Digital Poetics 2.9 The Conditions I Went Down On by Colin Leemarshall

Joe Luna’s ambitious long poem Development Hell is one of the most striking pieces of literature to have emerged from the UK in recent years. The primary literary mode under which the poem seems to be operating—or, I will contend, failing to operate—might be best unpacked via initial reference to Socrates’s opening word in Plato’s Republic: “κατέβην”.[1] When this word is translated into English, the synthetic morphology dissolves and we end up with the words “I went down”, a phrase that Luna has chosen as a would-be refrain for Development Hell. One might wonder what exactly Luna’s choice has to do with Socrates, given that these three words collocate so naturally as to be nigh on ubiquitous. But both Luna’s and Socrates’s words are more than what they appear to be. Socrates’s “κατέβην” is shot through with both relative mundanity and otherworldly portentousness. When the philosopher says “I went down to Piraeus”, he is, on the one hand, simply making reference to a journey down from the heart of Athens and to the port city that forms part of his predicate. But scholars have also read in these words an allusion to the katabasis—the descent into the underworld undertaken by numerous Greek heroes, including Odysseus, Orpheus, and Dionysus.[2]

Signalling its own katabatic drive early on, Luna’s poem opens thus:

In the middle of

a failed day, stolen by the katabatic chartjunk that

despair at the internal limit edges, and encamped in

ergonomic centrifuge I went down inside the dev room, where

eggs spy sick panoptic lassitude back up, to find

more plausible a form of life arreared in

foreign eye-traps,[3]

The opening line here alludes to Dante’s Inferno, a touchstone text throughout Development Hell—and relevantly so, given that Dante’s poem features one of the most famous katabases in all of literature. But before long, we get the sense that something is wrong with the descent, that the katabasis is failing in some way. The problem is not simply one of ironic drollery; tempting though it may be to extract something comfortably Augustan from the meretricious glow of “katabatic chartjunk”—to facilely postulate a ‘mock katabasis’ or some such—to do so would be to miss the complexity at work. Crucially, the lines are governed by a curtailed teleology that prevents them from arriving at any unadulterated mock katabatic heights (or depths). For instance, the reader will note that the “failed day” has seemingly been designated as such before it is over; that the “limit” is medially “internal”; and that the “I” of the poem “went down inside” rather than into the “dev room”. In other words, the lines seem inexorably centripetal, repeatedly “encamped in” or drawn “back up” to the middle, despite whatever “centrifuge” or downward movement they purport to exact. The prevailing sense of detainment comes to a heavily ballasted end stop in “eye-traps”, a phrase which, with “spy” and “panoptic”, presages the minatory ocular lexicon that will run throughout the poem. As the reader’s saccadic movement pauses at “eye-traps”, there is a momentary enactment of the designated arrest, one that perhaps doubles as a homophonic euchring into ‘I-traps’. Of course, for the invested reader, the saccades—and, by extension, the lines, however centripetal—will continue.

Indeed, one might even make the case that the vaguely rhomboid arrangement of Luna’s lines (as seen in the above excerpt) is intended to enjoin or entice the reader’s saccadic movement. On each page of Development Hell, Luna has contiguously stacked six such rhomboids—or not quite six, since the final half-line of the first block doubles as the first half-line of the second block, and so on. These stacked rhomboids seem collectively to suggest a kind of newel, one that fixes in place the steps on which we are to descend or ‘progress’. With careful inspection, however, we can see that the lineation, like the semantics, operates according to a logic of perverse curtailment. Specifically, the supernumerary half-line at the bottom of each page functions as a clear point of scission, preventing the steps of the discrete pages from connecting up with each other. What ultimately emerges, then, is a poem whose rigid formal arrangement locks the katabatic urge in place even as each of the 25 pages instantiates a video-game-esque ‘restart’ of the descent. Granted, the slates have not been wiped completely clean—each ‘tabula rasa’ is tinctured with affective or semantic seepages from elsewhere in the poem; but the uncanny mnemic traces serve only to make Luna’s “counter-Hades” all the more hostile to classical katabatic logics.[4]

