Abstract
This chapter extends Lukács’s ideas of form and totality into new terrain, ecological and aesthetic, in the present, considering how particular literary works might consider the totality in socioecological terms. It explores how certain works of contemporary poetry provide a vantage on metabolic relations and rifts as shaping dimensions of contemporary life within capitalism. Examining recent books by Eleni Sikelianos and Jennifer Scappettone, this chapter claims that these texts epitomize a realist direction in contemporary poetics that conveys a planetary whole undergoing cataclysmic alteration. Such works provide an alternative to the idealist totalizations of Anthropocene discourse and its now-dominant tropes, instead offering a means of conceiving the complex and precarious metabolisms of earthly life in late capitalism.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
György Lukács, Soul and Form, ed. John T. Sanders and Katie Terezakis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 137.
- 2.
Ibid., 36. Both of these assertions are from Lukács’s writings before his turn to a specifically Marxist aesthetics. Yet, even in these early essays, with their idealist philosophical formulations, Lukács is raising questions about form and totality that will persist throughout his work. As Katie Terezakis writes in her “Afterword” to Soul and Form, in such assertions “Lukács is surveying the orienting composure with which we may grasp our relationship to a modern society otherwise too massive to confront” (217).
- 3.
Ernst Bloch, “Discussing Expressionism,” Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 1977), 22. Lukács’s “Realism in the Balance” responds to Bloch’s critique.
- 4.
See the recent Mediations issue (2016) on Lukács and the edited volume Georg Lukács: The Fundamental Dissonance of Existence, eds. Timothy Bewes and Timothy Hall (London: Continuum, 2011) for examples of contemporary critical engagements with these ideas. These works share with this chapter an understanding of Lukács’s endeavors to historicize the novel as expressive of particular historical conjunctures rather than unmediated Hegelian “essences” (Lukács’s own idealist language in Soul and Form notwithstanding).
- 5.
See Jameson’s well-known argument in “Cognitive Mapping” on this subject. Fredric Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping,” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 347–357. Gail Day, “Realism, Totality and the Militant Citoyen: Or, What Does Lukács Have to Do with Contemporary Art?” in Georg Lukács: The Fundamental Dissonance of Existence, 203–219; Katie Terezakis, “Afterword,” Soul and Form. Also see Colleen Lye and Jed Esty’s introduction to their recent guest-edited MLQ special issue on Peripheral Realisms (with Joe Cleary). They describe a recent critical turn, particularly by scholars of postcolonial, ethnic, and feminist studies, to conceptions of realism that “take seriously the possibility … of representing the world-system rather than thematizing its unrepresentability” (284–285). Jed Esty and Colleen Lye, “Peripheral Realisms Now,” Modern Language Quarterly 73.3 (September 2012): 270–289.
- 6.
Terezakis, 217.
- 7.
Day’s essay argues that various contemporary artists, most prominently Allan Sekula, can be read in relation to Lukács’s aesthetics and politics. Day points out, up front, the “deeply incongruous” nature of these conjoined terms, given Lukács’s aesthetic proclivities. She writes, “To be clear from the outset: I do not think Lukács would approve of the art I will discuss,” but that his terms provide a useful framework for understanding certain dynamics in contemporary art (204).
- 8.
While Lukács, writing in the early twentieth century, developed a concept of “second nature” that bears on the ecological effects of the commodification process, his writings on totality and literary form remained largely unconcerned with capitalism’s mutually transforming interactions with natural forces and processes.
- 9.
This chapter discusses several recent critical recenterings of Marxist theory around ecological and earth-systems frameworks, including the work of Jason Moore, Andreas Malm, and John Bellamy Foster. Other recent examples of ecological or “red-green” Marxist approaches include James O’Connor, Natural Causes: Essays in Ecological Marxism, Paul Burkett, Marx and Nature: A Red and Green Perspective, Joel Kovel, The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World?, and Michael Löwy, Ecosocialism: A Radical Alternative to Capitalist Catastrophe.
- 10.
Lukács discusses the dialectic of appearance and essence in “Realism in the Balance”: “the crux of the matter is to understand the dialectical unity of appearance and essence. What matters is that the slice of life shaped and depicted by the artist and re-experienced by the reader should reveal the relations between appearance and essence without the need for any external commentary” (33–34).
- 11.
Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 24.
- 12.
Ibid., 21–22.
- 13.
