“Not Much Left”: Wageless Life in Millenial Poetry
Over the past decade, North American poetry has emerged as an unlikely but persistent site of imaginative inquiry into economic crisis and uneven development. A wide range of contemporary poets, including Mark Nowak, Ed Roberson, Myung Mi Kim, Barbara Freeman, Farid Matuk, Anne Winters, Juliana Spahr, Jennifer Moxley, Chris Nealon, Joshua Clover, Kevin Davies, Kaia Sand, Jules Boykoff, Jasper Bernes, Craig Santos Perez, and Sesshu Foster, explore the logics and effects of American deindustrialization and neoliberal globalization in their writing. Indeed, as Clover has recently argued, it is perhaps time to "post a brief on poetry ... as the signal literary form of the period," given its sustained attention to the "non-narrative" workings of late capitalism (39). This essay highlights one dimension of this extensive archive: poetic considerations of what Michael Denning calls "wageless life." 1
While the large-scale consequences of neoliberal economic policies have been laid bare in our moment of protracted crisis, the material conditions and lived experiences of the chronically jobless and destitute continue to enter public discourse largely by way of statistics: the unemployment rate, the number of long-term unemployed, rates of foreclosure and household debt. The multitude of the marginal, at once pervasive and socially invisible, might be seen as the exemplary figure of globalized capitalism and its logics of accumulation by dispossession. In turn, this collective figure troubles the frameworks of recognition, belonging, and agency on which conceptions of the liberal subject are based. Recent theoretical characterizations of what Zygmunt Bauman terms "wasted lives"—"or more correctly wasted humans ... which are the waste-products of globalization"—all point to a category-crisis wherein economic dispossession entails a negation, a "waste," of personhood itself (5, 66). 2 As Denning puts it, "To speak repeatedly of bare life and superfluous life can lead us to imagine that there really are disposable people, not simply that they are disposable in the eyes of state and market" (80).
Among poets, Nowak, Roberson, and Kim in particular turn their attention to forms of collective being subsisting at the margins of the marketplace. Their work, however, is animated not only by an attempt to restore visibility to the unemployed and poor but also by an inquiry into the larger representational problems their subsistence raises. What does it mean to be socially unrecognized, "disposable in the eyes of state and market"? And what distinctive resources might poetry offer for encountering the limits of social recognition? This poetry raises these questions of representation, in other words, not to offer solutions but to illuminate their very intractability. In place of straightforward documentary methods or prosopopoeia as means of redeeming the other's lost 'voice,' these poems engage various practices of "measuring silences" (to borrow Pierre Macherey's key phrase) (87). Such practices might, in turn, highlight poetry's distinctive capacities for addressing the recalcitrant and minimized forms of life characteristic of contemporary economic crisis.
I turn, first, to Nowak's Shut Up Shut Down (Coffee House Press, 2004), which offers a portrait of the decline of the American steel and auto industry, the rise of Rust Belt unemployment, and the transformation of productive workers into the wageless. Over the course of five long poems, Nowak collages photos of Rust Belt towns, newspaper reports, testimony, and historical accounts to trace key moments in the disenfranchisement of American manual laborers. Shut Up Shut Down addresses the value of the person in materialist terms, examining the economic sphere as a determining force in producing a narrative of personhood. This narrative becomes visible in the face of its absence for those cast aside by industrial decline. Shut Up Shut Down tends to be read as a new form of proletarian "oral history," a work of documentary poetry that reveals the class interests at work in Detroit, Youngstown, Buffalo, and other sites of deindustrialization. I want to suggest, instead, that Nowak uses the juxtapositional techniques associated with documentary form to track the effects of social negation itself. We might read Nowak's poetic mode less as straight oral history than as a framework for making audible the social silence that accompanies deindustrialization.
Nowak's book suggests that the person under capitalism is not merely identified with labor, but produced by it, such that being unemployed is synonymous with being "shut up shut down." To be rendered redundant is quite literally to be rendered speechless. What this sounds like is stutter, syntactical breakdown, halt and gap: in a kind of self-hushing stumble over the word "shutter,"one line simply reads "ssh...shutter. sssh...shhh..shutter shutter. shhh" (155). Another poem's white space and syntactic distortion erode a protest chant into halt and stammer:
Where are
yards our
yards where our
***
no you cannot
yards [where] away (13).
The homophonic rhyme of "are" and "our" points to a collective identification with the steel yards, the site of industrial production, such that they become synonymous, indistinguishable. To ask "where" is thus to pose an unanswerable question about the "we" itself. "Where," the poem asks; "away," it declares, marking not only a limit of geographical knowledge but a collective newly defined by privation, an "our" that finds itself "away." That this is a broken protest chant is crucial: rather than new forms of collective identity arising from economic disenfranchisement, Nowak's poem charts a breakdown even of the language of solidarity and protest.
