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Title: Creativity, Spontaneity and Poetry.
Author: Raoul Vaneigem.
Date: 1983.
Description: Chapter 20 of _The Revolution of Everyday
Life_, published jointly by Left Bank Books and
Rebel Press, 1983. No copyright claims will be
made against non-profit publishers.
Keywords: creativity, spontaneity, the qualitative, poetry,
Vaneigem, Revolution of Everyday Life, Situationist
Related Material:
Creativity, Spontaneity and Poetry.
by Raoul Vaneigem.
Human beings are in a state of creativity twenty-
four hours a day. Once revealed, the scheming use
of freedom by the mechanisms of domination produces
a backlash in the form of an idea of authentic
freedom inseparably bound up with individual
creativity. The passion to create which issues from
the consciousness of constraint can no longer be
pressed into the service of production, consumption
or organization. (1). Spontaneity is the mode of
existence of creativity; not an isolated state, but
the unmediated experience of subjectivity.
Spontaneity concretizes the passion for creation and
is the first moment of its practical realization:
the precondition of poetry, of the impulse to change
the world in accordance with the demands of radical
subjectivity. (2). The qualitative exists wherever
creative spontaneity manifests itself. It entails
the direct communication of the essential. It is
poetry's chance. A crystallization of
possibilities, a multiplier of knowledge and
practical potential, and the proper modis operandi
of intelligence. Its criteria are sui generis. The
qualitative leap precipitates a chain reaction which
is to be seen in all revolutionary moments; such a
reaction must be awoken by the scandal of free and
total creativity. (3). Poetry is the organizer of
creative spontaneity to the extent that it
reinforces spontaneity's hold on reality. Poetry is
an act which engenders new realities; it is the
fulfilment of radical theory, the revolutionary act
par excellence.
1
In this fractured world, whose common denominator
throughout history has been hierarchical social power, only
one freedom has ever been tolerated: the freedom to change the
numerator, the freedom to prefer one master to another.
Freedom of choice so understood has increasingly lost its
attraction -- especially since it became the official doctrine
of the worst totalitarianisms of the modern world, East and
West. The generalization of the refusal to make such a
Hobson's choice -- to do no more than change employers -- has
in turn occasioned a restructuring of State power. All the
governments of the industrialized or semi-industrialized world
now tend to model themselves -- after a single prototype: the
common aim is to rationalize, to 'automate', the old forms of
domination. And herein lies freedom's first chance. The
bourgeois democracies have clearly shown that individual
freedoms can be tolerated only insofar as they entrench upon
and destroy one another; now that this is clear, it has become
impossible for any government, no matter how sophisticated, to
wave the muleta of freedom without everyone discerning the
sword concealed behind it. In fact the constant evocation of
freedom merely incites freedom to rediscover its roots in
individual creativity, to break out of its official definition
as the permitted the licit, the tolerable -- to shatter the
benevolence of despotism.
Freedom's second chance comes once it has retrieved its
creative authenticity, and is tied up with the very mechanisms
of Power. It is obvious that abstract systems of exploitation
and domination are human creations, brought into being and
refined through the diversion or co-optation of creativity.
The only forms of creativity that authority can deal with, or
wished to deal with, are those which the spectacle can
recuperate. But what people do officially is nothing compared
with what they do in secret. People usually associate
creativity with works of art, but what are works of art
alongside the creative energy displayed by everyone a thousand
times a day: seething unsatisfied desires, daydreams in search
of a foothold in reality, feelings at once confused and
luminously clear, ideas and gestures presaging nameless
upheavals. All this energy, of course, is relegated to
anonymity and deprived of adequate means of expression,
imprisoned by survival and obliged to find outlets by
sacrificing its qualitative richness and conforming to the
spectacle's categories. Think of Cheval's palace, the Watts
Towers, Fourier's inspired system, or the pictorial universe
of Douanier Rousseau. Even more to the point, consider the
incredible diversity of anyone's dreams -- landscapes the
brilliance of whose colors qualitatively surpass the finest
canvases of a Van Gogh. Every individual is constantly
building an ideal world within themselves, even as their
external motions bend to the requirements of soulless routine.
Nobody, no matter how alienated, is without (or unaware
of) an irreducible core of creativity, a camera obscura safe
from intrusion from lies and constraints. If ever social
organization extends its control to this stronghold of
humanity, its domination will no longer be exercised over
anything save robots, or corpses. And, in a sense, this is
why consciousness of creative energy increases, paradoxically
enough, as a function of consumer society's efforts to co-opt
it.