For some examples, see Adam Trexler, Anthropocene Fictions, Timothy Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge, and Stacy Alaimo, Exposed.
- 14.
A well-known example of this thinking is Dipesh Chakrabarty’s somewhat infamous pronouncement in “The Climate of History”: “Climate change, refracted through global capital, will no doubt accentuate the logic of inequality that runs through the rule of capital; some people will no doubt gain temporarily at the expense of others. But the whole crisis cannot be reduced to a story of capitalism. Unlike in the crises of capitalism, there are no lifeboats here for the rich and the privileged (witness the drought in Australia or recent fires in the wealthy neighborhoods of California).” Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009): 197–222. Chakrabarty’s more recent article, “Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories,” expands on this earlier point, arguing that capitalism overlooks the way “processes belonging to the deeper history of Earth” are “coactors in the current crisis, playing themselves out on both human and nonhuman scales” (21). These processes precede and will continue beyond the particular economic system of capitalism, Chakrabarty argues. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories,” Critical Inquiry 41, no. 1 (Autumn 2014): 1–23.
- 15.
Jason Moore writes that the Anthropocene’s popularity “has been won on the strength of its storytelling power, and on its capacity to unify humans and the earth-system within a single narrative”; yet this narrative, Moore asserts, is “an idealist unity that severs the constitutive historical relations that have brought the planet to its present age of extinction.” See “Name that System!,” https://jasonwmoore.wordpress.com/2016/10/09/name-the-system-anthropocenes-the-capitalocene-alternative/
- 16.
In the recent volume, Anthropocene or Capitalocene?: Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, Justin McBrien writes that the Anthropocene concept “reinforces what capital wants to believe of itself: that human ‘nature,’ not capital, has precipitated today’s planetary instability” (119). Justin McBrien, “Accumulating Extinction: Planetary Catastrophism in the Necrocene,” Anthropocene or Capitalocene?: Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism (Oakland: PM Press, 2016).
- 17.
In his introduction to the edited volume, Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Jason Moore writes, “the Capitalocene signifies capitalism as a way of organizing nature—as a multispecies, situated, capitalist world-ecology” (6). Jason Moore, “Introduction,” Anthropocene or Capitalocene?: Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, 1–11.
- 18.
Ibid., 6.
- 19.
See Andreas Malm, “The Anthropocene Myth,” Jacobin, March 30, 2015, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/03/anthropocene-capitalism-climate-change/
- 20.
György Lukács, “Narrate or Describe?” Writer and Critic and Other Essays, ed. Arthur Kahn (New York: Merlin Press, 1971), 122. Here, see also Fredric Jameson’s argument in The Antinomies of Realism about Lukács’s insistence on the historical change represented in the novel’s portrayals of everyday life: “Thus one can argue, as Lukács does, that the realist novel is already itself profoundly historical, its new sense of everyday life now transforming the latter from the static sketches of custom or folkloric urban scenes into a sense of change—destruction, rebuilding, ruins, scaffolds, new and unrecognizable quarters.” Fredric Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism (London: Verso, 2013), 146.
- 21.
For an extended discussion of the concept of metabolism in Marx’s work, see John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000).
- 22.
Ibid., 163. This is a proto-ecological concept in Marx’s use, focusing attention on the cycles by which human waste and byproducts are returned to the soil as well as to the ways that human social relations are organized through and mediated by ecological relations (and vice versa).
- 23.
Jason Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life (New York: Verso, 2015), 35.
- 24.
Ibid., 45.
- 25.
Jason Moore, “Name that System!” https://jasonwmoore.wordpress.com/2016/10/09/name-the-system-anthropocenes-the-capitalocene-alternative/
- 26.
See Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976). Marx writes, “Capitalist production collects the population together in great centres, and causes the urban population to achieve an ever-growing preponderance. This has two results. On the one hand it concentrates the historical motive force of society; on the other hand, it disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth, i.e. it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natural condition for the lasting fertility of the soil” (637–638).
- 27.
Ibid. Marx writes, “All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress toward ruining the long-lasting sources of that fertility… Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the technique and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the worker.”
- 28.
John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York, The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010), 45.
- 29.
