Zukofsky's Historicism

The Louis Zukofsky Centennial Conference
Columbia University/Barnard College, New York
September 18, 2004

Girl: What is money?

Son: Clockwork in the dark. See, look around you: the universal equivalent that prevents the farmer from bringing the pig to market, that hides the ties between peoples—the time they put in on the things they make for themselves and for others. Did you work today? Did I? Our work is congealed in money, which grinds out the nightworker’s shift until he touches at least a crumb. . . .

Girl: I wish I knew something about the beginnings of these suburbs.

Son: A certain surgeon had a beautiful garden here. Here in New York, the grain sowed in the middle of August. They had a fruit called forerunners. The buildings have become morning glories of overnight. (He arches over her in the dance which now adds to the quiet of sleep about them).

—Louis Zukofsky, Arise, Arise (43-44)

No justice . . . seems possible or thinkable without the principle of some responsibility . . . within that which disjoins the living present, before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead, be they . . . victims of the oppressions of capitalist imperialism or any of the forms of totalitarianism. Without this non-contemporaneity with itself of the living present, without that which secretly unhinges it, without this responsibility and this respect for justice concerning those who are not there, of those who are no longer or who are not yet present and living, what sense would there be to ask . . . "where tomorrow?" "whither?"
—Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx (xix)

In 1998, after considerable delay, I visited the grave of Marx in Highgate Cemetery. As an event, it was a punctual occasion. We were scheduled to depart Gatwick at 2 PM, and the cemetery gates only opened at 11. There was an ancient attendant at the gate who, we had heard, was not averse to gratuities for services such as opening up a bit early. Allowing her to skim a bit of sustenance off Marx seemed only appropriate for a materialist, so we gave her five pounds and got in by 10:30. The cemetery itself was wildly corrupted and overgrown in late November. Look, here are the graves of George Eliot and Herbert Spencer, but where’s Marx? It turned out that Marx was not hard to find—turning a corner, we came upon a massive bust in the style of public monuments in the Eastern Bloc. "From Poland to Hungary to Romania," as Linton Kwesi Johnson wrote, the monuments had fallen and only this anachronism was left. One could only imagine the phalanxes of Russians, East Germans, Vietnamese, North Koreans making pilgrimages to the site, as well as the surveillance cameras located not far off recording their visits. Now there was only the deformed reminder of defunct politics, or so they would like us to think. But I was entirely moved. Hundreds of millions, literally, had worked and died for the form of liberation this monument represented, however co-opted and degenerate it had become. Then we had to get on our flight, and thus followed a hopeless rush across all of London that ended in our being booked out the next day. Not bad to have a day in London with nothing to do—all that came after owing directly to our detour at the grave of Marx.

Zukofsky’s work, I am going to claim, is a lifelong meditation on the horizon of liberation that was first understood in the class politics and theoretical framework of the Marxist tradition, and this is true even after the many moments in which those horizons were revised at crucial moments—the turn to Spinoza in "A"–9; to the family in "A"–11; to the everyday in "A"–12; to music throughout the second half of "A" and to language particularly in "A"–16, 22, and 23; and to a literary horizon that makes the historical seem merely an occasion to be gone beyond, as either particular or universal, in his reception—literally, Zukofsky is a poet who was influenced by Marxism in his youth, but went beyond it for modernist horizons. The implications of anti-historicist readings, however, go much farther than that. We can chart, here, two influential routes "beyond" history that are, without any doubt, offered by Zukofsky—but which are insufficient. The first aligns the horizon of the work’s completion ("Zukofsky is the only major modernist to have completed his long poem") with the great conversation; this is the reading represented by Robert Duncan’s neoplatonism, seen as a seminar in the sky where great souls hold forth unto eternity. The second takes the turn to language as Zukofsky’s literariness, and reads his swerve from any kind of ideality as the material instance of the work itself, a perpetual motion machine by which particulars are generalized as the kind of work literature does. Both readings are well founded in the text and have a range of implication, but both give up crucial aspects of how Zukofsky worked his materials as history and futurity. The first ignores the situatedness of literary production for an eventual overcoming that mystifies its origins; while the second positions language as the present in which it is produced. Both founder on the historical futurity Zukofsky constructed, as he shifted from one horizon to the next, in a staged presentation in which the manifest concerns of present language substitute for and overwrite the buried content of an historical past.