To further examine Luna’s departure from classical katabasis, it is worth returning for a moment to Socrates. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates’s katabatic allusion is no mere literary flourish; rather, it is an adroit eduction of some of the social and political potentials latent in the literary katabasis as mode. Like the Odysseus who went down to Hades to glean information about his return home, Socrates treats Piraeus as a personally significant topos that can shed light on his—and others’—spiritual existence in the polis. Glossing the philosopher’s halted ascent from Piraeus, a “rather grimy place, which was not noted for its cultural achievements”, Dante Germino writes:

He is about to re-ascend but is held in the depths by his friends […] who plead with him to converse; and so […] there commences from the physical depths of the Piraeus the spiritual ascent through the building in speech of the politeia laid up in the heavens that is to become the model for the souls of those willing to respond to the divine appeal, accomplish with divine help the periagoge, or inward conversion—literally , turning around—of philosophy.[5]

Socrates’s “periagoge” (which is also linked to the parable of the cave and to the emancipated philosopher’s emergence therefrom) might be taken as a philosophical analogue to the psychic or spiritual reorientations that are often engendered in the katabatic literary hero. In classical katabasis, as Rachel Falconer tells us, “the descent to Dis or Hades is about coming to know the self, regaining something or someone lost, or acquiring super-human powers or knowledge”.[6] By linking his periagogic dispensation to a descent and re-ascent, Socrates functions as a notable pivot in the history of katabatic literature, seeming to liberate some vital real-life potentials from the act of going down.

In Luna’s katabasis (such as it is), both the “coming to know the self” and the “periagoge” are fantastically impossibilised conditions. More than this, the journey itself is impossibilised, locked into a maddening Zenonic stasis that, as suggested above, keeps the poem at the “middle” point from which it begins: “If you’ve paid attention so far, you should be / as close to the central blob as you were to start with, /closer even […]”[7] Given so compromised—so bad—a katabasis, one is inclined to update the existing taxonomy somewhat. Thus, I here posit a new category by which to describe Luna’s infarcted descent: the cacobasis. The cacobasis, as I conceive of it, is characterised by a descent that is subject to constant restarts or to insurmountable blockages (or both). Due to the impossibility of completing the cacobatic descent, there can be no definitive re-ascent—and thus no ultimate psychic dispensation. Heading the ugly neologism “cacobasis” is the English combining form “kako-”/“caco”, which derives from the Greek “κακός” (‘bad’ or ‘evil’). For reasons that will become apparent, I opt here for “cacobasis” rather than “kakobasis”, since the former coinage seems to me to contain a more pungently scatological note (this notwithstanding the fact that the English “cack” and the Greek “κακός” are not in fact etymologically cognate). What follows in this brief essay is a broadstrokes lineamentation of Luna’s cacobasis, and thus, by implication, an adumbration of the cacobasis as potential literary mode or sub-mode.

