- 1 I am indebted to Simon Critchley’s reading of Stevens in Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetr (...)
1Twenty years after the appearance of his first volume Timothy Donnelly’s poetry still awaits a considered critical response. This situation seems all the more remarkable given the scope of his achievement as one of the most inventive and imaginatively audacious poets currently writing in English and the urgent topicality of many of his central concerns including the politics of emergency and the permanent war economy, climate change and impending ecological catastrophe, the social costs of the neoliberal ascendancy, the traumatic legacies of American imperialism, the vertiginous rise of “post-truth” politics, and the disquieting perception of some kind of mutation in human responsiveness which corrodes our ethical relation to one another and the world around us. The continuing critical neglect of Donnelly’s work is perhaps attributable to the encompassing demands made upon our attention by its speculative range, broad social lexicon and extraordinary linguistic receptiveness to the simultaneous forming and fragmentation of the modern American public sphere across the reciprocating realms of politics, economics, culture and information technology. Against this background my aim in what follows is to bring his writing into provisional focus around a question of poetic method and a few central conceits. My general claim is that Donnelly’s writing is best understood as a series of virtuosic responses to the conflict famously identified by Wallace Stevens—and Donnelly is among the most Stevensian of contemporary poets—between the “pressure of reality” (encompassing everything from direct political coercion to the bewitching embrace of our 24/7 electronic lifeworld) and the redemptive power of the poetic imagination. Central to this response is his crafting of a style of double lyric in which the imagination presses back against the pressure of reality by staging a confrontation between competing images of life. Such pressing back is a form of imaginative violence (“a violence from within that protects us from a violence without” in Stevens’s pithy formulation) that seeks to extend perception beyond the monological banality of capitalist realism, the totalizing claims of ideology or the routinized repetitiveness of technological and administered life (Stevens 36).1 This double writing is the ethical ground and horizon of all Donnelly’s major work. In tracing this ethical terrain my reading is guided by three interlinked motifs, “system,” “machine” and “clouds,” which bring the oppositional energies of his poetry into tense and transformative relation.
2The opening of “The Last Dream of Light Released from Seaports,” from Donnelly’s second collection The Cloud Corporation (2010), offers a provoking instance of his style of double writing:
And such proceedings shall be considered criminal:
amusement amendments, two or more individuals,
any dream proceedings which engage in the activities
indicating intention, love, or other things of value;
a safe house, a biological boulevard, communications
that demonstrate the actor plans to commit rips
in new material, transfer funds, have everlasting vision.
Wendy, a sadness shall take effect on the specified
streets until the real is removed together with the findings.
If removal is unlikely, they shall take the sentence,
the beach facilities, and the foreseeable future into custody
and charge all with a criminal offense not later than
seven days after the commencement of such strap
from physical officers, offenses to the hide, such striking
dismantling electronic surveillance, wild highway! (53)
3To attentive readers—or perhaps just readers of a certain age—this passage evokes a strange sense of incongruity by combining the hyperbolic romantic lexicon of one of the totemic rock anthems of the 1970s (“Wendy,” “dream,” “vision,” “boulevard,” “sadness” and so on) with an affectless and abstracted verbal landscape mired in bureaucratic legalese like “proceedings,” “findings,” “removal,” “custody” and “criminal offenses.” The poem’s idiosyncratic lyric form originates, Donnelly explains, in “words selected from successive pages of the USA PATRIOT Act (2001) and from Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” (1975), although this laconic summary scarcely prepares us for the vertiginous displacements of sense and feeing effected by his artful splicing of these inimical styles of language which juxtaposes an expansive vision of life rooted in the visionary possibilities of romantic self-transcendence with a repressive regime of modern biopower whose disciplinary apparatus and techniques of “electronic surveillance” relentlessly patrol the parameters of permissible thought and expression while inscribing state authority at the core of the social body (149). These displacements begin in Donnelly’s declarative opening line which abruptly reshapes the emancipatory promise of the Declaration of Independence (“We hold these truths to be self-evident”) into a bleak doctrine of social control where Springsteen’s “runaway American dream” is routinely policed by unspecified “dream proceedings” that regulate every citizen’s intentions, activities and right of assembly (here Donnelly’s blank interpolation of the simple denotative phrase “two or more individuals” assumes a particularly sinister aspect) while subjecting their “unalienable right” to the “pursuit of happiness” to a series of “amusement amendments”; they reverberate within coolly impersonal phrases like “biological boulevard” that transform Springsteen’s flamboyant scene of erotic trysting (“Hemi-powered drones cruise down the boulevard”) into a dystopian vision of a wholly administered world where state power controls the basic