‘its 11.58 in London’

July 22, 2013

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Sean Bonney’s Urban Commons

Since Los Indignados, OWS and the Arab Spring, symbolic popular occupations of urban space have once again asserted themselves as important ways of expressing dissent in cities. Recent marches in Sao Paolo and the occupation of Taksim Gezi Park, Istanbul, took place, whether they were articulated as such or not, within the broad rubric of ‘The Right to the City’: the dynamic of physical occupation of a space recognised as a public good in order to preserve it from predatory capital, is exactly that of the commons in practice.

‘who here can speak/the language of the dead’: ghosts & the collective

But what efforts have been made to write the experience of the contestation of urban space? Sean Bonney’s slim poetic sequence The Commons (Openned 2011) situates the struggle for the urban commons in contemporary London, but also within a historical long view that takes in the Paris Commune, Winstanley’s Diggers and October 1917 as analogous moments of unrest, juxtaposing English and American plebeian folk song with The Stooges, Brecht’s ‘A Reader for those who Live in Cities’ with the DWP’s ‘Form ES4JP (Looking for Work)’. Sifting through this historical jumble the assiduous reader can hunt down a lot of these interpolations using the ‘Selected Resources’ included at the back of the book, but doing so is not, I suspect, really the point of packing the sequence with so many and varied allusions. Summoning the dead, speaking their language, refreshes these insurrectionary pasts. Millennial superstition, anticipation of apocalypse, fairies, zombie-workers and brain-munching, blood-sucking capital coalesce to suggest that ‘superstition’ as a mode of collective popular expression, although suppressed by ‘police computer’ rationality, can spring up between ‘geometric gaps/in police lines, so tender’ (p.40). The Commons reminds us to believe in the efficacy of popular belief, that

ghosts are necessary

a chart of / a collective

inarticulate harmony

(p.62)

What kind of a collective is this? Probably the references imply a certain readership. And what does it have to do with ways of living in the city, ‘commoning’ urban space, or indeed theorising about doing either and how they might be induced to intersect? The ghosts are ‘necessary’ because if nothing else they constitute a community of previous attempts to stake out forms of urban commons, and assembling them in a way that is at once formal and anarchic is something a poem might be better equipped to do than a political essay.

‘this thing has fourteen lines/as in picket lines’: pastoral militancy

Central to Bonney’s imagination of the city is the country, that counter-space that appears to precede and surround the citadel, haunting it with the presentation of a grotesque parody of its past, which is at once its contemporaneous and not-quite-forgotten present. Indeed, ‘from another angle’ the countryside looks like a ‘nasty’, degraded version of English pastoral poetry:

But,

I dunno, from another angle

– pitched green malevolence –

– of the english countryside –

o cuckoo, nasty little churches

(p.63)

In his recent book Rebel Cities (Verso 2012) David Harvey is careful to point out that imaginations of the commons have been and continue to be loaded with a healthy dollop of nostalgia for a ‘supposedly moral economy of common action’ (p.68) in the hazily distant rural past. Furthermore, ways of thinking what form an urban commons might take have themselves been unhelpfully enclosed in binaries of public/private, hierarchy/horizontality, enclosure/borderlessness and so forth. Indeed, he writes, selective enclosure of certain open spaces in order to prevent their appropriation by capital (usually in the form of construction and rent extraction) can be types of ‘commoning’ that help to safeguard the fruits of the common reproduction of daily life in cities. But, as Harvey notes, the rhetoric of the common can itself be easily appropriated. One way this happens is through the capture of a nostalgic discourse that sees pastoral return to a simpler past of strong communal ties binding society organized at the scale of the village, using it in order to increase the value of property, sell commodities, etc.

