing partly by acknowledging its vague inutility — a poem or novel does not produce knowledge in a “rational” way, through reasoned argumentation or the analysis of data. But to start here is to accede in advance to a separation of labor that, as Lukács says, destroys the image of the whole. We still read Fanon and Césaire and June Jordan and Marx and Kanafani, etc., because of what they said and how they said it. The question of style, or the poetic, or the affected, even the difficult, whatever you like, is not narrow, or secondary, or bourgeois, but key to any discussion about how writing works and how we work on writing.

Everyone living in the United States for long risks becoming stupid without a supreme effort to refuse it. This is another way that separation, hierarchy, and domination are manifested. If politics and aesthetics are entwined as the modes of power and concept that make experience possible to think at all, we don’t have to exceptionalize the U.S. to understand that propaganda here is deep, extensive, and embedded in many of our categories of discourse — liberal, democracy, terror — and subtended by the extractive relationship between centers and peripheries, widely construed. This is why Joy James, after citing C.L.R. James on historians — “They wrote so well because they saw so little” — adds, in her own words, “Resisting violence is a mandate. If our writing suffers because we see more than we can articulate, that’s fine. At least we tried.” To say something meaningful about the pervasiveness and urgency of genocide is here linked immediately to a question of style, of “writing well,” of risking the fraying of something sometimes called, propagandistically, “craft.” The social arrangements which produce and separate us have at their root this creation of parts that destroy thinking, and they permit forms of psychic obscurity and ego preservation that can result in writers and artists wanting to be somehow “radical” in language while preserving and apologizing for genocide, like the group of “experimental” writers who attempted to force the Poetry Project to rescind their endorsement of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) after October 7. Their experiments in writing depend on the preservation of a kind of bourgeois indifference to genocide against which they engage in a zone of mildly interested play of signs.

So I talk about style to help center our consciousness on the how of the task, but our method has everything to do with what we allow ourselves to think and what we prepare ourselves to do. To think and act on reality, or what exists, from the perspective of the people most immiserated by it is to begin to end this division of labor, this separation into parts that produces “good writing,” “writing well,” and the ability to see this writing as anything other than a total expression of one’s life in society. Of course, the kind of writing I’m valuing here is not often valued, i.e., it does not make much money, even by the low standards of the publishing industry.

Our situation, our world order, is saturated by genocide, totally yoked to it. Many know this directly — others find it out when spectacular genocidal crises, like the last two years of U.S.-Israeli annihilation in Gaza, force this knowledge into consciousness. Some deny it at the cost of their spiritual and intellectual coherence. And even then, many of the poets who populate the U.S. poetry industry, small press or not, hit their heads against the same brick walls. See, for instance, 2017’s edition of the Harvard Review, where over 200 poets wrote a renga for Barack “we tortured some folks” Obama to commemorate him and protest the then-new Trump administration. The point is, if you want a “career” in U.S. poetry, if your dream is to sing from the balcony to the hoi polloi, you may one day find yourself being asked to sing the national anthem. You may even do it and blue the notes a bit to gesture toward something like critical thought.

And still, as critical as institutions like the Project and small presses are to maintaining a sphere in which some things we want to do in writing and culture can become more possible against a general cultural neglect and assault, these places have not been free from Zionists, sex pests, ghouls, racists, and work that refuses to think too hard about the world it takes place in. Poetry is not a luxury, sure, and aphorisms are not an excuse. The question of style then claims a kind of demand for integration from the alienated person who writes since the how and what of activity exert total pressure on each other and are unthinkable apart.

Read the next essay in the
Refusing Complicity project here.