Combining Uneven Developments: Louis Zukofsky and the Political Economy of Revolutionary Modernism

Abstract

Combining Uneven DevelopmentsLouis Zukofsky and the Political Economy of Revolutionary Modernism Ruth Jennison (bio) In the fields of modern and contemporary poetics in particular and cultural studies in general, recent scholarship has turned to world systems theory and critical geography to situate questions of culture in a global matrix. Increasingly, literary theorists and scholars are deploying the social scientific concepts of center, margin, core, periphery, and uneven development in order to problematize critical commonplaces regarding the trajectories of “dissemination” of literary forms from the polis of Empire to the countryside of the neocolony.1 Building on this turn, this essay analyzes the political geographies of Louis Zukof sky’s early twentieth-century Objectivist poetics as exemplary of revolutionary American modernism, a modernism characterized, in large part, by its anticapitalism and aggressive formal experimentation. Zukofsky coined the term “Objectivism” in 1931 to describe work by poets convening around these political and aesthetic coordinates. Objectivism’s numbers included working-class, Jewish, feminist, and Yiddish-speaking poets, such as George Oppen, Lorine Niedecker, and Charles Reznikoff, among others. While the Objectivists shared with the canonical modernists an interest in experiment and innovation, they also held commitments to radical democracy and the realization of the cultural potentials simultaneously unleashed and underdeveloped by capitalist modernity, commitments that they saw as the political parallels of their artistic avant-gardism. In what follows, I explore the ways in which Objectivist poetry elaborates in aesthetic terms the economic and social concepts of twentieth- and twenty-first century political economists of uneven development—an arc that extends from Leon Trotsky to David Harvey and comprises a diverse, interdisciplinary tradition of thought.2 This study situates [End Page 146] Objectivism’s central figure, Zukofsky, within this political-economic arc and reenacts his confrontation with capitalism’s differential tectonics in the early decades of the twentieth century. Against the still disseminated literary-critical view of modernity and poetic modernism as marked by fragmentation and dissolution (a view that follows the ideological-aesthetic perspective inaugurated by Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot), this essay argues that the Objectivists understand their modernity as a vast aggregate of uneven cultural developments and particulars, and so innovate what I call a poetics of uneven development.3 The poetics of uneven development reveals that what seem to be fragmented forms of a dissolving unity are, for the Objectivist, actually the differentiated particulars of a constructed totality. The historical contours of these particulars are rendered legible by a relational intaglio of paratactical comparison. As this argument will reveal in detail below, this poetics is Objectivism’s key strategy for mapping Depression-era geographies of capitalism in crisis. Zukofsky’s comparative methodology brings together seemingly distant objects and events through the chief formal strategy of parataxis. So, we find in Zukofsky’s epic poem “A,” for example, New York in 1648 cohabits with a late Victorian Henry Adams. Or, Bach’s St. Matthew Passion and the Russian Revolution interilluminate each other through their compressed adjacency. Such paratactical adjacency registers capitalism’s production of differentially developed zones and geographies. Marx completed the conceptual antecedent to Zukofsky’s formal comparisons of uneven developments seventy-three years before Objectivism was born. Zukofsky possessed a deep textual knowledge of Marx; accordingly, our study of the poet’s method first deserves a brief review of Marx’s own. In the Introduction to the Grundrisse, Marx explains how the dialectical approach to cultural analysis is rooted in historical comparison. Through their comparison, historically distant particulars that have the appearance of natural continuity (e.g., money and property) confess their historical situatedness. Marx argues that in spite of having this appearance of concrete immediacy, things like money are “concrete because (they have) the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse” (1993, 101). Marx inverts the usual understanding of concreteness; it is not a physical property of an object, but the way that we perceive that object’s [End Page 147] many, “diverse” social histories. These accumulated histories can never be mined from an object standing in solitude; they require comparison with other objects to reveal their multiple presences. The passage below suggests that this comparative method can be used not just to...