literature, art, and rats

by Michael Templeton

Constance Debré said recently that “perhaps it is necessary that literature dies, literature that divides the world, literature that has become the opposite of itself, that has become the bourgeoisie itself, in its bulwark, in its ornament, in its justification, just as the Church has become the opposite of Christ, who was poverty, the religion of the poor, and not power” (This is a translation from Spanish from the “Calle Del Orco” blog). It all becomes so much more compelling with the analogy of literature and the church, especially given that in America the church has become the very embodiment of corruption in our age. In the United States, we have people who claim to be Christians, advocating the wholesale slaughter and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and these same people claim their new man-baby king is some kind of reincarnation of Christ, a man who literally embodies all seven deadly sins. The church is a sickening and embarrassing scam, and almost everyone knows it. So, to begin to see literature in analogous ways is startling. Afterall, has not literature always held a place for the outlaws and the outsiders—the Beats, the surrealists, those writers who stopped adhering to the standards of decency held up by the old guard literary (Christian) elites. How can we relegate William Burroughs to the same pillar of filth led by American Evangelical wealth and power? It helps if we go further with what Debré had to say about all this: “Literature might need to die to be that night thing again, that cockroach activity, that rat language, and not that horrible thing, that cultural thing as repugnant as all other cultural things.” It is “that cultural thing” that is the problem, isn’t it, that concentration and extraction of abstract and meaningless value that has become culture and a bulwark against everything that ever went into the creation of literature and art. It helps to keep in mind that when Marx used the term ‘Capital’, he was talking about ‘Culture’, with a capital “c” in both instances. There is no “outside” of this horrible thing called culture, and for literature to flourish, to become something meaningful, that which is called literature that exists within the bulwark of culture needs to die so that the cockroaches and rats of the world can come out and create something interesting. For Debré, literature needs to die to become the rat language that it needs to be, the language of the night that scurries beneath the dominant forms, the walls and towers of culture that are now indistinguishable from all other towers of culture that are fully owned, operated, and most importantly controlled by global capitalism to the extent that those outlaws and outsiders we once admired are just commodities now. I mean let’s face it, as soon as you announce on social media that you are an outsider, you ain’t. As soon as Facebook places you in the “Outlaw Poets” page, you are not an outlaw poet. You are the law itself, and the outlaw, the outsider is someone who is literally scraping along the margins and bottom side of life like a rat or a cockroach. People who claim to admire outlaws invariably become terrified and repulsed when they actually meet one.

Scraping along the margins and beneath the towers and pillars is exactly the rat’s life. This is where Templeton found supreme happiness. He had no use for the goings on of the barn, for the pig, or for the spider. Templeton thought of nothing but getting by, stuffing himself with the slop and rot he amassed by his skill and cunning: “Templeton was a crafty rat, and he had things pretty much his own way. The tunnel was an example of his skill and cunning. The tunnel enabled him to get from the barn to his hiding place under the pig trough without coming out into the open. He had tunnels and runways all over Mr. Zuckerman's farm and could get from one place to another without being seen” (30). But it is Templeton who retrieves the words. It is Templeton who, by nothing but pure dumb luck (what we used to call the disinterestedness of the pure artist) and the skills of one who knows his way around in the dark finds just the right word to change the world. “Terrific” it is, up in lights, or at least up in a web, and everything changes from this point on. The elemental poet and artist: Templeton the Rat! Charlotte the spider may have woven it in her web, but it was Templeton the Rat who gave her the word/poem. She was nothing but a publicist. Let us consider other great literary rats; Bolano’s street rats in The Savage Detectives who skulk about the streets of Mexico City and form the infrarreasmo poets. Taking themselves just seriously enough to steal books, get drunk, and lay around all day dreaming and writing poetry. Try to imagine being these people, outlaw poets without a website or an Instagram account.

