Joe Harrington, “Poetry in the Ruins…” continued

My first response upon reading these questions was: Fuck if I know.          

It was the triangulation of poetics, the university, and neoliberalism that hit closest to home, when I considered how to respond. Yet this complex of issues has bedeviled me for some time now. The relation of poetry to the US university is fairly well-known. The patronage of colleges historically has provided poets and scholars their bread and butter (such as it is) for many decades. It has also offered new practitioners training, funding, and a ready-made scholarly and writing community. It also has given poets disciplinary training, in more ways than one. 

However, neoliberalism is breaking the public university. My public university is a good example.  

I have been a professor for twenty-six years at the University of Kansas, which now seems to be imploding. Through incompetent, ever-changing, self-interested leadership, as well as state legislators’ ideological antipathy towards public . . . anything, my university’s finances were in freefall even before the Covid-19 pandemic swept the nation over a year ago.  Recently, the governor of my home state of Kansas, who is a Democrat, proposed the biggest cut to university state funding in history. Tuition is rising, enrollment is falling, budget shortfalls are growing. Wages and salaries were temporarily cut in the last half of 2020.  

Aside from the sheer devastation of these funding and personnel cutbacks, the university’s administration may be using this state of affairs as a pretext to arrogate to itself the authority to fire any employee at will, tenured or not. We will find out by July 1, the beginning of the new fiscal year. That is the deadline for our administration to decide whether to adopt a new policy of the Kansas Board of Regents that allows for the dismissal of tenured faculty, without going through the process of declaring financial exigency. Word has it that this new policy was developed to placate legislators. Perhaps. But I think the university administration is trying to produce a chilling effect: to discipline tenured professors, to make us scared, to make us do whatever seems necessary to cling to our jobs—including, if necessary, returning us, in the Fall 2021 semester, to physical classrooms that may be filled with a more lethal, virulent form of the coronavirus. By the same token, the administration also leaves us with less to lose. I’ve recently talked with colleagues who feel the same way as I do about potential layoffs: Please don’t throw me in that briar patch.[1]

I say this as someone who has been organizing faculty on campus, primarily via the Faculty Senate and our chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). The last few years, I’ve been deeply involved in attempting to thwart our university administration’s most egregious attacks on academic freedom and to expand its protections. I and my colleagues in this effort together have had some degree of success. My own larger goal has always been to create a “culture of organizing” on campus. We now have a faculty unionization effort underway, and many more faculty members are actively and vocally opposing administration policies. We have created much cooperation and solidarity between faculty and student activists in the process. 

But the leg of the triangle that has been tripping me up is that between poetics, on the one hand, and neoliberalism, on the other. I have no idea how poetry and poetics, as those terms are usually understood, can make a significant intervention against neoliberalism, the ideology that is globally dominant. So what strikes me about that call-for-papers “write-up” are the active verbs in this text: accomplish, intervene, fight, create [social/political/economic] change. It is my opinion that these verbal choices ask a great deal of poetics.

In retrospect, it is difficult for me to see how poetics, as we usually understand it, could have defeated a punitive leave without pay policy; or a post-tenure review process that would have led to dismissal of tenured faculty. Or how it might have liberalized conditions for non-tenured faculty to challenge administrative decisions. It sure didn’t prevent the pay cut we had last year. And it’s hard for me to see how poetics will quash this latest effort to eliminate tenure and academic freedom, not to mention public education generally. 

This is not to say that poetry makes nothing happen; of course it does. Otherwise, people would not write or read or comment on it. But the common mistake, I believe, is to confuse poetics—or literary studies in general—with political organizing. I have been active both in poetry and poetics and political organizing, at the same time, throughout my academic career. To my mind, organizing is the art of getting people to do things they would not do otherwise; and it is the art of getting people to stop doing things that they’re doing now. The goals and strategies are varied, but this is the basic formula.

Having said this, I have to confess that I don’t know the best organizing strategy to defeat neoliberalism. However, I can imagine possible responses to it. Those responses may involve poetry and poetics. If so, they also will involve an expansion of what poetics can mean and be. 

In any discussion of neoliberalism, and its twin, corporate globalization, we must bear in mind that it affects not only literature and education, but every other aspect of human life, as well. So to give a sense of how poetics might relate to neoliberalism, I’d like to “pan out,” to look at one of its effects that is altering education, literature, and everything else: namely, climate collapse. 

While I have been organizing against my university’s administration, I have also been writing poetry about the climate emergency. When my poetry book, Of Some Sky, was published in 2017, I didn’t realize how allergic people were to thinking and talking about the climate catastrophe underway and in the making. I mean, it was not like the book was referring to a topic that half-awake people didn’t already know about, and, in my writing, a subject matter I was having a little satirical fun with. But, boy, my audiences seemingly did not want to hear about the climate crisis—at least not as “proper” subject for poetry.   

