Infinity for Marxists

Historical Materialism
Book Series

Editorial Board

Loren Balhorn (Berlin)

David Broder (Rome)
Sebastian Budgen (Paris)
Steve Edwards (London)
Juan Grigera (London)
Marcel van der Linden (Amsterdam)
Peter Thomas (London)
Gavin Walker (Montréal)

volume 281

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/hm

The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov
lc record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2022059002

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill‑typeface.

issn 1570-1522
isbn 978-90-04-53684-5 (hardback)
isbn 978-90-04-53685-2 (e-book)

Copyright 2023 by Christopher Nealon. Published by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink,
Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau, V&R unipress and Wageningen Academic.
Koninklijke Brill nv reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Requests for
re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill nv via brill.com or copyright.com.

This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

If the infinite is unknowable, we are powerless. For our concept of
the infinite is our concept of ourselves and our possibilities.
gillian rose

∵
Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

1 Camp Messianism, or the Hopes of Poetry in Late-Late

Capitalism 13

2 The Poetic Case 35

3 Reading on The Left 58

4 Affect, Performativity, and Actually Existing Poetry 89

5 Infinity for Marxists 107

6 The Prynne Reflex 126

7 The Price of Value 145

8 The Anti-humanist Tone 158

9 Modernism, Critical Theory, and the Desire for Objecthood 174

10 Literary and Economic Value (with Joshua Clover) 195

11 Abstraction, Intuition, Poetry 214

References 247
Index 260
Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the editors of the journals and volumes in which these essays
first appeared, and to anonymous reviewers who read them. They are as fol-
lows:

‘Camp Messianism, Or The Hopes of Poetry in Late-Late Capitalism’: American

Literature (2004) 76 (3): 579–602
‘The Poetic Case’: Critical Inquiry (2007) 33 (4): 865–86
‘Reading on The Left’: Representations (2009) 108 (1): 22–50
‘Affect, Performativity, and Actually Existing Poetry’: Textual Practice (2011) 25
(2): 265–83
‘Infinity for Marxists’: Mediations: Journal of the Marxist Literary Group (online,
2015): 47–64
‘The Prynne Reflex’: The Claudius App (online, 2013).
‘The Price of Value’: in Rónán McDonald ed., The Values of Literary Studies: Crit-
ical Institutions, Scholarly Agendas (Cambridge: Cambridge up, 2015): 91–104
‘The Antihumanist Tone’: in Alex Houen ed., Affect and Literature (Cambridge:
Cambridge up, 2020): 267–83.
‘Modernism, Critical Theory, Rhetoric’: in Stefanos Geroulanos, Peter Struck,
and Sophia Rosenfeld, eds. A Cultural History of Ideas (Bloomsbury, 2021)
‘Literary and Economic Value’: Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature (on-
line, 2017)
‘Abstraction, Intuition, Poetry’: elh 88.2 (Summer 2021): 387–420.

I have benefitted over the years from the generosity of more interlocutors than
I can recall, but I would especially like to thank my students and colleagues,
present and former, at uc Berkeley and Johns Hopkins. Thanks to Sebastian
Budgen, Steve Edwards, and Danny Hayward at Brill and the Historical Mater-
ialism Book Series, for enabling me to pull these essays together in a single
volume, and to Alex Lewis for his expert copyediting of the final manuscript.
Thanks, finally, to the many authors of hm volumes whose work has changed
how I think and write about capitalism. I am honoured to be in your company.
Introduction

This book collects eleven essays I have written on poetry and capitalism in
the last fifteen years. They cover material and ideas left unexplored in my 2011
study, The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in The American Century, but
which form part of a notable shift in scholarship on North American poetry
that has taken place in the last decade. Over these years a range of work has
moved away from older literary periodizations, especially those formed by a
modern-postmodern sequence, in favour of attempts to chart the history of
poetry according to political and economic movements. More studies than ever
have given serious attention to contemporary poetry. And there has been a shift
away from the post-structuralist emphasis on textuality as the primary means
to study the excitement or the specialness of poetic writing.
It was my aim in The Matter of Capital to suggest that the problems posed
by capitalism formed a great unidentified subject-matter of English-language
poetry from the interwar period to the turn of the twenty-first century. I argued
that returning the study of poetry to ‘subject-matter’, rather than forgoing the
study of form, allowed me to highlight the range of ways poets conceived of
their historical situation, as well as their sense of what kind of thing poetry
is. In particular, I argued that poets’ historical self-consciousness was shaped
by their sense of what kind of material life poems have. Trans-lingual, cross-
period subject-matter – as in the medieval ‘Matter of Britain’ or the ‘Matter of
France’ – became visible to me not only as a kind of topicality, but as an idea of
a kind of distributed material existence that I found a range of poetry seeking
to model. Much in the way the mid-twentieth-century internet was specific-
ally designed to be dispersed, in order to minimise the damage of a nuclear
assault, poets across the last century imagined poetry – especially when they
imagined it threatened by the social atomization and economic commodifica-
tion wrought by capital – as a low-lying, dispersed art-form whose continually
unfinished character was its saving grace. I did not assume that this was actually
true of poetry, of course, but left space open for new forms of readerly response
to poems that enabled solicitude for the self-conception of the art to serve as
part of aesthetic experience.
Preparing and writing that book opened possibilities for me, and made clear
some problems, that I could not explore in the monograph itself. In particular
I wanted to make more space for pushing back against the tendency in theor-
etical writing on poetry to ontologize the art form, which is to say the tendency
to think philosophically about poetry at the expense of understanding it rhet-
orically. A related problem was that philosophically-oriented readings of the

©
2 introduction

importance of poetry in the last quarter-century, even and especially when

they aimed to give the art a present-tense urgency, tended to think historically
only by way of broad-brush stories about ‘modernity’ that leaned on the actual
history of capitalism while both existentializing it, and declining to study its
particulars.
In The Matter of Capital it was important to my argument to focus on poetry
that was not explicitly left-wing, socialist, or communist, since I wanted to
show that even the least ‘political’ poetry was shaped by the imperatives and
contradictions of life under capital. In these essays, by contrast, I have tended
to focus on specifically anti-capitalist poetry. Across the course of the fifteen
years in which I wrote them, I have also moved gradually to incorporate a
more deeply grounded account of the history of capitalism into my arguments
against modernity-theories. At first this meant thinking about poems in rela-
tion to the history of social movements, but ultimately it has come to mean
returning to Marx’s Capital to highlight the non-teleological, open-ended way
Marx describes the horrible dynamics of accumulation.
The essays are as follows:

1 ‘Camp Messianism, Or The Hopes of Poetry in Late-Late

Capitalism’ (2004)

In this essay, I describe a rhetorical stance common to a range of poets on the

political left who came of age in the 1990s, after the experiments and mani-
festos of the Language poets. I suggest that these poets are testing out an atti-
tude toward capitalism that blends the melancholy historicism of the Frankfurt
School with the archness of the queer practice of camp. I look at the variety of
ways this blend of resources produces tropes of the future anterior, à la Ben-
jamin and Adorno, but point out how these gestures are often given a lightness
that departs from the dead-serious messianic claims of Benjamin in particu-
lar (that one day, for instance, the dispossessed will finally have recuperated
even the distorted lives of the dead who lived before them). I suggest that the
camp attitude both threatens to evacuate Frankfurt-style messianism – to see
it as liable to devaluation through humor – but also creates a certain breath-
ing room for it. I suggest that the complex tone generated out of this blend
of attitudes is traceable back to a kind of sub rosa, vernacular reading of the
history of social movements in the twentieth century, pitting the narrative of
the political failure of the European working classes of the first half of the
period against the later political successes of the lgbt movement in partic-
ular.
introduction 3

2 ‘The Poetic Case’ (2007)

This essay describes a more ancient poetic topos than the turn-of-the-twenty-
first-century trope of campily devalued messianic hope, but it is related. Begin-
ning with the question of exemplarity – what is a single poem a ‘case’ of? –
I suggest that there is a long history in theorising by poets of suggesting that
the relationship between any given poem and the category ‘poetry’ is one of
unrealisability – that is, an argument that suggests that no single poem could
encapsulate all the characteristics of the category. The reasons for making this
obvious-enough point, I suggest, have to do with how thinkers in the tradition
of the ‘defence of poetry’ have responded to Plato’s demotion of the claim that
poets can instruct us on the workings of every human endeavour by suggesting
that we live in a world of complex divisions of labor that poetry cannot over-
come – at least until those divisions are themselves overcome. I suggest that
poems, like defences of poetry, can offer versions of this topos – not only in
serial poetry, where the promise of full realisation (of aesthetic pleasure, or of
meaning) can always be deferred, but also in individual poems that, depending
on their occasion, may wish to decrease the pressure on themselves to promise
sure grounds for overcoming capitalism. I close my argument with attention to
a poem by Jennifer Moxley that beautifully enacts a self-consciousness about
how the relation between poems and ‘Poetry’ is one way to imagine poets’ rela-
tion to political history.

3 ‘Reading on the Left’ (2009)

This essay, which began as a talk at a conference meant to celebrate the 25th
anniversary of the publication of Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious,
offers a look at some exemplary instances of what has counted as ‘symptomatic
reading’ in the Anglo-American conversation with French theory since the late
1980s. As I did in ‘Camp Messianism’, I begin by identifying the early twentieth-
century heritage of left theory that took as its starting point the failure of the
European and American working classes to overthrow capitalism. The idea of
‘symptomatic reading’ that grew out of this moment signified a reading that
presumes to be smarter than its textual object (cf. Rita Felski), or that presump-
tuously superadds politics to texts that are not themselves ‘political’ (cf. Sharon
Marcus and Stephen Best’s ‘Surface Reading’, which was in fact the introduction
to the journal issue in which this essay appeared). I suggest, though, that when
we think about the earlier history of the ‘symptomatic reading’, such readings
can’t be reduced to one attitude or another, since their model is Althusser’s
4 introduction

interpretation of Marx’s relationship to David Ricardo: Althusser reads this as

a critical acceptance on Marx’s part that the terrain of ‘political economy’ can’t
simply be erased in order to critique capitalism more accurately, but must be
contended with by re-working its categories. This history both reminds us that
the two poles of the debate that emerged in this period – symptomatic and
reparative readings, suspicious and friendly – lead scholars to lose sight of the
political context out of which the two poles developed in the first place. Mov-
ing from the debate about symptomatic reading to actual examples of it, I show
that even for non-Marxist critics, the question of politics remains front and
center. Looking at Toni Morrison’s study of literary racism in Playing In The
Dark (1992) and Lee Edelman’s Homographesis (1994), I show how they both
analogise interpretive politics to movement politics, imagining the antiracist
critic facilitating a Civil-Rights-style healing and progress in Morrison’s case,
and the gay male reader committing to a survivalist war of position in the fash-
ion of aids-activist militancy, in Edelman’s. I suggest that, in 2009 at least,
those movement-related styles of reading symptomatically were in the process
of being supplanted by philosophical arguments that located militancy, not in
an engagement with any one social movement, but in a kind of pre-social atti-
tude of resistance that was ‘ontological’ in the sense of being prior to politics.
Though this style of thinking emerged from outside literary criticism, I note
that for theorists like Alain Badiou and Giorgio Agamben, militancy is linked
to an idea of ‘poetry’ as itself austerely above, or prior to, enmeshment with
the low-to-the-ground activity of political struggle. Wondering whether we had
escaped the either-or bind of suspicious-versus-reparative reading at the cost
of placing poems and the reading of poems too far above the fray, as a place of
purity that secured but could not engage in materialist politics, I conclude with
a reading of a poem by the Canadian poet Lisa Robertson whose own materi-
alism places the here-and-now practice of rhetoric at its centre.

4 ‘Affect, Performativity, and Actually Existing Poetry’ (2011)

This essay takes up the argument I began developing in ‘Reading on The Left’ –
that actual poems give the lie to key theoretical claims made about them in the
name of the category ‘poetry’. I approach the matter from a different angle here,
reflecting on the emergence of ‘affect’ and ‘performativity’ in the 90s and 00s
as literary-theoretical keywords in the North American academy. On the Amer-
ican side, ‘affect’ and ‘performativity’ have come to be understood as examples
of how ‘language’ supervenes in the attempts of a speaking or writing subject
to control utterance – that is, the keywords are part of a larger allegory of the
introduction 5

critique of the (Enlightenment, bourgeois) ‘subject’, where queer subjects are

seen by critics as cannily mobilising an awareness of their non-self-identicality
in the name of a subversive politics. But I am after something different. So the
essay splits its effort between a revisionary look at the critical-theoretical ori-
gins of the terms in Europe, on the one hand, and their uptake in the early
days of American queer theory, on the other. I turn first to De Man reading
Kant and Derrida reading Hegel, demonstrating that their attention to mood
and tone, over and against ‘structure’, lays the groundwork for the American
version of affect and performativity. I show that the terms on which the post-
structuralists imagined literary writing outmaneuvering structure were spe-
cifically anti-dialectical: the ‘performativity’ of sound-play in poetry, or chance
operations, as in Mallarmé, are positioned against a dialectic imagined as lock-
step and pre-determined. ‘Affect’, in this context, is primarily the critical affect
of droll irony. I pivot, then, to work by Judith Butler and Leo Bersani, emphas-
ising how the crisis of the aids epidemic produced a structure of feeling of
militant solicitude for vulnerable bodies, and suggesting that there was lurk-
ing in the broadly anti-subjectivist and anti-humanist currents of queer theory
a sensitivity to how the big-theory ‘language’ of post-structuralism could not
succeed in being conceptually anterior to rhetoric, to embodied and circum-
stantial language. In closing, I look to the poems of mid-twentieth-century gay
San Francisco poet Jack Spicer, who was trained as a linguist, and who used a
highly self-conscious rhetoric of gaming and chance, in tandem with mischiev-
ous uses of grammatical and phonetic theory, to develop a rhetoric of militant
tenderness for outsiders, hidden inside the idea of ‘language’.

5 ‘Infinity for Marxists’

This short essay serves as a little summa of my brief against the ontologisa-
tion of poetry in the work of non-Marxist left theory (where ‘ontology’ means
something like ‘anteriority to predication’). Reading across the work of spec-
ulative realists, eco-critics, object-oriented ontologists, new materialists and
historians of the book, I outline their various advocacies for the infinite – coun-
terposed to the textual, the interpretive, the Enlightenment, and the dialectic,
all of which are imagined in this discourse as cramped – as well as the arrogance
of ‘the human’. I note the syzygy, in this discourse, of anti-textualism and anti-
dialecticality, anti-humanism and the critique of meaning tout court. But I also
note that the supposedly un-interpretable ‘assemblages’ championed in this
discourse not only go by a poetic name – the ‘litany’ – but that they are meant
to provide exactly the sort of getting-out-of-oneself that the lyric poem has his-
6 introduction

torically promised. I contrast this anti-critical championing of the ontology of

the lyric, one last time, with an actual poem – in this case a poem from Dana
Ward’s volume The Crisis of Infinite Worlds (2013), which persuasively develops
an idea of the infinite as a kind of mediation among people, experienced in
poems as an embodied comportment carried out in language; that is, as rhet-
oric.

6 ‘The Prynne Reflex’

This essay marks a turn in the collection toward interrogating the modernity-
narratives that shape not only our critical theories, but the thinking of poets
themselves. It has a different shape than the other essays in the volume, since
it involves a sustained reading of the work of one poet, the British writer
J.H. Prynne. And it shifts from counterposing ontologised claims about ‘poetry’
with actual poems, to thinking about the implicit philosophical claims about
poetry and history made in poems. I chose to write about Prynne because
his work is a kind of limit-case for a particular left-wing modernism in which
an abstraction away from scenic modes and direct address are imagined as
part of a project of keeping the poetry un-commodifiable: the sheer difficulty
of Prynne’s work is seen by his advocates as proof of unimpeachable anti-
capitalist militancy. Reading a selection of his work from the 1970s to the 2000s,
I unpack the relationship between Prynne’s critique of commodification, his
gradual abandonment of direct address, and a fascinating soundplay in which
the reversal of graphemes and phonemes is meant to signal the possibility of
the de-commodification of human life. I describe the continuity of this project
across Prynne’s career, while suggesting, in conclusion, that it nonetheless pays
a very high price for having pitted abstraction against commodification in this
way, both in a political-economic sense (it linearises the capitalist accumula-
tion it dreams of reversing) and in a rhetorical one (its imaginary relationship
to the reader gradually becomes restricted to an endless education in ‘damaged
life’). I conclude by suggesting that what’s missing in this dazzling poetic pro-
ject is a sense of how capitalism produces not just commodities, but value.

7 ‘The Price of Value’ (2015)

This piece further pursues some of the questions I opened up in ‘The Prynne
Reflex’, regarding alternative ways to think about literary history and literary
value together. I try two things here: first, I test out a poetic comparison across
introduction 7

a longer historical distance than most field-based scholarship generally risks:

in this case, between a canonical late antique poem (Boethius’s Consolation of
Philosophy, ca. 524) and a twentieth-century anti-capitalist poem with no guar-
antee of eventual canonical value (Jasper Bernes’s We Are Nothing And So Can
You, 2015). I suggest that to recognise formal similarities between the texts –
their prosimetric alteration between lineation and paragraph, their phoneme-
and grapheme-level fascination with chiasmus – might open paths for research
into low-level but enduring poetic folkways that can’t be captured by a lit-
erary history of period styles, or of successive modernities. Because the key
formal similarities I identify also ramify to include both poets’ sense of ‘mat-
ter’ – they are both using chiasmus to think about reversibilities between what
we might call the material and the ideal – I suggest that we might also find a
hinge between literary and economic senses of value buried in the comparison.
Boethius’s poem is a tale of sequestration, a prison poem, a death row poem,
that imagines dematerialisation as freedom, as an escape from the prison of
matter. Its Neoplatonic idealism is re-worked by Bernes as a way of thinking
about capitalist accumulation and militant action alike as surpassing ‘material-
ism’: both require what we might call the ‘ideal’ – that which is latent, possible,
inarticulate.

8 ‘The Anti-humanist Tone’ (2020)

This essay is the first of two in the volume that explore the assumptions under-
pinning theoretical hostility to rhetoric. Drawing out similarities between early
twentieth-century modernist work and later critical theory, I show that they
share an antipathy to ‘the human’ shaped by a preference for a concept of
abstraction as radical alterity to the human, that is, a concept of abstraction
built on the sublime, as well as a deflationary sense of the relationship of the
human either to an indifferent cosmos, as in the Nietzschean anti-humanisms
of De Man and Benjamin, or of myth or the divine, as in the work of T.E. Hulme
and T.S. Eliot. I show that even across a right-left political divide, these dis-
courses share a notion of the aesthetic as a place of radical sovereignty – utterly
superior to individual makers of aesthetic objects – that is linked to a concrete
history of conservative class ideologies. I reply to this constellation of sover-
eignty politics, dispossession aesthetics, and absolutist versions of abstraction
by noting a revival of work that imagines abstraction in less Nietzschean and
more Hegelian terms, in which ‘the abstract’ is the whole, which does not obvi-
ate but animates each particular. And I suggest, in closing, that this totality
frame is undergoing a revival in new Marxist theory that clears ground for mul-
8 introduction

tiple histories of anti-capitalism, one less focused on which class will prove
to be absolutely revolutionary, and more focused on the histories of social
reproduction that themselves emerge out of many varied relations to value-
production, not just wage relations. I close with a poem by Sandra Simonds
that uses the supposedly declensionary ‘mythic method’ (the high modernist
making-Ulysses of everyday folk in order to show how comic and pitiful regular
people are, from the perspective of superhuman divinity) to puzzle over social
reproduction instead, not least the social reproduction of literature through the
teaching of the humanities.

9 ‘Modernism, Critical Theory, and the Desire for Objecthood’ (2020)

This essay further pursues one aspect of ‘The Anthumanist Tone’, that is, the
problems with the critical desire for sublime, radical alterity in aesthetic pro-
duction. It identifies a specifically anti-rhetorical aspect of that desire. This
piece demonstrates that the uptake of modernist aesthetic precepts in ‘post-
modern’ theory identified by Andreas Huyssen in After The Great Divide (1987)
also reworks the modernist championing of objectivity against personality and
ornament – that is, against rhetoric – into a periodising story, where the ‘post-
modern’ is a form of groundlessness that may be either lamented or celebrated,
but isn’t, in any case, hard and obdurate – ‘the post-modern’, here, standing for
the ungroundedness of rhetorical assertion, free-floating exchange value, and
immaterial production, and ‘the modern’ standing for production, inhuman
objecthood, and pure use value. I push back against this story by showing, first,
how the moderns and the post-moderns alike misunderstand the character
of the inhuman objects they attend to, mostly because those objects are spe-
cifically capitalist machine-objects, less ontologically alien to the human than
socially alienating. Second, I show that the version of ‘rhetoric’ repudiated in
both modernist manifestos and post-modern theory is a narrow version indeed,
one that misses the social value of the situatedness of rhetoric by impugning
‘ornament’ and ‘exchange’ in the theoretical equivalent of (first right, then left)
populism. Turning in closing to a reading of similarities in the conceptions of
objecthood and rhetoric in the work of Hans Blumenberg and Fred Moten, I
suggest that attending to rhetoric as the practice of contending with the per-
plexity of situation – of sudden crises and ancient impasses faced by human
creativity – offers opportunities for better periodisation of the capitalist period,
one focused on struggle rather than on technology.
introduction 9

10 ‘Literary and Economic Value’ (2017)

This essay, co-authored with Joshua Clover, works to expose the limits of post-
war stories about the autonomy of the aesthetic that see it as imperiled or
doomed – ‘subsumed’ is a recent usage – by the universal commodification
of art. We do this by looking at the longer history of thinking about the rela-
tion between economic and aesthetic value, which we show has been shaped
by a domain model that artificially separated aesthetic and economics, only to
be dismayed, later, by their fusion. Following early work by scholars like Terry
Eagleton, we highlight how Enlightenment-era attempts to separate out aes-
thetic value from its economic counterpart involved analogies between what
were understood to be different cognitive faculties (reason and emotion, say),
and relations among competing claims to political standing (between the bour-
geoisie and the sovereign, most of all). By the twentieth centuries the ana-
logies had become both more backgrounded and more baroque, leading, for
instance, to the complex relay of analogical terms in Benjamin’s theory of the
constellation – where individual features of an artwork could be seen to be
in potential rebellion against both its form and against ideologies of progress
that dictated the form – or to the strange overlay of post-World War i geopol-
itics and fragmentary citation in T.S. Eliot’s work, where part-whole relations,
as in Benjamin, take on uncertain aesthetic value pending the eventual des-
tiny of something like Christian culture. Liberal American conversations about
literary and economic value after World War ii worried over part-whole rela-
tions in terms of debates about works and canons, that is, the value of indi-
vidual literary works in what seemed to be an ever-expanding multicultural
canon. Post-war literary theories of economic and aesthetic value in a more
Marxist vein turned to various narratives of the ‘subsumption’ of social life
by economic values, either pessimistically imagining subsumption as a fatal
error on the part of capitalism, since sociability is too unruly finally to organ-
ise according to economic principles (deriving from the Italian autonomist
tradition, emphasising worker creativity), or as a terrible victory for capital,
now free to morph into something qualitatively different and more sinister,
like ‘bio-power’ (deriving, of course, from the Frankfurt School, before Fou-
cault). But even these Marxist literary theories tended to ignore contempor-
ary work in history and historical sociology that told capital’s postwar his-
tory, not as a story about saturation or subsumption, but as one about ever-
more consequential volatility leading to a crisis in capital’s ways of producing
profitable surplus value, and exchangeable use values. Seen from the vant-
age of this scholarship, it becomes clear that most discourses on the specific
value of the aesthetic tend to lean too heavily on spatialised domain mod-
10 introduction

els of art and economics, and that they tend to insist on a separation of art
and economics that rests on a false distinction between politics and econom-
ics. We conclude by urging a re-thinking the specificity of the aesthetic that
does not think of it as a separate sphere, or as necessarily resistant to cap-
ital.

11 ‘Abstraction, Intuition, Poetry’ (2021)

With this final essay I return to the baseline format of the volume – explor-
ing a body of theoretical work with significance for how we read poetry, and
then comparing its claims to the rhetoric of a contemporary poem. This time,
however, I don’t turn to the rhetorical liveness and situatedness of a poem
to deflate the ontologising claims of anti-humanist or anti-Marxist theory.
Instead, I begin with Marx and the Marxian tradition, laying out a path by
which Capital, Volume i can help us think about the anti-solidaristic forces at
work in contemporary capitalism, and then read a recent book of poetry that
itself tests out the limits and possibilities of imagining oneself to be aligned
with others, seen and unseen. The first part of the essay suggests that for today’s
struggles, which are coming to feel like a blend of ‘identity’ and anti-capitalist
movements, we can benefit from returning to Chapter 25 of Capital, Volume i
(‘The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation’), specifically because it lays out
how capital accumulation depends, not only on forcing populations into the
wage relation, but also on keeping populations out of it, or expelling them
from it. If the profitability of wage exploitation depends on unwaged, femin-
ised reproductive labour, for instance, and on the imprisonment of no-longer-
exploitable racialised populations, we begin to have grounds for linking femin-
ist to antiracist struggles in fresh ways. And if we read Chapter 25 along with the
subsequent chapters that focus on so-called primitive accumulation, we can
begin to see a global dynamic between colonisers and colonised that prefigures
and later mirrors this dynamic of tiered disposability and ever-shifting recipes
of waged to unwaged exploitation. I frame this reading of Capital as a mat-
ter of isolating value as its key abstraction, and distinguish this from attempts
to read Capital as primarily about ‘property’. I take time to suggest, specific-
ally, that this way of reading Capital in the Black Radical tradition, though
it enables a critique of the limits of Marxism’s ability to grasp the specificity
of Black chattel slavery, also leaves open a door to thinking of Black enslave-
ment and racialisation in terms of Marx’s theory of value production. I close
the essay by using this reading of Marx to focus on the dynamics of possession
and dispossession in Stephanie Young’s 2019 book Pet Sounds. In that volume,
introduction 11

Young uses the mode of autobiography and the form of the poetic sequence
to track how seemingly fleeting or circumstantial encounters can deepen or
ramify into the shape of a life, and which takes the occasions of these unexpec-
tedly deep entailments of places and times, and of people with each other, to
ask, shyly, what a solidarity might look like among people who don’t ‘deserve’ to
think of themselves as allied, because they are so different. I close by suggest-
ing that, however counterintuitive it may seem to a generation of academic
humanists who have been trained to critique ‘the human’, we urgently require
a humanist study of the historical barriers to solidarity if we are to overcome
them.

∵
Looking back at these essays teaches me about the long journey I have made
from thinking about poetry in relation to capitalism, broadly, to thinking about
it in relation to capitalist value-production, in particular. I hope that placing
these essays alongside each other will allow their readers to see that movement
more clearly than I could, at the time. And I hope that the place this volume
leaves off will encourage fellow-travellers to pursue its open questions further. I
will admit to wondering whether my own long learning curve en route to think-
ing about how value-production yokes us together and differentiates us is an
ontogenetic recapitulation of philosophy’s phylogenetic one: a century and a
half of anti-Hegelianism, for instance, has arguably deferred the nourishing of
habits of totality-thinking, and of honouring intuition, that I think we could all
use as it becomes harder to deny that our many political and, well, existential
struggles are part of a single problem.
Writing these essays, in other words, has led me to recognise the import-
ance of a deeper awareness of the workings of the logic of accumulation at the
level of the whole (if by ‘logic’ you’ll allow me to mean a social dynamic that
has achieved a long-term ability to overcome obstacles to reproducing itself,
however violently). But the unfolding of that logic happens as history, of course,
and I can see more clearly, now, that any further writing I do on capital and
poetry – or on capital and people! – will need to draw on histories of both the
geopolitics and the everyday experience of accumulation: not our familiar his-
tories of ‘modernity’, but histories of the reproduction of property relations, for
instance; or histories of anti-left and anti-communist violence. These are some
of the histories that meet the granularity of literary writing halfway; bundled
together with a capacity to think at the level of the whole, they might help
us become more intuitively nimble when we try to name the many ways that
value-production devalues most of us. What I mean is, if we could all develop
12 introduction

a clearer picture, in the coming years, of the relationship between ‘value’ in its
technical Marxist sense and its everyday humanist sense, I think we will have
done about the best that intellectual work can be expected to do, when it forms
part of a political struggle.

Washington, DC, September 2021

 chapter 1

Camp Messianism, or the Hopes of Poetry in

Late-Late Capitalism

Recent innovative North American poetry is a good place for thinking about
the status of a new aesthetics, since it’s been busy writing one. I’m thinking of
American and Canadian poets, most in their thirties and forties now, who are
writing in light of the poetic and critical projects of Language poetry, though
they are by no means simply following them out. These poets, referred to as
‘post-Language’ writers in the small-press world in which they’ve emerged,
raise interesting questions about new habits of literary criticism, since their
poems read both as theory and poetry. Although these poets have not yet pro-
duced a body of writing like the criticism and theory of the Language poets,
their poetry reads like the yield, if not the foregrounding, of significant theor-
etical effort.
More specifically, many of the post-Language writers seem to have taken a
kind of Frankfurt School turn in their poems, by which I mean not so much
that they are crankily denouncing a culture industry – though they may – or
critically miming ‘authoritarian’ types of language – though they do – but that
they have become invested in a historical story about what Theodor Adorno
called ‘damaged life’, or what Susan Stewart might call the ‘fate’ of the mater-
ial world, its pasts and possible futures.1 Unlike Adorno or Walter Benjamin,
though, many of the post-Language poets have struck a kind of camp posture
toward the ‘damage’ of late capitalism, in a way that borrows from but rein-
terprets both the messianism of Adorno and Benjamin and the subcultural
(especially queer) trajectory of camp.
The best sketch I can offer of the Frankfurtian part of this historical story
about a ‘damaged’ material life is to say that it’s not just a story of the cul-
ture industry whose workings Adorno and Max Horkheimer detailed at mid-
century, nor even of the ‘late capitalism’ Fredric Jameson first diagnosed in
1984; it’s the story of something like really, really late capitalism; capitalism
in a fully globalised and triumphal form, the destructive speed and flexibility
of whose financial instruments alone make Nixon’s lofting the dollar off the

1 See Adorno 1996; and Stewart 2001.

©
14 chapter 1

gold standard in 1971 look thoughtful and conservative.2 Depending on how

one understands the massive glut of capital unleashed on world markets since
the collapse of the Soviet Union, capitalism has either taken on a new, omnipo-
tently viral character (traveling across national boundaries, for instance, with
the power to imperil entire economies for no other reason than to keep a tiny
group of wealthy investors’ portfolios mobile and artificially inflated); or it is
in the last, seizing phases of a horrible addiction to its own mobility. In any
case, the privatising, shock-treatment destruction of the post-Soviet economy
in the early nineties, the collapse and bailout of the peso in 1995, the Asian
currency crisis of 1997, and the bottoming out of the United States’ supposedly
post-historical new economy in 2000 – all these indicate a volatility to cap-
ital on an order of magnitude beyond even the ricochets of the early twentieth
century.3 If Adorno and Horkheimer made much of how the Enlightenment’s
dream of the equality of all people had become the nightmare of the inter-
changeability of all people, that interchangeability could now be said to have
become entirely liquid, even quicksilver.
We might say that the camp aspect of post-Language writing, meanwhile,
is the rueful astonishment that, against all odds, this liquidation is still not
complete: post-Cold War global economic volatility has not resulted in whole-
sale disaster for the United States or Europe. Instead, late-late capitalism gives
texture to our everyday lives more murmuringly: most of us are at least inter-
mittently aware of being solicited day and night by a kind of manic mass
culture that seeks, ever more aggressively, to stuff our attention to the gills.
When Andrew Ross remarks, then, that camp ‘is the re-creation of surplus value
from forgotten forms of labor’, he touches on a polemical affection for waste,
which animates not just camp in its queer subcultural matrix but also in its
migrations beyond subcultural boundaries – to mass culture (which tries to
capture the dynamics of camp consumption in television, for instance, in pro-
grammes like Mystery Science Theater 3000, or in vh-1’s ‘Pop-up videos’, or in
fake-anachronistic sitcoms like ‘That ’70’s Show’) and to the literary culture
of small-press poetry.4 Mass-cultural camp invites us all to be clever; post-
Language poetic camp, I hope to show, invites us to take up a polemical affec-
tion for what’s obsolete, misguided, or trivial, and to risk the embarrassment of
trying it out.

2 See Adorno and Horkheimer 2000; and Jameson 1991.

3 In the vast lay literature on the post-World War ii financial system and its vulnerabilities, see
Korten 1995; Guyatt 2001; Martin 2002; and Shutt 1998.
4 Ross 1999, p. 320.
camp messianism, or the hopes of poetry in late-late capitalism 15

So how do post-Language poets do this? How do they perform a relationship

to the experience of a materiality that is both desubstantialised and supersat-
urating, subject to both lightning-swift consolidations and dispersals and to
humiliating, vegetally slow decay? A first text for consideration:

What gets me is
the robots are doing
my job, but I don’t get
the money,
some extrapolated node
of expansion-contraction gets
my money, which I need
for time travel.5

What gets me is how compactly this terrific little poem toys with, or speaks
through, an affect that has transformed North American poetry in the last dec-
ade. At first, this poem by Kevin Davies seems to be just the swift dodge of a
tedious sort of lecturing, political poetry. Yes, the speaker is complaining about
the theft of his wages, but he does it science-fictionally, and by way of a dated
science fiction, at that: there is no Matrix here, just ‘robots’ and ‘time travel’. But
the campiness of the obsolete sci-fi conceit has something to play off against,
namely, the description of the system that steals the speaker’s wages, the ‘extra-
polated node / of expansion-contraction’ – itself amusing in its succinctness
but not quite the same as the clanking of the worker-robots. If the poem is
a dodge, then, it’s not quite dodging politics with humour: the truth of the
poem lies elsewhere, in its rueful awareness of the obsolescence of its conceit.
This awareness is not simply reflexive – not simply a modernist recognition of
obsolescence – because the poem also performs the knowledge that even its
obsolescence is obsolete. This performance – I think of it as a kind of stance –
is designed to make the poem’s last, emphatic phrase – ‘time travel’ – escape, for
a moment, its camp value and reveal an extravagant demand: that the speaker
get his money and his history back, that he be freed to burrow back behind
the process that made even the expropriating robots obsolete – or, perhaps, to
lurch forward to a time when obsolescence will reveal itself to have been an
unfinished piece of a story about the rescue of human vulnerability from the
merciless abstraction of ‘expansion’ and ‘contraction’.6

5 Davies 2000, untitled frontpiece.

6 In a very helpful essay called ‘Globalit, Inc.; Or, the Cultural Logic of Global Literary Stud-
16 chapter 1

Read this way, Davies’s poem is not far from the canonical modern artic-
ulation of a redemptive historiography – that is, from Benjamin’s remarks in
‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’:

A chronicler who recites events without distinguishing between major

and minor ones acts in accordance with the following truth: nothing that
has ever happened should be regarded as lost to history. To be sure, only a
redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past – which is to say, only
for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments.
Each moment it has lived becomes a citation à l’ordre du jour – and that
day is Judgment Day.7

This scenario echoes not only the short poem by Davies but also a whole vari-
ety of post-Language writing, like this poem in Lisa Robertson’s Debbie: An Epic
(1997):

maybe
even
this
dress
shall
some
day be
a joy
to
repair8

And here, Davies again, from Comp’.s ‘Karnal Bunt’:

ies’, Ian Baucom makes use of the figures of expansion and contraction to characterise the
current mode of capitalism (see Baucom 2001). He deploys these terms to invest the rhet-
oric of globalisation with a cautionary note: the ‘expansion’ of capital, he insists, means
also its ‘contraction’, that is, its concentration in fewer hands. Baucom offers this caution-
ary coinage in order to work against what he sees as a potentially romanticising tend-
ency to model literary studies on a new global situation that is, in fact, an uneven global
marketplace. I take Baucom’s caution seriously; it is one reason I will rely here on the
Frankfurtian diction of a totality, whatever its problems, rather than on the word globalisa-
tion.
7 Benjamin 1969, p. 254.
8 Robertson 1997. Debbie has no page numbers.
camp messianism, or the hopes of poetry in late-late capitalism 17

Every junked
vehicle a
proposition
waiting for
the right rustic
welder
after the war that
never happened
here.9

And Rod Smith, from The Good House (2001):

Each reasonable house

& each waking motion
are votive, based on
the wiley insurgence
of awaiting worlds –10

Each of these poems (they are actually all stanzas or sections from longer
poems) finds in its material at hand – a dress, ‘junked’ cars, the ‘reasonable
house’ and ‘waking motion’ – a mute expectation of ‘repair’ or recuperation.
The character of this expectation is slightly different in each case. In the con-
text of Debbie, it becomes clear that Robertson is implicitly imagining herself
in the scene of repair; Davies understands the instances of his ‘junked vehicle’
logically, as ‘propositions’, but he complicates past logic the temporality of their
being welded since their future is contingent on what ‘never happened / here’;
and Smith places not only his ‘house’ but also a human figure, with ‘waking
motion’, in the way of expectation. The language in each poem is also differently
political – only whisperingly so in Robertson (though, again, elsewhere she will
show her cards), but frankly combative in Davies, with his hard-to-locate ‘war’,
and slyly, ambiently resistant in Smith’s ‘wiley insurgence / of awaiting worlds’.
I realise that in offering a preliminary account of these poems my focus on
modernist and mid-century points of comparison – camp modes of attach-
ment and critique, and Frankfurtian tactics of re-reading history – raises the
question, What about post-modernity? It is true, of course, that the two
‘schools’ of poetry to whom the post-Language poets are most indebted – the

9 Davies 2000, p. 61.

10 Smith 2001.
18 chapter 1

Language poetry of the 1980s and the New York school of the 1960s and 1970s –
are both understood in American literary history as signally ‘post-modern’. Are
the post-Language poets post-modern?
This is a hard question. It is true that poets like Davies, Robertson, and Smith
make use of the signal strategies of literary post-modernism as we’ve come to
recognise it, especially its engagement with mass culture and a decoupling of
signs from their referents. And it’s true that these poets have also grown up with
the peculiarly post-modern admixture of identity-based liberation movements
and post-structural critiques of identity. But their poems seem to be written out
of some set of conditions we are still struggling to name, conditions not quite
matching the major accounts of the post-modern (hence, with my apologies,
‘late-late capitalism’). At the very least, these younger poets are motivated by
a different sense of historical situation – specifically, a different sense of the
unfolding of a totalising political and economic system – than was felt by either
the New York school or the Language poets.
Although vastly different, of course, both Language and New York writing
developed in successive stages of the expansion of mass culture, and both drew
energy from critiques of authenticity bound up in mass culture’s unfolding. At
mid-century, in poems like Frank O’Hara’s ‘Having a Coke with You’ and John
Ashbery’s ‘Daffy Duck in Hollywood’, New York School poets made friends with
popular and mass culture, deliberately braving the possibility of obsolescence
or eventual inscrutability. Such risk-taking was meant to dislodge the idea of
poetry from the formalist anti-modernisms of ‘official verse culture’, which pre-
sumed that poems were autonomous linguistic artifacts whose aim was to rise
above their immediate surroundings and stake a claim to cultural perman-
ence.11
Language school poets later developed a critique concerned not with the
poet’s cultural isolation as much as with the authenticity of lyric utterance –
and, ultimately, of language itself – as a transparently truthful medium. Lan-
guage poets, like the poets of the New York school, were interested in the
relationship between mass culture and poetry, but rather than mining mass cul-
ture as a referential and affective resource, they tended to focus on its capacity
to obscure social truths, especially the truth of the commodification of lan-
guage. Deliberately fracturing syntax and troubling reference, Language poets
developed a relationship between the poetic and the political not so much by
striking the implicitly political posture of insouciance toward an official cul-

11 For a discussion of the character of ‘official verse culture’ (which is Charles Bernstein’s
phrase, coined long after the 1950s in reference to poetry of the 1980s), see Breslin 1983.
camp messianism, or the hopes of poetry in late-late capitalism 19

ture as by tearing away at its lies. If the relevant political backdrop for the New
York school poets was the Cold War, for the Language poets, it was Vietnam.12
What kind of poetics the post-Language poets articulate, meanwhile, is a
question understood so far primarily in terms of their relationship to Language
writing rather than to the New York school, perhaps because the Language
poets developed a large body of critical writing (and because they are the more
immediate precursors). While I can’t devote much space here to a comparison
between Language and post-Language writing, I think it is important at least to
mention some of the major arguments in the Language poets’ critical writing
in order to highlight what seems different now about the post-Language poets,
especially in their understanding of linguistic materiality.
Language poets’ contribution to the development of a post-modern poetics
can be understood as an argument on behalf of three interrelated arguments
about participatory readership, language and the commodity form, and the
decentring of the post-modern political subject. These contributions have been
widely discussed and analysed; in brief, I think it’s fair to say that the notion
of active readership lies at the centre of the Language poets’ collective self-
understanding.13 Active readership points to a belief that difficult, unconven-
tional texts, rather than being closed to readers, are actually more open than
traditional literary texts because they don’t smother or direct readers with too
many genre cues, overdetermined tropes, clichés, or heavily rehearsed rhetor-
ical movements – forms of what Language poets like Lyn Hejinian and Bruce
Andrews refer to as ‘closure’.14 This ‘rejection of closure’, as Hejinian calls it,
implies a scene of reader-writer collaboration meant to rescue language not
only from cliché but also from commodification, from becoming a unidirec-
tional, informatic, PowerPoint-y medium for social control. The argument for
referentially disjunct, nonclosural texts as the appropriate scene for a collab-

12 For one consideration of the political background of Language poetry, especially in terms
of its relation to the new social movements, see Kim 2001. Both Kim and Barrett Watten
identify the emergence of Language poetry as a politicised avant-garde with the practice
of criticism. For Kim, this means that the Language poets, in preserving a small-press
‘outsider’ status into the 1980s, actually ended up setting the stage for their (relative)
canonization in university-based literary culture. For Watten, the ‘turn to language’ is artic-
ulated in a critical response to the failures of ‘radical’ poets like Denise Levertov to grasp
the ‘insufficiency of language to history’ (Watten 2000, p. 182). For the Language poets of
Watten’s generation, this critique led to an exploration of the obduracy, even the opacity,
of the relationship between politics and the linguistic sign.
13 The active-reader theory has received a good deal of attention from both post-Language
poets and literary critics; see, for example, Gilbert 2002, and Altieri 1998.
14 For a key articulation of this theory, see Hejinian 2000, pp. 40–58.
20 chapter 1

orative decommodification of language has been made most forcefully by the

Language poet and critic Ron Silliman; this argument is linked, in the poetry
and critical writing of Bruce Andrews, to a theory of collaboration between
reader and writer that produces a mobile, protean, political subject along the
lines of the ‘schizo’ envisioned in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Anti-
Oedipus.15 As Andrews puts it:

[Language poetics] doesn’t call for a reading that rejects or negates the
referential, or even the baldly representational forces of language,
but one that resists letting those forces be confined and recuperated &
territorialized. It would join in the adventure of keeping them active at
the micro level, as singular & literal events – constantly varying, skidding,
interpenetrating, mutually transforming, out in the open, on the surface
........................
Works are responses, and the praxis of the reader reconstructs this re-
sponsiveness
.......................
Here we’re not looking for mastery, but passionate or even dizzying em-
brace – of an implicated social body.16

These concerns with active readership, the decommodification of language,

and the production of a new, political subject, fully enfolded (‘implicated’) in a
mobile social body, are formally present in many Language poems. One canon-
ical example is Hejinian’s My Life, which in its first edition contained thirty-
seven sections of thirty-seven sentences each, one section-sentence for each
year of Hejinian’s life (the second edition, written eight years after the first,
adds eight sentences to the thirty-seven original sections, and eight new sec-
tions: guess why). These playfully arbitrary formal conceits allow Hejinian to
foreground the variety of means she deploys to establish connectivity among
her sentences:

Back and backward, why, wide and wider. Such that art is inseparable from
the search for reality. The continent is greater than the content. A river
nets the peninsula
........................

15 Silliman 1995 makes his case for understanding reader-writer collaboration as a decom-
modification of language.
16 Andrews 2004.
camp messianism, or the hopes of poetry in late-late capitalism 21

The Spanish make a little question frame. In the case, propped on a stand
so as to beckon, was the hairy finger of St. Cecilia, covered with rings
........................
An extremely pleasant and often comic satisfaction comes from conjunc-
tion, the fit, say, of comprehension in a reader’s mind to content in a
writer’s work. But not bitter.17

Hejinian moves from one sentence to the next according to different principles
in different instances, and it is this connective variety that gives the poem life.
Sometimes the sentences move with a gesture toward logic. The second sen-
tence in this section, for instance, begins, ‘such that’. Or the sentences might
represent two phrasings of the ‘same’ idea: ‘The continent is greater than the
content’ is followed by ‘A river nets the peninsula’, which allows Hejinian to
begin to isolate the difference particular figures make when called into the ser-
vice of the same concept – in this case, the concept of content surrounding,
rather than being encased by, form.
It is this last concept, really an argument, that seems typical of the attitude
toward linguistic materiality expressed in Language writing. While it is true
enough to say that Language writers are concerned with linguistic materiality
(since they are poets, it is nearly tautological to notice this), what’s distinctive
is their relation to the aspectual character of this materiality. Language writ-
ing argues for understanding the medium of language as a kind of perpetually
mobile surround, which Hejinian typically calls ‘context’: placement, situation,
conjunction, animating constraint – the ‘net’ and the ‘frame’ – all serve to estab-
lish a scene that invites the reader to experience the toggle between material
and referential aspects of language as curious, as ‘a little question frame’ that
‘nets’ content but lets it go.18 Poems like Hejinian’s articulate linguistic material-
ity in terms much like those of a monist Deleuzian plenitude, where differences
are not metaphysical or categorical but ‘implicated’; they are folds. The relation-
ship between form and content in Language poetry takes on the character of a
materio-linguistic snapshot, where what is form one minute might be content
the next. It is a poetics of fluidity, and if we listen for it, I think we can hear in
it the echo of the post-1968 hope for a new, more fluid politics.
This set of beliefs and practices around the materiality of language is signi-
ficantly different from the testamentary, expectation-laden materiality in the
work of the post-Language poets who most interest me. The historical reas-

17 Hejinian 1987, pp. 84–5.

18 See Hejinian 2000.
22 chapter 1

ons for this difference are of course complex, and they are still being debated.
Hejinian has recently suggested, controversially, that the new generation of
poets has not been politicised as the Language poets were by the singular, defin-
ing experience of the war in Vietnam.19 While this doesn’t amount to the now-
familiar Baby Boomer charge that Generation X is ‘apathetic’ or ‘de-politicised’
(which Silliman has suggested), it does raise the question of how different polit-
ical moments breed different structures of political and poetic feeling. This is
of course a complicated question; we might take a first attempt at answering it
by way of the very largest abstractions to hand and try to understand the polit-
ical affects of the two generations and the formal strategies that animate their
work as expressing emphatically different moments in the unfolding of a late-
capitalist totality:

As for the current situation, … [we can see] how the very mood and meth-
odology of the analyses varied across the great internal polarity of vol-
untarism and fatalism (or determinism) according to the changes in the
objective situation, and its great cyclical rhythms that alternate from situ-
ations of great promise and change … to those of a locked social geology
so massive that no visions of modification seem possible …20

Fredric Jameson wrote this passage at the beginning of the 1990s, as part
of an explanation of why he felt Adorno’s work might, after what he felt
were the post-structuralist highs of the 1970s and 1980s, be freshly relevant for
political thinking. In 1990, at least, Jameson believed that Adorno, because of
his willingness to work in isolation from an identifiable political movement,
was a good model for the way critical thinking and political solitude might
have to go together in a new post-modern dispensation that had done away
with the types of cultural and historical memory that mass movements need.
More than ten years later, Jameson seems to have been both right – there is
undeniably a revival, in the English-language academy, of interest in Adorno –
and wrong: late capitalism, perhaps in the emergent form of empire, is being
written about as though it were all the more legible – and therefore more
vulnerable to opposition – to a new generation of ‘anti-globalisation’ activ-
ists.21

19 For excerpts from Hejinian’s and Silliman’s remarks on this topic, and for responses to
them by younger writers, see ‘Forum: The Blank Generation?’ Newsletter of the St. Mark’s
Poetry Project (February–March 2003), pp. 9–14.
20 Jameson 1990, p. 251.
21 For a recent example of this rhetoric of the emergent legibility of empire – American
camp messianism, or the hopes of poetry in late-late capitalism 23

The post-Language poets to whom I now want to turn, however, exhibit

neither a post-revolutionary political apathy nor a specific set of anti-globalist
affiliations. They are not ‘movement’ poets. But they do write with an acute
knowledge of the susceptibility of their materials to historical change. What I
would like to suggest in the rest of this essay is that the recent affective and stra-
tegic shift in American poetry can be described as a shift in attitudes toward the
character of late capitalist totality. We might say that where the Language poets
discovered a reserve of uncapitalised materiality in the lively, ‘aspectual’ char-
acter of language – so that the open-endedness of texts might outpace their
superscription by languages of power – the post-Language poets, battered by
another generation’s-worth of the encroachments of capital, are not so ready to
rely on those aspectual reserves. They can discern them in language, of course,
and in material objects, but it’s not their focus; instead, as I’ll try to show, they
expend their considerable talents on making articulate the ways in which, as
they look around, they see waiting.
Perhaps the best place to begin is with a poem from Joshua Clover’s manu-
script The Totality for Kids. Since 1996, when he published his first book,
Madonna Anno Domini, Clover has been trying to develop a new poetry of the
city, with Paris as his model – a kind of post-Benjaminian, post-Situationist city,
whose moods and contours are revealed by way of a perpetual and unstable
movement between concretion and abstraction. Like Ashbery’s poems,
Clover’s foreground the pathos of conceptualisation – how recursive it is, how
helpless, even in its glories; but unlike Ashbery, Clover develops a quietly messi-
anic sense that the city, and the aesthetic experience it fosters, awaits redemp-
tion. In this view, he follows Benjamin, for whom even ephemera – especially
ephemera – could whisper to listening ears the story of how a mute material
existence, completely overwritten by capital, might still one day become a tool
for breaking it apart. As Clover puts it in the last poem in The Totality for Kids,
‘What’s American about American Poetry?’:

They basically grow it out of sand.

This is a big help because it was getting pretty enigmatic.
Welcome to the desert of the real,
I am an ephemeral and not too discontented citizen.
I do not think the revolution is finished.22

empire, here – see Roy 2003. Roy describes the Bush administration’s international pos-
ture as ‘tactless imprudence’.
22 Clover 2006, p. 63.
24 chapter 1

The Baudrillardian ‘desert of the real’, now more familiar to us from The Mat-
rix, is – after all – a biblical desert of unredeemed wandering. Baudrillard’s
famous essay ‘The Precession of Simulacra’ opens with a simulacral ‘quota-
tion’ from Ecclesiastes and begins as a meditation on the death of God. But
Clover has none of Baudrillard’s enraged despair with the Left. Although ‘the
revolution’ that Clover counterposes to ‘the desert of the real’ is happening in a
suspended grammar, detached from an object, that suspension may occur just
because ‘the revolution’ has a temporality hard for him to see. Even the poem’s
fainting last line – ‘I drift, mainly I drift’ – recalls the situationist dérive, the
deliberately unregulatable ‘drift’ that is meant to restore life to a too-regular
city.
‘Ceriserie’, Clover’s first poem in The Totality for Kids, meditates hungrily on
where such life might hide:

Music: the unless of a certain series.

Mathematics: Everyone rolling dice and flinging Fibonacci, going to the
opera, counting everything.
Fire: The number between four and five.
Gold leaf: Wedding dress of the verb to have, it reminds you of of.23

There is a tiny messianic message, let me start by saying, even in the ‘unless of a
certain series’: that music can withhold exact certainty from the ‘certain series’,
or that there can be no truth unless there is music – not the rushed cacophony
of everyone ‘going to the opera, counting everything’, but the music of ‘fire’, of
what’s between the numbers, unaccountable. ‘Fire’ is the poem’s first foray into
another materiality, the serie-serie of the ‘Ceriserie’, the series-series that both
rests humbly in the interstices of the tossed dice of items in series and also
promises to overthrow them by lighting up as pun and performance: ‘Fire’ is
the tissue binding ‘four’ and ‘five’ – the tissue that, un-knotted and bright red,
turns items into relationships, and numbers into words.
Not so ‘Gold leaf’, which a few lines before the ones I’ve quoted is asso-
ciated with Enguerrand Quarton, the fifteenth-century painter who applied
it so heavily. Unlike ‘Fire’, the ‘Gold leaf’ represents, like the ‘robots’ in Dav-
ies’s poem, a sweet, bemusing anachronism, an artistic attempt revealed in
retrospect as literal-minded; as a nice try; as trumped by subsequent history;
as an object, that is, of camp affection. Clover puts it this way later in the
poem: ‘Enguerrand Quarton: In your dream gold leaf was the sun, salve on

23 Clover 2006, p. 3.
camp messianism, or the hopes of poetry in late-late capitalism 25

the visible world’. Quarton’s ‘salve’, with which he suffused paintings like the
Coronation of the Virgin (1454), is meant to supervene and redeem mere paint-
erly reference, ‘the kingdom of the visible’; to give ‘the verb to have’ a ‘wed-
ding dress’; to transform the genitive into the betrothed. But Quarton, endear-
ingly, is a bit of a mess – ‘swathed’, earlier in the poem, ‘in gold paint’ and
‘whispering come with me under the shadow of this gold leaf’. He cannot
see, that is, the tightening noose of a modernity that will foreclose on any
historical alchemy promising to make of possession a relation, a wedding,
and that will turn ‘Gold leaf’, instead, into the chill ‘red rock’ of The Waste
Land.
Robertson doesn’t necessarily see this as a problem. In Debbie, she writes:

I do not limit myself: I imitate

many fancy things such as the dull red
cloth of literature, its mumbled griefs.24

Although she shares with Clover a commitment to the recuperation of forms

of material waste, Robertson has a different sense of what the candidates for
recuperation might be, and by what means the recuperation might take place.
Indeed, though she says she does not ‘limit’ herself, she is interested in orna-
ment, and its uselessness, and she is everywhere an erotic poet, collaging from
both modernity and classical tradition new configurations of old figures for
pleasure. Her project, in books like The Weather and Xeclogue as well as in
Debbie, has been to articulate something like a cyborg pastoral. Writing as one
of ‘Virgil’s Bastard Daughters’, she highlights at every turn the arbitrary and
ideological nature of what she calls ‘filiation’, imagining in ‘Argument’ that his-
tory is simply a ‘library’, which might lend momentary legitimacy to a whole
variety of recuperative claims: ‘To narrate origin as lapidary, as irrevocable, is
only to have chosen with a styled authority from the ranked aisles of thought’.
Or elsewhere in the poem: ‘filius/flunks’.
Though Robertson puckishly calls Debbie ‘An Epic’, it is really something
like a prismatic pastoral, composed of ‘episodes’, ‘parts’, and unpaginated inter-
ludes, all gorgeously and adventuresomely typeset in varying text sizes and
shades of gray, so that not even the physical matter of the text eludes what
Robertson calls ‘decoration’. There is no plot, although there is an astonishing
array of poses and also a wide variety of background characters. Though only
Debbie speaks in the poem, it is filled with ‘nurses’, ‘majorettes’, ‘scholars’, and

24 Robertson 1997, l. 609–61.

26 chapter 1

‘shepherdesses’ who loll and stroll and set themselves in the thickly textual
landscapes Robertson paints. In a signal passage from an early section called
‘Party Scene’, the speaker asks:

Do you remember the day we wanted

to describe everything? We saw a
euphoria of trees. This was the middle
ground. Some women lounged on the clipped
grass, shadows and intelligence moving
lightly over their skin, compelled by
the trenchant discussion of sovereignty.
Others, in the background, rolled their pale
Trousers to wade in the intimate sea:
Their crisp gasps matched the waves. Freed scholars
Strolled slowly in pairs along gravel
Paths, reading from books the rhetoric
Of perfidy. Succinct flowers thrust gauche
Grammars into the air. In the upper
Left corner improbable clouds grouped
And regrouped the syntax of polit
Esse: The feminist sky split open.25

Few poets these days brave this kind of utopian description. Robertson man-
ages it, I think, because of how she foregrounds the ‘improbable’ – not just
the ‘improbable clouds’, moving as if in conversation, and not just the ‘gauche’
grammaticality of flowers, as if their principles of growth were at last a lan-
guage, but also the willful match between the crispnesses of waves and the
gasps of the waders who step into them. It is, in short, a willful utopia, which
overwrites the ‘party scene’ with an aspect of fulfillment that, it is hinted, can-
not be found there. The ‘euphoria of trees’ in the ‘middle ground’, which gets
listed first, seems indeed to ground the fanciful projections that follow and pre-
serve, even in the pastoral, a narrative of the liberation required to get there –
the ‘sovereignty’ won for women and ‘freed scholars’ by ‘perfidy’, by forego-
ing claims to legitimacy in favour of claims to ungrounded ‘intelligence’, which
moves lightly, like weather, and opens up history: ‘The feminist sky split open’.
It is perhaps a failure of my own imagination to want to probe such uto-
pian passages for traces of conflict. But Robertson, too, seems to feel that the

25 Robertson 1997, l. 25–41.

camp messianism, or the hopes of poetry in late-late capitalism 27

argument from ‘decoration’ – that it is simply, gloriously, extra; that it is a sup-

plement, and requires no ethical or political justification, no proper ‘origin’ –
can’t by itself address the problem of the entanglement of decoration in an
unredeemed world. In a section of Debbie called ‘As If the World’s a Punctured
Chit’, she writes:

The bridge and the river are

not landscape – nor is this forest with its
archival plenitude and entanglement.
The clerical earth just exudes itself.
– and the carved ruckus of milky bark
spells a long diary of placation
repeating ad infinitum We want
to love. We want to love.
Or the heart’s cheap
Dipthong snaps. Black ink trickles through my arms
And it has written landscapes. The trees still
pose embittered questions. Do
bright thrones yield civil shade? Some day I shall
laugh at even this obedience, wake
in the middling shade of the library
wander freely, calling out a name I hope26

This is a world not only overcome by a tyranny of exchange-value – made a

‘chit’ – but used, ‘punctured’, done with. It is still a richly textual scene – the
forests’ knotted plenty is ‘archival’, and the trees are transcriptions of a ‘clerical
earth’ that is still, even deflated, writing itself – but the archive doesn’t yield
‘euphoria’ here so much as a lonely, sad demand: ‘We want to love’, repeated
in each mute material thrust of life up from earth, and bleeding out of every
love-tattoo cut into ‘milky bark’. Even ‘the heart’ breaks down into he-art, just
what the thundering ‘feminist sky’ should have rinsed clear. The lines after
the ‘heart’s cheap / Dipthong’ seem crucial. Here and elsewhere in Debbie,
Robertson equates ink with blood, writing with the body, and the poem with
the landscape; but the embodied, erotic writing she vaunts is written, we can
see, not only as a monologue: ‘The trees still / pose embittered questions’. What
they want to know, it turns out, is something about what the women in the
earlier pastoral were discussing, that is, something about sovereignty: ‘Do /

26 Robertson 1997, l. 316–31.

28 chapter 1

bright thrones yield civil shade?’ It’s a way of asking, you might say, whether
mercy is a quality of Enlightenment: unanswerable question. And it obliges
Robertson to turn, once more, to a dialectical ‘some day’ that will not only
shed but also recuperate the pain of mute embittered questioning: ‘some day I
shall / laugh at even this obedience’. It is more persuasive, in its way, than the
full-blown pastoral of ‘Party Scene’, since it foregrounds not the fancy of pure
correspondences (between gasps and waves, clouds and syntax) but a not-quite
posthistorical humanity where mediation, where language, has survived: one
‘wakes’ from the nightmare of history into the tree-like ‘shade’ of a library, no
less, where there is world and time now for a future-anterior repair, and for the
enjoyment of yearning: ‘calling out a name’.
Rod Smith approaches the problem of a damaged materiality not so much
by setting the scene for the pronunciation of a name as by meditating on the
allegorical character of objects. And he finds, in his astonishing book The Good
House, a moving inadequacy in their materiality:

The good house feels bad about

The territory
– the house seems
to be a verb though it dislikes
the term ‘housing’ – the house
seems to be a bad dog & a
live wire – the house is bored
until people come over – the house
is anxious to please guests –
it is stupid & so thinks cordon
means love – it is wise & so
chooses –27

This ‘house’ is, yes, anthropomorphised, and allegorised, given attributes and
placed in relationships, but part of the achievement of The Good House is that
the ‘house’ is never left lying in a single rhetorical register or allowed to become
only allegory, only anthropomorphic figure. It moves instead among modes
of abstraction and concretion so ceaselessly that, reading the book, we are
finally obliged to understand it as a kind of perpetually collapsing second-order
allegory that performs and figures the vicissitudes of materiality – its dissatis-
faction with itself as material – before our eyes, and for our ears.

27 Smith 2001.
camp messianism, or the hopes of poetry in late-late capitalism 29

This sounds essentially de Manian, I know – and Smith’s writing is extraor-

dinary in obliging readers to confront the movement between the figural and
the performative that de Man argued was the very character of the materiality
of language.28 But for Smith, the character of materiality, even at its most mute,
its most formal, is historical – that is, it acts out and compasses its inadequacy
as material. As Smith puts it: ‘There are 8 houses in the heart, / there should
be 9’. Even the figural, these lines suggest, is not free from what it ought to be
but isn’t. There is no reason the ‘8 houses in the heart’ shouldn’t – or couldn’t,
for a more satisfied poet – complete the strophe; but the figure of the ‘8 houses
in the heart’ cannot be unhitched, for Smith, from what should be there. It is a
historical and material condition of ‘the house’ to fail to be self-sufficient:

the good house – it is heavy

the good house – it exercises
hope in the inhuman, is transformed
by it –
becomes blatant in its strength
& is destroyed, the good
house must be rebuilt
carefully. The good house
is in conflict
ordinary houses complete
the smart bombs and are
buoyant – victorious,
brainwaves of shunt commotion,
bestial then or not house29

28 See, for instance, de Man 1996b. There is a subtle and exceptionally elegant notion of the
historicity of the materiality of writing in de Man, of course, a notion of history as the
‘occurrence’ of the transfer, in writing, between its ‘cognitive’ and ‘performative’ aspects –
a notion of history as ‘the emergence of a language of power out of a language of cogni-
tion’ (de Man 1996b, p. 133). I cannot, here, compare the cognitivisms of, say, Adorno and
de Man – another and more daunting project – but I can say, à propos of the two ways of
understanding historicity and cognition, that where de Man rejects the idea of a dialectic
in the materiality of language, Adorno sees the dialectic as the very form of that materi-
ality – and sees the materiality of thought, furthermore, not as ‘occurrence’ (Adorno 1983,
p. 408), but as what he calls ‘the need in thinking’, which is motivated not by the inad-
equacy of language to materiality but by its inadequacy to history – by the fact that our
material productivity has not yet made of earth a paradise (Adorno 1970, p. 33).
29 Smith 2001.
30 chapter 1

The ‘inhuman’ and the ‘bestial’, here, are meant as a critique of ‘blatant
strength’ as the ‘buoyant’ self-congratulation that forgets, in the midst of lin-
guistic play, the ought at the heart of materiality – that it could be otherwise,
that it could be, as Adorno might say, more humane: ‘there should be 9’.
For Davies, meanwhile, the material world is overwhelming, and not in a nice
way. As he puts it in ‘Karnal Bunt’:

There’s nothing superficial about the way all that stuff burrows into any
available crack in the sidewalk, growing back, covering, by logical exten-
sion if not in fact, everything.30

‘All that stuff’, in Davies’s poems, is the frightening array of material that has
become commodified in late capitalism – not just the recognizably thing-like
widgets on sale at the hardware store but also the ‘node[s] / of expansion-
contraction’ whose materiality lies as much in their enmeshing network of
objects as in the objects themselves. In the lines above, that network congeals
momentarily, as it does in the untitled robot poem, around italicised speech,
around the ‘everything’ that is meant at once as the moment of collating diver-
gent objects in the ‘expansion-contraction’ but also as the moment where the
attempt to collate fails, and falls back on emphasis.
Elsewhere in ‘Karnal Bunt’, those italics are replaced with the comedy of
pretending to have a lived attachment to incommensurably abstract, and com-
plexly nested, nominalisations:

I love to be an international unit in the measure of the loading of the fis-

sures in the communal membrane into silos on a prairie in a basement by
a government of souls in trouble at a party for a long time31

This nesting of abstract objects, and the pointed political irony of pretending
that we can ‘love’ them, are part of an argument in Davies about the character
of materiality in late capitalism. Like Smith, Davies sees the stuff of the world
as wrong in its very quiddity. Where Marx, in the famous lines from ‘Theses
on Feuerbach’, italicises the word ‘change’ – ‘The philosophers have only inter-
preted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it’ – Davies
writes, in one of the first poems in Comp.: ‘The point, however, is to change
it’.32 As with Smith, materiality for Davies is not something worked on by his-

30 Davies 2000, p. 61.

31 Davies 2000, p. 54.
32 Davies 2000, p. 19.
camp messianism, or the hopes of poetry in late-late capitalism 31

torical conditions but actually produced by them: to change the world will
have to be to change it, the stuff of the world, no aspect of which is simply
‘pure’ material, unhistorical; or, as Davies puts it a few lines later in the same
poem: ‘Class violence at the level of the seedling’. Polemical, yes; but not, in
Comp., ungrounded. The book’s central poem, ‘Karnal Bunt’, names a fungal
disease affecting wheat – wheat that the United States, affected by Karnal bunt
in the late 1990s, managed to convince its trade partners not to scrutinise too
closely.
What I like so much about Davies’s poems is the unembarrassed glee with
which he asks to be read polemically; indeed, at least one version of his argu-
ment about the saturation of the world with appalling materialisations of ever-
tighter webs of capitalist relation is that we should not, at this point, even be
arguing about whether or not such a web exists. And, again, the polemic is italic:
‘You know, the fact that we’re ruled by the money that owns the people who
have the money that rules itself –.’ …33
I hope I’ve managed to show that the ‘votive’ or propositional modes of
expectation to which these poems gravitate implicitly distinguish them from
the ‘dark art’ of the modernism we know best, in the academy, and from the
blankness and euphoria Jameson suggests belong to the art of the post-modern.
It is impossible to say, reading poems like these, whether we have therefore
gone backward or forward – whether, for instance, these poems return us to
the type of expectation Siegfried Kracauer attributed, in the Weimar period,
to ‘those who wait’ while history horribly, unpredictably, seems to rouse itself
into the form of a capital ‘H’.34 Certainly the comparison is tempting, though
our conditions are different. What most chastens me on the edge of historical
comparison, however, is the presence in these poems of types of materiality so
gossamer, so nearly abstract – so nearly non-existent – that they feel as if they
could come to us only from the fragile singularity of the history of the present.
And the types of expectation by which Clover and Robertson, Smith and Davies
animate such material feel similarly fragile, partly because they seem to reside
neither in the form nor the content of the poems but somehow in their stance,
in what Adorno would have called their ‘comportment’. ‘Great works wait’, he
writes, and their waiting is one way to think about the relation of their form
to their content, of their politics to their aesthetics: it is unfulfilled.35 This is
especially true of a poetry that recognises that even its awareness of the obsol-

33 Davies 2000, p. 53.

34 Kracauer 1995, p. 137.
35 Adorno 1970, p. 40.
32 chapter 1

escence of its materials, as a literary strategy, is obsolete. It is in this sense

that the poems I’ve been reading in this essay feel more like models than just
instances – models of an aesthetics, at once enacted and theorised, groping for
the future in the suffering of its materials.
I’d like to say a bit, in closing, about what I imagine are some of the questions
left hanging by my discussion of these poems. First, I have foregrounded my
own enthusiasm for them rather than subjecting them to critique; and second,
I have focused, in reading them, on something like their content rather than
their form. I have highlighted their preoccupations more than their techniques.
What are the dangers for contemporary reading practice of a sympathetic,
content-focused aesthetics? What might be its promise?
I think the most obvious risks run by the critical practice I’ve been testing
here are a failure of critical distance and a literal-mindedness about content –
so that a descriptive, advocating criticism is endangered by the possibility of
becoming nothing more than an accompaniment to its object: packaging. Fair
enough. Sympathy, and advocacy on the basis of content, runs counter to some
of the most powerful and positive developments in late twentieth-century lit-
erary studies – such as theory’s claim to have extricated itself from pseudo-
neutral assessments of value, or the attempts in feminism, queer theory, and
U.S. ethnic and post-colonial studies to reveal pseudo-innocent content as a
component of historical form.
These projects make up the centre of my own training, and I hold them dear.
But I think we’re at an impasse in literary studies, on the way to which we have
sacrificed the critical potential of appreciation and advocacy in favour of what
has become a rote ‘problematisation’ of texts, and a sadly narrow practice of
appreciation that is only able to find subversiveness to admire. But what if the
texts we admire, even the politically engaged ones, turn out to be not subvers-
ive? What if their political efficacy has been evacuated or is pending? Ascribing
performative success to these objects – to pick one of our favorite strategies
of the last decade – and equating that capacity for performance with agency
doesn’t seem to do justice to the theoretical power of the idea of performativ-
ity, which I take to lie not in our applauding the aesthetic object’s performance
but in our being unable to pin down when the performance is finished. Crucial
to the sympathetic reading practice I want to advocate is an understanding that
critical acts are not discrete. To dismiss appreciative or content-driven readings
of texts on the grounds that they are insufficiently politicised, insufficiently
counter-hegemonic, is to mistake the work of countering hegemony (if that’s
what we’re doing) as individual work. When I read a text that interests me, espe-
cially for its political-affective comportment, my impulse, my critical impulse,
is: pass it on. Highlight it as best you can, read against the grain, or with it where
camp messianism, or the hopes of poetry in late-late capitalism 33

you can, and make sure others take a look. This is as true for texts that I find
repulsive as for those I admire: I don’t imagine myself, as a critic, judging by
myself.
This sense of critical reading as a self-insufficient act has historiographical
implications for the dynamic of form and content. In particular, I think it is a
living link both to camp and Left-messianic traditions of interpretation, for if
both traditions insist that waste and trivia are potentially recuperable, they also
imply that we might not be the final judges of what, in the object, was form, and
what content. For instance, in reading some post-Language poems here, I have
forgone looking at their (very interesting) line breaks and habits of syntax – not
because these don’t strike me as important but because those features of the
poems are not what is most vividly emergent in them when they are grouped
together. On the other hand, though I have been trying to foreground what I’ve
called the preoccupations of these poems, those preoccupations don’t quite
amount to content either. I have been trying to articulate a stance or relation to
a cultural problem that the poems are grappling with, which is the problem of
how to have a live relationship to a material world whose temporal-spatial char-
acter is unreadable: an obsolescence on top of an obsolescence. The polemical
affections of these poems for a ‘good house’, or a ‘feminist sky’, or for the lavish
misguided-ness of an Enguerrand Quarton, are, yes, a kind of content; but they
are also a relation to content – in other words, a kind of form.
It is the polemical character of this poetic stance that interests me most right
now, since it is something we might imitate in our emerging critical practices.
And what seems freshly polemical about some of my favorite post-Language
writing – what I think we might treat as a model – is its sense that polemic is
the element of the negative in affection, or in judgment. A critical or artistic
attachment is polemical, dangerous even, not because of which protagonist it
has chosen but because it models what it’s like not to know the whole story of
its object. The dream of a redeemed matter, that is, doesn’t entail a positive vis-
ion of what that redemption will look like so much as a resistance to the idea
that it will look like any one thing we know.
This seems to me the provoking thing about post-Language poetry’s polem-
ical affection, or its camp messianism: it is a new and interesting way of writing
from within the presumption of totality. This is a large part of why I like these
poems so much. And if we were to pick up on these cues and risk writing to
our peers about what we admire or revile (without neutralising our opinions
in advance by assuring our colleagues that yes, we too wish for the overthrow
of hegemonic systems), I don’t think we’d be giving ourselves over to a depol-
iticised humanism, or to mere impressionistic whimsy, so much as fostering a
refreshed, and refreshing, negativity. Kevin Davies:
34 chapter 1

These cheesy little hypertexts

are going to get better.
I don’t know
how much better, but we’ll see.36
36 Davies 2000, p. 67.
 chapter 2

The Poetic Case

What might a poem be said to be exemplary of, today? How is its exemplarity
shaped by discourse on poetry, on the aesthetic, on history? As far back as the
Republic, debates about the value and the function of poetry have been tied to
questions about the exemplarity of poetry as a kind of creativity, or representa-
tion, or labour so that, down to this day, much aesthetic and political theory still
depends on a notion of poetry to explain what escapes (and urges on) concep-
tualisation in language and in social life.1 But since the theory-revolutions of
the 1970s and 1980s the poem’s significance for historical thinking has dropped
out of sight; especially in the Marxism of Fredric Jameson and his readers,
narrative, rather than poetry, came to symbolise the historically and socially
significant scene of human action.
The narrative that has become dominant since Jameson is a tragic one; the
aim of this essay is to begin to disentangle Left aesthetics from that mode.
Though I will be following through on arguments of Jameson’s, I will also be
reading against the grain of the terms he has bequeathed us. I will not only be
arguing for a shift in our attention to different literary genres but also making
a case for tuning in to different emotional structures than those to which the
academic Left, at least, has become habituated. My argument will move from
a consideration of how the tragic operates in Jameson’s sense of history, to a
range of poetic and aesthetic theory that posits forms of value other than those
articulated in a tragic mode, and finally to a contemporary poem whose his-
torical pathos derives from a fascinating palimpsest of anti-tragic arguments.
What I have to propose is humbler than a political unconscious writ large, but I
think its pas de deux of hope and disappointment may be something like what
we need to read the history of the present.

