Tonight, whilst in your need you cry out. You cry out for someone to come to help you. All your private establishments have gone to their beds. There must be an ambulance somewhere in this long night of blades. “Come to me! Come to me!”. Silence. “Help me!”. Mr John Baron.
— We Will Bury You, Verity Spott, 2017.
In August 2017, the month Verity Spott published We Will Bury You, fascists descended on Charlottesville, Virginia. This “Unite the Right” rally saw various factions of the far right — neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, the alt-right — come together in raucous and violent protest which culminated in one far-right protester ramming his car through a crowd of counter protestors, injuring thirty-five and killing Heather Hayer. The rally was the third in a series of far-right protests in Charlottesville precipitated by the planned removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. The previous two, in May and July, having been smaller affairs, although marked by breakouts of violence between protestors and counter-protestors, gave little indication of the scale of the third. In all three incidents, police efforts to keep the peace were marred by poor planning and disorganized execution.1
Rage defined the rally. The members’ tiki-torch raid on the University of Virginia the night before, their faces snarled in anger, opening to yell, produced its defining image. Their sloganeering spoke to a threatened fury, “You will not replace us.” The slogan refers to a white supremacist conspiracy theory variously called “white genocide” or “The Great Replacement,” which blows up the simple demographic fact that the white population of the United States and other western countries has been shrinking, relatively speaking, into a conspiracy on behalf of some powerful cabal (Jews) aimed at the destruction of “white civilization.” Jacob Kessler, organizer of the Unite the Right rally, in a livestream at the start of the rally declared that the far right would not use violence except in self-defense. But of course the far right has an expansive, paranoid conception of what constitutes an assault which provides ground for self-defense: a conception stretching all the way to relative birth rates. For the attitude at the other side, we can turn to a demand from the mother of Heather Hayer, speaking at a memorial for her daughter, to turn “anger to righteous action.”
In this statement, we can find the modern progressive attitude towards anger. This attitude has received recent clear statement and philosophical defense in Martha Nussbaum’s 2018 book Anger and Forgiveness. Nussbaum understands anger, at least the central cases of anger, to consist of an appraisal that one has been wronged coupled with a “payback wish,” a desire to see the perpetrator of this wrong injured (21). This payback wish may or may not involve our directly taking revenge, we might be satisfied for a third party, say the legal system, to inflict punishment on our behalf or just to see the object of our anger come to some great misfortune. Nussbaum contends that while anger can be “well grounded,” in the sense that one might genuinely have been wronged (and so, say, have cause to grieve), the “payback wish” involved in anger is irrational or morally objectionable (26). In its irrational form, the payback wish involves a bit of magical thinking whereby the suffering of the perpetrator of a wrong somehow cancels out or restores that original injury. But of course this is almost never the case. The execution of a murderer is not the resurrection of the murdered. Only in the rare case that what has been injured is one’s “honor” or standing might revenge succeed in restoring what was lost, but this kind of thinking we should hope to leave behind as a relic of the honor cultures of yester century.
That’s it, we remind ourselves that “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind,” and then, what? Here, Nussbaum’s proposal is essentially to turn “anger to righteous action.” It is understandable, of course, that we might initially feel anger when wronged. (Such anger is “well grounded,” after all.) The flush of anger is an evolved and culturally ingrained response. But we ought to master our anger and turn it into a more productive avenue, what Nussbaum calls, in a somewhat clunky phrase, “Transition Anger.” Assuming we really were wronged and not just imagining slights, we may reasonably continue to feel outraged or grieved at our loss, but then we need to decide what we are to do about that. For the smaller slights, the turbulence of the middle realm, we’ll find it best to take a deep breath and get one with our day; for matters of significant moral concern, “righteous action” enters the picture: the wrong, now part of history, cannot be excised or reverted, but we might find a way to mend the carried rupture or to avert similar calamities going forward.
Of course, not all factions broadly within the left have rejected anger. The image of the guillotine more and more populates the posts and fantasies of the edgy online left, and, indeed, the counter-protestors at the Unite the Right Rally were sufficiently eager to “Bash the Fash” for street fights to break out during the event. Verity Spott’s long poem We Will Bury You provides clear expression to the rage and anguish behind the militant left. We can get a sense of the character of this work from the poet’s description.
This text contains the names of all of the MPs who voted against the proposed end of the cap on public sector pay. This is a spell against the character of the idea that seems to have populated the lives of these individuals. It is also a feeling of nausea at seeing the same names cropping up over & over again. The text was composed between 11:35 and 13:03 on the 29th June 2017.
Each stanza of the poem begins “Tonight,” proceeds with a description of a member of parliament dying, alone, from a sudden and inescapable malady, and ends by naming the MP. The claim that the text was composed in a specified two-and-a-half hour period situates the text as an overflowing of presently felt emotion, not a past emotion recalled at leisure, but rather a simmering fury “at seeing the same names” breaking through all restraint.
