I was eventually to become one person,
gathered up maybe, during a pause, at a comma.
— Lyn Hejinian, My Life
Marx writes in the Grundrisse that the “absolute working-out of his creative potentialities” and “the development of all human powers” is “the end in itself” (Selbstzweck) for every living individual.1 Some versions of historical materialism try to make this thought redundant. For the interpretation of Capital that makes the truth or scientific status of that text, and of historical materialism in general, depend on their having advanced beyond or extirpated the stubborn remnants of speculative, Hegelian conceptual thinking, this thought is at best a primitive metaphysical dress rehearsal for the Marxist theory of value. What appears as the subject working itself out and extending its powers in the Grundrisse is demythologizingly materialised in Capital into the wage labourer exhausting himself under the despotism of an alien law of production: idealism is discarded for materialism. But the truth of Capital does not depend on its expulsion of, but rather on its singularly intensive and radical pursuit of, speculative conceptual thinking: Capital is speculative conceptual thinking forced to confront an object that no effort of consciousness, however subjectively infinite, could ever transform out of its alienation back into a substance or property of the subject. That object is the commodity, and its most important example is the commodity labour-power. The strain of the concept under capital is precisely its irreversible materialisation into terminal human reality (in practice the absolute working-out of human powers ends up as Gallerte).2
Marx’s constant satirical unpicking of the political economist’s webs of speculation and metaphor, which is the continuation of his earlier satirical attacks on the so-called “Critical Critics” among the Young Hegelians, is work toward defining the last man left: the worker who is comprehensively exhausted.3 This is the intensively pursued speculative concept of the proletariat in Capital. The lifelong coercion to exhaust whatever still might be called with a straight face our “human powers” in crushingly deadening activity converts the “complete working-out of the human content” into its “complete emptying-out.”4 No effort of thinking, and more certainly still none of rethinking, will ever so much as retard this emptying-out and none will prevent it from being complete. Life is comprehensively wasted under capital; it is not just underperforming. Its creative potentialities are not worked out but exhausted when they are realized in actual production: the emptying-out of human powers is complete in every act of production by subjects who are made to survive on condition that their intellectual and bodily powers be perpetually wasted on the perpetual intensification of their social disempowerment. Life is wasted under capital not merely by being refused or neglected, or because people avoid whatever comportment philosophers or poets tell them is required for life to be authentic, but in great structural bloodbaths of murderous complete emptying perpetrated in sinkholes of spiritual devastation known as workplaces in labour markets. The science of “political economy” is a sophisticated means of avoiding this absolutely stupendous and glaring truth. Marx calls political economy the “sycophant” of capital,5 and Capital is the painstaking catalogue and mockery of the characteristic squirmings, justifications, and denials of the bourgeois practitioners of that “science”; Capital is the comic history of “the banal and complacent notions held by the bourgeois agents of production about their own world, which is to them the best possible one.”6 Political economy is an intrinsically repressive science and is concomitantly anti-speculative. Speculative accounts of the potential of human creative powers simply have no bearing on the calculations of political economists and the fantasy of ineluctable social fate they exist to justify. If workers “develop their potential,” it will be the increase in the value of their labour-power. Not just the terminal reality of the economic fact of infinite exploitation, but that terminal reality as the conscious result of everything it costs to throw out the speculative concept of life and look squarely at what thought cannot change, is the world of the proletariat in Capital.
My poetry has always been obscurely determined by what I think and how I feel about comprehensively wasting my life. The fact that life can be wasted at all is a fundamental cognition for poetry. The fear of wasting life fundamentally shapes and directs the impulses of poetic creation, and fear of comprehensively wasting it defines the whole relation of expression to intensity. Wordsworth was the first poet in English to make this truth about poetry overflowingly explicit. Poetry has never seemed capable of being truly written by me except through the maximum strain not to waste life (I have often written without that straining, but then the poetry has seemed untrue to me). What life means and what if anything could be saved by not wasting it may be very unclear, but the strain not to is intrinsic in poetry. Poetry strains to express life and cancel loss, and the strain is instinctive, emotional, cognitive, sexual, and sometimes orgasmic, often, radiantly, all at once.
In Capital Marx parenthetically distinguishes between what political economy thinks is the waste of fuel in an unmanned industrial furnace and the “waste of the living substance of the workers” who operate it.7 Later Marx explains: “Wherever there is a working day whose length is not restricted, wherever there is night-work and unrestricted waste of human life [freier Menschenverwüstung], there the slightest obstacle presented by the nature of the work to a change for the better is soon looked on as an eternal “natural barrier” inherent in production.”8 This free — in the sense of unrestricted — “humanity-wastage” is irreversible because working humans are naturally at least part-slave: this is proved unarguably by the fact that profit would have to disappear in order for working humans to actually be free. This miserable joke is the truth for political economy, for which no supersession of the concept of profit can be seriously speculated (concepts stop there). It is an example of what Marx called, in his notes on the work of William Petty, “exquisite irony.”9 As poets we are not only pressed into the terminal reality of this unrestricted waste of our lives, which is the social basis of all our material prosperity, but we also have to confront the painful difficulty that speculative thinking about the true alternative life that is worked out and not exhausted grows, inescapably, ever more intensely ironic. Poetry is often used to discredit that inescapability, to sound like actual escape, but the longer we live with it, the harder it is to make poetry really do that.
