Ron Silliman’s Ketjak beyond programmatism

Abstract

ABSTRACTRon Silliman’s long prose poem Ketjak (1978) is in part a swan song for 1960s radicalism, and the Fordist regime of capital accumulation undergirding that eras struggles for self-affirmation. In Ketjak Silliman develops what he comes to call ‘the new sentence’, which is meant to eschew narrative, along with the very referential mechanisms of capital, foregrounding instead word play and the organic, gestural labour of the author. This paper argues against the grain of Silliman’s poetics, demonstrating ways in which his innovative technique in Ketjak, rather than being autonomous from capital, ironises the regime of flexible accumulation emergent in the 1970s. The restructuring of capital–labour relations during this period has been compellingly theorised by Théorie Communiste as the last gasp of the programmatic workers movement, which sought to build a workers’ world in its own image. The labouring subject that Silliman is preoccupied with in his poetics becomes undermined through the very restructuring of capital that Ketjak harnesses towards its own imaginative ends. Spanning 100 pages, Ketjak’s length is read as an instance of Sianne Ngai’s aesthetic category of ‘the interesting’, which this paper considers as a critical response to hyper-financialisation’s attempt to foreshorten the duration of production cycles.