processes of life; before culminating in bloodless formulations like “Center the lonely secretary in accordance with such guidelines / as defined by the dream engines” which see Springsteen’s ecstatic vehicles of self-invention (“Chrome wheeled, fuel injected, and steppin’ out over the line”) commandeered by mandarin systems of security intelligence requiring anyone seeking a “cost effective” (rather than “everlasting”) kiss be first “fully integrated to soul points and a privacy database.” Central to the poem’s political drama is the struggle between two implacably opposed orders of language, the instrumental prescriptivism of this new biopolitical machine which deploys “authorized language drones” to stigmatize Springsteen’s utopian dreamers (“tramps like us”) as renegade “tramps of prominence” presenting a clear and present danger to the interests of homeland security, and a style of scrupulous verbal dexterity whose habits of studied ambiguity (“the procedures for taking / the liberty of fingerprints”), dialectical compression (the way a phrase like “appointing frauds of rearview” simultaneously implies reactionary policymaking and the authoritarian recasting of an entire democratic tradition), and surreal juxtaposition that reinscribe a subaltern visionary element into the rhetoric of securitization (“Wendy, stand in the wake of events, stand resolutely / vibrant in the worship of the possible”) hope to wrest some measure of imaginative freedom from the forces of coercion.
4But while faithful to the poem in many respects this kind of reading is also altogether too quick to rush to judgment, too blithe in its left-liberal presumption, to grasp the real radicalism of Donnelly’s approach which consists instead in the double sense of the political that plays out in his writing. Thus his poetry is at once recognizably “political” in its interrogation of social relationships and prevailing power structures and hostile to styles of thinking that determine their responsiveness in advance according to their presumed political effectivity or ideological consistency. Poetry for Donnelly doesn’t become intelligible (or political) simply by referring to an already existing reality: it is a distinctive kind of thinking in its own right whose peculiar power is to resist the reactive element in ourselves that wants to have done with judgment and dispose the world on our own terms by returning us instead to the problem and possibilities of interpretive decision (Clark 5). Crucial to the unfolding of Donnelly’s work is how it simultaneously asserts and contests its own central statements by continually turning them back on those who speak in their name. A signal temptation in reading “Seaports” as a political poem, for example, is to resolve its dialectical entanglements into a simple choice between freedom (“Born to Run”) and unfreedom (“The Patriot Act”). Yet in making freedom the privileged domain of political decision we risk reinscribing precisely the dispossessive forces we seek to contest given that The Patriot Act was explicitly conceived as an ideological defense of “freedom” while Springsteen’s emancipatory epic is saturated in the self-idealizing exceptionalism and romantic myth of origin that shape a reactionary strand of American cultural nationalism. Donnelly’s point is neither to dispute the repressive domestic effects of the War on Terror nor the forms of communitarian feeling engendered by Springsteen’s blue-collar boosterism, but rather that a vital part of political thinking is foreclosed whenever it collapses into program or presumption. Instead, as Timothy Clark observes, the aporetic demand of any genuinely emancipatory thought is to conserve within itself a singular element, some element of heterogeneity or moment of pure natality, that exceeds calculation and the terms of the already known by opening thinking up to its own outside (Clark 9).
- 2 I take the phrase “Greater Romantic Lyric” from M. H. Abrams. See his discussion of the genre in “S (...)
5Donnelly’s commitment to this style of aporetic thinking is already evident in his first volume Twenty-Seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit (2003), one of the most exhilarating and disconcerting poetic debuts of recent years. Effortlessly assimilating a range of postmodern techniques into a revamped version of the Greater Romantic Lyric—unreliable narration, hyperbolic self-referentiality, stylistic heteroglossia, promiscuous mixing of high and low culture, teasing metaphysical excursions, dizzying use of cinematic jump-cuts and dissolves, and so on—he immediately announces himself as someone capable of breathing expansive new life into established forms.2 His acerbic wit catalyses poems which variously recalibrate sonata form for the culture of electronic simultaneity (“Sonata Ex Machina”), ventriloquize the metaphysical Keatsian Ode to satirize the creative bankruptcy of rote poetry workshop exercises (“Natural causes! The very phrase is like the punch / that made the birthday boy puke up a very / sudden mess upon Felice”) or lament the decline of romantic iconoclasm into the mannerism of a minor intellectual style: “His thought appalled us. It bore the mark of having strayed too deep into the company of others” (18, 12). Typical of Donnelly’s early writing, as these examples suggest, is a radical commitment to artifice, a bond evident both in the volume’s theatrical title which imagines each of its twenty-seven constituent poems as “props” in the production or staging of a lifetime (Eine Lebenszeit) and the bravura opening of the eponymous lyric itself:
Let there be lamps of whatever variety
presents itself on the trash heaps. Let chance
determine how many, but take pains
to use only low-watt bulbs, and keep the lion’s share
flickering throughout the performance.
