To
enter into this conversation, perhaps it would be best to begin by defining my
term’s other, realism, through Lukacs’ engagement with it in
The Historical Novel.
For Lukacs, this definition comes out of the
creation of the novel during the first half of the 19
th century, in
particular, the historical novel.
The
realism of the historical novel is dependent on both recognizing the complex
structures of the society and the dynamics that define those structures.
Lukacs notes, “A total historical picture
depends upon a rich and graded interaction between different levels of response
to any major disturbance of life.
It
must disclose artistically the
connection
between the spontaneous reaction of the masses and the historical consciousness
of the leading personalities.”
The historical picture can be produced through
a complex structure of social mediations, mediations between social classes,
between the mediocre protagonist of the novel and the world historical
personalities.
The novel presents a
synthetic view of the antagonistic totality.
The ability of the novel to produce
this kind of understanding of society declines after the revolution of 1848 and
the increasing insurgency of the proletariat.
With this transformation, the novel can no longer hold together the structures
of synthesis found in the earlier novel.
For Lukacs, this represents the decline and eventual failure of the
bourgeois novel, which is simultaneously linked up to the decline of the
bourgeoisie as a progressive force in history.
Lukacs then spends the final section of the text trying to discover
where the new forms of critical and historical realism are occurring within the
literature of his time, primarily the literature of the popular front.
He argues that one can find a number of
successful projects that begin to accomplish this task once again in the fight
against fascism, although he is far less sanguine about this possibility in the
1960 introduction.
If we think about this within
conventionally Hegelian terms, this means that representation can only occur
within the third step of the dialectic, aufgehoben, a moment defined by both
the abolition of the old structure of totality and the creation of a new
synthesis. In political terms, it would
mean that a successful representation of the creative powers could only occur
at the moment of its successful conquest of the state. The bourgeois, historical novel is successful
precisely because they met these two linked stipulations, the conquest of the
state and the creation of a new synthetic totality. The demand that literature fulfill this
demand leads to Lukacs’ categorization of the post-1848 novels as forms of
failure, representing the “general tendencies of decadence”, which are linked
to the genre fragmentation of the novel, into a variety of specializations.
However, this approach would not
allow for the creation of an aesthetic that represents the experiences and the
forms of knowledge produced by the subaltern classes of a given society.
As Antonio Gramsci notes, “The subaltern
classes, by definition, are not unified and cannot unify until they are able to
become a “State”: their history, therefore, is intertwined with that of civil
society, and thereby with the history of States and groups of States.”
Following this analysis, Gramsci then offers
a list of the various possible strata that exist in a class formation moving
from the conservative to the most insurrectionary strata in this formation.
For Gramsci, the movement towards ‘integral
autonomy’ exists within the development of these strata, in their ability to
shape and transform the ideological structures that create structures of the
society that the subaltern classes are bound up in.
That development, whether linked up to the
production of a new synthesis or not, must operate at the level of the
fragmentary, the experimental, and, invariably, in the form of failure.
Negotiating this continued desire
for a continuation of capitalist hegemony on one hand, and the creation of an
‘integral autonomy’ of the subaltern classes is crisis. Or to put it another way, we find two poles
within this logic, the form of capital which is continually trying to
assimilate everything into its logic, and the figure of living labor, embodied
in the subaltern, which is immanent, but exogenous to the logic of capital. The two operate as an antagonistic totality. This needs to be understood at two levels, at
the level of everyday life, that is to say, at the level of the institutions
and ideological structures the construction horizons of common sense, and also
at the level of the aesthetic, that is the attempt to create imagined
structures of representation are. In
both contexts, the crisis is marked by capital’s attempt to abolish the
possibility of its own existence, by completely incorporating its other in the
myriad of forms that it’s found. At the
same time, the crisis takes the form of an ever shifting and mutating
resistance linked to the collective labors of living labor.
In order to deal with this question
of everyday life, it becomes necessary to return to Marx; particularly the
construction of value within the capitalist society produced the first volume
of Capital. Marx starts off by defining
two opposing concepts, use and exchange value.
Use operates qualitatively. An
object has use value insomuch as it fulfills a particular function. To an explicate this, a Bible might act as
family keepsake in one situation, a form of edification in another, and as a
door prop in still another. Use is
singular and cannot be put into a relation of equivalence. Exchange, on the other hand, can. It does this by draining of all
particularities. It, the commodity,
becomes an expression of the congealed, socially necessary labor time needed to
produce it. It is this transformation
that allows for the commodity to be entered into a series of relations of
equivalence. The money form becomes the
expression of this empty mode of equivalence, par excellence. It operates as a mode of potential, able to
transform itself from C to M to C, or from M to C to M’.
