He hated hearing last things. It was the breath, the quantity of oxygen in the blood. The rhetoric of the blood. It presents itself directly to the senses.
—Norma Cole, Coleman Hawkins, Ornette Coleman
“The rhetoric of blood presents itself directly to the senses.” I jotted it in a notebook while listening to Norma read one evening and, moved by what I thought I heard, the sentence made its impression on my page without comment, undated & unlocated, as if everything about it were self-evident, as obvious as blood.
Norma’s lines challenge common sense by arousing the promise of direct communication false immediacy between language, body, and sensation. Rhetoric, however, which Aristotle defines as “the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion,” is anything but direct in its struggle for common sense even as it threatens to capture the very thing it names. This reminds me of how a writer’s body expressive vehicle of communication can be said to capture the histories it holds—“which [have] deposited in you an infinity of traces without leaving an inventory” (that’s Gramsci)—obscuring the forces that allow a body’s voice to be heard, or silenced.
In his Rhetoric, Aristotle distinguishes between the “special places” [topoi idioi] and the “common places” [topoi koinoi] of all discourse. For Aristotle, poetic figures, turns of phrase, extravagant metaphors and singular remarks are “special places,” particular utterances or idiolectic confections appropriate in some forms of social intercourse but inappropriate in others. By contrast, “common places” are those linguistic expressions that lend themselves to any situation, locutions upon which so-called common sense depends and without which social discourse would be at a loss for coherent orientation: basic oppositions, like more & less, push & pull, sooner & later; or directions, like left & right, and the political antagonisms these directions sometimes connote.
Unlike commonplaces, “special places” might mark scenes of intense pleasure and suffering whose singular expression locates a limit of shared understanding, a horizon of public intelligibility, making legible the separations—often maintained by domination & control—that sustain the very order hierarchy of the common and the special. Such singular expressions what the common excludes may sound dissonant, like a score performed by Ornette Coleman; or offensive, like a passage out of Kathy Acker; or incomprehensible, like a poem by Gertrude Stein; or lurid, like a page by Sade, wrong, perverse. But for Aristotle, such phrases are absolutely proper, belonging to one and inassimilable to the common shared by all. If, however, what we hold in common has been negated, and what we share is what we’ve failed to make, then this distinction begins to erode.
In his Journaux Intimes, Baudelaire suggests that it would be an aesthetic and a social achievement of the highest order to create a commonplace, a cliché: “The creation of a commonplace [un poncif], that’s real genius,” he writes, “I must create a commonplace.” And I would add: Anything to prove the proper false, to return what appears to be singular & sublime to the banal & ordinary, the strange to the familiar. Or could it be the other way around as the prosaic is shown to be perverse, the inconspicuous conspicuous, the unremarkable remarkable?
And so, common & special commodity & artwork collide and converge as Baudelaire makes clear in Perte d’aureole (“Lost Halo”) where a poet-angel watches approvingly as their halo falls into the mud—“now I can wander about incognito, doing perverse things like ordinary mortals”—just as lyric poetry loses the illusion of its auratic insulation from the marketplace. Maybe it was Baudelaire’s singular achievement to have reinvented poetry as a vehicle to traverse the frontier dividing the common places from the special places, disguising the one as the other, smuggling false goods, sabotaging an otherwise hardened border, or making it irrelevant.
A contemporary version of Baudelaire’s allegory of poetry’s fall from grace would need simply to turn the mud into blood. But whose blood would that be? And what would it communicate beyond its rhetoric, that is, beyond the spill & the bath, the shed & the shot? What would it mean for blood to speak? What would it say before kin & line, true & blue, first & test, money & debt, property & race? Or maybe the beyond of blood, like the “thing itself,” is just another figure for silence. And is silence common or special?
How can rhetoric present blood as a direct sensation without reproducing the orders and hierarchies that make sensation intelligible in the first place? Does music do that? Can poetry? The temptation might be that of Mallarmé’s bouquet when the flowers themselves are forever lost to the word “flowers,” a rhetoric of double negation. Or maybe it’s more like trying to sense Rimbaud’s “silken seas and arctic flowers (they do not exist),” which the poet longs to feel, with senses unhinged, in a world whose carnage has ruined both seas and flowers with a flag of bloody meat.
Je n’aurai jamais ma main, writes Rimbaud in Mauvais Sang (“Bad Blood”): “I will never have my own hand,” i.e., my body, my labor, my writing. Blood is a rhetoric, and it’s always bad. It intercepts one’s relation to the body’s capacity and expression.
Reading Hortense Spillers, I’m reminded how the “vertical transfer of a bloodline” is sutured to entitlements and property—“the prerogatives of ‘cold cash,’” she writes—and insofar as these things were denied the slave, even kinship and motherhood are negated by the rhetoric of blood as it converges with the brutality of trade. “If a slave begat children, there was not a law south of the Ohio that could stop their eventual sale to any brute with the money” (that’s W.E.B. DuBois, in his biography of John Brown).
As I go on obsessing about how my most intimate desires are haunted by the most abstract relations—be it to soldiers or prisoners, migrants or laborers—I can hear in Norma’s lines the echo of another proposition that’s been haunting me, a proposition I recall neither reading nor writing—“an absolute distance lives inside the most proximate closeness”—suggesting again how the most mediated & the most immediate converge, and I feel myself straining to grasp this idea as if it denoted what is closest to my body while only exposing the obscurity of my own perception.
