SANDRA MAY
As Marxism critiques capitalism's effects on workers, language poets critique capitalist practices and affect the language of poetry. In his essay "Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World" language poet Ron Silliman espouses Marx's famous 1859 dictum as the basis for his writing: "The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men (sic) that determines their being, but on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness" (New Sentence 7). With regard to poetry and the use of language, the mode of production that determines human life decides the structures and "natural" laws of language with "the primary impact on language and language arts…the rise of capitalism" being "in the area of reference…directly related to the phenomena known as the commodity fetish" (Disappearance 122). According to Silliman, when language becomes subjected to the social dynamics of capitalism, "words not only find themselves attached to commodities, they become commodities and, as such, take on the ‘mystical' and ‘mysterious character' " (New Sentence 8). Capitalism has commodified our words, making language mysterious and detached from us. Since "the words are never our own," they become "our own usages of a determinate coding passed down to us like all other products of civilization" (If By Writing 167). We lose our social context when words fail to bind us into human community. Majorie Perloff discusses this loss from a pedagogical standpoint:
Those of us who have taught courses on poetry are familiar with the student with a very high IQ, say a computer science major, who cannot make anything of a poem like Blake's "London" because he or she cannot conceive of a linguistic or social context in which one might refer to a soldier's "hapless sigh" as "Run[ning] like blood down palace walls." In the discourse of medical textbooks or legal briefs, such statements simply make no sense. (Perloff 234)
Once society has lost the ability to define itself through language, it loses its identity, value, and place in the world.
How does this happen?
Ron Silliman explains the cause for this privation while introducing possible solutions, using Walter Benjamin's theory of aesthetics outlined in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Benjamin posits that the production of art, a reproduction of the world and its objects, becomes mechanical in our machine age, no longer imbued with aesthetic value. Benjamin notes: "In principle a work of art has always been reproducible…Mechanical reproduction of a work, however, represents something new" (Benjamin 218). This mutation is felt first in the product/producer relationship, for with mechanical reproduction we have uniformity. Equivalence becomes a ruling paradigm instead of the uniqueness of art. Science and mathematics serve to conceal theories of equivalence as they postulate "things equal to the same thing are equal to each other" (Sklar 14). Equivalence begets substitution, exchange, and reproduction—this principle extends itself into the economic sphere via the universal equivalent of money.
In Marx's critique objects are not valued on the basis of themselves or the labor that produced them but assigned an intangible monetary value. Marx writes of this in Capital:
When we bring the products of our labour into relation with each other as values, it is not because we see in these articles the material receptacles of homogeneous human labour. Quite the contrary; whenever, by an exchange, we equate as values our different products, by that very act, we also equate, as human labour, the different kinds of labour expended upon them. We are not aware of this, nevertheless we do it. Value, therefore, does not stalk about with a label describing what it is. It is value, rather, that converts every product into a social hieroglyphic. Later on, we try to decipher the hieroglyphic, to get behind the secret of our own social products; for to stamp an object of utility as a value, is just as much a social product as language. . . . It is, however, just this ultimate money form of the world of commodities that actually conceals, instead of disclosing, the social character of private labour, and the social relations between the individual producers. When I state that coats or boots stand in relation to linen, because it is the universal incarnation of abstract human labour, the absurdity of the statement is self-evident. Nevertheless, when the producers of coats and boots compare those articles with linen, or, what is the same thing with gold or silver, as the universal equivalent, they express the relation between their own private labour and the collective labour of society in the same absurd form. (Marx 74, 76)
Marx's idea of objects "stamped" with value, converted into hieroglyphics to be read, informs Silliman's understanding of language. Silliman extends Benjamin's idea of art (and Marx's anticipation of it) into commentary on the production of language, a commodity that becomes stamped, valued, and fetishized. Thus, according to Silliman, the "social basis of reality was transformed…where previously the manufactured objects of the world submitted themselves to the fetishizing and mutational laws of identity and exchange solely through an economic process, they now did so on a new level, that of information" (New Sentence 48).
Art and language lose their value as mechanical reproduction removes artist from object and language user from words. Benjamin describes the sensation of the direct connection between artist and object as aura, taken out of its constituting context, now destroyed by equivalence. Aura establishes the presence of the artist within the work, enacting a relationship of intersubjectivity that recognizes self-presence, the perceiver who establishes self and meaning from the artist's perception, translation, and expression. Aura once created the value within this relationship.
Benjamin theorizes that until our mechanical age aura was protected by its use in ritual or cult functions: "the uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being embedded in the fabric of tradition" (Benjamin 223). The revered artwork, unapproachable in its ritualistic state, protects its relationship to artist and meaning. Mechanical reproduction invalidates ritual with aura:
For the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the "authentic" print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice—politics. (Benjamin 224)
Silliman glosses Benjamin's term politics as economics: "Politics, it turns out, means economics, use subordinated to exchange" (New Sentence 49). Economics affects the referential quality of art when art and language are based not on aura but on substitution and exchange. Language poets speculate that language itself perpetuates the exchange system by universalizing, conventionalizing, and constituting the perceiver through mechanized forms or style. The reader becomes passive without an intersubjective relationship with the artist as other. How can the reader recreate meaning without the labor of engagement with the aura? In the case of poetry meaning can no longer be created by the reader.
Sandra May is the author of Fest Fest (Wipe, 2006).