There are of course genuine attempts at a civic level to ‘common’ parts of the city, and these often also tap into a rhetoric of pastoral return. Pedestrianised areas, by re-imagining a past without cars, attempt to ‘recover some aspects of a “more civilized” common past’ (p.74). But these gestures of affective deurbanisation are equally vulnerable to expropriation. This happens all the time in urban toponymy, as shopping centres and wealthy gated communities emphasise their exclusivity with the tag ‘village’, thus trading on parochial defensiveness within the larger and supposedly civic unit of the city. Likewise, Harvey writes, urban parks, while appearing to be an unproblematic public good, are often also capitalised upon, as with the High Line in New York, a disused section of railway turned into an elevated park which has had ‘a tremendous impact on nearby residential property values, thus denying access to affordable housing in the area for most citizens of New York City by virtue of rapidly rising rents. The creation of this kind of public space radically diminishes rather than enhances the potentially of commoning for all but the very rich.’ (p.75)

Agrarian nostalgia is employed by capital to market the countryside’s final erasure by the dominant polis, as the last trace of anything we might cautiously construe as ‘nature’ is swallowed and replicated inside the urban fabric. The most extraordinary and frightening contemporary example of this is to be found, unsurprisingly, in China. In Chengdu the world’s largest building was recently completed, echoing, as Oliver Wainwright implied in The Guardian, the control artificiality of Kubla Khan’s ‘miracle of rare device,/A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!’, in Coleridge’s classic poem. Wainwright goes on to detail some of the incredibly hubristic recreations of idealised habitat and previous, ‘primitive’ communities found within the building, quoting the unintentionally humorous (as well as deeply disturbing) descriptions of the building by its makers:

visitors are blasted with artificial sea breeze, designed to “make one intoxicated, as if he were enjoying himself in the fabulous heaven”. Moving past aquarium walls and through a strange hybrid townscape of Polynesian huts crossed with a middle eastern kasbah, tourists arrive at the 400m-long coastline, where the largest artificial waves in the world break in front of the longest LED screen in the world – on which “the alternating morning cloud and twilight afterglow extend the horizon limitlessly in the temporal and spatial directions”…”There is an artificial sun that shines 24 hours a day and allows for a comfortable temperature.” (Oliver Wainwright, The Guardian, ‘Architecture and Design Blog’, Tuesday 9 July 2013 13.09 BST)

The Commons gives a decidedly militant twist to such hyperreal urban reinventions of the rural. The sequence appears to break up almost terminally on page 67, as fragments culled from social media collide with the barricades of the 1871 Paris Commune:

– stop –

– 71 comments –

– we are your octave –

– not zombies, sirens –

– ie obsolete music –

– 1871, march –

– choke –

(p.67)

This apparent endpoint is followed, in the next poem, by a rallying that seems testimony to time spent in the sorry twenty-first century equivalent of the picket line, the kettle:

so, I’ve been in the penn

with the rough & rowdy

(p.68)

The ‘penn’ is in turn also a space for holding sheep before shearing, and this initial equation of protesters with animals belies the way the formal equivalence of these containing units also indexes urban social unrest in relation to a ghostly agrarian past. If we are encouraged to see the protesters as sheep, the coercive enclosure of independent thought and the possibility of common action in the police kettle is ironically enforced in spite of the demonstrators literally being-together, a key theoretical tenant of the common. As in the London anti-tuition fees marches of 2010, which this passage possibly refers to, in the strange, temporarily collective space of the kettle, there is no alternative to sharing that experience.

It is important to stress at this point that The Commons is a sonnet sequence; it adheres to that formal consensus, which historically has often made use of the motif of the sonnet’s structure enacting entrapment within a room space. For Bonney, however, the fourteen line stanzaic unit is less about tropes of containment and escape and more to do with the militant potential inherent in its lineated organisation, as a fragmentary text on his blog suggests:

this thing has fourteen lines

as in picket lines / like venus in a closing sky

(‘Cell 1 / Suite 3 / as in Crisis’, Friday October 26, 2012, abandonedbuildings.blogspot.co.uk/).

The passive kettle is re-figured as the actively militant picket line, but in a way perhaps inflected by nostalgia for forms of protest that belong to the previous century. If ‘this thing’ the sonnet can be used and useful like this, can we read The Commons as an extensive exploration of fourteen (picket) line resistance in the guise of a belligerent re-visoning of an antiquated and traditional form? Is it a wolf in sheep’s clothing or, as 14 year old John, who provides the book’s only jacket ‘blurb’ puts it, ‘a brick through a window’, which nonetheless is ‘never enough…to reawaken the dead’?

