Catherine Wagner’s poem “My New Job”2 is an example of the kind of ongoing and recursive form that Christopher Nealon and Sianne Ngai have characterized in recent discussions of aesthetic works that reference their own textual and rhetorical character in an effort to think the relation between matter as an objective thing and the abstract structures of social organization.3 Speaking of minor affects and politically ambiguous feelings in modern culture, Ngai has also linked this aesthetic tendency to “the confusion between the subjective status and objective status of feeling in general,” one which is “central to the philosophy of aesthetics.”4 Using a method of “reading dialectically” proposed by the Marxist literary critic Carolyn Lesjak, I want to suggest that we can read this poem, and many others like it, as an exposure of the relationship between lived experience and structure that not only develops as a politics of antagonism within the poem, but depends on poetry’s ability to bring into tension the resistant powers of affective rhetoric, and objective reference to the world of matter; a tension that in “My New Job” functions as a strategy of refusal that may open the ground for more radical feminist and anti-racist forms of thought.
The speaking subject of “My New Job” is implicitly gendered, raced, and classed, as a few lines from the poem’s opening section tell us:
I was lying Down on a yoga mat
My bones
basketing air Barely draped in
skin
the basket Effulged by local
Air Highquality scented
humid air
to support My orchid Skin5
The poem’s theatrical yet still awkward slippage is already apparent in Wagner’s use of capitals in this section: the word “Down” is capitalized so that the preceding words, “I was lying,” may be read as a single utterance; and the word “Highquality” appears incorrectly compounded and capitalized like so much sales-speak. In this context, the speaker’s reference to her own “orchid Skin” suggests an expensive whiteness tinged with self-loathing.
But it is through these melancholic observations and their formal arrangement that the poem is able to comment on the relation of the increasingly conflated structural forces of state and global capital to unformed and unstructured — yet still palpably felt — affective states dispersed or collected across the ostensibly “public” realm of the social, and within the pockets of the most intimate spheres of personal life; particularly in those instances where the location, origin, and direction of a specific feeling are unclear. The following section should give a sense of Wagner’s self-deprecating humour and enjoyably recognizable allusions to office life; but perhaps more importantly, this excerpt helps to indicate the formal properties of the poem — its spaces, unfinished clauses, repetitions, deliberate trip-ups, and, crucially, its sustained duration — which I want to suggest are some of Wagner’s most forceful and precise tools of critique. For these reasons, it is worth quoting at length:
How can I From inside this comfort
Represent Hope to
No no
I am Too tempted
To think I Deserve it
Rigidly and with effort
know my privilege
I know my fluorescent doorway
A rectangle Among the ceiling tiles
Ordinary flecked coated 1) foam rectangles
And one hard white light regularly rubbled
2) glass rectangle
the
ceiling tile I would tear
in behind the
Ugly lattice to the Duct area
Unscrew the grille Smallen myself
Into the dark cold Square pipe
To share My cold What is in
My basket Bone-basket
With the other breathers/Workers6
In this section, content-driven descriptions of bodily movements exist in dynamic relation with the poem’s linguistic and grammatical blockages: “How can I From inside this comfort,” “Rigidly and with effort,” and “Smallen myself / Into the dark cold Square pipe” all represent situations in which the “passive” speaker is impacted upon by the outside world, where the movement forced is not so much an imposition as a nightmare in which the subject pushed around by the world of capital and objects is also burdened with the guilt and shame of being in the way in the first place. The familiar abusive relationship is perhaps most precisely captured here in what we might term a “prosody of affect”; in the spatial and temporal dissonances of Wagner’s distorted syntactical units, temporally confused grammar, and self-consciously halting rhythms. As such, the poem is laborious; and mimetic of the virtuosic labour of a particular type of precarious post-Fordist worker — the knowledge-worker autonomous Marxism would designate as a member of the “cognitariat”7 — just as it links this worker, by inscription, to an emotional topography that recognizably belongs to a middle-class, white, bourgeois subject.
