Month: June 2020

David W. Kupferman (bio)
University of Hawai’i – West O’ahu

Abstract

Between 1946 and 1958, the United States tested sixty-seven nuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands, the largest of which was the “Bravo Shot” at Bikini Atoll on March 1, 1954. In the intervening years, the historical memory of that legacy has largely been reduced to a case of perpetrator and victim. Yet there is also an undercurrent of lowbrow discourse and nuclear kitsch, as well as questionable stewardship of the nuclear question, in and around contemporary Marshallese society, notably effected by prominent members of the American expatriate community. The “Bravo Shot,” to take but one example, is now available as an alcoholic drink at the airport bar in the nation’s capital. This paper considers the ways in which kitsch interferes with the work of mourning, and calls into question the ethical responsibility of a popular social imaginary that either rationalizes or willfully ignores problematic political decisions, such as ordering Bravo Shots at the bar, and thereby perpetrates violence against those whose very memory is at stake.

“The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.”’ —Cicero

The next time you are in the airport in Majuro, the capital atoll of the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI), stop in at the Hangar Bar and get yourself a Bravo Shot. For $4.50, you get a shot made of one-third Cointreau, one-third Kahlua, and one-third Baileys. The layered drink, which has been around since the opening of the bar in 2006, should be familiar to mixologists and drinkers more commonly as a B-52, providing a fitting pedigree for the Bravo Shot since the actual B-52 Stratofortress was designed specifically to carry an atomic payload. It was a B-52 that dropped a bomb on Bikini Atoll during Operation Cherokee in 1956, two years after the Bravo detonation. Alternatively, if you find yourself with some time to kill in Majuro around March 1, during the national holiday commemorating the Bravo test of March 1, 1954, in which the US dropped its first thermonuclear hydrogen bomb with a yield equivalent to fifteen megatons of TNT (Lindqvist 136), you can also head over to the Flame Tree, a local bar and restaurant that features Friday Shots as part of their “Nuclear Survivors’ Special” (see Fig. 1). Who wouldn’t need a drink after surviving a nuclear explosion?¹

If drinking isn’t your thing, you can always read the local paper, the Marshall Islands Journal, which reported on student activities during the 2012 March 1 holiday with the title “Students Have Explosive Day.” And then there’s the crossword, “The RMI Riddle,” which occasionally recycles clues like 3-Down from puzzle number 376 on December 12, 2011: “Yippee for bomb!” (Hint: it’s five letters.) Those familiar with the history of nuclear testing by the United States in the Marshall Islands will be reminded by 3-Down of the title of Holly Barker’s book, Bravo for the Marshallese, in which she explains that she chose the title

for two reasons. First, I want to document how the Bravo test … and the U.S. nuclear weapons testing program fundamentally altered the health, environment, language, economy, politics, and social organization of the Marshall Islands. Second, I want readers to know the Marshallese not as helpless victims rendered powerless by the events that took place in their land, but as the fighters and advocates for their communities they are. (xiii)

She goes on to explain, somewhat condescendingly, that “The Marshallese people deserve praise (bravo!) for the ways they resist” the U.S. government today. But who is conferring this praise and how does the polysemous character of the word “bravo” act in this context? Does appropriating the name of the most devastating test in this way diminish the terror and violence of colonization and nuclear weapons that are also conjured up by this name? There seems to be a third interpretation of the book’s title, which is that the Bravo bomb was, deterministically, for the Marshallese, as if they somehow deserved or earned it. A much more effective reappropriation of the word, ironically enough, can be found on the cover of the second edition of Barker’s book from 2012, in which a Marshallese woman is holding a sign that reads “Bravo to U.S./Contamination to Ailuk,” suggesting both that the US should sarcastically be applauded for its nuclear weapons program, and that the Bravo test should have taken place in (or at least been sent to) the United States. Indeed, while it may seem a small point, the reference to the Bravo Shot changes shape, meaning, and effect depending upon whether one uses the preposition for or to, and which entity (the US or the Marshall Islands) it is directed at; what is becoming apparent is that Bravo/bravo is a term that should not be treated lightly.

Still, the evocation of the Bravo detonation and its use for cheerleading can also be found in the second edition of Jack Niedenthal’s For the Good of Mankind, which is published by Bravo Publishers. Indeed, Bravo Publishers employs a curious use of the Greek β rather than the Latin B to symbolize Bravo (Publishers), suggesting a connection with the sign’s use in physics to denote beta radiation and nuclear decay. It is not clear whether the use of β is intended to be clever or ironic, or perhaps both, but it is nonetheless problematic in the way that it winks to the knowing reader, sitting as it does on the publication page of the book atop the word “Bravo!” thereby poking fun at, and so potentially diminishing, the horror of the actual Bravo detonation. (It should be noted that a different edition of the book, published by Micronitor Publishing – the parent company of both the Marshall Islands Journal and the Flame Tree – does not include either the β or the word Bravo anywhere on the publication page.)

And speaking of the Micronitor, we can also find a rather troubling nod, in the vein of Dr. Strangelove, to the comedy that is nuclear annihilation in Joe Murphy’s novella The Socialist Republic of the Marshall Islands, which chronicles the takeover of the Republic of the Marshall Islands by a Soviet commander named Ivan “La Midi” von Kotzebue. To be sure, this book is a joke, as it is dedicated to “President Saddam Hussein: ‘Perhaps one of the most misunderstood and under-appreciated leaders of the 20^th Century.’” As appalling as this sentiment is, it pales in comparison with the ending of the book, when La Midi meets with the RMI President and various cabinet ministers at a restaurant in Majuro to discuss the terms of his socialist takeover of the islands. The story takes place just as the Compact of Free Association with the US is going into effect in 1986, also the height of the Cold War under the Reagan administration, and on the last page the United States’ response to the Soviet takeover is to nuke Majuro:

A firm smile worked its way through the Soviet’s lips. “Passage of the compact is of no consequence. The Americans acted too late. Besides, the matter now goes to the United Nations Security Council and we have a veto. Regardless of American political objectives we are now a socialist republic of the Pacific.” “Not with our agreement,” repeated President Chutaro. “Oh, yes, with or without your agreement. The Americans have no choice. To interfere or block our move would mean war. We are here permanently. We remove you, all of you, and replace you with more cooperative elements. It’s that simple.”… “And the Americans can do nothing about it?” repeated Minister LiTokwa [sic] Tomeing. “Nothing,” agreed La Midi. Again silence, filled with the dribble of the phallic [fountain]. Then, suddenly, a flash brightens the morning sun-filled sky. No one moves, not even to blink. It was Justice Minister John Heine who realized first, and even though he was certain, he couldn’t resist having the absolute last word: “Nothing?” (77)

Thus, between the “flash” in the morning sky and the “absolute last word,” in this telling the government of the Marshall Islands finds it preferable for the United States to use nuclear weapons to eliminate the Soviet threat in Majuro than to abide a socialist takeover of the islands. What is so troubling about this, and our examples above, is that I should not have to point out how troubling they all are, from a standpoint of memory, mourning, ethics, and good taste. Granted, the drink specials at the Flame Tree, the Marshall Islands Journal, and The Socialist Republic of the Marshall Islands are the work of one individual (or those who work for that individual), a long-term American expatriate resident of the RMI. Yet this form of memory, or rather of kitsch as memory, interferes with the work of mourning, and provides the slippage necessary to produce the Bravo Shot at the Hangar Bar (which, incidentally, is also owned by a non-Marshallese), among other elements of such “memory,” as legitimate, if not necessarily with serious intentions.

So what are we to make of the Bravo Shot, and what role do Islanders and non-Islanders (and specifically Americans) play in how the Marshall Islands’ nuclear imaginary is produced and structured? What is appropriate, and what can be appropriated? What are the limits of – impossibly – good taste? In order to focus on these issues more immediately, I should briefly mention what this work does not do. I do not offer a history of nuclear testing in the Pacific, or specifically in the Marshall Islands, as that subject can be found elsewhere (see, for example, Firth; Weisgall; and Johnston and Barker). Nor do I concentrate on the impacts and aftermath of the testing in an anthropological sense; those interested in the history and legacy of the removal of Islanders should see Kiste’s 1974 study of the Bikinians, Carucci’s 1997 work on Islanders of Āne-wetak (Enewetak), and Barker and Barker and Johnston for analyses of Rongelap Islander experiences. And despite the title of this piece, I do not actually address alcohol in the islands, although there certainly is a need for an examination of the link between the terror and violence of nuclear testing and that of alcoholism and its corollary effects of domestic violence and social disintegration.

Rather, what I am concerned with here are the ways in which the Bravo Shot at the Hangar Bar, and fetishistic kitsch of this kind, provides us with an opening for a dialogue about death. For death hovers above this entire discussion—specifically, the deaths of those Marshallese who have crossed an atomic border, an “atomic situation” that, Michel Foucault argues, is predicated on the concept that “the power to expose a whole population to death is the underside of the power to guarantee an individual’s continued existence” (137). And what of the power to remember that whole population?

Perhaps, then, we should start from a point of mourning, for that is how we, the living, trace the border of death through memory. But what form does, or should, mourning take? Derrida, in his essay eulogizing Emmanuel Levinas, suggests that the work of mourning operates in that space where we must speak of the dead, and yet “at that very point where words fail us, since all language that would return to the self, to us, would seem indecent, a reflexive discourse that would end up coming back to the stricken community, to its consolation or its mourning” (Mourning 200). Our work in this instance requires us to interiorize or remember the person/s whom we are mourning, and to allow the departed to speak for themselves. Here we find the aporia of death and the work of mourning, in that we are speaking of and to those who cannot respond to us. We are engaged in an impossible response, and as such we must take care to interiorize without internalizing, to have the dead speak “in us” rather than “through us” or mediated by us, lest we do violence to them. Derrida engages in the tricky act of distinguishing interiorizing from totalizing by appealing to Levinas’s notion of the infinity of the other. For Levinas, “The epiphany of the face is ethical” (199) in that it signifies a Being for whom we are responsible and whom therefore we cannot totalize. Likewise, Derrida acknowledges that the aporia of death and mourning requires one to interiorize but without totalizing. In other words, interiorization for Derrida is a matter of approaching rather than appropriating the other, of keeping the interiorized other at arms’ length; and this trick is then aided by the second part of his formulation of mourning, that of allowing the dead to speak in their own words, what Brault and Naas refer to as the “impossible performative” of interiorization.

Michael Shapiro cautions us that violence in this sense “refers primarily to the violence of representation, the domination of narratives of space and identity” (59); and as all we have are representations of the dead, it is incumbent upon us to delineate the aporetic boundaries which we must limn but can never cross so as to avoid perpetuating the very violence to which misappropriations of memory and mourning – in other words, totalizing – can so easily lead. In the case of the Bravo Shot, and our other examples above, we find a fetishistic form of mourning, one that concerns itself less with ethics and responsibility towards the other and instead primarily through a mourning for ourselves, thereby creating the conditions of sentimentality that produce its most problematic and violent form: kitsch. For while the aporia of mourning is “an impossibility, nevertheless, that constitutes an infinite demand” (Zembylas 92), kitsch is both constructed by and reflective of mourning defined by resolution, finality, and closure, effectively by erasing the other and claiming to cross the border. While it is not my intention to provide an analysis of kitsch, per se, I must acknowledge the ways in which it has metamorphosed from the time that Clement Greenberg traced its origins to the rise of the industrial revolution and its mechanistic assemblage of “low” culture, to its service as a “rear-garde” (in contrast to avant-garde) form of totalitarianism, to Judith (now Jack) Halberstam’s creative use of kitsch and kitsch/iness as “low theory.” Throughout, as Friedlander explains, “kitsch is the complete subordination of the means of a medium to the communication of subject matter or to the creation of effect” (378); that is, it merely apes effects, it cannot produce them. We would do well, then, to turn our attention to nuclear kitsch and its troublesome effects on mourning.

In 1946, Superman flew to the Pacific during the atomic tests at Bikini Atoll (see Fig. 2). In Action Comics #101, a gang led by Specs Dour kidnaps Lois Lane in Metropolis, and Dour forces her to drink a formula that makes her go insane. When Superman arrives to try to rescue her, Dour forces Superman to drink the formula as well, and the Man of Steel proceeds to wreak havoc on the city, before floating away unconscious. Eventually he winds up in the middle of the Pacific just as the US is about to test a nuclear weapon over Bikini, and the explosion in fact cures Superman, implying perhaps that there is something beneficial to nuclear fallout (at least for those born on Krypton). The story was timely, arriving on newsstands as it did in October, just a few months after the testing took place. If we skip ahead four decades, however, we see Superman responding to nuclear weapons much differently during the late 1980s, at a time in the Cold War when nuclear annihilation seemed possible, if not likely, under the Reagan administration. In contrast to his first encounter with nuclear destruction, which restored him to his old self, in the film Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, Superman literally rids the world of nuclear weapons, detonating them out in space. And when he confronts Nuclear Man, Lex Luthor’s version of Frankenstein’s monster, Superman is harmed by the radiation to which he is exposed when Nuclear Man scratches him with his claws.

Not to be outdone, in Marvel Universe’s early 2000s The Ultimates, by Mark Millar (the blueprint for the cinematic Avengers series and its constituent spin-offs), Captain America, Iron Man, and Thor lead a team of operatives to an unnamed island in Micronesia to battle an invading alien force. The confrontation is a trap, however, as the alien base on the island is deserted, as is the island itself emptied of any actual Islanders, and instead a booby-trapped nuclear detonation eradicates the superheroes’ team (although the principal characters, we find out later, are unharmed). Of note for our purposes is that the conditions produced by nuclear kitsch make it possible for the comic book to incinerate almost nonchalantly yet another anonymous Micronesian island (though to the trained eye the visual depiction of the island is based on aerial views of Yap in the Federated States of Micronesia), complete with one frame of a palm tree foregrounding the imminent mushroom cloud. The complete lack of native inhabitants is never explained, and we are therefore left with yet another thermonuclear Bravo-type shot that, in the popular imaginary, harms no one, and thus produces no one to mourn.

Surprisingly, neither of these pop-culture entries is included on the Bikini Atoll website list of Bikini- and nuclear-related kitsch, although the list does include Salvador Dalí’s 1947 painting Three Sphinxes of Bikini, an inventory of seventy-eight movies with the word “Bikini” in the title, and a reference to the SpongeBob SquarePants episode “Dying for Pie,” which features footage of the Baker Shot detonation, presumably blowing up Bikini Bottom (Niedenthal, “Bikini Atoll”). The website also features the webmaster, Jack Niedenthal, an American former Peace Corps volunteer who serves as the liaison for the Bikini Atoll local government, is married to a Bikinian, and refers to himself as a Bikinian. He is also a self-proclaimed filmmaker–in a nod to kitsch, Niedenthal’s film company is called Microwave Films. To date he has produced five feature-length movies on various aspects of Marshallese culture and “legends”; all five were written, directed, and produced by Niedenthal, including his effort from 2012, The Sound of Crickets at Night, a take on the nuclear legacy of the islands starring Jack Niedenthal. The name of his company denotes the island-ness of the films and their producer, with “Micro” referring to Micronesia and “wave” evoking the importance of water to the region and to the Marshall Islands in particular; however, the name cleverly alludes to nuclear testing and its aftermath, as in “microwave radiation.” It should also come as no surprise that Niedenthal’s email handle on the Bikini Atoll website is “bikinijack,” employing kitsch to identify Niedenthal with both the suffering, and the cooptation of sentimental righteousness, of Bikini.

My concern with kitsch then is threefold: first, that kitsch leads one to sentimentality; second, that the deployment of kitsch erases difference, and is therefore an act of violence; and third, that kitsch masquerades as Derrida’s interiorization as part of the process of mourning but in fact corrupts the work of mourning by totalizing the other. In Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, Immanuel Kant warns against accepting sentimentality as necessary for moral duty and ethical obligation; rather, it is only out of a sense of duty that one can truly, ethically love and act. Thus, “beneficence solely from duty … is practical and not pathological love, which lies in the will and not in the propensity of feeling, in the principles of action and not in melting sympathy” (15, original emphases). The danger posed by this adherence to “melting sympathy” is that it counterfeits the actual and results in “a false sense of empowerment by the experience” (Friedlander 383); in other words, one evades ethical duty by actively embracing the sentimental, by engaging with the emotional (grounded in sympathy) rather than with responsibility (produced by the will).

The problem with kitsch is that it leads to Kant’s “pathological love,” and so we drink our Bravo Shots and read through the list of beach movies on the Bikini Atoll website without any sense of moral obligation to those whose lives were affected, and often destroyed, by the reality of the experience and the horror of the event. As Robert Solomon warns us, “The objection to sentimentality in both art and ethics, in other words, is not just its lack of sophistication and bad taste. Kitsch is dangerous…. Kitsch and sentimentality lead to brutality” (3, original emphasis). We can therefore dismiss the experiences of those Bikinians removed from their homes in 1946 and concentrate instead on the effects of nuclear testing on Superman or the Avengers and marvel at the worth of a comic book or comic-book movie franchise (rather than the worth of those Islanders’ lives).

The second effect of kitsch is to highlight the privileging of narcissism through the erasure of the other. As Karen Engle suggests, “Kitsch reflects a profound narcissism – a desire to insert oneself into a historical or otherwise significant moment” (72). And so we turn again to Niedenthal, who inserts himself into the narrative of Bikini Atoll on the dedication page of his book For the Good of Mankind, when he writes that the book is “For our elders, alive and dead, who have struggled to keep our community together over the years, reminding us of who we are and where we came from—and of what we still have to accomplish for our people” (emphases added). The use of the first person plural allows Niedenthal to claim the mantle of Bikinian righteousness, despite his coming from Pennsylvania, not Bikini, and although it stands in contrast with the subtitle of his book: “A History of the People of Bikini and Their Islands” (emphasis added). Why not “A History of the People of Bikini and Our Islands,” or is that too far a bridge to cross right on the cover?

In a cover story from The New York Times Magazine in 1994, Jeffrey Davis writes of the Bikinian community members’ struggle to balance their newfound wealth, island heritage, and the precarious environmental future of their atoll. But the article really revolves around the tensions between Bikini’s two American representatives: Jonathan Weisgall, their lawyer, and Niedenthal. Here we see numerous instances of Niedenthal’s insertion of himself into the story of Bikini: “‘When the Bikinians have to deal with the outside world … you need someone to deal with powerful personalities,’ Niedenthal says. ‘I’m their link to the outside” (Davis 47); or again, “‘I am a member of this community, and I have certain rights,’ Niedenthal argues” (Davis 72); and, as Davis describes him: “Niedenthal, ever quick to speak for the Bikinians” (Davis 48). And yet, as Engle warns us, “Kitsch enables the statement of universal community and belonging. This is the danger: the erasure of difference, the reduction of distance and the non-recognition of the Other all have as their unspoken desire the dream of homogeneity and absolute power” (78). Thus, we have no need of actual Bikinians; we have Niedenthal to “speak for” them, much as Dr. Seuss’s Lorax speaks for the trees. In this way, Bikinians are erased, and replaced with the narcissism of privilege, a privilege that reeks of the similar effects of colonization’s erasure of the ways of being, humanity, and lives of indigenous peoples. The only true Bikinian is now not even a Bikinian at all, but rather an ersatz Bikinian, one whose motivations, dripping as they are with Kant’s melting sympathy (as Davis puts it, “Much as it may distress Niedenthal the Bikinians are no longer the innocents they were in 1946” [73]), do not, in fact, even allow for Bikinian voices to speak for themselves. And so, in a letter to the editor following the publication of The New York Times Magazine article, Niedenthal’s sister writes that she “is grateful that he [Niedenthal] is there to protect what remains of their [the Bikinians’] heritage, while safeguarding their possibility of a future” (Niedenthal Axberg 8), since apparently the Bikinians are incapable of doing so for themselves. More recently, Niedenthal spoke before a group of yachties on Majuro, where he “told the story [of nuclear history] from the Bikinian viewpoint” (“Cruisers Spellbound” 18); tellingly, no Bikinians attended the gathering, nor did they need to, as Niedenthal has deftly coopted their story and, through the colonial gaze, mediates and controls it.

So what about the tourist patrons of the Hangar Bar and collectors of nuclear kitsch, and by extension of nuclear sentimentality? They, too, are implicated in this pathological drive towards “melting sympathy” and the erasure of the Bikinians, since they can also experience nuclear tourism through trinkets and souvenirs. Specifically, on sale in Majuro for $7.50 is a Bravo Shot shot glass that one can bring home and presumably use to enjoy a homemade Bravo Shot (see Fig. 3). In the words of Engle, “Through possession of my souvenir, I forge a connection to the tragedy. Now, I have a story to tell. I was there become words belonging to both survivor and tourist” (75, original emphasis). This sentimental tourist experience is certainly not limited to the Marshall Islands, however: as the entrepreneurial spirit of New Yorkers demonstrated after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the image of the World Trade Center as memorial adorned any number of items, including key chains and refrigerator magnets; and there is even a gift shop at Auschwitz, where I once saw a rack of postcards for sale. (To whom exactly do you send a postcard of Auschwitz, and what are you supposed to write on it? “Wish you were here”?) While Proust speaks of a “posthumous infidelity” (309), kitsch, I argue, engages in a form of posthumous promiscuity by demanding that the interloper, the observer, the faux participant insert her/himself into the narrative. This in turn totalizes and absorbs the other, which, according to Levinas, the self cannot do. Kitsch disavows this separation, and incites violence against the other, the violence of totalizing. As Derrida reminds us, “every reduction of the other to a real moment of my life, its reduction to the state of empirical alter-ego, is an empirical possibility, or rather eventuality, which is called violence” (Writing and Difference 128, original emphases).

And therein lies the ethical danger of the Bravo Shot and its companion shot glass: “This is the realm of kitsch. Kitsch says: we can all be One, and be united in our common purpose. But this One is totalitarian, and it desires no less than the extermination of its foes” (Engle 77). It is this extermination of foes, of difference and the other, of the reality of experience, that is at stake; indeed, there is nothing less at risk than legitimizing sentimentality as somehow ethical, authentic, and pure, and thereby threatening the memory of those connected to the event and displacing our responsibility to them. The duty, as Kant would command, is not to mistake the emotional for the actual, and thereby displace it; rather, it is to demonstrate fidelity to one’s duty to the other, by creating conditions that legitimize the very differences that separate the survivor from the tourist. The question becomes not “How do I insert myself into this story?” but rather “What is my responsibility to the memory of the other?” We must interiorize and allow Bikinians to speak, rather than speak for them and in so doing totalize them. Niedenthal does not allow the Bikinian people to speak “in us” – he does not give their voices a chance to have the last word. As Brault and Naas explain of Derrida’s impossible performative, “interiorization cannot—must not—be denied; the other is indeed reduced to images ‘in us.’ And yet the very notion of interiorization is limited in its assumption of a topology with limits between inside and out, what is ours and what is the other” (11). Kitsch is dangerous precisely because it delineates this topology while simultaneously erasing it. Kitsch bears witness not to the dead but to the living, to the appropriator, to us as we order our Bravo Shot.

At this point we can consider the effects of kitsch, and the ways in which the conditions of possibility delineated by kitsch corrupt the work of mourning. For if kitsch totalizes the other and violates the requirement that we interiorize the dead while allowing them to speak, it also denies the face of the other, and the ethical epiphany of that face. It is our ethical responsibility, as Levinas instructs, to resist this denial, and to embrace the infinity of the other: “The face opens the primordial discourse whose first word is obligation, which no ‘interiority’ permits avoiding” (201). The epiphany of the face brings us squarely in confrontation with the ethical impossibility of totalization, of, in effect, killing the other. We can contrast this with the ways in which totalizing subjectivities of “victimhood,” especially those in popular historical imaginaries, continue to reinforce not just the moment of the Bravo Shot but also its eternal drumbeat of violence against the very people that, say, a national holiday is intended to commemorate and mourn. The work of mourning is to operate as an antidote – a definitive antithesis – to the work of kitsch; yet kitsch does not abide what Shapiro describes as “the ethical sensibility,” which permits “various forms of alterity with contending modes of denotation and meaning to enter into the negotiation of space and identity” (80). There is no negotiation with kitsch; its effects are totalizing, as it denies what Shapiro names the ontology of encounter.

And what of that holiday, which is an officially sanctioned day for engaging in the work of mourning through the social imaginary? Since 1988, March 1, the anniversary of the Bravo Shot, has been designated as a Marshall Islands national holiday, originally called “Nuclear Victims Remembrance Day” (Marshall Islands, PL 1988-16 33). At stake in the naming of such a holiday is the advent of foundation, with this act of naming calling the memory of the Bravo Shot into existence; at the same time, the subjectivity of those whose deaths (and importantly not their lives) are to be commemorated and remembered is secured in a state of victimhood. In the first instance, national memory is deployed in the service of fixed meanings, while the phenomenon of foundation ensures that something that is assumed to exist (the Bravo Shot) must first call itself into being (through the holiday). Horwitz offers that “The irreducible nonclosure of context that can be found in the event of foundation due to its paradoxical structure always allows for an opening onto the politics of fixing contexts and deciding upon and stabilizing meanings” (163–164), suggesting that the Bravo Shot, since the founding of the holiday, possesses some essential and determinate meaning: namely, that it is a day for mourning (rather than celebration or even productive reflection), and that there is a narrowly proscriptive “right” way to mourn (for victims).

Yet it is with the second instance, that of subjectivity, that we begin to run into trouble. The foundation of the event may consistently be March 1 (since at least 1988), but the subjects worthy of commemoration and mourning have not always been so clear. In 2003, the government changed the name of the holiday to “Memorial Day and Nuclear Survivors Remembrance Day,” giving as its rationale

that the effected [sic] peoples wish to be remembered as survivors rather [than] victims [sic]. The holiday therefore should be a remembrance of their drive and to signify their struggle not to be defeated by their conditions but to continue to live their lives despite the physical, emotional and mental ravages of the nuclear testing program. (Marshall Islands, PL 2003-99 4)

Here there is a clear demarcation between subjectivities, between victims and survivors, and a break between remembrance and mourning. Indeed, one does not typically mourn survival. Importantly, this different holiday cites an ongoing struggle by the survivors, which has the effect of collapsing the notion of the linearity of time and history: the survivors are still alive (and therefore are not in need of mourning), the foundation of the event of the Bravo Shot is therefore renewed in the present, and “such symbolic synchrony of ‘now’ and ‘then’ reflects our conservative urge to do away with the very distinction between them” (Zerubavel 47, original emphasis). In short, we are commemorating here not death but life, in fact our own lives in the present moment, through the continuing ordeal of “survival.”

This recognition of the living did not last long, as the name of the holiday reverted to its original iteration, “Nuclear Victims Remembrance Day,” in 2005, without explanation (Marshall Islands, PL 2005-35 1). What then of the survivors from the two years previous? What becomes of their subjectivity (to say nothing of their lives), and what effect does the restoration of victimhood have on both the event and the revitalized memorialization of the dead? It seems that we have returned on March 1 to a set of fixed meanings and universal rules, and to a totalizing of the other, of the Islanders directly and indirectly affected by the US nuclear testing program writ large. Derrida explains the ethical formulation of Being in Levinas’s terms: “alone permitting to let be others in their truth, freeing dialogue and the face to face, the thought of Being is thus as close as possible to nonviolence” (Writing and Difference 146, original emphasis). The erasure of survivance and prolepsis of victimhood enshrined in the holiday in its current form therefore totalizes the experience of the nuclear-affected other, not the least result of which is the denial of the face (and face to face) of survival in its binary dance with that of victimization, as per the discourse operating within the naming of the holiday. We are commanded here to violence by denying this Being of the other, by denying the other to speak in their own words. As Derrida reminds us, “The experience of the other (of the infinite) is irreducible” (Writing and Difference 152); yet that experience here is reduced to a problematic subjectivity on an annual basis.