1 Poetry and poetics have an important role to play, for instance, in the political thinking
of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou, and Giorgio Agamben. See
Lacoue-Labarthe 1999; Rancière 2004; Badiou 2005; and Agamben 1993 and 1999. I don’t want
to presume to amalgamate the work of all these very different thinkers, but it is interesting to
note that they all interpret the relation between poetry and politics by establishing its spe-
cificity, sometimes (as in Badiou) even its singularity or (as in Lacoue-Labarthe) its absolute
character.

©
36 chapter 2

In the long first chapter of The Political Unconscious, Jameson writes that, ‘no
matter how weakly … all literature must be read as a symbolic meditation on
the destiny of community’.2 This is a less well-known pronouncement than the
one that opens the book – ‘Always historicize!’ – but it is, Jameson suggests,
a characterisation of the political unconscious itself – ‘meditation’ isolated in
no one subject or any single period on a ‘destiny’ that Jameson argues must
be understood historically as ‘the experience of Necessity’. Interpreting this
History requires assembling ‘inert’ historical data into a story of ‘why what
happened … had to happen the way it did’; Jameson refers to this reassembly
of data into History as ‘the ‘emotion’ of great historiographic form’.3
In Jameson’s interpretive system, a literary text must be read against ‘pro-
gressively wider horizons’: first as an isolated ‘symbolic act’ that exists in chro-
nological, punctual time; next as an ‘ideologeme’ that expresses features of
ongoing class struggles; and then as an instance of an ‘ideology of form’, which
orients the first two types of reading to an understanding of symbolic activity
as giving form to simultaneous, co-existent ‘traces or anticipations of modes
of production’.4 Against the backdrop of this widest horizon, the liberation of
texts from mere inert chronology and into the pathos of Necessity gives ‘the
‘emotion’ of great historiographic form’ a particular shading; it is ‘represented
in the form of the inexorable logic involved in the determinate failure of all the
revolutions that have taken place in human history’.5
These formulations have moved and inspired me since I first encountered
them in the early 1990s. But I have always been struck by how the prospect
of adhering to Jameson’s interpretive system feels at once too difficult and
too easy: too difficult because to take seriously the suturing of any given text
into the simultaneity-rich history Jameson describes would be to delay that
suturing, perhaps infinitely, while gathering data; and too easy because, once
Jameson has described the widest backdrop against which texts may be read –
the coexistence of traces of all modes of production and the determinate defeat
of every revolution to date – it is very hard not to succumb to the temptation
to skip to the end, as it were, and assign each text a place in universal history
right off the bat.

2 Jameson 1981, p. 70.

3 Jameson 1981, p. 101.
4 Jameson 1981, p. 76.
5 Jameson 1981, p. 102.
the poetic case 37

I have also been unable to answer the question of whether, in Jameson’s sys-
tem, the deepest ‘emotion’ literary texts can yield is tragic. My uncertainty is
linked to a confusion about phrasing the role of historical Necessity as ‘the
determinate failure of all the revolutions that have taken place in human his-
tory’ rather than, say, the determinate coordination of all writing to the same
system of abstraction that organises the life of the commodity. Why is ‘failure’
the normative standpoint for reading the political unconscious in or out of lit-
erature?
Not only do I feel a sheepish desire to redact or compress the Jamesonian
narrative, but I’m not sure whether some of the emotions that most interest me
in reading literary writing can count, in his terms, as truly ‘historiographical’. So
this essay will attempt to chart another way of reading, which takes seriously
Jameson’s insistence on a political unconscious – which tries to detect the trace
‘meditations’ on ‘the destiny of community’ at work in literary writing – but
which arrives at a different understanding of the ‘emotion’ it puts in play.
For Jameson, mere chronology becomes a ‘socially symbolic act’ by being
reconstructed into a tragic narrative of a very particular kind: the narrative of
the failure of revolutions, which he conceives as the supersession of one set
of historical conditions (‘revolutionary’) by another (‘inert’). What this means,
for Jameson’s reading practice, is that the inert chronologies he wants to recon-
struct into ‘socially symbolic’, affectively forceful interpretations are recon-
structed as inert – as a story of becoming-inert, becoming-failure, that mere
chronology, itself inert, has disguised. We move, in this style of reading, from
a historical inertness to a tragic story of becoming-inert. This is not a circular
interpretive practice, necessarily; it is a way of reading that turns interpretation
to the task of reminding ourselves, you might say, how dead we have become.6

6 Narrative is not, of course, Jameson’s only means of approaching the question of what can
or cannot be made present to consciousness in the production of a text; in ‘Postmodern-
ism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, Jameson calls for an aesthetics of ‘cognitive
mapping’ that would catch up to, and outmanoeuvre, the disorientation produced by post-
modernism’s technological sublime – famously rendered in that essay through the narrative
of a shopper being unable to navigate the spectacular spaces of the Bonaventure Hotel in
Los Angeles. The simultaneity of one’s sense of placement in space, were it made possible
again in post-modern spaces, would indeed share something with what I’ve taken as part of
lyric experience, something of its instantaneity (see Jameson 1984). But the optative pedagogy
embedded in ‘cognitive mapping’ – which, in the volume that later came to incorporate his
essay, Jameson acknowledges was ‘in reality nothing but a code word for “class conscious-
ness” ’, is still hitched to a division between materiality and vitality whose source lies, not in
Sartre’s useful depiction of totality as an ongoing process of totalisation, but in his under-
standing of that process as a cycle that always returns human projects to the ‘practico-inert’,
the used-up, the worked over (Jameson 1991, p. 418). Without dismissing the possibilities of
38 chapter 2

Even so, this reading style, grounded in a narrative of tragedy and superses-
sion, forecloses the possibility of reading for the local affirmations, emphatic
shifts in tone, and ecstatic simultaneity that have shaped the history of the
lyric, as well as the history of poetry as an early name for what we would now
call aesthetic experience. Three features of that history shape my essay. First,
I traverse episodes in a gradual movement from a classical context in which
poetry was a privileged name for all artistic creation to an aesthetic theory that
depends on, but departs from, the tradition of seeing poetry as the metonym
for all the arts. Second, I am moving across language that shifts from think-
ing of poetry as the name for a kind of thing made by poets – either literal
writers of poems or artists generally – to thinking about aesthetic experience
as marking a kind of human capacity, whether or not it produces traditionally
aesthetic objects. And, third, I will be attending to the ways in which Western
discourse on poetry is built so as to position any given poem as bearing value
partly by way of its partial realisation of the capacities of poetry. When I turn
to an individual poem at the end of this essay, then, I will be trying to read
it, not as an instance of inertness made live by reconstruction, but as a partly
realised instance of a discourse on poetry that avoids the deadness-liveness
binary of Jameson’s tragic model in favour of raising questions about poetic
value – what poetry is good for and whether what it’s good for can ever be real-
ised.
This last point forms the crux of my essay. I believe that we are able to
read poems through the lens of their partial realisation of the possibilities of
the category poetry because the history of the Western discourse on poetry
is itself built around recurring topoi of unrealisability. As I will detail below,
these unrealisability topoi range from meditations on whether poem-making
is a kind of labour to claims that poetry illuminates the unimportance or even
pointlessness of all human labour.7 The questions posed in such topoi are
so basic that they are capable of making the category poetry straddle what
we would now think of as two very different languages of value: an ancient
language of use-value and a modern one of surplus-value. Questions about

an aesthetics of cognitive mapping, then, I want to clear space for other understandings of
the political unconscious not premised on this undialectical division between the dead and
the living. For the practico-inert, see Sartre 2004.
7 My term unrealisability topoi modifies a phrase of Ernst Robert Curtius’s, ‘inexpressibility
topoi’, which he used to name the poetic strategy of claiming, in medieval Latin poems prais-
ing royalty, that the overlord to whom the poem is addressed is too glorious or powerful to be
compassed by any single poet or poem. See Curtius 1973, pp. 159–62.
the poetic case 39

whether a poem really is a made thing oblige us to think about something like
the use-value of poems, what they are for, what they can do, and whether for-
ness, telos, is really the right language for thinking about poems. Questions
about the pointlessness of human labour, meanwhile, shine a light on what
goes on in laboring activity, whether it can be said to be for something, a higher
purpose, or whether it is simply toil or exploitation. A central argument of my
essay is that, in the history of defending poetry, the topoi of unrealisability
give poetry’s defenders a way to suggest that the significance of poetry is not
captured by the language of making or purpose but that it is a type of activ-
ity that puts pressure on the social meanings of both. And as the meaning of
the social develops ever-greater complexity, relentlessness, and intensity, this
demurral from instrumentalisation opens up a space of bewilderment about
the present that is potentially critical, even as it risks valorising uselessness as
such.
In what follows, then, I will visit some key moments in the ‘defence of
poetry’ – a genre that returns, again and again, to questions of partial or
impossible realisation. In particular, I will focus on the way implicit and expli-
cit defences of poetry feed into a Left aesthetic tradition that keeps open the
question of whether and how poetry – or, later, aesthetic experience – troubles
our understanding of value as realisable in the first place. And I will argue that
pursuing this trouble is exactly the way to begin reading a history of poetry
that produces a historiographic emotion not quite captured by the story of the
tragic and the inert.

To build an archive of rhetoric around poetry that centres on the question of

the possible failure to realise its social value is to imagine that rhetoric as part
of a long reply to Plato; so I think it makes sense to begin with a scene from the
Republic in which this issue is addressed directly. In book 10 Socrates’s discus-
sion of poetry is almost entirely role based; he is irritated by a popular, unphilo-
sophical attribution to poets of polymathy – the idea that poets, because they
write about the whole world, must have expert knowledge of all trades, all
skills, all professions. Plato counters this claim to universal poetic subject-
hood by arguing, through Socrates, that poets are neither makers nor users
of anything. Luring Glaucon through a thicket of leading questions, Socrates
draws a distinction between the false universality of the poet and the func-
tional dyad of maker and user – here, figured as the player and the maker of a
pipe:
40 chapter 2

‘A pipe-player, for example, tells a pipe-maker which of his pipes do what

they’re supposed to do when actually played, and goes on to instruct him
in what kinds of pipes to make, and the pipe-maker does what he’s told’.
‘Of course’.
‘so far as good and bad pipes are concerned, it’s a knowledgeable per-
son who gives the orders, while the other obeys the orders, and does the
manufacturing. Right?’
‘Yes’.
‘Justified confidence, then, is what a pipe-maker has about goodness
and badness … while knowledge is the province of the person who makes
use of the pipes’.
‘Yes’.
‘Which of these two categories does our representer belong to?’ …
‘He doesn’t fit either case’.8

Plato presents, against the claims of poetry, a political economy of pure real-
isation: a theory of production and consumption in which one transforms into
the other with no overlap or residue. Everyone, that is, must have a single func-
tion, and there must be no gap between the production of a thing and its use,
no deferral or ambiguity in realising the value of, say, a pipe. The pipe may not
be played upon right away, but it must be immediately clear that being played
upon is what it is for.
So this is what we might call the economic claim against poetry. Socrates’s
objection to poetry is not that it is a failed case, a secondarity or copy, but that
it is neither a case of production nor of consumption; it is a failed universal-
ity. My interest in this essay will be in responses to this accusation, especially
when rhetoric around the utility or function of poetry proposes its unrealis-
ability, when languages that defend the deferral or non-existence of poetry’s
utility defend it exactly for having no obvious end. Another way to describe
what I mean by unrealisability is that it describes a condition of poetry as
not most importantly a made thing or perhaps not a made thing at all. Cer-
tainly this is what Plato thinks; and one feature of the defence of poetry, as
well as of the Left aesthetics that comes to draw on it, will be to accept Plato’s
characterisation and ask whether the not-made-ness of poetry is such a bad
thing. This opens up other ways of thinking about the importance of poetry,
not least as the scene of a perpetual making that never quite settles into the
state of having-been-made. Unrealisability, then, might also be a name for the

8 Plato 1994, 353.

the poetic case 41

way in which any given poem can be read as much for its instancing poetry as
for its separate status as individual poem.
In any case, these unrealisability topoi cluster around different kinds of
questions from the Renaissance on – questions of sovereignty, of labour, of his-
torical change and causality, of exploitation and value – but to read them from
the long end of their deployment is to begin to be able to read a compressed his-
tory of the social relations, imagined and real, around the reading and writing
of poetry. I think it makes sense to start looking at these unrealisability topoi in
Renaissance replies to Plato because the Renaissance is the period when poetry
begins to be understood once again as more than a school activity – not only
as material for memorisation, or as a tool for learning the classical languages,
but as a creative activity vulnerable exactly to Plato’s charge of nonutility.
I will, then, conduct a brief and whirlwind tour of selected defences of poetry
from the Renaissance on. This tour is meant to be neither comprehensive nor
definitive; indeed it is deliberately eccentric and discontinuous. What will link
my visits to these earlier defences of poetry is the topos of unrealisability and
the joint it forms at the beginning of the modern era with certain ideas about
labour, its value and its exploitation.
I begin with Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesy, which depicts the social com-
petition between schoolmen and courtiers by way of a language of utility, of
ends, and insists that poetry has an end, after all, even if it isn’t immediately
evident. Sidney, discussing oratory in his Defence, follows Aristotle by defining
kinds of human activity in terms of their relation to ‘virtuous action’ and spe-
cifies that it is not an action’s ‘next end’ – that is, its immediate utility – that
matters for virtue so much as its ‘further end’, which is a little harder to pin
down:

even as the saddler’s next end is to make a good saddle, but his further
end to serve a nobler faculty, which is horsemanship, so the horseman’s
to soldiery, and the soldier not only to have the skill, but to perform the
practice of a soldier. So that, the ending end of all earthly learning being
virtuous action, those skills that most serve to bring forth that have a most
just title to be princes over all the rest.9

Poetry’s telos, then, is virtuous action, but not necessarily the poet’s. Else-
where in the Defence of Poesy, Sidney suggests that poets can fashion models or
examples of governance superior to what – thus far, at least – has been found

9 Sidney 2002, pp. 219–20.

42 chapter 2

in nature and that these models can be of use to the queen. Indeed the canon-
ical rendering of the second nature of the made world in the Defence of Poesy
involves an implicit comparison of Elizabeth to the Cyrus of Xenophon’s Cyro-
paedia:

Which delivering forth [of ideal types] also is not wholly imaginative, as
we are wont to say by them that build castles in the air; but so far substan-
tially it worketh, not only to make a Cyrus, which had been but a particular
excellency as nature might have done, but to bestow a Cyrus upon the
world to make many Cyruses, if they will learn aright why and how that
maker made him.10

Though Xenophon’s Cyrus is a fictionalised perfection of the actual emperor,

Sidney suggests that the replication – and the replicability – of his ideality is a
form of service to the queen unique to the poet, useful to her in the perfection
of governance. Aristocratic court poets, then, become first among courtiers,
‘princes over all the rest’, by serving a higher authority, working for the sovereign
by miming sovereignty for her. As Robert Matz has shown, this canny rendition
of aristocracy-as-service allows Sidney to reply to detractors of poetry who see
it as having been reduced, since heroic times, to a decadent court pleasure.
Matz argues persuasively that Sidney’s Defence of Poesy is as much a defence
of the idea of virtuous aristocracy as it is a defence of poetry, and he draws
our attention to the ways in which, in Sidney’s hands, poetry’s role of circulat-
ing models of virtue allows it to serve as a kind of rhetorical value adjuster. To
accusations that the aristocracy is simply feeding off the rest of the social body,
Sidney argues that this problem – which he tacitly acknowledges is real – can
be altered by the activity of poetry, which will serve as a corrective to aristo-
cratic excess and return the class system to its proper functioning.11
This argument for poetry as the platform for class homeostasis survives past
the Renaissance, though it is called in to correct for different kinds of crises of
value. Beginning with Vico, and later among the romantics, we can see the par-
ticular not-quite production that is poetry brought to bear, not so much on the
question of decadence, but on the problem of the increasingly abstract char-
acter of social life. Vico’s The New Science, for example, is an attempt at what
he called universal history – universal not only in its aim of comparing civiliz-
ations by abstracting them into stories of development, but also in its method,

10 Sidney 2002, pp. 216–217.

11 See Matz 2000, pp. 60–4.
the poetic case 43

which is to use philology to coordinate across cultures their different histories

of kinship and state forms, habits of mind, and linguistic character.
Poetry has a central role to play in The New Science. Vico asserts that human
language was originally full of vivid images – for gods and the powers of nature,
especially – and that it became less ‘poetic’ with the development of modern
government and science:

the nature of our civilized minds is so detached from the senses, even
in the vulgar, by abstractions corresponding to all the abstract terms our
languages abound in, and so refined by the art of writing, and as it were
spiritualized by the use of numbers, because even the vulgar know how to
count and reckon, that it is naturally beyond our power to form the vast
image of this mistress called ‘sympathetic Nature’. Men shape the phrase
with their lips but have nothing in their minds; for what they have in mind
is falsehood, which is nothing; and their imagination no longer avails to
form a vast false image.12

This will prove a very influential formulation; it is reworked two centuries later
in the opening pages of The Dialectic of Enlightenment, where it buttresses
Adorno and Horkheimer’s argument that a ban on mimesis lies at the origin
of the development of instrumental reason.13 Vico’s understanding of the cost
of the development of abstraction is not dialectical, however; he believes in a
combination of tragic and providential historical causality, in which cultures,
even if they are destroyed by their own limitations, may be able to restart their
development. Having positioned poetry at the origin of civilization, Vico sees
it as a resource that later cultures can rediscover if they grasp a collective need
for imagination as well as for abstract and empirical knowledge. Writing about
this idea in Vico’s philosophy, Isaiah Berlin says that for Vico the problem of
rampant abstraction is that ‘men have not realised their marvellous potential-
ities’.14
This positioning of poetic imagination as an unrealised potentiality will
reverberate in the writing of the romantics. In the work of Schiller, Percy Shel-
ley, and others, though, the theological mode subtending their historical claims
about poetry will shift from the providential to the prophetic, not least because
by the early nineteenth century poetry has begun to be classified as obsolete by
a rising middle class that understands its interests in primarily material terms.

12 Vico 1984, p. 118.

13 See Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, pp. 1–34.
14 Berlin 2000, p. 60.
44 chapter 2

Shelley’s ‘The Defence of Poetry’, for instance, is primarily a defence against

Thomas Love Peacock’s claim that, in an age that prizes facts, science, and tech-
nical utility, poets are committed to hopelessly outdated ‘Cimmerian labours’.15
Shelley’s response to this claim is to insist that poetry can balance or com-
pensate for excesses of what he calls the ‘calculating principle’:

The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired than at periods when

from an excess of the selfish and calculating principle, the accumulation
of the materials of external life exceed the quantity of the power of assim-
ilating them to the internal laws of human nature.16

Like Sidney before him, Shelley wishes to defend poetry in terms of its capacity
to repair an imbalance of value or accumulation in the social body; like Vico, he
correlates periods of history and habits of mind. Under pressure to account for
poetry’s seeming supersession by the principle of utility, though, Shelley makes
two additional moves.
First, he makes recourse to the language of prophecy; the poet, he says,
‘beholds the future in the present’.17 Second, he reworks the definition of utility
so that it not only includes but is organised around poetry. This Shelleyan utility
is linked to tragedy; poets, in his account, produce a kind of mixed pleasure and
pain that is the highest pleasure, and ‘the production and assurance of pleasure
in this highest sense is true utility’.18 The argument here is obscure, but made
slightly less so by Shelley’s use, in the passage describing pleasure and pain, of a
verse from Ecclesiastes: ‘It is better to go to the house of mourning, than to the
house of mirth’.19 Though the particular verse does not express it, Ecclesiastes is
substantially concerned with the vanity of labour, its inability to realise human
happiness; and it seems, if we put the pieces together, that Shelley’s argument
about tragic emotion as the highest utility is an argument for poetry’s power
to highlight the limits of human labour ability to answer larger questions of
humanity’s ends or uses.20
Shelley’s ideas in ‘The Defence of Poetry’ are helpful in piecing together a
genealogy of poetic discourse on value partly because they are broad. His ideas

15 Peacock 1923, p. 16.

16 Shelley 2003, p. 696.
17 Shelley 2003, p. 677.
18 Shelley 2003, p. 695.
19 Shelley 2003, p. 694.
20 Scholarship on Ecclesiastes returns frequently to this question, not least as it is raised by
the insistent Ecclesiastian use of the Hebrew word hebel (lbh), which has been most fre-
quently translated as ‘vanity’. See, for instance, Miller 2002.
the poetic case 45

that poetry has the power to correct for excessive material accumulation and
that technical labour cannot provide its own answers to the question of the
ends of humanity allow us to see something like a perimeter of Left aesthetic
theory that will remain stable down to the twentieth century.21 Though his
defence of poetry contains elements that remain useful for contemporary the-
ory, however, it does not contain a theory of modernity per se; Shelley tends to
rely, in phrases like ‘periods of the decay of social life’, on an implicitly cyclical
historiography.22 For a romantic aesthetics that tries to ground its claims for
the value of poetry in an account of the rise of the modern, we have to look
elsewhere; and it is in Schiller that we can find the most thoroughgoing and
influential formulations.
In the sixth letter in his On The Aesthetic Education of Man, Schiller’s argu-
ment centres on an account of the fragmentation of modern society that
devolves from a comparison with ancient civilization:

[The ancient mind] did indeed divide human nature into its several
aspects, and project these in magnified form into the divinities of its glor-
ious pantheon; but not by tearing it to pieces; rather by combining its
aspects in different proportions, for in no single one of their deities was
humanity in its entirety ever lacking. How different with us Moderns!
With us too the image of the human species is projected in magnified
form into separate individuals – but as fragments, not in different combin-
ations, with the result that one has to go the rounds from one individual
to another in order to be able to piece together a complete image of the
species.23

For Schiller, having to ‘go the rounds’ of the social body just to piece together a
whole human subject is disastrous. As he puts it elsewhere, ‘Thus little by little
the concrete life of the Individual is destroyed in order that the abstract idea of
the Whole may drag out its sorry existence’.24

21 Robert Kaufman has worked assiduously to bring the contemporaneity of Shelleyan

aesthetics into view for the twenty-first-century academy and, more broadly, to align
the development of a romantic aesthetics of negativity with the aesthetic theories of
Adorno and Benjamin and problems of Leftist politics today. His work at this juncture is
immensely clarifying, and I feel a debt to it. For work most pertinent to the place of Shelley
as precursor and reference point for a Left aesthetic theory, see Kaufman 1996 and 2001a.
Also useful for a detailed account of the routes of transmission running from Shelley to
Adorno and Benjamin is Kaufman 2001b.
22 Shelley 2003, p. 685.
23 Schiller 1967, pp. 31–3.
24 Schiller 1967, p. 37.
46 chapter 2

Schiller views this destruction of concrete existence as unavoidable: ‘there

was no other way in which the species as a whole could have progressed’.25
By introducing the idea of historical necessity into the story of the fragment-
ation of human capacity, Schiller obliges aesthetic theory – and the theory of
poetry that forms part of it – to generate more complex concepts of part–whole
relations. And in the sixth of the Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man
he produces a striking account of what we could call the causality of tend-
encies, where individual causes contribute to an effect only apparent at the
level of the system: ‘one-sidedness in the exercise of his powers must … lead
the individual into error; but the species as a whole to truth’.26 Schiller sees
the implications of this causal mode in exceptionally stark terms, envision-
ing philosophy, for instance, as a kind of terror: ‘as long as philosophy has to
make its prime business the provision of safeguards against error, truth will
be bound to have its martyrs’.27 Sidney had seen aristocratic virtue tied to a
notion of sacrificial service; here, all humanity is subject to the possibility of
sacrifice.
Schiller’s martyrology of truth is resonant in Left aesthetics down to our day;
Jameson depends on it when, reading Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo at the end of
The Political Unconscious, he urges us to see the novel’s ‘ultimate narrative mes-
sage’ as the ‘disjunction between the movement of history and its enactment by
individual subjects’.28 For Jameson, to seek the ‘ultimate message’ of Conrad’s
novel is to understand the particular, the material, and the individual as per-
forming a sacrificial function that allows latter-day readers to ‘keep faith with’
the possible realisation of a good totality we can never perceive except in the
dialectical supersession of what has come before us; the characters in Nostromo
serve ‘merely to enable the coming into being after [themselves] of a new type
of collectivity’.29
The indelibility of the language of sacrifice in Left aesthetics since Schiller
does not mean, though, that it is the root formula for all subsequent rhetorics
of deferred or unrealisable value. It is particularly well suited to theory that has
been cut adrift from the energies of a live political movement; but in writers
more closely aligned with present-tense class or movement politics, the com-
plex form of historical causality Schiller helped make evident is lined up with
other languages than those of tragic necessity and sacrificial supersession. The

25 Schiller 1967, pp. 39.

26 Schiller 1967, p. 41.
27 Schiller 1967, p. 43.
28 Jameson 1981, p. 278.
29 Jameson 1981, pp. 277, 279.
the poetic case 47

history of the defence of poetry and of the aesthetic makes persistent recourse
to topoi of virtuality, potential, and prophecy before reaching, in Schiller, the
scene of tragic sacrifice; but those optimistic languages don’t seem able to
meet the possibility of tragic social abstraction head-on. In the militant Georg
Lukács, though – and, later, in the work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak – we
can read the emergence of other topoi that reground the tradition of valorising
making over the made, but in ways that are specifically geared to confront the
abstract character of social life. I would like to think through two of these other
topoi – of vigilance in Lukács and of tone in Spivak – before turning, finally, to
a contemporary poem that traffics in them all.

Lukács, in History and Class Consciousness, identifies Schiller and Schiller’s aes-
thetics as the ground for his own investigation of life under capitalism:

By extending the aesthetic principle far beyond the confines of aesthet-

ics, by seeing it as the key to the meaning of man’s existence in society,
Schiller brings us back to the basic issue of classical philosophy. On the
one hand, he recognizes that social life has destroyed man as man. On the
other hand, he points to the principle whereby man having been socially
destroyed, fragmented, and divided between different partial systems is to
be made whole again in thought.30

Lukács departs from Schiller by pointing out that man cannot be made whole
again only in thought or by any single individual; but he hews to Schiller’s
emphasis on the aesthetic principle as a ground for the development of free-
dom. This is because, for Lukács, the aesthetic is still determined by a relation-
ship between the given and the made, whereas a philosophy dominant since
Kant has insisted that only what has been made by humans can be known.31
But this emphasis on the made excludes the complex processes of making; by
limiting philosophical reflection to the realm of the already produced, Lukács
argues, the activity of thought becomes increasingly limited and less able to
grasp anything that straddles the world of given matter and the ‘intelligible’
matter of the humanly made world. What’s excluded in this narrowing of philo-

30 Lukács 1971, p. 139.

31 See, for instance, Kant 2000, p. 254.
48 chapter 2

sophical activity, Lukács suggests, is the entire realm of production, which is

where social relationships under capitalism are formed.32
To describe these relationships, Lukács develops a language of reifying tend-
ency and counterreifying vigilance. He describes the worker’s coming-to-con-
sciousness about the character of his exploitation this way: ‘the worker … per-
ceives the split in his being preserved in the brutal form of what is in its whole
tendency a slavery without limits’.33 Because this exploitation is tendential and
because it tends toward limitless exploitation, Lukács believes it must be met
not with a single act of becoming-aware, but with a continual reassertion of
immanent awareness of the workings of totalisation: reification ‘can be over-
come only by constant and constantly renewed efforts to disrupt the reified
structure of existence by concretely relating to the concretely manifested con-
tradictions of the total development, by becoming conscious of the immanent
meanings of these contradictions for the total development’.34 Not, in Eng-
lish at least, very pretty prose; but it helps clarify the particular function of
vigilance in a reading practice that seeks to understand the exemplarity of its
objects. For Lukács, aesthetic objects and experiences can be read as instances
of a single totalising process, but one in which the character of the totalisation
cannot be understood without reference to the constantly shifting ground of
the particular. Another way to think about this vigilance would be to say that
Lukács’s insistence on the relations of making as more central to philosophy
than the realm of the humanly made positions him alongside those thinkers
who tried to separate the significance of poetry from manufacture – whether
by emphasising its virtual force in Sidney, or by thinking of it as a reserve of
human potential in Vico, or as the mark of a time other than the time of fac-
ture in Shelley, or (though I have not touched on it directly here) as linked to
the capacity for play in Schiller.
The militancy of Lukács’s project lends a fatedness to this way of interpreting
aesthetic production, however; when he writes ‘the fate of the worker becomes
the fate of society as a whole’, it is implicit that the aesthetic capacities of work-
ers, always being tapped into by the processes of capitalist labour, are also
tangled up in that fate.35 This language of fate, however, limits the role of the
aesthetic to an alternative potentiality that, under the right historical condi-
tions, might serve as the ground for different forms of the realisation of human
value. In political terms, this idea has tended to mean that only those whose

32 Lukács 1971, pp. 111–20.

33 Lukács 1971, p. 166.
34 Lukács 1971, p. 197.
35 Lukács 1971, p. 91.
the poetic case 49

labour is obviously an instance of capitalist exploitation – especially wage

workers – can be imagined as the potential agents of revolutionary change. In
aesthetic terms, the language of fate tends to burden poetic or artistic activity
with an obligation to reflect, negatively, the operations of a capitalism we then
believe we fully understand. Ironically, it took the long twentieth century of
defeat and disappointment on the Left for its intellectuals to ask whether the
split between the technical and the aesthetic under capitalism is best under-
stood as a fated polarisation or sundering and to begin to think of the rela-
tionship between technologised labour and aesthetic experience in less binary
terms.
In her 1985 essay ‘scattered Speculations on the Question of Value’, Spivak
revisits the problem of the technical-aesthetic split, though it is not the binary
she begins with. She asks, instead, whether and how First World intellectu-
als might imagine a political subject who is predicated neither in exclusively
materialist nor idealist terms. To ask this question is to ask exactly how and to
what extent subjects are determined by social forces. Are they simply made
by them, or is there something else, some surplus in persons such that the
forces that determine their formation do not do so entirely? One wants to avoid,
Spivak suggests, thinking of people as simply the product of external forces but
also thinking of people as somehow innately able to transcend those forces.
Clearly, historical subjects are not purely determined by their histories; his-
tory keeps being changed by people. But if the idea of a transcendent will is
too triumphalist an account of the realisation of a human subject that is both
determined by and formative of history, what other narratives do we have? How
can the subject of capitalism, for instance, be said to be more than the product
of capitalist abstraction if he or she doesn’t transcend it?
Spivak answers this question in literary terms. In an explicitly deconstruct-
ive reading of passages from volume 1 of Capital, Spivak moves away from the
Lukácsian language of fate and towards an attention to what she calls, following
Derrida, an ‘apocalyptic tone’ she hears in Marx’s text.36 But what is this tone,

36 Spivak 1988, p. 175. Spivak takes the phrase ‘apocalyptic tone’ from Derrida’s 1980 essay, ‘On
a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy’, which reads a late work of Kant’s, ‘On a
Newly Arisen Superior Tone in Philosophy’. Kant’s essay is a polemic against the Chris-
tian neo-Platonists of his day, who mount an argument for the importance of emotion
and intuition in philosophy. Kant’s rejection of this argument is grounded, as was Plato’s
argument against the polymathy of poets, in the language of labour, which he links to the
language of tone. He writes:
In a word: all think themselves superior to the degree that they believe themselves
exempt from work … in this [mystical] philosophy one need not work but only listen
50 chapter 2

and what does it have to do with the unrealisability topoi or deferred realiza-
tion that I have been tracing?
For Spivak, reading Marx, it is crucial to understand that the conception of
the subject as the bearer of labour-power, of extractable value, is both histor-
ically contingent and, teleologically speaking, indeterminate. To conceive of
subjects as ‘superadequate’ to their material engagements, as Spivak puts it –
as bearing value not only in the labour they perform but in their capacity to
labour – is possible only as the outcome of long struggles of dispossession;
it is not a timeless idea.37 Furthermore, Spivak argues, the historical struggle
over exploitation is incomplete, and renewed at every moment in the circuit
of capital, to which that historical capacity to exceed making lends a series
of indeterminacies. As Spivak puts it, ‘at each step in the dialectic something
seems to lead off into the open-endedness of textuality: indifference, inadequa-
tion, rupture’.38

to and enjoy the oracle within oneself in order to bring all the wisdom envisioned with
philosophy into one’s possession: and this announcement is indeed made in a tone
indicating that the superior ones do not think of themselves in the same class as those
who, in a scholarly manner, consider themselves obligated to progress slowly and care-
fully from the critique of their faculty of knowledge to dogmatic knowledge. (Kant 1993,
p. 52)
We return here to the Platonic language of poetic class usurpation, though the centuries
have honed and altered it. In Kant, the claim of poets to have made a thing without having
actually worked to make it is twined together with the problem of mimesis, but not – as in
Plato – at a metaphysical level. In this passage we can see that Kant imagines poets mim-
ing the aristocracy, adopting their ‘tone’, flaunting a labourlessness they haven’t earned.
Kant thinks this tone, should it spread too wide among pretenders to philosophy, will
mean the end of the philosophical enterprise altogether, the abandonment of the hard
work of conceptual reflection and determination. This is why Derrida turns the phrase
‘superior tone’ into ‘apocalyptic tone’: Derrida sees the twining together of the question
of the end of philosophy with the more limited teleological question of the ‘ends’ of our
activity, its aims, what it is meant to produce. For Derrida, working the double meaning of
ends in French and English, the ‘apocalyptic tone’, the tone that announces the end, also
announces the question of ends. In his essay, a phrase like ‘the beginning of the end’ can
mean the beginning of the investigation of what we are for, or even the beginning of the
discovery of what we might do, what we might make.
I read Derrida here, and Kant, in order to suggest that behind not only Spivak’s ana-
lysis of value but all the texts I’ve set before you here there lies a problem, given the name
poetry, that haunts our scenarios of the realisations of value with an abiding insubstan-
tiality and that tethers even latter-day formulations of value to a social imaginary that,
if it is much simpler than the economic relations it tries to explain, nonetheless keeps it
honest; we don’t know, yet, what is at stake in social production.
37 Spivak 1988, p. 161.
38 Spivak 1988, p. 160.
the poetic case 51

This ‘inadequation’, Spivak contends, prevents use-value from seamlessly

becoming exchange-value becoming surplus-value, because keeping produc-
tion running is not simply a means of the physical survival of workers – what
Marx called ‘socially necessary labor’ – but of their emotional survival as well.
Spivak calls the calculations sustaining such survival ‘affectively necessary
labor’. One implication of ‘scattered Speculations on the Question of Value’ is
that the masters of capital (such as they are) must take despair into account
as a component of the immiseration they skirt; it is to the affective body,
at least as much as to the physical, that the rate of exploitation must be
pitched.
I write pitched because Spivak suggests that the enmeshment of affect in the
open-endedness of value is what produces the ‘apocalyptic tone’ she hears in
Marx. That tone, then, is something like the sound of the rate of exploitation,
differentially intensified across classes and sectors, and made most clearly aud-
ible in the ‘super-exploitation’ of women in the Third World.39
We have come a long way from the aristocratic-sacrificial poetics of Sidney,
the humanist theologisation of poets in Vico, and the Ecclesiastian warning
against the worship of technical labour in Shelley. But across the texts of these
writers and throughout the development of aesthetic theory and its incorpor-
ation into Western Marxism there is also a staggered continuity of thinking
about poetry – then the aesthetic and then the affective – as a ground or
example of indirect, deferred, or impossible realisation of value. This tradition
of unrealisability-writing has by no means always been critical (think of how
deferred utility is realised in service to the sovereign in Sidney) but its reson-
ances in Left aesthetic and critical theory make it possible to think about the
defence of poetry, for instance, as part of the prehistory of dialectical think-
ing and, the other way around, to see dialectical criticality as bound up, even
today, with a history of the aesthetic whose roots lie in defences of a broadly
conceived concept of poetry.
But can the collocation I have offered help us read a poem? I think it can, and
I would like to close by trying to show how. I’m not sure whether, by reading
a poem at the end of this essay, I’m constructing a test case; if the precondi-
tion for its authenticity or experimental success would be to choose a poem
as unlike the discourse I’ve traced as possible so as to measure the reach of
that discourse, or bid for its universal validity, then I am not providing a test
case. But the poem I have chosen, because it shares elements with the dis-
course I’ve been outlining, may help us think about the exemplarity of poems in

39 Spivak 1988, p. 167.

52 chapter 2

another way, by allowing us to see how much world can be touched on from
within, or around, a given structuring language.
This poem, written by a young American poet who is well versed in the
tradition of Euro-American Left aesthetic theory, is mimetic of parts of that tra-
dition; but its mimetic relation to that discourse does not have to mean that the
poem simply collapses into it. Instead it shifts the language of aesthetic value
from an axis of realisation and failure-to-realise to a cluster of descriptions and
performances of tone and comportment; indeed the poem quietly insists that
tone and comportment are built out of resistance to the idea of realisation. And
in doing so it serves as a reply, not only to the ancient insistence on usefulness,
but to the modernist valorisation of tragedy and failure.
The poem is by Jennifer Moxley, from her 2002 volume The Sense Record. In
its entirety:

on this side nothing

The objects have gone quiet. Even old

Mister Unicorn has run out of words,
despite his painted red lips. Things inured
to emptiness continue with their cold
busyness. And thus the flurry of cash
around the center silence still appears
charitable tinsel, bright with the solace
of distress, the joy of being in arrears
so much more joyful than other joys. Songs
unlike a virus have grown in this season
of record rare, they sound an echo long
in repose and leave conflicted reason
to its bafflement. Things couldn’t be worse,
or could, we could resist, or complacent
argue against resistance, neither course
puts change at risk. Though we lay adjacent
the cold garden wall and exquisitely sigh
it will come, freed perhaps of our compelling
but nevertheless compelled. It’s well-nigh
Christmas, snow covers the ground and is falling.
the thirsty birds have re-opened our hands:
though weary of ritual tending we deck
the house yet again, reenact the ends
of long antiquated customs, rectify
the poetic case 53

the aggressive apathy that binds us

to our friends. To what design? What lie lies
hidden in an ornament, in a truss
of tissue snug in a box? An old idea
forced into perverted service of the new
makes strange commerce of this cold affection
enfoiled in childish fables, a revenue
of hope out of the heart’s aphasic diction.
And if it prove false, at least daily labor
will feel refreshed in the wake of leisure.
The bonvivant who repeats ‘love thy neighbor’
does no harm, and Tennyson’s sad measure
of years since we last saw our friend can bring
to mind a loss reduced from one December
to the next, a comfort and reminder
that we are at worst, on this side, nothing,
and risk nothing, to fight against and yet
not cut the feeling from our breast in queer
penance to a blundering world, to split
the will in two, to tell the truth, to fear
defeat, etc. The thought-ruined things
have done their work to keep our sentiment
in trust, though now we know we raised the scene
neither for ourselves nor for the love of it,
but out of some mislaid duty to form –
a table, a ribbon, a set of rules –
to adjust the love of a furious home,
but do not think we were born to be fools
nor bred to thoughtless and false happiness,
given our time’s caution and your kind lash
it has never been easy for us to say yes.40

I think the first thing worth noticing about the poem is its particular super-
imposition of rhetorics; it is a Christmas poem, with Edwardian and Victorian
bearings, shot through with economic language: ‘cash’, ‘charitable’, ‘arrears’,
‘rare’, ‘commerce’, ‘revenue’, ‘trust’. In puzzling over why, each year, her circle

40 Moxley 2002, pp. 9–10. An mp3 of Moxley reading this poem at the University of Maine in
September 2003 is publicly accessible at www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Moxley​
.html.
54 chapter 2

of familiars participates in the season’s rituals – not least, it seems, the ritual-
ised rhetoric of loving one’s fellows – the speaker worries over a question of
larger ends (‘To what design?’) and joins that worry to two others: the poten-
tial hypocrisy of idly favouring ‘change’ or ‘resistance’ and the possibly foolish
affective labour of ‘rectify[ing] … aggressive apathy’, ‘adjust[ing] … love’, or
‘cut[ting] the feeling from our breast’. The poem also links the cyclical time
of the holiday to problems of memorial and to debt; she aligns her poem not
only with Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’ but also with Edward Verrall Lucas’s 1917
poem ‘The Debt’, from which Moxley takes the phrase ‘blundering world’. That
poem identifies the aesthetic experience of all English people who survived
World War i as indebted to the sacrifice of the young soldiers who died in its
battles.41
The poem’s title is a fragment of its emphatic answer to the problem of
whether merely managing feeling – wishing others well, disentangling aggres-
sion and apathy – can possibly serve as payment of the debt that the death or
injury of others incurs. The poet is agonisingly aware of the illusions in which
she traffics – that ‘the flurry of cash’ is actually ‘charitable tinsel’ or that ‘resist-
ance’ or arguments against it are of any consequence at all. Perhaps the bitterest
recognition in the poem is that beneath ‘distress’ is actually ‘solace’ – by which,
I think, the poet means the solace of finding that others have incurred injury on
her behalf, putting her joyfully, guiltily ‘in arrears’. And by citing Lucas’s poem,

41 Lucas’s poem includes this passage about the aesthetic experience the living owe the dead
soldiers, which he links, later in the poem, to collective guilt:
So lone and cold they lie; but we,
We still have life; we still may greet
Our pleasant friends in home and street;
We still have life, are able still
To climb the turf of Bignor Hill,
To see the placid sheep go by,
To hear the sheep-dog’s eager cry,
To feel the sun, to taste the rain,
To smell the Autumn’s scents again
Beneath the brown and gold and red
Which old October’s brush has spread,
To hear the robin in the lane,
To look upon the English sky.
….
Those men who died for you and me,
That England still might sheltered be
And all our lives go on the same
(Although to live is almost shame).
(Lucas 1917, pp. 228–30)
the poetic case 55

so centred on the guilt of survivors, Moxley suggests that worry about others,
or grief over losing them, may contain a germ of relief that they, not we, are the
ones who paid the price of injury or death.
The violence and loss the poem hints at is figured through three overlapping
moves: the reference to the loss of a friend, the link back to a poem of World
War i, and the insistent foregrounding of economic language. This last move
inflects the other two with a sense of system and circulation, which becomes
clear in the poem’s language of objects, through which all emotion is financed;
material things have already ‘gone quiet’ by the poem’s first line, silenced by the
‘flurry of cash’ around them, but they serve, despite being ‘ruined’ by thought,
‘to keep our sentiment / in trust’. This service objects offer is mismatched,
however, to the feelings of the season and to the subjects of those feelings:

though now we know we raised the scene

neither for ourselves nor for the love of it,
but out of some mislaid duty to form –

Spivak might call this ‘mislaid duty to form’ a kind of inadequation; ‘solace’ and
‘joy’ are no match for the other, ambivalent feeling that invests itself in objects,
carriers of the season’s rhetorical force. This inadequacy, and the foolishness or
even hypocrisy that it puts her in danger of, pushes Moxley to formulate two
related positions: first, an ambivalent assertion of her harmlessness or worth-
lessness and, second, a defence of fellow feeling in the face of something like
totalisation and paralysis.
At the poem’s rhetorical centre, the occasion of grief is met with a Tennyso-
nian ‘sad measure’ that allows the poet to feel her loss reduced from year to
year; a strangely actuarial formula, it offers, for Moxley

… a comfort and reminder

that we are at worst, on this side, nothing,
and risk nothing, to fight against and yet
not cut the feeling from our breast in queer
penance to a blundering world, to split
the will in two, to tell the truth, to fear
defeat, etc.

Only by positing her worthlessness in the face of death – that she and her
cohort are ‘at worst, on this side, nothing’ – is Moxley able to free herself from
serving ‘queer penance’ to the ‘blundering world’ that, in Lucas’s ‘The Debt’,
blundered into war and tethered all sensory experience thereafter to the guilt
56 chapter 2

of having survived it. Lucas’s proposition, I should say, is less like an Adornian
hesitancy about writing poetry after Auschwitz than it is a version of Sidney’s
language of aristocratic sacrifice as the guarantor of stable class relations; his
soldiers die ‘that England still might sheltered be / And all our lives go on the
same’. Moxley, then, in rejecting Lucas’s ‘queer penance’, is rejecting not the
idea of guilt but the idea that it must crush all other feeling; loss and violence
remind her ‘to fight against’ false solace, tinselled joy, but not at the price of
‘cut[ting] the feeling from our breast’, even though keeping it there may oblige
‘the will’ to ‘split … in two’ and place the subject of feeling in the path of ‘defeat’.
Moxley knows this counterformation, this defence of feeling despite its sus-
ceptibility to capture and falsification, places her on the knife-edge of the
weakest forms of sentimentality. Her assertion of worthlessness is also, by way
of reference to the ‘bonvivant’ who ‘does no harm’ in wishing others well, an
assertion of her own harmlessness – an assertion that would seem to confound
or back away from the poem’s aggressive insistence that seeming innocence is
no such thing. But the poem supplies a second, closing formulation that links
this potentially irredeemable sentimentality to the conditions that produced it
as an option: ‘given our time’s caution and your kind lash / it has never been
easy for us to say yes’. This last defense of affirmation – and of poetry as an
affirmative art – identifies the formalised and falsified emotion Moxley has
been describing as the product of ‘our time’s caution’ and the ‘kind lash’ of
a heretofore invisible addressee. Both this ‘caution’ and that ‘lash’ are meant
to encapsulate the structures of feeling of those who know they only bear the
brunt of exploitation indirectly and who live, literally, at the expense of others.
It is a guilty affirmation and a calibration of emotion registered in the ‘rectify-
ing’ and ‘adjusting’ affective work the poem describes. What Moxley offers is
a fellow feeling among all those who find, in the face of a hollow aesthetic (of
‘songs’), the ‘bafflement’ of a ‘reason’ that cannot answer the question of what
we are ‘for’. And she insists on positing a ‘we’ regardless, against the ‘you’ that
manages the rate of ruin with its ‘kind lash’.
‘On This Side Nothing’ is not a poem of solidarity with the oppressed. It is
an uneasy exploration of the reverb of oppression, as it registers in objects and
sentiments consumed by the sheltered, and a defiant insistence that, despite
its daily capture in the ‘flurry of cash’, emotion does not belong to it. I hope
I’ve made it possible to sense, reading Moxley’s poem, the different rhetorics
of deferred or unrealisable value I have identified here. I hope it’s possible
to hear, in other words, Moxley making the poetic case, the case for poetry,
once again, out of the checkered rhetoric of its defence. I cannot not hear, in
this poem, Sidney’s language of aristocratic sacrifice, displaced onto soldiers
lodging in an earlier poem and another period; the Viconian presumption that
the poetic case 57

poets (collectively evoked, I think, by the poem’s closing ‘us’) have a historical
claim to languages that precede abstraction; the tragic Shelleyan sense of the
pointlessness of labour (‘weary of ritual tending’ or the poem’s Ecclesiastian
title); Schiller’s dismay at the gap between the actions of the individual and
the workings of the system (‘freed perhaps of our compelling / but neverthe-
less compelled’); Lukács’s vigilance around traversing this gap (‘do not think we
were born to be fools’); or, by way of Spivak, both affective labour and the rate
of exploitation given tone (‘rectify / aggressive apathy’; ‘our time’s caution and
your kind lash’).
Moxley’s poem is a dossier, you might say, assembled on poetry’s behalf; and
as such it gains exemplarity as an instance of poetry, if we can give partial credit
to the language of poetry’s defence for shaping our sense of what poetry might
be. Tangled into that exemplary case-making activity is a thickly layered text
of propositions, no longer immediately evident as such, about poetry’s place
in the long development of value as a social abstraction; they form the poem’s
bridge between the feeling it affirms and the social violation it cannot escape.
This feels like the poem’s political unconscious – not a tragic emotion, built out
of inert materials and reconstructed from the point of view of failure, but an
assemblage, a case, fashioned out of historically divergent materials to create
a tone – a tone that makes both affirmation and exploitation audible at once. I
think learning how to listen for it is the central task of aesthetic theory today.
 chapter 3

Reading on the Left

My essay, like many of the others in this issue, began as a talk for the 2008
conference ‘The Way We Read Now’. I was included on a panel called ‘Her-
meneutics Without Suspicion?’ which raised the question of whether ‘symp-
tomatic’ reading, especially in the wake of Fredric Jameson’s work, was still
a relevant or useful model for literary interpretation today (the conference’s
subtitle was, ‘symptomatic Reading and Its Aftermath’). My paper attempted
to disentangle the ‘symptomatic’ from the ‘suspicious’ by way of emphasising
moments in Jameson’s career where he advocates for certain texts rather than
out-manoeuvres them; my larger aim was to link the hermeneutics of the symp-
tom to a quest on the literary-academic left – sometimes ‘suspicious’, some-
times not – for models of revolutionary action, or militant comportment, that
could replace the traditional Marxist championing of the industrial working
class.
What I couldn’t quite articulate at the time, though, were the reasons for
a gap I saw between Jameson’s style of ‘symptomatic reading’ and the vari-
ety of ‘symptomatic’ reading practices produced and consumed in the United
States since the 1970s. The problem was not only that Jameson’s practice of
symptomatising texts did not necessarily seem ‘suspicious’ to me, or to involve
an antagonistic relation to the texts he chose to read, but also that, despite
his extraordinarily wide influence on literary study in the United States, there
seemed to be almost no relation between his work and the other main strands
of symptomatising reading that emerged in the period. At the time, I under-
stood this gap in Jameson’s own terms, as responses to failure – in particular, as
readerly responses to the failure of the working class to become revolutionary
in the twentieth century. In other words, I interpreted the kinds of sympto-
matic reading that emerged in the U.S. literary academy in the 1980s as part of
a search for something other than a proletariat to valorise.
This seems accurate enough. Now, though, I’m inclined to reframe the matter
a bit, and to suggest that the gap between Jameson’s symptomatising read-
ings and those of, say, deconstruction and multiculturalism has equally to do
with the long history of anti-Marxism in the United States, which includes
the strong discouragement of academics from Marxist analysis.1 This history

1 There are many measures by which to gauge this history of American anti-Marxism. Employ-

©
reading on the left 59

of anti-Marxism has yet to be told as a coherent story with regard to post-war

‘theory’, and I couldn’t begin to lay it out here. But even if we keep it in mind
as a blunt, underdeveloped proposition, it becomes easier to make sense of
Jameson’s canonicity, since he is best known for a periodisation (modern-post-
modern) and an axiom (‘always historicize!’) that do not immediately demand
adoption by way of Marxist concepts. Jameson’s great obsession, the problem
of the non-revolutionary character of the twentieth century (or of the non-
liberatory character of its revolutions), is easily set aside when he is read this
way.
Ironically, then, it is possible to conduct a survey of American ‘symptomatic’
reading without much recourse to Jameson’s work, since, as I’ll try to show, what
counts as a ‘symptom’ in those styles of reading has little to do with the notion
of the symptom that emerges in the 1970s from within Marxism. Nonetheless, I
think the styles of symptomatic reading that grew up in the United States in this
period retain something that is now, in the new millennium, coming around to
meet that Marxist formulation. So I will begin with the intra-Marxist Jameson,
far though his work lies from the main line of non-Marxist symptomatic inter-
pretation, as a way of beginning the story of left-wing literary-academic reading
in the period from the 70s to today. After identifying three variations on symp-
tomatic reading – a Marxist version, and then two multiculturalist versions,
humanist and anti-humanist – I will try to suggest why symptomatic reading in
a multiculturalist vein has been dislodged by forms of reading that lay emphasis
on the history of the present. Then I will compare contemporary theories of
what it means to historicise the present to Jameson’s version, suggesting that
they share a theory of causal necessity that is linked to theories of matter or
materiality. And in closing I will point to ways in which a literary understanding
of ‘matter’, very different from the philosophical sense that drives historicising
theory, might help us work toward fresher ways to read now, and to read ‘the
now’.

ees of the State of California, for instance, must still sign, in 2009, a ‘loyalty oath’ that, while
it no longer obliges the signer specifically to declare that she has never been a member of
the Communist Party, is nonetheless shaped by the anti-Communism of the Cold War. This
history also registers in the common gesture by which liberal intellectuals in the English-
speaking world discount Marxist thought by depicting it as brainwashing, ‘ideology’, or hys-
teria – anything but intellection. A good example of this kind of work is Lilla 2001.
60 chapter 3

1 The Marxist Symptom

The foundational ‘symptomatic reading’ for twentieth-century Marxism is

actually a friendly reading of a text, that is, Louis Althusser’s reading of the
text of Capital. If Althusser could be said to be ‘suspicious’ in Reading ‘Capital’,
it is because he is suspicious not of Marx’s text, but of monocausal, econom-
istic readings of it. Indeed, for Althusser, this is the critical force of the idea of a
symptom: it is more complex than a mere reflection. I think a certain confusion
begins here between two senses of ‘symptomatic reading’: first, symptomatic
reading that allows us to see a text generating a concept of the symptom; and
second, symptomatic reading that critiques a text for not being in control of
itself. Althusser is reading Marx in the first sense. He is trying to get us to
see that Marx’s reading of the commodity in Volume i of Capital takes com-
modity relations to be, not mere reflections of a single process of exploitation,
but rather the complex result of multiple processes that can’t be understood
without recourse to an account of the activities of exploitation. In particular,
Althusser highlights the way that Marx begins in media res, not with the ori-
gins of capital but with its structuring activiIy, that is, commodity exchange. In
this context, the critical advantage of the symptom over the reflection is that
one can read texts as a Marxist without having to read them didactically. The
need for this kind of reading emerges, in the 1960s and 1970s, as it becomes
clear that the working classes of Europe and America may not be the engine
of revolution or the subject of history after all, that they are too divided, too
defeated, or too distracted to perform the role the revolutionaries of the nine-
teenth century first imagined for them. To read a text symptomatically in this
context means to become more flexible in one’s search for significant historical
action in texts: literature can be read as more than a mostly empty repository
of revolutionary acts; other acts besides revolutionary ones can be seen as his-
torically significant, or aesthetically important, because of the ways they point
to how human history is not only, or not yet, apprehensible as the pre-history
of revolution.
This is where Jameson picks up on Althusser, especially in The Political
Unconscious. Rather than choose a class to blame for the failure of the twen-
tieth century to be the century of liberatory revolutions, Jameson incorpor-
ates revolutionary failure into his system of interpretation, and, in doing so,
he makes it possible to think about the relationships among forms of histor-
ical causality, types of literary activity, and modes of critical reading without
hitching those relationships either to the hope that one class will emerge as
revolutionary, or to the accusation that it was the action or inaction of one
class or another that prevented revolution from coming to pass. The question
reading on the left 61

that haunts left criticism in the twentieth century – why wasn’t this a liberatory
age? – still shapes his work, but he refuses any single answer to it.
Jameson’s particular twist on Althusserian reading is to make an analogy
between structural causality in the social system and ‘heterogeneity’ or contra-
diction in literary works: rather than naming other classes, or social formations
other than classes, to whose fortunes left intellectuals might pin their hopes, he
makes an aesthetic turn that identifies in literary works the kind of fissures that
reveal the failure, both of left-wing political hopes and of the projects of capital
to quash them. He brings Althusser, that is, around to the language of literary
modernism:

It follows, then, that the interpretive mission of a properly structural caus-

ality will … find its privileged content in rifts and discontinuities within
the work, and ultimately in a conception of the former ‘work of art’ as
a heterogeneous and (to use the most dramatic recent slogan) a schizo-
phrenic text.2

That this aesthetic turn is still shaped by a notion of possible resistance by

actual categories of people is made clear, in The Political Unconscious, by the
contrast drawn between Althusser and Georg Lukács. For Lukács, the indus-
trial working class was the engine of historical change, and the realist novel was
the expression of its emergence, since, regardless of the political orientation
of realist novel-writers themselves, the codes of realism demanded an expan-
ded social palette. To move from Lukács to Althusser on aesthetic matters, as
Jameson does, is therefore also to imply a post-Lukácsian understanding that
heterogeneity in the work of art, even failure, is expressive of the pending prob-
lem of there being no obvious successor to the working classes as the engine
of history. Jameson’s literary modernism, then, his aesthetics of fissure and fail-
ure, is also always a political agnosticism about who might replace the working
classes, and a flexibility about how it might be useful to read in the meantime.
This flexibility makes possible a kind of symptomatic reading that is also
a friendly reading, along the lines of Althusser’s reading of Capital. Indeed
this is the Jameson I know best, the Jameson making what seem like untimely
defences of writers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Theodor Adorno at moments – in
1971, in 1989 – when those thinkers seem discredited or superseded. In these
moments, a ‘symptomatic reading’ involves figuring out how history and the
text have come around to meet each other once again, how what once seemed

2 Jameson 1981, p. 56.

62 chapter 3

like weaknesses in an argument, or in a mode of presentation, can come to find

new force, or even truth, in a later period. So when Jameson argues, in Marxism
and Form, that Sartre’s subjectivism, démodé in the Althusserian 70s, is actually
exactly what the foment of the time calls for; or when, in his book on Adorno, he
points out that Adorno’s much-derided quietism, seemingly surpassed by the
subversive energies in Michel Foucault, in Jacques Derrida, in Jacques Lacan, is
in fact the ground for a kind of dialectical patience that the global rightward
shift demands – in these moments, Jameson’s symptomatic style of reading
emerges not as a hermeneutics of suspicion but as a hermeneutics of situation –
a kind of reading that proposes texts for our attention because they seem useful
for historicising the present.3
What’s important here is not so much that Jameson’s readings of Adorno
and Sartre are friendly rather than suspicious, but that he models a reading
practice in which what nourishes a revolutionary comportment, or a proto-
revolutionary one, will be different under different circumstances. This is
another sense in which his reading style can be said to be symptomatic – his
own readings are themselves self-consciously symptomatic, that is, complexly
and unstably a product of their own time.
I say ‘unstably’ because in The Political Unconscious Jameson works up a
highly unstable compound of Althusser and Sartre, old enemies, in order keep
the objectivism of Althusser’s ‘structural causality’ from becoming a scient-
ism, even as the Sartrean language of the inert, to which I’ll turn in a moment,
threatens to topple that structuralism by positing a matter ontologically prior
to human action. But Jameson thinks that it’s worth the intellectual risk: as
the global shift to the right gains momentum, he is aware that any persuasive
account of the ongoing relevance of Marxism will have to be able to offer crit-
ics a reading practice that makes sense of defeat – something the Althusserian
model tends to do only in the mode of blame, of blaming would-be revolu-
tionaries for their lapses into ideology. So he turns to Sartre, to a language of
Necessity that is meant to be logical but not universally valid, ‘represented’, as
Jameson puts it, ‘in the form of the inexorable logic involved in the determin-
ate failure of all the revolutions that have taken place in human history’.4 In
describing the work of the interpreter, Jameson locates this idea of Necessity
in relation to the Sartrean categories of the inert and the practico-inert, which
represent, respectively, the dead matter that precedes human labour and the
unsettling autonomy of matter once it has been worked on. He writes:

3 See Jameson 1974 and 1990.

4 Jameson 1981, p. 102.
reading on the left 63

Whatever the raw material on which historiographic form works … the

‘emotion’ of great historiographic form can then always be seen as the
radical restructuration of that inert material, in this instance the power-
ful reorganization of otherwise inert chronological material and ‘linear’
data in the form of Necessity: why what happened … had to happen the
way it did.5

Notice the linkage here between the idea of matter as ‘inert’ and the idea of
causal necessity. In this Sartrean parable, events can be revealed to participate
in causal necessity because matter precedes human action, ontologically and
logically: it is there before us, and can therefore be said to have a determinative
effect on human action. Since 1981, Jameson’s linkage of causation to a notion of
inert matter that awaits ‘restructuration’ has made a good claim to be just what
historicising readers need in an unrevolutionary era: it seems to suit perfectly
an era of defeats for the Left. But there is an intellectual and historiographical
price to pay for this logicisation and ontologisation of ‘matter’, which is that
it tends to muffle our ability to understand capital as experimental and uncer-
tain – a feature of its workings that has become central to our understanding of
capital in the current financial crisis. I’ll return to this problem a bit later, since
it resurfaces in a different, but equally ontologising, theory of matter in the era
of globalisation. Meanwhile, though, there is a second, circumstantial limita-
tion on the explanatory power of Jameson’s method of historicisation – which
is that in the 1980s and 1990s, many readers on the left were experiencing the
era as anything but unrevolutionary.

