Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017)

Reviewed by Dermot Ryan

This essay has been peer-reviewed by the boundary 2 editorial collective. 

“That is not said right,” said the Caterpillar.

“Not quite right, I’m afraid,” said Alice, timidly; “some of the words have got altered.”

“It is wrong from beginning to end,” said the Caterpillar decidedly, and there was silence for some minutes.

                                                —Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

As a graduate student at Columbia in the early noughties, I attended Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s seminar on Poststructuralism. It was an often tense seminar, where once a week my classmates and I would flounder and generally fail to say anything illuminating about the assigned text for that session. One fraught morning, I attempted to answer a question of textual detail in Derrida to which Spivak responded, “Exactly wrong!” Lost in the rabbit hole of French theory and crazed for any crumb of comfort, I vacillated between hope and despair in my reading of Spivak’s “exactly.” Could an interpretation that was “exactly wrong” provide, through the looking glass as it were, a clue to the right reading? Was my answer so wrong that it was partially right? Or did my wrong answer, like a donut hole, merely identify where the good stuff would not be found. I found myself returning to these questions as I read Joseph North’s Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History (2017). North purports to offer a new history of literary studies, a diagnosis of its current malaise, and a prescription for where it should go from here. The book raises a number of important questions: What would a political history of literary criticism look like? What is the relationship (if any) between literary studies and politics? How is neoliberalism reshaping universities generally and literary studies in particular? North’s answers to these questions are wrong. And wrong in ways that are damaging to the discipline and give ammunition to reactionary forces within and beyond it. But my wager is that they are exactly wrong. North’s history of literary criticism—an account that is wrong from beginning to end, to quote the Caterpillar—can point us in the direction of its true history. Even, if it does so, like that donut hole, by identifying the places we need not look.

North frames his history as an overview rather than an exhaustive survey. His stated goal is to “step back from individual figures and movements in order to bring into focus the basic paradigms that have determined the development of Anglo-American literary studies throughout its history, and that therefore seem likely at least to condition its possible lines of development in the future” (2017, ix). In North’s account, two paradigms have dominated the field: the “critical” and the “scholarly.” In one of North’s many formulations, scholars are those who treat the study of literature “as a means by which to analyze culture” while critics treat the study of literature “as an opportunity to intervene in culture” (2). While scholars treat literary texts “chiefly as opportunities for producing knowledge about the cultural contexts in which they were written and read,” critics use literature as a means of enriching culture by “cultivating new ranges of sensibility, new modes of subjectivity” and “new capacities for experience” (6-7). According to North, the changing fortunes of these two paradigms have shaped the broad history of the field.

Hoping to bring the revolutionary potential of criticism into sharper focus and to explain its current institutional occlusion by the most recent scholarly turn he labels “the historicist/contextualist paradigm,” North proposes an alternative history to the “pre- and post-Theory” narrative, which he believes characterizes most accounts of literary studies. Labeling his own version rather grandly as “the new periodization,” North offers an alternative tripartite historical narrative. In the first period, I. A. Richards puts criticism on a disciplinary footing by developing an “incipiently materialist account of the aesthetic” (x). Richards’s characteristic methods of close reading and practical criticism helped readers, “each from their own specific material situations, to use the aesthetic instruments of literature to cultivate their most useful practical capabilities” (15). In the second period, the project of criticism was taken up by Leavisites and the New Critics, who transformed a materialist aesthetic into an idealist one. That is to say, they shifted the function of close reading and practical criticism from the cultivation of a reader’s aesthetic capabilities to the cultivation of aesthetic judgment. In the third period, which began in the late seventies and continues to our present, the project of criticism was rejected for historicism, reducing close reading and practical criticism to a means of producing historical and cultural knowledge about the contexts in which specific literary texts were written and received. According to North, these three periods of literary criticism map onto three moments in the history of capitalism in the twentieth century: an earlier period between the wars, where a crisis in capitalism raised the possibility of a radical break with the liberal consensus; a period of relative stability, where criticism and scholarship served “real superstructural functions within Keynesianism” (17); and lastly our own present, in which the establishment of a neoliberal order following the crisis of Keynesianism, has resulted in the “complete dominance of the ‘scholar’ model in the form of the historicist/contextualist paradigm” (17).

Perhaps the quickest way to trouble the neat binary between the critical and scholarly paradigm which this historical schema presupposes is to think about the role of close reading in so-called historicist/contextualist scholarship. North claims that historicists treat “literary texts chiefly as opportunities for producing knowledge about the cultural contexts in which they were written and read” (7). Under this paradigm, close reading entails “a focus on small units of the text for the purposes of understanding what the text has to teach us about histories and cultures” (105). In other words, historicists use literary texts as “diagnostic tools for the analysis of historical and cultural phenomena” (106). But is this actually the case? As a British Romanticist whose period interest dictates a deep engagement with historicist scholarship, I have found historically-oriented scholars do not tend to instrumentalize literary texts in order to produce knowledge about the cultural contexts in which texts were written and read. Rather, most historicist research is in the service of close reading: scholars restore the cultural archive that the work assumes, activates, challenges, and subverts. They do this out of necessity and as a matter of course. Imagine a study of American television comedy two hundred years from now. What kind of historical research would be required before future scholars could offer a “close reading” of an episode of The Simpsons or Seinfeld worthy of that name? Without reconstructing this cultural archive (always, in part, an act of imagination), we miss a text’s rich intertextuality. Historical scholarship here is not using a literary text as a diagnostic instrument to understand a historical and cultural moment; rather, it is using historical knowledge in an endeavor to make the full complexity of the text available to be read. Of course, North knows this because his entire argument is built on the premise that unless we understand the real history of literary studies, we are unable to read it correctly: “to understand the character of the neoliberal order that established within literary studies,” he notes, “we need to reconsider the history from the ground up” (14). In other words, we need to put an object of analysis in its historical context to understand it properly. North laments that the “literary disciplines’ sense of their own history is still stuck in the older two-period mode, and as a result fails to capture the quality of our present moment” (13). In short, bad historical research leads to poor reading. North’s historical corrective is a classic example of the “historicist/contextualist” paradigm in action.

And there is nothing wrong with that. Unfortunately, the revisionary history he proceeds to tell is wrong. It is wrong in its facts and in its method. One example can stand synecdochically for a series of unpersuasive historical claims and moves. According to North, during the eighties and nineties, neoliberal forces within the university systematically favored the scholarly over the critical model of literary studies. In this “professionalized and scientized context, the scholarly model of intellectual inquiry—intellectual work as knowledge production” became the central task of literary study (100). It’s a compelling story. And it’s completely inaccurate. Literary Studies has benefited enormously from the disciplinary histories of Gerald Graff, Louis Menand, Chris Baldick, Bill Readings and many others. Indeed, it is a sobering fact that the accretive crisis in literary studies has stimulated brilliant scholarship in this area. North references many of these scholars. But, having read them, he should know that the disciplinary commitment to professionalism and the scientific model of knowledge production in literary studies predates neoliberalism. It stretches back to the origin of English as a discipline. At the turn of the twentieth century, the first English Departments were composed of scholars—philologists and literary historians—who emphasized the utilitarian and scientific value of their research and pedagogy. Indeed, in the fifties, the new critics successfully lobbied the MLA to add the category of criticism to the association’s mission statement arguing that close reading was a method that produced new knowledge. No matter. Let’s return to North’s convenient morality play. In the late seventies or early eighties, according to North, literary studies opted for a form of professional scholarship, one predicated on “technological expertise, much along the lines of the social sciences” (11). Here the problems with North’s historical methodology kick in. Bracketing for a moment the inaccuracy of such claims, this account begs some questions. Who enacted this shift? Was it a voluntary choice within the discipline, one that occurred outside of broader institutional concerns? Or was it a result of institutional pressure? Did it come from university administrators as a vanguard of neoliberalism? Why would the mandarins of neoliberalism within the academy view disciplinary work as valid only to the degree that it resembled the scientific production of new knowledge? North is silent on these questions of historical agency and motivation; or rather, he resurrects a reductive version of the “base/superstructure” model to account for these paradigmatic institutional changes. That is to say, in North’s mind, the discipline has moved from paradigm to paradigm in lockstep with phase shifts in the capitalist economic order. When the mythical economic base shifted to neoliberalism, the disciplines were bound to follow suit. According to this logic, which North describes, in another fit of intellectual nostalgia, as “the historical materialist line,” the future course of the discipline will depend on the nature of the subsequent phase of capital to emerge out of our current crisis (196). To paraphrase the political quietism of Karl Kautsky, we cannot prepare the coming revolution, we can merely prepare ourselves for it.

Such economic determinism, long jettisoned by Marxist cultural theory, can only lead to a very imprecise account of the current political economy of the academy. Whatever we label the new economic model that is transforming third-level education in the United States and beyond—the continued abuse of “neoliberalism” as a buzzword renders its use increasingly problematic—it has shown itself perfectly happy to accommodate both literary criticism and scholarship. As long as these pursuits generate or do not interrupt the flow of revenue, neoliberalism is content neutral. Without fear of censure, North is free to deploy close reading as a means of training the sensibilities of his students. Many of his students, on the other hand, now find themselves in a far more precarious position. While scholars ranging from David Harvey and Wendy Brown to Philip Mirowski and Angus Bergin have debated the defining characteristics of neoliberalism, all share a sense that neoliberalism involves the curtailment of the state as an instrument of social provision (even as the state’s power grows in the areas of surveillance, incarceration, and the maintenance and extension of free markets and private property rights). Accordingly, at the level of third-level education, neoliberalism manifests itself at the level of funding: funding for programs, for students, and for academic labor. As state and federal funding for third-level education have dried up, the focus of university administrations has shifted to cutting costs and generating revenues, favoring those schools and disciplines that can maximize tuition and endowments. Faculty who run programs feel neoliberalism’s effects in the institution of “true cost accounting” as the metric that decides the survival of individual classes and entire programs. For students, federal grants have been replaced by student loans. As a result, future initiates into the sensibility-expanding capacities of close reading will be increasingly burdened by massive student debt. They will already know capitalism isn’t working for them; they won’t need a close analysis of Wordsworth to tell them that. In those programs that are not generating tuition and whose alumni do not contribute to university endowments, neoliberalism is felt in the shrinking of tenure lines and the massive expansion of graduate and adjunct labor. I couldn’t help reflecting that North, like me, was a graduate student at Columbia and that while he was working on Literary Criticism, Columbia’s graduate students (as was the case while I was there) were fighting to gain recognition for their union and collectively bargain with the university. I wondered why this latest union drive had so little impact on North’s thinking about neoliberalism, literary criticism, and the political economy of universities.