The March 1 holiday is in a way, then, a new form of state-sanctioned violence against those who are least able to speak, as we do not allow them to speak “in us.” Perhaps the greatest trouble with the naming of the holiday, according to Shapiro, is that “the ethical is the enactment of a response to the summons of alterity beyond or prior to any institutionalized normativity and foundational conceptuality. Among what is required to heed this summons of the Other is a distancing from the prolepses through which others are already inscribed” (77). The holiday thus refuses us the possibility of approaching those who are supposed to be mourned, and instead instructs us to appropriate the dead for our own totalizing ends.

Still, that cannot be the end of our responsibility to those whose lives were affected, and in many cases ended, by the legacy of US nuclear testing. Rather, we should recognize the work of mourning and its productive qualities, should we choose to engage them. The naming and renaming of the holiday demarcate the universality of victimization and the horrors of colonization, suggesting that there is an essential and totalizable subjectivity that is eligible for national and global commemoration (and that no longer includes survivors); in this way, there is a narrow, proscriptive, and “correct” mode through which to remember the Bravo Shot, and any deviations from that normalized and non-contingent subject – the victim – are suspect. The Bravo Shot drink, however, erases this other by thumbing its nose at the very real violence of nuclear annihilation, alcoholism, colonization, and the effects of totalizing, of integrating the other within ourselves: “Ontologies of integration are egoistically aimed at domesticating alterity to a frame of understanding that allows for the violent appropriation of the space of the other” (Shapiro 64). The holiday, in turn, erases the conditions of possibility for alternative subjectivities by legislating national victimization, and thereby establishes the official narrative of victimhood as history.

And so what is the holiday for? Is it to open that space for impossible mourning, in which we restore the subjectivity of the other (and thereby our own as well), or is it simply a day to head to the nearest bar to take advantage of the nuclear survivors’ special? It is easy simply to be outraged at the barbarous acts perpetrated by the US on the people of the Marshall Islands. It is far more difficult, and therefore necessary, to move beyond the subjectivization of the other as “victim” and instead consider the possibility of the impossible, of the impossible “I” of the other, that which Oliver terms the “sovereignty effect” (192). To presume a posture only of the former is not only dangerous (not the least because it is the most “universal” response available to us), but it is negative as well, as it results in the erasure not only of the other (here the Bikinian, the Enewetakese, the Rongelapese, the Utrikan) but also of history and memory. By adhering to universal rules of mourning and recognizing only “victims,” we abdicate our responsibility to the other and can thereby avoid having to make any kind of decision. If we have no responsibility to others, then it is of no consequence if we relegate human suffering to a joke at a bar or to a kitschy shot glass.

So how do we turn, or rather return, to the work of mourning, to the imperative of interiorization while carefully avoiding the totalization of the other, and thereby commemorate not ourselves but the dead? How do we allow the dead to respond “in us” rather than speaking for them? As a useful counterexample to the Bravo Shot drink, to Niedenthal, and to nuclear kitsch generally, let us consider one more example of representation of the Bravo test, namely the flag of the Bikini Atoll local government (see Fig. 4). Assembled to look like the US flag, it showcases a field of twenty-three stars in a sea of blue, each of which stands for an island in the atoll. The two stars to the bottom right of the flag represent Kili and Ejit, the two main contemporary population centers of the diasporic Bikinian community; the three stars in the upper right corner represent the three islands in the lagoon that were destroyed by the Bravo blast. This imagining of the Bravo shot as integral to the history of Bikini also suggests a number of other factors at work in the local nuclear imaginary, specifically the convergence of history, memory, colonization, dislocation, and modern conceptions of statehood (and its signs, such as the flag). The very name of the electoral district of Kili/Bikini/Ejit (KBE) is a reminder of the ways in which this community has been constructed as an effect of nuclear testing, western notions of national security and scientific progress, development, and displacement. A group of Islanders from Enewetak (which was the site of the majority of the sixty-seven nuclear weapons tested by the US between 1946 and 1958), Rongelap and Utrik (whose communities were devastated by the fallout from the Bravo test), and Bikini have periodically held demonstrations in Majuro, calling themselves ERUB after the four affected atolls, a word that can be glossed in English as Marshallese for “broken.” As a self-chosen designation, erub denotes a complex paleonomy, or weight that words carry. It also enables the survivors of the Bravo test to allow the dead to speak “in us,” to interiorize without erasing.

A painting hanging in the halls of Bikini Atoll Town Hall in Majuro shows a mushroom cloud flanked on either side by two upright nuclear bombs, one labeled Able and the other Baker, both with the year 1946 underneath their names. Running along the top of the painting is the wording from the Bikini flag, in English and then Marshallese: “Everything is in God’s hands… Men otemjej rej ilo pein anij.” Beneath the image of the bombs and mushroom cloud appears the phrase: “One nuclear bomb can ruin your whole day.” One Bravo Shot at the bar, I would add, can disrupt the work of mourning and ruin our ability to approach Bikini’s nuclear legacy soberly.

Footnotes

1. To be fair, the Flame Tree is not the only establishment to try to develop catastrophe and alcohol tie-ins: to commemorate Pearl Harbor Day in 2013, Murphy’s Bleachers Bar, across the street from Wrigley Field in Chicago, suggested on its marquee that patrons “Remember Pearl Harbor With Bombs & Kamikazes.” The difference between the two bars, however, may be that Murphy’s was called out in The Huffington Post and subsequently apologized “for the actions of our staff to our whole country” (“Chicago Bar”).

Works Cited

• Barker, Holly M. Bravo for the Marshallese: Regaining Control in a Post-Nuclear, Post-Colonial World. Belmont: Wadsworth, 2004. Print.
• Brault, Pascale-Anne, and Michael Naas. “To Reckon with the Dead: Jacques Derrida’s Politics of Mourning.” The Work of Mourning. Ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001. 1-30. Print.
• Carucci, Laurence Marshall. Nuclear Nativity: Rituals of Renewal and Empowerment in the Marshall Islands. DeKalb: Northern Illinois UP, 1997. Print.
• “Chicago Bar Murphy’s Bleachers Draws Criticism for Tasteless Sign on Anniversary of Pearl Harbor.” The Huffington Post. HPMG News, 8 Dec. 2013. Web. 9 Dec. 2013.
• “Cruisers Spellbound by Jack’s Nuclear Stories.” Marshall Islands Journal 15 March 2013: 18. Print.
• Davis, Jeffrey. “Bombing Bikini Again (This Time with Money).” The New York Times Magazine 1 May 1994: 43-48, 68, 72-73. Print.
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• Zerubavel, Eviatar. Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003. Print.

T.J. Martinson (bio)
Indiana University – Bloomington

A review of Breu, Christopher. The Insistence of the Material: Literature in the Age of Biopolitics. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2014.

Halfway through The Insistence of the Material, Christopher Breu compares postmodernism to a zombie. Its death has been announced multiple times, yet it always manages to find a way out of the grave. Breu finds reason to be optimistic within this metaphor: “[W]e may find that the subject of postmodernism has transformed in undeath and that the features that were so prominent in life have now receded or taken on less importance, while other originally obscured characteristics seem now to emerge, producing an uncanny visage” (122). The book sets out to join the living and the dead, the familiar and unfamiliar.

In fact, the phrase “uncanny visage” functions quite well as a description for the book’s theoretical framework. Predicated on the interdisciplinary nature of biopolitics, or “the direct management of life and death by political and economic power” (2), The Insistence of the Material brings into conversation a wide array of canonical theorists—Freud, Marx, Jameson, Lacan, Derrida, Adorno, Foucault—alongside the relatively newer theories of materiality—object-oriented ontology, animal studies, biopolitics, the new materialism. His wide theoretical net is by no means an arbitrary flourish of scholarly prowess: Breu’s goal is not to abandon the cultural and linguistic turns at the heart of postmodernism, but instead to focus where such work cannot: “the forms of materiality that resist, exceed, exist in tension with the cultural and linguistic” (3). His book works to fuse together the old and the new, revisiting familiar postmodern texts while rethinking configurations of biopolitics.

Though he agrees with Foucault that the emergence of biopolitics long precedes the latter half of the twentieth century, Breu contends that the postmodern era provides an excellent ground for analysis as it is simultaneously “preoccupied with immateriality” and “defined by biopolitics” (2). Looking at the transition out of modernism alongside the transition into late capitalism, Breu identifies a distinct aesthetic within literary postmodernism that he deems the “late-capitalist literature of materiality,” and which, in contrast to the self-reflexivity of metafictional texts, “presents the issue of materiality as one of the core questions of contemporary existence” (23). In Chapter One, Breu takes up one of the foundational texts of experimental postmodernism, William Burrough’s Naked Lunch, a novel that he argues provides theoretical insight into “three different registers of materiality—linguistic, bodily, and political economic” (38). Chapter Two turns to Thomas Pynchon’s first novel, V., to examine the complex dynamic at work between subject and object as read through biomedicalization, colonialism, and fetishism. Chapter Three focuses on J.G. Ballard’s 1973 novel Crash, particularly the novel’s representation of late capitalism in which material bodies become indistinguishable from their assertively industrialized environment, thereby providing a “dialectical flipside to the fantasies of material transcendence central to metafictional postmodernism” (97). Chapter Four looks to Dodie Bellamy’s The Letters of Mina Harker for its attention to the materiality of the human body in death and its active resistance to biopolitical notions of performativity and control against the backdrop of San Francisco’s AIDS epidemic. The final chapter takes as its object Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead and the novel’s negotiations between a late-capitalist world of overproduction and an ecological vision that attends to the material world.

As many of the theories of materiality that Breu cites are relatively new (especially as they relate to literary hermeneutics), there does not yet seem to be a set standard by which to perform a literary analysis of materiality. Breu capitalizes on this ambiguity by implementing various methodological approaches in each chapter and interpreting the “material” on micro and macro levels. When discussing Naked Lunch, for example, he examines the way in which Burroughs engages materiality through syntactic and semantic means, thereby centering the focus on material corollaries that arise from the idiosyncratic prose. In contrast to a material analysis of language, in the chapter on Ballard’s Crash, Breu performs a material analysis of the built environment depicted in the novel—an analysis he pairs with a reinvigorated configuration of Marx’s base/superstructure model. Breu’s varied approach to materiality works well for his purposes, in that it places an implicit emphasis on the similarities that carry through each analysis—the role of capitalism, politics, and medicalization in shaping biopolitics. His refusal to subscribe to a consistent material analysis might also serve as a suggestion that materiality’s “insistence” will reveal itself regardless of theoretical blinders.

The book could well be regarded as a successor to Brian McHale’s Postmodernist Fiction (1987) in that Breu, too, calls for ontological treatment of similar texts. However, Breu breaks from McHale’s treatment of the author as “fantasized controller of the fiction, as the maker of worlds and subjects,” a supposition in which Breu finds “the humanist fetish that lurks behind posmodernism’s ostensible antihumanism” (105). In this instance and many others, he echoes the anticorrelationist paradigm prevalent in theories of materiality, especially object-oriented ontology (OOO), to which Breu gravitates, drawing substantially on two prominent theorists from the field, Levi Bryant and Graham Harman. It is at once a precarious and admirable endeavor—to denounce a human-centered, epistemological perspective while simultaneously explicating text objects for a predictably human audience. It is precisely this paradoxical situation that critics place at the center of their skepticism (cf. Andrew Cole’s “The Call of Things: A Critique of Object-Oriented Ontologies”). Breu acknowledges the problematic by emphasizing the material world’s recalcitrance to human probing, while also noting that the limits of human inquiry do not provide a “reason to turn away from the attempt at such an account” (1). Here and elsewhere, Breu echoes the political and ethical imperative at the heart of Timothy Morton’s application of OOO. While Morton emphasizes the need to rethink global warming, Breu’s ethical compulsion is directed at the power dynamics that exert the greatest control over national biopolitics (notably, capitalism and biomedicalization). In this respect, the book builds on the ethical framework of Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, which asserts the agency of the inanimate in political, medical, and environmental discourse. Breu complements Bennett’s argument with his added focus on thanatopolitics, the deadly inversion of biopolitics that inevitably accompanies it as a result of the ontological privileging that both Bennett and Breu argue against.

Throughout the chapters, Breu works to contrast his discussion of biopolitics with that of thanatopolitics, a concept developed by Robert Esposito for whom biopolitics, by its nature, privileges “one community, nation, or group as immune” (17); thanatopolitics, then, vindicates violence against those outside the privileged sector on the basis of “immunity.” The fragile distinction between biopolitics and thanatopolitics creates a fascinating dichotomy in each chapter. For instance, in his chapter on V., Breu discusses thanatopolitics in application to the famously odd scene in which Esther, a Jewish woman, gets a nose job from the plastic surgeon Schoenmaker. The martial language that underscores the description of her surgery, argues Breu, indicates the way in which wartime thanatopolitical practices continue throughout the postwar era under the guise of biopolitics, in this case, biomedical “correction” (69). The relationship of biopolitics to thanatopolitics is entirely different in his discussion of Bellamy’s The Letters of Mina Harker. Here Breu writes that Bellamy’s refusal to conform to the homophobic rhetoric that pervaded discourse during the 1980s AIDs epidemic combats a thanatopolitical construction that conveniently places homosexuals at the epicenter of the disease (136).

The chapter on Bellamy deserves to be underscored as particularly important in its theoretical context. In this chapter, Breu best synthesizes theories of materiality with cultural criticism through his use of queer theory and feminist theory to discuss the ways the human body as physical phenomenon “elude[s] our fantasies of symbolic control” (32). Theories of materiality often face criticism for an intense focus on nonhuman actors while issues of race, sexuality, and gender continue to permeate political discourse. This chapter functions as a treatise of sorts, demonstrating how materiality can be thought through a cultural lens and culture through a materialist one. Breu performs a similar synthesis in his chapter on Silko’s Almanac of the Dead in which he reads the novel’s ecological vision of a “sustainable and just life” (159) in light of political-economic dynamics, thereby exploring ecological readings through Marxism. As in his chapter on Bellamy, Breu’s chapter on Silko brings new relevance to both ecological and Marxist theories by revealing how they shape each other in the context of late-capitalism.

In light of this summary, it should come as no great surprise that the book has a tendency to hop across theoretical spheres in a way that is at times dizzying. Moreover, through the inclusion of a wide theoretical base, important points of contrast between theories, especially the materialist theories—say, key points of difference between Ian Bogosts’s use of OOO and Bill Brown’s “material unconscious”—are taken largely for granted. Instead of fully attending to the differences responsible for demarcations within the umbrella of “theories of materiality,” Breu relies on their philosophical similarities when pairing these theories alongside canonical postmodern theory. Though it may not harm his argument outright, it does invite questions about the compatibility of specific theories with a synthetic, ontological understanding of postmodern texts. Perhaps this is the next step for scholars interested in developing understandings of materiality alongside postmodernism. Fittingly, Breu seems to anticipate this future work. In his conclusion he offers several propositions, among them a guiding principle for future applications: “Theory and critical thought should work to disrupt their fantasies of mastery while still attempting to be as adequate as possible to their objects” (190).

Not only does The Insistence of the Material ambitiously attempt to rethink familiar texts from late twentieth-century postmodernism, it also serves as an account of the ways in which postmodernism survives today—and not just as a zombie that refuses to die. At a moment when the humanities have largely turned to interdisciplinary approaches and exciting new syntheses to stake their relevance, Breu demonstrates that postmodernism is more than capable of contributing to the interdisciplinary discussion. In his conclusion he writes, “In order to deal with the challenges of the material turn and the growth of biopolitics, we need to be politically creative and theoretically impure” (194). Thus, to engage with and respond to the materialist turn is not a movement inward, but outward. In doing so, Breu makes visible how a new postmodernism rears its “uncanny visage.”

Works Cited

• Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke UP, 2010. Print.
• Bogost, Ian. Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2012. Print.
• Cole, Andrew. “The Call of Things: A Critique of Object-Oriented Ontology.” The Minnesota Review 2013.80 (2013): 106–118. Web. 21 May 2016.
• McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. London: Routledge, 1987. Print.

Christopher Law (bio)
Goldsmiths, University of London

Jessica Whyte, Benjamin Noys, Jason E. Smith and Alberto Toscano. “The Ends of Homo Sacer.” Roundtable discussion on the work of Giorgio Agamben. Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought, Goldsmiths, University of London, 10 November 2015.

On November 10, 2015 a group of four scholars of Giorgio Agamben’s work gathered at Goldsmiths, University of London for a roundtable organized by the college’s recently formed Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought (CPCT). Contributing to the event, and representing a diverse array of interests in Agamben’s work, were Jessica Whyte, Benjamin Noys, Jason E. Smith and Alberto Toscano (who, alongside the roundtable chair Julia Ng, acts as co-director of the CPCT). The event was dubbed “The Ends of Homo Sacer,” a title whose most obvious motivation was the recent publication of Agamben’s Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm and of L’uso dei corpi (recently published in English as The Use of Bodies). The former book, originally delivered as two lectures in October 2001, slots into an earlier position in Agamben’s nine-book Homo Sacer series, whilst the latter marks its ostensible termination, if not its completion. As is well known, the series has been published out of the order envisioned by Agamben himself (a confusion to which the delayed publication of Stasis adds, since it displaces a spot previously accorded to The Kingdom and the Glory). Both the elusive ordering of the project and the question of its conclusion provided food for thought throughout the evening; neither problem, needless to say, attained definitive closure.

Though all panelists addressed the appearance of Stasis and The Use of Bodies—and with them, Homo Sacer’s curious publication history as a whole—only Smith drew direct attention to the plurality of “ends” in the event’s title. There are, as Smith pointed out, at least two levels at which this title is productively ambiguous. It poses the challenge that there might exist more than one conclusion to Homo Sacer and, moreover, suggests a multiplicity of meanings in such “ends” themselves (a semantic indeterminacy to which the plurality of ends is related but not necessarily reducible). What other meanings might Homo Sacer’s multiplicity of ends hold? As well as termini, ends can point to purposes, whether those of Agamben himself, or those of his readers and interlocutors. A panoramic glance reveals homo sacer as a concept that has (especially in its canonical formulation in the opening pages of the series’ first and eponymous volume) detached itself from its immediate context, in order to function as a tool for almost all disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Much of this event’s relevance hinged on a critical reflection on the concept’s exile into other disciplines, a phenomenon seemingly matched by the intensification of the contemporary political crises to which Agamben has always accorded a structural significance.

This nomadic quality of homo sacer illuminates another equivocal element in the event’s title: the separability of the research project and book series Homo Sacer not only from the philosophical concept, but also from the historically specific legal figure (and its textual inscription) and, furthermore, from contemporary or historical homines sacri. Jessica Whyte’s paper, the most expressly concerned with contemporary crises of sovereignty, raised similar questions concerning the displacement of technical terms onto a generalized register. She was less preoccupied with the figure of homo sacer, however, than with the term “collateral damage” and its contemporary use as a justification for acts and ideologies of military and socio-economic ruination. The loss of human (and specifically civilian) life that military intervention requires, Whyte’s talk made clear, necessitates for its ideologues an appeal to higher sources in order to justify the suffering it causes. The term’s elasticity, as Whyte demonstrated, also allows it to be redeployed as a metaphor in the discourse of free markets and their enforcement upon indebted countries (Whyte referred to Yanis Varoufakis’s description of Greece as the “collateral damage” of the European Central Bank’s strategy to save the Eurozone by encouraging widespread austerity). Itself performing the wandering of the term “collateral damage,” Whyte’s approach skidded from the Christian theologies of Thomas Aquinas, Nicolas Malebranche and Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet to religious apologias for the Greek crisis, and negotiated problems of sovereignty and governance from Adam Smith to Friedrich Hayek via Carl Schmitt. Models of a calculating but restful God, drawn primarily from Malebranche, and an actively pain-causing, interventionist one, taken from Bossuet, were offered as opposed paradigms for figures of sovereignty, only to be united at the end of Whyte’s presentation; a shift from sovereignty to economic governance demands, after all, the continuation of the right to kill alongside the techniques by which destruction can be normalized as a calculable letting-die. Collateral damage, rather than naming an unwanted effect of discrete actions, is put to use within the discourse of the law. A government reneging on its democratic mandate, enforced privatization, a sustained rise in suicides: these are not simply the collateral damage of measures that had to be imposed on Greece but, more significantly, they create a lawful norm according to which governments of indebted countries are forced to surrender the democratic will of their citizens. Collateral damage justifies the formalization of a non-legal process (the killing of civilians, an act which is said to be known but not intentional) into the law.

Homo sacer becomes a philosophical concept for Agamben precisely because of its locus in the legal formalism of Rome. Of all the contributors, Jason Smith was the most pointed in drawing out the limitations of Agamben’s focus on the apparatuses through which alegal or paralegal practices become structured and defined by their inclusive exclusion within the law. Smith contextualized Agamben’s use and transformation of homo sacer through a reference to Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France in 1972 and 1973 (published in English as The Punitive Society), which is where Agamben discovered the concept, according to Foucault’s editors. While Agamben presents homo sacer as an obscure figure of law, Foucault shows that it was a relatively common form of punishment, according to Smith’s reading; the decisive difference, however, lies in Foucault’s emphasis on its unwritten nature, its lack of incorporation within a legal framework.

Attention to such parallels and divergences might threaten to sap the force of Agamben’s project, and it is surely not uncommon for events such as this one to undermine the premise of reading Agamben in a political context in the first place. Indeed, when the table fielded questions from the audience, Benjamin Noys carried out the somewhat unenviable task of advocating for Agamben’s idiosyncrasies with a provocative grace—if the “ends” of Homo Sacer are to remain a problem, the strangeness of Agamben’s methods demands a measure of fidelity. Nonetheless, Smith’s intention was less to historicize homo sacer than to ask whether Foucault’s articulation of exclusion makes the term’s modern history more legible, and expresses its heretofore unrealized dynamism. On the one hand, exclusion is a non-legal penalty whose afterlife determines punishment right through to the predominance of popular “scorn,” “contempt” or “infamy,” even in the late eighteenth century; indeed, it is only against the frame of this alegality that a general war against illegality—and a guarantee of control over an emergent working population—could take the form of mass incarceration. On the other hand, Smith argued, the tactic of exclusion has an immanent capacity to reemerge as the removal of juridical mediation in revolutionary forms of justice (Maoist, it was said). As provocative as this proposal was, it would have taken a different event—focused on a different set of texts, thinkers, and traditions—to work through its philosophical and legal ramifications, let alone its potential implications for problems of citizenship, sovereignty, and resistance in the contemporary world.

Alberto Toscano’s talk focused on Agamben’s use of “civil war” in Stasis, in contrast with Foucault’s use of the concept to describe the permanent state of exception inaugurated by mass incarceration. Toscano argued that Plato’s account of the relation between stasis and kinesis, which he rendered as immobility and movement, was absent from Agamben’s attempt to examine the problem of stasis in the ancient Greece. Although this was a welcome response to Agamben’s text, which readers might habitually assume carries out all the necessary etymological labour for them, the argument that Agamben is forced (as, perhaps, a “quiet Platonist” himself, in Whyte’s formulation) to more or less exclude Plato from his account was a little overstated. Toscano considered the role of stasis as a mediator between oikos and polis, terms more or less mappable onto the distinction of zoē and bios integral to the Homo Sacer project. For Toscano and Nicole Loraux, with whom Agamben’s text directly engages, the disarticulation of natural blood ties is enough to prove that the oikos in ancient Greece is always already politicized, that it cannot be thought at any point as an object of bare life, and that doing so enacts a formalization whose aim—or “end,” as it were—is to legitimize a false continuity between distinct moments of Western politics. Ritual, legal, and familial incongruities between Greece and Rome were offered as examples of that which Agamben’s method conceals with telling regularity. Toscano suggested that Agamben’s intervention ignores the peculiarity of this theme of artificial fraternity in Plato—what others have generalized as Plato’s communism—but Agamben himself is quite explicit in downplaying the theme of a “false fraternity” (Stasis 9). For Agamben, it is precisely the relegation of stasis to the role of revealing the oikos in the polis that requires correction. When rethought from the perspective of Agamben’s seminal articulation of inclusive exclusion, stasis comes to constitute a zone of indifference or undecidability between household and city, a threshold of politicization and depoliticization. Agamben’s concluding argument that global terrorism constitutes today’s predominant form of civil war might have proven a more productive point of debate, not least since it is predicated on the assumption of a perspective (the terrorist one) that no longer differentiates between polis and oikos, figuring the latter either as the “Common European Home” or as “the absolute space of global economic management” (24).

As Toscano argued, in the earlier parts of the Homo Sacer project, stasis does not count among the terms that Agamben attempts to rescue from their associations with abject experiences or forms. However, it could be counted alongside the “positive” orientation of the series’ more recently published volumes. Benjamin Noys traced this apparent shift by offering a succinct set of observations on three sets of relations: those within the Homo Sacer project, those between the project as a whole and Agamben’s earlier work, and those between the Homo Sacer texts and their potential readership. Noys suggested that Agamben’s articulation of a new notion of “use”—despite its affirmative sense—remains provisional relative to his pre-Homo Sacer output, and a far cry from the “affirmationism” that has characterized certain rehearsals of biopolitical theory. Noys outlined this characteristic of recent works vis-à-vis Agamben’s interest in the representation of totalitarian biopolitics in Sade; at the Château de Silling, every element of physiological life, in being identified with the law, is potentially public, classifiable, and thus susceptible to being used as an object of pleasure. If such situations mirror capital’s absolute subsumption, both in the danger it poses and in its promise of reversal within the law itself, Noys argues that Agamben’s recently lowered “tone” concerning both the implementation and perceptibility of this possible reversal is influenced by Walter Benjamin’s retelling of a Hasidic narrative about the world after the messianic coming—in which, as Benjamin wrote to Ernst Bloch, “everything will be as it is now, just a little different” (qtd. in The Coming Community 53).

Noys noted Agamben’s characterization of the Homo Sacer project as incompleteable and abandoned (L’uso dei corpi 9) in order to indicate the potential similarities between Agamben’s toned-down concepts and the project’s fragmentary status.¹ This begged the question of whether it is possible for readers to find a new use of Agamben. The conceptual afterlife of homo sacer was the theme of most audience questions, and the term’s limitations were predominantly figured in two ways. Toscano argued that Agamben’s relatively unreflexive approach to the conditions of possibility for categories such as “the West,” “the Greeks,” “the Jews,” even “Judeo-Christianity” (a term that only came into common use in the late 1940s), impedes an understanding of their retroactive nature. Similarly, the question of Agamben’s relation to colonialism led Smith to restate his position that the methodological drift by which a specific form of punishment comes to stand in for a particular human life and then for human life as such (or, at another level, the drift from “homo sacer” to homo sacer to Homo Sacer) inevitably restricts what the term might mean at each point, and therefore curbs its productive reversibility for anti-capitalist and anti-colonial struggles.