The response when the book was published went something like: This book will make you want to slit your wrists . . .  but there’s some decent laugh lines. It seems I didn’t learn my lesson. For over two years, I’ve been writing an ongoing verse chronicle, called, “Poem of Our Climate.” This project sets forth, in “real time,” the effects of climate chaos and extreme weather on human beings around the world; which, as it turns out, are rather pronounced, violent, and frequent, depending upon who you are and where you live. If the readers of this verse-chronicle are now reading this essay, I’d like to thank both of them.

Given the scientific data and recent experience, I believe that even comfortable middle-class white-Anglo mainland Americans like myself must engage in what Puerto Rican people call bregando—grappling, struggling, living by one’s wits, improvising. We are going to have to identify the likeliest water sources and how to access them, the best evacuation routes and how to follow them, the hardiest food crops and how to grow them, how to devise alternative sources of power when the grid goes down, and perhaps how to communicate with one another under government surveillance. Or, said another way, over the course of the next twenty years, all middle-class Americans—including tenured academics if tenure survives the neoliberal university—are going to end up living more like the rest of the world does now, even as people in the rest of the world suffer worsening immiseration and displacement.  

The materials of the world are as given. And if the climate scientists are correct—it seems they usually lowball the devastation predicted—the effects of “committed warming” resulting from greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere will continue to unfold for generations, possibly for centuries, even if all members of the human species start living like the Amish tomorrow. Indeed, the accelerating telos of neoliberalism has produced climate chaos, as well as biological, social, infrastructural, and institutional breakdown. It has replicated the widespread transmission of rumor and disinformation and has engineered economic precarity. As poets, writers, and academics, we must call for a frank discussion about a poetics that exists in a very different social and physical context than formerly, amidst a thoroughgoing transformation of the entire habitas. 

And the university? Most poets and theorists who work at universities do so at “public” schools, and, frankly, it is difficult for me to see much future for such institutions at the moment in this country, in which neoliberal values have taken charge to the point of proposing the firing of tenured faculty. The university is being transformed, being reduced, by bad actors (Right-wing politicians, the corporations who hire them, self-interested administrators, et al.); as well as extreme weather effects (for example, wildfires, hurricanes, floods, blackouts, record-breaking summer heat temperatures, insurance-rate increases). 

But what’s the point of being honest and sharing your perceptions and analysis if they are so dire nobody wants to hear them, or if people merely criticize you for voicing them? Kassandra was right, sure, but so what? Maybe it is better to give people a copy of 100 Simple Things You Can Do to Save Troy. On the one hand, will worst-case scenarios scare enough people enough to address the problem, or will they depress them so much they give up (or go into denial)? On the other hand, will a more hopeful message galvanize people enough to lure them into pursuing some kind of productive solution, or will it lull them into complacency?

I want to be perfectly frank. That’s why I’m writing about the climate emergency: I want to be perfectly frank. I feel compelled to speak and chant about what is happening, which is so horrible that it must not go unsung, regardless of whether anyone hears it or not. 

That is because, poetry, for me, offers a recourse to ethics rather than rhetoric (or market share). One way to talk about the ethical orientation possible in poetry is through the Greek concept of parrēsia. Michel Foucault spent the last years of his life studying and analyzing parrēsia. The verb form of this Greek term is a compound word, from pan (everything) and eirein (to say, to speak). Thus, parrēsia means to say everything and not hold back. In Foucault’s account, parrēsia originally meant the permission to tell the truth, as granted by a master or a king to a servant or subject, with the promise to refrain from removing the truth-teller’s head. Tenure could be seen as a milder latter-day version of this meaning: it is designed precisely to allow faculty members to speak frankly without losing their jobs. With the development of Athenian democracy, parrēsia came to mean the right and duty of the citizen to speak up—to say what was on “his” mind for the health of the state, regardless of how other leaders and citizens might feel. Consequently, the opposite of parrēsia is flattery—whether it takes the form of kissing up to a monarch or playing to the crowd. 

A couple of characteristics of parrēsia follow from these definitions and implications. First, according to Foucault, parrēsia is the “breaking with or…disregarding the traditional forms of rhetoric and writing. Parrēsiais an action, it is such that it acts; it allows discourse to act directly on souls….”[2] That is the point of parrēsia: to hit people in the gut, not to tickle their ears. The goal is frankness instead of artfulness for its own sake. Second, according to Foulcault,  “somebody is said to use parrēsia, and deserves to be considered as a parrhesiast, if and only if there is a risk, there is a danger for him [sic] in telling the truth.”[3] Consequently, Foucault continues, 

In a political debate, if an orator takes the risk of losing his popularity because his opinion is contrary to the majority’s opinion, he uses parrēsia. So, as you see, parrēsia is linked to danger, it is linked to courage. It is the courage of telling the truth in spite of its danger.”[4]

Christine Blassey Ford, who told her story of attempted rape by a Supreme Court judge nominee before the US Senate Judiciary Committee, would be a genuine parrhesiast. Participants in an anonymous whisper campaign would not be. Greta Thunberg has collected enough death threats to qualify as a parrhesiast. A tenured professor writing poetry that perhaps very few will read? Maybe not a parrhesiast in the same league.