North’s decision to make his history a “concise” one results in some serious and troubling exclusions. North states that his history makes “no programmatic attempt to recover the work of thinkers who have been ignored or marginalized because of their subject position” (viii). Viewing this acknowledgement as adequate restitution, North proceeds to ignore these thinkers throughout Literary Criticism, participating in their continued institutional marginalization. This omission seems particularly perverse when scholars of color historically and institutionally, have pioneered, often at considerable risk to their careers, the practice of literary criticism as political intervention. The scholarship of Edward Said, bell hooks, Spivak, Fred Moten, and Hortense Spillers (among many others) is invested in making literary studies and questions of aesthetics count politically in the very manner North demands. The failure to discuss these scholars in any depth seems all the more egregious when North is happy to indulge in a kind of victim blaming when assessing their broader impact on the field. The following swipe at feminism must stand in for a long list of North’s leading questions directed at the legacy of feminist, queer, and postcolonial criticism: “To what extent were second-wave feminist critiques of the welfare state likely to secure basic structural changes, and to what extent were they working to replace a material politics with a mere politics of recognition, thereby serving, albeit often inadvertently, as the hand-maidens of neoliberalism?” (58). In a historical narrative that repeatedly understands literary studies as being reshaped by economic forces outside the academy, feminist scholars are accorded a striking degree of agency here as midwives of the new neoliberal order. North’s choice of hand-maiden to characterize the work of his feminist colleagues is particularly unwelcome. At the same time, North claims their entry into the academy in the sixties and seventies had no institutional or disciplinary effects. We can only assume he believes they were too busy helping deliver neoliberalism. North complacently opines that “actual political struggle—the kind that involve a group, or class ‘forcing’ its way into something—does not take place within the world of scholarship” (88). Here as elsewhere, North’s discussion of the efforts by marginalized groups to challenge the academy’s exclusionary culture is not aided by his clubby tone, which comes off as privileged, tweedy, and smug. North goes on to suggest that “people from marginalized groups who entered the academy and became scholars were, in time, no less ‘trained specialists’ than the gentile white men who had tried to keep them out” (91). Perhaps. But in pursuing careers as ‘trained specialists’ these scholars radically transformed university cultures, helped overhaul admission policies, reshaped disciplinary scholarship, opened up the canon, and diversified campuses. As a matter of fact, their entrance into the academy corresponds with the flight of many of those “gentile white men” from the humanities, which is surely one of the factors in literary studies’ increasing institutional marginalization, the nominal focus of North’s work.

North’s ultimate goal is to recover the lost project of literary criticism and his most original and provocative claim is that the “incipient materialist aesthetic” at the root of Richards’s understanding of close reading can be harnessed as an instrument of radical politics. North sees a lot at stake politically in this project of recovery: “The incipiently materialist account of the aesthetic that lies at the root of the discipline and continues to mark its central practice of ‘close reading,’ is properly understood as part of a longer history of resistance to the economic, political, and cultural systems that prevent us from cultivating deeper modes of life” (x). Accordingly, North identifies one of his book’s desired audiences as the radical left: “the collective, or incipient collective, of those who have found themselves in the difficult and vexed position of trying to articulate and even to live a critique, not merely of the excesses of capitalism in its current form, but of capitalism itself” (ix). This is a curious formulation of the radical left, which smacks more of the romantic anti-capitalism of bohemia than the collective and organized political activism of the historical left. Be that as it may, North cites the proper goal of criticism as “a programmatic commitment to using works of literature for the cultivation of aesthetic sensibility, with the goal of more general cultural and political change” (3). In the wake of Richards, according to North, literary criticism was “an institutional program of aesthetic education—an attempt to enrich the culture directly by cultivating new ranges of sensibility, new modes of subjectivity, new capacities for experience—using works of literature as a means” (6). Once cultivated, this aesthetic sensibility demands ways of being far richer than those that can be offered by capitalism.

Here then is an attempt to articulate a political program for literary studies. Unfortunately, at the precise point where North’s argument needs to get into the details, unsupported pronouncements proliferate. The task of “higher students of literature,” writes North, is the “development of new methods for cultivating subjectivities and collectivities” (20). North never explains why and how literature is a good instrument for such work. Why would it be an effective instrument as opposed to say critical theory, cultural studies, political science, sociology, mindfulness, or yoga? He also struggles to delimit the category of literature. Conceding the sustained difficulty literary scholars have had securing a stable category of “literature,” North can still complacently ask, “Is it too naive, given our investigation of Williams’s cunning critique of the category of the literary, to object that the justification for literary studies surely has to rest, at some stage, on the concept of literature?” (108). The simple, if inconvenient, answer to this question is “yes, it is too naive.” Wanting a stable concept of literature doesn’t make one exist. The discipline has a rich body of work over the course of the twentieth century dedicated to establishing the quality of  “literariness” that might distinguish literary and non-literary texts. These various projects were fascinating, but ultimately unsuccessful. Doubling down, however, North declares that “a discipline needs to justify its object of study, not just its method for studying it” (108). If that is the case, literary studies is in trouble. Even North cannot be consistent here and a supplement immediately and necessarily appears in this anxious declaration: “For of course literary and other aesthetic texts are particularly rich training grounds for all sorts of capabilities and sensibilities” (my emphasis, 109). Of course they are. And of course, we won’t ask what these “other aesthetic texts” might be. Finally, it is never made entirely clear in what manner Richards’ aesthetic is “incipiently materialist” (x). If I follow North’s argument, Richards’ aesthetic is materialist because it refuses to set up the aesthetic as “a self-sufficient category insulated from the rest of life” (30). Richards asks us to shift our focus from artworks in themselves to the relationship between artworks and their audience. The experience of art elicits a set of complex cognitive and affective processes deeply imbricated in the reader’s life world. And yet I can imagine an aesthetic theory that provides a rich account of the mental and affective nature of our encounter with art that is not materialist. I found myself wishing that North had more carefully delineated the materialism of Richards’s approach as well as explain what is at stake politically in designating it materialist in the first place.

For those of us working within the discipline who had registered a certain fatigue with the constant hand-wringing, the countless articles and conference panels diagnosing “the crisis in the humanities,” and the elegies on the demise of literary studies, the alacrity with which the London Review of Books, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and n+1 have championed Literary Criticism is reason enough to take notice of North’s book. For the most part, reviewers have joined North in piling on the discipline and its practitioners, endorsing the book’s conclusion that literary studies is truly in a parlous state. Perhaps we literary scholars can take comfort from the fact that if we are worth kicking (even when we’re down), then we still matter. Apart from offering these dubious consolations, however, the book’s critical reception serves as an important barometer: it confirms that recent efforts to revamp the discipline (distance reading, the cognitive turn, digital and public humanities, the ecological turn) have failed to win over a skeptical public, a public that includes state legislators, university administrators, prospective students and their parents. In other words, those stakeholders who will decide whether the discipline has a future. The broad embrace of North’s old-school model of criticism suggests that many outside the discipline remain unconvinced of the value of these latest developments in literary studies. But the need for an engagement with North’s book goes beyond the fact that its reception highlights the discipline’s ongoing public relations problem. If North’s book failed to answer any of the important questions it raises, it did persuade me that our discipline could benefit from a genuine history of materialist aesthetics that might include Richards, but would stretch further back to William Hazlitt and Edmund Burke and would include figures ranging from Herbert Marcuse and Spivak to Paul de Man and Sianne Ngai. One of the goals of such a history would be to bring into sharp focus the political implications of the kinds of aesthetic education we offer our students. Now that is a hole worth filling.

Dermot Ryan is professor of English at Loyola Marymount University. He is the author of Technologies of Empire: Writing, Imagination and the Making of Imperial Networks, 1750-1820 (2013).

Jasper Bernes, The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization (Stanford University Press, 2017)

Reviewed by Laura Finch

Jasper Bernes’s The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization inherits not only its title from Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility” (1936) but also Benjamin’s concern with the “developmental tendencies of art under present conditions of production” (Benjamin 2010 [1936]: 11). For Bernes this means tracing the dialectical relationship between poetry and labour over the course of the deindustrialisating era of post-1960s North America. One story that has been told of this relationship between art and late capital has been that of homology: the dematerialisation of both that can be seen in the correspondence between the related abstractions of the postmodern and the postindustrial. This argument has been made most famously by Fredric Jameson who depicts the post-1970s epoch of finance capital as the moment when “capital itself becomes free-floating [and] separates from the concrete context of its productive geography” (1997: 250-1), while analogously “the narrativized image fragments of a stereotypical postmodern language … suggest a new cultural realm or dimension that is independent of the former real world” (265). The converging narrative of aesthetics and labour that Bernes tells largely follows this logic of dematerialisation, where “the work of art and work in general share a common destiny” (Bernes 2017: 1, emphasis in original).

The story of deindustrialisation that Bernes narrates clearly and succinctly in his introduction describes the move from the profitable production-based economy of post-war industry towards financialisation, while automation led to a shift from a blue-collar to a white-collar workforce, a “massive demographic and occupational transformation, as workers moved away from goods-producing to service-providing sectors of the economy and as women entered the workplace in massive numbers” (179). Similarly, art turns away from making objects and in the wake of Duchamp increasingly treats its materials as things that need “rearranging, sorting, cataloguing, parsing, transcribing, excerpting” (21) such that “artwork becomes paperwork” (20).

