Danny Hayward
“I literally have no control over what comes out of my mouth,” writes a friend. “I write from the pathological standpoint, I do not know how to follow orders or work according to plan.”
I’ve never really been able to organize my own books. In London, finally home after a couple of years of moving, I unpack the library of my dead lover along with my own, packed up two years ago when we moved to the place where she died, and I think about these books in their boxes. I stamp her books, I try to catalog them, and yet I also think about mine, which I also try to organize—my small press poetry books, DIY chapbooks, magazines with runs of one issue, little photocopied A4 things with no spines, offensive, incomprehensible or simply absent titles, sub-ephemera, etc.: physical remnants of the group to which I most belonged.
I used to describe the feeling that I was losing my language in terms of a loss of belief in ideas, as if the experience were comparable to other such symptoms, like the loss of sense of smell or libido or hair, but over time, my way of describing what was happening changed. I didn’t have a problem with language—that is, as something over which we literally have no control, which nevertheless comes out of our mouths. The language I was reacting against was the opposite kind: It was all control, order, classification, hierarchy.
Over time, I started to think about something other than language inside of language: The words I most hated no longer had meaning; they were just incantations. They had a social function and a purpose, a power to situate and name, but no coherent vector of sense. The field of forces they invoked seemed to have sheared away from meaning, and another aspect of language—something large and heavy, something that had been submerged for a long time in something else, an aspect of language that I had not well understood—rose up inside me instead, and I felt embarrassed for not having seen it sooner.
This year, I’ve tended to carry your book around with me and place it on top of whatever else I’m reading—the act of placing it on top of things is a kind of substitute for order: It symbolizes by means of a single, isolated assertion of preference a capacity for order that I know I cannot otherwise achieve in my life, a life always tilting less and less intelligibly toward total disorder, trending toward it irreversibly. For so long as I can place your book on top of the others, I can accept disorder: The gesture is not an act of substitution and it is not a symbol; it is a declaration of independence from an order I cannot produce, that I cannot meaningfully know or know how to want. At a Christmas fair at a well-known music venue near my flat, I sit with my friend Lotte, recently back from Scotland, where she took leave of a friend, this one dying in his mid-30s after his cancer spread to his brain, and we talk about death. In the dimly lit cafe space, the would-be shoppers pick up her books of poetry and put them down again hi smile lips moving can’t hear and then they walk away again, with Can records playing obtrusively in the background. One book in particular is picked up and put down again and again: a book that mentions him, a book that brought her and me together once and created the link of friendship between us, which was also made out of death, as if death were an adhesive substance that we could use to stick things and people together and not a simple absence or void: Of course this is what it is, an adhesive, gummy underside of life, to which the crumbs and dust and hair of our common experience incontinently stick. Belatedly, I came to see that the language I rejected was not language, but only a system of classifying, ordering, categorizing, the role of which in our daily experience has increased as the oppressive function of state classifications more or less unrelated to conventional or rational usage has itself increased in visibility and power to harm.
At home, I read an article by one of the prisoners on hunger strike in the UK, in which she writes about the punitive consequences of her retrospective classification as a member of a terrorist organization. She writes about her library worker privileges being taken away. There is a weak yet resonant irony in this: that the person so classified is denied the right to classify.
At St. James’s Park, I get off the tube and find myself immediately surrounded by police. Two people are being led into the back of a van for chanting the words “globalize the Intifada,” made an arrestable offense earlier the same day as a “response” to the massacre on Bondi Beach, ten thousand miles away. “Bromley,” says one of them to me as they’re escorted into the van. “Bromley,” I repeat. It’s the end of the day, the end of the year: People pour out from the station toward the Thames as if in conscious mimicry of a poem by T.S. Eliot, the December sky lit up a dull blue from the lights on the south side of the river. I haven’t even clocked yet that it’s the name of the police station they’re being taken to.
“Classification and taboo go together.”
The symmetry between the attempt by Western states to classify (political) language post-October 7 and the efforts of imperialist counterinsurgency to categorize and segment physical space is more than a simple analogy, even if the attempt to generalize the comparison leads to self-heroicizing equivalences whose own classificatory hubris derives from a simple failure of perception: of difference. Classification and taboo go together. In Claude Lévi-Strauss’s discussion of linguistic taboos in The Savage Mind, based on his formalist and highly technocratic analysis of the people of the Tiwi Islands in Australia’s Northern Territory, “proper nouns contaminate common nouns; common nouns, banished from ordinary language, pass into sacred language, which in turn allows the formation of proper names.” Proper names, he continues, “are metaphorically connected with common nouns through a positive phonetic resemblance, while sacred words are metonymically connected with proper names . . . through negative resemblance.”