It is not that Debré, or I for that matter, are advocating just slovenly and lazy junk in place of literature. What is at the heart of Debré’s sentiments here is that all that we call literature and art have been thoroughly colonized by consumerism, and the gate keepers of high art have become little more than priests who stand over the sacred objects in order to hold defilement at bay. It is all become so deeply rarefied and reified that literature and art no longer have any contact with living human experience. Mediated and controlled by the logics of the algorithm and the society of the spectacle, where the fuck is literature and art anymore anyway? Writers and poets spend more time building their online presence than writing novels and poetry. The literature is far more online commodity than artistic endeavor these days, and the big names in publishing are not going to do a goddamn thing to change that. As engines of global capitalism, these corporate giants would be completely fine with training AI to steal from all of us to generate a sure thing in The New York Times bestseller list. I will not leave the university system out of this either. These citadels of culture have been exposed over the past few years as the cultural arm of global capital. The recent collapse under pressure from our fascist regime, coupled with their own inability to divest from Israel, has shown the American university system to be more than just under the thumb of Empire but just another department in the ever expanding grasp of Empire. The university has become what Vaneigem described when he said that “The same high-minded people who denounce police-state brutality would have us all live in a state of well-policed brutality” (The Revolution of Everyday Life, 20). We could digress on this tangent for pages and pages... Where amid all of this could we carve out the autonomous space for something we could call literature? And perhaps a more important question, is there any reason to still pursue it?

This is where Debré’s thoughts become so important. Down below, in the corners in in the gnawed out tunnels of the world, the rats are working away for the sake of being rats. They are not serving masters, and if they are creating word-objects (literature and art), they are doing for the sake of doing it. It is not as if these people do not want to make money from their work. It is more a matter of refusing to relinquish some semblance of a living self in the process. Perhaps the literature of our time is not at all what turns up in the important reviews. I wonder if the most important works are those that circulate along rat tunnels. I am not suggesting some kind of alternative literary purity, one which would revel in the filth like filth is the other side of the equivoque of the sacred, the divine purity of Culture brought down as the rat-like source of defilement is converted to sacred gold. It seems crucial on this point to make sure we do not fall back into the same terms, the same terrain only in different hands. I am thinking of Hélène Cixous when she speaks of “birds, women, and literature I call ‘writing,’ the noblest in my view, a free traveler along edges and abysms, the one that confers upon the language it traverses all its primordial strangeness” (Stigmata, 132). Cixous even names the very things I have been speaking of as “what Genêt called ‘the lower depths,’ or “the most hidden, most elusive regions, the most difficult to work.” All of this climbing down into the depths, into the grottoes and dank rat tunnels is to climb down “the ladder or writing that goes down to the roots” (132). Here is where we find the unclean, the source of defilement, the literature of what Debré called rat language which, we cannot forget, she holds up against that repugnant thing called culture. It is the roots deep in the depths that break up the soil, find the essential elements, recondition the earth itself; the roots and the rats hard at work retrieving the words and the objects.

Historically we looked to culture as the space of human endeavor that preserves what is best about human life. Culture with a capital C was said to be the repository of the distillation of human spirit. These assumptions would be quaint if they were not loaded down with the violence and nightmares of the forms of domination and cruelty that characterized culture over the centuries. Culture is also an equivoque, and the unspoken other side to culture is the violent legacy of everything that provided the bulwark, to use Debré’s word, of culture. We all know that famous quotation from Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” which states: “There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” This was a stunning insight when first formulated by Benjamin nearly 100 years ago, but it is something that has become so terrifyingly indisputable in our own time as our bastions of culture are completely paralyzed by the thought of divesting from Israel in the face of the genocide against the Palestinians. The American university cannot divest from anything because the very existence of these bastions of culture is entirely dependent upon the forms of global capitalism which drive and feed the genocide. Which to say that the American university system is the capitalism that drives and feeds the genocide. Culture is an obscene mockery of what it has historically claimed to be.

