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FINAL Blake and Labor Diss Jcords[1] “Word, work, & Wish”: Labor and Productivity in William Blake by John N. Cords A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English Language and Literature) in The University of Michigan 2011 Doctoral Committee: Professor Marjorie Levinson, Chair Professor Tobin A. Siebers Associate Professor Julia C. Hell Associate Professor Adela N. Pinch © John N. Cords 2011 Acknowledgements It is probably a truism that dissertations always have a powerfully autobiographical character. If this is the case, it is little wonder that I wrote one on labor and productivity, since throughout the process my own productivity, my own anxieties of production, were very much at play. This anxiety may be endemic to scholarship in general; in my case, it has pervaded, defined, and (I hope) ultimately enriched the process of reading, researching, and writing this document. It may have been inevitable that Blakean labor without production—the poet’s myriad descriptions of incessant, obscure, repetitive, solitary, and issueless labor—appealed to me and seemed perfectly suited to my own habits and dispositions. More to the point, I’m quite aware of how my own anxieties about scholarly production and productivity have affected my relationships with my committee members and, most importantly, my family and friends. My advisor, Marjorie Levinson, deserves a great deal of gratitude for being an intellectual mentor, as well as for her patience and consistent enthusiasm for the project. Tobin and Julia provided detailed and insightful comments on my chapter drafts, and Adela generously agreed to participate despite a daunting list of other commitments. Special thanks to my parents for their unflagging support over the many years I’ve been working on this dissertation. Most importantly, without Tamara’s encouragement and patience, I honestly don’t think I would have finished this. And Asha was an outstanding motivator even before she made her appearance. The images included in the Appendix are used with permission from the Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright (c) 2010 William Blake Archive. This project is supported in part by a William Blake Archive Reproduction Grant for Graduate Students. ii Table of Contents Acknowledgments ii Abstract iv Chapter One: “Brilliant and Disintegrating”: Blake, Labor, and the Ruins of Albion 1 Chapter Two: “Thousands & thousands labour”: Labor Theory, Aesthetics, and Blake Criticism 45 Chapter Three: The Production of the Laborer in “The Chimney Sweeper” 125 Chapter Four: “[T]he times are return’d upon thee”: Primitive Accumulation, Repetition, and “life itself” in America a Prophecy 175 Chapter Five: “Departing; departing; departing”: De-forming Labor and the Labor of Reading The [First] Book of Urizen 246 Appendix 295 Works Cited 301 iii Abstract “Word, work, & Wish”: Labor and Productivity in William Blake by John N. Cords Chair: Marjorie Levinson This dissertation addresses the political valence of labor in William Blake. That scenes of labor occupy a pivotal position in Blake’s poetry is widely acknowledged by critics who examine the political or ideological significance of his work. The general scholarly tendency has been to fit labor in Blake into critical narratives that herald a broadly liberatory thrust of Blake’s art, aligning it with various discourses about freedom. Blake was highly attuned to the historical, economic, and ideological shifts that were gradually taking place in the realm of material labor in his lifetime, and while he may indeed have attempted to re-imagine the determined and coercive forms of capitalist production in favor of liberatory practice, there is another strain in his work that is deeply ambivalent about this very project. Blake’s enduring concern with modes of production (in his poetry, images, and other writings) iv represents a complex, multi-faceted, and ultimately thwarted attempt to envision alternative modes of liberatory praxis. Employing Adorno’s notion of aesthetic negativity and critiquing the recent work of scholars such as Saree Makdisi, Guinn Batten, and others, I examine the theoretical discourse on labor from Hegel, Marx, and their heirs as it relates to aesthetic theory and Blake’s aesthetic practice. Extended readings of “The Chimney Sweeper” of Songs of Innocence, America a Prophecy, and The [First] Book of Urizen focus on the negativity of labor and its disruptive effects in order to understand Blake’s presentation of the abnegation of labor; the laboring dead rising from the grave; the ghostly subject of labor; and the unmooring of the concept of labor from the themes of activity, energy, and creation in favor of stupor, sleep, and the dissolution or decay of the body and sensorium. I argue that Blake’s approach to labor involves an interference without resolution between two opposing views: on the one hand, a liberatory narrative of how oppression might be redeemed via aestheticization; on