Johan Jönson - Laboratory-bacteria-cultures... the unconscious concretized in multiple bombings... self-mutilating-freedom

Johan Jönson, Collobert Orbital, Displaced Press, 2009. 

 «If Vicente Huidobro met Georges Bataille on a Waste Management(R)truck, the result might be something akin to Johan Jonson's COLLOBERT ORBITAL, the new manifesto of "the waste-disposal-working-class." At times soaring across "aerospatiality," at others existentially grounded in "an overheated world factory" of "all work, all healthcare, all logistics," Jonson's linguistic propulsions and dynamic formal innovations challenge "a victorious bourgeois poetry order" to, once again, rearticulate verse experimentation to the politics and poetics of working a day job." - Mark Novak 

 «DNA bonanza contaminant reverie, target overhead. Flock to revelator gridded up to have no stake in history. See that their grave is kept clean. Fatalize wrong, upend amphetamachinic tort. Zero immunity. Cology — hyperplex mini flair, underalphabetic biodebt. Ssay. I couldn't remember the advanced memory formula. Dunno ergo soma. Autoquadrilateral & exogeneric, the transparencies regroup. Law intuition anything uncocked reason craters. Eco rad mono dead with note attached, incalculably inorganic property of the object continuity you just heard — the world, overtime. Mooniac, tricked-up torso love before discharges false dichotomies start stuttering. Ahysterical — swiftest closeup transplant nude spatiality. "To speak an ecstatic technology." The flattest are the busiest arterial munchies. Sextras: bend them over. Faster buckle conjure against choice as surrogate overheating extinction as obliteratable chew. Speed mash mouth lexicon amphetamaneuver. The goo goo amok, self torture broad-minded guts — interzonad gaffered all over you. Put tools in your face. Overdifferent anti-creamery daub up name. Existential logistics: a porous will, a rectal will suckling finality. Mutate epithet or no ending belowgistics. Buzzerless blisscharge, cuties with fists pry open your syllables. Cunnilanguage, cunnilanguish — hope, a surgical implant. Wishful stun: harmony is a warning where anything can breathe. Poppy, missile! Safe, natural, bombing run — victory post-mortem lab blubber. Difference gets you dead. Prey unwriting rumba complicity radio spook you white on white disgust. Whiteous coke on scalpel socialized ice cream. The larval class: vote yes. Cattle reward you, interzonked Fanonical swearing in cattle corporation. Dark retro, subtlety reverses it up the ass. Wage labor, context meltdowns. War — short term memory loss. You think about a lot of things when you're insoluble. Reptility: turn gold into cash. PEWS (Political Economy [of the] World System) refusal mash-up. Organize the slaves to vaporize hegemon. Any accident would be one ending.» - Bruce Andrews