Jason Moore, too, argues that these processes of simplification create new forms of “uncontrollable diversity”: “superweeds, MRSA staph infections, manifold cancers and autoimmune disorders, avian and swine influenzas” (Capitalism in the Web of Life, 253). Moore’s concept of the oikeios and the account of metabolic rift offer slightly different readings of this concept of metabolism. For a polemical account of their differences, see “Marxism and the Dialectics of Ecology,” John Bellamy Foster, Monthly Review website, October 1, 2016, https://monthlyreview.org/2016/10/01/marxism-and-the-dialectics-of-ecology/
- 30.
Lukács, “Realism in the Balance,” 37.
- 31.
Ghosh’s book offers a brief itinerary of a poetic tradition of representations of socioecological forces in motion, from Blake and Wordsworth through Snyder and Merwin. A longer arc might begin with Hesiod, Virgil, and Lucretius and continue through Renaissance pastoral poetry, the eighteenth-century georgics of Thomson and Cowper, and Romantic poetics from Wordsworth, Clare, and Charlotte Smith to Bryant, Sigourney, Emerson, and Thoreau, and into the modern period. The essential history of this Western poetic tradition remains Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City; other key critical works on poetry’s modes of conceptualizing the historicity of human-ecological relations include Ken Hiltner’s What Else is Pastoral?, John Barrell’s The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, Angus Fletcher’s A New Theory for American Poetry, and Joshua Schuster’s The Ecology of Modernism. These works all describe poetry’s distinctive forms of thought and patterns of meaning making in thinking through these relations, over against narrative forms (particularly the novel).
- 32.
To name only a few North American exemplars, we might regard Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Toomer’s Cane, Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead, Niedecker’s “Lake Superior,” and Williams’s Paterson as key historical markers. Various more recent works have taken up these “world-forms,” such as Lisa Robertson’s Office for Soft Architecture, Peter Culley’s Hammertown, Stacy Doris’s Knot, Mary Kinzie’s California Sorrow, Brenda Hillman’s Cascadia, Myung Mi Kim’s Commons, Marcella Durand’s Traffic and Weather, Ed Roberson’s To See the Earth Before the End of the World, and Sherwin Bitsui’s Flood Song.
- 33.
For an example of a reading practice that explores these dynamics in relation to poetry, see Fredric Jameson, “Poetics of Totality,” The Modernist Papers (New York: Verso, 2007).
- 34.
Srikanth Reddy, “Eleni Sikelianos Interview,” BOMB Magazine, March 6, 2017, http://bombmagazine.org/article/035431/eleni-sikelianos
- 35.
Narration, in this sense, refers back to Lukács’s valuing of narration over description in the realist tradition in his essay, “Narrate or Describe?” Connecting the unifying imagination of narration, which he identifies in realists such as Tolstoy, back to epic poetry’s emphasis on omniscience and action, Lukács contrasts such portrayals of the “involved complexity of patterns of life” with the flattening, static quality of description he sees in writers such as Flaubert. “Narrate or Describe?” (128).
- 36.
Ibid.
- 37.
Lukács argues that the turn to description in realism is tied to larger historical developments; he writes that “description … becomes the dominant mode in composition in a period in which, for social reasons, the sense of what is primary in epic construction has been lost” (127).
- 38.
Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry (New York: Paris Press, 1996).
- 39.
Judith Butler, “Introduction,” Soul and Form (3).
- 40.
See Lukács, Studies in European Realism, and Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism, for such accounts.
- 41.
Lauren Goodlad, “Worlding Realisms Now,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 49.2 (August 2016), 184.
- 42.
Goodlad writes, “As capitalism has intensified and expanded its hold over the material structures of lived reality, a variety of millenial realisms have begun to flourish” (188). Goodlad refers here, in particular, to Alison Shonkwiler and Leigh Claire La Berge’s edited volume Reading Capitalist Realism, which offers wide-ranging investigations of contemporary realist practices that reflect on the conditions of the capitalist world system, but this introduction also points to several recently published monographs, edited volumes, and special issues of journals that take up realism in these expanded contexts and definitions.
- 43.
Ibid., 184.
- 44.
Eleni Sikelianos, Make Yourself Happy (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2017); Jennifer Scappettone, The Republic of Exit 43: Outtakes and Scores from an Archeology and Pop-Up Opera of the Corporate Dump (Berkeley: Atelos Press, 2016).
- 45.
Melissa Buckheit, “An Interview with Eleni Sikelianos,” The University of Arizona Poetry Center website, September 28, 2011, https://poetry.arizona.edu/blog/interview-eleni-sikelianos. Sikelianos says that her poetry is characterized by “focused, deep observation of entities, objects, motion, symmetry and asymmetry, analogous forms, function, and interaction. How does the endomembrane system function? How do all the parts of the poem carry energy? These questions seem related. The unknown that surrounds the known is the major playing field of both science and poetry.”