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In the euphony of its lines, the breadth of its heteroglossia, the finely wrought muscularity of its syntax, and the weirdly eidetic juxtapositions of its imagery, Development Hell is an impressively virtuoso poem. For those of a certain persuasion, these formal elements quickly facilitate an exquisite (if also frequently squeamish) pleasure in the reading. However, the poem’s content—insofar as it might be considered extricable from the poem’s form—is far more intransigent. The difficulty is not one of theme or motif; indeed, we might say, with reasonable confidence, that Development Hell is a poem about finance, labour, exploitation, selfhood, depression, thought, game-playing, and biological or economic growth—and, most importantly, about how each of these things intersects with or animates or complicates the others. What is far more difficult is to follow the local movement of the poem at each rung of the ‘descent’. Playing up its own difficulty in this regard, the poem deliberately subverts one of the most well-recognised features of the descent narrative. In classical katabases, the hero is frequently attended by a psychopomp (Hermes and Virgil being two of the most famous such guides). While Luna’s poem partakes in the psychopomp tradition, it does so in a decidedly protean fashion. One of the poem’s most prominent psychopomps is “Candace”, who—in a nominal and psychic dispersal that is simultaneously an accretion—is also billed as “Tiara Newmaker” (or simply “Tiara”). In the aggregation of these names, we can deduce that “Candace” is intended to evoke Candace Elizabeth Newmaker (born Candace Tiara Elmore), a ten-year-old child who was killed during a highly controversial attachment therapy session aimed at “rebirthing” her.[8] Luna’s decision to draft such a figure—or spectral suggestions of her—into the role of poetic psychopomp is questionable, to say the least. One senses that the poet is both aware of this questionable deployment and indignant at the conditions that have given rise to it (for Luna, as shall be seen, questions must remain if a poem is to avoid the traps of bourgeois identification). However uncomfortable we may feel about the appearance of Candace or her various avatars in the poem, we will discern that, as a figure of thwarted rebirth, she functions as something of a cacobatic cipher. Her appearance in Development Hell seems to be refracted through Petscop, a creepypasta YouTube playthrough for an apocryphal Playstation game that makes various allusions to Newmaker.[9] The upshot of such refraction is that Candace flickers further into various onomastic and psychic configurations, giving the lie to the idea that we have a firm grasp on who Candace Newmaker was or is (either outside of or inside the poem). On the one hand, these psychic ramifications and dispersions imply a nefarious misprision of the subject; on the other, they preclude the bourgeois reader’s attempts to facilely recuperate or identify a stable ‘character’. Thus, Candace stands as a tantalising exemplar of the dichotomy between seizure and resistance that runs through the poem.

Though more prominent than other psychopomps in the poem, Candace is nonetheless still evanescent and soon replaced: “Candace got you this / far, but I can get you farther”.[10] Such mutability can perhaps be attributed to the ludic, video-game-esque framing of Development Hell. This framing may initially suggest that the poem is composed of multiple ‘levels’ in a way that makes it analogous to Dante’s Inferno with its various circles. However, the deaths and restarts endemic to a video game ekphrasis must also imply something more open and aleatory than a methodical descent through hell. With each new page of Development Hell, we are reminded that the world that we are inhabiting in the poem—and perhaps outside of it—is one defined by a permutable array of elements that can quite literally change the narrative. And change the narrative Development Hell does—repeatedly, in the process rendering its world an entirely intractable one. Somewhat at odds with this intractability is the fact that the poem is almost obsessively signposted downwards. Each “I went down” (or twist on that formula) is ostentatiously italicised, while a panoply of other lexical items or phrases (“BASE”, “untergeben”, “deep state”, etc.) suggest descent, degradation, or hypostasis.[11] On top of this, there are morphemically subtle reminders of the katabatic tradition that the poem is both partaking in and reneging on (“catatonic wormhole”, “katamari damashī”, “infantile catachresis”, “UR-catalepts”, etc.).[12] Collectively, these katabatic inflections suggest something like a sophisticated poetico-grammatical system—or, more specifically, what might be described as the descenditive case of such a system. That is, in a fashion analogous to how heavily inflected languages mark their various cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, etc.) with particular forms of declension, Luna’s poem seems to be constantly declining so as to indicate (or instantiate) descent or baseness. The result of this relentless descenditive declension is not a reinforcing or intensifying of the katabatic arc; rather, it is a lateralising—and hence flattening—of the descent. Thus, when one claims that the poem or the “I” is stuck at the middle, “the middle” does not necessarily denote a topographical node in a linear katabasis. Indeed, from one perspective, each of the various nodes of the katabasis exists in a single “central blob”. Although these nodes are recognisable as would-be stages in a descent, they are not arranged teleologically, instead betokening a clogged ontology by which the descent seems to curdle from process to product. Unsurprisingly, then, the titular hell of Luna’s poem is not navigable in the same way that Hades might be said to be. Rather, it is a hell constitutive of the very axons that are intended to convey it—a hell that cacobatically thwarts whatever synaptic impulses would make it apprehensible as mere referent. In other words, both the descent into hell and the hell itself infarct the process of the relaying, thereby stultifying the diegetic descent from page to page.

