FlaK/jacket

Commune Editions

selections from three months posting at jacket2

Co m m un e E d i t i o n s
p u rv e yo r o f p o e try & other a n tagon ism s

Oakland
2014

communeeditions.com
 poetry and class society

Self-Abolition of the Poet

selections from abolition and realization

Part One
At the excellent Poetry and/or Revolution conference a few months back,
one salient but perhaps muddy point of discussion concerned the rela-
tionship between poetry and capitalism (or class society more broadly). A
couple of us here at Commune Editions wrote on this point in our state-
ments for the conference, with Joshua Clover averring that a successful
revolution would spell the end of the poet as a distinct social role, while
Tim Kreiner and Jasper Bernes seemed to take an even more maximalist
position, suggesting that the revolutionary formation of a free and equal
society would mean not only the end of poets but also poems, allowing for
some new and for us inconceivable form of aesthetic expression that might
still deserve the name poetry.

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s e l f-a b o l i t i o n o f t h e p o e t

In context, these are trivial speculations. Its not as if the fate of revo-
lutions will hang on the successful resolution of these theoretical nice-
ties. That people should continue to call themselves poets or write poems
however defined seems unlikely to bring much harm to anyone or
anything. Of course, these remarks were not intended as normative claims
telling people what they should or shouldnt do but claims about
historical processes and historical effects. The stakes of such speculation
are entirely in the present. How we conceive of the relationship between
poetry and revolution and, conversely, the relationship between poetry
and capitalism matters (as the argument goes) because such conceptions
are, implicitly, a thought about what poetry is.
What is poetry, then? One definition might be: a literate dissatisfaction
with poems and poets. The dissatisfaction is often some variant (or defor-
mation) of the following syllogism: poems are products (if not servants)
of this world; this world is mostly awful and must be destroyed; therefore
poems and poets must also be destroyed. But who, pleads the poet, is better
suited to vanquish the poet than another poet? And what possible weapon
could be better suited to the task than the poem itself, intimately familiar as
it is with the poets frailty, navet, and hubris? You see where this is going.
The coronation of kings, the praise of nations, the vindication of the
ways of god (or the gods) to man, the counting and administration of the
wealth of the rulers. These were the original tasks of the poem. The poet
emerges alongside the warrior class, the priestly class. The poem emerg-
es as one expenditure of the newfound surpluses of the grain-cultivating
civilizations of the Nile and the Tigris and Euphrates. Without peasants,
no poets. Poets really are the unacknowledged legislators of the world be-
cause, from the start, the poem was a tool for the administration of the
affairs of state: written business records and legal codes enabled by the
measurement and patterning of speech provided by the poetic technique.
Dickinsons attic, Rimbauds departure, Oppens silence. Though such
dissidence is not unique to the modern poet, the legendary refusals and
decompositions of the modern poets emerge largely as the consequence of
the dawning awareness of this legacy. Once poetry is defined as an explicit
antagonism to this legacy and to the official, sanctifying role that the
poem might play in bourgeois society the categories of poet and poem
and poetry are animated by curious contradictions, like so many of the cat-

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egories in capitalism. The vocation of the poet becomes self-destruction;

the vocation of the poem, self-abolition. The realization of poetry can only
be had through the destruction of its specific instances. In this way, poetry
enters into alliance with that class whose historical mission is the abolition
of all classes, itself included, and the production of communism therefrom.

Part Two
Some of our respondents have objected that the preceding post on the
self-abolition of the poet assumes, wrongly, an essential link between po-
etry and literacy. This is a good point, and one we had intended to ad-
dress eventually. Oral poetry has, its true, existed alongside and inside
literate poetry for thousands of years, and there is every indication that
poetry defined broadly as the patterning of speech is a primordial
set of mnemonic techniques that cultures have used to transmit and con-
serve important information since long before the advent of writing.But
the point of the earlier post was to demonstrate that the emergence of
poets and poems particular authors attached to particular written cre-
ations was a product of literate class societies, societies with a complex
division of labor, with something like a state and with a division between
commoners and elites. Were going to stand firm on this point, with the
added complication that, in many cases, the poetry that played the role of
glorifying, consecrating and mythologizing such class societies was also
oral (see, for instance, the Bardic tradition). In this regard, the presence or
absence of writing is not really determinative its merely an index. Whats
determinative is the social form. This is one of the reasons why poetry can
itself never be a program for the abolition of poets and poems (we intend
to say more about this point in a subsequent post).
If we can speak of a popular or folk poetry before the modern period a
poetry of the commoners rather than the elites it was not only unwrit-
ten but fundamentally authorless. The virtuosic balladeer, to give one ex-
ample, may have been celebrated for his or her unique capacity to ring a