At the same time, the investigation
maps out the movement of capital through the dialectical method. This method operates immanently through the
exploration of the movement of the creation of value. The shift from value in its antagonistic
forms of exchange and use value, to its expansion in the realm of circulation,
and into the need for the production of surplus value in order to allow for the
expansion of circulation operates as a continual expansion of the movement of
capital through the incorporation of its contradictions, not as synthesis, but
as antagonistic totality. The most
immediate result of this process is the production of an abstract apparatus of
appropriation that could operate without limits taken within its own logic, a
logic which sees its outside as potential raw material for its processes.
In addition to this logic of
abstract domination through the machinery of appropriation, capital
restructures the temporality of those living within its logic. This shift is mapped out by Benedict Anderson
in his attempt to understand the structure of the nation-state, both in special
terms, and more importantly, in terms of temporality. This constructs the nation as a bounded space
defined by both a homogenous structure of language, and a radical shift in the
temporality of the societies involved.
As Anderson notes,
“What has come to take
the place of the mediaeval conception of simultaneity-along-time is, to borrow
again from Benjamin, an idea of ‘homogenous, empty time’, in which simultaneity
is, as it were, transverse, cross-time, marked not by prefiguring and
fulfillment, but by temporal coincidence, and measured by clock and calendar.”
Capitalism then shifts the temporal
structure from a cyclical structure full of meaning to a time that operates on
a logic of simultaneity that is linked to the clock and the calendar.
Anderson is not the first one to bring up
this logic.
It has been brought up by
Benjamin, who Anderson quotes, and its logic in defining the work day is
explored in E.P. Thompson’s Work, Time, and Discipline.
However, Anderson exams how this is produced
by the construction of national languages and by the linked process that he
calls ‘print capitalism.’
The newspaper,
the book, and the market become the second linkage that insures the existence
of the imagined community of the nation.
Anderson notes that the book is “the first modern-style mass-produced
industrial community.”
As a product, it is infinitely reproducible
on a large scale.
Moreover, its
introduction led to an entire series of transformations to the language,
particularly concerning the standardization of languages.
This standardization is linked to a more
elaborate project of comparative study of languages, in the service of the
colonial project, linking the construction of the nation-state with the
imperial expansion of capital.
For Anderson, the newspaper becomes
the most emblematic form of this print capitalism, infinitely reproducing an
imagined national through the juxtaposition of a complex set of articles,
randomly covering events ranging from economics to sports.
It also is a form that continually becomes
obsolete the following day, making its replacement a necessity to stay within
the community.
As Anderson notes, “the
ceremony is incessantly repeated at daily or half-daily intervals through the
calendar.”
The newspaper then becomes a sort analogue to
the time-clock, producing its own disciplinary logic, constructing a sense of
time and space that allow for the production of surplus value.
The novel then becomes the
privileged form of the aesthetic, allowing for the construction of the time of
the nation, Anderson argues,
Consider first the
structure of the old-fashioned novel, a structure typical not only of the
masterpieces of Balzac but also of any contemporary dollar-dreadful.
It is clearly a device for the presentation
of simultaneity in ‘homogenous, empty time,’ or a complex gloss upon the word
‘meanwhile’.”
The novel constructs a structure of
time that allows for a complex assemblage of events, linked through the phrase
“meanwhile.” This term allows for the
linkage of seemingly disparate events, linking them together to produce a
mediated sense of totality. It also
allows for an engagement with the new, as that novel operates as a modular
form, negotiating its form in order to bring in new social arrangement, new
cultural forms, and new symbolic into its regime (while simultaneously changing
them.) For instance, despite their
radical differences, authors from dos Passos to Mahfouz and Mieville have used
the novel to try to capture the radical novelty of the social relations of the
city, mapping its tempo and intensity through its structures. The novel becomes the primary engagement with
the forms of novelty that define capitalism, whether to abhor them, assimilate
them, or push their radical possibilities farther.
Furthermore, the novel produces a
form that is conducive to creating forms of critique that operate within its
logic. Anderson notes the shift of in
critical discourse, based in structures of comparison, created in the apparatus
of print capitalism.
“All these tongue-in
cheek utopias, ‘modeled’ on real discoveries, are depicted, not as lost Edens,
but as contemporary societies.