This confusion of process and product is also a recurring local feature of Development Hell. In particular, the “I” of the poem frequently finds itself confused with various actions or experiences, in some cases ones of which it is itself the agent: “I was not / having a vision, but was in fact one”; “I went / down, made of what I went down into”; “and so as I was each beam of light that lit me”; etc.[13] Unlike the heroes of classical katabasis, who are changed by the katabatic process, the “I” of Development Hell is changed into or made consonant with the process. Even more vertiginously, in striving forlornly to arrive at a katabatic self-knowledge or periagoge, the “I” seems to burrow into a humanoid body (perhaps its own). This peristaltic descent is inevitably scatological, and the objects described and suggested during the cacobasis often give off an appropriately indolic whiff, even when they don’t always strictly conform to a recognised gastrointestinal anatomy (“stinkeye regardant”; “smart-gut”; “peristaltic hole”; “hypogastric / plexus fuckface”; “the stolid rectum”; etc.).[14] Language thus “copro-/phatic” (to borrow Luna’s own neologism) feeds into the humorous claim that “the whole poem is an actual / human piece / of shit”.[15] This claim seems somehow related to the above-excerpted “I went / down, made of what I went down into”. Presumably, in the “brain to bowel” peristalsis of Development Hell, the beshitten “I” becomes the shit into which it constantly descends.[16] Moreover, in the total aggregate of coprophatic relations and equivalences between self and shit, the I becomes the poem. This is an odd claim, surely, but one that the poem might be thought to make further justifications for throughout. In particular, the poem evinces a distinctive brand of materialism that vacillates between the extremely crude and the ultra-refined. In its crudest form, Luna’s materialism sees the “I” or other selves or bodies “plugged […] with matter” in a way that is presented as being ontologically constitutive.[17] But even within such crudity, we can often see something far more complex at work. As one part of the poem has it: “a system of lexical and nominal relations / does not / a life add up to, when quite patently it does and always has done”.[18] The paradox of these incongruous propositions succinctly encapsulates the crucial psychic tension of Luna’s poem.

Particularly salient among the “lexical and nominal relations” of Development Hell is the financialised language, which, like the poem’s gastrointestinal anatomy, is often comically or teratologically re-figured (“What is the rent on my toddler?”; “Please don’t lease me.”; “lip-service pain in- / stalments”; “my-/ elinated ideal realty”; etc.).[19] In his suggestively titled essay Sketch for a financial theory of the poem (a paraphrase of J. H. Prynne’s poem ‘Sketch for a Financial Theory of the Self’), Luna has written convincingly about “poetry that is sensitive to the capitalist logics of financial abstraction”, interpreting poems by Jonathan Swift and William Fuller as exemplary of such logics as they obtain(ed) in the sixteenth century and the modern era, respectively.[20] For Luna, the financial logic confronted by a contemporary poet like Fuller is chiefly mediated by the derivative, a financial instrument that has value only through being speculatively tied to an underlying asset. As a modern capitalistic feint, the derivative ratchets up the stakes of abstraction in the human-capital relation; no longer is the subject simply a “commodity-bearing monad”, but a “commodity-bearing monad the life-history of which is now connected, directly and indirectly, in all sorts of ways to all sorts of investments.” In other words:

Modern financialization ensures that our personal relation to the engines of value is no longer simply staked to the extraction of surplus-value, but is diversified, spatially and temporally, by the explosion and re-assemblage of ‘the possessive relations between persons and things’ that make-up the calculative monetisation of contemporary living.[21]