Once the classifying order of public speech has been compromised by a dangerous categorical equivalence (i.e., vandalizing corporate property is justice) and measures have been taken to repurify it (i.e., vandalism is terrorism), boundary cases begin to proliferate. They do this according to a logic of association. Over time, these become as significant as the paradigmatic cases that gave rise to them: “sacred words are metonymically connected with proper names . . . through a negative resemblance.” The eight hunger strikers in the UK prison system in late 2025 did not contest their “crimes” against property, only the classification of those crimes as terrorist acts: the imposition of a social taboo that makes verbal support for those acts, a kind of linguistic touching, subject to a form of quasi-magical contagion. Any number of examples could be added to the list of proliferating prohibitions. Outside the Ministry of Justice, I see an older friend who I know is waiting to see whether he’ll be charged for terror offenses for his own violation of this taboo: holding a paper sign of support for the Palestine Action prisoners. I hug him briefly, then slip away.
For Lévi-Strauss, it is uncontroversial that there are several distinct languages within a “native” society that make use of the same phonetic material, even as each retains its own conventions and areas of application. In contemporary society it’s usually only poets who make an issue of this: that individual words may have an ordinary and a sacred use, that sacred language can banish words from ordinary usage, that sacred language can acquire its own, specialized meanings, and, finally, that entire systems of mandatory usage can be organized along lines that are plainly and undisguisedly ritualistic. When we speak, other languages speak beside the one that we mean. “The world is blue as an orange.” The trace of physical decomposition in that famous, once-surprising image makes an identical argument by way of an associative implication: Ritualized, conventionalized social classifications must be kept clean. Most of all, they must be kept clean of that which decays, which is the same as that which renews. In London, I unpack the library of my dead partner along with my own books, packed up two years ago when we moved to the place where she died. I think about the books in their boxes. The books that interest me now are not the same ones that interested me when they were packed away. Parts of me have turned as blue as the orange from which I have spent years squeezing the significance, and yet I feel more able to speak now about what it means to hate ideas, what it means to lose your own language.
In 1966, the conservative English anthropologist Mary Douglas proposed two stages for thinking about dirt that are also applicable to language:
In the course of any imposing of order, whether in the mind or in the external world, the attitude to rejected bits and pieces goes through two stages. First they are recognisably out of place, a threat to good order, and so are regarded as objectionable and vigorously brushed away. At this stage they have some identity: they can be seen to be unwanted bits of whatever it was they came from, hair or food or wrappings. This is the stage at which they are dangerous; their half-identity still clings to them and the clarity of the scene in which they obtrude is impaired by their presence. But a long process of pulverizing, dissolving and rotting awaits any physical things that have been recognised as dirt. In the end, all identity is gone. The origin of the various bits and pieces is lost and they have entered into the mass of common rubbish. It is unpleasant to poke about in the refuse to try to recover anything, for this revives identity.
The possibility that we don’t know what language we are speaking goes some way toward eliminating an artificial boundary between poetic and political understandings of speech and its underlying phonetic material. When things are thrown together randomly, carelessly, when ordered relations are annulled or broken down and replaced by the merely arbitrary connections established by chance, by mere physical propinquity, it’s usually because the things in question have been treated like dirt: because they have been discarded, thrown into the place designated for dirt, the place where dirt is kept.
“It isn’t the chapbooks themselves that have broken down: It’s the relations between individuals—the group relations—that made them meaningful.”
My own collection of poetry pamphlets, spineless, pseudonymous, and disordered, sprawls over a stained carpet covered in dirt and strands of hair, pieces of lint, nails, leaves of houseplants, pieces of food. It isn’t the chapbooks themselves that have broken down: It’s the relations between individuals—the group relations—that made them meaningful. I pick up magazines and try to remember which love relation gave rise to this untitled ephemeral love poem but cannot. In a state of total decomposition, writes Douglas, all identity is lost, because the relation of each thing to each other thing is a random outcome of pure physical adjacency. In the end, no categories, no identities, no groups remain, other than the single anti-identity of dirt itself, this ultimate dedifferentiated state of matter which has no place within the social order and is in fact no longer even a threat to it, since it’s been purged entirely from the space of meaning, swept into an antizone of that system that presents its arbitrary classifications as language as such.
Here’s one way a group breaks down: A moment arrives when the other is speaking and you realize you’re not speaking the same language anymore. You no longer know what they mean, the words are the same but they’ve emptied themselves out; they no longer involve a shared content or claim, they’re just familiar, like breakfast food, and maybe you begin to realize that it’s already been like this for a long time and that what you thought was understanding was really just acculturation, the feeling of a familiar voice, a familiar way of turning a phrase, of deriving a conclusion. At some point, you either interrupt or drift away.