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change upon time-tested stories and myths, but these latter are seen as the
product of a society, a community, and certainly not the individual singer.
In a repertory cultural practice of this sort, there is little possibility of the
sort of posthumous recognition that one gains with literate cultures no
fame, no posterity, as it were. Only the work and its subject lives on: Robin
Hood, for instance, as popular hero, emerges as individual character out
of the collective, iterative retelling of a community of balladeers. And it is
in this sense that we would suggest that the terms poet and poem as
they are used now do not capture very well what is happening in such folk
traditions. Whoever signed the name of Homer to the oral-formulaic cul-
tural material of a community of singers and bards effectively transformed
that material into the property of an individual, a poet. Poem is one of the
names we give to cultural material once it has become property.
There is no going back, not even if we wanted to (which we dont).
Thats the first rule of history. We would not want the above remarks to
suggest the possibility of romantic return to a pre-history that was certainly
oppressive and ugly enough as it was. But knowledge of these folk tradi-
tions does help to denaturalize our sense of what poetry is, and gives us,
as a result, a much better sense of the possibilities for patterned language
under entirely different social conditions. What would happen to poetry
in a society in which there was a fundamental equality of opportunity and
equality of access to the means of cultural expression? Poetry would no
longer be a restricted domain, accessible to the few, to those with the re-
sources, or the good fortune, to find their way to the Parnassian foothills.
The equalization of access of free time, essentially would have pro-
found and far-reaching effects, we think, on the social status of aesthetic
activity, which would instantly become the possession of the many, rather
than the few, even if there were no generalization of inclination or talent.
In a situation where there are as many writers as there are readers, col-
laborative, iterative and collective production of text seems as if it would
present the more logical choice. Lets imagine, too, a human community
in which what one took from or gave to the social store was entirely vol-
untary and regulated by nothing so much as ones sense of belonging to
a community. In this situation, one would likely no longer experience
the social field as a regulative and even violent force that stood over and
against ones individual freedom, but as the fundamental precondition of

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such freedom. Likewise, the individual would no longer appear as a varia-

tion played upon a general type man, woman, poet, carpenter, whatever.
Rather, each individual would present as absolute singularity, as specificity
belonging to no general category, a unique actualization of social pos-
sibilities; any conjunction of individuals would likewise be unique. There
would be no need to seek out distinction by way of difference as happens
in capitalist society, since distinction and singularity would be the given of
social life. The quest for recognition that animates so much poetry would
be meaningless. If we imagine poetry surviving in such a set-up but not
poets or poems its because poetry is likely to emerge as the creation
of these unique conjunctions of singular individuals, under conditions
where social interactions are animated by collaboration and cooperation
rather than competition. The mode of address of poetry would likely be
radically different as well, since the distinction between public and private
spheres, bound up as it is with the distinction between free and unfree
activity, will have disappeared. Poetry might become both more intimate
and more social all at once.
In a subsequent post, we will to return to what all this means for poetry
today. Until then, we will simply conclude by stressing that the foregoing
speculations have no reality except as the horizon projected by the con-
tradictions within the society we live in today. They are not soothsaying.
They are a possible (but by no means definite or even likely) future. Such
speculations are future relative rather than future perfect. They are aspects
of the present, speculations we can make on the basis of what we know
now, and in that way they are also negative descriptions of the present.
Thats part of their value the shadow they cast on the present. This holds
as much for todays capitalism as for todays poetry.

