www.infopool.org.uk/Files/ic.

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The Melbourne e-dialogue
Henriette Heise and Jakob Jakobsen are two Danish artists living in
London who have for the past year been running Info Centre, which the
artists define as "an ongoing activity dedicated to the exploration of art,
architecture, technology, and urban life". The Danish Contemporary Art
Foundation has invited the two artists to exhibit at the Melbourne Biennial
1999 under the section, Collaborating Country Projects. As part of the
preparation for the participation by the artists in the Melbourne event,
Dorthe Abildgaard and Marianne Krogh Jensen have engaged in a
continued e-mail dialogue with Henriette Heise and Jakob Jakobsen

There are certain objectives you may best pursue as an individual, and
there are others best sought together. We find that it is important to be in
control of the framework and distribution of our art, for which reason we
found it necessary to establish an institution like Info Centre. We see both
the individual and the collective work as part of our artistic practices, and
our work at Info Centre preparing exhibitions, planning our journal and so
on is just as important as when we are busy with our individual work.
These are merely different areas of activity which are separate, but which
also inform each other. We work on the basis of the idea that artistic
practice is not just about creating works of art, but also includes the
presentation and distribution of these. Normally the works and their
framework run together for us.

We are probably both of us artists preoccupied with thinking about all

aspects of art and the relationship between art and the surrounding world.
But a critical position is something quite different, because that creates a
dialectical situation where one easily reinforces what one attempts to
criticise, and so everything is in a deadlock. We are much more interested
in finding new ways, and with Info Centre we have tried to create a
constructive and, insofar as possible, ideal framework for our own
reflections and those of others. An important aspect of Info Centre is for it
not to be a self-enclosed entity, but rather an open institution pointing
beyond itself. It has therefore not been a huge problem collaborating with
people who do not see themselves as artists - people who have a practice
lying outside of institutionalised art. London Psychogeographical
Association, for instance. And the discussions that have arisen in that
connection have constantly made us question the potential of art. Why
should I continue to make art? And the answer is mostly: You must,
because art is sometimes a free space where ideas can be tested. Art is a
tool one can deploy to reach other objectives (knowledge, pleasure, etc.).
In practice, we insist that art may have a symbolic significance which may
invade consciousness (calmly and quietly) and liberate energy. The so-
called non-artists we are working with do precisely that. The fact that they
prefer not to be labelled as artists is beside the point.

English. From here the exchange took off. We invited LPA to present their
work at Info Centre, which is more like a reading room than an actual
gallery, and the exhibition pointed, by way of maps and newsletters,
towards the psychogeographical activities which LPA has carried out in
and around London for the past five to six years. LPA was in the process
of closing down at that time, and the show was the first phase of its
historification. Our collaborations are not about joint artistic projects, but
about opening fields where already existing ideas and activities may
accelerate, splinter, condensate, etc. Our focus on "Art, Architecture,
Technology and Urban Life" is perhaps mainly to make it clear that we are
not concentrating exclusively on art, but are interested in several areas of
a larger cultural field.

J:
We become subjective in and through our social/aesthetic practice, just
like other people do. It is difficult to handle the concept of identity, but we
usually maintain that our activities unfold beyond identity. I understand
identity as a defensive measure, and I am probably more interested in a
rather fluid subjectivity and in considering how one is made into a subject
and in how one can make oneself into a subject. In this context, it is
liberating for us to work across social/cultural categories and pursue cross-
sectional lines of flight, since we can thereby shortcut the ready-made
'subjects' that await us in all areas of culture, as for instance the role of the
artist. That is probably also why it does not create so many problems when
we simultaneously work both individually and together, since it, in my
opinion, is the same edifice that is being constructed anyway. The artist's
signature sometimes locks the situation rather than illuminates it. A way of
living beyond identity - okay... Regarding the ethical, we become, as
mentioned, subjects in and through practice, and we move in areas where
many forces are at play simultaneously. These areas are constantly
informed with the dissipating energies of desire, by inscrutable obsessions,
traumatic memories, dirty thoughts, regressions, avoidance, etc. I know
that the notion of the good life is a classical term, but I can't do anything
about that, for every time I hear it, I see before me endless rows of kitchen
hardware, single-family houses, nice cars, and so on. The ethical and the
aesthetic is probably two aspects of the same case and must be integrated
parts of practice in all its complexity.

POST-MEDIA OPERATORS
AN IMAGINARY ADDRESS

I think I better start off by warning people that this stammered address is
hardly going to be fluid. By the time I reach even this point of the address,
we'll have discovered why it is that I fear speaking in public and in fact
would avoid it as if it were a mediatised, pseudo-historical event, or, would
avoid it, in order not to induce within myself some inkling of belonging to all
the other spokespersons and publicists. That is why the current conditions
of its reception barely audible and coming through via the slickness of
consensus-inducing computer technology - seems like the only way to
agree to delivering this address. Either that, or it should be spoken into the
microphone only to be replayed backwards; the strange rhythms of a
butchered and flayed voice-box... a tongue frozen to the roof of the mouth,
a contorting gap drawing attention to the possibility of another word other
than the one that comes; in short, a mouthhole that, in buying and delaying
time, already demands a re-think and a re-write. But this is already a
theme. A stammered word, half-begun and half-finished... it seems to me
that such a wavering between absence and presence, the breathlessness
of a disjunctive pause, is more than indicative of the topic of this address...

What we have here is a public speaker with a stammer who consequently

is no public speaker. But I think that this, rather than being a kind of self-
conscious appeal for a sympathetic hearing, alludes to what I have been
asked to record here today. That I, a stammerer, have been asked to
address this meeting by others here, is a strong pointer to what motivates
the post-media attitude. For starters, it suggests that post-media operators
are hardly very conscious of maximising the PR potential and cronyism of
such a gathering. Why choose a stammerer whose words may very well be
garbled and whose syntax may very well be so disjointed as to be
unintelligible? This, to me, not only suggests the importance of music for
the post-media scene, an openness to non-verbal forms of communication
and the all-important and much overlooked struggle for the means of
expression, but it also indicates that what is considered of prime
importance to the post-media operators is the activity that goes on in
places other than in this room and at this console; that a stammered
address points us to consulting and engaging with the post-media
magazines, journals, record labels, web-sites etc. But, whatsmore, we've
also got a situation here where we are perhaps being made to feel
uncomfortable. Often I've been in an audience and I've heard the nervous
tones and wavering voice of another speaker and I think we feel
embarrassed by this because we are conditioned into expecting speech
and speeches that are flawless, rehearsed and professional, and which
function kind-of-like adverts for the speaker. Such a seamlessness brings
to mind the chrome-plated newscasters and constrained texts of a
structurally subdued journalism. A lecture, a talk, an address, becomes a
means of visibility that feeds into fees and the trade in ideas. A valorised
coherence rather than a pre-articulation. The post-media attitude is, for
me, somewhat contrary to this and, I feel, politicised because of it. What
we have in the magazines, journals, labels and web-sites is a kind of
febrile communication that legitimises itself; generates its own self-
confidence and works laterally rather than vertically. In many ways post-
media operations aspire to invisibility in that, as with the web-site
programmer, they dissolve behind a fledgling community or subsist
beneath their obsession. A hazardous poise.

When we hear the wavering voice of the speaker, or the stammerer

stuttering, we are perhaps embarrassed because we also sense the falsity
of the situation, its constructedness... chairs in rows, tables, jugs of water;
we are also alive to the sensation of an audience as being judgmental,
critical or defensive about what a person is saying. The nervousness is our
reminder of a 'gap' that is being established just at the point when it was
supposedly being breached by 'bringing' an audience-in-common together.
There's a competitive indifference rather than a play of difference. So, if we
are post-media, we are post-media in the sense that we are trying to close
the gap set up by mediation, the gap that draws people apart, the gap into
which, it seems, everyone, in the rush to be recognised, seems to want to
fill. But by doing this in this way, by going-in individually, the gap doesn't
close, it just gets wider. We are maybe dealing here with a post-media
opposition to opportunism as this latter can be seen initially as a
commitment to career meeting the lack of an aim-inhibited identification
with others. The growth of communication and knowledge as economic
resources, the acculturation of capitalism, means that there are increasing
openings for which more people compete to gain admittance. The rise of
the cultural sector as a money-spinner for capitalism means that
opportunism is on the increase. The opportunism is such that by causing a
grasping after opportunities it establishes a self-centredess, a self-
strictured and specialised focus that seems not to admit of the presence of
any others except those who are similarly opportunist and those who can
be used as vehicles to assuage the opportunism. A kind of phalanx of
media-cadre. An example of this can be the seen in the political dimension
of an interview where the interviewer can gain kudos from the interviewee
and visaversa. Where often a kind of pillaging can go on or a kind of
indirect communication that looks beyond the interview situation towards
the reception of what is said. The interview can be a situation that
functions like a blackhole: two people communicating to others who aren't
present: mythical others... like an audience. The post-media attitude
obviously wants to establish a gap between itself and the opportunist pit-
fall!. The post-media way of doing things can be seen as establishing a
direct and communal communication, one that is accessible and closer to
a practice whose effects, not unfolding in an immediately forgettable
mediatised instant, reach fruition over periods that resuscitate an
awareness of the passage of time. Foucault perhaps hits this on the head
when he says: "Refer the discourse not to the thought, to the mind, or
subject which might give rise to it, but to the practical field in which it is
deployed". Practice and action, are, for the post-media operators, not
mutually exclusive terms. Ease of involvement becomes the watchword
here.