As the evening ended, attention turned to the textual singularities of Agamben’s work: its typographic consistency, the use of “thresholds,” the significance of the Hebrew character aleph; Agamben’s “piety” to his philosophical influences within his books themselves; and the architectonic peculiarity of the Homo Sacer project as such. All of this reflected a dynamic in Agamben’s reception that seems to hinge on the perceived relations between his earlier and later works. For the majority of readers whose focus is on the Homo Sacer project, its promises and limitations for contemporary political crises are obvious, and remain only in need of spelling out. For readers of Agamben’s earlier work, its philosophy of language constitutes a means of interpreting the later politically-oriented research, but often at the expense of ignoring the aporias and shortcomings of the earlier writings, especially those outstanding from Agamben’s occasional polemics. As a whole, the roundtable would have benefited from a better situation of Agamben in his theoretical and philosophical contexts. Considering the wider problem of “tone” as it is formulated from Kant to Derrida, for instance, could have problematized Agamben’s notion of “use” and the model of transcendence that, arguably, continues to structure his thought. Despite, or rather because of, the quality of contributions at this event, it seems clear that the philosophical and methodological heterogeneity of Agamben’s writings, and of his readers, demands critical engagement at the closest proximity, perhaps closer than this roundtable could offer. A hope of my own, following this event, is that it might give rise to such critical groupings, from which the political actuality of Agamben’s thought ought to be inseparable.

Footnotes

1. Agamben’s proposal that this incompletability applies to works of poetry as well as thought suggests another referent of the event’s title: the concluding section of his Categorie italiane (1996), which gave rise to its English translation as The End of the Poem.

Works Cited

• Agamben, Giorgio. The Coming Community. Trans. Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. Print.
• ———. L’uso dei corpi. Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 2014. Print.
• ———. Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm. Trans. Nicholas Heron. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2015. Print.

Duy Lap Nguyen (bio)
University of Houston

Abstract

This essay outlines a critique of the autonomist theory of post-Fordism as a stage of capitalism defined by immaterial forms of production that purportedly constitute “value beyond quantification,” which is to say, value exceeding the measure of spatialized time. The essay argues that this concept of immaterial labor – proposed as a corrective to Marx’s “quantitative theory of value” – elides the crucial distinction in Marx’s analysis between two entirely different kinds of spatialized time: the time required for the production of material goods and the time that determines their (exchange) value. This elision, the essay argues, results in a fundamental mischaracterization of contemporary capitalism.

Spatialized Time and the “Quantitative Theory of Value” in Capital

For past thirty years, the theory of post-Fordist production developed in the works of Autonomist Marxists (including Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno and Franco Berardi) has provided one of the most widely employed critical frameworks for understanding the increasing significance of culture, affect, information, and digital labor in the contemporary global economy. This theory emerged, in part, out of a phenomenological critique of the spatialized concept of time (as the measure of value) employed in Marx’s analyses of capitalism. For the Autonomists, this spatialized time – inherited from the Western metaphysical tradition – is no longer sufficient as a measure of value, given the prevalence within contemporary capitalism of immaterial (and immeasurable) forms of production. As I show in this essay, this account of post-Fordist production is based upon a fundamental misreading of Marx. The critique of the Autonomist reading of Marx outlined below draws extensively on the reinterpretation of Marx’s mature critical theory developed by thinkers – including Norbert Trenkle, Robert Kurz, Jean-Marie Vincent, Hans-Georg Backhaus and Moishe Postone – associated with the Marxian school of critical theory known as Wertkritik, or value critique. In particular, my analysis attempts to build upon the critique of Autonomist Marxism elaborated by Robert Kurz and Anselm Jappe in Les Habits neufs de l’Empire, as well as upon the critique of the Autonomist notion of bio-political production outlined in the work of Tiqqun. These texts extend Marx’s critique of the commodity form to an analysis of important secular trends within the contemporary global economy, including the decline of stable rates of exchange, the rise of financial derivatives, the prevalence of precarious labor, and the increasingly predominant role of information in the global economy. These developments, which have been the focus of Autonomist Marxist analyses of post-Fordist production, have been largely ignored in earlier works associated with Wertkritik, limiting the latter’s potential as critique. In proposing a critical reading of Autonomist theories of post- Fordist production, based on the work of the Wertkritik school and on related interpretations of Marx, this essay addresses this important limitation.

In Empire, Hardt and Negri situate Marx’s theory of value within the “great Western metaphysical tradition:” From “Aristotle’s theory of virtue as a measure to Hegel’s theory of measure as the key to the passage from existence to essence,” this tradition is one that “has always abhorred the immeasurable.” “Marx’s theory of value pays its dues to this metaphysical tradition: his theory of value is always been a theory of the measure of value” (Hardt and Negri, 2000, p. 355).¹

This account of Marx’s theory of value appears to rely upon Heidegger’s critique of the “vulgar conception of time” in the history of Western metaphysical thought. In Being and Time, Heidegger argues that, in both Aristotle and Hegel, the passage of time is understood as a succession of homogeneous “now-points” that is conceived on the model of the movements of physical objects in space (see Derrida 34-35). For Heidegger, it is this conversion of time into space that allows the former to serve as a measure of movement:1 time becomes subject to quantification through its reduction to spatialized units. In Marx’s theory of value, this vulgar conception of spatialized time is applied to an analysis of the exploitation of labor in capitalism.² As Melinda Cooper describes in her reading of Negri’s interpretation of Marx: “Aristotle’s writings on exchange and measure … [and] Hegel’s Science of Logic, with its reflections on measure, the limit and quantity[,] … provide… the logical scaffolding for [Marx’s] theory of surplus value,” a theory that “defines exploitation as a measurable quantity, locating it in [capital’s] extortion of surplus labor” (128). The Marxian theory of value, therefore, is a “quantitative theory of value” (Hardt and Negri Commonwealth, 313) a theory that assumes that the value created by labor can be measured in spatialized time. This assumption makes it possible to quantify exploitation, and to locate the latter in the division of the working day into necessary and surplus labor time. In Marx’s “theory of measure” (Hardt and Negri, Empire 355), the exploitation of labor – defined as a “measurable quantity” (Cooper 128) – is localized in a determinate place and a delimited duration of time: the factory during the working day, separated from leisure or non-laboring time.

For the Autonomists, however, this quantitative theory of value – which defines exploitation as a measurable quantity that capital appropriates in the factory – no longer provides a sufficient account of the domination of time within capitalism due to the transformation of labor in post-Fordist production. This transformation, as Franco Berardi and others have argued, was in part the result of the struggles against work in the factory in the era of Fordist production, an era in which industrial workers sought “freedom from capitalist domination” by “refusing their role in the factory” (Berardi, “What is the Meaning”). In Negri’s writings from the period, this strategy of the “refusal of work” is identified with the notion, attributed to Marx, that free time is inherently emancipatory (Negri, Marx Beyond Marx 167). Rather than liberating labor from the exploitation of capital, however, the refusal of work precipitated the rise of flexible labor and the development of new technologies applied to the manipulation of free time outside the factory.³ As a result, the “whole of society,” as Negri explains in Time for Revolution, “becomes productive. The time of production is the time of life” (44).

For Negri, this transformation of labor marks a definitive break with the metaphysical conception of time that Marx’s theory inherits:

The new temporalities of bio-political production cannot be understood in the frameworks of the traditional conceptions of time. … [I]n postmodernity … the Aristotelian tradition [that “defines time by the measure of the movement between a before and an after”] is broken … most decisively by the fact that it is now impossible to measure labor, either by convention or by calculation. (Empire 401)

In postmodernity, then, value can no longer be quantified because its production is no longer a function of physical labor alone. Instead, the creation of value assumes an increasingly immaterial form, one that exceeds every standard of measurement. Knowledge, science, affect, and culture (as immaterial and immeasurable forms of activity) become the “the highest value- producing forms of labor” (Hardt, “Affective Labor” 90). In the postmodern economy, “as labor moves outside the factory walls,” activities associated with “life” or social existence – communication, cooperation, and social interaction in general – acquire the capacity to constitute value outside the measure of spatialized time imposed in the workplace. As a result, “it is increasingly difficult to maintain the fiction of any measure of the working day and thus separate … work time from leisure time” (Hardt and Negri, Empire 401-402). Due to the “social diffusion of living labor” – through which life itself is subsumed as a source of surplus value for capital – the “intellectual energy and … communicative [capacity] of the multitude of … affective laborers” no longer “has a determinate place. … [E]xploitation can no longer be localized and quantified” (Hardt and Negri, Empire 401-403). Thus, as the “entire time of life … becomes the time of production,” the site in which the production of value occurs becomes coextensive with society itself as whole. In bio-political production, therefore, the “value of labor … is determined deep in the viscera of life,” produced by a multitude whose social existence creates an immeasurable time through its ability to generate value beyond every measure: “The activity of the multitude constitutes time beyond measure. Time might thus be defined as the immeasurability of the movement between a before and an after, an immanent process of constitution” (Hardt and Negri, Empire 401-402).

The immeasurable time, labor, and value produced by the multitude, then, constitutes a defining characteristic of a postmodern economy whose immaterial forms of production exceed the Aristotelian conception of time that Marx’s theory maintains as a measure of value. For Negri, this presupposition – that of “time-as-measure of value” (Negri, Time for Revolution 44) – constitutes the fundamental historical (and metaphysical) limit of Marx’s critical theory, a theory of the measure of value that emerged in a “period when capital was able to reduce value to measure” (Hardt and Negri, Empire 402): “The critique of political economy[,] … including the Marxist tradition, has generally focused on measurement and quantitative methods to understand surplus value and exploitation. Biopolitical products, however[,] … exceed all quantitative measurement” (Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth 135). “[W]hat escapes political economy,” therefore, and “freezes political economy in its tracks … is … value … beyond measure” (Hardt and Negri “Value and Affect” 87).

This account of post-Fordist production, of course, has been enormously influential in analyses of contemporary capitalism. In fields like anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, and new media theory, concepts like the “real subsumption of labor,” derived from Autonomist Marxism, have become a predominant model for analyzing what Tiziana Terranova describes as the emergence of new forms of technical, cultural, and cognitive work that appear to “question … the legitimacy of a fixed distinction between production and consumption, labor and culture” (Terranova, “Free Labor” 35). Blurring the distinction between free time and labor, these new forms of productive activity combine elements that were once exclusive to each. The result is a “labourization of social activity” giving rise to new paradoxical forms of temporal control in which freedom and servitude are conjoined in a “free labour” or “unwaged immaterial work” (Brown and Quan-Haase; Brown) that is “[s]imultaneously voluntarily given and unwaged, enjoyed and exploited” (Terranova, “Free Labor” 33)).

This essay outlines a critique of the Autonomist theory of post-Fordist production as a “social factory” (Hardt and Negri, Empire 273) in which immaterial forms of production, blurring the line between free time and labor, constitute value beyond quantification: value that can no longer be measured in spatialized time, and whose exploitation, therefore, is accomplished through new forms of temporal control that are no longer confined to either the factory or the “fiction” of a working day that can be clearly distinguished from free time or leisure (Hardt and Negri, Empire 402).

The concept of “value beyond measure” (which defines post-Fordist production) was derived in part from a reading of the so-called “Fragment on Machines,” a text that, for Autonomists – discussed in the final part of the paper – constitutes a radical departure from the “quantitative theory of value” developed in Capital. One of the main aims of this essay is to dispute this reading of Marx, and the relationship it proposes between the “Fragment” and Capital, as the textual basis for the Autonomist claim that immaterial labor in post-Fordist production creates value beyond measure. Contrary to the Autonomist reading, the “Fragment” does not imply a critique of the “quantitative theory of value” in Capital, but rather encapsulates the latter’s fundamental conclusions. The continuity between these two texts and their analyses is missed in the Autonomist reading because of the emphasis placed on the problem of measurability. The theory developed in both the “Fragment” and Capital, however, is not simply a theory of the measure of value; it is also – and more fundamentally – a critique of value itself, a (measurable) form that Marx defines in the “Fragment” as the very “foundation of bourgeois production” (Grundrisse 704). In the Autonomist reading of Marx, the critique of spatialized time (as the measure of value) ignores the historical character of the particular property (value) that it claims can no longer be quantified in post-Fordist production. As a result, the foundation of capitalism is affirmed in the immeasurable form of an immaterial labor that remains productive of value even while it exceeds all quantification.⁴

From the perspective of Marx’s critique, the focus on quantification conceals the difference between the creation of value (as the foundation of capitalism) and the process of production in general, both of which are measured in spatialized time. The same standard of measure is used to determine two entirely different kinds of duration: the time required for the production of goods and the time that determines their value. Because value is measured by labor time, a decrease in the time required for the production of goods – which should “equal to an increase in free time” (Marx, Grundrisse 711) – increases the time required for the production of value, thereby increasing the compulsion to labor. Because of this “antagonistic movement” in capitalism, the liberation from labor itself, from the time required for the production of goods, results in the domination of work by the time that determines their value (Marx, Capital 53). In the Autonomist reading of Marx, the contradictory movement between the (spatialized) time of production and valorization – which underlies the analysis in both the “Fragment” and Capital – is elided in the opposition between material and immaterial labor, measure and immeasurability. As a result, a crisis of value, which Marx believed would arise from this contradictory movement, is reduced to a crisis of quantification, as a consequence of the rise of an immaterial labor whose ability to constitute value exceeds measure itself. This theory of post-Fordist production, therefore, is based on a reading of Marx that fundamentally misrepresents his critique of both the domination of time under capitalism and the possibility of a liberation from labor, which the “Fragment” describes as a condition for the creation of post-capitalist society based on “disposable time” (Marx, Grundrisse, 708). ⁵

The Metaphysics of Value and Measure

Although the Heideggerian history of the concept of time that Negri appears to employ has been widely disputed,⁶ the references to this philosophical tradition in Marx’s critique would appear, at first sight, to correspond to Negri’s account of the latter as a theory of the measure of value. In the Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy, Marx explicitly formulates the notion of labor time as the measure of value in terms of Aristotle’s definition of time as the measure of motion: “Just as motion is measured by time, so is labor by labor time; it is the living quantitative reality (Dasein) of labor” (271-72). In Capital, moreover, the “discovery” that labor is the measure of value – which Negri defines as the limit of Marx’s analysis (“The limit of Marx’s consideration consists in his reducing the form of value to an objective measure” (Negri, Marxism Beyond Marxism 151) – is described as political economy’s most important achievement: “The scientific discovery … that the products of labour, so far as they are values, are but material expressions of the human labour spent in their production, marks, indeed, an epoch in the history of the development of the human race” (Marx, Capital 85).

Yet, although Marx accepts the validity of this “scientific discovery,” his critique of political economy cannot be reduced to its theory of the measure of value. For if Marx, in the passage above, “pays his dues” to a metaphysical tradition “that has always abhorred the immeasurable,” he also maintains, more importantly, that this theory of measure is based on the “metaphysical subtleties” of a commodity form whose mystery it entirely fails to unravel. As Marx emphasizes at the end of the sentence cited above, the “scientific discovery [that value is measured by labor time] … by no means … dissipates the mist through which the social character of labour appears to us to be an objective character of the products themselves” (Capital 85).

For Marx, therefore, what political economy and its theory of measure fails to demystify is not – in contrast to Negri’s critique of the theory – the “illusory manner” in which time is conceived on the model of space, but rather the illusion that value, determined by the duration of labor, is an objective characteristic of material objects. This property, however, is one that “no chemist has ever discovered … in a pearl or a diamond” (Capital 95). Political economy, then, is credited with the discovery of a scientific approach to the quantification of a “metaphysical” property that does not exist. It is a science that has succeeded in identifying the appropriate measure for a “supersensible” substance whose actuality is never called into question.

This critique of political economy draws upon Aristotle’s account of exchange in the Nicomachean Ethics, an account in which the method of measurement – and the principle that “all the comparables must possess an identical something whereby they are measured” (Aristotle 545) – is applied to the form of value. As Marx explains, this form is defined in the Ethics as a non-existing property attributed to incommensurable objects as a “makeshift” to allow exchange to occur:

“Exchange,” [Aristotle] says, “cannot take place without equality, and equality not without commensurability.”… Here … he … gives up the further analysis of the form of value. “It is … in reality … impossible that … unlike things can be commensurable” – i.e., qualitatively equal. Such an equalisation can only be something foreign to their real nature … only “a makeshift for practical purposes.” (Capital 68)

What Aristotle proposes, therefore, is a method with which to measure accurately a common “something” or attribute that does not exist in the material objects whose equivalence it serves to establish.⁷ Although this “common ‘something,’” as Marx explains, “cannot be either a geometrical, a chemical, or any other natural property of commodities” (Marx, Capital 44), its magnitude, nevertheless, can be measured like an empirical property. But because of its measurable quality, value – as a “purely social” relation, constitutive of a capitalist society based on the exchange of incommensurable products – can be confused for a natural substance:

One of the measures that we apply to commodities as material substances, as use values, will serve to illustrate… . Just as … iron, as a measure of weight, represents in relation to the sugar-loaf weight alone, so, in our expression of value, the material object, coat, in relation to the linen, represents value alone. … Here, however, the analogy ceases. The iron, in the expression of the weight of the sugar-loaf, represents a natural property common to both bodies, namely their weight; but the coat, in the expression of value of the linen, represents a non-natural property of both, something purely social, namely, their value. (Capital 65-66)

The same method of measurement, then, is used in order to quantify both empirical properties and the “purely social” abstraction of value. Contrary to the Autonomist reading, therefore, the difference between use and exchange value, in Marx’s analysis, is not defined in terms of the opposition between quality and quantity, measure and immeasurability.⁸ Rather, use and exchange value refer to two different kinds of abstraction, both of which can be measured or quantified.

This distinction – which, according to Marx, constitutes “the pivot on which a clear comprehension of political economy turns” (Marx, Capital 48) – is elided in Negri’s critique of political economy as a mode of analysis that has always “abhorred the immeasurable” (Hardt and Negri, Empire 355). Like political economy, then, Negri’s critique of the “illusory manner” in which value is reduced to its measure affirms the illusory character of value itself, as a measurable but non-natural “something” that conditions the exchange of commodities. If the “Aristotelian tradition of measure,” therefore, is incapable of conceiving of value beyond measure, Negri’s critique of this metaphysical tradition remains bound to the limits of a political economy that, according to Marx, is incapable of thinking beyond value itself and its metaphysical subtleties. While Negri’s critique of the labor theory of value, therefore, rejects the metaphysics of measurement, it remains squarely within the metaphysics of value that constitutes, in Marx’s analysis, the fundamental presupposition of political economy.

As Marx argues, moreover, this presupposition – which constitutes “one of the chief failings of classical economy” (Marx, Capital 93) – has its origins in the universality of the value relation in capitalism. Because of its general character in capitalism, value – as a historically determinate form that the product of labor acquires in a bourgeois society based on the exchange of commodities – appears as an eternal and self-evident fact, a natural property that political economy can scientifically measure, but whose immutable existence it merely assumes:

[C]lassical economy … treat[s] the form of value as … having no connexion with the inherent nature of commodities. The reason for this is not solely because their attention is entirely absorbed in the analysis of the magnitude of value. It lies deeper. The value form of the product of labour is … the most universal form . . . taken by the product in bourgeois production … [and] thereby gives it its special historical character. If then we treat this mode of production as one eternally fixed by Nature for every state of society, we necessarily overlook that which is the differentia specifica of the value form. (Marx, Capital 93)

Political economy, then, is limited to a theory of measure because it assumes that the form that it measures – the determination of value by labor – exists in every society (an assumption that arises from the general character of the commodity form within capitalism). As a result, the defining historical feature of capitalism itself – its differentia specifica as a “definite historical … epoch when the labour spent on the production of a useful article becomes expressed as one of the objective qualities of that article, i.e., as its value” (Marx, Capital 93) – appears in political economy as an eternal and natural given.

This presupposition, of course, is preserved in Negri’s critique of political economy, which rejects the latter’s theory of measure but shares its fundamental assumption that value is “eternally fixed.” Thus, if the limit of Marx’s critique consists, as Negri maintains, “in reducing the form of value to an objective measure” (Negri, “Interpretation of the Class Situation Today” 71) the limit of Negri’s analysis lies in the fetishistic assumption that the form of value itself is an objective characteristic of the product of labor in all states of society. In Negri’s attempt to apply a phenomenological critique of spatialized time to Marx’s theory of value, therefore, the historically determinate problem of value is conflated with the problem of quantification in general. But as such, the concept of a bio-political production that constitutes value beyond every measure – proposed as a corrective to the historical limitations of Marx’s critique of political economy – is based on an ahistorical understanding of value, one that eternalizes the particular form “taken by the product in bourgeois production.”

Value and Immaterial Labor

This form – as the differentia specifica of bourgeois production – is presupposed in the Autonomist periodization of post-Fordist production as defined by a shift from material to immaterial labor, from a “period when capital was able to reduce value to measure” (Hardt and Negri, Empire 402), to an immeasurable form of production that escapes the quantitative theory of value developed in Capital. This presupposition is particularly clear in Paolo Virno’s discussion of immaterial labor. In A Grammar of the Multitude, Virno maintains that, for Marx, labor can generate value only by objectifying itself in a material object. In Marx’s analysis, “productive labor” – that is, labor that is productive of value – is necessarily labor that produces a physical product.

This assumption, however, “falls to pieces” in post-Fordist production, in which labor acquires the characteristics of an artistic performance: “[T]hose who produce surplus value behave … like the dancer,” a performer whose work does not produce a material “object distinguishable from the performance itself” (Virno 52). In post-Fordist production, therefore, labor generates value by producing an “activity without an end product” (Virno 52). According to Virno, this “labor without an end product (virtuosic labor) places Marx in an embarrassing situation,” since his theory assumes that only material labor is productive of value (54).

The problem of immaterial labor, of course – as Virno correctly contends – was largely excluded from Marx’s theory of capitalism due to the insignificant role that it played in the period of industrialization. In the “Results of the Direct Production Process” (the text that Virno employs in his reading), Marx maintains that “non-material production” (encompassing labor that “cannot be converted into products separable from the workers themselves”) can be “left out of account entirely” because this particular form of production is “infinitesimal … in comparison with the mass of [material] products under capitalist production” (448-452).

But if Marx, because of the limits imposed by the historical stage in which he developed his theory, believed that immaterial labor was too insignificant “to be considered when dealing with capitalist production as a whole” (“Results” 452), contrary to Virno, this theory does not simply assume that immaterial labor – or “activity without an end product” – is incapable of creating value. On the contrary, in the same section cited by Virno, Marx makes exactly the opposite argument: “A singer who sings like a bird is an unproductive worker…. The same singer [however] when engaged by an entrepreneur who has her sing in order to make money, is a productive worker, for she directly produces capital” (Marx, “Results” 448). A service, therefore, can be productive of value without producing a material product: “kinds of work which are only enjoyed as services … are capable of being exploited directly in the capitalist way [i.e., for surplus value], even though they cannot be converted into products separable from the workers themselves” (Marx, “Results” 448. Emphasis added).

For Marx, then, “productive labor” – as labor that is productive of value – is not defined by its material or immaterial content – that is, by whether it “results in commodities which exist separately from the producer,” or produces a “product … inseparable from the act of producing it.” Rather, Marx states unequivocally that: “productive labour … has absolutely nothing to do with the particular content of the labour… Labour with the same content can therefore be both productive and unproductive” (“Results” 448).⁹

As Marx mentions, moreover, this tendency within political economy to classify labor that counts as productive according to the content it creates arises from the “fetishistic” assumption that the (“purely social”) form of value exists as an objective characteristic of the product of labor, a product that, in capitalism, becomes a “material repositor[y]” for the form of value itself:

[T]he obsession with defining productive and unproductive labor in terms of its material content derives from … 1) the fetishistic notion, peculiar to the capitalist mode of production … that the formal economic determinations, such as being a commodity, or being productive labor … are qualities belonging to the material repositories of these formal determinations … in and of themselves; 2) the idea that, considering the labour process as such, only such labour is productive as results in a product (a material product, since here it is only a question of material wealth). (“Results” 450)

The description of the commodity in the passage above as a material repository for the formal determination of value is indicative, of course, of the limits imposed by Marx’s historical context, a period marked by the predominance of material production (which led Marx to assume that immaterial labor could be “left out of account entirely”). The problem, however, is primarily a terminological one, an ambiguity in the technical language employed in Marx’s critique, one that Virno interprets as the “embarrassment” of a theory that precludes the possibility that immaterial labor can be productive of value. For Marx, “material wealth” – produced by a “material process of production” as opposed to the formal determination of value – is a category that also includes immaterial products and forms of activity. The content of labor that serves as a material repository for value can also “consist … of extremely paltry products (use values), serving to satisfy the most miserable appetites, fancies, etc. But content is entirely irrelevant to whether the labour is determined to be productive or not” (Marx, “Results” 448). Thus, the use values or “material products” in which the value form is deposited can include both imaginary and useless productions: “labour is productive as produces capital; hence that labour which does not do this, regardless of how useful it may be – it may just as well be harmful – is … unproductive labour” (Marx, Grundrisse 306).

Moreover, instead of assuming that labor is productive of value only if it produces a material product, Marx – in the second point made in the earlier passage – insists that the predominance of material production in industrial capitalism disguises the fact that value can also emerge from immaterial services. This misconception, moreover, perpetuates the fetishistic illusion that labor itself, whether it assumes the form of a material product or an immaterial action, is identical to the creation of value. The “obsession with defining productive and unproductive labor in terms of its material content derives from … the idea that … only such labour is productive as results in … a material product” (Marx, “Results” 450), an idea that reinforces the fetishistic appearance that the formal determination of value is an objective characteristic of both service and labor as such.

The production of value, therefore – as something “peculiar to the capitalist mode of production” – is distinct from production in general, regardless of whether the latter produces a material good or an immaterial product inseparable from the act of producing it. As Marx explains: “Service … in general [is] only an expression for the particular use value of labour, in so far as this is useful not as a material object but as an activity” (“Results” 451). In capitalist production, however, the conversion of “all services … [“from the prostitute’s to the king’s”] … into wage labour … gives … grounds for confusing the two” (Marx, “Results” 446). As a result, services, like that of the singer whose performance generates value without creating a material product, are identified with immaterial labor in general. According to Marx, this confusion “makes it easy to pass over in silence the differentia specifica of this ‘productive worker’, and of capitalist production – as the production of surplus value, as the process of the self-valorisation of capital” (“Results” 446). The differentia specifica that defines the “productive worker” in capitalism, of course, is the ability to be productive of value, a property that constitutes the differentia specifica of the product of labor within bourgeois society. Thus, the immaterial form of value is a “non-natural” property that is distinct from its material and immaterial “repositories,” from the (potentially useless and imaginary) use values created by production or service in general.

