Ruth Jennison’s article “Combining Uneven Developments: Louis Zukofsky and the Political Economy of Revolutionary Modernism” attempts, in her words, to “explore the ways in which Objectivist poetry elaborates in aesthetic terms the economic and social concepts of twentieth- and twenty-first century political economists of uneven development” (146). Her primary argument is that, through paratactic aesthetic structures in which historical events and concepts are jumbled together, Zukofsky could comment on the current social and political environment of the Depression-era United States. She focuses primarily on close readings and analyses of “A”-8, “A”-6, and “Outline of a Book on American Art Design.”
Before looking closely at Zukofsky’s works proper, Jennison first has to explain the concept of “uneven development,” specifically in the Trotskyan vein: “Trotsky’s theory of combined and uneven development seeks to account for the dynamic of uneven development both within and between national/statist entities” (151). A simple explanation of “uneven development” is that nations develop in terms of economics and culture in widely varying ways from each other, but are interdependent. This forms the backbone of Jennison’s argument, that Zukofsky juxtaposing events across historical and cultural boundaries enabled a stark look at the 1930s.
In looking closely at “A”-8, Jennison points out that Zukofsky references Victorian-era historian, Henry Adams, Stalin in 1935, Native American wage-earners in 1648, and the broken-off expulsion of Jews that occurred in Brazil in 1655. After a lengthy discussion explaining the historical background and connotations of each of these seemingly-unrelated figures and events in history, Jennison explains: “In the form of the timeline, Zukofsky yokes uneven temporal and spatial developments, and the poetic proximity of 1648, 1655, and the (implied) 1930s delivers a comparative lesson about the uneven movements of global capital” (156). Through the parataxis in the poetry itself, Zukofsky has provided a message about capitalism in America in the Great Depression.
Similarly, Jennison looks at “A”-6 as an example of how uneven development in nations often manifests in the past, the future, and the present as interconnected, in that the present looking at the future will oftentimes subconsciously elevate the past. As she will eventually conclude, Zukofsky’s poetry proves this theory: “In the “Outline” to the Index and in “A,” Zukofsky paratactically presents both “archaic” and avant-garde forms not as a retreat from capitalist development but rather as a poetic sublation of its inner workings” (176-177). “A”-6 features a Chinese company in San Francisco advertising wives, that she reads as a commentary on Chinese “backwardness” (economically and culturally) compared to the United States, while paradoxically such a thing as selling wives is occurring within the United States proper. As Jennison puts it: “Zukofsky’s modernism intervenes at once against nostalgia for a retroactively installed premodern plenitude, more broadly, against a hegemonic ideology that would claim the progressive and the futural as the province of Western capitalism (159).
Jennison returns to “A”-8, this time in the form of three letters. One is written from an “ex-soldier” to the New York Times, declaring that he would die for Standard Oil, one is from Marx to his daughter Jenny, complaining about having company over in London, and one is from a Chinese publishing company that must refuse a manuscript because it would overshadow all future publications in that country.
In “Outline of a Book on American Art Design,” part of the work Index of American Design that Zukofsky wrote for the Works Projects Administration, Jennison points out that Zukofsky delineates different periods of American cultural and social development, that are simultaneously separate but inextricably linked, especially through the differing types of available capital. After explaining in great detail the Marxist implications for each of the overlapping time periods, with special emphasis on “handicraft” and its pre-Industrial labor and capital implication, Jennison posits a question, followed by her immediate interpretive answer:
Why does handicraft persist throughout and into this modernist’s present day, reappearing without exception as a still extant “Mode of Production”? In large part, it is because Depression era crises threw into relief the fault lines of American geographies of profit, scarcity, and oppression. In other words, a historical rupture occurred during and after which it became possible to conceive of the history of American capitalist development, class struggle, and forms of labor as expressing the deep tectonics of contradictory and interdependent developments (173).
Jennison’s reading of Zukofsky’s poetry seems to echo much of our expository reading on the Objectivists, especially in regards to their politically leftist positions. As opposed to other material on Zukofsky that I read and considered for this blog post which focused on the interpretations more of his form than of his content, Jennison really seems to categorize Zukofsky in the 1930s as very politically aware, although in keeping with “objectivism” and “sincerity,” and more so on the former of the terms, he does not provide an active commentary like perhaps Pound or Eliot did, but rather a clear look at the society he found himself living in. If we share Jennison’s reading of Zukofsky’s poetry as emblematic of uneven development, then it is small wonder that he broke with the early Modernists and their prescriptive right-wing political ideologies; Zukofsky, if read this way, wanted to point out the conflicts, causes, and social issues underlying the continually-advancing but devastated Great Depression era-United States.
A question or two:
- Is this reading of Zukofsky limited only to his passages that specifically (or even implicitly) mention historical elements? Are the Objectivists limited in their political positions to only the 1930s? What about the later renewed interest during the 1960s?
- Where are these leftist elements in the other poets we read? I believe the background reading we did suggested strong political undertones; is this matched in content? form?
Works Cited
Jennison, Ruth. “‘Combining Uneven Developments: Louis Zukofsky and the Political Economy of Revolutionary Modernism. Cultural Critique, vol. 77, 2011, pp. 146-179. MLA International Bibliography.
In response to your question, I think the Objectivists are, of course, motivated by the political environment of the Americas during this time, but the Objectivists did not define themselves as such–the label was placed on them. Thus, I think the poetics of Objectivism is not naturally linked to politics. Rather, these specific poets’ styles incorporate political perspectives, but Objectivism does not require political reflection.