But returning to the stammer. What has occurred to me as an explanation

for this shitty stammer is that it is expressive of a gap between thought and
language. There is an operation that occurs between my thinking of a word
and my utterance of it. This gap can often be unconscious, it can surprise
me so to speak... I can stammer at the most inopportune of moments.
There are also certain words that I always stutter on such as nnnnnnnniine
(no I won't say it). What can be drawn from this partial explanation of the
stammer is that, for a stammerer, language is not something that is reified
or second nature, it is something I am acutely aware of and being aware of
it has made me sensitive to varying contexts and atmospheres. But for our
purposes today, the stammer has made me reflect upon language: a
personal relationship to it, a 'situated' relationship to it, how other people
use it, how language can be institutional, how it can construct its own
motives and adopt more fitting ones, how it is conjoined to emotional
factors and how it can be 'blocked' and function approximately and in
generalisms. Similarly, we can, in a post-media context, substitute the
word 'language' for the word 'media' and conjecture how those engaged in
post-media activity are, perhaps unconsciously, carrying out reflections on,
and an auto-critique of, the media. For post-media operators the media is
not taken for granted but is silhouetted by similar factors as those that a
stammerer may see around language. I think it is here as well that we can
put the mokers on the underground versus mainstream split... to use the
analogy of the stammer... I am both a fluent speaker and a stammerer...
these are the differing conditions of my language and, extending this to the
post-media context, it becomes possible to say that a zine producer is
dealing with media but deploying it to a different end: at times shoddy and
overly idiosyncratic, obsessive and poignant, resolutely small scale and
anti-institutional, but above all revelatory of its means of construction and
production... and, importantly, always tending elsewhere, towards groups
and collaborations, towards beginnings. As with the stammerer there is an
added element of reflection that enters into the equation and one of the
first outcomes of this reflection is to see that the media functions not in
terms of meaning... creating meaning, pushing meaning... but in terms of
marketing... but what is worse is it presents marketing as entertainment
and what is worse is it presents a distracted entertainment and what is
worse is that it presents a distracted entertainment that admonishes and
abolishes thought and reflection. From the shittiest cable station to The
Wire magazine the media deals in individualities rather than movements
and collectivities... and the post-media operators, in contrast, are dealing in
scenes (to varying degrees of cliquishness) that in some cases are actually
dealing with, and are part of, a historic and continuing sense of community
(such as can be seen from working class and communist literature).
Meaning in such contexts is generated between people and is deployed
outwards rather than inwards (what I mean by inwards is that it is
opportunist in the sense that the meaning generated in academic and
some media circles, being caught structurally in the trap of book
production, relates to individual authors and that this is unconsciously
reflected in the writing itself - I think, instead, of communist literature,
where huge reams of research are presented anonymously as if they
function as 'gifts' to a wider movement. This is important, in any post-media
context, for it is suggestive that creativity has a purpose other than being
caught in some mirror-stage where an author is entranced by his or her
own reflection. Pierre Bordieu has called such a process "narcissistic
complacency". Postmedia practice, then, is more engaged in the
construction of counter-meaning and is a persistent challenge to those
meanings that circulate more widely but which reinforce, to put it bluntly,
capitalism: individualism, opportunity, success, exposure, buying and
selling. Ideas that circulate within the media are often so decontextualised
and bounded by established forms and ideological mechanics that they
loose social-relevance. They can't be hooked-up and set to work. For a
stammerer, fluency of language is so much taken for granted that the
problems and challenges of language that, say, I encounter, become a
means of making my own experiences into an irrelevancy.

Irrelevancy? Maybe I should go to speech-therapy and get a job as a

journalist? To be opportunist I could answer this rhetorical question by
saying "a little yes and a little no", but really what is at issue with post-
media operators is making what is irrelevant, displaced and inappropriate
in a media context, into something that for many people is more provoking,
situated, linked-up and potentiated than what is already widely available.
Why does one thing merit exposure and another thing not? The most
seemingly free as the most disarmingly censored? The media can be
fluent and stammered, it can be primal in the extreme (tabloid) and
sophisticatedly seductive, it can be clever and ironic, but most of all it
seems to be opaque. Post-media is about dissatisfaction and suspicion
about what is made available and I mean suspicion in the sense of its
being critical and wary of motive rather than being debilitatingly
mistrusting. Information comes in the guise of an objectivity underpinned
by 'hidden constraints'. If the media is dispassionately motivated then post-
media can be a site of transparent passion and aim-inhibited reflexes. It is
this transparency that makes it attractive as a site of engagement. It has
nothing to hide and has the strength to carry forward and explore its
convictions. If, as a stammerer, I have agreed to speak to more people
than I have ever spoken to before it is really in order to demonstrate some
of the things I have spoken about. To be a 'live' example of them, to show
a lack of fear that has been communicated to me by other post-media
operators, to expose myself, to risk being misunderstood, to demonstrate
what passion is capable of achieving. Maybe, above all else, it is to show
that anybody can do it if they disentangle themselves from the overriding
prohibitions and fears of what others may think, because afterall, it is only
by breaching the gaps that society can become transparent enough to
encourage our actions to aim for its weakest points where, at present, its
only cohesiveness, the last remnant of its passivity-inducing arsenal, lies in
the fear a person may have of another. Pierre Bordieu sums this up when,
in talking of political journalism he remarks how it shows us "a world full of
incomprehensible and unsettling dangers from which we must withdraw for
our own protection". Post media operations seem to me to be about risk..
they are horizontal, dispersed and all-inclusive and, in being so, are open
to what may come to 'affect' it. In this way I think it is activity that is
socialised and polyphonic, that can imagine what it wants to imagine rather
than have its fantasies made-up for it like a be-spoke suit. It could imagine
revolution if it wanted to.

I can say in concluding that my stammer has predisposed me to post-

media operations. At its best, a lack of willingness to speak means that the
whole area of possession of the means of expression is, for me, still an
issue. As with other post-media operators, expression is not taken for
granted and it still appears to me to be necessary to encourage a growth of
expression. One that is unguarded and not subject to such structural
constraints as circulation figures, mythical audience categorisation and the
circularity of exclusives. Whereas the media, acting like a filter, wants to
maintain a quality-control, a party line, that is obedient to the
communicative and aesthetic demands of capitalism, post-media operators
are aware that it is no longer necessary to spectate upon the expressions
of cultural celebrities, but, becoming aware that such celebrities are often
haphazardly chosen from the networks of opportunism and cronyism, that
they are legitimated by the media for a reason, it falls to the post-media
operators to illustrate through their practice, that others, can, and should
have, a confidence in their own autonomous activity. A growth in
expression undermines the ideologies of consent. It always remains a
matter of looking elsewhere.

Howard Slater Break/Flow

(22/9/98)  

Autotraumatise
(Against Voluntary Servitude) Being exposed to fright and crisis, hearing
what we do not want to hear, placing ourselves in a position where we can
be traumatised leads to a situation where we acclimatise ourselves to fear,
inhabit it and become fearless enough to confront other fears. On so many
occasions it is even a memory that we cannot revisit and, anxious before a
return to a site or a scene anxious of what it may conjure up in the
mind'seye, we remain in a paralysed state of fear rather than become
accustomed to confrontation, re-vision and secession. Fearful, even, and
ignorant of the full ramifications of what constitutes and still constitutes us.
So, we should be relieved that we are protected and the search will go
on... the search for a father or a boss who will, in returning our imploring
gaze, see to it that we will never be independent or autonomous, but will
remain in this situation of servitude unable even to make a mistake or an
error or a criticism. Thus the adrenaline of fear is dissipated and the
libidinal charge it effects soon cathects to other more respectable and
repressed scenes. But internally policed by external forces, living at such a
low-ebb beneath the infra-red glare we become energised by differing
media of repression. Reality-testing and avoidance-filters make sure that
there is never even a chance of our being traumatised and so with this,
withdrawn and shrivelled, the present expands to be all there is, and our
memories, the interactions they present, are painlessly lobotomised. No
more will we hear our inner-voice our social voice. The arousal and
discharge of thought through language, becomes possible only as a
recitation and a regurgitation, and it seems after all that the traumas we
feared the ones we rushed away from, were no more than the simple
insistence of thoughts misconstruals and elucidations. To autotraumatise is
not to enter crisis, to dramatically confess, but it is that which ensures that
the repressed neither wells-up and explodes nor does it expend too much
energy in maintaining its asocial equilibrium. Is it, in facing-up to
dispossession, to be a little freer? It is though, a shock, but a shock of
recognition seeing first and always the 'other' that persists as a self-
representation and, through the mirror, that there exists others who are no
more alien or estranged than we from a reconfiguration of desire; a new
enactment of a resuscitated history that departs from incestual nostalgia
and steps slowly towards desire and from there to will.

Detourned Freud
(Libidinal Musics) With music we can change the world. If listening is
listened we are no longer adjusted for we are unable to control affectivity
and motility, no longer civilised enough to exclude stimulus, avoid
excitation and remain at a manipulatable ebb. Somehow through sound it
is a question of being opened to affective intensity, a charge of diffuse
cathexis, as it creates a surplus of thought that resists and defies the
existence of a "tendency towards stability". Music, ignored by Freud, is that
which throws back into chaos the limited topography of the psyche and its
division into hierarchically ordered systems. If we are full of a psychical
energy that, it is said, must fall under the domain of social and psychic
repression so as to remain unconscious and, if when this energy is
expended it is guided by the selection of appropriate objects and expulsed
onto these so as to return us to a state of inertia, a minimised state of
excitation, then it is the charge of music to overcome this economical
binding of psychical energy. It is music, when listened-to and fused-with in
the knowledge of the absence of social laws of decorum and restraint, that
effects a turbulence and that provokes the latent psychical energy into
circulating like some vortex; rendering it thus unable to select or settle
upon any one object. Singular lines of relation become dynamical ones
and psychical energy, not some mystical emanation but the very real motor
of thought, becomes indistinguishable from libidinal energy. Instrumental
music, carrying no verbal signification has the simultaneous effect of
communicating directly to an unconscious that it is said pays little credence
to words. The energies provoked do not therefore settle around a signifier
that subsumes the energy and determines response. Thus empassioned
we come to by-pass language, but the gap which opens up between
feeling and expression, the need to articulate, is creative of a further
surges of tension (mistaken as unpleasurable) that continues to defy the
"tendency towards stability". Such surges of "intensive potency" are not, as
Freud would have it, emanations of some archaic instinctual drives, but in
seeking to become conscious (their very intensity guarantees their forcing
themselves through), they are markers of a desire that reveals and forms
itself in the need to act, produce, combine and institute anew. Desire,
spurred on by uncathexted psychical energy, rolls and roves to the point
that it intuits the restrictions of the predominant models of subjectivity.
Moreover, music's pull towards an 'outside' of our own sense-experience
means that the last agency this roving energy wants to cathect is its own
ego (narcissism). In this case, remaining self-same and individualised, the
stimulus received is not used to provoke the circulation of energies and act
as a spur to thought, but comes to feed instinctive needs and functions as
an ever commodifiable hedonism. This delimiting of the flows of psychical
energy is thus tantamount to a specifically sexual cathexis rather than one
that is libidinally charged. However, an "indifferent psychical energy",
resistant to the fallacies of eroticised markets, is not in a state of dis-
affection but is indifferent to being subsumed by a particular object
(product) that would, in its turn, create the danger of defining the energy in
its own terms, perhaps to condition the unbound energy with a feeling of
well-being and settled-satisfaction (conformity). Music helps change the
world by instaurating such possibilities for change.