«COLLOBERT ORBITAL sounds like an operation performed on the retina of a late night comedy show host. It is not. What is it? To speak an ecstatic technology. It is labor and language. Work and wonder. I would like to connect your tongue to a garbage disposal and then ask you to moan a song called Global Capitalist System Dynamic bribes. The fucking ocean is bleeding black tears right now. People say experimental, here it is. Packed up tight. This poetic arterial order. Bleeding, too, as it spins. worldfactory. It is an isotope slam of French writer Danielle Collobert’s journals. Wait now. Johan Jonson flicks the switch. Original Gravity: 1.059 Final Gravity: 1.013 International Bittering Units: 30 Color (SRM). Carry the one, etc. About a 3 inch head with great sustainability. The coating was itself river flotsam and endured. I drank all 6, quickly. The buzz was not dissimilar to running four miles and then downing a cruet of heavy syrup. Glow. Jonson as member of Teatermaskinen. Some remember his performance, Project FAUST-FUCK. His poems reminded me of eating glass, shitting out the glass, reconstructing the glass into a mirror or a frame to frame ourselves doing the fake smile. Asked to. What does all that mean? This. That the scalpel-sharp amphetamine logic reconstitutes things and orders. Deep in the darkest depths of Rock Lake prowls a great saurian known today as Rocky. The legend of Rocky is old. The ancient inhabitants of Aztalan warned of the beast by building a giant serpent mound at the lake’s edge. The early residents of Lake Mills were forewarned of a guardian placed in the lake to protect its sacred stone tepees. And history tells of numerous encounters with Rocky, who became a source of great worry and fear. Although not seen for over a century, divers still experience a feeling of dread and being watched. Enjoy Rocky’s Revenge, our offering to this legendary protector of Tyranena. Right. Ok. It tasted malty. Ever had Russian black bread? It tasted like Russian black bread someone had shoved beneath the radiator of a studio apartment in Grand, Rapids, Michigan, one of those pipe heater things that groan and ping all night. Toasted black bread. Malty. There was a slight toffee finish, like that hard grandmother candy. Also a finishing note of whiskey. Why? It was aged in whiskey barrels, dumb-ass. I liked it. Yes. Something is taking place. Yes, it is enormous and white wall, strong institutional lighting. You stand there, in front, on the surface. A speech therapist instructs you. You cannot speak. The words produce an unendurable aftertaste. The word combinations produce an unendurable aftertaste. You write write think write for no reason. It is disgusting to hear that which is said to be YOUR voice. What do you remember? You remember a creature without name who stuttered in a foreign language. The speech therapist is a whispering choir machine, a movement, a kinetic, a gray and white. Nothing worth seeing. That which is visible is always already lost territory, lost time. A good beer makes the mouth feel tingly. My mouth felt tingly with all 6 beer. I could bounce quoted poems off my ideas of, but to pick is like selecting a drop of water from the river–I’d like you to experience the river whole, in all its…Here is 67. I mean come on. Read 67 and then go read the book entire. Flow. Simultaneously ongoing labor: -laboratory-bacteria-cultures- the unconscious concretized in multiple bombings the energy extraction from the event the reveling body aggregate animal and machine mutations and pleasures only not dead which you miss only not torture which you want The capital’s industrial revenue. you only absolute time without space Deleuzian deterritoritializations the impulse flow never stopped by human will your bodily blood no longer testifies about you illiteracy for no minds the room a neverending field the key an open repetition swallow more infected seed gurgle the disgusting swallow again always already uninterrupted in the inscribing reactor self-mutilating-freedom Light carbonation. I already discussed light carbonation. You want steak not sizzle. You want flavor not fluff. You want light carbonation. God invented beer. The Swedish Arts Council invented the money for COLLOBERT ORBITAL. Johannes Goransson invented the English words to put into the words (thanks for doing that). Frank Place invented a pregnancy test that will always come out positive. Steven Hendricks invented the scaffolding world of this book. A. Hormel & Co. developed the world’s first canned ham in 1926. Meghan McNealy invented the colors. Eric Gill (who was a sculptor, designer, devout Catholic, and person who experimented sexually with his own dog) invented the font used here called Gill Sans. Temple Grandin invented a friendly way to slaughter cattle. Antoine Louis invented the Guillotine (not Guillotine himself). Johan Jonson says: Buzzerless blisscharge. Buzzerless blisscharge. Buzzerless blisscharge.» - Sean Lovelace 

 «Johan’s text is in many ways a "re-translation" of Norma Cole's translation of Collobert's diaries (Litmus Press), translating it into his own severely restricted language, and also his life (he used to work as a feces-remover at a hospital). Johan is an interesting poet. A working class guy who was early on heralded as a bright young promise in the late 80s; then his work grew increasingly obscene and constrained (an odd combination); and in the 90s he was more or less exiled from the poetry world. Instead he wrote performance pieces for an incredibly obscene Artaud/Muller-inspired performance troop in northern Sweden (Teatermaskinen), publishing his texts as pamphlets that were eventually gathered up as I krigsmaskinen (In the war machine, they dealt largely with the war in Yugoslavia). At this point he was in many ways “rediscovered” by Aase Berg, a young poet who had gone from being a member of the radical avant-garde group the Stockholm Surrealists Group to an incredibly popular and influential young poet. The big press Bonnier very briefly let her edit its flagship journal BLM, and she used it in part to bring Johan into prominence. I’ve translated her work too, so I included one of those books. She also has an interesting tie-in for American poetry: as you can perhaps tell, there’s a big shift in her work from the extreme Bataille-influenced early surrealist prose poems to the highly charged, extremely translation-infused poems that follow (particularly Transfer Fat, which is based largely on “translations” of string theory, sci-fi films and other materials, a text that seems to “transfer” the “fat” of signifiers/signified in a continuous movement). Anyway, a big part of that shift had to do with Berg’s interest in American poetry, particularly Susan Howe, who was then just being translated into Swedish. Since then, Johan has become one of the central poet of OEI, a journal and publishing house founded by Jesper Olsson, a Swedish scholar who spent years in the 1990s studying with Charles Bernstein at SUNY Buffalo and who was inspired by Charles’s emphasis on do-it-yourself publishing. In the years since he came back from Buffalo, Jesper has made OEI into a major influence on contemporary Swedish poetry.» - Johannes Göransson