In Virno’s account of post-Fordist production, the distinction between “productive labor” in capitalism and production and service in general is elided in the opposition between material and immaterial labor. But as such, the notion of a “virtuosic labor” that constitutes value without a material product – a notion that, according to Virno, defines the historical limits of Marx’s critique – presupposes the production of value as “eternally fixed.” But in that case, Marx’s critique of the concept of “productive labor” in classical bourgeois economy – which assumes that the production of value is the only “natural form of production” – also applies to the Autonomist notion of immaterial labor, which is based on the same “narrow-minded” confusion between value and “material wealth” (a category that can also include immaterial forms of activity):

Only the narrow-minded bourgeois, who regards the capitalist form of production … as the sole natural form of production, can confuse the question of what are productive labour and productive workers from the standpoint of capital with the question of
what productive labour is in general, and can therefore be satisfied with the tautological answer that all that labour is productive which produces, which results in a product, or any kind of use value, which has any result at all. (Marx, “Results” 443)

In Virno’s discussion of immaterial labor, the “differentia specifica of [the] ‘productive worker’” in capitalism is affirmed in the form of a multitude whose “labor is productive (of surplus-value) labor precisely because it functions in a … virtuosic manner” (29). Because this virtuosic labor does not objectify itself in the form of a physical product, its capacity for value creation, in contrast to industrial labor (with which Marx’s political economy was solely concerned), exceeds the metaphysics of measure that Marx inherits from Aristotle: “There is an easy measuring stick for the worker … which is quantitative: … the factory produce[s] so many pieces per hour… [With immaterial labor] it is different. … How does one measure the skill of a priest, or … a journalist, or … someone in public relations?” (Virno 26).

The Socially and Technically Necessary Time of Production

In Marx’s analysis, however, the metaphysical presupposition that defines the limit of political economy is not that the value created by labor can be measured in spatialized time. Rather, the fundamental question that political economy precludes is why value is determined by labor at all:

Political economy has … analysed … the magnitude of value. . . . It has never even so much as posed the question: Why does labour manifest itself in value … ? [These] forms … belong to a social formation wherein the process of production masters men but not yet does man master the process of production – such forms count for their bourgeois consciousness as just such a self-evident natural necessity as productive labour itself (Marx, Capital 92-3).

Political economy fails to grasp the determination of value by labor time as a distinguishing feature of bourgeois production because it identifies this phenomenon with productive labor in general, that is, with the production of use values as things and intangible services that “by [their natural or immaterial] properties satisf[y] human wants” (Marx, Capital 41). Productive labor, therefore – or what Marx refers to (ambiguously) as the “material process of production” – is distinct from the determination of value according to labor, from a “process of valorization” whose historical character is masked by its identification with productive labor as a condition of human existence in all forms of society.

This process of valorization is tied to what Marx describes in the passage above as a historically determinate form of social compulsion (“wherein the process of production masters men”), one that assumes the fetishistic appearance of the natural necessity to labor itself. Contrary to the Autonomist reading of Marx’s critique as a theory that “defines exploitation as a measurable quantity,” this compulsion cannot be identified with the exploitation of labor measured in spatialized units of time. In Capital, Marx insists upon the distinction between the exploitation of labor as a measurable quantity – which exists in both capitalist and non-capitalist societies – and the domination of labor by a process of valorization in which labor, as the measure of value, “appears to us to be an objective character of the products themselves” (Marx, Capital 85):

Compulsory labour [in feudalism] is just as properly measured by time … as commodity- producing labour. … No matter … what we may think of the parts played by the different classes of people themselves in [feudal] society, the social relations [in feudalism] … are not disguised under the shape of social relations between the products of labour. (Marx, Capital 89. Emphasis added)

Although labor, therefore, is measured in all forms of society, the labor that constitutes value – as a “social” relationship of equivalence between incommensurable products – entails a form of compulsion or “mastery” that cannot be reduced to either class exploitation (“No matter … what we may think of the parts played by the different classes of people”) or the natural necessity to labor in general. But since both forms of compulsion are “just as properly measured by time,” the time required to constitute value can be difficult to distinguish from the time required for production in general.

Economy of time, to this all economy ultimately reduces itself. Society … has to distribute its time in a purposeful way, in order to achieve a production adequate to its overall needs. … Thus, economy of time … remains the first economic law. … However, this is essentially different from a measurement of exchange values (labour or products) by labour time (Marx, Grundrisse 173. Emphasis added.).

The production of goods to meet the needs of society – that is, the production of use values that satisfy human desires – requires an organization of labor time, one that presupposes, of course, the quantification of labor. The need for an “economy of time,” however, is “essentially different” from the compulsion associated with labor time as the measure of exchange value (a compulsion that, because of its measurability, is conflated by political economy with the necessity of productive labor in general). In capitalism, workers are not only compelled – by necessity or class exploitation – to produce use values that satisfy needs. In order to obtain the “full” value of their commodities on the market, they must also produce them as a socially average rate of production: the “economy of time” imposed by the necessity to labor (as the “first law” for every society) is coupled in capitalism, then, with the social (and historically specific) compulsion of “socially necessary labor time,” a compulsion that is “just as properly measured” by spatialized time as the process of production itself.

For Marx, then, this socially necessary labor time cannot be identified with the spatialized time of production imposed in the factory during the working day, as the determinate location and time in which labor is quantified and exploited. Rather, as Marx describes in Capital, the homogeneous time imposed in the factory through the use of time-discipline and technology – through the “technical subordination of the workman to the uniform motion of the instruments of labour” (Marx, Capital 463) – is essentially different from the compulsion to labor at a socially average rate of production:

[In manufacture] [i]t is clear that the direct mutual interdependence of the different pieces of work … compels each [worker] to spend on his work no more than the necessary time. This creates a continuity, a uniformity, a regularity, an order, and even an intensity of labour. … [On the other hand] [t]he rule that the labour-time expended on a commodity should not exceed the amount socially necessary to produce it is one that appears, in the production of commodities in general, to be enforced from outside by the action of competition: to put it superficially, each single producer is obliged to sell his commodity at its market price. In manufacture, on the contrary, the provision of a given quantity of the product in a given period of labour is a technical law of the process of production itself. (Marx, Capital 379)

In this passage, Marx – developing the earlier distinction between productive labor and value – distinguishes between a socially necessary labor time, identified with the sphere of exchange (or the “action of competition”), and a technically necessary time of production that is applied in the factory. Although both forms of time are quantifiable (and thus spatialized), the time technically necessary to produce a particular product in a given period of time (which imposes “a continuity, a uniformity, a regularity” to which labor is compelled to conform) pertains to the production of goods, as opposed to their price or their value. This time, then, refers to the efficiency – or “economy of time” – achieved through the application of timesaving devices and discipline to the production of objects whose empirical (and immaterial) properties satisfy particular needs and desires. In the factory, then, a social compulsion, established in the sphere of exchange – and which therefore cannot be confined to the determinate time and space of the factory – forces producers (in the sphere of production) to adopt or develop the technical means required to achieve this temporal norm. Conversely, a reduction in the technically necessary time of production achieved in the factory can act reciprocally, in the sphere of exchange, to reduce the socially average rate of production that determines the value of goods.

As Marx argues in Capital, the “mutual interaction” between these two forms of temporal compulsion – which are elided in the Autonomist interpretation of Marx’s critique as a theory that defines exploitation as a measurable quantity – is rooted in the “antagonistic movement” between the spatialized time of production and valorization. Because exchange value is measured according to labor time, a more efficient economy of time (just as properly measured by spatialized time) – one that decreases the labor required to satisfy needs by increasing the quantity of use values that can be produced in a given period of time – can diminish the amount of exchange value expressed in commodities: “With two coats two men can be clothed, with one coat only one man. Nevertheless, an increased quantity of material wealth may correspond to a simultaneous fall in the magnitude of its value” (Marx, Capital 53). Thus, an increase in things that, by their empirical or immaterial properties, satisfy human desires, can correspond to a decrease in the “purely social” relation of value (as a property that the product of labor acquires in capitalism).

But since the use values that satisfy needs are obtained, under capitalism, through the exchange of commodities, a decrease in the exchange value created by labor (due to an increase in productivity that reduces socially necessary labor time) can result, paradoxically, in an increase in the social compulsion to work: “Hence … the economic paradox, that the most powerful instrument for shortening labour-time [i.e., machinery], becomes the most unfailing means for placing every moment of the labourer’s time … at the disposal of … expanding the value of … capital” (Marx, Capital 445). Laborers, then, must paradoxically work longer to generate value (measured in socially necessary labor time) because less time is required to produce use values that satisfy human desires. Due to the inverse relation between productive labor and value, therefore, a decrease in the natural necessity to labor can lead to an increase in the social compulsion to work. In capitalist production, the “saving of labour time”– which, in a “real economy,” based on the production of use values, would be “equal to an increase in free time” (Marx, Grundrisse 711) – prolongs the labor required in order to constitute value: the potential for free time, of freedom from labor, engenders a social domination or servitude that underlies a specific form of society “wherein the process of production masters men.”

Free Time and the Autonomist Reading of the “Fragment on Machines”

In the Autonomist reading of Marx, this antagonistic movement between concrete productive activity and socially necessary labor time is collapsed in the opposition between qualitative and quantitative time. As Robert Kurz has argued, the Autonomists fail to distinguish between the process of valorization – the “creation of value” measured according to socially necessary labor time – and the material process of production (a difference that follows directly from the distinction between use and exchange value) (Kurz 1).

This conflation is most readily apparent in the Autonomist interpretation of the “Fragment on Machines.” As Tiziana Terranova has noted, this text played a pivotal role in the development of Autonomist theories of post-Fordist production: “In the vivid pages of the ‘Fragment,’ [we see] the ‘other’ Marx of the Grundrisse … adopted by the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s against the more orthodox endorsement of Capital.” In the “Fragment,” Marx proposes what Paolo Virno describes as the “hardly Marxist” (100) suggestion that, with the rise of industrial production, science (and knowledge more generally) displaces direct human labor from its primary role in the process of production:

But to the degree that large industry develops, the creation of real wealth comes to depend less on labour time … than on … the general state of science and on the progress of technology. … Labour no longer appears so much to be included within the production process. … [G]eneral social knowledge has become a direct force of production…. [T]he conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it. … [L]abour time ceases and must cease to be … measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. … [The] theft of … surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth. … With that, production based on exchange value breaks down, and the direct, material production process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis. … (Marx, Grundrisse 705)

Eliding the distinction between valorization and material production, Virno, in his reading of this part of the “Fragment,” interprets Marx’s description of heavy industry – as a technical process in which knowledge, displacing direct human labor, becomes the “chief actor” in the production of use values¹⁰ – to imply that the immaterial labor of the “general intellect” has become the primary source of value creation. This “one-sided” reading, however, completely removes the “antithesis” – or antagonistic movement – that underlies Marx’s analysis in the “Fragment” (Osborne 21). For Marx, the application of knowledge and science as a direct force in material production invalidates the immaterial process of valorization, since it reduces socially necessary labor time to a “vanishing minimum,” thereby rendering labor time itself largely irrelevant as a measure of material wealth. “[L]abour time must cease to be … the measure … of use value” because labor no longer plays a significant role in the material process of production.¹¹ In the Autonomist account, on the other hand, this antagonistic movement between value and material wealth is elided in the opposition between measure and immeasurability, that is, between physical labor, which is subject to quantification, and an immaterial labor that is supposed to exceed every standard of measure. In Negri and Hardt’s terms, the displacement of direct human labor by the general intellect “negates every possibility of measure, even monetary measure” (82). As a result, “the value of labor-power is today … s-misurato (immeasurable and immense) … [,]outside of measure but at the same time beyond measure” (Negri and Hardt 82).¹²

Whereas for Marx, then, the application of the general intellect in the production of material wealth invalidates the creation of value measured according to labor time, for Hardt and Negri, the general intellect constitutes an immeasurable source of value creation, of value without measure, exchange value without equivalence. Thus, a crisis of value, resulting from the obsolescence of labor as the measure of exchange value, is reduced in the Autonomist reading to a “crisis of quantification,” resulting from the rise of immeasurable forms of immaterial work that remain productive of value.

In the Autonomist interpretation of Marx, this argument is attributed to the “Fragment” itself: Because Marx’s critique of temporal control presupposed spatialized time expropriated from physical labor, Marx believed that the crisis of measure would lead to the abolition of capital. However, contrary to this prediction (incorrectly attributed to Marx), the displacement of material labor did not lead to a “hotbed of crisis” (Virno 101). The immeasurability of immaterial labor did not create the conditions for the demise of capitalism, but instead, “has given rise to new and stable forms of power” (Virno 101). With the development of post-Fordist production, activities associated with non-laboring time – which, for the Autonomists, include not only science and technical knowledge, but also language, cognition, and affect – are subsumed as a new a source of surplus value for capital (Berardi, The Soul 33). In the social factory, there is no longer any “well defined threshold separating labor time from non-labor time” (Virno 103). The “qualitative difference between labor time and non-labor time” is completely collapsed (Virno 102), with the result that the exploitation of value, which was once only imposed on the labor performed in the factory during the working day, is extended to linguistic performance and other immaterial forms of activity that occur outside of the workplace: “Capital,” as Berardi explains, “must be absolutely free to expand in every corner of the world to find the fragment of human time available to be exploited” (Precarious Rhapsody 33). In that sense, “the post-Ford era is the full factual realization of the tendency described by Marx without, however, any emancipating consequences” (Virno 100). Thus, the “free time” that Marx mistook as a condition for the abolition of capital (Marx, Grundrisse 708) is subsumed in a new stage of production in which the “time of production is the time of life” (Negri, Time for Revolution 44). According to Berardi, therefore:

In the classical mode of industrial production … rule was based … on the possibility of determining the value of goods on the basis of socially necessary working time. But in [post-Fordist production] based on exploitation of fluid info-work, there no longer exists any deterministic relations between work and value (After the Future 92).¹³

This account of post-Fordist production is based upon a misreading of the concept of socially necessary labor time, one in which the latter is identified with the “spatial boundaries” of the working day. Marx’s critique of temporal domination is thereby reduced to an analysis of the exploitation of quantified time through the use of time discipline applied in the factory during the “dominant temporality” of the “normalizing day.”¹⁴ The alleged historical limitations in Marx’s approach – based on a nineteenth-century capitalism still largely confined to the production of material goods measured in spatialized units of time – can then be transcended, purportedly, by simply removing the “fiction” that supposedly separates labor from non-labor time, socially necessary labor time and free time, quantitative and qualitative time (Hardt and Negri, Empire 401-402).

For Marx, however, socially necessary labor time is not identified with the quantified time of production applied in the factory. Rather, it refers to a socially determined temporal norm that imposes an abstract compulsion upon the technical process of production. (“[S]ocially necessary [labor time] … appears … to be enforced from outside by the action of competition. … In manufacture, on the contrary, the provision of a given quantity of the product in a given period of labour is a technical law of the process of production itself” (Marx, Capital 379).) In Capital, this technical process is opposed to the process of valorization, insofar as a reduction in the technically necessary time of production increases the quantity of use values that can be produced in a given period of time while simultaneously decreasing the socially necessary labor time that measures the latter’s exchange value.

This “antagonistic movement” corresponds to what Marx refers to in the title of “Fragment” as the “[c]ontradiction between the foundation of bourgeois production (value as measure) and its development … [in m]achines” (Grundrisse 704). In this contradiction, a technical process of production that no longer depends upon labor (“machines”) is measured by a social abstraction of value whose quantity is determined by labor time: “Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth” (Marx, Grundrisse 706). Hence, the continual reduction of labor time due to machinery (and the application of the general intellect) is opposed to the measurement of material wealth according to value determined by labor time, a measure that Marx defines in the section title as a historically determinate feature of capitalism, as the “foundation of bourgeois production” itself.

This characterization of capital – as a moving contradiction that continually reduces the labor it must always apply as a measure of material production – is entirely consistent with the antagonistic movement described in Capital between socially necessary labor time and the time technically necessary for the production of material wealth. Contrary to the Autonomist interpretation, therefore, the “Fragment” does not represent a “hardly Marxist” departure from the analysis developed in Capital. On the contrary, the text appears to encapsulate the historical implications of the “antagonistic movement” described in the opening chapter of Capital.

These implications, moreover, would appear to be directly opposed to the Autonomist interpretation of the “Fragment.” In this interpretation, the process of valorization – as the historically determinate “foundation of bourgeois production” that machinery has rendered invalid – is affirmed in the form of an immaterial labor that purportedly constitutes an immeasurable source of value creation. This reading, however, presupposes what Marx describes – with reference to bourgeois political economy – as a conflation of valorization and material production that “eternalizes” historical relations specific to capitalism.¹⁵ But as such, the attempts by Autonomist thinkers to overcome the historical limitations of Marx’s critical theory – namely, the presupposition that only spatialized time can be exploited by capital – amounts to a periodization of post-Fordist production that is predicated upon an ahistorical conception of labor as value-creating activity. In that sense, the attempt to define a new stage of post-Fordist production in terms of an immaterial labor that collapses the “well-defined threshold between labor and non-labor time” (Virno 103) (a threshold that is purportedly maintained in Marx’s analysis) results in what the Krisis Group describes as a “moralising broadening of the concept of labor,” one that results in a “further extension of the capitalist ontology of labor.” As a consequence, “life” itself is invested with the power of producing exchange value beyond every measure, a power of “self-valorization” on the part of a multitude whose capacity for creating surplus value for capital can no longer be quantified. As Tiqqun has argued, moreover, this affirmation of the immeasurable ability of life to generate value affirms the very domination of abstract labor and value that continues to alienate individuals from their own social activity: “Each … creates value in their own way, creates value in the maximum of sections of their existence … but self-valorization of each only measures the estrangement from self that the value-system has extorted, and only sanctions the massive victory of this system” (Tiqqun 119).

As I have already mentioned, however, the distinction (or spatial boundary) between labor and non-labor time – whose disappearance defines the new “bio-political economy of time” (Sharma 17) – cannot be identified with the distinction between “free time” and “socially necessary labor time” within Marx’s analysis. In the “Fragment,” “free time” (or “disposable time”) does not refer to a qualitative time that exists outside of the quantified time applied in the factory as the measure of physical labor. Rather, free time refers to a non-laboring time that could be appropriated potentially as a result of the reduction of time technically necessary for the production of material wealth. Insofar as socially necessary labor time, however, remains the measure of the material wealth produced by this technical process, the free time that the latter potentially generates can exist only in the form of surplus labor for capital:

Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth. Hence it diminishes labour time in the necessary form so as to increase it in the superfluous form; hence posits the superfluous in growing measure as a condition – question of life or death – for the necessary.

… But its tendency [is] always, on the one side, to create disposable time, on the other, to convert it into surplus labour. If it succeeds too well at the first, then it suffers from surplus production, and then necessary labour is interrupted, because no surplus labour can be realized by capital (Marx, Grundrisse 706).

In this passage, the antithesis between disposable time and surplus labor time – or what Marx refers to elsewhere in the “Fragment” as the “abstract antithesis” between free time and direct labor time – corresponds to the antagonistic movement between use and exchange value that constitutes the foundation of Marx’s critique in Capital. Due to the contradictory movement of capital, the technical possibility of disposable time – a possibility that Marx identifies with that of a post-capitalist society based on the “general reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum” (Grundrisse 706) – becomes the condition for crises in the creation of value. In these crises, production can no longer continue – and thus wage labor cannot be employed – because the free time created potentially by increased efficiency in the production of material wealth cannot be appropriated as surplus value by capital. Insofar as socially necessary labor time continues to serve as the measure of an industrial process of production in which labor is no longer technically necessary, the potential for free time that the latter creates must be converted into a further reduction of socially necessary labor time, thereby perpetuating the latter’s abstract compulsion on the material process of production.

This compulsion (the compulsion continually to convert the possibility of a socially general reduction of labor time into a means for achieving greater output per hour) constitutes a fundamental feature of Marx’s analysis of temporal domination in capitalism. Measured according to labor time, an increase in material wealth and disposable time results in a reduction in the exchange value of goods, leading to crises characterized paradoxically by scarcity, lack of employment, and an increased compulsion to labor: “Labour time as the measure of value posits wealth itself as founded on poverty, and disposable time as existing in and because of the antithesis to surplus labour time; or, the positing of an individual’s entire time as labour time… The most developed machinery thus forces the worker to work longer than the savage does … with the simplest, crudest tools” (Marx, Grundrisse 708-9).

In the Autonomist account of the “Fragment,” the antithetical character of disposable time – as existing potentially in capitalism only “in and because” of surplus labor time – is elided in the literal interpretation of free time and socially necessary labor time as spatially delimited segments of time. This literal interpretation appears to underlie the Autonomist strategy of “refusal of work,” proposed by thinkers like Negri during the ‘70s. In Negri’s writings from the period, temporal domination in capitalism is associated with the exploitation of labor time in the factory: “Therefore, when we spoke of the refusal to work, one should have understood a refusal to work in the factory” (qtd. in Tiqqun 130). Thus, socially necessary labor time is identified with the determinate time and place of the factory during the working day. For Marx, however, socially necessary labor time does not refer to the spatialized time imposed in the process of production, but rather to an abstract form of temporal domination (“just as properly measured” in spatialized time), one that is established in the sphere of exchange. As such, the impersonal form of compulsion that this social abstraction engenders cannot be abolished by a refusal of work at the physical point of production.

Moreover, failing to recognize the antithetical existence of free time in capitalism, the Autonomists conceived of the refusal of work as a “reclamation of surplus value” (Thoburn 136), as opposed to the appropriation of the potential for free time (a potential that, in capitalism, exists only “in and because” of surplus labor time). The refusal of work, then, is an attempt to reclaim disposable time as exchange value. As a result, the possibility described in the “Fragment” of appropriating an abundance of use values liberated from the measure of labor (which machinery has rendered invalid) is replaced by the Workerist demand for “wage increases without regard for productivity” (see Cleaver, “Work”) – that is, for an excessive appropriation from capital of a surplus value that immaterial labor purportedly generates beyond every measure: “Today, there is no longer any measure, and hence there is no longer any reasonable appropriation either. Today, we are outside measure— and that is so because we are in a state of productive surplus” (Casarino and Negri 77). Thus, in the “refusal of work,” the abolition of labor as the measure of value is reduced to the demand for a wage labor remunerated in value without measure.¹⁶ As a result, the possibility of a liberation from labor (implied in the “Fragment”) is replaced by the demand for a liberation of labor from quantification.¹⁷

For Marx, however, disposable time – as a potential that emerges from the reduction of time technically necessary for the production of material wealth in industrial capitalism – cannot be appropriated so long as labor continues to determine exchange value, regardless of whether it is measured or not. But insofar as such an appropriation of free time as value presupposes the determination of value by labor (a fetish that, in the notion of “bio-political production,” is extended to life or existence in general), the strategy would appear to preclude the possibility of eliminating the “foundation of bourgeois production” itself. In that sense, the refusal of work (based on the claim that immaterial labor produces immeasurable value) is directly opposed to the abolition of labor as the measure of value.¹⁸ From the perspective of Marx’s analysis, then, such a refusal of work – which elides the distinction between surplus value and free time – confuses a condition for the emergence of crises in capitalism with a condition for the abolition of capitalism itself.

Conclusion: The Multitude and Surplus Humanity

For Negri, of course, what emerged after the crises produced by the refusal of work in the ‘70s – or what Franco Berardi describes as the demand for “freedom from the life-time prison of the industrial factory” (Berardi, “What is the Meaning of Autonomy”) – was a new bio-political mode of production that, dissolving the distinction between free time and labor, exploits existence itself as a source of surplus value. Thus, society itself becomes a site for the control of quality time outside the industrial factory. From the perspective of Marx’s analysis, however, this new stage of production is not a bio-political economy of time, one in which the life of the multitude is incorporated as a new source of value-creating activity that can no longer be measured. Rather, it is a political economy that, by preserving a social measure of value according to labor that is no longer (technically) necessary, creates a growing “surplus humanity” that is excluded from the conditions of life because its labor is no longer productive of value.¹⁹ As Moishe Postone has described, in the political economy of contemporary capitalism, the increase in the potential for free time, “the growing superfluity of labor[,] … is expressed as the growing superfluity of people” (Postone, “Critical Theory” 10). Contrary to the Autonomist theory of post-Fordist production, contemporary capitalism is not defined by the manipulation of free time, understood as the quality time of existence separated from the quantified time of production. Rather, it is a society in which the potential for free time, and the possibility of a post-capitalist society, remains unrealizable insofar as free time continues to be appropriated as value measured according to labor.

Footnotes

This article grew out of a presentation delivered during the 2013–14 Pembroke Seminar at Brown University on the theme of socialism and post-socialism. In developing the argument for this essay, I benefited greatly from discussions with Joshua Neves. My thanks also to Alessandro Carrera at the University of Houston for his critical comments on earlier drafts of the essay, and for his generous assistance in deepening my understanding of the intellectual and political genealogy of Autonomist Marxism. Any errors or inaccuracies in my account of the latter, of course, are my own.

1. “Aristotle sees the essence of time in the nun, Hegel in the ‘now’ (jetzt). Aristotle takes the nun as oros; Hegel takes the ‘now’ as ‘boundary’ (Grenze). Aristotle understands the nun as stigme; Hegel interprets the ‘now’ as a point. That space is time.” (Heidegger 500, footnote xxx).

2. Although Negri’s account, in Empire, of the Western metaphysical tradition does not rely explicitly on Heidegger’s history of the concept of time, his critique of spatialized time in Aristotle and in Hegel is consistent with Heidegger’s. This critique, moreover (as applied, in particular, to the theory of value), is one that Negri appears to maintain throughout his writings, despite the significant changes in his assessment of the concept of time in Marx and in Heidegger. Thus, in Empire, Marx’s theory is described in apparently Heideggerian terms as belonging to the “Aristotelian tradition of measure” (401). In Insurgencies, on the other hand, Negri argues that “Marx’s metaphysics of time is much more radical than Heidegger’s” (28, 9), precisely because the Marxian notion of time as immanent to praxis and to the process of production departs from the Aristotelian tradition (which Heidegger is said to inherit) that conceives time as a transcendent form. As Negri explains, “‘temporality [in Marx] is rooted in man’s productive capacity, in the ontology of his becoming. … [Temporality here is] absolutely constitutive… [in that it] does not reveal Being but produces beings” (Negri and Boscagli 29). This verdict, however, is reversed in “Power and Ontology.” Here, the “absolutely constitutive” temporality that supposedly separates Marx’s “metaphysics of time” from Heidegger’s is attributed to Heidegger’s philosophy as well: “Heidegger … points to a conception of time as ontologically constitutive, which radically breaks the hegemony [of] … the transcendental … Time aspires to be power, it alludes to its productivity” (310–311). In ‘‘Twenty Theses on Marx,’’ a similar reversal occurs in relation to Negri’s interpretation of Marx: for Negri, the “limit of Marx’s consideration consists in his reducing the form of value to an objective measure,” even though this limitation is one that Marx already exceeds: “Certainly Marx goes beyond Marx, and one should never pretend that his discussions of labor and value are only a discourse on measure” (“Twenty Theses” 151). What remains consistent throughout these contradictory statements, of course, is the critique of spatialized time: Marx and Heidegger fall in and out of the Aristotelian tradition of measure, depending on whether they are interpreted as endorsing the concept of time as a transcendent measure of movement, or not.

3. “The industrial workers had been refusing their role in the factory and gaining freedom from capitalist domination. However, this situation drove the capitalists to invest in labour-saving technologies and also to change the technical composition of the work-process, in order to expel the well organised industrial workers and to create a new organisation of labour which could be more flexible” (Berardi, “What is the Meaning”).