A confession that “I am Too tempted / To think I Deserve it” is followed by the effort to “know my privilege”; and it is partly as a result of the poem’s fragmented spatial arrangement, and the robotic rhythm to which each isolated phrase passes by, that it is possible to see how this language suggests the paralysis caused by a moralizing discourse of privilege co-opted by neoliberalism. Blocked agency in the poem mutates, instead, into a perverse and abject intimacy with the ceiling tiles, whose material properties (“Ordinary flecked coated”) are seemingly the speaker’s fault: “These are my choices.” In this way, “My New Job” enacts a form of critique both material and abstract, cognitive and conative. A poem like this can easily be read as a poetic manifestation of what Lauren Berlant has called “cruel optimism.” Building on her earlier notion of intimate publics, Berlant’s concept provides a framework through which to read patterns of adjustment in specific aesthetic and social contexts to highlight the collective aspects of certain modes of sensual activity toward and beyond survival in a time of “crisis ordinariness.”8 Cruel Optimism aims to conceive of a contemporary moment from within that moment, claiming that “the present is perceived, first, affectively.”9
While we might keep in mind the particular temporalities outlined in Berlant’s project, both in terms of the immediacy of an affective register of perception and as a suspended, ongoing present within the bounds of everyday life, we should also consider how Wagner’s absolute lamentation of such a life, and of the precarious post-Fordist worker required as its subject, could be a necessary extremity in the face of cruel optimism. “My New Job” presents a form of antagonism that seeks to reject the feminized ontological categories of “survival” and “adjustment,” and seems to desire something else — that is, on the nervous edge between compliance and resentment there is a chance that everything holding the situation of the poem together will be (at least figuratively) abolished. With this in mind I hope to suggest, via Lesjak’s method of “reading dialectically,” that there is a politics to how we read poetry that is crucial to the development of a Marxist-Feminist literary practice. Developing such a practice is necessary in light of the critical turn, in some corners, towards the relationship between poetry and political economy, if that turn is to have fidelity to a revolution that is not sexist; but also, and perhaps more importantly, a Marxist-Feminist literary and poetic practice holds the potential to develop in meaningful solidarity — and sometimes in convergence — with other minority struggles and epistemologies, including black feminist struggles, Indigenous struggles, queer politics, and even the mercurial form of black radical politics put forth by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney in their recent book, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study.
In “Reading Dialectically,” Lesjak defends Marxist literary criticism against the various types of surface reading that have emerged in the context of a conservative-liberal “return to literature” in academic literary studies in the twenty-first century:
The impulse to be affirmative, to talk about what
texts do rather than what they don’t do, occludes the
negation upon which such affirmation is based — [. . .]
the ontological assumptions structuring what appears
“in the text” — but unlike a dialectical reading, offers no
way of actually registering or thinking the occlusion
that structures the surfaces being privileged.10
Lesjak contends that, after the heady theory days of the 1960s–1990s, the smallness of new historical claims sends literary scholarship into comfortable retreat as “middle-level research,” a position occupied without irony or chagrin by the non-heroic critic whose aim is not to master the text but to appreciate it.11 Lesjak’s point, however, is not to dismiss the relevance of a text’s surface, but to think about how “notions of surface and depth can be seen in productive tension or unease with each other,”12 and in this regard her methodology provides a particularly salient way to read contemporary poetry and its historicity.