Argus is blind to the danger right in front of him.
Where quantity reigns, quality has no legal existence; but
this is the very thing that safeguards and nourishes it. I
have already mentioned the fact that the dissatisfaction bred
by the manic pursuit of quantity calls forth a radical desire
for the qualitative. The more oppression is justified in
terms of the freedom to consume, the more the malaise arising
from this contradiction exacerbates the thirst for total
freedom. The crisis of production-based capitalism pointed up
the element of repressed creativity in the energy expended by
the worker, and Marx gave us the definitive expose of this
alienation of creativity through forced labor, through the
exploitation of the producer. Whatever the capitalist system
and its avatars (their antagonisms notwithstanding) lose on
the production front they try to make up for in the sphere of
consumption. The idea is that, as they gradually free
themselves from the imperatives of production, people should
be trapped by the newer obligations of the consumer. By
opening up the wasteland of 'leisure' to a creativity
liberated at long last thanks to reduced working hours, our
kindly apostles of humanism are really only raising an army
suitable for training on the parade ground of a consumption-
based economy. Now that the alienation of the consumer is
being exposed by the dialectic internal to consumption itself,
what kind of prison can be devised for the highly subversive
forces of individual creativity? As I have already pointed
out, the rulers' last chance here is to turn us all into
organizers of our own passivity.
With touching candour, Dewitt Peters remarks that, "If
paints, brushes and canvas were handed out to everyone who
wanted them, the results might be quite interesting". It is
true that if this policy were applied in a variety of well-
defined and well-policed spheres, such as the theatre, the
plastic arts, music, writing, etc., and in a general way to
any such sphere susceptible of total isolation from all the
others, then the system might have a hope of endowing people
with the consciousness of the artist, ie., the consciousness
of someone who makes a profession of displaying their
creativity in the museums and shopwindows of culture. The
popularity of such a culture would be a perfect index of
Power's success. Fortunately the chances of people being
successfully 'culturized' in this way are now slight. Do they
really imagine that people can be persuaded to engage in free
experiment within bounds laid down by authoritarian decree?
OR that prisoners who have become aware of their creative
capacity will be content to decorate their cells with original
graffiti? They are more likely to apply their newfound
penchant for experiment in other spheres: firearms, desires,
dreams, self-realization techniques. Especially since the
crowd is already full of agitators. No: the last possible way
of coopting creativity, which is the organization of artistic
passivity, is happily doomed to failure.
"What I am trying to reach", wrote Paul Klee, "is a far-
off point, at the sources of creation, where I suspect a
single explanatory principle applies for people, animals,
plants, fire, water, air and all the forces that surround us".
As a matter of fact, this point is only far off in Power's
lying perspective: the source of all creation lies in
individual creativity; it is from this starting point that
everything, being or thing, is ordered in accordance with
poetry's grand freedom. This is the take-off point of the new
perspective: that perspective for which everyone is struggling
willy-nilly with all their strength and at every moment of
their existence. "Subjectivity is the only truth"
(Kierkegaard).
Power cannot enlist true creativity. In 1869 the
Brussels police thought they had found the famous gold of the
International, about which the capitalists were losing so much
sleep. They seized a huge strongbox hidden in some dark
corner. When they opened it, however, they found only coal.
Little did the police know that the pure gold of the
International would always turn into coal if touched by enemy
hands.
The laboratory of individual creativity transmutes the
basest metals of daily life into gold through a revolutionary
alchemy. The prime objective is to dissolve slave
consciousness, consciousness of impotence, by releasing
creativity's magnetic power; impotence is magically dispelled
as creative energy surges forth, genius serene in its self-
assurance. So sterile on the plane of the race for prestige
in the Spectacle, megalomania is an important phase in the
struggle of the self against the combined forces of
conditioning. The creative spark, which is the spark of true
life, shines all the more brightly in the night of nihilism
which at present envelopes us. As the project of a better
organization of survival aborts, the sparks will become more
and more numerous and gradually coalesce into a single light,
the promise of a new organization based this time on the
harmonizing of individual wills. History is leading us to the
crossroads where radical subjectivity is destined to encounter
the possibility of changing the world. The crossroads of the
reversal of perspective.
