DATABLEED reads Andria Nyberg Forshage’s ‘Five Poems (surge)’
Andria Nyberg Forshage’s ‘Five poems (surge)’ present a contemporary exploration of the Benjaminian Jetztzeit, a term which derives from his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ and refers to a moment in time, or rather, a suspension of time, detached from the historicist continuum of history, held at a standstill, charged with energy. It is a ‘flash of awakened consciousness’ in which we are struck with an awareness elicited by the bringing together of disparate fragments of time, achieved only by rupturing the empty flow of time of the ruling classes (Benjamin 1999).
The poems enact a torsioning: of time, of language, of bodies, of gender, of moods; a wrenching, twisting motion implying an exertion of forces, in which bodies unravel and rupture, or become fine particles (powder, rain, diffusion) and fragments of sound. Syntaxes warp and distort, while words sharpen to the precision of blades. The nonlinearities of lived time are reflected in echoes, repetitions, rearrangements and mutations.
This Jetztzeit, this ‘stagnant never’ in which ‘the hours haven’t’, is filled with turbulent drug-fuelled emotional shifts from euphoria to dissociation to anhedonia. In the first four poems, moods transmute and shift through domestic party landscapes marred with ruptures – cuts, shreds and lines – and populated with uncanny bodies; scenes of vulnerability, intimacy and survival. “A fantasia in which sorrows do not place,” where revolutionary potential wanders unrestricted, through strange, dream-like terrains. And, as dialectical image, it is filled with opposing forces: the ‘formless square’ of ‘Bliss Politics Flesh Powder’; the ‘stagnant spring’ of ‘Ghost Days’; or the repeatedly contrasting states of becoming and flatlining.
The final prose poem – ‘A Cold Season is Coming Up’ – shifts perspective, offering a snapshot of our dystopian present, complete with the markers of surveillance capitalism - drones, data-mining, and ‘self-organising prison zones for busywork’ – and a Tolkienian nod by way of Saruman’s military industrial complex in Isengard. Decimating false binaries of nature vs. human, bodies and machines merge in this hellish present, combining oceanic symbols (the Mariana Trench, cetacean language) and with those emblematic of the energy industry (combustion engines, nuclear reactor codes), while cities metastasize as giant blood diamonds, mimicking the perception of time as a crystallographic system.
One of Benjamin’s favourite metaphors for Jetztzeit was of a mosaic – fragments of human experience assembled into a larger picture – in a stopped moment to create a flicker of recognition from the juxtaposition of past and present (Ikkos, Stanghellini and Morgan 2024, 590). Nyberg Forshage’s poems function as this kind of mosaic, drawing fragments together to create a larger image of revolutionary possibility.
Works cited
Benjamin W. (1999) The Arcades Project (trans. Eiland H, McLaughlin K). Belknap Press.
Ikkos, G., Stanghellini, G., and Morgan, A. (2024) 'History, 'nowtime' (jetztzeit) and dialectical images: introduction to Walter Benjamin for psychiatriy), International Review of Psychiatry 36: 6.