Chiffren der Transzendenz; or, Almost Persuaded by North Korean Hold-Out at Bus-stop: Carte Blanche, by Drew Milne (Prest Roots Press, 1995, 22pp., £6)
CB consists of 36 stanzas of eight lines each of six syllables. The publisher informs me that a 'companion volume', possibly called The Slaughter Bench, may soon be published by Milne himself. Milne - born 1964, and from Edinburgh -is by now hot stuff on the small press scene, as a first book (Sheet Mettle) is immediately followed by a second (this one), and another pamphlet (How Peace Came), within the year - unheard-of figures in this market. Milne's élan and brilliant solution of formal problems richly deserved this success. Milne is the same age as Simon Armitage, and the next couple of decades may see them both as leaders, Armitage commanding the official patronage and Milne the intellectual respect.
Milne is attached to certain traditions of German Marxist philosophy (Adorno: "Whoever pleads for the maintenance of this radically culpable and shabby culture becomes its accomplice, while the man who says no to culture is directly furthering the barbarism which our culture showed itself to be", Negative Dialectics) and of English Left poetry (the "Cambridge" school). Indeed, some people believe in a Holy Family of Prynne, Wilkinson (probably also Mengham), and Milne. Another reaction was "Oh, a Wilkinson clone." The arrival around 1988 of Lawson, Marriott, and Milne - the Men in Black? - sweepingly redefined the Cambridge Style by recycling it and so giving abrupt notice of its temporal limitedness. This revival coincided with the rise of sampling to the foreground of pop music. 1987 saw the first JAMM (Justified Ancients of Mu Mu) album, although the most scandalous episode was the confessed sampling of John Bonham's drum sound on "When the Levee Breaks" for the dominant texture of "Relax", a 1984 no.1 by Frankie Goes to Hollywood. 'Paid in Full', Cold Cut's delirious fairground-cento of samples, was a hit in 1988. The new technology, let's recall, was a box (by Fairlight, Australia) that would capture sounds from any signal on studio tape, and allow them to be tonally modulated, multiplied, repeated in rhythmic patterns, etc., and mixed with other sound sources. The resemblances to Marriott and Milne's analysis of the Cambridge style into its component parts, and relinking of those parts into new original sequences, are obvious. Milne isn't a million miles from the techno-Situationism of The KLF.
How did this technique affect the nature of the works? Citation and automatic generation outsourced or set aside the human personality. But the solidity of the program-originated dance beats was permissive, allowing improvisation and strange junctures to be fitted into the patterns of the new track. Also in Milne and Marriott we find a comforting regularity of line-break and syntactic motion, subsuming the apparent meaninglessness and disconnectedness. Without an editing suite, they had an extraordinary ability to fit phrases into smooth metrical and syntactic cadences; a technique borrowed from Prynne. But we also find the personality in question as source of patterns; Marriott is probably laying down the laws of a tragic and authoritarian theology, insofar as meaning is discernible; Milne is more blatantly absent, and some of his poems (notably in Satyrs and Mephitic Angels, 1992) are made up of quotes from other voices, although these "samples" are distorted and sarcastically inflected. Satyrs does read like Cold Cut, a fruit salad of snipped-up and cut-in snatches of signal.
The poet in question is chilly, hot-headed, disputatious, anti-authoritarian, authoritarian, cerebral, censurious, side-taking, indignant, pessimistic, intransigent, withdrawn, self-confident, contestatory, idealistic, moral in aspirations.(The voice constructible from the inarticulate, paralinguistic, gestures of the poems is disputatious, cerebral, reproving, comminatory.) But a presented self which speaks to us and animates the goings-on is absent from this poem, which is left blank; specific meaning is hidden behind a kind of cloud of shifts and distortions. Aufhebung? His chiffrierte Sprache is like techno music, developed to a last extreme and impossible to listen to. He definitely kicks bottom in live performance (a racket hack writes), causing teeming squealing turmoil in the mosh pits.