However, where Jameson and Bernes diverge is in their analysis of the closeness of the relationship between art and capital. While for Jameson postmodern culture “cleaves almost too close to the skin of the economic to be stripped off and inspected in its own right,” (Jameson 1994: xv) [i], The Work of Art is interested in exactly the ways that culture and the economic inform one another. Bernes’s writing proceeds with a rigorous dialectical energy as he narrates the mutually influencing evolution of art and capital from the 1960s to the present day: that is, how does the shift in the North American economy in this period (from production and manufacturing to white-collar work) effect how labour is conceptualised, and how, in turn, does culture represent these changes? Rather than arguing that art and labour are exactly homologous or in direct opposition, The Work of Art details the convergence of art and work as a “complex set of reversible mediations” (1). Bernes works with what he terms a “loosely deterministic relationship,” where “the social and technical conditions of labor in a given society delimit a ‘horizon of possibilities’ for art” (33), an approach that “does not rely on simplistic notions of correspondence, homology or reflection” (33).

In Bernes’s account, the increasingly porous boundary between art work and work allowed the aesthetic to have agency in the transformation of the workplace. The corollary to the shift from factory production to office work also led to a change in the kind of demands workers were making on their employers: while during the first half of the twentieth century organized labour couched demands in a quantitative language, asking for better pay, shorter hours, greater job security, and safety protections, the latter half of the century brought a turn to explicitly qualitative demands such as “calls for greater participation in decision making, for a democratization of the workplace, for more varied and creative work, for greater autonomy, and even for [sic] self-management” (8).[ii] The relative difficulty of expressing a growing workplace ennui despite the quantitative gains made by the labour movement created a space for “various literary and artistic experimental cultures of the 1960s and 1970s … to articulate, though certainly not to create, these new qualitative complaints and demands” (8 italics in original), providing “tropes, motifs, and forms of articulation for [d]issatisfaction” (16) in the newly refigured workplace of deindustrialising North America.

The optimistic reading of the cultural response to the increased “alienation, monotony, and authoritarianism” (9) of the workplace is the commitment of artworks to critique the “division of labor between artist and spectator, writer and reader, which condemns the latter to inactivity” (15) by making of the art work “performances, conceptual elaborations, installations, environments, and earthworks” (11). However, this is not where Bernes’s account ends: under the pavement, the beach, but watch out for the dialectical kicker because “under the beach, the office” (130). While the turn to qualitative demands allowed for a shared vocabulary between art and work, this permeability came at a cost. While art helped to articulate problems of the workplace, these new articulations were then borrowed in turn by the workplace to further its own goals, such that “the critique of labor posed by experimental writers and artists of the postwar period became a significant force behind the restructuring of capitalism, by providing important coordinates, ideas, and images for that restructuring” (18). Here is the centre of Bernes’s argument, the case that he makes convincingly throughout the book: that, finally, “the qualitative critique of work passes into the quantitative worsening of work” ( Bernes acknowledges that he is not the first to make this claim, citing the work of Eve Chiapello and Luc Boltanski, Alan Liu, and David Harvey (17). However, he is interested in adding granularity to this claim by showing that while some aesthetic forms are co-opted wholesale (chapter one), at other times the art world and the corporate world are fighting it out over a set of terms made available by a third discourse (in chapter three, for example, the language of cybernetics).

Chapter one opens with of Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems (1964). O’Hara is a good choice – he is the poet of feelings and personal experience and this collection in particular, written by O’Hara in his lunchbreaks, is typically read in opposition to work: the stolen moments of artistic and bodily freedom as O’Hara walked through NYC on his breaks, “a lunch-hour flâneur in an urban landscape” (39). In contrast to this reading, Bernes reorients us to the ways that the Lunch Poems intersect with a vocabulary of work. In particular, O’Hara’s poems seem to foreshadow the turn from a focus on the commodity to the focus on aestheticised experience that was to become the central ploy of advertising, where “the commodity-object itself is simply a placeholder, an empty form that facilitates experience” (43). Retrospectively, O’Hara’s commitment to experience over the object (which puts him in line with a larger movement towards event and performance that Bernes traces throughout the art of the 1960s and 70s) seems to “prefigure and perhaps even contribut[e] to, indirectly” (41) the sale of experience by advertising. Bernes clearly shows this at work in the final lines of the poem “Having a Coke with You,” where O’Hara claims that the experiences of artists in the past were impoverished by their exclusive focus on objects: “it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous / experience / which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling / you about it.” Bernes’s sassy rejoinder to O’Hara’s call for pure experience is: “in other words: just do it,” (46) citing Nike’s ultimately motto as a bathetic reminder of the infinite recuperability of art by argument that 1960s counter-culture was swiftly recuperated by advertising is not new – in fact, Bernes gives a nice reading of how it is staged in the closing scene of Mad Men where Don Draper, with beatific smile, leverages his “proximity to liberated, bohemian spaces” (61) into Coca-Cola’s 1971 “Hilltop” commercial where the aesthetics of “perfect harmony” can be reached through “buy[ing] the world a Coke” (63). The likening of O’Hara to Nike and Mad Men works well, as do Bernes’s sharp close readings, for example when he makes the counter-intuitive claim that O’Hara is “a poet of service work as much as a poet of consumption” (39). Equally successful is the reading of O’Hara’s curatorial work at MoMA as a kind of training ground for his future shaping of New York as commodity, “cultivating an image of the worldly cultural space of New York for an equally worldly, international audience in the discursive context of the Cold War” (60).

Where I hesitate in Bernes’s reading of Lunch Poems is over the question of identity – a question that The Work of Art keeps bringing me back to. Let me pause on two readings of O’Hara mentioned by Bernes: Terrell Scott Herring’s “Frank O’Hara’s Open Closet,” and José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia. Bernes turns to Herring’s theory of “impersonal intimacy” (2002: 422), a form of belonging that, Herring argues, O’Hara created as a queer counterpublic to provide (and create) sociality without the personalisation that would lead to the violence of surveillance. While Bernes recognises that O’Hara developed impersonal intimacy as a way “to solve the specific problems of queer counterpublics” (Bernes 2017: 50), his interest is in how this partial universalism made O’Hara’s work open to recuperation: for example, the creation of this affect through a circulating commodity (such as a can of Coke) was catnip to advertisers who sought exactly this kind of staged intimacy. Certainly, the tool of impersonal intimacy could, as Bernes writes, “anticipat[e] quite well the affective rhetorics that advertisers and retailers [would] use to lubricate the flow of commodities, generating rapport in the absence of familiarity” (50) (is “lubricate” being deployed by Bernes as a reminder of the queer history embedded here, or is it just a Freudian slip?). However, the too swift separation of the queer form from the content of O’Hara’s poems operates on the logic that O’Hara’s work and the history of labour are separable from O’Hara’s experience of sexuality.

We can see the consequence of this separation of queer from career in Herring and Bernes’s divergent readings of O’Hara’s “Poem”. Bernes reads the line “Lana Turner has collapsed!” as “available to us as mode and mood and model because it is not clearly addressed toward anyone or anything in particular” (53); Herring’s reading offers “Poem” as the “search [for] a localized public though it uses the techniques of mass subjectivity” (422). Further, Herring argues that “given O’Hara’s admiration for William Carlos Williams and for Williams’ belief that the poem should function as a material ‘thing’ in the social realm, it follows that individual men (or, potentially knowledgeable women) meet and attract each other through the circulation of the personal poem, a stimulant to desire akin to a tight pair of pants” (422).[iii] While for Bernes, O’Hara’s use of celebrity is an open invitation, Herring argues that Lana Turner’s position as gay icon attracts “a readership familiar with homosexual semiotic codes … the property of a mass public is now reclaimed for a particularized, more restricted audience” (422), and this audience is explicitly sexualised. Bernes’s claim to a mode, mood, and model of universalism is a move that effaces the erotic and the corporeal, both of which are necessary parts of Herring’s argument and of O’Hara’s life.

A similar move is made in relation to José Esteban Muñoz’s reading of O’Hara’s “Having a Coke with You” as “signif[ying] a vast lifeworld of queer relationality, an encrypted sociality, and a utopian potentiality” (6). Bernes terms this reading from Muñoz “exemplary” but swiftly closes down the queer potential by stating that Muñoz’s “dereifying maneuver … is itself rather easily reified” (44). Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia is exactly about the way that utopian queerness is so often silenced: “shutting down utopia is an easy move … social theory that invokes the concept of utopia has always been vulnerable to charges of naiveté, impracticality, or lack of rigor” (Muñoz 2009: 10).[iv]  The thing is – Bernes is not anti-utopian. He is “not afraid to make claims for the effectivity of the aesthetic sphere” (6) and the book ends with the potential of a utopian horizon outside of work. Further, Muñoz’s reading is hardly against the history of labour: his O’Hara is a “queer cultural worke[r]” who can “detect an opening and indeterminacy in what for many people is a locked-down dead commodity” (9). I am not sure why Bernes is so quick to hand the coke bottle back to straight white masculinity, i.e. to Don Draper.[v] A queer reading is not antagonistic to a reading of the marketplace.

While Bernes is attendant to the specificities of O’Hara’s life insofar as they pertain to his work, spending a fair amount of time on O’Hara’s position as a curator at MoMA, the queer impetus that gives the poems their commercially recuperable form is quickly put to the side. This situates Bernes’s reading of O’Hara on a spectrum of criticism that separates identity politics and class criticism (whose bluntest proponent is Walter Benn Michaels and his frequently reiterated claims that identity politics are a distraction from the real work of class analysis[vi]). In the current moment, this feels like an impossible position to hold – although hasn’t it always felt impossible given the white supremacy that is the foundation and fuel for American capitalism? Bernes’s writing is not blunt; quite to the contrary, he is a generous and nuanced reader. However, this winnowing out of concerns that are outside of a very delimited idea of labour recurs throughout The Work of Art. I will return later to the epilogue of the book, titled “Overflow,” which uses the poetry of Fred Moten and Wendy Trevino to look at the relationship between race and labour. It suffices to say, for now, that the idea that a critique of wage labour could address sexuality or race only as an overflow is one that maintains the white, straight subject as the default and proper centre of labour history and separates vectors of social oppression from a class-based analysis.