4. “Even if the political has become a realm outside measure, value nonetheless remains. Even if in postmodern capitalism there is no longer a fixed scale that measures value, value nonetheless is still powerful and ubiquitous” (Hardt and Negri, Empire 356, emphasis added).

5. There is, of course, an enormous body of critical literature on the concept of immaterial labor. Much of this work – especially that informed by conventional Marxist approaches that insist upon the irreducible materiality of production and labor – has been largely confined to challenging the Autonomist claim that immaterial labor constitutes a defining feature of the contemporary capitalist economy. This claim, according to critics, is belied by the “persistence of all-too-material forms of labour,” both in the “developing world” as well as within the “postmodern economies” of Europe, the US, and Japan (Gill and Pratt 9). As Harman, Henwood (184–185), and Thompson (84–85) have noted, for instance, industrial labor, contrary to the Autonomist claim, has in fact expanded in the era of post-Fordist production, while those engaged in the industries that the Autonomists define as immaterial labor continue to constitute only a tiny minority of the global work force. The emphasis on immaterial labor, therefore, has served to obscure the prevalence of manual labor in non-Western economies: “Negri’s analysis [is] profoundly Eurocentric in its neglect of the value-creating labor of billions of people on the planet” (Caffentzis, In Letters 79).

Critics, moreover, have also called into question the very distinction between material and immaterial labor. According to Caffentzis, Hardt and Negri’s classification of reproductive work as immaterial labor implies a sexist denial of the latter’s bodily character: “[A]fter the women’s movement’s long struggle to have ‘housework,’ ‘reproductive’ work and the body be recognized as central to the analysis of capitalism, it is discouraging to have two men come along and describe the very embodied reproductive work done largely by women as ‘immaterial’!” (In Letters 199). Moreover, in response to the Autonomist insistence on the unlocalizable character of virtual networks, critics have underscored the embeddedness of Internet companies in specific locales (English-Lueck et al. 90–108, Indergaard 4, and Perrons 45–61), while emphasizing the materiality of digital labor: “[E]ven the zeros and ones that make up the Internet’s codes have to be written, and entered, by someone, somewhere” (Gill and Pratt 9). For Caffentzis, the dependence of immaterial labor on physical infrastructures and embodied experiences calls into question the category of immaterial labor itself: “[I]mmaterial labor as defined … by Hardt and Negri… —‘labor that produces an immaterial good, such as a service, a cultural product, knowledge, or communication’—does not exist. … The products of services, from stylish hair cuts to massages, are embodied material goods” (In Letters 177).

As Ben Trott has argued, however, “many of [these] criticisms have … been based on a failure to fully comprehend the tendential nature of [Hardt and Negri’s] argument. … [This] argument … is qualitative as opposed to quantitative. … In other words, their argument that immaterial labour is tending to … influence other forms of production … is in no way contradicted by the claim that there has been no overall decline in the number of people involved in industrial or … agricultural production” (218).

These statements, however, expose an important assumption underlying the debate on immaterial labor. This assumption – shared by both the Autonomists as well as those of their critics who insist on the “stubborn materiality” of labor – is that the historical trajectory of capitalist production can be adequately understood in terms of the opposition between material and immaterial labor, and therefore in terms of either a qualitative tendency toward immaterial labor or the (quantitative) persistence of physical labor in the postmodern economy. As a result of this presupposition, the debate on post-Fordist production has tended to focus on the significance of material versus immaterial labor in the production of value while failing to analyze critically the production of value itself, which Marx defines as a historically determinate feature (or differentia specifica) of both material and immaterial labor in capitalism. Thus, in a recent analysis of the crisis in 2008, Hardt argues against the “standard narrative” that the “fictional economy” of speculation and finance had lead to the falsification of “real … industrial value,” insisting that it is “not a question of real and fiction anyway [but] of measure and immeasurability. . . The value of material and tangible products corresponded to regimes of economic measure, but the value of immaterial or intangible products are not measureable” (“Falsify”). On the other hand, in the essay “Immeasurable Value?” Caffentzis contends that value and labor time remain measurable in post-Fordist production despite their supposedly immaterial character (115). What these arguments fail to call into question is the fictional character of value itself, understood as a measurable quantity underlying both the real as well as fictional economy in capitalism. In contrast to the Marxist critiques outlined above, Marx’s critical theory does not affirm the materiality of production and labor as an indispensible principle for understanding the capitalist economy. On the contrary, for Marx, as David Harvey has mentioned, capitalist production is identified with the “immaterial” concept of value: “[M]any are surprised to find that Marx’s most fundamental concept [of value] is ‘immaterial…’ given the way he is usually depicted as a materialist for whom anything immaterial would be anathema” (142). In capitalism, according to Marx, the production of value – as an immaterial and fictional (or fetishistic) quantity – becomes a function of both material and immaterial labor: both physical goods and intangible products or services become the “material repository” for the “supersensible” substance of value (Marx, “Results” 452). The tendency of capitalist production, moreover, is defined in Marx’s analysis by the “antagonistic movement” between the (immaterial) process of valorization and what Marx refers to as the “material process of production” (a category that, as Fiona Tregenna points out, also includes immaterial labor or service (11)). This contradiction is elided in the opposition between material and immaterial labor that has continued to frame much of the debate on post-Fordist production. As I argue in the final part of this essay, this elision results in a fundamental mischaracterization of the tendency of capitalist production.

6. As Derrida argues in “Ousia and Grammé,” for example, Heidegger’s critique of “intra-temporality,” or the “vulgar conception of time” as a “homogenous medium in which the movement of daily existence” (Derrida 35) occurs, is already anticipated in the writings of Aristotle and Hegel. Although Aristotle defines time as the “number” or measure of movement, he also maintains that time cannot be reduced to this measure: “There is time only in the extent to which movement has number, but time, in the rigorous sense, is neither movement nor number” (Derrida 59; emphasis added). If time, in Aristotle, is conceived on the model of space, this “spatial and linear representation,” nevertheless, “is inadequate” as a figure for time (Derrida 56). In Hegel, likewise, time is not simply conceived as a homogenous medium in which movement occurs. As Hegel explains in the Encyclopaedia, ‘it is not in time … that everything comes to be and passes away, rather time itself is the becoming’” (Derrida 44). According to Derrida, such formulations suggest “an entire Hegelian critique of intratemporality.” (Derrida 45). If time, then, for Aristotle and Hegel is the measure of motion, this measure of motion, nevertheless, cannot be equated with time (Derrida 45).

7. My reading of Marx’s commentary on Aristotle differs from one Cornelius Castoriadis famously proposed. In Capital, Marx maintains that Aristotle failed to discover the “secret of the expression of value, namely, that all kinds of labour are equal and equivalent” (a secret whose “scientific discovery” is attributed to political economy), due to the existence of slavery in Greek society and the “inequality of men and of their labour powers.” These “peculiar conditions … alone prevented [Aristotle] from discovering what, ‘in truth,’ was at the bottom of this equality” (Capital 69). But insofar as this equality, Castoriadis maintains, is established on the basis of a property that (“in truth”) does not exist in the products of labor, what Aristotle fails to uncover is a secret with no scientific validity: Aristotle “did not see [abstract labor] because there was nothing to see, because the equality of human labors, as far as it ‘exists’… [is] the historical constructum of an effective pseudohomogeneity of individuals and labors … [a] creation of capitalism” (Castoriadis 688). In Marx’s criticism of Aristotle, therefore, abstract labor, as “a creation of capitalism,” is accorded a scientific status, transforming it into a “trans-historical determination, into the Substance Labor” (Castoriadis 688). For Castoriadis, this “ambiguity” in Marx’s criticism of Aristotle reveals an “antinomy … that perpetually divides the thought of Marx between the idea of a ‘historical production’ of social categories … and the idea of an ultimate ‘rationality’ of the historical process.” I would argue, however, that these positions are not mutually exclusive. Marx’s critique of political economy, as having discovered a secret property (abstract labor and value) whose existence it merely assumes, suggests that, for Marx, political economy provides a scientific account of a society based on the measurement of a “metaphysical” and historically determinate property.

8. “Marxists analyze how this qualitative conception is transformed into a quantitative notion of the law of value centered on the problem of the measure of the value of labor. The magnitude of value expresses the link between a certain commodity and the labor time necessary to produce it, which can be expressed in units of ‘simple labor’” (Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth 166).

9. “The difference between a material product and an ‘immaterial’ service consists solely of a different temporal relationship between production and consumption: the material product is first produced and subsequently consumed. … In the case of a service (whether we are talking about a taxi ride, a massage, or a theater performance), the act of production is concurrent with the act of consumption” (Heinrich 44). Virno’s reading conflates Marx’s position on immaterial labor with what Fiona Tregenna describes as the “physicalist approach of earlier classical economists” such as Smith, Malthus, and Ricardo (Tregenna 9). As Tregenna explains, this approach “equate[d] production with the production of physical goods and defined productive labour in terms of the labour involved in the production of such goods” (9). In “Results of the Direct Production Process,” Marx not only criticizes this view explicitly, he also argues that the identification of “productive labor” with the production of physical goods obscures the historical character of the category of “productive labor” itself – that is, labor that generates value – as a characteristic that both material and “non-material” labor acquires only in capitalism.

10. In Capital, Marx cites Aristotle’s definition of real wealth as “values in use:” “‘True wealth (o aleqinos ploutos) consists of such values in use’” (170).

11. According to Peter Osborne, “Negri’s rejection of Marx’s theory of value[,] … the claim that, under conditions of real subsumption, the productive power of science and technology abolishes the possibility of labour-time functioning as a measure of value,” is based upon a “misreading of the temporal grammar” of Marx’s statement in the “Fragment” that “‘labour time ceases … to be … measure’” (Osborne 21). This statement, as Osborne explains, does not imply that labor is no longer the measure of value. Rather, Marx is “describing a hypothetical, counterfactual situation” (Osborne 21). “There is a characteristic movement between an exhortatory … ‘must’ and a speculatively already achieved future present (‘ceases’, ‘has ceased’, ‘breaks down’ and ‘is stripped’)” (Osborne 21). Yet, according to Osborne, despite this “one-sided” reading – which “conflate[s] the categories of wealth and value” – Negri succeeds in identifying the “main problem with Marx’s account[,] … his assumptions about the use of disposable time within capitalism, in its antithesis to labour-time: namely, that everyone’s time is freed ‘for their own development.’ … These are now utterly untenable, nineteenth century assumptions. … Existing society has turned free or disposable time into the site for the realization of value. . . . This is the terrain of Negri’s and Virno’s concepts of … the real subsumption of the social” (Osborne 21–22). This interpretation of the concept of free time, however, is based on an equally one-sided “misreading of the temporal grammar” in Marx, one that removes the antithetical relation between free time and labor time within capitalism. Like the Autonomists, Osborne assumes that “free time” refers to non-laboring time in “existing society,” to “disposable time within capitalism.” For Marx, however, free time refers to the non-laboring time that could be appropriated potentially in a society in which labor ceases to be the measure of value. In capitalism, however, “disposable time … exist[s] in and because of the antithesis to surplus labour time” (Marx, Grundrisse 708). Free time, in other words, refers to a “hypothetical, counterfactual situation” (Osborne 21), not to leisure in existing society. But as such, Marx’s “nineteenth century assumptions” about free time are not contradicted by the commodification of leisure – or the prevalence of yoga and time-management specialists – in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (see Sharma 92). Marx’s assumption is not that leisure cannot be commodified, but that, under capitalism, the reduction of labor time in the production of material wealth cannot be appropriated as disposable time, but must be converted into surplus value for capital.

12. Negri and Hardt’s interpretation of the contradiction of capital as a contradiction between the value created by labor and its measure or quantification is partly derived from Raniero Panzieri’s reading of the “Fragment.” According to Panzieri, “Marx asserts … a theory of capitalism’s ‘untenability’ at its maximum level of development, when the ‘superabundant’ productive forces enter into conflict with the system’s ‘restricted base’ and the quantitative measurement of labour becomes an obvious absurdity” (36). In the “Fragment,” however, the “restricted base” that comes into conflict with the industrial process of production is not the “quantitative measurement of labour.” Rather, the contradiction lies in the valuation of goods according to labor time despite the development of a mode of production in which the “creation of [material] wealth” has become “independent of labor” (Marx, Grundrisse 706).

13. “The Fordist industrial economy was founded on the production of objectively measurable value quantifiable by socially necessary labor time. The postindustrial economy is based on linguistic exchange, the value of simulation. This simulation becomes the decisive element in in the determination of value” (Berardi, After the Future 106).

14. See Sarah Sharma’s Autonomist critique of Marx’s analysis of socially necessary labor time as a theory of the “role of clocks and other timekeeping devices to control workers” in the factory during the working day (141).

15. In Capital, for example, Marx criticizes the “ambiguous” “analysis of the commodity in terms of ‘labour’ [that has in general been] … carried out … by all previous economists” (Marx, “Results” 401): “It is not sufficient to reduce the commodity to ‘labour’; labour must be broken down into its twofold form – on the one hand, into concrete labour in the use-values of the commodity, and on the other hand, into socially necessary labour as calculated in exchange-value. … By confusing the appropriation of the labour process by capital with the labour process itself, the economists transform the material elements of the labour process into capital. … But it is evident … that this is a very convenient method by which to demonstrate the eternal validity of the capitalist mode of production.…” (Marx, “Results” 401, emphasis added).

16. This position is one that Negri maintains in his later writings as well. For Hardt and Negri, the immeasurability of the value produced by immaterial labor serves as the basis for their demand for a social wage:

In the passage to … biopolitical production, labor power has become increasingly collective and social. It is not even possible to support the old slogan “equal pay for equal work” when labor cannot be individualized and measured. The demand for a social wage extends to the entire population the demand that all activity necessary for the production of capital be recognized with an equal compensation such that a social wage is really a guaranteed income (Hardt and Negri, Empire 403).

17.

Here, the rallying cry of communists like … Negri is not the abolition of work, but it’s “real liberation;” not the cessation of work time (which is the “essential component of life time”!), but the project of reclaiming mastery over it, in the interest of liberating suppressed “creative energies;” in short, not the end of work, but the unleashing of its enormous potential. … The goal of this new, postmodern communism (the way to package and sell our revolution today) is to celebrate subjectivities and make good on desires, even if some of them seem intractably stamped with the commodity form, and hence anathema to any substantial social transformation. (Lamarche 61)

18. My interpretation of Negri departs from readings, such as those of Harry Cleaver and Kathi Weeks, that attempt to identify the critique of labor in Marx with the “refusal of labor” proposed in the work of Autonomist writers. In his introduction to Negri’s Marx beyond Marx, Cleaver argues that “Capital … is … largely consistent with the main lines of Negri’s [interpretation of the Grundrisse]” (Cleaver, “Introduction” xxvii). Similarly, in The Problem with Work, Kathi Weeks argues that, in “replacing [the] slogan… ‘the right to work’ with … ‘the refusal of work,’ the autonomists … follow in the footsteps of Marx, the Marx who, for example, insisted that freedom depended on the shortening of the working day” (Weeks 97–8). For Negri, moreover, according to Cleaver, the “refusal of work appears as a constituting praxis that produces a new mode of production, in which the capitalist relation is reversed and surplus labor is totally subordinated to working-class need.” (Cleaver, “Introduction” xxv). Contrary to Cleaver, I argue that the refusal of work cannot be equated with the abolition of labor in Marx, since the strategy (in Negri’s formulation at least) presupposes (in an immeasurable form) the determination of value according to labor that Marx identifies as the very foundation of bourgeois production. In that sense, the refusal of work is an attempt to establish a new mode of production on the same foundation as the one it seeks to abolish.

19. “In this society, those who cannot sell their labor are considered ‘superfluous’ and are discarded in the social waste dump. Those who do not work shall not eat! This cynical principle is still in effect, today more than ever, precisely because it is hopelessly obsolete. It is absurd: Although work has become superfluous, society has never been more of a labor society” (Krisis).

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• Negri, Antonio, and Michael Hardt. “Value and Affect.” Boundary 2 26.2 (1999): 77-88. Print. Potere Operaio. “Italy 1969-1970: A Wave of Struggles.” A supplement to Potere Operaio, no. 27, June 27-July 3, 1970. Print.
• Osborne, Peter. “Marx and the Philosophy of Time.” Radical Philosophy 147 (January/ February 2008): 15–22. Print.
• Panzieri, Raniero. “Surplus Value and Planning: Notes on the Reading of Capital.” Trans. J. Bees. The Labour Process and Class Strategies, CSE Pamphlet No. 1. Ed. CSE. London: Stage 1, 1976. 4-25. Print.
• Perrons, D. “Understanding Social and Spatial Divisions in the New Economy: New Media Clusters and the Digital Divide.” Economic Geography 80.1 (2004): 45–61. Print.
• Postone, Moishe. “The Critical Theory of Capitalism.” Seminario Internacional “¿Teoría Crítica del Capitalismo?” Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales del CSIC. 23 Nov. 2012. Web. 28 Feb. 2015.
• —. Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. Print.
• Rosenkrantz, Max. “Empire, Imperialism, and Value: Negri on Capitalist Sovereignty.” Reading Negri; Marxism in the Age of Empire. Chicago: Open Court, 2011. Print.
• Sharma, Sarah. In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics. Durham : Duke UP, 2014. Print.
• Terranova, Tiziana. “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy.” Social Text 63 (Volume 18, Number 2) Summer 2000: 33-58. Print.
• Thoburn, Nicholas. Deleuze, Marx and Politics. London: Routledge, 2003. Print.
• Thompson, Paul. “Foundation and Empire: A Critique of Hardt and Negri.” Capital & Class 86 (2005): 73-86. Print.
• Tiqqun. This Is Not a Program. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011. Print.
• Tregenna, Fiona. “‘Services’ in Marxian Economic Thought.” Cambridge Working Papers in Economics 0935, Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge. Sept. 2009. Web. 10 May 2016.
• Trott, Ben. “Immaterial Labour and World Order: An Evaluation of a Thesis.” Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organisation 7.1 (2007): 203-232. Print.
• Virno, Paolo. A Grammar of the Multitude. Trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito and Andrea Casson. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004. Print.
• Weeks, Kathi. The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Durham: Duke UP, 2011. Print.

Brad Prager (bio)
University of Missouri

The panels that compose Rolande Glicenstein’s exquisitely illustrated graphic work depict the genesis of the bond between Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, whose friendship and correspondence has been extensively documented. The originality of Glicenstein’s piece lies in her technique: the density of the lines, alternately thick and thin, taken together with the depth she achieves through creatively contrasting foregrounds and backgrounds, demonstrates an understanding of these two thinkers’ personal connection, and of their varying degrees of integration into the German and Jewish worlds they inhabited.

To choose one example: Glicenstein’s distinctive style underscores Scholem’s recollections of Benjamin’s comportment as a speaker, about which Scholem claims to have retained vivid memories. He writes in his memoir: “The first thing that struck me about Benjamin—indeed it was characteristic of him all his life—was that he never could remain seated quietly during a conversation but immediately began to pace up and down in the room as he formulated his sentences. At some point, he would stop before me and in the most intense voice deliver his opinion on the matter. Or he might offer several viewpoints in turn, as if he were conducting an experiment” (Story of a Friendship 8). The initial images in Glicenstein’s depiction present Benjamin-in-motion, a hydra of a man who occupies the right halves of two consecutive panels. These panels, with their vacant centers, their lack of dialogue, and their tandem depictions of Scholem observing Benjamin’s erratic movements from a safe distance, contrast with the many well-known likenesses of Benjamin in repose, the images that make up the finite photographic archive we have by now grown accustomed to seeing. Benjamin appears here in the dynamics of a relationship because Glicenstein resists the temptation to sanctify him. Unlike many other portraits, hers is hardly hagiographic.

The subjective standpoint inherent in Glicenstein’s depictions acknowledges that Benjamin’s bearing is seen through Scholem’s eyes. He is this work’s narrator, and the author-artist relies on a first-person indirect perspective, just as one would expect to see in a cinematic adaptation. This is, by and large, a graphic retelling of Scholem’s recollections: we know what we know about their friendship mainly from his memoirs. The movement of Benjamin’s body in that first encounter, nearly bowing, echoes Scholem’s own description in which Benjamin presents himself with an “almost Chinese courtesy” (On Jews 174). He is an object of Scholem’s adoration and fascination, and he makes for a curious interlocutor, moving in and out of this story, woven into its frames. His orbital motions reflect the paths of these thinkers’ ongoing discussions and follow the tangential tendencies symptomatic of Scholem’s account of their friendship. The two rove improvisationally in their conversations, touching on an assortment of books, essays, and ideas. The many stations of the conversation that brings the two of them, for example, from Kant to Henri Poincaré to Schelling, as depicted in these pages, are derived entirely from Scholem’s own writings (Story of a Friendship 11).

More than a mere adaptation of Scholem’s memoirs, this representation is commentary; its form uniquely underlines a range of cultural and interpersonal dynamics. Throughout the conversations that are depicted here, Benjamin, who was five years older than Scholem, seems to take up more space than his counterpart. Scholem brushes up against the margins, sometimes crowded out by his own speech bubbles, and Benjamin looms larger. For these psychically weighted compositions, expressionist film is surely a point of reference. 1915, the year of Benjamin and Scholem’s first conversation, was the year Paul Wegener and Henrik Galeen’s Der Golem was released. Accordingly, a number of Glicenstein’s panels highlight the expressionistic play of light and shadow. One notes, for example, the panel in which Scholem’s father, entirely enshrouded by darkness, says a prayer over his tobacco. Glicenstein makes use of the chiaroscuros typical of that cinematic moment, drawing attention to the scale of Scholem’s Oedipal dramas.

Where she gestures toward expressionism, the artist’s style deliberately reflects her subjects’ era. Glicenstein also persistently calls her readers’ attention to the specter of the First World War. Some may not be aware of how doggedly Benjamin worked to avoid military service, starting in late 1914 when, at an appropriate age to serve, he was exempted for exhibiting a type of palsy (Story of a Friendship 11). His avoidance of the military became especially arduous as the war dragged on and his brother Georg entered the service. As noted by Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings, Benjamin would stay up all night (in Scholem’s presence) drinking large amounts of coffee so that he would fail his medical examinations (78), and when, at the end of December 1916, Benjamin was classified by the draft board as “fit for light field operations,” his partner Dora undertook to induce illnesses in him through hypnosis (91). Scholem recalls: “[Dora] revealed to me in the strictest confidence that she was using hypnosis—to which Benjamin was very susceptible—to produce sciaticalike symptoms, thus making it possible for the doctor to give him a certificate for the military authorities. A medical committee came…for an investigation, and Benjamin was actually given a few months’ deferment. The sciatica story was kept up, and Benjamin remained incommunicado to everyone but Dora” (Story of a Friendship 35–36). In the pages of the present work, Dora can be seen hypnotizing a remarkably wide-eyed and helpless Benjamin.

In Anson Rabinbach’s assessment, both Benjamin and Scholem “abhorred and avoided” the First World War. They likewise shared a strong reaction against “the culture of the middle-class” and against “assimilated German Jewry” (xi). With a similar distaste for ideology, they turned against Martin Buber, who was busily articulating his brand of Zionism. Up to a point, Scholem had been under Buber’s influence. He writes, “I had undertaken to unite the two paths of socialism and Zionism in my own life and presented this quest to Benjamin, who admitted that both paths were viable. Of course, like every Zionist in those days, I also was influenced by Martin Buber…. Even in our first conversation Benjamin expressed strong reservations about Buber” (Story of a Friendship 6–7). Buber’s ideas were later collected under the title “The Jewish Movement” (Die jüdische Bewegung – gesammelte Aufsätze und Ansprachen 1900–1915), which includes his perspectives on Zionism, his disagreements with Theodor Herzl, and the nationalistic ideas that subsequently came to be known as his “Hebrew humanism.”¹

Scholem and Benjamin’s disputation over Buber is well represented in these pages. In 1916 Buber initiated the publication of the journal Der Jude, and Benjamin wrote a brief letter declining an invitation to contribute. His reluctance, according to Eiland and Jennings, was a function of his enduring opinions about politically engaged prose, which he believes sacrifices the complexities associated with writing’s fundamentally literary character.² Benjamin can be intensely disdainful of Buber. Scholem recalls Benjamin criticizing Buber in sharp terms: “[H]e told me in parting that if I should run into Buber I should hand him a barrel of tears in our names.… He said derisively that if Buber had his way, first of all one would have to ask every Jew, ‘Have you experienced Jewishness yet?’” (Story of a Friendship 29). For his part, Scholem finds Buber’s Zionism intriguing and is apprehensive about rebuffing him.

Glicenstein conveys this in a series of panels that illustrate Scholem’s feelings of isolation. Shrouded in darkness, Scholem resembles an alien figure from one of Alfred Kubin’s drawings. Kubin is not named here, but Benjamin and Scholem were quite enthusiastic about his illustrated novel The Other Side (Die andere Seite 1909) as well as his drawings for Paul Scheerbart’s science fiction novel Lesabéndio (1913). Scholem’s words about Benjamin and Der Jude, expressed here in thought bubbles, come from a letter he wrote to Buber on 25 June 1916.³ As Scholem composes this letter in his head, we sense his anxiety: he is little more than an extension of his lone, wide-open eye, diminished by the densely crosshatched blanket of darkness. By the time one reaches the third panel on that page, Scholem’s figure has been nearly entirely absorbed by the thick, dark pen strokes. Here, he comes to realize with disappointment that Benjamin will not be an appropriate contributor for Der Jude, and that his friend’s Judaism is less politically engaged than his own. There and then, he has to turn away from Benjamin, at least for a moment, which is precisely what we see: not Scholem’s face, but merely his back as he, during the night, resolves to put pen to paper.

This is only one among several superbly illustrated pages in Glicenstein’s work. I would draw a reader’s attention to a wealth of other subtle details, including the moment when Scholem notices the ring on Grete Radt’s finger (after Benjamin had somewhat inadvertently proposed to her). Scholem’s startled gaze falls directly on it, a vivid moment drawn from his memoir (Story of a Friendship 12). That encounter takes place on the street and, owing to its depiction of central Europeans during the First World War, readers may think of the odd physiognomies that pervade Max Beckmann’s paintings, or of the urbanites who commingle with the metropolis in Ernst Kirschner’s works. Glicenstein’s flat figures play against the backgrounds, calling attention to the transformations in the cityscape, and to the looming 1920s, the unrestrained years that were to come.

But to refer the reader only to paintings would diminish the work’s narrative qualities. In her skillful storytelling—the many ways the narrative voice intermixes with the illustrations—Glicenstein recalls the style of the Jewish Brooklyn-born graphic novelist Ben Katchor. In works such as The Jew of New York (1998), Katchor plays similarly with light and shadow, and even with comparably architectural lines. Glicenstein’s work is certainly fascinating to look at, but it also serves as a comment on the dynamics of a friendship. The flow of the narrative does a great deal to bring these two figures to life. Glicenstein effectively highlights not only their shared personal circumstances, but also the intellectual tensions, including the preferred languages of scholarship, the significance of translation, and much else that goes hand in hand with the literary and philosophical air these two German Jewish thinkers spent those years breathing.

Footnotes

1. Buber’s “Hebrew humanism” was a political movement that would, according to Mendes-Flohr, “heal the division between morality and politics and ultimately between Kultur—our inner, private spiritual reality—and our public life.” It aimed to “exemplify for all the nations of the world the possibility of healing the rift between Kultur and Zivilisation, between spirit and life” (164).