(Break/Flow 3 outtakes for Jakob and Soren: Remixed paragraphs from

John Carpenter and Mille Plateaux articles: Feb 99)

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Georges Sorel's thought

Rimbaud: Intermediary Militant

– Through Rimbaud's Season In Hell

"If the poet can no longer speak for society,

but only for himself, then we are at the last ditch"
– Henry Miller

"It is possible that the impossibility of poetry is itself the condition of poetry"
– Georges Bataille

The question of how to subvert power, to live a life, was a problem that
Arthur Rimbaud didn't so much formulate as enact. Reading his poetry
again, a poetry of improvisational emotion, it's possible to be struck by a
forceful contemporaneity that has such works as 'Season In Hell' read,
now, like a political manifesto. But it is a politics of a different kind, a
politics that has given up any redemptive vectors. Instead Rimbaud seeks
to create an exodus, a chimerical materiality of the possible, that can lead
us to a politics of becoming. As he drifts towards the end of the word
Rimbaud takes us on a detour through composite cities and countryside
trysts, passed colonial beachheads and debauched bars, and delivers us
into the company of quotidian messiahs; revolutionaries of everyday life
whose unaimed benevolences reek of crimes against self-interest.
Accompanying Rimbaud in his flight from a permanent state of emergency
based upon this 'right of self-interest', we can get an inkling of what we can
leave to politics: national origin, institutional representation, inherited
morality, wage-labour, Christ, Satan, wise-guys. But Rimbaud's exodus,
his self-abandonment, is not a bid for a transcendence that would
posthumously mark him out, but a deep, nomadic immersion in the social
unconscious. Thus, with Rimbaud, there is the inkling of a preemptive
strike on a pleasure-principle that would, like the politics of security based
on a disavowed abundance, make pleasure and pain equate to an
equilibrium that is made indicative of a death drive – a return to an
inanimate state; the fear of experience that fuels a legislated neutralisation
of life. Instead Rimbaud surmounts sociable equidistance and Caucasian
equations through an inveigling of death; he took the piss out of its
politicised threat, facing up to death-in-life with a surfeit of energy that
turned trauma into the will to experience, into autotraumatisation: "I
summoned my executioners so that I could bite their rife butts before I
died".

Rimbaud's politics of becoming was premised on a use of trauma that gets

beyond pleasure and pain. This is the experience of living life that
Rimbaud unprotectedly sought out and, as we read, it is not so much that
these experiences were chased-after as the raw material of a 'poetry' that
could make him belong, as they were experiences that ensured a lack of fit
between himself and the literary norms of the time – "I thought laughable
the great figures of modern painting and poetry". This scorn for his
precedents, akin to his scorn for the sovereignty of the law, was not so
much a transgressive pose as a means for a heightened affectivity: the
very raw material, not exclusively of poetry but, of a politics of becoming,
an abandonment of the 'self' from all the apparati of identity as they are
assured by family... state... poetry. So, at the very outset of a Season In
Hell, one of his last works, Rimbaud abandons the coordinates of
belonging even to his own autobiography. He has no antecedents, he is a
non-pseudo nigger, a pagan. He has made himself an orphan, a
potentiated multiple, that, being no longer an individual but a precipitate of
emotional layers, can only identify with those that are 'a law unto
themselves'. Seeking thus to see through the eyes of a criminal and
becoming "the great criminal, the great accursed", Rimbaud intuits that the
law is a personalisable lexicon and that the most feared crime is to
communicate your own self-contesting law, to be amply prepared for the
trauma of self-abandonment. That both poets and politicians can be cast
as 'legislators' leads Rimbaud to be a stranger in his 'own' language: "But
always alone; without family: I even have to ask what language I speak."
Rather than seeking release in the form of a pleasure or pain, rather than
seeking synthesis in the form of a single persona or a character that
speaks the 'truth' in a possessable language, Rimbaud's deliberating
incognito, his immanence, becomes a source of experiential tension, an
enlivening contradiction. Permanently unfulfilled, at odds even with a
language that can liberate him, Rimbaud embraces a mode of living that
can lead to freedoms beyond those enshrined in the Declaration of the
Rights of Man: affectibility. As Deleuze has written, "affectibility... is a
capacity of affection without personality... that becomes all its modifications
and yet... constitutes a manner of existence that is positive" [1]. Rimbaud
slides between the multiple personas that voice him and pulls every
conceivable face. His mug-shot is a composite. His poetry is 'free indirect
discourse'.

Rimbaud's 'affectibility' is what has him outside the law. Even before the
pleasure principle came along to announce its death sentence, its fear of
the positive energy of desire that took on the pronunciation of lack,
Rimbaud's hatred of the law makes us reflect that the fear of life has
become entangled and codified in legislation. This fear translates into the
concept of 'security' which, as Marx wrote, guarantees to each of the
members of a society "the conservation of his person, his rights and
property" [2]. But this conservation, which makes people into the objects of
a legislative mediation, presupposes the lives it legislates for to be
bounded entities, it presupposes that what is feared in life is an
'affectibility', a giving-ourselves-over, which can not only pierce our
'binding', but lead to the self-abandonment of becoming. Such autonomous
expenditure has no need of a legislation that protects only those who seek
to conserve. Not having anything to conserve – personality, property, a
name, a country – Rimbaud, for better and for worse, lives at the
uncodified behest of the senses. He 'becomes all modifications'. This taste
for life as becoming, as 'self-mediated being', is what, on the one hand,
makes Rimbaud's 'poetry' a free indirect discourse, a compound of cited
voices that shift, and, on the other, stakes-out the import of his writing as a
political manifesto that affirms life as that which it is possible to live without
guilt: a living exchange of linguistic ardours. Rimbaud, who seems to intuit
that the law is based on protecting the private property of private persons,
and who, wanting more than the conservation of the self, being desirous of
more than a choice between the war of pleasure and the law of pain, is not
one who seeks to pay back the inherited debt. Scorning the securities
market of the state, Rimbaud leaves it to the leftists to conserve the law by
changing it: "I armed myself against justice". But he has another form of life
in mind, an inconvertible demand for a politics of becoming: "several other
lives, it seemed to me, were owed to every being".

Rimbaud seemed to know that to abandon oneself to 'affectivity', to

become a 'being' between, was to drop beneath the scan of a
characterlogical radar. To fall from a law's eye view, to become a non-
person, a self abandoned shadow of a self ("I am hidden and not hidden")
is to embrace the trauma of being declared 'a nothing': "Quick a crime, so
that I may plunge into nothingness, according to human law". But this
'nothingness' is more than full. It is declared as nothing by 'human law'
because, as an act of becoming, it does not seek to preserve itself, it does
not seek a stable representation that could be merited, weighed,
accounted for. As Bataille has said of nothingness: it can sometimes be
"the being envisioned in the totality of the world" [3]. Being in the world
thus, unmediated and unindividuated, being "absorbed by everybody... a
multiplier of progress" [4], is to run the risk of 'anguish', which is to say,
Rimbaud runs the risk of no longer offering himself up for the protection of
being represented by political pleasures, but of, instead, attempting to
make himself heard as an unrepresentable collective. Responsible for
humanity, Rimbaud sheds guilt : "I belong to a race which sang on the
scaffold; I understand nothing of laws; I have no moral sense". His poetry,
amoral to the degree that it rejects utility, criminal to the extent that it urges
the formation of a new language, is a poetry that, facing up to the
inexpressible, defies itself as being authored by himself as an individual:
"Universal intelligence has always thrown out its ideas, naturally; men
picked up part of these fruits... author, creator, poet, this man has never
existed" [5]. Thus can Rimbaud rail against the 'egotists' and 'one eyed
intellects' who call themselves 'authors', for the affectibility that Rimbaud
pursued led him not only to urge a war on law, but to challenge the very
limits of experiences as these are represented by a possessable
knowledge voided of sensuality and a use of language that insulates us
against the risks of a stumbling expressivity: "What a life. True life is
somewhere else. We are not in the real world."

Affectibility as a modality of thought is, possibly, a way to bypass what

Rimbaud calls the "false significance of the ego". It is the ego, cathecting
itself, that the legislators seek to secure through means of constitutional
documents. It is this same ego that valorises personality, that, reigning-in
our becomings, conserves our failure to communicate because, being in
possession of a point-of-view, we seeks to 'express our self' rather than to
'be expressive', to be a locus for 'expressivity'. This impasse has been
revolutionised by Rimbaud as an experience of struggling with a language
that, not being always malleable enough to resist inherited knowledge, can
result in the end of the primacy of the word as it is alloyed to the primacy of
knowledge: "I understand, and, incapable of expressing myself without
pagan words, I would rather say nothing." Here Rimbaud, who always
valued music, indicates, perhaps, how affectibility as a form of thought
enables 'understanding' without it necessarily having to be be written or
spoken. Sensualised, Rimbaud 'understands' without having recourse to
the right words. 'Saying nothing' for Rimbaud is not the end of thought, but
the end of being said and the beginnings of a communication by means of
'pagan words', words that may not even be formed from letters, but from
sounds ("I became a fabulous opera") or from coloured letters ("I invented
the colour of vowels"). In this way affectibility, in conflict with a use of
language that limits thought to an accumulation of concepts, changes not
so much what we think, but the way we perceive that we think: "It is wrong
to say: I think. One ought to say: I am thought" [6]. Rimbaud rejects the
inherited knowledge of philosophy that, in linking thought to an individual
and making knowledge a matter of private property, conserves our failure
to communicate. Instead communication is enhanced through a mistrust of
a knowledge that has declared war on the praxis of the senses by means
of the law of the Logos: "Since the declaration of modern knowledge,
Christianity, man has been deceiving himself, proving the obvious, puffed
up with the pride of repeating these proofs, the only life he knows!... Mr
Wise Guy was born with Christ!". In this light the 'universal intelligence'
which Rimbaud mentions is not so much an indication of an ethereal God
but, after Marx, a matter of the 'general social wealth' of culture. Thus 'to
be thought', as Rimbaud says, is not just to be a mouthpiece, but to
actively place the onus of thought onto affectibility; a mode of sensual
apprehension that can lead to a reformulation of knowledge as that which
arises from being open to the 'universal intelligence' of the world: a shared
ability to experience life, to be a locus for poetic expressivity ("Your own
ardour must be the task").