Adverting to the logics of the derivative with perhaps even more intensity than William Fuller, Luna conjures a schizoid self that convincingly satirises our current, “diversified” relation to “the engines of value”. To give a more sustained impression of what such satire reads like, I here quote a swatch of four consecutive rhomboids from Development Hell:

to get a move

on, believing that what you put in is what you get out,

when in fact on balance recovery is the arglos of progression,

as in, before you know it (e.g.) you’re mining your own

back catalogue for content-rich seashells at

a stake-out, sick with uncut en-

dorphins,

weak and bloody as the afternoon is, obscured by

any one of the 14.4 trillion reasons to abandon ship entirely,

the light is that exhausting, brother, at the end of the

day they paid for, bit by bit, the estimate

they love inside you comes from zilch

but what

you gave them, what you GIVE UP, what you inherit,

what you collate, what you interpret, what you learn, what you

or some of your 200 phantom limbs inveigle,

what you identify in aimless stupefaction with

the dev room basement, harmonious inter-

penetrating

mix-up my ass, what any self-respecting agent

knows day one from the court of public opinion about systems

per se, that 4.8 trillion for every star in

the universe of star balloons is still yet nothing,

next to the law still hard at work

inside you,[22]

One of the social phenomena that most saliently characterises our particular brand of development hell is surely the housing crisis, by which “to get a move” is, for more and more people, an impossible or increasingly precarious condition. For the enemy, it becomes more imperative than ever to push the capitalist canards: “what you put in is what you get out”. But the logic of the derivative means that this bootstrap maxim is felt as nonsensical. What is in fact gotten out is more than what has been put in, since the asset or commodity has been tricked out with all sorts of insidious propagules. The subject no longer experiences a simple monadological relationship to the asset (if it ever did); instead, subjectivity writhes with the abstract appendages (“200 phantom limbs”) that represent its computed purchase in a world where—in accordance with cacobatic logic—people are struggling to “move / on” (or indeed, to move in). But it is not simply the asset or commodity from which things are ‘gotten out’; it is the subject, too. In its impaction as a site of clinically calculated values (“14.4 trillion”; “4.8 trillion”), the subject becomes a rich repository of material for capitalism to mine. Thus, we see a grotesque inversion of the katabatic trajectory, whereby the subject is hellishly figured as the topos into which a usurping, pathetically fallacious hero (derivative capital) descends with despicable rapaciousness (“penetrating / mix-up my ass”; “still hard at work / inside you”). As the subject restarts its cacobasis each day or each page, recursively locked into thwarted or negative development, a more successful descent and return occurs elsewhere—again and again, capitalism goes down into the subject and returns with new gains: “at the end of the / day they paid for, bit by bit, the estimate / they love inside you comes from zilch”. In Luna’s carefully weighted anacoluthon, the vampires of finance trade in the non-saleable (“the / day”), while creating value from “zilch” by purchasing an “estimate” that tends grotesquely to orgasm (“inside you comes”). Under these heinously extractive conditions, the subject is moved to attempt some extraction of its own, “mining” (in an antanaclasis that implies cryptocurrency, cacobatic bodily descent, and the leveraging of dead labour) “[its] own / back catalogue for content-rich seashells”. On the other hand, there is a temptation to “abandon ship entirely” for fear of going down. And indeed, however much the derivative fantasia of Development Hell would render the “I” so much flotsam and jetsam, we might also discern in the “I” an urge to steal a reclamatory march on its own imminent wreckage—that is, an urge to purposively embrace its rupture into disidentification. In other words, in the hyper-complex skein of relations there can be discerned two contradictory ‘subjects’: 1) a subject that, according to a gelid algebra, is a fully calculable, tabulable, and minable entity; 2) a subject whose mercurial movement confounds any attempt to render it computable, no matter how sophisticated the instrument that would purport to measure it.