2. On Benjamin’s 1916 letter to Buber, see Eiland and Jennings 86. See also Brodersen 87–89.

3. Scholem’s letter to Buber is translated and transcribed in Scholem (A Life in Letters 28–29).

Works Cited

• Brodersen, Momme. Walter Benjamin: A Biography. Trans. Malcolm R. Green and Ingrida Ligers. Ed. Martina Derviş. New York: Verso, 1996. Print.
• Eiland, Howard, and Michael W. Jennings. Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2014. Print.
• Mendes-Flohr, Paul. “Nationalism as a Spiritual Sensibility: The Philosophical Suppositions of Buber’s Hebrew Humanism.” The Journal of Religion 69.2 (1989): 155–168. Print.
• Rabinbach, Anson. Introduction. The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, 1932-1940. By Gershom Scholem, ed. Trans. Gary Smith and Andre Lefevere. New York: Schocken Books, 1989. vii-xxxviii. Print.
• Scholem, Gershom. A Life in Letters, 1914-1982. Trans. and Ed. Anthony David Skinner. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002. Print.
• —. On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays. Ed. Werner J. Dannhauser. New York: Schocken Books, 1976. Print.
• —. Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship. Trans. Harry Zohn. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1981. Print.

Ben Novotny Owen (bio)
Ohio State University

A review of Hoberek, Andrew. Considering Watchmen: Poetics, Property, Politics. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2014.

Andrew Hoberek’s Considering Watchmen: Poetics, Property, Politics asks about the literary status of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s influential comic book series, Watchmen, to structure the four main topics of his book: the comic’s complex formal properties, the relationship of the work and its creators to the comic book industry, its implicit and explicit politics, and its impact on contemporary literary fiction in the United States. The framing idea for the book is that there have been substantive changes in the concept of literature in the United States and Britain since the mid-1980s. Looking at these changes through the lens of a single comic, even a well-regarded and much-read one, allows Hoberek to map the points of exchange between mainstream superhero comics and contemporary literary fiction.

In writing this history, Hoberek is characteristic of the current reflective phase of comics studies. Having established comics as a valuable field of study mainly (though not solely) within literary studies, scholars are now trying to open up the field to new approaches, and also asking how a comics-centered approach might reshape our understanding of adjacent “comicitous” arts (to use Colin Beineke’s term). Hoberek therefore attends to the formal properties of Watchmen not simply for their own sake, but also “in a way that self-consciously interrogates—rather than taking for granted—the concept of literature” (6). Considering Watchmen’s coda traces with considerable subtlety the afterlife of Watchmen (and the reflexive era of superhero comics it represents) in the work of several contemporary prose fiction writers: Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Junot Díaz, Aimee Bender, and Rainbow Rowell. Hoberek is particularly invested in exchanges between comics and prose in which prose learns something important from the superhero genre. For example, he contrasts the use of superpowers as metaphor for character, which he sees operative in such books as Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude, with the subjective examination of the experience of superpowers, which he sees in Bender’s The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. The latter use—the idea that having a superpower might profoundly alter a person’s perception of the world and sense of self—interests Hoberek because it shows how one of Alan Moore’s primary innovations as a writer of superhero comics in the 1980s finds new life as a means of revivifying not just the appearance, but also the form of contemporary literary fiction. Bender’s attempt to render the experience of having a superpower, “the ability to read the emotions of whoever prepares her food,” leads to experiments with synesthetic prose “as a kind of formal metaphor for the difficulty of writing” about others’ subjectivities (178, 179).

While Considering Watchmen highlights the multiple ways in which the reconfiguration of the superhero genre emblematized by Watchmen creates new possibilities for literary fiction writers, Hoberek’s book is most valuable as a close examination of the work itself, providing three nuanced readings of the form, conditions of production, and politics of text. The first chapter argues that Watchmen “devotes itself to fleshing out the subjectivities of its characters” through experiments with comic book form (39). In this way, Hoberek argues, Watchmen follows the formula of high modernist novelists such as Virginia Woolf, whose “modernist experimentation in fact serves the ends of a more precise psychological realism” (39). In supporting this claim, Hoberek provides an overview of the formal techniques Moore and Gibbons use, particularly in the five issues (of the twelve issue series, later collected as a graphic novel) that focus on each of the main characters. So, in perhaps the most well-known example of Watchmen’s formal reflexivity, the fourth issue tells the story of Dr. Manhattan, for whom time exists as an already-complete whole, and who sees the human perception of time as moving forward as a narrow limitation. The chapter shuttles back and forth between panels depicting moments in the past and the future, all accompanied by Dr. Manhattan’s present tense narration captions. The effect, as Hoberek notes, is to make the character a self-conscious reflection of the experiences of a comics reader attuned to the affordances of the medium, able to flip back and forth or to cross-reference distinct moments in the story out of sequence. Hoberek is on fairly well-trodden ground in this reading, which has become something of a standard in analyses of the properties of the medium. The novelty comes late in the chapter, where Hoberek thinks about how other characters in the story might function as self-conscious reflections of formal properties. His explanation of the Walter Kovacs/Rorschach issue as an attempt to create a rounded comic book character by the deliberate refusal of mono-causal origins (be they heroic, psychoanalytic, or existential) is particularly compelling.

The second chapter looks at Watchmen, and specifically at the conflict between the characters Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias and Walter Kovacs/Rorschach, as “an allegory of the conflict between the work-for-hire creative talent of the comics industry and the corporations which by and large controlled and profited from their creations” (81). Hoberek sees this allegory as unstable, “torn between Moore’s idea of comics as literature, which … allows him to relocate agency to creators, and a more medium-specific celebration of the aesthetics and modes of production of comics themselves” (81). Essentially, the straightforward reading of the comic, that it is about the conflict between an author who has integrity and who controls his or her singular work and the corporation that seeks to market it and profit from it does not fit easily with its somewhat nostalgic vision of an earlier period of comic book production in which comics were regarded as improvisatory collaborations under difficult circumstances, rather than highly polished authorial works.

As Hoberek shows, the conflicting ideas of ownership and authorship here are not simply problems in Watchmen, but also in thinking and writing about comics generally. Open-ended seriality has been one of the hallmarks of comics storytelling in both newspaper strips and comic books since their beginnings. The advent of the graphic novel (a relatively new phenomenon in 1986 and 1987, when Watchmen was first published as a serial) challenged the centrality of seriality to comics. Hoberek is right that Watchmen, like the comics of Chris Ware—and, I have argued elsewhere, a large number of long comics produced by creators whose work spans the rise of the graphic novel—bears “the marks of this tension on its very shape” (100). The fact that single-volume works, mostly by individuals who both write and draw, have dominated critical discussions of comics presents a methodological challenge for comics scholars who wish to look at the medium more broadly, and yet solutions to that problem are far from clear.

Hoberek’s advocacy for thinking about Watchmen as a collaboratively-created work, deeply embedded in the corporate history of comics, is one promising approach. His account of the industrial origins of the series is admirable. Moore initially envisioned Watchmen as a reimagining of characters from the Carlton Comics company, rights to which DC had recently purchased. Vitally for Moore, several of these characters were created by Steve Ditko, the first artist to draw Spider-Man and, like Jack Kirby, an artist who left Marvel after disputes over financial compensation for his work creating company-owned characters. Hoberek shows that Ditko—independent creator and Randian ideologue—serves as a weird doppelganger for the decidedly radical Moore. He quotes an interview in which Moore states, “There’s something about his uncompromising attitude that I have a great deal of sympathy with” (86). In this, Hoberek finds an industrial explanation for Moore’s surprisingly favorable depiction of “Rorschach’s unbending integrity as a violent crime-fighter,” reading the vigilante “as a figure for the uncompromising artist and, more specifically, of the comic book artist for whom work-for-hire had historically meant a lack of ownership or control over his (usually) creations” (86). It seems to me that this thinking through of the ways in which comics symbolically mediate the collaborative and corporate elements of their own production offers a fruitful mode of inquiry, analogous to film studies’ embrace of the studio as a relevant frame of reference for understanding movies produced under the classical Hollywood system.

More scholarship in this vein—formalist, but well-versed in the history of comics— may well be on the way. Considering Watchmen is the first volume in Rutgers’ new Comics Culture series, and starting with a superhero comic marks out the series’ investment in examining genre comics that have, as Hoberek and others argue, thus far received less scholarly attention than single-artist “art comics” such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus or Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. The next two volumes in the series, on Wonder Woman and Archie, suggest the editors are interested in a project that expands attention to more mainstream genre comics.

Hoberek’s third chapter, on Watchmen’s political argument, is compelling and straightforward. Watchmen advocates a “left-wing anarchist populism” in opposition to the vision of the state under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. But, Hoberek argues, the comic “surreptitiously reproduces a key tenet of Thatcher’s own rhetoric, in the process demonstrating the link between the postwar countercultures, literary and social, in which Moore cut his teeth and the emergent neoliberalism of the mid-1980s” (120). This “key tenet” is the distrust of institutions as inherently repressive. Watchmen’s vision of individual action as the only valid response to a world in which all institutions are corrupt and repressive is largely compatible with Thatcher’s famous claim that “there is no such thing as society” (145–46). Watchmen opposes the expansion of corporate and police power under the Reagan and Thatcher governments, but fails to identify the degree to which its notion of individual agency arranged against institutional power — best exemplified by its cliff-hanger ending, in which the reader is left to decide what happens next in the story world — is a view “that Conservative ideologues might well have endorsed” as they sought to dismantle unions and the welfare state (145). The difference between Moore and Thatcher “is that Moore takes his position absolutely seriously while Thatcher observes it mostly in the breach, excoriating all institutions while demonstrating a willingness to support and even strengthen those (the police, the military, corporations) that are central to neoliberal capitalism” (143). What’s nice about this statement of Watchmen’s politics—particularly for a teacher interested in looking at Watchmen in the classroom—is that it opens directly onto one of the major questions facing the contemporary left: the difficulty of imagining satisfactory forms of collective action not based on coercion. This is of course precisely the problem David Graeber, for example, has taken up in his recent work.

The only significant reservations I have about Considering Watchmen amount to a quibble and a desire for something the book never sets out to address. The quibble is over the term “modernist,” and has to do with my disagreement with Hoberek’s claim that the mid-1980s mark comics’ “modernist era” (39). I would argue that comics have had several modernist moments over the course of their history. Not least of these would be the explicitly modern-art-informed newspaper strips of Lyonel Feininger or George Herriman. This is only a quibble because Hoberek is careful to define the sense in which he means modernism in terms of English-language novels of the high modernist era. The heart of his argument is the idea in Woolf’s “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” that “modernist experimentation in fact serves the ends of a more precise psychological realism” (39). This is very clearly something that Moore and Gibbons pursue in Watchmen, and might not apply to other periods of comics history. But other ideas that we associate with “modernism” seem deeply part of early comics history. Syncopation and montage, for instance, two techniques integral to the poetics of modern art, poetry, and film, are also basic to comics of the 1910s and 1920s, and arguments that comics artists arrived at these techniques without conscious deliberation about their own practice or its relationship to modern art are no longer tenable.

The aspect of Watchmen that Hoberek never addresses as fully as I’d like is its tone. Considering Watchmen is very clear in its explanation of Moore’s central formal breakthrough—that ostensibly unconnected passages of text and image, included in a single panel, can create unexpected ironies and resonances between the two tracks. So, for example, in the first issue a detective advises that he and his partner should let the case they are investigating “drop out of sight” over a picture of Edward Blake falling several stories to his death. The effect certainly amounts to an ambitious and self-conscious exploration of the properties of the medium. And yet because this text-image disjunction is one of the central techniques of the book—happening, in some cases, six or seven times per page—the text is constantly punning, effectively like a string of groan-worthy jokes from the back of Laffy Taffy packages. Whether this tone undercuts the seriousness of the comic’s philosophical and political intent, or whether it echoes the larger theme of our attempts to impose order on the universe as some kind of cosmic joke, or something else, it seems worth exploring. Watchmen is often placed alongside the first volume of Art Spiegelman’s Maus to demonstrate that 1986 was contemporary comics’ year zero. It seems equally valid to put it alongside Spiegelman’s other great mid-80s creation, “The Garbage Pail Kids,” which also relied on a series of gross and extraordinary puns. It might be interesting to try and correlate the aesthetics of all three, as part of a broader inquiry into the place of extreme puns in 1980s culture.

Considering Watchmen provides a series of excellent readings of its subject, a thoughtful contribution to the study of contemporary American fiction, and an admirable demonstration of the best of contemporary comics criticism.

Matthew B. Smith (bio)
Northern Illinois University

Abstract

This essay shows that translation has redefined the parameters of poetry in the United States through a case study of two works by the contemporary poets Andrew Zawacki and Bill Luoma. Both responded to the French translation of their poems with a revised or new work in English; whereas Zawacki takes advantage of this new pattern of circulation to enrich and embellish his poem, Luoma documents its obstacles and setbacks. In both cases, these works take up and re-examine the problems and challenges posed by translation. They also signal a new kind of poetry that directly engages with the foreign scene of its circulation.

A little before the poet Andrew Zawacki published “Georgia” in his book, Petals of Zero, Petals of One in 2009, he sat down with his French translator, Sika Fakambi, in her sunny house in Fresnes, working “over many days and many drafts” to translate his poem into French, “hashing out lines and ideas and sonic analogs” (Zawacki, “On Slovenia”). Through the course of these sunny meetings, Zawacki made many promising discoveries in the French translation; in fact, so pleased was he with what he found that he reworked many lines in the original, which had been published earlier that year in the journal 1913: A Journal of Forms, according to their French translation. “I vowed,” he later stated, “that I should never publish anything before it got translated!” (“Tremolo”). Thirteen years prior to this, Bill Luoma contemplated a list of 101 questions sent to him by a group of translators working collectively to bring his My Trip to New York City into French. Luoma later compiled his responses to their questions to create a list poem. Much has been written about what happens to a text in translation. But what to make of texts such as these when they come, so to speak, back home?¹

Questions of how poetry circulates and who constitutes its publics loom large in these works, not least because translation, as a practice with growing prestige and as a prominent discourse in both commercial and academic spheres, has increasingly larger stakes in poetry’s circulation.² This is especially the case in the Franco-American context, where a strong mutual interest is enabled and facilitated by a network of institutions, funding agencies, publishing houses, periodicals, and reading series, not to mention an overlapping canon of writers and a long history of exchange.³ Translation, then, has given rise to a new set of circumstances for poetry: not only is it something that happens to poetry, but its questions and problems often become matters for poets to take up, re-examine, and respond to in their work. Questions of circulation and publics, though, are no less present at a work’s inception, and a writer’s choices—from style to publication contexts—orient a work’s possible trajectories. My intention, then, is to track these two poems as they move from journals and chapbooks into French translation and then back into English in subsequent books.⁴ As two American poets writing roughly in the same period, Zawacki and Luoma take approaches—borrowing from Bourdieu, we could use the term dispositions—that stand in stark contrast to each other. If Zawacki’s poetry has a more universal impulse with its ontological concerns and its desire to dazzle and disorient with a barrage of linguistic devices, Luoma’s work is involved more with local questions of social communities whose activity he documents with a sort of plain-speech esthetic of casual, offhand commentary. In other words, Zawacki’s text can be characterized in general by an excess of stylization; Luoma’s by its absence. The publics these opposing styles imagine and enable are fundamentally at odds. This is expressed in the poets’ practices—encompassing choices at once stylistic, ideological, and pragmatic—and, ultimately, in the ways they respond to the set of circumstances created by the practices and institutions of translation.

Presently, translation often informs or exists alongside increasingly popular poetic practices such as rewriting, appropriation, multilingual writing, and digital poetry, whose popularity stems from modernist experiments and mid-century movements such as concrete poetry and Oulipo.⁵ Marjorie Perloff has made a compelling case for linking the rise of these practices to shifts in communication and information technology in a globalized world. For Perloff, citation, ekphrasis, “writing through,” constraint-based experiments, found language, récriture, translation, and intertextuality are all instances of “unoriginal writing,” the import of which is now unquestionable in the age of the Internet, where writing has given way to various forms of rewriting (17). This is the “logical form of ‘writing’ in an age of literally mobile or transferable text—text that can be readily moved from one digital site to another or from print to screen, that can be appropriated, transformed, or hidden by all sorts of means and for all sorts of purposes” (Perloff 17). The writers in question here are certainly participating in this kind of “unoriginal writing.” Zawacki’s text, after all, began as a translation, and Luoma’s “Annotation” is clearly an appropriation of another pre-existing text. But there is a significant difference between “rewriting” as a poetic strategy undertaken by a writer and “rewriting”—or, to be more precise, translation—as a cultural phenomenon to which a writer then responds. Translation, in these cases, not only refers to a procedure of writing, but also to a social trajectory, in particular one that begins with an original poem composed in English, then moves via translation by others into another language, then ends with a new version in the original language. More specifically, I am interested in how this trajectory—its movement in and out of various domestic and foreign publishing contexts—finds expression in these poems.

Whereas recent criticism such as Perloff’s has sought to examine the influence of technology (specifically, the Internet) on practices of rewriting, I am more concerned here with the ways that writers respond to the circulation of their own texts.⁶ To be sure, there is a long history of fruitful exchanges between poets and their translators; but for the exchange itself to become matter—the subject, even—for new poetic experiments attests to a new shift in social circumstances.⁷ Although many writers have drawn on, and continue to draw on, translation in their poetry in diverse ways (Pound’s “Homage to Sextus Propertius,” Zukofsky’s homophonic translation of Catullus, Jack Spicer’s playful adaptation in After Lorca, Jerome Rothenberg’s “total translations” of indigenous writing, or Caroline Bergvall’s more recent catalogue of translations of Dante in her piece “Via” represent just a small sample of a wide range of approaches), few, to my knowledge, have approached translation from this angle.⁸ Bill Luoma and Andrew Zawacki both exploit the opportunity afforded by these new circumstances in distinct ways. Whereas Zawacki’s estheticizing approach to translation leads him to enrich and embellish his original poem, Luoma turns his attention to the social labor of translation by exposing the reading habits of his translators in a new work.

Before Andrew Zawacki sat down with Fakambi to work on the translation of “Georgia,” his poem had already appeared as the co-winner of the 1913 prize in 1913: A Journal of Forms in early 2009.⁹ By this time, Zawacki had already published two full-length poetry books, By Reason of Breakings (2002) and Anabranch (2004), which were received by poetry enthusiasts with great acclaim and which won distinguished awards and prizes. His first published work, however, was a volume of Slovenian writing from 1945–1995 that he edited (Buffalo, NY: White Pine Press, 1999). Since the mid-nineties, he had been—and continues to be—actively involved in the field of poetry as an editor, translator, and critic (he is currently an Associate Professor of English and the Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Georgia). He has also published several chapbooks and another full-length collection, Videotape (2013), since his third book, Petals of Zero, Petals of One, came out. When Zawacki began writing “Georgia,” he probably hadn’t given much thought to how the poem would be impacted by its future French translation. But translation of another sort was clearly on his mind at the outset. According to Zawacki, “Georgia,” a poem of twenty-six pages (548 lines), began as a translation of Philippe Soupault’s smaller poem of the same name and expanded into its own while remaining loosely patterned on the original’s anaphoric repetition of the word “Georgia.”¹⁰ Though broken up and slightly modified in translation, Soupault’s entire poem of twenty-eight lines makes it into Zawacki’s “Georgia.” The decision to use a modernist poem as a sort of anchor is not without significance. To start with, it provides a clear intertext for Zawacki’s poem, signalling in this way that “Georgia” is to be read in relation to other modernist poetry. Soupault’s poem isn’t the sole intertext. Zawacki also cites Maurice Blanchot, Louis Zukofsky, and William Carlos Williams, among others. If writing can suggest the context in which or against which it wishes to be read, which I believe it inevitably does by indexing various social contexts through tone, register, visual design, references, allusions, and a host of other stylistic mannerisms and devices, then Zawacki’s use of intertextuality asks that “Georgia” be read in relation to other works of literature. This may seem an obvious point, but when viewed in comparison to Luoma’s modes of social address below, we see that it is not to be taken for granted.

One can readily identify traces of Soupault’s style throughout Zawacki’s poem. The flashy, incongruous metaphors, the jarring juxtapositions, and the spew of colorful descriptive adjectives of Zawacki’s “Georgia” strike a strident Surrealist note.¹¹ Consider, for example, the visual clash and simultaneous merge of opposites in “the skuzzy drag queen dawn” (4), where a traditionally poetic subject or symbol—dawn—has anthropomorphized into a socially marginalized figure such that, in spite of its resultant connotative sparks, the two images remain fundamentally irreconcilable. Notice, too, the overlay of horticultural and bodily images as well as the violent corporeal transfiguration in the lines: “I prune your buds / unbutton my ribs / pot you inside like a bonsai Georgia” (8). This sort of bodily transformation seems almost cartoonish, and Zawacki, acutely aware of this—“it’s not unlike a kiddie cartoon / fluorescent way out of proportion”—continues to multiply its effects until it becomes unimaginable: “I see horses / running through diamonds Georgia I / can’t hold / it all in my head” (25). This is characteristic of Zawacki’s style. Rare words and garish metaphors always trump plain, unadorned language, just as figurative modes of expression are favored over their literal counterparts. This also holds true when Zawacki resorts to translation. While at times he modernizes Soupault’s poem—“Je lance des flèches dans la nuit Georgia (I shoot arrows into the night)” is rendered “I shoot bullets into the dark” (3)—most of Zawacki’s decisions display a brazen Gallicizing tendency. Soupault’s “Je marche à pas de loup dans l’ombre Georgia” becomes, for instance, “I walk wolfstep into the shadow Georgia” (4, emphasis added). Instead of drawing on a more common idiom such as “I creep into the shadow” or “I slip into the shadow,” Zawacki translates the words literally to create a jarring neologism of a highly figurative nature. Similarly, Soupault’s “Je vois la fumée qui monte et qui fuit Georgia” (I see smoke rising and drifting off) is rendered “I see smoke it rises it quadrilles Georgia” and “Et le froid et le silence et la peur Georgia”(And the cold and the quiet and the fear) as “And the cold and soundless decibel” (4, emphasis added).¹² French clearly inflects Zawacki’s choices here (as do specific phonetic concerns to which I return shortly). Quadrilles, an imaginative evocation of swirling circles, derives from French and visually flaunts this derivation with its “qu-” and “-ll-”; and decibel echoes faintly the French –dicible, as in indicible (unspeakable, unsayable), thereby creating a neat contrast with soundless. These translation choices may seem overreaching when viewed in isolation, but they are consonant with the poem’s overall style, a style that depends on many forms of inflated expression—hyperbole, adynaton, and, more generally, a conspicuous, self-conscious mannerism.

If drawing on Soupault gives Zawacki’s “Georgia” a clear intertext, then his tendency to over-translate in favor of French as well as to stud the text with French expressions and rare words gives the poem a cosmopolitan air of linguistic sophistication (I should mention that the poem is dedicated to Zawacki’s wife, Sandrine, who is French). But appropriation, Surrealist metaphor, and Gallic inflections are only three of the numerous poetic strategies Zawacki deploys in this poem. Indeed, although there is a general absence of meter and its traditional trappings, Zawacki exploits a wide range of linguistic phenomena with panache and flair. This is perhaps made possible by the framing device of the poem: the repeated apostrophe to “Georgia.” Although staged as a direct address, the poem has none of the urgency or intimacy associated with this device. Rather, the addressee functions as a stylistic placeholder, a sort of steady beat whose expected return and regularity binds together the vagaries of Zawacki’s style. And these vagaries are many. Just a partial list of linguistic and literary devices used in the poem would include word-play; assonance; alliteration; rhyme (slant, internal and external, rimes riches); anagrams and visual puns (“it’s aliment vs. ailment Georgia” [9]); shifts in register; phonetic, morpho-syntactic, and lexical disjunction; asemantic and nonsense speech; and a plethora of performative language where the text acts out what it says (“I’m an echo playing bumper cars in basilicas of Georgia Georgia”[24]). Within the larger apostrophic structure, none of these features dominates the poem; instead, no sooner does one feature flash forward than it fades and gives way to the next one, usually triggered by a sort of associative or metonymic link.¹³ It’s necessary to quote the poem at length in order to witness this at full effect:

a façade Georgia a fusillade the firing squad and the wall Georgia a cenotaph in the aftermath of petty Georgia your petticoat slipping pussy- and pistolwhipped son of a Georgia if I ever I swear if I if you ever so much as hint at Georgia I don’t know what I’d fixin’ to fix you know not what I would do but no one’s ever sure what they’re capable of so I try Georgia I try to remit this dragnet that dredges the ends of an earth what is it Georgia is it Georgia or is it not I can’t figure it Georgia ’twon’t stay in focus it doesn’t possess a center or an outside or an in like skipping a stone and the shale doesn’t sink or taming a tidal wave with a riding crop or swimming inside a prism Georgia (19–20)

With its abrupt shifts, the course of the excerpt is not easy to follow. From façade the poem moves via phonetic likeness to fusillade (note, again, the Gallic inflection), and from fusillade it opens through a semantic channel onto a scene of an execution (while maintaining a surface continuity through rhyme: façade, fusillade, squad). This scene is given period detail by the mention of the “petticoat slipping”—petticoat having sprung from the near homonym petty of the previous line—but no sooner is this scene offered than withdrawn, as the poem quickly shifts along thematic lines to a more contemporary depiction of violence with “pussy- and pistolwhipped son of a Georgia.” A first-person subject enters here as an irate Southerner whose threats suggests impending violence. Zawacki is careful here with his line breaks, granting a pause where the speaker’s temper might cause him to stutter:

if I ever
I swear if I
if you ever so much as hint at Georgia
I don’t know what I’d fixin’ to fix you

This low, regional register gives way to an arch and archaizing syntactic inversion—a clear signal of a higher, literary register: “know not what I would do.” (This is echoed a few lines later with ’twont). Then, after introducing a new, more contemplative first-person, the poem slips into poetic metaphor with “this dragnet that dredges the ends of the earth.” The speaker waxes philosophic for the next seven lines, mulling over an unspecified phenomenological paradox in terms reminiscent of Blanchot (whom, it bears repeating, Zawacki quotes elsewhere in the poem):

it doesn’t possess a center or an outside
or an in

It ends with three jarring poetic analogies, each of which seems to have abandoned its related term or explicatory purpose and drastically veered off in a different semantic direction, demonstrating in this way the speaker’s expressed lack of focus (“I can’t figure it Georgia / ’twont stay in focus”).