Bernes is certainly aware of the problem of treating the straight white male worker as the only subject of history, and deals with this problematic universal in his second chapter. Rather than deny the central position of the white male worker to his narrative, Bernes argues instead that “such claims [to universality] derive from real features of white-collar work, since these workers were, in fact, often both bosses and employees, as well as mediators between executives and simple subordinates. This does not make their experience universal, but it does give such workers a uniquely privileged viewpoint, however full of contradictions” (66). It is through this idea of viewpoint that Bernes approaches John Ashbery’s writing. We begin with a setup: how on earth, asks Bernes, could we be expected to read Ashbery’s early work with the tools provided by poetry criticism when Ashbery’s use of proliferating points of view is more akin to that of a modernist novel? Citing a dozen lines from The Tennis Court Oath (Ashbery 1962), Bernes identifies five different viewpoints (as well as the multiple standpoints offered to the reader in the various pathways that can be taken through the poem’s exploded layout). In response to this proliferation of narrative standpoints and readerly viewpoints, Bernes suggests that free indirect discourse may be the best critical tool for navigation.

Turning to Marx’s work on commodities, Bernes reminds us that exchange occurs indirectly – we sell our time in order to make money, which we then use to buy the products of other peoples’ time. These transactions are also characterised by their appropriation by others, such that our work is not to create products for ourselves but to create products for an employer to sell. Bringing the analysis of poetic form and labour together we now see that “labor is both indirect (undertaken on behalf of others) and free (capable of being stripped from its producers and appropriated by someone else). We might say, therefore, that labor in capitalism is a form of free indirect activity, in which others act through us or we act on behalf of others” (78, italics in original). While free indirect activity is a consistent facet of capital, its formal centrality to Ashbery’s work is a sign of the newly slippery reversibility between layers of hierarchy within the corporation such that “management becomes more difficult to locate in a particular person, and the source of particular commands becomes more difficult to trace” (78). This confluence of Ashbery’s formal technique with economic theory is great: innovative and unexpected.

Bernes situates his reading of the universal voice of the white-collar worker in opposition to work such as Andrew Hoberek’s Twilight of the Middle Class: “whereas Hoberek wants to demystify white-collar pretensions to universality,” writes Bernes, “I argue that such claims derive from real features of white-collar work” (66). Again, it is unclear to me why these lines of argument have to be in opposition to each other. Both Hoberek’s and Bernes’s accounts of the formation of the white-collar worker are persuasive and accurate. Hoberek argues that the universal white white-collar subject was only made possible in its formation against a raced background of non-white blue-collar workers. Bernes’s reading of Ashbery serves to provide another dimension to the way that white privilege and capital work to prop each other up. A historical situation that presses white white-collar workers into a fractured and contradictory managerial position could certainly create a form of uniquely classed viewpoint; this managerialisation of the white-collar worker is also, as Hoberek writes, a “shift of focus from the manipulation of things to the manipulation of people[. T]he resulting, self-alienating collapse between person and thing is long established for African Americans … The white-collar class is formed in a crucible of the perceived [attack] both racially and economically” (2008: 68). Even if we set aside Hoberek’s desire to efface the universality of the white-collar worker, and accept that there was in fact a structurally new subject position open to the white managerial class, the formation of this white-collar position is created not just against blue-collar work but also against black bodies. That an argument about class feels the need to eject the specificity of certain bodies to make its argument speaks to the white elephant that isn’t in the room but is the room. As Glen Sean Coulthard (Yellowknives Dene) writes, capital is “a structure of domination predicated on dispossession … the sum effect of the diversity of interlocking oppressive social relations that constitute it” (2014: 15).

*

The next two chapters of The Work of Art burrow further into the mutual imbrication of work and leisure as we head further through the century. Chapter three details the brief but influential obsession with cybernetics in the 1950s and 60s, a distinctly masculine-gendered managerial approach that took on the same gender inflection in culture such that “if you were a white man and interested in experimentation in prose fiction in the 1960s and 1970s, then you were probably writing about machines, entropy, and information [i.e. cybernetics]” (85). In its promise of “social self-regulation based on horizontal, and participatory relations rather than explicit hierarchies” (29) cybernetics appealed as much to artists as it did to office managers who were looking to “trim administrative bloat” (29) and ease worker dissatisfaction. Chapter four continues this discussion of the dual exigencies of promoting worker morale and increasing profits by turning to the feminisation of labour where “not only [did] large numbers of women enter the workforce but labor methods and job positions [were] themselves feminized” (122). By importing ideas associated with leisure and home life into the workplace, the office was meant to be made more tolerable (29), while the further blurring of the line between life and work led to the now-familiar situation where “the entirety of life [is subsumed] by the protocols and routines of work” (30).

Bernes gives an impressively detailed history of the battle over cybernetics’ utopian possibilities. In line with the era’s general shift from control from above to self-management, cybernetics evolved from a Fordist/ Keynesian phase (a rigid and controlled structure) to the 1970s and beyond where “productive dynamism and creative disorder are valued over stability” (100). The post-1970s model led to management that was decentralised – workers do not get commands but are given “structures, protocols, and objectives” (104). This new freedom, is of course, not uncomplicated: “cybernetics presents an image of social self-regulation based on reciprocal, horizontal, and participatory relations rather than explicit hierarchies” (29). The open potential of cybernetics made it an interesting prospect across the political spectrum, both to employers hoping to cut costs by instituting self-governing practices of work and to artists who felt that cybernetics’ claims to totality offered the possibility of a utopian “global language” (101). This chapter is cautious in its assessment of the disruptive powers of the works it attends to. The ambivalence over what kind of freedom cybernetics would actually bring is at the centre of Hannah Weiner’s Code Poems (1968), which Bernes presents as a playing out of the conflicts over cybernetic potential: her poems are either “a model of the adaptivity, mutability, and openness to contingency that employers will demand from their workers” (106) or “a critique in advance of these new participatory models, revealing the violence and disorientation inherent in them” (106).[vii]

The false freedom of permutational choice was only one way that the tedium of the workplace was addressed: chapter four turns to the feminisation of labour as another corporate tactic to make work feel less tedious and automated. Through a reading of Bernadette Mayers’ Memory (a 1976 piece that mixes photography, performance, and text) Bernes criticises the way that the merging of private and public serves only to double the amount of labour the female worker has to do. Again, Bernes excels in his close attention to the texts – there’s a great reading of a scene in Memory where the staccato rhythm of a typewriter interacts with the rhythm of dishwashing to display the collapse of the once separate spheres of domestic life and office labour.

Bernes argues that this collapse is not only spatial – as the metaphor of spheres would suggest – but also creates “forms of interconnection that are temporal” (125): women must work the “double day … of paid and unpaid labor” (126). Time is also encountered through the growing role of technology in the 1970s. Here, Bernes takes another detour through Marx, describing a “temporality where the past remains present in an objective form, in the form of material accumulation that makes demands on, limits, and fates the course of the present. This is the sense in which Marx’s project is historical materialism – an account of history and historical change as materialized force” (140). This can be seen in Mayer’s Memory where “the superabundant complexity of her documented past comes to require continuous transfusions of present attention and creates … an explicit sense of tyrannical control in her presentation of the relationship between past and present” (142). The weight of this past is what Marx calls the “general intellect,” that is the huge amounts of knowledge stored in machinery that are external to man and therefore make the past an alienated and over-determined behemouth “speed[ing] onward, relentlessly, but not toward anything” (148). Beyond the faster pace of the growth of technology in the contemporary era, it strikes me that this description of Memory where “attempting to document the past in all its fullness, continually creates new, undocumented pasts” (144) could just as well apply to, for example, Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) as to the information age.

Perhaps a more surprising link not made (given the title of Bernes’s book) is to Walter Benjamin’s much theorised Angel of History, that celestial “historical materialist” who, like Mayer, “would like to pause for a moment so fair, to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed” (Benjamin 2007 [1955]: 257) but cannot as the rubble piles up in front of him.[viii]

The motivation of both chapter three and four are a little less clear than the first two chapters. The readings of Weiner (chapter three) and Mayer (chapter four) interestingly flesh out histories of cybernetics and the accelerated work day. However, the conclusion that these chapters reach – that artworks have an ambivalence such that “what is potentially revolutionary in one moment can become definitively system reinforcing in another” (117) and that the past materialisation of capital makes “the present a mere adjunct to the past” (148) – are not specifically new to the deindustrialised age. Possibly this is an intentional move in order to show that there is continuity (with intensification) across the century as well as a break in the 1960s, but if so the argument is not brought out quite clearly enough for this reader to find it.

*

The final chapter of The Work of Art hops forward to the twenty-first century in order to look at the effect on art of this over-determination by the general intellect, i.e. “what happens when art confronts a workplace whose very technologies, attitudes, and structures are a materialization of its own defeated challenges?” (156)[ix] We turn first to Flarf poetry, an experimental form that emerged in 2001 that mines the internet’s propensity for ridiculous juxtapositions; as Flarf-er Mike Magee puts it: “you search Google for 2 disparate terms, like ‘anarchy + tuna melt’” and stitch the quotes captured by Google into a poem (qtd. on 157). Flarf is explicitly tied to the workplace, both by “fucking around on the man’s dime” (164) as another Flarf practitioner Drew Gardner claims, and also by re-purposing the language of technology. The anhedonic other of Flarf is conceptual poetry, which creates homologies with clerical work by framing itself, in the words of Kenneth Goldsmith, as “information management” (qtd. on 166). Bernes cites Vanessa Place’s Statement of Facts – a reproduction of the briefs she wrote as a public criminal Appellate defence lawyer – as “one of the most remarkable confirmations of the thesis that work activity and nonwork activity have become nearly identical at present” (167).[x] Faced with the qualitative demands of white collar workers, capitalism takes these demands and converts them into a banalised version (156): demands for community are replaced by team work; for variety by adding more responsibilities to job descriptions; to complaints of the domination of work over life, employers responded with contingent and flexible labour; and the demand for creativity was taken in and spat back as the playful workplace that might offer you a growing wall and granola while exploiting you for longer hours.