2 The Multicultural Symptom

Though we tend to frame the 1980s in U.S. political history in terms of the rise of
the right, it is also true that those years were the great period of academic multi-
culturalism in the humanities, the period in which the ‘culture wars’ were won,
by and large, by teachers and scholars working to open up the canons of literat-
ure (especially American literature) to other voices – ‘other voices’ being both
a feminist and an ethnic-studies catchphrase of the period. These struggles,
which were not confined to the university, permanently altered the syllabi of
children’s literature and high school curricula and, in commercial publishing,
opened the way to the more global understanding of literature in English that

5 Jameson 1981, p. 101.

64 chapter 3

we now take for granted. Toni Morrison’s Nobel Prize in 1993 was the capstone
of this period, serving not only as a recognition of her literary achievement
but also as an endorsement of U.S.-style expansions of the literary canon. So
a variety of readers would have had cause to experience the category of ‘lit-
erature’ in the 1980s as undergoing a ‘revolutionary’ period in the restricted
sense that it saw the academic fulfillment of earlier, more properly political
struggles.
In the political realm, meanwhile, the period did in fact witness the upsurge
of a confrontational, direct-action movement in the form of aids activism,
which created a generation of activists who became expert not only at organ-
ising mass demonstrations but also in speaking the languages of government
health policy, science policy, and even of science itself. The aids Coalition to
Unleash Power (act up), which spearheaded this activism, had chapters in
every major city in the United States, with ‘affinity groups’ devoted to a host of
issues affecting people with aids; virtually all of the aids service organisations
in American cities today owe their existence to this period of activism. The epi-
demic, which fueled particularly vicious forms of homophobia, and suffered
alarming neglect by the Reagan and Bush i administrations, produced a milit-
ant consciousness in many gay men and lesbians of the time, who were led to
rethink not only their relationship to government and its services but also to
categories like family and community, which were tested and reworked in the
crisis. The catchphrase of the movement, ‘silence=Death’, conveyed succinctly
the sense that the epidemic was creating persons with nothing to lose from rad-
icalisation; it formed a key part of the protest in the 1987 March on Washington
for Lesbian and Gay Rights, which brought more than half a million people to
the capital.6
Both the multicultural expansion of the canon and the militancy born of the
aids epidemic affected literary reading in the 1980s and early 1990s, in ways
that form a countercurrent to the Jamesonian story of revolutionary failure. In
terms of how these developments fit into the broader story of left politics in
the period, I think we can say that two things happened to left-leaning U.S. lit-
erary criticism at this point. One was an opening-out of the search for historical
actors, either as the new revolutionaries, or as the sub-jects of modes of action
that are liberatory without being punctually revolutionary. The other was a shift

6 The archive of aids activist work was itself built in a movement context, but there is of course
a large body of academic work on it by now. The best history of the intersection of activism
and medical policy remains Epstein 1998. For a collection of influential essays that were writ-
ten on the ground during the first decade of the epidemic in the U.K. and the U.S., see Watney
1994.
reading on the left 65

from the search for a replacement for the working classes to a sustained critique
of the acquisitional middle class. The first describes what I think of as broadly
multicultural reading practices, which point to the historical agency of other
actors than, say, the white middle-class man; the second set of practices, which
took up the tools of psychoanalysis and deconstruction, critique the idea of
the autonomy of the liberal political subject that the middle-class white man
comes to represent. In the first case, to read critically is to excavate the histor-
ical violence, and the causal contingency, by which the liberal political subject
achieved his autonomy – by the becoming-significant, for instance, of his race,
or his sex – and to leverage knowledge of this violence and contingency to point
out that subjects other than the white man can act significantly. In the second
case, to read critically is to point out that the indicatively white male political
subject, at least as he appears in literary texts, does not in fact enjoy autonomy:
autonomy is seen as residing in the textual system, which not only trumps the
subject through its systematicity but also carries traces of what that subject
can’t bear having made manifest, that is, evidence of his heteronomy. Together
these two developments count for much of what we have come to think of
as ‘symptomatic reading’ in the United States; against Marxist symptomatic
reading, we might indeed call them the two major variations on ‘American
symptomatic reading’, which amount to humanist and anti-humanist multi-
culturalisms.
In different ways, both of these kinds of reading put pressure on the cat-
egory of ‘the literary’. Toni Morrison’s 1992 Playing in the Dark, for instance
(which is subtitled Whiteness and the Literary Imagination), relies on Freudian
ideas about unconscious habits of fetishisation, condensation, and displace-
ment in order to develop an account of how white American writers figured
blackness by paying attention to the actual depiction of black persons, as well
as to the unconscious stress she believes white writers felt in attempting to
prevent those depictions from becoming an overwhelming formal problem.
In Morrison’s analyses of white writers’ texts, the pressure to address histor-
ies of racial violence threatens to deform those texts, indeed to press them
past the bounds of the literary. Reading Willa Cather’s late novel Sapphira and
the Slave Girl (1940), in which an elderly, disabled, slave-owning white woman
becomes obsessed with the possibility that her faithful husband is having sex
with a young slave woman, Morrison homes in on the over-determined charac-
ter of Sapphira’s behavior, which finds no plausible explanation in the novel. As
Morrison points out, this behaviour makes no characterological, narrative, or
historical sense: Sapphira arranges for the slave girl to be raped, hoping thereby
to destroy her husband’s sense of pleasure in possessing the girl, Nancy; but
we are given no grounds for judging whether Sapphira is paranoid, and in any
66 chapter 3

case, Morrison notes, there was no concept of black women’s chastity in the his-
tory of U.S. slave-holding, so that Sapphira’s scheme to have Nancy ‘despoiled’
is incoherent.7
This is a ‘symptomatic’ reading, then, in that it judges the author to be not
fully in control of the production of her text. More interesting, though, are the
measures by which Morrison assesses this ‘symptom’. She observes that Cather,
almost as if to compensate for the incoherence of plot and character created
by the casuistical situation of Sapphira’s evil and Nancy’s virtue, indulges in an
epilogue to the story in which, many years after Nancy successfully escapes to
the north, a stand-in for the young Cather returns with Nancy to present her
to her mother, the former slave Till. In Morrison’s eyes, this only makes matters
worse, since the scene of mother-daughter reunion is thus focalized around
the young author-to-be, for whom the agony of maternal separation, and the
pathos of reunion, become mere staging for the emergent narrative skill of the
white child. This is a serious list of literary flaws. What’s startling, then, is Mor-
rison’s conclusion:

The final fugitive in Cather’s novel is the novel itself. The plot’s own plot-
ting to free the endangered slave girl … is designed for other purposes. It
functions as a means for the author to meditate on the moral equivalence
of free white women and enslaved black women.8

In this phrasing, the flaws in Cather’s novel make it not a failure, but a loss –
the loss of a potential story in the history readers and writers will need if they
are ever to come to terms with the heritage of slavery. Morrison’s reading of
Sapphira and the Slave Girl is symptomatic, and it is critical, but her aim in
identifying the symptom is to create space in the American history of race
for damaged literary texts. Her narrative is one of healing, though neither the
author nor the text can benefit from it; the forgiving of author and text – for
forgiveness is what’s at stake – is rather part of a healing process in the history
of American racism, which exceeds literary writing. Cather’s novel may have
become ‘fugitive’, barely a novel, but it (and its author) can now be read as part
of an extra-literary history of damage and deformation. To read ‘symptomatic-
ally’, for Morrison, is to set aside ‘literature’ as the master-category of reading.
It takes more effort to track the position of the category of the literary in the
deconstructive flank of American symptomatic reading, partly because it does
not locate ‘symptoms’ in any one author or text. Where a multicultural reading

7 Morrison 1993, p. 25.

8 Morrison 1993, p. 27.
reading on the left 67

like Morrison’s exceeds the bounds of ‘the literary’ by way of a humanism that
elevates the writer into the position of exemplary personhood (writers, for Mor-
rison, are worth studying on something like their own terms, as writers), decon-
structive, anti-humanist symptomatic reading is interested in getting behind
personhood to the question of what systems or structures shape it, make it pos-
sible. But what is at stake in the turn to systems or structures?
Lee Edelman’s Homographesis of 1994 is a culminating example of the anti-
humanist turn in American symptomatic reading – ‘culminating’ because it
brings deconstruction back around to the question of the political stakes of
reading for actual persons, even as it reserves the intellectual right to under-
stand personhood in terms of textuality. The genius of Edelman’s book is to tell
a story in which a whole category of persons in the modern era – gay men –
are made to stand in for something like writing and reading: their bodies are
understood as especially legible, even as they present problems of legibility
recognisable to the professional scholar of literature as problems of interpret-
ive endlessness, of too much meaning. ‘Homographesis’, for Edelman, is meant
to name both the social and cultural processes by which gay men become
equated with writing, and the interpretive strategies by which professional
gay textual scholars can expose those processes as ‘reductive’ and ‘repress-
ive’.9
For Edelman, the violence of homophobia, at least as it is directed at gay
men, is linguistic, in an epistemological and metaphysical sense: homophobia
works as a kind of demand in the medium of language that gay men correspond
to the hostile fantasies about them. This demand for exact correspondence
is not only levelled at gay men, however – Edelman makes clear that straight
men’s presumption of wholeness, and self-evident personhood, is bought at the
price of masking an ambiguity and open-endedness of language that he thinks
is its essential quality. To expose self-identity as containing difference, then,
is both to loosen the bonds of homophobia on gay men and to show up the
pretensions to uncomplicated masculinity of straight men: they are, gay and
straight men alike, both more and less than what the culture has made them
out to be.10
There is an irreducible humanism in this linguistic account of homophobia.
In this light, Edelman’s project is cultural, psychological, and historical; indeed
it is multicultural. Queer theory, as he puts it, is

9 Edelman 1994, p. 23.

10 See Edelman 1994, p. 14.
68 chapter 3

the study of the historically variable rhetorics, the discursive strategies,

and tropological formations in which sexuality is embedded and con-
ceived; it suggests that the differing psychologies of figuration in different
places and at different times bear crucially on the textual articulations
and cultural constructions of sexuality; and it suggests that the sphere of
gay criticism need not be restricted to the examination of texts that either
thematize homosexual relations or dramatize the vicissitudes of homo-
sexual/homosocial desire.11

This is a humanist, multiculturalist argument for the expansion of a canon, and

for attention to historical and psychological variability. It also contains an anti-
humanist counter-current, however: in the same paragraph in which Edelman
makes his bid for the importance of studying human and historical variabil-
ity, he writes: ‘The project of homographesis would locate the critical force of
homosexuality at the very point of discrimination between sameness and dif-
ference as cognitive landmarks governing the discursive field of social symbolic
relations’.12
So the work of the anti-homophobic scholar is a kind of textual scholarship,
isolating metaphors (‘the very point of discrimination between sameness and
difference’) – but the goal, unlike that of traditional textual scholarship, is not
to produce the cleanest, most authoritative text. Metaphors are now under-
stood as ‘cognitive’, that is, in the language of the social sciences (Edelman does
not call metaphors ‘imaginative’ or ‘intellectual’ or even ‘mental’ landmarks).
Indeed the phrase, ‘the discursive field of social symbolic relations’, points dir-
ectly back to Levi-Strauss’s structuralist anthropology, which itself was built out
of an analogy to Saussurean linguistics.
In terms of the category of ‘the literary’, then, this style of reading involves
subsuming the specificity of literature under a metaphor of ‘writing’ as legibil-
ity, cognition, symbolisation, governance, philosophy, and philosophy’s discip-
linary anxiety. In a brief reading of Marcel Proust at the beginning of Homo-
graphesis, for instance, Edelman interprets a scene in which Proust’s narrator
recognises M. De Charlus’s homosexuality retrospectively as a recognition of
‘writing itself’, though the narrator’s figure for his belated recognition is spe-
cifically of seeing letters assemble themselves into an order – that is, a figure
for a socially and educationally specific process of becoming literate.13

11 Edelman 1994, p. 20.

12 Ibid.
13 See Edelman 1994, pp. 18–20.
reading on the left 69

As with Morrison’s humanist symptomatic reading, then, Edelman’s anti-

humanist reading subsumes ‘literature’ under another category – here, a cognit-
ivised ‘writing’, to which homosexuality has also been subsumed. In Morrison’s
case, the identification of Cather’s symptom is aimed at healing literature, so to
speak, by giving it a clearer sense of its history, and thereby allowing literature
to move on. It would seem, in Edelman’s case, that gay men are being advised to
participate in a perpetual discursive skirmish with heterosexual men and along
the way to seize their spectacularised gay identities, which threaten male het-
erosexuality so as to make it anxious. This would be a way for gay men to ‘enjoy
their symptom’, as Slavoj Žižek would put it; this is certainly the direction Edel-
man’s work has taken since the early 1990s.14
The ideas of history behind these humanist and anti-humanist multicultur-
alisms are quite different – one imagines something like progress, the other an
endless war of position – but I think they share the confidence of the social
movements out of which they grew. One way to confirm this is to compare
them with the Jamesonian narrative, which is so emphatically formed through
notions of failure. The Marxist symptom and the multicultural symptom are
not just temperamental ‘opposites’, however, one ‘optimistic’ and the other
‘pessimistic’; they represent two poles in a contradictory historical develop-
ment. American multiculturalist reading practices grew out of the successes,
in the 1960s and 1970s, of the civil rights movement and the new social move-
ments, like feminism and gay liberation, that modelled themselves on it – while
Marxist models of historical necessity read the same period in terms of the
decline of working-class militancy and social democracy.
Read from a different angle, the tension between Marxist and multicultur-
alist models of reading is linked to a contradiction built into the new social
movements themselves. On the one hand, they seemed to sidestep the end-
less factionalism and cumulative defeatism of the European Marxist left: they
were grassroots movements without party structures. On the other hand, they
tended to forsake a critique of capital as old-style politics and ended up focus-
ing on injury and its repair at the expense of the question of liberation: they
became practical, institutional.
As these social movements grappled in the 1980s and 90s with contradic-
tions external and internal (between identity and the critique of identity;
between grassroots organising and institution building), they became less dis-
tinct from liberal civil society, and they gradually lost their grip on the imagin-
ation of left-leaning intellectuals. During the same years, however, the profile

14 See Žižek 2001; and Edelman 2004.

70 chapter 3

of global capital emerged with ever greater clarity, bouncing back from the
oil shock of 1973 in a trans-Atlantic rightward turn that loosened up market
regulations, facilitated the implementation of new, highly speculative forms of
‘wealth’, and launched migrations of labour across national boundaries on an
unprecedented scale. These developments have produced a wholesale aban-
donment of post-structuralist thinking in the humanistic academy, which has
been reduced to fire-sale prices as its advocacy for textuality as a model for cul-
ture (or becoming-literate as a model for political activity) seems less and less
relevant in what looks like a new era of number. What has emerged instead is
a constellation of critical thought that reframes the contradictions of the age
of new social movements in terms of a new situation and aggressively reasserts
subjectivity as the ground of politics. The model of reading that has developed
alongside this new critical thought is less ‘symptomatic’ than exemplary, as in:
who is the exemplary subject in the era of global capital? I would like to out-
line the features of this latest style of reading in what follows, focusing on how
it tries to understand politics through a grasp of the special character of the
contemporary, of something like a ‘situation’ that calls for heroic action.

3 After the Symptom: Situational Reading

I don’t mean to say that this style of reading is not ‘symptomatic’ in the broad
sense of being diagnostic: indeed diagnosis of the contemporary is exactly what
motivates it. But it does not read the contemporary scene for indications of a
masked or occluded reality; whatever ‘symptoms’ it sees are eminently present.
But the urge of this style of reading toward the exemplary makes it hard to
describe by way of the ‘symptom’ in a literary sense, since the work I am think-
ing of – writing by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, by Giorgio Agamben, and
by Alain Badiou – has largely forgone the operation of reading literary texts in
order to reposition them in a wider frame. Instead, this style of reading begins
with the assumption that the wider frame, or situation, is the starting point
and then turns to literary texts for relatively transparent support for one kind of
action or another in that situation. Gone is the attempt at elevating ‘writing’ to a
commanding position among the incommensurable disciplines; gone too is the
valorisation of failure on its own terms. In their place we find a return to reading
writers for the kind of personhood they depict or exemplify. So there is a con-
tinuity between this kind of reading, which has a strong humanist component,
and the humanist multiculturalism of, say, Morrison. But these writers are less
interested than Morrison in recuperating ambivalently progressive writing, and
more interested in assembling a canon of something like heroes or saints.
reading on the left 71

The work of Hardt and Negri, Agamben, and Badiou overlap in many ways.
Hardt and Negri follow Agamben in developing a concept of the ‘biopolitical’;
Agamben and Badiou have both written books on Saint Paul; Badiou and Hardt
and Negri have been at work outlining new forms of militancy to meet the
present. There is also significant disagreement among these writers – Badiou
in particular is dismissive of both Agamben’s work on Paul, and of Hardt and
Negri’s alliance of their concept of ‘the multitude’ with the anti-globalization
movement. What they all have in common, though, is an urgent message that
a new era has arrived, and a sense that reading, such as it is, must emerge from
the urgencies of the contemporary situation.
What the situation is, exactly, differs among these thinkers, and I will sketch
their respective senses of it further on. First, though, it’s worth noting a cer-
tain irony, which is that the prominence of Agamben, Badiou, and Hardt and
Negri on the American literary-academic left can be understood as register-
ing the decline of American exemplarity for European intellectuals. From the
mid-1960s to the early 1990s, grassroots politics in the United States held a spe-
cial place in left-wing European thought: from Herbert Marcuse’s interest in
(and adoption by) 60s youth movements and Guy Debord’s situationist read-
ing of the 1965 Watts uprising in Los Angeles, on through to Derrida’s remark
in the mid-1980s that ‘deconstruction is America’, the United States was a met-
onym for the possibilities and the contradictions of the period that Jameson,
himself making a global exemplar of American art and architecture, helped
popularise as ‘post-modern’.15 But Badiou’s work is emphatically centred on the
politics of France; Agamben’s makes central the experience of the mass murder
of European Jews; and Hardt and Negri’s co-authored work emphasises the
theoretical importance of migrant populations around the globe. Whether we
understand this turn away from the United States as the result of failures in its
multiculturalist and grassroots politics, or of developments outside the United
States, it is true that all the most widely circulating theoretical languages for the
present are post-American in some sense – and I think this is a significant part
of their appeal for Americans, either because they are eager to break from the
solipsism engendered by U.S. exceptionalism, or because they are exhausted
by hunting for possibilities of resistance from deep within the centre of the
imperium.
For Badiou, calling for a return to the exemplarity of a militant stance he sees
in Saint Paul, the political scene is particularly French, and defined by factional
struggles on the post-war left. In the preface to the English-language edition of

15 See Marcuse 1969, Debord 2008; and Derrida 1986.

72 chapter 3

his 2005 Metapolitics he outlines these struggles, fondly recalling the Maoism
of the 70s, when ‘everyday life was entirely politicized’ and ‘daily activism was
the done thing’.16 This activism was positioned against both the official polit-
ics of the French Communist Party and the decay of the spirit of the student
uprisings of May 1968, neither of which was as spontaneous as the Resistance
of the 1940s (Badiou’s main contemporary model of militancy). For Badiou,
everything hinges on an exasperated critique of liberal parliamentarianism,
which, politically, tends toward identification of the state with the common
good and, philosophically, tends toward the endless expostulation of opinion
instead of the pursuit of truth. As he puts it, opinion is ‘forever disjoined from
all truth. We know what this idea amounts to: sophistry … sophistry dedicated
to the promotion of an entirely particular politics. In other words: parliament-
ary politics’.17 This distinction between philosophy and sophistry, or truth and
opinion, dates to Plato, and in attempting to establish it as the criterion for an
authentic politics, Badiou dismisses the politics of multiculturalism in favour
of a small canon of writers, philosophers, and political figures who embodied,
in his mind, an ontological resistance to what ‘is’. Mao heads up the list, as does
Paul; also present are his own father and a cluster of limit-modernists like Paul
Celan, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Samuel Beckett – a canon of literary extremity
also dear to the post-structuralists whom he despises.18 What unites these lit-
erary figures for Badiou is their placement in situations where the Leninist
question of ‘what is to be done’ had an obvious answer, an answer requiring
no thought or reflection: resistance happens ineluctably – or, as he puts it, ‘by
logic’.19 Inasmuch as these literary figures are to be ‘read’ at all, they serve as
examples of militancy.
I think Badiou’s work has touched a chord among leftist academics in Bush-
era America because his exasperation with liberal humanism finds a mirror
in the capitulation of the Democratic Party to Bush’s ‘war on terror’, and the
militancy he calls for can be imagined as an antidote to that liberal giving-
away of political ground. Obscured in the U.S. context has been Badiou’s bizarre
interpretation of his modern locus classicus, the French Resistance, which he
leverages, not only against the Marxist concept of class as an engine of his-
torical change, but also against sociability, opinion, thought itself. It is beside
the point, he writes in the preface to Metapolitics, ‘to assign the study of
the Resistance to sociological or institutional representations. No group, no

16 Badiou 2005, p. xxxiv.

17 Badiou 2005, p. 14.
18 Badiou 2005, p. xxxii.
19 Badiou 2005, p. 4.
reading on the left 73

class, no social configuration or mental objective was behind the Resistance’.20

Even his sympathetic translator is left to wonder how a politics like this, so
insistent on the idea of any reflection at all as liberal nattering, can imagine
change.21
One answer, it turns out, is poetically. Badiou is appealingly schematic when
he describes the historical relations between philosophy and poetry, which
he understands to have developed along three lines: a Parmenidean postula-
tion of the oneness of all knowledge, a Platonic exile of poetry from legitim-
ate thought, and an Aristotelian impulse to categorise it. One key to Badiou’s
appeal to literary scholars in particular, I think, is the simple but bravura ges-
ture he makes, in Infinite Thought, of introducing a fourth option – which, if
you believe there have only ever been three, is breathtaking in its freshness.
This fourth relation, which is actually as old as Romanticism, assigns the role
of ‘presence’, or unmasterable intensity, to poetry and rewrites philosophy’s role
as occasional visitor to its realm, where it learns commitment.
The literary canon that facilitates such a relation must remain narrow, as
you might imagine. Only the most intense of poems can plausibly be taken as
establishing this kind of relation to philosophical thought: what could Frank
O’Hara teach Plato of commitment? And even in the case of Celan, certainly
unsurpassed in linguistic and experiential intensity, Badiou’s reading assimil-
ates his poems into the category of ‘poetry’ in general, where ‘poetry’ figures
ontological excess. He writes:

When Celan tells us:

Wurfscheibe, mit
Vorgesichten besternt,
wirf dich
auf dir hinaus.
Which can be translated as:
Cast-disc, with
Forseeings bestarred,
cast yourself
out your outside.
… [this means that] one must be poetically ready for the outside-of-self.
For the nomination of an event – in the sense in which I speak of it, that
is, an undecidable supplementation which must be named to occur for a

20 Badiou 2005, p. 5.
21 See Badiou 2005, pp. xxii–xxiii.
74 chapter 3

being-faithful, thus for a truth – this nomination is always poetic. To name

a supplement, a chance, an incalculable, one must draw from the void of
sense, in default of established significations, to the peril of language. One
must therefore poeticize, and the poetic name of the event is what throws
us outside of ourselves, through the flaming ring of predictions.22

Badiou’s assimilation of ecstasis to militancy and his assimilation of poems

to ‘the poetic name of the event’ severely contracts the imaginable canon of
‘poetry’ even as it elevates the role of ‘the poetic’ to co-chairmanship with
philosophy in the sciences of the human. This tiny canon comes at a cost:
only by being more militant, more rigorous than Plato himself, it seems, can
poetry share space with philosophy. Badiou’s thematic reading of the content
of Celan’s poem as getting the reader ready for ecstasis, however, reveals the
poem’s secondary status, since upon arrival of the logically necessary event,
the militant subject will have no need of poetry, indeed of language, in order
to act.
In Giorgio Agamben’s work, the contemporary situation is defined, much as
it is for Badiou, as a moment when issues internal to philosophy emerge as the
truth of human history. For Badiou that truth is revealed in moments where
‘logic’ supervenes all other considerations to produce blind, heroic action; for
Agamben, that truth is revealed in a coincidence between what he thinks of as a
conceptual tangle between ‘biological’ and collective life (zoe and bios, in Aris-
totle), and its manifestation as the overriding political problem of the age. Once
again the story of history is assimilated to the story of ‘Western metaphysics’,
although with Agamben it is not the exile of writing from the authenticity of the
voice that defines philosophy and therefore provides the key to understanding
history, but rather the undecidability built into the question of whether our
humanness is creaturely or political.23 The historical event that exposes this
undecidability as the new truth of history is for Agamben, as it was for Han-
nah Arendt, the mass murder of the European Jews, as well as the subsequent
refugee crises of the twentieth century. The refugee and the concentration
camp prisoner are for Agamben exemplary figures of the human because they
force the question of what we are to become, what aspects of ‘biopolitical’ life
we are to emphasise if we are to survive as a species. Only the dispossessed,
he argues, can make a humane future, because they are unhitched from the
ancient viciousness of territoriality. He makes this explicit in a 1994 essay called

22 Badiou 2005, p. 75.

23 See Agamben 1998.
reading on the left 75

‘We Refugees’, which takes its title (and no little of its argument) from a 1943
essay of Hannah Arendt’s. Describing a cosmopolitan Europe in which nobody
would claim citizenship in any state, he writes,

This space would not coincide with any homogeneous national territory,
nor with their topographical sum, but would act on these territories, mak-
ing holes in them and dividing them topologically like in a Leiden jar or
in a Moebius strip, where exterior and interior are indeterminate. In this
new space, the European cities, entering into a relationship of reciprocal
extraterritoriality, would rediscover their ancient vocation as cities of the
world. Today, in a sort of no-man’s-land between Lebanon and Israel,
there are four hundred and twenty-five Palestinians who were expelled by
the state of Israel. According to Hannah Arendt’s suggestion, these men
constitute ‘the avant-garde of their people’. But this does not necessar-
ily or only mean that they might form the original nucleus of a future
national state, which would probably resolve the Palestinian problem just
as inadequately as Israel has resolved the Jewish question. Rather, the no-
man’s-land where they have found refuge has retroacted on the territory of
the state of Israel, making holes in it. It is only in a land where the spaces
of states will have been perforated and topologically deformed, and the
citizen will have learned to acknowledge the refugee that he himself is,
that man’s political survival today is imaginable.24

For Agamben as for Badiou, the figure of the Möbius strip is useful for how it
is not the dialectic – which, for Badiou, reduces history to mere circularity.25
In this passage, the Möbius strip captures what Agamben understands to be
the undialectical directness of forms of state power that act on ‘life itself’. This
emphasis on alternatives to the dialectic is key to his thinking. In his work on
Saint Paul, Agamben argues that what Paul exposes is an unsynthesisable rem-
nant in human experience, something that the operations of reason cannot
overcome or sublate. This remnant can be understood as that which is uncap-
tured in our collective experience of time, and which therefore perpetually
keeps open the possibility of something entirely other, some different exper-
ience of time, appearing to us. In his Paul book, the problem of dialectical
thinking is that when it is confronted with this unsublatable gap in human
experience, it tries to paper it over – or worse, force it shut. Agamben’s example

24 Agamben 1995, p. 119.

25 For a helpful exposition of the figure of the Möbius strip in Badiou’s thinking, and its rela-
tion to his interpretation of the Hegelian dialectic, see Barker 2002, pp. 40–1.
76 chapter 3

of this problem is the late dogmatism of Lukács, who faced the gap between
theory and political practice, the working classes and the Communist Party, by
choosing the party line on its supremacy over the proletariat.26 In his deploy-
ment of these examples and figures, then, Agamben imagines that the undia-
lectizable dispossession of the refugee goes deeper than the exploitation of
the working classes, and eludes what he takes to be the dogmatic militancy
of a Lukács. In the distance between the figure of the dogmatic Lukács and the
sleek topology of the Möbius strip lies the source of Agamben’s appeal in the
English-language literary academy: the cosmopolitan replaces the militant and
a sense of ontological crisis (what is inside? what is outside?) replaces a theory
of revolution.
This anti-dialectical stance expresses itself in a formalist reading practice
that, like Badiou’s, turns to poetry for exemplary instances of an alternative
understanding or experience of time. In his book on Paul, Agamben interprets
a well-known sestina by the twelfth-century Occitan poet Arnaut Daniel called
‘The firm will that enters my heart’. He describes the play of rhyme in the form
of the sestina as ‘a soteriological device’ that obliges the reader to experience
a kind of recurrence that disrupts ‘linear homogeneous time’, because the six
end-words identical to each stanza appear not only in a different order in each
of a sestina’s first six stanzas but also one last time, reshuffled and compressed
into a final three-line stanza. This property of the form leads him to argue that

the sestina – and, in this sense, every poem – is a soteriological device

which, through the sophisticated mēchanē of the announcement and
retrieval of rhyming end-words (which correspond to typological rela-
tions between past and present), transforms chronological relations of
time into messianic time.27

Unlike Badiou, whose universalisation of ‘poetry’ from Celan’s poems depends

implicitly on an understanding of the urgency of the moment in which Celan
wrote – that is, during and after the mass murder of the European Jews – Agam-
ben does not suggest that there is anything about Daniel in particular, or the
itinerant status of the troubadour, or the special place of Occitan-Provençal in
Ezra Pound’s influential construction of the history of the modern lyric, that
leads him to choose this example: indeed he makes no remark on its historical
particularities at all. He is not even especially interested in the content of the

26 Agamben 2005, pp. 32–3.

27 Agamben 2005, p. 82.
reading on the left 77

poem, though arguably, like the other historical details he forgoes inspecting, it
might have made the tie between the poem and the letters of Paul (since, after
all, the figure of the ‘strong will that enters my heart’ is easily read in religious as
well as romantic terms). Instead, Agamben assimilates Daniel’s poem into ‘the
poetic’ as such, collapsing Daniel’s sestina into its form, ‘the sestina’, and the
form into ‘every poem’. Where for Badiou ‘the poetic’ earns its place by defin-
ing a realm inhabited by a small band of poetic militants, in Agamben’s case
‘the poetic’ wins particularity as an instance of language that comes to an end,
and which therefore raises philosophical and religious questions about what
endings are, as well as what salvation from them might look like (the ‘soteri-
ological device’). Just as Agamben understands the age undialectically, as a case
in extremis of mass dispossession that opens onto the possibility that those in
possession (of goods, of land) might one day let possession go, so does Agam-
ben’s soteriological ‘poem’ stage escapes from linear time by becoming a small
exemplary case of its disorder: topology become typology.
The intense pressure Agamben and Badiou put on the category of ‘poetry’
to be a lever for understanding the urgency of the present makes one wish not
only for the liberation of actual poems from such frameworks but also for a
more nuanced understanding of the contemporary ‘situation’. Michael Hardt
and Antonio Negri, among the theorists of the present who have enjoyed wide
popularity in the U.S. literary academy, certainly provide this. This is partly
because, alone among the theorists of the contemporary who have achieved
the widest readership, they tell a comparative story, a story that links Europe
and the United States to the global south. And because they take the idea of
‘the global’ seriously, they are much more wide-ranging in their examples of
political activism and militancy than either Badiou or Agamben.
They are also more dialectical. The story they tell about the current state
of capitalism is of capital responding to the creativity of workers by retooling
itself to meet a situation that workers alter. It is a story they tell and retell from
different angles, but the central version of it involves linking traditional labour
struggles with youth struggle, linking struggles over the means of production
with a reworking of what counts as production in the first place. It begins as a
story about labor unions and young people in the global north in the 1960s and
1970s and the pressure they put on capitalism:

The social struggles [of this period] not only raised the costs of reproduc-
tion and the social wage (hence decreasing the rate of profit), but also
and more important forced a change in the quality and nature of labor
itself. Particularly in the dominant capitalist countries, where the margin
of freedom afforded to and won by workers was greatest, the refusal of
78 chapter 3

the disciplinary regime of the social factory was accompanied by a ree-

valuation of the social value of the entire set of productive activities. The
disciplinary regime clearly no longer succeeded in containing the needs
and desires of young people. The prospect of getting a job that guaran-
tees regular and stable work for eight hours a day, fifty weeks a year, for
an entire working life, the prospect of entering the normalized regime of
the social factory, which had been a dream for many of their parents, now
appeared as a kind of death. The mass refusal of the disciplinary regime,
which took a variety of forms, was not only a negative expression but also
a moment of creation, what Nietzsche calls a transvaluation of values.28

This emphasis on the creativity of refusal by young people in the postwar global
north has two significant meanings for Hardt and Negri, both of which they
italicise. First, they take this refusal as evidence that ‘[this] “merely cultural”
experimentation had very profound political and economic effects’ – by which
they mean a range of developments, from the creation of a ‘youth market’ to
the expansion of a service sector designed to meet new desires.29 Capital, that
is, was obliged to respond to what Hardt and Negri think of as ‘new subjectivit-
ies’. Second, they take the example of youth counterculture as a signal instance
of ‘change from below’ – or, as they put it, ‘Capital did not need to invent a
new paradigm (even if it were capable of doing so) because the truly creative
moment had already taken place’.30
But Hardt and Negri’s scenario of youthful creativity as the engine that drives
changes in capital begs two questions. One, is this kind of creativity available to
more directly exploited populations? And two, what does it mean to call ‘cre-
ative’ a refusal that is met so emphatically with a subsumption? That is, why
emphasise the creativity of youth culture when it so quickly became a mere
market?
In answering these questions, Hardt and Negri tread lightly on the causal
links between the rise of new forms of labour in the global north (which they
call, in rotating fashion, ‘post-Fordist’ labor, ‘affective labor’, and ‘immaterial
labor’). In this they lag behind thinkers like Gayatri Spivak, who in 1985 had
already pointed out that new information systems, which sped up the flow
of data in the north and made possible a futurist vision of the home office
and the telecommute, were causing an intensification of exploitation in the
global south, essentially a work speedup in response to sped-up demand in the

28 Hardt and Negri 2000, pp. 273–4.

29 Hardt and Negri 2000, p. 274.
30 Hardt and Negri 2000, p. 276.
reading on the left 79

north.31 Like Spivak, however, Hardt and Negri draw attention to the becoming-
parallel of exploitative processes in north and south, so that the growth of the
service sector in the north, which obliges workers to give over their creativ-
ity to seeming nice, or to solving minute problems of client whim, is part of
the same process by which the dispossessed of the south are forced into cre-
atively defending their livelihoods and their resources. For Hardt and Negri,
‘creativity’ in the south looks different, both because the global poor of the
south are often the guardians of traditional knowledge that benefits everyone
and because they are on the front lines of struggles that implicate everyone.
Hardt and Negri’s examples stress battles to preserve biodiversity, which they
call a form of ‘wealth’ especially concentrated in the global south.32
As for the question of why we should construe as ‘creativity’ the kinds of
refusals of life under capital that seem simply to breed more sophisticated
responses from capital’s machinery, Hardt and Negri have a slightly unstable
answer that splits the difference, you could say, between the social and the
ontological. They clearly believe that the priority of inventiveness from below,
however constantly it is met with counter-invention by capital, gives those
‘below’ the edge in seizing their situation and changing it. This seems a per-
petual condition of social relations since the rise of capital. But they also seem
to believe that this era is special because of the way capital has been obliged to
take hold of affect, of creativity, in ever more ‘immaterial’ ways, raising the pos-
sibility that the intensification of capital into the realm of the ‘biopolitical’ will
trigger a massive rejection of its demands, since capital may be approaching
too close, as it did in the era of child labour, to a kind of absolute exploitation.
The persuasiveness of these arguments has been at issue since the publica-
tion of Empire in 2000, perhaps no more acutely than in Gopal Balakrishnan’s
early and pointed observation that the difference between the multitude and
the empire is not so much that the multitude is inventive and empire reactive,
but that the empire has more guns.33 I am going to demur, however, from the
question of whether Hardt and Negri have an effective political programme to
propose (they don’t claim to).
I’d like to spend a moment, instead, to suggest what might be the appeal of
work like Empire and Multitude for readers in the literary academy. I think it
lies in Hardt and Negri’s argument that, as capital is obliged to colonise more
and more ‘immaterial’ aspects of the labour process, commodifying affect, bod-
ily comportment, information, and knowledge, this colonisation deforms older

31 See Spivak 1988, pp. 154–78.

32 See Hardt and Negri 2004, pp. 131–2.
33 See Balakrishnan 2000.
80 chapter 3

class categories and makes it harder to describe the world in terms of an indus-
trial proletariat and a capitalist class. In Multitude, they call this ‘the social-
ization of all the figures of labor’, meaning that older categories – peasant,
proletariat, service worker – are alike caught up in new imperatives of capital
so that ‘the struggles of each sector tend to become the struggle of all’.34 Though
they caution that this ‘socialisation’ does not mean that all struggles are alike,
or that all exploitation is equally intense, their stance clearly makes room for
the affect-workers of the northern literary academy to imagine themselves in
alliance with the exploited of the global south.
Hardt and Negri’s concept of the becoming-social of labour finds expres-
sion in the composition of their two books as well. One thing to notice about
Empire and Multitude is that they incorporate a far wider canon of texts than
do Agamben or Badiou: they include quotes from ancient and modern literary
sources, from popular songs, from political thinkers and economists. Inter-
estingly, though, Hardt and Negri make almost no space for poetry in their
work, perhaps because the modern lyric, the most extractable form, lays greater
emphasis on individual subjectivity than on the kinds of collective experience
they are interested in tracking.
This move in the direction of culling prose sources across fields and genres
also leads Hardt and Negri away from the close reading of literary texts. Instead,
they strew mention of them throughout Empire and Multitude in the forms of
anecdote, epigraph, sidebar, and what they call ‘excurses’. The overall effect of
this incorporation of literary material into the two volumes is that each citation
carries a lighter burden of exemplarity, and takes on the ready-to-hand char-
acter of the aphorism. In pursuing this activity of literary assemblage, Hardt
and Negri prove themselves humanists in a textual sense: among other things,
Empire and Multitude are left-wing commonplace books, stuffed full of aphor-
ism, products of the kind of rhetorical invention that reassembles texts to suit
an occasion: indeed at the end of Multitude, they make specific recourse to the
idea of kairos, or occasion, in order to highlight that they do not a have a polit-
ical programme, that programme making is the job of activists, but that they
are calling for a kind of reading that helps prepare for, and clarify, activism.35
This inventive textual practice, and its relation to a sense of situation, is per-
haps best encapsulated in the very first of their hundreds of citations, a song
lyric by Ani DiFranco that appears on the front page of Empire: ‘Every tool is
a weapon if you hold it right’. So the concept of creativity and inventiveness

34 Hardt and Negri 2004, p. 125.

35 See Hardt and Negri 2004, p. 357.
reading on the left 81

that is Hardt and Negri’s key to rethinking capital, and the source of the most
controversy in their work, has a literary and rhetorical corollary in how they
put their books together: they tell a story of inventiveness by way of sustained
textual invention.36

4 Criticism, ‘Theory’, and Matter

I conclude my survey of contemporary ‘reading on the left’ with Hardt and

Negri not only because their work, among the major critical theories of the day,
offers the most thorough account of the present, but also because it completes
a certain critical arc that begins with Jameson. As with Jameson’s work, Hardt
and Negri’s is rooted in an understanding of capital that hinges on the question
of the priority of matter and labour. Their emphasis on the primacy of labour-
ing creativity, which has a fifty-year history in Italian operaismo (‘workerism’),
and which has philosophical roots in Spinoza’s monism, is a precise counter-
position to the Sartrean materialism of Jameson, which gives ‘inert’ matter pri-
ority over human praxis. So we could say that these two accounts of literature’s
relation to history and politics since the 70s, because they are so firmly rooted in
philosophical accounts of matter and labour that worry the question of which
comes first, leave us in a kind of manic-depressive readerly situation, where we
are invited to read according to whether post-proletarian social movements –
multicultural, anti-globalising – are failures awaiting redemption, or upsurges
of irrepressible creativity. Either way the post-1968 history of reading on the
left, viewed in this light, becomes a history of rushing – first with high hopes,
then in disappointment – from one potential exemplarity to the next.
I would like to propose that we literary critics consider another option,
which, put most briefly, is the option of thinking of ourselves as literary crit-
ics, instead of as ‘theorists’, or activists. Activists we may become – wonderful
to think! – but the kinds of things we might learn, in developing literary-critical
knowledge, seem to me to have a different relation to politics and history than

36 In this practice of assemblage and invention, Hardt and Negri’s work parallels two devel-
opments in contemporary literary studies: a shift in the scale of reading, driven both by
technologies of digital reproduction and data storage, which make it possible to develop
new forms of pattern-recognition across many more texts than could be carefully read
by a single scholar, and by a new comparativism, which insists on tracking the often-
surprising circulation of texts across linguistic and geographical divides. Franco Moretti’s
recent work on the novel, and Wai-Chee Dimock’s research into the ‘deep time’ of circu-
lation, are defining examples of these new developments. See Dimock 2006, and Moretti
2007.
82 chapter 3

what was on offer in the age of ‘theory’, which tried to mediate between cri-
ticism and activism by imagining the relation between the two as necessary,
or as definitional (not least in a compressed code that went: writing-is-reading
/ reading-is-literacy / literacy-is-empowerment / empowerment-is-activist). In
fact, as I hope I’ve managed to suggest, ‘theory’ tended to assimilate literary
texts, not to politics, but to philosophical questions about necessity, or about
universality and particularity. So let me turn for a moment to a defence of lit-
erary criticism that slightly predates the left-wing reading I’ve outlined here.
In 1957, at the height of the Cold War, Northrop Frye argued in the ‘Tentative
Conclusion’ to Anatomy of Criticism that ‘no discussion of beauty can confine
itself to the formal relations of the isolated work of art; it must consider, too, the
participation of the work of art in the vision of the goal of social effort, the idea
of complete and classless civilization’.37 Lest he be mistaken for a Commun-
ist, Frye makes clear that his understanding of ‘class’ is Arnoldian, not Marxist;
‘classlessness’ in this account amounts to urbanity, to good taste. But along-
side the rear-guard action in Frye’s formulation there exists a progressive truth,
which is this idea of the participation of ‘the work of art’ in imagining society
as other than itself. This is what Jameson means when he writes, retooling Frye
in The Political Unconscious, that ‘no matter how weakly … all literature must
be read as a symbolic meditation on the destiny of community’.38 Note that
this is not a definition of literature; it identifies in literature something Jameson
thinks we must attend to. For Frye and Jameson alike, criticism tracks literature;
they have a mimetic relation, and negative, ‘symptomatic’, or even antagonist
readings by critics of literary texts do not change this relation – they merely
strike different notes on its scale.
What this suggests to me is that the more deeply we allow ourselves to under-
stand literary texts as being written out of histories of struggle, of liberation, of
toil, the less pressure we will feel to read them ‘theoretically’, to super-add an
activist orientation to them, since they will all the more clearly be documents of
a history of human struggles to be free – not least free, for readers of nineteenth-
and twentieth-century writing, of the consequences of capitalist exploitation.
One thing that emerges, when we allow ourselves to imagine a mimetic relation
between literature and criticism along the axis of ‘the destiny of community’, is
the possibility that reading literary texts for marks of how they imagine them-
selves as literary, as part of the history of literature, is not only self-referential,
but referential of literature’s shifting position in the history of ‘social effort’.

37 Frye 1957, p. 348.

38 Jameson 1981, p. 70.
reading on the left 83

I think allowing for the simultaneously social and intraliterary orientation of

our objects of study at the outset places the search for scholarly objectivity on
firmer footing: objectivity is to be found not in the ability of literary scholars to
read texts from frameworks that bear no trace of the objects they study, but in
the historical story that emerges when we read texts for how they participate
in the history of what, at different times and places, ‘the literary’ has meant.
There are many avenues along which we might construct histories of the lit-
erary imaginary of literary texts. Because the frame of my essay has been the
post-1960s history of ‘reading on the left’, though, I’d like to highlight one pos-
sibility in particular. I have tried to suggest that the strong situational forms of
reading that bookend the last third of the twentieth century depend on theories
of matter bound up in what comes first – matter ‘itself’, or human action upon
it? I have also tried to suggest that this logical and ontological problem is not
well suited to confront the problems of materiality with which literary history
presents us – that the philosophical phrasing of what matter is does not match
very well the history of literary objects imagining themselves to be one kind
of ‘matter’ or another. I have also argued that the political comportment we
are invited to adopt by Jamesonian and Negrian materialisms (or Sartrean and
Spinozan materialisms) has tended to fork, meta-historically, in the late twen-
tieth century: we should read for optimism or pessimism, or (put modally) for
tragedy or comedy.
So I feel enabled by work like Jameson’s, and Hardt and Negri’s, to under-
stand literary history as part of a broad history of social and political struggle,
and eager to expand our understanding of ‘political struggle’ so as to include
under its rubric struggles to survive, to love, to live in safety and in joy that
may not at first have seemed ‘political’ per se. And I am convinced that to read
literature as part of a human struggle to be free necessarily includes reading
literature for its engagement with ‘matter’ – with its production, its appear-
ance, its working and reworking. But I think we need an account of literary
materialisms closer to the ground of literary history than what is on offer by
the strongest left-wing theoretical materialisms, which quickly become full-on
philosophies of history before they have really absorbed the particulars of liter-
ary history (which, after all, may seem a mere by-way or rest stop in the rush to
theorise History, capital H). I don’t mean that the ‘literary’ is a single thing, or
an unconstructed thing, or that it is not riven by internal contradictions; but I
think there is a record, in the writing we have come to call ‘literary’, of how that
writing conceives of its literariness, and I think that record could inform a his-
tory of ‘matter’ that makes more sense for literature. My own investigation into
this question in the archive of twentieth-century poetry in English suggests,
for one thing, that the history of poetic materialism is less heroic, less clearly
84 chapter 3

tragic or comic, than the theoretical accounts would suggest, and more scatter-
shot, more ad hoc, and more protective of ‘poetry’ than prescriptive of political
action. It is also more linked than we might think to the educational traditions
by which written poetry has been made part of the body of ‘literature’ in the
West – more linked, that is, to the long history of poetry as a tool and occasion
for the teaching of rhetoric and grammar, where ‘matter’ has its own meanings.

5 A Poem

I’d like to conclude with a brief reading of a contemporary poem. Poetry is

underrepresented in the post-1968 English-language literary criticism of the
Left, even as it has emerged, at least in North America, as an extremely fine-
grained and inventive medium for understanding the present – not least the
present in which capital has achieved the spectacular form Guy Debord de-
scribed for it in 1967, where the awesomeness of capital’s productive power
mediates all social relations.39 So while I don’t mean for the poems that fol-
low to bear excessive exemplary weight, I do think there’s an interesting story
to be told about twentieth-century poetry and twentieth-century capital. And
one chapter of this story has to do with how English-language poets since the
1980s have deployed figures of literacy and reading, not as ‘post-modern’ or
self-referential tropes, but as indices to the history of poetry and to how its
assembly of textual ‘matter’ competes with the massive organisation of mat-
ter under capital. This is true when Michael Palmer writes, at the beginning of
his astonishing 1988 poem ‘sun’,

Write this. We have burned all their villages

Write this. We have burned all the villages and the people in them
Write this. We have adopted their customs and their manner of dress40

Or when Lyn Hejinian, in her 1994 volume The Cold of Poetry, writes,

‘Depress the world’

with true literary realism – that is, words
as they are41

39 See Debord 2006.

40 Palmer 2001, p. 233.
41 Hejinian 1994, p. 163.
reading on the left 85

Or when Harryette Mullen writes, in the abécédaire (called ‘Jingle Jangle’)

she includes in her 2002 collection, Sleeping with the Dictionary,

Backtrack backpack Bahama Mama balls to the wall bam-a-lam band-

stand
Battle in Seattle beat the meat bee’s knees behani ghani best-dressed.42

All these poems, which are in conversation with the influential avant-garde
movement called ‘Language Poetry’, riff on figures and concepts of the acquis-
ition of literacy in order to investigate what kind of ‘matter’ poetry might be –
and, often explicitly, to set that matter against other ‘matters’ that seem to
operate on a much larger scale (Vietnam, in Palmer’s poem; or ‘the world’ in
Hejinian; or the ‘Jingle Jangle’ of spectacular noise that includes ‘The Battle in
Seattle’, in Mullen).
The poem I’d like to look at, which participates in this recent poetic history, is
from Lisa Robertson’s 2001 book The Weather. Robertson grew up poetically in
the very active scene around the writer-organised Kootenay School of Writing
in Vancouver, though she now lives in the United States. The Weather grew out
of research into what Robertson calls ‘the rhetorical structure of English met-
eorological description’. Written during a fellowship at Cambridge University,
it cites and reworks language from bbc shipping forecasts, Sprat’s History of the
Royal Society, Wordsworth’s Prelude, and William Cobbett’s Rural Rides, among
many other sources. It is prefaced with a passage from the Arcades Project:
‘Architecture, fashion – yes, even the weather – are, in the interior of the col-
lective, what the sensoria of organs, the feeling of sickness or health, are in the
individual’. The book is organised in sections named for the days of the week,
punctuated by shorter parts called ‘Residence at C’. Here is one of those parts:

Give me hackneyed words because

they are good. Brocade me the whole body
of terrestrial air. Say spongy ground
with its soft weeds. Say self because it can.
Say arts of happiness. Say you have died.
Say sequin because the word just
appeared. Say weather take this adult
from its box. Memorize being sequined
to something, water. Everything you forget

42 Mullen 2002, p. 34.

86 chapter 3

inserts love into the silent money.

Memorize huge things of girders greased. Say
the water parting about the particular
animal. Say what happens to the face
as it gala tints my simple cut
vicious this afternoon the beautiful
light on the cash is human to guzzle
with – go away wild feelings, there you go
as the robin as the songsparrow go
the system shines with uninterrupted
light. It’s petal caked. Leaves shoot up. Each
leaf’s a runnel. Far into the night a
sweetness. Marvelous. Spectacular. Brilliant.
Clouded towards the south. It translates
Lucretius. Say cup of your heart rush
sluice is yellow sluice Kate Moss is Rousseau
have my arms. Say impasto of
atmosphere for her fur. Halo open
her face. Misplace the death. All the truth
under the tree has two pinky oozy
names. Say trying to possess or not. Say
if you thought love was ironical. If
pleasure emancipates, why aren’t you some-
where. Sincerity.43

The poem begins in praise of deep mundanity, of the ‘hackneyed words’ about
the weather that we use to pass the time, placeholder language that keeps us
in each other’s company though it may not carry lots of information. But the
weather is a topic, in the old sense of a topic in rhetoric, and the rest of the
poem plays with the idea of poetry as a school art, medium for rhetoric but
also for grammar and for elocution. It is written largely in imperatives: Say this,
say that. Memorise. ‘It translates / Lucretius’ – the most didactic poet on the
least exotic subject, the nature of things. The poem is engaged in something
like a humanist project of stylistic pedagogy, arranging utterances in anthology
form. It is itself, I think we can say, hermeneutical: the reader of the poem is
not the only one doing the work of interpretation.

43 Robertson 2001, pp. 14–15.

reading on the left 87

The poet is also engaged in a memory practice, in the form of an anatomy

of pleasures she is worried she’ll forget. It’s an anatomy not only of ‘the whole
body / of terrestrial air’ but also of the ‘self’, the ‘adult’, the ‘particular animal’ –
its face, its haircut, its feelings, its heart, its arms. Memorising these, the poem
suggests, is a stay against the problem of money; but money is fused with the
medium of perception, light:

Everything you forget

inserts love into the silent money.

the beautiful
light on the cash is human to guzzle
with
…
the system shines with uninterrupted
light.

Robertson seems to be saying that any lapse of our attention to what we love
hurries love off to capital; she is noticing that it is perfectly human to want to
soak up the light, but that whatever it falls on, it is always falling on cash, so
that one cannot perceive without ingesting it; and she is saying that there is no
pause in the light, so that to seek pleasure is to become sutured – ‘sequined’, in
the poem’s language – to an unending process that sounds a lot like the spec-
tacle.
Robertson’s speaker is a feminist, and she wants to believe in a politics of the
body and its pleasures, but the twining together of beauty to money has left her
dismayed:

If
pleasure emancipates, why aren’t you some-
where. Sincerity.

So what, as they say, is to be done? The poem does not answer this question,
but the one it does pursue may be more appropriate to literary criticism: what’s
going on? I think poetry is especially useful as a record of how print textuality,
passed down to us out of a humanist configuration of rhetoric, grammar, and
criticism, is constantly being refigured and retooled into new forms of textual
matter so as to meet what capital makes into material. Some poetry seeks to
keep up with it, to outmanoeuvre it; some poetry seeks to stave it off; some
poetry seeks homoeopathic contact with it, so as to make itself immune to it.
88 chapter 3

These relations are all experimental, and they are liable to failure; indeed, in a
Sartrean mode we should expect them to fail. But their failure is not the most
interesting thing, or even the most literary-historically important thing about
them. Even if revolution remains the limit-horizon against which we measure
literary dreaming, its wishes for arcadia or its visions of suffering, that does not
mean that the critic has only the measure from text to revolution to name. We
don’t know what revolution will look like, what it will seize hold of, because the
history of the capture of material life by capital, and of resistance to it, is still
being written. And in any case, cultivating revolutionary consciousness may
not be a job we need to do; the comment boxes underneath the articles on the
subprime mortgage fiasco show clearly enough that in a crisis, everyone is cap-
able of systemic thinking. But we may be the best trained in the custodial job of
maintaining and arranging texts according to the anatomies they suggest, and
the questions they pose: do feelings move as fast as money? Does language?
Assembling the textual body that tracks these questions, even if they shift like
clouds, can help us rethink the meanings of literary and rhetorical material-
ity; and I think we can learn from this assembly a little bit about the workings
of another ‘matter’ – matter in the sense of the deeds of a mighty protagonist,
as Arthur’s were known by the name The Matter of Britain, or Charlemagne’s
The Matter of France. I think if we can learn to read the weather we will better
understand The Matter of Capital.
 chapter 4

Affect, Performativity, and Actually Existing Poetry

This essay thinks about how the conjunction of the keywords ‘affect’ and ‘per-
formativity’ in U.S. literary studies encodes a theoretical story about literature
and politics, especially poetry and politics, that has drifted from the actual
poetry written in the States since the mid-twentieth century. In the first part
of the essay I try to piece apart this theoretical story, and in the second I turn to
the work of the poet Jack Spicer, who is enjoying a significant revival in the U.S.
at the moment, as a way of beginning to tell stories about poetry and politics
other than the affective-performative one that became so dominant in the era
of the American consumption of French theory.
First, though, I should note that in the American literary academy, the field
first called to mind by the words ‘affect’ and ‘performativity’ is the field of queer
theory – which begins with deep debts to French post-structuralism but quickly
puts French theory’s presuppositions and insights to quite different use. Judith
Butler’s work in the early 1990s on the performative and citational character of
sexuality made it possible for scholars of sexuality to imagine strong accounts
of sexual identity that were not etiological – an immense benefit after more
than a century of pathologising, origin-obsessed descriptions of sexual identity
in the medical and social sciences. In a similar way, the work of Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick on the dynamics of shame – especially as she began to make use of
models of affect like those of Silvan Tompkins – allowed scholars in the human-
ities to imagine that affect could be studied, not only for its origins, but for its
variety. Sedgwick’s work was especially emphatic in its detourning of the ques-
tion ‘why are there gay people in the world?’ – which she rightly took to imply
an obsession with figuring out how to engineer their presence out of it.1
In the 1990s, then, queer theory formed a riposte or counter-movement
to the becoming-scientific of American psychoanalysis, whose mutation into
professional psychology and psychiatry at mid-century was closely tied to the
military’s need to assess the fitness of soldiers for the work of war. Queer the-
orists, as if in response, turned to literary writing, especially fictional narrat-
ive, to overturn the categorical and pathologising styles of knowing that the
military-industrial boom had helped facilitate. Fiction in particular provided

1 See, of course, Butler 1990. Sedgwick’s work on Tompkins is redacted in Sedgewick 1995, and
her remark about the will to erasure lurking in the desire to know the ‘cause’ of homosexuality
can be found in Sedgewick 1993.

©
90 chapter 4

these scholars a rich terrain by which to study the ways in which the seeming
autonomy of character was in fact enmeshed in other features of storytelling –
was inseparable, in fact, from plot, discursive aspect, and point-of-view. And
in a Foucauldian turn, in these accounts enmeshment was cousin to freedom,
since, unlike bourgeois notions of the autonomy of character, queer-theroetical
accounts focused on affect and linguistic performance saw character as rela-
tional.2
So the conjunction of ‘affect’ and ‘performativity’ in U.S. literary studies has
strong liberatory overtones. But the rise of those two keywords is linked back to
the emergence of a post-structuralism with different aims and somewhat dif-
ferent coordinates, which for my purposes here include a preference for poetic
over fictional examples and an anti-scientism aimed, not at the professional-
ised therapeutic arts, but at the scientific pretensions of Marxism.
This pre-history also has roots in the Second World War. In post-war France,
the diverse writers of the Tel Quel group began to carve out a notion of literat-
ure as ‘writing’ that emphasised, instead of the genius of any particular author,
or the canon-worthiness of any particular text, the self-reflexive, theoretical
practice shared by writers of poetry, fiction, journalism, and philosophy. This
reformulation of literature into ‘writing’ drew on both the semiotics of Barthes
and the Russian Formalism of the 1920s, which was being translated into French
in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Through its many twists and turns (apolitical
beginnings, an alliance with the Communist Party of France, its dalliance with
Maoism) the Tel Quel group argued for a medium-specificity of ‘language’ that
was innately political, and in need of no external ideological support for its
politics. This put them at odds with Sartre, whose engaged existentialism pre-
sumed that authors, not writing, were the vector of politics. This politicisation
of ‘language’, then, was also a critique of existentialist Marxism.3
By the time of the rise of literary post-structuralism in France and the U.S.,
this earlier debate had congealed into a kind of fossil-layer under the ground,
invisible to surface observation but rich in useful fuel. To get a clear sense of the
relationship between politics and literature in this work therefore requires a bit
of lingering: its polemics are often embedded in what seem like purely local ges-
tures. But I would like to linger briefly with some examples of it because, at least
in the U.S., its sidelong propositions about the political character of literature
became reflex assumptions before they were ever made explicit.

2 Again, Sedgwick’s work is crucial here. See essays collected in Sedgewick 1997.
3 For good English-language work on the post-war milieu of French intellectual life, and the
germinating conditions of post-structuralism, see Marx-Scouras 1996, Holsinger 2005, and
Cusset 2008.
affect, performativity, and actually existing poetry 91

The late work of Paul de Man, especially the work collected in the volume
Aesthetic Ideology, gives a good sense of how ‘affect’ and ‘performativity’ were
used in his writing. In the well-known essay ‘Phenomenality and Materiality in
Kant’, de Man locates a ‘deep, perhaps fatal break’ in Kant’s Critique of Judge-
ment (1790), which is caused by Kant’s inability to understand that words for
beauty are not simply part of a catalogue – they cannot be typologised or
made into a system without cost to their nuance.4 To put it another way, de
Man is impatient with Kant’s reduction of language to ‘a system of tropes’, not
least after Kant has been obliged to acknowledge, in attempting to develop
an account of the sublime, that there is a dynamic and not merely descript-
ive relation between language and the world in the moment of sublimity. As de
Man phrases it, ‘From the pseudocognition of tropes, language has to expand to
the activity of performance’.5 What ‘performance’ means here is a kind of pre-
conscious mimesis or echo-system in which words and phrases call each other
up like a rebus, in a drive more powerful than even the driest of philosophy
can regulate. De Man calls it ‘the play of the letter and the syllable’ – and he
says it forces even Kant to modulate from a faculty model of psychology to one
‘mediated by affects, moods, and feelings’.6 This appearance of linguistic play
in the activity of writing, when the writer cannot help but, say, include in his
text multiple words with ‘-ll’ in them – this appearance is what de Man means
by the performative, and he views it as a kind of mundane violence (it leads us
to break down words into their component parts) that philosophers ignore at
cost to analytic clarity.
One way to read the idea of the performative in de Man, then, is as a mark
of the differences in analytic rigour between disciplines. In another late essay,
‘Kant’s Materialism’, de Man writes that ‘Kant is never as bland as when he
discusses the emotions’, suggesting that what his writing misses is the ‘inter-
pretive sensitivity, the affective cogito that one can capture in Montaigne, in
Malebranche, or in the Romantics’.7 It’s not just that Kant’s philosophy is weak
on the emotions because of a weakness in his understanding of language; it’s
that the performative powers of language, which de Man suggests Kant under-
stands full well, simply cannot be incorporated into any philosophy in a Kan-
tian vein.
When de Man refers to ‘Kant’s materialism’, then, he is being ironic: the
formal system into which Kant attempts to incorporate affect, mood, linguistic

4 de Man 1996a, p. 79.

5 Ibid.
6 de Man 1996a, pp. 89, 80.
7 de Man 1996a, p. 123.
92 chapter 4

performance – this system has already de-materialised matter after the manner
of a comfy beachside encounter with a storm far from shore: ‘Poets, in Kant, do
not embark on the high seas’.8 He has still more stringent ironies reserved for
the misguided ‘materialists’ of the contemporary literary academy: ‘Theoreti-
cians of literature who fear that they may have deserted or betrayed the world
by being too formalistic are worrying about the wrong thing: in the spirit of
Kant’s third Critique, they were not nearly formalistic enough’.9
Lest the Marxist materialist miss the irony, de Man makes sure to dismiss the
critical force of their other key concept. In another late essay on Kant, de Man
rejects the notion that the movement by which philosophical contemplation is
disrupted by linguistic performance can be understood by way of the dialectic:

At that moment things happen, there is occurrence, there is event. History

is therefore not a temporal notion, it has nothing to do with temporal-
ity, but it is the emergence of a language of power out of a language of
cognition. An emergence which is, however, not itself either a dialectical
movement or any kind of continuum …10

This anti-dialectical loyalty to the pre-contextual ‘event’, so closely linked in

de Man to properly professional literary reading, is cousin to another key anti-
Hegelian moment in French post-structuralism, which is to be found in the
work of Jacques Derrida. Briefly, then, I’d like to turn to a crucial theoretical
story of Derrida’s.
Over the course of his long career, Derrida revised his thinking about liter-
ature, philosophy and politics countless times, but his early work is very clear
in establishing a set of founding relays among those domains. So I’d like to take
a look at his influential 1966 essay, ‘From Restricted to General Economy: A
Hegelianism without Reserve’. The piece leans on Alexandre Kojève’s Marxian
interpretation of Hegel in order to produce an allegory of Hegelian negativity
as industrial labour; then, enabled by this analogy or allegory, it turns to Bataille
and a Kierkegaardian absurdism to argue that the negative must be under-
stood in terms other than those to which philosophy submits it; the negative,
for Derrida, is constantly being brought into philosophical service – exploited,
he suggests – as the other of meaning, providing the prompt to philosophical
concept-honing. But it cannot be assimilated to such uses.

8 de Man 1996a, p. 127.

9 de Man 1996a, p. 128.
10 de Man 1996a, p. 133.
affect, performativity, and actually existing poetry 93

Derrida’s essay makes two key moves that, taken together, proved extremely
persuasive on American shores. One is to transpose the question of the exploit-
ation of labour into a philosophical register, by reading it as the capture and
exploitation of negativity by philosophy, where it is forced into the work of sys-
tematic thinking. The other is to suggest that the true character of the negative
is expressed in chance and in play, and that this true character of the negat-
ive is best understood in literary terms – or, more specifically, modernist poetic
terms, best exemplified by Mallarmé’s Un coup de’dés jamais n’abolira le hasard.
Derrida gestures at Mallarmé’s poem this way:

The poetic or ecstatic is that in every discourse which can open itself up to
the absolute loss of its sense, to the (non-)base of the sacred, of nonmean-
ing, of un-knowledge or play, to the swoon from which it is reawakened
by a throw of the dice.11

This move is significant because, having transposed the question of labour into
a philosophical question of negativity, and having implicity posited the mod-
ernist poetics of Mallarmé as a privileged site for the expression of the negativ-
ity that philosophy seeks to capture, Derrida aligns the poetic specificity of the
modernist lyric with the uncapturable life-force of the rebellious worker. He
contrasts the ‘master’ of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic with a Bataillean ‘sov-
ereign’ who laughs at philosophy’s mere ‘amortisation’ of the negative, who
laughs at death: ‘laughter alone exceeds dialectics and the dialectician’.12 Not-
ing that ‘philosophy is work itself for Bataille’, he adds that Hegelian Aufhebung
is ‘laughable’ because it is merely a ‘busying of discourse’ that starts panting as
it ‘reappropriates all negativity for itself’.13 Philosophy, here, is a huffing bour-
geois.
Now the bourgeoisie, as a mercantile or a professional class, are not entirely,
or not necessarily, the same as the industrial capitalist class that actually would
compel labour; so we should note another slight shift or transposition in the
Marxian critique here. Similarly, note that it is not capital, but the dialectic, that
is the enemy – so that the militant worker, when the moment of rebellion finally
becomes possible, rebels not against capital, but against philosophy. Indeed, at
the moment when Derrida’s allegory depicts rebellion, ‘the negative’ – figured,
Derrida says, in the Hegelian slave, who Derrida says Kojève suggests is the
worker – at the moment of rebellion, the worker looks more existential than

11 Derrida 1980, p. 261.

12 Derrida 1980, p. 256.
13 Derrida 1980, pp. 252, 257.
94 chapter 4

militant.14 Indeed he looks more like a Resistance fighter in World War ii than
a proletarian. Here is Derrida’s gloss on the negative in Bataille:

[it] can no longer be called negative precisely because it has no reserved

underside, because it can no longer permit itself to be converted into
positivity, it can no longer collaborate with the continuous linking-up of
meaning, concept, time, and truth in discourse; because it literally can no
longer labor and let itself be interrogated as ‘the work of the negative’.15

Note the italicised word ‘collaborate’ in this passage, which to my ear is a

giveaway signal that the allegory of the negative-as-worker has now received
an overlay of wartime militancy.
What all these deft allegorical, anthropomorphic, and transposing gestures
accomplish, for Derrida, is the insight that German dialectical philosophy is no
match for French literary modernism:

In interpreting negativity as labor, in betting for discourse, meaning, his-

tory, etc., Hegel has bet against play, against chance. He has blinded him-
self … to the fact that play includes the work of meaning or the meaning
of work.16

In 1966, this overlay of the figure of the militant Resistance fighter on top of
the figure of the worker, who is cannier than the philosopher-bourgeois about
the work-cancelling play that modern poetry highlights, is a kind of backward
glance. But it is also an echo of a contemporary development in French polit-
ics. Here is a key passage from the 1966 Situationist pamphlet On The Poverty of
Student Life:

For the proletariat revolt is a festival or it is nothing: in revolution the road

of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. A palace which knows only one
rationality: the game. The rules are simple: to live instead of devising a
lingering death, and to indulge untrammeled desire.17

The distribution of this pamphlet by the students of the University of Stras-

bourg helped trigger, two years later, the student alliance with workers in the

14 Derrida 1980, p. 276.

15 Derrida 1980, pp. 259–60.
16 Derrida 1980, p. 260.
17 See Ford 2005.
affect, performativity, and actually existing poetry 95

uprisings of May 1968; and it remains an exemplary text for non-Communist

Party, Marxist anti-capitalism in France. I cannot trace the lines of common-
ality or influence between Derrida and the Situationists with much precision
here; it is hard to say whether Derrida is leaning on rebellious student ener-
gies, or the students are picking up on something that Derrida is also aware of,
a critique of Communist Party politics that is registered as a romantic (here,
Blakean) critique of Hegel (the ‘lingering death’ of the dialectic as work, as
opposed to ‘untrammeled desire’, which Derrida renders, in the title of his essay,
as ‘Hegelianism without reserve’).
What has become clear with time, though, is that the leveraging of mod-
ernist poetry into an anti-dialectical argument with Hegel (and implicitly,
doctrinaire, party-line Marxism) becomes the gesture into which the idea of
‘poetry’ is incorporated in the French theory that travelled to American shores
in the 1970s and 1980s. This anti-dialecticism is emphatically present in Julia
Kristeva’s 1974 Revolution in Poetic Language, which pits the disruptive liter-
ary practice of Mallarmé and Lautréamont against a psychoanalytic subject
falsely unified by the state and society. And it organises Jean-Luc Nancy’s 1982
The Inoperative Community, which cites Bataille’s remark in Literature and Evil
(1957) that ‘Literature cannot assume the task of directing collective necessity’
in order to position a Levinasian-Heideggerian understanding of poetry as an
‘interruption’ against both those literary texts that seek after mere produced
beauty, and that late Marxism that imagines state-managed ‘productivity’ as
the only engine of history.18 This is not to mention the work of Gilles Deleuze
and Félix Guattari, or, more recently, Alain Badiou, who have all kept alive, from
very different philosophical positions, the practice of pitting one literary mod-
ernism or another against a cartoon of Hegel made to stand in for something
like either the rigidness or the insufficient militancy of the French Communist
Party.
So when we speak, in the U.S. at least, about ‘affect’ and ‘performativity’, we
are not only silently glossing the rise of an American queer theory in which
both keywords signal the escape from an orthodoxy – either Freud’s, or that
of a scientised psychoanalysis. We are also glossing a French intellectual and
political history in which literary studies, under cover of structuralism, lays
claim to the autonomy and priority of an idea of poetry over and against mid-
twentieth-century versions of both cognitivist and dialectical philosophy –
which is to say, over and against both instrumental reason and Communist ‘sci-
ence’.

18 Nancy 1991, p. 77.

96 chapter 4

There is a third layer to this American absorption of the idea of the per-
formative, though, which involves a rejection of the scientific pretensions of
literary post-structuralism itself – a residual urge-to-structure that, from the
vantage of the queer American 90s, seemed to tend towards political quiet-
ism. If the rise of student movements in the late 1960s gave non-Communist
Party, left-wing French intellectuals a way to outmanoeuvre what they took
to be the failings of a structure-dependent Marxism that yearned helplessly
for a working-class uprising that never arrived, American queer theorists of
the 1990s were able to draw on the then-insurgent energies of queer move-
ment politics to move even further away from a post-structuralist competition
between literary formalism and dialectical materialism, and to turn instead to
figures of the expressive body as the metonym for a different idea of perform-
ativity.
I think this is what enables Judith Butler, in her 1997 Excitable Speech, to
identify a too-abstract opposition between structure and style in her critique
of Pierre Bourdieu, and also to bat back at an allegory of structure-versus-
utterance in Derrida’s work on the performative. Looking back, one can read
into her critique of Derrida a counter-allegory in which the merely ‘semantic’
functions as a social energy that can actually influence the social ‘structure’
that should, according to a Derridean scheme, work on an entirely other plane.
Reading Derrida’s 1972 essay ‘signature Event Context’, she asks why his account
of performativity requires that ‘the structural [always] exceeds and opposes the
semantic, and the semantic is always crossed and defeated by the structural?’19
As a way of leaving behind the political attitude embedded in this account –
be it defeatism, or resignation, or even a kind of theodicy – Butler argues, later
in the book, that ‘No act of speech can fully control or determine the rhetorical
effects of the body which speaks’.20
This idea of the body as rhetorical re-situates ‘performativity’ twice, we
might say: first, by locating its political force in its medium, the body, rather
than in the separation between utterance and structure, langue and parole,
and second, by highlighting the power of the body as rhetorical rather than lin-
guistic. These shifts allow Butler, and much of the queer theory that followed
her, to do justice to the queer movement energies of the era – that is, to ima-
gine utterances that don’t merely reply to structures, but to alter them. Later
in her career, this move will also allow her to link the performative to an idea
of ‘doing justice to someone’, as in her beautiful and heartbreaking essay on

19 Butler 1997, p. 150.

20 Butler 1997, p. 156.
affect, performativity, and actually existing poetry 97

David Reimer, the Canadian man who was forcibly raised as a girl after a failed
medical procedure.21
In the 90s, though, to do justice to a queer body was more often than not to
take into account that body’s susceptibility to devastation, not least because of
the aids epidemic. And so the American transposition of the performative to
the zone of the body, and to the terrain of rhetoric, carries with it not only insur-
gent energies ready to shake off an earlier defeatism, but also a deep solicitude
for the body’s vulnerability. So the intertwining of militancy and solicitude we
can find in Butler, for instance, finds cousin formulations in Leo Bersani’s 1995
volume Homos, where the expressivity of the queer body at once re-writes deep
psychoanalytic scripts but also opens onto new terrain for figuring humanity as
the capacity to be tender. Take this passage, which utterly re-works the idea of
the threat of paternal castration:

We might imagine that a man being fucked is generously offering the sight
of his own penis as a gift or even a replacement for what is temporarily
being ‘lost’ inside him – an offering made not in order to calm his part-
ner’s fears of castration but rather as the gratuitous and therefore even
lovelier protectiveness all human begins need when they take the risk of
merging with one another.22

I can’t recall another moment in 90s queer theory that so fully exemplifies the
American transposition of ‘affect’ and ‘performativity’ into the militant, solicit-
ous structure of feeling that takes up residence in the zone of the body – here,
ferociously insisting in the specificity and worth of gay male sexual fantasy
while ushering into the scene of its enactment a new universalism. Like But-
ler’s transposition of the question of performativity from the terrain of struc-
turalist and post-structuralist analogies to linguistics, and into rhetoric, here
Bersani transposes the body’s affects and its performative life into the realm of
aesthetic experience: indeed it recalls the many places in Adorno’s aesthetics
where the body helplessly emblematises and enacts the origins of mimesis.23
Now, what does this all have to do with poetry? Well, for me, coming of intel-
lectual age in the queer 1990s, the connections were clear. Since I witnessed a
transposition of the great ‘turn to language’ from a French analogy between
literary study and linguistics to an American insistence on the rhetorical and

21 See Butler 2004.

22 Bersani 1995, p. 112.
23 See, for instance, the astonishing passage on the shapes of the bodies of rhinoceri in
Adorno 1973, p. 180.
98 chapter 4

aesthetic dimensions of any analogy to ‘language’, a transposition driven both

by queer activism and by the aids epidemic, I felt licensed to begin reading
poetry otherwise than I had first been taught – otherwise, that is, than the
post-structuralist insistence on the prima facie political character of the lyric
understood as ‘language’per se. What if one began reading poems, even poems
called ‘Language’, not as instances of ‘performativity’ and ‘affect’ pitted against
linguistic structures, but as the rhetorical and aesthetic practices of particular
poets in particular times and places?