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Part Three
In the last two posts in this series, weve tried to illuminate a possible future
for poetry beyond poets and poems. Weve argued that this future is one
resolution of a long-standing contradiction internal to poetry, a contradic-
tion we can trace back to the emergence of literate poetry in the first class
societies. The horizon we have sketched out is not an idle utopia, even
if it is hardly certain; it is, as weve argued, perceptible as the decipher-
ment of a persistent tension within poetry, a strange ache. In the modern
period, this tension has given rise to a curious tradition of antipoetic or an-
tiaesthetic experiments through which poets have tried to abolish poems
and themselves along with them, to exorcise poetry once and for all of its
powers of mystification, to render it unintelligible, mute, to tear it apart
in hysterical enactments of the fragmentation of bourgeois society. Poetry
signals beyond itself to what it cannot resolve, though it does keep trying.
This much, we hope, has been clear.
However, the question that seems to linger for our readers pertains not
to tomorrow or yesterday but to today. What is to be done, then, if poetry
is what we say it is? We have few answers here. Indeed, we think that the
search for answers in poetry is, in many regards, not the answer. We are
certainly not endorsing the antipoetic tradition, such as it is. In fact, we
think it rather obvious in retrospect that these antipoetic experiments have
only served to sustain the poetry they hoped to negate. The relationship
between antipoetry and the institutional preservation of poetry is now so
well-established, the negative gesture so domesticated, that one can only
participate in such creative anachronisms cynically. There are apps for
that. The result, now, is that we have varieties of simple negation whose
only horizon seems to be to return poetry to its primordial vocation as a
technique of administration poetry as inventory, as legal code.
This is why we wrote, in our last post, that poetry cannot itself be a
program for the abolition of poets and poems, however much the drive
toward such abolition is ineluctably part of the make-up of poetry. Only a
revolutionary reconfiguration of human society could do this. Until such
time, nothing that anyone does is likely to either satisfy this itch or divert
our attention from it. To the extent that we have a relationship to this
contradiction, as publishers of poetry and other antagonisms, we want to render

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this horizon, this future, visible. Perhaps thats the most we can hope for
from poetry.
But what of the other thing, revolution? What is to be done about that?
Sadly, we have few answers here too. We have perspectives. We have a
sense that capitalisms prospects are very weak, and that these grim pros-
pects are at once the conditions of possibility both for the communism
we have described above and new and perhaps more brutal forms of class
society. We can tell you how the social movements and uprisings of re-
cent years have failed; we can describe their limits, and how the various
programs and ideas about revolution received from the 20th century are
unlikely to be of much help to us now. We can talk in the abstract about
how things might unfold, what they might look like, but we certainly have
no idea about how to bring anything about, and in many regards think
that this simply cant be done apart from those historical moments when
people truly can collectively ask each other what they might do. In those
moments, there are answers. 2011 was one of those moments. There will
be others. This is the point, then: while we certainly have commitments,
our thoughts about revolution do not come from should and ought. They
come from registering the intolerability of the present world, from the
foretaste of its demise, and from the sense that such developments press
closer on us now than they have previously. Struggles dramatic enough
they will not bear the name progress are coming, whether one finds such
a prospect appealing or not. Until then, there are some modest things we
can do: study, write, develop relationships, build infrastructure that might
be helpful in the future but that doesnt absorb too much energy.
Poetry is, lets say, one of these modest things. Elsewhere, we have writ-
ten that Commune Editions might play a role something like the riot dogs
of Athens, a companion to struggles and manifestations whose contribu-
tion is ultimately minor, providing inspiration, maybe distracting the en-
emy now and then but unable to do much to alter the balance of forces.
A dog, too, might start barking when the cops are about to kick down your
door. Perhaps thats it, for now, what were doing, what is to be done, with
poetry. Some barking. Some letting you know that the cops are at the door.
Theyve been there for a while.

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a great disorder is an order

The Art of Riot

selections from riots

Starting from Lull: Jill Richardss Distribution Series

Ronald Paulsons The Art of Riot in England and America is a small, thin
book. Its concerns are mainly with art, with nineteenth century pictorial
representations of riot. In it Paulson attempts a taxonomy of riot so as to
understand its festivities, its seditions.
I have read Paulsons book several times in the last few years. At mo-
ments frustrated with how it seems too ecumenical. At other moments
frustrated because when it gets to the literature his examples feel a little
tired (and so male): Norman Mailer, Nathanael West, George Romero,
etc. But still his taxonomy has felt useful for thinking about the various