Did you bring me the silver? Did you bring me the gold?: folk song

One way it does so, offering what common hope there is to be found in what otherwise looks like a pretty shabby post-crisis commons, is through the conjuring trick of summoning past voices from past struggles, bringing them to bear on the contemporary. Among the most powerful and persistent of these voices are the folk songs that recur throughout The Commons. As with the use of the sonnet sequence, traditional music might seem a strange vehicle to entrust with the envisioning of a collective future, but it is precisely its symbolic power to represent a form of expression relatively untouched by capital that makes it so valuable for articulating a linguistic commons.

The epigraph to the first ‘set’ of the poem is a quotation from the Clarence Ashley song ‘The Coo-coo Bird’, which goes ‘the cuckoo is a pretty bird,/she warbles as she flies’ (p.1). The cuckoo neatly introduces an uneasily close relation between two key concerns of The Commons: song and falsity. Cuckoos are the villains of British ornithology, laying their eggs in other birds’ nests which, once hatched, push their competitor-chicks out and hog all the food brought by the unfortunate mother who, somewhat implausibly unable to distinguish between her own chicks and the cuckoo, continues to feed the impostor. Despite the cuckoo’s deceptive nature, its song is clear, sweet and very distinctive; the folk songs imported into The Commons find themselves exposed, in the unfamiliar environment of the modern city, to a similar blend of purity and corruption.

Indeed, Bonney is ambivalent about the wisdom of bringing such voices into the capitalist city. On Abandoned Buildings he frets about the supermarket, wondering why ‘they only ever play certain songs in there. Simply Red, for example. Though that’s not quite the case. I was walking around in there the other day, wondering what it would be like if they were playing Leadbelly’s “Gallis Pole” over their radio system. You know the song. Did you bring me the silver, did you bring me the gold, and all of that. The guitar picking sounds kind of like a spiderweb. It would actually make the whole thing worse: the vibrations would empty the content of the supermarket back into the frequencies of folk ballads and superstition. Rings of flowers and gallows trees. It would be useful insofar as the contradictions and antagonisms of bourgeois production would be strikingly revealed. It would be a disaster inasmuch as all sound in the supermarket, including the old Leadbelly song, would be reduced to a frequency spectrum of predominantly zero power level, except perhaps for a few almost inaudible bands and spikes. We wouldn’t be able to get out, is what I mean. All known popular songs would be seen flickering and burning like distant petrol towers in some imaginary desert.’

(‘Letter on Harmony and Crisis’, Sunday October 14, 2012, abandonedbuildings.blogspot.co.uk/)

In this flattening of qualitative difference, reducing Leadbelly to the same plane as Mick Hucknall, the distinction between expression as art and as commodity has been lost, if was ever present. Still, it is clear that folk song can only continue to be politically useful if it can resist its commodification. As Harvey cautions, ‘culture is a form of commons, and…has become a commodity of some sort’ (Rebel Cities, p.89). In this ‘imaginary desert’ of sameness, Simply Red and Leadbelly are interchangeable through the equation of value, made possible, of course, by money. At base the coin is, like the word, a device that allows anything to be equated with anything else, especially ‘now that each word is reduced/obviously to money, ie invisibility’ (p.64). Gold or silver coins stand in, as well, for their more familiar poetic cousins, the ‘false full moon/embroidered over with burning gold’ (p.4) and ‘-the metal discs of the sun-’. Like mythic rural England and traditional song, the sun and the moon are forms of purity tested against the grid plan of the city, and they are often found wanting. But it is important nonetheless that they are brought into contact with it, testing linguistic complacency with the exigency of a demand for common life in language, which any actual urban commons will need to engage with. The Commons at least attempts to imagine this possibility, against the contemporary reality that

we are mouths

& strings of words

stupid

stitched into the language

that resting place

for exhausted shoppers

for used opinions

call it the graveyard

(p.21).

By Dan Eltringham | Dan Eltringham is working towards a PhD at Birkbeck College, University of London, on negotiations of the commons in contemporary British poetry and in early British Romanticism. He co-edits online literary magazine The Literateur, and has written for PN Review, Times Literary Supplement, Fiction Uncovered, Banner and others. Recently he contributed ‘Enclosure’, a poetic information sheet and installation, to LEAF (Little Ecological Arts Festival). Sometimes he writes poems which can be found, amongst other things, at maundering/hatless/desconsolado, and can be contacted here.