2
Spontaneity. Spontaneity is the true mode of being of
individual creativity, creativity's initial, immaculate form,
unpolluted at the source and as yet unthreatened by the
mechanisms of co-optation. Whereas creativity in the broad
sense is the most equitably distributed thing imaginable,
spontaneity seems to be confined to a chosen few. Its
possession is a privilege of those whom long resistance to
Power has endowed with a consciousness of their own value as
individuals. In revolutionary moments this means the
majority; in other periods, when the old mole works unseen,
day by day, it is still more people than one might think. For
so long as the light of creativity continues to shine
spontaneity has a chance.
"The new artist protests", wrote Tzara in 1919. "He no
longer paints: he creates directly." The new artists of the
future, constructors of situations to be lived, will
undoubtably have immediacy as their most succinct - though
also their most radical - demand. I say 'succinct' because it
is important after all not to be confused by the connotations
of the word 'spontaneity'. Spontaneity can never spring from
internalized restraints, even subconscious ones, nor can it
survive the effects of alienating abstraction and spectacular
co-optation: it is a conquest, not a given. The
reconstruction of the individual presupposes the
reconstruction of the unconscious (cf the construction of
dreams).
What spontaneous creativity has lacked up to now is a
clear consciousness of its poetry. The commonsense view has
always treated spontaneity as a primary state, and initial
stage in need of theoretical adaptation, of transposition into
formal terms. This view isolates spontaneity, treats it as a
thing-in-itself - and thus recognizes it only in the
travestied forms which it acquires within the spectacle (eg
action painting). In point of fact, spontaneous creativity
carries the seeds of a self-sufficient development within
itself. It is possessed by its own poetry.
For me spontaneity is immediate experience, consciousness
of a lived immediacy threatened on all sides yet not yet
alienated, not yet relegated to inauthenticity. The centre of
lived experience is that place where everyone comes closest to
themself. Within this unique space-time we have the clear
conviction that reality exempts us from necessity.
Consciousness of necessity is always what alienates us. We
have been taught to apprehend ourselves by default -- in
absentia, so to speak. But it takes a single moment of
awareness of real life to eliminate all alibis, and consign
the absence of future to the same void as the absence of past.
Consciousness of the present harmonizes with lived experience
in a sort of extemporization. The pleasure this brings us --
impoverished by its isolation, yet potentially rich because it
reaches out towards an identical pleasure in other people --
bears a striking resemblance to the enjoyment of jazz. At its
best, improvisation in everyday life has much in common with
jazz as evoked by Dauer: :The African conception of rhythm
differs from the Western in that it is perceived through
bodily movement rather than aurally. The technique consists
essentially in the introduction of discontinuity into the
static balance imposed upon time by rhythm and metre. This
discontinuity, which results from the existence of ecstatic
centres of gravity out of time with the musical rhythm and
metre proper, creates a constant tension between the static
beat and the ecstatic beat which is superimposed on it."
The instant of creative spontaneity is the minutest
possible manifestation of reversal of perspective. It is a
unitary moment, ie, one and many. The eruption of lived
pleasure is such that in losing myself I find myself;
forgetting that I exist, I realize myself. Consciousness of
immediate experience lies in this oscillation, in this
improvisational jazz. By contrast, thought directed toward
lived experience with analytical intent is bound to remain
detached from that experience. This applies to all reflection
on everyday life, including, to be sure, the present one. To
combat this, all I can do is try to incorporate an element of
constant self-criticism, so as to make the work of co-optation
a little harder than usual. The traveller who is always
thinking about the length of the road before them tires more
easily than his or her companion who lets their imagination
wander as they go along. Similarly, anxious attention paid to
lived experience can only impede it, abstract it, and make it
into nothing more than a series of memories-to-be.
If thought is really to find a basis in lived experience,
it has to be free. The way to achieve this is to think other
in terms of the same. As you make yourself, imagine another
self who will make you one day in his or her turn. Such is my
conception of spontaneity: the highest possible self-
consciousness which is still inseparable from the self and
from the world.
All the same, the paths of spontaneity are hard to find.
Industrial civilization has let them become overgrown. And
even when we find real life, knowing the best way to grasp it
is not easy. Individual experience is also prey to insanity -
- a foothold for madness. Kierkegaard described this state of
affairs as follows: "It is true that I have a lifebelt, but I
cannot see the pole which is supposed to pull me out of the
water. This is a ghastly way to experience things". The pole
is there, of course, and no doubt everyone could grab onto it,
though many would be so slow about it that they would die of
anxiety before realizing its existence. But exist it does,
and its name is radical subjectivity: the consciousness that
all people have the same will to authentic self-realization,
and that their subjectivity is strengthened by the perception
of this subjective will in others. This way of getting out of
oneself and radiating out, not so much towards others as
towards that part of oneself that is to be found in others, is
what gives creative spontaneity the strategic importance of a
launching pad. The concepts and abstractions which rule us
have to be returned to their source, to lived experience, not
in order to validate them, but on the contrary to correct
them, to turn them on their heads, to restore them to that
sphere whence they derive and which they should never have
left. This is a necessary precondition of people's imminent
realization that their individual creativity is
indistinguishable from universal creativity. The sole
authority is one's own lived experience; and this everyone
must prove to everyone else.