In particular, one gooseneck should pulsate religiously
on the leeward corner of an escritoire,
which is a writing table, or an unhinged door
suspended on sawhorses. These will be spattered
in a clash of pigments, signifying history.
Dust is general over all the interior.
You are very tired. You are very weary.
On the floor, one carpet, its elaborate swirling
recalling the faces of wind on old maps.
And let there be maps, at least half reimagining
The world according to a scattered century:
a shambles, patched (3).
- 3 Donnelly reflects in some detail upon poetic artifice and non-fungibility in his Boston Review inte (...)
6Let there be lamps (not light), let art find transcendence in “trash” and the everyday sublime, let art recover the aleatory energies of contingency and chance, let art “pulsate religiously” at the heart of daily life, let’s recall the irreducible textuality of historical representation (“These will be spattered /in a clash of pigments signifying history”), let art invent new “maps” to order the chaos of a scattered century—glimpsed here is a first sketch of an aesthetic model of experience that informs all of Donnelly’s subsequent writing. Donnelly cleaves to this model because thinking about art necessarily involves us in questions of perspective and problems of interpretation that highlight the historical contingency of our value judgments while the emphasis poetic artifice in particular places upon the material properties of language, its inhospitality to ideas that can simply be extracted from its forms and phrasing, offers an experience of the singular or non-fungible (“a grace note / that little something extra”) which might resist thought’s tendency to congeal into cliché, dogma and received opinion and extend affection and perception beyond their subjection to instrumental reason and technological rationality.3 The aesthetic always retains this radical potentiality for Donnelly even in those moments, like our own, when it risks absorption into a culture of the image and the simulacrum that threatens to rob it of critical force and oppositional energy. “I am by nature / made a mimicker, by miracle adept at taking in / and flinging back,” he writes in “Accidental Species,” one of the volume’s central poems, and we only grasp the full measure of Donnelly’s seemingly inexhaustible verbal inventiveness when we also see it as perverse mimicry of a postmodern culture which perpetuates itself by the relentless reproduction of simulated novelty and the cannibalization of past styles (38). Indeed, to read Twenty-Seven Props is to be powerfully reminded of Fredric Jameson’s critique of postmodernity as the cultural logic of late capitalism where aesthetic innovation has now been seamlessly integrated into the sphere of commodity production (Jameson 4). The emergence of a new mode of cultural production in which the ceaseless demand for innovation is increasingly detached from historical consciousness and original expression is the satirical target of “Fanny Fowler’s Poetry and Dioramas Workshop” whose participants spend their time constructing elaborate models of the world from other people’s poems (Jack’s “forest primeval” a la Longfellow showcasing an “Evangeline / of the five-and-dime” as a clay figurine, Donna’s homage to “Goblin Market” an elaborate fruitery) cheerfully unconcerned with the rigors of aesthetic autonomy or the need to cultivate a signature style: “I have a need to express myself artistically / I don’t care how” (18). Much more bleakly, the systemic demand for imaginative novelty regardless of subjective nuance or any residual sense of a common historical lifeworld periodically provokes moments of creative crisis when these poems suddenly break down, paralyzed by the fear that the system now speaks directly through them, reconfiguring their responses to its own productive rhythms, making them the machine of its own acquisitive drives. As “Sonata Ex Machina” laments “The desired machine /will start itself and stop itself, will fuel itself / and fuck itself. It will right itself when thrown /off-kilter, and it will even change its own /damn filter. It would make itself if it had to, but it don’t” before despairingly concluding “What are the traits that delineate the human? / I am not my own machine” (7-8).