Carte blanche is a blank sheet whose unconstrained power derives from the arbitrary sovereignty of the government issuing it; a kind of écriture publique. Carte is an archaic French legal term; blank means unfilled. It could be taken as an empty sheet on which to design a new society; when equity would have sovereignty. Or, as the paper on which the null acts of the apparent State are written.
There is no discernible meaning at any point. We see a phantasmagoria of penumbras, scorings of deleted resemblances, the text regressing back to pure whiteness: of which Carte Blanche may be an ironic summary. The gratification of grasping the purpose of a phrase is endlessly withheld. Gratification stalks therefore into centre stage. Along with it, the figure of the writer's authority, setting the rules of dialogue. The validation of any projected sight-of-meaning would be redundancy: how the compagination of the text around it confirms it. Withholding confirmation technically increases the meaningness of the text, since no association is excluded at any point. It would be an error to see some kind of richesse, some welcoming democratic pluralism; gratification and evocation are rigorously withheld. It could be that Milne is constantly being faced with demands to identify, the everyday coin of social life, and refusing them. This would place the poet's subjectivity at the centre of the text, albeit in an occluded and negating reduction. We can only comply by negation of this art, 'radically culpable and shabby' on its own premises. There is a retrievable structure in certain denatured phrases which we could equate with scorn and sarcasm. So an unnamed speaker - the ideologue of a consumer-business civilization? - is supplying words which are being bent out of recognition, taken out of circulation. What is cited, is negated.
Be out of this ear shot
to a least spirit level,
shaking rag hands off
through silvery vibrato
or bone shed languish
to quid whistle, where
languish suggests a rustle
and there is none nor rime.
(stanza 1) I find it is only possible to process this by thinking about the wordfield to which the words belong. Vague affiliations can be seen but not articulate meaning. Thus "vibrato" and "whistle" both belong to the field "vocalisation", and so vocalisation is somehow in play in the stanza, which might be an exordium, where the poet indicates the genre of the poem and tells us what to expect. languish suggests a rustle/ and there is none nor rime: 'rustle' may conceivably be the "froissement du langage" evoked by Barthes, in a dull culinary way; the couplet would then be saying "don't expect evocative associations or ornament". "Languish" would then be the poet's subjectivity, in the form of melancholy, equally imputed by us but not really locatable inside the text. However, such interpretations are unlikely, because, if the poet wanted to say something, he would have told us what it was. "least spirit level" could be a pun on spirit level (a mason's or carpenter's tool) and "low spirits"; the punning would, if so, be part of the seared and withdrawn affect. But why would the poet evacuate the articulate structures of language and withdraw into puns, something attenuated, epigonal, and manneristic? surely this can't be true. "quid whistle" may link to "penny whistle", a kind of instrument, used by English peasants for folk songs. "languish" and "least spirits" may belong to the same semantic thread; being then the presence of the artist; this indifferent state would explain the lack of emotional content of the poem. "Be out of this ear shot" might mean "carry meaning to where the reader can't possibly find it". Given the tone of "vocalisation", "rag" might adhere to "ragtime" and "bone" to "bone flute" (cf. "tibia").
Everything is imagery, if only because nothing appears under its natural identity. The surface of the text is therefore a pictographic gewgaw peddler's tray. It offers objects and textures, which are primary things; what would be a merely decorative surface if not for the ominous withholding of mood and resolution.
Sentence structure is articulate throughout, neatly distributing segments across the line structure. This is another decorative element; syntax implies logical and semantic relationships which just aren't there. Subjects and objects are unrelated to each other. To this extent it is surreal. It is a kind of trick, an opulently wrought lattice of the postiche. This attaches the poet to the extravagant and wide 1980s. Much the same applies to the distribution of words across lines and stanzas, a set of relations and emphases which systematically cheat the ear.
