Month: August 2020

(Director’s note: Walt Hunter, author of Forms of a World: Contemporary Poetry and the Making of Globalization (Fordham UP, 2019) and co-translator, with Lindsay Turner, of Frédéric Neyrat’s Atopias: Manifesto for a Radical Existentialism (Fordham UP, 2017), is an associate professor of World Literature and associate chair of Clemson English.  Current events have him thinking about this moment in history, our moment in history, and our relationship to it.)

Social scientists and economists have singled out 1973 as a pivotal year in the history of global capitalism—the end of the post-war, Bretton Woods model of “embedded liberalism” and the beginning of the “long downturn”—but could the humanities add something new to this narrative? I’m interested in the cultural shifts in literature and art in the early 1970s that coincide with the end of what the French call the trente glorieuses, the years before the current period of globalization and of dramatically increased inequality.

One of the relatively minor, and yet, for me, ultimately illuminating events of 1973 is the publication of a book of sonnets by Robert Lowell called History (1973). In 1969 Lowell had published many of these sonnets in a collection called Notebook (1969) that, four years and two editions later, became History. “I am learning to live in history,” Lowell writes in the second edition of the fifth poem of a twelve-part sonnet sequence called “Mexico.” “What is history? What you cannot touch.”

Lowell’s reflection in this particular poem is prompted by the passing of the end of the day: the “full sun,” the “silhouetting sunset,” then the “undimmed lights of the passing car.” Typical of Lowell’s sonnets, the intimacy of personal experience occasions a reflection on large-scale processes: though he’s often received as a confessional poet, Lowell’s style in fact reflects his globalized present. The question “what is history?” comes to life as part of a larger American cultural, historical, political, and economic predicament in the early 70s.

Admittedly, the sonnet is probably not the first cultural form that springs to mind when we think about the late 1960s and early 1970s. 1973 was not a marquee year for the sonnet—though it was for Gravity’s Rainbow, Dark Side of the Moon, “Killing Me Softly,” The Exorcist, “Love Is a Hurtin’ Thing,” Badlands, Linda Ronstadt, and “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.” This list has very little in common except a vague sense that something was over and it was now, as Joan Didion writes, the “morning after the 60s.” Americans in the early 1970s suspect that time is out of joint, that their lives fit into their country and their country fits in the world in a different way.

I take Lowell’s comment seriously: what is it to “learn to live in history” and how can a sonnet, of all things, help do that? Whose history is he talking about, this white scion of a patrician New England family? Why is history “what you cannot touch”?

One of the sonnet’s oldest motifs is noli me tangere—literally, “don’t touch me”—which appears in Thomas Wyatt’s mid-sixteenth-century sonnet “Whoso List to Hunt.” The sonnet’s noli me tangere, a phrase Wyatt borrows from the Latin Vulgate, is figured by Wyatt and later sonneteers as the gendered body. Its perspective is one of suspended or thwarted desire—usually, though not always, rooted in a male gaze. The sonnet man is probably a close cousin to the “longing man,” as Merve Emre describes this enduringly odious figure.

But in Notebook, history becomes the object of the sonnet instead. In this way, Lowell speaks quite clearly to the present, his and ours. Living with the “I” in history remains, perhaps, one of the most intractable questions for the United States in 2020. Later, Claudia Rankine will write this through in a different way, while nodding at Lowell: “drag that first person out of the social death of history,” she writes in Citizen: An American Lyric, “then we’re kin.”

The sonnet is not a form in which history lives comfortably. It’s a pretty room or a narrow cell, the place where poets argue with themselves. The schematic grace of the sonnet allows for two positions to be reconciled, or to be held in tension. And the sonnet’s closure, if it comes, is not the closure of an event, but the closure of logic or rhyme. When something happens in the sonnet, it is often a product of the energy created by the poem’s own forces, married to the poet’s thoughts and feelings. While the sonnet sequence might elaborate the emotional conditions in which an “I” is forged, we leave it to Tasso’s ottava rima stanza or Milton’s blank verse to provide the historical sweep.

So when Lowell writes a sonnet, he already knows that it’s not going to accommodate historical narratives very easily—which makes the sonnet’s aversion to history perfectly compatible with its history of adversion. But there’s also something about history itself which, for Lowell, is untouchable, even though he must learn to live in it.

