Connaissance: Sean Bonney’s Oppositional Poetics + Poetics of Refusal

by Jennifer Valdies

Understanding the geography of Sean Bonney’s Letters Against the Firmament is to understand that there is more than one world, and that the majority of all people, including working class artists, poets, teachers, laborers etc. largely exist lodged, or suspended in between the two. The world belonging to a small percentage of all people, the ruling class, as understood through the map of a city (London, inferrably, but interchangeable with many metropolitan cities of the west), is presented in Bonney’s letters as a series of concentric circles, at the center of which is a “force of negative gravity keeping us out, and keeping their systems in place.” (Bonney, 13) This epicenter, Bonney describes, is nothing but “a bullet, pure and simple,” (Bonney, 13) and is entirely responsible for the orbital path we move in around it, keeping us at a healthy distance from the truth of that center. The fact of this center being a bullet, rather than a gun, or someone handling a gun, is to imply that the magnetic field which holds people in their place is not necessarily violence, but the implication of it as a consequence of our decisions, bearing with it the illusion that if we are harmed or affected in any way, that it was somehow chosen, self-inflicted, the result of our incapacity to follow the rules, to be a good citizen. The other world, in Bonney’s reasoning, is an imagined one, more tangibly difficult to map, but inarguably real. It is the city’s invisible, inverted replica, nailed directly onto the face of the one which is visible. 

Much is revealed to be invisible and/or unintelligible throughout Bonney’s Letters, the forefront being that the reality of our existence is fundamentally a forced compromise which intends to keep us conformally silent, using our own sense of moral ethic and conscience, common sense, and understanding of our place in a community, against us dialectically. Our mass resignation to this dynamic of power and influence is largely subliminal and involuntary, as is astutely described by Erica Hunt in “Notes for an Oppositional Poetics” (The Politics of Poetic Form, Roof Books, 1990): 

          “[The dominant culture] will always maintain that it holds the complete world view, despite the fissures. Opposition is alternately demonized or accommodated through partial concessions without a meaningful alteration of dominant culture’s own terms. The opposition is characterized as destructive to the entire social body and to itself. State power in dominant culture depends upon its reducing social and political problems into pathologies requiring the police. It is a small step from that point to reducing world politics to individual aberration and to gaining our consent to maintain a world-wide police.” (Hunt, 5)

The language we speak is an occupied language. Any words we may use in opposition to these dominant forms of power, then, definitively move within the confines of its influence. In “Letter on Riots and Doubt,” Bonney imagines a poetry “that only the enemy can understand.” (Bonney, 8) Understanding being, as he proposes later, “‘precisely what is incompatible with the bourgeois mind.’” Hunt posits that, just as governments and other authoritarian regimes, “[d]ominant modes of discourse, the language of ordinary life or of rationality, of moral management, of the science of the state, the hectoring threats of the press and media, use convention and label to bind and organize us.” She continues, “The convenience of these labels serves social control. The languages used to preserve domination are complex and sometimes contradictory. Much of how they operate to anesthetize desire and resistance is invisible; they are wedded to our common sense; they are formulaic without being intrusive, entirely natural – ‘no marks on the body at all.’” (Hunt, 3) Because our language is occupied, and is the same language that is used to “bind and organize,” it registers at the same frequency as the enemy’s language, obscuring its meaning and purpose, dissolving its weight and effect, and preventing a true understanding in the bourgeois mind. “Speech,” Bonney writes, “which usually would be your means of entry to actual lived time, is compressed and stretched into a network of circles and coils, its perimeter a system of scraped, negative music, and at its center, a wall.” (Bonney, 40-41) The project becomes, then, to construct a language that finds a way to extend outside this frequency—a language that is centrally altered, and thus reclaimed. 

A poetics of refusal is a necessary catalyst in beginning to break out of the enemy language and create an alternate discourse which moves “counter-clockwise to bourgeois anti-communication… making visible whatever is forced into invisibility by police realism.” (Bonney, 142) This mode of poetic thinking has so much to do with music and harmony, as Bonney outlines in detail, using “Pythagorean harmony of the spheres” as scaffolding, which bears an uncanny resemblance to the city as Bonney describes it: “a hierarchy built on scalar realities that justifies social conditions on earth, where everybody is in their place, and nobody is able to question the beauty and perfection of these relationships.” (Bonney, 33)

Like Bonney’s geography of the city, which is held in orbit by the epicenter of a bullet, Pythagoras’s harmonies also have a gravitational center, which Bonney describes as an “untruth with the power to kill;” its own harmonic, mummified. (Bonney, 33)  In order to get at that hard center, a different kind of music, “a secret harmony,” is necessitated. Bonney imagines this music “as a slicing through of harmonic hierarchies etc, poetic realities as counter-earths where we can propose a new stance in which we can see and act on what had previously been kept invisible etc. Ourselves for one thing.” (Bonney, 33) The only problem is that this music must first be made visible, summoned into the real world as it were. Existing and composing within a poetics of refusal means, to Bonney, “...becoming a force that moves beyond any musical utterance, while still containing direct, clear communication at its center: dialectical love, undeclared logic.” (Bonney, 35) To do this, we need to reconsider what lies at the foundation of,  and vectors out from, all thought.