One could
argue that they had to be, since they were composed as criticisms of real
societies, since they were composed as criticisms of contemporary societies,
and the discoveries had ended the necessity for seeking models in a vanished
antiquity.
In the wake of the utopians
came the luminaries of the Enlightenment, Vico, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and
Rousseau, who increasingly exploited a ‘real’ non-Europe for a barrage of
subversive writings directed against current European social and political
institutions.
In effect, it became
possible to think of Europe as only one among many civilizations, and not
necessarily the Chosen or the best.”
Each of these forms, along with
critical travel literature and ethnography shift the modes of social critique
to match up with the progressive and open structure of capitalism. To begin, their temporality is one of
comparison, rather than nostalgia. More,
Montaigne and others look to a variety of fantasies taken as realities in order
to question the naturalized order of their societies. These critiques then take the form of
critical comparisons with another possible order, one that exists in social
novelty, rather than in an essence found in the golden age. This process continues in travel literature
and ethnography, which both legitimate the processes of conquest through their
narratives, and offer different imaginings of the social. The comparative lens then becomes an
important technique to exam the dominant structures of European society and
show that the forms of domination that exist in those societies is at very
least contingent, if not grotesque. In
short, this technology of comparison creates a literary mode of critique
through estrangement. This form takes
perhaps its richest form in the satires produced by Swift and Rabelais, but it
continued to exist in subterranean form as the realist novel began to become
the dominant literary form, finding its way into the Gothic in a modified form,
into cheap pamphlets, paraliteratures, etc.
It’s notable that this mode of
comparison through travel writing as well as through ethnography and the utopia
that becomes the foundational material for the genre of science fiction, which
takes the comparative form of those earlier forms of social critiques, but
transforms its temporal operations.
Rather than offering temporal structure of simultaneity, which defines
these earlier genres of estrangement, a temporal structure that can be found as
late as the work of Verne
,
science fiction produces a structure of estrangement based the shift in the
perspective of time, frequently moving into the future, or engaging with the
alien that operates in the non-human.
The work of H.G. Wells provides the template for both models,
The Time Machine offering a critique of
the ideology of progress as well as social Darwinism through the image of a
dystopian future, in which the survival of the fittest produces brutality.
On the other hand, the figure of the alien is
used to critique colonialism in
First Men
on the Moon, and
War of the Worlds.
At this point, it becomes important to shift from
a set of narrative practice that produce a sense of estrangement, to
engagements with language, that are designed to either engage with the new, or
produce effects of estrangement.
Although Marx is hesitant to make the analogy, the emptiness of the word
form can be linked to the emptiness of the money form. The sign, as an assemblage of letters, can be
shuffled into another arbitrary formation and can be linked to another
assemblage, which is then linked to another signifier. Nietzsche sees, in the gap between signifier
and signified a kind of abyss that can only be filled in by a sort of social
contract of language. In this sense,
socially necessary labor time acts as an analogue to this social contract,
being defined by both the constructions of socially necessary labor time in the
past (in the form of constant capital) and by the demands of the working class
within its development in the class struggle.
This linkage then produces a crisis
in language itself, as the circulation of literary tropes; motifs, narrative
arcs, etc. lead to the continual deadening of those structures into
cliché. This continual colonization of
language produces alienation from language, and an inability to produce a form
of communication that authentically links to experience. This crisis can be expressed in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s
“Letter to Lord Chandos”, written in 1902, as Hofmannsthal abandoned writing
literature for producing libretto for the theater and opera. This shift is linked to a general crisis of
language linked to a feeling of alienation.
He writes,
But it is my inner
self that I feel bound to reveal to you-a peculiarity, a vice, a disease of my
mind, if you like-if you are to understand that an abyss equally unbridgeable
separates me from the literary works lying seemingly ahead of me as from those
behind me: the latter having become so strange to me that I hesitate to call
them my property.
Within this passage, Chandos
indicates that he has lost his previous rhetorical eloquence because of a sense
of alienation, expressed in the terms of a sickness.
This sickness is linked up with a gap or
abyss between the language of literature and Chandos himself, regarding both
Chandos own literary production and literary production in general, his own
words, previously produced with ease, now have ‘become so strange’ that they no
longer are his ‘property.’
In effect,
Chandos can only express this loss in the language of alienation itself.
In his analysis of Hofmannsthal, Adorno notes
that, “along with the categories, the materials too have lost their a priori
self-evidence, and this is apparent in the case of poetic language.”