7In The Cloud Corporation Donnelly develops these concerns while giving them a much more explicit political focus. Here he turns his attention to a period of recent American history punctuated by 9/11 and the War on Terror, the intensifying climate emergency, the explosion of social inequality precipitated by neoliberalism and the increasing corporate capture of the state symbolized by the 2010 Supreme Court decision in “Citizens United” conferring political speech rights upon corporations. A glance at the titles page gives a flavor of its prevailing atmosphere: “The Malady That Took the Place of Thinking,” “To His Debt,” “Partial Inventory of Airborne Debris,” “Chapter for Breathing Air Among the Waters,” “Fantasies of Management,” “No Mission Statement, No Strategic Plan.” What unites these poems is their common emphasis upon the entanglement of contemporary experience with forms of domination—the domination of politics by corporate interests, the domination of popular feeling by a culture of fear rooted in anxieties about crime, terrorism and homeland security, the technological domination of nature, the domination of desire by the commodity form—which internalize social power at the core of the subject itself. Donnelly’s response to this entanglement is to reimagine lyric space as a kind of limit situation in which a subject is suddenly brought to the very edge of its own understanding, compelled to choose between maintaining its reactive identification with forms of authority that abolish its freedom in the act of proclaiming it or else moving tentatively beyond such unhappy complicity, a movement which, while often experienced as loss, disenchantment or disorientation, might offer a glimpse of freedom irreducible to compulsion.
8The volume’s two opening poems present two different experiences of this limit situation. Here is the beginning of “The New Intelligence”:
After knowledge extinguished the last of the beautiful
fires our worship had failed to prolong, we walked
back home through pedestrian daylight, to a residence
humbler than the one left behind. A door without mystery,
a room without theme. For the hour that we spend
complacent at the window overlooking the garden,
we observe an arrangement in rust and grey-green,
a vagueness at the center whose slow, persistent
movements some sentence might explain if we had time
or strength for sentences. To admit that what falls
falls solitarily, lost in the permanent dusk of the particular.
That the mind that fear and disenchantment fatten
come to boss the world around it, morbid as the damp-
fingered guest who rearranges the cheeses the minute the host
turns to fix her a cocktail. A disease of the will[.] (3)
9Remarkable about these lines is the curious tonal ambivalence occasioned by their mixture of oracular and quotidian details. The scene is the altogether familiar, a stroll home through the American suburbs, so what should we make of the grandiose opening subordinate clause whose elegiac abstraction (“After knowledge”) and tacit reverentiality (“worship”) seem to belong to another poem entirely? Yet if the amplitude of Donnelly’s idiom teeters upon the brink of parody it also conserves a singular or exorbitant element (“mystery”) incommensurable with the unreflective presumptions of average everydayness which condemn us to doubleness in the wrong sense (ironically remarked here by the bathetic redundancy of “walking”/”pedestrian”) where thought is framed in advance by the norm and the rule or enclosed within the reactive feedback loop of a “fear” system that can only conceive the future as the defense of already established interests (like the rights of capital or the hegemony of corporate elites). Bred in such “complacency” we only dimly perceive that this scene also holds some other quality, a “vagueness at the center” which might forestall the return of the predictable and pregiven by opening us to ways of encountering the world undetermined by system or end. Another name for this quality in Donnelly’s work is art or the aesthetic whose innate purposelessness (its aversion to fixed function) and power of singularization (beginning from minute particulars of experience rather than ideas and abstractions) resists the “permanent dusk of the particular” by refusing the peremptory conversion of “knowledge” into ideology and value into exchange value. What Donnelly calls the “new intelligence” is neither the extirpation of mystery in the name of reason nor the triumph of intuition over the concept but a momentary pause or break in the rhythm of perception (“slowness”) that allows us sufficient distance from the strength of our “sentences” (both what we believe and are sentenced to believe) to confront the ground of our own truth. Inhabiting this distance necessarily means residing at a certain remove from some of the poem’s most declarative statements: it may be true that “the goal of objectivity depends upon one’s faith / in the accuracy of one’s perceptions, which is to say / a confidence in the purity of the perceiving instrument,” but the goal isn’t simply objectivity but rather that power of responsible decision only achieved, Donnelly’s final sentence suggests, by “living dizzily /hereafter in reality,” implicated in but never circumscribed by the world’s protocols and procedures or the prior prescription of our own best interests.
10The peril of lacking this singular conception of world is the subject of “The Malady that Took the Place of Thinking”:
When I close my eyes its voice insists we’re close
to solving once and for all and with panache
those mysteries to which we’ve been applying
ourselves so much these days, almost to the exclusion
of all that I had taken to be the case, factwise.