The yardstick for testing read-in meaning is the visible intentions of the author. Where intention is occluded and withheld, there is no ground; everything is left in Aufhebung. This is a deflationary spiral, because the read-in meaning is how we construct the author's intent from the very first moment. In architecture, one speaks of scenographic effects to distinguish mere one-dimensional surfaces from shaped and modulated space; in this sense, the author's intent supplies the third dimension of poetry. Under a regime of defection and occlusion, the interpretative act of projecting the illusory space is vexed and problematised; a phantom space shimmers unresolved around the decorative fa‡ade. We cannot tell whether the film has stopped or whether it is showing objects that have wilfully frozen. The poet seems neither to accept the collusion which produces the social order, nor that which produces three-dimensional space, nor the illusion of a human being speaking in the page, nor shared meaning emerging from words. Instead we see a fearful sucking wound; the disproof of the bourgeois system or the poet's distaste for the reader.
I am used to texts in foreign languages where slow and painstaking work is cumulatively enlightening. Milne's text is rebarbative, but three days of working through it offer no gratification, nor any hidden pattern. It's more like being immersed in cold washing-up water. Milne is totally uninterested in his material; he lacks all enthusiasm; he is uninterested in sharing with the reader; he does not wish to express any life values; he has no wish to process experience. He is not interested in appearances, or in moments of beauty. His aims lie elsewhere.
It's conventional to make a distinction between sensuous art and intellectual art, where the latter gratifies the rich tissues of the cerebral cortex. It's not apparent to me that this poetry appeals to the intellect. Milne is as bored by argument as by, say, recording the play of sunlight on leaves. The text lacks chains of reasoning, precise qualification, numbers, comparison of ideas with reality or different ideas. It doesn't throw up hypotheses, qualify itself, or show uncertainty. It's contentious, but excludes ideas. I don't think that this poetry in any way resembles Prynne's, which despite surface similarities surely has a movement and a calmness, even a grandeur, of which Milne shows no trace. Part of the problem is versification; Milne's lineation is mechanical and graceless.
The disapproval and disdain with which Milne treats the world suggests that he is being made some kind of offer, which he finds an insult to his dignity. The core of this book is Drew withholding assent. This reminds me of 'Almost Persuaded' (1968), in which Tammy Wynette eventually rejects an offer of fabulous adultery with a glamorous stranger met in a bar. The song is predicated on Tammy, conservative yet inflammable, taking the offer seriously, an excuse for thinking about sex for three minutes: almost persuaded to strip myself... of... my pride, Wynette sings with lascivious slowness. Does Drew share with us ideas like 'if I sold out I could write New Right leaders for the Times and become a famous thinker and be featured in the colour supplements and appear on Radio Three a whole lot and my students would have heard of me'? This delayed, languishing, disparaging of the goods is as nothing if you aren't tempted by them. Milne, a rigorous and mortified personality, gives no hint that he is going to change his mind about anything. Nothing is really being debated. I think he is unsuited to conceptual art for this reason; in IBM speak, he has strong negative competitive advantage in this area. He could learn a lot from Wynette, not yet a member of The KLF, singing the teasing interrogation of post-self selfhood and deterritorialised desire that is I'm not mine to give.
I can't take this poetry as subverting authority because it also subverts, as much or more so, the individual mind. This is no way to alter the balance of power. How can it be anti-authoritarian when the most visible psychological figures are Prynne and Wilkinson, as founding fathers who authorise the style? The triangle of authority - poet, system, and oppositional system - is important to this text titled Unlimited authority. Milne is attacking a vested power, whose words provide a hold for weapons of derision; his motivation is that he wants to be appointed in its place, but he is unaware of this. The issue for the reader is by no means whether the power order is perfect, but only whether it is better than the alternative, or whether an alternative with enough vigour exists. Milne declines the contest. His dislike of debate empties the text of its content: a white sheet.
Larkin wrote poetry in which affect had sunk to the lowest possible level, and which offers no emotional rewards. Andrew Motion, in Secret Narratives, wrote poems whose solution is deliberately left out; an enigmatic space hovers behind or above the logical space of the words. Milne merely follows these tendencies to the nth degree, an "over fulfilment" well known in "high art". Nothing oppositional here; these are very popular poets.
