Preamble
I intend the coinage demonstrategy to break two ways, toward two pretended etymologies. As demon strategy, this book’s title derives from daimon, the ancient Greek word for a divinity, genius, attendant spirit, and strategía, Greek for generalship, decision, command. As demonstrate-gy, it derives from the prefix de- and the root monstrare, the Latin verb meaning to show.
Both derivations imply that poetry, like a magnetic field, has two poles, in poetry’s case one pole affirmative, the other oppositional.
The derivation from daimon poses the question Wittgenstein asked in this way: “Is this the sense of belief in the Devil: that not everything that comes to us as an inspiration comes from what is good?” It marks the tendency, in origin stories about poetry, to personify poetry’s affirmative pole as a benign being, a god or angel or muse, and its oppositional pole as a malign being, a devil, as when Czeslaw Milosz grants that “poetry is rightly said to be dictated by a daimonion,” but adds the disclaimer that “it’s an exaggeration to maintain that he must be an angel.” As a demon strategy, is poetry animated by a demon like the one that secured Socrates from error, or like those that gave the Gerasene to break all chains and fetters? This book’s answer to that either/or is yes, to both.
The derivation from monstrare also offers an either/or. Does poetry demonstrate in the affirmative sense, as a lab experiment might demonstrate that one element can bond with another, and as a mathematical proof might demonstrate that the square of the length of one side of a right triangle equals the sum of the squares of the lengths of the other two sides? Or does it demonstrate in the oppositional sense, as workers in a union might demonstrate against unfair employment practices, and as affected citizens might demonstrate against an unjust political decision? Again, this book’s answer to the either/or is yes, to both.
Thus the double entendre in the subtitle: that poetry itself ever urges both a for and an against, and that the book gives both a case for poetry and a case against it. That, because “for” and “against,” also, each has more than one meaning. “For” here, to mean both in favor of, as in “I’m for gun control,” and in service of, as in “the car is for getting back and forth to work.” “Against,” to mean both opposed to, as in “I’m against fracking,” and adjacent to, as in “the ladder is against the wall.”
Do the articles that follow explore poetry’s polarities, or do they expose poetry’s polarity? I hope the answer is yes.
Article 1:Make another world, make this world otherwise.
1.1: Poetry Against Growth
One take on contemporary life sees technology as having displaced poetry, rendering it irrelevant or at best compensatory. On this view, we live in the information age, under the sign of Moore’s Law, and poetry, as Wittgenstein observed even before digital supplanted analog, “is not used in the language game of giving information.” Absence from popular culture confirms poetry’s reduction to insignificance. Gaming and film and television reach billions worldwide, and generate billions in revenue; poetry reaches a tiny, tenuous, negligible audience, and operates at a loss, propped up by patronage, burdening rather than bolstering economic growth.
Consider, though, this contrary view: technology’s influence makes poetry more urgent than ever, so urgent that it conditions the continued survival of the human species. Exclusion of poetry from popular culture symptomatizes not poetry’s illness but culture’s. Poetry is not dying for want of an audience; humanity is dying for want of poetry. In Charles Bernstein’s words, we suffer “not the lack of mass audience for any particular poet but the lack of poetic thinking as an activated potential for all people.” In fulfillment of that contrarian understanding, as a response to our want of poetry, I propose ethopoesis. The ethopoetic would recognize the urgency, even the necessity, of poetry, and envision a poetry adequate to this cultural need.
Technology and economy now enmesh the globe in ways, and to a degree, beyond precedent. Transportation has overcome regional limitations to the movement of goods; digital technology has overcome the limits distance once imposed on communication; corporations now enjoy worldwide market reach; resources from any region are accessible to exploitation by entities in distant regions; and so on. The economy has raced toward total globalization, but cultures and concepts of citizenship have lagged, remaining local and sectarian. Corporations have become thoroughly multinational, but political institutions remain stubbornly national; natural resources and manufactured products move easily from one place to another, but movement of humans is tightly restricted by nation al boundaries; those with capital find safety and security for their money more readily than those without capital can find safety and security for their persons; and so on.
This disparity between a global economy and local cultural and civic values has as one upshot structural violence: violence, as Paul Farmer puts it, perpetrated “by the strong against the weak, in complex social fields” in which “historically given” and “economically driven” conditions guarantee “that violent acts will ensue.” Political democracy cannot be had without economic democracy; cultural and civic values must also check, not only be checked by, economic forces. Farmer does not identify poetry as an ally, but poetry urges, and furthers, the revaluation for which he calls. Until we construct, and enact, a global culture and global citizenship, our global economy will only be destructive: exaggerating the disparity between rich and poor, exhausting resources and generating waste faster and faster, prompting ever more terrorism and war and genocide.
Among the many ways to articulate why this is so, Janet Dine’s is especially lucid. Capitalism, she affirms, in its essence is simple, and its primary tool, the contract, is functional and ethically sound. But “like any other human institution it [contract] can be corrupted,” and the dominant contractually-based institutions, namely multinational corporations (e.g. banks) and international financial institutions (e.g. the IMF), have been corrupted. In a market economy, commercial law ought to allocate risk, but, Dine observes, it has not done so equitably. Instead, both international and national laws, “written,” Dine reminds us, “mostly by wealthy élites,” have participated in creating poverty the results of which include: more than one in eight humans is undernourished; one in eight humans does not have access to safe drinking water; two in five do not have access to adequate sanitation. That combination of factors kills 1.4 million children every year (4,000 children every day, one child every 20 seconds). In creating laws about contracts, commercial law establishes rules defining and protecting property, regulating how it is acquired and disposed of, but Dine emphasizes that “property rights are not rights over things but, on the contrary, rights against other people,” specifically the right to exclude them. Laws constructed by and for those who already own property will pursue “the widest concept of property and freedom to trade” without regulatory control, inviting “accumulations of property without imposing countervailing responsibilities.”
Dine depicts the global economy as not merely out of step with, but dependent upon the suppression of, valid conceptions of global culture and citizenship. Such an exposition suggests a condition for any suitable response. To mitigate the structural violence of our economy, we need cultural and civic parameters able to stand up to, and to modify, economic activity. Without what I call here the “ethopoetic,” our attempts even to envision, much less to implement, such parameters cannot but be impoverished and futile. That impoverishment and futility is revealed by contrasting the medium of economic exchange with the medium of cultural and civic exchange. Along at least one vector, the contrast is stark. The medium of economic exchange, currency, homogenizes and distorts value. It makes everything fungible: by means of it, anything can be rendered equivalent to anything else. So many tons of rice equivalent to, and traded for, one automobile; so many