Read on one level, “My New Job” epitomizes the cynical reason and ironic detachment of a post-ideological world, as it invites us to fetishize its textual qualities, to immediately grasp its self-flagellating disillusionment, to dwell mournfully in the pauses between each phrasal expression of capitalist complicity, and, in short, to be surface readers. But perhaps, thanks to its less frequent moments of ardent sincerity — moments that respond to the performative helplessness of much of the poem — “My New Job” not only also invites a dialectical reading, but to some extent attempts to read itself dialectically. Insofar as it foregrounds the untruth of its own surface in order to theatrically stage the disavowal Lesjak attributes to surface readings, we could read this poem too as a rejection of surface reading and its accompanying benign, “objective,” nonheroic critic, because “My New Job” literally renders this type of critic useless. The following lines, for example, document a painful relation between constituted subject and constitutive conditions:
When I concentrate The light bending
All at once Hooks my outsides
Hooks them into itself
Now I am
absent that
I am not / shined upon13
In this instance, the “light bending” is the terrifying agent that hooks the speaker’s outsides into its own absent structure: crucially, we can only understand the significance of “light bending” as an analogy for capital here if we read these lines dialectically, in the context of the poem’s spatial and temporal dissonances, and with the “leap of faith” made necessary — by the inhuman quantifications, ruptures, and contradictions of high finance and cognitive labour — to comprehend the constitutive abstraction of globalized capital.14 This turning inside-out of ideology is not the same as the fetishism that, in Žižek’s analysis, we cling to in order to cancel the full impact of reality: rather, “My New Job” is dialectical in the sense that, with a metaphor at once as potent and untouchable as “light bending,” it forces us to see the visible structure’s “aching gaps” (as Lesjak, after Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, calls them), at the same time as it suggests the presence of an employed subject who is positively determined by capital yet painfully aware that her “presence” depends solely on her production of surplus value. And so it is through a dialectical reading of “My New Job” that I want to suggest that the poem’s resignation to the complete saturation of life by capital is, precisely at the point of saturation, an exposure of capital’s limit and a negation: by foregrounding the absence of any subject not determined by capital, the poem desires to call forth a negated, contradictory subject into political action, and in this way carries a feminist utopian impulse and a rejection of the state of “crisis ordinariness.” For a poem that makes frequent and depressed allusions to the normative codes of heterosexual and gendered experience under capital, we can read no small amount of joy and affirmation in its indignant anticlimax — an address to the boys that they can keep their Oedipus complex (and with these lines the poem finishes):
Disappear into a hole
Into Mama
but come back out.
Go in boys.
Go in and stay there.15
Utopias aside, it is worth noting that we could make an argument for a surface reading of this poem if we read it as a kind of testimony; one that contributes to the generation of social belief in the obviousness of dominant reality, an obviousness that, as Angela McRobbie and others have argued in a Western context, is lost to working-class and lower-middle class women when verbal slurs and shaming tactics, often projected in the name of so-called self-improvement, actually function as forms of classed and post-feminist symbolic violence that are then absorbed and embodied by those to whom they are addressed (McRobbie points to the grateful and humbled subjects of television make-over programs such as What Not to Wear and Ten Years Younger as examples of this).16
But if poetry’s role is reduced to stating the obvious, the reader engaged in ideological critique is arguably left in a kind of aporetic sinkhole. This might not be so bad if it did not also entail an obscuring of even the imagined possibility of a subject capable of opposing capitalism. However, Lesjak’s argument is also that “what is needed is a better way of reading surfaces as perverse rather than as obvious, as never identical to themselves in their “thereness,” and always found within and constitutive of complex spatial relations, both seen and not seen, deep and lateral, material and figural.”17 This is a case of “seeing what we know” rather than “knowing what we see” — “because relations, after all, cannot be seen in any solely literal sense.”18 Reading “My New Job” dialectically, then, also means seeing what the poem can only sense, despite its reflexive attempt at self-consciousness; which is that the depressed and anxious speaker is a subject whose “privilege” and “comfort” are dependent on the structural subordination of groups of people — including entire populations — for whom the experience of “precarity” is not only more intensely