Articulating an exitlessness that is redolent of Adorno and Horkheimer’s view of the culture industry, Bernes asks: “what possibilities for the aesthetic critique of work remain now that workplaces have been designed to anticipate and neutralize such critiques?” (156). Seeing conceptual poetry’s “emptying out of the libidinal content of the work landscape” (168) as a return to the very workplace tedium that began the narrative of his book, Bernes suggests the work of British poet Sean Bonney as a possible escape from this bind. Writing from a place of long-term unemployment, Bonney locates his critique of labour from outside the productive sphere of the gainfully employed. Of course, unemployment is bound up with precarity and “given the tendency of release from work to become a lack of work, or unwork, such joys are inextricable from agonies various and sundry” (172). (In particular, the Jobseeker’s Act of 1996 shifted the terminology in the UK from “unemployment benefits” to “Jobseeker’s Allowance” such that not working is always also a form of work.) Despite the difficulty of positioning oneself outside the labour market, it allows Bernes to find a space of possibility: “perhaps the task of the aesthetic challenge of our time is not to demand freedom in work but freedom from work” (171). No one is going to disagree with that sentiment, although whether escape from work is the most useful utopian horizon of course depends on one’s subject position. This point is briefly addressed with the inclusion of the Mexican American poet Wendy Trevino, who swats away the idea that the desire to be freed from work is anything to do with poetic freedom: “I’ve been told grant writing / Will ruin my writing. In the long list / Of reasons I wish I could quit my job / What it’s doing to my poems is absent” (196). I would have liked to see more of a critique of the demographically-limited possibility of un-work than this brief moment spent with Trevino.

This brings us to the previously mentioned Epilogue, containing the “overflow” of the book. It opens with a history of the vagabond as a way of living outside of labour, where Bernes writes that “just as literary history provides numerous examples of a poetics of labor so too there is an abundance of formal and thematic resources from which we might elaborate a poetics of wagelessness” (184), citing examples that range from broadside ballads to Wordsworth, John Dos Passos to Claude McKay. Bernes then links the “fugitivity” of the vagabond to the theorisation of fugitivity in Fred Moten’s work (189). One model of this fugitivity, Bernes suggests, is Sean Bonney’s turn away from work. The application of Moten’s terminology to the white poet Bonney is justified, for Bernes, by Moten’s statement that the use of fugitivity can “expan[d], ultimately, in the direction of anyone who wants to claim it” (qtd. on 193). This leads Bernes to write that “the African American radical tradition, both poetic and political, provides examples that will be increasingly crucial for all antagonists to capital and the state” (193). On the one hand, this desire for an all-inclusive collaboration of anti-capitalist agitators is exactly what will be necessary when we crush the state. On the other hand, the attention to emancipatory African American aesthetics arrives only when they become relevant to the increasingly precarious position of white male workers. This clarifies what has been a cumulative experience over the course of reading The Work of Art, namely that even a book that is explicitly thinking about production still manages to theorise art outside of the full conditions of its production by circumscribing “work” to the limited sphere of class.

*

Instead of moving from particular to universal, I will conclude with a little specificity by spending some time with Wendy Trevino.[xi] The work that is addressed in Bernes’s Epilogue is her 2015 piece, “Sonnets of Brass Knuckles Doodles.” This sonnet is centered on Trevino’s job at a nonprofit organization and the fraught fact that she is there working for a white female poet whom she met through poetry circles. Bernes focuses on the way that Trevino documents “the vanishing of the boundary between work and life under the force of new, social media that instrumentalize the affective languages of friendship … [and] the incorporation of artistic technologies and relationships into the work place” (195). Bernes then, importantly I think, shows how Trevino resists this encroachment of work upon her life:

According to Human Resources, I’m white.

I have been confused for other women

With dark hair. Maybe I am them sometimes.

In the elevator, taking the stairs

Walking back from lunch, saying ‘it’s not me.’ (Trevino 2015)[xii]

Of this moment, Bernes writes that “work is all-encompassing but its compulsive identifications – its identity with the self – can be resisted. For Trevino, this means refusing the identifications of poetry as well” (195). This is true – Trevino wrestles with the structural difficulty of writing in the enmeshed sites of the workplace and the institutions of poetry. But these lines are also about race and ethnicity. Her refusal of work – “it’s not me” –  is a refusal of all the things Bernes lists, but also a refusal of the inadequate racial categories offered by human resources and of the fungibility created between herself and other women based on ethnic markers.

In the penultimate verse of this ten-sonnet cycle, she also writes:

Next time we talk about race & poetry

I’d be interested in talking about

How many poets of color end up

Working for their white friends, who are also

Poets & how that might affect what they

Write & publish & do & how they talk

About it – instead of talking about

How many poets of color are in

This or that anthology. We always

Talk about that. More than half the staff of

The non-profit I work for are people

Of color. For various fundraising

Materials, they tell their stories. They

All sound the same & don’t take up much space.

Certainly, the collapse of work place and art work is evident in the parallel ways that these arenas both demand the inclusion of the voices of women of colour, while simultaneously disregarding them. But there is more. The stanza opens with the conjunction “race & poetry,” and while the workplace is discussed, it is under this interpretational rubric. Having posited this dyad as the centre of the stanza, Trevino directs the reader to the more and less important ways that race and poetry can be addressed. There is a clear “we” and “I” in this stanza.  The “we” talks about the number of people of colour included in poetic journals, the alliterative “this and that” pointing to the banality of an abstract inclusivity when it is reduced to a statistic. The “I” points to a different form of sociality. It is plural, linked immediately with the other people of colour that Trevino works. From this plurality, the “I” is not interested in inclusion, when this inclusion means adding a single name to the contents page of a journal while leaving the material condition of the (indistinguishable, negligible) co-workers untouched. We can see here that without an analysis of race (and at other times in “Sonnets of Brass Knuckles Doodles,” gender) the material inequities of class cannot be approached.

Part of the difficulty of writing about certain topics is the whiteness of the archive. I find Sara Ahmed’s work good to think with here, in particular her idea of building a citational house that welcomes those beyond whiteness. To this end, Ahmed has a clear policy in her book Living a Feminist Life: “to not cite any white men. By white men I am referring to an institution … Instead I cite those who have contributed to the intellectual genealogy of feminism and antiracism” (15). This is a strong policy, which makes sense in the context of Ahmed’s book, which is a (brilliant) toolkit for thinking, feeling, living feminism. Not all books need, should, can, be as trenchant as this in their citational practices. However, as Ahmed writes, “citations can be feminist bricks: they are the materials through which, from which, we create our dwellings. My citation policy has affected the kind of house I have built” (16).

No matter how compelling the individual readings are in Bernes’s The Work of Art, as a whole it implicitly makes the claim that “gender and race are not material while class is material, an argument articulated so often that it feels like another wall, another blockage that stops us getting through” (Ahmed 147). The experience of reading a history of deindustralisation in the U.S. that sequesters gender to one chapter and race to an Epilogue confronts the reader with the inhospitality of a white house that serves only to remind her of the ways that her gender, race, sexuality, or ethnicity are barriers to entry. As Trevino shows us, we need to think about race when we write about white poets. We also need to think about gender when we write about male poets, sexuality when we write about straight poets, disability when we write about able-bodied poets. This, and only this, will destabilise the white male as the universal category where race, gender, sexuality, and disability can be sloughed off as the concerns of others – namely the bodies that bear those categories.

References

Ahmed, Sara. 2017, Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press.

Benjamin, Walter. 2007 [1955]. “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility.” Trans. Harry Zohn.  In Illuminations. Schocken Books: New York.

Bernes, Jasper. 2017. The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Coulthard, Glen Sean. 2014. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Goldman, Judith. 2001. “Hannah=hannaH: Politics, Ethics, and Clairvoyance in the Work of Hannah Weiner.” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 12.2: 121-168.

Herring, Terrell Scott. 2002. “Frank O’Hara’s Open Closet.” MLA 117. 3: 414-427.

Hoberek, Andrew. 2005. The Twilight of the Middle Class: Post-World War II American Fiction and White-Collar Work. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Jameson, Fredric. –. 1994. Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

–. 1997. “Culture and Finance Capital.” Critical Inquiry 24.1: 246-65.

McCarthy, Michael A. 2016. “Alternatives: Silent Compulsions: Capitalist Markets and Race.” Studies in Political Economy 97.2: 195-205.

Michaels, Walter Benn. 2016. The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality. New York: Picador.

Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press.

O’Hara, Frank. 1995 [1959]. “Personism: A Manifesto.” In The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara. Ed. Donald Allen. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Roediger, David R. 2017. Class, Race and Marxism. London and New York: Verso.

Trevino, Wendy. 2015. “Sonnets of Brass Knuckles Doodles.” Boog City Reader. 8 (2015) http://www.boogcity.com/boogpdfs/bc95.pdf

Zultanski, Steven. 2012. “Short statement in five parts on Statement of Facts: A review of Vanessa Place’s Statement of Facts.” http://jacket2.org/reviews/short-statement-five-parts-statement-facts

Notes

[i] Jameson uses the terms synonymously at times: for example, “the economic preparation of postmodernism or late capitalism began in the 1950s” (Jameson 1994: xx).

[ii] Of course, quantitative demands such as shorter hours hopefully lead to a qualitative improvement of work conditions, but the distinction Bernes is making here is between the language that these demands are couched in.

[iii] The image of the “tight pair of pants” is a reference to O’Hara’s “Personism: A Manifesto,” where he celebrates poetry’s inextricable relationship with consumerism: “as for measure and other technical apparatus … if you’re going to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you” (O’Hara 1995 [1959]: 498-99).

[iv] Sara Ahmed provides an invaluable defense of the intellectual rigour of hope: “I am relatively comfortable in critical theory, but I do not deposit my hope there, nor do I think this is a particularly difficult place to be: if anything, I think it is easier to do more abstract and general theoretical work … The empirical work, the world that exists, is for me where the difficulties and thus the challenges reside. Critical theory is like any language; you can learn it, and when you learn it, you begin to move around in it. Of course, it can be difficult, when you do not have the orientation tools to navigate your way around a new landscape. But explaining phenomena like racism and sexism—how they are reproduced, how they keep being reproduced – is not something we can do simply by learning a new language. It is not a difficulty that can be resolved by familiarity or repetition; in fact, familiarity and repetition are the source of difficulty; they are what need to be explained” (Ahmed 2017: 9).