This excerpt illustrates what the poem does as a whole. It moves between a variety of thematic material—in this case from violence to philosophical aporia; elsewhere it dwells on the tension between technology and nature and man’s fraught relationship to both—while foregrounding a wide range of linguistic and poetic concerns. As can be seen, the poem doesn’t proceed in any linear manner nor does it follow any narrative arc. What’s more, no stable or coherent subject stands behind its language; instead, the many appearances of a first person pronoun posit as many possible subject positions rather than a single, socially identifiable speaker (at one point, the speaker states, “I is a shotgun shell” [11]). Semantically troubling, nonlinear, and disjointed, “Georgia” displays many characteristic traits of the experimental poetry of previous decades, beginning with the many Modernist movements at turn of the century and extending up to the Language Poets of the 1970s and ’80s. And yet there is no mistaking the fact that Zawacki’s poetry, though greatly influenced by these writers, belongs to another tradition entirely. The reasons for this are many. For one, the devices Zawacki employs are used for different purposes and therefore serve different ends. Whereas the Language poets, for example, had theorized and politicized their use of certain poetic strategies—and these were by no means wholly novel nor did they constitute a fixed, identifiable repertoire—Zawacki’s use of these same devices attests to a knowing poetic style. In other words, Zawacki showcases a sort of virtuosic savoir-faire—thereby signalling his poetic skill—but the tightly stitched surface of his style may obscure his other ostensible concerns. Behind this stitching may lurk a whole host of ontological and metaphysical concerns related to the kind of negative theology he has repeatedly alluded to in interviews and essays—and I trust his engagement with Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Levinas, Blanchot, and Jean-Luc Marion to be deep and sincere—but only infrequently do these concerns find just articulation.

What Zawacki’s poem accomplishes, then, is seemingly at odds with what he considers to be the objective of poetry. Indeed, the various interpretative paths made possible by his virtuosic display of style are overwhelmed, in his own conception of poetry, by metaphysics. Glossing Heidegger’s “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” Zawacki claims that “the poet’s role is to heal the ontological rift that has occurred since mortals took leave of Being and the gods fled the world” (“The Break is Not a Break” 165).¹⁴ The poet accomplishes this, according to Zawacki, through love, as this concept is articulated by Kiekegaard and Heidegger: “The poet’s ontological project of recovering Being of both the men and gods is, then, a type of love, as he converts the break that each has effected toward the other into a distance that promotes the possibility of a reunion with their own respective natures and with one another”(169). This is what Heidegger professes when he states: “To be a poet in destitute times means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods” (cited in “The Break is Not a Break” 168). The poet is the only one capable of accomplishing this fundamentally solitary task, since it is in him that the holy resides. As Zawacki makes clear, “By stepping forward, in a solitude occasioned by his fellow mortals’ amnesia and the god’s deliberate default, the poet entrusts himself to the holy that entrusts itself to him” (169). Although without relying on the facile notion of personal experience or without taking for granted a determined self, since, for Heidegger, the self is sacrificed as it steps into Being or into the Open, Zawacki’s understanding of poetry remains evokes a traditional romantic ideology, whereby the poet is a bard whose privileged position gives him a noble, even holy, purpose. Since the privileged poet must step forward “in a solitude occasioned by his fellow mortals’ amnesia,” he thus turns away from the world of social relations and toward an abstract category of Being.¹⁵ Following this line of thought, the poem must suspend its personal or social modes of address. It is in this respect that, in spite of his seemingly defiant style, Zawacki inscribes his work into the poetic tradition in which the poet plays the noble role of philosophic bard, one who addresses not the members of his society but absent gods. Although “Georgia” takes the form of a second-person mode of address, the addressee, like a transcendent deity, remains abstract and absent as a mere stylistic ploy. In this way, the poet’s metaphysics overshadows the social relevance of his poem, as the poem is meant to be read more as an unanswerable prayer than an intervention in a given cultural context.

Combining experimental devices with traditional poetic objectives defined much of the poetry of the ’90s and continues to this day. Zawacki himself acknowledges this in the work of Gustaf Sobin, a poet whose work stands as a major point of reference and source of inspiration for Zawacki, and in whose work he detects “the sense of being both archetypal and avant-garde” (“Towards the Blanched Alphabets”). This is because, for Zawacki, “Sobin’s poetry dances on a wire between largely traditional aims and an innovative style which, while emergent from Duncan, Olson, and Char and embraced by experimental writers, is as internally consistent and recognizable as Hopkins or Heraclitus” (“Towards the Blanched Alphabets”).¹⁶ The critic Stephen Burt gave wider recognition to this phenomenon in his 1998 review of Susan Wheeler’s Smokes, where he labeled this new tendency in poetry “Elliptical.” Here’s how he describes it:

Elliptical poets try to manifest a person who speaks the poem and reflects the poet while using all the verbal gizmos developed over the last few decades to undermine the coherence of speaking selves. They are post-avant-gardist, or post-“postmodern”: they have read (most of them) Stein’s heirs, and the “language writers,” and have chosen to do otherwise. (“Smokes”)

Additionally, as Burt later explained, “Elliptics seek the authority of the rebellious, they want to challenge their readers, violate decorum, surprise or explode assumptions about what belongs in a poem, or what matters in life, and to do so while meeting traditional lyric goals” (“The Elliptical Poets 346 emphasis added). As for what he means by traditional lyric goals, Burt says little. But he does make the surprising claim that these poets “want to entertain as thoroughly as, but not to resemble, television” (“Smokes”).¹⁷

Zawacki might contest any affiliation with Elliptical poetry, not to mention the notion of poetry as entertainment. But Burt’s brief sketch of Ellipticism provides a set of fitting terms for describing “Georgia” (as well as many other works too, which explains its unexpected popularity). We have already noted the ways Zawacki’s poem challenges the reader and undermines the notion of a coherent speaker. But there are many other features of “Georgia” that are helpfully explained by Burt’s Ellipticism. Here’s Burt: “[Elliptical poets] create inversions, homages, takeoffs on old or ‘classic’ poems” (“The Elliptical Poets” 348) (Zawacki’s use of Soupault’s poem is clearly an instance of this); “Elliptical poets like insistent, bravura forms, forms that can shatter and recoalesce, forms with repetends—sestinas, pantoums, or fantasias on single words” (“The Elliptical Poets 346) (“Georgia” is unmistakably a case of the latter, with its title serving as the repetend); “Elliptical love poems that declare ‘I am X, I am Y, I am Z’ where X, Y, Z are incompatible things” (“The Elliptical Poets” 347) (“I’m an echo playing bumper chars in basilicas of Georgia Georgia / a silhouette / I’m a satin flower / I’m a sick bag and the sick Georgia / an avalanche an insomniateque / a ruby-throated humming” [“Georgia” 24–25]). Burt’s catalogue of tendencies also includes jump-cut transitions—“one thought, one impression, tailgates another” (“The Elliptical Poets” 349)—and shifts in register “between low (or slangy) and high (or naively ‘poetic’) diction” (“Smokes”). Both disjunctive transitions and shifts in register are vividly present in the excerpt of “Georgia” cited above.¹⁸ But if Zawacki’s “Georgia” can be read within the framework of Ellipticism, it is not for its stylistic choices alone. By appealing to “the poetic” as a set of devices with little or no bearing on social matters, Ellipticism necessarily underplays the role of its own social context and mode of address. Indeed, its position depends on this very fact. Nonetheless, this poetic ideology arises within very specific institutional settings (remember Burt is a Harvard professor, prominent reviewer, and a poet himself). Indeed, the publishing context of “Georgia” supports and throws into sharper relief the esthetic features I’ve highlighted.

As the co-winner of the 1913 Prize for Poetry, “Georgia” first appeared already wearing a ribbon. In a field where blurbs by well-known poets and prizes granted by esteemed judges are increasingly the means of poetic legitimization, its introduction and endorsement by the poets Peter Gizzi and Cole Swensen already guarantees it a public for whom those standards of qualification matter.¹⁹ Gizzi’s praise of the work is telling: “[Zawacki] has defiantly written a new anthem to his new home, poetry, an ever present subaltern house of the blues and anvils, house of song, of sting and sung, of bling, and of sorrow” (Gizzi 25). Following this reasoning, “Georgia” is written for and about poetry itself. More importantly, it is written by one of poetry’s newest members. By committing himself to a specific conception of style—a standard practice of Elliptical poetry—Zawacki creates a “new home” that is less a “subaltern house of the blues and anvils,” as Gizzi would have it, than a prison-house of poetry. Yet, if “Georgia” is an “anthem” to poetry without overtly speaking about poetry itself, then it must signal its subject, as well as its belonging, in other less obvious ways. As I’ve noted, by passing quickly through a range of poetic devices, emotional registers, and topical themes, so quickly, in fact, that no single poetic strategy within its apostrophic structure can be isolated and deemed emblematic of the poem, Zawacki’s work is poetically pluralistic. This pluralism is matched and accentuated by the journal in which it appears. Founded by Sandra Doller in 2003, 1913 has an expansive board of directors, a team of interns, and a tendency to fill its pages with a wide and eclectic mix of writers, styles, and forms. With most of its issues nearing three hundred pages, it is a big journal, one that finds its contributors through open submissions and regular prize contests. Casting such a wide net doesn’t exclude the possibility of identifying preferred tendencies, stylistic tics, or related themes in each issue. The very nature of a journal where a diverse group of writing is published together encourages some sort of pattern recognition. The issue in which “Georgia” appears, for example, shares with this poem an interest in appropriation, translation, Surrealism, and linguistic cosmopolitanism. Moreover, the many overlapping frames of reference suggested by much of the work remain within the field of aesthetics (visual art, poetry, music, etc.). For a closer comparison of “Georgia” and the journal, consider Zawacki’s use of Soupault. This decision to draw on the text of a modern Surrealist writer resonates both with the journal’s fascination with all things modern as well as its interest in practices such as collage and appropriation. Just as Zawacki’s “Georgia” is “after Soupault,” so too are many poems in the issue “after” another writer or artist, such as Shin Yu Pai’s “Métaphysique d’éphèmere” written “after Joseph Cornell” or Renee Gladman’s piece “after Pina Bausch” (there are also poems written “after Donne” and “for Zukofsky”). No less represented in the issue are practices of ekphrasis and found language.²⁰ Similarly, Zawacki’s surrealist language is complemented by this issue’s translation of the one-time friend of André Breton and cofounder of the Surrealist movement in Czechoslovakia, Viteslav Nezval. His piece “Parrot on a Motorcycle, or on the Craft of Poetry” offers fanciful definitions of poetic terms such as “image,” “association,” “rhythm,” “rhyme,” “assonance,” and “metaphor,” all of which shed light on Zawacki’s “Georgia” when the two pieces are read in conjunction. In brief, the pluralist tendencies of the journal, its panoply of forms and esthetics, mirrors Zawacki’s own style, with its myriad poetic devices and its appeal to modernist techniques. This style, combined with Zawacki’s desire to dazzle, is precisely what situates “Georgia” within the objectives and criteria of contemporary poetry’s more accepted ideologies and institutions. In many respects, this is what wins prizes.

But Zawacki’s rise within the institutions of poetry began even before the appearance of “Georgia” in 1913: A Journal of Forms. His second collection had won the endorsement of John Ashbery—“Reading Anabranch is like being rowed along the corridors of a flooded palace”—and C.D. Wright, who awarded one of the book’s sections, “Masquerade,” the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award on behalf of the Poetry Society of America, a controversial organization that also granted Zawacki’s poetic sequence Viatica from the same book the 2002 Cecile Hemley Memorial Award.²¹ Zawacki’s poem “Fermata” from this collection was also published in the esteemed pages of The New Yorker.²² Additionally, selections from “Masquerade” appeared in Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present, published by the commercial publishing house Scribner. Endorsed by star poets, conferred prizes by the oldest and most established Poetry Society in the United States, published by a commercial publishing house and a large-circulation, highbrow magazine—Zawacki’s work had already begun circulating among the recognized venues of established poetry.²³ In many ways, then, the ground had been laid for a favorable reception of “Georgia” within certain poetic institutions in the United States. Additionally, its engagement with French writers and the French language—exemplified by its translation of Soupault—began to imagine a French public, which it would soon find. By the time Sika Fakambi began translating “Georgia” in 2009, Zawacki’s poetry had already appeared in various French journals such as Action Poétique, Passage à l’Acte, Le Nouveau Recueil and Vacarme, and Zawacki had started translating works by the French poet Sébastien Smirou into English. Zawacki was thus amply prepared to assist Fakambi with her translation. In the process, he became aware of new possibilities for his original, and he took advantage of the poem’s not yet being collected in a book to make small but significant changes to it.

These changes are telling. For instance, what was “an explosive rigged in a micro chip” in the journal becomes “an explosive packed in a microchip” in the book (7). Moreover, “all hauntedlike Georgia” changes to “all haggardlike Georgia” (16); “lean out to know the distance” to “lean out to inquire of the distance” (17); and “the cold and soundless decibel” to “cold the inaudible decibel” (9, emphases added). Zawacki cites this latter change while discussing the productive relationship between translation and writing in an interview.

To give a brief example of translating becoming writing: I had a line in “Georgia” that read, “and cold the noiseless decibel.”²⁴ In Sika’s version, the phrase became, “et ce froid et ces décibles inaudibles.” When I looked at that, the future of the so-called “original” phrase suddenly clarified itself: “inaudible decibel.” Beyond the not-so-striking oxymoron of a silent unit of noise, which is all the phrase initially had to recommend it (if that much), now a pair of –el sounds were in play—and more sexy to my eye for their ending anagrammatically: -le and –el. Moreover, “decibel” literally contains the other word’s “-dible,” although in a scrambled way, or rather “inaudible” seems to bloom into “decibel,” as silence might burst into sound. So thanks to the relative closeness of French and English and especially to Sika’s ear (or her eye?), I changed the line according to the phrasing she’d found—the translation as haint, come back to haunt its antecedent into surrogate, secondary speech. There were other cases like this throughout “Georgia”—I call them backdrafting and imagine them as filaments of smoke causing fire—, and I felt lucky the poem hadn’t been published in English yet. In fact I vowed, reversing the terms, I should never publish anything before it got translated! So maybe Benjamin is right, that a translation invigilates the “maturing process of the original language,” and that “the original undergoes a change” only in its “afterlife” as a translation. That a poem can’t arrive until it’s been carried into another language—this passage is what allows it to begin. (“Tremolo”)

Zawacki’s rich metaphors of backdrafting and haunting can be restated in plainer terms. What he means by “the future of the so-called ‘original’” is simply that through translation he is able to further craft his writing according to the stylistic principles and esthetic effects that most interest him. With inaudible, his objective seems to be to compress as much semantic, acoustic, and visual information into this line as possible, not to mention the gain from the marked French inflection, so that it resonates more with its surrounding text. The other changes can be characterized in the same way. Replacing rigged with packed in the line “an explosive packed in a microchip” gives rise to a semantic contrast between the outward-expanding motion of exploding and the inward-contracting motion of packing. Additionally, the k sound of packing amplifies the crackle—“the racket” and “clatter”—taking place before and after this line with its surplus of voiceless velar stops. Observe the sound patterning in the sequence that precedes the line in question:

they bicker and click
the clamors I mean
blur as if struck with a Lucifer match
guesswork Georgia
netherlight’s joke
I see smoke it rises it quadrilles . . . .

(4, emphasis added)

Words such as shellacked, skuzzy, frisking, pixeled, are carefully plotted throughout the next few lines only to be followed by phrases such as “a dumdum blank to the clavicle Georgia” and “the clangors clang if you hearken Georgia” (5, 6). This dense patterning of sound is reflected on a thematic level, too, with frequent references made to noise and feedback (“the feedback Georgia / the anvil’s hymnal / a dial-tone looped in a flophouse Georgia” [6]). The same can be said with respect to Zawacki’s choice to change “all hauntedlike Georgia” to “all haggardlike Georgia” based on the French “hagard ou tout comme Georgia,” only this time the sought-after sound pattern is the voiced velar stop g (“frag,” “blitzkrieg,” “slug cocked snug in the six-shooter chamber”), which has the additional advantage here of visually rhyming while phonetically clashing with the following two lines: “a hangman Georgia / a hanged man Georgia” (16). Finally, the change from know to inquire of in the line “lean out to inquire of the distance” (17) (the French has évaluer le distance) illustrates Zawacki’s predilection for stylization and falls in line with his unabashed taste for neologisms, compound formations, and Latinate constructions. Moreover, inquire is more speculative and also belongs to a higher register than know.

On the whole, the rewritten version of “Georgia” varies only slightly from its first edition, and thus seems to have passed through French and returned to English relatively unscathed, even with a few new spoils. The circumstances and context of the poem’s French translation—Zawacki and Fakambi sitting side by side in Fakambi’s sunny house in Fresnes—offer Zawacki another opportunity to expand and refine the original objectives of his poem, as he keeps his gaze fixed on the formal properties of language (“On Slovenia”). In this respect, Zawacki benefits in many ways from the circulation of “Georgia”—gleaning things here and there, touching up a few rough patches while embracing and using to his own advantage what translation offers him: namely, a writing workshop for fine-tuning his poem.

“If the house is just poetry / we’re in trouble”

– Rod Smith, The Good House (New York: Spectacular Books, 2001)

Bill Luoma’s My Trip to New York City and its companion piece “The Annotated My Trip to NYC” are written with a whole set of choices, concerns, and poetic strategies fundamentally at odds with those we’ve witnessed thus far in Zawacki’s “Georgia.” Whereas Zawacki’s projected public is hemmed in by fixed assumptions concerning the nature of the poetic—since, as we’ve seen, the addressee of the book is no other than an abstract notion of poetry itself—, Luoma’s work addresses an identifiable social group in a mode that at first glance seems more communicative than poetic. First published as a chapbook in 1994, Luoma’s My Trip to New York City was subsequently translated into French as Mon Voyage à New York in 1997, and then reproduced in Luoma’s first full-length book, Works and Days. “My Trip to New York City”—now a poem in a collection—opened the book and “The Annotated My Trip to NYC,” published here for the first time, closed it. If the first piece is ostensibly about a poet’s trip to New York, the second is about a poem’s trip to France. Despite this difference of subject, both pieces address, and consequently enable, very distinct publics.

Bill Luoma began publishing poetry in little magazines—mainly in cheaply produced mags edited by, and printed for, friends—and as small chapbooks in the late 1980s, but it wasn’t until 1998 that his first full-length publication, Works & Days, was published. He has since published a chapbook titled Dear Dad (Tinfish, 2000), which consists of a series of notes, reflections, and casual comments addressed to the author’s dying father, and in 2011 he published his second full-length collection, Some Math (Kenning Editions), a set of neo-dada sound poems that draws on a vast array of jargon from various scientific and cyber-techno fields. Whereas Zawacki is in many respects a career poet—a professor of poetry and creative writing whose regularly published works have gained increasing recognition—Luoma has remained an amateur poet who is employed by other means than his writing and who publishes only occasionally. His work has yet to gain a wider readership and has received very little critical attention other than that from his own circle of friends. His poetic practice, as I attempt to demonstrate, is both a cause and a consequence of this.

“My Trip to New York City” is written in an unmistakably flat style. There are few complex constructions, polished turns of phrase, shifts in register, instances of word play, or marked displays of erudition. It is composed of brief prose paragraphs, each between three and eight sentences, each left justified and separated by an inch of white space. Rather than subordinate clauses there are strings of paratactic remarks—each of which remains stubbornly straightforward and unassuming:

Douglass has a picture of his father on the wall. It is a fishing picture and his dad was smoking. Sometimes he imitates his father by putting a cigarette in his mouth and pretending that a lot of ash has built up. His father would trick him sometimes. (15)

There is seemingly nothing particularly jarring about this paragraph. Each sentence seems to belong to the same context. And yet, the more one considers that last sentence—“His father would trick him sometimes”—the more intractable it becomes. How would his father trick him? It’s unclear whether this is related to what his father does with a cigarette or if it opens onto another subject about which the reader remains in the dark. This is typical of this piece. One sentence, often the last, seems both to belong to the context of the paragraph and to lie outside of it. There are other paragraphs that are more semantically disjointed. Consider the following:

Around us was Snet because they can reach beyond the call. We were cautioned of the depressed storm drains. One time Douglass touched a trend. (21)

We learn from the annotated poem that the first two sentences are species of found language—of which there is abundance at the end of the piece—while the last sentence can only be associated with the previous two by means of associative links (“touch” is related to “reach,” for example). The stylistic influence of Language poetry, where sequential sentences elicit different frames of reference, is well noted in this particular paragraph. But once this paragraph is placed back in its larger context this influence appears less significant. There is, after all, a narrative arc to which all the sentences, no matter their semantic disparity, belong. In keeping with this being a trip to New York City, the found language here comes right off the streets of New York: Snet is a phone company whose advertisements blanket public space, and the narrator is cautioned of depressed storm drains by road signs. What’s more, the narrative “I” is hardly troubled or called into question—a supposed hallmark of Language poetry—since each paragraph relates to the fixed perspective of the first-person narrator. On the whole, even if there is much temporal ambiguity—we come to find out that the trip to New York is actually two trips, for example—and even if certain moments shake the work’s narrative continuity, these elements are never so pronounced as to make one lose sight of what, in the end, the piece is about. Rupture, disjunction, and radical incoherency, all key words used in describing Language poetry and other experimental practices, are here significantly pared down.

If the influence of Language poetry is notably muted in this work, it’s because Luoma was primarily writing for an emergent group of poets who were trying to find a foothold in the field of poetry. Breaking from the Language poets while remaining experimental is not a radical esthetic move on Luoma’s part but rather a simple shift in terms of address. Luoma makes this clear in his piece “Illegal Park.” When asked at a poetry reading if he considered himself a Language poet, he responds (or reports to us his response):

I say I can’t be a language poet because I wasn’t there then. I say language poets were some of my teachers and I was receptive to the work because I had no poetry background having just come from the sciences. It wasn’t all fluffy and stuff I say. I also say that I admire their community model but don’t feel any compulsion to replicate their forms. (Works & Days 99)

That Luoma sees his not belonging to the Language poetry tradition as a simple matter of time and place is an obvious, but significant point to be made (his way of embedding his own “I” through reported speech also curiously distances himself from his own comments). He suggests that poetic traditions originate within a specific social context and are thus often bound to defined periods and geographic locations. Moreover, what he recognizes and values in Language poetry is not its forms but its formations, which recalls Ron Silliman’s claim that the coherence in Language poetry is to be found “not in the writing with its various methods and strategies, but in the social composition of its audience” (“Realism” 64). Published by The Figures, a small publishing house with strong ties to Language poetry, Luoma’s chapbook reflexively positions itself in relation to his predecessors while addressing a new community of writers and readers. Whereas Luoma’s take on the New Sentence recalls the dominant though largely misunderstood experimental tradition of Language poetry and evokes the publishing context of his own work, his use of gossip, in-jokes, and group talk both imagines and realizes a new poetry community. The guiding metaphor of Luoma’s poem is alluded to in the last paragraph of the work:

Scott’s voice was broadcasting on the phone when I got back from New York. Sometimes I crack jokes around Scott. His wife is very beautiful. He wants me to send him some slides. (26)

This is a suggestive metaphor for both the content and structure of the book. It is easy to imagine each paragraph as a slide and each slide as a discreet moment from the trip. More importantly, though, this is a slide show for Scott (which refers to Scott Bentley, another poet and friend of Luoma, and to whom the book is dedicated). Since Scott was unable to join him on the trip, Luoma is simply telling him what happened.²⁵ This framing device provides a specific social context for Luoma’s anecdotes. It also accounts for the intimate details and gossip that give the work a sort of insider feel. Consider the following paragraph:

I asked Cindy where all the power lines were. A stranger can point things out. You can’t jump as high in New York, for example. She was sorry that she smelled so bad because of the shrink and the video producer. Actually, her skin smelled well good. I’ve admired her work for a long time. Bob with Chicken made me laugh more than Hollywood doing Charles Nelson Riley. (13)

Many things are obscure here. Not the least of which is the last sentence—“Bob with Chicken made me laugh more than Hollywood doing Charles Nelson Riley.” It’s hard to know if this relates to the previous sentence, and thus refers to Cindy’s “work”—which also isn’t specified—or if there is some other suppressed context that would clarify this. The annotated poem does indeed fill us in, letting us know that this is a “twisted ‘in-joke’ that only Douglass and Brian and Chris and Dave would get” (128). In this companion piece, Luoma explains the joke, telling us that Cindy is a painter who lives in Williamsburg and that she had made a funny painting of Douglass as part of a series. That only a small group of people would get this joke naturally excludes many readers from this sort of interpretative possibility. In other words, this paragraph offers a very specific reading for only a small, determined group of friends.

In-jokes are only one way of expressing the social relations of this small group, as it is only a subcategory of a larger discursive form central to the poem—namely, gossip.

Margot lives in San Francisco and she currently has a boyfriend. We went to the bar and watched a band that Margot’s friends were in. I liked Carla who sang some songs. Brian had a crush on Rachel. Margot’s old boyfriend Bob was there and Brian blurted out something about Margot moving to New York because her boyfriend just got a job at Columbia. I guess it didn’t matter because Bob was dancing with a tall woman. When Margot questioned Brian about her looks on the phone, Brian asked me. I said I thought she was good looking. That was the wrong answer. (13–14)

Crushes, jealously, social blunders, intimate personal opinions, he-said-she-said talk—under what conditions does one typically encounter this type of discourse? In keeping with Luoma’s structural metaphor, this is precisely the kind of language one might use with friends as a sort of running commentary while showing a series of slides. Except that as readers we don’t really know who Margot and Carla and Brian and Bob are, and, unlike in a novel where names can become fully fleshed out characters, here they remain mere ciphers, some of which are repeated in the work, while others are only mentioned in this paragraph. This is pure gossip. And as gossip is only meaningful when you know the people involved (or at least “know of” the people), this language seems directed at someone else. We know that this poem was ostensibly written as a sequence of metaphorical slides for the poet Scott Bentley. But who else is part of this poem’s intended public? And what is at stake in using gossip as a poetic mode?²⁶

As Michael Warner argues in his work Publics and Counterpublics, the concrete public of a text can never be fully determined by any quantitative measure. This is because a public, as a specific cultural artifact, is “as much notional as it is empirical.” It is created by a self-organizing discourse and exists, solely, “by virtue of being addressed” (72). The logic of a public is thus necessarily circular in order to account for an existence that is at once real and imaginary. “A public might be real and efficacious, but its reality lies in just this reflexivity by which an addressable object is conjured into being in order to enable the very discourse that gives it existence” (67). But any and every move a writer enacts implies or imagines a corresponding public for which that move would be meaningful, regardless of whether this public becomes realized or not. As we saw with Zawacki, the meaningfulness of his poetic gestures depends precisely on one’s ability to recognize them as indexes of the “poetic.” Abstracted from any identifiable social context, these gestures are read as an accumulation of devices—devices bound to widely accepted categories and conventions of poetic expression (with this latter term being a loosely defined category in its own right). The value and significance of Zawacki’s poem thus relies on the institutions that establish these categories since Zawacki’s sympathetic readers must in some way be connected to or instructed by these same mediating institutions. The meaningfulness of Luoma’s gossip, on the other hand, depends more on the social relations of a tight-knit circle of friends (and, we might add, on this group’s knowledge of the importance of coteries in the history of poetry). Although certain features of his work take up practices established by experimental writers, such as gossip in Frank O’Hara’s and Joe Brainard’s writing or the abrupt non sequiturs between consecutive sentences in the work of many Language poets, Luoma’s poem by no means depends on the shared recognition of these conventions for its success. Those who recognize the personal references and the in-jokes and who take interest in the gossip are the same people about whom and for whom the poem is ostensibly written. Whether belonging to this group or not, one cannot fail to notice the poem’s restricted field of reference and its imagined public (there are of course other overlapping publics imagined in this work, a point to which I return shortly).