If poetry, under capitalism, or consumerism, etc., which brings about delight, or just relief, is culpable and shabby, the task is then to discredit it. The Stalinist rejection of democracy, the expression of individual wishes, implies the invalidation of individual wishes as the topic or intent of poetry. A void opens up into which something new can be put. If I say that Elisabeth Bletsoe's (also b.1964) poetry is better because it is warm-hearted, I sound very old-fashioned and unintelligent. Milne's poetry is secretive, authoritarian, and without compassion, and this echoes the attitude of corporate management, the elite of our society. Where kindness is weakness, the new middle-class elite wish to read about their fitness for power. In both contexts, my subjective wishes, as employee or reader, are absolutely barred from utterance; real feelings threaten a power order based on anxiety and compliance because they thermally burst the bonds of which it is constructed. Something can be too emotional; how do we know what the right level of feeling is? Displacing and denaturing the emotional bonds between people strikes at Socialism, which places the spontaneity and durability of those bonds at the heart of its theory of society; whereas it marches very well with neo-liberalism. Switching off the major basis of a political (and artistic) system could generate new hypotheses; but this game with the negative sublime also draws the work of art into the realm of the clammy, the cadaverous, and the soulless. One should not forget the terror and nausea which such man_uvres bring to someone who does have high affect. This is one of the areas where Socialism can improve on its past attitudes, or the Stafford Cripps factor. How can man be called liberated if the prerequisite of the liberation process is to sacrifice the gratification of recurring wishes, that is, that which liberation liberates?
Can one act validly in an unjust society, or is justness then cast out and occluded? Hegel, in describing what unworldly religion is not, gave us an evocation of fulfilment: "Belief is in this abstraction separated from life, remote from the concrete reality of human existence, from the positive relationship of humans to each other, which only in belief, and for the sake of belief, know themselves identical and love each other in a third term, in the spirit of the common. This third thing is only the clear spring, in which their shape is reflected, without human looking another human directly in the eye, entering direct relations with others, and sensing the unity of love, trust, confidence, of purposes and actions in concrete livingness." (Vorlesungen ber die Žsthetik, second series, 'Das Rittertum'). Thus the exit from the merely ideal, which is the object of work with ideas. This suggests why Hegel is the ancestor of Socialism and not merely State Socialism. DM is unwilling to evoke this positive goal, which is nevertheless the beautiful component of Socialist art and what poetic language could model as an inner form. The negative dialectic falls short. Is even the act of philosophising innerly vitiated in an exterior of prepotence and oligarchy? If what we have seen of equity and kindness in social life is false, how can we know enough to imagine Socialism? But perhaps capitalist society is saturated with endogenous elements of equity and co-operation, as a kind of virus which both preserves it and prevents its subjects from believing in its asserted principles. Perhaps elements of verbal behaviour - dialogue, response, attentiveness, fair representation - foreshadow within a text a just society.
This poem, timeless, placeless, disembodied, is not dealing with objects but with details within a fictional and shared structure. Caught inside a myth, the kind captured in propaganda posters, and fiddling with details of it. This completely figured discourse could be part of a late-Stalinist belief that we only perceive shared perceptual schemas (and the world isn't there). The error that meaning is constituted by the relationship of one sign to another, leaving out the neurology of perception and discrimination, the existence of the world and of memory, fantastically gives the sign-makers the power to control what everyone perceives, which could make for self-confident art: but Milne disbelieves in all the schemas and shows no interest in constructing his own. We are drowning in the sea, smothered in wet canvas from our sunk ship. Carte Blanche is an allegory with no interpretation, a kitsch canvas we cannot see out of, described with indignation and indifference.