[v] In fact, not even Don Draper can keep a straight face: he only becomes Don Draper by closeting his birth name Richard “Dick” Whitman.

[vi] In particular, see The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality (Benn Michaels 2016). For refutations of this argument see “Alternatives: Silent Compulsions: Capitalist Markets and Race” (McCarthy 2016) and Class, Race and Marxism (Roediger 2017).

[vii] While Bernes points out that cybernetics is a hyper-masculine domain, he does not make anything of the fact that Hannah Weiner is his key exemplar. For a reading of Weiner’s code in relation to gender, see Goldman, 2001. For Goldman, Weiner’s Code Poems reveal “gender [as] a code for code and additionally a code for the intrinsic failure of code to carry a stable meaning: gender as an error message” (2001: 128).

[viii] Thanks to Katy Hardy for pointing out this parallel with Benjamin, and more broadly thanks to Jessica Hurley, Isabel Gabel, and Thea Riofrancos for their comments.

[ix] A version of this chapter appeared as “Art, Work, Endlessness: Flarf and Conceptual Poetry among the Trolls” in Critical Inquiry in 2016. A version of chapter two appeared as “John Ashbery’s Free Indirect Labor” in MLQ, 2013.

[x] It feels strange to discuss Place and Goldsmith without referring to the controversies surrounding the anti-black sentiments of their more recent work (Place’s tweeting of Gone with the Wind in its entirety; Goldsmith’s reading of Michael Brown’s autopsy) or Marjorie Perloff’s response to Place’s Statement of Facts at the 2010 Rethinking Poetics conference, where she “caused the audience to collectively gasp when she claimed that what Statement of Facts reveals to us is that the victims of rape are ‘at least as bad as or worse than the rapists’” (Zultanski 2012).

[xi] Thanks to Arne de Boever for encouraging me to write this section. (Of course, all responsibility for its content rests on my head alone.)

[xii] The title is misspelled in The Work of Art as “Sonnets of Brass Knuckle Doodles.”

Alison Shonkwiler, The Financial Imaginary: Economic Mystification & The Limits of Realist Fiction (University of Minnesota Press, 2017)

Peter Knight, Reading the Market: Genres of Financial Capitalism in Gilded Age America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016)

Reviewed by Matt Seybold

Matthew Arnold spends much of Civilization in the United States (1888) savaging the nation’s literary tastes. Arnold derides “the glorification of  ‘the average man,’” the “addiction to ‘the funny man,’ who is a national misfortune,” and, in case it isn’t abundantly clear who he’s talking about, “the Quinionian humour of Mr. Mark Twain, so attractive to the Philistine of the more gay and light type” (Arnold 1888: 92, 177). Twain read Arnold’s book shortly after it was published and felt “a friendly word was needed in our defense” (Clemens 1888: 5). This he offered in an open letter to the President of Yale University.

The conceit of the letter is that the honorary degree Yale had recently awarded him is “sufficient” to relieve Twain of the temptation to publicly rebuke Arnold. He speculates as to what kind of immodest and unbecoming things he “might” have said, but “since you have rehabilitated us it is not necessary” (5), he writes, just before copying this “private” correspondence to his local Hartford Courant. From there the letter circulated virally through the newspapers Arnold had recently recriminated, as Twain knew it would, further feeding the native “addiction” to his sarcastic wit.

It is a master class in the art of trolling.

But the Yale letter also contains a sincere apologia for the brand of literature appearing in the U.S. periodicals Arnold denounced, like Atlantic Monthly. Twain’s letter was ingeniously designed to “remind the world that ours is a useful trade, a worthy calling” with “one serious purpose, one aim, one specialty, and it is constant to it – the deriding of shams, the exposure of pretentious falsities, the laughing of stupid superstitions out of existence…whoso is by instinct engaged in this sort of warfare is the natural enemy of royalties, nobilities, privileges, and all kindred swindles, and the natural friend of human rights and human liberties” (5).

In the final two decades of his career, as his celebrity continued to grow, Twain pursued this singular purpose more aggressively, focusing especially on the shams and pretentions of colonialism and cultural imperialism. It was as if Matthew Arnold’s face was pasted to his dartboard. Many of his fellow novelists, some of whom he expressly trained in “this sort of warfare,” took their fight to a “kindred swindle,” and even won a few skirmishes against the likes of J. P. Morgan and J. D. Rockefeller. The concurrence of muckraking realism and progressive political economy at the turn of the twentieth century is a notable example of how “the novel has,” as Alison Shonkwiler puts it, “at various times in its history, aimed to destabilize capitalist reality” (Shonkwiler 2017: xxx).

Both Shonkwiller, in The Financial Imaginary (2017), and Peter Knight, in Reading the Market (2016), present U.S. literature engaged in a “sort of warfare” with financialization. It is not, as one might expect, a conflict driven by difference. Rather, it is a dispute over shared territory, a border war mobilized by concordances in how financiers and novelists “think,” as Shonkwiler frames it; that is, how they deal with the representational limitations imposed upon them by their prescribed mediums, their imagined audiences, and their own subjectivities. Knight shows how genres of financial capitalism, from the ticker tape itself to conspiracy theories aimed at influencing investment patterns, depend upon readers whose literacy is developed through popular forms. Financial media must, therefore, borrow liberally from familiar narratives, both fictional and factual, until the reading habits of the nation are no longer “merely a passive reflection of an existing economic reality but part of the cultural armature that helps create it” (Knight 2016: 15).

Crucial to both accounts is the inherent “fictiveness,” “fictionality,” and “fictitiousness” of finance. The imaginative and speculative pretexts to literary and financial forms create grounds for analogies between them. Both scholars explore these parallels, but are most interested in whether (and how) the mutual territory of the literary and financial imaginary endows literature, particularly realist literature, with the capacity to reveal and resist the totalizing forces of financialization. Because of the overlap between these crafts, Shonkwiler argues, critical readers of novels may be better prepared to interrogate financial forms. Knight shows that nineteenth-century fiction writers sought to create competing representations of the financial economy to expose and unsettle the “cultural armature” upon which it rests.

For Shonkwiler, it is a kamikaze “sort of warfare.” Novelists have increasingly been willing to highlight the counterfactuality and constructedness of their own works, and by doing so reveal the counterfactuality and constructedness of other mediums, like financial products, which prefer to evade such transparency. For Twain and Henry James, the demystification of British cultural imperialism was achieved in part by ridiculing the romantic precedents to their own preferred genre: the novel. In many of the “economic novels” of 1890s and 1900s, realists would exchange the romantic hero as object of demystification for what Shonkwiler calls “economic virtue,” the strained effort to “maintain the integrity of the self in the face of gambling temptations” (2). Knight traces the manufacture of such virtue through corporate publicists’ and neoclassical economists’ efforts to glorify greed with shallow appropriations of Adam Smith, efforts pilloried in Upton Sinclair’s The Moneychangers (1908) and Frank Norris’s The Octopus  (1901).

According to Shonkwiler, that generation of economic novels “marks the historical end of one kind of capitalist realism, where market value is grounded in character, and the beginning of another kind of capitalist realism, where character and history are both grounded in the market” (29). Most of her book focuses on this second kind. Post-45 novels may not be conventionally associated with realism, but possess “the persistence of a realist narrative impulse towards demystification” (xii). The novels of Don DeLillo, Richard Powers, and Jane Smiley “revive the premodernist interest in demystification” (xv) while remaining characteristically postmodern in their mimetic and metafictional disembowelings, which make them more effective “tools to critique finance and to resist the narrowings of its imaginary” (127). These novelists are experts at drawing attention to the intentional ambiguity, abstraction, arbitrariness, elusion, and contradiction in their own works. When they depict financialization, they bring that expertise to bear.

Shonkwiler and Knight agree that financialization relies on processes of mystification and abstraction which have reached an absurd precipice in recent years. “Structural pressures of abstraction…that were emergent in the nineteenth century,” Shonkwiler writes, “are now fully articulated in the twenty-first” (xx). Since 2008 finance has been an emperor with no clothes. The fictiveness of finance capital now stands so ludicrously exposed that even those who benefit from its sustained pretenses seem shocked that their imaginary wealth continues to reproduce itself and be accepted in exchange for commodities and political favors. They are reduced, as Leigh Claire la Berge has shown, to increasingly outrageous affectations of counterintuitive intelligence. If the public recognizes the financial system is as automated and autarchic as it seems in the works of contemporary muckrakers like Michael Lewis and Matt Taibbi, the persuasive illusions of economic virtue which justify their compensation and, indeed, their existence, are jeopardized. “If we’re so rich, why aren’t I smart” is the logos of 21^st-century banking executives.

Knight focuses on how the elaborate representational and rhetorical architecture of finance capitalism, now crumbling, was erected. Even when reading nineteenth-century novels, Shonkwiler describes finance in the “fully articulated” terms of our late stage, with a critical eye towards how the well-intentioned efforts of earlier generations of realists failed to adequately antagonize the ascendant hegemon. Theodore Dreiser, for instance, accepts fictive finance and the rhetoric of economic virtue with an ambivalence that is easily read as endorsement. While Knight also regards texts of the Gilded Age as productively conversant with financialization in the New Gilded Age, which has “reached a level of abstraction and opacity that is hard to comprehend, let alone regulate” (255), aside from his introduction and epilogue, he remains embedded in the emergent financial culture of the nineteenth century. His hope is to support critiques of contemporary financialization by “demystify[ing] the logically prior notion of the market as an entity that is both abstract and yet curiously animated” (12). He tracks a series of market metaphors common to financial genres of the Gilded Age explicitly designed to combat the impression that financial wealth is purely imaginary.

