proposal-ing

The revised Estranging Lyric proposes to examine the emergence of civilian guilt as one of the dominant modes in which the moral regime of financial capitalism comes to be developed out of the framework of postwar Europe. I argue that poetry creates a space in which the discourse of political morality becomes discernible, first, because the subject of poetry figures centrally in how the postwar dialectic of culture and barbarism reaches its so-called last stage, and second, because the processes of identification that become perceptible in this “crisis of lyric agency” map onto the crises of political activity experienced after the second world war. In short, the lyric “I” becomes a cipher for reading the newly construed “bystander,” who arose as the model of the world citizen after the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Part of the work of the book is to develop the terms for talking about this postwar period, in which, I argue, the terms of “culture” and the “economy” are developed together. In this book, I propose a strong reading of the “postwar,” problematizing characterizations of the period as the aftermath of trauma. Instead, I focus on how economic restructuring gets taken up through figures of guilt and responsibility. The unique focus of my project lies in approaching the discursive aspect of guilt and considers how this period yields the simultaneous constitution and crisis of the liberal bourgeois subject as the subject of lyric poetry.  The situation of this discussion around the figure of war isolates the problem of violence and representation by establishing barbarism as the term through which the continuity of European fascism and imperialism can be thought. In contrast to books that explore postwar culture as a problem or crisis of representation, this book addresses the continuity of aggression in the postwar through the construction of morality.

There are many historical pinpoints that elicit periods and readings of the “postwar” period, and there are multiple aspects of the restructuring processes, including the global economic policies put forth in Bretton Woods in 1944 implemented later in 1958, the Marshall Plan, the creation of the IMF and World Bank, the restructuring of defeated countries and the organization of Cold War states, decolonization, and wars of national liberation. Now, it is possible to see this all as the unfolding of capitalism, of neo-liberal economic policies, and to see it not as something inevitable, but as something with pronounced turning points throughout. Accompanying these discontinuous developments of today’s late capitalist world, are the moral and ethical positions that not only keep pace with development, but present us with the very capacity to make sense of historical periods. This is crucial: it is crucial that the construction of morality and the distribution of ethical behavior are not just the ideological underpinning of these economic and structural forms of violence, but that they are the very means  by which we can claim to be able to see something like the system from the position of the system, to see the very materiality and immateriality of labor. The arc that forms connecting one plotted point to the next coincides with a necessity that appears narrative. 

The question I approach is thus an inversion of one that is often posed elsewhere, such as Christopher Nealon’s notion in his article “Value| Theory | Crisis” (PMLA 127.1 (Jan 2012)101-106) that it is “not the pursuit of a transcendental vantage point or the critique of that pursuit but the relentless surveying of possible grounds for solidarity among those for whom the regime of capital spells only suffering” (106, cites after During 115). The turn to poetry made recently and explicitly by Nealon and by Joshua Clover (whose essay of the same title also appears in this issue of PMLA, pages 107-114), as a response to the narrative (and I would say performative) supremacy of the linguistic turn (and post-structuralism), involves thinking about the suitability of poetry as a form to deal with the contradictions of “value theory” (Clover 110). 

Acknowledging, as Nealon does above, that the pursuit of the subject and its critique are one and the same, his positing of a third, of the “solidarity [of] … suffering,” raises similar contradictions about how to think of the position of subjectivity. If Nealon exhibits “the optimism of the will,” Clover, in his own phrase, inhabits “the delusion of the intellect” (Clover 113), something that, if I am to read him correctly, is only a good thing. Postwar poetry too has a lot to say about the tension that holds between the collective “we” and the individually deluded “I,” and more explicitly about the claims that are made to either of these positions. It is for good reason that Adorno maintains the tension and distinction between individual and collective identifications--not, of course, to place one above the other, but because of this very tension, which is at the heart of the production of morality. 