The
structures of rhetoric which formerly served to express something authentic are
now recognized as a set of social conventions that have lost their meaning, or
to use Nietzsche’s language, they become effaced coins, no longer useful for
circulation.
He goes on to link this up with
their very possibility of expression.
“The
disintegration of the materials is the triumph of their being-for-other.”
Chandos inability to communicate through writing has allowed him a connection
to experience that he had not previously experienced, ranging from the ecstatic
to the terrifying.
The disintegration of
language allows for him to gesture to a structure of feeling that cannot be produced
in writing, but can only be gestured to through their inability to be
expressed.
The loss of the ability to
operate within a set of rhetorical norms, the collapse of an empty language of
circulation, gestures to this trace of an authentic experience.
This experience of the modern as
lack or as the inability to link up language with an authentic experience
becomes one pole of modern in response to the relationship of the commodification
of language, linking up to the work of Rilke, Georg, and Hesse amongst others.
Producing a work that is simultaneously aware
of the limitations placed on the alienation of experience, and caught within a
certain nostalgia.
The other pole
refuses this nostalgia precisely by diving headlong into the flow of the
commodity, the flow of the masses, the flow of the city.
One can turn to Whitman to see this mode of
expression in its full form.
Whitman
introduce a form of exchangeability that bursts asunder the instrumental bonds
set upon it by the framework of transcendentalism that Whitman draws from to
conceive of his work.
We enter into the
work through this exchangeability.
“I
celebrate myself/And What I assume you shall assume/ For every atom belonging
to me as good belongs to you.”
It gestures to the delirium of the
commodity form. This is the production
of a leveling equality that operates within the endless chain of equivalence. This allow for the poem to act as a wild
juxtaposition of images, concepts, narratives, subjects, and desires. Through this assemblage, Whitman attempts to
capture or even create the utopian dimension of the American Revolution linking
its expansiveness to a capacity to act and be acted upon. This expansive power
is linked to the capacities of the body, laboring body, the suffering body, the
desired and desiring body. The
equivalence of the commodity reveals its other possibility, one the breaks
through the parasitical bonds of capital.
The novel of the city continues to
multiply the density of its social, political, and economic structures, a
density that both demands and resists representation. When we turn to the introduction of Henry
Roth’s Call it Sleep, we find this same confluence through the representation
of density, and the density of representation with the experience of the
immigrants’ entrance into the city of New York.
“All that day, as on
all the days since the spring began, her decks had been thronged by hundreds
upon hundreds of foreigners, natives from almost every land in the world, the
jowled close-cropped Teuton, the full-bearded Russian, the scraggly-whiskered
Jew, and among them Slovack peasants with docile faces, smooth-cheeked and
swarthy Armenians, pimply Greeks, Danes with wrinkled eyelids.
All day her decks had been colorful, a matrix
of the vivid costumes of other lands, the speckled green-and-yellow aprons, the
flowered kerchief, embroidered
homespun,
the silver-braided sheepskin vest, the gaudy scarfs, yellow boots, fur caps,
caftans, dull gabardines.
All day the
guttural, the high-pitched voices, the astonished cries, the gasps of wonder,
reiterations of gladness had risen from her decks in a noisey billow of sound…”
The density and complexity of the
city is represented through this parallel chain of signifiers, a chain of
ethnicities, clothing, and sounds.
Each
chain is introduced by the phrase ‘all day.’
The oscillation between this motif and the chain of descriptors produces
the representation of endless variety within the space of the city, each marked
by their simultaneous singularity and linkage to the chain.
What is notable is that this structure
succeeds in bringing out the creative capacities of the crowds they describe,
whether through phobia or through pleasure.
The crowd of the street is then defined
through this seriality by it productive powers, whether affective,
reproductive, or economic, although these descriptions never are far from the
various apparatus of domination that also define these cities.
The crisis exists between them.
In this sense, I am strongly
sympathetic to Burger’s theory of the avant-garde.
Burger’s argument is that the avant-garde
tries to return art to what Burger calls the “praxis of life.”
This means criticizing the former mode of
aestheticism and simultaneously producing new methods for engaging with the
new.
These foci are then linked with a
production and reception of art that is no longer individual.
For Burger, the prime examples are the
productions put on by the Dadaist performances, and Breton’s recipes for poetry
production in his manifestos.
However, this focus can be seen in a number
of more politically dubious artistic movements such as Italian futurism, the
vorticists, and others.
Adorno
too emphasizes both this collective effort and the attempt to return to
a structure of social function in his
Aesthetic Theory, although with an
ambiguity that is not found in Burger.
