Psycho-Materialism, the Anti-Book, and the Literary-Academic System: On Four RM Haines Chapbooks
RM Haines, Three Essays (for a poetics of psycho-materialism), Dead Mall Press, 2022
RM Haines, Civil Society, Dead Mall Press, 2022
RM Haines, Dysnomia, Dead Mall Press, 2022
RM Haines, Interrogation Days, Dead Mall Press, 2022
What happens to writing gestating in money? What happens to writing whose form is given by the whims of money? It can disappear: as a CNN article on academic literary magazines notes, “There’s an idea rising in higher education that the market should decide what gets funded, which then leaves more artistic pursuits like literary magazines out.” It can mimic the shape of the desires of the donor class. In Post45, Dan Sinykin and Edwin Roland quote a passage from Sherry Kempf’s book on her internship at Graywolf Press, in which she writes that the novel Little by the Ojibwe author David Treuer is a type of project that “fulfill[s] the community outreach goals that funders are looking for right now. The book is written by a person of color whose own community will be served by the grant.” Taking Kempf’s experience as a point of departure, Sinykin and Roland bring the point home: “State and philanthropic money freed Graywolf from surviving solely on sales and subsidiary rights but made the publisher beholden to the priorities of its funders.” The choice, here, seems to be between two different incarnations of a neoliberal approach to publishing—one shaped by the free market and one by philanthropy.
In his essay “Poets Should Be Socialists,” poet and publisher RM Haines critiques another neoliberalized publishing apparatus: the U.S. literary-academic system. This apparatus is one, Haines writes, “supposedly designed to support poets—but which serves primarily to professionalize and class them.” Haines suggests that under this particular social arrangement, poets are compelled to mold themselves into careerists, accumulate credentials and debt, provide a cheap pool of labor, unflaggingly submit, and pay mounting submission fees to make a living. This auto-exploitation is the typical path to career success (if it ever arrives), and the typical mode of becoming a writer. In this process of becoming a writer, however, Haines contends that poets also become “legitimizing ornaments of capital,” participating in a mode of literary production that “unconsciously reproduce[s] the values of the ruling class.” While Haines writes harshly, his critique is not meant to vilify anyone. He continues: “rather, my criticism is structural and institutional. The fault lies with the university itself as an instrument of capital, overseen by boards and presidents and other zealous advocates and enablers.” The parasitism of the neoliberal university has created the conditions in which people are required to consent to exploitation to access literary recognition.
Haines’ own hollow experiences with this neoliberal apparatus of literary production led him to self-publish several collections, beginning with A Dark Address, in 2020. Subsequently, he started his imprint, Dead Mall Press, and self-published four more collections: a chapbook of essays (Three Essays (for a poetics of psycho-materialism)) and three poetry chapbooks (Interrogation Days, Dysnomia, and Civil Society).
These self-publishing efforts, Haines writes, were an initial attempt to break with an apparatus of capitalist literary production and an atmosphere of auto-exploitation, and instead to move towards socialist/collectivist publishing practices. Self-publishing, for many, is an attempt to circulate one’s work in a gift economy—to share one’s work outside of the market of commodities. It’s a rejection of prestige. As Haines suggests in “Poets Should be Socialists,” what’s less reputable than self-publishing your own work?
Haines has since published seven chapbooks by other authors through DMP. In doing so, he contends that DMP is operating “outside publishing,” if publishing is considered to be the game of prestige, marketing, literary contests, and professionalized presses. Instead of publishing to find customers, DMP publishes to find collaborators. For Haines, “the ideal arrangement between poets and publishers is an intensification of collaboration, leading to more known affiliations and long-term associations.” This publishing ethic is enabled by Haines’ DIY approach to making books —he designs the books and eBooks, produces them at home, and distributes them himself. DIY bookmaking keeps cost low, and it also allows him the sort of autonomy that’s a key part of DMP’s politics. As he writes in the press’s FAQ page, should he begin printing perfect-bound books and pursuing wider distribution for them, costs would increase and he would need to start fundraising—in which case DMP would go down the road of becoming a nonprofit. This is an approach that, it should be stressed, is not new. As Haines acknowledges, many presses have long been exploring similar publishing practices.