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the art of riot

books and blog posts and poems and prose that have started appearing
in public in the last few months that are full of what David Buuck keeps
naming with at moments a snideness and at other moments a joking
generosity occu-po, or writing that is somewhat informed by and/or
about the various moments of political antagonism of the last few years.
And as I keep reading Paulson on the nineteenth century I keep wonder-
ing about how riot shows up in these twenty-first century works.
I will eventually get to works that attempt to represent the interrup-
tions, the antagonisms in various ways. But I want to begin with a piece
by Jill Richards called Distribution Series. I heard her read this piece at
Davis during the Revolution and/or Poetry conference. And while many at
this conference were reading works about the joyous hope that comes with
possible sedition, Richards read a work about what happens after these
moments: we agree that it is lonely now, that it is lonely at home and it
is lonely in the large groups of people at the beginning of the summer.
Richards piece is written in twelve parts. She has written it in a sort
of modified version of the form Nanni Balestrini used in The Unseen: nar-
rative prose paragraphs with limited punctuation that frequently, but not
always, start in one time and then without transition move to another. I
like this form because I see it as getting at some of the complications of
connection that are impossible to articulate except through proximity.
Here is section two:

At reading group there is an argument about what a lull is and whether it exists here or not.
There is an argument about who attends what meeting and who speaks for how long. The
people I know work shit jobs or have no jobs or keep working the jobs that promise to lead
to better jobs we agree that it is lonely now, that it is lonely at home and it is lonely in the
large groups of people at the beginning of the summer the Holdout was robbed and the
robbers separated the white people from the non-white people now there is a door that is
locked after dark

Most of Distribution Series is about what happens in the lull. The

way that everything gets a little brittle. That if before in the time of festivity
and sedition, everything and everyone felt possible to see, after everyone is
forced to play one singular representational role. At least three times this
sort of statement appears:

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Everyone knows that outside of this assembly or reading or conference where everyone
is represented equally is one thing and that outside of the poem or the conference or the
assembly is another that the people who shake sometimes still shake and the people who
are stared at are stared at the people who dont belong dont belong the people who are
beaten are beaten the people who cant pay rent cant pay rent the people who are bosses
are bosses and the people who are harassed at work are still harassed at work before and
after they are the ones that speak on the stage.

Recently Some Oakland Antagonists wrote a piece for CrimethInc.

for a series that was to study what we can learn from the waning phase
of social movements. It was about the rise and fall of the Oakland com-
mune, and after inventorying the rise, it turned to the toxic interpersonal
dynamics that come after the rise. These antagonists end their piece like
this But the questions still remain: what would it mean to actually take
care of each other and to collectively sustain and nurture an unstoppable
insurrectionary struggle? How can we dismantle and negate the oppressive
power relationships and toxic interpersonal dynamics we carry with us into
liberated spaces? How can we make room for the myriad of revolts within
the revolt that are necessary to upend all forms of domination? These
are, of course, not the easiest of questions. They are big and bold, full of
aspirational bravado.
I begin trying to understand an art of riot with the lull, even as I am
looking for a literature to understand what it means to collectively sustain
and nurture an unstoppable insurrectionary struggle, to dismantle and ne-
gate oppressive power relationships and toxic interpersonal dynamics. In
part I do this because I feel as if I am writing this in the lull and because
so much of the literature about the occupations, about the possible sedi-
tions of the last few years has been written from the lull. Poetry after all
has a long tradition of tranquil recollection, for better or worse. And I
suspect that this makes some of the work that has been written about these
moments full of heroism. And some of it full of defeat. What I like about
Richards piece is that it is about being inside and being involved and try-
ing to think from that position. It is neither heroic nor defeated. Richardss
piece juxtaposes the moments of friendship with the moments of brittle,
perhaps in an attempt to work through an answer. It ends with a story of
wheat pasting posters about Marilyn Buck and leaving one of the buckets

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of wheat paste on the sidewalk. Its a nice story of a moment before the lull,
about being together. If I was an optimist, I could write here about how it
remains there for some else to pick up. Wheat pasting will go on! But Im
not an optimist. Marilyn Buck spent a lot of time in jail and only got out
as she was dying.
Richards doesnt say it but Marilyn Buck was a poet too. I mention that
though not as a moment of hope, for poetry will not save us, but just for
the historical record.