The value of addressing the terms of identification in poetry is that it opens up questions about how we can theorize the crisis of agency and also possibilities of subjectivity. These are important because they concern “the subjective life-world of labor” (Clover 111). If it is true that poetry is better equipped to deal with the “axial transmutation” of price into value, as Clover claims, or with “passing off time as space,” it is not because it has resolved and put behind the debates and discussion surrounding poetry in Europe in the 40s and 50s, and in the U.S. in the 60s and 70s, which track the emergence of the problem of the subject. By “problem,” I mean, perhaps, what Jason Read has identified in The Micro-politics of Capital: Marx and the prehistory of the Present as the “philosophical” nature of the mode of production, which Read emphasizes is not “just another name for economy or society,” but relates to the production of consciousness and subjectivity (6). My study of poetry develops this aspect of Marxist and poetic thought, proposing that the lyric “I” is a cipher for this problem of subjective agency. 

The experience of feeling “haunted,” which Clover describes in “Autumn of the System: Poetry and Financial Capital” (Journal of Narrative Theory 41.1 (Spring 2011) 34-52) as akin to Jameson’s account of the “waning of affect,” is the experiential grasp of this subtraction: “the feeling of M-M’; haunted by the C to come” (Clover 46). The experience of this haunting has a correlate in postwar writing on the problem of civilian guilt. Different, and yet not unrelated to mourning, or the working through of the atrocity of the Holocaust, civilian guilt involves thinking about the limits of language, that is, precisely those points at which things become unsayable. Normally read through trauma theory, the unsayable also pertains to the intractability of the moral and economic and to be more precise to the figure of indeterminacy and delusion that is well-taken by the “I” in postwar lyric. My thesis is that the crisis of agency in the lyric speaker of postwar poetry corresponds to the experience of civilian guilt. Civilian guilt, in the figure of the bystander, in turn, becomes the founding narrative of postwar reconstruction; it describes how subjects experience the postwar but it also involves the subject’s capacity to maintain the delusion of a moral regime that accompanies capital’s global expansion. 

Postwar poetry makes the argument that wartime aggression continues into daily life, that it becomes everyday. But this argument is supplanted by another, more critical discourse, which notes a similar phenomenon. This critical postwar poetry regards the continuation of aggression into society as the extension of European imperialism and thus as the continued project of European self-making. These “I”s are thus critical of both reconstruction and the denunciation of aggression because they are two sides of the same construction of morality. The project is thus to think about the genealogy of the bystander, the guilty civilian, who becomes the figure of morality that accompanies the regime of postwar globalized capital. There are reasons to locate this figure in the context of Germany. The bystander, I propose, is not immediately the liberal subject, but the barbarity of bystanding becomes internalized or introjected; it provides us with a model for thinking about the problems of the liberal subject that is no merely not-not-a-collective, and by taking the conflict between ethical and transcendental subject head on.       

sketched

After listening to Rachel Greenwald-Smith give a paper on Aldo Leopold and the contemporary Naturalist, Charles Bowden, titled “After the Land Ethic,” I have been reading from A Sand County Almanac, and thinking about the literature and theory that inhabited Greenwald-Smith’s work. At the same time that I have been drawn towards this body of work, it continues to provoke my feelings of alienation from academic work, as well as uncertainty about what constitutes my own field and area of study. In part, the seeming flexibility but ultimate rigidity of defining and redefining oneself for the diminishing market offerings can be a process that threatens, challenges, or destroys one’s feelings about one’s own work. I don’t know if it’s this that has seemed to destroy my own work, or if my work was destined to some sort of end in itself that began, perhaps, in the claustrophobic office space of Andrej Warminski, who found my writing so unintelligible and my German so in need of correction that the only comments he could muster were dramatic x’s across entire pages. I was incredibly fortunate to find the counsel and friendship of Rei Terada, who cared to read my writing and to try and sort out its terms of intelligibility. Still, there were gaping periods of white noise, of things that did not come across: the mess of my qualifying exams, for example. The dissertation ended up being a more affirmative process. The chapter on Brecht remains a disaster, but the next chapter that I worked on, on Durs Grünbein, which ended up being the third, has been published and reviewed and presented, and I like it while still not entirely getting what it’s all about. The chapters that I wrote after having Philomena, on Ingeborg Bachmann and on the Science Fiction poet, Ann K. Schwader, were inspired acts of writing, as were the introduction and conclusion. And now it has been a year since this last bit of really necessary work has been completed. Since, I’ve applied to two rounds of job postings, and to over twenty adjunct positions. I have given one conference paper, submitted one essay for publication (not accepted), and submitted two conference proposals. I’ve listened to a handful of talks, read drafts of peers’ papers and work, and done some research work in German.