Rimbaud's conflict with language, leading him to utter the phrase "no more
words!", is a way that he takes his conflict with the law into a new
dimension. Rather than having a personality to 'conserve' and offer-up to
representation, Rimbaud, voicing in his 'poems' the characteristics of a
multiple personality ('free indirect discourse'), seems to embark upon
guerrilla actions against those substructures of language that ensure that
we remain opaque and separable from one another: the decentred voice of
his poems is simultaneously masculine and feminine, singular and plural,
active and passive, past and present, sardonic and sincere. Language as a
material, its suppleness, is that which is lost when, its substructures intact,
it is promulgated as a means to shore up an ego that expresses its self,
that reiterates the possible. Bataille: "Language is lacking because
language is made of propositions that make identities intervene" [7]. These
ego driven identities that speak in order to be returned-to their own
subjection are what Rimbaud seeks to be exiled from, they are what
provoke him to flee from the men of letters ("I don't know how to talk!") and
which lead him to say of Baudelaire that "he lived in too artistic circles". For
him, before the end at any rate, language should be supple enough to
sound-out a compound emotion that renders us dumb, it should be the
means to bring to expression what it is impossible to say. As Giorgio
Agamben has pointed out "it is the very sayability, the very openness at
issue in language, which in language we always presuppose and forget...
because it is at bottom an abandonment and oblivion" [8]. Yet, just as
language is not an abstract entity (it does not doesn't possess 'openness'
in and of itself), the utterance is dependent upon its situated addressees
and Rimbaud, in declaring his open defiance of State-sanctioned laws that
enshrine alienation and lead to death and servitude, surmounts oblivion
and abandons himself to his capacity to say anything. Having a variety of
places to talk from and a variety of personas to talk through, securing thus
his 'affectibility', a guiltless Rimbaud can use language not as a mode of
dissemblance, but as a means to communicate his 'inner experience'.

But Rimbaud wanted more from language, more from himself than was
possible by means of language: "the point is to arrive at the unknown by
the dissoluteness of the senses" [9]. To 'arrive at the unknown' is not only
to reject the common knowledge of the day but it is, by means of the
'dissoluteness of the senses', a way to re-experience a prelingual phase.
The fluctuation of the emotions, our wordless affectibility, is what
overpowers language, makes us stammer, and renders us dumb even
though we have won the power of speech. To experience the prelingual is
to be rendered disarticulate and decentred and, yet, it is not so much that
Rimbaud resents a 'fall into language' as an estrangement from the 'pure
life of feeling' as it is a means to bring forth affective knowledge by means
of gaining access to inner experience. In many ways this inner experience
is what is deemed superfluous. It is not required in the world of work ("I
abhor every trade"). As a timeless compound of affect this very
'unsayability', its traumatic pressure, is what ensures the drive to
communicate. In many ways, then, the 'unknown' which Rimbaud wants to
arrive at could be said to be inner experience, the sensorium of affects,
that, unable to be fully articulated in language, are what come to form the
raw material for becomings: approximations of feelings that can be
enacted through language, a 'capacity for affection without personality'. So,
when Rimbaud speaks of an "alchemy of the word" and of "turning words
into hallucinations", it is as if he intends to work the fracture of language,
its lack of fit with inscrutable affect, and, from there, situating himself in the
fluctuational space of inner experience, to, by means of 'poems' as
prearticulations, translate affects into insinuations of shared meanings.
Such a semiotic of the impulses, whereby language is made malleable by
its being compacted with a re-experienced memory of the prelingual and
by its simultaneous intent to make affect communicable by means of
language and against language, is perhaps what was hinted-at by
Rimbaud in one of his most famous passages, a sequence that heralds the
avant-garde of the next century: "I invented the colour of vowels... I
organised the shape of every consonant, and by means of instinctive
rhythm, flattered myself that I was the inventor of a poetic language,
accessible sooner or later to all the senses."

When, in his famous letter to Paul Demeny, Rimbaud offered that he

wanted to "make himself" a seer rather than a poet, it is not so much an
aspiration to religious fervour that Rimbaud is urging onto himself, but a
politics of becoming, a living self-production and hence an abandonment of
conserved being. To be a seer requires an access to 'inner experience'
rather than to the divine logos, for the knowledge of the unknown which
Rimbaud seeks cannot be a knowledge that is preformed and readily
articulatable in language, but a new form of knowledge, a 'non-knowledge',
that, in surpassing any usefulness, comes to register an affectibility, a
passion, that is crucial for wider bonds of communicativeness to be
established than are possible between poet and reader, politician and
citizen. As Marx has said at the onset of the communist movement: "What
is needed above all is a confession... to obtain forgiveness for its sins
mankind need only to declare them for what they are" [10]. This is the
sense in which Rimbaud is a seer. He has dropped his defences to such a
degree that his inner experience does not make him feel guilty. Quite the
opposite: he has no secrets because, expressing his inner experience,
pursuing unsayable affect, he reveals that the interminable mystique of
inner experience (the domain of poets and priests) is what ensures a
mysticism that trades in pleasure and pain, deferment and punishment.
Beyond the pleasure principle, the abandonment of equilibrium, Rimbaud
reveals that inner experience is what is eminently shareable – there is an
'otherness' of inner experience ("I is another") that is reduced to a self-
flagellating privacy. It is social separation, instituted in the affectless
language of politics and by a common knowledge reduced to
proprietorship, that hinders this inner experience being communicated
between people and its being seen as 'sinful'. For the 'sins' that require
forgiveness are nothing other than private thoughts that have not remained
private and unenacted, but have been uttered and acted-out between
people. The sharing of 'sins', the 'declaring them for what they are', thus
loosens the hold of the law and reduces the power of guilt, and enables
social bonds to form that are not mediated by judgmental knowledges
(commandments, constitutions) that lead to voluntary servitude, but, in
Rimbaud's case, are the relational material of a law beyond law, the
formation of contracts of trust: "Poor men, workers! I do not ask for
prayers; with your trust alone I shall be happy".

With these contracts of trust we are faced with the paradox of giving a
legal form to an openness that enables inner experience to be shared
between people, an openness that, in its affective interminability, cannot
be subject to decrees or judgments. In other words, what does it mean
when, beyond the law, we seek recourse to some means to be at ease
with an articulation of our inner experience? At one level an answer lies in
the form of poetry itself; the way that by becoming aligned with a
recognisable tradition of writing we seek a means with which to expose
ourselves; our feelings and fears. But Rimbaud, in his trajectory towards
abandoning poetry, is always moving beyond this. His rejection of the law
and the state, of nationality and poetic antecedents, has him not only quest
for a new language of affectivity ("this language will be from the soul to the
soul, summing up everything, perfumes, sounds, colours..." [11]), but has
him begin to run this idea of a new language alongside a poetical practice
that is indistinguishable from the living of his life. For Rimbaud it seems
that writing poetry is a means of writing the autonomous law of his life that
he hands down to us not on stone tablets, but on scraps of doodle-filled
paper. He becomes a stateless legislator and his poems become contracts
of trust that can encourage the propertyless to speak to one another. This
possible contract between the affective – the ones who own little except
their ability to empathise and feel-for – is, in Rimbaud, moved on from its
submergence in literary craft towards the realm of a recast 'free speech'
that has no need of parliaments and courtrooms for its legitmation. With
affectibility as a modality of thought, the unknown in us, our inner
experience, is what can change our lives. Shared between us without
being reified into knowledge it is the communicative risk that presupposes
a politics of becoming that is instinctively opposed to the way we are
inveigled to live our lives. As Foucault, in his late seminars on 'free speech'
has said: "The problem of freedom of speech becomes increasingly related
to the choice of existence, of the choice of one's way of life. Freedom in
the use of logos increasingly becomes freedom in the choice of bios" [12].

This choice of the way to live a life, vouchsafed in Rimbaud by his being
free enough with language to want to turn 'words into hallucinations', is a
traumatic encounter with possibilities that are withheld in favour of the
profitable maintenance of an equilibrium. Not only does Rimbaud present
these choices with the metaphor of his own displacement and nomadism,
his coming up against the dialectic of language, testing the logos against
the bios leads him to abandon the writing of poetry altogether. For Henry
Miller, Rimbaud's renunciation of his 'calling' is related to his standing "so
clearly revealed to himself that he no longer had need for expression at the
level of art" [13]. This may be the case, but it is also worth suggesting that
Rimbaud's abandonment of poetry is concerned with his inner experience
having less and less need of artistic mediation, a mediation that would
neutralise this inner experience as a canonical expression. What was
needed was not so much the invention of a new language that would
isolate Rimbaud the orphan even further, aligning him with the roll-call of
poets he scorns, but the invention of a free speech, a distribution of inner
experience, that could bring people together as becomings. To this end
when, in his letter to Paul Demeny, he urged upon himself the role of seer,
he outlined a future in which 'poetry would be ahead of action' and
envisioned also that poets would be citizens. In choosing not to say that
'citizens would be poets' and in thus not elevating poets to a position
above others, Rimbaud's rejection of poetry can be related to the absence
of addressees. This is put to dramatic effect when, in A Season In Hell, he
says "... in front of several men, I chatted very audibly with a moment from
their other lives." In many ways this hallucinatory line is indicative of
Rimbaud having to create addressees, addressees that, it can be
suspected, do not fear that very inner experience that is creative of 'other
lives', becomings. Could it then be that Rimbaud's rejection of poetry was
indicative of missing addressees that could comprise a 'missing people', a
people becoming? Deleuze, writing on cinema – the art that combines
colour, movement, sound and words – offered that "this acknowledgement
of a people who are missing is not a renunciation of political cinema, but
on the contrary a new basis on which it is founded... art must take part in
this task: not that of addressing a people, which is presupposed already
there, but of contributing to the invention of a people." [14]

When Rimbaud refused the trappings of sovereignty – nationality,

compatriotism – and refused to see himself as a part of a People legislated
for in law, it was not simply a matter of his becoming an individualist rebel
devoted to the cause of art. This thesis of Henry Miller's can be countered
by the way that Rimbaud, in being a poet of 'free indirect discourse' and in
his consequent adoption of the tension of contradictory standpoints in his
verse, is not seeking a representational status for himself. As an
'undecidable' becoming cultivating lawless contradiction, Rimbaud subsists
beneath the level of visible identities that can be constitutionally accounted
for: "my life lacks solidity, it flits and floats away up above action, that focus
the world holds so dear". Such a solidity may be indicative of the refusal to
listen-to and attempt-an articulation of 'inner experience' in such a way as
to bring affectibility to the fore as precisely that which gives rise to the
potential of living life differently: emotional states not only have their own
duration and means of relational bonding they are what enable us to relate
differently to what we know, 'subtilise' our language and resist being
defined as an abstracted People in whose name we are ruled. Scornful of
the colonial adventure through which national identities were intensively
being constructed, Rimbaud's 'minority of one' was opposed to the abstract
generalities of such a People and posited instead a multiplicity of identities
that, in uncoupling affects from their poetic personification, make affects
into timeless components of identity that are always reaching after
articulation. In this way any solidity that can be achieved is not a solidity
that can be legislated for, that can be secured by a private property of
rights or a proper space for speech, but, beyond such laws, is a matter of
contexts of free speech that encourage the 'missing people' to become
responsive addressees, co-authors of their becomings. Rimbaud's
rejection of poetry – backed by a surplus of shareable affect, by the
abreaction of inner experience and by a respectful connectivity to
'universal intelligence' (general intellect) – is tantamount to bringing the
creativity of the addressee to the fore. This creativity, a politics of
becoming, is constitutive of passionate associations that mark an improper
place of the polis. After Rimbaud, poems, contracts of trust, become
collectively authored social relations. The impossibility of poetry becomes
a renewed possibility for free speech.