Nonetheless, what Haines is doing is notable. His initial four publications through Dead Mall Press, together with the launch of his press, mark the elaboration of a poetics Haines calls “psycho-materialism”: a Marxist approach to literary production that seeks to suffuse material reality with the psyche and the psyche with the material. Haines orients this approach within what he describes as a “psycho-political moment” characterized by the economic rationalization of the mind. Drawing on the philosopher Byung Chul-Han’s notion of psychopower described in his book Psychopolitics, Haines describes this moment as one in which economic modalities characterized by technologies like Big Data nudge people into self-disciplining themselves in such a way that makes their minds into engines of economic productivity (Three Essays, 20). Here is where Haines draws his notion of the “auto-exploiting subject” exemplified by contemporary poets and writers, and where the connection between psycho-materialism and the literary academic system is apparent. Psycho-materialism is in part conceived of as an escape hatch from neoliberal forms of publishing.
In the third essay of Three Essays, “The Ghost Mine Explodes: Toward a Psycho-Materialist Poetics,” Haines provides a sketch of psycho-materialism. He describes it as an aesthetic that aims to lay bare the interpenetration of reality and psyche and thereby explode the commodified forms of expression that legitimate its assimilation by neoliberal institutions like academia.
He positions psycho-materialism within a modernist lineage. It’s not surrealism, but it orients itself by the conjunction of surrealism and Marxism. It works towards the synthesis of the insights of Rimbaud and Marx that André Breton insisted upon—something Haines notes Sean Bonney described as “one of the most important ideas in the history of modernist poetics” (Three Essays, 15) and yet to be achieved.
How does psycho-materialism attempt this synthesis? In the first two essays of Three Essays, “Identity and Its Discontents: Notes on Rimbaud” and “Revolt and Divination: On Sean Bonney’s ‘Letters Against the Firmament,” he offers psycho-materialist readings of Rimbaud and Marx (via Bonney) that circle around an integration between the two.
In “Identity and Its Discontents,” Haines interprets Rimbaud’s oeuvre, focusing on his famous quote, “I is an other.” He suggests that Rimbaud might expand our understanding of the psyche to encompass not just the mind but material reality. Here, ego spills out into the world, engendering the realization of the “materiality of soul” (Three Essays, 6). This configuration produces a reconfigured poetics characterized by ruptures in the borders between mind and matter and “[n]ew languages for relation that does not admit ownership of meaning, of property.” (Three Essays, 6).
While Rimbaud reveals the interpenetration of ego with alterity, Marx offers a method for its realization. In “Revolt and Divination” Haines argues that Marx “fought to bring an invisible order that had emerged from the visible, material relations of capitalist society back into plainly material terms.” (Three Essays, 9). He ascribes this work of reading the invisible a divinatory logic akin to that employed by Sean Bonney in his poetry collection Letters Against the Firmament. This scrying, or augury, is the function of the psycho-material poem. Contrast this with “police realism,” Sean Bonney’s term for the aesthetic produced by those in power who determine what is and isn’t sensible. As opposed to exploding the psyche, police realism “keeps one’s psyche in one’s head,” Haines writes (Three Essays, 10). Against this aesthetic of the invisible, psycho-materialism aims for a lyric “I” that is collective rather than privatized—clarifying rather than mystifying.
While Haines has a clear picture of what a psycho-materialist poetics should do, he shies away, in Three Essays, from clearly delineating what it should look like. Nonetheless, he offers a few examples of the forms it could take:
disrupting unified voices and discourses by adding more layers and registers, more material in dialectical tension and collision … Juxtaposed citations, fictions, jokes. Polyvocality … Montage, collage. Syntax as surgery (Three Essays, 25–26)
In the trilogy of poetry chapbooks inaugurating Dead Mall Press, Haines puts his own recommendations into practice. Up until this point, I’ve outlined Haines’ vision of psycho-materialism as an aesthetic, which is how he conceives of it. But if, as Haines argues, this aesthetic is to recast “the poet’s consciousness of their task as imaginative worker” and break out of auto-exploitation (Three Essays, 18), then psycho-materialism has to function not just as an approach to writing but also to publishing.
I argue, then, that Haines’ self-publishing efforts fall within the lineage of what Nicholas Thoburn in his 2016 monograph calls the “anti-book,” a work of writing and publishing that critically interrogates its media form. Thoburn positions the anti-book as a response to the commodity book—the type of book published by the likes of the big five or the literary academic system. This is a good both Haines and Thoburn argue receives treatment as a product transcending economics, sacred, supposedly “immune to commodification.”