Shut Up Shut Down assembles textual matter that might provide a reconstructive itinerary of this collective vanishing point, "what / disappears / in the distance / with / who" (143). For an example of this reconstruction, we might look to one of the long sequences in the book, entitled "June 19, 1982," which takes as its narrative centerpiece the murder of Vincent Chin, a Chinese American beaten to death in Detroit by a Chrysler plant superintendent and his stepson. 3 Rather than documenting this story as an individual drama with clearly demarcated perspectives, Nowak layers four kinds of text to provide insight into what Raymond Williams calls the "social situation" of unemployment (qtd. in Nowak, 85). Each poem in the 26-page sequence moves from several lines of Williams' etymological Keywords research into the word "unemployment" across three centuries, to a litany of ailments suffered by the long-term unemployed, to fragmentary descriptions of Chin's murder alongside historical accounts of mass unemployment in the Rust Belt. Framing the sequence are photos of empty factories and industrial spaces with broken windows, piles of detritus, boarded-up fronts. Nowak's juxtapositions reframe what would otherwise appear an isolated, exceptional incident to reveal its material and historical determination. At the same time, this assemblage provides a diachronic itinerary of the antagonisms that underlie the social category of the unemployed, pointing toward the insufficiency of any one document, event, or perspective to adequately grasp the negative condition that is being wageless.
What emerges in this sequence is a portrait of the minimization of personhood in the wake of unemployment. The extreme individuation accompanying the loss of the social sphere of labor functions, paradoxically, as a negation of self: "emptied of / discarded by//vacated vacant," one set of lines reads, its assertions echoed by the eerie portraits of decaying industrial spaces (69). Nowak catalogs a litany of self-canceling ailments—physical pain, extreme anxiety, depression, agoraphobia, paranoia, numbness, alcoholism. Numbness, above all, is the affective marker of the absence of the coherent identity that work offers: "I seem to have given up. I've stopped trying because all that I do seems to end in failure. I feel as though I am paralyzed. It is as though I feel numb all over" (77). We might regard this winnowed person as the antithesis of the liberal—and lyric—subject, suffused with possibility and directed agency. One logical endpoint of such social negation, this sequence suggests, is the misdirected, often racist rage, culminating in violence, that Chin's murder exemplifies.
Calling attention to the unproductive person produced by a changing mode of production, Nowak aims not for sentimental witnessing. Indeed, the repetitive feedback loop of maladies in "June 19, 1982," along with the vituperative racist phrases and violent acts it portrays, engender a powerful refusal of readerly identification. This is, of course, precisely the point: the unproductive person is visible only in negative, in psychological disorders and self-effacing or violent behaviors. Nowak's poems reveal a class of persons whose effacement enters the public imaginary only through its symptomatic anti-social acts. His portraits-in-negative evoke a feedback loop in which the loss of the legible identity that accompanies employment leads to behaviors that radically internalize or externalize this sense of invisibility, which in turn generate deeper alienation from the social sphere. By turning to a particularly vicious hate crime as the site of his investigation, Nowak challenges his readers to confront the ugliest psychic effects of unproductivity.
Like Nowak's Shut Up Shut Down, Roberson's City Eclogue (Atelos, 2006) charts the geographies of collective joblessness and dispossession. While Nowak focuses on abandoned work sites in the Rust Belt, Roberson turns to urban scenes of precarious life in Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Newark, cataloging barely livable domestic spaces that expose the particular forms of social invisibility that African American residents of these cities face. "(the first casualty is where you live)," he warns (41). Roberson writes in serial form, each section of his long poems portraying a discontinuous piece of a composite portrait of urban black neighborhoods in crisis. These sequences combine descriptions of everyday racism and police harassment, the blight of littered streets and crumbling projects, and the indignities of turned-off heat and electricity: "Something is off //re: the water the heat / is out of control the land toxic" (41). In these decaying urban locales, steady employment is nowhere to be found, while chaotic uncertainty is endemic: "The maelstrom we had all outrun / dances us right here" (44).