3
The qualitative. I have already said that creativity,
though equally distributed to all, only finds direct,
spontaneous expression on specific occasions. These occasions
are pre-revolutionary moments, the source of the poetry that
changes life and transforms the world. They must surely be
placed under the sign of that modern equivalent of grace, the
qualitative. The presence of the divine abomination is
revealed by a cloying spirituality suddenly conferred upon
all, from the rustic to the most refined: on a cretin like
Claudel as readily as on a St.John of the Cross. Similarly, a
gesture, an attitude, perhaps merely a word, may suffice to
show that poetry's chance is at hand, that the total
construction of everyday life, a global reversal of
perspective -- in short, the revolution -- are immanent
possibilities. The qualitative encapsulates and crystallizes
these possibilities; it is a direct communication of the
essential.
One day Kagame heard an old woman of Rwanda, who could
neither read nor write, complaining: "Really, these whites are
incurably simple-minded. They have no brains at all." "How
can you be so stupid?" he answered her. "I would like to see
you invent so many unimaginably marvellous things as the
whites have done." With a condescending smile the old woman
replied, "Listen, my child. They may have learned a lot of
things, but they have no brains. They don't understand
anything." And she was right, for the curse of technological
civilization, of quantified exchange and scientific knowledge,
is that they have created no means of freeing people's
spontaneous creativity directly; indeed, they do not even
allow people to understand the world in any unmediated
fashion. The sentiments expressed by the Rwandan woman --
whom the Belgian administrator doubtless looked upon, from the
heights of his superior intelligence, as a wild animal -- are
also to be found, though laden with guilt and thus tainted by
crass stupidity, in the old platitude: "I have studied a great
deal and now know that I know nothing". For it is false, in a
sense, to say that study can teach us nothing, so long as it
does not abandon the point of view of the totality. What this
attitude refuses to see, or to learn, are the various stages
of the qualitative -- whatever, at whatever level, lends
support to the qualitative. Imagine a number of apartments
located immediately above one another, communicating directly
by means of a central elevator and also indirectly linked by
an outside spiral staircase. People in the different
apartments have direct access to each other, whereas someone
slowly climbing the spiral stairs is cut off from them. The
former have access to the qualitative at all levels; the
latter's knowledge is limited to one step at a time, and so no
dialogue is possible between the two. Thus the revolutionary
workers of 1848 were no doubt incapable of reading the
Communist Manifesto, yet they possessed within themselves the
essential lessons of Marx and Engels' text. In fact this is
what made the Marxist theory truly radical. The objective
conditions of the worker, expressed by the Manifesto on the
level of theory, made it possible for the most illiterate
proletarian to understand Marx immediately when the moment
came. The cultivated person who uses their culture like a
flame thrower is bound to get on with the uncultivated person
who experiences what the first person puts in scholarly terms
the lived reality of everyday life. The arms of criticism do
indeed have to join forces with criticism by force of arms.
Only the qualitative permits a higher stage to be reached
in one bound. This is the lesson that any endangered group
must learn, the pedagogy of the barricades. The graded world
of hierarchical power, however, can only envisage knowledge as
being similarly graded: the people on the spiral staircase,
experts on the type and number of steps, meet, pass, bump into
one another and trade insults. What difference does it make?
At the bottom we have the autodidact gorged on platitudes, at
the top the intellectual collecting ideas like butterflies:
mirror images of foolishness. The opposition between Miguel
de Unamuno and the repulsive Millan Stray, between the paid
thinker and their reviler, is an empty one: where the
qualitative is not in evidence, intelligence is a fool's cap
and bells.