Writing a sonnet can require some grappling with the long and cumbrous European history of the poetic form itself. Traveling to English from Italian, the sonnet loosens up dramatically in English, which lacks the availability of Italian rhymes. Sonnets by Wyatt, Wroth, Wordsworth, Meredith, Frost, McKay, and Brooks are closer to the language as it’s spoken than sonnets by Dante or Petrarch. The sonnet always arrives, in other words, with a lot of baggage—not the least of which is its co-emergence with early modern capitalism and colonialism in Europe.

Lowell struggles with the sonnet’s grandiosity, flattening its music out and grounding its images in material from “the abundance of reality.” He puts it this way at the of Notebook (1970):

My meter, fourteen-line unrhymed blank verse sections, is fairly strict at first and

elsewhere, but often corrupts in single lines to the freedom of prose. Even with this

license, I fear I have failed to avoid the themes and gigantism of the sonnet.

I have been thinking so far about the sonnet as a way of dramatizing Lowell’s discomfort with making history while learning to live in it. This is a predicament that, I think, is only more pressing for US artists today. Given the US influence in remaking the world within its own global framework, how can one shape that history from a position that is effectively inside it, complicit with it, part of its continuation? For Lowell, the sonnet, with its own elaborate history in poetry, becomes a convenient vehicle on which the poet can displace his anxiety about his position and privilege in American history.

For the humanities, grappling with the history of poetry can be an effective way of studying history writ large. So one question that came to me as I was writing this piece was not what the true facts are, but what the right forms might be. This could be the question that animates Rankine’s Citizen, too, as it situates everyday moments of racism within its “American lyric,” and Terrance Hayes’s American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, a sequence of 70 sonnets written immediately after the election of Donald Trump in 2016. To “touch” history might be to possess it, as a new national myth; it might be to touch it up, as an old national lie. But the process of learning to live in history, to deal with what happened honestly, is to embrace one’s own role—not in remaking the past, but in continuing to make a future.

Directors note: A few years ago, Clemson English MA alum Ron Rash generously spoke at a celebration for the 50th anniversary of the Clemson MA in English program.  I remember him saying something about how when he was a graduate student at Clemson, “people thought we were part of a cult, because we were always carrying books and reading.”  Well, reading is central to the Humanities, and it seems to have stood Ron in good stead.  In this review of his new book, Janet Maslin of the New York Times–the paper of record–describes Ron as “one of the best living American writers.”  This is Clemson Humanities Now.

(Director’s note: Maria Bose is assistant professor of media and cultural studies in the Clemson English department. Her current project is “Cinema’s Hegemony,” a cultural-materialist account of cinema’s primacy to an unfolding phase of Asia-led global political economy.) 

Midway through Age of Extinction (Paramount, 2014), Michael Bay’s fourth installment for the Transformers franchise’s live-action film series, robotics magnate Joshua Joyce (Stanley Tucci) mistakes amateur inventor Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg) and race car driver Shane Dyson (Jack Reynor) for “grease monkeys” in his Chicago facility. There, Joyce has recently authorized the Chinese manufacture of a fleet of Galvatrons: sentient, modular automobiles-cum-super-soldiers reverse engineered from the “living metal” out of which the Transformer robots are composed. Irked to discover two low-level technicians in his pristine showroom, Joyce challenges Yeager and Dyson to define the products on which, he believes, they are all at work. “What do you think it is that we make here?” the CEO asks. “We make poetry. We’re poets.” Later, Joyce learns that his outsourced Galvatrons lack “souls,” their corruption and insurgency implicated in Chinese assembly. Having modeled the robots on benevolent, democratic Autobot leader Optimus Prime, Joyce is baffled by their similarity to evil, authoritarian Decepticon leader Megatron. Faced with this discrepancy—between soulful poetry and corrupt machinery, American design and Chinese execution—Joyce’s metaphors begin to harden. “Simple coding. Algorithms! Math! Why can’t we make what we want to make, the way we want to make it?”