It is this movement of the
avant-garde that leads to the first theorizations of estrangement.
Perhaps the earliest attempt to conceptualize
literature at this moment of capitalist development was taken on by the
formalists, most notably the early arguments of the literary critic; Viktor
Shklovsky Estrangement is a concept that is originally developed in the early
twentieth century by literary critic Viktor Shklovsky as a way of understanding
the use of language in literature.
Literature obtains its literariness by the process of taking the
material of the everyday and making it strange or difficult.
By making the structure of the language
strange, literature allows for the reader to rethink and recognize life in the
phenomena of everyday life.
At the same
time, literature operates as an autonomous sphere, that is to say, it cannot be
understood as an effect of the economic or political sphere.
Within in this context, Shklovsky argues that
the estrangement effect is always constructed as to reveal the constructedness
of the devices themselves.
The work of
the Bakhtin circle offers an effective critique to this perspective,
particularly with the text co-written by Mikhail Bakhtin and P.N Medvedev. The text offers a sustained engagement with
the concepts of the formalists, critiquing their understanding of literature as
a set of autonomous devices, referring only to themselves. These limitations are linked to the
limitations of the formalists understanding of the sign in relationship to
ideological structures. The two note
that,
“Their struggle against idealist
detachment of meaning from material led the formalists to negate ideological
meaning itself.
As a result the problem
of the concrete materialized meaning, the meaning-object, was not raised, and
in its place we find the mere object, which is not quite a natural body, and
not quite a product for individual consumption.”
In their
attempt to escape from an endless series of literary criticism to find the
figure of god through their reading of literature, the formalists wind up
making the opposite mistake, taking the aesthetic out of the realm of the world
altogether. The poetic word has an immense
ability to allow for transforming the everyday banalities of life into
something new, perhaps in the language of the surrealists, something marvelous,
but this transformation can only be folded back into the operation of the work
itself, it can only gesture back to its contructiveness. For Shklovsky, art is only capable of stating
that it is art, and therefore a construction, creating a curious tension
between the influence of the crisis of the revolution, the crisis of the modern
city, and the refusal on the part of both the formalists and the Russian
futurists to recognize that influence.
However,
despite the polemics against the formalists, they are clearly an influence on
Medvedev and Bakhtin in their alternative formulation.
Rather than interpreting literature as a form
of devices that act to reveal their own constructiveness, it is an apparatus of
refraction, that is to say, literature is constructed through the refraction of
ideologies or sign systems, including literature itself.
Literature’s power is in its distortions,
rather than its reflections, and it is in this distortion or making strange
that literature becomes productive.
The
two put it in the following terms, “It is bad if the critic forgets that there
is no philosophy in literature, only philosophizing, no knowledge, but only the
process of cognition… For the artist only asserts himself in the process of the
artistic selection and shaping of ideological material.
And this artistic assertion is no less social
and ideological epistemological, ethical, political, etc. assertions are.”
Refraction
then becomes a potential political tool in its constant ability to reshape the
sign systems of a variety of ideologies.
These acts of reshaping are still linked to the expectations of the audience,
but those expectations are marked by the existence of discourses outside the
production of the literary. The novel in
particular then is defined by its multiplicity of voices, its heteroglossia;
however this structure is made artistic by its manipulation of refraction of
those voices, not through their accurate representation. Hence, the creative power of the novel is in
its ability to satirize, to make the common sense expectations of the everyday
seem strange, and point out other possibilities that exist within the
world. To return briefly to the earlier
conversation about Gramsci, we see a concept of art that perhaps can resonate
with the fragmentary and partial social formations that exist within the subaltern
classes.
This possibility
is taken up by the second concept of estrangement that is developed by Bertolt
Brecht in his sporadic critical commentaries.
Removed from Brecht’s attempts to shock and offend his contemporaries,
the Verfremdungseffekt can be defined in the following manner. Art
has traditionally been used to shore up the arbitrariness of modes of political
domination. Aristotle’s catharsis
ultimately becomes an acceptance of domination as it exists. The release of affective tension becomes a
way of mediating the contradictions contained within Brecht instead proposes a
mode of art that reveals the historicity of social structures of the present,
and to allow the audience a glimpse into the possibility that the world can be
transformed. Estrangement within this
context is a form of artistic creation that shows that the contemporary social
structures are contingent, and are, therefore inessential. Brecht’s theatre then becomes an incitement
to revolt and a laboratory to conceptualize other social relations. Unconscious release is replaced by conscious
engagement, mediation with critical labor, acceptance with experimentation.