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Lions, Mists, Riot Poems

Poetry, many cultures in many different times have decided, is a good
genre for ecological thinking, for cataloguing and storing things humans
need to know about the plants and the animals in order to survive. It is
often, as many nations realize, a fine genre in which to incite patriotism.
And similarly, many use it to articulate a love for a beloved.
And yet this morning, we were asking ourselves what if the riot is one
of these things with which poetry also has a special relationship? We are
asking this question naively, aware of its possible absurdity. Nervously
even. Weve said milder things, called milder things into existence and got
called terrorists for it before.
We are asking it after reading Philip Levines They Feed They Lion,a
poem he wrote about the five days of the Detroit riots of 1967. (And were
just going to use the word riot and not uprising or any other possible
euphemisms. Were fine with riot. It doesnt need to be a slur if we dont
let it be.) Levine called this poem a celebration of anger. It is a list poem
full of repetition and sonorous rhythms. It is a poem that keeps amazing.
And then after that, thinking some about the lion we are to rise like
after slumber in Shelleys Mask of Anarchy.
Levine attributes his lion line to the literal, to something someone
named Eugene said when Levine and Eugene were sorting universal
joints. But one cannot hear the line they feed they lion and the line
Bow Down come Rise Up and not hear Shelleys Rise like Lions after
slumber / In unvanquishable number, / Shake your chains to earth like
dew / Which in sleep had fallen on you / Ye are many they are few.
Although next thought: what Shelley? For that poem with its pun on
swords and words has never had an interpretative clarity. Some use it to
justify the rise up that sometimes gets called militancy. Some use it to justify
passive resistance. Weve thought often that the mist of that poem, the mist
that seems to call forth the maniac maid called Hope, is this interpretative
unclarity. (And we are often thinking of that Shelleyian mist more literally
every time we click through our daily riot porn, which is often full of gases
and mists of various sorts.)
And then we began reading, as if we had all day, in a sort of associa-
tional way. Turned to Claude McKays If We Must Die, written next to

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the red summer of 1919 when there were over twenty race riots where
white people attacked black people. In many cities, black people fought
back: If we must die, let it not be like hogs. This poem of such a rich
history; it was read and recited by the prisoners of Attica before they began
to riot in 1971.
Next spent some time with Gwendolyn Brooks Riot, about the 48
hours of riots in Chicago in 1968 after the death of Martin Luther King.
We promised ourselves that we would return to this book in the future.
This list just the beginning of our noticing. There is a lot of riot in
literature.
Our thoughts this morning are more associational than anything else.
Is it just us, or is there a dry period of riot poetry in the 80s and 90s? We
can remember them here and there. Myung Mi Kim, for instance, writes
on the 1992 LA riots in Dura. She gives two pages; she quotes the mother of
Edward Jae Song Lee who was killed during the riot; references the news-
paper. But this poem is more descriptive. It isnt the solidarity statement
that is Levine, Shelley, McKay, Brooks, etc.
Then we thought it is hard right now to imagine someone writing a
book defending a riot and calling it Riot. But why did we think this? Be-
cause our next thought was Sean Bonney.
We know though that we thought this despite Sean Bonney, and some
of the works we hope to discuss in the weeks to come, because is easy to
imagine the sorts derision that might accompany this book called Riot, the
accusations of naivity, of wielding a rapier of coolness, of supporting to-
talitarianianism, of being an armchair leftist, easy to imagine all the com-
ments that this imagined author might experience when they announce
their publication of this imagined book on facebook. Why does so much of
poetry land want to discipline and dismiss this sort of work? Why so much
shaming of those who write about riot, protest, uprising? Why so much
dismissal of the rich, diverse, and various traditions of writing that have
supported them? Why do we not complain more about the relentless red
baiting of this moment?
For as riots are a thing that happens, sometimes in our own backyards,
why wouldnt they have a poetry? Or be a part of a poetry? Is it something
to do with the genre? Riot porn, we get. We get why they call it porn.
It excites. Inspires sometimes. But riot poetry seems less obvious. In part