Matthias Friedrich on ProponeisiS: Zoembient växelverkanvers by Johan Jönson

I cannot imagine how someone nowadays could write a poem which is longer than, say, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, yet Johan Jönson has dared to do exactly this: he has just published a long poem of 2,272 pages, which mainly, but not completely, consists of two stanzas of five lines per page. The form he has invented has a name of its own: ProponeisiS, or, as the subheading says, Zoembient växelverkanvers. But who is Johan Jönson? Born in 1966, he has been publishing poetry since 1992 and is regarded as one of Sweden’s foremost poets. Probably you have not read him, and that is because most of his works are not available in English (apart from this little book, translated by Johannes Göransson). His breakthrough came with the 800-page volume Efter arbetsschema (According to Work Schedule, 2008), a book which earned him both Aftonbladet’s Literature Prize and a nomination for Northern Europe’s most prestigious literary award Nordiska Rådets Litteraturpris – and, again, in 2020, for Marginalia/Xterminalier. Here is what Ulf Olsson had to say about it in Expressen. The critic describes Jönson’s text as a “machine”:

(It) works for 800 pages, disgorging different types of text. A short slogan like “work and fun belong together” alternates with diary notes, job descriptions from nursing homes with accounts from the writer’s machine. And the text grinds and buzzes so loudly that one really isn’t capable of grasping its different parts: the machine is working.

Jönson is a conceptual artist. He builds poetry apparatuses, gets lost in typographical shenanigans, prose fragments, long run-on sentences, lists, verses scattered all over the page, streams of consciousness. But his works are far from being inanimate or apathetic. When Efter arbetsschema was published in Elisabeth Fryking’s Norwegian translation in 2012, his editor Leif Høghaug said that the reader was “swept away” by the book, and I consider this to be an accurate description of what Jönson does to those who dare to read what he has contrived. His writing is hypnotic, dream-like, radical, and one has to make sure not to get lost in the labyrinths of his mind. Even if there is very little one can hold onto – the title of his new book is a good starting point.

In Sara Abdollahi’s and Andrea Lundgren’s podcast Godmorgon, midnatt, Jönson mentions that ProponeisiS is a made-up word – or, if that’s what one wants to call it, a creation in the spirit of Finnegans Wake. (If you understand Swedish, you can listen to him explaining his title at around 1:22.) First of all, the title contains poiesis, the Greek word for “poetry”, which also means “making”. For Jönson, poetry connotes mechanical art – that’s not surprising given his numerous references to factory work. Pro, of course, means for. Other than that, the creation includes the Swedish word for “no” (nej),  although it is written as nei. Taking these aspects into account, it is tempting to read Jönson’s obscure neologism as an apocryphal title: For a Negative Making – that is, a form of critique in a certain dialectical tradition, both private and political, socially critical and arty. It is a critique that in itself is a “P.S.”, a post scriptum to all of Jönson’s earlier works – or, rather, a summa of everything he has written before.

Zoembient växelverkanvers is another invented term, even a literary genre of its own. The adjective zoembient is based on a post-dramatic script written by Jönson himself and includes three words – zoe, zombie, ambient: zoe is Giorgio Agamben’s term for bare life. Furthermore, it implies that one aspires to reach a certain form of self-fulfillment through work – which Jönson’s “I” is never going to reach, precisely because his jobs are utterly absurd, both to himself and to society. Therefore, he has quite a different conception of zoe than any neoliberal would have. In a sort of introduction to his play script, he writes that the word “describes a form of flickering life, caught between vegetation and an insect-like existence, landscape and subject, environment and vector, discourse and evolution, redistribution and geology, movement and language, silence and obscurity”.  A zombie is, of course, an undead bedeviling innocent people, an abhorred revenant that is difficult to kill, and a constant source of sorrow or even grief personified. Ambient refers to proximate surroundings (society and nature) – but also to electronic soundscapes: a background noise, elevator music, a machine humming in the background. Hence, Jönson uses poetry – aesthetic and rhythmic qualities of language – to highlight the interplay (växelverkan) between living and inanimate spheres. What is alive? What is dead? Does his narrator still walk among the animate, or has he moved back to the inferno? Jönson’s narrating “I” is a kind of Orpheus whose Eurydice has never existed. He himself tries to sing but is drowned out by the buzzing city behind his back. The only thing he can do is to try again, to fail again, to fail better – although he can never give up singing.

The book is centered around “a proponeitic and zoembient subjectivity”. It refers to itself as “I” and is called “Johan”, but it cannot be defined as an alter ego of the author. Rather than that, it is, in the words of the Danish-Norwegian critic Susanne Christensen, “a serial I”, chattering about the violent society it lives in. This “collective” narrative instance is caught up between waking and sleeping, and, therefore, bears witness to an “inertia regime” – an account of a continued dehumanization through work, an existence between life and death, which is why it is exclusively capable of delivering sequence upon sequence of hypnagogic images. “Johan” describes how capitalism has inflicted damage to his body and mind. He has always had low-paid menial jobs, for example in a graphite powder plant, in nursing homes, as a cleaner, etc. He is suffering from constant financial strain and feels that he can’t provide for his family. Furthermore, he doesn’t have much time to write and moves back and forth between the gloomy existence of a worker and that of an author. This is what is meant by “zoembient”: “Johan” has to find a compromise between the animate sphere of literature and the inanimate sphere of work because he cannot live in both domains at the same time. But his only accomplishment both as a worker and as a writer is a certain stasis, a perpetual iteration of internalized procedures in a capitalist society which only takes and never gives, and reduces him to nothing but a shadow, a prospective version of himself he can’t recognize. In her review of Efter arbetsschema, Susanne Christensen likens Jönson’s poetry to the paintings of Norwegian artist Hariton Pushwagner, in which people merge with the dehumanizing urban environment, and the Swedish poet’s most recent book further confirms this comparison.