Against that horrible thing called culture, within Cixous’s primordial strangeness there is also what Blanchot described as “(t)he poetic work, the artistic work, if it speaks to us of something, speaks to us of that which is removed from all value or repels all evaluation, articulates the demand (again), which is lost and muddled as soon as it is satisfied in value” (Blanchot. “An Approach to Communism [Needs, Values], 6). Herein is where we are to discover the rat language of a literature and art that is attuned to life, to living in the world as opposed to the tamed commodified renderings of life that wash over us and consume us in the digital world of pre-digested and pre-organized experience designed to direct our most elemental desires before we ever experience even our own sense of ourselves. These are questions concerning the irresolvable difference between the form-of-life, the life that is the expression of lived experience, and the Bloom, that “spectral, distracted, supremely vacant humanity that no longer accesses any other content than the Stimmung [the empty and vacuous tonality of being] in which it ex-ists the twilight being for whom there is no longer any real or any self but only Stimmungs” (The Theory of the Bloom, 19). The Stimmung, the empty commodified form into which anyone can plug themselves and voila, they become the ideal image of themselves. You know them, they are all over the worlds of social media. Nobodies who are everybodies. Poets because their Instagram bio says poet. Artists for the same reason. If we are to oppose the Bloom, we need the rat whose existence is of a moment and in an experience—lived experience rather than idealized and spectacular images of experience, people for whom “creativity is revolutionary in its essence,” to cite Vaneigem again, and “a new poetry of real experience” (The Revolution of Everyday Life, 96, 118). This detour back into the language of the Situationists is extremely deliberate because it is in the creation of situations that art can gain traction in that autonomous space I alluded to above. While Empire has totalized all of life, has penetrated the deepest parts of our lived lives in the forms of biopolitical mechanisms of capture and control, the creation of situations causes a rift, a rupture to open wherein one could potentially create something meaningful again in the rat language of literature and art. It is not as if I can locate some kind alternative “pure literary” or “pure artistic” artifact that represents what I am talking about. We find evidence of these things all the time, but to point to something like a movement or even worse, a school of new literature and art that escapes the grip of Imperial control is pointless; it does not exist, nor should it. We do not gain the force of the rat language by creating an alternative set of institutions and practices to counter culture as Debré describes it.

I was in Richmond, Indiana recently; just wandering around what is a fine example of a small midwestern city in decay. There are empty buildings everywhere in the downtown area, most recently rehabbed in preparation for the great gentrification the city leaders hope will happen. But the city is like a ghost town, and the primary feeling in downtown Richmond is emptiness. Like every other city in America now, there are the city-approved murals that are meant to convey the city’s history and cultural significance. In an alley behind everything, I found a series of monochromatic paintings on the walls. These were not the approved murals. Some of these images were from famous paintings, others were literary references. They were beautiful and haunting. All of this hidden behind the official cultural forms just splattered on buildings to instill a civic pride that does not exist. There are also instances of poetry that exist only in the rebirth of zine culture. These publications do not even have social media representations. They are circulated by contagion in the way revolution circulates by contagion rather than by personalities and chiefs. If there is to be a literature and art created in rat language, it will emerge like rats, and it will circulate like rats. It will emerge one way or another. We should consider one last time the words of Raoul Vaneigem:

“Poetry is always somewhere. If it leaves the realm of the arts, it is all the easier to see that it belongs first and foremost in action, in a way of living and in the search for a way of living. Everywhere repressed, this poetry springs up everywhere. Brutally put down, it is reborn in violence. It consecrates riots, embraces rebellions and animates all great revolutionary carnivals until the bureaucrats place it under house arrest in their hagiographical culture.” The Revolution of Everyday Life. 178.

Still, the rats remain. It is Templeton or Ben.

Works Cited:

Blanchot, Maurice. Political Writings, 1953-1993. Tr. Zakir Paul. New York: Fordham

University Press, 2010.

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Tr. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken

Books, 2007.

Calle del Orco. Blog de Literatura. Grandes Encuentros. “Quizás sea urgente que la literatura

muera, Constance Debré.” https://calledelorco.com/2025/05/14/quizas-sea-urgente-que-la-literatura-muera-constance-debre/

Cixous, Hèléne. Stigmata: Escaping Texts. New York: Routledge, 1998.

Tiqqun. The Theory of the Bloom. Tr. Robert Hurley. LBC Books.

Vaneigem, Raoul. The Revolution of Everyday Life. Tr. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oakland: PM

Press, 2012.

White, E. B. Charlotte’s Web. Pictures by Garth Williams.  New York: Harper & Row, 1952.

*Stay tuned for Michael Templeton’s next monthly installment in July.