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because, unlike riot porn, it is often recollected in tranquilty. So that has

opened it to one easy accusation of being armchair. But then most poems
are in some sense written from the armchair and that cant mean we all
want poems that celebrate only activities conducted from armchairs. But
then also a lot of the work that we admire that has been written in the last
few years has been so not armchair.
Trying to begin to think on this, pulled out Spy Wednesday by David
Brazil. In it he tells a story of being arrested in an anti-war protest (it prob-
ably wasnt a riot but it is a literary representation of protest so were going
there). We remembered that moment where he calls out his name: As
they were loading me in the van /someone yelled out Whats your / name
man? And I cried out / real loud David Brazil! / David Brazil! / Then I
was in / the van. In handcuffs. / Thats an experience. Solitary, / cut off,
fettered. When we first read this in 2008 we thought of the maqta of the
ghazal. Today we thought about how theres all this stuff that happens in
life. As landscapes exist, as love exists, as breakups exist, as patriotism ex-
ists, so riots exist (and seem to be happening more). And if nothing else,
the poetry of riot is at least in opposition to a poetry of nationalism and that
has to be a good thing.
As weve been reading and writing this, weve been again paging
through Paulsons The Art of Riot in England and America. And weve noticed
that he only talks about prose when he turns to the literary riot as he calls
it. And this might explain why we find Paulsons book less exciting when
he writes about literature. When Norman Mailer writes about the 1968
riot at the Democratic National convention in Miami and the Siege of Chicago:
An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968, he writes
of watching the riot from the nineteenth floor of a hotel. It is Mailer, so he
feels guilty. Of course, we hear more about that than the riot. In his guilt,
he goes out and incites the police to apprehend him.

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 the poetics of surplus

Elegy
the complete essay now with more hyphy

Part One
We often find ourselves discussing, often in rooms with other poets, often
in academic settings, what it means to say that something is poetic. It is
for the most part clear enough in reference to other literature, suggesting
a higher-than-average degree of patterning the sonic and visual aspects
of language. Or to put matters in another register, poetic suggests that
some relatively larger portion of the communication is borne by things
other than denotation and connotation, by measures to be found beyond
the dictionary and thesaurus.
But when something beyond language is identified as poetic, problems
arise. One can easily imagine some people agreeing over dinner that a
particular piece of furniture was poetic, but when pressed, producing five

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e l e g y, o r t h e p o e t i c s o f s u r p l u s

or eleven different explanations. In the last century, poetry did perversely

well in coming to stand for something like an acme of aesthetic achieve-
ment, indeed becoming a kind of synecdoche for imaginative capacity
itself perversely in that it is able to mean so much precisely by meaning
so little, or at least lacking a specific self-recognition. Fredric Jameson of-
fers a rather unsympathetic formulation of this inverted development as
part of modernist ideology.

It is as though in return for the acknowledgement, by the other arts and media, of the su-
premacy of poetry and poetic language in the modernist system of the beaux-arts, poetry gra-
ciously returned the compliment by a willingness to adopt, however metaphorically, the tech-
nical and material accounts the other arts gave of their own structure and internal dynamics.

In the late modern era, whether we use the term postmodernism or

not, poetry has been largely evicted from the catbird seat, while still pant-
ing doggily after other modes. Witness the familiar blather about poetry
trailing X number of years behind painting or sculpture or what have you,
as if the only difference among these practices was that certain external
ideas always and freely available to be gotten from the ether had been spot-
ted sooner elsewhere, and now it was just a matter of poetry pulling the
wool from its eyes and cotton from its ears. We might suggest that this
ambiguous delusion about the comparability of poetry and the studio arts,
this desire to arrive where painting already is, has a half-submerged class
character. One need only consider the well-known phenomenon (we have
felt it ourselves) of the poets jealousy when the painter comes strolling out
of his or her studio at end of day, clothes smudged and streaked with lovely
and serious-looking oils, runoff turpentine staining sturdy shoes. This en-
vious sense that painters, e.g., go to work and have work clothes, that they
actually make things, that they work with their hands well, this is not
terribly challenging to decode.
Surely this is the reason that Jamesons epochal assessment of post-
modernism begins with a historically older object, able to stand for the
lost era of manual labor: van Goghs painting of work boots. Grounded in
the materiality of production, painting et al. are well-situated to encounter
as well its loss, and the ensuing transformations, via transforming their
own production processes; hence the much-vaunted dematerialization of

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the art object. But such a historical understanding must simultaneously

disclose the absurdity of poetry trying to reproduce this dematerialization,
as if the concept were simply transposable. It is precisely fine arts parallels
to commodity production that give the allegory a sensuous ground, and in
turn give the refusal to produce a political charge.