∵
In the rest of this essay I will trace the local byways of a ‘turn to language’ in
one influential poetic subculture of the 1950s and 1960s, the circle around Jack
Spicer that was the scene of the Berkeley and San Francisco ‘renaissances’. Like
de Man, Spicer thought of poems as events in language; but he developed his
ideas, not as a critique of dialectical thinking, but as a strategic response to
the new forms of commodity, spectacle, and enclosure that took hold in San
Francisco at mid-century. I will suggest that the meanings of ‘language’ gen-
erated by Spicer give rise to a second idea about the social function of poetic
form, which is to hide and protect forms of experience that are endangered
by the encroachments of capital on subcultural life. Indeed one of the reasons
Spicer’s profile in the literary academy has remained low since his death in 1965
is that he was so committed to poetry as subcultural. He was suspicious of East
Coast literary life, the life of the prominent journals, even though he submit-
ted poems to them; he would not sell his own books, sending copies only to
those who bothered to write him personally to request a copy; and he urged
others in his circle – you might say he policed them – to do likewise. Spicer’s
biographers Kevin Killian and Lewis Ellingham tell a story about how Spicer,
on hearing that the poet Philip Whalen had been offered the then-significant
sum of ten dollars to read at a poetry festival, said ‘I’ll offer him $ 11 not to
read’.24
Spicer always insisted on a continuity between poetic form and what he took
to be right social relations in a poetic subculture. Both things, he felt, are shaped
by crisis, which itself took many forms, from a resistance to the commercial-
isation of the North Beach Bars where he and his cohort hung out, to a dread
about the emerging possibility of nuclear war in the 1950s. Killian and Elling-
ham write about Spicer being terrified of the possibility of a Russian invasion

24 Ellingham and Killian 1998, p. 240.

affect, performativity, and actually existing poetry 99

during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, to the point of advising friends to start
saving water; they also recount his disgust with the music of the Beatles, whose
songs began to displace the kind of noise Spicer and his crowd liked to gener-
ate in the bars of North Beach. Where the Spicer circle had once instigated a
popular ‘Blabbermouth Night’, in which patrons were urged on to ever-greater
feats of spontaneous hyperbole and nonsense, by 1962 the North Beach bars
were ever friendlier to that music Spicer called ‘devoid of form and color, but
full of images’.25 So when he writes, in the 1963 sequence he called ‘Thing Lan-
guage’,

I
Can-
not
accord
sympathy
to
those who
do
not
recognize
The human crisis.26

He is both trying to name something that takes many forms, and trying to pre-
serve the boundaries between those who do and those who don’t stay true to
the medium he held so dear.
I say ‘medium’ rather than ‘form’ because it was a significant feature of
Spicer’s sense of poetry that it was part of language, intermixed with other
kinds, but stashed away in it, liable to flash out at any moment, easy to miss,
and important to protect. In his 1961 sequence Lament For The Makers, Spicer
rehearses an anecdote about the corpse of D.H. Lawrence that gives a good
sense of how he conceived poetic form as medium-based:

Then Frieda [Lawrence, the writer’s wife] told us an incredible story.

Someone who wanted Lawrence – and Frieda named the possessive ad-
mirer – wanted him in death as well as in life. Frieda’s house was invaded
and Lawrence’s ashes were stolen.

25 Ellingham and Killian 1998, pp. 99–100, 255, 306.

26 Spicer 2008, p. 379.
100 chapter 4

‘You can believe’, said Frieda, ‘I had a hard time getting them back. But
I recovered them. And I made up my mind that nothing of the sort should
happen again. So I fixed it’.
‘How?’ we asked. ‘What did you do?’
‘I had the ashes mixed with a lot of sand and concrete. Now they are in
a huge concrete slab. It weighs over a ton’. She laughed heartily. ‘A dozen
men could not lift it’.27

If we want a ready allegory for Spicer’s sense of poetic form, there is none more
illuminating than this one – ‘form’ is a simultaneous scattering and preserva-
tion of poetic language that is designed to prevent thievery or mis-use. It is
designed to create a relationship of initiation between poet and reader, where
the reader must work, not to become learned, or to assemble a whole out of
fragments, as in the Pound tradition, but to catch the flash of the poetic before
it is re-submerged in protective camouflage.
By these lights poetic form is minimally distinguishable from other linguistic
strategies: Spicer’s friend Jim Herndon recalls Spicer’s relationship with his
three-year-old son Jay, and how Spicer would tell the boy that the real name
for his unwanted potatoes and broccoli was ‘Child Psychology’, or roar, when
he left the Herndon’s apartment at the end of the night, that he was ‘Goin’ to
Texas!’ As Herndon puts it:

Children ought to be told a random combination of fantasy, outright lies

and simple truth, all in the same tone of voice. The Giant’s Garden, pigs
can fly, cows eat grass. Correctly applied, this principle would keep the
child’s mind inviolate, curious, alert, and above all, wary.28

Years later, the poet and critic Bruce Boone would write about this insistence
of Spicer’s on the mixing – and the mixedness – of truth and untruth, ‘The real
and fake only make sense in terms of some always-seeming-to-be-impending
disaster. You better be careful, is Spicer’s advice – you might miss the point if
you [aren’t]’.29
So poetic language is meant to be only minimally different from its surround-
ings, though it is also different in kind. The worst fate for poetry is to have that
minimal relational difference made absolute. Here is another parable of con-
crete, a gloss on the California poet Robinson Jeffers from ‘Thing Language’:

27 Spicer 2008, p. 113.

28 Herndon 1974, p. 57.
29 Boone 1983, p. 120.
affect, performativity, and actually existing poetry 101

A redwood forest is not invisible at night. The blackness covers it but it

covers the blackness.
If they had turned Jeffers into a parking lot death would have been
eliminated and birth also. The lights shine 24 hours a day on a parking
lot.
True conservation is the effort of the artist and the private man to keep
things true. Trees and the cliffs in Big Sur breathe in the dark. Jeffers knew
the pain of their breath and the pain was the death of a first-born baby
breathing. Death is not final. Only parking lots.30

Worse than death, here, is 24-hour illumination, the kind of brightness ‘full of
images’ but ‘devoid of form and color’ that Spicer heard in The Beatles. Poetry,
cicadian and respiratory, takes in and gives out its context; but the spectacle –
and it’s the spectacle we’re talking about here, in Guy Debord’s sense – the spec-
tacle obliterates these rhythms and miscibilities. To fend off such flattening,
Spicer always chose confrontation – ironically, confrontation with his friends
and fellow writers. He kept a cordon, or a minor kind of counter-enclosure,
separating those who did and those who didn’t resist the 24-hour glare of the
emergent spectacle. Anyone could cross over, if they proved true to his sense
of poetry as more than aesthetic, but he did not hold back from denouncing
those who lingered on the other side.
Spicer’s companions resisted what they saw as his tests of loyalty, even as
they admired his will to purity in writing. The record of their skirmishes is con-
siderable; here is a piece of correspondence between Spicer and the younger
writer Stan Persky, who published Spicer in his North Beach magazine Open
Space. Spicer writes across town to the magazine (whose name, we should
notice, speaks against exactly the enclosure of subculture):

July 30, 1964

Dear Stan Persky (I add the last name because I am sick of the tea-
party first name business, my fault as well as yours, as if Open Space were
a Turkish Bath of the imagination):
The only poem that interested me in the whole July issue (including my
own) was the rhymed poem called ‘Underwier’ about half-way through
the issue. Though the signature of it is given as Lew Ellingham, he tells me
that the authors, in tandem, were you, Ron Primack, and Jim Alexander.
The poem seems to me better than anything the three of you have writ-

30 Spicer 2008, p. 221.

102 chapter 4

ten in the last two years and I wonder why you did not give your names
to it.
Something happened. It isn’t happening often enough now and I won-
der if the accusation against Open Space is not that it is too homosexual
but that it is too homogenous. Like cartons of milk.
…
I am, nonetheless, submitting poems in this August issue and will con-
tinue to even if things get worse.
Sincerely yours,
Jack Spicer

Persky replies:

Dear Jack,
This is the last ‘Open Space’ – like the end of part one; but not the end
of the magazine – because as a poet my business is to do what’s really
real. The only point where you and I agree now is that people don’t read
poetry; hardly anymore.
Trying to figure out […] how to be fair [to you] is hard, who have so
often used unfairness for your way. Even in my dreams you confuse me
by two of you: Dirty Jack and Radiant Jack. In one part I come into your
room, your back to me, I see your elbows in the holes of your shirt, the oily
glass, the back of you looms up big as a ship, and you growl and tell me
to give it up. In Radiant Jack you yourself come to the warehouse where
we’re working, wearing clean sports-clothes, and you have tickets to the
ballgame for me. It isn’t that you’ve given little or withheld too much […]
but it seems to me you want a world small enough so that wherever you
spit you’ll hit something, a world you can control.31

At the time of this exchange, Spicer was 39, Persky 23. Persky senses that Spicer’s
resistance to the commodification of poetry, to its becoming-homogenous like
‘cartons of milk’, has resulted in its own form of enclosure, ‘a world small
enough’ that ‘wherever you spit you’ll hit something’. Persky cannot experience
the two practices – the serial quest for poetic purity, with its alluring integ-
rity, and the stern, even cruel, rejection of friendliness, with its concomitant
enclosure, its cordoned-off ‘world’ – as coming from the same person: hence
‘Dirty Jack’ and ‘Radiant Jack’. But the two men of the dream – the grubby, cruel,

31 Ellingham and Killian 1998, pp. 302–3.

affect, performativity, and actually existing poetry 103

impoverished one, and the fresh, flush, generous one – are both bound up in
what Persky renders as ‘the warehouse’, the scene of shared poetic labour that
Spicer is willing to picket, as it were, if it threatens to produce commodities
instead of poems. The young Persky senses the tension at the heart of Spicer’s
work, or its greatest challenge: it is a poetics of social relation, which implies
at every turn that social relations must be managed as part of the poetic pro-
cess. Spicer envisions that management as the keeping of his cohort clear of the
market, but his friends experience it as volatile and ambivalent, both a form of
integrity and an intimidating move toward cult-like fixity. The correspondence
and the biography both amply demonstrate that the poets around Spicer felt a
constant tension between the world-making possibilities of the poem, as Spicer
expounded on it, and the world-enclosing strategies meant to protect ‘poetry’.
So what is poetry? As I imagine you can tell by now, for Spicer it is less a
thing than a relationship, a situation of language or an event in language where
certain kinds of content flash out from camouflage and disappear. What that
content might be is variable in Spicer’s work, of course; it is less often rendered
as image than as idea, conceit, or theme; and often, that theme is a theme of
camouflage or interstitiality, as when he writes in the Language sequence

Being a [poet] a disyllable in a world of monosyllables. Awakened by the

distance between the [o] and the [e]32

This isn’t to say, though, that Spicer’s poems are always ‘about’ poetry, that they
are nothing other than a self-referential game. They are a game, I think, or a
series of card tricks, designed to startle us, but part of the pleasure in reading
them comes from beginning to sense an idea of language being hashed out that
isn’t reducible to a single theme. This is where Spicer’s analogy to ‘language’
in the linguistic sense becomes important; oddly, it’s also where his interest
in folklore, legend, and balladry also assert themselves. Spicer studied as an
undergraduate at Berkeley with the medieval historian Ernst Kantorowicz, who
seems to have helped Spicer form a sense of poetry as part of a shifting cor-
pus of textual matter with overlapping and different versions of the same story,
like the different versions of the Arthur legend that comprise the multi-lingual
‘Matter of Britain’, or the variations of detail that mark different versions of
songs in the ballad tradition.33 A poetic fragment, then, has for Spicer the dual
charge of being an event in language, and a piece of something like literary

32 Spicer 2008, p. 243.

33 Brief accounts of Spicer’s work with Reed and with Kantorowicz can be found in Elling-
ham and Killian 1998, pp. 19–21 and 122.
104 chapter 4

‘matter’, part of a set of concerns and ‘topics’ (to use the rhetorical term). This
loose net of literary matter is kept fresh and alive by variation, substitution,
and the transformation of nonsense into language, by a whole variety of activ-
ities Spicer called – almost certainly knowing the rhetorical sense of his word
choice – ‘invention’.
I’d like to close with a brief look at a poem from Language, the second of the
poems from the series called ‘Transformations’, which begins with lyrics from
the old English or Scottish ballad, ‘Barbara Allen’:

transformations ii

‘In Scarlet Town where I was born

There was a fair maid dwelling’.
We make up a different language for poetry
And for the heart – ungrammatical.
It is not that the name of the town changes
(Scarlet becomes Charlotte or even in Gold City I once heard a good
Western singer make it Tonapah. We don’t have towns here)
(That sort of thing would please the Jungian astronauts)
But that the syntax changes. This is older than towns.
Troy was a baby when Greek sentence structure emerged. This was the
real Trojan Horse.
The order changes. The Trojans
Having no idea of true or false syntax and having no recorded language
Never knew what hit them.34

In linguistics a ‘transformation’ is the name for the operation by which the

speaker of a language alters sentences from active to passive, or declarative
to interrogative, forms. ‘Poetry and the heart’, here, are said by Spicer to ring
syntactical transformations of this kind. But they also have an off-beat, ungram-
matical language, like an extra syllable where there’s no call for one. These two
features of poetry, in this poem at least, Spicer makes different from a third
kind of language change, the semantic variations and substitutions that the
ballad accumulates over time. That accumulation, which can look like a col-
lective unconscious, is what Spicer thinks will delight ‘the Jungian astronauts’.
And he likes that kind of language-change, too, as registers in his parenthetical
aside.

34 Spicer 2008, p. 233.

affect, performativity, and actually existing poetry 105

But it’s a fourth kind of linguistic variability, a set of rhetorical inventions,

that gives the poem its movement. The leaps from part to part – from the bal-
lad lyrics to the language of poetry, to town names to syntax to Greek to the
Trojan War to an instance of shock – these are hallmark instances, not only of
Spicer’s poetry, which is always designed to keep us off guard, but of invention
in the sense of the fresh arrangement of parts, topics, or tropes drawn from a
received textual matter. And poetry, for Spicer, is the relation among parts of
this matter that flashes out of it like the glint of a dead writer’s bones in a ton
of concrete, or unthieveable, uncommodifiable, because it cannot be separate
from the strewn – nowadays we might say ‘networked’ – textual material from
which it is drawn. From the safety of its recesses it reaches out to swat you, like
Greek syntax charging on to the scene, or like a poem with an at-first inexplic-
able turn:

Smoke signals
[…] in the Eskimo villages on the coast where the earthquake hit
Bang, snap, crack. They will never know what hit them
On the coast of Alaska. They expect everybody to be insane.
This is a poem about the death of John F. Kennedy.35

A poem like this shares with the post-structuralist language that bequeathed
us the conjunction of ‘affect’ and ‘performativity’ an analogy to linguistics that
turns out to be a cover for a return to rhetoric. To be sure, it is gleefully ‘per-
formative’ – ‘This is a poem about the death of John F. Kennedy’, for instance,
enacting the stated theme of ‘never knowing’ what will hit us. And in its attrac-
tion to rabbit’s-hat games of invention it does not lie too far from Mallarmé’s
Un coup de dés. It even shares with the writing that interested de Man a focus
on the linguistic ‘violence’ of its own composition and decomposition, on how
the poet is ‘Awakened by the distance between the [o] and the [e]’.
But I hesitate to make Spicer’s poems into evidence for the ideas we find
articulated in the Francophone affect-performativity nexus. This is because the
poems are not an argument with philosophy: they are wrestling with other mat-
ters, not least the matter of capital, and it becomes hard to name that matter if
the poems’ performativity is taken up into the background narratives about the
dialectic and its others that structure the critical feeling in post-structuralism.
But the queer transpositions of ‘affect’ and ‘performativity’ into a rhetorical and
aesthetic zone that includes the body may allow us ask what structures of feel-

35 Spicer 2008, p. 221.

106 chapter 4

ing are made articulate by the performances of the poems. For all the similarity
between Spicer’s recourse to the idea of poems as events in language and de
Man’s sense of writing as inducing events, that is, I prefer to see his ‘turn to lan-
guage’ as a queer response to the work of capital in his time and place. I don’t
doubt we are enriched by a critical attention to how, in the interstices of any
historical dialectic, linguistic making and unmaking occur behind the cogito;
and I certainly think recalling the lightness of laughter in the midst of bleak
absurdity can remind us that the dialectic hasn’t captured everything in us. But
that won’t make it go away.
 chapter 5

Infinity for Marxists

… this is paradise
not for people
but paradise
regardless.1

∵
In this short essay I’ll try to identify some of the impulses guiding a recent turn
to thinking about vastness in the critical-theoretical wing of the humanities,
and to assess whether it might be put in dialogue with contemporary Marxist
criticism. As readers of Mediations are no doubt aware, a wide variety of schol-
ars in philosophy, literary criticism, and political theory are engaged in projects
that re-scale their enterprise to suit what they take to be a larger world than
the one we were able to study in the days of the linguistic turn. Two things in
particular interest me about this interdisciplinary body of thinking: first, that
its critique of ‘the human’ is all but interchangeable with a critique of textual
interpretation; and second, that this critique seems to replace a critique of cap-
italism. The intellectual centre of gravity for this critique is in anti-humanist
strains of contemporary philosophy, but I am less interested in a ‘philosophical’
critique of this infinity-discourse than I am in giving it just a touch of intellec-
tual history, and in thinking about the very human perplexities and worries that
may have led to its current allure.
The backdrop of this turn to the infinite is generally acknowledged to be the
challenges posed by climate change, though many of the intellectual projects
I have in mind express this only indirectly. More than a focus on climate or
ecology as subject matter – though certainly some of this work does do that –
the new infinity-scholarship shares across the disciplines an anti-humanism
that is expressed as impatience with interpretation and with ‘texts’ – that
is to say, an impatience with the residues of post-structuralism, which in its

1 Ward 2013, p. 37.

©
108 chapter 5

universalisation of critique as ‘reading’ was the last great trans-disciplinary

paradigm shift.
This scholarly situation has led me to structure my thoughts here in some-
thing of a round-robin fashion, or at least a set of relays. What I’ll be suggesting,
below, is that this new anti-interpretive stance mistakenly equates Marxism
with the deconstruction that critiqued it, rejects deconstruction while fre-
quently repeating its key gestures, and swaps in ontology for epistemology in
Christian language whose history it will not or cannot acknowledge. And it pro-
poses as a method of (ana-)interpretation a stance toward reality that, in its
insistence on the radical ‘autonomy’ of non-human objects and relationships,
delivers a critique, not of capitalism, or anti-democracy, but of scholarly self-
absorption. Against this presumptuousness, which it links to over-investment
in texts, it proposes a limpid, un-rhetorical poetry of the world, which, when
expressed as text, takes the form of litanies and lists that pale in compar-
ison to the best actual poetry. So in what follows I’ll be tracing how the new
infinity-language both critiques post-structuralism in the language that post-
structuralism used to critique Marxism, and implicitly repeats a second cri-
tique of Marxism also deployed by the post-structuralists, which worked by
pitting Marxism against a certain idea of poetry. Then I’ll turn to a poem that
makes this opposition look shabby on both Marxist and poetic grounds. How
this all plays out in the current idiom of infinity will take a little while to explain.
We might begin with its extent: this new language of the vast and the wide-
open has touched several subfields, as we will see, but it is most immediately
evident in literary ecocriticism. As the critic Cristin Ellis has pointed out, con-
temporary ecocritics have a strong anti-textualist bent. Ellis notes an overlap
between critics as different as Lawrence Buell, who argues in his Environmental
Imagination that theory served to ‘efface the world’, and Ursula Heise, who con-
tends in Sense of Place and Sense of Planet that environmentalist discourse has
overdeveloped a tendency to ‘think locally’, to the point where the latest eco-
critics see their predecessors as having licensed what Ellis calls a ‘parochial
presumptuousness’.2 The mark of this presumptuous parochialism is the envir-
onmentalist subject’s projection of simple correspondences between herself
and the wider world, which are made at the cost of investigating the alien vari-
ety of relations that are the wider world’s moving parts.
More than any other contemporary ecocritic, Timothy Morton responds to
this sense of literary theory’s narrow gaze with a rhetoric of infinity. His 2010
book The Ecological Thought begins with a chapter called ‘Thinking Big’, which

2 Buell 1996, p. 5; Heise 2008, p. 12; Ellis 2012, p. 6.

infinity for marxists 109

concludes with an enthusiastic gloss on the mathematics of Georg Cantor, who

conceived the concept of the ‘transfinite’ – a number bigger than we can count,
though it is only the hem of the garment of infinity ‘itself’.3 The epigraph to the
volume, from Emmanuel Levinas’s Totality and Infinity, frames Morton’s argu-
ment in Cantorian terms: ‘Infinity overflows the thought which thinks it’.
Gestures like these have placed Morton in alliance with the loosely-affiliated
group of philosophers who have taken to calling themselves, at times, ‘speculat-
ive realists’. Several of these philosophers practice what has come to be known
as ‘object-oriented ontology’, or ooo: a theory of being that, like Heise’s ‘sense
of planet’, is organised by the imagination of a set of relations among entities
that do not place the human being at their centre. The best-known of these
philosophers, Quentin Meillassoux, though he rejects affiliation with so-called
ooo, nonetheless refers in his 2008 volume After Finitude to a ‘great outdoors’
in which the mind is at last able to free itself from the philosophical equivalent
to the parochialism Ellis sees ecocritics rejecting.4 The word the speculative
realists have come up with for that parochialism is ‘correlationism’, by which
they mean a narrowing-down of the project of philosophy to endless iterations
of the subject-object problem. For the speculative realists, Kant is the great
enemy: by focusing on epistemological questions, he shackled philosophy to
what subjects could know, leaving us ill-equipped to grapple with the kind of
mind-bending ontological problems we must confront if we wish to under-
stand globalisation, the cosmos, environmental damage, or the deep time of
the planet.
Not only ecocritics and young-turk philosophers, but literary critics and
political theorists have made gestures that imply a vastness beyond textual ana-
lysis and after critical theory. Leah Price, in her recent How to Do Things With
Books in Victorian Britain, opens by suggesting that ‘the transactions that enlist
the books stretch far beyond the literary, or even the linguistic’, moving on to
lambast recent critics of material culture for never getting down to the actual
vastness of real books, and for clinging instead to ‘theory’ at the cost of a pos-
ture both overweening and far too cramped: ‘the hermeneutics of suspicion has
given way to a poetics of deflation … in the process, scholars change from the
freest of associators into the most slavish of idiots savants’.5 For the speculative
realists, meanwhile, that hermeneutics is still a problem; praising the philo-
sopher Alphonso Lingis, Graham Harman compares him favourably to what
he takes to be the ongoing dominance of 1980s-style theory: ‘where [Lingis] is

3 See Morton 2010.

4 Meillassoux 2008, p. 7.
5 Price 2010, p. 22.
110 chapter 5

engaged with the flesh and pulp of the universe, contemporary fashions have
turned primarily to the interpretation and deconstruction of texts’.6
Not infrequently, these declarations of the outmodedness of deconstruction
either encode or modulate into a similar claim about Marxism: Marx may have
been able to explain the class formations and the methods of accumulation
that emerged in the industrial era, the argument goes, but he could not have
foreseen the planetary consequences of what capital unleashed, which extend
far beyond what his original categories could grasp. There are more and less
subtle versions of this argument; among the most clear-eyed is to be found
in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s 2008 essay ‘The Climate of History’, which adopts a
pose of gratitude for how the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ allowed postcolo-
nial theorists to critique universality, then moves on to suggest that it is exactly
universality that climate change obliges us to conceptualise. Equating the post-
structuralist ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ with the critique of capital, he writes:

Climate change, refracted through global capital, will no doubt accen-

tuate the logic of inequality that runs through the rule of capital; some
people will no doubt gain temporarily at the expense of others. But the
whole crisis cannot be reduced to a story of capitalism. Unlike in the crises
of capitalism, there are no lifeboats here for the rich and the privileged
(witness the drought in Australia or recent fires in the wealthy neighbor-
hoods of California).7

The problem here, of course, is that Marx’s understanding of capitalism did

not presume that the rich were immune to its effects. But the impulse to see
Marxism as an outmoded vocabulary is too strong: so Chaktrabarty goes on to
reinvent the wheel of the dialectic, as it were, suggesting that because human-
ity cannot conceptualise itself as a species, at least not yet, we are at ‘the limits
of historical understanding’ and must make recourse to a ‘negative universal
history’.8 The footnote in which Chakrabarty explains this coinage points right
back to Adorno and Benjamin.
If the narrative of the obsolescence of Marxism is one side of the contempor-
ary turn to deep time and infinity, then its other side is an anti-capitalism that
has been entirely re-routed through philosophy. Speculative-realist thinkers
like Reza Negarestani and Nick Srnicek have specifically thought through the
question of whether contemporary philosophy might provide grounds for res-

6 Harman 2005, p. 61.

7 Chakrabarty 2009, p. 221.
8 Chakrabarty 2009, p. 222.
infinity for marxists 111

isting or overcoming capital. But though Negarestani refers to capitalism as ‘the

most recurring politico-economic figure of speculative thought’, and Srnicek
has written about it, they conceive of it in philosophical terms, as the great
engine of ‘correlationist’ thinking: the problem with capitalism, for these think-
ers, is that it creates an echo chamber that makes our minds small.9 The cap-
italist problem that speculative realism seems best equipped to address, in
other words, is not an actual dynamic of accumulation and exploitation, but
the epistemological problem of capitalism’s reduction of all phenomena to its
own image. However revolutionary it may be in philosophical terms that these
thinkers respond to capitalist epistemology not with a counter-epistemology
but with an ontology, and however enthusiastically they may imagine subjects
who think (or exist) entirely differently than the ones we know today, their anti-
philosophical and anti-hermeneutic gestures are just that: anti-philosophical
and anti-hermeneutic, not anti-capitalist.
To think dialectically, it seems, is not to think hugely enough, or infinitely
enough. So how must we think, if we are to grapple with these unprecedented
species-problems? As it turns out, in one way or another, the undialectical way
we are urged to think, in this discourse, is poetically – but in a very particular
sense, the sense that Archibald MacLeish was after in 1926 when he suggested
a poem ‘should not mean but be’.
In her recent Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett champions the sheer alienness of
the life of things: in their unknowability, especially in their unknowable rela-
tions to each other and not to humanity, things point to a universe wider that
we can ever grasp. Bennett refers to this unknowability as the ‘recalcitrance’
of the object world; her language quite closely recalls what speculative realists
and object-ontologists like Graham Harman and Ray Brassier refer to as the
‘autonomy’ of phenomena (including those it would be hard to call ‘objects’).
This recalcitrance is poetic for Bennett – it leads her to include, along the course
of her argument, short lists and parenthetical asides that function as a ‘poetry’
that instances what she’s after:

one man’s large black plastic work glove

one dense mat of oak pollen
one unblemished dead rat
one white plastic bottle cap
one smooth stick of wood10

9 See Negarestani 2011, p. 182; and Srnicek 2011.

10 Bennett 2010, p. 4.
112 chapter 5

Bennett calls these lists ‘contingent tableaus’ or ‘assemblages’: she shies away
from calling them ‘poems’ straight out, I think, because that would suggest that
they mean something, and the contemporary language of infinitude depends
on a critique of ‘meaning’. The tone in which this critique is delivered varies
considerably: Morton affably turns to evolutionary theory for examples of non-
teleological, non-adaptive features of animal life to argue on behalf of a big,
raucous, non-meaning-intensive world.11 He also turns to our experience of
reading, which he suggests involves us assembling meaning out of patternless
flux: as he puts it, ‘meaning depends on unmeaning’. By the end of the passage
in which he makes this claim, encountering texts has become like encountering
people, and the unknowability and meaninglessness of encountering others is
not hell, as Sartre had it, but endlessness. ‘The stranger is infinity’, he writes:
not meaning-bearing per se, but not quite meaningless, either.12
Brassier, for his part, critiques ‘meaning’ in more Nietzschean terms. ‘Philo-
sophers would do well to desist’, he writes in the preface to his Nihil Unbound,

from issuing any further injunctions about the need to re-establish the
meaningfulness of existence, the purposefulness of life, or mend the
shattered concord between man and nature. Philosophy should be more
than a sop to the pathetic twinge of human self-esteem.13

For Brassier, whose Nihil Unbound is subtitled Enlightenment and Extinction,

the relentless auto-critique of philosophical Enlightenment has disenchanted
the world to the point where we may finally be able to absorb the traumatic
knowledge of our individual deaths as well as the inevitable extinction of
humanity. As with Morton and Bennett, in Brassier’s work the trap of ‘mean-
ing’ in the sense of ‘meaningfulness’ is a result of a fixation on the human as
the centre and the limit of our sense of scale.14

11 See Morton 2010, p. 73.

12 Morton 2010, p. 80.
13 Brassier 2007, p. xi.
14 In his turn to Freud’s notion of the death drive as a conceptual resource for his argument
about the unassimilability of the fact of our death and extinction, Brassier repeats the
work of Leo Bersani, who in 1986 had already argued that psychoanalysis, in its inability
to adequately assimilate the self-shattering aspects of sexuality into discourse, was a kind
of ‘epistemological catastrophe’ that, in its attempt to ‘coerce’ the unassimilable ‘into dis-
course’, keeps us at a remove from ‘any consciousness of being’ (Bersani 1986, pp. 30, 40).
Bersani’s counterposing of epistemology and ontology, and his attachment of negative
and positive values to the two, respectively, does not only predate the key gesture of the
speculative turn, but grounds it in what would become a specific, anti-identitarian queer
politics.
infinity for marxists 113

Given the Nietzschean aggressivity of language like Brassier’s it should per-

haps come as no surprise to discover that the new infinity-rhetoric frequently
expresses itself in theological terms, particularly as (anti-)Christologies of one
kind or another. Brassier, for his part, is a champion of the philosopher Fran-
çois Laruelle, whose 2011 volume Future Christ bears a strong resemblance
to most accounts of Meillassoux’s soon-to-be-translated Divine Inexistence.15
In Harman’s gloss on the French edition of Meillassoux’s book, he suggests
that Meillassoux develops an unprecedented attitude toward God, to be dis-
tinguished from agnosticism, atheism, and so on. This position, as Harman
renders it, is ‘believing in God because he does not exist’. The key, it turns out, is
that God does not exist … yet. This is the insight that Meillassoux claims to have
uncovered in Stephane Mallarmé’s 1897 poem, Un coup de dès jamais n’abolira
le hazard.16
But even if we agree with this reading of Mallarmé’s poem as encoding a
secret Christology, we needn’t see it as unprecedented: there have been Future-
Christs for a very long time. Just restricting ourselves to the modern era, we can
find this stance in Schelling’s idea of the ‘third age’ of the world, the spiritual
age, which describes a future dispensation in which a personalised ‘Christ’ will
no longer suffice as the vehicle for the unfolding of the spirit of Christianity
on earth, which will one day demand a post-personal, spiritualised ‘Christ’.17
Meillassoux’s famous critique of Hume reads this way, too, as an effacement of
religious arguments that predate his own: for Meillassoux, the failure of Hume’s
critique of causality is to back away from sheer ‘factiality’ (the possibility that
anything could follow on anything else), which leads him to a watered-down
probabilism.18 But the Puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards, Hume’s contem-
porary, got there long ago: read ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God’, and
you’ll see that his exhortation to his congregants is based on dispelling their
probabilistic sense of the likelihood of grace by recourse to arguments and fig-
ures whose force is to suggest that God could do anything next, at any moment.
Take that, probabilists!
Alongside these Christologies, meanwhile, is an array of other gestures in
this contemporary current that have Catholic resonance. In the conclusion

15 See Laruelle 2010.

16 Meillassoux claims to have uncovered this truth in Mallarmé (he treats it as a truth, not
an interpretation) in Meillassoux 2012.
17 See Schelling 2000. Löwith 1957 provides a useful medieval back-history to Schelling’s dis-
pensational model in the passages on Joachim of Fiore. Joachim’s sense of dispensational
time as subject, moment-to-moment, to utter transformation, also forms part of the his-
tory behind Hume and Edwards.
18 See Meillassoux 2009, pp. 82–111.
114 chapter 5

to Vibrant Matter, Bennett writes that she would like to end with a ‘litany, a
kind of Nicene Creed’ (the text of the ‘creed’ runs, ‘I believe in one matter-
energy, the maker of things seen and unseen. I believe that this pluriverse is
traversed by heterogeneities that are continually doing things’).19 The video-
game theorist Ian Bogost, too, is fond of the form of the litany, which like
Bennett he owes to the work of Bruno Latour: in his recent Alien Phenomen-
ology, Bogost describes writing a computer program that will generate what he
calls ‘Latour litanies’ – arrays of what we are asked to take as incommensur-
ably different things (weather patterns, cleaning products, theories of history,
hair gel) that, he thinks, have a mind-expanding effect on the too-humanistic,
text-centred reader.20 And though he does not frame them as litanies, per se,
Graham Harman, too, imagines the list of incommensurables to have strong
anti-hermeneutic power. In a recent essay, he frames one such list in a way that’s
meant as a kind of encrypted defence of the theological language to which he
and his fellow travellers make recourse:

making human experience the homeland of all relations is no less out-

landish than importing a theological concept of God into a philosophical
sphere where faith no longer suffices as proof. In short, human experience
has become the Almighty God of mainstream philosophy. Overmining
has become the central dogma of our time: everything is relations, or
language, or appearance to the mind. This dogma cannot be countered
with an undermining theory that views the world as a partless, rumbling
depth. What is missed in both cases is the autonomous reality of indi-
vidual objects: dogs, trees, flames, monuments, societies, ghosts, gods,
pirates, coins …21

There are a few sleights of hand worth noting in this passage. One is the
way a rhetorical equivalence – two equally ‘outlandish’ things, making God or
humans the centre of everything – is treated as a philosophical equivalence,
as if the relationship between secular humanism and deism is that they are
‘opposites’ in some formal sense, rather than positions with histories.
The second sleight of hand is related to the first: Harman reduces philo-
sophy’s relationship to the question of ‘meaning’ to two tidily opposed pos-
itions, which he calls ‘overmining’ and ‘undermining’ (roughly overinterpret-
ation on one hand, and a monist insistence on miasmic, predifferentiated

19 Bennett 2010, p. 122.

20 Bogost 2012, p. 94.
21 Harman 2011, p. 71.
infinity for marxists 115

arche-materiality on the other), and then, having performed this reduction,

produces a Third Way – not ‘overmining’ or ‘undermining’, but the ‘autonom-
ous reality of individual objects’. But in order to enjoy the clarity and rad-
icality of this third option, we’ve had to switch from a critique of ‘meaning’
to a celebration of ‘autonomy’ – that is, to a different question and vocab-
ulary altogether. That switch elides the question of whether there might be
‘meaning’ in or around that radical autonomy. That the answer is ‘yes’ – and
that therefore Harman has failed to get away from even the artificially narrow
scheme he thinks he’s demolished – is clear from his list. It is a kind of poetry,
in which words don’t distract us too much with meaning-play, but radiate,
instead, both their own actuality and the actuality of the things they repres-
ent.
This anti-hermeneutic sense of poetry is old – perhaps as old as rhetoric.
But for my purposes, it’s worth noticing not its oldness but its lability: reading
Price’s testy denunciation of literary critics today as hidebound deconstruc-
tionists, obsessed with meaning and the critique of meaning, is not unlike
reading the Derrida of ‘From Restricted to General Economy’, and watching
him mock the Hegelianism of his day by characterising it as a huffing, puff-
ing bourgeois habit of thought of assigning historical meaning to everything
under the sun – a habit which he and virtually every other post-structuralist
felt needed not the actuality of a Marxism but the unbearable lightness of a
Mallarmé, to banish it from the scene.22 So the insurgent anti-hermeneuticists
of the 1960s have now become the navel-gazing hermeneuts of the new mil-
lennium, and along the way, the critique of capital has been replaced with a
critique of arrogance. The poetry called forth to rectify the problem is still Mal-
larmé’s (he is as beloved and exemplary for the speculative realists as he was
for the post-structuralists they denounce): the poetry of being, not meaning;
the poetry built out of words and not ideas; the poetry that limpidly presents
us with an actuality, and spares us rhetoric, hermeneutics, and ‘grand the-
ory’.
But where is this poetry? It’s not clear to me that we can find it in Mallarmé.
Even if we could, his is only one location in a universe of brilliant twentieth-
century poetry, much of which has struggled, not to replace thinking about
some mere human bungle of capitalism with matters anterior to it, or more
ontological, but to make poetry in and through the conditions the century gave
us, not least the conditions of life under capital. Reading the post-war archive
of anti-humanist thought, one wearies of the gestures opposing an arrogant,

22 I make this argument at greater length in Nealon 2011.

116 chapter 5

myopic criticism to a wide-open, ontologically pure poem-world; I find myself

wishing for a critique of something other than arrogance, and for accounts of
poetry other those concerned to ratify the ontological dignity of the art. This is
why, though I fear it will seem abrupt, I want to introduce you to a great poem
now.
In the title poem of his 2013 volume The Crisis of Infinite Worlds, the Cincin-
nati-based poet Dana Ward constructs a framework for comparing two distinct
modes of infinitude whose significance, he makes clear, is not simply their vast-
ness, but that they have come into play in his poem in a here and now. The
poem is framed on one hand by Ward’s misremembering the title of a dc Com-
ics series he came across at the mall, a series called Crisis on Infinite Earths.
That twelve-part series, published in 1985, was designed to establish retroact-
ive continuity among the many and contradictory plotlines that had accrued to
the heroes and heroines in the dc universe over the decades. Meanwhile, the
poem is also structured by its opening address to Krystle Cole, the young Kan-
sas woman who was party to the last days of a massive lsd-producing outfit
run by the now-imprisoned chemist William Leonard Pickard. Pickard’s facil-
ity was built in a revamped missile silo; in a subsequent memoir, Lysergic, and
in a series of popular YouTube videos, Cole recounts experiences of intense
lsd trips in the months before Pickard’s November 2000 arrest. So the poem is
playfully framed both by reference to the question of how long a ‘pluriverse’ of
contradictory plotlines can last, and also by a sympathetic identification with
the manner in which Cole describes the trippy, ‘lysergic’ mind-bending which,
depending on how the poet takes her tone, she either enjoyed or endured. It
begins like this:

Krystle
Krystle Cole
you’re all I thought about sometimes
I watched you while our daughter slept
your Sissy Spacek ways
your laconic demeanor in relaying
either ecstasy or trauma
& the un-embittered empathy your voice conveyed
on YouTube
which is our loving cup
the solution of butter
& dmt you took
anally that really made you
freak the fuck out
infinity for marxists 117

& your friends just stood there

watching you
as you hurtled alone through mirrored tunnels.23

What follows from this opening, already a richly articulated set of cross-cur-
rents of ‘empathy’ and dispassion – devoted YouTube viewing, beloved children
sleeping under parents’ gazes, friends looking away when they should attend
to each other – is something like a super-compressed journey of the soul, not
into Dante’s heaven so much as into the nature-less ‘universe’ with which the
ecocritics, object-ontologists, and speculative realists intend to beat back her-
meneutics:

It’s that frictionless feeling

the smooth & vacant course
that lacks abruption, one wave
the clinical mania undifferentiated
whiteness
contains when cylindrical cloud
hard & plastic comes to represent
the mind to the mind
& thus describe a model
of terrible momentum
with unity of purpose
toward nothing so much
as cold, radiant nature
stripped of Eros, of becoming,
just the mainframe
& its withering severity
without any predicate
of others, save perhaps their
gazes, no walls,
no nothing, completely
white light & your name
when your consciousness was
splitting time was stopping
you were going always into that.24

23 Ward 2013, p. 32.

24 Ward 2013, pp. 32–3.
118 chapter 5

Notice that the bare identificatory structure of address has not fallen away –
that the poem is still, in the argot of infinity-theory, ‘correlationist’. The ‘you’,
Cole, has all but stopped being a self in her encounter with this lysergic vast-
ness; but she is still the object of the poet’s address. As we will see, this is
not inadvertent, or a falling-away from some purer, more ‘speculative’ form of
thought – the project of the poem is emerging specifically as the attempt to
think personless infinity through persons. Cole is not only his object: as his sub-
ject, she leads him to make a further set of comparisons. ‘You were always going
into that’, he says, a little in awe; then

I was going always to the mall

in those months,
the young century’s rainiest
April & May, to walk the
baby & to understand my art.
I didn’t understand.
I would move the stroller
through the halogen, over
grooved tile & across those
smooth marble expanses meant
to simulate floating & gliding
before that pure frictionless
feeling was entire.25

Three time-scales – the centuries’, the months’, the time of reproduction –

frame the poet’s quotidian struggle ‘to understand [his] art’. The problem of
that art, it turns out, presents itself as the question of whether and how the
‘frictionless’ feeling of lysergic wildness, its ‘terrible momentum’, has anything
to do with the mall’s simulation of ‘floating & gliding’ and how those pseudo-
sensations build into something ‘entire’. It is tempting to say that the one, the
mall, is a kind of bad totality, and the other, the trip, is its counterpart infin-
ity, frightening but freer than that tiled enclosure. But the poem is not relying,
as the theorists do, on a Levinasian frame, though infinity and totalisation are
surely in play. After all, the mall’s enclosure is a refuge, too, an infinity – well,
he has more to say on that score.
Meanwhile, though, Ward is still trying to understand his art: pursuing the
question of whether there’s a similarity or possibly an asymptotic relation

25 Ward 2013, p. 33.

infinity for marxists 119

between the two kinds of frictionlessness he’s describing, he finds himself

wanting to cease pursuit. The connections between departments in the Sears
he’s wandering through, he writes,

… felt
besieged or like a mask
for separation, they felt
like connection between us
in life but I didn’t
take my allegory
further Krystle Cole, into your
lysergic delirium later redeemed
by a beautiful discipline
of spirit & cosmography
developed for praxis.26

It seems as though the question of likeness, posed as metaphor and meta-

morphosis – how is one thing like another? when does one space become
another? – it’s as though this question of likeness fails before the ars poetica
of Krystle Cole, which is less a tracking of asymptotic mystery than a response
to situations. He likes her latest video, ‘on candy / flipping hard & developing /
esp with friends’; it suggested to him, he writes, that:

… oneness
was a leavened mix
of random indiscretion,
bruising wariness, & bliss
obtained by synchronizing
chemical encounter.27

This is the kind of array of ‘objects’ prized by Harman and others, when they
make their litanies and lists. But the items in this array are not dignified by
‘autonomy’ from us, or from each other. They are routed through each other;
they are mediations of each other.
Part of the attraction of the Krystle-method, though, seems to be that it’s
more than the poet can muster. What he comes up with in the rest of the poem,

26 Ward 2013, p. 34.

27 Ibid.
120 chapter 5

instead, is a beautifully restless groping after ways to experience infinity and

relation at the same time. Not all of them are nice; at least one of them depends
on merging with capital.

Krystle,
there’s a made up drug
I wonder if you’d do it?
Bradley Cooper, in Limitless
takes this little pill, which
in its candy dot translucence
looks a lot like a tear plucked
from the cheek in Man Ray’s ‘Larmes’.
With it, he can utilize
all of his brain, & so
he un-riddles the patterning
hidden in the ceaseless
flow of capital, structuring its
chaos in excess of any mortal
with a terrible momentum
& unity of purpose toward
nothing so much as pure profit
& complete subordination
of the world.28

I have to say that, when I read critiques of ‘correlationism’ and how pinheaded
it’s supposedly made us all, how unequipped to think huge thoughts, I’m always
reminded of the futurist meme that goes like, what could we become if we
could use more of our brains? That the answer might be, ‘better capitalists!’
is the wry implication of this passage, just as it’s one of the concerns of a theor-
ist like Catherine Malabou, whose recent What Should We Do With Our Brain?
keeps in play the possibility – one the speculative realists do not – that ‘infinity’
might be a mixed blessing.
Back at the mall, meanwhile, Ward has moved from the frictionless ease of
illimitable surfaces to the junk-sundries of the smaller, less-profitable shops. It’s
here he encounters the comic book that makes the title of his poem, though,
as he notes, he writes it down wrong, substituting ‘world’ for ‘earth’. Wondering
what the relation might be between the two forms in the closing mediation of

28 Ward 2013, pp. 34–5.

infinity for marxists 121

the poem, in which the poet tries once more to settle on whether the figure of
the asymptote will serve him – is there a trajectory, he wonders, along which,
after a certain point, ‘earth’ becomes ‘world’? ‘That same May’, he writes,

I had gone to Detroit. I saw

the most wonderful graffiti, more
a prayer, written on a wall
in magic marker, it read –
Two Things:
1) That we would grow closer & closer as time progresses.
2) That our ships would not crash.29

Ever closer, never crashing – a mystical union, and a Zeno’s paradox, worthy of
Dante. But at the end of the poem, as throughout, it’s less infinity as math than
as relation, that reveals itself as the subject of the poem; we can sense this in
the way that, turning away from Cole and addressing himself in loneliness, he
remarks on the medium in which the graffiti was rendered:

Magic marker on a
surface doesn’t have
much depth of skin.
You move it smoothly
on the wall & it stays smooth
barely records the softest friction
of two separate textures meeting.
The wetness of its onyx
dries quick or even quicker
if you blow on it with circled lips,
like clouds in old maps
that blew ships across a flat earth
to an edge I don’t exactly
not idealize.30

It’s a textureless texture – ‘magic’, industrial – that recalls the frictionless floors
of the shopping mall. But it can’t help but be marked by how it renders: you
can blow on it to make it dry faster. Does the image that the blowing generates,

29 Ward 2013, p. 37.

30 Ibid.
122 chapter 5

an image of the edge of the world, allow the ink to retain a trace of its sep-
arateness from us, its ontological ‘autonomy’? Perhaps. But I think we would
misread the poem if we saw that breath as a ratcheting-down from illimitability
into myopic human meaning-making. The poem does not split the difference
between these two things, autonomy and solipsism, so much as upend the idea
that they are the relevant opposition. In the terms it sets up, infinity and rela-
tion are not opposites – they are shot through with each other, as much in
nausea and ‘wariness’ as in synchrony and bliss. They make and are made by
texture – by what we might call, in a more academic vocabulary, mediation.
This also means, of course, that the activities the poem describes are precisely
what we are urged, in this latest post-Marxism, to dismiss as merely ‘human’:
they are dialectical.
This seems to me the great error of the critique of humanism when it con-
joins with the critique of hermeneutics: the idea that scrutiny and attention are
somehow essentially englobing. This seems a displacement of a critique of the
social divisions that separate scholarship from politics onto the mechanics of
the scholarship. It is not reductive and parochial to read a poem closely, or to
read poems for a living; it is reductive and parochial to do so in a world where
that activity is cordoned off from the others that support it. In a world where
every professor was also a janitor, would we really find close reading so myopic?
Ward ends his poem with a fragment:

That somewhere
there’s a precipice in this world & tracing
my finger along those ardent lines
I’d found the fault of it
a little, in its boldness far too faint
& not enough.31

He’s been at the mall, thinking of a girl in a missile silo; he’s wanting to find
a crack in the world that by way of enclosure separates us and pits us against
each other. But the opposition isn’t between the mere human world and the
vaster universe that teaches us humility by ignoring us; it’s between the quality
of paradise in the world that is and the hints of paradise in the world that might
be. Before the closing lines I cited above, the poet asks Cole a sinuous, twenty-
six-line long double question – one so long it doesn’t conclude with a question
mark. It goes like this:

31 Ward 2013, p. 38.

infinity for marxists 123

Krystle, have you ever,

just standing around,
noticed someone smoking
in an older silver Volvo
& watched the comeback feelings
of a Tupac Easter Sunday
steep in their ambivalent features
until they are more radiant
than cinematic virgins
having lost it in the wake
of Saint Maria Goretti
whose patronage is lost
to the brutalized sweetness
of her charges
when depicted in the mind
& reconstructed
as a low-res simulation
by scientists the weekend
Wall Street’s occupied & particles
are found to go
faster than light
then weirdly feel like
this is paradise
not for people
but paradise
regardless.32

This virtuosic query is built around a series of dazzling shifts of focus and scale.
We begin with the becoming-auratic of a particular, anonymous face, which
moves outward from the resurrection-discourse around the remembered per-
son of Tupac Shakur into the traces of holiness in the unnumbered ‘charges’ of
the Catholic saint and martyr Maria Goretti (who was raped and murdered in
1902). Then we’re suddenly in a particular weekend, a here and now, in which
advances in brain research and particle acceleration collide with the protest-
ors in Zuccotti Park. The wedging of the occupation in between the technical
advances seems to serve as a kind of spar: on one hand, sheer variety and jux-
taposition propose a paradise, but the middle term in that variety sticks in

32 Ward 2013, pp. 36–37.

124 chapter 5

paradises’s craw. And the ‘weird’ feeling the poet describes comes from a dis-
covery that we are blocked from paradise, not by the way vastness makes us
minuscule, but by how our social arrangements make it impossible to explore
vastness except in technical terms.33
I’ve taken this time to walk through Ward’s poem – which deserves much
closer reading than I’ve provided here – because I think it gives the lie to
the anti-hermeneutic anti-humanism on offer in the new discourse of infin-
ity today. One reason for this, as I hope I’ve at least sketched here, is that Ward’s
poem does not rely on a false dichotomy between ‘humanity’ and ‘infinity’,
working instead to co-locate life under capital with something like the varieties
of infinite experience.
So can Marxists learn from this latest anti-humanist turn? Certainly we’ve
had our day with language like this, not least by way of Althusser – whose
youthful involvement with the organisation Action Catholique, and late desire
for an audience with Pope John Paul ii, suggests that more research is needed
on the relation between secular and religious critiques of humanist presumptu-
ousness.34 And it’s true that Marxist scholars in the humanities lag behind act-
ivists, and scholars in the social sciences, in thinking through ways to link envir-
onmental crises to the critique of capital without using the either-or vocabulary
on offer in the infinity-discourse. The geographers and the sociologists are way
out ahead.
But we’ll catch up. Perhaps the lesson to be learned from the latest turn
to infinity is that it would help to understand the need behind the desire
to critique humanist hubris and textual interpretation. Is it just the conflu-
ence of a long Catholic tradition with the hangover from post-structuralism?
Is it a way for Left-leaning liberals, grappling with feelings of powerlessness
in the face of environmental destruction, to direct those feelings at them-
selves, in a masochistic anti-humanist discourse whose structure of feeling is
something like species-shame? Or is it an attempt to import the wonder, if not
the method, of the sciences into the life of the humanities? It is likely all of
these. And as we seize the opportunity of the revival of interest in Marx to

33 The ‘weird’ feeling Ward describes bears some relation to a certain ‘weirdness’ prized by
the speculative realists in the work of the horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, whose writing in
pulp venues like Weird Tales gave to horror a specifically cosmic dimension: perhaps, many
of the tales suggest, the universe is entirely indifferent to humanity. That Ward identifies
this feeling, but also feels it differently, suggests that there is no necessary relation between
the awareness of that indifference and the implications – generic, tonal, political – one
draws from it. See Harman 2012 and Thacker 2011.
34 See Wolin 2010, p. 212.
infinity for marxists 125

learn and to struggle, we could no doubt incorporate a sensitive awareness of

this latest turn’s coordinates, even if it’s not to incorporate the terms of that
turn itself, which don’t provide what Marxism needs today. No shame; more
poetry.
 chapter 6

The Prynne Reflex

This essay is about a single poet, but also about a way of reading poetry. I’m
focused here on the work of J.H. Prynne, but also on the ethical and histori-
ographical presuppositions in which that work is embedded. I hope to describe,
in this relatively short space, a way of appreciating the power of Prynne’s poetry
while backing away from some of its enabling premises – which have to do with
literary modernism, on the one hand, and the idea of modernity, on the other.
I’d like to do this because I think the time has come for us to begin questioning
the ethical value of literary modernist form and technique, as well as our under-
standing of ‘modernity’ as a master category for understanding recent poetic
history. I use the pretentious-sounding phrase ‘the time has come’ with a little
embarrassment, but since so much of the critical conversation about poetry
these days is about its relation to crisis – ecological crisis, economic crisis, the
crisis of the university – I really do think that we would be better readers of
poetry today if we identified capitalism, not modernity, as the engine of those
crises, and distinguished capitalism as a struggle over the production of value
from modernity as an allegory of historical stages. And, as you’ll see, I think it
matters which version of capitalism we emphasise in our conversations about
poetry and crisis.
I think the dominant critical approach to poetry, at least in the English-
language world, is centrally invested in a modernist narrative of the undoing
of cultural damage, of getting back to lost origins. You might ask, how can such
a desire for lost origins have survived the devastating post-modern critiques
aimed at it in the 1970s and 1980s? That’s a very good question; let’s just say
that the post-modern critique may have been more a lament for the failure of
what modernism thought possible that a demurral from its goals. Already in
the 1980s Andreas Huyssen had argued quite cogently that post-modern lit-
erary theory was in some sense primarily an excavation of the diminishing
possibilities to be found in the innovations of literary modernism, not least
innovations around the assembly of fragments into open-ended, non-holistic
forms.1 As more French literary theory of the period was translated into Eng-
lish, the centrality of Mallarmé’s work to theorists as diverse as Julia Kristeva,
Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze only drove home the point for American

1 See Huyssen 1986.

©
the prynne reflex 127

readers. As it turns out, Mallarmé remains crucial even for mutually antagon-
istic latter-day European theorists like Giorgio Agamben and Alain Badiou. So
we could say that an attachment to the value of open-ended assemblage offered
us by modernist poetry has outlived the popularity of the term ‘post-modern’
itself.
Now, what’s the link between the value of open-ended forms, and the desire
to use the notion of reversal as a model for undoing cultural damage? For a
recent example of scholarship that makes this link, we might turn to Susan
Stewart’s book, The Poet’s Freedom, which begins with an anecdote about Stew-
art seeing a young boy on a beach make a sand-castle, and then destroy it with
great glee. At first, Stewart says, she was dismayed by how casually the boy tore
down what he had so painstakingly created; but gradually, she writes, she came
to feel otherwise. As she puts it: ‘Without the freedom of reversibility enacted
in unmaking, or at least always present as the potential for unmaking, we can-
not give value to our making’. This value, it seems, arises partly out of the fact
that destruction is impossible to regulate: ‘there is no such thing as a precision
bomb, or even the precision destruction of a sand castle’.2 At the end of the
book, Stewart includes a poem of her own, a cento called ‘The Sand Castle’,
made out of fragments from the book’s introduction, scrambled so that the
original anecdote is both obscured and revivified. Open-ended form, here, is
explicitly linked to the return to what Stewart calls ‘pure potential’.3 It is the
poetic equivalent to a philosophical and political position Stewart sketches
out at the end of the prose portion of the book, in which she draws on Han-
nah Arendt to suggest that authentic political action, like poetic destruction,
involves a breaking-open, an undoing, of what has come before – a return to
inaugurality, or, in Arendt’s word, natality.
One aim of this essay is to register my demurral from the premises of this
constellation. While I appreciate the importation of the language of vulner-
ability and precariousness into contemporary academic and poetic discourse
because it invites us not to take either the given or the made world for gran-
ted, I can’t make the leap from that invitation to the formal premise that our
collective vulnerability to disaster, or the vulnerability of art to destruction,
is the result of an irreversible historical movement from simplicity to com-
plexity, or authenticity to hollowness, or religiosity to the secular. I also can’t
accept the further formalisation of vulnerability into a result of the movement
of something like ‘time itself’, which is what Stewart pits against the reversibil-

2 Stewart 2011, 1–2.

3 Ibid., 2.
128 chapter 6

ity of art. Already, then, the tenderness of the position on vulnerability shades
over into a formalisation that replaces a sense of history as the struggle over
the value of time, ‘modern’ or not, with a truism about time’s directionality.
My objections, though, are rather beside the point for now. Mostly I want
us to begin to see some links between open-ended poetic form, and ways of
reading poetry for its ethical value as a vulnerable tissue of fragments. But
there’s another piece of the contemporary conversation that’s important here,
also drawn from the modernist tradition, and it has to do with the ethics
attached to difficulty in the modernism-modernity constellation. This piece
will be especially important when we get to Prynne, not only because his poems
are objectively quite difficult, but because he and his commentators have made
‘difficulty’ a central term by which to judge his work. In a 2010 essay for the
Cambridge Literary Review, Prynne describes poetic difficulty in terms that link
ethics to philology: as in the work of William Empson, Prynne champions the
ambiguity of words, not least the complexities they derive from long use, as
‘energy-promoting’ for the reader, who is moved to do the hard work of inter-
pretation by having to test out possible meanings from among the many a
well-chosen word suggests.4
As I’ll detail below, this ethics of poetic difficulty is linked to a critique
of both commercialisation of language, and of the American language poets,
against whose early emphasis on the ‘free play’ of signifiers he insists that there
is no ‘free lunch’: that the play of signification, like everything else today, comes
at a cost.5 In a review of Prynne’s 1999 Poems, Leo Mellor quotes Prynne’s poetic
fellow-traveller Ian Sinclair putting the case even more bluntly: ‘Why should
[poems] be easy? … If it comes too sweetly then someone is trying to sell you
something’.6
This notion that aesthetic experience is compromised by commercial ex-
change forms the background for the persistent damage-language around Pryn-
nian aesthetics. In the online journal The Claudius App, for instance, the poet
and critic Keston Sutherland described the stanza form of his 2009 volume
Stress Position in language that accurately renders one of the effects of a typ-
ical Prynne stanza, too – as a ‘metrical block whose reiteration as narrative
would damagingly proscribe anything I could identify as my own fluency in
poetic language’.7 And in an early essay on Prynne, Simon Jarvis argues that
the poet’s work reminds us that poetry can only overcome a capitalistically-

4 Prynne, ‘Difficulties’, 2010, 159.

5 See Jarvis 1993.
6 Mellor 1999.
7 Sutherland 2011.
the prynne reflex 129

imposed division between truth and beauty by not overcoming it, but rather
by writhing inside it: ‘Only a poetry recalcitrant to exile from cognition, and a
thought which admits its own artifice of articulation, can remain awake to the
damage done and the capacities set loose by these formally free divisions of
labour’.8 This dialectical position nonetheless preserves the link between free-
dom and difficulty; I think it forecloses the possibility, not that the route to
freedom is difficulty’s opposite, but that freedom might not be an ethical cat-
egory.
In the American conversation about poetry, we have our own touchstones
for this particular ethics of damage and difficulty: the most obvious would be
how key Language poets, who like Prynne came of age in the 1970s, built a cri-
tique of capital around a critique of the simplifications of thought engendered
by the culture of commodification and by the rise of spectacular media – a cri-
tique whose central point was that capitalism made relationships thing-like,
and reduced the complexities of political struggle and lived suffering to mere
spectacle. Prynne has stated publicly that the early Saussurian commitments
of the Language poets, their pursuit of generative arbitrariness and aleatory
surprise, leave him cold; because he has a theory of the history of language
that is built around the pressing of cumulatively deep meanings into the shapes
and sounds of words, he prefers to tackle the problem of the commodification
of language using older, Empsonian techniques that emphasise the historical
treasures of ambiguity.9 But both the Language poets in the moment of their
most clarion poetics and Prynne in his recent essays make a link between an
ethics of difficulty and a theory of damaged language. The idiosyncratic anti-
capitalism they share has been eclipsed by formalist modernity-language: the
U.S. poets have been construed as ‘post-modern’ and Prynne as ‘late-modern’ –
the Americans the poets of the sharp break, and Prynne the poet of attenuated
continuation.
Actually, as Anthony Mellors has suggested, the continuity of Prynne’s work
with the modernists may be less a technique per se than a topos or matter cent-
ral to English-language literary modernism – the topos of the underworld, and
of the cyclical return to life. Mellors points out that for the earliest modernists,
this topos centred on the figures of Prosperpine or Kora; for later writers, not
least Americans like Charles Olson, this vertical figure of katabasis, or going
under and coming back up, was rotated 90 degrees, as it were, and given a new
classical pedigree – the ‘horizontal’ arc of journeying and homecoming exem-

8 Jarvis 1993, p. 37.

9 See Prynne 1993.
130 chapter 6

plified in the wanderings of Odysseus.10 In the early 1970s Prynne delivered a

beautiful, adoring lecture on this thematic of Olson’s, which Prynne also exper-
ienced as a deep structure, a kind of boomerang arc, so that the short lyric
sections of Olson’s Maximus added up to something like epic, and then col-
lapsed back into being lyric again, more beautiful for having been incorporated
for a while into a larger structure.11
Olson was a sometime friend and a great influence on the young Prynne;
Prynne’s reworking of the Olsonian topos of exile and return, which has shaped
his whole career, involves re-inscribing that arc of homecoming in movements
of many different scales – not only the wide compass of the great Homeric
voyage, but the turning of one’s head from left to right and back again, or the
movement of molecules back and forth across a membrane, so as to write a kind
of dream of the return to authenticity into even micrological space. As early as
1979, in an essay that remains among the very best on Prynne, Douglas Oliver
noticed that ‘Prynne’s work would reach, if it could, beyond the language condi-
tion where sub-microscopic events are mere metaphor for mental process to a
condition where they more closely become a description of the same, essential
process’; he calls it a ‘sublime-literal’.12
Like Oliver, I think Prynne’s ambition is toward a poetry that would stage
cognition’s ability to reverse time and, in doing so, reach past mere metaphor.
I think this mostly because of how a belief in this ability organizes Prynne’s
essays well as his poems. So let me give you three quick examples of how, in his
critical writing, Prynne has imagined pitting reversal or undoing against what
he takes to be the historical damage of modernity: one that addresses biology,
one that turns to economic history, and a third that thinks through poetry and
philology.
In a 1972 prose piece called ‘The Plant-Time Manifold Transcripts’, Prynne
imitates the proceedings of a scientific conference whose participants are
entertaining the possibility that at the level of cell membranes, plants could
be said to move both forward and backward in time. Indeed, given different
conditions of rot, compost, and generation, the scientists are interested in
how plants might be describable as being alive and dead at the same time:
as one speaker puts it, ‘plant death is clearly a more complex event than in
other life systems’.13 What’s interesting about the piece is that it is not a lam-
poon of science but a kind of fantasia on it: Prynne is dead serious. And his

10 Mellors 2005, pp. 52–89, 58–9.

11 See Prynne 1999.
12 Oliver 1979, pp. 95–6.
13 Prynne 1999, p. 240.
the prynne reflex 131

readers have followed him: the poet and critic Justin Katko, matching this ser-
iousness, calls the piece ‘relativistic phytosophy’.14

In another piece from the late 1960s, this one called ‘A Note on Metal’, Prynne
offers a sketch of economic history that tells a story of how stamped coinage
emerged as the result of complex processes of social abstraction that began, at
the dawn of recorded history, with simpler, more concrete measures of value,
like weight. Interestingly, for Prynne, the rise of coinage is both a practical mat-
ter, involving the need for a medium of value transferable across ever greater
distances, and a metaphysical one, since he imagines that stamped coins,
unlike ingots or worked metal, are de-magicalised: their stamps over-write any
trace of the resonance of the substance itself. It doesn’t matter, Prynne believes,
that a gold coin is gold so much as that it is gold whose value is backed by
political authority, and for Prynne what’s damning about the imposition of that
authority is that it’s an abstraction – an abstraction and a displacement from
something magical, something alchemical, that was once evident to us when
we first encountered gold. That poetry might help us remember this magic, and
that such remembering is a leftist project, Prynne makes clear at the end of the
essay: ‘at this [late] stage’, he writes, ‘there is the possible contrast of an exilic
(left-wing) history of substance’.15 The triumph of the left, in this vision, would
be measured less by justice or by liberation, whatever they might mean, than
by a return to ‘reality’ or authentic life.
Finally, in a recent Chicago Review essay, Prynne imagines the lineation of
the poem on the page, in its difference from prose in paragraphs, as a kind of
machine for making time tremble and reverse: ‘line-breaks or step ordering that
override the unfeatured page space of normal printed language perform the
overt function of continuity by versus and retroflex’.16 That is, our eyes darting
from the end of one line to the beginning of another create a kind of instabil-
ity in linear time. Elsewhere he suggests that not only left-justified writing, but
the etymology of English words, can be motivated or activated into reversing
time, and to heightening painful, buried contradictions in the human history
of violence, as when Wordsworth uses the word ‘blessing’ with beatitude but
also, Prynne thinks, with an implicit awareness of the word’s link to words like
the French blessure, to wounding, to blood sacrifice.17

14 See Katko 2010. In the original version of this essay, I misidentified the date of publication
of Prynne’s text as 1968; it dates to 1972. Thanks to Ryan Dobran for pointing out this error.
15 Prynne 1999, p. 130.
16 Prynne 2010, ‘Mental Ears’, p. 140.
17 Ibid. p. 136; pp. 139–41.
132 chapter 6

All of these examples, I think, can make us better readers of Prynne’s poetry.
But they also make me feel my critical problem most acutely, and so I think I
need to name for you the contradiction I experience between my keen interest
in what Prynne’s poems are capable of, on the one hand, and my rejection of the
historical and ethical premises that generate them, on the other. It’s not clear to
me, for instance, that ‘the unfeatured page space of normal printed language’
exists in any continuous way such that we could say poetry stands out against
it because of how it’s printed – historically, the formats of prose have been as
marked by conventions and surprises as poetry has, perhaps more so. And the
stagist history of the rise of capitalist money, in which the problem with capital
is that it’s abstract and not concrete, has long since been disabled by a variety of
scholarship in anthropology and economic history: I’d point to David Graeber’s
recent volume Debt: The First Five Thousand Years as the great synthesis and
clarification of this scholarship. Finally, the intellectual strain behind the play-
fulness of the Plant Time Manifold is all too evident. It is deflating indeed when
a perceptive reader like Katko, glossing Prynne’s piece for more than fifty pages,
can only assert in the end that Prynne’s insistence on our reading plants as mov-
ing in more than one temporal direction is evidence of ‘the poet’s faith that his
description bears absolute fidelity to the total logic of his own experience’.18
Katko’s use of the contemporary keywords ‘fidelity’ and ‘logic’ calls to mind the
work of Alain Badiou, the arbitrariness of whose use of set-theoretical math
to found a new ontology of ‘infinitude’ shares with ‘relativistic phytosophy’ an
all-too willful hermetic ‘fidelity’ to its improbable cause.19
So what about the poems? As I’ve said, I agree with Oliver that Prynne is
after a kind of ‘sublime-literal’ in which a poem can demonstrate that the activ-
ity of the mind is like the activity of nature, that the movement of molecules
is like the movement of the stars, that at some level erosion and continental
drift and neuronal impulses and the etymology of words are all expressions of
the same non-linear dynamism. At mid-twentieth century, the emergent dis-
cipline that gave this belief a contemporary cast was cybernetics – a field of
inquiry that presumed to find the structural commonality across psychological
and natural disciplines by way of assuming an innate dynamism to all phe-
nomena, which was to be understood via informatic keywords like ‘signals’ and

18 Katko 2010, p. 286.

19 For a devastating critique of Badiou’s use of math, to which Badiou was only able to
respond by huffing and puffing and bullying, see Ricardo Nirenberg and David Nirenberg.
‘Badiou’s Number: A Critique of Mathematics as Ontology’, Critical Inquiry 37 (Summer
2011): 583–614, and Badiou’s reply in Critical Inquiry 38 (2012), 362–87.
the prynne reflex 133

‘feedback’.20 Prynne likely picked up on such ideas from Olson, the opening
assertion of whose canonical poem ‘The Kingfishers’ – ‘What does not change /
is the will to change’ – finds its support in the cybernetic language that surfaces
a few lines later: ‘not accumulation but change, the feed-back proves, the feed-
back is / the law’. While Prynne does not hew long or closely to this particular
idiom – the first piece in his 1997 Poems, from 1968, begins with the language
of signals, and it subsides shortly after – he retains his insistence on the non-
metaphoric commonality of phenomena across scale. This seems important for
understanding Prynne’s career, since his belief in this trans-scalar commonality
is what drives the wide reach of his reference, not least his famous juxtaposi-
tions of economic, scientific, and poetic language. This wide reach, as one reads
across Prynne’s volumes, is at least in part an expression of the sheer will to
align seemingly incommensurate phenomena into a single cosmically coher-
ent picture. Many of his champions see in this reach the measure of Prynne’s
genius; however true that may be, it is also an expression of his will to restore
what C.S. Lewis mournfully called ‘the discarded image’ – i.e., a vision of the
spheres.
Unlike Olson, of course, Prynne has never sought to restore us to the spheres
by writing in the epic mode; indeed one suspects he actively rejects the attempt.
In the place of epic, we find an ongoing engagement with a notion of lyric,
expressed in the early work by the belief that attention to minutiae, given
expression in shorter forms, can open space for human tenderness in a time
of universally reified relations. This tenderness sits uneasily with the testiness
that the cybernetic ambition breeds, so that, in the early poems, we are being
spoken to by a poet who is both eager to show us the value of quiet attentiveness
to what’s small, and exasperated that we don’t understand its significance (the
first of the relatively few questions that dot his collected 1999 Poems is, ‘How
could this be clearer?’). Here is the penultimate stanza of ‘Die A Millionaire’,
from the 1968 volume Kitchen Poems:

And the back mutation is knowledge and

has always been so in the richest tradition
of the trust it is possible to have, to repose
in the mysteries. The perversions which
thrust it forward, as a new feed into the

20 A good survey of the trans-disciplinary ambitions of cybernetics, and of its reluctance

to engage disciplines on anything like their own terms, is Jean-Pierre Dupuy, On The
Origins of Cognitive Science: The Mechanization of the Mind (Cambridge: The mit Press,
2009).
134 chapter 6

same vicious grid of expanding prospects

(profits) are let through by the weakness, now,
of names.21

There are three things in this passage that are resonant throughout Prynne’s
career: the reference to knowledge as a ‘back mutation’; the sense of forward
movement as a ‘perversion’ (rendered here in cybernetic language, as a ‘new
feed’); and the sense that capitalism, in accentuating forward movement at the
expense of our ability to remain aware of the role of ‘back mutation’ in shaping
authentic perceptions, has done damage to language (‘the weakness, now, / of
names’). The poem concludes with a mix of tender piety and teacherly curt-
ness:

This is
a prayer. I have it now between my
teeth and my eyes, on my forehead. Know
the names. It is as simple as the purity
of sentiment: it is as simple
as that.
P, 16

Later in Kitchen Poems, in a poem called ‘A Gold Ring Called Reluctance’,

Prynne invents another version of this elusive idea of literal continuity across
scale: that underneath seemingly irreversible phenomena is an endlessness,
both modestly un-metaphysical and quietly cosmic, bigger than linearity. He
discovers it while walking – walking slowly, in particular:

As you drag your feet or simply being

tired, the ground is suddenly interesting;
not as metaphysic but the grave, maybe,
that area which claims its place like
a shoe. This idea of the end is a neat
but mostly dull falsity, since the
biologic collapse is violence reversed,
like untying a knot.
P, 21

21 Prynne 1999, p. 16. Hereafter abbreviated P and cited parenthetically by page number.
the prynne reflex 135

The poet’s interpretation of death (‘biologic collapse’) as ‘violence reversed’,

and the body as a ‘knot’ awaiting its untying, makes a lovely bid for entropy as
deserving our fondness. It also speaks to the career-long will to reversal with
which I began. In a moment I want to sketch the way in which this matrix of
concerns endures across Prynne’s career, but before I do so, I want to turn to its
one remaining element, which is the critique of capital in which that matrix
finds its specificity. For Prynne, in the late writing as well as in the early poems,
the critique of capital is to be conducted by pitting an actuality won of stillness
against a frenzy of commerce that frays language. It is to be found in minu-
tiae, and in something like un-velocity. Here are the last two stanzas of ‘Gold
Ring’:

And as the age or condition of this

fact we call place grows daily more remote,
the literalness thrives unchecked. The
imbalance is frightening: the splintered
naming of wares creates targets for want
like a glandular riot, and thus want
is the most urgent condition (e.g. not
enough credit).
I am interested instead in
discretion: what I love and also the spread
of indifferent qualities. Dust, objects of use
broken by wear, by simply slowing too much
to be retrieved as agents. Scrap; the old ones,
the dead who sit daily at the feast. Each
time I hesitate I think of them, loving what
I know. The ground on which we pass,
moving our feet, less excited by travel.
P, 23

The critique of capital emerges here in the way two sets of words sift into oppos-
ition: on one side, the ‘frightening imbalance’ between ‘fact’ and the ‘splintered
naming of wares’ (that is, something like advertising) produce a ‘glandular riot’
that overexcites something like a faculty of ‘want’. To these are opposed ‘discre-
tion’, the ‘indifferent qualities’ of minor, well-worn objects, and the ‘slowness’
that prevents them from capture in the circuits of commerce. All of this, along
with a respectful nod in the direction of ‘the dead’, produces a lessened ‘excit-
ation’ in which we are invited to rove and saunter, forsaking a presumably
hyped-up, touristic ‘travel’.
136 chapter 6

These oppositions are typical of Prynne’s critique of capital, and they do

not disappear in the later work. The pitting of one speed against another, but
also the ethical commitment to personal refusal, and the sense that there is
something ‘glandular’ in susceptibility to the solicitations of commercial life –
that a central problem with capitalism is that it excites people’s concupis-
cence – all these remain constant, as we will see. Indeed I believe they provide a
template for the later work, despite the supposedly un-thematisable density of
the more recent poems. The way to read the endurance of these concerns from
the early to the later poems, I think, is to see them transposed from first-person
statements of theme and belief, as we’ve seen above, to figures of reversible
flow, and then to reversal-games at the level of the part-word. Rather than
abandoning an early thematics of reversible damage, that is, Prynne in his later
work saturates each poem with it. If reversibility stops being a ‘theme’ of the
poems, that is, it isn’t because it stops being a concern of the poems – indeed it
becomes their formal principle.
Prynne’s mid-career work bears this out. The 1983 volume The Oval Window
is a good example: as Reeve and Kerridge note, the book assembles its mat-
ter from an array of seemingly incommensurable material, from the tropes
of sixth-century Chinese ‘Palace Style’ poetry, to the ordering of cause and
effect in computer programming, to the sloshing and cascading movement of
the crystals in the inner ear that give us our sense of balance, and on to the
Heisenbergian sensitivity to observation of data on financial markets (‘Deaf
To Meaning’). Once again, the poet brings that material into alignment (per-
haps with the residual permission of those mid-century cybernetic ambitions),
and frames the alignment with a proposition about the reversibility of time –
here, in the volume’s unattributed epigraph, which describes how computer
languages operationalise the ideas of ‘before’ and ‘after’, and concludes that
‘This condition says essentially that, / given the present, / the past and future
/ are independent / of each other’. But where in the volumes from the late
60s and 70s Prynne would have offered a first-person statement of programme
or theme, pitting griddedness or spectacle (understood as perverse forms of
relentless forward motion) against one or another micrological reversal of time,
in The Oval Window we will come across it in small rhetorical turns and word-
choices: the theme is in place, if miniaturised. Take the opening of this untitled
poem:

So: from now on too, or soon lost,

the voice you hear is your own
revoked, on a relative cyclical downturn
imaged in latent narrow-angle glaucoma.
the prynne reflex 137

Yet the snow picks up and infolds,

a mist of gold leaf lightly shimmers
as floating clouds go back to the mountains
P, 333

Here the thematics of un-damage are played out in the mini-structure, revoke-
vs-infold: even as the ‘voice’ is made dumb and un-lyric in the ‘revoking’ move-
ment of capital (the ‘cyclical downturn’), the infolding ‘snow’, like the snow-
flake-seeming crystals in the inner ear, tumbles in upon itself and facilitates
return to something less damaged: the clouds ‘go back to the mountains’.
By the 1990s, Prynne has carried this theme of reversal down to the level of
the morpheme and the grapheme. Take this poem from the 1997 volume For
The Monogram:

Tuck up tawdry attraction for the follow broken air

to separate yield and distort along the floor,
moving flood in a pure scheme they have but them
selves alone flutter drain orphans in ultra wrong
unit time set. Either dies young or lives (almost)
for ever trailing blab across some bad sequence
of strides, seeking trim animal redress. For lifted
maternal protection slurping canny on a bundle at
just one table in the entire universe, for him now
governed lazy just one it counts viewless torn lip
chained. All possible out rankings flunk my presents
in ever hopeless profusion scattered grandly on
sea-bed panegyric stipple. Brother set in both limbs
dismissed as a tort factor of age craning forward to
counter stream cycle proof, invests its hatch cover
by orphan fragments reverting to current seed.
P, 425

As usual, the word-hoard is organised as a blending of domains: here we

get industrial agriculture (the ‘flutter drain orphans’) with a light dusting of
computer-language (‘stream cycle’ and ‘current seed’) framed by a caution
against finding something about the scene arousing (the ‘tuck up’ in ‘tuck up
tawdry attraction’, being a way of hiding an erection by restraining one’s penis
with the elastic band of one’s underwear). The ‘orphans’ in line 4, dying young
or barely alive, are drooling as they move in a ‘bad sequence of strides’, on weak
limbs with a ‘brother set’ in the bones, twisted into parallel from remaining
138 chapter 6

mostly seated, their mothers replaced with ‘a bundle’ from which they suck,
their lips punctured by the holes made for a chain, their worlds contracting
to ‘just one table in the entire universe’, in stalls that are otherwise ‘viewless’.
As these poor creatures ‘[crane] forward’ for sustenance, the poet notices the
messy backwash of their suckling, or possibly their gag reflex, and imagines
it violating the one-way motion of the flutter-valved tubes they are obliged to
mouth at, producing a wet white counter-spray to the force-fed flood of milk
that’s all they have to gulp.
I’ve noted that from early in his career Prynne makes it possible to see,
even in the flux of backwash, a metaphor for something like the great Homeric
arc of exile and return (the backwash-sperm ‘reverting to current seed’ at the
poem’s close). What makes this poem typical of his later style is the way he
also expresses theme at the level of the vowel and the dipthong – the poem is
an extended play on ‘u’-sounds in English, with 11 of 16 lines containing the
letter either alone or as part of a dipthong, and a smattering of words like
‘one’, ‘cover’ and ‘brother’ that make a short u-sound even without the letter. I
call this ‘thematic’ because the difference between the ‘ou’ in ‘young’ (line 5)
and in ‘count’ (line 10) likely represent movements back and forth across a
great vowel shift, a kind of perpetual miniature ‘versus and retroflex’ between
what began as French and what ended up as ‘English’ pronunciations of the
vowel combination – from coup de foudre to ‘pound’ and ‘ounce’, as it were.
This play with dipthongs also raises background questions about the conver-
gence and divergence of word-pronunciation across time, like how the ‘er’
in ‘revert’ came to sound like the ‘ur’ in ‘current’. Whatever the actual his-
tories of such convergences and divergences, it is more than likely that for
Prynne they are meant to represent the time of the English language mov-
ing forward and backwards at once. This vowel and dipthong-play is one of
the central elements of Prynne’s late style, and once more I find support for
my sense that it’s thematic in critical writing by Prynne, not least his 1992
essay ‘Stars, Tigers, and the Shapes of Words’, which is a brief against Saus-
sure and what Prynne calls the thesis of arbitrariness in structuralist linguistics.
Against that thesis, Prynne suggests that there are deep cultural reasons why
some, if not all, words are shaped the way they are – his main example, whim-
sically enough, being the ‘twinkle’ in ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ – a word
whose terminal ‘-le’, he argues, bespeaks diminutiveness on the model of the
terminal ‘-le’ in ‘little’, and brightness, on the model of the terminal ‘-le’ in
‘sparkle’.22

22 Prynne 1993, p. 9.
the prynne reflex 139

This may explain why, in the poem above, Prynne pairs his dipthong-play
with a sustained attention to the shape and sound of the letter combination
‘-or’ and its variants: notice ‘for’ (4 times), ‘floor’, ‘distort’, ‘pure’, ‘orphan’, and
‘orphans’, ‘torn’, ‘profusion’, ‘tort’, ‘factor’, and ‘forward’. Meanwhile ‘protection’,
‘profusion’, ‘brother’ and ‘proof’ reverse the ‘-or’ to make a series of ‘ro-’ sounds
and shapes, making a kind of counter-current to the connotations of the ‘or-’
words. I don’t know what Prynne thinks is the historical significance of this or-
ro lability, except that after hearing the two sounds together they seem to call
out to one another (and perhaps that, in things like the movement from the
‘Orlando’ in Orlando Furioso to the ‘Roland’ in the Chanson de Roland, which is
modelled on the earlier Italian poem, we can see the transposition in literary
history, too). But the point is, and this is a little astounding, that it’s all done
according to a thesis about modernity.