There seemed to be only one world to adhere to
but now I can see how there really isn’t any, just roads
with signs directing further, towards and away
from the same humiliating noplace you already are. (5)
11Here the simple grammatical expedient of a possessive adjective without subject (“its”) crystallizes the ethical catastrophe of a world without world. When I close my eyes a voice whispers to me promising an end to life’s mysteries, culminating perhaps in a genuinely emancipatory moment, a glimpse of the true universal of freedom and justice, although the presumptive finality of “once and for all” induces momentary hesitation by simultaneously envisaging existence from the vantage of the closed system or total society, a suspicion deepened as the poem unfolds by the realization that this voice is no human voice but rather the ideological mouthpiece of the military-industrial complex during the Vietnam War. Something of this doubt imbues the subject who initially opposes the system’s claim to totality even as it experiences this refusal as reduction to the “humiliating noplace” of social abjection. In fact what looks like abjection is better understood as that style of negative thinking which refuses the primacy of the whole or the “one solution” (the subjection of social relation to instrumentality, war production of the market mechanism) by passing through totality to the particular concealed within it. Such tarrying with the negative, resisting the liquidation of the particular by any positive ideological project, extends the promise of a much more generous conception of world as the unfolding complex of actual and possible relationships that matter to human beings (Dahlstrom 822). “If it looks like I’m thinking, I’m not, / I’m waiting, and I can wait forever to find out why,” the speaker reflects at the poem’s midpoint, but the problem, of course, is that thought only preserves its properly antithetical function by a continual labor of the negative capable of preserving the non-identical element in identity. Suspending this labor—choosing “waiting” over “thinking” rather than inscribing this aporetic moment within thinking itself—offers no point of resistance to the progressively self-totalizing nature of modern society in which domination and capitalist production are indissolubly intertwined. Donnelly dramatizes this failure in the stunning reversal of the final two stanzas where the speaker’s internalization of domination becomes synonymous with a state of ethical worldlessness in which the My Lai massacre cannot be mourned, cannot even be thought to have happened, since from the perspective of imperial policy its victims were never human in the first place:
If it looked like I was sorry to look at that photograph
of women and children shot down by an American
battalion on a bright clear day in March, look again:
with no world to adhere to, there can be no photograph,
no women, no children, and certainly no battalion
shooting when there was nothing there to begin with.
- 4 Kennan’s actual remark was “The greatest danger that we can befall us in coping with this problem o (...)
12The connection between internalized domination and ethical violence quickly becomes a major theme of the volume. Such violence, as with “Malady,” is recurrently conceived in a double sense as an injury imposed upon others and a form of psychic self-mutilation which blocks empathic identification with another’s situation and suffering. So “Clair De Lune” exploits the villanelle’s intricate recursive structure to show how the “libertarian” interventionism of the War on Terror threatens to replicate in its protagonists the nihilistic energy and sadistic cruelty of the forces it opposes. Taking its cue from a misquotation of George Kennan’s famous “Long Telegram” on American strategic responses to the threat of Soviet communism (“The greatest that that can befall us as a nation is to become like those who seek to destroy us”),4 the poem’s ornate repetition of the opening tercet’s first and third lines (“We revolt ourselves; we disgust and annoy us”/ “We become like those who seek to destroy us”) presents the inward turning of outwardly directed domination as a mode of ethical suicide which progresses through stages of bewildered self-alienation (“The way we look at us lately chills us to the core”), nihilistic purposelessness (“We push us lately into small tasks that employ us / unrewardingly on purpose. We tire, we bore”) and orgiastic violence (“We cat-and-mouse, roughhouse, inflatable-toy-us”) before culminating in an abyssal arabesque where torture, pleasure, triumph and moral defeat become imbricated and equivalent terms:
If in triumph, our defeat; in torture our joys is.
Some confusion so deep I can’t fathom anymore.
We appall ourselves; we disgust and annoy us
Into those we become we who seek to destroy us (14).
13Throughout Clouds Donnelly locates one source of this ethical torsion in modern technology’s power of objectification which turns human subjects into manipulable objects. “Partial Inventory of Airborne Debris” examines this power at work by surveying the sadistic voyeurism of American military personnel at Abu Ghraib prison who used cell phones to record their abuse of Iraqi detainees compelled to “stand / precariously on boxes” then “ridden on like donkeys, / smeared in feces, stacked / one on top of the other/ for a photo to prolong / the swell an accomplishment / like that engenders” (18). Remarkable about this poem is its disconcerting combination of appalling intimacy, each succeeding image offering another trophy snapshot of outraged humanity, and affectless narrative tonality mirroring the desensitization to human suffering occasioned by its technological framing. The baleful effects of the technological capture of social experience emerge in Donnelly’s duplicitous handling of the key term “detained” which describes both the victim’s violated body and the benumbed and benighted state of the purveyor of violence who high on drugs and secure in his virtual remove from the lure of human sympathy is detained from any real ethical reckoning with the consequences of his actions (“It’s like being /detained indefinitely / but with three meals a day / on a tropical island!”).