It is here that the title of this essay comes into focus a little more. Writes Luna: “What the hell / did I want? To continue? To mock-up / the conditions / I went down on?”[23] The deployment of the preposition “on” here is just odd enough to protrude slightly. Granted, it could be the case that the “I” is travelling downwards on the understanding that certain conditions are being met. But given the constant divesture of agency running through the poem, I am more inclined to read “conditions” here as referring to the qualitative circumstances of the descent, such that the noun phrase “the conditions / I went down on” becomes an instantiation of cacobasis in miniature. The ectopic preposition places the “I” in the wrong position relative to the required descent, such that the descent that is undergone in not one that redounds to the benefit or development of the “I”. Indeed, only in respect of its sinking or dying on the faulty vessel of its conditions might the “I” be said to go down. When we extend the phrasal verb to “go down on”, there is of course also a sexual overtone, one which the epigraph to the poem perhaps pre-emptively invites: “When I have thoughts, / it means I have nothing to suck”. Although unattributed, this epigraph can be traced to the psychoanalyst Hanna Segal and her essay Psychoanalysis and freedom of thought.[24] While in Segal’s text the desired object is a breast, rather than a reproductive organ, the analysand’s sexualised sucking might nonetheless be said to effect something like a cacobatic arrest. As Segal puts it: “Thinking puts a limit on the omnipotence of phantasy and is attacked because of our longing for that omnipotence.”[25] The pursuit of phantasmal omnipotence results in the attenuation of a more engaged thinking. In its fantastic oneirism, Development Hell might be thought to share something with this lunge for the intangible. At the same time, thinking and thought are constant presences in poem, dispersed desirously and depressively in the oneiric matter: “what thought laid three grey perforated spheroids”; “Where thought tanked, I followed, sobbing uncontrollably”; “Some thoughts are not worth having, / soon got, soon gone”.[26] As a constituent part of the emulsion, thought is occluded by the erotics of the suck (an erotics that can quickly be turned to the vampiric ends of the spectacle, in the Debordian sense). The subject can therefore not attain to any self-knowledge or periagoge whatsoever. Instead, it tarries constantly with the phantasm of omnipotence, becoming ironically weaker.

The damage that the cacobasis wreaks on thought and thinking in Development Hell gives the poem an undoubtedly pessimistic inflection. However, by foregrounding the dianoetic material of his poem, even if only via negation, Luna does at least keep in view a potentially useful friction between thought and spectacular capitalism. Luna is not the first to anchor such friction to a katabatic trope. Indeed, in Marx in Hell: The Critique of Political Economy, William Clare Roberts has compellingly argued that none other than Marx himself invoked the katabasis for similar ends. Making his case for Marx as a psychopomp who guides the reader through the hell of political economy, Roberts writes:

[…] in our relation to political economy, as long as we are embodied, as long as we are materially productive, it is never quite too late to turn our eyes from the always impending capitalist fantasia towards the coming force of transformation within ourselves. This is the empowering transformation promised by the katabasis through political economy [….] In [Marx’s] effort to so transform us, he must work with the materials at hand, the economic, philosophical, and religious forms of thought that weigh like a nightmare on his brain.[27]

Already in Marx, the adversion to thought is extremely strenuous, weighing like a “nightmare on his brain”. How much more strenuous must the adversion be when, as in Development Hell, the vampiric spectacle writhes with the derivatively abstract tentacles of late capitalism? Is it still possible to think through our psychic entanglement when the logic of the katabasis has broken down or become inoperable? It is perhaps too early to answer such a question. Nonetheless, I believe that the brokenness or inoperableness that Development Hell convincingly gestures towards demands that we consider exactly where Luna’s poem sits in the katabatic lineage. Falconer claims that in post-WWII katabatic narratives, hell no longer exists in a mythical or theological domain, having instead altogether suffused our quotidian contexts. While conceding that this psychic shift implies a damning teleology (“we have already reached the end”), Falconer also points to the optimism that can be engendered through a recognition of hell as historical condition:

[…] by framing the experience of Hell as a journey of descent and return, many contemporary descent narratives articulate their resistance to this apparently inescapable infernal condition. If hell has become a historical phenomenon, then it need no longer be regarded as a mythical or theological absolute. It can be resisted, transformed, and even […] ultimately destroyed.[28]