∵
In a 2006 seminar visit to a class taught by Keston Sutherland at the University
of Sussex, Prynne referred to a conversation he had with one of his German
translators in which, against the notion that they should work toward a German
version that would transmit some English meaning, Prynne proposed that they
simply translate ‘the words’. A few moments later, he said that the infrequency
of his live reading, at least in the UK, was due to a ‘policy’ he keeps to. With the
audience chuckling, he joked that

My policy … is to read only to audiences that don’t understand English.

That sounds contrarian, but actually it works pretty well. It means I can
read at liberty in China, I can read quite freely in Australia, I can actu-
ally read more or less in parts of the USA, and I can read quite widely in
Canada, but not usually in Britain … [laughter]23

The serious part of the joke seemed to be that, in contexts where audiences
aren’t familiar with the meaning of the words or the phrases they congeal
into, they can simply enjoy the play of sounds, instead of fussing about look-
ing for meaning, or – worse – a ‘moral’: it’s a joke, then, at literary Britain’s
expense. But this seems only partly serious. And the mere joke, the in-house
British joke at the expense of the former commonwealth, seems only partly a
joke.

23 https://www.archiveofthenow.org/authors/?i=77&f=922#922.
140 chapter 6

I mention these remarks because together they bring to a sharp point the
questions I began with about the modernity thesis, and the ethics of difficulty,
in Prynne’s work. To read word by word, having given up the possibility of
framing one’s reading with prior assumptions, sounds to some ears like the
very description of the way to read under conditions of what Adorno called
‘wrong life’ – eschewing interpretive presumption, avoiding the moral offence
of being caught going tra-la-la next door to Auschwitz or in view of Fallujah,
letting meaning, when it comes, thrust up from a two- or three-word sequence,
dutifully reminding ourselves that all we have left now of a once-rich lyric
tradition is a kind of infra-lyric beauty that is certainly ana- and possibly anti-
hermeneutical. In this Adornian framework, the poet adopts (and presumably
the attentive reader mimics) a position of ‘damage’ in which, as Simon Per-
ril puts it, ‘Utterance is more often maimed and wounded by a self-conscious
sense of inappropriateness and inadequacy’.24
But there are problems with this framework. For one thing, it depends on
a pun between semantic meaning and ‘meaning’ in the sense of ‘the meaning
of life’ – the latter of which, indeed, Adorno critiqued mercilessly as a kind of
country-club philosophical pursuit after the mass murder of European Jews.
To read for a phrase or a sentence and attempt to gain from it local meaning
is not to insist, like a mole-eyed bourgeois, that art be pretty and give us deep
thoughts. To argue that those two things are the same is to reduce the critique
of capital to a critique of concupiscence (which is, as we’ve seen, an old target
of Prynne’s).
The problem is broader, though, than a skirmish around how to read indi-
vidual lines or phrases in poetry like Prynne’s. It has to do with how to inter-
pret his tone. To use the critique of damaged life as a background support for
the unremitting gravitas of Prynne’s work is to read Adorno undialectically –
not, I don’t mean to say, to mis-read the Adornian dialectic, since Prynne’s
best expositors are brilliant readers of Adorno, but to read his version of the
dialectic as though it were simply correct. Certainly Adorno had a lancing cri-
tique of too-easy beauty, and of the homogenising force of mass culture, but
he developed it in sentences that showed off his unmatched ear for that popu-
lar form, the aphorism. At the same time, he was never less persuasive than
when critiquing the popular. This problem in Adorno, which is also a prob-
lem for Prynne and the Adornian reading of Prynne, stems from Adorno’s own
background reliance on an idea that, in its Heideggerian variant at least, he

24 Perril 2003.
the prynne reflex 141

opposed – the notion of reification. But he relied on it nevertheless, leading

us decades later once again to the problem of a reductive critique of capital –
here, the reduction of the critique of capital to the critique of abstraction and
objectification. Adorno’s defence of the qualitative and the non-identical as
redoubts against the tendency to abstraction and objectification in systematic
philosophy is far more persuasive than his critique of quantitative, homogen-
ising mass culture, and that’s because the qualitative and the non-identical live
in the subject as much as in the object: unfortunately for the critique of reific-
ation, there turn out to be plenty of idiosyncratic and reflexive ways to love
‘Oops I Did It Again’. My point is simply that, just as it is a pun to equate the
desire for local meaning-making with the brute insistence that Life is Mean-
ingful, so too is it a pun to construe the lyric as morally ‘complicit’ with capital
because it has a price tag: the critique of capital is not the critique of price, but
of value.
This matters, both for the critique of capital and for our understanding of
the moral life of poetry (if it has one). Too much contemporary anti-capitalist
theory depends on a linear understanding of both capital’s operations, and
its movement in history, as though the problem we face in the 21st century is
that there is more capitalism now than there used to be, that it extends farther
and deeper than ever before: this is the notion expressed in theories of ‘affect-
ive’ and ‘immaterial labor’, for instance. And certainly it’s true that the forced
politeness of a flight attendant, and the strokes of a keyboard at a console,
are new capillary termini for capital. But this newness no more explains the
history of capitalism than a critique of Autotune explains the history of black-
face.
Capital works as a circuit, first of all, not a simple vector: in order to self-
expand, it must move through phases, and it is beset with logistical, political,
and financial obstacles at every moment of its metamorphoses from money
into capital and back again. Marx didn’t begin his critique of capital unidirec-
tionally, or with a humanness that became commodified, a kind of H → C,
so to speak. He begins with the movement of commodities in and out of the
money form, over and over: M-C-M’. The relentless technological innovation
capital compels is easy to interpret linearly, of course – we didn’t have gas
chambers in 1926, or iPods in 1987. But the linear interpretation fails to grasp
the contradictory relationship between technology and the value produced
by labour, which is that every innovation that frees capitalists from having to
pay wages simultaneously moves them away from the source of the value –
exploited labour – that in turn makes their profits possible. It also fails to
grasp that not all money is capital, and that not all goods are commodities,
at every moment, but only inasmuch as they are not lying around unused, or
142 chapter 6

up for sale, and so on. This not to mention all the problems capitalists face in
forming and maintaining stock, staving off wastage, gaining access to credit,
enforcing labour discipline, securing a stable market, and surviving compet-
ition. That capitalists as a class have been so successful at solving (or defer-
ring) these problems neither means that capital has simply triumphed over
everything, as in the thesis of damaged life, nor that its perpetual vulnerab-
ilities instantly suggest a route to its overthrow. It does mean that, if we are
serious about understanding capitalism, or even just capitalism’s relation to
the impulses that lead to poetry, we can do much better than to bemoan ‘reific-
ation’.
Without a sense of capital’s beset metamorphoses, that is, we in the academy
and in the poetry-world that’s hitched to it end up telling ourselves modernity-
stories about the Commodification of Everything instead of producing analyses
of how capital is working today. And without a sense that it is participation in
the capital-labour relation, not the existence of a market, that makes money
and labour and commodities into bearers of capitalist value, our ars poetica
tend to waffle between a thin hope that poetry, undercapitalised as it is, is
somehow ‘outside’ capital, and a self-flagellating despair that nothing is. The
‘dialectic’ that tries to capture the movement between these two positions by
producing negative art is less a dialectic than a practice of self-mortification
with an older pedigree by far than capital. That’s not to say that dark art cannot
be anti-capitalist, or that there is a ‘better’, celebratory route to resisting cap-
italism via poetry. It’s to suggest that the relationship between art and capital,
whatever it will turn out to be, is not best understood – or practised – as an
ethics.
So how do we read poetry like Prynne’s, which has staked its claim to legib-
ility on precisely that, on an ethical practice of self-ruining negativity? I think
the answer is, by trying to historicise how he came to the positions he holds,
and to the comportments those positions produce. This returns us, in closing,
to the question of tone, and also to the arc of his career.
For all the praise given Prynne because he reads widely in the sciences, his
poems feel less experimental than ascriptive, so that each new bit of scientific
(or financial, or engineering, or programming) language comes to seem merely
the latest support for Prynne’s claim about the un-linear instabilities inside of
seemingly linear time, and their capacity to model (if not actually enact) the
undoing of the damage caused by linearity, grids, forward-thrustingness, and
instrumentalisation. More consistent even than the absence of any lightness
in the poems is the absence of the scientific emotions of perplexity and won-
der. Early in the career, variations on the words ‘hope’ and ‘hopelessness’ come
closest to that, and they carry the sweet residual erotic charge of the sonneteer-
the prynne reflex 143

ing lover’s hopelessness; the poems of the 70s are full of them.25 But along with
question marks, exclamation points, and the first-person plural, they disappear
in the early 80s, never to return.
This is perhaps to say that Prynne’s late style is a victory for Margaret
Thatcher. Looking back from the vantage of the later work, it is hard not to read
lines like these from a 1971 poem, ‘The Five Hindrances’, and feel that a whole
daylight world has been lost:

The two friends

Walk down the sandy track and we hold back
The ends of the crescent. The future history of the
Air is glowing, with amity beyond the path itself;
Touched gently and brought to this stubborn wreck.
163

To be sure, the work that comes after is far more rigorous, more refusing, more
minutely controlled: I can only imagine the compositional joy that must arise
from the sensitivity to the relays among ‘or’s’ and ‘ow’s’ and ‘ou’s’ that makes
a poet able to shape a line like, ‘undertow no more down, weak born to make
allow fervent or you’ (Sub Songs, 13). But that doesn’t make the work better; it
just makes it more stern.

∵
I have tried to suggest that perhaps the strongest argument for the value of the
enduring thematics of reversal and anti-linearity in Prynne’s work is an Ador-
nian argument that, in the modern era, we live a damaged life. In the Prynnian
version of that argument, the reversibility (or at least non-linearity) of patterns
of everything from migratory drift, membrane salinity, and word-shapes can be
pitted against the relentless instrumentalisation of time and persons deman-
ded by capital, without actually being ‘pitted against it’per se. But this argument

25 See, for instance, ‘… when so hopelessly / we want so much more’ from ‘Numbers in Time
of Trouble’ (Poems, 17); ‘The qualities then area name, corporately, / for the hope they will
return to us’ from ‘Sketch for a Financial Theory of The Self’ (20); ‘… perhaps only the
smell of resin // holds him to a single / hopefulness’ from ‘A Figure of Mercy, of Speech’
(39), and so on. In some sense the early language of ‘hope’ is what the retroflex-trope grafts
itself onto and then replaces, by way of the mediating term ‘rise’, variants of which (‘rising’,
etc.) are used to describe moral, geographic, and meterological ‘gradients’ that are a kind
of last pit-stop before the reversibility idea fully takes hold.
144 chapter 6

for the ethical merit of pitting reflex time against linear time, as the title ‘The
Five Hindrances’ suggests, may be a better Buddhist than a Marxist one, since
capital is a social relation and not a bad physics.
My argument, then, is not that Prynne’s negative-dialectical poetry is too
‘difficult’, or too negative. It’s that, by construing the dialectic in terms of phys-
ics and of ethics, his poetry is not nearly dialectical enough. The conditions of
its legibility are not simply that we read word-to-word, staving off easy inter-
pretation; they are also that we subscribe to a modernity-narrative that stakes
everything on a notion of ‘damage’ that, in turn, depends on a very slender
critique of capital as ‘commodification’. I should be clear that I’m not wish-
ing Prynne’s poetry were built on a stronger critique of capital. Little of my
favourite poetry is a product of ‘correct’ analysis, and I don’t expect it to be. But
since Prynne and his interpreters have made a claim for the force of his poetry
on the basis of how its difficulty-ethics performs a compelling critique of life
under capital, it becomes important to notice how and when that critique is
not compelling. As an ethical comportment, this one is not. And the idea that
Poetry and Marxism Are Serious Business, given warrant by the damage-thesis,
is a damaging idea.
 chapter 7

The Price of Value

My essay, though it is meant to address the ‘economic’ dimension of literary

value, approaches the topic at a rather steep rake. This is partly because the
full-frontal approach, so to speak, has already been developed: there is a sturdy
tradition of work that compares literary texts and economic ideas in analogical
and homological terms, for instance – not least work in the vein of Jean-Joseph
Goux and Marc Shell.1 In this work it becomes possible to see long histories of
overlap between how we have historically conceptualised words and coins, say,
or householding and rhetorical economy. For a student of twentieth-century
poetry like myself, such work provides an important back-history to the work
of a poet like Ezra Pound, for whom matters of economics, rhetoric, pedagogy,
and poetry all twined together in ways that continue to influence poets to this
day.
More recent work has explored the intimate relationship between key ele-
ments of modern literary and economic theories. Tim Kreiner, for instance,
has traced not only the similarities between Saussurean linguistics and mar-
ginalist economics, but also their historical co-emergence. Kreiner’s work not
only outlines the way Saussurean linguistics, which is built around the idea
that the specificity and value of any given word is built out of a differential
relation between that word and the words around it, also mimics marginalist
economics, which imagines economic value to be produced in the price dif-
ferences among commodities. He also situates Saussure’s project, worked out
beginning in 1907 at the University of Geneva, in the long shadow of Swiss mar-
ginalism, whose intellectual prestige ran high, through the renowned work first
of Leon Walras, and later Wilfredo Pareto, both of whom were chair of polit-
ical economy at the University of Lausanne from the late nineteenth to the
early twentieth century.2 There is certainly still a story to be told about how
the literary theories built up around a Saussurean model of potential differ-
ence carry with it liberal-reformist politics of marginalism, whose focus on the
way marginal-use values could afford the modern world a potential infinity of
value was meant quite explicitly as a riposte to insurgent socialist theories of
the economy that imagined a zero-sum game between capitalists and workers.3

1 See, for example, Goux 1990, and Shell 1978.

2 See Kreiner 2013, pp. 16–17.
3 In some of the important scholarship, not least in the work of Roberto Unger, the marginal-

©
146 chapter 7

But I am going to approach the matter of literary-theoretical ‘values’ and

economic ‘value’ from a different angle, by way of a straightforward but idiosyn-
cratic act of literary comparison. Such comparisons are basic building blocks
of our work as critics, and I think they can make our values in this role vis-
ible quite plainly. I think the dominant historical frameworks we use to make
such comparisons tell a value story, too. And I think that reshuffling which
texts we tend to compare, as well as making comparisons that demand possible
reperiodisation, can be useful tools for contesting dominant literary-critical
values.
In my case, I have been interested for some time now in whether, for Marxist
literary critics, such acts of comparison and reperiodisation might be of par-
ticular use. It seems to me that Marxist literary criticism has an odd double
status in the profession: on the one hand, it is seen as a somewhat dated (if pos-
sibly resurgent) brand, or method, which limits critics to reading left-wing texts
only, and constrains interpretation to the endless repetition of stale discover-
ies about the unacknowledged role of labour behind most literary production.
On the other hand, Marxist criticism has an uncannily universal heritage in
English-speaking literary academia: the very critics who would disavow it on
the terms I described in the preceding text are nonetheless likely to tell mod-
ernity stories, for instance, that ultimately depend on an understanding that
capitalism is the engine for most of what goes by the name of ‘modernity’ in
the first place; or they turn to ideas like ‘structures of feeling’, which have a spe-
cifically Marxist provenance, whether or not they acknowledge it.
So in this essay I will be looking at portions of two historically far-flung
poems in order to see if I can push back against this situation, not least by
thinking about modernity and feeling. The first of the poems, Boethius’s sixth-
century Consolation of Philosophy, is, among other things, a Neoplatonic med-
itation on the sufferings of the body and the freedom of the soul. The second,
a recent long poem by Jasper Bernes, is a more-than-realist account of recent
anti-capitalist struggles that reflects on capital’s ability to create persons and
warp the very fabric of space and time. Both poems are prosimetric (that is,
they alternate between verse and prose), and both take the occasion of a certain

ists not only passively facilitate a shift away from political economy to economics, but also do
so in a pointed response to socialist critiques of capitalism. How precisely this is true is hard
to determine, but we might see a latter-day measure of its plausibility in Robert Heilbroner’s
observation that modern-day economics, the economics marginalism helps create, has also
created a blindness within the field whereby economists are so focused on the autonomy
of ‘the economy’ as their object of study that they are unable to realise that they are in fact
students of capitalism. See Unger 1987; and Heilbroner and Milberg 1995.
the price of value 147

kind of human suffering to investigate whether, somewhere in the space-time

we think we know, possibilities for salvation or political liberation might be
lying in wait.
The aim of my comparing these two poems will be to suggest, first, that the
prosimetric tradition they share, as well as techniques internal to the form,
make the links between them much sturdier and stranger than a simple mod-
ernity story can explain; second, that we can profit from allowing ourselves to
feel something more than scepticism about these poems’ speculations on the
cosmos, or on space-time; and third, that the philosophical framework to which
we might turn in order to make a quick-and-dirty distinction between the Neo-
platonic Boethius and the Marxist Bernes – that is, a distinction between ‘ideal-
ism’ and ‘materialism’ – tells us more about received ideas concerning religion
and Marxism, respectively, than it does about the poems, or the problems that
animate them. I will conclude, building on these three points, by suggesting
that if we disrupt our first impulses to linear periodisation, clear feeling, and
philosophical tidiness – that is, by questioning the literary-critical value we
place on those things – we can see Bernes’s poem in particular struggling to
come to terms with capitalism in ways that actually improve our understand-
ing of how capital produces so-called economic value.
So let’s turn to Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, famous not only for its
exploration of the solace philosophy and poetry alike can bring to the suffering
mind, but also for its mixed verse-prose structure. The moment most germane
for my argument here is famously the central pivot of Boethius’s text, the ninth
poem of the third book in the Consolation. Readers will recall that Boethius
has been imprisoned and sentenced to death after a mysterious reversal of
political fortune under Theodoric, the Ostrogoth ruler of Rome. Though he pro-
fessed to be a Christian, the ‘consolation’ of the title comes to the narrator not
through religious doctrine, but through the figure of Philosophy, who appears
to Boethius as a woman, and who leads him through a succession of prose dia-
logues, which are punctuated by verse interludes. The arc of the Consolation
is from despair to enlightenment, and it follows a Platonic (and Neoplatonic)
trajectory – which is to say that as Philosophy leads the narrator to let go of
his outrage and his anguish, she does so by way of urging him to reflect more
deeply, not only on the moral character of his suffering, but also on the evan-
escence and the insignificance of the material world.
This is consequential, believe it or not, for my reading of contemporary
poetry: more and more I want to read it in light of the poetry that comes, not
only immediately prior to it, but also long before it. So, when we read Boethius’s
Neoplatonic ode to the uncaused wholeness of divinity, and isolate this ‘doc-
trine’ from everything around it in the poem, we lose something important
148 chapter 7

that poets today still tap into, not least the allure a certain kind of poem exerts
when it invites us to meditate, not only on its propositions, but on the com-
plex self-relation that is its shape, form, performance. In a recent study of the
form of the Consolation, Robert McMahon argues that despite generations of
careful modern readings of Boethius’s text, its statements of belief about the
nature of matter, the universe, soul have been taken as free-standing asser-
tions of something like a Neoplatonic creed, whereas Boethius built the work
to enable readers to experience such moments as part of an unfolding succes-
sion, a journey, in which statements taken as true in earlier parts of the work
are altered in meaning by the exposition of the ‘higher’ truths that come after.4
McMahon also goes to some length to demonstrate, not only the careful seed-
ing of the Consolation with numerological significance, but also the way such
numerology is meant to combine with the successive and retrospective struc-
ture of the work to facilitate not argumentative, but meditative reading. And
in a compelling new examination of the political struggles over liturgy and
literacy in late medieval England, Katherine Zieman pushes hard against the
now-intuitive Althusserian notion, built in part around Pascal’s remark, ‘Kneel
down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe’, that to sing, chant, recite,
submit to the rhythms of a song or a text, even one organised around ‘doctrine’,
is necessarily to be ‘interpellated’.5
In addition to the isolation of ‘doctrine’ from its textual and literary sur-
round, the practice of critique as critique-of-doctrine makes it harder to see
the continuities between historically distant poetic stories about the value of
matter and the meaning of suffering (and vice versa). There is hardly any schol-
arship, for instance, on how texts from the nineteenth and twentieth centur-
ies that mix prose and lineated ‘verse’ are tapping into the long tradition of
the prosimetrum. But as Peter Dronke has suggested in his study of the form,
prosimetric composition establishes an extremely useful, flexible framework in
which poets can signal shifts among degrees or kinds of reality, not to mention
tonal shifts that embed or imply larger, looming modal ones.6 But our narratives
of ‘secularisation’, built around notions of doctrine rather than practice, and
our exceptionalist accounts of literary modernism, which tend to afford it no
longer historical story than one that looks back to the Romantics for contrast –
these make it very hard to see contemporary mixings of mode in anything but
a recent historical framework, or see them merely as ‘secular’ version of earlier

4 See McMahon 2006.

5 See Zieman 2008.
6 See Dronke 1994.
the price of value 149

‘religious’ work. We thereby miss the full range of what such texts are doing,
including the full range of how they are struggling with problems of value.
One way I think poetry struggles with problems of value – from ‘value’ in its
most traditional moral and ethical senses to ‘value’ in a fully Marxist sense –
is through the repertoire of techniques by which poems suggest that their
forms are like the world, or that something about their forms is like something
about the world. This is an ancient poetic practice, and a long-standing sub-
ject for criticism, including highly sophisticated, left-leaning contemporary
criticism – as when Giorgio Agamben describes the rhyming structure of the
sestina as ‘eschatological’, because, as a form of cyclicality, it is not linear, secu-
lar; sestina rhyme fulfills a temporal expectation.7 Agamben, writing about the
troubadour poet Arnaut Daniel, seems to ‘believe’ that such a device works,
perhaps because he believes that Arnaut ‘believed’ it. But I wonder whether
there is a slightly different way to approach the formalism that makes claims
about how poetic form is like the material world, one less modelled on belief
and faith (Agamben is writing about the cyclical time of the sestina in light of
the writings of Saint Paul).
Take, for instance, the first seventeen lines of the ‘invocation’ that forms Con-
solation iii.9. In these lines, which are sung by Lady Philosophy (possibly by the
poet as well), the Lady and her companion appeal to the divine Creator to help
them achieve the clarity it will take to comprehend the meanings of matter –
which, in the Neoplatonic framework, is a first step toward understanding the
meanings of suffering. In terms of their argumentative content, these lines have
long been recognised as a straight-forward recounting of Plato’s account of the
origins and destiny of matter in the Timaeus:

O you who in perpetual order govern the universe,

Creator of heaven and earth, who bid time ever move,
And resting still, grant motion to all else;
Whom no external causes drove to make
Your work of flowing matter, but the form
Within yourself of the highest good, ungrudging; from a heavenly pat-
tern
You draw out all things, and being yourself most fair,
A fair world in your mind you bear, and forming it
In the same likeness, bid it being perfect to complete itself
In perfect parts. You bind its elements with law …

7 Agamben 2005, p. 79.

150 chapter 7

You, binding soul together in its threefold nature’s midst,

Soul that moves all things, then divide it into harmonious parts;
Soul thus divided has its motion gathered
Into two circles, moves to return to itself, and the Mind deep within
Encircles, and makes the heaven turn, in likeness to itself.8

And so on. The question is, why sing the Timaeus? Why have two characters
sing it? The Althusserian answer would be that, in singing, we are perform-
ing an action that makes us more susceptible to ideological imprintation (or,
more precisely, that in dramatising two characters singing, the poet is inviting
us to mimic such imprintation). In this light, it is a short step to claiming that
the prosody of these lines is in service of the project of making the doctrine
singable, unconsciously absorbable.
One might think this is a good or a bad thing, but it is certainly plausible.
Even with a minimum of knowledge about Latin prosody, for instance, I can
read the last line and a half of the invocation this way. In the Loeb Library
English of S.J. Tester, it is rendered, ‘And you [the Neoplatonic creator], alone
and same / Are [to the blessed] their beginning, driver, leader, pathway, end’.
In Latin, the last line reads, ‘Principium, vector, dux, semita, terminus idem’.
Why could we not see in the wide variability of end-sounds and end-letters of
those last words the kind of allness the song is praising? M-sounds, r-sounds,
x-sounds, terminal a’s: like compass points of enunciative possibility. Bracket-
ing the ‘idem’ (which, as the ‘same’ in the English, has the sense of ‘alike’, that
is, of applying to all the terms in the list), could we not see in the ‘x’ of ‘dux’
(‘leader’) the chiasmus across which the last line pivots (it is, McMahon points
out, something like the midway point of the Consolation)? Could we not read
the ‘x’ as the crossover point for all the sounds and items on either side of it,
two before and two after? Could we not see that ‘x’ as a miniature nadir of the
Neoplatonic story of matter, created by glory, committed to being mere stuff,
eventually returned to its creator? Can we read redemption into chiasmus?
Sure we could; we’ve been trained to. But how would we describe ourselves,
doing so? As secular or anti-ideological readers who got caught up in an old
way of having literary pleasure for a moment, a religious or mystical or ideolo-
gical or demonstrably incorrect way? As readers who do not mind slipping up
like that, every now and then? As readers who think it is just a game?
I am not happy with any of those options, especially because they depend
on a narrative of either secularisation or modernity that presumes a break or

8 Boethius 1990, p. 273.

the price of value 151

a declension from the past into the present. I would prefer to think of myself,
at least, when I enjoy the experience and later the apprehension of the formal
significance of a given range of sonic play and lability, as someone participating
in an ongoing and ancient history that cuts across a stagist mythical-religious-
secular history, is available to the right and to the left, and may be ‘ideological’ or
not depending on the context in which it is deployed. I think of myself as visit-
ing the literary history of engagements with the possible relationships between
suffering and matter. I think of myself as being asked to imagine that under-
standing materiality more deeply might give me solace.
Much as a doctrinal reading of the Consolation seems to miss its motion,
so too do ‘secular’ or ‘materialist’ readings of contemporary poetry, especially
poetry on the left, miss the full scope of that poetry’s engagement with capital-
ism. So let me turn now to the second of the two poems I’d like to read: Jasper
Bernes’s long poem from 2012, We Are Nothing And So Can You. The poem was
written in the context of the resistance to the austerity policies brought to bear
on universities after the 2008 economic crash. That resistance became milit-
ant and widespread in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2009–11, and one vector
of that militancy developed along the axis of repeated encounters between
protesters and the police – whose job, of course, is to protect things, in their
guise as private property (not least the ‘property’ of the places protesters occu-
pied, in this interval). It is the thing-ification of everything, and the reduction of
humanity to thing-like status, that provokes the poem to meditations on mat-
ter and suffering and value – in this case, ‘value’ in a Marxist sense. Keeping the
opening of Boethius’s invocation in mind, take these lines from the middle of
We Are Nothing. A microphone is tapped, thump-thump, and

the thing is on, we’re live from the

server farm on the moon.
Yeah, basically, humanity … a caucus of depressed
apes taped together by the boomerang
of programmable matter, which moves either
slower while the other moves faster, or faster
while the other moves slower and therefore
hurts less or more than bare being.9

We could certainly read these lines as a parody of the Neoplatonism of Boethius

and others, or at least as its blunt negation. Indeed its demotic bluntness is a

9 Bernes 2012, pp. 9–10.

152 chapter 7

negative of the elevated rhetoric of the Boethian invocation. And the passage –
like the poem as a whole – is emphatically anti-humanist, if by ‘humanism’
we mean belief in a humanity that has been guaranteed the kiss or destiny
of the divine. Finally, of course, the passage imagines matter moving at dif-
ferent velocities much like the way the orbits of the planets were imagined
in the Ptolemaic cosmos that came to accompany the Neoplatonic narrat-
ive of ascent. In this last instance, Bernes’s ‘programmable matter’ is a secu-
larising, even Nietzschean, parody of the ‘perpetual order’ of the invocation,
one that swaps in capitalism where God or the pre-Christian ‘creator’ used to
be.
Again, though, the satisfactions of such a reading are thin, to my mind. For
one thing, the ‘humanism’ of the Neoplatonic ascent that connects human-
ity to the divine is readily appropriable by church anti-humanisms that wish
to remind humanity, not of its continuity with divinity, but rather its depend-
ence on divine mercy. And the ‘anti-humanism’ of calling humanity ‘a caucus
of depressed / apes’ is too funny and too sad to be simply ‘ironic’. The possib-
ility that capital takes charge of matter is being thought of in terms of human
pain. It is less anti-humanist than focused on dehumanisation. Something else
is going on, a deployment of literary techniques that certainly rework older tra-
ditions of poetic materialism, but depend on them, and acknowledge it. Here
are the next two stanzas:

The zoo is really just one big exhibit:

the N. American Homo Artificalis,
force-fed though the voluble casework
of habit, the simple bonds of the bourgeois family,
to which attach the foodstuffs and trinketized
feelings, the one-point perspective, light
brigade of virgin ontologies, our late display, its salad of malady
piled atop the great misshapen
happening of wealth where the sea was once,
shell-pocked, elective, civilized and critical.
Flames, too, are a form of literacy.

This is where we meet each other

once the cameras have been destroyed,
once the metering of time by hallways and workdays
by which we experience a change of ownership
has been destroyed, and the face deformed by things it has to say,
destroyed,
the price of value 153

and the diagrammatic metals of combustible elsewheres, destroyed,

and the destruction, destroyed.10

In the first stanza, the poem moves with lightning speed through a series of
tropes for dehumanisation under capitalism – even our feelings are ‘trinket-
ized’. What looks like ‘family’ is really just a feeding trough and a training in
appropriate emotion; what looks like ‘light’ is actually just ‘late’. The sea has
been overcome by the accumulation of wealth. But with ‘Flames, too, are a form
of literacy’, the poem pivots over to its thematics of destruction – the destruc-
tion of surveillance, enforced productivity, the deformed comportments to
which we subject ourselves, the reduction of space to thoughtless, disposable
use (‘combustible elsewheres’). These stanzas act out a chiastic movement that
the poem repeats on several scales, from the microswapping of the order of
letters and sounds from word to word (the l’s and c’s in ‘shell-pocked, elective,
civilized and critical’, for instance) to the way ‘trinketized feelings’ are reversed
by ‘fire’ into a place where ‘we’ can finally ‘meet each other’, to the prosimetric
alteration back and forth between verse and prose (more about which is in the
following text). These back-and-forth movements are not quite a ‘theme’ of the
poem, nor could they be said to constitute the entirety of its ‘form’, but together
they begin to sensitise the reader to a sketched structure in which, to be blunt
about it, capitalism keeps capturing time and space for the work of value-
production, but time and space keep failing it by becoming mere duration,
mere matter. Oddly though, it is in the area marked out by people becoming
mere matter that capital reveals its vulnerabilities, even as it exerts its greatest
power over living persons. Capitalist time and space form an X / Y axis in the
poem that feels as cosmic as anything in Boethius, but it is policed, militarised,
fully historical, and mortal. Note the x’s in this summary passage, as well as the
poem’s return to that lightly verb-like sense of ‘matters’:

Capitalism – how does it work?

a matrix of acts, inexact, x-ed out

and undercounted, overruled, compelled

to become a sum that never dawns

a sun whose blacks ‘twixt past and future

10 Bernes 2012, p. 10.

154 chapter 7

mount a series of tactical strikes

in the precise place that body is no body

and therefore matters, is the keep of the real, the reaper’s keel11

In the poem’s lineated verse, the opposition between capital and its opponents
becomes mathematically stark – capital, immortal, the reaper, with time and
space at its disposal; and its opponents, mortal to the core, mere matter, armed
only with fire. And ‘x’, clearly, marks the spot. The spot is empty – ‘that body is
no body’; we are nothing – but the force of the emptiness is lost if we read it
merely as a clever reversal of the achieved fullness of mystical union with God.
This is because the poem is using chiasmus and reversal, not just to mock its
earlier poetic deployments, but because those earlier uses have trained us to
hear something about matter ‘itself’ when we come across them, and the poet
wants to understand what is happening in contemporary capitalism by way of
what is happening both to matter and to the category ‘human’.
This is where the poem’s outermost gaming with alternation – its movement
back and forth between verse and the prose sections – becomes important. The
prose sections are written, as Robert McMahon reminds us the medieval poetry
of meditative ascent is implicitly written, in retrospect. Unlike in the Boethius,
the retrospect is the least rather than the most ‘real’ thing about the poem,
because what is being recalled has not happened yet. It is not mystical, quite,
but it is italicised – and since Faulkner, at least, modulations into italicised
prose have come to signal reverie, lyricism, a matrix in which anguish can be
given shape, but not too rigid a shape. Here (again with a small ellipsis) are the
closing two paragraphs of the end of the poem:

We get an old city bus and give it the number of a line that doesn’t exist –
47 or 810. Immediately we exclude all those sad characters who know
where they are going and want to go there, who think in terms of means
and ends, origin and destination, or who are compelled to do so by cir-
cumstances of class or bodily incontinence. This narrows our range of
riders less than you might imagine …
Eventually we have so many buses running, so many constantly impro-
vised lines, and so many partisans running into and out of the buses and
grabbing provisions off the shelves of corner shops, with or without guns,
and taking the gas that we need from the gas stations, with or without

11 Bernes 2012, pp. 22–3.

the price of value 155

guns, with or without leaving behind the mutilated corpses of police,

and getting off one bus and onto another, that the buses become like the
rooms of a disarticulated mansion, whirling through space and crossing
and recrossing, combining and disassembling in a stupid, manic dance …
There are sanitation buses and fully-armed bank-robbing buses and buses
that hate all the other buses. There are so many of these buses spinning
through the city that, eventually, it truly is as if they were themselves the
only thing stationary in a crazy world jumping about in every direction,
as if space had too many dimensions to be space but not enough to be
time.12

This is not ‘redemption’; it is not perfect peace. It is more like liberation, if

the liberation of an immediately post-revolutionary moment is marked both
by a sense of multiplying possibilities and unnerving disorientation (the ‘stu-
pid, manic dance’; the ‘crazy world jumping about in every direction’). To put
it more emphatically, the post-revolutionary matrix is more and less ‘real’ than
the X / Y grid it has just supplanted.
By virtue of their merely possible futurity, the prose sections could also be
said to take place in a less ‘real’ space than the verse sections. But they are also
more ‘realist’: if in the verse we are given to witness letters and syllables revers-
ing and unreversing, on the page, in the prose section in the preceding text we
are given descriptions of whole buses engaging in that same movement, ‘cross-
ing and recrossing’ as they grope to find the x-mark of a new world. I think
this is one of the poem’s great achievements – to write a description of a post-
revolutionary moment that is not a utopia; to use techniques that orbit wider
than realism, while looping through a descriptive realism nonetheless. This is
beyond the resources of realist fiction when it tries to think about capitalism.
The best dystopian science fiction, meanwhile, when it tries to extend capital-
ism into the future, tends to invite allegorical readings that, while pleasurable,
tend to lose sight of the thing Bernes has kept our gaze on all the while: the
conditions of production under capital, the ones that make us merely ‘program-
mable’, make us just sad apes.
What We Are Nothing does that realist fiction does not, though, is play bril-
liantly, and across scale, with reversal. I think that, when we tune into this
reversal-play, and see it repeat itself – as technique, theme, form, key change,
reality shift – we can also see how Bernes’s rendering the fate of matter as a
perpetual ‘recrossing’ rather than an ascent allows him to tap into older poetic

12 Bernes 2012, p. 35.

156 chapter 7

resources for thinking about matter without merely ‘secularizing’ them. I think
it would be more accurate to say that in We Are Nothing the chiastic or orbital
fate of matter in Neoplatonic poetics becomes, not profane, but epicyclical. It is
as though the poem allows us to absorb, not only the ongoing literary practice of
thinking about matter and suffering through poetic gaming, but a story about
how the open-ended cyclicality of capitalist accumulation is both utterly new
in history and also impossible to imagine without the capture and deployment
of ancient capacities and humble, un-‘modern’ bodies.
Bernes’s poem is also, if we care to notice, a caution about the limits of
understanding Marxist anti-capitalist projects as ‘materialist’. There is too
much cosmos in the poem, too much reflection on what capital obliges us to
become, for us to read simply as a ‘materialist’ poetic critique of some capital-
ist reduction of ‘spirit’ to ‘matter’. The poem is clearly suggesting, rather, that
spirit and matter – whatever they are – find themselves yoked into the service
of capital.13
This leads me to a final point that is, I am afraid, a bit terminologically twisty.
One of the most wonderful things about Bernes’s poem is that it performs a
bafflement and dismay about the power of capital that nonetheless connects
to a deepening resistance to it. I think this complex attitude – this poetic struc-
ture of feeling, if you will – is possible in part because Bernes’s anti-capitalism
is not reducible to a philosophical ‘materialism’. He clearly sees that, in order
to reproduce itself on an ever-expanding scale, and in ever-intensifying ways,
capitalism needs the perpetual nourishment of exploitable labour, uncapital-
ised time, as-yet-unconquered space. It needs potential; it needs the ‘ideal’. This
is not just a point about how the poem gives the lie to unhelpful reductions
of anti-capitalism to philosophical categories. It is about how a ‘materialist’
reading of contemporary capital tends to see it as an achieved thing, a ‘cultural
dominant’, to use Fredric Jameson’s term, whose greatest power lies in its sheer
extent.14 Sadly the situation seems to be much worse than that: it is not so much

13 As Erich Fromm argued more than fifty years ago, Marx was not interested in being a
philosophical ‘materialist’; and, as Z.A. Jordan points out, it was not Marx, but Georgi
Plekhanov, who gave Marxist currency to the phrase ‘dialectical materialism’. In the early
twentieth century, Jordan reminds us, a wide range of thinkers friendly to Marxism objec-
ted to the characterisation of Marxism as a ‘materialism’, because the philosophical bag-
gage associated with ‘materialism’ simply looped it back into an ancient debate about
transcendent causes and the metaphysical character of matter. Marx, of course, did not
concern himself with developing a theory of ultimate historical causality, preferring to
work outward from the dynamics of capitalism to explain its processes of accumulation
and reproduction. See Fromm 2011; and Jordan 1967.
14 Jameson 1991, p. 6.
the price of value 157

that capitalism has triumphed over every alternative – true enough – as that it
does triumph over resistance, alternatives, the vicissitudes of the market, every
day, again and again. ‘Capitalism-has-won’ is a modernity story. ‘Capitalism-
exploits-us-every-day’ is an anti-capitalist one. We Are Nothing tells the second
story, and in order to do so – this is the twisty part – it reaches past the false
reading of Marxism as a ‘materialism’ in order to tap into the long poetic his-
tory of philosophical wonderment about matter, both ‘materialist’ and ‘idealist’.
That poetic tradition is what allows We Are Nothing’s unphilosophical anti-
capitalism to shine with poetic and philosophical force.
I called this essay ‘The Price of Value’ so as to nod in the direction of what,
for Marx, propels each cycle of capital accumulation, which is the transforma-
tion of value into price: the realisation of the values won from exploitation by
sale in the market. Market exchange is, of course, only a moment in the circuit
of capital; but while capital exceeds it, it cannot do without it. Sooner or later
it needs to be vulgar, and let us know, not only what we are good for, but what,
at any given moment, we are worth. More and more, in the university, we are
told that the answer is, not very much. But there is a danger here for capital:
what if the answer becomes, you are worth nothing? What if machines really
can do your job, design your syllabus, teach your classes? What might being
nothing free those who have been terminally devalued to do? We Are Nothing
jokes about this – ‘And now it seems / We’ll have to discover something else to
use / Our ration books for, like poetry?’ – but it does not only joke. Toward the
end of the poem, in its italic future anterior, the poets asks an ancient question
about value in the only way still possible, the radically contemporary way:

… would the 500 years experiment find at its limits not just capitalism
or class society but the human form, not just the speaking ape but all the
carbonated sacs of self-reproducing logos that foamed out of that old, ter-
rible constancy? … The frequencies collecting in our forehead felt good –
we understood it not at all at once, the bright reasons flashing like stairs
in the dark. We drank it up. And then we fought as hard as we could.15
15 Bernes 2012, p. 32.
 chapter 8

The Anti-humanist Tone

This essay forms part of a project whose aim is to develop a clear picture
of the sources and styles of contemporary anti-humanism. Though we tend
to think of the critique of ‘the human’ as a project led by the French post-
structuralism of the 1960s, it is both older than that, and more various. The
sources of anti-humanism are as old as the classical rhetoric of misanthropy,
and include an enduring strain of Christian theology that insists on an infinite,
humbling difference between God and ‘man’. And though the primacy of post-
structuralism in the literary academy has long subsided, the anti-humanist
rhetoric in which it took part has survived, even flourished, in recent years. In
contemporary politics, anti-humanism shapes a whole flank of environmental-
ist discourse that bemoans humanity’s supposedly innate rapaciousness, and it
forms part of current anti-racist rhetoric, which includes ‘Afro-pessimist’ argu-
ments that, because dehumanisation (or a structural position outside ‘human-
ity’) so centrally shapes the experience of Black people in America, they might
best give up on the category of ‘the human’ as a staging ground for appeals
to dignity. A similar argument can be found in queer theory, which includes
a whole variety of arguments in favour of seeing queerness as monstrous or
inhuman.
In contemporary philosophy, meanwhile, anti-humanism is at the centre
of new ‘object-oriented ontologies’ that make much of how supposedly ego-
driven, overweening human subjects get in the way of better understandings of
the workings of everything from political life to the universe itself. We can even
find a strange, triumphalist strain of anti-humanism in the techno-optimist
rhetoric of Silicon Valley, not least in conversations about ‘the singularity’ –
the projected future moment when robots surpass humans in every aspect of
cognition, possibly including emotion.
As these different aspects of anti-humanist rhetoric blend into modern
anti-humanism, they are also increasingly visible as arguments about how we
should feel about being human. Though anti-humanism is generally framed as
an argument about humanity, in other words – the claim, for instance, that cos-
mically speaking we are tiny to the point of insignificance – its claims may be
most significant for the tone in which they are delivered (our insignificance,
if that’s what it is, can be described in tones both wonderstruck and baleful).
Indeed I have come to think of anti-humanism less as a set of propositions than
as an historically transmitted, and rarely questioned, repertoire of attitudes.

©
the anti-humanist tone 159

These attitudes, I want to suggest, are as much about the material condi-
tions that structure human relationships as they are about the existential value
of humanity. In the twentieth century, this meant that such attitudes were,
however ontologically they were framed, also always attitudes about capital-
ism. In the opening chapter on ‘tone’ in her pathbreaking 2005 volume Ugly
Feelings, Sianne Ngai argues that ‘tone’s generality and abstractness should not
distract us from the fact that it is always “about” something’.1 For Ngai, the
‘aboutness’ of tone cannot be compassed by New Critical models of tone as a set
of reader-writer relations, such as address; instead, she thinks closely through
Adorno’s struggle both to incorporate and hold emotion at bay as the prop-
erty of art objects. Adorno’s Marxism is of use to Ngai because his dialectical
method continually points to a set of determining conditions that are contra-
dictory products of social struggle, which makes it possible to read the strange
way tone seems both to emanate from objects and to be created in response to
them: there is no one ‘subject’ in the subject-object dyad favoured by theorists
of tone. In a brilliant later essay, Ngai hones her sense of this elusive ‘aboutness’
by tracing the afterlife of Marx’s concept of value as it produces the concept of
‘real abstraction’ – a way of understanding that no one commodity can fully
express its capitalist value, since value-production under capitalism depends
on the totality of the process of accumulation.2
This essay means to pick up Ngai’s discoveries from a slant angle, by framing
anti-humanist rhetoric in terms about a particular kind of ‘aboutness’ it never
quite acknowledges – that is, its concern, not just with ‘humanity’, but with
property and value-production, expressed in a set of imaginary class relations.
I will try to convey the centrality of tone to anti-humanism by focusing briefly
on some moments in English-language literary modernism, and then on a few
moments in the history of critical theory. Reading these moments together, we
should be able to see at least two of the key features of twentieth-century anti-
humanist rhetoric: an insistence on an absolute gap between humanity and
its others (God or nature, especially), and a critique of meaning-making, sym-
bols, and metaphors as devices of false consolation that distract us from the
hard wisdom of appreciating this absolute gap. I will close with a parenthet-
ical gesture in the direction of exciting developments in contemporary Marxist
scholarship that has no particular use for this comportment, and with a con-
temporary poem that is part of a remarkable new literary anti-capitalism that
doesn’t depend on anti-humanist tropes.3

1 Ngai 2005, p. 87.

2 See Ngai 2015.
3 My pivot from modernist poetry to critical theory, then back to contemporary poetry, takes a
160 chapter 8

1 Modernist Anti-humanism

I’ll begin with a 1916 essay by T.E. Hulme called ‘Humanism and the Religious
Attitude’. Hulme was a polymathic critic and poet who died young in the First
World War, but who had a notable impact on a range of key modernist thinkers,
not least T.S. Eliot and Robert Frost. His writing is blunt and polemical, so he
gets very clearly at some key anti-humanist ideas – most importantly, here, the
idea of an absolute gap between humanity and God. At the beginning of the
essay, he asserts that his aim is to clarify problems in our perception of real-
ity. ‘Certain regions of reality differ’, he writes, ‘not relatively but absolutely’. He
elaborates this way:

Let us assume that reality is divided into three regions, separated from
one another by absolute divisions, by real discontinuities; (1) the inor-
ganic world, of mathematical and physical science, (2) the organic world,
dealt with by biology, psychology and history, and (3) the world of ethical
and religious values. Imagine these three regions as three zones marked
out on a flat surface by two concentric circles. The outer zone is the world
of physics, the inner that of religion and ethics, the intermediate one that
of life. The outer and inner regions have certain characteristics in com-
mon. They have both an absolute character, and knowledge about them
can legitimately be called absolute knowledge. The intermediate region of
life is, on the other hand, essentially relative; it is dealt with by loose sci-
ences like biology, psychology and history. A muddy mixed zone then lies
between two absolutes. To make the image a more faithful representation
one would have to imagine the extreme zones partaking of the perfection
of geometrical figures, while the middle zone was covered with some con-
fused muddy substance.4

This cosmology and its attendant theology are also an aesthetics. Critiquing the
religious art of the Renaissance as not really religious at all, Hulme writes,

When the intensity of the religious attitude finds proper expression in

art, then you get a very different result. Such expression springs not from

distant permission from Andreas Huyssen’s argument that critical theory can be interpreted
as a post-facto speculative armature for the artistic avant-gardes that preceded it. See Huyssen
1986.
4 Hulme 1936, pp. 5–6.
the anti-humanist tone 161

a delight in life but from a feeling for certain absolute values, which are
entirely independent of vital things. The disgust with the trivial and acci-
dental characteristics of living shapes, the searching after an austerity, a
monumental stability and permanence, a perfection and rigidity, which
vital things can never have, leads to the use of forms which can almost be
called geometrical.5

Hulme’s essay is a dense crossroads for several aspects of anti-humanist rhet-

oric. There is a reason, for instance, that he keeps returning to geometry as
his preferred language for aesthetics and cosmology alike: as Amir Alexan-
der has argued, in seventeenth-century Europe geometry was the Catholic
Church’s preferred basis for mathematical inquiry, since it was easily inter-
preted as the study of the works of a maker with no contiguous relation to
humanity. Alexander shows very clearly how geometry emerged as the math
of church authority when it was confronted with an emergent calculus, whose
language of differentials implied that the differences among things – per-
haps even humanity and divinity – could be described in terms of slopes and
gradients, rather than chasms. This math opened up a dangerous bridge, so
to speak, between god and humanity, suggesting the possibility of a human
arrogation of divinity to itself, if it were to be able to conceptualise infin-
ity.6
Hulme’s aesthetics also has what we could call a literary component, since
in insisting on the unbridgeable discontinuities among zones of reality, he is
partaking of a long hostility to metaphor that can be traced to Plato, but which
reaches a polemical high point with Nietzsche. You may recall that in ‘On Truth
and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense’, from 1873, Nietzsche regards metaphor as a
pathetic human invention designed to keep us from recognising the puniness
and the ephemerality of our life as a species. He begins by writing,

In some remote corner of the universe, flickering in the light of the count-
less solar systems into which it had been poured, there was once a planet
on which clever animals invented cognition. It was the most arrogant and
most mendacious minute in the ‘history of the world’, but a minute was
all it was. After nature had drawn just a few more breaths the planet froze
and the clever animals had to die.7

5 Hulme 1936, p. 9.
6 See Alexander 2014.
7 Nietzsche 1999, p. 141.
162 chapter 8

This is virtually a recipe for later Lovecraftian weird tales and horror stories
about the insignificance of humanity, tales that are championed by contem-
porary ‘speculative realists’ as delivering hard truths about an absolute break
between humanity and the cosmos.8
In its dramatic distance-taking from the dailiness, or even the historical char-
acter, of human life, Nietzsche’s language here also partakes of the rhetoric of
prophecy (which comes to fullest flower, of course, in Thus Spake Zarathustra
[1891]). And there is something of the prophetic in much anti-humanist writ-
ing. Indeed the trace of the prophetic offers an important way to think about
anti-humanism, since sooner or later the use of a prophetic tone or stance must
produce the question, to whom is this prophetic language addressed? To reflect
on this, I’d like to turn to a moment in literary modernism where the rhet-
oric of prophecy, given a broadly anti-humanist coloration, both indicates and
obscures its origins in very concrete circumstances.
I’m thinking (you will not be surprised to learn) of T.S. Eliot’s 1922 poem The
Waste Land, which has not only been figured since its first success as a kind of
prophecy of the particular alienations native to twentieth-century history, but
also features a literal prophet, the mythical Tiresias of Thebes, as well as the
Sibyl of Cumae. I am thinking of the poem, but also its title, which has received
little scholarly attention. In English common law, the late-medieval definition
of ‘the waste land of a manor’ begins as a category to describe land that is either
unusable or not in use, and which, therefore, was traditionally available for
common use. Later, however, the concept of ‘waste land’ becomes a political
tool in the hands of capitalist landlords, who were given license by the concept
to expropriate commonly held land that was ‘waste’ only in the Lockean sense
that it was un-capitalised upon.9 So we could say that one sense in which the
tone of The Waste Land was able to be called prophetic was that it gestured,
if broadly, at an earlier form of dispossession – the history of enclosure – that
prefigures the later capitalist alienations of wage and commodity with which
Eliot’s early readers would have been intuitively if not analytically familiar.
This makes Eliot’s poem sound anti-capitalist, which it surely was. We don’t
often think of Eliot this way today, because contemporary anti-capitalism is
a language of the left; but a century ago it was still possible to be a right-of-
centre, even an aristocratic, anti-capitalist. Eliot’s writing, not least his influen-
tial essay-writing, falls squarely in this zone.10 But The Waste Land itself bears

8 See, for instance, Thacker 2011, and Harman 2012.

9 For a detailed version of this argument see Wood 2012.
10 My sense of Eliot’s conservative anti-capitalism has been shaped by the arguments made
in Joel Nickels’s World Literature and the Geographies of Resistance (Cambridge up, 2018).
the anti-humanist tone 163

this out inasmuch as the content of its prophecy is not only about universal
dispossession, but also about something like secularisation.
Eliot’s poem, its readers know, makes inventive use of parallels between
Greek myth and twentieth-century civilisation, generally so as to depict con-
temporary life as fallen, distorted, and pathetic by comparison to mythic anti-
quity. The Waste Land strikes anti-humanist postures, that is, inasmuch as it
depicts humanity in a sorry relation to mythical divinity, or even just the dig-
nity of mythic tragedy. That this is a political strategy as well as a literary one
is clear in Eliot’s 1923 review of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), in whose similar
techniques Eliot clearly found himself reflected: ‘In manipulating a continu-
ous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity’, Eliot wrote, ‘Mr. Joyce is
pursuing a method which others must pursue after him … It is simply a way of
controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense
panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history’.11 Just a year
earlier, the conservative German political theorist Carl Schmitt would argue,
in his influential Political Theology (published the same year as Eliot’s poem),
that ‘All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized
theological concepts’.12 The literary strategy Eliot describes as ‘controlling’ and
‘ordering’ a contemporary ‘anarchy’ is met, elsewhere in Schmitt, with a conser-
vative political theory championing strong sovereignty over and against exactly
such ‘anarchy’.
Schmitt’s theory of secularisation, and Eliot’s depiction of the fall from
mythic dignity, share more than a declensionary shape. In 1983 Hans Blu-
menberg wrote in The Legitimacy of The Modern Age that the history of the
concept of ‘secularisation’ that helps shape Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty, is
criss-crossed by episodes of alarmed objection to the expropriation of church
lands from Westphalia on. These expropriations, Blumenberg suggests, inter-
mittently but persistently dog more contemporary, neutral-sounding concepts
of secularisation. As we know, of course, the concept later becomes almost
inconceivably broad, but – and here’s what interests me most – Blumenberg
suggests that it still carries something of the aggrieved tone attached to the
dispossession of a propertied class.13 So the prophetic, anti-humanist tone
of The Waste Land may be tangled up in the political history of land use in
more than one way: not only because it makes contemporary life seem sorry
in comparison with myth, and distantly analogises that sorriness to the history
of enclosure, but how it further analogises the dispossessions of enclosure –

11 Eliot 2005, p. 167.

12 Schmitt 1985, p. 36.
13 See Blumenberg 1983, pp. 18–22.
164 chapter 8

which devastated peasants – to the dispossession of aristocrats and wealthy

monastic communities at the hands of strong, ‘secular’ states.
If we could say that the use of the rhetoric of prophecy is a way to give literary
shape to the anti-humanist insistence on a wide or even absolute gap between
humanity and divinity, we could also say that the ‘humanity’ placed on one
side of this gap gains literary force in part because prophetic and secularising
rhetoric erases the tracks of its class histories. This is ironic inasmuch as proph-
etic and secularising rhetoric are meant, as in Hulme, Nietzsche, and Eliot, to
come across as clear-eyed, hard truth. This irony, meanwhile, can clarify for us
the ways in which a rhetoric of negativity or criticality can come, by dint of its
tone, to obscure what it is meant to be critical of. If in English-language liter-
ary modernism the persuasive character of prophetic anti-humanism had this
effect, we can see a similar problem in modernist critical theory, which took
up an insistence on absolute gaps by way of a critique of the symbol. Unlike
the literary history of anti-humanist language I’ve sketched here, though, the
critical-theoretical one tries not to obscure its class character, but to foreground
it unambiguously from the left – at least at first.

2 Critical Anti-humanism

The critique of the symbol begins as a modernist reaction to an earlier, Roman-

tic critique of allegory. Most commentators suggest that it was Goethe who
transformed ‘symbol’ and ‘allegory’ from broadly synonymous terms into an
opposing pair, writing in Maxims and Reflections that the symbol is the device
by which writers express ineffable ideas, whereas allegory is the device by
which they communicate specific concepts. Goethe argues that the symbolic
technique is best suited for poetry because the symbol inexhaustibly excites
our intuitions, whereas allegory is exhausted once it’s de-coded.14 In Coleridge,
influenced by the German idealists, this difference in kind gets transformed
into a difference in values: though Goethe did not impugn allegory per se,
simply noting that it was most germane to kinds of writing he didn’t count as
especially ‘poetic’, Coleridge influentially pits the modes against each other –
at this point they have gone from being devices to being modes – by aligning
the symbol with a living organicism, and allegory with a reductive mechanism.
This is to say that the critique of the symbol has come down to us as a cri-
tique of organicism and of the idea of harmony. The lever by which pressure

14 Bell 1997 provides a compelling summary of these twists and turns.

the anti-humanist tone 165

is applied to the idea of organic harmony between humans and nature is the
idea of time. The symbol is contemptible to its critics, because it factors out
time and history, offering a momentary flash of an impossible union between
humanity and nature, and hewing to that moment of insight as though it were
continuously accessible to us, or as though it were true. In a much-cited pas-
sage from his 1928 Origin of German Tragic Drama, Walter Benjamin puts the
distinction this way:

Whereas in the symbol destruction is idealized and the transfigured face

of nature is revealed in the light of redemption, in allegory the observer is
confronted with the death mask of history as a petrified, primordial land-
scape. Everything about history that, from the very beginning, has been
untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful, expresses itself in a countenance – or
rather a death’s head … this is the form in which man’s subjection to
nature is most pronounced and it gives rise to the enigmatic question not
only of the nature of human existence as such but of the biographical
historicity of the individual.15

Allegory, here, rather than being merely a mechanical writer’s tool, is a mode
of worldliness in which haunting emblems, rather than pointing at ineffable
unity, keep us in mind of our scars, because it is narrative and durational rather
than imagistic and instantaneous. It dispels our illusions of paradise with the
hard truth and the cold water of lived human history. It is the hangover to the
high of the symbol.
But there are problems with this rhetoric of demystification. For one thing,
while it appears to be the case that Benjamin champions allegory against the
symbol because allegory does not offer a vision of redemption, it is more accur-
ate to say that in the Trauerspiel book symbol and allegory have different rela-
tions to it – symbol promises instant redemption, while allegory, far from refus-
ing redemptive language, heightens the drama of redemption by expanding its
compass from the individual to society itself, and by insisting that redemption
will only happen when all are redeemed. The preference for allegory over sym-
bol, here, is less the demystification it purports to be than a prolongation of the
suspense around redemption.
So there is a crypto-optimism embedded in Benjamin’s revolutionary pess-
imism; I think his readers can generally sense this. Perhaps more unexpected,
though, is that the vision of redemption on offer in the Trauerspiel and else-

15 Benjamin 2009, p. 166.

166 chapter 8

where in Benjamin’s work is a vision of sovereignty which he first built up

in admiring response to the work of Carl Schmitt. As Horst Bredekamp has
shown, in the Trauerspiel the young Benjamin polemically reverses the loca-
tion of sovereignty in Schmitt from the ruler to the masses – a bravura move
that nonetheless accepts the sovereignty-framework of the right-wing polit-
ical theorist as the correct one.16 This remains the case in his 1940 ‘Theses on
the Philosophy of History’, which pits a militant historical materialism against
both Social Democratic politics and empirical historicism, both of which Ben-
jamin finds wanting because they are expressions of an abstract, struggle-free
concept of progress. Against these progressive forms of imagining time, Ben-
jamin imagines it divided between a continuous flow and moments of dra-
matic arrest, akin to the Greek concepts of chronos and kairos, respectively.
In Schmitt, it is the sovereign which is able to create or seize upon kairos; in
Benjamin’s theses, it is the revolutionary classes who are able to do this. But, as
Bredekamp suggests, it is sovereignty, rather than capital, that is at issue, des-
pite the bravura inversion. We can see this in Thesis xvi, when Benjamin aligns
the revolutionary hatred of ruling classes with the militant clarity of the his-
torical materialist, both of whom exercise a particularly masculine sovereignty
over themselves:

A historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is

not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop. For
this notion defines the present in which he himself is writing history. His-
toricism gives the ‘eternal’ image of the past; historical materialism sup-
plies a unique experience with the past. The historical materialist leaves
it to others to be drained by the whore called ‘Once upon a time’ in his-
toricism’s bordello. He remains in control of his powers, man enough to
blast open the continuum of history.17

This melodramatic vision of masculine militancy is built around the idea of

absolute sovereignty as of a fleeting moment: the anti-humanism of this idea
becomes clear when we see that it is purchased at the price of a theory, not just
of ‘homogeneous, empty time’, but of oblivion. Benjamin owes this to Nietz-
sche: indeed, Thesis xvi has close parallels with passages in The Use and Abuse
of History for Life, from 1874, as when Nietzsche writes of the ‘man’ who must
come to terms with human insignificance this way:

16 See Bredekamp 1999.

17 Benjamin 1969, p. 262.
the anti-humanist tone 167

Then [he] learns to understand the words ‘once upon a time’, the ‘open
sesame’ that lets in battle, suffering and weariness on mankind, and
reminds them what their existence really is, an imperfect tense that never
becomes a present. And when death brings at last the desired forgetful-
ness, it abolishes life and being together, and sets the seal on the know-
ledge that ‘being’ is merely a continual ‘has been’, a thing that lives by
denying and destroying and contradicting itself.18

Benjamin inverts Nietzsche’s use of the phrase ‘once upon a time’ – in Nietzsche
it tears down the veil, while in Benjamin it is the veil – but he preserves the con-
stellation of transformation, abolition, and history-as-‘battle’. And Thesis xviii
precisely recalls the opening of Nietzsche’s ‘On Truth and Lying’, cited above:

‘In relation to the history of organic life on earth’, writes a modern biolo-
gist, ‘the paltry fifty millennia of homo sapiens constitute something like
two seconds at the close of a twenty-four-hour day. On this scale, the his-
tory of civilized mankind would fill one-fifth of the last second of the last
hour’. The present, which, as a model of Messianic time, comprises the
entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgment, coincides exactly
with the stature which the history of mankind has in the universe.19

Benjamin’s revolutionary anti-humanism, then, depends on a high-contrast

binary between the masculine seizure of sovereign power and a vision of sur-
rounding oblivion that, in its disregard for what today we might call social
reproduction, is equally masculinised. This insistence on a model of milit-
ancy as tragic sovereignty directs attention away from opposition to capitalist
accumulation, and toward a critique of false sovereignty – not least the false
sovereignty of liberals and Social Democrats, who supposedly think they can
benignly engineer human ‘progress’ with light taps on the steering wheel. And
it is this critique of hubris, rather than an anti-capitalist or communist politics,
that survives into the anti-humanist criticism that would follow on Benjamin.
Paul de Man, in his influential ‘Rhetoric of Temporality’ (1969), tacitly bor-
rows from Benjamin’s introduction of a chastening temporality into the sym-
bol’s cloistered playroom. He is blunter than Benjamin, referring at one point
to the symbol’s ‘ontological bad faith’.20 In a brief reading of Rousseau’s 1761

18 Nietzsche 2015, p. 6.
19 Benjamin 1969, p. 263.
20 de Man 1983, p. 211.
168 chapter 8

Nouvelle Héloïse, he suggests that the realism of the lover’s amorous feeling
is in fact built around a highly literary reference to the allegorical Roman de
la Rose of the thirteenth century. For de Man, this instance of literariness
posing as realism points to the intertextual character of all literary writing,
a feature of writing he then suggests is anterior to all pretensions to realism
or to symbolic harmony: ‘The prevalence of allegory always corresponds to
the unveiling of an authentically temporal destiny. This unveiling takes place
in a subject that has sought refuge against the impact of time in a natural
world to which, in truth, it bears no resemblance’.21 In the closing portion of
his essay, de Man re-works his contrast between allegory and nature, which
is rendered as a contrast between literariness and naturalism, into a contrast
between fictionality and nature, where the privileged vehicle for fictionality
is irony. As you likely recall, irony for de Man is a tool of self-objectification,
by whose action we are reminded of our non-fit with the world, as when in
Baudelaire’s famous essay on laughter we see our innate clumsiness when we
trip and fall. Inasmuch as literariness is like fictionality, de Man seems to sug-
gest, allegory is like irony. Both are endless, and both, he says, are demystify-
ing:

Allegory and irony are thus linked in their common discovery of a truly
temporal predicament. They are also linked in their common demystific-
ation of an organic world postulated in a symbolic mode of analogical
correspondences or a mimetic mode of representation in which fiction
and reality could coincide. It is especially against the latter mystification
that irony is directed.22

These sentences describe a kind of baseline of shared values in literary the-

ory and criticism that, if we disagree with them, require effort to dispel. In its
language of nature’s non-resemblance to humanity, and its use of phrases like
‘authentically temporal destiny’, de Man’s essay partakes of the same spatialised
domain model, and the same language of sovereignty, that we saw in Hulme
and in the Schmittian aspects of Benjamin.23
But there are problems here. Why is intertextuality best characterised as
abyssal, and why is its infinitude – if that’s what it is – seen as ‘inorganic’? Why

21 de Man 1983, pp. 206–7.