the other hand, a view of labor that refuses to enter into any of the compensatory strategies of modern ideologies of productivity, economic, aesthetic, or otherwise. v Chapter One: “Brilliant and Disintegrating”: Blake, Labor, and the Ruins of Albion According to one biographer of William Blake, between the years of 1790 and 1800, whenever the poet and artist strolled into the City from his Lambeth residence in South London, his path took him past one of the great ruins of the early Industrial Revolution in England, a ruin that was also, I would add, a concrete symbol of the complexities of labor in the age of the increasing hegemony of capitalist modes of production (Ackroyd 130).1 Blake’s London, while not at the vanguard of early industrial production, nevertheless was home to perhaps the greatest symbolic feature of the reorganization of labor and production that was occurring more prominently in the cities of the North. In March of 1791, the Albion Flour Mill, built in 1786 on the south bank of the Thames (roughly near the present location of the Tate Modern), caught fire and, in spectacular fashion, burned to a charred, massive hull. According to Gillian Darley’s concise survey of the Albion Mill, its construction in effect brought the Industrial Revolution to the heart of England’s capital, it featured the most advanced steam-driven technology of the day, and its goal was unprecedented productivity (16-19). The Albion Mill was the first of its kind to use steam as its primary source of power (mills had been powered by wind or water), and was built by Matthew Boulton and James Watt (with 1 The recent and more authoritative biography by the Blake scholar G. E. Bentley Jr., The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake, makes no mention of the Albion ruin. Cyril Smith comments on the presence of the Albion Mill in Blake’s London (215). 1 architecture by important early factory designer Samuel Wyatt). It employed “fifty pairs of millstones set in motion by two engines. The output was expected to reach sixteen thousand bushels of flour a week” (Mantoux 333).2 It is difficult to imagine today that the mill, aside from being “a definitive emblem of British industrial eminence,” also was a destination for London’s elite and a “fashionable location in which to hold events, masques and balls… frequently visited by the more enquiring representatives of the aristocracy and City grandees, such as the Directors of the East India Company and the Bank of England, as well as eminent figures from abroad such as Thomas Jefferson” (Darley 18-19). Despite its glamour, the Albion Mill’s advanced technology was insufficiently tested and was worked well past safe capacity—insurmountable mechanical difficulties marred its short existence. And, despite the attraction of the mill to London’s elite, ordinary working men and women of London looked upon it with great hostility as it threatened the smaller manufacturers and more traditional methods of milling flour. 2 The advent of steam as a source of power in industry is an event of great importance. Karl Marx discusses the innovations of Watt and Boulton in the first volume of Capital, where he cites Watt’s “so-called double-acting steam-engine” as a “prime mover” that, in effect if not in fact, released machinery from human or natural direction, thus reversing the traditional hierarchy of the human over tool: “The worker has been appropriated by the process; but the process had previously to be adapted to the worker” (499, 501). Marx goes on to describe the result as “the most developed form of production by machinery. Here we have… a mechanical monster whose body fills whole factories, and whose demonic power… finally bursts forth in the fast and feverish whirl of its countless working organs” (503). In Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present, David Landes argues that “The development of mechanized industry concentrated in large units of production would have been impossible without a source of power greater than what human and animal strength could provide… The answer was found in a new converter of energy—the steam- engine” (95). Palmer and Neaverson claim that the Albion Mill featured twenty millstones (23). For more background on the Albion Mill, see A. W. Skempton’s “Samuel Wyatt and the Albion Mill.” 2 Indeed, economic history remains uncertain whether the fire resulted from machines catastrophically overheated from overwork, or from the sabotage of proto-Luddite machine-breakers.3 In any event, many accounts of the destruction of the mill share a sense that its glamour was in fact heightened by its destruction. Indeed, the Mill’s destruction became not only an occasion for celebration, but also paradoxically enhanced its allure: E. P. Thompson quotes one observer of the conflagration that, “the people were ‘willing spectators’, and ‘ballads of rejoicing were printed and sung on the spot’” (The Making of the English Working Class 67).
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