Truth be told, these limbo chronicles can be as tiring as my description sounds. However, they are remarkable in terms of syntax: full of nested sentences, parentheses, and disruptions. The poem begins at a graphite powder plant and moves on to defining life stations: a childhood in a doomed family, jobs, an encounter with the love of life, and is constantly interrupted by small chapbooks – most of them only several pages long –, often right in the middle of a sentence. In the podcast I have mentioned, Jönson reveals that these chapbooks were planned as addenda to ProponeisiS, leaflets to be taken out by the reader and distributed anyplace in the book. Unfortunately, this was unfeasible for the publisher. Apart from these incognito poetry collections, the poem itself – that is, the sequences of two five-line stanzas – is not paginated.  Given its length, this seems to be a sadistic trick of the author. However, it is not that the author gratuitously mocks the readers by denying them the comfort of knowing on which page they are at the given moment – his purpose is rather to allow them to go astray in the zoembient subjectivity’s mind. The enormous extent of Jönson’s text should not be viewed as the product of loose editing but as a sign of its obsessive qualities and transgressive potential.

Jönson recounts the history of a personal cataclysm caused by heavy work and elitist class distinctions. His language is full of anger, invectives and injuries. He does not have qualms about resorting to explicit depictions of graphic sexualized violence. There is nothing erotic about intercourse here (very frequently, sperm clumps are described as little white “maggots”). Ubiquitous images of violence even haunt the “I”’s sleep  in such a way that I (don’t) hope he’s going to publish a dream protocol:

In a dream, I’m at home, but I’m forced to eat enormous heaps of fresh ravioli filled with thick sperm. It’s like chomping into a deliciously fat pillow pasta and realizing that yellowish, gooey ricotta or mozzarella cheese trickles from the middle of it. I don’t know why I need to gobble up this food, but somehow, I feel like I have to go for it. And I get pregnant, my belly swells up, becomes taut. When I’m expected to give birth, it turns out that the grotesque belly doesn’t contain a child but thick, semi-fluid, dissolved, feculent fat. It oozes out of me, both out of my anus and my contaminated, blazing red snatch, and somehow even out of the cesarean which has been made under my wobbling belly. The doctors and the midwives are kicking their heels, laughing scornfully.

In the Freudian sense of the term, this dream is a condensation of the violence the “I” is confronted with and subjected to every day. Apart from continuous harassment by employers and, as a poor person, being made invisible by an exploitative and elitist society, the “I” has to deal with the internalized violence it inflicts on both itself and others. As is customary in Scandinavian societies, it spirals into a crisis of conscience and självransakelse (self-examination): Did I commit any mistakes? And, if I did, how can I make up for them? The “I” has to answer this question by questioning the destructive aspects of its masculinity through literature and writing. It has “found itself within a forest dark” – not only like Dante but also like the man in Ulrich Schlotmann’s magnum opus Die Freuden der Jagd (The Pleasures Of Hunt), a stream of consciousness which is, in fact, a deconstruction of fatalist conceptions of masculinity. (Jönson mentions the author a couple of times, which is impressive because this novel has never been translated and is little known even in Germany.) The “I” is much more transgressive than, for instance, Karl Ove Knausgård in his autobiographical novel series – in the sense that it doesn’t indulge in narcissistic accolades of the self, but in collectivized images of brutishness caused by a harmful society. Nor does it engage in kitchen-sink realism or, as the poet would call it, “lifestyle liberalism literature”.

In a sense, Jönson follows the 19th-century Danish critic Georg Brandes who said that literature had to moot social problems – a request which became increasingly popular not only with Henrik Ibsen’s plays but is still going strong in a lot of Scandinavian books making their way into the Anglophone world. But unlike all those writers (among them Knausgård), Jönson does not dwell on trite simulations of middle-class life in the suburbs. In his conceptual art, he aims to represent the poor, the sick, the dispossessed and invents a disrupted, infinite poetical form, a rich tapestry of subaltern life in today’s Sweden. Does it hurt? Yes. Is it necessary? Not only that, it’s past overdue. https://theuntranslated.wordpress.com/2021/03/16/guest-post-matthias-friedrich-on-proponeisis-zoembient-vaxelverkanvers-by-johan-jonson/