Howard Slater @ Break/Flow

March 2002

Notes
Unless otherwise noted all citations are drawn from 'Season in Hell'. See
Arthur Rimbaud: Collected Poems, Oxford 2001, p211– p255. Translated
by Martin Sorrell.

1. Gilles Deleuze cited by Giorgio Agamben in Potentialities, Stanford

University Press 2000, p230.
2. Karl Marx: On The Jewish Question in Early Writings, Penguin 1981,
p230.
3. Georges Bataille: The Unfinished Theory Of Non-Knowledge, Minnesota
2001, p31.
4. Arthur Rimbaud: Letter To Paul Demeny(15/5/1871). See
www.mag4.net
5. ibid.
6. ibid.
7. Georges Bataille, ibid, p64.
8. Giorgio Agamben, ibid, p35.
9. Arthur Rimbaud: Letter to Georges Izambard (13/5/1871). See
www.mag4.net.
10. Karl Marx: Letter To Ruge (September 1843) in Early Writings, ibid,
p209.
11. Arthur Rimbaud: Letter to Paul Demeny, ibid.
12. Michel Foucault: Fearless Speech, Semiotext(e) 2001, p85.
13. Henry Miller: The Time Of The Assassins, New Directions 1952 p43.
14. Gilles Deleuze: Cinema Two, Athlone 1989, p217.

Afterword: This Game Of The Discursive Real

Much has been left open, unsaid. Bataille's presence, his unfinishd system
of non-knowledge, haunts the text. As the text – my half project – draws to
a close, Rimbaud lives on in his intermediary position: the herald of a
militancy that's been, is to come and is here now. The emotive instant. The
emotive motion of time travel wherein, across history, links accrue without
forming an object. The whole thing could spiral out of control. I cease with
Rimbaud: such a false word 'cease' when Rimbaud is now inside me,
incomplete, possessing me; when Rimbaud, my brother by means of 'non-
human sex', has become another means to practice 'free indirect
discourse' :– I have always only dared to speak of myself while ostensibly
speaking about someone else; there is always this experience of thought
passing through the persona that I can be in the text, and the personae of
the others text, an experience of thought by means of an assemblage, an
experience of thought as a pretence, an access to a 'field' never populated
by individual persons, but by the liberating conductance of energies across
time, the 'general intellect'. So to Bataille. 1953. I continue with Bataille
after adding him to the assemblage: it's a matter of me, Rimbaud and
Bataille now. No 'I' at the end of the sentence. The same person. We're
one and the same. This is the power of imagination. To undeludedly say
such a thing, to be given so much confidence, is to accept, not pseudo
prominence, an equality of sameness, but is to accept the 'general
intellect', the possibility of making connections, which is, after all, the
baseline of a knowledge that is feted out of all proportion to this simple
operation: that I am conscious, conscious of the breach of my
unconscious, conscious of the unconscious of social relations and thus
open to history as a means of permanent potentiality, thus open,
disgustingly open, to the sharp signs of affectivity: spinning in a word-sea
of stimuli, of poetry as free speech. Knowledge, if we are to greet it openly,
is only experience. If we must state the obvious then it is not to re-utter
something that's been said before (and hence nondescript to say it again),
but both a sad, crushing, indictement of the way experience is today a
matter for legislation and, with Marx's Letter To Ruge, an
acknowledgement that "mankind will not begin any new work, but will
consciously bring about the completion of its old work". We 'complete' this
work by experiencing thought as an emotional praxis, inhabiting the
affective minutiae of history (the hole in Rimbaud's shoe). So, if affectivity
is outlawed by knowledge (thus the link between law and knowledge is
made present), non-knowledge frees our capacity for affectivity with the
bonus risk of ... here comes Bataille, anguish and ectasy. Which is another
way to pronounce 'Rimbaud', which is another way to say that poetry is
"reflective experience" (p138) that should be recast as free speech. But
Bataille 'knows' something else (maybe he learnt it from Rimbaud who
learnt it from a drunken rioter). Bataille hopes to know how to not know,
how to get out of the framework of the law too: "...And if the violation of the
law, being the origin of all that we love, after the law, more than the law,
destroyed the foundation of thought no less then it put an end to the power
of the law?" (p204). For Bataille, as with Rimbaud, it is a frightfull delight to
be leaving knowledge and the law behind. To have understood, intuited,
that it is a matter of books, access to books, access to the language-key,
to a sanctioned means of expression, that links knowledge and the law –
the latter being that most difficult of subjects to ever know: a non
knowledge masquerding as absolute knowledge. So. Exodus. Rimbaud in
the Eden of Arden. No more project. Rimbaudian Bataille: "Today I could
say that the slightest thought granted to my projects, which exist despite
me, surpasses me and overwhelms me. But the Instant! It is always infinite
delirium" (p202). Surpassed by your own project is: the 'general intellect',
'alienation'. At worst it's work, forced labour, the labour of pride. At best it's
history again, a laying down of unsuccessive strata, the ineffable of the
unexpected, the affectivity of the minutiae, the suprise that re-triggers
access to risk, to 'reflective exprience', to non-knowledge (Benjamin –
coming across Bataille at the College of Sociology and calling a book
'Illuminations' after Rimbaud, as well as making One Way Street follow the
poetic prose of A Season In Hell – knows this as a "shot through with chips
of messianic time"). Rimbaud and Bataille. I, their intermediary, who pulls
their conjunction point forward towards its third point – a starburst in a
future that's ahead of me and behind them. Endless points of contact,
shared and sharded: "The unappeased multitude that I am (will nothing
permit my withdrawal?...) ... is generous, violent, blind. It is a laugh, a sob,
a silence that has nothing, which hopes for and retains nothing" (p200). To
chalk a poetry of the most simple utterance on the pavement and to hope
for a shower. A blissful release from expression into being an expressive
loucus for becomings that populate the worn out shell known as an
individual. This will be your permit to withdraw, this risk of depossessing
your own, our own, autobiographies. Exodus = untested feasibilty. The
interminable instant of anguish and ectascy: living life as an experience.
"Fuck the writers", says I, speaking in tongues, "they are the ones who
enshroud us in silence without ever having shared in our struggle to attain
silence as the limit-point of language, as the maximum mentasm of the
'general intellect'". The point of silence is not just to be an everything – the
nothing that is uttered fills the interclocuter with a violent conjecture – but it
is to rely on someone else, somewhere else, to say for us what we would
want to say, hope to say, without being mindful of changing the words or
their intonation (the latter swathes us with music, the former is the loving
gift of solidarity). The point of silence is to acknowledge a kind of trust that
results from struggle, it is to suspend ourselves as the centre of even our
own body, it is to practice the dialectic of the logos and the bios, to be part
and not apart from the conversation: "My writing is always a mixture of the
aspiration to silence and that which speaks me" (202). Bataille speaks for
me and I'll have him speak for Rimbaud too. There is always anguish in
having a voice that the rhythm of silence and free speech can appease. It
encourages laughter, self mockery, which itself says "All I know is that I
know not". The freedom of belonging to error is not terror: "In this equality
with limitless error, wherein I myself am led astray, have I ever felt more
plainly human?" (197). Only the excessive, obscene pride of the most
writerly, those written into life, those who haunt the fringe of the glossed-
over page, can bring us to this 'bare life', this unabashed honesty, this
slush of confession and fascination with 'sin'. Inside out. "The honesty of
non-knowledge, the reduction of knowledge to what it is" (201). It is
defensive pride, it is defences constructed with too accurate characters i.e.
it is annihilation of the multitude within, and hence severence from the
multitude at large. It gags us all with its legalised tag. For Bataille, as with
Rimbaud, there is this constant tension between isolation and belonging.
This is the rhythm of Exodus. It depends upon a death-in-life, it is
vouchafed for by a familiarity with the little deaths that can be experienced
in life: anguish and ectasy, insight and idiocy. These little deaths destroy
our self. We help the process along. We burgeon into...free speech that
builds bonds, contracts of trust on flaming paper. First something needs
anihilating. What? The ego linked to pride, the super-ego linked to law, the
ego-ideal linked to knowledge. We anihilate possession in order to be
'sovereign' in Bataille's sense i.e. to rebel against suboordination, to thus
discover the motor of desires rather than the satisfaction of vanity: "I know
that without this annihilation already within my thought, my thought would
be servile babble" (204). Remember Rimbaud biting the rifle butts? Here
Bataille, no stranger to the long dark lucid Night, to defeating the idea of
death by making it into a release from thought, a confrontation with non-
knowledge that he will never know or turn into project, here Bataille, like
Rimbaud, assures himself that, desiring, he can never dominate anything:
"Sovereignty is an act of rebellion against every rule, including the logical
rule. A negation of every limit, of every condition, this is the taste for an
experience that can no onger be limited by any of the given conditions..."
(161). This 'taste for experience' is simultaneously cast as a pursuit of the
'instant' that assures 'non-knowledge' be nothing less than "a bond before
knowledge" (158). That which is inarticulateable, that escapes language,
and hence the conceit of pride, of knowledge as possession, is what also
escapes a practice of thought severed from affectibility. This is a new
dynamic for consciousness trailblazed by poets such as Rimbaud: anguish
and ecstacy are registered in the consciousness but are, from there,
means of access to the unconscious – there is no dividing line when
experience subtends knowledge and there is no protection from
autotraumatisation other than instinctive bonds that can refigure our means
of socialisation. Vanity, instilled in us by knowledge, comes to be
outmanouvered by desires distilled in us by non-knowledge, the unknown
that's ahead of us because it's always behind us: "How could I be
depressed in refusing to take the world and what I myself am for an
unavoidable measure and a law? I accept nothing and am satisfied by
nothing. I am going into the unknowable future. There is nothing that I
could have recognised in myself. My gaity is founded on my ignorance. I
am what I am: being is at stake in me, as it wasn't, it is never what it was"
(205). Rimbaud.