Roberson's serial form, with its attention to the socially charged topographies of urban space, maps patterns of so-called "urban development" that displace the poor and erase complex racial legacies. Buildings are razed to a "flattened sea of housing brick rubble"; and in the aftermath, "the fallowing lies there / invested in waiting for / the dead to clear and the air / to smell of the scrub of money" (63-65). Charting these life-cycles of habitation, vacancy, and gentrification, Roberson draws attention to those cast aside, the "lone survivor" who dwells in the "last building standing," the "ghosts" "whose any settlement / is overturned for the better // of a highway through to someone else's / possibility" (63, 70). Roberson points to the ways the urban dispossessed become positioned with the rubble and garbage of the city, viewed as disposable goods. The plural "we" of these poems cannot even get a job "hauling // away / our dead"—the torn-down buildings that were once "living on our street" (57). Aligned with the bulldozed buildings themselves, Roberson's subjects are regarded as unfit for even temporary employment. In one poem, he describes the morning garbage truck as a "wolf" that "lopes from house to house, street to street": "It has our scent. It has our fucking jobs" (56). Such lines portray these impoverished city-dwellers as doubly vulnerable, at once hunted and cast-off.
Garbage emerges as marker of the informal economy that arises in the wake of wagelessness. In the long poem "Beauty's Standing," Roberson writes:
After empties us
out into the local dump
to turn what we can find over
***
to make up
into something we can use (54)
Like Baudelaire's rag pickers, Roberson's speakers subsist on "a piece of that / fall off the back of the truck first / economy" (55). Garbage becomes the figure, in City Eclogues, not only for social dispossession but also for the makeshift forms of ingenuity that arise in its wake. As Baudelaire describes the rag picker in "On Wine and Hashish" (1851), "he gathers the refuse that has been spit out by the god of Industry, to make of it objects of delight or utility" (7). Roberson calls it "the catch / up / in what / we catch off the truck" (54). Roberson's images of recycled garbage uncover a subsistence economy of getting by and making do, illuminating what can be made out of being cast off. Roberson refuses to romanticize this state, insisting instead that such thrifty resourcefulness emerges from the inability to "get paid." In this way, we might see Roberson's serial poems, like Nowak's juxtapositional documentary mode, as revealing the sheer bankruptcy of "bootstrap" ideologies of social betterment through hard work. Yet Roberson's sustained attention to the active life circulating within urban ruin and amid economic blight divulges the means of persistence, as well as the extreme limits of what he calls "the other side of the idea / of having anything" (54).
Unlike Shut Up Shut Down and City Eclogue, where we are situated in particular historical and geographical locales, Kim's work is marked by a disconcerting absence of such locating cues. In Commons (University of California, 2002), she writes of "a small number multiplied many times by itself" (69),and her books of poetry mark the untallyable figure of the global multitude whose numerousness and fundamental substitutability cause it to go unrecorded in the "great books." Her poems move from war-torn "muddy villages" to the first-world urban destitute, from rural famine to gated projects, from images of "gnarled hands pulling up wild onion" to a postmodern "global buying frenzy." Such disorientation—often on a single page—vivifies the uneven character of global capitalism, in which, as Gayatri Spivak puts it, "the 'pre-modern' and the 'post-modern' are inscribed together" (88). It also suggests a "common" experience of dispossession, an experience that has no center nor bounds, that is happening everywhere but possesses no preordained location. As Kim declares, "To a body of infinite size there can be ascribed neither center nor boundary" (13). What this multitude shares, Kim asserts, is various forms of lack: illness, hunger, debt, pain, geographical displacement, "houseless heads and unfed sides" (99).
Where Nowak's poetry works by juxtapositional assemblage and Roberson's by serial discontinuity, Kim writes in radically pared fragments that enact a poetics of scarcity. This insistent reduction provides the means by which scarcity can become apparent. Kim's lines refuse to ornament, elaborate, embellish "common life," but instead graph its sparse conditions:
This is the gullet
***
***
Helmets make cooking pots
Tin cans make roofs
***
[sparrow, crow]
***
***
Not much left
Not much left (48)
These fragments portray a scene where the person is minimized to questions of bare survival. Food, shelter, and the threat of war constitute essential, omnipresent facts, which Kim renders in flat declaratives. Like the sparrow and crow, the figures in this poem are scavengers who depend on remnants to supply their basic needs. The only additive formal gesture in these lines is the insistent repetition of "not much left"—an abundance only of insufficiency. Similarly, in a poem from her most recent collection, Penury (Omnidawn, 2009), Kim writes of a "minimal human subsistence experiment": "deemed not worthy of destroying . public order . kneeling / on the ground . hastily dug . ditches, syringes . hoarding . withholding" (7). Kim depicts an act of state-sponsored violence whose bewildering, if "orderly," terror is mirrored in the stripped vocabulary, white spaces, and emphatic periods of her verse.
What such graphically rendered and yet minimal scenes "withhold" is a historically situated narrative that would make sense of them. If Nowak and Roberson's poems are motivated by a historicizing logic that speaks to the larger causes of Rust Belt and Northeast urban unemployment, Kim deliberately eschews such locating markers in favor of portraying pure effects. Such portrayals position the reader amidst the disorientation and bewilderment of those subjected to "subsistence experiments" while removing the rationalizing languages of neoliberal economics or biopolitics that could serve to justify such experiments. We might see this refusal as an attempt to convey the essential irrationality of the dispossession and violence wrought by globalization.