Here, putting the content of Haines’ psycho-materialist poetry chapbooks in conversation with parts of the conceptual map Thoburn sketches throughout Anti-Book reveals the ways in which Haines’ texts, both in content and form, challenge the commodity form of the book and produce a publishing alternative to the neoliberal academy.
The first of these poetry booklets is Civil Society, comprised of a short poem that is maybe the least chaotic of the three. In the final section of this book (subtitled “September 11, 2021, etc.”), Haines writes in muddled layers:
Dead dreams on the tarmac. Tent encampments in the streets of
Kabul. Eight trillion dollars, 929,000 dead. “How far is it to the
mineral deposits? How far to the laboratory, the factory, the
mall?”
“...OF THE SAME FOUL SPIRIT...” (Bush)
A day before the US withdraws, one of its drones kills seven
children carrying bottles of water. A fresh shiver across the planet
(deformed stars, a new and final word).
“There was not a strong enough case to be made for personal
accountability.” (Under the sirens,
tearing at one’s skin.) (Civil Society, 9)
The poem quotes Defense Department spokesperson John Kirby’s statement on an August 29, 2021 airstrike. Other quotes are original to the poem. Some sources, Haines writes, he lost. The effect of these layerings is disorientation. The everyday catastrophes of U.S. imperialism are stripped of their mundanity through this disorientation and become horrifying.
Here Deleuze and Guattari’s typology of books, as analyzed by Thoburn, helps situate Civil Society and the rest of the trilogy. They offer three classifications of books: the root book, the fascicular root-book, and the rhizome book. Thoburn describes the root book as “an enclosed and sufficient entity constituted as an image of the world.” It is the dominant form of the book. The rhizome book, in contrast, is characterized by connection rather than separation. Rather than reproducing an image of the world, the rhizome book exists and evolves in relation to the world. The fascicular root book is a “botched escape” from the representationalist root book to the rhizome, and forms Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of modernist experiments with language and form. Whereas the root book is characterized by unity, the fascicular root book severs that unity and understands the world as “fragmented and chaotic.” Despite its reconfiguration of the world, the fascicular root book retains the same function as the root book, forming a “totalizing image of the (now chaotic) world.”
This typology contains some useful parallels with psycho-materialism. The root-book could be understood as police realism in their shared interest in cleaving the text from material reality and offering a transcendent, authoritative image of truth. The rhizome book shares with psycho-materialism an interest in exploding boundaries, whether between psyche and matter or book object and reality. If psycho-materialism is to challenge police realism, like the rhizome book, it needs to adopt a different relation to matter. Nonetheless, Haines elaborates psycho-materialism principally as aesthetic (Three Essays, 29), and as an aesthetic rendered in Civil Society, it mostly resembles the fascicular root book. The question arises, for Haines’ chapbooks, of whether their content has the totalizing function Deleuze and Guattari critique.
In the second release of this trilogy, Dysnomia, Haines draws on fragments from a variety of sources to produce a long poem: the letter Donald Trump wrote to Nancy Pelosi in December 2019 in the midst of his first impeachment trial; a testimony from James Mitchell, one of the psychologists responsible for developing methods of torture for interrogation dubbed “enhanced techniques”; and the revelations regarding Jeffrey Epstein and his death. The collection’s name itself, Haines writes, “has a variety of references: the ancient Greek goddess of lawlessness; a moon of the dwarf planet Eris (goddess of strife); and a kind of aphasia. This fusion of law(lessness), strife, and damaged speech was essential to the poem’s conception.” (Dysnomia, 13).
An atmosphere of chaos results:
“Nerve end cut out by Law / in trash stratum, pvxsyhe psyche
as compost, as spasm / discards moaning, busted guts, objects
in protected air-space (blockchain/synapse) / said: mother planet
gone, resisting / said: weapons supplied to Space Force / “here” “on
screen” “I” read the diagnosis / “A terrible thing you are dgnoi doing,
but you will have to live with it, nto not I” / (cell dracfting fuct
copies cpoiesz) / said: enter redemption codes, ask permission, [in-
audible, laughter], (all the gixs gods turned informants) / see: Idols
& Judges, all Americans, see: the anthem on repeat / “Not I” (Dysnomia, 6)
Like Civil Society, the text in Dysnomia disorients. Aside from fragmentation, Haines employs redaction, strike-throughs, and constant misspellings. Through these techniques, Haines deranges his source materials, many of which originate with the state, or from the powerful.