HS: 7/4/02

Bibliotek
Georges Bataille: The Unfinished System Of Non-Knowledge, University of
Minesota, 2001
Walter Benjamin: Illuminations, Fontana Press, 1992
Karl Marx: Early Writings, Penguin 1981

Back

Rimbaud: Intermediary Militant

– Through Rimbaud's Season In Hell

"If the poet can no longer speak for society,

but only for himself, then we are at the last ditch"
– Henry Miller

"It is possible that the impossibility of poetry is itself the condition of poetry"
– Georges Bataille

The question of how to subvert power, to live a life, was a problem that
Arthur Rimbaud didn't so much formulate as enact. Reading his poetry
again, a poetry of improvisational emotion, it's possible to be struck by a
forceful contemporaneity that has such works as 'Season In Hell' read,
now, like a political manifesto. But it is a politics of a different kind, a
politics that has given up any redemptive vectors. Instead Rimbaud seeks
to create an exodus, a chimerical materiality of the possible, that can lead
us to a politics of becoming. As he drifts towards the end of the word
Rimbaud takes us on a detour through composite cities and countryside
trysts, passed colonial beachheads and debauched bars, and delivers us
into the company of quotidian messiahs; revolutionaries of everyday life
whose unaimed benevolences reek of crimes against self-interest.
Accompanying Rimbaud in his flight from a permanent state of emergency
based upon this 'right of self-interest', we can get an inkling of what we can
leave to politics: national origin, institutional representation, inherited
morality, wage-labour, Christ, Satan, wise-guys. But Rimbaud's exodus,
his self-abandonment, is not a bid for a transcendence that would
posthumously mark him out, but a deep, nomadic immersion in the social
unconscious. Thus, with Rimbaud, there is the inkling of a preemptive
strike on a pleasure-principle that would, like the politics of security based
on a disavowed abundance, make pleasure and pain equate to an
equilibrium that is made indicative of a death drive – a return to an
inanimate state; the fear of experience that fuels a legislated neutralisation
of life. Instead Rimbaud surmounts sociable equidistance and Caucasian
equations through an inveigling of death; he took the piss out of its
politicised threat, facing up to death-in-life with a surfeit of energy that
turned trauma into the will to experience, into autotraumatisation: "I
summoned my executioners so that I could bite their rife butts before I
died".

Rimbaud's politics of becoming was premised on a use of trauma that gets

beyond pleasure and pain. This is the experience of living life that
Rimbaud unprotectedly sought out and, as we read, it is not so much that
these experiences were chased-after as the raw material of a 'poetry' that
could make him belong, as they were experiences that ensured a lack of fit
between himself and the literary norms of the time – "I thought laughable
the great figures of modern painting and poetry". This scorn for his
precedents, akin to his scorn for the sovereignty of the law, was not so
much a transgressive pose as a means for a heightened affectivity: the
very raw material, not exclusively of poetry but, of a politics of becoming,
an abandonment of the 'self' from all the apparati of identity as they are
assured by family... state... poetry. So, at the very outset of a Season In
Hell, one of his last works, Rimbaud abandons the coordinates of
belonging even to his own autobiography. He has no antecedents, he is a
non-pseudo nigger, a pagan. He has made himself an orphan, a
potentiated multiple, that, being no longer an individual but a precipitate of
emotional layers, can only identify with those that are 'a law unto
themselves'. Seeking thus to see through the eyes of a criminal and
becoming "the great criminal, the great accursed", Rimbaud intuits that the
law is a personalisable lexicon and that the most feared crime is to
communicate your own self-contesting law, to be amply prepared for the
trauma of self-abandonment. That both poets and politicians can be cast
as 'legislators' leads Rimbaud to be a stranger in his 'own' language: "But
always alone; without family: I even have to ask what language I speak."
Rather than seeking release in the form of a pleasure or pain, rather than
seeking synthesis in the form of a single persona or a character that
speaks the 'truth' in a possessable language, Rimbaud's deliberating
incognito, his immanence, becomes a source of experiential tension, an
enlivening contradiction. Permanently unfulfilled, at odds even with a
language that can liberate him, Rimbaud embraces a mode of living that
can lead to freedoms beyond those enshrined in the Declaration of the
Rights of Man: affectibility. As Deleuze has written, "affectibility... is a
capacity of affection without personality... that becomes all its modifications
and yet... constitutes a manner of existence that is positive" [1]. Rimbaud
slides between the multiple personas that voice him and pulls every
conceivable face. His mug-shot is a composite. His poetry is 'free indirect
discourse'.

Rimbaud's 'affectibility' is what has him outside the law. Even before the
pleasure principle came along to announce its death sentence, its fear of
the positive energy of desire that took on the pronunciation of lack,
Rimbaud's hatred of the law makes us reflect that the fear of life has
become entangled and codified in legislation. This fear translates into the
concept of 'security' which, as Marx wrote, guarantees to each of the
members of a society "the conservation of his person, his rights and
property" [2]. But this conservation, which makes people into the objects of
a legislative mediation, presupposes the lives it legislates for to be
bounded entities, it presupposes that what is feared in life is an
'affectibility', a giving-ourselves-over, which can not only pierce our
'binding', but lead to the self-abandonment of becoming. Such autonomous
expenditure has no need of a legislation that protects only those who seek
to conserve. Not having anything to conserve – personality, property, a
name, a country – Rimbaud, for better and for worse, lives at the
uncodified behest of the senses. He 'becomes all modifications'. This taste
for life as becoming, as 'self-mediated being', is what, on the one hand,
makes Rimbaud's 'poetry' a free indirect discourse, a compound of cited
voices that shift, and, on the other, stakes-out the import of his writing as a
political manifesto that affirms life as that which it is possible to live without
guilt: a living exchange of linguistic ardours. Rimbaud, who seems to intuit
that the law is based on protecting the private property of private persons,
and who, wanting more than the conservation of the self, being desirous of
more than a choice between the war of pleasure and the law of pain, is not
one who seeks to pay back the inherited debt. Scorning the securities
market of the state, Rimbaud leaves it to the leftists to conserve the law by
changing it: "I armed myself against justice". But he has another form of life
in mind, an inconvertible demand for a politics of becoming: "several other
lives, it seemed to me, were owed to every being".
Rimbaud seemed to know that to abandon oneself to 'affectivity', to
become a 'being' between, was to drop beneath the scan of a
characterlogical radar. To fall from a law's eye view, to become a non-
person, a self abandoned shadow of a self ("I am hidden and not hidden")
is to embrace the trauma of being declared 'a nothing': "Quick a crime, so
that I may plunge into nothingness, according to human law". But this
'nothingness' is more than full. It is declared as nothing by 'human law'
because, as an act of becoming, it does not seek to preserve itself, it does
not seek a stable representation that could be merited, weighed,
accounted for. As Bataille has said of nothingness: it can sometimes be
"the being envisioned in the totality of the world" [3]. Being in the world
thus, unmediated and unindividuated, being "absorbed by everybody... a
multiplier of progress" [4], is to run the risk of 'anguish', which is to say,
Rimbaud runs the risk of no longer offering himself up for the protection of
being represented by political pleasures, but of, instead, attempting to
make himself heard as an unrepresentable collective. Responsible for
humanity, Rimbaud sheds guilt : "I belong to a race which sang on the
scaffold; I understand nothing of laws; I have no moral sense". His poetry,
amoral to the degree that it rejects utility, criminal to the extent that it urges
the formation of a new language, is a poetry that, facing up to the
inexpressible, defies itself as being authored by himself as an individual:
"Universal intelligence has always thrown out its ideas, naturally; men
picked up part of these fruits... author, creator, poet, this man has never
existed" [5]. Thus can Rimbaud rail against the 'egotists' and 'one eyed
intellects' who call themselves 'authors', for the affectibility that Rimbaud
pursued led him not only to urge a war on law, but to challenge the very
limits of experiences as these are represented by a possessable
knowledge voided of sensuality and a use of language that insulates us
against the risks of a stumbling expressivity: "What a life. True life is
somewhere else. We are not in the real world."

Affectibility as a modality of thought is, possibly, a way to bypass what

Rimbaud calls the "false significance of the ego". It is the ego, cathecting
itself, that the legislators seek to secure through means of constitutional
documents. It is this same ego that valorises personality, that, reigning-in
our becomings, conserves our failure to communicate because, being in
possession of a point-of-view, we seeks to 'express our self' rather than to
'be expressive', to be a locus for 'expressivity'. This impasse has been
revolutionised by Rimbaud as an experience of struggling with a language
that, not being always malleable enough to resist inherited knowledge, can
result in the end of the primacy of the word as it is alloyed to the primacy of
knowledge: "I understand, and, incapable of expressing myself without
pagan words, I would rather say nothing." Here Rimbaud, who always
valued music, indicates, perhaps, how affectibility as a form of thought
enables 'understanding' without it necessarily having to be be written or
spoken. Sensualised, Rimbaud 'understands' without having recourse to
the right words. 'Saying nothing' for Rimbaud is not the end of thought, but
the end of being said and the beginnings of a communication by means of
'pagan words', words that may not even be formed from letters, but from
sounds ("I became a fabulous opera") or from coloured letters ("I invented
the colour of vowels"). In this way affectibility, in conflict with a use of
language that limits thought to an accumulation of concepts, changes not
so much what we think, but the way we perceive that we think: "It is wrong
to say: I think. One ought to say: I am thought" [6]. Rimbaud rejects the
inherited knowledge of philosophy that, in linking thought to an individual
and making knowledge a matter of private property, conserves our failure
to communicate. Instead communication is enhanced through a mistrust of
a knowledge that has declared war on the praxis of the senses by means
of the law of the Logos: "Since the declaration of modern knowledge,
Christianity, man has been deceiving himself, proving the obvious, puffed
up with the pride of repeating these proofs, the only life he knows!... Mr
Wise Guy was born with Christ!". In this light the 'universal intelligence'
which Rimbaud mentions is not so much an indication of an ethereal God
but, after Marx, a matter of the 'general social wealth' of culture. Thus 'to
be thought', as Rimbaud says, is not just to be a mouthpiece, but to
actively place the onus of thought onto affectibility; a mode of sensual
apprehension that can lead to a reformulation of knowledge as that which
arises from being open to the 'universal intelligence' of the world: a shared
ability to experience life, to be a locus for poetic expressivity ("Your own
ardour must be the task").