At the same time, these poems systematically eliminate the fullness of subjective expression associated with the lyric. The 'person' of these poems, like the scenes she occupies, remains recalcitrant, her speech blunted and reduced to shards. Kim leaves the reader to "measure silences" that mark an itinerary unmappable by communicative reason. Leaving her pages mostly unwritten amid a few fragmented words, Kim makes imposed silence a palpable, loaded presence. Silence, in these poems, marks the extremities of physical pain, the psychic stress of impoverishment, and the lack of access to basic resources that characterize the wageless "commons." Through these demarcations of what remains unsaid and who cannot speak in the global marketplace, Kim's poetry follows out the question Spivak poses: "What subject-effects are systematically effaced or trained to efface themselves so that a canonic norm might emerge?" (74). Indeed, we might see Kim's poems, along with Nowak and Roberson's, as collectively posing what Spivak calls a "counter-question" to the liberal/lyric concept of the person as locus of potentiality and possessor of value. Purposely eschewing lyric conventions, they instead attend to who and what drops out of the frame.
These works gesture toward a larger task characteristic of North American poetry today. While they cannot offer compensatory valuation for the socially devalued, poems such as Kim's, Nowak's, and Roberson's attempt to account for the conditions of non-recognition itself. Such inquiry into the limit-cases, the vanishing points of social value, conjures a view of the poem as what Kim calls a "social space" for bearing what remains unrecognizable (111). I want to suggest, in closing, that it is poetry's very proximity to silence—what Paul Celan calls its capacity to "hold the ground on its own margin"—that makes this undertaking possible (49). In his 1960 speech "The Meridian," Celan defines the modern poem as "showing a strong tendency toward silence," as "pull[ing] itself back from an 'already-no-more' to a 'still-here'" (48-49). Celan claims that this "tendency toward silence" bespeaks poetry's desire to "speak on behalf of ... an altogether other" (48, original italics). In this contemporary archive of post-industrial, global-recession era poetry, we discover the "altogether other" of wageless life as a presence whose social absence can be demarcated in the margins of the poem. Such an ability to confront the limits of representability, to stage erasure and elision through white space, juxtaposition, and serial form, perhaps renders poetry particularly suited to confront the extremities of late capitalism. In the "still-here" of poetry, its wresting of presence out of silence, these works discover ways of reckoning with forms of life for which words seem to fail.
Margaret Ronda is an ACLS New Faculty Fellow in the Department of English at Indiana University. Her current scholarly project examines the ecological turn that accompanies twentieth-century poetry's recognition of its own obsolescence as a media form.
Works Cited
Baudelaire, Charles. "On Wine and Hashish." Trans. Stacy Diamond. In Artificial Paradises. New York: Citadel Press, 1996.
Bauman, Zygmunt. Wasted Lives. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004.
Celan, Paul. "The Meridian." Trans. Rosmarie Waldrop. In Paul Celan: Collected Prose. New York: Routledge, 2003.
Clover, Joshua. "Autumn of the System: Poetry and Finance Capital." Journal of Narrative Theory 41.1 (Spring 2011): 34-52.
Denning, Michael. "Wageless Life." New Left Review 66 (Nov/Dec 2010): 79-97.
Kim, Myung Mi. Commons. Berkeley: U of California P, 2002.
-----. Penury. Richmond, CA: Omnidawn, 2009.
Macherey, Pierre. A Theory of Literary Production. London: Routledge, 1978.
Nowak, Mark. Shut Up Shut Down. Minneapolis: Coffee House, 2004.
Roberson, Ed. City Eclogue. Berkeley: Atelos, 2006.
Spivak, Gayatri. "Scattered Speculations on the Theory of Value." Diacritics 15.4 (Winter 1985): 73-93.
- #1 As Denning memorably puts it, "Under capitalism, the only thing worse than being exploited is not being exploited" (79).[⤒]
- #2 Some of the most well-known theoretical interpretations of negated personhood include Agamben's The Coming Community and Homo Sacer, Deleuze and Guattari's Nomadology, Hardt and Negri's Multitude, and Butler's Precarious Life.[⤒]
- #3 Chin's murder was a galvanizing event for Asian American politics. The outrage over the lenient sentence of his killers produced a variety of broad-based coalitions dedicated to protecting the civil rights of Asian Americans. See "Remembering Vincent Chin," http://www.asianweek.com/061397/feature.html, (accessed August 25, 2011).[⤒]