Nothing exactly seems to stick. I have the feeling that I am a tourist, passing through these worlds and feeling the emptiness that often accompanies these feelings of estrangement. Or I would feel like I was co-opting someone else’s something. In California, I felt hugely distant from the lived experience of the student protests, even while attending some and while having at many other points in my graduate student life taken on these activities. I wonder if it was because I was no longer a student, or if it was because the causes that were so worth fighting for were ones that had already demoralized me and that even now I have not found an adequate response for. And so I settle for wallowing, a pathetic defense, and feeling instead like I have suffered injustice on top of injustice for the way that my life has been affected by these political and structural realities. And amidst the wallowing, I kind of bob up to realize that I have lost the ability to talk about these things in an intelligent way. I am so self-absorbed, in other words, that I have given up trying to think about the variety of aspects that are expressed in any one thing, and that even on this level, reading is a choice.

I think that this was the meaning and import of encountering Greenwald-Smith’s work at this point, and of talking to her about her work and my own. The desire for a space of non-coercive writing, such as is also found in Rei Terada’s. Reading Aldo Leopold, there is room to think about the profundity of this process. The main target of his critique is conservation economists, and he calls for a supplemental ethic, one which “presupposes the existence of some mental image of land as a biotic mechanism” (214). In contrast to the image of “the balance of nature,” which I think for Leopold involves the logic of exchange between populations and species, according to each its rightful place, the biotic image is a pyramid consists of layers “alike not in where they came from, or in what they look like, but rather in what they eat” (215). Energy is thus in movement up and down, in life and death. Such a dynamic, which recalls to my mind Rei Terada’s figure of the erosion at work in Hegel’s logic in her essay, “Hegel’s Bearings,” is a compelling anti-Hegelian logic, since it displaces the dynamic of conversion from A to B, and the coerciveness which is also a part of this logic, with the variety of connections that can link chains across layers. In a sense, I am sure, this is what is compelling to so many about the rhizome, but I have never felt convinced of wanting to take up its abstraction until now, since the biotic not only redefines how we think of “the land,” but it also simply and fundamentally reorganizes the place of the human, and not in contrast to the animal, but as a matter of this schema: “Proceeding upward, each successive layer decreases in numerical abundance. Thus, for every carnivore there are hundreds of his prey, thousands of their prey, millions of insects, uncountable plants. The pyramidal form of the system reflects this numerical progression from apex to base. Man shares an intermediate layer with the bears, raccoons, and squirrels which eat both meat and vegetables” (215). The human being takes his place in this scheme according to how he uses the land, that which is the common ground for all things. Perhaps this is also in line with Jane Bennett’s construction in Vibrant Matter (reference to this book was made by Greenwald-Smith in her essay, thanks) of the vital materialist, in contrast to the historical materialist when she claims that it is a “dogged resistance to anthropomorphism” on the part of the vital materialist that constitutes their difference. Despite or because of this, the vital materialist paradoxically needs to “cultivate a bit of anthropomorphism,” highlighting for me a contradiction that inheres, both productively and unproductively, within the discussion of the human and nonhuman. I feel like Leopold’s bioticism swerves much of the contention about the human nonhuman without deflating the political and obviously ecological impact of making such designations. Bennett’s project of giving agency to nonhuman actors as a way of attempting to establish a more equatable and non-instrumental relationship between things and nonthings still involves characterizing humanity at the very beginning as “complexity,” and even while she offers this as a way to break apart the ontological divide, in which humans remain distinct on the basis of intellect or a rational soul, I can’t quite help but to want to know more about what drives this apparently ethical question for her, of establishing the affective agency of all material. Would Leopold find a similar desire for the “balance of nature” lurking here? An argument that is economic because of the way in which it attempts to correct injustice, to balance and counterbalance according to continued anthopomorphic standards?

picture: trees, biotica, Minneapolis.

violetizing

In the back matter to an issue of Science Fiction Studies (#20 volume 7, pt 1: March 1980), Darko Suvin takes note of a new journal of science fiction poetry. He writes, "Starline raised the question of whether there waws such a wordbeast as SF poetry, and if so how was it to be defined or delimited: a theoretically and practically fascinating questsion, so far unanswered (e.g. is something like "the door-handle opened a violet eye, and blinked at him" SF, or poetry, or both?)."