In a certain sense, Falconer’s insight aligns with the teleological stasis evinced by Development Hell. But unlike in the post-1945 tradition of katabatic narratives as defined by Falconer, in Luna’s text we are nowhere near “the end”—how could we be, when the conditions for the katabatic descent have become impossible? Instead, despite the illusion of difference that we can encounter from page to page on Development Hell, we are perennially stuck at or close to the middle. It is telling that, in a cruel burlesque of the Homeric homecoming trope, the final, Dantean words of the poem (“In the Midlands”[29]) evoke the opening words. The truth is that we have not come home; and indeed, because late capitalism has rendered the very concept of home in many respects a reductio ad absurdum, it is quite possible that we never began there, either. By so powerfully evoking the tradition of the katabasis, only to constantly stultify the “descent and return” implied by this tradition, Development Hell creates a breach in the existing taxonomy. In addition to endless in medias res restarts, what chiefly distinguishes the cacobasis from its illustrious progenitor is that the former appears, prima facie, to offer no discernible periagoge, empowering transformation, or resistance.

Naturally, one must then ask—why cacobasis? I.e. what use is a poem that seems to offer us no escape chutes or payoffs, even if only ones that might be apprehended via utopian wish? But I would argue that it is just such refusal that makes Development Hell one of the poems that we most need to read at this particular moment in time. In the face of ongoing injustices, there are some contemporary poets who feel compelled to treat poetry as a reveille that can rouse us by instantly rendering intelligible and actionable the hyper-reticulated abstractions in which such injustices are enmeshed. For Luna, this kind of clarity, which presupposes that the questions that most need answering can be answered easily and decisively in a poem, does not ring true. The problem is not the question itself, but the particular “erotetic” logic that governs the question—specifically, a misemphasis on the question as a vehicle for producing an answer. In his essay Unanswerable Questions, Luna makes a claim for poetry whose immediate horizons preclude the answer.[30] According to Luna, such poetry represents not a feckless capitulation, but a refusal of “the murderous equilibrium of a normative ethics”. For all of the clinical calculus that permeates Development Hell, the poem’s deliberately truncated erotetic logic ultimately helps make it, and its psychic wagers, “incommensurable with [a] life measured out in an endless exchange of values”.[31] One way to ensure such incommensurability is to weave a certain recalcitrance into the structure of the question itself, and thereby to inspire in the reader “an interpretive effort of deciphering what is being asked in the first place”.[32] The protean gaze and anfractuous grammar of the quotation-marked text in the below excerpt are exemplary on this point, carefully sequestering the endangered question into an increasingly remote refugia of equivocal logic.

in whichever

order makes most sense, to coin a phrase, that

finding the rules to learn, learning the rules to find put food

in our mouths and gave us peace, because the question

is not ‘how do we prevent those deaths?’ but ‘how

do we discern from their inefficient

impaction

what exactly makes a body shit, where is lies down

in which dimensional space, to afford a sundry vein tapped

in practice for the kernel trick to pirouette off,

all in a day, smothering the gentle air in super-

forecast, millenarian distinctions

from above?’[33]

Based on the above excerpt, we must acknowledge that if Luna’s truncated erotetics in Development Hell allow for quicksilver refusals of and escapes from of the levelling gestures of bourgeois identification, they also do something like the converse: namely, they keep us constantly mired in the cacobatic ordure of the poem, confronting us with the question of “what exactly makes a body shit”. Being thus mired, we are surely forced to expend more effort “deciphering what is being asked in the first place”. Moreover, I would suggest that by dint of such effort we might come closer to palpating, if not necessarily disentangling, the real-world conditions of which Luna’s cacobasis serves as a fantastically perspicacious literary analogue.

Ultimately, Development Hell is a poem that, formally and semantically, seeks to descend into the abstractions of our current state of ‘development’. The ways in which the poem might be said to fail in its descent are in themselves highly revealing. In prescinding our access to the desired ‘truth’ or ‘self-knowledge’ or ‘periagoge’—in returning us again and again to its cacobatic mire—Luna’s poem performs a vital act of detainment. Such detainment helps us see that in our desire to arrive at the wished-for psychic dispensations, we have seemingly been far too eager to credit as plausible the katabatic narrative trajectory that we have inherited. After reading Development Hell—surely our most exemplary cacobatic poem to date—we must conclude that our classical katabases have elided far too much in order to arrive at their destinations. In light of such conviction, we might legitimately argue that Development Hell brings us as close to the answer as any of our traditional katabatic narratives have. Closer, even.

