What could be more suspect in today’s aesthetic and political terrain than sincerity? On the political side, we have images of Bill Clinton’s soft-focus projections of empathy on his continual campaign trail, and we have Stephen Harper deploying an affectless sincerity in the service of the state to deliver an apology from the Government of Canada to First Nations people. In literature, we have the call for a new sincerity in American fiction to address the national urgency after 9/11 and to counter the fear of a lingering, ironic postmodernism. And in poetry, the influence of the first stage of conceptual writing, drawing heavily from a particular moment in Anglo-American conceptual art, isolated expression as the deadening poetic dominant (a shift that overlooked post-conceptual practices that have delved into the aesthetic construction of affect). Outside of both of these restrictions (the aesthetic and the post-political), new social movements have increasingly turned to the necessary yet difficult-to-isolate role that affective alliances play in bringing together people, places, and communities into some form that pushes back against the state or imagines and builds another form of life. Militancy today is not only political; it is also affective. Sincerity, whether tied to counterinsurgent movements or militant poetics, is a social affect rather than an expressive fallacy or practiced authenticity.
To avoid generalizing affect as an intensity sprung from deep feelings and emanating from a performative subject and then spreading outward into social relations, I want to propose sincerity as a compelling force within an affective economy. In The Migrant Image, T. J. Demos builds a compelling argument for the use of an affective economy in new documentary works to “dislodge the conventional security of the representational categories of political art”1 in order to challenge “triumphalist narratives” of globalization and neoliberalism,2 and reads the films of Steve McQueen and the Otolith Group as works that mobilize “a form of address at once aesthetic and affective.”3 In doing so, Demos aims to refigure the relation of aesthetics and politics and to pull these two categories together so that the making and representation of politics are not separated. Shifting this mode of reading over to poetry could provide an entry point to thinking through poetry’s relationship to affect, aesthetics, and politics where poetics is also a making of politics. Sincerity as a form of address that is both affective and political can dislodge poetry from a representational event and launch it into the social in a way that challenges the security of established social relations, as well as the security of poetic address. Was this not the mode of address that many modernist poems, militant poems, and engaged poems tried to activate in order to break down the gap between reader and the world, and between the poem and politics? Today, under very different conditions, sincerity can undermine the relations that make us imagine the social as a done deal, a historical end point.
The Objectivists’ rather open notion of “sincerity,” introduced by Louis Zukosfky in a 1931 issue of Poetry with his essay “Sincerity and Objectification with Special Reference to the Poetry of Charles Reznikoff,” ultimately has to do with bringing a sincere rendering or reflection of material relations seen in the social world back into the poem and thus folding the poem into material social relations.4 Objectivist sincerity, as Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Peter Quartermain point out, has been “(perhaps paradoxically) productive” due to its loose definition, but according to Zukofsky, the actual poetics of sincerity move from an aesthetic aspect of the poem, in which sincerity mediated the relationship of word to thing, out into the social via an “accuracy of detail.”5 More politically, sincerity can take on a particularity that, as Burton Hatlen writes, the Objectivists believed would “shatter the grand ideological abstractions of the dominant culture, and thus open up a new way of being-in-the-world.”6 If Objectivist sincerity aimed to create a sincere rendering or reflection of material relations in the social world in the poem via the accuracy of a particular use of language and image, then sincerity represents an aesthetic folding of the poem into material relations. Further, can we speculate that sincerity not only reflects or represents material and social relations, but also produces them? That is, is sincerity a moment where aesthetics and politics are not separated? Boris Groys comes close to this when he locates sincerity as a form of affective labour in contemporary artistic production:
In today’s world, the production of sincerity and
trust has become everyone’s occupation — and yet
it always was, and still is, the main occupation of
art throughout the whole history of modernity;
the modern artist has always positioned himself
or herself as the only honest person in a world of
hypocrisy and corruption.7
Groys’s artist as the only honest person in a corrupt world aligns with Herbert Read’s8 and Lionel Trilling’s9 presentation of a sincere self to a receptive public. Groys’s aesthetic solution, however, involves the breakdown of the artistic producer of affect and the audience through a participatory art practice that “weakens the radical separation of artist and audience to a certain degree.”10 The Objectivists saw sincerity as breaking the separation of word and thing and thus illuminating the actual world, pulling back the curtain on the distorted world of dominant ideology.11 In this, the philosophical dimensions of the political project of sincerity do not seem so far removed from Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s rerouting of love from Spinoza to the terrain of militancy today: “People today seem unable to understand love as a political concept, but the concept of love is just what we need to grasp the constituent power of the multitude.”12 Hardt and Negri formulate love as “an action, a biopolitical event, planned and realized in common,”13 and from there they leap to love as an affect that produces new objects and even new subjects in the world.”14 Sincerity, in the Objectivist sense, was imagined to operate through the poem to thicken social relations; to overcome ideological frames that separated word from the whole complex of social relations that a thing is, as well as create a new relation between the reading subject and the thing. The Objectivist leap — the leap of sincerity — would then make a new relation between the subject and world. Word. Thing. Subject. World. In this way, I imagine social sincerity not as the expression of a self-assured historical subject (from Rousseau to Pound) but as a social process in the production of new social subjects. What’s the poem got to do with it? Sincerity — as produced and circulated, as lived and structured — can likewise circulate through the poem into the social (just as it can enter the poem through the social). Sincerity, shorn of its attachments to authenticity, and unleashed from a singular subject, can be a political force between social subjects. That is, poetic.
1 T. J. Demos, The Militant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), xxi.
2 Ibid., 32.
3 Ibid.
4 Louis Zukofsky, “Sincerity and Objectification with Special Reference to the Poetry of Charles Reznikoff,” Poetry 37.5 (February 1931): 272–85.
5 Zukofsky, quoted in Peter Quartermain and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “Introduction,” The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics (Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1999), 8.
6 Burton Hatlen, “A Poetics of Marginality and Resistance: The Objectivist Poets in Context,” in Quartermain and Blau DuPlessis, 38.
7 Boris Groys, Going Public (Berlin: Sternberg Press/e-flux journal: 2010), 43.
8 The Cult of Sincerity (London: Faber & Faber, 1969).
9 Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972).
10 Groys, 47.
11 Hatlen, 39.
12 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 351.
13 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge: Belknap Press/Harvard UP, 2009), 180.
14 Ibid., 181.