Work-in-Progress Seminar

In this talk, I present a version of the first chapter of my thesis. I look at some of the poems in Alli Warren's 2020 collection Little Hill, which I relate to Marx's labor theory of value. Throughout Capital and the Grundrisse, Marx understands value as a social relation that captures the living labor of working bodies, accumulating their time and calculating it as the possibility of expansion: value's only goal is surplus-value, or its self-expansion. Life-time is rendered as a commodity (labor-power), dispensed in units of calculable time (labor-time). This produces subjects who are bound to this relation, formed by its constant movement towards expansion. This is what Marx calls the form-determination of value: it determines the form subjectivity in capitalism can take. In her poetry, Warren is always playing with this determination, creating subjects who are hyper-oppressed and muted, alone in a world of animated commodities, but who then break out of this determination through stunning moments of social struggle. For me, Warren's poetry is the poetic life of little revolutions.