Part Two
These are merely preliminary thoughts toward approaching the question
of the poetic in an art that is purely physical, activity without direct prod-
uct. What would it mean to say that a dance is poetic? The occasion for
this question is subjective: an encounter with a specific dance or two as
the most astonishing experience of art in the last few years. Turf Feinz is
a collective from Oakland and environs. They practice turfing, a dance
style which is also a way of understanding style itself according to an in-
tense localism an assertion that stylistic distinctions belong not just to
a city but to a neighborhood, to a few blocks. Turfing is in turn associated
with hyphy, a hip-hop phenomenon largely of the Bay Area that simmered
during the nineties and emerged nationally around 2006-2007; it is the
soundtrack of choice for turfing shows, sharing with the dance style an
intense localism, as if its language were landscape.
Hyphy has its own poetics and its own localism. As the immortal E-40
puts it, in a turf-laden video, Im from the Bay where we hyphy and go
dumb / from the soil where them rappers be getting they lingo from. E-40
is not himself from Oakland but from Vallejo, a few towns over. Hyphy
had its glory but it never quite went national, never quite broke like it
might have. At any given moment, alongside whatever strain of hip-hop
sets the measure of the moment, there will be both a faster and a slower
subgenre contending for the crown. From G-funk to trap to the present,
slow emergents are inevitably taken more seriously; fast emergents get
treated as party music, send some hits up the charts, but never take over.
Hyphy was a fast emergent, too much BPM, all about going dumb like
good party music should; it never really had a chance. Or so goes one
theory. It may be that there were only a couple great hyphy producers,
that whatever Rick Rock and Droop got a hold on just wouldnt travel.
Droop is 40s nephew, and that made at least a few things possible. For

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a few months in 2007, everybody in the country knew what it meant to

ghost-ride the whip.
This is the practice of exiting your vehicle, either latest model or an
older American make, and letting it roll slow, stereo thumping, while you
promenade outside the cabin, sort of dancing together. It is a joyous prac-
tice and the cops dont care for it; the side shows at the center of hyphy
culture are not, how you say, legal. The driverless car, or more accurately,
the car almost but not quite separated from its person, is a strange and sug-
gestive figure. You are the ghost, still spectrally attached to the vehicle you
have left; it follows you, or you follow it, a spectacle of the broken but still
indissoluble unity of machine and body. Behind it is, among other things,
the Ford Motor Company Assembly Plant in Richmond, the largest plant
built on the West Coast, half a million square feet. It was the third largest
employer around, after the railroad and the oil company, but it closed in
1956, unable to compete with other, more efficient facilities. Needing to
employ too many bodies to be profitable, it ended up employing none.
Even now it is impossible to put cars and bodies back together again, real-
ly, as they once were; even in ritual performance they keep coming apart.

Part Three
It is not the association with hyphy, exactly, that makes Turf Feinz po-
etic; in the first instance, it is the intensely elegiac character of the danc-
es. This is true in the most literal sense: the major pieces (recorded and
tracked by YAK Films) are dedicated to the dead. The first Turf Feinz
piece to find a global audience is frequently known as Dancing in the
Rain, from 2009; its proper name is RIP RichD. It was recorded on a
rainy streetcorner the day after the death of dancer Dreals half-brother
in a car accident. It remains incomparable. It comprises an astonishingly
inventive set of passages, building from a single dancer toward an impro-
vised quartet, the dancers betraying considerable formal training, some
ballet behind the classic Oakland boogaloo from whence turf dancing
springs. The main feel is that of gliding, its intensity amplified by the slick
surfaces. On the corner of 90th and MacArthur, the moves feel despite
the remarkable technique perhaps a bit tossed off, casual. But thats not
it. The dance is somewhere between machinic and all-too-human, but it