14Several of Donnelly’s regnant concerns converge in the titular sequence “The Cloud Corporation” which explores the corrosive effect upon our common life of a newly transcendent form of centralised power represented by late neoliberalism and neoliberal imperialism. Implicit in the poem’s title is an echo of the volume’s epigraph from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest where the sudden parting of clouds bestows a momentary vision of life redeemed from coercion and constraint:
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices,
that if I had then wak’d after long sleep,
will make me sleep again, and then in dreaming,
the clouds methought would open, and show riches,
ready to drop upon me, that when I wak’d,
I cried to dream again. (3. 2. 132-99)
15Donnelly’s poem reworks the same conceit to much more disconsolate ends. Each of its seven sections begins with the same four words (“The clouds part revealing”) but rather than imaginative “riches” or the manifestation of divine grace as a “pillar of cloud” here the act of rending repetitively reveals a new image of secular transcendence embodied in the hieratic figure of the “chief executive officer of clouds” (30). Across the sequence the “cloud corporation” describes a new neoliberal architecture encompassing finance capitalism (where “human speculation” becomes merely a “business / project undertaken in a bid to acquire and retain / control of the formation and movement of clouds”), the national security state (which uses the i-cloud and digital technology for purposes of domestic political surveillance and military adventures abroad to “keep clouds safe” or extend the investment opportunities of corporate elites), and expanding control of the democratic process by corporate “dark money” encouraged by the 2010 Citizens United decision. What response can be imagined to this neoliberal dispositif whose powers becomes ever more immanent to the social field? Retreat into private life (to “wander lonely as a cloud”) offers no redemption since these powers are increasingly interiorized within the subject itself who now contemplates the world “surround sound on, all my money made / in lieu of conversation,” and anyway such principled iconoclasm is already perfectly compatible with the smooth running of the corporate machine, a point made at the end of section 1 which simply folds the desire for social subtraction into the system efficiency of the neoliberal workplace which instantaneously effects your disappearance “when all they want from you is your station / cleared of its personal effects please and vanish” (8). Against the pious fantasy of the “advocates of clouds” in section 5 that these new powers might miraculously be turned to emancipatory ends (like foreign interventionism in the name of “democracy”) Donnelly opposes a dash of cold realism by blending his words with phrases culled from H. L. Mencken’s “The Cult of Hope” which famously argued that reformist desires to ameliorate moribund systems from within often “only feed an optimism that ultimately precludes any change” (Mueller 307). Instead the task is to part the clouds differently through what Donnelly calls a “flash of autonomous, ardent, local brainwork” or singular leap in logic capable of changing the terms of the situation itself.
16The necessity of this singular leap is shown in section 6 which explores the reconstitution of social reality by the transcendent power of neoliberal capitalism:
The clouds part revealing a congregation of bodies
united into one immaterial body, a fictive person
around whom the air is blurred with money, force
from which much harm will come, to whom my welfare
matters nothing. I sense without turning the light
from their wings, their eyes; they preen themselves
on the fire escape, the windowsill, their pink feet
vulnerable—a mistake to think of them that way.
If I turn around, the room might be full of wings
capable of acting, in many respects, as a single being,
which is to say that I myself may be the source of
what I sense, but am no less powerless to change it.
17Crucial to this passage is the transformation of the corporation into a “fictive person” hollowed out by the profit motive and hostile to the forms of social sympathy which constitute our ethical and political commons. The threat to our commons simultaneously appears in the subjection of the body politic to the “immaterial body” of corporate power and our willing participation in the reification of social relationships in a society universally structured by the commodity form: indeed “I myself may be the source of /what I sense” since I am so entirely “engrossed” by commodity culture I can only imagine any movement beyond it as the absolute destitution of value (“and if I picture myself outside of it / it isn’t me anymore, but a parasite cast out, inviable”). Paradoxically, however, this experience of destitution opens the possible freedom of a future not wholly bound to commodity fetishism since to exist as the cloud corporation’s “parasite” is to inhabit a double position inside and outside the system as the “inviable” element whose expulsion reciprocally guarantees the system’s purity and internal coherence. Parasitism in this regard resembles Kristeva’s idea of the abject, the “expelled and used-up parts of the self which signify that the self is not separate and unitary, but involved in constant processes of dissolution and exchange with the world” (Reeve and Kerridge 9-10). Such processes, in imperiling the subject’s identity as both inside and outside, self and other, have the power to propel it beyond the delusion of autonomous subjectivity already surpassed by the corporation’s rebirth as a transcendental subject towards an idea of the commons which refuses the reduction of social life to the reified object of corporate control. Donnelly’s recent work explores this idea in the form of the multitude or what he calls in the title of his third volume the problem of the many.