The proper names strewn throughout Luoma’s piece—Scott, Douglass, Lee Ann, Jennifer, Steve, Monique, Cindy—constitute not only a group of friends, but a network of emerging and amateur poets, critics and painters. It’s important to keep in mind the publishing context of this work. Printed in an edition of only two hundred copies, the book had a limited distribution range, reflecting the restricted public indicated by its style and content. As Warner reminds us, these material limits—“means of production and distribution, the physical textual objects, social conditions of access”—work together with internal ones, including “the need to presuppose forms of intelligibility already in place, as well as the social enclosure entailed by any selection of genre, idiolect, style, and address,” to impose constraints on circulation. In this case, given these limits and constraints, it’s fair to call this group a coterie (Warner 73). This is easy enough to do, since we can identify a small group of like-minded friends whose work is often occasional and is created out of an impulse to share or dispute ideas with one another and to maintain or question certain social relations with each other.²⁷ In fact, as Reva Wolf argues in respect to poetry and art in the 1960s, gossip serves just this purpose: it’s a form of bonding that can keep social groups together when their ties are threatened by external forces. It is also, and often quite intentionally, comprised of exclusionary tactics that prevent others from participating, or at the very least offers a highly stratified structure of participation.²⁸ Contrary to the common association of coteries with high society, as a social formation they are essential to writers who wish to enter the poetic field without participating in the established rituals of recognition, e.g., writing according to market trends, striving toward self-distinction with a competitively innovative personal style, submitting one’s poems to prize contests and recognized journals or publishing houses, attending a distinguished writing program, etc. This is not to say that the writers in Luoma’s coterie did none of these things, only that this close group of poets sought to create their own sub-system of circulation and recognition.²⁹ Of course, belonging to a coterie itself may also constitute an important ritual of recognition—a point surely not lost on this particular group—but the rules of coterie formation remain less apparent than the other established means of poetic legitimatization.

This is where the names and social relations mentioned in the poem take on greater significance. As previously mentioned, Scott is Scott Bentley, poet and founder of the little magazine Letterbox, to which Luoma and many of the poets mentioned here regularly contributed. Lee Ann is Lee Ann Brown. She is a poet and the editor and founder of Tender Buttons Press. Jennifer is Jennifer Moxley, a poet whose small-circulation, stable-bound magazine The Impercipient was an important outlet for this group of friends and a common point of reference for Luoma. Douglass is Douglass Rothschild, whose first chapbook was published three years after My Trip to New York City by Situation Press in an edition of 500.³⁰ Another important figure is Steve. Steve is Steve Evans, a poetry critic and English professor at the University of Maine whose authority is alluded to when the narrator states, “I want to listen when Steve talks. Even Douglass listens to Steve,” and also at the end of the piece when he mentions, “In Providence I read the Frank O’Hara poem that Helena read me when we got married. Steve knows the title” (16, 24). As a critical voice, Steve is in many ways the spokesperson for this coterie. In an article written in 2003, he attempted to make a case for a post-Language avant-garde poetry by assessing new poetic practices in the work of six writers, all of whom he counts as friends, including Bill Luoma, Lee Ann Brown, and Jennifer Moxley (“The American Avant-Garde after 1989”). There are also various amateur painters and artists mentioned throughout Luoma’s piece, such as Monique Van Gerderen. This coordinated network of poets, critics, and painters, all of whom have relations of varying proximity to small presses, poetry magazines, reviews, galleries, and academic institutions, provides a sort of map of this poetry’s conditions of possibility. Together, they create a multi-contextual space through which their writing can circulate, and, through repeated circulation, this group can begin to imagine itself as a self-contained public. But it’s important to stress that “My Trip to New York City” isn’t written only for this context, as if this were preexisting, but rather the poem helps enable it by designating it as its addressee. It’s true that Lee Ann Brown had already established her press a few years prior to this book’s publication, and Moxley’s and Bentley’s respective magazines had started publication two years prior in 1992. But by 1994 these poets still belonged to an emergent group: Scott Bentley published his first book-length work the same year with O Books; Lee Ann Brown’s first book-length work Polyverse was published in 1995 by Sun and Moon Press; Jennifer Moxley’s Imaginative Verses was published by Lee Ann Brown’s press Tender Buttons in 1996; Steve Evans assumed his academic position only in 2000 and wrote the previously mentioned article in 2003.³¹ Bill Luoma himself didn’t publish his first full-length collection, in which My Trip to New York City is included, until 1996. Luoma’s work, then, both represents and enables this social base of writers by imagining it as the parameters of its own space of circulation. To be sure, this doesn’t mean his work won’t circulate outside its intended field of reference. Once a work is published, that is to say, once it becomes public, it can never fully determine its public in advance. As Warner makes clear, a public by definition is always in excess of its known social base. This means that “a public must be more than a list of one’s friends. It must include strangers” (Warner 74). This is because publics cannot be contained within any institutional framework—the state, the nation, the academy, even the market—and the members of a public can never be determined by any positive, categorical qualifications, such as race, class, or ethnicity. A public is essentially a mobile cultural construct, whose existence is contingent solely upon the participation of social agents. Indeed, to become part of a public, one need only demonstrate some form of interest or some form of active uptake, no matter how nominal this may be.

This is what happens when Luoma’s coterie poem elicits the interest of the French poet Emmanuel Hocquard. As a prominent poet, translator, and editor, Hocquard is largely responsible for the growing interest in American poetry in France. Since the 1970s, he has invited American poets to read at various institutions (most notably, at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, where he curated readings and literary events for fifteen years) and to collaborate on collective translations through the organization he founded in 1989, Un Bureau sur l’Atlantique, the principal aim of which was to strengthen the ties between French and American poetry. He has translated several American poets—including several works by Michael Palmer—and coedited two anthologies of previously untranslated American poetry (21 + 1 poètes américains in 1986 and 49 + 1 nouveaux poètes américains in 1991). This strong interest in American poetry helps explain how Hocquard could come to discover a relatively obscure work published primarily for a small circle of friends. But this isn’t as fortuitous as it may seem. Embedded within the poem’s coterie public is another public bound to a whole different set of concerns. These are related to the poem’s negative space—that is, not what the poem says or does, but what it withholds and refuses to do. And what this poem clearly does not do is employ those poetic devices recognized by established poetic institutions. In fact, one might say that rather than appropriating a slew of poetic devices, as Zawacki does in “Georgia,” Luoma flatly negates them. Of course to write without style is itself a demonstration of style, and Luoma’s use of gossip and the structure of the New Sentence derives in part from the New York School (gossip) and the Language poets (the New Sentence). But the fact remains that, seeking to escape the “poetic”—understood here as a quality abstracted from its social significance—Luoma turns to those modes and strategies that are direct—gossip, casual remarks, frank opinions—while complicating their immediacy with irregular sequencing on the level of the sentence. Due to the weight of tradition, any blatant absence of conventional devices, which are themselves constantly in flux, signals a practice of restraint and willful opposition. It is this absence of the “poetic” that must have interested Emmanuel Hocquard.

Since the 1970s Hocquard and other French writers of his generation such as Claude Royet-Journoud and Anne-Marie Albiach have sought to negate the poetic by advancing a practice of literalism. Against metaphor, analogy, and other forms of poetic connotation, these writers have relied on a diverse set of strategies in order to eschew the traditions and expressive possibilities with which these forms are closely associated. Rosmarie Waldrop has shown how Royet-Journoud strives to eliminate from his texts metaphor, assonance, and alliteration “in order to get down to a flat, literal language” (107). Hocquard further reinforces this point by soliciting a shift in reading, suggesting that if his reader were to view his texts as mere copies—“All my books are to be read as copies. I am the copier of my books” (98)—she wouldn’t find metaphors where none exist. The appeal of Luoma’s text to Hocquard, then, is clear. But when Hocquard organized a collective translation of Luoma’s poem, he was faced with the same challenge that any “outsider” has when confronting this work: namely, the proliferation of allusions, in-jokes, gossip, and group references. As previously mentioned, Hocquard and the other translators approached this problem by sending Luoma a list of questions to which he duly responded (albeit often with tongue in cheek). Luoma then compiled his list of 101 responses to create a new serial poem—“The Annotated My Trip to NYC”—which he dedicated to “the French who asked me 100 questions about the little book” (123; Luoma rounded the number down). Each numbered paragraph provides a response to the translators’ corresponding question. In this piece, however, the questions are withheld.

Luoma prefaced his list of responses with a letter to his translators. A modified version of this is reproduced at the beginning of the annotated poem. After speaking to the difficulty of understanding the many in-jokes and specific allusions, Luoma states:

Please don’t be overly swayed by my responses. Consider that writers tend to say misleading or unhelpful things about their own work […] I believe you will have to lie to the French reader when you translate; that is, please be unfaithful to my text and make the French have multiple meanings. Make it yours. It is the reader who knows nothing of the glee club whom you must please. (125)

This prefatory letter demonstrates Luoma’s attitude toward the translation of his poem. Since the strategies and objectives of the original are bound to the social group—the glee club—to which it is addressed, there is little he can offer in the form of help to his French translators. His role as “annotator,” then, is an ambiguous one. He speaks with authority as to the poem’s initial context while remaining deeply skeptical about its meaning or purpose in its future French setting. On the whole, when read as an annotation, this poem shines no more than a fitful light over the obscure references and intimate details of “My Trip to New York City.” At times the narrator explains much more than required, offering far too many interpretative paths; at others he says far too little, merely repeating the original poem. And sometimes, even when he explains too much, it turns out he’s said very little of importance:

#53: level cut: a hitting term in baseball. there are three basic types of swings, or “cuts.” uppercut, level, & down. when you uppercut you hit fly balls and home runs. for big guys. level you hit line drives, for regular guys. down you make ground balls, for fast guys. however there are many theories of hitting and I have given you a false sense because every hitter must employ variations on every type of swing. I have also imparted to you the notion that hitting can be described. (134)

Here Luoma sketches a schema and then, as though defeated by the task, quickly disavows it. This sense of defeatism runs through the annotations, deflating whatever aura of authority a given annotation may evince at first glance.³²

Whether in the spirit of defeatism, sincerity, or play, Luoma often relies on terse explanations by way of repetition in his annotations. This creates many ironic tautologies throughout the annotated poem (another feature Hocquard is particularly fond of).³³ Consider the following from the first poem: “Brian has three sisters, Ann, Margot, and Alison. They are always on the phone and Brian calls Ali honey. I think he’ll probably get married” (13). Here’s the annotation: “#21 married: one day Brian will get married” (129). The shift from “They are always on the phone and Brian calls Ali honey” to “I think he’ll probably get married” is one of those inconspicuous transitions that only becomes jarring when one takes account of the small but significant absence of some kind of temporal clause, such as “one day” or “in ten years” between the two sentences. It’s easy to imagine the scrupulous French translators not wanting to miss anything and wondering if “married” is used figuratively or idiomatically. No, Luoma reassures them, “married [means] one day Brian will get married.” There are many of these responses in the annotated poem, several of which consist of a concise repetition, such as that of #23: “Being tall: she is very tall” (129). Taken together, these responses function as a deliberate reversal of some common assumptions of literary translation, especially as they relate to poetry. Indeed, the multiplicity of meaning springing from the interplay of the linguistic sign’s various features—visual, phonic, grammatical, semantic, etc.—is often cited by theorists and translators alike as the principle challenge of translating poetry.

The textures of a language, its musicality, its own specific tradition of forms and meters and imagery, the intrinsic modalities and characteristic linguistic structures that make it possible to express certain concepts, emotions, and responses in a specific manner but not in another—all of these inhere so profoundly in a poem that its translation into another language appears to be an act of rash bravado verging on the foolhardy. (Grossman 94)

Edith Grossman, a prominent translator of both prose and poetry, is expressing a widespread belief here, one that depends on a certain tradition of poetry and poetics. Luoma is clearly working outside of this tradition, and so the problems his translator faces is of an entirely different sort. What’s more, Luoma significantly exacerbates these problems by providing misleading information. For instance, although he encourages his translators to “make the French have multiple meanings,” as an annotator he often does just the opposite by stripping the poem of any figurative or connotative dimension, thereby restricting its meaning. The oft-cited difficulty of translating poetry’s polysemy is therefore not taken here as the translator’s dilemma but as her false assumption. If Zawacki uses the circumstances of translation to make his poem “mean more,” Luoma responds to the same circumstances by countering poetic abstraction and polysemy with direct referential meaning, as in annotation #22, which informs us that “park” refers to “central park” (129).

The significance of “The Annotated My Trip to NYC” lies, then, in the ways in which it fails as an annotation. For if Luoma’s responses serve a precise function for his French translators, how are they to be read when framed as a poem for English readers? Most American readers don’t need to know that ump means umpire or that shrink means psychoanalyst. Motivating such responses are the questions and misunderstandings of the French translators. In other words, the annotated poem documents the reading habits of the French translators by highlighting the limits of their understanding. Luoma capitalizes on this context to create a dynamic poem that moves between frank literal statements and other tangential narrative developments, all written with the same sprezzatura that characterizes “My Trip to New York City.” Luoma’s annotated poem, however, is no postmodern pastiche of annotated works. The poem doesn’t imitate a given style nor does it borrow or abstract its form from another discourse genre, as, say, the epistolary novel does with correspondence. In fact, Luoma’s piece wasn’t written as a poem at all. It was only framed as such subsequently. Removing these responses from their initial social context and presenting them as a poem has many interpretative consequences. On one level, as a record of the social process of translation, the trivial details, false steps and meticulous work of translation are made visible in the poem. In this way, Luoma’s poem is a partial archive of the one thing that often escapes theoretical discussions of translation: the plain fact and history of the translator’s painstaking labor. Like the poem itself, this is at times intellectually engaging, surprising, even funny, and at others profoundly trivial and boring. Another consequence of this procedure is that it brings two cultural contexts together and therefore causes two distinct publics to overlap. Published as a poem in English by a small press, its American readers will take themselves as the public of the work—and not without reason—while continuing to recognize this phantom French public inscribed in the text itself. In this respect, Luoma’s annotated poem complements Charles Bernstein’s 1993 poem “A Test of Poetry.” In this poem, Bernstein arranges in lineated verse the questions his translator, Ziquing Zhang, posed when translating poems from Bernstein’s Rough Trades and The Sophist into Chinese. Bernstein also lifted this piece from personal correspondence, but as opposed to Luoma, he withholds his responses, so that we only have the voice of his translator:

What do you mean by rashes of ash? Is industry
Systematic work, assiduous activity, or ownership
Of factories? Is ripple agitate lightly? Are
We tossed in tune when we write poems? And
What or who emboss with gloss insignias of air? (52)

Perhaps we’re witnessing a burgeoning genre where the circulation of one’s own poems are documented and reimagined through the reading habits of others. Similar to other poetic experiments in translation and multilingual writing, this kind of writing arises from the increased contact and collision of various cultures in a globalized world, and offers a critical response to the impact of the circulation of texts on contemporary poetry. But unlike Bernstein’s poem, Luoma’s annotations take us back into the social world of his circle of friends. And although it is not a coterie poem per se, it specifically addresses the intended limits of Luoma’s social poetic practice. These limits—we can call them limits of address—are brilliantly illustrated, in negative as it were, by the translators’ unstated questions that structure and motivate the annotated poem.

Just as “My Trip to New York City” attempts to document and enable the activity of a given group of poets by designating and creating a space of circulation for them outside the framework of larger institutions (major publishing houses, wide-circulation journals, academia, etc.), “The Annotated My Trip to NYC” documents and interrogates the stakes of circulation once it becomes mediated by these same institutions. For, as I’ve argued, translation plays an increasingly significant role in the circulation of poetry. By addressing the circumstances of his own poetry, Luoma takes stock of poetry’s conditions of possibility. In so doing, he points toward new areas of poetic production, namely those that reflexively engage with poetry’s circulation. Thus, whereas Zawacki approaches translation as a writing workshop for refining formal linguistic matters, Luoma approaches it as a set of social conditions with its own assumptions, practices, and consequences, all of which become new matter for poetry. Zawacki’s “Georgia” and Luoma’s “My Trip to New York City” and “The Annotated My Trip to NYC” thus reflect in contrasting ways their imagined publics and the scene of their circulation. But whereas Zawacki’s poetry does this by transcending its social circumstances, Luoma’s does it by confronting them head-on.

Footnotes

1. Luoma’s poem was first published as a chapbook in 1994 and subsequently reprinted in his first full-volume collection, Works & Days. All citations will be from its later reprinting. “The Annotated My Trip to NYC” was also published in Works & Days.

2. On the growth of translation studies as an academic discipline, see Baker’s introduction to the four-volume collection Translation Studies.

3. These institutions are too numerous to outline here. For more on this exchange as it takes place in periodicals, see Bennett and Mousli. For more on larger social questions concerning translation, see Sapiro.

4. I owe much here to Peter Middleton’s notion of the “long biography of the poem” (1–24).

5. See Dworkin and Goldsmith; Bergvall et al. For a wide range of multilingual and translational experiments, see the fifth and tenth issues of Chain dedicated to “Different Languages” (1998) and “Translucinación” (2003), respectively. All twelve issues of Chain (1994–2005) have been digitally archived and are available at http://jacket2.org/reissues/chain.

6. In addition to Perloff; Dworkin and Goldsmith; see also Fitterman and Place; Morris and Swiss; Funkhouser.

7. In a Franco-American context, it is not uncommon for poems or whole works to appear first in translation. This was most notably the case for Keith Waldrop’s Falling in Love with a Description, which was first published in French translation by Françoise de Laroque (Paris: Créaphis, 1995), before being published as part of Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), the winner of the National Book Award for Poetry in 2009. Many of the poems written by Americans in Emmanuel Hocquard and Claude Royet Journoud’s two anthologies—21 + 1 poètes américains in 1986 and 49 + 1 nouveaux poètes américains in 1991—were also first published in French translation.

8. Charles Bernstein’s treatment of translation in “A Test of Poetry,” discussed below, is similar to Luoma’s.

9. Unless otherwise noted, all citations will be from its republication in his book Petals of Zero, Petals of One, hereafter cited as “G.”

10. Zawacki discusses the origin of the poem in an interview with Leonard Schwartz. Given that Zawacki had recently accepted a teaching position at the University of Georgia, his interest in Soupault’s “Georgia” is perhaps more biographical than esthetic, a point made explicit by his deeming the poem of little poetic value. In any case, it’s clear that “Georgia” stands for far more than a geographical location in the poem. See below, where I discuss its importance as a framing device.

11. Andrew Joron mentions Zawacki in a list of contemporary poets who bear the mark of Surrealist influence in his survey of Surrealism in American poetry from the period 1966–1999.

12. I cite here its publication in 1913, as this line is revised when republished in Petals of Zero, Petals of One to read “cold the inaudible decibel.” I discuss the significance of this change below.

13. There are no fewer emotional registers and tones than there are poetic devices, as the speaker shifts from expressions of sadness to those of anger, arousal, contemplation, joy, pain, etc.

14. Hereafter cited as “BNB.”

15. For a stark point of contrast, see the social function of poetry and love in Frank O’Hara (“Personism: A Manifesto” 499).

16. Sobin’s influence on Zawacki can be noted both stylistically and ideologically. The above discussion of poetic address echoes, in Zawacki’s terms, Sobin’s “invisible auditoria.” [cite source for Sobin?] See Zawacki, “Vertical Tracking.”

17. Burt refined his idea on Elliptical Poetry in “The Elliptical Poets.” I am drawing here on both this article and his review of Susan Wheeler’s “Smokes” where he first introduced the term.

18. For a pointed critique of Elliptical and hybrid poetry, see Craig Dworkin, “Hypermnesia.”

19. On the impact of the prize structure in contemporary poetry, see Steven Evan’s compelling analysis in his “Field Notes, October 2003–June 2004.” My reading of the pluralist tendency of 1913: A Journal of Forms is greatly indebted to this article as well as to his “The Little Magazine A Hundred Years On: A Reader’s Report” and, above all, to his “The Resistible Rise of Fence Enterprise” and the discussion this provoked. These articles are archived on his website Third Factory.

20. There are two consecutive essays on Ronald Johnson, both of which emphasize his use of found language and procedures of erasure, as well as a handful of “ekphrastic pieces,” such as Noah Eli Gordon’s, Jeremy Prokosch’s, and Valerie Mejer’s.

21. The PSA was in the headlines in 2007 after awarding the Frost award to John Holland, a conservative poet who had once referred to “cultures without literatures—West African, Mexican and Central American” and who, in an interview, had stated, “there isn’t much quality of work coming from nonwhite poets today.” See Motoko Rich, “Poetry Prize Sets Off Resignations at Society.”

22. Published the month before the 2003 invasion of Iraq—one of the issue’s featured articles details in mildly critical terms the Bush administration’s justification for war—Zawacki’s poem about personal memory and fragmented subjectivity unfolding under “olivine clouds, / clouds of cerise, a courtesan sky” with fishermen and windmills and a family gathered at a dock at twilight strikes one, at least in hindsight, as a curious choice on the part of The New Yorker editors. It’s interesting to note that the same month of that year Leslie Scalapino and Rick London published an anthology of highly politicized poetry: Enough (Oakland: O Books, 2003).

23. The public success of “Georgia” can be measured by its reviews, many of which are archived on Zawacki’s own webpage.

24. The original publication of the poem reads “soundless decibel.” Whether “noiseless” is from an early or intermediate draft between the original and its republication is unclear.

25. Many of Luoma’s poems are also for someone who couldn’t be at the event he is describing. See, for example, “97.5 KPOI The Rock You Live On” (Works & Days 103–109).

26. Luoma isn’t the first to use gossip as a poetic mode. Frank O’Hara frequently used gossip in his poetry, as in the poem “Adieu to Norma, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul,” where he writes,

and Allen is back talking about god a lot and Peter is back not talking very much and Joe has a cold and is not coming to Kenneth’s although he is coming to lunch with Norman I suspect he is making a distinction well, who isn’t. (328)

For more on O’Hara’s use of gossip, see Wolf 16–21.

27. For more on poetry and coteries, see Shaw. My argument here is greatly indebted to Shaw’s study.

28. See Wolf 15. This argument has its origin in Max Gluckman’s seminal “Gossip and Scandal.”

29. Given that this particular group held no institutional power and did not occupy a dominant position in its field at the time of the book’s publication, it would be a mistake to consider this coterie elitist. For a reading of the coterie as an elite phenomenon in a modernist context, see Rainey 146–168.

30. It is interesting to contrast Moxley’s The Impercipient, one of the major contexts of Luoma’s collection Works & Days, with 1913: Journal of Forms. Whereas 1913 is a big endeavor with interns, a board, and a long and eclectic list of contributors, The Impercipient was run by Moxley herself, printed cheaply, and had an extremely small distribution range. It never appealed to the authority of established poets by asking for their contributions but rather printed only Moxley’s close friends, who were all emerging poets at the time.

31. This delay of recognition is even more marked for others mentioned in the book. Douglas Rothschild, for example, didn’t publish his first book-length work until 2009.

32. The French translation of this annotation opens Hocquard’s Ma haie. One can imagine Hocquard appreciating this annotation on two levels: first, for the specificity of the language game it instantiates, and second, for the distance created by Luoma’s disavowing its explanatory force. Hocquard also briefly discusses the collective translation of this piece (522–523).

33. See his Un test de solitude.

Works Cited

• Baker, Mona, ed. Translation Studies. Vol. 1. New York: Routledge, 2009. Print.
• Bennett, Guy and Béatrice Mousli. Charting the Here of There: French & American Poetry in Translation in Literary Magazines, 1850-2002. New York: The New York Public Library / Granary Books, 2002. Print.
• Bergvall, Caroline, et al., eds. I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women. Los Angeles: Les Figues Press, 2012. Print.
• Bernstein, Charles. My Way: Speeches and Poems. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999: 52-55. Print. Burt, Stephen. “The Elliptical Poets.” Close Calls with Nonsense. Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2009. 345-355. Print.
• —. “Smokes.” Boston Review. Summer 1998: n. pag. Web. 31 July 2014.
• Dworkin, Craig. “Hypermnesia.” Boundary 2 36.3 (2009): 77-95. Print.
• Dworkin, Craig and Kenneth Goldsmith, eds. Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Poetry. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2011. Print.
• Evans, Steve. “The American Avant-Garde after 1989: Notes Toward a History.” Assembling Alternatives: Reading Postmodern Poetries Transnationally. Ed. Romana Huk. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 2003. 646-673. Print.
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• —. Un test de solitude. Paris: P.O.L., 1998. Print.
• Joron, Andrew. Neo-Surrealism or the Sun at Night. Oakland: Kolourmen Press, 2010. Luoma, Bill. My Trip to New York City. Great Barrington: The Figures, 1994. Print. —. Works & Days. West Stockbridge: The Figures & Hard Press, Inc., 1998. Print. Middleton, Peter. Distant Reading: Performance, Readership and Consumption in Contemporary Poetry. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2005. Print.
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• —. Georgia. Trans. Sika Fakambi. Toulouse: Éditions de l’Attente, 2009. Print.
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Rolande Glicenstein was born on December 31, 1943, in hiding in the south of France of Jewish emigres from Poland. She grew up in Paris and came to the United States in 1968 where she worked as a costumer for film and television. She has a daughter, Hylda Berman, who is a sculptor living in Chicago. Rolande currently lives in Baltimore.

David Kupferman is an assistant professor of education at the University of Hawaiʻi – West Oʻahu. He lived and worked in the Marshall Islands for many years prior. His research interests consider the intersections of pedagogy, theory, and cultural studies, occasionally as they play out in the region known as Micronesia.

Christopher Law is a Ph.D. student in the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he also teaches topics in philosophy. He is completing a dissertation on the concepts of life and “uncriticizability” in the work of Walter Benjamin.

T.J. Martinson is a PhD student at Indiana University – Bloomington. His research interests include 20^th/21^st century American literature, object-oriented ontology, and phenomenology.

Duy Lap Nguyen is an assistant professor of world cultures and literatures at the University of Houston. His work has appeared, most recently, in Thesis Eleven (2015), Constellations (2015), Differences (2015), Interventions (2014) and Historical Materialism (2010). Nguyen’s current research explores works by the Vietnamese philosopher Trần Đức Thảo and develops a reading of Thảo’s materialist critique of phenomenology. A second project, titled “The Postcolonial Present: Redemption and Revolution in Twentieth-Century Vietnamese Culture and History,” examines Vietnamese cinema, literature, and mass culture from the Vietnam War era.

Ben Novotny Owen is a PhD candidate in English at the Ohio State University, studying film, graphic narrative, and twentieth-century American literature and art. He has published on race and early sound cinema in Screen, and has an essay on comics form and the politics of history in the recent collection The Comics of Joe Sacco: Journalism in a Visual World. He is currently working on a dissertation about the interrelation of cartoon aesthetics and modernism in the United States 1915–1965.

Brad Prager is Professor of German in the Department of German & Russian Studies at the University of Missouri. He is the author of After the Fact: The Holocaust in Twenty-first Century Documentary Film (2015), The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth (2007), and Aesthetic Vision and German Romanticism: Writing Images (2007). He has edited several books, and is on the editorial boards of New German Critique and German Studies Review.

Matthew B. Smith is an Assistant Professor of French at Northern Illinois University. He has translated three novels by the Belgian writer Jean-Philippe Toussaint and a work of poetry by the Oulipo poet Frédéric Forte.