Rimbaud's conflict with language, leading him to utter the phrase "no more
words!", is a way that he takes his conflict with the law into a new
dimension. Rather than having a personality to 'conserve' and offer-up to
representation, Rimbaud, voicing in his 'poems' the characteristics of a
multiple personality ('free indirect discourse'), seems to embark upon
guerrilla actions against those substructures of language that ensure that
we remain opaque and separable from one another: the decentred voice of
his poems is simultaneously masculine and feminine, singular and plural,
active and passive, past and present, sardonic and sincere. Language as a
material, its suppleness, is that which is lost when, its substructures intact,
it is promulgated as a means to shore up an ego that expresses its self,
that reiterates the possible. Bataille: "Language is lacking because
language is made of propositions that make identities intervene" [7]. These
ego driven identities that speak in order to be returned-to their own
subjection are what Rimbaud seeks to be exiled from, they are what
provoke him to flee from the men of letters ("I don't know how to talk!") and
which lead him to say of Baudelaire that "he lived in too artistic circles". For
him, before the end at any rate, language should be supple enough to
sound-out a compound emotion that renders us dumb, it should be the
means to bring to expression what it is impossible to say. As Giorgio
Agamben has pointed out "it is the very sayability, the very openness at
issue in language, which in language we always presuppose and forget...
because it is at bottom an abandonment and oblivion" [8]. Yet, just as
language is not an abstract entity (it does not doesn't possess 'openness'
in and of itself), the utterance is dependent upon its situated addressees
and Rimbaud, in declaring his open defiance of State-sanctioned laws that
enshrine alienation and lead to death and servitude, surmounts oblivion
and abandons himself to his capacity to say anything. Having a variety of
places to talk from and a variety of personas to talk through, securing thus
his 'affectibility', a guiltless Rimbaud can use language not as a mode of
dissemblance, but as a means to communicate his 'inner experience'.

But Rimbaud wanted more from language, more from himself than was
possible by means of language: "the point is to arrive at the unknown by
the dissoluteness of the senses" [9]. To 'arrive at the unknown' is not only
to reject the common knowledge of the day but it is, by means of the
'dissoluteness of the senses', a way to re-experience a prelingual phase.
The fluctuation of the emotions, our wordless affectibility, is what
overpowers language, makes us stammer, and renders us dumb even
though we have won the power of speech. To experience the prelingual is
to be rendered disarticulate and decentred and, yet, it is not so much that
Rimbaud resents a 'fall into language' as an estrangement from the 'pure
life of feeling' as it is a means to bring forth affective knowledge by means
of gaining access to inner experience. In many ways this inner experience
is what is deemed superfluous. It is not required in the world of work ("I
abhor every trade"). As a timeless compound of affect this very
'unsayability', its traumatic pressure, is what ensures the drive to
communicate. In many ways, then, the 'unknown' which Rimbaud wants to
arrive at could be said to be inner experience, the sensorium of affects,
that, unable to be fully articulated in language, are what come to form the
raw material for becomings: approximations of feelings that can be
enacted through language, a 'capacity for affection without personality'. So,
when Rimbaud speaks of an "alchemy of the word" and of "turning words
into hallucinations", it is as if he intends to work the fracture of language,
its lack of fit with inscrutable affect, and, from there, situating himself in the
fluctuational space of inner experience, to, by means of 'poems' as
prearticulations, translate affects into insinuations of shared meanings.
Such a semiotic of the impulses, whereby language is made malleable by
its being compacted with a re-experienced memory of the prelingual and
by its simultaneous intent to make affect communicable by means of
language and against language, is perhaps what was hinted-at by
Rimbaud in one of his most famous passages, a sequence that heralds the
avant-garde of the next century: "I invented the colour of vowels... I
organised the shape of every consonant, and by means of instinctive
rhythm, flattered myself that I was the inventor of a poetic language,
accessible sooner or later to all the senses."

When, in his famous letter to Paul Demeny, Rimbaud offered that he

wanted to "make himself" a seer rather than a poet, it is not so much an
aspiration to religious fervour that Rimbaud is urging onto himself, but a
politics of becoming, a living self-production and hence an abandonment of
conserved being. To be a seer requires an access to 'inner experience'
rather than to the divine logos, for the knowledge of the unknown which
Rimbaud seeks cannot be a knowledge that is preformed and readily
articulatable in language, but a new form of knowledge, a 'non-knowledge',
that, in surpassing any usefulness, comes to register an affectibility, a
passion, that is crucial for wider bonds of communicativeness to be
established than are possible between poet and reader, politician and
citizen. As Marx has said at the onset of the communist movement: "What
is needed above all is a confession... to obtain forgiveness for its sins
mankind need only to declare them for what they are" [10]. This is the
sense in which Rimbaud is a seer. He has dropped his defences to such a
degree that his inner experience does not make him feel guilty. Quite the
opposite: he has no secrets because, expressing his inner experience,
pursuing unsayable affect, he reveals that the interminable mystique of
inner experience (the domain of poets and priests) is what ensures a
mysticism that trades in pleasure and pain, deferment and punishment.
Beyond the pleasure principle, the abandonment of equilibrium, Rimbaud
reveals that inner experience is what is eminently shareable – there is an
'otherness' of inner experience ("I is another") that is reduced to a self-
flagellating privacy. It is social separation, instituted in the affectless
language of politics and by a common knowledge reduced to
proprietorship, that hinders this inner experience being communicated
between people and its being seen as 'sinful'. For the 'sins' that require
forgiveness are nothing other than private thoughts that have not remained
private and unenacted, but have been uttered and acted-out between
people. The sharing of 'sins', the 'declaring them for what they are', thus
loosens the hold of the law and reduces the power of guilt, and enables
social bonds to form that are not mediated by judgmental knowledges
(commandments, constitutions) that lead to voluntary servitude, but, in
Rimbaud's case, are the relational material of a law beyond law, the
formation of contracts of trust: "Poor men, workers! I do not ask for
prayers; with your trust alone I shall be happy".

With these contracts of trust we are faced with the paradox of giving a
legal form to an openness that enables inner experience to be shared
between people, an openness that, in its affective interminability, cannot
be subject to decrees or judgments. In other words, what does it mean
when, beyond the law, we seek recourse to some means to be at ease
with an articulation of our inner experience? At one level an answer lies in
the form of poetry itself; the way that by becoming aligned with a
recognisable tradition of writing we seek a means with which to expose
ourselves; our feelings and fears. But Rimbaud, in his trajectory towards
abandoning poetry, is always moving beyond this. His rejection of the law
and the state, of nationality and poetic antecedents, has him not only quest
for a new language of affectivity ("this language will be from the soul to the
soul, summing up everything, perfumes, sounds, colours..." [11]), but has
him begin to run this idea of a new language alongside a poetical practice
that is indistinguishable from the living of his life. For Rimbaud it seems
that writing poetry is a means of writing the autonomous law of his life that
he hands down to us not on stone tablets, but on scraps of doodle-filled
paper. He becomes a stateless legislator and his poems become contracts
of trust that can encourage the propertyless to speak to one another. This
possible contract between the affective – the ones who own little except
their ability to empathise and feel-for – is, in Rimbaud, moved on from its
submergence in literary craft towards the realm of a recast 'free speech'
that has no need of parliaments and courtrooms for its legitmation. With
affectibility as a modality of thought, the unknown in us, our inner
experience, is what can change our lives. Shared between us without
being reified into knowledge it is the communicative risk that presupposes
a politics of becoming that is instinctively opposed to the way we are
inveigled to live our lives. As Foucault, in his late seminars on 'free speech'
has said: "The problem of freedom of speech becomes increasingly related
to the choice of existence, of the choice of one's way of life. Freedom in
the use of logos increasingly becomes freedom in the choice of bios" [12].

This choice of the way to live a life, vouchsafed in Rimbaud by his being
free enough with language to want to turn 'words into hallucinations', is a
traumatic encounter with possibilities that are withheld in favour of the
profitable maintenance of an equilibrium. Not only does Rimbaud present
these choices with the metaphor of his own displacement and nomadism,
his coming up against the dialectic of language, testing the logos against
the bios leads him to abandon the writing of poetry altogether. For Henry
Miller, Rimbaud's renunciation of his 'calling' is related to his standing "so
clearly revealed to himself that he no longer had need for expression at the
level of art" [13]. This may be the case, but it is also worth suggesting that
Rimbaud's abandonment of poetry is concerned with his inner experience
having less and less need of artistic mediation, a mediation that would
neutralise this inner experience as a canonical expression. What was
needed was not so much the invention of a new language that would
isolate Rimbaud the orphan even further, aligning him with the roll-call of
poets he scorns, but the invention of a free speech, a distribution of inner
experience, that could bring people together as becomings. To this end
when, in his letter to Paul Demeny, he urged upon himself the role of seer,
he outlined a future in which 'poetry would be ahead of action' and
envisioned also that poets would be citizens. In choosing not to say that
'citizens would be poets' and in thus not elevating poets to a position
above others, Rimbaud's rejection of poetry can be related to the absence
of addressees. This is put to dramatic effect when, in A Season In Hell, he
says "... in front of several men, I chatted very audibly with a moment from
their other lives." In many ways this hallucinatory line is indicative of
Rimbaud having to create addressees, addressees that, it can be
suspected, do not fear that very inner experience that is creative of 'other
lives', becomings. Could it then be that Rimbaud's rejection of poetry was
indicative of missing addressees that could comprise a 'missing people', a
people becoming? Deleuze, writing on cinema – the art that combines
colour, movement, sound and words – offered that "this acknowledgement
of a people who are missing is not a renunciation of political cinema, but
on the contrary a new basis on which it is founded... art must take part in
this task: not that of addressing a people, which is presupposed already
there, but of contributing to the invention of a people." [14]

When Rimbaud refused the trappings of sovereignty – nationality,

compatriotism – and refused to see himself as a part of a People legislated
for in law, it was not simply a matter of his becoming an individualist rebel
devoted to the cause of art. This thesis of Henry Miller's can be countered
by the way that Rimbaud, in being a poet of 'free indirect discourse' and in
his consequent adoption of the tension of contradictory standpoints in his
verse, is not seeking a representational status for himself. As an
'undecidable' becoming cultivating lawless contradiction, Rimbaud subsists
beneath the level of visible identities that can be constitutionally accounted
for: "my life lacks solidity, it flits and floats away up above action, that focus
the world holds so dear". Such a solidity may be indicative of the refusal to
listen-to and attempt-an articulation of 'inner experience' in such a way as
to bring affectibility to the fore as precisely that which gives rise to the
potential of living life differently: emotional states not only have their own
duration and means of relational bonding they are what enable us to relate
differently to what we know, 'subtilise' our language and resist being
defined as an abstracted People in whose name we are ruled. Scornful of
the colonial adventure through which national identities were intensively
being constructed, Rimbaud's 'minority of one' was opposed to the abstract
generalities of such a People and posited instead a multiplicity of identities
that, in uncoupling affects from their poetic personification, make affects
into timeless components of identity that are always reaching after
articulation. In this way any solidity that can be achieved is not a solidity
that can be legislated for, that can be secured by a private property of
rights or a proper space for speech, but, beyond such laws, is a matter of
contexts of free speech that encourage the 'missing people' to become
responsive addressees, co-authors of their becomings. Rimbaud's
rejection of poetry – backed by a surplus of shareable affect, by the
abreaction of inner experience and by a respectful connectivity to
'universal intelligence' (general intellect) – is tantamount to bringing the
creativity of the addressee to the fore. This creativity, a politics of
becoming, is constitutive of passionate associations that mark an improper
place of the polis. After Rimbaud, poems, contracts of trust, become
collectively authored social relations. The impossibility of poetry becomes
a renewed possibility for free speech.

