Two Alienations: Jean Baudrillard and Georg Lukacs

In History and Class Consciousness, Georg Lukacs performs a close reading of Marx's Capital in order to focus on the effects of commodities. Lukacs is primarily interested in how workers are alienated from their labor due to the fetishization of commodities in the capitalist system. Further, the alienation is read back into self-consciousness; the subject understands itself in terms of the commodity form.

Jean Baudrillard argues in The Consumer Society that human society has become a profusion of consumer objects which are part of a signifying system governed by consumption as a metonymical means toward happiness. The logic of consumption, however, tends to the needs of the order of production rather than the needs of human beings -- and does so primarily by inflating the subjective perception of these needs. The subject becomes a collection of desires walking through a shopping center of magical objects.

These analyses are valuable because they reveal the material basis of such concepts as "the self" and "desire." Taking Lukacs and Baudrillard into account forces readers to consider the role that literature plays in social and economic developments. I don't claim to have a well-developed way to do this, but I would suggest that an awareness of these perspectives can add depth and complexity to our interpretations of poetic texts. Let's use a short poem as an example. Here is "The Scour" by A. R. Ammons:

It was so windy
last night the snow
got down nowhere
except against something.

Without the benefit of a social analysis, this becomes what it at first appears for so many critics: a poem about nature. One might actually group the possible readings of this poem into three types. First, the poem can be seen as an attempt to get at "the thing," a sensible object in nature. The natural world operates in peaceful and violent ways.

It's difficult to remain in this rarefied field of interpretations without jumping to the second level, which involves the individual subject in the instantiation of nature. This can happen in two ways. First, the poetic speaker can recount his experience of nature and reflect on the intersection of man and nature as two objects. Second, the object or event in the natural world can explain or refer to some aspect of the poetic speaker's (or poet's) personal history.

It's possible to read the Ammons poem from either of these first two levels, and in fact the poet may have meant for it to suggest possibilities on these levels. However, the poem is just as open to the third level: the social. The process of snow falling on a windy night might be a figure for a social process as much as it may stand in as a figure for a personal revelation. In this case, one's standard understanding of snow descending peacefully is disrupted in order to show that nature has different modes and can enact violence. In other words, instead of a 'natural mode' in nature, there is a set of fluctuating possibilities. Among these possibilities, the poet recognizes the potential for violence.

If the earth is taken as a figure for the subject, this means that there are a variety of processes leading to our definition by the falling snow. That is, the contours of our subjectivity are determined in part by the material relations covering us. Ammons' poem encourages the reader to consider not just the violent scouring of snow and wind, but also its innocuous counter-possibility: the inevitable and more natural-seeming slow covering by falling snowflakes.

Cary Nelson's Socioeconomic View

Cary Nelson seeks to historicize the study of modern American poetry in order to correct the record of literary history as it has been institutionalized in the academy. Nelson argues that poetry is more varied and complicated than the narratives that are told about it, narratives that reduce complexity by deemphasizing or completely skipping over whole poetic traditions. In particular, Nelson points out that much poetry was being written that rejected the modernist break from the past. The poetry that survives the critical and historical apparatus is a modernism that "reinforces a romantic ideology of timeless individual achievement and a disdain for lived experience" (37).

I find it very easy to agree with all of this. A problem emerges, however, when Nelson attempts to discuss what makes overlooked poetry worth recovering. For example, he praises H. H. Lewis's "Thinking of Russia":

I'm always thinking of Russia,
I can't keep her out of my head,
I don't give a damn for Uncle Sham,
I'm a left-wing radical Red.

Nelson highlights the concise and effective wordplay that substitutes Sham for Sam, but this is the whole poem. I may be looking for techniques that I've been trained to by the academy, but if there's no other skillful use of language than a quick pun, than I'm not sure what there is to value. Nelson appreciates its commitment and clarity, but the poem seems flat to me as a use of language.

My comments here of course reveal the unfortunate tendencies against which Nelson struggles. Our aesthetic perspectives are based on entirely different notions of what the function of poetry is. Without inventive language and an important discovery that rewards repeated readings, I'm just not that interested. To me, it reads like propaganda -- and it would if it was for rather than against the American economic (and military) system. In fact, I'm sympathetic to the underlying concerns that give rise to the third line, but the poem itself hasn't investigated these in a compelling way. Staunch (though humorous) assertion is all we get.

Nelson succeeds more when he discusses poets or poems that are richly provocative that have only sometimes been coopted by the prevailing literary history. Nelson admits that poetry can be interpreted -- and especially retroactively interpreted -- to perform different social functions. He discusses Eliot's The Waste Land as a poem with at least two viable histories, the revolutionary and the reactionary. Nelson contends that it cannot be decided which of these two is true; the practice of literary history involves understanding the direction and uses of interpretation.