For Brecht,
he links this aleatory dimension of the experiment with his acts of
collaboration with workers, who break him out of the traditional space of the
theater. It adds a dimension to the
production that “was never literary or stated in terms of theatrical
aesthetics.” This non-aesthetic
dimension of class conscious workers links the project back to an attempt to
create a socially useful form of art, but not one that is either conservative
or predictable. Instead, the workers
were willing to consider the validity of the most non-conventional forms of
artistic production and representation if it contributed to the process of
collective critical consciousness. As
Brecht notes,
“The workers judged everything
according to the truth of its content; they welcomed every innovation which
helped the representation of truth, of the real mechanism of society; they
rejected everything that seemed theatrical, technical equipment that merely
worked for its own sake—that is to say, that did not yet fulfill, or no longer
fulfilled, its purpose.”
The process
becomes linked to this truth function, that is, to the critical understanding
of the ‘real mechanism of society.’ The
experimental process is directed to finding this social mechanism within the
dross of the purely ‘theatrical, technical.’
This process of discovering social reality can never stop, as that the
very nature of that reality is constantly in flux. Hence, the innovation becomes welcome, the
unfamiliar a way of reorienting one’s self with the crisis of
representation. At the same time, this
process allows for the honing of skills and new forms of intersubjective
relations that Brecht insists are crucial to transforming the society. The workers leave with a new set of tools for
creating the new, if unknown future society, as well as contributing to an
artistic process. Fredric Jameson
emphasizes this element of process in Brecht’s approach to the theater. He notes that at points, when he had the time
and money, Brecht was willing to stretch this out indefinitely. During a DDR, state sponsored production of
Galileo, Brecht responded to the criticism that if the practices continued at
this rate, the production would come into being in four years, by agreeing and
stating that this would be a productive framework.
Perhaps we
can illuminate this process by discussing a set of plays known as the
Lehrstucke that focused on the very
artistic practices of experimentation and working with non-actors, which were
later defended in the expressionism debates, and were used as an example
against Lukacs’ conceptualization of realism.
Of these plays, the most useful to look at are three short plays,
Der Jasager,
Der Neinsager, and
Die
Massnahme.
All three are reworkings
of a tradition No played known as
Taniko
or
The Valley-Hurling, and each of
the revisions were produced in non-traditional theatrical spaces, and with the
collaboration of non-actors.
The first
two plays were written for a school opera, while
Die Massnahme was written worker’s theatrical groups.
None of the productions ever got the
extensive production schedules that they were intended for, and could be
considered only ‘partial successes at best if one uses the terms that Brecht
sets up for the concept of the experiment.
Brecht’s
processes then open into a wide spectrum of artistic practices that link the
popular in film, music, and literature to the avant-garde, although not all
directly influenced by him. To stay focused in literature, we find a creation
of a set of novelistic practices that link to the collection of para-literary
practices discussed earlier.
This is
most notable in the novels of Kathy Acker and Ishmael Reed
,
but it also can be found in the work of Thomas Pynchon, and much of the work in
the science fiction of New Worlds.
This
play is marked by both the intensification of the commodity and its
resistances, leading Jean Luc Godard to characterize its youth culture as ‘the
children of Marx and Coca-Cola.’
But I
see the same tension between the modes of sociality that proliferate within
capitalism, and the attempt to make them entirely productive to capital.
Perhaps
then we should return explicitly to the question of literary experimentation at
this late moment in the paper.
The
question poses the question of how do we distinguish between the genuinely
subversive, and the merely experimental?
My response is that I don’t think that the distinction is necessary.
Estrangement is created within the logic of capital, linked to the empty
homogenous time of the commodity, of socially necessary labor, of capital’s
attempt to incorporate everything into it, and at the same time, the immanent
fragmentary forms that constantly put it in crisis.
In one sense, these efforts are all
failures.
Their fragmentary, inchoate
forms have been successfully folded back into the logic of capital, but that
process is and can never be complete.
This process is capture neatly by a manifesto of the Nation of Ulysses.
“Wherever a sign, symbol or style exists, ideology is inherently present, and
thus we perpetually seek out our own language.”
It is not that this process of seeking is
inherently joyful or easily libratory, but its process constantly undoes the
clean and easy process of reproduction, posing the capacity to produce new
forms of life as constant potential within the often banal forms of everyday
life, just as the empty form of the commodity contains the seeds for another
world in its empty form of domination.