However, criticizing your university administration after they’ve seriously considered eliminating the protections of tenure? Maybe that professor begins to qualify.

As an ancient example of parrēsia, Foucault quotes the late-fifth, early-sixth-century BCE rhetorician Isocrates as telling the Athenians, “[Y]ou have formed the habit of driving all orators from the platform except those who support your desires.”[5]  In other words, modern-day democratic Athenians in this country might watch Fox or MSNBC, but not both. Isocrates goes on to declare that “I know that it is hazardous to oppose your views and that, although this is a free government, there exists no freedom of speech [parrēsia] except that which is enjoyed in this Assembly by the most reckless orators, who care nothing for your welfare, and in the theater by the comic poets”[6] —demagogues and satirists, in other words. The citizens will listen to the comic poets because they cloak their parrēsia in laughter. Or, as George Bernard Shaw supposedly said, “If you want to tell people the truth, you’d better make them laugh or they’ll kill you.” 

However, the true parrhesiast is willing to risk life, reputation, and career because they feel a moral duty to tell it straight. As Foucault puts it, “The parrhesiast…faces power, he opposes the majority, or public opinion…He acts not as an integrating agent but as a disintegrating factor or agent.”[7] Or, as one famous parrhesiast said, “I come not to bring peace, but a sword.” He is a critic and a cutter. The parrhesiast intervenes by saying everything, even if it doesn’t do a damn bit of good.

Nonetheless, parrēsia “should not,” as Franco Berardi points out, “be translated as ‘truth’: in fact, the term refers rather to ethical and political frankness, the freedom to say what one thinks.”[8] But, just as in fifth-century Athens, we in contemporary America only want to hear what we think we already believe to be true. We thrive on denial and our selective acceptance of “truths.” I would like to be able to say to myself, “until climate change really kicks in…”—but I can’t, because I know from my research and perceptions that the time of climate change is now. As I write, my dad in Memphis is boiling his water, due to weather-related power outages; people in Texas are going broke from suddenly spiking electric or insurance bills; and Louisianians are sopping floodwaters out of their houses for the second time in as many weeks, all events created or worsened by climate change. And Americans on the West Coast are facing heat and wildfires in summer months the likes of which they’ve never before experienced.

Now, not all poets or critics are parrehisiasts. But it does seem to me that, given the situation I have just described, a rethinking of poetics must be part of a rethinking of everything. Such a rethinking would require considering, as Jacques Rancière puts it, not “simply a change of government, of laws, of institutions,” but rather “a revolution of the forms of life, of the sensual universe, and of how to perceive it and act within it…”[9] It is not “the fact of fighting for a better future,” but rather “the fact of already living a different present.”[10] Ironically, the collapse of the future we thought was ours might force us into a necessary revolution. 

Rancière’s notion of “the aesthetic” might be of use here in conceiving of this revolution. He uses the term “the aesthetic” not in the narrow sense of “viewing works of art.” Rather, he uses the term to suggest “the strong sense of one’s relationship with the perceived world”[11] and “striving to live in a different sensual world” (my italics).[12] The aesthetic in his usage means that the worker will look up from their employment activity to regard the world around them, and their hand “will ultimately change its function; it will start writing, writing poems, writing texts.”[13] But it seems to me this shift of gaze from the narrow job to the broader environment also might entail the poet’s hand engaging in physical labor as part of their work—and that such a convergence is and ought to be what the “poetic” means or could mean today. 

One way to think about this reorientation is as making life the work—not in the sense of aestheticizing experience, à la Walter Pater, but by making—making a new and liberatory situation out of difficult circumstances.[14] Rather than dictate “which purposes the works must obey in order to be works of art,”[15] we might expand our scope as makers to include purposes made necessary by the historical moment—not to “create works of art, but rather create forms of life,”[16] in the words of Rancière. And, as he adds, “Ultimately, emancipation always consists in stepping out of the role one has been assigned, and showing an ability characterized by the fact that it’s a shared one.”[17] Specialization and professionalization set limits as to what can be said or done, by whom, and where. Academic disciplines as they currently exist are part of the division of labor. Professionalism for poets, as well as other university instructors, has come to mean a certain type of intra-professional politics, an ever-increasing workload, and the acceptance of job precarity for the majority of postsecondary educators. The implicit, never-stated assumption of professionalism is: Sure, engage in subversive discourse, as long as you can list it on your c.v. and it shows up in Academic Analytics.