Poetry is the opposite of the unrestricted waste of humanity: it is actualized subjective infinity. Poetry is the opposite of emptying: it fills language.
But poetry is also emptying. Writing has not been, for me, all working-out of creative potentialities and no exhaustion. Poetry is exhausting too, and its language is itself very often exhausted: this is a part of the total eloquence of poetry and not a criterion for distinction between real poetry and fake or rubbish. No poem contains any language that is never exhausted, and the best poetry is also invariably the best at using exhausted language. No sound captures the infinity of our exhaustibility so comprehensively as the last movement of Beethoven’s piano sonata in A-flat major, Op.110. But this infinitely exhausted movement ends with coming: the last bars are a shattering ascent into a climax that strikes its intense sexual thrill into the listening soul. The movement is through exhaustion out into terminal ecstasy. Not the unrestricted bliss of paradise is its terminal reality, but the restricted ecstasy of fucking and coming. Complete emptying-out in poetry too is a singular power, and poetry sometimes comes through its own singular strain (Adorno said that music listens to us. Poetry can touch, caress, and fuck us).
Hegel is the author of his concept of absolute knowledge, which he defines as “comprehensive knowing”: what is presented as the destiny of the subject is actually all its work, comprehended into a history of conscious experience that is at every stage the substance of “the life of Spirit in its entirety”; and The Phenomenology of Spirit is all Hegel’s work, which has been the work not of inventing but precisely of comprehending: “Our own act here [writing The Phenomenology of Spirit] has been simply to gather together the separate moments, each of which in principle exhibits the life of Spirit in its entirety.”10 Writing poetry is work like this, both when it is the emptying-out of life in exhausted language and when it is the opposite of the unrestricted emptying-out of human creative powers: the infinite restricted ecstasy of expression. We are the authors of our poetry, conscious and not, and the poetic subject is what must comprehend its own moments into a life made capable of entirety. How poetry then unfolds into its truth is through the work of social communion that only readers and not authors, other people and not the poet, can perform.
Writing a poem has always felt to me like the greatest possible strain of the subject. It is the most ardent form of what Marx called “really free working, e.g. composing” which he says is “precisely the most damned seriousness, the most intense exertion.”11 At least, I have always anxiously conceived of poetic composition as the kind of work that cannot be done without that strain, and when the work has sometimes seemed actually to have been done and lived, so that a poem is really there, actually living the work has felt like extreme effort and extreme duress at once: both the maximum possible conscious straining of the subject in all its present and infinite particularity, and the most undefended possible submission of the subject to whatever duress might arrive to be inflicted on it in and by the world under the despotism of capital. Writing poetry is filling up and emptying-out at once. The subject in the sense I mean is not the equivalent of psyche, ego, personality, the individual, or any of their careers. The subject is conceptually non-exchangeable and nothing is its equivalent: its activity is intrinsic in all conceptual exchange. It is the whole, flickering extension, coverage, love, and unfolding of experience, the action of every moment and the gathering together of all knowledge, rational or affective, conscious and not: every stop, shift, step, leap, and blackout I make as I am. And the subject is the present historical accumulation of every prior stage in that unfolding, as well as their incessant attrition by forgetting or devaluation. Writing a poem means the exertion of all this life, the exhaustively incomplete expression of the creative powers of everything life can still be meant to be.
1 Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 488; Grundrisse (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1974), 387.
2 For an interpretation of Marx’s use of the word Gallerte, which in the English translations of Das Kapital is misguidingly rendered “congelation,” see Keston Sutherland, “Marx in Jargon,” in Stupefaction: a radical anatomy of phantoms (London: Seagull, 2011), 26–90. “The strain of the concept” is my translation of Hegel’s “Anstrengung des Begriffs,” familiarly known from Miller’s English version as “the strenuous effort of the concept”: Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: OUP, 1977), 35. I think “strain of the concept” better captures the sense in Hegel that the concept is both work and stress, or effort and duress.
3 Marx’s satires against “Critical Criticism” are discussed in “What is called Bathos?,” Stupefaction, 159–221.
4 Marx, Grundrisse, 488.
5 Karl Marx, Capital: a Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1990), 793.
6 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 174–5, fn. 34. Marx cites Hegel’s Logic to clinch his general point about the sure and certain justifiability for the capitalist of all forms of exploitation and violence that are good for margins of profit, at Capital, vol. 1, 373, fn. 70: “In a time so rich in reflection and so devoted to raisonnement as our own, he must be a poor creature who cannot advance a good ground for everything, even for what is worst and most depraved. Everything in the world that has become corrupt, has had good ground for its corruption.”?
7 Capital, vol. 1, 374.
8 Capital, vol. 1, 605.
9 Karl Marx Frederick Engels Collected Works, vol. 34 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1994), 171.
10 Phenomenology of Spirit, 485.
11 Grundrisse, p.611. “Wirklich freie Arbeiten, z. B. Komponieren ist grade zugleich verdammtester Ernst, intensivste Anstrengung.” Grundrisse, 505.