The alchemists called those elements needed for the Great
Work the materia prima. Paracelsus' description of this
applies perfectly to the qualitative: "It is obvious that the
poor possess it in greater abundance than the rich. People
squander the good portion of it and keep only the bad. It is
visible and invisible, and children play with it in the
street. But the ignorant crush it underfoot everyday." The
consciousness of this qualitative materia prima may be
expected to become more and more acute in most minds as the
bastions of specialized thought and gradated knowledge
collapse. Those who make a profession of creating, and those
whose profession prevents them from creating, both artists and
workers, are being pushed into the same nihilism by the
process of proletarianization. This process, which is
accompanied by resistance to it, ie, resistance to co-opted
forms of creativity, occurs amid such a plethora of cultural
goods -- records, films, paperback books -- that once these
commodities have been freed from the laws of consumption they
will pass immediately into the service of true creativity.
The sabotage of the mechanisms of economic and cultural
consumption is epitomized by young people who steal the books
in which they expect to find confirmation of their radicalism.
Once the light of the qualitative is shed upon them, the
most varied kinds of knowledge combine and form a magnetic
bridge powerful enough to overthrow the weightiest traditions.
The force of plain spontaneous creativity increases knowledge
at an exponential rate. Using makeshift equipment and
negligible funds, a German engineer recently built an
apparatus able to replace the cyclotron. If individual
creativity can achieve suck results with such meagre
stimulation, what marvels of energy must be expected from the
qualitative shock waves and chain reactions that will occur
when the spirit of freedom still alive in the individual re-
emerges in collective form to celebrate the great social fete,
with its joyful breaking of all taboos.
The job of a consistent revolutionary group, far from
being the creation of a new type of conditioning, is to
establish protected areas where the intensity of conditioning
tends toward zero. Making each person aware of their creative
potential will be a hapless task unless recourse is had to
qualitative shock tactics. Which is why we expect nothing
from the mass parties and other groupings based on the
principle of quantitative recruitment. Something can be
expected, on the other hand, from a micro-society formed on
the basis of the radical acts or thought of its members, and
maintained in a permanent state of practical readiness by
means of strict theoretical discrimination. Cells
successfully established along such lines would have every
chance of wielding sufficient influence one day to free the
creativity of the majority of the people. The despair of the
anarchist terrorist must be changed into hope; those tactics,
worthy of some medieval warrior, must be changed into a modern
strategy.
4
Poetry. What is poetry? It is the organization of
creative spontaneity, the exploitation of the qualitative in
accordance with its internal laws of coherence. Poetry is
what the Greeks called poiein, 'making', but 'making' restored
to the purity of its moment of genesis -- seen, in other
words, from the point of view of the totality.
Poetry cannot exist in the absence of the qualitative.
In this absence we find the opposite of the qualitative:
information, the transitional programme, specialization,
reformism -- the various guises of the fragmentary. The
presence of the qualitative does not of itself guarantee
poetry, however. A rich complex of signs and possibilities
may get lost in confusion, disintegrate from lack of
coherence, or be destroyed by crossed purposes. The criterion
of effectiveness must remain supreme. Thus poetry is also
radical theory completely embodied in action; the mortar
binding tactics and revolutionary strategy; the high point of
the great gamble on everyday life.
What is poetry? In 1895, during an ill-advised and
seemingly foredoomed French railway worker's strike, one trade
unionist stood up and mentioned and ingenious and cheap way of
advancing the strikers' cause: "It takes two sous' worth of a
certain substance used in the right way to immobilize a
locomotive". Thanks to this bit of quick thinking, the tables
were turned on the government and capitalists. Here it is
clear that poetry is the act which brings new realities into
being, the act which reverses the perspective. The materia
prima is within everyone's reach. Poets are those who know
how to use it to best effect. Moreover, two sous' worth of
some chemical is nothing compared with the profusion of
unrivalled energy generated and made available by everyday
life itself: the energy of the will to live, of desire
unleashed, of the passions of love, the power of fear and
anxiety, the hurricane of hatred and the wild impetus of the
urge for destruction. What poetic upheavals may confidently
be expected to stem from such universally experienced feelings
as those associated with deaths, old age, and sickness. The
long revolution of everyday life, the only true poetry-made-
by-all, will take this still marginal consciousness as its
point of departure.
"What is poetry?", ask the aesthetes. And we may as well
give them the obvious answer right away: poetry rarely
involves poems these days. Most art works betray poetry. How
could it be otherwise, when poetry and power are
irreconcilable? At best, the artist's creativity is
imprisoned, cloistered, within an unfinished oeuvre, awaiting
the day when it will have the last word. Unfortunately, no
matte how much importance the artist gives it, this last word,
which is supposed to usher in perfect communication, will
never be pronounced so long as the revolt of creativity has
not realized art.