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is insistently expressionless. The first dancer is masked up. As others join,

it becomes clear that the inexpressive faces are part of the performance:
all of the embodied activity with none of the exuberance such motion
would ordinarily imply. The dance is soulful, whatever that means, but
without spirit. Even as the four members wheel and pivot through space,
the dance is flat, or flattened. It is in this way that it becomes fully elegiac.
It is about whats missing, or a missing dimension.
It is also about the police. The establishing shot, indeed, is a conver-
sation between one of the crew and a cop in a roller, which must depart
before the dance can begin. This will foreshadow Turf Feinz other best-
known dances, part of the Oakland, California, R.I.P. Project: RIP 211
and RIP Oscar Grant. Kenneth 211 Ross was shot to death by officers
in December of 2009; Oscar Grant on January 1st of that year by transit
cops, though such differences are specious. All Cops Are Bastards, after
all, and killing African-American kids is pretty much their thing. This is a
broader context of elegy as it exists in Oakland; the missing dimension is al-
ways the life of kids of color. At the end of RIP 211, under heavy dubstep
(a remix of Neros This Way), the crew gathers against the wall of a squat.
An AC Transit bus passes across the frame right to left like a cinematic
wipe made from the material of the city. When its gone, so are they.
This shot will be reprised in RIP Oscar Grant, finally the most power-
ful of the trilogy but in the middle, at the inflection point. Seven and
half minutes long, the clip develops with no hurry as the crew makes its
way, inevitably, to the Fruitvale BART station where Grant was executed,
an event that would set off a sequence of riots and confrontations known as
the Oscar Grant Rebellion. There are many recorded images of the police
murder, of the scene. It will be familiar to many in Oakland and beyond
for whom this was a signal event, even as it is one within an awful history.
Accompanied by audio collage of news reports and a minor-key pi-
ano, the crew one by one offers isolated performances at the site of the
killing: patient, slow (and sometimes filmed in slow motion), beautiful.
Again they remain expressionless. Just before the three minute mark, one
of them glides up and down the platform at moments almost resistanceless
and yet absolutely stuck to the earth. No friction, all gravity. There is no
taking flight in turfing, no transcendence, no symbolic emancipation or
escape. There is only this world, where the bodies are until erased.

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At 3:04 the lateral motion is suddenly interrupted by an awkward, as-

tonishing pirouette thrown against his angular momentum, pivoting and
then improbably pausing en pointe, just one foot, body perfectly arched.
The world is suspended. He tilts backward and toward the ground, his
backpack pulling on him. Catastrophe, a downward turn. It seems hell
fall, that everything will come down. A BART train enters the picture right
to left and obscures whatever happens next. There is the sound of a gun-
shot. When the train passes, another dancer is mid-move. Things resume.

Part Four
If the social distance between poetry and painting concerns ideologies
of production, what then of dance of allegories of physical labor without
an immediate product? It would be easy enough to go to the late modern
ideas about performance and post-medium arts, the dialectically doomed
attempts to outmaneuver commodification. But this seems inapposite to
say the least, and moreover shifts us unremarked to the consumption side,
the marketplace where commodities are exchanged and exhausted. This
wont do, finally. The dance is production side, if via its absence. It is
scored and choreographed to the rhythm of machines but without their
presence, embodying the blank technicity of labor without any produc-
tion to speak of but still unable to efface entirely its moments of human
discovery, the swerve. It is a dance of aimlessness and streetcorner, inven-
tion for its own sake, amazing and defeated: a dance, and here we perhaps
arrive at the far horizon of the argument, not of surplus goods but surplus
populations, excluded from the economy if not from the violence of the
state. A post-production poetics.
In this sense, poetics means something like a form of timeliness. The
shape of being historical. By the end of 2009, the year in which Rick D,
211, and Oscar Grant are killed, the unemployment rate for black youth
peaked just barely short of 50% almost half the population excluded
from the wage. The dance in this sense is a conversation with Detroit and
Athens, Madrid and Dhaka, with the favelas of So Paulo; a quiet confron-
tation with the world as it goes, after the global slowdown, after the social
factory could put any kind of good life on offer. In Oakland, where unem-
ployment already runs above state levels, the rate for African-Americans

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is generally double the city average at any given time. In 2008, Vallejo,
home of E-40, became the largest California city to declare bankruptcy.
Catastrophe calls the tune. It is perhaps seductive to imagine a post-pro-
duction aesthetic as utopian, emancipatory, freed from the factory whistle.
Post-human, even. For now, the inverse is the case. There are bodies. As
in the the ghost-riding allegory, they can neither be finally separated nor
recombined with the car, the factory, with production. They have neither
an obvious way out nor a persuasive way back in. This surely is the pecu-
liarity of our moment...

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