In a poetry community, the speech or style of the group becomes harder to sustain over time: As each member is given more time to read and live, we all tend to drift apart. The only counterforce I’ve known in my life is the wish to take the language of others into myself: to mold myself out of the phraseological scraps of what has been said to me, or said in my presence, by others. I need to take this into myself even if that means emptying myself out, becoming a shell. I know that I do it in a way that relies very heavily on you, on the one to whom I speak, and that in this way I keep the collective alive only in a very attenuated space of intimacy and need. I know all the problems that come along with that: self-deception and emotional manipulation, the misrepresentation of the courtship ritual in the language of the group. I’m still thinking about what all of this means. I haven’t come to a final judgment yet. Perhaps it’s not my judgment to make.
*
Oh I know I too shall cease and be as when I was not yet, only all over instead of in store, that makes me happy, often now my murmur falters and dies and I weep for happiness as I go along and for love of this old earth that has carried me so long and whose uncomplainingness will soon be mine. Just under the surface I shall be, all together at first, then separate and drift, through all the earth and perhaps in the end through a cliff into the sea, something of me. —Samuel Beckett, From an Abandoned Work
Earlier this year I read a short text by Wilfred Bion with the title “Attacks on Linking.” I don’t read psychoanalysis very often anymore: My own neurotic tendency to attack links has for a long time prevented me from taking much pleasure in this type of language. But I read it because it appeared as an allusion in some poems sent to me by a friend. The poems often came late at night. They were mostly about a psychiatric institute in southern France, where my friend was living at the time. I received them while staying in a university town in northern Germany, working on a book manuscript of the writings of my late partner and wondering why I was there, why I was alive, who or what I was or wanted. A few months later, I wrote to Tegan a short text about her poems, in which I got a lot of things wrong in a very small amount of space:
In his essay ‘Attacks on Linking’ Wilfred Bion describes a patient of his for whom “the experience of being understood had been split up, converted into particles of sexual abuse and ejected.” I don’t know about you, but to me this sounds like a description of musical post-production, a description of a filter applied to a signal: something more like delay or compression than anything that could be approaching using the word ‘metaphor,’ or any of the other related and outdated Greek terms.
Bion is, of course, the major analyst of groups, but he also wrote about psychosis, mainly as a process of endless splitting, of the breakdown of the connections between people which often take the symbolic form of things. Maybe I’m wrong to say that what he calls an attack on a link doesn’t sound like one to me, that it sounds like a process of decomposition, like what happens when you bury a body and let it disintegrate back into its constitutive elements, a sum total of chemical nutrients flowing back into the soil, but I still connect this language, which for Bion is a way to describe the psychic processes of psychotic patients, with the breakdown or loss of language that for me has been the overriding political experience of the last five years. In any case, I still identify with his description as the description of a particular kind of experience, where something that you want to mean feels like it’s always on the brink of decomposing back into something else, is always hardly itself, a half of itself, a kind of flickering out of itself, a fata morgana appearing above the substrate of what it really is. “He said ‘I am dry now,’” says Bion of one of his two schizophrenic case studies. “I replied that he felt he was awake and capable of thought, but that this good state was only precariously maintained.”
A couple of years before the exchange with Tegan in which I tried to sketch out these thoughts for the first time, another poet, William, wrote to me, in the context of some collective discussions we’d been organizing in a social center in London:
Freud’s notion of “binding” came into [our] conversation at the recent Mayday Rooms meeting. Freud’s use of the term, where binding works in terms of “an energy which flows along chains of ideas and implies associative “links,” suggests a possible cross-over between inner life and the political outside.
I didn’t check where the quote came from at the time, but I just did so now; it’s from Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis’s The Language of Psychoanalysis, from the entry on “binding.” William continued: “Rimbaud’s poem ‘The Drunken Boat’ sums up a basic element of Leftist tradition: to break all moorings, the call to rebellion as radical subjective unbinding, the legacy of the Paris Commune gathered into that call, that cell of meaning.” He acknowledges that “the boat lands in Africa and finds itself facing white men with firearms: subjective emancipation includes colonial violence.”
The earth is blue as an origin. Paul Éluard, when he wrote his Surrealist poem in French, could not have been aware of this bad pun, but I’m frightened of letting the Paris Commune mean something more fundamental to me, more originary, than musical post-production. This cell of meaning stands for a politics already beginning to break down, to lose its integrity as a means of binding any kind of collective political experience. Of course, that’s partly to do with finding ourselves much closer in time to a significantly larger act of genocidal vengeance. At the same time, the loss of, the breaking up or splitting of, the feeling of understanding or being understood, which Bion associates with psychosis, often feels to me like the only way of making sense. At a memorial conference for Marina in late October, one artist gave a beautiful presentation in which she spoke at length about dust. She said the dust had to have a positive connotation as well as a negative one, but she didn’t clarify what she meant and when I asked her about this afterwards, she said she just thinks that it must.