Identification is a crux because it's very difficult to explain unless, circularly, by near-synonyms. What is it? why is the value of a work of art measured by the amount of feeling and compassion in it? In this way a work like CB can stimulate thought, and that is the function it carries out. The word problematising implies the lost bus-stop principle, namely that if you are forced to wait at a bus-stop for two hours, you ask why you like buses, you vividly imagine the longed-for Bus Object, the bus is problematized, and this intellectual benefit is the attainment of the conceptual artist. But mostly the audience thought about catching the artist and kicking his brains out. In this sense, Milne is problematising identification, feelings, political hopes, beauty, desire. The means by which curiosity and alert rigour are encoded into a featureless, defiant surface are pure suggestion, and almost mystic. I admit that some of my most intense artistic experiences have come from works which partake almost of sensory deprivation in their featurelessness; blancheur. But it seems to me that such anti-humanist art belongs to the nadir of the 1970s, and has mainly a nostalgia value today. One to file with the Hawkwind albums.
Does a Socialist poet have to accept that his or her life will be taken as an allegory of those revolutionary ideals, blown up from traces within the work and used as a testing-ground? The answer is yes. Of course the reader is doing this. So here is the passage at arms, in the terms of chivalry. Every gesture in a poem is a Chiffre, being examined as a sign of the purity of the ideas, and of the poet's character. The text is a print blue, carte blanche, for the culture dreamed-of. We could fit this poetry, squeamish and picky, into the genre of euphemism. It occurs to me that, by emptying the text of any element of feeling or attachment, Drew is trying to avoid manipulating the reader. The less effect, the better, fluttering towards the perfection of zero. The obsession with contamination comes out of the blowing-up of slightest traces in the text to a huge scale. sifr also means "zero", and multiplying or dividing by zero is the easiest way from finger-arithmetic into the domains of the infinite and the inexistent. Normalisation is a mathematical way of bringing usable results back from the realms which transcend reason. It is possible Milne has multiplied by zero at an inopportune moment.
The discourse of authenticity developed by German philosophers, especially Buber and Jaspers, in the second half of the 1920s, was the contre-coup of the failure of systematic non-empirical thought. No attack on language can assail the fact that we know the difference between lying and telling the truth; philosophy can confine itself to this short-range level of speech, even if the longer range proves permanently infirm. Tearing off its diaphanous wings to become dialogic, philosophy falls spiralling back to its real source, in conversation; of which argument is only a specialisation. The pursuit of authenticity cannot be cut short by a proleptic out of hand declaration of failure. The recent marxian assertion of the falseness of consciousness of all non-Marxists, and of all official Marxists in Russia, China, Vietnam, Serbia, all really existing and genocidal Marxisms, etc., had at its core the fruitful kernel of its own downfall; i.e. the recognition that Marx's original writings falsified the nature of social life, the motives of economic endeavour, and the consciousness of human agents in history, because of his dishonesty in reporting other people's acts, statements, and thoughts; a Show Trial which condemned in absentia all future Marxian governments to martial dictatorship whose legitimacy was merely transcendent. Milne has left a few mighty hostages to Marxism; his claims to authenticity must be tested by his willingness to represent other people's behaviour and consciousness. Is this merely occlusion? where indeed do we find other people here, except in the form of persiflage, distorted quotation, disparaging sampling, snipped-up recruitment into a judicial polemic of inexorable finality? denatured, occluded, unattributed montage, a sorites-ratatouille of disent les imb‚ciles, a cento phantasmagoria which murders what it re-animates.
Adorno's formula of splenetic, epigrammatic, niggling may give us the hint for a quite different reading of Milne. Perhaps his genius is really comic. If I consult a poem of John Wilkinson's from the days when I could still understand what he was saying, say Tracts of the Country (1977), I find the sound of a human voice: skittish, sarky, catty, incredibly observant, uncommitted, a flƒneur. Although Milne's reputation is as a new Puritan, a righteous maelstrom, I submit that he is not really a moralist at all, but someone brilliantly and comically and even autobiographically rendering social and linguistic surfaces from the life of the arty intelligentsia. The facture of much of Sheet Mettle (1994) is like a candle held to a wax mask - it melts and distorts. The technique is like sampling, and The Apes of God; the inauthentic is primary, the poetic text is without its own means. Here acoustic parody, and juncture (of exogenous snippets), predominate, and statement or dialectic motion are no-shows. In these mauled, echolalic, soundbites, imitation implies disbelief. The moral issues are all turned by reducing them to questions of manners.