As voiced anger, We Will Bury you expresses not only the magical thinking that Nussbaum finds in anger generally — a wild and whispered conviction that somehow, someway payback will right wrongs or make whole the sufferer; the deaths of the politicians responsible for a certain government policy does not usually suffice to change that policy — a magical thinking around the consequences of retribution, but also explicit magical thinking about the means of retribution. The diseases that “tonight” will claim the lives of these politician is one with no known cause and certainly no consequence; we are not to think of the members of the politicians’ family or staff to whom the disease might be transmitted, the dying are perfectly alone, the drone strikes targeted with divine precision. Only a god could put this spell into effect and, we must think, tonight the audience, the other half of the titular “we,” will play God’s part and rid the caster of these meddlesome Tories.
We Will Bury You is one note, but it is one note in the way that drone music is one note. Although, or rather precisely because, the sound does not change, it is our attention that wanders about its various overtones. We will come to these in a moment, but let us linger a second longer on this anger as politics. We may easily dismiss anger, in our minds if not our hearts, in our everyday lives as trivial and stupid. Punching the horn when that bastard cuts us off on the interstate is nothing more than infantile tantruming. We may even learn to recoil at public executions, finding in the picnicking spectators more love for blood than justice. “But,” Nussbaum raises, “isn’t anger noble, when society is corrupt and brutal?” (211)
Nussbaum’s answer to this question emerges from a study of Nelson Mandela and the African National Congresses’ successes in ending South African apartheid. Mandela, Nussbaum claims, practiced a politics of non-anger, empathy, and unconditional forgiveness that allowed a limited, tactical role for the use of violence. Nussbaum’s argument here is essentially pragmatic, that by eschewing the payback wish, the desire to see one’s opponents punished as something itself good, Mandela thereby embraced a politics that could end apartheid and achieve a measure of reconciliation and peace in an integrated society. Does this analysis persuade? As a matter of history, this story is highly selective, focusing in one aspect of Mandela’s politics who in turn represented one of many, frequently more militant, approaches to political revolution. It would take a broader contextual view to establish that non-anger was the decisive or most important factor. Even granting Nussbaum’s understanding of this case, it is not clear how far the morals generalize. Certainly, Nussbaum admits, nonviolence would not have been particularly effective in resisting Nazi Germany. Was or would violence without anger have been effective? Nussbaum does not consider this sort of case, though perhaps we could point out at her behalf that anger in war often lies behind civilian reprisals which, like the firebombing of Dresden, morally appall while often retarding the war effort: wasting resources and reinforcing the enemy’s will to resist.
In any case, for political struggles that inescapably involve conflict, knock-out, drag-out fights to the death with no umpire, no ability to tap-out, anger may have more of a role to play. Certainly for a Marxist like Spott, the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is just such a fight. Perhaps the dictatorship of the proletariat could arise without a “long night of blades,” but only if the rich meekly hand over the keys to the kingdom. And it is not only the nature of the struggle which should determine the shape of one’s strategy and so the arrangement of affects behind it, but where, precisely, one is in relation to that struggle. As Spott sees it, the left is largely outside of the ring, approaching politics as a polite spectacle. In an essay on protest, Spott writes of the dull, frozen-over approach to protest and the language of protest.
What that [the present lack of “insurrectionist poetics”] leads to is this kind of weird situation where screaming isn’t enough, where the same noises are made in the same established patterns again and again and when you say “death to the oppressor” people start jumping down your throat and saying “oh no! We mustn’t go down that route! No violence!”. No violence is not an option,. Violence is what is happening now. What we need to stop. Saying “Death to the oppressor” is in part an invocation of a hope to end the order of oppression.
This blog post, published on June 14th, 2017, shortly before the composition of We Will Bury You, has attracted one hundred and seventy-six comments. Of these, only the first appears to have been written by a human being in response to Spott’s post. The other one hundred and seventy-five are spam. Presumably because the post makes several references to magic, the vast majority of these comments advertise the service of a magician, taking the form of supposed testimonials of happy customers of these magicians. There is a set formula here: the customer introduces themselves as a normal person and a skeptic of magic, but a skeptic of a magic with a problem (there are two main types here: crushing debt or a broken heart) who therefore decided to take a chance on a magical solution, and, hey, what do you know but that this wizard, PRIEST WISDOM (cited in no less than fourteen of these testimonials) or Dr OSOFO (twelve) or DR OSCAR DILAN (ten), cast the best money spell and / or love spell the esoteric society has ever seen.