Like Adorno, Suvin is dedicated to genre, and some of his fascination eludes us if we don't acknowledge this preoccupation. His work on the "poetics" of Science Fiction has classified it as a genre that is based on "estrangement and cognition" ("On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre"). Leading scholars following him to adopt the term "cognitive estrangement" in their descriptions of science fiction, Suvin also acknowledged the role of the novum in the construction of the SF text (or "word-beast," following Samuel Delaney). The novum, a concept taken from Ernst Bloch, is an element of novelty or innovation that structures the narrative--"an imaginative framework." For Suvin, it is important both that this framework is something other than the author's "empirical environment," and that all of the fantastic elements are controlled by the logic of this framework. Returning to the question of science fiction poetry, this framework is relevant because it is the distinction between a efficacious (i.e. cognitive) metaphor and its non-cognitive other. The compelling question of SF poetry matters to Suvin because it concerns the role of metaphor. The possibility of SF poetry seems to be something that excites Suvin--something that, unlike poetry, would not merely be metaphor, but that would transport the cognitive aspect of science fiction, its logical narrative unfolding into a poetic form. And though this possibility excites Suvin, it also pushes at the strictly defined generic conventions, for it poses the question: what would ineffacious metaphor look like? In other words, how do uncontrolled "fantastic" elements interact?

The example Suvin gives --"the door-handle opened a violet eye, and blinked at him"-- presents several options for reading. To read it realistically, as SF, it presents the creation of a world in which door-handles have eyes, in which perception is located in structuring objects. Thus, the "violet eye" is a fantastic element, but as part of the novum, becomes a metaphor for the habitation of the faculty of perception within door-handles, suggesting that the inanimate world has agency. To read the "violet eye" as simply an image--that is, to read it as a fantastic element that is not part of a greater framework--would be to read it as an element of fantastic literature, and I would wager that this is what Suvin means by poetry. But if this image takes place within a Science Fiction poem, then it is not simply an image either, that is, it becomes a metaphor that might not be taken literally. In this case, one of the literal referents would be non-literal, the tenor of the metaphor. It could be that "door-handle" is a metaphor for an abstract concept (if we think of something like "love is like the door-handle that opened a violet eye and blinked at him"), in which case we are asked to think about the literal meaning through a fantastic example, without having to take the fantastic element seriously, perhaps, without having to think through the possibility of its logic. Cognitive, or estrangement, or both?

picture: violets, on the Balkon

blind contours

These blog writings began as things that could not be included in my dissertation. i suppose at some point, my feelings about the dissertation began to change. i think at this time, the content of what was included here also changed. though the dissertation is hopefully changing in positive ways, what is here is not. and that is largely because there is very little here. this is very sad to me. at the same time, the fact that there is not very much here seems to be one of the phenomena that i am trying to explain in my dissertation. i am writing about how poetry is able to theorize about political activity. one of the outcomes of this is that i am able to see and to say how poetry can engage in political action. in the first chapter, which deals with the Bertolt Brecht, i suppose i am trying to see how poetry sees its removal from the realm of politics, and how Brecht theorizes its return. one of the consequences of this removal from politics is the loss of external reality. by external reality, i mean things that are registered as belonging to the world--the "many-sided world," according to Brecht. i feel like not being able to write things in this blog is related to the loss of external reality, of my external reality. i think this relationship--that is, to external reality--is always very tenuous anyways. i think it takes a lot to maintain it, but the "work" of its activity is not always that clear. in fact, i think the work is downright murky; it is dark.

One of the things that has made the dissertation writing go better is that i am slowly realizing how slowly i need to proceed in order to present an intelligible argument. sometimes i am surprised at how "beyond me" this has seemed. i have begun to think that this process is somewhat like drawing blind contours. i have held onto this practice for quite some time, since high school, i think. the task is to move your pen as slowly as your eyes trace the object you are drawing, not looking at your paper until you have finished tracing the whole object. what results is, of course, never realistic, but it is rare that the object that is traced is not at all intelligible on the paper. i have never grasped the idea, exactly, that in writing, my pen might have to move as slowly. the value of the patience of sticking with it blindly to end goes without need to say more. so perhaps that is something