An alternative way to read Zukofsky may be to see his work as a self-generating, self-effacing instruction manual in how to read it—a kind of cybernetics in which the operating system is unzipped from a series of LZ compression packets, perhaps—while at the same time it updates and replaces superceded program languages, with the historical risk that certain ways of running the work may be irretrievably lost, turning into defunct code. In this analogy, Zukofsky offers, right from the beginning, a series of metalinguistic instructions for reading his work that are in turn modified and replaced as the work proceeds, but that continue to bear the underlying structure of the earlier systems (much as current computing architectures embed the history of their development for ever greater capacity and integration). This is a logic quite different than a Marxist-Hegelian dialectic of negation and overcoming toward a final horizon of resolution at the end of history; at a certain point, much like an innovative software developer or hardware engineer, Zukofsky abandons previous systems while preserving their general operational capacity. He shows us how to do this in the famous epochal turn of "A"–9, where the language of one system—the empirico-critical method of Marx—is refunctioned (not simply translated) into an Spinozan operating system based on "love," as we know. Since there is a deep convergence of the good to be redeemed by Marxism, in the opening of commodities to the labor and value congealed within them, and the love that, since the Symposium, is the most desirable form of that good, Zukofsky is performing a mode of deep overwriting, not simply an overthrow of a junked vocabulary. Given that crucial instruction into how a "horizon shift" works, Zukofsky performs a number of crucial revisions and substitutions as the poem proceeds. Indeed, we can imagine the entire structure of "A" to be, not a dialectical totality, but a construction that substitutes new horizons—languages and how to read them—for old, much like the deformed worker’s states of the Eastern bloc were taken over by global managerial operatives but still preserve both their empirico-critical organization and their even more basic historical residues.

Let me propose, then, a thumbnail sketch of the major form of "A" in which the Marxist-Hegelian dialectic, the mode of historical presentation from the work’s outset until its radical modification in "A"–9, is substituted and overwritten but also preserved as an undeniable component of the work as a whole—as a vehicle of its reception, in Zukofsky’s view. "A"–1, of course, puts in question of the historical meaning of the work of art, the St. Matthew’s Passion, written in 1729 but performed in 1928, "Thursday evening, the fifth of April, / The autos parked, honking" (1). Importantly, there were no autos in 1729; Zukofsky’s hermeneutics are grounded in modernity as the specific date of performance. A displacement occurs that is both an aesthetic experience and its historical undermining—in other words, the poet may have had an experience of pleasure and transcendence in the Passion, but outside are the beggars and the poor, the emerging reality of the Great Depression ("A country of state roads and automobiles, / But great numbers idle, shiftless, disguised on streets"; 5). Art and politics generate a method—not simply in responding to the rabble-rousers of the Left ("We need propaganda, the thing’s / becoming a mass movement"; 3) but one that aligns the pre-modern, millennial horizons of Bach with aesthetic experience more generally as revolution. No doubt that Zukofsky, as he does in numerous early poems, sees his art, like that of the Surrealists, "in the service of the revolution"—but deferred toward a futurity that was there all along in the work.