Howard Slater @ Break/Flow

March 2002

Notes
Unless otherwise noted all citations are drawn from 'Season in Hell'. See
Arthur Rimbaud: Collected Poems, Oxford 2001, p211– p255. Translated
by Martin Sorrell.

1. Gilles Deleuze cited by Giorgio Agamben in Potentialities, Stanford

University Press 2000, p230.
2. Karl Marx: On The Jewish Question in Early Writings, Penguin 1981,
p230.
3. Georges Bataille: The Unfinished Theory Of Non-Knowledge, Minnesota
2001, p31.
4. Arthur Rimbaud: Letter To Paul Demeny(15/5/1871). See
www.mag4.net
5. ibid.
6. ibid.
7. Georges Bataille, ibid, p64.
8. Giorgio Agamben, ibid, p35.
9. Arthur Rimbaud: Letter to Georges Izambard (13/5/1871). See
www.mag4.net.
10. Karl Marx: Letter To Ruge (September 1843) in Early Writings, ibid,
p209.
11. Arthur Rimbaud: Letter to Paul Demeny, ibid.
12. Michel Foucault: Fearless Speech, Semiotext(e) 2001, p85.
13. Henry Miller: The Time Of The Assassins, New Directions 1952 p43.
14. Gilles Deleuze: Cinema Two, Athlone 1989, p217.

Afterword: This Game Of The Discursive Real

Much has been left open, unsaid. Bataille's presence, his unfinishd system
of non-knowledge, haunts the text. As the text – my half project – draws to
a close, Rimbaud lives on in his intermediary position: the herald of a
militancy that's been, is to come and is here now. The emotive instant. The
emotive motion of time travel wherein, across history, links accrue without
forming an object. The whole thing could spiral out of control. I cease with
Rimbaud: such a false word 'cease' when Rimbaud is now inside me,
incomplete, possessing me; when Rimbaud, my brother by means of 'non-
human sex', has become another means to practice 'free indirect
discourse' :– I have always only dared to speak of myself while ostensibly
speaking about someone else; there is always this experience of thought
passing through the persona that I can be in the text, and the personae of
the others text, an experience of thought by means of an assemblage, an
experience of thought as a pretence, an access to a 'field' never populated
by individual persons, but by the liberating conductance of energies across
time, the 'general intellect'. So to Bataille. 1953. I continue with Bataille
after adding him to the assemblage: it's a matter of me, Rimbaud and
Bataille now. No 'I' at the end of the sentence. The same person. We're
one and the same. This is the power of imagination. To undeludedly say
such a thing, to be given so much confidence, is to accept, not pseudo
prominence, an equality of sameness, but is to accept the 'general
intellect', the possibility of making connections, which is, after all, the
baseline of a knowledge that is feted out of all proportion to this simple
operation: that I am conscious, conscious of the breach of my
unconscious, conscious of the unconscious of social relations and thus
open to history as a means of permanent potentiality, thus open,
disgustingly open, to the sharp signs of affectivity: spinning in a word-sea
of stimuli, of poetry as free speech. Knowledge, if we are to greet it openly,
is only experience. If we must state the obvious then it is not to re-utter
something that's been said before (and hence nondescript to say it again),
but both a sad, crushing, indictement of the way experience is today a
matter for legislation and, with Marx's Letter To Ruge, an
acknowledgement that "mankind will not begin any new work, but will
consciously bring about the completion of its old work". We 'complete' this
work by experiencing thought as an emotional praxis, inhabiting the
affective minutiae of history (the hole in Rimbaud's shoe). So, if affectivity
is outlawed by knowledge (thus the link between law and knowledge is
made present), non-knowledge frees our capacity for affectivity with the
bonus risk of ... here comes Bataille, anguish and ectasy. Which is another
way to pronounce 'Rimbaud', which is another way to say that poetry is
"reflective experience" (p138) that should be recast as free speech. But
Bataille 'knows' something else (maybe he learnt it from Rimbaud who
learnt it from a drunken rioter). Bataille hopes to know how to not know,
how to get out of the framework of the law too: "...And if the violation of the
law, being the origin of all that we love, after the law, more than the law,
destroyed the foundation of thought no less then it put an end to the power
of the law?" (p204). For Bataille, as with Rimbaud, it is a frightfull delight to
be leaving knowledge and the law behind. To have understood, intuited,
that it is a matter of books, access to books, access to the language-key,
to a sanctioned means of expression, that links knowledge and the law –
the latter being that most difficult of subjects to ever know: a non
knowledge masquerding as absolute knowledge. So. Exodus. Rimbaud in
the Eden of Arden. No more project. Rimbaudian Bataille: "Today I could
say that the slightest thought granted to my projects, which exist despite
me, surpasses me and overwhelms me. But the Instant! It is always infinite
delirium" (p202). Surpassed by your own project is: the 'general intellect',
'alienation'. At worst it's work, forced labour, the labour of pride. At best it's
history again, a laying down of unsuccessive strata, the ineffable of the
unexpected, the affectivity of the minutiae, the suprise that re-triggers
access to risk, to 'reflective exprience', to non-knowledge (Benjamin –
coming across Bataille at the College of Sociology and calling a book
'Illuminations' after Rimbaud, as well as making One Way Street follow the
poetic prose of A Season In Hell – knows this as a "shot through with chips
of messianic time"). Rimbaud and Bataille. I, their intermediary, who pulls
their conjunction point forward towards its third point – a starburst in a
future that's ahead of me and behind them. Endless points of contact,
shared and sharded: "The unappeased multitude that I am (will nothing
permit my withdrawal?...) ... is generous, violent, blind. It is a laugh, a sob,
a silence that has nothing, which hopes for and retains nothing" (p200). To
chalk a poetry of the most simple utterance on the pavement and to hope
for a shower. A blissful release from expression into being an expressive
loucus for becomings that populate the worn out shell known as an
individual. This will be your permit to withdraw, this risk of depossessing
your own, our own, autobiographies. Exodus = untested feasibilty. The
interminable instant of anguish and ectascy: living life as an experience.
"Fuck the writers", says I, speaking in tongues, "they are the ones who
enshroud us in silence without ever having shared in our struggle to attain
silence as the limit-point of language, as the maximum mentasm of the
'general intellect'". The point of silence is not just to be an everything – the
nothing that is uttered fills the interclocuter with a violent conjecture – but it
is to rely on someone else, somewhere else, to say for us what we would
want to say, hope to say, without being mindful of changing the words or
their intonation (the latter swathes us with music, the former is the loving
gift of solidarity). The point of silence is to acknowledge a kind of trust that
results from struggle, it is to suspend ourselves as the centre of even our
own body, it is to practice the dialectic of the logos and the bios, to be part
and not apart from the conversation: "My writing is always a mixture of the
aspiration to silence and that which speaks me" (202). Bataille speaks for
me and I'll have him speak for Rimbaud too. There is always anguish in
having a voice that the rhythm of silence and free speech can appease. It
encourages laughter, self mockery, which itself says "All I know is that I
know not". The freedom of belonging to error is not terror: "In this equality
with limitless error, wherein I myself am led astray, have I ever felt more
plainly human?" (197). Only the excessive, obscene pride of the most
writerly, those written into life, those who haunt the fringe of the glossed-
over page, can bring us to this 'bare life', this unabashed honesty, this
slush of confession and fascination with 'sin'. Inside out. "The honesty of
non-knowledge, the reduction of knowledge to what it is" (201). It is
defensive pride, it is defences constructed with too accurate characters i.e.
it is annihilation of the multitude within, and hence severence from the
multitude at large. It gags us all with its legalised tag. For Bataille, as with
Rimbaud, there is this constant tension between isolation and belonging.
This is the rhythm of Exodus. It depends upon a death-in-life, it is
vouchafed for by a familiarity with the little deaths that can be experienced
in life: anguish and ectasy, insight and idiocy. These little deaths destroy
our self. We help the process along. We burgeon into...free speech that
builds bonds, contracts of trust on flaming paper. First something needs
anihilating. What? The ego linked to pride, the super-ego linked to law, the
ego-ideal linked to knowledge. We anihilate possession in order to be
'sovereign' in Bataille's sense i.e. to rebel against suboordination, to thus
discover the motor of desires rather than the satisfaction of vanity: "I know
that without this annihilation already within my thought, my thought would
be servile babble" (204). Remember Rimbaud biting the rifle butts? Here
Bataille, no stranger to the long dark lucid Night, to defeating the idea of
death by making it into a release from thought, a confrontation with non-
knowledge that he will never know or turn into project, here Bataille, like
Rimbaud, assures himself that, desiring, he can never dominate anything:
"Sovereignty is an act of rebellion against every rule, including the logical
rule. A negation of every limit, of every condition, this is the taste for an
experience that can no onger be limited by any of the given conditions..."
(161). This 'taste for experience' is simultaneously cast as a pursuit of the
'instant' that assures 'non-knowledge' be nothing less than "a bond before
knowledge" (158). That which is inarticulateable, that escapes language,
and hence the conceit of pride, of knowledge as possession, is what also
escapes a practice of thought severed from affectibility. This is a new
dynamic for consciousness trailblazed by poets such as Rimbaud: anguish
and ecstacy are registered in the consciousness but are, from there,
means of access to the unconscious – there is no dividing line when
experience subtends knowledge and there is no protection from
autotraumatisation other than instinctive bonds that can refigure our means
of socialisation. Vanity, instilled in us by knowledge, comes to be
outmanouvered by desires distilled in us by non-knowledge, the unknown
that's ahead of us because it's always behind us: "How could I be
depressed in refusing to take the world and what I myself am for an
unavoidable measure and a law? I accept nothing and am satisfied by
nothing. I am going into the unknowable future. There is nothing that I
could have recognised in myself. My gaity is founded on my ignorance. I
am what I am: being is at stake in me, as it wasn't, it is never what it was"
(205). Rimbaud.

HS: 7/4/02

Bibliotek
Georges Bataille: The Unfinished System Of Non-Knowledge, University of
Minesota, 2001
Walter Benjamin: Illuminations, Fontana Press, 1992
Karl Marx: Early Writings, Penguin 1981

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