The diversity of source texts Haines uses in Dysnomia lends it a resonance with documentary poetics. Haines’ intent with these sources is, in part, “fucking with, and fucking up, an archive of recorded documents,” which is likewise a key aspect, in one sense, of documentary poetics. But where documentary poetics’ version of defacing the monument could be thought of as a form of rewriting or counter-narrative, psycho-materialism shucks narrative, or garbles. This garbling, however, is not meant to derange for the sake of derangement, but to clarify. In Three Essays, Haines regards the psycho-material explosion as a moment of lucidity. He quotes Sean Bonney’s assertion that the poem is not “magical thinking” but “analysis and clarity” (Three Essays, 13).
The documentary impulse of psycho-materialism, then, aims for a lucidity that does not appear lucid—a “continuity in discontinuity” (Three Essays, 14). The mechanism of this production of lucid derangement is apparent in Haines’ conceptualization of Guattari’s chaosmosis, which he considers characteristic of psycho-materialism: the reconfiguration of the psycho-political operations of capital into novel forms that resist and re-organize the “psychic valence” of those operations (Three Essays, 25).
Haines’ documentary poetics is in this sense one of “noncommunication”—a concept Thoburn notes appears in both the writings of Deleuze and the Situationist International. That is, instead of a counternarrative, or alternative form of communication, psycho-materialism attempts a breach in the subjectivity introduced by psychopolitics, which appears as noncommunication.
The resultant fragments congeal into a kind of toxicity. In “The Ghost Mine Explodes,” Haines emphasizes that it is the “poison space” of our current “nightmarish reality” that poetry must operate in to confront that reality and open up a different approach to the psyche in opposition to police realism (Three Essays, 23). The ordinary contaminants enveloping our everyday lives via spectacles like those of CNN or the New York Times are transmuted by psycho-materialism into hazardous materials. This is, to paraphrase Haines, poisoning to cure.
Here, psycho-materialism begins to differ from the fascicular root-book. Rather than reproducing an image of the world as chaos, it aims at metabolizing the toxicities of psychopolitics towards a lucidity that is currently impossible. But what is the clarity offered by noncommunication?
The final release of the trilogy, Interrogation Days, focuses on the psychic toll of the U.S.’s ongoing “war on terror.” Later on, in “Lines in a Time of Error” (a poem containing quotes from Wallace Stevens, John Keats, Donald Rumsfeld, the Prophet Mohammed, and Syrian militant poet Ahlam al-Nasr), Haines collages:
2001. The poet declares his aim:
“To create a show of terror
more spectacular than anything
the world had ever witnessed.”
O love, O dream, buried in the heart.
To bring into being. To sing desire
into neurons, into weaponry.
One listens to the Prophet’s words:
Better suicide than to be thought a poet.
Better nightmare than false dreams. (Interrogation Days, 17)
The embarrassment of being a poet here is the embarrassment of complicity with police realism. Under the re-configuration engendered by this collage, poetic speech hawks false dreams, is a gun, a procedure, a spasm, a show of terror. Like Dysnomia, through its derangement of quotes from various poets and politicians, Interrogation Days employs psycho-materialist aesthetics to reconfigure poetry as nightmare.
Haines acknowledges the limit to the cure offered by a poisonous aesthetic that wallows in catastrophe. “Any aesthetic gesture can be appropriated and neutralized by capital,” Haines writes in the footnotes of “The Ghost Mine Explodes” (Three Essays, 29). Therefore aesthetic interventions are not sufficient to achieve an anti-capitalist poetic practice—one must also attend to material publishing practices (Three Essays, 29). Psycho-materialism, as an aesthetic alone, might similarly be vulnerable to cooptation. But in contrast with Haines, I consider psycho-materialism as not just an aesthetic—it’s an orientation towards literary production as a whole.