The engine of deferral is the negativity of context—in "A"–1 this is the horizon shift between the experience within the boundaries of the work of art and without it. The next section of the poem risks its coherence as art, even so, in trying to extend the poem’s original motivation. Though "A"–2 through 5 are the weakest parts of the poem, they are interesting in their attempts to find substitutes out of personal experience for what may turn out to be, but is not yet, history—as Zukofsky writes, this part of the poem is unsure of its horizon, having achieved "what distinction?" With "A"–7, however, the quotidian is redeemed at the point where art and history converge in an anticipatory illumination. Labor is the dance of figurative sawhorses by the stoop as the sign creaks "To Let," and we are within the province of an indexical history of the 1930s, projecting revolution as redeemed labor. Now the empirico-critical method can advance, through the traces of whatever Zukofsky means by the "fugue" as poetic form, to the redemptive horizon of Marxist teleology in "A"–8, while the crucial move from material to theoretical poetics in "A"–9 (first half) overwrites Marx’s theory of commodities onto the material substrate of historical event. Such a logic of substitution and overwriting permits Zukofsky to move from art to everyday life to history to theory, and that is only the beginning. "A"–9 (second half)’s overwriting of Marx by Spinoza, from de-reification to love, is thus not the privileged epochal divide of the poem, the overturning of teleology for immanence, as it was prefigured by many such "horizon shifts" already. (For "love," we may imagine a dissociation of Socrates’ claim "love is of something" in the Symposium into two traditions, one founded on "love is" as neoplatonic and eternal, the other on "of something" as continually productive of material language. The horizon shift of "A"–9 thus would separate and recombine two halves of a dissociation.) The difference is that Zukofsky, beginning with "A"–9 (second half), is beginning to push away from the normative dialectic of positing/negation/sublation—the historicist reading of Hegel’s Logic typical of the American Left in the 1930s—toward horizons that cannot be predicted by method. In this crucial move, Zukofsky modified the politics of Marxism that he shares with his time and shows a crucial way out—how to posit a horizon in which material privation is overcome without becoming mired in sclerotic party or state formations that would take another forty years to come undone. Not exactly permanent revolution, but Zukofsky’s cunning of history re-maps the horizon of Marxism apart from its normative vocabulary.

The poem is well on its way to understanding its development in terms of a logic of substitution and overwriting. "A"–10, as literally Popular Front and anti-fascist as Louis Aragon’s Front Rouge, abuts the familial intransitivity of "A"–11; both overwritten by the durational presentism of "A"–12, whose length duplicates that of the poem to that point, substituting its own a-formalism for the highly formal methods that preceded it. What happens in the subsequent movements of "A", however, both preserves and displaces this logic; while a logic of paradigm shift continues at specific epochal divides (particularly in the highly contrastive breaks at "A"–16, 21, and 24), Zukofsky’s "overwriting" becomes more systemic than dialectic and might be analogized to the replacement of one computer operating system by another, a rescripting at minute levels of linguistic code. The resulting condition of "music" is hardly that; Zukofsky’s feint toward the aesthetic, an example of the cunning of poetry if there ever was one, masks and encrypts while it preserves and extends the historical method of the earlier poem at every turn. Of course, there are numerous specific historical references—"John to John-John to Johnson" comes to mind, playing history against language to aesthetic effect. But the more encompassing poetic strategy of uniting history and the aesthetic resolves in the specific terms of displacement of the poem’s language, as in the cryptic substitution of "A"–16’s paradoxical "an / /inequality //// wind flower" (376). This poem begs a reading as both a synecdoche for the entire work, its punctual realization in the middle of durational unfolding, and as a specific negotiation of its immanent terms. In other words, Zukofsky is trying to show how major form is condensed and distributed in the minute workings of the poem’s language, leading to the stated goal of realizing the end of the poem in the present in "A"–22: "an era / any time / of year" (508). In "A"–16, the general form of history (as force, "wind") is conjoined with a specific beautiful thing ("flower") in a way that it is predicated on an inequality. That inequality is precisely the historical, not just the language that substitutes for it; this is what the poem wants to redeem. If, by analogy, "major form" in more general senses—totality, history—is distributed in the particulars of language in dialectical interplay, he has restored the method of "A"–9 through an equivalence of "love" with historical experience. As Marxist, he comes to occupy the punctual "day" of modernity, perhaps, but it is only through the overwriting of history as the nondurational presentness of language. The historical performance of "A"–1 looks forward to the poem’s culminating moment, the potential performativity of "A"–24; just so, the poem begins and ends with an insistence of itself as a historical occasion, but in the first instance limited by context and in the second, prospective and unbounded.