Knight’s interpretation of familiar literary works – William Dean Howells’s Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man (1857), Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth (1905) – would fit naturally into Shonkwiler’s account, as he shows them allegorizing the dematerialization of U.S. economic infrastructure via securitization. But Knight is more insistent on how these novels and other popular literary forms competed with a series of new mediums and genres created explicitly to depict the “financescape” (10). Several populist publications – James Gordon Bennett’s “Money Market” columns, Puck magazine’s political cartoons, and sensational memoirs of market immorality – were designed to both profit from the public fascination with finance and warn readers that finance was a rigged game. Others – counterfeit detectors, stock-picking manuals, pseudo-scientific economic pamphlets, and bucket shop advertisements – enticed amateur investors by presenting speculation as Americanization: a challenging, democratic enterprise. Becoming a market “insider,” like becoming American (at least according to Theodore Roosevelt and Andrew Carnegie), was simply a matter of effort and ingenuity. Anybody could learn how to “read the market” through newspapers reports, government documents, tip sheets, and, above all, the ticker tape.

Through Knight’s account we see how the fictions of finance were perpetuated despite being persistently interrogated by literary forms, some evolving expressly to pursue that purpose. The warfare between popular literature and Wall St. has been waged in US for as long as either has been a recognizable institution. Many of the authors closely associate with US literary realism were keenly aware that they were losing ground. As Edith Wharton recalls it, even after decades exploring “the deep connection between the personal and financial realms” in the era of emerging capitalist hegemony, Henry James felt he was only scratching the surface of this “impenetrable mystery” (Knight 2016: 190). Knight argues that the elusiveness which frustrated James was produced not only by the sometimes purposeful complexity and obscurity of rapidly-developing securities markets, financial institutions, and commercial relationships, but also by finance capital’s propensity to invent and inspire new methods and mediums expressly to confuse and compete with existing modes of representation.

In the final scene of James’s “The Real Thing” (1892), a pair of penniless aristocrats, having failed as figure models for a series of dimestore novels the narrator is illustrating, beg to be kept on as hired help, replacing the housekeeper and valet who have proven superior impersonators of noble characters in spite of their rank. Pressed nearly to starvation, Major Monarch and Lady Monarch, lacking any marketable trade, are reduced to pleading for menial employment. “If my servants were my models, my models might be my servants,” the narrator muses, “They would reverse the parts” (NY Sun 1892: 2). It is an almost perfect allegory for the triumph of capitalism over the feudal system. Almost.

James expects US readers to relish the parable of a transatlantic marketplace that annihilates titles and evaluates everybody according to the exchange value of their labor. His image of high-toned Monarchs “emptying my slops” strikes a burlesque note appropriate to the U.S. newspapers in which the story was syndicated. But the triumphalism of “The Real Thing” is marred by the evident regret expressed in the story’s final lines.

As the illustrator pays the Monarchs “a sum of money to go away,” he admits that despite the expense and delay caused by their worthless attempts to serve him, he is “content to have paid the price – for the memory” (2). This narrator, like James, recognizes that the death of aristocracy is also the destruction of the patronage system that sustained literary and visual art in Europe for half a millennium. In its absence, artists will be forced to submit to the demands of the masses, demands unlikely to be aligned with the tastes and talents of the artist over the course of a long career. The narrator, for instance, would prefer to paint portraits, but can only make an adequate living by drawing and, even in this medium, is limited by the preferences of publishers rushing to satisfy U.S. consumers clamoring, ironically, for romantic tales of feudal Europe.

With this hint of nostalgic sympathy for the Monarchs, James signals both reluctant acceptance of the ascendant logic of capitalism and reticence about the future it promises. When the Monarchs initially propose that their gentility is “the real thing,” it seems a comically desperate cry of entitlement. But James does not let his readers revel in the tidy poetic justice of the Monarchs coup de grace. Instead he provokes them to submit their new world order to the same litmus test. Is exchange capital any more durably precious than hereditary titles? Is a society divided by wealth any less arbitrarily organized? When a financial oligarch claims to possess “the real thing,” does his claim have any more intrinsic merit?

The St. Louis Dispatch was apparently so frustrated by the irreconcilability of James’s remorseful final lines with the fable of American Exceptionalism promised by the preceding episode, they “corrected” the final word of the story, changing memory to money. The tautological phrase thus produced – “to have paid the price – for the money” (STL Post-Dispatch: 26) – is transactional, rather than existential. In James’s manuscript, “price” is metaphorical, referring to potential damage done to the illustrator’s marketability by subtle aesthetic alterations precipitated by sympathizing too deeply with the Monarchs. “Price” in the Post-Dispatch version asserts a strict relationship between the “sum of money” paid to get rid of the Monarchs and the profits to be generated by securing a contract for additional books in the popular series. The Post-Dispatch, in a word, rescues the narrator’s economic virtue, his native allegiance to the laissez-faire logic of neoclassical economics, a logic which insists that faith in future returns is sound justification for financial decisions, that individuals are exchangeable “human resources,” and that the correlation between private accumulation and public benefit need not be carefully interrogated.

As with Shonkwiler’s reading of “The Jolly Corner”(1909), in “The Real Thing” James “presents a problem of defining self-interest at a moment when older forms of economic selfhood appear superannuated” (Shonkwiler 2017: 13). He stood, in 1892, at the intersection of two epochs, one organized by the divine right of kings, the other by the divine justice of markets. That the delusion of the former seemed apparent and absurd did not ensure that devotion to the latter was any more rational.  James was unenthusiastic about the “science” of capitalism and the society it promised, but he was appropriately awed by the popularity and persuasive power of its fictions.

Reading The Market and The Financial Imaginary are part of a subfield of post-2008 econo-literary criticism which appears, as Shonkwiler poetically puts it, “deep in the ‘autumn’ stage of the American century” (xxi). We stand, in this epochal moment, revolted by the steady march of market imperialism and its associated atrocities and hypocrisies, as apparent to us as King Leopold and Edward VII’s were to James and Twain. These scholars also provoke us, however, to turn a skeptical eye towards the Utopian promises of finance capitalism’s would-be usurpers. It remains uncertain “whether the logic of abstract value and equivalence can be coopted for less violent and antisocial ends” (xxi). What new simulacra and ideological abstractions will successfully make themselves personal and persuasive?

Knight emphasizes Wharton’s claim that James “often bewailed to me his total inability to use the ‘material,’ financial and industrial, of modern American life” (Knight 2016: 176). But James’s oeuvre shows that he did in fact mine an extraordinary amount of material from this supposedly inaccessible territory. The continuous and often comical breaches of patriarchal decorum by obscenely wealthy Americans are the means by which James shows the erosion of European class structures. That which once seemed the very essence of reality, a set of coded behaviors by which power relationships were performed and understood by the powerful, came to signify nothing except the obsolescence of those who cared about those codes.

Finance offered an alternative code. It offered an “impersonal market,” as Knight puts it, “made intelligible by concretizing its abstractions” (256). That financial representations of reality are frequently delegitimized by crises of economic confidence during which “all that had been taken as solid and dependable melt[s] so quickly into thin air” (170) does not necessarily make its claim to realism any more or less specious than what preceded it, or what follows. Or, as Shonkwiler reminds us: “It is important to forestall the conclusion that more abstract means less real” (Shonkwiler 2017: xxiv).

Matt Seybold is Assistant Professor of American Literature & Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College and co-editor of the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Literature & Economics.

Clemens, Samuel. 1888. “Mark Twain Accepts.” Hartford Courant, June 29.

James, Henry. 1892. “The Real Thing.” New York Sun, April 10.

James, Henry. 1892. “The Real Thing.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 10.

Knight, Peter. 2016. Reading the Market: Genres of Financial Capitalism in Gilded Age America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins.

Le Berge, Leigh Claire. 2014. Scandals and Abstractions: Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s. New York: Oxford.

Shonkwiler, Alison. 2017. The Financial Imaginary: Economic Mystification & the Limits of Realist Fiction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.

by Adrian Nathan West

Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason. Duke University Press, 2017.

The question of Blackness, of what it might or ought to mean, lies at the fault line between timeworn notions of race as a biological destiny, rechristened for the resurgent right as “human biodiversity” or “racial realism,” and identity theory in its various permutations. If the first is generally acknowledged to lack scientific fundament, the second’s refusal to dispense entirely with race, coupled with its difficulty in establishing strict criteria as to who may and may not claim a given ethnicity, has provided fodder for advocates of dubious identitarian positions from transracialism to White Lives Matter. Yet the alternative of avowed post-racialism has frequently served as a cover for the diminishment of the historical suffering of marginalized groups or an excuse for the advocacy of policies that work to these groups’ detriment. Amid the snares of these various approaches, is a different thinking of Blackness possible?

This is the question posed by Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe, whose impressive body of work has yet to achieve the prominence it deserves in the English-speaking world. Critique of Black Reason, his most accomplished book to date, opens by positing Blackness as a historical conception of a kind of being, neither entirely subject not object, elaborated over the course of three successive phases: first, the “organized despoliation of the Atlantic slave trade,” which transformed black flesh into “real estate,” in the words of a 1705 declaration of the Virginia Assembly, and led to the codification of racial difference following Bacon’s Rebellion in the seventeenth century; second, the birth of black writing, which Mbembe traces from the late eighteenth century, as an examination of blacks’ condition as “beings-taken-by-others” to its culmination in the dismantlement of segregation and apartheid; and third, the confluence of market globalization, economic liberalization, and technological and military innovation in the early twenty-first century (Mbembe 2017, 2-4). In this last, grim episode, the concentration of capital following the saturation of global markets, accompanied by processes of efficiency maximization, has led to the seclusion of the black subject on the irrelevant fringes of society and to a consequent “production of indifference,” or “altruicide,” that helps render this barbarity psychologically cost-efficient for the privileged (Mbembe 2017, 3). “If yesterday’s drama of the subject was exploitation by capital,” he states, “the tragedy of the multitude today is that they are unable to be exploited at all. They are abandoned subjects, relegated to the role of a ‘superfluous humanity.’ Capital hardly needs them any more to function” (Mbembe 2017, 3; 11). This novel arrangement, according to Mbembe, has given rise to “new imperial practices” that tend toward a universalization of the black condition that he refers to as the “Becoming Black of the world” (Mbembe 2017, 6).