The notion of the anti-book supplies the approach to the materiality of books and publishing that psycho-materialism requires. In exploring the concepts orbiting around the anti-book, Thoburn calls attention to the expressivity of the materiality of books—text is not the only means of signification for a book. Drawing on Ranciere, he writes that, in fact, “the medium of signification may sometimes be more politically decisive than the content it carries.” This expressivity of the form of an anti-book lives in what Thoburn calls a “self-differing” relationship with its content. That is, the content of the anti-book addresses its form in such a way that what’s communicated by its medium and its text triangulates or even approaches a kind of mimesis or unity.
Here, the materiality of Haines’ self-published chapbooks comes into play in their reading. If the psycho-material text can be understood as an anti-book, then Haines’ DIY approach to publishing them becomes an additional site for their interpretation. Saddle stitch binding, the lack of ISBN, the way the books initially thwarted Haines’ attempts to get them stocked in bookstores—all of these aspects of the chapbooks’ materiality are expressive.
Thoburn’s understanding of the communist object, of which small press pamphlets constitute an example, provides a relevant analytic for understanding how and what Haines’ publishing practices signify. Thoburn risks a schematic of the communist object, understanding it to have three key characteristics. It is a lively, perhaps even agential object existing in a sensuous relation with its reader; it is an object without utility or commercial value; and it is an object closed off to commodity exchange but open to the “fleeting and permeable” circulation characterized by the practices of the collector. Crucially, the communist object is not an other to the commodity but “emerges in the midst of the everyday objects and desires of commodity culture.”
For the psycho-materialist text, an especially relevant aspect of the communist object, for me, is its status as comrade. Thoburn explores this aspect through Russian Constructivism, which configures the object as a “sensuous entity in material equality with the human, the object as ‘comrade’ and ‘coworker.’” For Boris Aravatov, a Soviet critic active in the Constructivist movement, capitalist consumption produces an object that is configured as private property: mute, solitary, and easily mass-produced, constrained by bourgeois individualism. In becoming a commodity, it becomes deadened. In being liberated from the property relation and absorbed into a “communist material culture of the object” as articulated by Aravatov, an object is retrieved from suspension and is given agency. It becomes dynamic. It explodes into material excessiveness by closing the “rupture between things and people.”
This sensuousness and dynamism is a key attribute for a psycho-materialist text. The mute, isolated death of the commodity is the death of the privatized lyric “I” of the police realist text. So long as a book object is constrained by its status as property, something to be owned, the text will convey a psyche confined to the individual. “Cracking open the psyche,” as Haines writes, necessitates cracking open the isolated, finished veneer of the unit of private property as well (Three Essays, 13). If the psycho-materialist aesthetic communicates the interpenetration of materiality and imagination, the psycho-materialist book embodies it—releasing the psyche from the confines of the text into the material of the book itself. Police realism, in this sense, is not just an aesthetic but a material regime producing dead book-objects.
There is, however, an apparent divergence between the content and the form of the psycho-materialist chapbooks considered here, whereas for Thoburn an anti-book requires a mimetic relation between the two. The forms of Haines’ chapbooks (compact, neat, iterable) seem to contradict the garbled noncommunication of its contents. Like Thoburn’s small press pamphlets conceived as communist objects, Haines’ chapbooks operate not as an independent entity existing outside the structures underlying the commodity book form, but as an “unreliable mimic.” Just as the psycho-materialist text breaches the subjectivity arranged by police realism using its own language, the psycho-materialist book object breaches the economic structures producing police realist texts using its own form. The psycho-materialist chapbook’s detournement of police realism’s form and content marks its realization as an anti-book—a poetic object resisting literary auto-exploitation.
This convergence between material and aesthetic practice is ultimately what’s most transformative about Haines’ poetic practice. In “The Ghost Mine Explodes,” Haines describes the experience of living under police realism as a “nightmare” in which any possibility of radical transformation is foreclosed (Three Essays, 23). Producing a psycho-material anti-book, on the other hand, is an attempt to break out of the barricades erected by police realism, even if that attempt ultimately amounts to a cure that is nightmarish. The choice to wake to the nightmare is the freedom the anti-book offers, and this freedom is a future achieved via escape from psychic domination.
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Austin Miles is from southeast Ohio. He is the author of the chapbook Perfect Garbage Forever (Bottlecap Press) and has poems published in Landfill, Sip Cup, and elsewhere.