18With the appearance of The Problem of the Many (2019) Donnelly’s poetry acquired an even darker aspect. Alongside the continuing crisis of ecological catastrophe and neoliberal global governance his writing now had to take account of the rise of post-truth politics and the Presidency of Donald Trump whose habits of mind and speech he brilliantly anatomizes in “The Death of Truth”: “But my own value fluctuates, falling up and down / with the markets and with attitudes and with feelings, / even my own feelings, but I try. Studies have shown / how I try” (121). Elsewhere Donnelly’s poetry inspects a landscape where war has metastasized into a permanent social relation (“the not knowing when I was, if or where we were at war with /and for what reason now”), capital inscribes itself in the affective textures of everyday life (“I couldn’t remember any of it any more than I could feel / the corporate brotherhood at work among my breakfast flakes”) and domination of nature is inextricably tied to mastery over other human beings: “the sea is blurred brocade /on a sofa in a basement a face is forced into” (15, 8, 18). But the volume is also bookended by two poems which dream of transforming life under advanced capitalism through the fashioning of a new political body. “What is Real” begins by considering the largest question: is it still worth continuing human existence given the universal entanglement of civilization with domination or better to “surrender” by releasing “the sum of our particles back into the flow” where they might coalesce into forms of common life that no longer take the human as the index of all value? Such surrender necessarily returns us to a plane of existence prior to language and Donnelly relishes the imaginative paradox of conceiving experience “subatomic-style” in waves of perception that scatter apart the moment we measure them in words. Yet this comic dexterity also conceals a vein of utopian longing which sees in the dissolution of the “human” the possibility of “a common source of being” or style of political vision that might reimagine life from particular bodies and connections rather than the global power of capital (1).
19This vision takes centre stage in the volume’s final poem tellingly titled “The Human” which returns to Aristotle’ view of “man” as the animal that is always more than an animal since its gift of speech opens the possibility of properly political life where custom and value are commonly determined. Politics begins here not at the ideological level of persons, classes and interests but rather in breathing, sound and rhythm (“to adapt / parts of the body intended for breathing into a means to /force air into sounds, sounds into words, words into prayers of / thanks to the sun”), the repertoire of affects and intensities that first enables a group to perceive itself as a common body. In returning to primitive life Donnelly reimagines the political body in the image of the multitude Hardt and Negri describe as the network of singular differences which produce commonality through ever expanding circuits of cooperation and collaboration (Hardt and Negri 105). This constituent power of the multitude is always around us even now in New York under the ”imperial sun,” its presence underscored by another of Donnelly’s signature reversals where one of our primitive ancestors stepping from a cave in thought is simultaneously figured as a glimpse of the coming democratic subject who will join in shared communion with the “many” when “some new / distortion in the throat” or form of political expression precipitates the movement toward a new social commons (198).