22 de Man 1983, p. 222.
23 I outline the persistence of this sovereignty-based aesthetic theory with Joshua Clover in
Clover and Nealon 2017 (Chapter 10 in this volume).
the anti-humanist tone 169

is the inorganic seen as a tonic? What looks like a bracing demystification is

actually the reappearance of the literary and philosophical topos we’ve seen
already, in which human pretensions to omniscience need to be broken by con-
tact with the infinite. Why is the literary equated with the fictional in the sense
of the untrue? We have learned from the work of Mary Poovey that fictionality
is not simply a Platonic truth-category, but a web of social relationships built up
around the ability to trust in the reliability of a given fiction.24 Why is reality, as
de Man puts it elsewhere in his essay, ‘empirical’? Frederick Beiser has shown
that German philosophical debates throughout the second half of the nine-
teenth century, debates that follow on the same idealism to which Benjamin
and de Man are responding, went far beyond a simple equation of reality with
empirical fact.25 What does it mean to say that humanity ‘has no resemblance’
to the natural world? The tradition of German philosophical anthropology,
from Helmuth Plessner and Alfred Gehlen down to Blumenberg, persuasively
suggests that our species-relation to nature is at least as well described in terms
of a wobbly, contingent fit, in which we are niche organisms only ever partly
suited to dynamic, unstable environments.26 This view is borne out in debates
in evolutionary biology, which Richard Lewontin, among others, has laboured
to make clear to non-scientists.27
That it is so easy to dismantle the claims of de Man’s essay suggests that
its persuasive power lies less in its propositions than in its tone. Though the
prestige of his variant of post-structuralism has subsided, the anti-humanist
web of argument in which he participates continues to serve as a critical default
for literary academics whenever we make arguments built around the ‘demysti-
fication’ of a text. We see this both in more avowedly left-wing Frankfurt School
arguments that pit a despairing negativity against an all-devouring capitalism,
and we see it in contemporary anti-humanist philosophy, which has made a
sport of critiquing post-structuralism for a myopic focus on texts rather than
on the cold immensity of the universe – a critique that repeats the very moves
de Manian post-structuralists, relying on Nietzsche, once deployed against the
humanisms to which they objected.28

24 See Poovey 1998.

25 See Beiser 2014.
26 Vida Pavesich outlines this conversation in Pavesich 2008. I am grateful to Chris Westcott
for directing me to her essay.
27 See, for instance, Lewontin 2000.
28 I make this argument in a bit more detail in Nealon 2015.
170 chapter 8

3 Coda: Marxism without Anti-humanism, Poetry without Modernity

I am aware that much of what I have suggested so far might seem to dovetail
with the widely discussed championing of ‘post-critical’ literary studies in the
work of Rita Felski and others. But I am after something different. Felski’s pro-
ject, especially as summarised in her 2015 The Limits of Critique, is to pit one
mood or attitude – the ‘critical’ one – against a provisional set of tonal, meth-
odological, and ethical opposites: appreciative instead of glowering, nuanced
instead of reductive, humble instead of arrogant. But her project is generalising,
adjectival, and vaguely ad hominem: the book abounds in sentences like, ‘Cri-
tique’s fundamental quality is that of “againstness”, vindicating a desire to take
a hammer, as Bruno Latour would say, to the beliefs and attachments of oth-
ers’.29 Inasmuch as the book has its own theoretical framework, it is drawn from
Latour, whose Actor-Network Theory (ant) is remarkable for shadow-boxing
with caricatures of Marxism, in particular: in ant, Marxism is irrelevant as a
critique of political economy; instead, it is just another form of methodological
‘reductiveness’ that can’t do justice to sensuous particulars.30
I am less interested in championing positive or negative affects and attach-
ments in criticism, per se, than I am in trying to unpack the histories of the class
imaginaries that shape them. I have directed my attention to the anti-humanist
comportment in particular because its rhetoric presents an interesting prob-
lem for the Marxist literary criticism that matters to me most: it remains our
most fully elaborated model of a reading style whose affiliations are militant,
but it seems to me to borrow too much from rightist political values to provide
the tools a twenty-first-century Marxist criticism will need. Among those tools
would be concepts and historical frames that do not oblige literary writing, or
critical interpretation, to waffle between transcendent meaning or mythical
wholeness and their utter absence. Outside the precincts of network materi-
alisms and post-critical reading, there is a lively conversation in Marxist schol-
arship today that has focused on how capitalism not only demands exploitable
wage workers to produce value, but also a whole range of relations to the wage –
direct and indirect, readily available and forcibly excluded – in order to repro-
duce itself.31 This focus on the production of different relations to the wage,

29 Felski 2015, p. 129.

30 For an incisive account of Latour’s breezy dismissals of Marx and Marxism, see Noys 2014.
31 This scholarship cuts across studies of race, gender, and more traditional Marxist schol-
arship. See, for instance, Chen 2013. Chen’s work, which tries to understand racialisation
as a process that has historically included both compulsion to labour and exclusion from
the labour pool, is in dialogue with a revival of the question of the relationship between
the anti-humanist tone 171

and on the vicissitudes of social reproduction under capital in general, suggests

the possibility of a political framework in which race, class, and gender all play
roles in capitalist value production in ways that invite us to think of aesthetic
value, not in terms of sovereignty, or spatialised domains of authority, or high-
contrast oppositions between lost or impossible fullness and tragic or ironic
fallenness.
I can’t compass this scholarship here. What I can do, very briefly, is to suggest
that in tandem with this conversation in Marxist studies, contemporary poetry
in English has achieved a remarkably fresh and flexible range of ways to address
the capitalist conditions that gave rise both to high modernism and modernist
critical theory. I will close with one poem from this foment, by Sandra Simonds.
It would give me great pleasure to offer a ‘close reading’ of it – or, for that matter,
a ‘distant’ one, since the conditions of its emergence are also of great interest –
but instead I’ll just suggest, by way of closing, that the poem is striking, but not
unique, for how it thinks through a nexus of poetry-writing, teaching for low
wages in the humanities, the property relations behind them, and the forms
of social reproduction behind the property relations. The poem is evidence, I
think, of the irony behind the project of post-critical reading – which, in con-
struing militant styles of critique as forcing politics onto texts, is overlooking
a great revival of militant literary writing. It is also evidence that, if we prise
anti-humanist rhetoric apart from the longer and broader history of rhetorics
of militancy, we can see contemporary forms of militancy that don’t require the
anti-humanist warrants of absolute gaps, natural indifference, or steep-grade

capitalism and slavery, one that explores both slavery’s difference from, and facilitating of,
emergent wage-based exploitation. For a good synopsis of this work, see Clegg 2015. Simil-
arly, in their pathbreaking essay ‘The Logic of Gender’, Maya Andrea Gonzalez and Jeanne
Neton extend a feminist tradition begun by Silvia Federici, who argues that wage labour
emerges in medieval Europe partly by way of excluding women, and traditionally femin-
ine forms of reproductive labour. See Federici 2004. Benanav 2020 develops an analysis
of this dynamic around the post-World War ii state’s framing of the category of unem-
ployment, whose porousness reflects Marx’s own understanding of the labor market in
Chapter 25 of Capital, Volume i, and elsewhere. What links these studies – not all of them
yet in explicit dialogue with each other – is the possibility they offer for a political analysis
of value production that unhitches Marxist scholarship from a hunt for a single revolution-
ary class, and that opens it to a more capacious and coalitional sense of the relationships
among patriarchy, racism, and proletarianisation. This political possibility has a literary-
academic corollary inasmuch as it allows us to see how narrowly critical theory, working
in a modernist vein, has conceived of the question of class composition, thinking of it in
terms of sovereignty rather than in terms of differential relations to accumulation, and
missing, thereby, any chance to grasp militant political energy or literary production that
has ‘humanist’ characteristics.
172 chapter 8

languages of sovereignty. Compared to the declensionary modernity stories I

have visited above, the poem is an exciting and beautiful alternative:

I Am Inside The Humanities And

if I step
too far out of it,
I’m dead. The figure
at the top left corner is Securitas.
No rent! No work! No wages!
No more! For those thinking
of disturbing the peace, let
the hanged man be your warning.
In order to write this poem,
I paid daycare $523
for the week. Make sure you premix
the bottles, bring diapers. Make it worth
something, this time. Mayan
countdown clock to Mayan
countdown clock, two bodies,
uncivilized, in a bed wanting
the water of the world to
give them back a pyramid.
Also, the bronze head of Adam.
Also, the world of children,
their toys, the plastic imitation food – eggs,
miniature cereal boxes, deformed mirror
to the real. I could not keep working
to make money for the people I despised,
nothing is right, but I couldn’t afford
not to either. Late at night, Chris
said ‘I hate my job’. The hydro-geologists
have to give permits to Gulf Oil
for more water or someone
will lose their livelihood. It was winter
in Florida, the path to all principles
of all inquiries led back to this
one statement, like a recite
from Publix: I was teaching
the humanities again.
the anti-humanist tone 173

In the garden of the fallen

aristocrats, where no one sits
on the lawn, it is as if heaven is on
one side, hell, on the other,
and somehow I have slipped very far
into the abyss between the two,
an abyss that contains suns
the way black holes
do not give back the history
of light, the way a galaxy
turns like a clock
into the desperate desire
for water and these flowers
bloom like idiots,
live as thieves.
Chris’ cryptic texts
from West Florida: ‘No coffee.
nuclear power plant’ and a picture
of some industrial
map of rust.
O Apollinaire, eau-de-vie,
in this garden, which is a mockery
of all gardens,
in this Bed, Bath and Beyond
of the intimate, remember me,
I know what is real
and I will remember how to steal
back what is mine.32
32 Simonds 2015, pp. 87–8.
 chapter 9

Modernism, Critical Theory, and the Desire for

Objecthood

This essay will give an abridged account of how proponents of two genres of
writing, the critical theory of modernity, and the modernist ars poetica, thought
about language in the twentieth century. In the later part of this period crit-
ical theorists, working in a broadly Marxist philosophical vein, thought about
language in terms of how the historical and political transformations wrought
by capitalism, especially technological and administrative changes, put pres-
sure on a range of language practices from democratic deliberation to literary
style. Earlier modernist authors of statements about poetry, meanwhile, did not
always name capitalism as explicitly as their theoretical counterparts, but ten-
ded nevertheless to recommend poetic techniques designed to keep up with
the technological changes driven by capital.
The concerns articulated by these two genres of writing touch on older con-
cerns about rhetoric, namely the fear of excessive methodization in rhetorical
teaching, and the risk of rhetoric becoming demagoguery.1 In the theoretical
writing I will briefly survey below, critics see capitalism posing problems of
linguistic routinization that cut language off from its most vital sources. In
the poetics statements I will track across the century, poets sense something
similar, but they also push against what they believe is a creeping advance of
the ego in the production of poetry. Across the course of this essay, I will sug-
gest that the obverse concerns about rhetoric articulated by these two genres –
about too much method, and too little self-control – also drove an attraction
toward philosophical (rather than political) accounts of language under cap-
italism that hold out the promise of avoiding problems of rhetoric by being
anterior to them or by being less methodological and more ‘theoretical’. I will
suggest that this attraction to the promise of a philosophical ‘theory’ has both
limited critical theorists’ ability to characterize accurately the operation of
capitalism in the twentieth century, and, in its guise as anti-rhetoric, has pro-
duced a poetics that drifts from actual poetic practice, often including the
practice of the poets writing the statements. At the end of the essay, I will
turn to an early twenty first-century ars poetica that points toward both less

1 See Jost and Hyde 1997.

©
modernism, critical theory, and the desire for objecthood 175

philosophical ways of thinking about capitalism and less skeptical ways of

thinking about rhetoric.
Critical theorists tended to tell the story of what happened to language in
the twentieth century as a story about ‘modernity’, an existential condition,
derived from social, political, and technological changes under capitalism, in
which received truths could no longer be relied upon. In the fullest version
of this story, modernity is followed by a ‘post-modernity’ that either abolishes
key features of modernity or transforms them beyond recognition. This story
has proven persuasive across the humanities and social sciences; in the most
renowned and well-elaborated literary-critical account, a 1984 essay by the
American literary theorist Fredric Jameson, the productive capacity of capital-
ism outstrips our interpretive abilities so thoroughly that understanding basic
relations like cause-and-effect or part-and-whole requires a multi-tiered her-
meneutic system.
Jameson’s essay, which was eventually turned into a piece called ‘The Cul-
tural Logic of Late Capitalism’, brilliantly turned to the aesthetic theory of the
sublime as a way of accounting for the difficulty of understanding the rela-
tionship of culture to industrial production in post-World War ii capitalism.
Drawing on the work of the historian Ernest Mandel, Jameson suggested that
capitalism’s sheer productive power in the second half of the twentieth century
had obliged us to acknowledge a kind of capitalist sublimity, and he suggested
that the cultural aspects of its latest phase, because they could not be captured
by any single interpretation, might best be understood by a return to Thomas
Aquinas’s four-tiered system of Biblical interpretation, which moved outward
from literal to allegorical to salvational and cosmic meanings. The distributing
of literary analysis across ‘levels’ of historical meaning promised to make space
for the too-muchness of a capitalism whose cultural products seemed other-
wise uninterpretable in terms of older distinctions like those between high or
low culture, authentic or inauthentic intention, and so on.2
The ‘Cultural Logic’ essay proved indispensable to left-leaning critics, not
least because it established a firm foothold for Marxist literary criticism in a
period of political conservatism. But the history Jameson drew on, from Man-
del’s 1972 Late Capitalism, came in for pointed criticism from Marxist theorists
who felt that it made the advance of capital seem inevitable (Mandel described
capitalism in terms of progressive stages and repeating ‘cycles’). And the lan-
guage of overwhelming sublimity with which Jameson characterised the aes-
thetic disorientation produced by capitalism of the 1980s tended to push Marx-

2 See Jameson 1991.

176 chapter 9

ist literary criticism in an epistemological rather than an explicitly political

direction, since it focused on finding some stable ground on which to under-
stand, rather than to shape, aesthetic experience.
But the epistemological worries shaping Jameson’s project linked him to
a key debate in critical theory. In the 1980s, the German philosopher Jürgen
Habermas and the French theorist Jean-François Lyotard became involved in
a prolonged exchange over the political and philosophical meanings of ‘mod-
ernity’ and ‘post-modernity’. While that debate has receded today, at the time
it was considered crucial for any left-political philosophy wanting to equip
itself to describe the workings of capitalism in the twentieth century. And the
modernity-into-post-modernity framework that the debate helped consolid-
ate has still not been decisively replaced in humanistic scholarship. It is worth
outlining, very briefly, how Habermas and Lyotard thought about the role of
language in particular in their accounts of modernity and post-modernity.
For Habermas, European cultures since the Enlightenment had witnessed
both a fragmentation of culture into separate spheres – drifting, in his most
famous rendition, into isolated scientific, moral and artistic zones – and a fur-
ther separation of each of these spheres into expert and everyday knowledges
and practices. In his 1980 essay, ‘Modernity: An Unfinished Project?’ Habermas
suggests that there are always hints of how these separations might be over-
come, and briefly mentions Peter Weiss’s three-volume novel The Aesthetics of
Resistance (1975–81) as a momentary, partial success: the novel describes how a
group of working-class German youth, through night classes that expose them
to the history of art, begin to realise that, however they come to love the beauty
in artworks, they actually need to give them a value quite different than those
ascribed to the art by teachers and experts. Habermas hesitates here, caution-
ing himself and his audience by adding,

However, a differentiated reconnection of modern culture with an every-

day sphere of praxis … will admittedly only prove successful if the process
of social modernization can also be turned into other non-capitalist direc-
tions, if the lifeworld can develop institutions of its own in a way currently
inhibited by the autonomous systemic dynamics of the economic and
administrative system.3

For Habermas, language and rhetoric have a special role to play in facilitating
the possibility that ‘the lifeworld can develop institutions of its own’. This is,

3 Habermas 1996, pp. 52–3.

modernism, critical theory, and the desire for objecthood 177

Habermas believes that the world of the everyday can cause forms of language
and thinking to flourish in ways that reconnect, from below, the moral, tech-
nical and aesthetic domains into which he thinks the world has separated, as
well as to overcome the separation of expert-elite and everyday values. Across
many books and essays, Habermas outlines the possibility of a rhetoric aiming
at ideal conditions of inclusiveness, equality, and non-coercion.
Like Habermas, Lyotard sees the condition of a certain modernity as the
result of technical progress gone unchecked; but Lyotard’s focus is on the post-
World War ii rise of computerisation, and on the reduction of all knowledge to
its efficiency and potential profitability. ‘Post-modernism’, for Lyotard, is closely
linked to a ‘post-industrialism’ in which the struggle among capitalists for profit
must be conducted as a struggle to profit from ideas rather than objects. As with
Jameson and Habermas, this presents an epistemological problem. As he puts it
in his influential book The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979):
‘Our working hypothesis is that the status of knowledge is altered as societies
enter what is known as the postindustrial age and cultures enter what is known
as the postmodern age’.4 But where Habermas sees technical expertise corrod-
ing the possibility of a unity between the everyday and the elite, or among the
scientific, the artistic, and the moral, and sees a certain deliberative rhetoric as
the channel for attempting to achieve that unity, Lyotard insists that the prob-
lem of capitalist technological development is that it papers over a human live-
liness based precisely on incommensurable difference. One expression of this,
in his work, is a capitalist rationality that poaches from, but denies, the ‘libid-
inal’ energy of the people whose lives it organises – that is, their pre-conscious,
anarchic, rebellious, or unpredictable desires. The agents of this rationality, for
Lyotard, have been modern ‘grand narratives’ or ‘metanarratives’ of human-
ity’s eventual achievement of scientific truth and political emancipation, both
of which dishonestly seek to ‘totalise’ inherently unruly histories and experi-
ences by giving them a single, retroactively coherent, meaning. This tendency
reaches a breaking point in the post-modern era, which finally achieves what
Lyotard famously called an ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’.5 For Lyotard,
the loss of grand narratives is a good thing, but capitalism’s denial of the libid-
inal energies that give the lie to Enlightenment require a perpetual rebellion
from within.
Astute observers of this debate wondered at the time what it meant for a con-
versation manifestly about the practice of capitalism to be so theoretical. The

4 Lyotard 1984, p. xx.

5 Ibid., p. xxiv.
178 chapter 9

American critic Mark Poster, for instance, asked whether Lyotard’s celebration
of ‘difference’ overlooked the concrete challenges posed by de-colonial and
multicultural politics.6 And the American philosopher Richard Rorty sensed in
the debate a doubling down on that aspect of the philosophical tradition that
was more concerned to find the grounds for understanding capitalist modern-
ity than to articulate desires for improving or replacing it.
Rorty’s thoughts on the modernity-postmodernity framework are of partic-
ular interest here because, in one crisp formulation at least, he likens a distinc-
tion between more theoretical and more pragmatic strands in the history of
philosophy to a difference between the discipline of philosophy and the prac-
tice of rhetoric. As he put it in a 1984 essay,

One can … attribute Descartes’ role as ‘founder of modern philosophy’

to his development of what I earlier called ‘an overzealous philosophy of
science’ – the sort of philosophy of science which saw Galilean mechan-
ics, analytic geometry, mathematical optics, and the like, as having more
spiritual significance than they in fact have … Had Bacon – the prophet of
self-assertion, as opposed to self-grounding – been taken more seriously,
we might not have been struck with a canon of ‘great modern philosoph-
ers’ who took ‘subjectivity’ as their theme. We might … have been less
inclined to assume that epistemology (i.e., reflection on the nature and
status of natural science) was the ‘independent variable’ in philosoph-
ical thought and moral and social philosophy the ‘dependent variable’.
We might thereby see what [Hans] Blumenberg calls ‘self-assertion’ – the
willingness to center our hopes on the future of the race, on the unpre-
dictable successes of our descendants – as the ‘principle of the modern’.
Such a principle would let us think of the modern age as defined by suc-
cessive attempts to shake off the sort of ahistorical structure exemplified
by Kant’s division of culture into three ‘value spheres’.7

By turning to Hans Blumenberg’s distinction between ‘self-grounding’ and

‘self-assertion’, Rorty allows his distinction between the theoretical and prac-
tical strands in the history of philosophy to double as a distinction between
philosophy and rhetoric. For Blumenberg, those terms not only mark a differ-
ence between theory and practice internal to philosophy, between philosophy
(which seeks ‘grounds’) and rhetoric (which ‘asserts’), but between two oppos-

6 See Poster 1992.

7 Rorty 1984, p. 41.
modernism, critical theory, and the desire for objecthood 179

ing attitudes to humanity that constitute a problem of ‘philosophical anthro-

pology’: a conversation about what humanity is or could be, frequently centred
on the question of whether as a species we are well or poorly suited for survival
on earth. In an important 1987 essay, Blumenberg describes this ambivalent
tradition of conceptualising the human to a prior ambivalence about how to
characterise rhetoric. Outlining the poles of this discourse, he writes:

The varieties of what we now call philosophical anthropology can be

reduced to one pair of alternatives: Man can be viewed either as a poor or
as a rich creature. The fact that man is not fixed, biologically, to a specific
environment can be understood either as a fundamental lack of proper
equipment for self-preservation or as openness to the fullness of a world
that is no longer accentuated only in terms of vital necessities. Man is
made creative either by the urgency of his needs or by playful dealings
with his surplus talents …
As far as rhetoric is concerned, the traditional basic conceptions of it
can likewise be reduced to one pair of alternatives: Rhetoric has to do
either with the consequences of possessing the truth or the difficulties
that result from the impossibility of obtaining truth.8

Though it was not widely taken up in the English-speaking world in the 1980s,
Blumenberg’s depiction of a split in conceptions of the human along this axis
of attitudes about rhetoric provides an interesting alterative to the modernity-
discourses whose political concerns so quickly became epistemological wor-
ries. As I will indicate at the end of this essay, his anthropology of rhetoric
has historiographical implications inasmuch as rhetoric, in his view, becomes
less a ruse for covering over epistemological limits than a tool for dealing with
historically situated struggle. Meanwhile, Blumenberg’s more forgiving under-
standing of rhetoric will be useful to keep in mind as we turn to some important
twentieth-century ars poetica, because a distinguishing mark of the modernist
literary poetics essay is a strident realism meant to outmanoeuvre the ancient
Platonic charge that poets, as abusers of rhetoric, distract the polis from the
hard project of achieving wisdom.
When they wrote manifestos or poetics statements, practising poets in the
last century tended to lay greater emphasis on modern-ism than modernity,
though of course the modernist attitudes and techniques for which they advoc-
ated were aimed at confronting the effects of a modernity that philosophers

8 Blumenberg 1987, p. 429.

180 chapter 9

would theorise most fully in the century’s last quarter. These modernisms run
across the political spectrum, though they are broadly anti-capitalist, even
when produced from the right (Ezra Pound’s conservative-populist hatred of
usury is a good example). They are also almost entirely anti-subjectivist and
anti-rhetorical, where ‘rhetoric’ implicitly signifies unnecessary ornament, dis-
tracting expressivity, narcissistic personal psychology, and excessive sentiment.
A whole range of modernist techniques – avoidance of too-easy iambic flu-
ency; turning to the vernacular; the deployment of startling line breaks and
enjambments; the introduction of white page-space as a structuring element
of poems – were aimed at bringing lucidity and clarity to poetic language that
was seen, correctly or not, as having been overtaken by sentiment and meta-
phor. But in an ironic twist, inasmuch as the poets of the burgeoning modernist
‘tradition’ worked off a very general sense of modernity, rather than a specific
understanding of the capitalism that was driving it, their hard-nosed theorisa-
tions were generally too fuzzy to hit the mark. This produced an interesting and
ongoing gap between what was championed in manifestos and poetic theory
and what was practised in poems. In his pathbreaking study Solid Objects: Mod-
ernism and The Test of Production (1998), Douglas Mao has shown that poets in
the early twentieth century were exceptionally tuned-in to the contradictions
at the heart of objecthood – in particular how objects could at once seem free
from human interference and also liable to a disappointing human projection.9
In what follows I want to think through the modernist fascination with ‘the
test of production’ in specifically anti-capitalist terms, and to link the modern-
ist desire to be free from a humanness seen as tainted by sentiment with its
sidelong attention to capital, which never quite names its ‘object’ as such.
The poet-critic T.E. Hulme’s 1908 essay, ‘A Lecture on Modern Poetry’, though
it did not circulate as widely as later work by poets like Ezra Pound and
T.S. Eliot, was influential in key modernist circles at the beginning of the cen-
tury. The essay has little to say about capitalism, but it articulates several key
points that will preoccupy theorists of capitalist modernity later in the century.
Hulme prefigures Lyotard’s remarks about ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’,
for instance, when the former writes

… the great poems of ancient times resembled pyramids built for eternity
where people loved to inscribe their history in symbolic characters. They
believed they could realize an adjustment of idea and words that nothing
could destroy.

9 See Mao 1998.

modernism, critical theory, and the desire for objecthood 181

Now the whole trend of the modern spirit is away from that; philosoph-
ers no longer believe in absolute truth.10

Hulme also sketches a narrative of separation of human capacities or prac-

tices akin to Habermas’s – here, a distinctly modern separation of reading and
singing or chanting:

Starting then from this standpoint of extreme modernism, what are the
principal features of verse at the present time? It is this: that it is read
and not chanted … We have thus two distinct arts. The one intended
to be chanted, and the other intended to be read in the study. I wish
this to be remembered in the criticisms that are made on me. I am not
speaking of the whole of poetry, but of this distinct new art which is
gradually separating itself from the older one and becoming independ-
ent.11

Like Habermas and Lyotard, Hulme describes an acceleration of production in

his era – here, an acceleration of poetic production that he links to technology,
specifically the newspaper.
Describing a process by which fresh linguistic images are born in poetry and
then mature and decay in prose, he distinguishes between the way poetry and
prose are produced, and notes that mass-circulated prose has obliged poetry to
move ever faster to keep up:

Prose is due to a faculty of the mind something resembling reflex action

in the body. If I had to go through a complicated mental process each
time I laced my boots, it would waste mental energy; instead of that, the
mechanism of the body is so arranged that one can do it almost without
thinking. It is an economy of effort. The same process takes place with
the images used in prose. For example, when I say that the hill was clad
with trees, it merely conveys the fact to me that it was covered. But the
first time that expression was used was by a poet, and to him it was
an image recalling to him the distinct visual analogy of a man clad in
clothes; but the image has died. One might say that images are born in
poetry. They are used in prose, and finally die a long, lingering death in
journalists’ English. Now this process is very rapid, so that the poet must

10 Hulme 2003.
11 Ibid.
182 chapter 9

continually be creating new images, and his sincerity may be measured

by the number of his images.12

In Hulme’s account, the reflex mental activity of prose is well-suited to mass

production, while the special quality of poetry is both its font and its pillaged
terrain. This pas de deux between something vital (poetry) and something rote
(prose) also prefigures Lyotard’s depiction of the dance between the unruly
vitality of the players of various local language-games and the capitalist rou-
tinization of them.
For Hulme, the contrast between prose and poetry is cousin to a contrast
internal to the history of poetry, between an older poetry driven by regular
meter and a new, modern poetry driven by ‘images’. In Hulme’s rendition, an
image is a hard-won form of instantaneous impression, as contradictory as that
may sound, and it brings with it a special alertness that is the opposite of the
effect produced by the old poetry:

The effect of rhythm, like that of music, is to produce a kind of hypnotic

state, … [but] the procedure of the new visual art is just the contrary. It
depends for its effect not on a kind of half sleep produced, but on arrest-
ing the attention, so much so that the succession of visual images should
exhaust one.
Regular metre to this impressionist poetry is cramping, jangling, mean-
ingless, and out of place. Into the delicate pattern of images and colour
it introduces the heavy, crude pattern of rhetorical verse. It destroys the
effect just as a barrel organ does, when it intrudes into the subtle inter-
woven harmonies of the modern symphony. It is a delicate and difficult
art, that of evoking an image, of fitting the rhythm to the idea, and one is
tempted to fall back to the comforting and easy arms of the old, regular
metre, which takes away all the trouble for us.13

Hulme here revises the old Platonic prejudice against the un-rational anti-
clarity of poets by turning it into a prejudice against the unclarity of bad poetry.
It is clear that he is aware of this when he writes, mischievously, ‘Personally I am
of course in favour of the complete destruction of all verse more than twenty
years old. But that happy event will not, I am afraid, take place until Plato’s
desire has been realized and a minor poet has become dictator’.14

12 Ibid.
13 ibid.
14 ibid.
modernism, critical theory, and the desire for objecthood 183

Regular poetic rhythm, in Hulme’s essay, is figured not only as being like
something mass-produced (or mass-induced), but also as something feminine
and maternal: ‘the comforting and easy arms of the old, regular metre, which
takes away all the trouble for us’. This is, for him, the character of rhetoric, which
he all but equates with musicality and femininity: ‘Imitative poetry’, he writes
referring to poetry that clings to older styles, ‘springs up like weeds, and women
whimper and whine of you and I alas, and roses, roses all the way. It becomes
the expression of sentimentality rather than of virile thought’.15
Hulme’s dissatisfaction with the sentimentality he hears in the rhythms of
‘metrical’ poetry, and in the use of metaphors of ‘roses’, is more than literary. In
his essay, ‘Humanism and The Religious Attitude’, he elaborates his critique of
false comfort into a distinction between a human-centred view of the world, on
the one hand, and another (‘the religious attitude’) that forces itself to come to
grips with humanity’s insignificance, on the other. In this essay, written shortly
before his death in 1917, Hulme argues that

When the intensity of the religious attitude finds proper expression in art,
then you get a very different result [than in religious humanism]. Such
expression springs not from a delight in life but from a feeling for certain
absolute values, which are entirely independent of vital things …16

It would be hard to overstate how archetypical the ideas about poetry and rhet-
oric Hulme develops here would become. To step outside the English-language
world for a moment, Hulme’s pitting of poetry and prose against each other,
along an axis of alertness and susceptible wooziness, is replayed in mid-century
France, when the writers of the Tel Quel group would face off against Jean-Paul
Sartre, in an intergenerational, intra-leftist debate in which Tel Quel writers
advocated for the complex reflexivity of poetry as a suitable tool for left-wing
politics, while Sartre insisted on the political utility of clear, reportorial prose.17
And we can hear clear echoes of Hulme’s parable of the decay of a metaphor
in the French novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet’s 1965 essay ‘Nature, Humanism, and
Tragedy’, when he writes,

Metaphor, in fact, is never an innocent figure of speech. To say that the

weather is ‘capricious’, or a mountain ‘majestic’, to speak of the ‘heart’
of the forest, of the ‘merciless’ sun, of a village ‘crouching’ in the hollow

15 ibid.
16 Hulme 2003, p. 188.
17 See Marx-Scouras 1996.
184 chapter 9

of a valley, is to some extent to describe the things themselves – their

form, their dimensions, their situation, etc. But the choice of an analo-
gical vocabulary, however simple it may be, in itself goes beyond the mere
description of purely physical data … In practically all our contemporary
literature these anthropomorphic analogies are too insistently, too coher-
ently, repeated, not to reveal a whole metaphysical system.18

Like Hulme, Robbe-Grillet sees metaphor as the vehicle for a rhetorical obfus-
cation of reality that contaminates and routinises language. The thrust of his
argument in ‘Nature, Humanism, and Tragedy’ is an anti-humanist insistence
that human persons are not, as they console themselves they are, at the centre
of the universe. In fact, the universe is indifferent to their presence, just as
‘The intensity of the religious attitude’ in Hulme springs from an attraction to
everything that is ‘independent of vital things’.
It is not only the similarities that are striking here; it is the continuities
across half a century, and across religious and political difference. Hulme’s anti-
humanist critique of metaphor and anthropomorphism is religiously orthodox,
whereas Robbe-Grillet’s is secularist; but they both partake of an earlier, Niet-
zschean critique of metaphor that can, by turns, be used either to demolish
the idea of God (God is a metaphor that obscures from us our mortality and
insignificance) or to support religious orthodoxy (our metaphors will always
fail in the face of God’s absolute character). Hulme’s anti-rhetorical realism is
politically conservative, even as it is meant to be aesthetically revolutionary,
while Robbe-Grillet’s anti-metaphorical realism has generally been taken as a
left-wing position (his essay was originally published in The New Left Review).
Remarkably, we can find elements of this broadly anti-rhetorical, frequently
anti-humanist attitude even in twentieth-century poetic manifestoes that are
essentially humanist and rhetorical. Charles Olson’s renowned 1950 essay, ‘Pro-
jective Verse’, is a good example. In that essay, Olson aims to pick up on excite-
ment about new theories of communication, including emergent cybernetic
theory, to suggest that poetry, if it freed itself from an old-fashioned attach-
ment to meter and rhyme, might recover the lively relation to actual speech
that it supposedly enjoyed in the Elizabethan era. The key element in this emer-
gent poetics was the poet’s breath – as a determining unit of sound, of rhythm,
of ideation. Unlike Hulme’s anti-humanist anti-vitalism, Olson’s breath-based
stance in ‘Projective Verse’ is deeply humanist. And the texture of Olson’s essay
is purposely oral, even when it is scholarly. Early in the essay, he writes, ‘A poem

18 Robbe-Grillet 1965, p. 68.

modernism, critical theory, and the desire for objecthood 185

is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several caus-
ations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader. Okay’.19
At the same time, however, Olson’s 1950 essay shares key traits with Hulme’s
piece from 1908. Like Hulme, Olson feels it necessary to steer poetry away from
meter and rhyme; and as with Hulme, what Olson advocates for instead is
a combination of speed, energy, and anti-egoic objectivity. The technological
background has shifted: instead of the rise of a communicative medium, the
newspaper, enjoying a heyday early in the century, here it’s the rise of a sci-
ence of communication and information, cybernetics, in the background. But
as with Hulme, a relentless energetics is meant to displace the implicitly fem-
inine and sentimental allure of rhyme and meter: ‘I would suggest that verse
here and in England dropped this secret [of sound being more than just met-
rical] from the late Elizabethans to Ezra Pound, lost it, in the sweetness of
meter and rime, in a honey-head’.20 Instead of that ‘sweetness’, Olson argues
for an energy-transfer that, like Hulme’s laboriously wrought but instantan-
eously communicated image, is lighting fast – ‘it has the mind’s speed’, as he
puts it – and the product of an implicitly masculine labour, which produces, as
in Hulme, not feelings but objects. Olson calls this ‘objectism’:

Objectism is the getting rid of the lyrical interference of the individual as

ego … that peculiar presumption by which western man has interposed
himself between what he is as a creature of nature (with certain instruc-
tions to carry out) and those other creations of nature which we may, with
no derogation, call objects.21

As with Hulme, the philosophy of history that undergirds Olson’s critique of

sweetness, lyricality and the ego links him to the theorists of modernity and
post-modernity with whom we began. Hulme’s sense of poetic history was
modernist inasmuch as it was anti-progressive, focused instead on a potentially
eternal cycle of decays into rhetoric and rebirths into objectivity; Olson’s sense
of history is that of a vast arc that led into a technological modernity which
needed to be overcome by a return to the kinds of oneness with nature that
he sees in pre-colonial cultures, especially in Mexico: hence his critique of the
lyrical ego, above, as a problem of ‘western man’. Meanwhile, Olson was part of
a generation that viewed advanced systems theory, and the technologies that

19 Olsen 1997, p. 240.

20 Olsen 1997, p. 241.
21 Olsen 1997, p. 247.
186 chapter 9

might grow out of it, as the route back to a communication un-muddled by lyr-
icality and ego – un-muddled, in other words, by the kind of ‘rhetoric’ that, in
poetic terms, is linked to rhyme and regular meter, and in political terms, to
centralised state administration and dull parliamentary debate. The keywords
of mid-century cybernetics – ‘command’, ‘control’, ‘feedback’ – are at the centre
of Olson’s canonical 1949 poem ‘The Kingfishers’. That poem also quotes a then-
triumphant Mao to produce a blend of revolutionary impatience (with bureau-
cratic ‘pejorocracy’) and cautious hope that a new science of communication
will foster a kind of second-take return to the ‘primitive’ knowledges and histor-
ical rhythms embodied in the myths of rejuvenation attached to the bird of the
poem’s title. Writing in what seems to be an historiographical register, Olson
declares, ‘not accumulation but change, the feed-back proves, the feed-back is
/ the law’, and continues,

We can be precise. The factors are

in the animal and / or the machine the factors are communication and /
or control, both involve
the message. And what is the message? The message is
a discrete or continuous sequence of measurable events distributed in
time22

This quantification of the idea of a poem’s ‘message’ is anti-rhetorical in the

sense that it is aimed at dispensing with the idea of a moral or spiritual content
to poetry that lies beneath its forms or is separable from them. Olson’s anti-
rhetoric is consonant with the critiques of meaning and symbol that became
second nature to the early cybernetic theorists, who were at pains to establish
the plausibility of the idea that communication among elements in systems
could take place without the psychological participation (conscious or uncon-
scious) of individual actors.23 That this anti-subjective – or at least anti-egoic –
stance should have political dimensions may seem startling in an arguably
‘lyric’ poem, but it prefigures key attitudes developed outside of poetry too, not
least in French structuralism, which would accrue significant left-wing cachet
until the student revolts of the late 1960s.
After the anti-colonial struggles of the later 1960s and 1970s however, aspects
of these ideas were discredited. The valorisation of ‘primitive’ cultures over
and against a neurasthenic ‘modernity’, for instance, came to seem implic-

22 Olsen 1987, p. 90.

23 See Dupuy 2000.
modernism, critical theory, and the desire for objecthood 187

ated in a fetishism of those cultures, and the idea of ‘structure’ seemed too
abstract as a ground or frame for revolutionary activism. As with the rise of
post-structuralism, however, which preserved aspects of structuralist analysis
while shifting its emphasis from deciphering systems conceived as finite and
combinatory to understanding language anti-systemically as open and aleat-
ory, the poetic statements that followed on Olson preserved key aspects of the
anti-egoic tradition of which he was a part, even though their politics absorbed
the energies of new social movements that Olson could not have foreseen.
Lyn Hejinian’s 1983 manifesto ‘The Rejection of Closure’ is a good measure
of these differences and similarities. On the one hand, Hejinian’s essay (origin-
ally a talk) is more overtly political than Olson’s. Hejinian, an American poet,
makes explicit links to the academic French feminism of the 1970s and 80s, cit-
ing figures like Luce Irigaray and Hélėne Cixous to argue that ‘open’ texts (as
opposed to ‘closed’ texts) are anti-hierarchical and perhaps even anticapitalist:

The ‘open text’, by definition, is open to the world and particularly to

the reader. It invites participation, rejects the authority of the writer over
the reader and thus, by analogy, the authority implicit in other (social,
economic, cultural) hierarchies. It speaks for writing that is generative
rather than directive. The writer relinquishes total control and challenges
authority as a principle and control as a motive. The ‘open text’ often
emphasizes or foregrounds process, either the process of the original
composition or of subsequent compositions by readers, and thus resists
the cultural tendencies that seek to identify and fix material and turn
it into a product; that is, it resists reduction and commodification. As
Luce Irigaray says, positing this tendency within a feminine sphere of
discourse, ‘It is really a question of another economy which diverts the
linearity of a project …’24

Elsewhere, however, Hejinian’s distinction between ‘open’ and ‘closed’ texts

draws on a critique of the lyric ego and a language of energetics that recalls
Olson and even Hulme. She writes:

For the sake of clarity, I will offer a tentative characterization of the terms
open and closed. We can say that a ‘closed text’ is one in which all the ele-
ments of the work are directed toward a single reading of it. Each element
confirms that reading and delivers the text from any lurking ambiguity.

24 Hejinian 2000, p. 43.

188 chapter 9

In the ‘open text’, meanwhile, all the elements of the work are maximally
excited; here it is because ideas and things exceed (without deserting)
argument that they have taken into the dimension of the work.25

As in statements by her predecessors, in Hejinian’s essay ‘things’ should exceed

other aspects of poetic composition – especially, here, ‘argument’, at least the
kind of ‘argument’ to be found in a traditional poem. And while the anti-
authoritarian and participatory language of Hejinian’s essay marks its affinity
with the social movements on which it follows, and its difference from the mas-
culinist character of the ars poetica on which it draws, its rejection of the poet’s
authority is made on the same terms – a rejection of lyric ego and of rhetoric
in its guise as excessively domineering language – that Olson uses to establish
the authority of the poet. Finally, though her essay doesn’t traffic in the kind of
primitivism that makes Olson’s politics of modernity founder on the question
of race, the fact that her examples of open writing are drawn from the work
of white writers returns us to questions of historical and geopolitical uneven-
ness raised by the broad claims of the modernity theorists – that is, for whom
might it be said that authoritativeness is best shorn? Throughout the 1980s,
debates among poets ranging from the liberal to the left rehearsed versions
of this question: were avant-garde techniques akin to advanced technologies
that should be distributed more democratically among writers emerging from
unevenly ‘modern’ historical trajectories, or were they like luxuries that the
supposedly less ‘modern’ writers (usually, writers of colour) sadly could not
afford?26
Fred Moten’s 2015 essay ‘Blackness and Poetry’ takes as its point of departure
the technologically and racially uneven character of the capitalist modernity
against which the essays above pit themselves. For Moten, ‘modernity’ is most
vividly expressed in the terrors of the Middle Passage that brought enslaved
Africans to the Americas; he turns in particular to the now-famous historical
episode of the slave ship Zong:

In 1781 the captain of the slave ship Zong (a vessel of Dutch manufacture
which earlier had been called Zorg, or care) ordered that some 150 Afric-
ans be thrown overboard so that the ship’s owners could collect insurance
taken out on their ‘lost cargo’.27

25 Hejinian 2000, pp. 42–3.

26 See Kreiner 2013.
27 Moten 2015.
modernism, critical theory, and the desire for objecthood 189

In this terrifying, demoralising episode, cutting-edge transport technology

(trans-Atlantic shipping) and up-to-the-minute financial instruments (the in-
surance on the slaves) combine to make a mockery of the Enlightenment idea
of the dignity of humanity. But the recording of this event also begs the ques-
tion of whether there is, or can be, humanity. Moten’s essay coordinates this
vision of modernity with the question of humanism, and – in what will prove
to be the essay’s most generative idea – suggests that thought and sociability
are indistinguishable from each other, at least where blackness is concerned:
‘black thought, which is to say black social life, remains a fruitful site for inhab-
iting and soliciting the human differential within the general ecology’.28
This equation of social life and thought is the source of Moten’s two ex-
amples of ‘poetry’: M. NourbeSe Philip’s 2008 book-length poem Zong! – a
multi-voiced poetic rendition of the existential wreckage caused by the murder
of the slaves aboard the titular ship – and the improvisatory music of jazz com-
poser Thelonious Monk. What they share, in Moten’s essay, is a powerful poetics
in which there is no humanity without sociability, without mutual dependence
and mutual vitality. For Moten, these artworks share a poetics in which there
can be no single voice, no purely solo performance, and, indeed, no ‘artwork’
in an enclosed, autonomous sense. They show up the disastrous character, for
Moten, of the impulse to create a ‘modernity’ out of the idea of a possess-
ive or ‘sovereign’ individuality that, because it was first predicated on some of
us possessing others, can never be universalised except as a sham. As he puts
it:

we book passage on this transportive thought: that modernity (the con-

fluence of the slave trade, settler colonialism and the democratization of
sovereignty through which the world is imaged, graphed and grasped) is
a socioecological disaster that can neither be calculated nor conceptual-
ized as a series of personal injuries.29

What this means for poetry, in Moten’s essay, is that

Philip’s heroism, which emerges as a radical disavowal of the heroic, con-

sists in a deep and fatal sounding … The one who dives, who falls, into
the wreckage of the shipped cannot come back for or as or by herself …
What remains is more than incalculable loss. The logic of this supplement,

28 Ibid.
29 Ibid.
190 chapter 9

whose appearance as fade and induced forgetting is terribly beautiful, dic-

tates that the next word be ‘nevertheless’. Nevertheless, this deprivation is
sung forevermore … En masse, Philip realizes this inescapable and over-
whelming truth: that insofar as the story of the Zong cannot be told, or
sung, alone it isn’t a story, it isn’t anybody’s story, at all. Zong! is the story
of no-body and it cannot be sung alone.30

This irreducibly social, entirely choral, understanding of poetry, with its cri-
tique of the sovereign self, gives it a family resemblance with the other critiques
of the lyrical ego we’ve seen here. It also pulls hard away from the idea, as
in Olson, that the anti-egoic poet would therefore be A Great Poet, that is,
still best grasped as an individual. This is a complex, inflectional difference
that nonetheless suggests a stark re-framing of the anti-rhetorical aspect of the
modernity-stories at work in twentieth-century statements of poetics. Indeed
Moten writes,

Even in Olson, whom I have been shamelessly and religiously chant-

ing in my head this whole time, there’s a massive problematic regarding
the relations between genius, generative power, rule, concept, invention,
concept, purposiveness and nature.31

Moten closes his essay by suggesting that (despite his ill-conceived, racist ideas
about jazz), German critical theorist Theodor Adorno offers helpful descrip-
tions of how a work of art, produced under the conditions of a modernity that
is built from the outset on violence, gives itself a rule of form to obey, by dis-
obeying that form:

what if representation is the instantiation of a radical impropriety? What

if truth is given in and by way of this dehiscence? This is something
Adorno approaches by way of the notion of Bewegungsgesetz, which is
usually translated as the law of motion, and by way of its relation to rad-
ical art’s primary and necessary darkness.32

I end with Moten’s essay because it both culminates and deviates from the
twentieth-century habit of making the chastisement of the ego the pivot-point

30 Ibid.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid.
modernism, critical theory, and the desire for objecthood 191

of a story about modernity. On the one hand, Moten’s essay doubles down on
the utility of telling the story of the century as a story about modernity, since
one version of the modernity-tale – it was built on dehumanisation, and has
been a disaster – is never clearer than when counterposing the Enlightenment
thinkers’ supposed investment in what the political scientist C.B. MacPherson
called ‘possessive individualism’ to the possession of human beings in slavery.
In this light we can see Moten’s attraction to the versions of post-structuralist
theory that lay emphasis on the non-sovereignty of the subject who has built
a sense of self on false premises, and also notice Moten indirectly suggesting
that the possibility of post-structuralist critique may indeed be facilitated by
the millions of persons whose subjected existence gave the lie all along to a
possessive sense of stable selfhood. On the other hand, Moten’s pulling the
rug out from under the individual ego feels different from earlier manifes-
tos that aimed to chasten the single lyric singer as too arrogant, too driven
by the feminine sentiment of rhyme, or too metronomic; he wants, instead,
to make the revelation of the non-sovereignty of the subject mark a recogni-
tion of our mutual dependency. Whatever its critique of the subject, the essay’s
tone is humanist, where the tone of the other manifestos we have looked at is
broadly anti-humanist. Rather than rebuke those (bad poets, gullible readers)
with presumptions to solitary, self-sufficient ego, it calls for them to lay down
its burdens.
Moten’s ‘Blackness and Poetry’ also points back to a whole other twentieth-
century tradition of poetic manifestos, not least produced by black writers, that
champions the social utility of poetry without making use of the anti-rhetorical
framing devices I have been tracing. Walt Whitman’s 1855 Preface to Leaves
of Grass helps shape this tradition (when he writes that ‘The United States
themselves are essentially the greatest poem’), but it is given pointed and polit-
ical voice in a range of poetic statements from Langston Hughes’s 1926 essay
‘The Negro Artist and The Racial Mountain’ to Amiri Baraka’s 1966 manifesto
poem ‘Black Art’ and Audre Lorde’s ‘Poetry is Not a Luxury’, published in 1985.
Adrienne Rich’s 1983 essay ‘Blood, Bread and Poetry’ forms part of this tradition
as well – it is, indeed a counter-tradition, marked most clearly by its political
explicitness and its generally non-academic production.
There is a final reason that Moten’s essay makes a good ending or at least
turning point for the tradition I’ve been describing. It has to do with two words
he uses at key moments in his piece, and with their implications for how
an understanding of ‘rhetoric’ as something more than excessive egoism also
opens onto more complex historical understandings of capitalism. The words
are ‘nevertheless’, and Bewegungsgesetz, or ‘law of motion’.
Describing Philip’s poem Zong! above, Moten writes that
192 chapter 9

The one who dives, who falls, into the wreckage of the shipped cannot
come back for or as or by herself … What remains is more than incalculable
loss. The logic of this supplement, whose appearance as fade and induced
forgetting is terribly beautiful, dictates that the next word be ‘nevertheless’.
Nevertheless, this deprivation is sung forevermore …33

Moten is describing an unfathomable survival, any description of whose char-

acter must begin with a ‘nevertheless’ that marks a turn away from merely
aesthetic appreciation for the power or beauty of Philip’s poem, and keeps in
play the slave-trade violence whose viciousness and scope deforms even a Yeat-
sian ‘terrible beauty’. In this use of the word ‘nevertheless’, Moten is echoing
a similar use in German, where nineteenth-century debates about the philo-
sophical significance of new biological discoveries – including a discovery of
our species’ dependence on highly specific and unstable ecological niches –
resulted in a sense that humanity’s survival was a kind of low-grade against-all-
odds elaboration of viability.
For Blumenberg, however, the value of rhetoric is that it is the medium for
a kind of ongoing practical wisdom itself the product of both surplus and lack,
playfulness and necessity. This means that rhetoric is not only a practical but
also an historical tool, not least as a tool for history understood less as stages or
cycles, as in modernity theories or in the manifestos of Hulme or Olson, than
as a kind of struggle – a social and political struggle whose characteristics Blu-
menberg emphasises by a turn to Marx. This understanding of history leads
Blumenberg not only to a sense of irreducible sociality akin to Moten’s, but
also to a use of that word, ‘nevertheless’, in a similar sense: the human subject’s
non-sovereignty, however important it may be to point out as part of a critique
of Enlightenment notions of individualism, is more interesting for the way it
suggests a shared perplexity and a collective struggle:

‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please;
they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under
circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past’,
Marx writes in the Eighteenth Brumaire. The deeper the crisis of legitim-
acy reaches, the more pronounced the recourse to rhetorical metaphor
becomes – it is not inertia that makes tradition but rather the difficulty of
living up to one’s designation as the subject of history … I am not cel-
ebrating rhetoric here as in innate creative gift that man possesses. To

33 Moten 2015.
modernism, critical theory, and the desire for objecthood 193

illuminate it anthropologically is not to demonstrate that it gives man

a special ‘metaphysical’ distinction. As a behavioral characteristic of a
creature that lives ‘nevertheless’ [trotzdem], it is literally a ‘certificate of
poverty’.34

This insistence on the practical nature of rhetoric links Blumenberg’s essay to

Moten’s as a cousin form of demurral from an old critique of rhetoric, more
recent examples of which we have seen above. It is also remarkable in that, as
with Moten, Blumenberg’s sense of rhetoric as the product of lack removes a
key element of the philosophical tradition’s similar characterisation: he sees
that lack as most important for being a sign of vulnerability, rather than a
source of duplicity. Finally, Blumenberg’s slightly arm’s length turn to Marx for
clarification about the nature of the history out of which rhetoric emerges links
his essay to Moten’s in another sense. When Moten turns to Adorno’s use of the
idea of a Bewegungsgesetz or ‘law of motion’ in the artwork, he draws our atten-
tion to how Adorno is himself making an analogy between the compulsions
under which art must operate, and Marx’s characterisation of the compul-
sions under which capital must operate. The pressure of competition, of costly
technological innovation, or worker resistance, of the tendency of the rate of
capitalist profit to fall: Marx included all these in what he called the capitalist
Bewegungsgesetz – not an eternal or cosmic law, but a tendential constriction
of possibility reproduced each time capital triumphs – violently, and at a cost –
over its obstacles.
Moten and Blumenberg work in tandem here because they both suggest
ways beyond the impasses produced both by the theories that tell the story of
language in the twentieth century as a story of modernity, and by the modernist
ars poetica of the same century, which felt obliged to defend poetic technique
against the possibility that poetry would be seen as rhetorical. To read Blu-
menberg against the history of the modernist ars poetica is to sense behind
their manifesto-like aura another genre: the defence of poetry, which since the
Renaissance has felt (in English at least), indeed, defensive – as though poets,
responding to Plato over and over again across the centuries, have long felt they
had to make the case for some version of realism to an imagined audience of
the most sceptical people conceivable. To read Moten’s ‘Blackness and Poetry’
is to see what the defence of poetry looks like with its guard down. And to
read these two texts together is to sense the prospect of an embrace of non-
sovereignty whose aim is not to ‘critique the self’, but to escape a philosophical

34 Blumenberg 1987, p. 452.

194 chapter 9

modernity-story whose origins can be traced back to philosophy’s phobia of

rhetoric. Blumenberg characterises that phobia as a resistance to abandoning
the search for what one conservative journal of theology calls ‘first things’ in
favour of beginning where we are. But in their desire to make poetry object-
like, the modernists endorsed Augustine’s non verba res (deeds, not words) at
the cost of Horace’s in media res (in the middle of things), where all poetry –
including their own – begins.
To sum up: the anti-rhetorical impulse I’ve traced here in theories of mod-
ernity is linked to historical narratives that fail to describe capitalism accur-
ately because they keep becoming histories of what happens to an individual
self. Conversely, the poetic objection to rhetoric and ego, and the anti-rhetoric
that champions thinghood over selfhood, are linked to capitalist dynamics
more than the poets often realise, because they so frequently imagine egoless
objectivity competing with capitalist technologies. But when we recognise the
history of capitalism as involving more than problems of knowledge or self-
hood, the limits of the critique of rhetoric as unseemly egoism (or routinising
method) become extremely clear. The temptations to periodise according to
modernity, and to proselytise against the self, proved equally irresistible in the
last century; you might say that it was easier to advocate for the end of the ego
than the end of capitalism. Still, the one is unlikely to depart us, while the other
may yet be made to fall away, one day.
 chapter 10

Literary and Economic Value (with Joshua Clover)

Given the sheer variety of ways in which literature has been valued or defen-
ded, not to mention the universe of values literature has both championed and
rejected, any attempt at comprehensiveness would be mad, and a linear history
would either never arrive at its twenty-first-century destination, or arrive there
at the cost of a vitiating generality.
Instead, this is a reflection on the relationship between literary and eco-
nomic discussions of value, focused on later twentieth-century debates in each
discussion that dovetail, implicitly or explicitly, with the question of whether
literature, or the values it might express, can be said to be separate or autonom-
ous from the economic and social system in which it is embedded – that is,
global capitalism, limiting it, for the most part, to material in English and on
translations from some European languages, and homing in on an even more
particular set of conversations internal to Euro-American Marxism in the last
several decades.
Why this highly specific, arguably presentist, and directly political ap-
proach? On the one hand, the intermingling of political theory, ethics, and
the analysis of literature is ancient. Reading literature has long been cham-
pioned as a medium for enlightenment or self-cultivation, that is, for its eth-
ical value: but of course Aristotle concluded in the Nicomachean Ethics that
ethical inquiry necessarily led to the study of politics. On the other hand, we
are persuaded by the spirit of Karl Marx’s remark in the Grundrisse, regard-
ing a method that reads past history out of the most involute conditions of
the present, that ‘Human anatomy is the key to the anatomy of the ape’.1 This
metaphor of Marx’s feels applicable, not only to the practice of reading back-
wards from the present, but of reading outwards from it. That is, if ethics is
the study of how we might best live, and if global capitalism is, in the words of
Susan Sontag’s story of the aids epidemic, ‘the way we live now’, then the eth-
ically focused tradition of championing the value of literature should welcome
a new chapter that takes seriously the analysis of exactly how we live together,
not least how we live together in a complex political-economic system. And
since, as Robert Heilbroner has noted, the modern discipline of economics has
been built around a refusal to name capitalism as the medium and object of its

1 Marx 1993, p. 105.

©
196 chapter 10

study of ‘economies’, the Marxist tradition has distinct advantages – not least
its insistence that politics and economics are not separate domains, and that
value is a constitutive feature of their unity rather than a virtue of one or the
other.2
In other words, any attempt to answer the oldest question about ‘value’ –
that is, what is the good, or what makes a good life? – must sooner or later be
immersed, as it were, in the particulars of how we have ended up organising
life so as to produce value. This means that all questions of value in the ancient
sense must be thought through at least some of the particulars of value produc-
tion under capitalism. Some of the Marxist debates have been absorbed into
a ‘critical theory’ that has tended to deemphasise the economic origins of its
criticality, because those traditions themselves have fallen behind more recent
developments both in capitalism and its study. Conversations about literary
value demonstrate the usefulness of thinking through the general question of
value by way of particulars in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Marxist con-
versations about value, but also show that those conversations have tended to
be more philosophical and less historical than they might best be. An irony is
that, in order to press for a more historically focused study of how value pro-
duction under capitalism shapes discussions of literary value, we skip over a lot
of history.
A final idiosyncrasy is that we will also be bookending the specific ques-
tion of literary value with discussions of aesthetic and economic value. This
is because, whatever their specific interest, discussions of literary value have
depended on ideas developed in prior philosophical conversations that even-
tually congealed into the category of aesthetics. Especially important is the way
in which defences of literature in the modern era have deployed a language of
mental faculties that is explicitly analogical to political relations of sovereignty.
This is perhaps easiest to see in the run-up to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s famous
declaration, in ‘A Defence of Poetry’, that ‘poets are the unacknowledged legis-
lators of the world’. This declaration is framed by an extraordinary passage that
makes a link between relations among mental faculties, and relations of mater-
ial production:

The functions of the poetical faculty are twofold: by one it creates new
materials of knowledge, and power, and pleasure; by the other it engen-
ders in the mind a desire to reproduce and arrange them according to
a certain rhythm and order which may be called the beautiful and the

2 See Heilbroner and Milberg 1995.

literary and economic value (with joshua clover) 197

good. The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired than at periods

when, from an excess of the selfish and calculating principle, the accumu-
lation of the materials of external life exceed the quantity of the power of
assimilating them to the internal laws of human nature.3

Writing in 1821, during the first heyday of British industrial capitalism, Shelley
takes for granted that an inwardness marked by harmonious relations among
faculties or ‘principles’ can serve as a stay against the predations of that capit-
alism. Shelley figures capitalism as a usurpation and a disproportion alike.
A political language of sovereignty and a spatial language of domain, in other
words, shape Shelley’s critique of nineteenth-century capitalism and serve
as the basis for his counter-valuation of poetry. This literary-critical hinging
together of intellectual faculties and social roles depends in turn on a prior
philosophical history in which a key feature of the good life is the achievement
of sovereignty over one’s emotions. The championing of literary value depends
on the philosophical framework that will develop into ‘aesthetics’ even more
clearly in the history of defences of poetry in Sir Philip Sidney’s ‘Apology for
Poetry’, first published in 1595. In that essay, Sidney argues that poets are better
moral guides than philosophers because poetry accesses a desire or motivation
that is anterior to reflection:

For suppose it be granted – that which I suppose with great reason may
be denied – that the philosopher, in respect of his methodical proceed-
ing, teach more perfectly than the poet, yet do I think that no man is so
much Philophilosophos [a friend to the philosopher – ed.] as to compare
the philosopher in moving with the poet. And that moving is of a higher
degree than teaching, it may by this appear, that it is well nigh both the
cause and the effect of teaching; for who will be taught, if he be not moved
with desire to be taught? And what so much good doth that teaching bring
forth – I speak still of moral doctrine – as that it moves one to do that
which it doth teach?4

Indeed, Sidney continues, poetry allows for precisely the kind of moral educa-
tion that the philosophers claim to value: an education that leads to the rule
of reason over passion. This argument (along with many others in the same
vein) allows Sidney to remark, a moment later, ‘Now therein of all sciences …

3 Shelley 2009.
4 Sidney 2002, p. 226.
198 chapter 10

is our poet the monarch’. The anti-capitalist pivot between faculties and social
arrangements seen in Shelly finds its precursor in Sidney’s argument among
the disciplines, which, like Shelley’s, is also an argument about the faculties.
And literary value, in both these essays, is intimately linked to the idea of sov-
ereignty, where ‘sovereignty’ is meant simultaneously to indicate hierarchical
arrangements of human capacities and arrangements (hierarchical or harmo-
nious) of social roles.
This mode of championing the specific value of literature by way of ana-
logising relations among faculties to relations among social types, or social
arrangements, is alive and well today. For instance, Martha Nussbaum’s advo-
cacy of a ‘perceptive equilibrium’ in novel reading, which she believes can
create an ethically productive balance between fine-grained perception and
impulses to universal moral laws: her argument is that ethically attuned novel
reading can calibrate both emotion and cognition, and a harmonious relation
between literary theory and philosophy.5 This style of argument – the defence
of literature – endures in literary debates.
While the separating of literary value (conceived as immanent to the text)
from other modes (understood as imposed on the text by force and thus as
instrumentalising literature for other ends) remains a persistent feature, such
defences are varied in whether they purport that such an approach makes
literature more effectively critical or happily ‘post-critical’. Such approaches
are so resolutely spatial in their conceptions that they cannot accommodate
much in the way of thinking about time, expect perhaps as individual liter-
ary Bildung, or as a story of successive, quasi-mythological Ages (as in Shelley).
Such defences also tend to remain locked in a disciplinary battle between liter-
ature and philosophy that can make very little room for other disciplines, such
as history.
And, when this style of arguing for literary value does attempt to think his-
torically, it tends to raise the question of economic relations, only to imagine
them as yet another domain – separate from, or parallel to, history and politics
alike.
There is however a more adequate way of thinking about value, one that
is centred on the vicissitudes of value production in capitalism, rather than
on a parable of the war of the disciplines, or a struggle among the faculties.
We want to think about how forms of struggle that are simultaneously polit-
ical and economic give the lie to such parables, while honouring the fact that
they touch on desires that life under capital continually solicits and harries. As

5 See Nussbaum 1992, pp. 190–3.

literary and economic value (with joshua clover) 199

suggested above, this departure from reading literary value out of the tradition
of defences of literature will involve suggesting very different coordinates for
thinking about the value of a poem or a novel, or of deep reading, or of joy-
ous reading on the fly. But in order to maintain a sense that these coordinates,
drawn from scholarship on the history of capitalism, might speak to literary-
critical projects, we will take a look at a moment in literary theory and cri-
ticism that feels like a near miss, as it were – a moment in the 1980s when
debates about the status of the literary canon provoked conversations about
value that necessarily included reflection on the history of literary criticism,
as well as the history of literature. Following that, we will turn to debates in
so-called ‘critical theory’ that begin with a sense of the intimacy of economic
and literary value, and therefore get much closer to the problem as we would
like to see it reframed. We will suggest in closing, though, that critical the-
ory has tended to fall into the same trap as the defence-of-literature tradition,
in that it keeps trying to champion literature as other than capital, perhaps
because it predates capital. This tends to bifurcate critical-theoretical positions
into those that imagine utopian possibilities for literature, and those that can
only imagine literary value as crushed under the weight of capital. These posi-
tions tend to gloss over the scholarship that focuses not just on the expansion
of capitalism across the globe over the last few centuries, but on the vicis-
situdes capital suffers as it pursues its compulsion to expand forever. First,
though, let us look at a literary-critical brush with thinking value and history
together.

