Elliot C. Mason: Poetics of Value: The Form-Determination of Subjectivity in Contemporary American Poetry

  • Date: 25 October 2024, 10:00
  • Location: Ihresalen 21-0011, Engelska parken, Uppsala
  • Type: Thesis defence
  • Thesis author: Elliot C. Mason
  • External reviewer: Keston Sutherland
  • Supervisor: Daniel Kane
  • Research subject: Literature
  • DiVA

Abstract

Poetics of Value studies the temporality of subject-production in capitalism. By staging a debate between Marxist value-form theory, black studies, and contemporary American poetry, this thesis pursues ways out of value’s form-determining production of subjectivity. Value-form theory posits the present as a generalizing moment of abstraction, in which concrete labour is distributed in undifferentiated units of socially necessary labour-time, which allows each commodity to find its universal equivalent in exchange. What this misses, however, is the past that survives differentially in productive bodies: capital requires labour to be both undifferentiated (as labour-power) at the site of exchange and differentiated (as racialization, gendering, etc.) at the site of production. This surviving, differential past is brought to fugitive presence in the critical modality of black studies. Where value-form theory understands the abstract temporality of value as primary, black studies posits the antagonistic survival of other temporalities as primary. By closely reading four contemporary American poets, this thesis proposes a poetics of value that merges the critical projects of value-form theory and black studies, locating the survival of sociality in a fugitive present beside the standardizing temporality of the capitalist value-form. Those four poets are Alli Warren, Rob Halpern, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, and Fred Moten.

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