There are many forms of silence throughout Letters Against the Firmament. There is the “dense hideous silence” (Bonney, 12) which is a silence of collective, ignorant complicity; there is the silence of the invisible, whose language is eschewed in the ears of the bourgeois, authoritarian, dominant rule; there is the silence of the bourgeois themselves, which is more of a “complicated, monstrous hiss” (Bonney, 10); and there is the silence which is not really a silence, but which operates at a frequency that doesn’t seem to fit into the Pythagorean theory of harmonies. A silence which is a different kind of song. This variance between silences and their implications is important to keep in mind when considering knowledge, the processes we rely on to exchange and obtain knowledge, and the ways in which that information will affect change or maintain stasis.

In The Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre posits that “[t]he ruling class seeks to maintain hegemony by all available means, and knowledge is one such means. The connection between knowledge (savoir) and power is thus made manifest, although this in no way interdicts a critical and subversive form of knowledge (connaissance); on the contrary, it points up an antagonism between a knowledge which serves power and a form of knowing which refuses to acknowledge power.” (Lefebvre, 10) This distinction is key when navigating a poetics of refusal. Returning to Erica Hunt’s statement that dominant culture will always maintain its “complete world view,” in effect creating itself as a sort of level ground whose rules create order and harmony between all people, then this constructed reality must first be rejected, uncompromisingly refused. The “against,” after all, of Bonney’s vernacular, calls to mind not only a language of resistance, but also one that brushes up on the infinite, a language that leans against the firmament: what borders the imaginable, the inaudible, the invisible. As both definitions fit inside this one word, so multiple understandings must fit inside connaissance.

Poetics is a mode of thinking which operates out of connaissance, knowledge generated from a place which exists outside of an authoritarian regime. Working within a poetics of refusal is thereby one way to resist savoir, the thinking and language of dominant culture. This “poetic reality,” which actively counters dominant influence, is real enough in the minds of poets and poetic thinkers—who know it bears the capability to carry the immense weight of dominant culture, as well as the capability to dissolve and surpass it. It embodies the different kind of music Bonney is searching for, which defies the Pythagorean rule of harmony; possessing the potential to be the song which “not only [raises] the living standards of the working class, but [prevents] the ruling class from living in the way they have been.” (Bonney, 35) Returning to Bonney’s discussion on music and harmony, if the Pythagorean theory of harmonies is akin to the oppressive geography of a city, then a different kind of music, an inversion or negation, is necessitated to counter it—the example Bonney provides being the “unlistenable” music of Coltrane. (Bonney, 36) He asks us to consider this unlistenability more closely, as its cacophony, when given more attention, isn’t the lack of harmony, but its counter: a resistance. If poetry is borne out of the scar of “intellectual mutilation,” (Bonney, 141) it is itself also an act of resistance.

However, as Bonney states, “counter-earths refuse to die but are alive precisely nowhere.” (Bonney, 116) Whether connaissance originates within the body, and is alive undetectable within the mind, or originates directly out of the invisible, imagined world, and is alive undetectable within its atmosphere, it is difficult to use this form of knowledge to make real, progressive change in the earth in which the majority of people are oppressed and silenced, and are complicit with being so, largely against our awareness. 

There is a delicate balance to be maintained between a poetics of refusal and incomprehensibility. In order for this form of poetics to be effective, it must originate from clear, direct ideologies which are applicable in the real world. For Bonney, no sentiment is more clear or more direct than that of anger. It’s one tangible way we can really be seen in the physical world, or as he more precisely puts, “If we’re not setting fire to cars we’re nowhere.” (Bonney, 8) But anger, in the way it manifests in Bonney’s language, isn't made up of the same energy as those fighting to stay in power. Bonney’s anger, the energy he calls on to bring about real change, is more like a form of light—one that wakes you up out of a deep sleep. Bonney knew that to be angry is to be awake to what is happening to us, to the world.

This is a form of poetic thinking only proposed in Bonney’s letters, the reachability of which is still undetermined. One way we can bring this thinking into reality is through direct action, which Bonney made an unremitting priority during his life. Reading poetry at picket lines, utilizing the performance of poetry at the epicenters of unrest—rallies, protests—was a dedicated practice in his life’s work. In verbalizing poetry, it becomes a physical wave that vectors out in all directions, from the mind into the body, from the body to the air, through the body and into the minds of other people. This is differentiated from the simple act of reading as the physical world and real sound become the medium of transmission, rather the silence of a page. It was an unavoidable and essential act made to supplement and reify poetic thinking—now needing, after Bonney’s passing, to be carried on by other poets, in an ongoing and undying effort to make the invisible visible.

Works Cited

Bonney, Sean. Letters Against the Firmament. Enitharmon Books, 2015.

Hunt, Erica. Bernstein, Charles. “Notes on an Oppositional Poetics.” The Politics of Poetic Form, Roof Books, 1990.

Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Blackwell, 1991.

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