Mbembe defines race as a system of images tailored to the demands of rapacity that forestalls any encounter with an authentic subject. The briefest glance at the early literature of African exploration, from Jobson to Olfert Dapper, shows the extent to which fantasy superseded reality and public desire for the salacious and hair-raising left little room for ethnographic rigor. These accounts dished up the archetypes of those tropes of sloth, intellectual inferiority, wiliness, and concupiscence that remain in vigor even today and that would provide eventual justification for colonialism and enslavement. “To produce Blackness is to produce a social link of subjection and a body of extraction,” Mbembe affirms, and, being constituted far in advance of any earnest investigation of African history, sociology, or folkways, these primitive notions of Black life responded less to enlightened curiosity than to the question of “how to deploy large numbers of laborers within a commercial enterprise that spanned great distances” as a “racial subsidy” to the expanding plantation system (Mbembe 2017, 20).

The question of Black reason proposed by the book pertains, first of all, to the body of knowledge concerning things and people “of African origin” that came to stand in for primary experience thereof and served as “the reservoir that provided the justifications for the arithmetic of racial domination” (Mbembe 2017, 27). Black reason categorized its more or less willfully misunderstood African subjects through a series of exemptions to normalcy that mutated in conformity with the scientific reasoning of successive eras, leaving them morally and juridically illegitimate, unfit for human endeavor, suited only to forced labor. The traces of Black reason, according to Mbembe, persist in the search for Black self-consciousness, the founding gesture of which is the question: “Am I, in truth, what people say I am?” (Mbembe 2017, 28). Against this grappling with the oppressive image of Blackness, Mbembe will propose, in the book’s later chapters, an engagement with tradition for the sake of a “truth of the self no longer outside the self,” with Aimé Césaire, Amos Tutuola, Frantz Fanon, and others as his guides (Mbembe 2017, 29).

A brief caveat concerning language is in order. Translators from French frequently grapple with the word nègre, and the results are rarely ideal. It remains common in standard French as a term for ghostwriter (nègre) and in the now off-color expression travailler comme un nègre (equivalent to the once-current work like a nigger in English), but when used disparagingly, there is no doubt as to its intent. Mbembe’s title, and his use of nègre throughout the book, are not meant to be provocative, but they do draw on a long tradition of recalcitrant self-assertion embodied in Aimé Césaire’s famous phrase, “Nègre je suis, nègre je resterais,” which has its complement in the reappropriation of the word nigger by H. Rap Brown, Dick Gregory, and others (Césaire, 28). All this is elided in Laurent Dubois’s excellent translation; in his defense, there is no happy alternative.

For Mbembe, the racialization of consciousness takes root with the legal effort to distinguish the greater rights and privileges owed to European indentured servants with respect to their African slave counterparts in America in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. With the growth of scientific racism and its subsequent application to African peoples in the heyday of colonialism, which coincided with the “capitulation to racism” in the southern states as described by C. Van Woodward, Blackness was reconstituted as an Außenwelt or “World-outside” in the Schmittian sense: a zone in which enmity was paramount, rapine permissible, and the supposition of reciprocity suspended (Woodward, 67-110). Though the rationalization of scientific racism granted the field an appearance of objectivity, as an ideology racism was never independent of “the logic of profit, the politics of power, and the instinct for corruption” (Mbembe 2017, 62). This is evident from the massive wave of resettlements starting in the 1960s in South Africa, the organized attacks on Black businesses and appropriation of black-owned lands in the United States after the Civil War, and the introduction of foreign land ownership in Haiti under Roosevelt. Whether predicated on Blacks’ irreparable inferiority, in the American case, or on the civilizing mission, in the French, the principle of race, as a “distinct moral classification,” educated the populace in “behaviors aimed at the growth of economic profitability” (Mbembe 2017, 73; 81).

In the book’s second half, Mbembe turns from racism as such to an eloquent account of the development of Black self-consciousness, which necessarily takes over and diverts the discourse of race:

The latent tension that has always broadly shaped reflection on Black identity disappears in the gap of race. The tension opposes a universalizing approach, one that proclaims a co-belonging to the human condition, with a particular approach that insists on difference and the dissimilar by emphasizing not originality as such but the principle of repetition (custom) and the values of autonomy […] We rebel not against the idea that Blacks constitute a distinct race but against the prejudice of inferiority attached to the race. The specificity of so-called African culture is not placed in doubt: what is proclaimed is the relativity of cultures in general. In this context, ‘work for the universal’ consists in expanding the Western ratio of the contributions brought by Black ‘values of civilization,’ the ‘specific genius’ of the Black race, for which ‘emotion’ in particular is considered the cornerstone (Mbeme 2017, 90).

This notion of a peculiar set of Black values has informed the praxis of evocation essential to Pan-Africanist thinkers from Edward Blyden to Marcus Garvey, whose thought has special importance for Mbembe despite his own universalist principals. While praising the aptitude of what he terms “heretical genius” to promote a self-sustaining understanding of the African condition, Mbembe admits that this understanding itself is a falsification to be transcended (Mbembe 2017, 102).

For Mbembe, Blackness resides above all in the individual’s inscription in the Black text, his term for the accrual of the collective recollections and reveries of people of African descent, at the core of which lies the memory of the colony. Memory he defines as “interlaced psychic images” that “appear in the symbolic and political fields,” and in the Black text, the primordial memory is the divestment of the subjectivity of the Black self (Mbembe 2017, 103). His discussion of Black consciousness in the colonial setting leans heavily on Frantz Fanon, particularly The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks. Here again, Mbembe’s dialectical proclivities show forth: while looking toward a future in which a new humanism might divest historical memory of the trappings of race, he pays homage to thinkers who insisted on the necessity of a specifically Black memory to combat colonial distortions; at the same time, without advocating violence, he quotes Fanon approvingly to the effect that violence, for the colonized, may prove the lone recourse able to establish reciprocity between oppressor and oppressed.

Since his 2006 essay Necropolitics, death has been the axis on which Mbembe’s political philosophy turns, and its invocation in Critique of Black Reason makes for some of the book’s most resonant as well as exasperating passages. Mbembe is no doubt correct in positing the border between the capacity of the sovereign to kill and that of the subject to bring his own life to an end as the furthermost border and defining conflict of the experience of subjection, and its relevance is beyond debate in the political discourse of the present day, especially as it impends upon those regions of the world where weakened civil institutions have allowed for a merging of private and public power and their subordination to moneyed interests. Yet his frequent linkage of these considerations to theoretical concepts of French coinage is at times belabored. In particular, the concept of the remainder (le reste), the heritage of which stretches from Saussure to Derrida and Badiou, and which Mbembe relates to the Black subject’s life-in-death through Bataille’s notion of the accursed share, muddies rather than illuminates Mbembe’s ordinarily lucid prose.

Mbembe concludes Critique of Black Reason with an examination of the prospects for overcoming the idea of Blackness in the service of a world freed of the burden of race, yet unbothered by difference and singularity. Considering négritude as a moment of “situated thinking,” borne of and proper to the lived experience of the racialized subject, he calls for the contextualization of Blackness within a theory of “the rise of humanity” (Mbembe 2017, 161; 156). Blackness, in the positive sense Mbembe’s favored thinkers impart to it, would then become “a metaphysical and aesthetic envelope” directed against a specific and historically bound set of degradations and toward a humanism of the future; and the question that emerges for all liberatory struggles is “how to belong fully in this world that is common to all of us” (Mbembe 2017, 176). It is curious to read his sanguine meditations on the dialectical transcendence of Blackness against the collapse of the ideal of a post-racial America, particularly toward the end of Obama’s second term, and the re-legitimation of overt racism in the Trump era. Whereas Mbembe largely dispenses with the fictions of race to conceive of Blackness in political terms, present-day racism on the right has held onto the Black person as a biological subject while discrediting the political implications of ethnicity. Mbembe is not blind to the consequences of this decoupling of ethnic origin and political status, which has given impetus both to the annulment of protections afforded to African-Americans as well as to a revival of stereotypes of thugs and welfare cheats whose alleged malfeasance is undetermined by history or circumstance: he decries post-racialism as a fiction, advocating instead for a “post-Césairian era [in which] we embrace and retain the signifier ‘Black’ not with the goal of finding solace within it but rather as a way of clouding the term in order to gain distance from it” (Mbembe 2017, 173).

Increasingly, the diffusion of Blackness into the common human heritage may devolve as much from oppression and destitution as from any humane disposition toward fraternity. In his 1999 essay “On Private Indirect Government,” Mbembe spoke ominously of the “direct relation that exists between the mercantile imperative, the upsurge in violence, and the installation of private military, paramilitary, or jurisdictional authorities” (Mbembe 1999). Mbembe was writing specifically of Africa, and well in advance of the economic crisis in the West that permitted an unheralded transfer of wealth into the hands of a minuscule proportion of the global elite. Since then, Americans have witnessed a newly militarized police force engaged in profiteering via civil asset forfeiture, the yields of which now exceed total losses from burglary; at the same time, privatization of education, public services, and infrastructure has made a growth industry of what once were thought of as human rights. The escalation process of capital mentioned by Mbembe in the book’s preface has meant that the citizens of countries that once dictated the brutal debt adjustment regimes imposed on the Third World now find themselves burdened by austerity as the global periphery expands and the core grows ever more restricted.

In the epilogue, “There is Only One World,” Mbembe characterizes the progressive devaluation of the forces of production, along with the reduction of subjectivity to neurologically fixed and algorithmically exploitable market components, recently criticized by philosophers such as Byung-Chul Han, as a not-yet complete “retreat from humanity” to which he opposes “the reservoirs of life” (Mbembe 2017, 179; 181). For Mbembe, this situation confronts the individual with the most basic existential questions: what the world is, what are the extant and ideal relations between the parts that compose it, what is its telos, how should it end, how should one live within it. To conceive of a response, it is necessary to embrace the “vocation of life” as the basis for all thinking about politics and culture (Mbembe 2017, 182). Mbembe closes with a layered reference to “the Open,” which draws on Agamben, Heidegger, and finally Rilke to specify a state of plenitude, an absence of resentment, in which a care is made possible beyond the distortions of abstraction through the acknowledgement and inclusion of the no-longer other. The “proclamation of difference,” he concludes, “is only one facet of a larger project––the project of a world that is coming” (Mbembe 2017, 183).

Adrian Nathan West is author of The Aesthetics of Degradation and translator of numerous works of contemporary European literature.

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