The African work of art -- poem, music, sculpture, or
mask -- is not considered complete until it has become a form
of speech, a word-in-action, a creative element which
functions. Actually this is true for more than African art.
There is no art in the world which does not seek to function;
and to function -- even on the level of later co-optation --
consistently with the very same will which generated it, the
will to live constantly in the euphoria of the moment of
creation. Why is it that the work of the greatest artists
never seems to have an end? The answer is that great art
cries out in every possible way for realization, for the right
to enter lived experience. The present decomposition of art
is a bow perfectly readied for such an arrow.
Nothing can save past culture from the cult of the past
except those pictures, writings, musical or lithic
architectures, etc., whose qualitative dimension gets through
to us free of its form -- of all art forms. This happens with
Sade and Lautreamont, of course, but also with Villon,
Lucretius, Rabelais, Pascal, Fourier, Bosch, Dante, Bach,
Swift, Shakespeare, Uccello, etc. All are liable to shed
their cultural chrysalis, and emerge from the museums to which
history has relegated them to become so much dynamite for the
bombs of the future realizers of art. Thus the value of an
old work of art should be assessed on the basis of the amount
of radical theory that can be drawn from it, on the basis of
the nucleus of creative spontaneity which the new creators
will be able to release from it for the purpose, and by means
of an unprecedented kind of poetry.
Radical theory's forte is its ability to postpone an
action begun by creative spontaneity without mitigating it or
redirecting its thrust. Conversely, the artistic approach
seeks in its finest moments to stamp the world with the
impress of a tentacular subjective activity constantly seeking
to create, and to create itself. Whereas radical theory
sticks close to poetic reality, to reality in process and to
the world as it is being changed, art takes an identical tack
but at much greater risk of being lost and corrupted. Only an
art armed against itself, against its own weaker side -- its
most aesthetic side -- has any hope of evading co-optation.
Consumer society, as we well know, reduces art to a range
of consumable products. The more vulgarized this reduction,
the faster the rate of decomposition and the greater the
chances for transcendence. That communication so urgently
sought by the artist is cut off and prohibited even in the
simplest relationships of everyday life. So true is this that
the search for new forms of communication, far from being the
preserve of painters and poets, is now part of a collective
effort. In this way the old specialization of art has finally
come to an end. There are no more artists because everyone is
an artist. The work of art of the future will be the
construction of a passionate life.
The object created is less important than the process
which gives rise to it, the act of creating. What makes an
artist is their state of creativity, not art galleries.
Unfortunately, artists rarely recognize themselves as
creators: most of the time they play to the gallery,
exhibitionistically. A contemplative attitude before a work
of art was the first stone thrown at the creator. They
encouraged this attitude in the first place, but today it is
their undoing: now it amounts to no more than a need to
consume, an expression of the crassest economic imperatives.
This is why there is no longer any such thing as a work of art
in the classical sense of the word. Nor can there be such a
thing. So much the better. Poetry is to be found everywhere:
in the facts, in the events we bring about. The poetry of the
facts, formerly always treated as marginal, now stands at the
centre of everyone's concerns, at the centre of everyday life,
a sphere which as a matter of fact it has never left.
True poetry cares nothing for poems. In his quest for
the Book, Mallarme wanted nothing so much as to abolish the
poem. What better way could there be of abolishing the poem
than realizing it? And indeed a few of Mallarme's
contemporaries proved themselves rather brilliant exponents of
just such a 'new poetry'. Did the author of Herodiade have an
inking, perhaps, when he described them as "angels of purity",
that the anarchists with their bombs offered the poet a key
which, walled up in his words, he could never use?
Poetry is always somewhere. Its recent abandonment of
the arts makes it easier to see that it resides primarily in
individual acts, in a lifestyle and in the search for such a
style. Everywhere repressed, this poetry springs up
everywhere. Brutally put down, it is reborn in violence. It
plays muse to rioters, informs revolt and animates all great
revolutionary carnivals for a while, until the bureaucrats
consign it to the prison of hagiography.
Lived poetry has effectively shown throughout history,
even in partial revolts, even in crime -- which Coeurderoy so
aptly dubbed the "revolt of one" -- that it is the protector
par excellence of everything irreducible in mankind, ie,
creative spontaneity. The will to unite the individual and
the social, not on the basis of an illusory community but on
that of subjectivity -- this is what makes the new poetry into
a weapon which everyone must learn to handle by themself.
Poetic experience is henceforth at a premium. The
organization of spontaneity will be the work of spontaneity
itself.