immiserating but constitutively (and perhaps ontologically) different. Drawing on Frank B. Wilderson’s writing on the prison slave, Fred Moten’s description of blackness in America as a site “that generates no categories for the chromosome of history [. . .] an experience without analog — a past without a heritage” is tied to an image of the black subject as the “subprime debtor,” who is always in the red, always in the negative.19 Yet this negativity is the basis of Moten’s appeal to the undercommons of an already integrated totality, a “social and historical paraontology” that takes place in what Moten and Harney, in The Undercommons, call “the surround”: a space that defends itself against the settler’s armed incursion and against politics and the law, at the same time as it calls for a revolution without a singular subject.20 Precarity is thus also a powerful threat, and in this complex and historical sense is fundamentally (qualitatively) distinct from and still entangled with the types of precarity that have only recently proliferated under post-Fordism for more privileged and usually white subjects, and cannot simply be figured on a spectrum of intensity.21
It is not that “My New Job” provides this knowledge or thought for us, but that it is inevitably situated within its indeterminacies and in/visibility. As such, reading the poem’s prosody of affect as something more than itself is also the dialectical ability to “think ourselves and the world spatially.” It is a different way of thinking about subjectivity, where the gaps in the poem are no longer read simply as the speaker’s introspective feelings of dislocation and lack, but as a structural absence that is not one: that is in fact the history of racial capitalism.22 It is significant, then, that the most immediate and affective dimensions of “My New Job” are also the means by which the poem exposes the perversity of its surface. I want to end on a suggestion that the affects of the poem’s surface also belong to the poem’s internal dynamic: the poem “hooks them into itself,” to use Wagner’s words, to create a politics of antagonism that we can think of in terms of a claim made by Marina Vishmidt for feminist maintenance art. Vishmidt has argued that thinking about art in terms of the production of abstract labour — that is, any kind of waged work in a capitalist economy, “the generic social condition of capitalist work” as opposed to autonomist Marxist conceptions of ‘living labour’ as an excess or constitutive outside to capital — allows for “an encounter with the contradictions we perform and reproduce.”23 Wagner’s poem suggests the same negative movement in the following lines:
I think I’m better than the walk throughs
because something is left of me
that’s what I think I must
be wrong to think so.24
Moten and Harney have underlined how the modern university “wants to reproduce a labor force that understands itself as not only unnecessary but dangerous to the development of capitalism.”25 Since “My New Job” unnervingly mimes and documents an experience of work, and also assumes the status of labour itself, reading the poem’s rhetorical affect as inherent to the antagonism that exists as a structural potentiality, both within the poem and within abstract labour, points to the dialectical negativity of the post-Fordist subject who is conscious of her precarious relation to capital. Crucially, however, the Jamesonian spatial dialectic that Lesjak’s rich analysis opens up as a mode of reading both surface and depth offers a way of reading and writing poetry that “no longer relies on self-reflexivity as the means toward the apprehension of history.”26 This kind of dialectical poetics might also be a better way to conceive of forms of solidarity with those individuals and groups who are negatively rather than positively determined by capital: the excluded subjects who, in contrast to the bourgeois subject of this poem, are expelled from the production process, and whose experience takes place in the “aching gaps” left in capitalism’s wake.
1 This is an abbreviated version of a longer essay. For the final version, see Anguish Language, eds. Marina Vishmidt, Anthony Iles, John Cunningham, and Mira Mattar (Berlin: Archive Books, 2015).
2 This poem appears in the book of the same name, My New Job (Albany: Fence Books, 2011).
3 See Nealon’s discussion of Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely and Kevin Davies’s The Golden Age of Paraphernalia in The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in the American Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2011), 140–66, and Ngai’s critique, in Our Aesthetic Categories: Cute, Zany, Interesting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2012), of a number of contemporary patterns: the subject’s increasingly despecified relation to work in post-Fordist economies; the thoroughly saturated commercial culture and “aestheticization of life” (20) that accompanies this shift (and its oppositional relation to the autonomy of art); and the pervasiveness of “weak or trivial aesthetic categories” (21) and what this means for the longstanding discussion of art’s truth-content and commodity status.
