INOPERATIVE POETICS LYRIC AND ANARCHY IN THE ERA OF FINANCIALIZATION A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Tatiana Sophia Sverjensky May 2015 © 2015 Tatiana Sophia Sverjensky ii INOPERATIVE POETICS: LYRIC AND ANARCHY IN THE ERA OF FINANCIALIZATION Tatiana Sverjensky, Ph.D. Cornell University 2015 My dissertation approaches longstanding debates about the sociality of poetry and the current status of the lyric genre by looking closely at how poetry and anarchist praxis have reimagined questions of subjectivity and identity over the latter half of the past century. While poetry, especially the lyric, has long been dismissed and at times openly denounced for its inability to adequately engage in productive political discourse and action, I argue that lyric poetry’s refusal to fully reproduce dominant linguistic and economic paradigms — the tendency towards inoperativity that it shares with the anarchist refusal to participate in society via the acceptable channels — allows it to open up a mode of conceptual transformation that is also central to anarchist theories of broader sociopolitical transformation. I explore generic experimentation from Elizabeth Bishop’s late Romanticism to Michael Palmer’s Language poetics to feminist epic at the turn of the 21st century, tracing the features of poetic language that allow poets to explore new forms of temporality and subjectivity. My project thus contributes to ongoing attempts to define the lyric genre, while articulating the challenges that poetry presents to predominant understandings of what it means to be political. The inoperative mode shared by the modern lyric and anarchism takes on particular significance in the context of the economic restructuring of the latter half of the past century. I argue that changes in the production of value — from the expansion of American global hegemony during World War II to the incorporation of emotional labor into the workplace in more recent years — have transformed the limits and possibilities of political resistance and poetic experimentation in the United States and other higher-GDP countries. This terrain is iii expanding today with the global proliferation of rioting and other forms of social unrest which, in their attempts to experiment with rather than affirm socialized identities, tend not to be recognized as “political” in a conventional sense. My analysis of the lyric alongside anarchism shows that to reimagine subjectivity and identity in terms that are relatively unintelligible to and unanswerable by the social order has in fact become one of today’s most significant political paradigms. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Biographical Sketch…………………………………………………………………………….vi Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………………………...vii Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………...1 Chapter I: Geographies of Power………………………………………………………………27 Chapter II: Inoperativity and Action…………………………………………………………...79 Chapter III: Phenomenology of the Dark Ages………………………………………….……108 Chapter IV: Love in the Time of the Value-Form……………………………………….……166 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………….233 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………………...239 v BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Tatiana Sverjensky received her B.A. in Comparative Literature from Brown University, after which she studied for a year at the Université de Paris VIII. At Cornell University, she has taught seminars on topics ranging from literature and science to the poetics of nihilism, and has participated in a number of informal and formal reading groups, including a dissertation writing group funded by the Society for the Humanities. As the President of the Comparative Cultures and Literature Forum at Cornell, she has co-organized Comparative Literature conferences and colloquia that contribute to strengthening graduate student research through community-building and collaboration. A graduate reading group entitled “Feminist Modernities: Multiple Geneologies of Feminist Thought” that she coordinated this year has been awarded grants from the Polson Institute for Global Development and the Institute for Comparative Modernities at Cornell, and she organized a conference in October 2014 at Cornell University on the future directions of global political resistance, entitled “The Antisocial Turn: The Age of Riots.” She has also co-organized conferences and panels at Cornell and elsewhere on topics related to poetry and continental philosophy, and continues to coordinate informal discussion groups and presentations on gender and critical race theory and praxis. Her research interests include the history of poetry and poetics; materialism and idealism; gender, race and sexuality; anarchist and communist theory and praxis; indigenous resistance and poetics in North America; and contemporary intersections between poetry and ecology. vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my committee members — Jonathan Culler, Kevin Attell, Bruno Bosteels, and Roger Gilbert — for their years of guidance on this dissertation and their continued interest in this project. I would also like to thank the Department of Comparative Literature for making this project possible, and Sue Besemer in particular for her generous assistance over the past few years. I would like to acknowledge my parents, Pamela and Dimitri Sverjensky, for their extreme generosity in making my education possible, for their unwavering emotional support, and for instigating my lifelong obsession with poetry by reading Shakespeare to me as a baby. Thank you also to my sister, Natalya Sverjensky, for her brilliance and support. I would also like to acknowledge my friends — especially Liron Mor, Nila Nokizaru, Kat Yang-Stevens, Chris Gang, and Kenton Cobb — for their consistent support and their impact on my intellectual formation, and to acknowledge the unpaid labor that they have performed and continue to perform in shaping my research interests, along with the ideas and political commitments of many others. Thank you especially to Joshua Clover for his consistent support and mentorship over the past several years, without which this dissertation and my current ideas and interests would look very different. vii INTRODUCTION Western lyric poetry’s association with solipsistic, disengaged individual expression has immersed the lyric in a contradictory web of sociopolitical implications since its inception. Ancient Greek poetics identified lyric’s failure to conform to the mimetic standards of art as a tendency towards misrepresentation, setting the stage for the complexities and idiosyncrasies of lyric’s particular mode of conveying both individual expression and representation of the social world. Lyric’s modern association with the intensive expression of the feelings of a lonely individual has, in turn, been alleged more specifically to have perpetuated liberal individualism, elitist aestheticization, solipsistic withdrawal from the world, ontological dualism, and anthropocentrism, according to various critiques of the Western lyric tradition. This same valorization of individual expression that has led lyric poetry to be widely denounced for failing to contribute to the public sphere or to sociopolitical resistance, however, has also historically been interpreted as its source of potential opposition to society. Plato’s infamous distrust of poetry relies in part on the assumption that poetry has the capacity to develop a form of liberty “which refuses to be subject to the rulers” (Laws 3.701b), a liberty that develops from the ways in which poetry promotes the validity of individual experience and knowledge. The paradoxically social nature of poetry’s disengagement from the social takes on a particular political burden once the realm of the poetic imagination comes to conflict more specifically with the values of capitalist production. My dissertation focuses on the more recent era of deindustrialized capitalism in the U.S., during which time, as I aim to demonstrate here, the dynamics of poetic refusal and disengagement from the social become additionally complex in their capacity to trace the contradictions, possibilities and limitations currently imposed on the entangled realms of poetic imagination and political action. 1 Once characterized in technical terms, as verse accompanied by a stringed instrument, the vastly divergent theoretical stakes that lyric poetry has taken on for various schools of thought and under differing historical conditions have since made it impossible to neatly define. The mimetic theory of lyric developed in ancient Greece was predominant until the late eighteenth century, when it was countered by the expressive theory of poetry, exemplified by Wordsworth’s definition of lyric as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” With the rise of the expressive theory of lyric, the lyric increasingly took on certain political and theoretical associations. This was partly because the expressive theory allowed lyric to become the “poetic norm,”1 but also because of the new sociopolitical significance that lyric, as the paradigm of apolitical emotional expression, paradoxically acquired to some critics and poets as a sign of its opposition to the industrialization and rationalization of the Western world. This view of lyric’s political meaningfulness has persisted in the U.S. in the twentieth century, while being increasingly countered by objections to lyric’s historical and ongoing complicity with various values and