The Communicative Community

... only here speech still evades quantification, escapes the enumerating sign, and follows language towards its ear, toward natality, which is anybody's. --Lisa Robertson, Nilling ... in the spectacle our own linguistic nature comes back to us inverted. --Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community What we attempted was an impossible task and it disassembled our community. It pointed us back to the arbitrary category "women," to the impossibility of communal support under current structural conditions, and finally to the misidentification of what we do here in the Bay Area together, pretty much weekly, in private living rooms and nonprofit spaces, at summits and on softball fields, and in tiny afterparties, at formal lectures, at self-organized conferences or university ones, what happens at our private desks or propped up in bed or during stolen time at work, on transit, or whilst ignoring the kid, what happens at a cafe as every American subject with a laptop also ignores the humans around them, what gets transmitted or performed or whispered or sung or given as a gift to the rest of us--it pointed us toward our misidentification of that as "community." This is deeply emotional. Insofar as the history of poetry suggests interiority, each week we visited each other's phantasmagorical living rooms--and with Bay Area real estate, most living rooms double as bedrooms. But our over-intimacy was also doing capitalism's dirty work, over-caring for each other verbally in a way which never actually approached a lived enmeshment, but was more like an administrative check-in in an exceedingly couch- and pillow-lined social space. And not just us. New Yorkers do it, too. Probably others all over the US. This is what social life looks like between a collection of subjects. M. M. Bakhtin writes about the carnival as the festival in which the people turn power on its head one day each year, when they burn an effigy of the king. If some of us imagined this is what poetry's reordering of language--the very material of law--was doing already, the East Bay Poetry Summit would ramp up this possibility and invite guests. So the summit is when the details of a series of recent assaults came out: a handful of rapes, a push, a hairpull, some domestic violence, a slap. Some of the perpetrators were lesser known to some of us, but some were good friends. Some were known letches who we'd been getting consistent misogynist vibes from, but some organized in the center of our community. (1) Our address to each other took place on a register so direct and activated I am not sure it can be called "conversation. " It was infused with disturbing amounts of sunlight, wavering thickly in a potent combination of clarified information, lament, fury, reception, debate and militance. More kept coming and more. It spilled over to nonstop email and texts, and so overtook the lives of several Bay area poets in the summer of 2014. Many of us spent the summer physiologically transformed. The season preceeding, Dia exhibited a Carl Andre retrospective with no mention of Ana Mendieta's death and Elliot Roger massacred several Santa Barbara students in accordance with his misogynist and racist manifesto. Thus, it certainly could not have been a "bad summer" as many began to call it, like the prostitute euphemism "bad date." Rather, it was the summer that an active, political, emotional, experimental, critical, deeply serious poetics scene, with anti-capitalist, anti-racist, feminist commitments looked directly at untouched, entrenched patriarchy. I have been reading all day about communication, reading around it for months, actually, in order to make a case for a de-sublimated, non-language driven politics which exceeds the horizon of a social justice under current contexts of power: Politics beyond representation. When we posted our statement to Pastebin and disseminated it by Facebook and email I might have quoted Alphonso Lingis from The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common, when he states, "the technology that eliminates the noise also eliminates the communication. …