20To think in terms of multitude, Hardt and Negri observe, is to relocate life on the plane of immanence by conceiving the body politic as a multiplicity of singular differences that cannot be reduced to a unity, identity or transcendental horizon (xiv). Consequently, the power of the multitude is never given in advance but only emerges in the continuous encounters of bodies and the affective cooperative and collaborative networks of social production (350). The constituent power of the multitude is the explicit focus of “Solvitur Ambulando” which conjectures the need in our state of continual political emergency to “commit to a new kind of take on what it means to be / composed, and of how the properties /of the collective won’t necessarily reflect those of its constituents” but are “miraculously” transformed by the play of different differences that constitute life in common (32). Donnelly underlines the ethical necessity of this understanding of the collective body in the titular poem “The Problem of the Many” which contrasts an immanent vision of life as the action and reaction of forces with the terrifying transcendence of Alexander the Great’s imperial imagination which violently remakes the world in his own image. He takes the phrase “the problem of the many” from Peter Unger’s philosophical puzzling of identity construction and the metaphysics of material constitution which returns us again to the speculative realm of clouds. Here is David Lewis’s synopsis of the puzzle:
Think of a cloud—just one cloud, and around it a clear blue sky. Seen from the ground, the cloud may seem to have a sharp boundary. Not so. The cloud is a swarm of water droplets. At the outskirts of the cloud, the density of the droplets falls off. Eventually they are so few and far between that we may hesitate to say that the outlying droplets are still part of the cloud at all; perhaps we might better say only that they are near the cloud. But the transition is gradual. Many surfaces are equally good candidates to be the boundary of the cloud. Therefore many aggregates of droplets, some more inclusive and some less inclusive (and some inclusive in different ways than others), are equally good candidates to be the cloud. Since they have equal claim, how can we say that the cloud is one of these aggregates rather than another? But if all of them count as clouds, then we have many clouds rather than one. And if none of them count, each one being ruled out because of the competition from the others, then we have no cloud. How is it, then, that we have just one cloud? And yet we do. (Lewis 3)
21Donnelly uses Unger’s questioning to dramatize two different approaches to the constitution of the material body: the power of transcendence which imposes a subject, substance or being from which all other identities and social relations are determined, and the idea of life as multitude or intensive multiplicity which resists transcendence through its capacity to transform itself through each new encounter and interaction. The first is personified by Alexander the Great who is enraged upon entering Corinth to be rebuffed by the philosopher Diogenes:
opening at last his eyes to the long
shadow the king cast, said in the company of many the only
thing he wanted at the moment was for the king to quit blocking
his last drops of afternoon sun, which had until quite recently
been blocked by many clouds, themselves composed of many
drops or droplets, a variant whose suffix serves to diminish
the small thing further, if not in actuality, then at least in one’s
perception. (40)
22To draw a border around clouds, Donnelly writes later in the poem, is always to make a claim about the nature of reality, and Alexander’s response to appearing a mere droplet in the philosopher’s eye is to reduce the rule of everyone (“many clouds”) to the rule of one by unleashing upon Corinth an orgy of imperial violence. Against this violent transcendence Donnelly poses the counter-power of poetic language which marks the limits of the absolute and self-identical through what Jacques Derrida calls the “bottomless undeterminability” in the structure of metaphor (Derrida 224). This counterforce appears in virtuosic displays of poetic mereology which unsettle the borders of sovereign bodies as they “smear out of focus” to reveal the multiple histories contained within them: the way, for example, images of water droplets recall the “drops of enzymatic fluid” expressed from murex snails in the manufacture of Tyrian dye which take us back by way of Tyre to memories of imperial violence, mass suffering (so many snails for a single drop of dye) and the expropriative supply routes that suture ancient and modern colonial economies (41). Throughout these transitions Donnelly acknowledges the persistence of those forces whose drive to impose absolute identity upon the world is crystallized in the history of indigo from its discovery during Alexander’s Asian excursions and subsequent cultivation “in Indian soil under British rule” to its reappearance in synthetic form in Germany “whose Wehrmacht marched as far west as the Bay of Biscay” (43). Thoughts about sovereignty are never “free from all anxiety” because politics begins in a border dispute over who and what counts as properly human life, a point echoed in the elision of “clouds” and “crowds” (“And if I include another / droplet or leave another out, now there’s three, now ten, now many, / now an infinity of clouds crowds”) that reframes the problem of the many in terms of the geopolitics of migration and the ethics of hospitality (45). Because to challenge the contemporary calculus of command necessarily means to reimagine the question of political sovereignty Donnelly increasingly divides the second half of the poem between two distinct styles of writing, a series of affectless declarative sentences mimicking the social transcendence of state power (“It will attempt to control the flow/of experience. It will establish relatively fixed points in its extended / network in light of what patterns it picks up in its information intake”) and a multiplicity of equivocating and self-questioning transitive verb phrases expressively tuned to possibilities of life no longer conceived in the image of imperial authority or absolute identity: “To open oneself to more will take more /effort than architecture, or as much, but in reverse: a dismantling/ into expanse, definitionless, unexploitable, which is to say as enemy / of the state, just as Diogenes was.” To be an enemy of the state in this sense is to be improper in the name of freedom, to become monstrous not like Alexander (“He was a monster”) but rather as “a steadfast becoming other than that /which you are” through forms of collective desire capable of organizing the commons into a new social body (82). Such are the hopes and stakes of Donnelly’s writing.
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