This prospective ending is also a form of loss of that which historical, a retrospective aspect of the "horizon shift" that allows a reading the poem as equally loss as the positivity of "love." Just so, Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx is an overwriting of failed redemption as loss through logics of substitution that preserves the original content of Marxist method—in a way, he claims, that redeems the latent potential congealed in party and state bureaucracies. After the fall of the Eastern Bloc, for Derrida, it is imperative to read Marx once more—to show that one has always been a Marxist. This is literally tenable if one considers the content of a specific intellectual milieu as formative of one’s subsequent projects as what it means to write historically. So for Zukofsky’s 1930s, the New Americans’ 1940s, Derrida’s 1950s, my own generation’s 1960s: each inaugurate a long duration of encoding and transcoding that preserve their horizons, through logics of substitution and overwriting that are anything but teleological. While there is no time here to develop the full implications of Derrida’s reading of Marx for a reading of Zukofsky, a strong parallel exists—not only in terms of substitution and overwriting, but in an ethical relation common to their manner of presentation (and to a priority of presentation over representation as well). This can be seen in the specific terms of Derrida’s recovering of Marx’s language in The Eighteenth Brumaire, where the material content of language gives up the ghost of futurity by means of its overcoming: "It will exceed the form, it will break out of the clothes, it will overtake signs, models, eloquence, mourning. Nothing there will be any longer an affected mannerism, giving itself airs: no more credit and no more borrowed figure" (115). Revolution exceeds le mot juste in Marx and Zukofsky; that which is poetic in politics and art opens up the materials towards a larger horizon.

It is here that Zukofsky and Derrida are joined at the hip—in seeing any specific language in relation to that which it substitutes for and overwrites. For Zukofsky, from the beginning of his work, what is overwritten is not only the truth of experience, as redeemed in a Marxist critique of reification, but the lives of those who have suffered and gone before. The unfolding of Marxist critique always occurs in Zukofsky’s work proximate to an act of mourning; in the early "A", for the dead as present in life, figured "the trainmen wide awake, calling / station to station, under earth" (4), but also for the universal death that leads to eschatology ("it’s a hard world, anyway / not many of us will get out of it alive"; 22). The final conjoining of Marxism and mourning at the poem’s end, thus, confirms a crucial aspect of Zukofsky’s historicism: that the moment of substitution and overwriting is a moment of loss, and that the redemption of the material will only occur with the absence of the loved. In "A"–24, the revival of the 1930s context of Zukofsky’s play Arise, Arise as one of the movement’s four subtexts (written in 1934; published in Kulchur in 1962; and reissued with "A"–24) speaks directly to this conjoining of millennium and loss. The play itself is a dream vision "after death" in which the best selves of the protagonists, family members and medical staff at a New York hospital perform their relations to each other in dreamtime, "as if" in eternity and the here-and-now. "Girl: You know, it’s your birthday. / Son: I never had a birthday till my mother died" (10). The figure of music, everywhere the synecdoche of Zukofsky’s work, rises and fades at the entrances and exits of the scenes. The drama is the mystery of the revolution: both desire for futurity and mourning—responsibility, in Derrida’s words—for those who are either no longer here or not yet to be. The punctual moment of redemption is eternal, but in no simply traditional or neoplatonic sense. Literally, it’s not here, as that desire and absence that motivated Zukofsky’s politics and art from the first moments of his project.

Of twentieth century poets, Charles Olson and Louis Zukofsky have the most to say to "we moderns" about the nature of historical experience (while Pound may have inaugurated the modern historicist epic, there is arguably less in his work "for use"; the radio speeches are more of interest as historical)—Olson, for his grasp of the lived experience of historical being, but Zukofsky for his working of history into a form of art that will transcode the specific terms of its occasions. Reading loss and futurity in the form of "A"—as Derrida does in Marx’s writings—is both a mode of reading and a construction, of the futurity of the 1930s and Zukofsky’s experience of loss, as a lesson in liberation.

[Home Page]