1 Literary Value and Literary Politics: The Moment of the Canon

Debates

In his landmark 1990 study The Ideology of The Aesthetic, Terry Eagleton traced
the history of an influential and primarily German discourse of aesthetic value
that ranged from Alexander Baumgarten and David Hume to the work of
Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, and Friedrich Schiller, and on to the theor-
ies of Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, and Theodor Adorno. Though the
discourse Eagleton describes takes different shapes across a political spec-
trum, two of its features remain constant – it is a philosophical discourse,
and it tends toward allegory. Writing about the first great wave of aesthetic
theory, for instance, Eagleton turns to a formulation of Baumgarten’s that is
clearly meant to describe the political relations between a people and a sov-
ereign through the idiom of the relationship between reason and sensory
delight:
200 chapter 10

‘science’, writes Baumgarten, ‘is not to be dragged down to the region of

sensibility, but the sensible is to be lifted to the dignity of knowledge’.
Dominion over all inferior powers, he warns, belongs to reason alone; but
this dominion must never degenerate into tyranny. It must rather assume
the form of what we might now, after [Italian Marxist Antonio] Gram-
sci, term ‘hegemony’, ruling and informing the senses from within while
allowing them to thrive in all their relative autonomy.6

Eagleton’s achievement was to identify, at the end of the 1980s, a common

thread of political tropes around relative autonomy and hegemony in the com-
plex and multifaceted discourse of aesthetics – a philosophical discourse about
intra-cognitive capacities that, at first glance, would seem to have nothing to do
with politics at all.
So Eagleton’s work allowed scholars to see many of the twists and turns taken
by an ‘ideology of the aesthetic’ on the left and right, especially in European
traditions. In North America, things looked a bit different. At the same time
Eagleton was writing about the political underpinnings of attempts to set lit-
erary value over and against politics or economics, the question of the polit-
ical meanings of aesthetic experience was at the heart of raging debates in
the United States over which texts should count as canonical in higher educa-
tion. These debates were themselves downstream from the tumultuous polit-
ical challenges to the global order posed by decolonising movements, by the
rise of modern feminism, and by anti-racist activism. Major scholarship in
English challenging the contours of the canon, and calling for altered ways of
assessing literary merit, appeared throughout the period, from Elaine Showal-
ter’s A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing
(1977) and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in The Attic: The
Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979) to Hous-
ton Baker’s Blues, Ideology and Afro-American Literature (1984) and Henry Louis
Gates, Jr’.s The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism
(1988).
In the United States, this wave of activist scholarship was met with a forceful
conservative pushback during the Reagan era, led by, among others, William
Bennett, Allan Bloom, and Dinesh D’souza; but it also gave rise to a variety
of critical and theoretical glosses on the concepts of value that, although not
themselves activist, could be said to range from something like the centre-
right to the centre-left. Work like Barbara Herrnstein-Smith’s Contingencies of

6 Eagleton 1990, p. 17.

literary and economic value (with joshua clover) 201

Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory (1988), Charles Altieri’s Canons
and Consequences: Reflections on The Ethical Force of Imaginative Ideals (1991),
and John Guillory’s Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation
(1993) attempted to summarise and give theoretical closure to these debates.
By and large, however, this body of work demurred from the kind of expli-
citly class-based analysis developed by Eagleton, even though the question of
‘canon’ was quite clearly related to the question of ‘taste’. In a definitive issue
of Critical Inquiry devoted to the question of literary value in the age of canon
reformation, where each of these authors first tested out the ideas that would
lead to their monographs, Herrnstein-Smith, Altieri, and Guillory lean toward
a broad pluralism: Altieri advocates a self-reflexive ethics of value that tests
itself against the value judgments of others, Herrnstein-Smith pushes back
against attempts to define axiomatic criteria of literary value, favouring instead
a model of fluctuation and dynamic interplay among kinds of evaluation, and
Guillory frames post-war literary-critical history in terms of a devolution from
orthodoxies about literary value, in which a latter-day ‘heterodoxy’ of compet-
ing value claims and proliferating canons is to be neither lamented nor prized
so much as acknowledged and studied as evidence of a play of differences that
he takes to define culture.7
A notable exception to this demurral from pursuing the connections be-
tween economic and aesthetic value was Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s 1985
essay, ‘scattered Speculations on the Question of Value’. In that essay, Spivak
attempts to historicise struggles of literary canons in the American academy
by turning to the deep background of a longstanding international division
of labour in which ‘comprador countries’ provided cheap labour power to
‘advanced’ nations: labour power kept cheap, most recently, by the subjection
of poor women in the global South to the regime of the wage. Startlingly, even
prophetically, Spivak counterposes these deep and recent histories with a cri-
tique of mid-1980s advances in telecommunication whose aim was to reduce
the circulation time of capital. In contrast to capitalist futurists like Peter
Drucker, who imagined the emergence of the ‘knowledge worker’ as the over-
coming of the division between manual and intellectual labour, or Marxists
like Antonio Negri, who predicted the machine-driven expansion of an anti-
capitalist sphere of ‘non-work’, Spivak insists that under current geopolitical
conditions, any overcomings of the divisions between mind and body, sub-
ject and object, fact and value, are not only provisional but extorted: whereas
Solomon Brothers, thanks to computers, ‘earned about $ 2 million for … 15

7 See Altieri 1983, p. 58; Herrnstein-Smith 1983, pp. 11–15; and Guillory, p. 195.
202 chapter 10

minutes of work’, the entire economic text would not be what it is if it could
not write itself as a palimpsest upon another text where a woman in Sri Lanka
has to work 2,287 minutes to buy a t-shirt.8
Spivak’s point in bringing the gendered international division of labour to
bear on the utopian prospects of computer technology is to argue that, inas-
much as canon debates in the literary academy had involved a ‘materialist’
desire to include histories of oppression and struggle alongside ‘idealist’ cel-
ebrations of genius and formal beauty, that ‘materialism’ was inadequate. It
was inadequate because the ‘material’ and the ‘ideal’ in these usages were co-
implicated expressions of a system of value production in which ‘ideality’ for
some was achieved at the price of enforced ‘materialisation’ of others. Until
that division of labour was overcome, she argues, and that regime of value pro-
duction destroyed, the ‘materialism’ of adding Toni Morrison to a list of great
texts would be subsumed under the idealism of a range of related ideas: that
canons are finite lists, that mind and body are opposites, that the goal of the
good life is to overcome the divide between them by sheer technological power.
Spivak’s essay was in many ways years ahead of its time, but the sheer diffi-
culty of her attempt to link questions of canon formation to problems of the
geopolitics of value production may have limited its reception. It is also marked
by a commitment to reading Marx’s understanding of value production as an
open-ended ‘text’ – in particular, as a textuality that is by definition, and before
any history, recursive and aleatory. This effectively pre-decides the priority of
text to value and undermines critiques (including its own) that seek to under-
stand literary value in materialist terms. So the great wave of literary-critical
self-scrutiny around ‘value’ came to an end without a deep transformation that
work like Eagleton’s and Spivak’s might have inspired.

2 Value in Critical Theory

These transformations were happening elsewhere – and though they were

multiple and contradictory, they were loosely gathered under the idea of the
‘new economy’. As Robert Brenner has detailed, profitability in manufacturing,
commonly understood to be the leading source of value able to drive capit-
alist expansion, waned decisively in the shift from the Long Boom (1947–73)
to the Long Bust (1973–).9 This was true not only in the United States but

8 Spivak 1985, p. 88.

9 See Brenner 2006.
literary and economic value (with joshua clover) 203

across the leading industrial powers, and while this decline was uneven, it was
a global phenomenon. Though some low-wage nations attempted to enter into
the labour-intensive sectors grown fallow in leading economies, in general jobs
lost from manufacture and ongoing losses from agriculture could not be fully
absorbed elsewhere.
In the 1983 Time magazine article generally regarded as the origin of the
phrase ‘new economy’, its authors wrote, ‘Every industrialized country is look-
ing to high technology for its salvation. But competitiveness, high productivity,
innovation – or their lack – will be even more decisive in the New Economy
than in the old; an inefficient chipmaker will suffer just as much as an ineffi-
cient steelmaker’.10 This is, however, a somewhat misleading account; the force
of information technology would not be that it provided a new line of lead-
ing commodities overseen by a comparable raft of producers. Rather, the new
economy proposed to generate new value from greater coordination of both
social and economic activity, a coordination enabled by advances in inform-
ation technology. Notably, both critics and proponents of capitalism offered
accounts of this change. For example, the theorists of the Italian workers’
movement reasoned early on that, as all life (beyond the formal work day) was
increasingly brought within the sphere of capital, value would come to derive
from social relations as such:

The more capitalist development advances, that is to say the more the
production of relative surplus value penetrates everywhere, the more the
circuit production – distribution – exchange – consumption inevitably
develops; that is to say that the relationship between capitalist production
and bourgeois society, between the factory and society, between society
and the state, become [sic] more and more organic. At the highest level of
capitalist development social relations become moments of the relations
of production, and the whole society becomes an articulation of produc-
tion. In short, all of society lives as a function of the factory and the factory
extends its exclusive domination over all of society.11

Meanwhile, the prophets of what would be called Toyotaisation or ‘Just In

Time’ production strategised to increase profits via a new integration of sub-
contracted production and supply chains within an expanded global division
of labor – logistics, in sum – to minimise any unused time or materials from the

10 Alexander 1983, p. 70.

11 Cited in Cleaver 1992, p. 137.
204 chapter 10

sequence leading from demand to production to sale. Further, as traditional

production declined, the financial sector ascended, no longer an adjunct to
industry but its replacement as a profit source. This offered a different but cor-
responding sense of ‘social’ value production, given that finance made profits
from neither producing nor exchanging useful commodities but via a series of
enchained beliefs about the future value of such commodities, beliefs them-
selves produced and propagated by communicative or discursive practices,
emphasising the idea that information itself was able to generate new value.
The context for the ‘new economy’, then, was a shift in the early-industriali-
sing nations away from a declining manufacturing sector toward service work
and financial profit-taking, and an increased pressure on labour to conform
to new conditions even as the work/life distinction was subjected to ongoing
erosion. This dream of informationalised and ‘socialised’ value production was
also, from the start, a dream of the conquering of labour: making it not just less
expensive but more flexible, more fluid, more disposable, more ‘efficient’.
In cultural and literary studies, these changes were noted early on, not least
in Fredric Jameson’s epochal 1984 essay, ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic
of Late Capitalism’. It is difficult to imagine a more influential periodisation of
literary studies than Jameson’s. Jameson’s periodisation depended in turn on
the work of the German economic theorist Ernest Mandel, whose 1972 volume
Late Capitalism laid out a three-period scheme for the history of capital that
ran from ‘market capitalism’ to ‘monopoly’ or imperialist-led capitalism, and
on to ‘late’ or consumer-driven capitalism oriented by financialisation, that fig-
ure of value-from-discourse par excellence. This clean, schematic history lent
itself well to a similarly bold narrative of cultural periods. As Jameson put it,
‘my own cultural periodization of the stages of realism, modernism, and post-
modernism is both inspired and confirmed by Mandel’s tripartite scheme’.12
Jameson, like Mandel, was careful to avoid the implication that capitalist
value is produced by technology; indeed, he insisted that even the greatest
technological revolutions are themselves expressions of shifts in the relations
between capital and labour. But Jameson’s caution was largely set aside in the
literary-theoretical discussions on value that were to follow – partly because,
despite his own scrupulousness, his and Mandel’s periodisations were built
around the idea that capitalist technological revolutions subsumed what came
before them – that is, they believed that each wave of innovation resulted in
more capitalism, extensively and intensively. Jameson called it ‘a prodigious
expansion of capital into hitherto uncommodified areas’; regarding the value

12 Jameson 1984, p. 78.

literary and economic value (with joshua clover) 205

of art, he argued that ‘aesthetic production today has become integrated into
commodity production generally’.13
This slippage wherein subsumption came to name commodification or mar-
ketisation was useful for thinking about the subjective conditions of making
art – indeed, of thinking and acting – under the then-latest organisation of cap-
italism. But it blurred the difference between production and exchange, one
organised by value and the other by price, in ways that would allow further
confusions regarding value’s relation to literature. For Marx, subsumption was
a way to think about compelled transformations of particular labour processes,
more than about periods in capitalist history, much less the making social of
market relations; but the impulse to periodise according to a subsumption nar-
rative – rather than one focused on the instability of capitalist social relations,
for instance, or on capitalism’s perennial need to stave off crisis – proved dom-
inant in the literary-theoretical discussions about value from Jameson onward.
A confusion of price and value, and a drift in the meaning of subsump-
tion, would have profound consequences for later debates about the relation
between literary and economic value. Beyond liberal demands that literature
should stand outside economic determination and thus serve as a repository
for ‘social’ values, much of the critical discussion has drifted since the 1980s
toward one of two poles: a broadly optimistic sense that technological advances
and the unfettering of human creative potential would sow the seeds of the
overthrow of capitalism, and a pessimistic sense that until some political force
emerged to replace the defeated working classes of the mid-twentieth century,
only minimal forms of existential autonomy from capitalist value production
would remain.
The high point of the optimistic discourse on aesthetic value remains Mi-
chael Hardt’s and Antonio Negri’s 1999 volume Empire, which rode a wave of
anti-globalisation protest to achieve a readership that extended beyond the
academy. In that volume, Hardt and Negri leaned on Michel Foucault to argue
that an earlier age of the disciplining of labour had been subsumed by an era of
‘biopolitics’, a concept applied now to their old colleagues’ ideas of the ‘social
factory’. Now life as such and society were organized according to the demands
of capital:

Power is now exercised through machines that directly organize the

brains (in communication systems, information networks, etc.) and bod-
ies (in welfare systems, monitored activities, etc.) toward a state of auto-

13 Jameson 1991, p. xx.

206 chapter 10

nomous alienation from the sense of life and the desire for creativity …
Power is thus expressed as a control that extends throughout the depths
of the consciousnesses and bodies of the population – and at the same
time across the entirety of social relations.14

But because capital has touched on life itself, Hardt and Negri argued, it has
unleashed life’s own power with Pandora-like consequences that it cannot con-
trol:

The analysis of the real subsumption, when this is understood as invest-

ing not only the economic or only the cultural dimension of society but
rather the social bios itself, and when it is attentive to the modalities of
disciplinarity and/or control, disrupts the linear and totalitarian figure of
capitalist development.15

Hardt and Negri, reinterpreting Marx’s ‘real subsumption’ as a penetration of

capitalist social relations, not into artisanal labour processes, but into some-
thing like ‘life itself’, begin to imagine what they helped make famous as ‘imma-
terial labour’: work that purportedly adds economic value without newly mak-
ing a physical commodity. They elaborated ‘three primary aspects of immater-
ial labor in the contemporary economy: the communicative labor of industrial
production that has newly become linked in informational networks, the inter-
active labor of symbolic analysis and problem solving, and the labor of the
production and manipulation of affects’.16
In this narrative, the socialisation of labour – that is, its extension into realms
of existence previously not ‘labour’ at all, but part of social life – in this nar-
rative, the becoming social of labour is always a potentially Pyrrhic victory for
capital, since ‘sociality’ is taken to be unruly by definition: it is uncontainable,
excessive. The Italian Marxist Paolo Virno put it this way: ‘It is enough to say,
for now, that contemporary production becomes “virtuosic” (and thus polit-
ical) precisely because it includes within itself linguistic experience as such’.17
Via small tags like the ‘itself’ in Hardt and Negri’s ‘the social bios itself’, or the
‘as such’ in Virno’s ‘linguistic experience as such’, literary and social value are
imagined as contrary to economic value by definition, as though the literary,
the social, and the economic were innately at odds.

14 Hardt and Negri 2000, pp. 23–4.

15 Hardt and Negri 2000, p. 25.
16 Hardt and Negri 2000, p. 30.
17 Virno 2004, p. 56.
literary and economic value (with joshua clover) 207

This quietly tautological understanding of literary value reorients the dis-

cussion around literature and capital, rendering it more triumphalist but more
ambiguous. Literature preserves a privileged claim on extra-economic value
in these arguments. Moreover, because it now helps constitute value produc-
tion, it takes on new potentials of opposition. Writing in 2012 about the same
supposedly ‘immaterial labour’ identified by Hardt and Negri, Italian theorist
Franco Berardi imagines its disruptive power as poetic:

In order to accelerate the circulation of value, meaning is reduced to

information …
But language and information do not overlap, and language cannot
be resolved in exchangeability. Poetry [in particular] is language’s excess:
poetry is what in language cannot be reduced to information, and is not
exchangeable, but gives way to a new common ground of understanding,
of shared meaning: the creation of a new world.18

Berardi’s celebration of literary ‘creation’ as a priori un-capitaliseable finds

a strange counterpart in pro-capitalist narratives about the ‘creative classes’.
Management theorist Richard Florida, for instance, argues that the presence
of a ‘creative class’ increases the possibilities for economic growth in a given
area.19 The implication is that, even if creative work does not directly produce
economic value, its non-economic values – the social norms and arrangements
it engenders – are economically desirable and will draw investment. This is the
practical obverse of the argument, à la Berardi, that poetic thought and poetic
uses of language can be a relatively direct source of anti-capitalist struggle.

3 The Breadth of Value Discourse and Its Limits

There is, however, a basic problem for these arguments, no matter their va-
lences. Their validity rests on a misrecognition of capital’s development of new
sources of profit as a capitalist invention of new sources of value. However,
there is only the most limited support for the existence of a ‘new economy’
that features a new kind of value production. While firms specialising in what
is deemed immaterial production may themselves make profits – the sectors
of finance, real estate, and insurance provide the clearest examples – this

18 Berardi 2012, p. 147.

19 See Florida 2002.
208 chapter 10

appears to be zero-sum redistribution of extant value. No new use values are

produced, much less exchanged, and nominal price increases are subject to
instant devaluation. In the era of the new economy, there is little indication
of economic expansion either in the leading economies or at a global level in
comparison to previous waves of industrialisation – a development outlined
by thinkers as diverse as Brenner, the Marxist sociologist Giovanni Arrighi, and
former secretary of the U.S. Treasury Lawrence Summers.20 Thus the sugges-
tion that literature has a new and privileged relation to value production via its
relation to new modes of production seems more an ideology of the age than a
truth; these new modes qualify as production in the sense of neither new uses
nor new surplus value.
At the same time, it is inarguable that the form and phenomenology of work
have changed in the face of deindustrialisation in ways that have had profound
effects for literature. Increasingly, waged work begins to look like data entry
and word processing. As Jasper Bernes argues, the forms of employment that
post-Fordist firms offer resemble literary making far more closely than they
do manufacturing labour.21 The field of literature registers this clearly enough.
New technology firms such as Facebook and Google, having become influ-
ential companies operating at the intersection of data, discourse, and affect,
increasingly come to be site, source material, and model for literary produc-
tion and innovation (suggestive examples of this include the early twenty-first-
century ‘Flarf’ poetry, built up from the verbal detritus of blogs and comment
boxes, or poet-artist Kenneth Goldsmith’s project of ‘printing out the inter-
net’).
While it can seem as though literature, under these conditions, is either a
redoubt for some older form of artisanal value, or on some cutting edge of per-
forming and critiquing an emergent, ‘biopolitical’ form of value, it is more his-
torically accurate to understand these literary forms as responding to a secular
decline in capitalist value production: whatever the ‘value’ of their craftedness,
or their wit, or their critique of craftedness and wit, it is not an opposing form
of value so much as a lively human activity that takes place in a powerfully
shaping political and economic context. It is possible, in other words, to notice
that the problems addressed by literature, and literary form, may shift in rad-
ical and startling ways, without taking this to imply that we have entered some
new and qualitatively different phase in the relations of value. This is, however,
what critical-theoretical discourse on capitalism and art has tended to do –

20 See, for instance, Brenner 2006, Arrighi 1994, and Summer 2016.
21 See Bernes 2017.
literary and economic value (with joshua clover) 209

both in the optimistic Italian discourse of poetry as counter-value, and in the

more famous pessimism of the Frankfurt School.
Arguments on behalf of the anti-capitalist potential of the aesthetic would
seem worlds away from the pessimism of Theodor Adorno and Max Hork-
heimer, for instance; but they share with the Frankfurt School a reliance on
the idea of subsumption as the way to simultaneously mark epochs in capital-
ism and describe them in terms of a new subjectivity. In the case of the work
of Adorno in particular, subsumption and value are intimately linked, and the
linkage has fostered recent arguments that attempt to extend his thinking into
the era of so-called neoliberalism.
Though Adorno’s writing has been steadily translated into English since his
own lifetime, it was not until the 1990s that interest in his work expanded bey-
ond German-studies contexts and into the Anglophone humanities at large.
In the United States, this was due in part to the 1989 publication of Jameson’s
Late Marxism, Or, The Persistence of The Dialectic, which positioned Adorno as
the preeminent thinker of political defeat on the left, and therefore perfectly
suited for the tail end of a decade of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
The revival was apt: for just as Adorno had witnessed the political defeat of the
German working classes between the two world wars, so too was the end of the
Long Boom accelerated by the rise of a right-wing coalition bent on destroying
the power of labour unions.
In the English-speaking world, at least, Adorno is read most closely for his
account of the negativity that any aesthetic experience must suffer if it is to
have any integrity; he is best known as the theorist and proponent of self-
cancelling, agonised reflexivity in art. But less attention is paid to the historical
framework in which Adorno makes his arguments on behalf of negativity. It is a
framework that depends on the idea of subsumption as a psychic and political
experience, in particular the subsumption of the category of ‘the individual’
under the demands of capital. It is loose and flexible, more of a philosophical
anthropology than a history per se, and its polemical aim is to invert Enlighten-
ment narratives of universal human progress: in Negative Dialectics, he writes,
‘No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one
leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb’.22 Earlier, in his Minima Mor-
alia, he specifically analogised the transformations wrought by capital in the
worker’s bodily movements – the kinds of transformations stylised earlier in
the century by Charlie Chaplin – to Marx’s account of subsumption in the
labour process. ‘Only when the process that begins with the metamorphosis

22 Adorno 1973, p. 320.

210 chapter 10

of labour-power into a commodity has permeated men through and through’,

writes Adorno, ‘is it possible for life to reproduce itself under the prevailing rela-
tions of production’. Then, in a nod to Marx’s idea of the ‘organic composition
of capital’ (occ) – roughly, the ratio of the value of machine to human power
in a given production process – Adorno adds,

The organic composition of man refers by no means only to his special-

ized technical faculties, but … equally to their opposite, the moments of
naturalness which once themselves sprung from the social dialectic and
are now succumbing to it. Even what differs from technology in man is
now being incorporated into it as a kind of lubrication.23

This analogy between transformations in the labour process and deep exist-
ential transformations (‘the organic composition of man’) has proved costly.
Of course changes in the character of work create corollary changes in people;
but for Marx, occ was a way to describe the ratio of means of production to liv-
ing labour in the production process, and therefore part of an attempt to track
the value productivity of different capitalist sectors and enterprises: it offered
a glimpse of the different roles that cheap labour and cheap means of produc-
tion had to play in facilitating capitalist profitability.24 It can be understood as a
ratio between the value of machines and labour inputs; and for Marx, its tend-
ency was to rise over time, as inter-capitalist competition obliged ever-greater
mechanisation to lower unit costs while reducing wage expenditure. Unlike the
subsumption of ‘life’ to machinic regularity in Adorno’s analogy, however, occ
is for Marx a way of describing the labour process in production, not ‘life itself’,
and its tendency to rise is not, as for Adorno, an irrevocable loss; it is always
met by various counter-tendencies (expansion of the labour market, lowered
wages) that keep living labour profitable to exploit. So Adorno’s figures of ‘per-
meation’, ‘incorporation’, and (widely used elsewhere) ‘liquidation’ take what
in Marx is a description of the countervailing forces at play in producing value
and transform it into a modernity story. In this story, ‘life’ has always aimed at
‘progress’ but found only snatched moments of happiness in a complex devolu-
tion. The concept of value in Adorno – expressed as anti-progress, as ‘damaged
life’ – hitches a ride, as it were, on Marx’s analysis of capital, but its aim is to
articulate something that became a more generalised tragic sensibility.

23 Adorno 1996, pp. 229–30.

24 For an excellent discussion of Adorno’s idea of the ‘organic composition of man’, see
Tomba 2014.
literary and economic value (with joshua clover) 211

This modernist anguish about ‘subsumption’ in discourses of aesthetic value

has retained a great deal of power in the decades since Jameson’s reintroduc-
tion of Adorno to the English-speaking world. But the discourse of subsump-
tion still tends to end up thinking in terms of ‘relative autonomy’, much like the
liberal, pluralist languages it meant to oppose. It drifts quickly into an ontology
of social life, rather than an analysis of value production under capital, and
this drift registers in its metaphorics of integration and penetration. Further,
because ‘commodification’ rather than value production is its analytic lever,
subsumption language gets caught in a game of determining which art objects
are and are not fully commodified.
Even in work that expressly critiques ontologised narratives of subsump-
tion, it proves difficult to escape a metaphorics of commodification as a kind
of saturation or penetration of social reality, in a way that questions the over-
or under-estimation of art’s autonomy from commodification without ques-
tioning whether ‘autonomy’ is the best way to discuss artistic value. In his
2015 volume Art and Value, a high-water mark in the contemporary analysis
of aesthetic and economic value, Dave Beech explicitly rejects languages of
subsumption that are simply versions of modernity discourse: ‘subsumption
in Marx’s economic analysis is never abstract or general but always refers
to the subsumption of labour’.25 Because commodities and markets existed
before capital, he argues that the social relations around commodities, rather
than commodification itself, should be the critical vantage point from which
to understand the relationship between artistic and capitalist value. But his
framework remains one of asking to what degree art is ‘free’ in the sense of
freedom, and of imagining art and capital as domains. As he puts it,

Throughout this study … I will not ask whether art is or is not economic,
or whether art is or is not exchanged as a commodity, but in what ways
precisely art is subjected to or remains free from economic rationality and
how exactly art enters or resists commodification.26

The arguments regarding literature and value are many and frequently offered
in entangled conjunctions. They may suggest that literature (and the aesthetic
more broadly) is increasingly subsumed by economic value materially and/or
ideologically, or contrarily that its incommensurability with economic value is
ever more distinct and pressing; they may suggest that as economic value pro-

25 Beech 2015, p. 243.

26 Beech 2015, p. 11.
212 chapter 10

duction has transformed, literature and the aesthetic offer an increasingly priv-
ileged role either against or in support of capitalist value production; they may
suggest that literature and the aesthetic are, in comparison to other regimes
and practices, ever more able and obliged to preserve other discourses of value.

4 The Unity of the Political and Economic

What all these arguments share is a domain model of ‘economics’ and ‘art’ that
endlessly worries over their degree of separation or intermixed-ness, worries
about the dominion of one over the other, without grasping that ‘the economy’
is not a space, virtual or otherwise, but a set of historical relationships. Even
when this discourse acknowledges the relational character of capitalist value
production, it tends to read history in linear terms: that is, it interprets the his-
tory of political struggles over capitalist value as a story in which there is simply
‘more capitalism’ now than there once was. This domain model, with its lin-
ear historiography, comes from the sovereignty tradition of Baumgarten, with
a faculty-psychology apotheosis in Kant and a decline-narrative apotheosis in
Eliot, and it fails to contend with the vicissitudes faced by capitalist expansion,
which is never guaranteed beforehand, and whose victories are less ‘subsump-
tions’ of one domain by another than costly applications of force designed to
preserve profitable class relations.
This presents a final set of puzzles for the question of literature and value
in the contemporary era. At the broadest historical level, this expansion of
economic value is not just a core feature but the differentia specifica of cap-
ital against previous economic relations: its compulsion to expand at the peril
of ceasing to exist altogether. Capital is, after all, defined properly as value in
expansion. But mourning the expansion of capital after the fact, as the domain
and subsumption models do, loses sight of how effortful and tumultuous it is
for capital to expand in the first place. So narratives of economic and aesthetic
value as separate modes, the former always threatening to impinge on the lat-
ter, also keep re-installing the economic and the political as separate categories,
when they are entangled from the start.
This attempt to distinguish politics and economics leads to a kind of ulti-
mate – which is to say, an initial – confusion. One can certainly argue persuas-
ively that value production is expanding or contracting, that commodification
is expanding or (in very rare cases) contracting, and even that more and more
labour processes are really subsumed in the technical sense. However, these
expansions and contractions are not expressions of an opposition between
two different kinds of value, two autonomous regimes locked in some ageless
literary and economic value (with joshua clover) 213

conflict. Rather, they are expressions of a dynamic that is immanent to capital

itself. While value production or commodification may rise or fall, these devel-
opments are compelled by a value relation that is already generalised once the
great majority of the population is dependent on the market for goods, and
dependent on work for access to the market – and in turn once both goods and
labour become value-bearing commodities, and once firms are compelled to
reinvest profits and increase productivity to survive inter-capitalist competi-
tion. Insofar as these are compulsions that unify the totality of social relations
behind the back of consciousness, they render a new unity of the political and
the economic that provides the mutually constitutive development of political
economy.
In this circumstance, an artwork is or is not a commodity, art making is or
is not labour, aesthetic production does or does not take part in the accumu-
lation process. However, it is not possible to conclude as a consequence of any
of these that there is some kind of value external to capitalist value. Indeed,
the division of the political and the economic into discrete domains is a fetish
of bourgeois thought: for example, in the idea that we are politically liberated
in the sense of formal freedom, while we are at the same time economically
unfree. This might be understood by analogy to an equally implausible sep-
aration of use and exchange value, implausible because under capitalism use
values will be produced only because they have exchange value, while things
can have exchange value only if they offer a use value as well. This is their mater-
ial basis. Use and exchange are part of political-economic value as a whole,
just as the two initial values proposed are part of political-economic value as
a whole. They can be separated only in the movement of the ideal. Modern-
ity, to the extent that remains a term that reveals more than it obscures, is not
the name for the asymptotic victory of one side over the other but of the era
defined by their unity.
The basis, therefore, of the demand that we recognise, valorise, and produce
other sorts of value existing beyond political-economic value is a demand that
literature and the aesthetic remain a space where the idealist conception of the
world is preserved.
Of course it is easy to be sympathetic to this forlorn desire for there to be an
outside to the value relation. One might argue that our sympathy for literature
derives precisely from the ways in which it provides an arena for this desire to
move. However, there is little gain in confusing this pathos for real conditions.
Until those conditions change – whatever the impressive range of new forms
of profit-taking capitalism invents, and whatever the equally impressive invent-
iveness of the aesthetic responses to them – the form of ‘value’ under which we
live will remain the same.
 chapter 11

Abstraction, Intuition, Poetry

at the stadium our seats are really high

two flags fly along the perimeter
one national, one rainbow

the supreme court decision came down

June 26th, same day same anniversary
we shared then broke it, yours with Bonnie

mine with Heather. I message hi

guess where I am congratulations.
she married Caitlin this summer

they have that way of looking in photographs

the right amount alike, of corresponding
like Catherine and Elliot and Lindsey and Steve

there is an excellent image of her

giving someone the finger. That thing
she whispered in your ear

when she showed up at the office

when it was going down
stay away from my lady, white boy

This poem, from Stephanie Young’s recent volume, Pet Sounds, develops in
unexpected ways.1 It begins sounding like a straightforward celebration of
same-sex marriage, possibly even a patriotic one – marking the anniversary
of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling in favour of a constitutional right to
such unions in Obergefell v. Hodges, framing the anniversary at a sports event
with the rainbow flag flying alongside the American one. But it ends up with
something else to celebrate – or perhaps, to value. The story that unfolds across
its eighteen lines is of unexpected twists and turns. The speaker texts an ex, a

1 Young 2019, p. 42. Hereafter abbreviated P and cited parenthetically by page number.

©
abstraction, intuition, poetry 215

woman, with whom she used to have an anniversary that happens to match
the one her current husband (a man, whom other poems tell us has been with
men) shared with his ex-wife. And we see the affection evidenced by the mes-
sage more deeply when we learn, not only that the speaker and her ex-girlfriend
survived a breakup, but that the breakup was messy, involving a shift in affec-
tions if not actual cheating, as well as a shift in the gender and the race of the
person with whom the speaker would eventually end up. More than that, we
learn that for the white female speaker of the poem, her non-white ex-partner’s
possessiveness – ‘stay away from my lady, white boy’ – is still a part of what
she values about her; it’s part of something not rigidly possessive, in fact, but
something fierce, something punk, or butch, or courageous. Other poems in
the volume flesh out this value. They also make clear that for the speaker and
her current husband, both whiteness and heterosexual couplehood are deeply
imperfect categories. We get a whiff of the speaker’s dissatisfaction not only in
the affective loop by which we see her accept that her husband is irreducibly
‘white’ in the sense of unearned privilege, as in, the kind of ‘white boy’ who
claims possession of something, or someone, that isn’t his to claim, but also in
her mischievous depiction of appealing homo-likeness through two examples
of heterosexual couples. And in a final twist for this poem about couples and
coupling, the most vivid scene of intimacy – a sudden, fierce whisper in the
ear – is actually between two people divided by race and gender who are not
themselves a couple.
The poem does not go down as easy as it promises, that is, with its middle
diction and its roughly self-sufficient tercets. But for me, the real glory of the
poem is its non-self-sufficiency; it really shines as part of a volume in which
the gestures I’ve just glossed take on richness that is partly historical (we learn
more about all of these people), partly political (all the identity categories I’ve
just mentioned are put under further pressure), and partly formal (the opening
poem in the volume makes clear that the tercets, which structure many of the
poems, are explicitly referencing Dante Alighieri’s terza rima and a thematic of
inaccessible paradise). It is primarily from the vantage of the whole that indi-
vidual poems take on their greatest beauty. And that beauty, while of course
expressed in the medium of poetic language, is also a beauty of something like
value, a set of values insisted on, against steep odds, as tools for rethinking what
possession means. The book as a whole imagines differential forms of dispos-
session as the perennial ground of a compassion that appears, by the final page,
to need only the lightest nudge to mutate into solidarity – specifically, a solid-
arity against capital.
Poems like Young’s don’t especially need what we’d normally call theorising.
But my excitement in reading them is bound up with a desire to set them in a
216 chapter 11

context that will show them off at their best. They feel liable to various forms of
categorisation – confessional poetry, poetry as memoir; the self-critical poetry
of white allyship – whose truth doesn’t quite name what animates the work.
What does animate it, I think, is a sense of value that is a bit abstract at first,
because its full articulation requires a reading of something like the book as a
whole. If I don’t feel like a theorist reading these poems, though, the beauty of
their kind of abstraction – the compassion it both invites and gives out – does
make me want to advocate for a way of thinking rigorously about value that
would depart from poems, get down to the business of understanding value
under capitalism, and return to the poetry refreshed. I think Karl Marx could
use some Stephanie Young. Or: Marxism could. And that will be the subject of
my essay.

∵
I have taken the occasion of the English Institute’s 2019 theme of ‘Abstraction’
to pursue the interest and the importance of a key abstraction in the work of
Marx, the abstraction he calls value. I will try to suggest that ‘value’, for Marx,
has more political potential than non-Marxists are used to crediting Marx with,
since they tend to think of Marxist theories of value as restricted to the surplus-
value produced by exploited labour, and therefore, in political terms, as an
economic theory of society that privileges class above other identity categories.
The reason I think Marx’s theory of value does not do this is because it is a hol-
istic abstraction, an abstraction that expresses itself through a differentiated
totality, and so I think it opens up possibilities precisely for thinking across cat-
egories. To stake a claim for this way of reading Marx is to acknowledge Marx’s
debts to G.W.F. Hegel – an unpopular position among Marxists, and a counter-
intuitive one on the academic left, where Hegelian philosophy tends to be seen
as subsuming particulars into a foreordained and monological absolute. But I
try to argue below that opening the passage between Marx and Hegel has the
potential to help us think more clearly about the possibilities for solidarity, and
the steep barriers to it, with which we are faced today.
There is another aspect of Marx’s debts to Hegel that bears on how we
might expand our sense of the utility of the abstraction called ‘value’, and it
has to do with the role of intuition in holistic thinking. In a recent essay on the
role of abstraction in Marx’s theory of value, Leigh Claire LaBerge has called
abstraction a ‘social intuition capable of leading to the concrete’.2 There is a

2 La Berge 2019, p. 246.

abstraction, intuition, poetry 217

long history of Marxists coming after Marx who have tried to downplay this
intuitional aspect of his work by making it a quasi-mathematical science, but
I am interested in how foregrounding the role of intuition in Marxist thinking
might broaden the conversation between political and literary Marxisms. As I
will suggest below, recent scholarship on Hegel has made it clear that his philo-
sophy can be understood to champion a deeply social and linguistic picture of
what abstraction is and does – linguistic, not in literary criticism’s half-century
long sense of language as a structure, but in the older philological and rhetor-
ical senses of language as an evolving, contradictory medium for thought and
expression.
This will allow me to suggest, in turn, that we can read literary writing, not
least poetry, in fresh ways if we are willing to be friendly to a holistic sense
of what the abstraction ‘value’ might mean. In a book I wrote in 2011 called
The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in the American Century, it was import-
ant to me to show that in the twentieth century, even poets not categorisable
as Marxist or even leftist were frequently writing and worrying about capital-
ism, and how its forms of value might deform or destroy poetic ones. In this
essay, however, I will try to highlight the advantages of reading what you could
broadly call Marxist poetry for the way it illuminates resonances between a
holistic theory of economic value in Marx, on the one hand, and the linguistic
holism that fuelled the Hegel Marx turned to, on the other.
The poetry I will read for you in the second part of my essay will make these
links by way of some very beautiful meditations on how property and dispos-
session shape its intuitions of likeness and even solidarity. First, though, I’d
like to suggest that these questions are not esoteric to the study of American
poetry. They have shaped the reception of Walt Whitman’s poems, for instance,
almost since their publication. This is consequential: in recent decades the
reception of Whitman has served as a kind of proxy for debates about similar-
ity and difference in American multiculturalism. When it comes to questions
of abstraction, Whitman is still seen, even by some of his champions, as a kind
of bad (or typical) Hegelian, subsuming lived and painful differences among
people in the name of a merely speculative announcement of their likeness:
he means well, but his ego takes over. In this debate, Whitman generally comes
out looking ‘kinda liberationist, kinda settler colonial’, to paraphrase a remark
of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank’s.3
In a pathbreaking recent essay, however, Tobias Huttner breaks from this
debate by reading Whitman’s universalism in terms of his Free Soil politics,

3 Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank make this quip (Sedgewick and Frank 1995, p. 500).
218 chapter 11

which made him an anti-slavery thinker, but only to the extent that halting the
westward expansion of slavery would afford white freeholders their westward
expansion.4 For Huttner, this allows us to reread Whitman’s democratic vistas
less as bad Hegelian subsumptions of difference and more as a tactical punting
of the question of abolition down the road in the name of a type of property
relation. Whitman’s support for the westward expansion of free soil for white
farmers, (instead of the westward expansion of plantation-style slavery) can
look like abolitionist opposition to racial enslavement, but it simply deferred
reckoning with the problem of white supremacy, and arguably only deepened
it by further entrenching a racialised homestead model of relation to the land.
In short, Huttner allows us to move from a reading of Whitman that sees his
habits of likening as usurpations of property – the subsumption of the specific
personhood of his various others and addressees into his ever-expanding ego –
to a reading that sees the poems as wrestling with the contradictions of how
property is politically constituted in the first place.
To track this tension in interpretations of Whitman’s habits of likening, not
least across lines of racial difference, is to see its continuity with a central polit-
ical problem on the American left today, which is the problem of how best to
relate anti-racism and anti-capitalism. This problem is as old as Reconstruc-
tion, but in the deindustrialised North America of the 2020s, there is no way
around it. The secular stagnation bred by declining capitalist profitability since
the 1970s has accelerated the proletarianisation of the non-capitalist white
population of the U.S., and though it is generating real possibilities for cross-
racial solidarity, it has been aggressively re-narrated by the capitalist classes,
who have redoubled up their age-old efforts to signal to working (or unem-
ployed) white people that they have a property interest in whiteness that places
them above immigrants or, of course, Black people. The counter-hegemonic
project of identifying commonality across racial divides – which are of course
not static, or simply historical, but produced and reproduced every day, every
fiscal quarter, every business cycle – this counter-hegemonic project is still a
work in progress. It faces daunting obstacles, not least how to overcome the his-
torical tendency of the white labour movement in the U.S. to compromise with
capital rather than take up arms with non-white workers. This is a problem for
theory, as well. Ruth Wilson Gilmore has famously called racism a ‘process of
abstraction’ that vertically sifts populations: a ‘death-dealing displacement of
difference into hierarchies’.5 An important question for the left today is, might

4 See Huttner 2019, pp. 642–90.

5 Gilmore 2002, p. 16.
abstraction, intuition, poetry 219

a declining rate of profit create opportunities to think across those hierarch-

ies, with the aim of cross-racial militancy, or has the left been outmanoeuvred
for so long that downwardly mobile whites are simply more attracted to racist
populism? Mainstream political discourse in the U.S. (as we know too well)
tends to provide two ideological solutions to this problem: a conservative one
that doubles down on naturalised racial hierarchies, in implicit acknowledge-
ment that there is no longer a high enough rate of capitalist profit to share at
a level that would benefit the so-called white working class; and a liberal one
that insists on imagining that there is enough to go around, if only racists could
overcome their prejudice, or the rich would pay their fair share of taxes. Both
of these ideological programmes gloss over the history of property relations in
the U.S., not least their racial character. I would like to suggest that the key work
that has highlighted the importance of understanding the racialised history of
property in the U.S., were it to add ‘value’ to its repertoire, would have a power-
ful resource for articulating the potential for deeper solidarity across race than
we tend to feel is possible.
Black and decolonial thought has been at the centre of attempts to think
about property in rigorous ways since at least the time of W.E.B. DuBois’s Black
Reconstruction (1935). But for my purposes, it is the projects devolving from the
expansion of the Reagan-Thatcher rightward turn into full-blown Clinton-Blair
neoliberalism – that is, the deepening of what Robert Brenner first called ‘the
long downturn’ – that make most sense as coordinates for our rethinking our
contemporary dilemmas of anti-solidarity.6 So I’d like to turn to two Black intel-
lectual projects dating from that period: an exploration of the racialisation of
property, and a critique of the limits of Marxism as too focused on property.
The second is most important to my essay, but let me mention the first, since it
helps explain the second. To think about property this way will lead me away
from the question of poetry, but only in order to return to it with fresh eyes.

∵
Cheryl Harris’s landmark article ‘Whiteness as Property’ laid out a complex and
thoroughgoing framework by which to understand the legal history that estab-
lished and that reproduced a ‘property interest in whiteness’, one so ingrained
by the late nineteenth century that Homer Plessy and his attorneys deployed it
in their arguments on his behalf.7 In a recent elaboration of the global implic-

6 See Brenner 1998.

7 Harris 1993, p. 1747.
220 chapter 11

ations of Harris’s work, Brenna Bhandar has linked the ongoing reproduction
of racialised ‘property interest’ in settler-colonial contexts to political abstrac-
tions derived from the mobilisation of John Locke’s arguments about the capit-
alist right to any land deemed insufficiently ‘improved’.8 For Bhandar, crucially,
these settler arguments also include the racialising claim that the populations
inhabiting such supposedly ‘unimproved’ territory are themselves in need of
what capitalist construe as improvement. Racialisation and abstraction are
linked, in Bhandar’s argument, by how the Lockean logic of ‘improvement’
views property not only for what it is, but for what it could be, that is, against
the measure of its potential profitability.
A second development in Black thought that helps us see potential linkages
between abstraction and property has proven even more consequential in the
academic humanities. This strand of Black thinking has an obverse relation to
the study of whiteness as property, focusing instead on the predominantly non-
or anti-revolutionary politics of the white working class in order to demon-
strate the limits of any Marxism that cannot think beyond the abstractions of
property. The key work here is of course Cedric J. Robinson’s Black Marxism:
The Making of The Black Radical Tradition, first published in 1983. Robinson’s
meticulous and visionary history of radical Black political action and thinking
culminates with a distinction between a Marxism unequipped to acknowledge
the foundational role of Black enslavement in the history of capitalism, and a
more encompassing Black radical thought that could see anti-Black racism as
a deeper and prior political problem.
The marker of the distinction between the two kinds of political thought is
property. Looking back on his research, Robinson writes:

There was the sense that something of a more profound nature than the
obsession with property was askew in a civilization that could organize
and celebrate – on a scale beyond previous human experience – the bru-
tal degradations of life and the most acute violations of human destiny.
It seemed a certainty that the system of capitalism was part of it, but as
well symptomatic of it.9

Robinson sees a distinction between the political thought limited by an ‘obses-

sion with property’ and a more foundational thought that is also marked out
by a distinction between different forms of abstraction. He elaborates this dis-

8 Bhandar 2018, p. 8.
9 Robinson 2000, p. 308.
abstraction, intuition, poetry 221

tinction by way of an interpretation of the political thought of C.L.R. James.

He praises James’s Notes on Dialectics as a highwater mark in mid-century
Marxist thinking, not least for its early recognition of the political disaster
of Stalinism. But he argues that James over-optimistically imagined a rad-
ical proletariat dialectically overcoming Stalinist authoritarianism. For Robin-
son, this was a pitfall of James succumbing to abstraction, its Hegelian form
specifically: ‘The most obvious problem stemmed from James’s fascination
for Hegel’s mode of argumentation: the distillation of history into rich con-
centrates used solely for the grounding of abstract discourse’.10 For Robin-
son, the irony is that had James set aside dialectical abstraction, he would
have seen both the actual property relations that tied the radical Russian
intellectual class to the bourgeoisie they hated, and the limitations of using
‘property’ to understand those intellectuals’ eventual betrayal of the working
classes they had once imagined leading. Implicitly, for Robinson, this betrayal
is rooted in the history of racialising workers and peasants that ultimately took
its most world-shattering form in the enslavement of Africans and in anti-Black
racism.
To think past where he felt James had been able to go, Robinson turned
to Richard Wright, who, he argues, ‘was not entirely rejecting [Marxism] but
was attempting to locate it, to provide a sense of the boundaries of its author-
ity’.11 One key boundary, again, is property. Robinson suggests that even in the
1930s, before his break with the Communist Party, Wright was pushing past
this boundary, citing Wright’s remark in ‘Blueprint for Negro Literature’ that
‘[l]acking the handicaps of false ambition and property, [Black proletarians]
have access to a wide social vision and a deep social consciousness’.12 Robin-
son tracks Wright’s idea of a generative, negative Black relation to property
forward to the 1950s of White Man Listen, where Wright would re-mark the
boundary between Marxism and Black thought in similar way, revising the pair-
ing of unpropertiedness and social consciousness into a contrast between class
conflict and a political, existential search for meaning born of sheer annihilat-
ing violence:

I maintain that the ultimate effect of white Europe upon Asia and Africa
was to cast millions into a kind of spiritual void … The dynamic concept
of the void that must be filled, a void created by a thoughtless and bru-

10 Robinson 2000, p. 284.

11 Robinson 2000, p. 304.
12 Robinson 2000, p. 299.
222 chapter 11

tal impact of the West upon a billion and a half people, is more powerful
than the concept of class conflict, and more universal.13

Through the reading of Wright that culminated Black Marxism, Robinson

establishes a distinction between Marxism and Black radical thought that on
the one hand feels categorical: Marxism is epistemological, and focused on
abstractions of property and class that it mistakes for concretions, while Black
thought is existential – today we would say ontological – and focused on a
racialised world-making that is anterior to class and property, or deeper than
them, or categorically different than them. On the other hand, inasmuch as
Robinson sees Wright giving Marxism a necessary if subordinate place, the dis-
tinction between Marxism and Black thought seems to be more about different
kinds of abstractions, or different media for it.
To contrast the existential alertness and agony of Black radical thought with
a Marxism that, on the one hand, is ‘obsessed with property’, and on the other,
follows Hegel in boiling down the richness of history to mere philosophical
abstraction, is to leave Black thought and Marxism quite separate. But there
remains a question of the door Robinson thinks Wright left open by putting
Marxism in its place – locating it – rather than merely rejecting it. How far apart
are the two locations?
They may be closer than is suggested by the sad history of the racism and
anti-solidarity of European and American labour movements. For one thing,
the critique of the limitations of a body of thought for its fixation on property –
this is Marx’s critique of Hegel. Hegel lays out his Philosophy of Right of 1820 on
the foundation of a concept of private property that, though it is unlike Locke’s,
is also grounded in the self-possessed individual. As Wright does with Marxism,
so too does Marx do with Hegel in his 1843 critique of the Philosophy of Right –
not rejecting Hegel’s concept of property, but historicising it, and arguing that
the form of private property that began as individual self-possession, already
a stunted form of human freedom, serves as the basis for a deeper violation of
the potential for freedom as it in turn forms the basis of capitalist social rela-
tions. Later on, in Capital itself, Marx will begin his analysis with a specific form
of property – the commodity – whose basis turns out to be dispossession, that
is, the commodity called labour power. One cannot come to be in the proud,
self-possessed position of having the ability to exchange this commodity, Marx
argues with irony, without having nothing else to survive by.14 Marx does not

13 Quoted in Robinson 2000, p. 301.

14 See Marx 1970.
abstraction, intuition, poetry 223

negate or invert Hegel’s idea of property so much as give it a long history and a
deep irony. And he did not reject Hegel’s abstractions for his own concretion,
though he sometimes boasted that that’s what he had done. When he was in
a more serious mood, he acknowledged that he had given Hegel’s abstractions
their place in an expanded frame.
So Marx puts Hegel in his place, as Wright does with Marx. But Wright leaves
open a door by which we might think of Marxism itself as capable of more than
a simple ‘obsession’ with the concept of property. What does Marx leave avail-
able in Hegel? And does it matter?
I think it does. When Robinson sees James meeting a political and theoret-
ical limit because James succumbed to the Hegelian habit of reducing history
to abstractions, he is placing himself in a lineage of critiques of Hegel that begin
with Friedrich Schelling, and which distort Hegel. This would not matter much
if it weren’t the case that critiques of Marx as reductive of all political analysis to
the question of waged exploitation did not themselves depend on the template
of Schelling’s critique of Hegel, which, as Stephen Houlgate argues, have gradu-
ally produced a false picture of Hegel as the ur-reducer of lived particulars to
inward abstractions.15 This is the template, in turn, for the main line of philo-
sophical critiques of Marx. We know this critique of Hegel and Marx, in the
English-speaking world, by the negative associations attached in the literary
academy to the word ‘totalise’. But to read Capital is to see that the framework
of thinking from the whole that Marx takes up from Hegel and recontextualises,
that is, the framework of totality, is less like a boiling down of diverse particu-
lars into a flattening ur-concept (‘the wage’, or ‘class conflict’) and much more
like the unfolding of a concept embedded in a social relation (‘the commod-
ity’).
Critiques of Marxist thought that derive from Schellingian critiques of Hegel
suggest that dialectical thought fails to think outside its categories – to think
outside the wage, outside class, outside exploitation. But Marx’s emphasis was
always to examine how categories come into social being in the first place. The
tragedy is that the history of communism and the labour movement in Europe
and North America licenses the categorical critique. Those political formations
embraced what Marx saw early on was capital’s own strategy of sifting labour
into hierarchies – even as it deskilled labour – and they allowed race, sex, and
national identity to gird those hierarchies. But if we accept that we cannot get
out of the mess of American history without grasping it as the history of racial
capitalism, then it could be productive to follow Robinson’s implication that

15 See Houlgate 1999, pp. 99–128.

224 chapter 11

Wright saw something worth holding onto in Marx. I think it would be espe-
cially useful to revisit what Marx meant by ‘abstraction’ – which has less to do
with property, per se, than to do with value.

∵
When Marx discusses ‘abstract labour’, he means the abstract character of a
total social labour whose individual expressions make no sense until they are
grasped as part of a whole – specifically, a whole that is the product of a history
of dispossession that allows different kinds of labour to be equated with each
other, because the dominant social meaning of the objects they produce is that
they were produced in order to make money; their actual use is secondary.16
Marx also calls the condition for this kind of abstract labour ‘socially necessary
labor time’; it is what distinguishes his theory of value from David Ricardo’s.
Unlike Ricardo, Marx does not calculate value in terms of individual physical
inputs that become commodities, but in terms of a total production of surplus
value that is distributed among competing capitalists as profit. As he puts it in
the first volume of Capital: ‘socially necessary labour-time is the labour-time
required to produce any use-value under the conditions of production normal
for a given society and with the average degree of skill and intensity of labour
prevalent in that society’.17
In what follows, I will to try to flesh out the implications of this shift from
the quantitative to the qualitative, which is also a shift from Ricardo’s famous
labour theory of value to what Diane Elson has usefully called Marx’s ‘value
theory of labor’.18 In order to do so, I’m going to revisit some of the means
by which academic and political readings of Marx in the twentieth century,
whatever their merits, got in their own way. I will contrast these readings with
what I take to be more promising ways of interpreting Marx, which restore
to his work the importance of non-inevitable readings of capitalist accumu-
lation. This feels urgent in light of the looming possibility that capitalism has
reached a terminal period of secular stagnation, that is, a long-term decline
in profitability that cannot be permanently counteracted, even by the most
frantic measures. Oddly, it is the very possibility of a kind of terminal velocity
to capital accumulation that forces the question of its non-inevitable charac-
ter.

16 Marx 1990, p. 174.

17 Marx 1990, p. 129.
18 See Elson 1979, pp. 115–80.
abstraction, intuition, poetry 225

The Marxist economist Michael Roberts, drawing on data stretching back a

century, has recently shown that it is possible to calculate a long-term decline
in capitalist profitability that corresponds to Marx’s argument that under capit-
alism there is an inescapable tendency for the rate of profit to fall.19 In Marxist
circles this argument is referred to as ‘the law of the tendency of the rate of
profit to fall’, or ltrpf. It is worked out in part three of Volume iii of Capital, and
built around the observation that inter-capitalist competition drives innova-
tion in production, but also undermines its own conditions of reproduction.
This is because, once capital has confronted the limits of absolute exploita-
tion, that is, the limits of its ability to reduce wages, capitalists must turn to
machine-driven efficiency gains in order to survive. Machines offer the advant-
age of reducing the number of workers required to maintain profitability, but
the problem is that workers are the source of surplus value, and therefore of
profit.
Unlike exploitable labour, that is, technological innovations cannot produce
value; they can only buy time. So the expulsion of labour from the productive
process produces short-term, sector-specific gains, but at a cost. What Marx
suggests is that at a systemic level, the ratio of technology to labour – what he
calls the ‘organic composition of capital’ (or the ‘occ’) – will inevitably rise,
and the risk of system-wide crisis increases.20 But Marx also details the range
of ways that capitalists can bat back at this tendency. The recipe can shift, but
when Roberts lists some of the tactics deployed between 1982 and 1997, for
instance, a time when profitability rose in the U.S., they are all versions of those
Marx himself outlined in Capital: ‘the greater exploitation of the U.S. workforce
(falling wage share), the cheapening of constant capital through new high-tech
innovations, the wider exploitation of the labor force elsewhere (globaliza-
tion), and speculation in unproductive sectors (particularly real estate and fin-
ance capital)’.21 These counter-tendencies to the tendency of the rate of profit
to fall are where the action is – they are the means by which capitalist classes
attempt to make over the social world to fit its need for endlessly expanding
accumulation. These means are not guaranteed success, and they require a
range of violence to mobilise.
Unfortunately, this framework of tendency and counter-tendency is still a
minority interpretation of Marx. It got sidelined by the mechanistic view of his-
tory among political Marxists in the orbit of the Soviet Union, which claimed

19 See Roberts 2016.

20 Marx 1990, p. 571.
21 Roberts 2016, p. 21.
226 chapter 11

the mantle of Marxism after World War i. For those Marxists, capitalism would
need to fulfil its full productive potential before its contradictions made a
transition to socialism inevitable. This is the early-twentieth century version
of contemporary accelerationist arguments about how advanced technology
will inevitably undermine the logic of capitalist accumulation.
Another inheritance from the early and mid-twentieth century has got-
ten in the way of thinking about capitalism in terms of the vicissitudes of
accumulation, and it bears more closely on the work of humanistic schol-
ars on the academic left. This is the legacy of the Frankfurt School. Joshua
Clover and I have argued elsewhere (and we are not the first to do so) that
whatever the brilliance of Theodor Adorno’s dialectics when it comes to aes-
thetic experience, for instance, his use of political economy is far less dia-
lectical.22 Indeed it is built on a linearised idea that, in his era, the processes
of mass consumption had led capital to saturate every pore of modern life.
The key term is ‘modern’ – what looks like a background of Marxist polit-
ical economy in Adorno is more often than not an allegory about lost prom-
ises for freedom, more a moral declension than a set of economic tenden-
cies and counter-tendencies. As he puts it in Negative Dialectics, ‘No univer-
sal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading
from the slingshot to the megaton bomb’.23 The sentence is dialectical, but
the history is inevitable. Martin Jay long ago pointed out how the Frankfurt
School’s critique of progress was built on a rejection of sunnily optimistic
socialist and liberal political theory, and hardened by the capitulation of Ger-
man workers to military nationalism in the run-up to World War i; but the
points scored by rejecting the idea that modernity has an upward trendline
are lost in the capitulation to the idea that the problem is modernity rather
than capitalism in the first place.24 This is even more true of Walter Ben-
jamin than it is of Adorno or Max Horkheimer. Frankfurt-style analysis pro-
duces brilliant accounts of aesthetic experience, but it reduces capitalism to
a modernity that is linearised even as its products are interpreted dialectic-
ally.
The Frankfurt School problem of linearising the movement of capital has
roots in exactly the Second International theories that its members rejected.
For the intellectuals and strategists of the International, Marx was read as
suggesting that capitalism had to reach peak capacity in order to trigger a

22 See Clover and Nealon 2017.

23 Adorno 1973, p. 320.
24 See Jay 1986.
abstraction, intuition, poetry 227

transition to socialism. Instead of questioning the premises of this idea, they

accepted it and inverted its conclusions: instead of peak capitalism producing a
revolutionary consciousness in the working classes, it produces universal atom-
ization. But capitalist accumulation is still understood as a kind of saturation –
rather than, say, a movement from one set of contradictions to another.
It is possible to show, however, that the idea of a peak capitalism, or a capit-
alism that saturates the social field, is not to be found in Marx. This is not just
because Marx lived in an earlier moment in the development of capitalism. In
his 2015 study Marx After Marx, Harry Harootunian demonstrates that for Marx
the idea of a completed capitalism is more a heuristic device than an historical
prediction.25 Harootunian’s argument turns to another text of Marx’s, ‘Results
of The Immediate Process of Production’, that shared the fate of the Grundrisse
notes and the Theory of Surplus Value in remaining unpublished until the 1930s,
and that is not as widely read as the body text of Capital. For Harootunian the
‘Results’ helps deepen distinctions made along the course of Capital Volume i
between different stages of capitalist takeover of the production process. In the
‘Results’, Marx distinguishes between what he calls the ‘formal subsumption’
and the ‘real subsumption’ of the labour process by capitalist imperatives to
produce for value rather than utility.26 For Marx, formal subsumption describes
the initial encounter of capital with a preexisting labour process, which it takes
over intact and begins to incorporate into larger enterprises. Real subsumption,
meanwhile, designates a later moment in that same labour process in which its
organisation is altered to comply with competitive pressures, thereby becom-
ing what in broad terms we would think of as more fully capitalist.27
Thinkers across a range of Marxist tendencies have tried to construe the
movement from formal to real subsumption as a gesture of periodisation, but
this is not what Marx is suggesting. In the ‘Results’ and in chapters 16–18 of Cap-
ital Volume i, Marx closely correlates that first moment of formal subsumption
with what he calls absolute surplus value, which is extracted by extending the
working day, and he correlates the second moment, real subsumption, with his
concept of relative surplus value, in which additional surplus value is obtained
by technological means, especially through the addition of machines to the
production process. What’s lost in turning this sequence of moments internal
to a given production process into a large-scale historical sequence is that Marx
is describing inter-capitalist competition. This matters: no competitive advant-

25 See Harootunian 2015.

26 See Marx 1990, pp. 1019–38.
27 Ibid.
228 chapter 11

age lasts forever, and all competitive advantage is bought dearly. Higher wages
in the white-collar tranche of the high-tech sector, for instance, are made pos-
sible by brutally low wages elsewhere in the value chain. Once we scale up to
see capitalism as a totality – not a social totality, as in the Frankfurt School,
but a totality of value-production specific to capital and labour – we can see
that the ‘real’ in ‘real subsumption’ isn’t an intensifier – like, shit’s getting real
in capitalism now! – but rather a marker of the contradictory entailment of all
capitalist enterprises with each other. This is what totality means, as a circuit
of accumulation: every wage relation needs an elsewhere.
So there is a non-linear way to relate the forms of accumulation to the devel-
opment of capitalist history. In chapter 25 of Volume i of Capital, which is
called ‘The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation’, Marx stresses that the
revolutions in productivity driven by inter-capitalist competition have a con-
tradictory effect on the labour pool. This is because the rhythms of large-scale
industry are cyclical, and at different moments in that cycle capital both dra-
goons workers into waged labor, and expels them from it. Furthermore, because
machinery lowers the cost of production if it is adopted quickly, it creates the
possibility of paying fewer workers to achieve the same level of productivity.
But because underpaying labour is the source of profit, this reduction in the
number of workers must be compensated for by an increase in the amount
they produce, regardless of any logic of what mainstream economics thinks of
as supply and demand. This heedless expansion of production, in turn, lowers
the value of each commodity, at the same time as it has created competition for
scarcer jobs. Eventually, the relative advantage of new technology is equalised
among capitals, and for a moment, hiring workers becomes relatively advant-
ageous again, compared to investing in yet another round of new technology.
But the workers called back into production are not the same as those who’d
been expelled from it – they are younger, fresher – or, if they are the same, they
are called back on worse terms.
The rhythm of accumulation therefore produces what Marx calls a ‘reserve
army of labour’ stratified by age, health, working conditions, and skill level.
And this reserve army expands continuously, drawing ever more people into
the wage relation, then expelling them, and only ever partially reincorporating
them, if at all. This stratified reserve army produces what Marx calls ‘surplus
populations’ meaning they are superfluous to the needs of capital. What this
means is there is also a tendency, as capital pits itself against itself, to pit work-
ers, and classes of workers, against each other.
This dynamic does, though, provide an opportunity to notice that accumu-
lation depends not only on the forced migration of labour into the wage rela-
tion, but on walling people out of it, as well. The logic of surplus population
abstraction, intuition, poetry 229

described in chapter 25 of Capital becomes the retrospective vantage by which

to view the dynamics of what Marx referred to in the more famous chapter 26
as ‘so-called primitive accumulation’ – the name given to the expropriations
of land and means of production in early modern Europe, which created the
conditions for the spread of the wage relation. For a feminist scholar like Silvia
Federici, the story of the enclosure of the commons and the rise of the wage
relation is also the story of the establishment of a gendered division of labour
by which women’s work and women’s knowledge are forcibly separated out of
public life, as what congeals into public life includes both waged work and
political activity.28 It is also what Robinson is describing in Black Marxism
when he writes that the ‘tendency of European civilization through capitalism
was thus not to homogenize but to differentiate – to exaggerate regional, sub-
cultural, and dialectical differences into “racial” ones’.29 If chapter 25 of Capital
focuses on the business cycle to highlight the ways in which lives are shaped by
exteriority to the wage, then chapter 26 expands the frame to direct our atten-
tion to a similar dynamic unfolding across centuries. Taken together, the two
chapters allow us to think about not only capital’s dependence on exteriorit-
ies to the wage in any given cycle of accumulation, but its production of those
exteriorities across time, and downstream from the limits reached by previous
cycles.
This conjunction enables a political viewpoint with the capacity to link
workplace struggles with others that, to eyes trained by liberalism or by the
politics of difference, still look separate. And political discourse on the left
today has begun to reactivate these links: more contemporary anti-racist act-
ivists, prison abolitionists, water defenders, anti-austerity militants, and fem-
inists have all become explicitly anti-capitalist. But we are a long way from the
kind of universalism that might serve as the theoretical assist to linking these
struggles. I have tried to outline, above, aspects of the Marxist tradition that
have gotten in the way of such a project, and I’ve sketched another path from
Marx to a robust holism that might help us reconceive the intraleft differences
the capitalist classes surely enjoy observing us rehash. I have wanted to sug-
gest in particular that when we look at how Marx understood what he called
‘the general law of capitalist accumulation’, we can train ourselves to see the
commonality in all the different relations to value-production that have been
entailed by absorption into wage labour, expulsion from it, forced exclusion
from it, and degraded reincorporation into it. I think it is helpful to consider

28 See Federici 2004.

29 Robinson 2000, p. 26.
230 chapter 11

how the production of surplus value depends on a shifting recipe of all these
relations to the wage, at any given moment, and how that recipe of stratifica-
tion depends on prior cycles of accumulation. I think there are other ways to
act on our intuition that we’re all in this, some horrible ‘this’, together.

∵
Intuition – we are getting closer, once again, to poetry. Earlier in this essay I
suggested that the anti-Hegelian critique of Marx as reductive of difference
dated back to an influential critique of Hegel himself, Schelling’s critique,
and that that Schelling’s influential view had shaped a reception history that
equated totality with the elimination of difference. There is another twist to
this critique, though, which is that the critique of totality is premised on a
model of thought that specifically delegitimates intuition. Houlgate argues that
Schelling is so committed to the Kantian framework that equates thought with
judgment, partition, and categorisation that he faults Hegel for failing to abide
by it, without realising that Hegel has in fact rejected that model of thought
at the outset. Houlgate puts it this way: ‘The principal difference between
Hegel and Schelling is thus that Hegel understands thought to be a form of
intellectual intuition, whereas Schelling understands thought to be primarily
discursive. Like Immanuel Kant, Schelling takes thought to be essentially the
discursive activity of judgment (Urteilen) or of forming propositions’.30 In 1984,
Gillian Rose began her Dialectic of Nihilism with a sustained analysis of how
deeply Kant’s conception of thought as Urteil (judgment) committed him to a
conception for judgment that was itself historically saturated with arguments
from property law that imagined possession as absolute, and difference as cat-
egorical. Intuition, in this model of thought, is an unwelcome guest, which sees
likeness where there is none, or where none can be permitted.31 Houlgate per-
suasively suggests that these are the terms through which Schelling saw the
Hegelian idea of a concept: failing to respect property, imagining everything
belonged to it.
Recent scholarship on Hegel suggests that we are missing something if we
conceive of him as a philosopher of judgement rather than intuition, however,
and that what we overlook has to do with the deep historical sociability of
human language. In two different studies across the last few decades, John
McCumber has made this case in great detail, arguing for a ‘linguistic ideal-

30 Houlgate 1999, p. 119.

31 See Rose 1984.
abstraction, intuition, poetry 231

ism’ at the heart of Hegel’s thought, one in which intuition is the source, not of
the illegitimate traversal of domains that are separated by a categorical abyss,
but of an ever-revising social activity in which our conceptualisations cannot
be separated from our idioms. As he puts it,

[for Hegel] the individual things we experience exhibit manifold distinc-

tions, similarities, and relationships. Some of these – a tiny fraction –
become semantic, that is, are given names and thus made universal.
Which these are depends, as linguistic, upon the needs and capacities of
the community whose language it is …
From a linguistic perspective, to have [true] existence thus means to
have significance to a community; for only things which have such signi-
ficance will find their way to semantic significance, and only in virtue of
such significance can we talk to one another and become a community.
The universals produced by our minds are thus the ‘true’ essences of
things, not in that they are responsible for the existence of those things
but in that they are what matter to us in those things.32

Timothy Brennan takes up a similar argument in Borrowed Light, pushing it

in a more explicitly political direction. For Brennan, the linguistic Hegel is the
Hegel of philology in its broadest sense, the centre of a project launched by
Giambattista Vico, where the stakes of philosophical truth-seeking are shaped
by the rhythms of the vernaculars in which the truth is sought. This is the great
source, Brennan argues, of a Hegelian Marxism that placed its faith not in the
inexorable march of historical laws, but in people: ‘Both Marxism and philo-
logy adhere to historical forms of knowing, to the sedimentary traces of a past
that happened, to the ultimate creativity of the unnamed, unheralded, pop-
ular elements of society’.33 For Brennan, this is not merely a shared tempera-
mental inclination, but the root orientation of Hegel’s philosophical project,
running all the way up to its apical concepts, not least the Absolute. As he puts
it,

The term ‘absolute’ has led to misconceptions. ‘Absolute knowledge’ for

Hegel is not omniscience – not final, complete, or total knowledge – but
knowledge absolutely given over (reconciled, one might say) to the col-
lective nature of knowledge, to the contingency of any personal appre-

32 McCumber 2014, p. 108.

33 Brennan 2014, p. 10.
232 chapter 11

hension of it. The term is about the necessity of superseding the self in
the recognition of the other, yielding a shared understanding of knowing
as that which all humans have the capacity to possess.34

There is an opportunity here. When Robinson concludes Black Marxism by

championing Wright’s distinction between Marxism and Black thought, he
attends not only to Wright’s political writing, but to Wright’s novels, the two
of which Robinson describes in something like the philological terms that
McCumber and Brennan make visible as part of a Left Hegelian legacy:

In the syncopations and the phrases, the scamp and the beat, the lyric and
melody of Black language, Black beliefs, Black music, sexual and social
relations and encounters, Wright’s work reconstructed the resonances of
Black American consciousness in its contests with reality. The quests pur-
sued in his novels and essays were set to the improvisational possibilities
obtained in that Black culture’s collisions with its own parameters and
those prescribed by the market forces and labor demands of capitalism
and by a racialist culture.35

What I have been trying to establish is that there is a way of reading the intellec-
tual history of abstraction through the lens of property that allows us to rethink
what it means to think about similarity and difference. I have been trying to
suggest that thinking oriented around property as possession tends to imagine
difference in categorical terms, whereas the Marxist starting-point of think-
ing property through dispossession leads to thinking difference in conceptual
terms, that is, as a thing in motion, shaped by history but liable to revision.
I have been suggesting that capitalist accumulation has a will to the categor-
ical in its attempts to affirm and reaffirm the property relations that sustain
it, as in Harris’s and Bhandar’s expositions of the racialising and endlessly re-
racialising work of property law, but that it needs to be studied conceptually in
the sense that dispossession, which is invisible in the eternal present-tense of
the law, is historically variable: both path-dependent and unpredictable. I have
tried to suggest, further, that capitalist history becomes clearest when we see
its ‘absolute’, its drive to accumulate without end, as also endlessly producing
elsewheres to surplus-value, both as its preconditions and as its waste. I have
suggested that this conception of capitalist history might help us see solidarity

34 Brennan 2014, p. 76.

35 Robinson 2000, p. 315.
abstraction, intuition, poetry 233

where it has been hard to see. And I have suggested that improving our vision
would depend not only on getting a clearer sense of Marx’s conceptual work,
but of the aspect of intuition facilitating it. To that end, I have tried to suggest
that Marx’s relation to Hegel is neither a replication of dialectical thought in
some sense of dialectics as the key to all mythologies, nor a triumphant mater-
ialism that inverts a mentalist Hegel. I have tried to suggest that Marx sees in
Hegel the opportunity to think out of a specifically social intuition. And I am
inching us toward thinking about how, if we conceive of intuition in linguistic
terms – where human language is both tendential and inventive, not simply
categorical or structural – then the ‘improvisational possibilities’ Robinson saw
in the rhythms of radical Black thought may be part of a heritage of vernacular
creativity whose full extent the widening disaster of contemporary capitalism
makes it urgent to explore.
I hope to show in the rest of this essay that to think this way, and to use lan-
guage this way, groping for similarities, is to risk a range of vulnerabilities, and
to suggest that the risk is worth it. Some of those vulnerabilities we might think
of as emotional – part of the glory of the Black thought Robinson identifies in
Wright is its courage to risk articulating joys liable to destruction, or griefs liable
to being weaponised. Some we might think of as political – like the potential
overreach of imagining solidarity when there may not have been enough work
to establish it: popular anti-racist discourse has good language for unearned
allyship, for instance.
Back in the academy, we can see other vulnerabilities in terms of method.
One resonant mood in literary criticism and theory today, broadly post-critical,
is organised around advocacy for epistemological modesty: not making over-
broad claims, not totalising, not appropriating; stay in your lane. The vibrant
conversation around ‘weak theory’ in modernist studies explores the range of
possibilities that spring up when one adopts this modesty about method.36 But
I am thinking less of the humanising vulnerabilities that can be disclosed when
one reduces the ambit of one’s observations – method as epistemological mod-
esty, a heritage of Kant – than of the vulnerability entailed in discovering how
powerfully a strong theory can describe the world, only to feel unequipped to
change it, at least alone. The chastening limits I feel are not to what we can
know, but to what we can do with how much we know. This is not to say I am
not concerned with method – just that my own sense of where its vulnerabil-
ity might lie is not epistemological, per se, so much as rhetorical; a matter not
only of knowledge but of attention. Take, for instance, the risks I run by racing

36 See Saint-Amour 2018 and the engaging online forum it inspired.

234 chapter 11

through a long history of thinking about abstraction, only to place its burdens
on a single book of poems.