Age of Extinction’s lurking resentment at shifts in the global balance of power away from the US and toward China is nearly lost in the film’s explicit narrative of US-China collaboration. The American Joyce is volubly enamored of his Chinese associate Su Yueming (Li Bingbing), who defends him valiantly in the film’s final Hong Kong sequence. But read as a reflexive parable, Age of Extinction’s preoccupation with production’s shifting centers appears immanently self-theorizing and complexly historical, offering both an index of Bay’s frustrated “poetic” autonomy in co-producing the film with Jiaflix Enterprises and the China Movie Channel, and also a broad systemic critique of US hegemony’s decline in conjunction with a “rising China.” Age of Extinction opens with Yeager purchasing analog film projectors from a shuttered Texas movie theater where Optimus Prime lies in hiding, disguised as a semi-truck manufactured by the now-defunct American brand, Marmon. Walking past a poster for Howard Hawks’ El Dorado (Paramount, 1966), the theater owner laments the current state of cinema. “The movies nowadays, that’s the trouble,” the old man sighs. “Sequels and remakes, bunch of crap.” If Joyce articulates Bay’s anxiety that his “poetry” will, by dint of global media conglomeration, runaway production, and foreign-market pandering, be reduced to “crap,” then Yeager simultaneously locates the source of that anxiety in late-twentieth-century US deindustrialization and binds it to the film’s nostalgia for a contemporaneous era of American studio auteurism putatively immune to conglomerate oversight, new-media competition, and foreign-market pressure. Surprisingly, then, given the film’s outpouring of nationalist bombast, Age of Extinction is less neoliberal-imperial jingo than neo-protectionist post-imperial swansong, less a refutation of US hegemony’s unraveling than its strategic diagnosis. Age of Extinction’s moral and geopolitical lesson is that global industrialists like Joyce are ultimately responsible for disenfranchising hardworking Americans like Yeager—corporate hardliners who offshore jobs in the automobile sector to China and speed blue-collar American workers’ deskilling and redundancy in the advent of automation. The film is willing to risk these admissions—driven, in fact, to solicit a rigorous account of American declension and the breakdown of the liberal-democratic project—because they serve its corporate-existential stakes, which are, on the one hand, to align the fates of state and cinema by synchronizing its account of American decline with that of Hollywood’s progressive evanescence in an increasingly diversified global media complex and, on the other, to motivate that synchronization toward Bay’s and Paramount’s auteurist self-promotion.

Since Age of Extinction’s release, the US-China tension it registers has only escalated, fueled by a hawkish Trump administration bent on hobbling Chinese firms’ forays into European markets and on portraying Chinese authoritarianism as the single greatest threat to US democracy. Amid a prolonged trade war and an unprecedented global downturn triggered by the coronavirus pandemic, American CEOs like Joyce and Hollywood filmmakers like Bay have been castigated for ongoing collaboration with Beijing. The film’s underlying diagnosis of the “Chinese threat,” and its nostalgic appeal to the competitive and autonomous US industrial sector foreclosed by deindustrialization is thus entirely familiar. Across party lines, presidential candidates have called for US manufacturers to maximize native production. “We’re bringing it back,” Trump said at a Ford factory plant in Michigan, just earlier this year. “The global pandemic has proven once and for all that to be a strong nation, America must be a manufacturing nation.” That statement captures both the promise of closing America’s gaping trade deficit with China and the threat of global supply chains’ overexposure in Chinese markets increasingly susceptible to rolling shutdowns and political oversight.

But despite Trump’s longing for a new “golden age” of industrialization and his apparent willingness to confront China on matters of trade—in less than two years Trump has imposed sanctions and tariffs on Chinese imports, revoked Hong Kong’s special trade status, pressured European allies to ostracize Chinese firms, and offered inducements to lure investors away from China—manufacturing job-growth in America has barely kept pace with the total workforce. At the same time, and in the recent course of the pandemic especially, China’s export shares have risen, a testament to the indispensability, competitiveness, and innovation of the nation’s industrial base. And while there is evidence that many firms plan to relocate some or all of their manufacturing facilities away from China, there is also widespread concern that manufacturing itself is swiftly becoming less labor intensive, as low-tech industries transition to the automated and robotic systems for which China is the largest market.

At a moment of reckoning for American manufacturing, and the reassessment of just-in-time global supply chains, then, calls to divest from “Factory Asia” unfold ideological debates about the fate of the global political order. But these debates carry significance less in terms of the overblown contest between “American democracy” and “Chinese authoritarianism” (pace Trump, or Bay). Rather, their significance lies in the exfoliation of far subtler processes of hegemonic rebalancing involving America’s wary retreat from, and China’s equally wary advance upon, a vertiginous neoliberal system, as both nations confront the potential boons and perils of a return to—or the continuation of—an anachronistic state-led capitalism. More likely than serious geo-economic overhaul is the emergence of regional hegemonies ordered to suit the state’s immediate desire for market, political, and military supremacy (China seeks such supremacy in the Indo-Pacific; America plans to carve it out by further industrializing hubs in Mexico and Canada). Perhaps, then, it’s only a matter of time before we can “make what we want to make, the way we want to make it.” For now, it’s all still made in China.