It may be true that the Paris Commune’s “call to rebellion as radical subjective unbinding” achieved “the unmooring of ideas from their historical basis, right down to the linkage of words in their phrasing”—in other words, that it attacked all the links. Already in this passage, William suggests that a related process of linguistic decomposition is occurring in the present, which is to say at the time of his writing, in the years culminating in the summer of 2023. At the same time, my own experience now, the experience I am having or undergoing when I helplessly attend all these fucking demos, is describable in different terms: by way of a superstitious prohibition on touching, the evident precondition for which is the possibility of a link.
“I became preoccupied with the idea that our language system is suddenly overrun by taboos, restrictions on speech that derive from, or are at least symbolically connected with, prohibitions on touch.”
More and more, I find that I live off random connections between things, mere physical adjacency. Tegan’s poem is about fear of touching, of touching a person you love who is sick, who has come to symbolize fragility for you. It’s about the lack of trust we feel in our own capacity for intimacy, maybe because people close enough to us to touch us have caused us pain, or maybe because we know we have caused pain to those with whom we are intimately connected, with whom we are “in” touch. The slip or hairlike fracture of that preposition hits me now like a vehicle moving at high speed, like something massive, impenetrable, and violent. This minute grammatical link, this prepositional prophylactic inserted between the expression of love and its sender, is the fundamental component of a sterile pseudo-intimacy ubiquitous in everyday speech. Is it not also the beginning of a taboo? The first intrusion of a pure, and purely spatial, grammar, which is to say, an abstract relation of order, into the language of our physical intimacy? It’s like a fresh plastic bag folded into a bin.
There’s a really beautiful paragraph at the end of the Bion text:
The internal object which in its origin was an external breast that refused to introject, harbour, and so modify the baneful force of emotion, is felt, paradoxically, to intensify, relative to the strength of the ego, the emotions against which it initiates the attacks. These attacks on the linking function of emotion lead to an over-prominence in the psychotic part of the personality of links which appear to be logical, almost mathematical, but never emotionally reasonable. Consequently the links surviving are perverse, cruel, and sterile (emphasis mine).
I became preoccupied with the idea that our language system is suddenly overrun by taboos, restrictions on speech that derive from, or are at least symbolically connected with, prohibitions on touch. I tried to believe something could be made out of this random, almost physical adjacency, that Tegan’s poem and my exchange with William might have something to say to that idea, that the adjacency of my own feelings and impressions—not yet thoughts, because so often I am forced to admit that I am just lying down in garbage—might be meaningful, even though the connections are not ordered, are physical rather than symbolic, just like the hair that I’ve cut off and the poetry magazines for which I no longer have space in my life.
More and more it felt to them like the significance of words was defined not by what they meant, but by the consequences of touching them, which is to say, the consequence of saying them; it was as if saying and touching had collapsed into one another, and at the same time touching itself became prohibited and difficult in a way it had never been before. “I want to touch death,” said a Palestinian filmmaker to a group in which I found myself earlier last year, by which she meant “to transgress a quite fundamental but commonplace taboo.” That the taboo begins with questions of food and physical contact, with the construction of collective identity by eating, with the threat of sickness and the refusal of food by the members of a group, a group that may not be a group except in the state’s own conception of it, with these elemental questions of physical adjacency that are beyond or prior to language, does not revoke or alter the fact that this is also how entire systems of oppressor language now come into being, at the level of the state and the courts, as they evacuate themselves of meaning in order to counter the threat of those who offer support to this group, who would establish a link with them. Experiencing decomposition, disorder, and violence, we try to imagine links that are not perverse, sterile, and cruel, even if sometimes it means nothing except placing ourselves in very simple relations of physical adjacency. Struggling to remember some lines from a poem, you fall asleep and then wake and someone else remembers them for you, and the words pass through us as though through a cliff into the sea. “Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself.” “The world is as blue as an orange.” Its uncomplainingness shall soon be ours.
[1] For an account of Palantir’s role in political repression, see Alberto Toscano, “Built to Dominate,” In These Times, inthesetimes .com/article/palantir-designs-infrastructure-of-repression.
[2] Noura Erakat has recently analyzed the formation of Donald Trump’s Board of Peace as the inauguration of a new kind of political sovereignty, one based not on democratic deliberation and multilateral compromise, but on a system of patronage, capital, and brute power. See Erakat’s “Exit and Exception,” the 2026 Edward W. Said ’57 Memorial Lecture at Princeton University, delivered March 26.