Ezra Pound and Mang Ke (??): Image, Affect, and Consumerism in Western and Chinese Modernism

Abstract

"Modernist" culture is a complex constellation of cultural phenomena—the qualities of economic goods based upon desire rather than need, aesthetics and experiential values, horizons of possible ways to understand the world, and social formations—that effect and assign value to human experience. The growing imbrication of consumerism with poetics can be seen both in the poetry of the late twentieth-century Chinese poet, Mang Ke (芒克, 1950-) and Ezra Pound (1885–1972) and their respective poetic movements: menglong (朦胧; "misty" or "obscure") poetry in China in the late twentieth century and the poetry of Imagism in the early twentieth century in the West. Juxtaposing these poets and movements shows that the spirit of modernism, once caught within material, historical and economic phenomena, does not belong to any particular culture. Its conjunction of relations among things creates the conditions of sensibilities for emerging affects imbricated with new modalities of feeling, understanding, and social organization.