∵
Pet Sounds blends and rethinks abstraction and intuition, possession and dis-
possession, likeness and unlikeness in memorable, beautiful ways. It is not a
metaphorically dense book of poems at the level of the phrase, but it medit-
ates on whether categories can successfully describe lives in ways that provoke
Young’s speaker to seek commonality with others whom she knows are differ-
ent than her, and to distinguish such commonality from possession, likeness
from subsumption. It is full of playful private names and in-jokes between
couples, full of the deadening categories of the state, full of a wish for solid-
arities that may not yet have been earned.
The book’s long title poem is structured as a sequence of untitled pieces
that gives each individual poem its own integrity while drawing its greatest
poetic power through the complex and cumulative connections among them.
In their demotic language and personal candor, the poems take part in a recent
period style that has reactivated the energy of earlier feminist and New York
School poetics (Bernadette Mayer is a key background figure for the book).
Young’s work emerges from the collective energy of the San Francisco Bay Area
poetry scene (she teaches at Mills College in Oakland, and edited a volume
called Bay Poetics in 2006), which is remarkable for its history of fostering
collaboration, for its deep connections to West Coast histories of anarchist,
Marxist, and queer politics, and for its unpretentious affection for popular cul-
ture.
These qualities are signalled by the book’s three epigraphs, which come from
Marx (a quote distinguishing the pinprick-sting of money from the unbridled
gore of capital), from Federici (‘The family is essentially the institutionaliza-
tion of our unwaged labor’), and from The Beach Boys (‘God only knows what
I’d do without you’), whose 1966 album Pet Sounds gives the book its title.
Together they establish terrain for the title poem, which is a kind of memoir
that attempts to make sense of the arc from adolescence to midlife by charting
the course of two relationships, first with a non-white woman (Young is white),
then with a white man, who’d been with a woman but who also identifies as
queer. At least as important, they move in a world of semi-stable, lower middle-
class employment (her teaching and his work as an actor, supported by office
work), where families, chosen and unchosen, are both porous and determinat-
ive. The poems express a constant awareness of an outermost political horizon
that would be something like revolution, but that awareness only takes on
abstraction, intuition, poetry 235

meaning through the poems’ vernacular. And by ‘vernacular’ I mean both its
diction and what turn out to be its concepts, which we can piece together only
by reading the sequence as a whole, and which have to do with how initially
circumstantial encounters – with their sudden loyalties, inevitable misrecog-
nitions, and material limits – bequeath enduring attachments regardless. ‘Pet
Sounds’ tells a story in which concepts, realised through words, can be mobil-
ised to put pressure on categories like whiteness, and maleness and femaleness,
as well as on the forms of possession that make them so inhospitable to libera-
tion. It keeps intuiting likeness across categories, sensing regimes of possession
as barriers to its realisation, and countering possession with a curiosity about
the potential significance of lived similarities that moves between humour and
elegy.
The first poem, just four three-line stanzas, begins with a description of
metaphor-making, specifically of a metaphor the poet makes and then demurs
from:

in the dark I say you are a kitten

and I am a kitten and this makes us
homosexuals. it isn’t true

we are mostly straight

old cats. it’s the closest I can get.
P, 15

So we start with sameness, likeness, homo-ness – or, not quite. It negates itself.
But the desire to ‘get’ to likeness, and queerness, will not be dispensed with
by self-negation. The poet immediately questions her choice of category – not
‘homosexual’, but

what is a kitten anyways?

a younger woman who dates older men

something we have done
P, 15

So the man in the partnership has dated older men, too. This doesn’t help much,
it seems, because the next move in this short opening poem is to conclude by
re-booting the metaphor entirely, moving in the last line of the penultimate
stanza from kittens to insects:
236 chapter 11

stout, furry, gray and white moth

totally dependent
the caterpillar of which resembles
highly social animals
P, 15

Maybe it’s the man’s body hair that triggers the shift in metaphor; it’s impossible
to say for sure. And only the subsequent poems will make clear that the shift is
typical of the roving, self-negating intelligence of both the poet and the couple,
whose private language – their pet sounds – keeps even the poems’ most pro-
bative language close to the bodily production of sheer shaped sound. What we
do know is that the poem’s curiosity is most evident in the pressure it applies
to the last lines of its first three stanzas, where ‘it isn’t true’, ‘what is a kitten
anyways?’ and the shift to ‘stout, furry, gray’ establish the difference between
its formal units (the poem’s categorical aspect, you could say) and its intellec-
tual mobility. Through negation, critique, and the induction of new material,
the poem’s ideas keep walking out the stanzas’ back doors.
This living tension will express itself across the book as something like a mat-
ter of language colliding with categories, especially around scenes of care and
social reproduction. The web of relationships depicted across the poems’ sec-
tions is built out of ever-shifting, often-lopsided caregiving relations, between
the poet and her partner Clive, first of all, but also between each of them and
their siblings and parents, or between them and friends and neighbors. Young
pushes the language against different categories, not least ‘woman’, but also,
toward the end of the volume, against the category of the ‘household’, at least
as the state defines it. ‘The US government says you and I are a household with
two members related by birth, marriage, or adoption’, she writes in unlineated
prose, but only after having made clear that the category can’t capture the tex-
ture of the rhythms of care:

your mom lives in the cottage behind Bonnie

Randy stays with Bonnie most of the time

we take care of your mom some of the time

she takes care of Mark by letting him care for her

most of the time, the hardest parts

getting in and out of the shower
abstraction, intuition, poetry 237

Randy and Mark don’t speak

Michael visits Joanie’s sister in the nursing home

calls his roommate partner, it sounds like business partner

we transfer money to your mom’s account

for rent she pays Bonnie
P, 76

Plain actions, simple phrases, rotating names: the language isn’t poetic but its
movement is. It’s a kind of rondelé of tending that gives the lie to the idea that
the categories of the state can capture all the work it takes to nourish collective
life.
This work, though it is shared in the world Young describes, is also always
unevenly distributed, not least according to gender. In a short poem describ-
ing the overlapping but non-identical ways she and her partner care for each
other’s needs, Young writes:

I’m writing this [poem] in my office at work

because you’re home sick. I knew
if I worked there I’d take care of you instead.

maybe you also meet your own needs

by meeting the needs of others. I think so.

that I do may or may not mean anything

about how far we haven’t come. I am not
every woman. every woman is not in me.
P, 53

If patriarchy encourages women to care for others at their own expense, and
makes that self-sacrifice a central part of the category ‘woman’, Young sug-
gests, then Clive may be feminine, too, inasmuch as he is other-directed in a
similar way. Obversely, Young suggests that perhaps her own willingness, even
her desire, to care for him may not emerge entirely because of the patriarchal
pressure to validate herself though that care. But she knows she’s too small
a sample size, all by herself, to use that possibility as a measure of the suc-
cess of what feminism has sometimes fought for: not only the freedom from
compulsory care work, but the freedom to care for others. And in any case,
she concludes, whatever the size of ‘woman’ as a category, as a concept it’s
238 chapter 11

internally riven: she can’t join the party – ‘I’m Every Woman’ – that Chaka Khan
kicked off in 1978.
Today, of course, the redoubling of collective efforts to uncover the history
of the specifically racial differences internal to the category and the concept
of ‘woman’ makes Khan’s exuberance (and its mighty early-90s afterparty con-
tinuation, by Whitney Houston) feel distant and bittersweet. Young tracks
this, too, by self-marking as ‘white’ throughout the book. What’s so interest-
ing about the category, though, is that it retains the instability of something
conceptual, something you might want to avoid or rework, if you’re liable
to whiteness. In one poem, after she and Clive knock heads in bed before
they’re fully awake, Young wryly describes the embarrassment of going out
in public after, knowing cultural codes will make her look like she’s been
abused:

I walk around like that all week

with a kind of jelly smeared on top. it takes a while
to heal. don’t be that guy, either of them.
don’t become that white woman artist.
P, 29

‘Don’t be that guy’ seems to refer both to her and to Clive – don’t be the abuser,
abused; ‘don’t become that white woman artist’ seems to indicate a cliché
where the woman pays the price in abuse for refusing or neglecting her respons-
ibilities to the man or men in her life. The light touch of cross-gendering opens
space to imagine that, if she’s not literally a ‘guy’, Young might also not quite fit
into ‘white woman artist’ either, if she is able to outmanoeuvre the ghost-word
‘tragic’ haunting the epithet.
She is less able to avoid its comic aspect, which is what emerges from her
inability to simply escape the label ‘white’. Sitting on the stoop with her older
friend Michael while they wait for the police and medics to arrive – his wife
Joanie has just died – she looks back on their friendship:

it wasn’t until he introduced me to someone else

as Jennifer that I corrected him and hurt his feelings

I didn’t say anything before because I didn’t want to

hurt his feeling or make either of us uncomfortable

plus tbh it amused me

abstraction, intuition, poetry 239

Joanie, Jennifer, Stephanie

white girls
white girl names
P, 49

Excerpting limits what I can convey of the tenderness in those lines, the ease
Young feels with the comedy of the inescapability of her race, which emerges
in part because of Michael’s own gentleness. But it matters for the greatness of
the poetry. It matters because it emerges out of intuitions of likeness that aren’t
categorical but experiential – not, we are the same, but: we’ve been through
things together.
Young’s are songs of experience, you could say – most importantly, in ‘Pet
Sounds’, the experience of love and affection across and inside the categories
created by racial ascription and gender hierarchy. In the case of gender, Young is
constantly swapping positions out of choice or necessity – going out dancing
with Clive and thinking, ‘go ahead honey / let your femme flag fly’ while she
leans against the wall and ‘casts her chin’ like a man, or remembering her father
being ‘interested in me as a son’ (P, 70–1). In the case of race no such swapping of
positions is possible, however, and aside from moments of wry or gentle com-
edy – ‘don’t be that white woman artist’; ‘white girl names’ – the ascription of
whiteness feels like a gravitational pull that is all but impossible to fight off,
but which it is imperative to resist, since it is always tending toward a terrible,
racist limit or its flipside, a hoary, unearned self-congratulation. Remembering
a road trip through Washington State with her first partner, Heather, she writes,
‘we were coming from Spokane / a place so white it felt satanic. she was not’ (P,
33). Elsewhere she wrestles with what it means for Clive – an actor outside his
day job – to take on a role as a white supremacist whose change of heart makes
him the hero in a liberal, anti-racist play:

you are frustrated that the script

depicts the white man as having moved
beyond his racism, that his speech

after years of silence instigates the hunger strike

P, 43

At the level of biography or memoir, ‘Pet Sounds’ moves from Young’s relation-
ship with Heather to hers with Clive, and though the politics of the book make
it reasonable to expect that Young would fret over the transition as part of a
capitulation to larger cultural norms – from a cross-racial same-sex partner-
240 chapter 11

ship to a monoracial, heterosexual pairing – she pivots unexpectedly to the

question of culture through the medium of music. The volume keeps return-
ing in particular to the many versions Van Morrison recorded of his epic ballad
‘Madame George’, whose possibly trans subject, and whose conditions of pro-
duction, allow Young to think about how race and gender mediate the unstable
boundary between love and possession. Referring to the version of ‘Madame
George’ on Van Morrison’s 1973 album T. B. Sheets, she writes,

Heather gave me that album or

I took it when we broke up. I did that to you
with Pet Sounds – the lost objects
of breaking up so often music
P, 32

This wry attention to how beloved music ends up shuttling between gift and
theft opens out onto a larger question of cultural theft. Across a cluster of
poems in the middle of the sequence, Young reflects on how the version she
loves best, which featured backup vocals by the all-Black female band The
Sweet Inspirations, keeps getting erased in various ways. So she laboriously
reconstructs the performance history of the group, who are dismissed by
(white, male) rock critic Greil Marcus in his writing on the song. ‘[B]ecause
something is wrong with my brain’, she writes,

because I believe I’m a dumb girl

and men of a certain class know more than me
about music, history, Greil Marcus

must know more than me

I spend a lot of time attempting to figure out
if The Sweet Inspirations ever went
by The Sweet Emotions instead.

they did not. Greil Marcus is wrong.

he is also wrong when he writes

If one’s response to that culture – the culture

as set down by a small number of people
in Mississippi and elsewhere in the American South
from the late 1920s to the early ’40s –
is as strong as Van Morrison’s plainly was,
abstraction, intuition, poetry 241

how can that culture not be

in the deepest sense one’s own?
P, 34

Marcus’s dismissal of the black women’s contribution to the song feels to Young
like the gateway to a dubious argument about how sheer love of Black music
can make it ‘one’s own’, if you’re white. This becomes especially dubious when,
as Young notes in another poem in the sequence, the liner notes for T. B. Sheets
deliberately miscredit the backup vocals to three white men.
Young does not equate her love of the song with a sense of possessing it.
Indeed she loves it despite the conditions that produced it. This includes Van
Morrison’s own gender politics:

if Madam George is, like [Lester] Bangs said

and Morrison denied, a lovelorn drag queen

why should that be the saddest thing

to write a sad song about? And if she is

the wife of Yeats, his medium and muse?

more or less sad? Morrison said it’s whatever
you want it to be. a swiss cheese sandwich.

that sounds a lot like a woman

or something a woman would make for him
P, 37

But the song is part of her. ‘Everything I love is born of brutal contact’, she writes,
just a line above these lines. This is a political problem, one that would seem to
call for imagining an utterly different world, probably a world undone by actual
revolution. But Young suspects that it cannot be grasped entirely inside the cat-
egory ‘politics’, perhaps especially not inside the category ‘revolution’, at least
as it’s discussed in old-school Marxist circles:

I heard some friends, men, speak beautifully

of all the things they’d miss most
after the, uh, rev

the pop the jazz the blues

all the shapes made possible by slavery
unmake that problem so too its music
242 chapter 11

couldn’t exist. not me, not you and me together

and that’s my jam. both things
have to go. those sounds, those guys

I didn’t get them. I still don’t. I’d miss each other

more than music, myself – can you actually abolish her?
P, 31

That humorous hesitation at the start of the poem – ‘the, uh, rev’ – previews the
space Young holds open between her scepticism about a model of revolution
that addresses earlier forms of dispossession by ‘abolishing’ them in the sense
of erasing them, and her willingness to imagine that perhaps, indeed, she, her-
self, needs to be ‘abolished’. But if she has to go, so do her relationships – ‘you
and me together’ – and that’s where she can only imagine abolition in this nar-
row sense if she becomes an object, ‘her’. The baseline three-line stanza of the
book breaks apart here – ‘can you actually abolish her?’ – fracturing the tercet
into an off-rhymed couplet and a small, stray third line, adrift on the other side
of a carriage return: ‘you can try’.
Taken as a whole, ‘Pet Sounds’ argues that what is lost in this model of revolu-
tionary abolition as erasure is the obverse of what has been lost in the long
histories of dispossession that make a revolution necessary in the first place:
the radical ‘dependency’ of ‘highly social animals’ announced on the poem’s
first page. That dependent sociability is acted out imperfectly in a language that
Young takes care to show is strung between something like the undead ascript-
ive power of categories, on the one hand, and a vital, inventive, and vulnerable
animality in speech that is also a kind of category-breaking conceptualisation.
It is actualised throughout the book in humour, imperfect form-making, ten-
derness, grief and self-awareness. And it keeps looping through the forms of
intimacy that categories can’t track, a fluidity itself imperfectly captured by the
concept of queer. She celebrates the ‘basic shittiness of private language’, sitting
atop her kitchen table, ‘talking, honestly, nonsense’ but enjoying the feeling
of disorientation, ‘in the house who were we even’ (P, 54). One poem lists the
names she and Clive have given their kitten (‘the old man / pumpkin spice /
captain crunch’), and senses the groping behind the humor:

nonreproductive nonsense for a nonhuman companion

I would never call that queer, still
nothing fits
P, 27
abstraction, intuition, poetry 243

After the mass murder of 49 people at the Pulse queer bar in Orlando, Flor-
ida – the climax of the book’s narrative – she lists the names of the people
killed, and marks the difference between the slurs to which she and Clive have
been subjected and the obliterating violence that night:

faggot, dyke

what didn’t kill us

didn’t kill us
P, 73

She hopes against hope for a universal queerness, asking like a child, ‘if every-
one is queer would nobody get hurt?’ (P, 72). But she recognises that this
desire may itself be hamstrung by its voicing through ‘straight mostly white
women’ who are ‘coming out this week on the internet’ (P, 72). She tries on ‘wife’
and ‘husband’ for herself and Clive, retreats from that – ‘I call you my person
mostly’ – but knows there isn’t any queerness without categories to upend:

if I disinvest us from the categories

what’s left? two cat ladies
two men and a baby who is a cat
P, 74

What subtends the categories that chafe, in ‘Pet Sounds’, is property – private
property, that is, which gives the binaries and the slurs a rigidity that perhaps
categories themselves needn’t have. I have backgrounded all the economic lan-
guage in the book, but it is everywhere, and perpetually appears in how rela-
tionships are constructed. In the opening poem of the book she calls it ‘the
shape togetherness was taken by // dispossession and constraint’ (P, 3). At the
far end of the book’s arc, in the final poem, Young describes cobbling together
a household and a garden by happenstance,

a green plastic table

I haggled down to fourteen dollars

what was in your wallet

what we found on the street,

and senses in the loose assemblage a life in which the dispossession of having
to live by ‘purchased wages’ opens on to understanding the lie embedded in
possession:
244 chapter 11

we don’t own the house

or the yard or the shed
we covered in a tarp

I’m learning to tell the difference

P, 78

If you only read the final poem, you wouldn’t know what ‘the difference’ is
between: ownership and …? But taken as part of a dynamic whole, the differ-
ence is shimmering, and clear. It’s between possession and life – life as given
shape in a collective language, harried and enabled by animal vulnerabilities
that ‘the, uh, rev’, if it ever were to happen, would need to build with.
Another way to put the book’s closing distinction would be to say it’s be-
tween possession and value – not least linguistic value, shaped by capitalist
value and perpetually outmanoeuvring it. The book ends with the beginning of
an education we’ve actually seen in action, disarmingly humble (self-negating
as Young is) but resolute in its own way, and clear-eyed about the strong forms
of analysis that deepen its modesty. It can feel academic indeed – deadening,
even – to say about so unprepossessing a collection of poetry, one so full of
open-hearted humour, that it is a ‘Marxist-Feminist’ book, or that it is ‘dialect-
ical’. It feels more legible in terms of the poetic pet sounds made by ‘highly
social animals’. All that purring and mewling might seem a long way from
the dialectic – and perhaps pleasantly so! – but for Hegel, the purposiveness
of earth’s creatures, their motility, their growth – these were a fundamental
ingredient in his sense of dialectical motion, which he felt our minds could
only engage inasmuch as we are creatures too. As McCumber puts it, ‘Hegel
genuinely believes that animals are idealists’.37

∵
There is a long debate in studies of Marx that centres on whether and how
Marx managed to succeed in connecting his theory of value to an account of
how it becomes economically legible in the prices of commodities, that is, over
whether Marx was able to reproduce the transformation of value into price. It is
an intricate debate. But from a distance, it becomes interesting for how it links
anti-Marxist economists eager to demonstrate that Marx didn’t prove that the
source of value under capitalism is the exploitation of labour, on the one hand,

37 McCumber 2014, p. 80.

abstraction, intuition, poetry 245

with Marxists determined to correct what they see as Marx’s failure to prove
this (or to be explicit enough about having proved it), on the other. The premise
on both sides is that if you can make the numbers work out – that is, if you can
show that it is at least theoretically possible to calculate a total difference (for a
given period) in the net output of capitalist production between what accrues
to capitalists as profit and what is paid to workers as wages, then … well, then
you’d have proved something, proved that the labour theory of value is correct,
that capitalism works not by paying workers but by underpaying them. You’d
have proved, in short, that capitalism, as a form of perennial underpayment to
workers, exists.
But Marx wasn’t trying to prove that capitalism exists. As Fred Moseley has
argued, one of the problems for Marx’s defenders in the debate over the ‘trans-
formation problem’ is their unwillingness to acknowledge that Marx presup-
posed fully developed capitalism at the beginning of his analysis, so that the
inputs his quantitatively-minded defenders want to prove add up are already
value-derived themselves, that is, they are already capitalist money, and can’t
be used to prove from outside the circuit of capital that there is a circuit of
capital to begin with.38 In his landmark 1993 study Time, Labor and Social Dom-
ination, Moishe Postone puts it this way:

[Marx’s] explicit arguments deriving the existence of value in the first

chapter of [Capital] are not intended – and should not be seen – as ‘proof’
of the concept of value … The critique only fully emerges in the course
of the presentation itself which, in unfolding the basic structuring social
forms of its object of investigation, shows the historicity of that object.39

Another way of putting this might be to say that Capital is meant to be per-
suasive, not legitimate. The Marxism that is focused on the legitimation of his
theory of value walls off Marx from the very holism that enabled the concept
in the first place. It is still the dominant Marxism in and around the academy.
A Marxism that accepted its origins in a ‘social intuition’, however, would be
more clear-eyed about its character as rhetoric – ‘rhetoric’ not in the sceptical
sense of ornamented, or hectoring, but in Hans Blumenberg’s sense of rhetoric
as the kind of thought that grapples with its own situatedness.40 It may or may
not be philosophical. The importance of rethinking Marx’s debt to Hegel, in this

38 See Moseley 2016.

39 Postone 1993, pp. 141–2.
40 See, for instance, Blumenberg 1987.
246 chapter 11

light, is not to boost the intellectual prestige or leftist credibility of the philo-
sopher, but to recognise that inasmuch as we need to think philosophically
when we think holistically, it is liberating to tap into a philosophy whose atten-
tion to the social activity of language as a form of collective concept-making
itself implicitly acknowledges philosophy’s intellectual non-autonomy. It can
enable a theory of value less likely to fork into Marx bros and people who have
come to believe they’re ‘dumb girls’; one that sees its need for poetry.
Poetry benefits, too. As an English professor, I have to say that one of the joys
of the flowering of Marxist poetry in English over the last twenty years is the
way it has made the task of disentangling the living currents of poetry from the
need to defend its philosophical legitimacy so much easier. In his Theory of The
Lyric, Jonathan Culler gently but insistently turns our attention away from the
hostile Platonism that can only ever find in poetry a failure native to repres-
entation, and enables us to begin thinking about poems as ‘articulating values’
rather than subsisting lamely as a ‘species of fiction’.41 This project is nourished
by a poetry in which ‘values’ are so up front. Marxist poetry is not a metonym
for all poetry, but it shines a light on all of it.
It is impossible not to feel that time is running out for the institutions and
practices of literary criticism we have known since the great expansion of uni-
versity education after the gi Bill. But we have our opportunities. A return to
Marx that sees in his theory of value not a Hegelian subsumption of partic-
ulars but an honouring of holism might help us rethink political difference,
rather than erase it. A theory of value that sees in abstraction an irreducible
element of intuition might allow us to see the helplessly situated character of
abstraction. And focusing on that heteronomy might assist in re-narrating what
it means to think, in the first place: something more collective and less categor-
ical. Abstraction, intuition, poetry: maybe made into a little constellation, they
could be a metaphor for ‘what we’re going to need’.
41 Culler 2015, p. 7.
References

Adorno, Theodor W. 1983 [1966], Negative Dialectics, translated by E.B. Ashton, New
York: Continuum.
Adorno, Theodor W. 1970, Aesthetic Theory, translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor, Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Adorno, Theodor W. 1996 [1951], Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans-
lated by E.F.N. Jephcott, New York: Verso.
Adorno, Theodor W. 1991 [1974], ‘Lyric Poetry and Society’. Notes to Literature, vol. 1,
translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen, edited by Rolf Tiedemann. New York: Colum-
bia University Press: 37–54.
Adorno, Theodor W. and Horkheimer, Max. 2002 [1944], The Dialectic of Enlightenment,
translated by Edmund Jephcott, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Agamben, Giorgio 1993 [1977], Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans-
lated by Ronald L. Martinez, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Agamben, Giorgio 1995, ‘We Refugees’, translated by Michael Rocke, in Symposium, 49:
114–19.
Agamben, Giorgio 1998 [1995], Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, translated
by Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Agamben, Giorgio 1999 [1996], The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics, translated by
Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Agamben, Giorgio 2005 [2000], The Time that Remains: A Commentary on The Letter to
The Romans, translated by Patricia Dailey, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Alexander, Amir 2004 Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the
Modern World, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Alexander, Charles P. 1983, ‘The New Economy’, Time, 121, 22: 50–8.
Altieri, Charles 1983, ‘An Idea and Ideal of a Literary Canon’, Critical Inquiry, 10, 1: 37–60.
Altieri, Charles 1998, ‘Some Problems about Agency in the Theories of Radical Poetics’,
in Postmodernisms Now: Essays on Contemporaneity in the Arts, edited by Altieri,
University Park: Penn State University Press.
Andrews, Bruce 2004, ‘The Poetics of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E’, available at www.ubu​
.com/papers/andrews.html.
Arrighi, Giovanni 1994, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and The Origins of
Our Times, London: Verso.
Badiou, Alain 2005 [1998], Metapolitics, translated by Jason Barker, London: Verso.
Badiou, Alain 2005 [1998], Handbook of Inaesthetics, translated Alberto Toscano, Stan-
ford: Stanford University Press.
Badiou, Alain 2005, Infinite Thought, translated by Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens,
London: Continuum.
248 references

Balakrishnan, Gopal 2000, ‘Hardt and Negri’s Empire’, New Left Review, 5: 142–8.
Barker, Jason 2002, Alain Badiou: A Critical Introduction, London: Pluto Press.
Baucom, Ian 2000, ‘Globalit, Inc.; Or, the Cultural Logic of Global Literary Studies’,
pmla, 116, 1: 158–72.
Beech, Dave 2015, Art and Value: Art’s Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and
Marxist Economics, Boston: Brill.
Beiser, Frederick 2014, After Hegel: German Philosophy, 1840–1900, Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Bell, Vance 1997, ‘Falling into Time: The Historicity of the Symbol’, Other Voices, 1, 1:
available at http://www.othervoices.org/1.1/vbell/symbol.php.
Benanav, Aaron 2020, Automation and the Future of Work, London: Verso.
Benjamin, Walter 1969 [1942], ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations:
Essays and Reflections, edited by Arendt, Hannah, translated by Zohn, Harry, New
York: Schocken Books.
Benjamin, Walter 2009 [1928], The Origin of German Tragic Drama, translated by John
Osborne, New York: Verso.
Bennett, Jane 2010, Vibrant Matter, Durham: Duke University Press.
Berardi, Franco 2012, The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance, Cambridge, MA: mit Press.
Berlin, Isaiah 2000, Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder, edited by
Henry Hardy, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Bernes, Jasper 2012, We Are Nothing and So Can You, Oakland: Tenured Ninja.
Bernes, Jasper 2017, The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization, Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
Bersani, Leo 1986, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art, New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press.
Bersani, Leo 1995, Homos, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Bhandar, Brenna 2018, Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Own-
ership, Durham: Duke University Press.
Blumenberg, Hans, 1983 [1966], The Legitimacy of The Modern Age, translated by Robert
Wallace, Cambridge: mit Press.
Blumenberg, Hans 1987, ‘An Anthropological Approach to the Contemporary Signific-
ance of Rhetoric’, in After Philosophy: End or Transformation?, edited by Kenneth
Baynes, James Bohman, and Thomas McCarthy, Cambridge: mit Press.
Boethius 1990, The Consolation of Philosophy, translated by S.J. Tester, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Bogost, Ian 2012, Alien Phenomenology, or, What It’s Like to Be a Thing, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Boone, Bruce 1983, ‘For Jack Spicer: And a Truth Element’, Social Text, 7: 120.
Brassier, Ray 2007, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, by Basingstoke: Pal-
grave.
references 249

Bredekamp, Horst 1999, ‘From Walter Benjamin to Carl Schmitt, via Thomas Hobbes’,
translated by Melissa Thorson Hause and Jackson Bond, Critical Inquiry, 25, 2: 247–
66.
Brennan, Timothy 2014, Borrowed Light: Vico, Hegel and The Colonies, Stanford: Stan-
ford University Press.
Brenner, Robert 1998, ‘Uneven Development and the Long Downturn: The Advanced
Capitalist Economies from Boom to Stagnation, 1950–1998’, New Left Review, 229: 1–
264.
Brenner, Robert 2006, The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Eco-
nomies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945–2005, London: Verso.
Breslin, James E.B. 1983, From Modern to Contemporary: American Poetry, 1945–1965,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Buell, Lawrence 1996, Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the
Formation of American Culture, Cambridge: Harvard University.
Butler, Judith 1990, Gender Trouble: Feminism and The Subversion of Identity, New York:
Routledge.
Butler, Judith 1997, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, New York and Lon-
don: Routledge.
Butler, Judith 2004, ‘Doing Justice to Someone: Sex Reassignment and Allegories of
Transsexuality’, in Undoing Gender, New York and London: Routledge.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh 2009, ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’, Critical Inquiry, 35:
197–222.
Chen, Chris 2013, ‘The Limit Point of Capitalist Equality’, in Endnotes, 3.
Cleaver, Harry 1992, ‘The Inversion of Class Perspective in Marxian Theory: from Val-
orization to Self-Valorization’, in Essays on Open Marxism, edited by W. Bonefeld,
R. Gunn and K. Psychopedis, London: Pluto Press.
Clegg, John J. 2015, ‘Capitalism and Slavery’, in Critical Historical Studies, 2, 2: 281–
304.
Clover, Joshua 2006, The Totality for Kids, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Joshua Clover and Christopher Nealon, ‘Literary and Economic Value’, in The Oxford
Research Encyclopedia of Literature (27 July 2017), https://oxfordre.com/literature/​
view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.001.0001/acrefore‑9780190201098‑e‑123.
Culler, Jonathan 2015, Theory of The Lyric, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Curtius, Ernst Robert 1973 [1953], European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans-
lated by Willard R. Trask, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Cusset, Francois 2008 [2003], French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co.
Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, translated by Jeff Fort, Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Dauben, Joseph W. 1977, ‘Georg Cantor and Pope Leo xiii: Mathematics, Theology, and
The Infinite’, Journal of The History of Ideas, 38, 1: 85–108.
250 references

de Man, Paul 1983, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criti-
cism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
de Man, Paul 1996a “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant”, in Aesthetic Ideology,
edited by Andrej Warminski, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
de Man, Paul 1996b, “Kant and Schiller”, in Aesthetic Ideology, edited by Andrej Warm-
inski, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Davies, Kevin 2000, Comp., Washington, D.C.: Edge Books.
Debord, Guy 2004 [1967], The Society of the Spectacle, translated by Ken Knabb, London:
Rebel Press.
Debord, Guy 2008 [2004], ‘The Rise and Fall of the ‘Spectacular’ Commodity-Econo-
my’, in A Sick Planet, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, New York: Seagull
Books.
Derrida, Jacques 1980 [1967], ‘From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism
without Reserve’, in Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass, Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press.
Derrida, Jacques 1986 ‘Mnemosyne’, in Memoires for Paul de Man, New York: Columbia
University Press.
Dimock, Wai-Chee 2006, Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep
Time, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Dronke, Peter 1994, Verse with Prose from Petronius to Dante: The Art and Scope of the
Mixed Form, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Dupuy, Jean-Pierre 2000 [1994], The Mechanization of the Mind: On The Origins of Cog-
nitive Science, translated by M.B. DeBevoise, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
During, Simon 2010, Exit Capitalism: Literary Culture, Theory, and Post-Secular Modern-
ity, New York: Routledge.
Eagleton, Terry 1990, The Ideology of The Aesthetic, Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Edelman, Lee 1994, Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory, New
York: Routledge.
Edelman, Lee 2004, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Durham: Duke Uni-
versity Press.
Eliot, T.S. 2005 [1923], ‘Ulysses, Order, and Myth’, in Modernism: An Anthology, edited
by Lawrence Rainey, Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Ellis, Cristin 2012, Political Ecologies: The Contingency of Nature in American Romantic
Thought, Dissertation, Johns Hopkins University.
Elson, Diane 1979, ‘The Value Theory of Labour’, in Value: The Representation of Labour
in Capitalism, edited by Diane Elson, Atlantic Heights, N.J.: Humanities Press.
Epstein, Steven 1998, Impure Science: aids, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge,
Berkeley, University of California Press.
Ellingham, Lewis and Killian, Kevin 1998, Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Fran-
cisco Renaissance, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
references 251

Federici, Silvia 2004. Caliban and The Witch, Brooklyn: Autonomedia,

Felski, Rita 2015, The Limits of Critique, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Florida, Richard 2002, The Rise of The Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work,
Leisure, Community and Everyday Life, New York: Basic Books.
Ford, Simon 2005, The Situationist International: A User’s Guide, London: Black Dog
Publishing.
Fromm, Erich 2011 [1961], Marx’s Concept of Man, translated by T.B. Bottomore, East-
ford, CT: Martino Publishing.
Frye, Northrop 1957, Anatomy of Criticism, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Gilbert, Alan 2000, ‘re: Reading the Active Reader Theory’, Tripwire, 6: 118–24.
Gilmore, Ruth Wilson 2002, ‘Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference: Notes on Racism
and Geography’, The Professional Geographer, 54, 1: 15–24.
Gonzalez, Maya and Jeanne Neton, ‘The Logic of Gender: On The Separation of Spheres
and The Process of Abjection’, in Endnotes 3.
Goux, Jean-Joseph 1990 [1973], Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud, translated
by Jennifer Curtiss Gage, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Graeber, David. Debt: The First Five Thousand Years. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House,
2012.
Guyatt, Nicholas 2001, Another American Century? The United States and the World after
2000, New York: St. Martin’s.
Guillory, John 1983, ‘The Ideology of Canon Formation: T.S. Eliot and Cleanth Brooks’,
Critical Inquiry, 10, 1: 173–98.
Habermas, Jürgen 1996 [1981], ‘Modernity: An Unfinished Project?’ In Habermas and
The Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on The Philosophical Discourse of
Modernity, edited by Maurizio Passerin d’Entrèves and Seyla Benhabib, Cambridge:
Polity Press.
Halpern, Rob 2009 [2006], Disaster Suites, Long Beach, California: Palm Press.
Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio 2000, Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio 2004, Multitude, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press.
Harman, Graham 2005, Guerilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of
Things, Chicago: Open Court.
Harman, Graham 2011, ‘Realism without Materialism’, SubStance, 40, 2: 52–72.
Harman, Graham 2012, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy, Alresford: Zero.
Harootunian, Harry 2015, Marx After Marx: History and Time in The Expansion of Cap-
italism, New York: Columbia University Press.
Harris, Cheryl I. 1993, ‘Whiteness as Property’, Harvard Law Review, 106, 8: 1707–1791.
Heilbroner, Robert and Milberg, William S. 1995, The Crisis of Vision in Modern Economic
Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
252 references

Heise, Ursula K. 2008, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagina-
tion of the Global, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hejinian, Lyn 1987, My Life, Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press.
Hejinian, Lyn 1994, The Cold of Poetry, Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press.
Hejinian, Lyn 2000, ‘The Rejection of Closure’, in The Language of Inquiry, Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Herndon, Jim 1974, ‘Thus Jack Spicer Refuted Child Psychology’, Manroot, 10: 56.
Herrnstein-Smith, Barbara 1983, ‘Contingencies of Value’, Critical Inquiry, 10, 1: 1–35.
Holsinger, Bruce 2005, The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and The Making of The-
ory, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Houlgate, Stephen 1999, ‘Schelling’s Critique of Hegel’s Science of Logic’, The Review of
Metaphysics, 53, 1: 99–128.
Hulme, T.E. 2003 [1908], ‘A Lecture on Modern Poetry’, in Selected Writings, edited by
Patrick McGuinness, New York: Routledge.
Hulme, T.E. 1936, ‘Humanism and the Religious Attitude’, in Speculations: Essays on
Humanism and The Philosophy of Art, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner &
Co.
Huttner, Tobias 2019, ‘‘Not the Abstract Question of Democracy’: The Social Ground
of Whitman’s ‘Lilacs’’, esq: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and
Culture, 65, 4: 642–90.
Huyssen, Andreas 1986, After The Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodern-
ism, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Jameson, Fredric 1974, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Lit-
erature, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Jameson, Fredric 1981, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act,
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Jameson, Fredric 1984, ‘Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, New
Left Review, 148: 53–92.
Jameson, Fredric 1990, Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic, New
York: Verso.
Jameson, Fredric 1991, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press.
Jarvis, Simon. ‘Soteriology and reciprocity’. Parataxis: Modernism and Modern Writing
5 (1993): 30–9.
Jarvis, Simon 2003, ‘The Incommunicable Silhouette’, Jacket, 24, available at jacketmag
azine.com/24/jarvis‑tis.html
Jay, Martin 1986, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to
Habermas, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Jordan, Z.A. 1967, Evolution of Dialectical Materialism: A Philosophical and Sociological
Analysis, New York: St. Martin’s.
references 253

Jost, Walter, and Michael J. Hyde (eds.) 1997, Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Our Time,
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Kant, Immanuel 2000 [1790] Critique of the Power of Judgment, translated by Paul Guyer
and Eric Matthews, edited by Guyer, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kant, Immanuel 1993 [1796], ‘On a Newly Arisen Superior Tone in Philosophy’, in Rais-
ing the Tone of Philosophy: Late Essays by Immanuel Kant, Transformative Critique by
Jacques Derrida, edited by Peter Fenves, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Katko, Justin. ‘Relativistic Phytosophy: Towards a Commentary on The Plant Time Man-
ifold Transcripts’. Glossator 2 (2010): 245–93.
Kaufman, Robert 1996, ‘Legislators of the Post-Everything World: Shelley’s Defence of
Adorno’, English Literary History, 63: 707–33.
Kaufman, Robert 2001a, ‘Negatively Capable Dialectics: Keats, Vendler, Adorno, and the
Theory of the Avant-Garde’, Critical Inquiry, 27: 354–84.
Kaufman, Robert 2001b, ‘Intervention & Commitment Forever! Shelley in 1819, Shel-
ley in Brecht, Shelley in Adorno, Shelley in Benjamin’, Romantic Circles, available at
https://romantic‑circles.org/praxis/interventionist/kaufman/kaufman.html.
Kim, Eleana 2001, ‘Language Poetry: Dissident Practices and the Makings of a Move-
ment’, in Gary Sullivan’s online journal readme, available at https://www.academia​
.edu/456515/.
Klein, Naomi 2007, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, New York: Met-
ropolitan Books.
Korten, David C. 1995, When Corporations Rule the World, Bloomfield, Conn.: Kumarian
Press.
Kracauer, Siegfried 1995 [1927], ‘Those Who Wait’, in The Mass Ornament: Weimar
Essays, translated by Thomas Levin, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Kreiner, Tim 2013, ‘The Long Downturn and Its Discontents: Language Writing and the
New Left’, Dissertation, University of California, Davis.
La Berge, Leigh Clare 2019, ‘Abstraction’, in The Bloomsbury Companion to Marx, edited
by Jeff Diamanti, Andrew Pendakis, and Imre Szeman, New York: Bloomsbury Aca-
demic.
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 1999 [1986], Poetry as Experience, translated by Andrea Tar-
nowski, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Laruelle, François 2010 [2002], Future Christ: A Lesson in Heresy, translated by Anthony
Paul Smith, London: Continuum.
Levi-Strauss, Claude 1966 [1962], The Savage Mind, trans George Weidenfeld, Letch-
worth, Hertfordshire: The Garden City Press Limited.
Lewontin, Richard 2000, The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment, Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Lilla, Mark 2001, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics, New York: New York Review
of Books.
254 references

Löwith, Karl 1957, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of
History, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lucas, Edward Verrall 1917, ‘The Debt’, in A Treasury of War Poetry: British and Amer-
ican Poems of the World War, 1914–1917, edited by George Herbert Clarke, Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Company.
Lukács, Georg 1971 [1923], History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics,
translated by Rodney Livingstone, Cambridge: mit Press.
Lyotard, Jean-François 1984 [1979], The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge,
translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Lyotard, Jean-François 1993 [1974], Libidinal Economy, translated by Iain Hamilton
Grant, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Mao, Douglas 1998, Solid Objects: Modernism and The Test of Production, Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Mellor, Leo. ‘The Amazing Mr. Prynne’ (review of Poems). Buzzwords. http://www​
.buzzwords.ndo.co.uk/mellor/poems.html.
Mellors, Anthony. Late Modernist Poetics: From Pound to Prynne. Manchester: Manches-
ter up, 2005.
Marcuse, Herbert 1969, An Essay on Liberation, Boston: Beacon Press.
Martin, Randy 2002, The Financialization of Daily Life, Philadelphia: Temple University
Press.
Marx, Karl 1970 [1843], Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, edited by Joseph O’Malley,
translated by Annette Jolin and Joseph O’Malley, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Marx, Karl 1990 [1867], Capital Volume 1, translated by Ben Fowkes, London: Pen-
guin.
Marx, Karl 1993 [1939], Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy,
translated by Martin Nicolaus, New York: Penguin.
Marx-Scouras, Danielle 1996, The Cultural Politics of Tel Quel: Literature and the Left in
the Wake of Engagement, University Park, PA: Penn State University Press.
Matz, Robert 2000, Defending Literature in Early Modern England: Renaissance Literary
Theory in Social Context, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McCumber, John 2014, Understanding Hegel’s Mature Critique of Kant, Stanford: Stan-
ford University Press.
McMahon, Robert 2006, Understanding the Medieval Meditative Ascent: Augustine,
Anselm, Boethius, and Dante, Washington, DC: Catholic University of America
Press.
Meillassoux, Quentin 2009 [2006], After Finitude: An Essay on The Necessity of Contin-
gency, translated by Ray Brassier, New York: Continuum.
Meillassoux, Quentin 2012 [2011], The Number and The Siren: A Decipherment of Mal-
references 255

larmé’s Coup De Des, translated by Robin Mackay, Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic/Se-

quence Press.
Miller, Douglas B. 2002, Symbol and Rhetoric in Ecclesiastes: The Place of Hebel in
Qohelet’s Work, Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature.
Moretti, Franco (ed.) 2006–7, The Novel: History, Geography and Culture, 2 vols, Prin-
ceton: Princeton University Press.
Morrison, Toni 1992, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press.
Morton, Timothy 2010, The Ecological Thought, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Moseley, Fred 2016, Money and Totality: A Macro-Monetary Interpretation of Marx’s
Logic in Capital and the End of the ‘Transformation Problem’, Leiden: Brill.
Moten, Fred 2015, ‘Blackness and Poetry’, Arcade, available at http://arcade.stanford​
.edu/content/blackness‑and‑poetry‑0
Moxley, Jennifer 2002, The Sense Record, Washington, D.C.: Edge Books.
Mullen, Harryette. 2002, Sleeping with the Dictionary, Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Nancy, Jean-Luc 1991 [1986], ‘Literary Communism’, in The Inoperative Community,
translated by Christopher Fynsk, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.
Nealon, Chris 2009, ‘Reading on The Left’. Representations, 108: 22–50.
Nealon, Chris 2010, The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in the American Century,
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Nealon, Chris 2015, ‘Infinity for Marxists’, Mediations: Journal of the Marxist Literary
Group, 28, 2: 47–64.
Negarestani, Reza 2011, “Drafting the Inhuman: Conjectures on Capitalism and Organic
Necrocracy,” in The Speculative Turn, eds. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham
Harman (Melbourne: re.press), 182.
Ngai, Sianne 2005, Ugly Feelings, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Ngai, Sianne 2015, ‘Visceral Abstractions’, glq: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 21,
1: 33–63.
Nietzsche, Friedrich 2015 [1874], The Use and Abuse of History, translated by Adrian
Collins, Eastford, CT: Martino Publishing.
Nietzsche, Friedrich 1999 [1873], ‘On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense’ in The
Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, translated by Raymond Geuss, Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Noys, Benjamin 2014, ‘The discreet charm of Bruno Latour’, in (Mis)readings of Marx in
Continental Philosophy, edited by Jernej Habjan and Jessica Whyte, New York: Pal-
grave Macmillan.
Nussbaum, Martha C. 1992, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature,
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Oliver, Douglas. 1979, ‘J.H. Prynne’s ‘Of Movement Toward a Natural Place’’, Grosseteste
Review, vol. 12, 1979, 93–6.
256 references

Olson, Charles 1997 [1950], ‘Projective Verse’ in Collected Prose, edited by Donald Allen
and Benjamin Friedlander, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Olson, Charles 1987 [1953], ‘The Kingfishers’, in The Collected Poems of Charles Olson,
edited by George F. Butterick, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Palmer, Michael 2001 [1988], ‘Sun’, in Codes Appearing: Poems 1979–1988, New York: New
Directions.
Pavesich, Vida 2008, ‘Hans Blumenberg’s Philosophical Anthropology: After Heidegger
and Cassirer’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 46, 3: 421–48.
Peacock, Thomas Love 1923 [1820], ‘The Four Ages of Poetry’, in Peacock’s Four Ages of
Poetry, Shelley’s Defence of Poetry, Browning’s Essay on Shelley, edited by H.F.B. Brett-
Smith, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Perril, Simon. ‘Hanging on Your Every Word: J.H. Prynne’s Bands Around The Throat and
a Dialetics of Planned Impurity’ http://jacketmagazine.com/24/perril.html
Plato 1994, Republic, translated by Robin Waterfield, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Poovey, Mary 1998, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences
of Wealth and Society, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Poster, Mark 1992, ‘Postmodernity and the Politics of Multiculturalism: The Lyotard-
Habermas Debate over Social Theory’, Modern Fiction Studies, 38, 3: 567–80.
Postone, Moishe 1993, Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s
Critical Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Price, Leah 2010, How to Do Things with Books in Victorian England, Princeton: Prin-
ceton University Press.
Prynne, J.H. 1999 [1971], ‘Jeremy Prynne lectures on Maximus iv, v, vi’ [1971], in Minutes
of the Charles Olson Society, 28, available at www.charlesolson.org/Files/Prynnelectu
re1.htm.
Prynne, J.H. 2010, ‘Mental Ears and Poetic Work’, Chicago Review, 55, 1: 126–57.
Prynne, J.H. 2015, Poems, Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books.
Prynne, J.H. 1999, Poems. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books.
Prynne, J.H. 2010, Sub Songs. London: Barque Press.
Prynne, J.H. 1993, ‘Stars, Tigers, and the Shapes of Words’. The William Matthew Lectures
1992. London: Birckbeck College.
Prynne, J.H. ‘Difficulties in the Translation of ‘Difficult’ Poems’. Cambridge Literary
Review, i/3 (2010): 151–66.
Rancière, Jacques 2004 [2000], The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible,
translated by Gabriel Rockhill, New York: Bloomsbury.
Reeve, N.H., and Richard Kerridge 1996. Nearly Too Much: The Poetry of J.H. Prynne. Liv-
erpool: Liverpool up.
Reeve, N.H., and Richard Kerridge 2002, ‘Deaf to Meaning: On J.H. Prynne’s The Oval
Window’. Jacket 20 (2002). Web.
Robbe-Grillet, Alain 1965 [1963], ‘Nature, Humanism and Tragedy’, translated by Bar-
bara Wright, New Left Review, 31: 65–80.
references 257

Roberts, Michael 2016, The Long Depression, Chicago: Haymarket Books.

Robertson, Lisa 1997, Debbie: An Epic, London: Reality Street Editions.
Robertson, Lisa 2001, The Weather, Vancouver: New Star Books.
Robinson, Cedric J. 2000 [1983], Black Marxism: The Making of The Black Radical Tra-
dition, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
Rorty, Richard 1984, ‘Habermas and Lyotard on Post-Modernity’. Praxis International,
4, 1: 33–44.
Rose, Gillian 1984, Dialectic of Nihilism: Poststructuralism and Law, Oxford: Black-
well.
Ross, Andrew 1999 [1988], ‘Uses of Camp’, in Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing
Subject, edited by Fabio Cleto, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Roy, Arundhati 2003, ‘Mesopotamia. Babylon. The Tigris and Euphrates’, The Guardian,
available at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/apr/02/iraq.writersoniraq.
Saint-Amour, Paul K. 2018. ‘Weak Theory, Weak Modernism’, Modernism/modernity, 25,
3: 437–59.
Sartre, Jean-Paul 2004 [1960], Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume 1: Theory of Prac-
tical Ensembles, translated by Alan Sheridan Smith, edited by Jonathan Rée, London:
Verso.
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von 2000 [2015], The Ages of The World, translated
by Jason M. Wirth, Binghamton: State University of New York Press.
Schiller, Friedrich 1967 [1794], On the Aesthetic Education of Man: In a Series of Letters,
translated by Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby, Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
Schmitt, Carl 1985 [1922], Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty,
translated by George Schwab, Cambridge: mit Press.
Sedgwick, Eve 1993 [1991], ‘How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay: The War on Effeminate Boys’,
Tendencies, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Sedgwick, Eve (ed.) 1995, Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tompkins Reader, Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
Sedgwick, Eve (ed.) 1997, Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, NC: Duke University
Press.
Sedgwick, Eve and Frank, Adam 1995, ‘Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan
Tomkins’, Critical Inquiry, 21, 2: 496–522.
Sidney, Philip 2002 [1595], The Defence of Poesy, in Sir Philip Sidney: The Major Works,
edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Shell, Marc 1978, The Economy of Literature, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe 2003 [1840], ‘The Defence of Poetry’, The Major Works, edited by
Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe 2009 [1840], ‘A Defence of Poetry’, available at https://www.poetry
foundation.org/articles/69388/a‑defence‑of‑poetry.
258 references

Shutt, Harry 1998, The Trouble with Capitalism: An Enquiry into the Causes of Global
Economic Failure, London: Zed Books.
Silliman, Ron 1995 [1977], The New Sentence, New York: Roof Books.
Simonds, Sandra 2015, Steal It Back, Ardmore, PA: Saturnalia Books.
Smith, Rod 2001, The Good House, New York: Spectacular Books.
Spicer, Jack (2008), My Vocabulary Did This To Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer,
edited by Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 1988, ‘Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value’, in
In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, New York, Routledge.
Srnicek, Nick 2011, “Capitalism and the Non-Philosophical Subject,” in The Speculative
Turn, eds. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman (Melbourne: re.press),
164–81.
Sutherland, Keston. Interview with Geoffrey G. O’Brien. The Claudius App 3 (2011). Web.
Stewart, Susan 2001, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Stewart, Susan 2001, The Poet’s Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Taleb, Nassim Nicholas, 2007, The Black Swan: The Impact of The Highly Improbable.
New York: Random House.
Thacker, Eugene 2011, In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy, Volume 1, Alres-
ford: Zero.
Tomba, Massimiliano 2014, ‘Adorno’s Account of The Anthropological Crisis and the
New Type of Human’, in (Mis)readings of Marx in Continental Philosophy, edited by
Jernej Habjan and Jessica Whyte, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Unger, Roberto Mangabeira 1987, Social Theory: Its Situation and Its Task, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Vico, Giambattista 1984 [1725], The New Science of Giambattista Vico, translated by
Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Virno, Paolo 2004 [2001], A Grammar of The Multitude, translated by Isabella Bertoletti,
James Cascaito and Andrea Casson Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2004.
Ward, Dana 2013, The Crisis of Infinite Worlds, New York: Futurepoem.
Warsh, David 2006, Knowledge and The Wealth of Nations: A Story of Economic Discov-
ery, New York: W.W. Norton.
Watney, Simon 1994, Practices of Freedom: Selected Writing on hiv/aids, Durham: Duke
University Press.
Watten, Barrett 2000, ‘The Turn to Language and the 1960s’, Critical Inquiry, 29, 1: 139–
84.
Wolin, Richard 2010, The Wind from The East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolu-
tion, and the Legacy of the 1960s, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Wood, Ellen Meiksins 2012, Liberty and Property: A Social History of Western Political
Thought from the Renaissance to Enlightenment, New York: Verso.
references 259

Young, Stephanie 2019, Pet Sounds, New York: Nightboat.

Zieman, Katherine 2008, Singing the New Song: Literacy and Liturgy in Late Medieval
England, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Žižek, Slavoj 2001 [1992], Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out,
New York: Routledge.
Index
aids pandemic 4, 5, 64, 97–98, 195 Bredekamp, Horst 166
Adorno, Theodor 97, 110, 140–141, 159, 190, Brennan, Timothy 231–232
193, 209–211, 226 Brenner, Robert 202, 208, 219
Agamben, Giorgio 4, 70–71, 74–77, 80, 127, Breslin, James E.B. 11, n11
149 Buell, Lawrence 108
Alexander, Jim 30 Butler, Judith 5, 89, 96–97
Altieri, Charles 19n13, 201
Althusser, Louis 4, 60–62, 124 Capitalism 1–4, 6, 9–11, 13–33, 47–49, 77,
Andrews, Bruce 19–20 107–108, 110–111, 115, 126, 129, 134, 136,
Arendt, Hannah 74–75, 127 141–142, 146–147, 151–157, 159, 162, 169–
Aristotle 41, 74, 195 171, 174–177, 180, 191, 194–199, 203–204,
Arthur (King) 88, 103 208–209, 212–213, 216–220, 223–229,
Anti-humanism 5, 7, 10, 115–116, 158–173, 232–233, 244245
184, 191 Accumulation 2, 6–7, 10–11, 44–45, 104,
Arrighi, Giovanni 208 110–111, 156–157, 159, 167, 213, 224, 225–
Ashbery, John 18, 23 30, 232
Augustine (Saint) 194 Commodities 6, 103, 141–142, 145, 203–
204, 211–213, 224, 244
Badiou, Alain 4, 35n1, 70–77, 80, 95, 127, Commodification 1, 6, 9, 18–19, 102, 129,
132 142, 144, 187, 205, 211–213
Baker, Houston 200 Exploitation 10, 39, 41, 48–51, 56–57, 60,
Baraka, Amiri 191 76, 78–80, 82, 93, 111, 157, 171n31, 223,
Baucom, Ian 16n6 225, 244
Baudrillard, Jean 24 Organic composition of 210, 225
Baumgarten, Alexander 199–200, 212 Profit and profitability 9, 10, 77, 120, 141,
Beach Boys, The 234 177, 193, 202–204, 207, 210, 212–213,
Beech, Dave 211 218–220, 224
Benanav, Aaron 171n31 So-called ‘primitive accumulation’ 10,
Benjamin, Walter 2, 7, 9, 13, 16, 23, 45, 110, 229
165–168, 169 Subsumption 9, 78, 205–206, 209–212,
Bennett, Jane 111–112, 113–114 227–228, 234, 246
Bennett, William 200 Surplus populations in 228–229
Berardi, Franco 207 Technology and 8, 141, 202–204, 208,
Berlin, Isaiah 43 225–228
Bernes, Jasper 146–147, 151–157, 208 Cather, Willa 65–66, 69
Bersani, Leo 5, 97, 112n14 Celan, Paul 72, 73–76
Best, Stephen 3 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 110
Bhandar, Brenna 220, 232 Chaplin, Charlie 209
Bloom, Allan 200 Charlemagne 88
Blumenberg, Hans 8, 163, 169, 178–179, 192– Chen, Chris 70n31
194, 245 Cixous, Hélène 187
Boethius 7, 146–154 Cleaver, Harry 203, n11
Bogost, Ian 114 Clegg, John 171n31
Boone, Bruce 100 Clover, Joshua 9, 23–25, 31, 168n23, 226
Bourdieu, Pierre 96 Cobbett, William 85
Brassier, Ray 111–113 Cold War 14, 19, 59n1, 82
index 261

Cole, Krystle 116–123 Fromm, Erich 156n13

Communism 223 Frye, Northrop 82
French Communist Party 72, 95
Critical theory 7, 51, 109, 159, 160n3, 164, 171, Gates, Henry Louis 200
174–194 Gehlen, Alfred 169
Culler, Jonathan 246 Gilbert, Alan 19n3
Curtius, Ernst Robert 38n7 Gilbert, Sandra 200
Cusset, Francois 90n3 Gilmore, Ruth Wilson 218
Cybernetics 132–134, 136, 184–186 Global South 77–80, 201
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 164
Daniel, Arnaut 76–77, 149 Goldsmith, Kenneth 208
Dante Alighieri 117, 121, 215 Gonzalez, Maya 71n31
Davies, Kevin 15–17, 18, 24, 30–31, 33–34 Goretti, Maria 123
de Man, Paul 5, 7, 29, 91–92, 98, 105–106, Goux, Jean-Joseph 145
167–169 Guattari, Félix 20, 95
Debord, Guy 71, 84, 101 Gubar, Susan 200
Deleuze, Gilles 20, 95, 126 Guillory, John 201
Derrida, Jacques 5, 49–50, 62, 71n15, 92–96, Guyatt, Nicholas 14n3
115, 126
Dialectic (in philosophy) 29n28, 50–51, 75, Habermas, Jürgen 176–177, 181
92–96, 105–106, 110–111, 140, 142, 144, Hardt, Michael 70–71, 77–81, 83, 205–
226, 244 207
DiFranco, Ani 80 Harman, Graham 109–111, 113–115, 119,
Dimock, Wai-Chee 81n36 124n33, 162n8
Dobran, Ryan 131n14 Harootunian, Harry 227
D’souza, Dinesh 200 Harris, Cheryl 21–220, 232
DuBois, W.E.B. 219 Hegel, G.W.F. 5, 92–95, 199, 216–17, 221, 222–
Dupuy, Jean-Pierre 131n20, 186n23 223, 230–233, 244, 245
Heidegger, Martin 199
Eagleton, Terry 9, 199–202 Heilbroner, Robert 146n3, 195, 196n2
Economics 9–10, 145–146, 195–196, 200, 212, Heise, Ursula 108–109
228 Hejinian, Lyn 19–22, 84–85, 187–188
Edelman, Lee 4, 67–69 Herndon, Jim 100
Edwards, Jonathan 113 Herrnstein-Smith, Barbara 200–201
Ellingham, Lewis 98–99, 101 Holsinger, Bruce 90n3
Ellis, Cristin 108–109 Horace 194
Elson, Diane 224 Horkheimer, Max 13–14, 43, 209, 226
Empson, William 128 Houlgate, Stephen 223, 230
Epstein, Steven 64n6 Houston, Whitney 238
Hughes, Langston 191
Faulkner, William 154 Hulme, T.E. 7, 160–161, 164, 168, 180–185,
Federici, Silvia 171n31, 229, 234 187, 192
Felski, Rita 3, 170 Humanism 33, 67, 72, 107, 114, 122, 152,
Feminism 32, 69, 187, 200, 237 189
Ford, Simon 94n17 Huttner, Tobias 217–218
Foucault, Michel 9, 62, 205 Huyssen, Andreas 8, 126, 160n3
Frank, Adam 217
Frankfurt School 2, 9, 169, 209, 226, 228 Irigaray, Luce 187
Freud, Sigmund 95, 112n14
262 index

James, C.L.R. 221, 223 Literary study (criticism and theory) 4, 13,
Jameson, Fredric 3, 13, 14n2, 22, 31, 35–38, 58, 64, 82, 84, 87, 97, 107, 108, 126, 146,
46, 58–63, 71, 81–83, 156, 175–177, 204– 168, 170, 175–176, 198, 199, 217, 233, 246
205, 209, 211 Levertov, Denise 19n12
Jarvis, Simon 128–129 Levinas, Emmanuel 109
Jay, Martin 226 Lorde, Audre 191
Jeffers, Robinson 100–101 Lovecraft, H.P. 124n33
Jordan, Z.A. 156n13 Löwith, Karl 113n17
Lucas, Edward Verrall 54–56
Kant, Immanuel 5, 47, 49n36, 50n36, 91–92, Lukács, Georg 47–48, 57, 61, 76
109, 178, 199, 212, 230, 233 Lyotard, Jean-François 176–178, 180–182
Kantorowicz, Ernst 103
Katko, Justin 131–132 McCumber, John 230–232, 244
Kaufman, Robert 45n21 McMahon, Robert 148, 150, 154
Kennedy, John Fitzgerald 105 Malabou, Catherine 120
Kerridge, Richard 136 Mallarmé, Stéphane 5, 72, 93, 95, 113n16, 115,
Khan, Chaka 238 127
Killian, Kevin 98–99 Mandel, Ernest 175, 204
Kim, Eleana 19n12 Mao, Douglas 180
Kojève, Alexandre 92–93 Mao, Zedong 72, 186
Kreiner, Tim 145, 188n26 Marcus, Greil 240–241
Kristeva, Julia 95, 126 Marcus, Sharon 3
Marx, Karl 2, 4, 10, 30, 49, 50–51, 60, 110,
La Berge, Leigh Clare 216n2 124–125, 141, 156n13–157, 159, 170–
Labour 3, 35, 38–39, 41, 44–45, 48–51, 57, 171n30, 192–193, 195, 202, 205–206,
62, 78–79, 81, 92–93, 103, 141–142, 146, 209–211, 216–217, 222–230, 233, 234,
156, 170n31, 185, 201–213, 216, 223–229, 244–246
244 Capital volume i 10, 49, 60, 171n31, 224,
Affective 54, 57, 78 227, 228, 224
division of 201–203, 229 Capital, volume iii 225
Immaterial 78, 141, 206–207 Grundrisse 195, 227
Intellectual 201 Results of the Immediate Process of Pro-
Post-Fordist 78 duction 227
Manual 201 Marx-Scouras, Danielle 90n3, 183n17
manufacturing 208 Marxism 10, 35, 51, 58–60, 62, 90, 95–96,
Post-Fordist 78 108, 110, 115, 122, 125, 144, 147, 156–157,
Wage 171n31, 228, 229 159, 170, 195, 209, 216–223, 226, 231–232,
Unwaged 10, 234 245
Socially necessary labour time 51, Matter
224 Philosophies of 59, 83–85, 156–157
Reproductive 10, 171n31 Literary subject matter 1, 88, 103–105,
Laruelle, François 113 107
Lawrence, D.H. 99 Matz, Robert 42
Lawrence, Frieda 99–100 Mayer, Beernadette 234
Latour, Bruno 114, 170 Meillassoux, Quentin 109, 113
Lewontin, Richard 169 Mellor, Leo 128
Lilla, Mark 59n1 Mellors, Anthony 129
Lingis, Alphonso 109 Mexico 185
Linguistics 68, 97, 104–105, 138, 145 Milberg, William 146n3, 196n2
index 263

Modernism (artistic and literary) 6, 31, 61, Materialism 4, 7, 81, 83, 91, 96, 147, 152,
94, 95, 126, 128, 129, 148, 159, 162, 164, 156–157, 166, 170, 202, 233
171, 174–193, 204 Object-oriented ontology 5, 109, 158
Modernity 2, 6, 11, 25, 45, 126, 128–130, 139, Ontology (in general) 5–6, 108, 109, 111,
140, 142, 144, 146–147, 150, 157, 172, 112n14, 132, 211
174–180, 185–186, 188–194, 211, 213, Speculative realist 5, 109, 110–111, 117,
226 120, 124n33, 162
Morrison, Toni 4, 64–67, 69–70, 202 Realism 61, 84, 155, 168–169, 179, 184, 193,
Moseley, Fred 245 204
Moten, Fred 8, 188–193 Plato
Moxley, Jennifer 3, 52–57 and Platonism 72–74, 161, 169, 179, 182,
Mullen, Harryette 85 193, 246
Multiculturalism 58, 63, 65, 69, 70, 72 Neoplatonism 146–152, 156
Plekhanov, Georgi 156n13
Nancy, Jean-Luc 65–66, 95 Plessy, Homer 219
Negarestani, Reza 110–111 Plessner, Helmuth 169
Negri, Antonio 70–71, 77–81, 83, 201, 205– Poetry 1–6, 10–11, 13–34, 35, 38–48, 50n36–
207 51, 56–57, 73–77, 80, 83–87, 89–106,
Neton, Jeanne 171n31 108, 111, 115–116, 125, 126–132, 136, 140–
New Social movements 19n12, 69–70, 187 144, 145, 147, 149, 151, 154, 157, 159, 164,
Ngai, Sianne 159 171, 174, 181–194, 196–198, 207–209, 216–
Nickels, Joel 162n10 219, 230–246
Nietzsche, Friedrich 7, 78, 112–113, 152, 161– Ars poetica 119, 142, 174, 179, 188, 193
162, 164, 166–167, 169 Chinese 136
Nirenberg, Ricardo 132n19 defence of (genre) 41–42, 44, 47, 51, 193,
Nirenberg, David 132n19 196–199
Nixon, Richard 13 epic 130, 133
Noys, Benjamin 170n30 Flarf 208
Nussbaum, Martha 198 “Language” 13, 18–21
Lyric 37–38, 76, 80, 93, 98, 104–105,
Oliver, Douglas 130, 132 130, 133, 137, 140–141, 185–188, 190–
Olson, Charles 129–130, 133, 184–188, 190, 191
192 modernist 174, 179, 188, 193
New York School 18–19, 234
Palmer, Michael 84–85 “post-Language” 13–23, 33
Pareto, Wilfredo 145 Prosimetric 7, 146–148, 153
Paul (Saint) 71–72, 75–77, 149 rhyme and meter 184–186
Pavesich, Vida 169n26 tercets 215
Peacock, Thomas Love 44 tone 2, 5, 49–52, 57, 112, 116, 140, 142,
Perril, Simon 140 148–173, 191
Persky, Stan 101–103 Postone, Moishe 245
Philip, M. NourbeSe 189–192 post-structuralism 5, 89–92, 96, 105, 107–
Philosophy 11, 46–50, 68, 72–75, 90–95, 105, 108, 124, 169, 187
107, 109–114, 141, 158, 169, 176, 178, 185, Poovey, Mary 169
194, 198, 216–217, 222, 246 Poster, Mark 178
Anti-rhetorical attitude of 8, 174, 180, Pound, Ezra 62, 76, 100, 145
184, 186, 190–191, 194 Price, Leah 109, 115
Epistemology 108, 111, 112n14, 178 Primack, Ron 101
Idealism 7, 147, 169, 202 Proust, Marcel 68
264 index

Prynne, J.H. 6, 126–144 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 47, 49–51, 55–

Pulse (queer bar) 243 57, 78–79, 201–202
Sprat, Thomas 85
Queer theory 5, 32, 67, 89, 95–97, 158 Socialism 227–227
Sontag, Susan 195
Race 65–66, 170n31–170, 188, 215, 219, 223, Soviet Union 14, 225–226
239–240 Srnicek, Nick 110–111
Racism 4, 66, 171n31, 218 Supreme Court, U.S. 214
Anti-racism 158, 200, 218, 229, 233, Sutherland, Keston 128, 139
239 Stalin, Josef 221
Reagan, Ronald 64, 200, 209, 216, 220–222, Stewart, Susan 13, 127
239 Levi-Strauss, Claude 68
Reeve, N.H. 136 Structuralism 62, 95, 186
Reification 48, 141–142 Summers, Lawrence 208
Revolution 23–24, 36–37, 60–63, 76, 88, 94, Sweet Inspirations, The 240
228, 234, 241–242
Rhetoric 4–10, 16n6, 22n21, 26, 39–40, 53– Tel Quel 90, 83
56, 84–87, 97–98, 105, 108, 115, 145 Tennyson, Alfred Lord 53–55
Ricardo, David 4, 224 Tester, S.J. 150
Rich, Adrienne 191 Thacker, Eugene 124n33, 162n8
Roberts, Michael 225 Thatcher, Margaret 143, 209, 219
Robertson, Lisa 4, 16–18, 25–28, 31, 85– Tomba, Massimiliano 210n24
87 Tomkins, Silvan 89
Robinson, Cedric 220–223, 229, 232–233
Rorty, Richard 178 Unger, Roberto 145–156n3
Rose, Gillian 230 United States 14, 31, 58, 59, 64, 65, 71, 77, 85,
Ross, Andrew 14 191, 200, 202, 209
Roy, Arundhati 23n21
Value 6–12, 15, 32, 35, 38–52, 56–57, 78,
Saint-Amour, Paul 223n36 126–128, 131, 133, 141–143, 145–157,
Sartre, Jean-Paul 37–38n6, 61–63, 90, 112, 159, 170–171, 176–178, 192, 195–213,
183 214–217, 219, 224–225, 227–230, 244–
Saussure, Ferdinand 138, 145 246
Schelling, Friedrich 113, 223, 230 Exchange value 8, 27, 51, 213
Schiller, Friedrich 43, 45–48, 57, 199 Surplus value 9, 14, 38, 51, 203, 208, 224–
Schmitt, Carl 163, 166 225, 227, 230, 232
Secularization 156, 163 Use value 8–9, 38–39, 51, 145, 208, 213,
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 89, 90n2, 217n3 224
Shakur, Tupac 123 Van Morrison 240–241
Shell, Marc 145 Vico, Giambattista 42–44, 48, 51, 231
Shelley, Percy Bysshe 43–45, 48, 51, 196– Virno, Paolo 206
198
Showalter, Elaine 200 Walras, Leon 145
Sidney, Philip 41–42, 44, 46, 48, 51, 56, 197– Ward, Dana 6, 116–124
198 Watney, Simon 64n6
Silliman, Ron 20, 22 Watten, Barrett 19n12
Simonds, Sandra 8, 171–173 Weiss, Peter 176
Smith, Rod 17–18, 28–31 Whitman, Walt 191, 217–218
Spicer, Jack 5, 89, 98–106 Wood, Ellen Meiksins 162n9
index 265

Wordsworth, William 85, 131 Young, Stephanie 10–11, 214–216, 234–244

Workers 48–49, 51, 77–80, 94–95, 145, 170,
203, 218, 221, 225, 226, 228, 245 Zieman, Katherine 148
Wright, Richard 221–224, 232–233 Žižek, Slavoj 69
Zuccotti Park 123