Nonsense Poetry

The future will be better tomorrow.

If we don’t succeed we run the risk of failure.

Expectations rise above that which is expected.

There’s a passage in Zizek* where he re-interprets some classic Bushisms and Quaylisms as subtle dialectical thinking. Its of course partly in jest, but the result is somehow productive, as if a perverse literalism (wilfully ignoring the [enfeebled] spirit of the utterance), or an apparently illegitimate interpretative generosity, or an assumed poker-faced seriousness (treating these casual blunders as cryptic texts that repay close reading) or the merest semantic tinkering, will ultimately redeem what are otherwise banal tautologies or a-grammatical nonsense. You don’t attack the statement from elsewhere, merely install yourself perversely inside it.

But we are dealing, here, not with some Freudian (or other) slip – as if a true ‘deep’ content is revealed, as if some Other suddenly speaks. The ‘deeper meanings’ are simply the effects generated when a tired language (familiar political rhetoric) breaks down, fed through an imperfect medium (Bush), or when language itself (eg the inherent logic of tautology) speaks, uncontaminated by a meaningful subjective presence.

Anyway, something similar happens in this satirical exercise, wherein Donald Rumsfeld’s pronouncements are re-rendered as poetry. It is as if just by isolating language on the page, introducing a certain spacing and lineation, the words are made to speak in a new way. Perhaps it is an effect not unlike the proverbial (now utterly boring) gesture of modern art, which, by placing a toilet or some other everyday object in the museum, sequesters it in silence and white space, and makes it different, an enigmatic thing surrounded by questions.

It is said that the classically ‘committed’ & charismatic politician is a thing of the past, replaced by the more neutral Manager. These managers pass on directives not their own, and their political language is just part of the manual, a set of appropriate noises and signals emptied of meaning or conviction.

But the withdrawal of subjective commitment from language can also hand over the initiative to language itself, a seditious instrument which, in the absence of an owner, will insist on speaking itself.