But the aesthetic, as Rancière defines it, asks us to violate those limits. It asks us to assume our role as human beings in whatever world we have and make. This version of the aesthetic will require us to do things that are not written in our job description. It will mean not staying in our lane. Rancière holds that “…politics exist…in so far as one presupposes that there is an ability shared by everyone, no matter who they are, beyond all the abilities that are specific to the professor, the doctor, the scholar, the strategist.”[18] Given the deteriorating situation of the university as an institution under neoliberal defunding practices, not to mention the deteriorating physical environments in which we are forced to teach, many of us are being and will be forced out of our profession, or at least out of our assigned roles within our profession. It therefore will become increasingly incumbent upon all of us to show our shared abilities – both by using abilities we don’t usually use and by sharing those abilities with others. 

Thus, the aesthetic ultimately means the art of inventing ways of living with other people. This involves creation and making (Greek poiein) but not only of that which is framed as “art.” The aesthetic means turning life into an art—an art practice, practiced in common. It is the art of revealing life as lived in common. It is the art of the future. And it starts with saying what is. 

I certainly don’t know what form these activities and creations will take, particularly given the growth of neo-fascist paramilitary movements in the United States and around the world. It will depend a great deal on developments as they unfold. It may look like the Puerto Rican people’s bregando after Hurricane Maria, in the face of an absent, corrupt government. It may mean learning to resist and survive in the shadow of a repressive government. In the center of the US, where I live, it may require scrambling to house an increasing population of climate migrants and displaced persons. And it may involve some form of writing. These may end up being the same thing, in some instances. I’m pretty sure it will involve mutual aid. 

But whatever new or transformed practices or institutions look like, they probably will not resuscitate the English department as a site of poetics. Rather, I agree with Ranciere’s assessment that “any departure from the system results not from the system itself, but from the development of all the forms of resistance and autonomy that one attains in relation to the system…What’s still imaginable, if not the development of a kind of autonomous system of forms of the future in the present?”[19] What indeed, when the future is being thrust upon the present? Perhaps our shared ability as making and thinking beings will help us to do that imagining.

[1] On June 17, 2021, after this essay was in production at CDLS, Chancellor Douglas Girod announced that he would not implement the policy (a decision the other Regents institutions had made almost as soon as the policy was made available). Girod publicly cited an influx of federal COVID relief funding as easing the budget deficit enough to make the policy unnecessary. Meanwhile, faculty activist group OneKU, which obtained thousands of signatures on petitions from within the university, as well as condemnations from professional organizations and statements of solidarity from around the country, claimed the decision as a victory. However, the group noted in its emailed newsletter:

The majority of our colleagues continue to work without the protections of tenure. Programs and departments are being discontinued, and we are all being threatened with new workload policies and budget challenges. This month’s KBOR meeting saw the expansion of concealed carry on campus to age 18 and up, while an earlier inquiry asked all Regents’ schools to provide a list of courses teaching Critical Race Theory. Finally, in its push to return to normal in the fall, the administration ignores on-going considerations of public health and safety for our campus and community. 

 (Quote from “One Minute with OneKU: A Regular Message Addressing Questions of Concern at KU,” OneKU newletter [June 21, 2021], n.p.).

[2] Michel Foucault, “Discourse & Truth” and “Parrēsia” (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2019), 17.

[3] Ibid., 42.

[4] Ibid., 43.

[5] Ibid., 127.

[6] Ibid., 127-128.

[7] Ibid., 65.

[8] Franco “Bifo” Berardi, The Second Coming (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2019), 88.

[9] Jacques Rancière, Politics and Aesthetics (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2019), 50-51. 

[10] Ibid., 58.

[11] Ibid., 10. Note that the term “aesthetic,” though a modern term, derives from the Greek aisthánomai, “to perceive.”

[12] Ibid., 29.

[13] Ibid., 30.

[14] Cf. Carlyn Ferrari‘s comments orally on March 6, 2021, during the “Poetics & the University in Crisis” webinar regarding the poet Anne Spencer. Ferrari spoke of African-American woman’s practices of self-fashioning and physical self-care, which for Spencer and other Black women were in themselves a creative and liberatory act in the 1920s, and arguably still are today. “Her life was art because she made it herself,” said Ferrari.

[15] Rancière, Politics and Aesthetics, 37.

[16] Ibid., 49.

[17] Ibid., 58.

[18] Ibid., 72.

[19] Ibid., 100-101.