As with many scams, it feels scarcely possible than anyone should fall for them. Who could really believe that a Nigerian prince would reach out to a random stranger for help recovering their fortune? And even if you were so mystically inclined to look to spellcasting for the cure of one’s marital woes, wouldn’t this panoply of pitches put one off the project all together? Never mind the implausibility of dozens of readers of an avant-garde English poet having all been rescued by a handful of enchanters and experiencing such gratitude that they cannot help themselves but share how you too can get your ex-lover back in your life, that each of these insists all the rest to be scammers should give on sufficient pause over trusting any of them. I suppose if lures are cheap enough even the worst fisherman can turn a profit.
Leave that to one side and consider in these comments more as a text in their own right. Considered as a whole, they constitute a repetitive, anaphoric poem comparable in formal structure to Spott’s own text. In place of repeated fantasies of divine retribution, we find endless, miraculous liberation. Though each stanza leads us outwards, extends a hand to drag us out, by the next we reset to our lowest point. Though each miracle worker may save his private flock, none is powerful enough to overcome strife, loss, poverty itself. The wheel of fortune spins and spins and if PRIEST WISDOM intercedes with Lady Luck to land us up top, surely some other miscreant just slides down to take our place. In this closed system, the reader finds herself in a sealed affective space turning again and again through the same circuit. These texts, though finite, are infinitely capacious; the reader, should she reach the end, can just as well proceed on her own, replaying the same scenarios with an unlimited stock of characters. Tonight, everyone we hate will find themselves asphyxiating, their own blood filling their throats.
What else can we find in the closed quarters of We Will Bury You? Earlier, I had suggested that anger is the dominant but not the only note in the text. Indeed, turning to the nature of the suffering the text wishes on its enemies, we notice that these imagined deaths mirror the real deaths of those killed by austerity: isolated deaths of illness in a world where no aid, no rescue will be provided. Of course payback wishes often are wishes for a payback “in kind,” giving the target “a taste of their own medicine,” and all that. But in this identification of the injury one has suffered and the injury one hopes to be inflicted, anger loops back around on grief as one’s attention turns back to what was loss even if one never names it as such. Through this mirror, the future comes precisely to resemble the past and the walls of the room yearn with you.
For Nussbaum, anger is the refuge of the helpless — unable to see through their problems, the enraged focus instead on destroying the perceived cause thereof. Allowed to play out, anger destroys and sparks cycles of revenge. What breaks these cycles, at the level of an individual, is self-discipline, emotional regulation, and, at the level of a society, the discipline of the law, political regulation. And law only of a certain caliber, for the law, with its spectacles of execution, mortification, and incarceration, can be nothing more than anger institutionalized. A just law, consistently applied is what we need. We bring Solomon our disputes, we rancor and scream at our neighbor, but Solomon quiets us and makes a pronouncement and we emerge if not happy then at piece, determined to see his justice through. Eventually, we learn to play Solomon in the court of our own experience. The law, then, notice, offers a sealed affective space in which anger is permitted no ingress. We are at peace, our peace is disturbed, we grieve our loss, settle on a path forward and come to another peace. The stream of verdicts constitutes its own infinite poem.
We, in the most expansive sense, are all stuck in various rooms. In my first essay on this site, I sketched some of the walls of these rooms. In this debate about the political role of anger, we can see a parallel dispute over political imagination. In one view, which we can at least read into Spott’s work, since a just world is very far from the present one, a powerful act of political imagination, an “insurrectionist poetics,” is needed to make progress. Such imaginings will of necessity be highly affectively charged, affects which may appear suspect or excessive from the standpoint of polite society. Excess, however, is just what is needed to escape the confines we find ourselves in. If we take up the voice of that polite society, what may concern us is not a matter of decorum but a matter of security. Given the stakes involved, political action must be sure-footed, which in the first instance involves being clear-sighted, being disciplined against fantasies.
This stylized debate occurs at a time where political imagination has grown diseased, at once somehow both fantastical and short-sighted. We can find cause for this in our recent political history, in the diminution of labor power over the last seventy years, and in the more recent technological and economic developments. Put simply, the Internet has colonized and claimed the imagination. The individual has no time alone to think but is instead connected to a shifting imaginarium, a sea of infinite poems whose forms come already defined in which the role of the individuals is to pump out stanzas to spec. Here capital determines not so much the contents but the necessary effects: attention must be captured, which means that closed, affective loops must be found, infinite feeling machines. Anger provides one popular driver, as outrage and numbing self-soothing provide an elegant piston. In such an environment, exercises of either political imagination or emotional discipline are out of the question, as those are exercises by an individual and the individual has been mulched. What becomes essential is that we never expose ourselves to sunlight, never reveal ourselves as we are as opposed to how we are imagined to be. A year after the first, Jason Kessler organized a sequel rally, “Unite the Right, 2.” The police planned carefully, hoping to avoid a repeat of the first rally’s violence. They needn’t have bothered. Nobody came.
For a comprehensive breakdown of police (in)action during these protests, see this report commissioned by the Charlottesville government from the law firm Hunton and Williams.