Joe Luna's Developmental Hell is available here

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[1] While I certainly believe that this ascription of primacy is supported by the text, I concede that some may dissent with me on this point. Not least of the dissenters may be the author, who introduced the poem as a “mock visio” during a 2019 reading at a Christmas Hi Zero event in Brighton. Either way, it is hoped that alternative lenses or heuristics—which are beyond purview of this essay—might be taken up by other critics in the future.

[2] See in particular Eric Voegelin’s influential reading in Order and History, Volume III, Plato and Aristotle (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2000), pp. 104-116.

[3] Joe Luna, Development Hell (Brighton: Hi Zero, 2020) p. 5.

[4] Ibid., p. 13.

[5] Dante Germino, Editor’s Introduction to Voegelin’s Order and History, ibid., p. 9.

[6] Rachel Falconer, Hell in Contemporary Literature: Western Descent Narratives Since 1945 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007) p. 3.

[7] Luna, Development Hell, p. 17.

[8] A particularly harrowing revelation in the Wikipedia entry for ‘Candace Newmaker’ (accessed June 22, 2021) runs: “Forty minutes into the session, Candace was asked if she wanted to be reborn. She faintly responded ‘no’; this would ultimately be her last word. To this, Ponder replied, ‘Quitter, quitter, quitter, quitter! Quit, quit, quit, quit. She's a quitter!’” This shudder-inducing string of epithets and imperatives is directly quoted (unattributed) in Development Hell. The poem also incorporates from Petscop various allusions to Newmaker.

[9] The entire Petscop series is still accessible on YouTube. The opening entry can be watched here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6e6RK8o1fcs&ab_channel=Petscop

[10] Luna, Development Hell, p. 16.

[11] Ibid., p. 5, p. 11, p. 13.

[12] Ibid., p. 6, p. 8, p. 12, p. 20.

[13] Ibid., p. 6, p. 7, p. 8.

[14] Ibid., p. 5, p. 7, p. 10, p. 16, p. 23.

[15] Ibid., p. 7.

[16] Ibid., p. 6.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid., p. 22.

[19] Ibid., p.5, p. 5, p. 8, p. 13.

[20] Joe Luna, ‘Sketch for a financial theory of the poem’, in Textual Practice (2021). Downloadable here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0950236X.2021.1900362?scroll=top&needAccess=true

[21] Ibid. The quoted text is an excerpt from Randy Martin’s Financialization of Daily Life (Temple University Press, 2002) p. 11.

[22] Luna, Development Hell, p. 24.

[23] Ibid., p. 12.

[24] Hannah Segal, ‘Psychoanalysis and freedom of thought’, in Dimensions of Psychoanalysis, ed. Joseph Sandler (Karnac Books, 1989) p. 58.

[25] Ibid. p. 55.

[26] Luna, Development Hell, p.5, p. 22, p. 27.

[27] William Clare Roberts, ‘Marx in Hell: The Critique of Political Economy’, in Critical Sociology 31 (2005) p. 54.

[28] Falconer, p. 4., p.5

[29] Luna, Development Hell, p. 29.

[30] Joe Luna, ‘Unanswerable Questions’ in the Chicago Review (2017). Accessible online here: https://www.chicagoreview.org/unanswerable-questions/

[31] Ibid.

[32] Ibid.

[33] Luna, Development Hell, p. 23.

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Colin Leemarshall is currently working on a long project titled Total Spiritual Refection, swatches of which have appeared via Earthbound Press, Hi Zero, and ZAZA. He plans to launch Erotoplasty Editions later this year. With Owen Brakspear, he languorously presides over slub press, which welcomes PDFs and other media (slubpress [AT] gmail.com).

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The moral right of the author has been asserted. However, the Hythe is an open-access journal and we welcome the use of all materials on it for educational and creative workshop purposes.