When routine has me thinking thoughtlessly about my pleasures and my pains as if my desires were self-evident to me—the way the significance of blood might be said to be self-evident, its communication of itself spontaneous & clear—an infinite field unfolds between the idea of my person and the feeling of my body, an expanse at once spectacular & sentimental, indifferent & personal, reconciled & ruptured, mediated & direct, the way my reflection reproduces the fictitious immediacies of common sense.
Like the appearance of an autopsy report seen with one’s own eyes! the rhetoric of blood is saturated with all the social relations concealed by forensics, severing tongue & song, bone & word, organ & utterance. Perhaps forensics is the perverse condition that undergirds what psychoanalyst Marion Milner refers to as “the too great enthusiasm for clarity,” or “the separateness of the seer and the seen” (that’s Adam Phillips reading her).
Opposites often persist in and thru one another, like clarity & opacity, the way positive propositions—say, “the rhetoric of blood presents itself directly to the senses”—coincide with their own negations. Were I to move inside the space of such a proposition as if it were a building, a feeling of falling excites my bowels as false floors open on an endless series of regressing surfaces under the infinite strobe of yay & nay, provoking the collapse I associate with a certain movement of thought that philosophers might call “the dialectic” when they separate theory from the body. I like thinking how I first grasped this movement of thought as a feeling in my stomach, not an idea in my head, as logic opens a chute in my pelvic floor and I plummet, returning concrete sensation to an abstract turn of phrase.
And as my organs plunge unmoored in the cavernous space I call myself, I orient my senses back toward an ever-receding horizon of disaster—the rhetoric of blood made flesh—whose history is coeval with the present, while I simultaneously direct my senses forward toward history’s undoing revolution, something my mind can only fail to grasp while struggling to resist that failure.
A plume of smoke, visible at a distance / In which people burn. (that’s Oppen)
The rhetoric of blood might present itself directly only to the degree that someone’s body burns inside another’s sensation. Like its own rhetorical instrument, my body is replete with these feelings, every gesture making meaning in excess of what common sense perceives.
‘Common sense’
And cannot. We stand on
That denial
Of death that paved the cities (that’s Oppen again)
Like “common sense,” the rhetoric of blood is shot-thru with a violent struggle for meaning and it can only present itself to the senses by silently disavowing the blood to which it refers.
Maybe “the rhetoric of blood” refers not to the senses but rather to the volatile space between our fragile figures, “the membranous precincts between our multiple bodies […] where much is sounding and also unsounded” (that’s Selah Saterstrom, Essays in Divinatory Poetics), and while “sounding” might augur the disruption of common sense, “unsounding” persists and it can be as violent as a chokehold, the rhetoric of blood authorizing a cop’s brutality.
Perhaps the analogy ought to be with film. But were I to say “the image of blood presents itself directly to the senses,” would I be any closer to naming this rhetoric? I’m still left trying to sense the rhetoric of blood as if I could touch the space between framed images, the space that Dziga Vertov calls “the interval,” the common place that structures perception, a film’s plastic support, the space between sensations being inseparable from sensation itself, at once condition and betrayal of “immediacy,” so to feel an image can only be to feel the structure of this feeling, a phantom sensation resembling the body that bears my name, a name carried on the tongue that calls to me as if I were leaving a voicemail to myself.
Lost between sentence and sentience at once block and blank, obstruction and promise I’m suspended in a void of sensation that the rhetoric of blood indirectly anticipates—“the dazed state toward which words incline” (that’s Georges Bataille)—and the absence of suspense is unbearable. In this space, rhetoric threatens to anaesthetize my capacity to sense anything at all as it performs its hygienic function, cleansing language of its visceral trace in the flesh. So while “the rhetoric of blood” might profess to speak of the body, it can only do so by forgetting the violence that makes the body something that can be spoken about.
Perhaps what I’m circling here resembles more “the grammar of blood” because grammar, I’ve often thought, refers to a set of arbitrary conventions that govern control the relations between subjects & objects, a coercive affair of monitored agreements stabilized by custom. But insofar as subjects & objects are also structural positions in a social grammar, places occupied by particular bodies, arbitrarily determined and historically naturalized, the grammar of blood can be said to present itself directly to the senses, but only to those whose body experiences this presentation as violence.
As my senses incline toward our common place—be it prison cell or futures market, “the excess of unfulfilment” (that’s Danny Hayward), “our / Hollowing out” (that’s Brian Whitener)—an image circulates of a body baking on hot asphalt, “Faceless down in a puddle / In a collage of puddles” (that’s Tongo Eisen-Martin), where “blood” absorbs a ruddy pool that spreads beneath the weight of sanctioned death. The body hangs in a place whose structure is framed by police tape cordon sanitaire where the thing I sense is the silence of blood, echo in a gulf, this blank in perception replete with a violence I do not see, coz “blood” is in the way. This is my theater of displacement, arousing whatever sensation it takes to awaken me from the rhetoric of what I can not feel, my body’s amnesia.
In the face of this surface without a face, in a dream of dreamless nite, or a fog of fogless flight, in a rage muted by force, or a panic made feckless by verse, and fearing my inability to feel anything at all, I substitute his heart on my heart for his cheek on the pitch, his lips on my skin for his fingers on tar, his cum on my belly for his blood in the sun, my fantasy of intimacy, this feeble effort to destroy a bloody rhetoric, to return a feeling to numbed abstraction, tuning my body atoning so that I might come closer to a negated touch called care.
“The Rhetoric of Blood” is forthcoming in Rob Halpern’s Weak Link (2019) from Atelos.