- 46.
Sikelianos, Make Yourself Happy, 17.
- 47.
Ibid., 13.
- 48.
On happiness as neoliberal affect, see Sam Binkley, Happiness as Enterprise: An Essay on Neoliberal Life (Binghamton: SUNY Press, 2014).
- 49.
Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism (Alresford, UK: Zero Books, 2009).
- 50.
Sam Binkley, “Happiness as Resilience and Resource: An Emotion for Neoliberal Times,” Psychological Governance and Public Policy: Governing the Mind, Brain, and Behavior, eds. Jessica Pykett, Rhys Jones and Mark Whitehead (London: Routledge, 2017), 39.
- 51.
Sikelianos, Make Yourself Happy, 5.
- 52.
Ibid., 20.
- 53.
See, for comparison, Lukács’s description of Tolstoy’s novels as dramatizing the “ceaseless play of moods in which the dramatic fluctuations of the contradictions of life ripple under the motionless surface of the commonplace.” György Lukács, Studies in European Realism (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964), 172.
- 54.
Justin McBrien argues that extinction offers a key means of understanding capitalism’s socioecological regime: “Extinction is both the immediate success and ultimate failure of the real subsumption of the earth by capital; the ecology of capital is constructed through attempted erasure of existing ecologies” (117).
- 55.
Sikelianos, Make Yourself Happy, 81.
- 56.
Ibid., 112.
- 57.
Ibid., 132.
- 58.
McBrien argues, “The accumulation of capital is the accumulation of potential extinction—a potential increasingly activated in recent decades. This becoming extinction is not simply the biological process of species extinction. It is also the extinguishing of cultures and languages, either through force or assimilation; it is the extermination of peoples, either through labor or deliberate murder; …it is ocean acidification and desertification, melting ice sheets and rising sea levels; the great garbage patch and nuclear waste entombment; McDonalds and Monsanto” (116–117).
- 59.
Sikelianos, 167.
- 60.
Scappettone plays on Duncan’s phrase in a poem from The Republic of Exit 43: “like the mine, which is a made place / & joist gas of the metropolis, Coketown” (46).
- 61.
See Scappettone’s article, “I owe vs. I/O,” Jacket2, December 14, 2016, http://jacket2.org/article/i-0we-v-io
- 62.
Scappettone, The Republic of Exit 43, 67.
- 63.
Ibid., 99, 101.
- 64.
Ibid., 103.
- 65.
Ibid., 107.
- 66.
Ibid., 15.
- 67.
Ibid., 21.
- 68.
Ibid., 104.
- 69.
Sikelianos, Make Yourself Happy, 114.
- 70.
Scappettone, Exit 43, 140.
- 71.
For respective examples of such environmental politics, see Bart Barendregt and Rivke Jaffe, eds., Green Consumption: The Global Rise of Eco-Chic and Oliver Morton, The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Save the Earth.
- 72.
We might contrast this insistently negative mode of Capitalocene poetics with the more revolutionary and utopian commitments of a work like Stephen Collis’s The Commons (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2014). This text explores the history of primitive accumulation and land enclosures and contemporary indigenous land-based resistance movements, drawing on Romantic and Transcendentalist ecological language to develop a sustained argument against the logics of property and extractionist capitalism. Collis draws on the image of the blackberry as an “imaginary alternative already growing in our midst,” emerging in the “junk spaces capital has used up” (129, 134). Collis’s blackberry offers a natural figure for a commons (human and nonhuman) dwelling marginally in the capitalist present that might herald other futures to come. Such images of collective resistance to capitalist land logics enact a more explicitly communist poetics, attentive to horizons of revolutionary change in the present and future, that might serve as a contrast with Sikelianos’s and Scappettone’s realist poetics.
- 73.
Judith Butler, “Introduction,” Soul and Form, 7.
- 74.
Scappettone, 172.
- 75.
Sikelianos, 131.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Ronda, M. (2019). “Everywhere, Worlds Connect”: Realist Poetics and the Ecologies of Capitalism. In: Jennison, R., Murphet, J. (eds) Communism and Poetry. Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17156-8_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17156-8_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-17155-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-17156-8
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)