4 Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 22–4.
5 Wagner, My New Job, 107.
6 Wagner, My New Job, 107–8.
7 The autonomist Marxist scholarship that has emerged out of the Italian Operaist movement of the 1960s and 1970s includes the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in addition to that of Paolo Virno, Mario Tronti, and Franco Berardi, among others. Their thought has become influential in North America as a mode of response to what has been called the precarization of work: the global reorganization of labour and the increasingly abstract, communicative, “subjective” nature of work in post-Fordist economies. The general direction of this work has also been criticized by Silvia Federici and others for its Eurocentrism and its failure to acknowledge the gendered character of much affective labour. See Hardt and Negri, Multitude (New York: Penguin, 2005); Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude (http://libcom.org/library/grammar-multitude-paolo-virno); and Silvia Federici, “Precarious Labor: A Feminist Viewpoint” (http://inthemiddleofthewhirlwind.wordpress.com/precarious-labor-a-feminist-viewpoint/).
8 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke UP, 2011), 3.
9 Ibid., 3.
10 Carolyn Lesjak, “Reading Dialectically,” Criticism 55: 2 (Spring 2013): 247.
11 Ibid., 245.
12 Ibid., 248.
13 Wagner, My New Job, 109.
14 For a nuanced account of the ability of artistic practice to reflect on the instability of the dialectic of abstraction and concretion, see Sven Lütticken, “Inside Abstraction,” e-flux 38 (October, 2012), http://www.e-flux.com/journal/inside-abstraction/.
15 Wagner, My New Job, 104.
16 See Angela McRobbie, “What Not to Wear: Post-Feminist Symbolic Violence,” in The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change (London: SAGE, 2009), 124–149.
17 Lesjak, “Reading Dialectically,” 251.
18 Ibid.
19 Fred Moten, “The Subprime and the beautiful,” African Identities 11: 2 (July 2013): 239–240.
20 Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Brooklyn: Minor Compositions, 2013), 17–43.
21 As Angela Mitropoulos has noted, the grammar at work in discussions of what has recently become known as “precarity” shows us that the replacement of “precariousness” with this word also marks the transition from adjective to noun, condition to name, since “capital is perpetually in crisis. Capital is precarious, and normally so”; and it is possible — since the rise of the relatively-empowered “cognitariat”— to speculate as to why this has only recently come to be an assumption in scholarly discourse (“Precari-Us?,” Mute 1.29 (2005): 88–92).
22 Following Chris Chen’s argument that race must be understood in terms of domination — as opposed to liberal conceptions and celebrations of difference (“The Limit Point of Capitalist Equality: Notes Toward an Abolitionist Antiracism,” in Endnotes 3 (September 2013): 203) — I would argue that the conditions of possibility for the existence of a poem like “My New Job” are the forms of exploitation specific to gendered and racialized capital. These conditions necessarily involve an obscuring of race relations, and racial hierarchies that, as Jack Halberstam observes, “are not rational and ordered [but] chaotic and nonsensical.” (“The Wild Beyond,” in The Undercommons, 10). To read this poem dialectically, then, should be to suggest that we not repeat the obscuring gesture; it should require that “we” — the collective pronoun becomes intensely suspect here — reject readings that re-entrench a universalizing view of the world from the position of the white bourgeois subject. For a more detailed discussion of how race, as a structural coercion in the history of capitalism, unfolds as a material antagonism in dialectical readings of contemporary poetry, please see the longer version of this essay (detailed in footnote 1).
23 Marina Vishmidt, “‘To Die and Leave Silk for Capital’: Abstract Labour, Art and Reproduction,” in Post-Fordism and its Discontents, ed. Gal Kirn (Maastricht, Netherlands: Jan Van Eyck Academie, 2010), 317.
24 Wagner, My New Job, 110.
25 Moten and Harney, The Undercommons, 29.
26 Lesjak, “Reading Dialectically,” 260.