"Poets have been writing about money and about capital for a long time.
"This distinction is significant: by “writing about money” I mean something like the poetry that deals with personal economy, with having and not having, observational accounts of possession and dispossession.
“Poetry about capital” designates, for me, an attempt to find a poetic that’s adequate to political economy and particularly the systematic characteristics of the circuits of capital, defined in the first instance as value in motion, a form of value which requires a certain life-world and set of relations to move and increase.
"This later is the poetry I’m most interested in, and committed to. And as I suggested, it is an ongoing poetic activity, as captured in exemplary fashion by Chris Nealon’s forthcoming book, The Matter of Capital, which traces this lineage and this struggle across the 20th century into the present.
"What must be striking for us on this occasion is thus not that such poetry exists but that we’re talking about it. As a matter of habit, this poetry is reflexively marginalized, dismissed, ignored — particularly as it tarries with reputedly utopian-slash-apocalyptic Marxism, so thoroughly discredited and allegedly so distant from the real world to which poetry remains obligated.
"This is true until something goes really wrong in the economy, crisis, catastrophe, and then we have these punctual events: “Poetry & Economics.”
"It’s not that poets are suddenly turning to this set of concerns — well, a few are, and they deserve our sympathy — but something more akin to the adage about a stopped clock being right twice a day. Except in this case the adage is stood on its head: the poetics of capital have been ticking away, and periodically the circuit of capital stops — and suddenly that poetry seems reasonable, relevant and timely. And in that way the poetics of capital is right twice a century.
"This momentary situation conforms exactly to the situation in the broader social sphere: the sudden sayability and intelligibility of certain ideas, certain positions that had seemingly been banished from polite conversation. Here I do not really mean the hysterical and symptomatic derangement of the word “socialism” — but the spectre of Marx, and more generally, the willingness to discuss capitalism as an open topic, as something with frailties and finitudes.
"This crisis, endlessly intertwined with the crisis of US hegemony, entered its terminal phase first with the political spasms following 9/11, and now with the economic collapse from which no real recovery is imaginable. But it is of an older vintage, and has been in motion since the signal crises of the declining rate of profit and the massive image-defeat of the Vietnam war, both around 1973. The belle époque of 1989-2001 provided a contingent and largely cosmetic diversion of this trajectory.
"It is ironic, therefore, that this is something like capitalism’s 1989. Not its historic end, but the discrediting of the idea at a global scale. It is no longer able to administer even its own most basic percepts. Consider, for example, the Geithner-Summers PPIP, which is the scheme for buying up what we have been calling “toxic assets.” The fundamental curiosity of this plan is its thoroughgoing admission that the price signal, the truth and virtue of capitalism (per no less than Friedrich Hayek), doesn’t work. Obviously “the free market" has required and benefited from endless regulation and tinkering, but it has always had the conviction at least to claim it believed in itself. PPIP forthrightly renounces the belief that the worth of commodities is set by the operations of the market place — capitalism’s sine qua non, without which it is hollowed out.
"How then can we return to the question of poetry? This is a particularly puzzling question when we are being told, not just poets but everyone, not to think structurally. Exemplary here is, say, Nassim Taleb and his Black Swan story. For a long time we have watched the ascent of quants in the world of finance — Katy will know more about this than I do. Even if we start with 1973, we can trace the lineage from Black-Scholes-Merton to John Meriwether’s “young professors” (first at Salomon and then at Long Term Capital Management) to David X. Ni’s Gaussian copula. And each one of these eventually fails catastrophically, and indeed is bound to. Taleb intuits this correctly, though his quasi-historical metaphysic is off: he thinks that because unprecedented things are unprecedented and still exist, precedent-based models — which they all turn out to be — should be abandoned.
"One of his mistakes is to think the failure of the quants is in their inability to foresee the unforeseeable. That’s not quite right. It turns out that the quants, with their increasingly complex modeling of the larger financial structure, are great dialecticians — their models don't simply fail, they help drive the financial system pitilessly toward that failure, toward the very conditions in which the models no longer work. So Taleb’s intuition is well-tuned in at least one way; this risk-pricing thing has to stop (though I would argue this is not simply because it’s dangerous to the financial system, but because it’s at heart a series of arbitrages which distribute wealth with increasing disparity). But Taleb himself is unable to think this thought at a truly structural level: he can’t depart the world of risk intrinsic to markets themselves, and ends up with what Chris Nealon calls “a theodicy of volatility, and a kind of apotheosis of the genre of financial advice-writing.” Taleb's account of financial risk as a transcendental truth that is always with us is historically inept and ideologically blindered; financial risk may we be inevitable within the present dispensation of commodity capitalism, but that dispensation had a beginning and will have an end. There are other structures.
"One of the ways in which poetry has been for a long while modeled is as a kind of humanism that can stand against the quants. But it must stand against the Talebs, too. That is to say, it should not be at the work of simply naming and counterbalancing some extraordinary distortion or swerve within the logic of capital’s value; it should be more prepared than the quants or Taleb to think structure, to decipher the value form and insist that it change.
"My suspicion is that poetry, with its unique linguistic position from which to think relations of parts-to-whole even as they transform themselves — what I call “structure in motion” — is well-positioned to think at the structural level, at the level of political economy, of value in motion, rather than the phenomenology of money (I actually take narrative to be better-adapted to that pursuit, and hip-hop too). Not that all poetry should turn to this structural thought, but that one shouldn’t be surprised when poetry does make such turns, and should see this as poetry’s way of being adequate to history, of being of its time, which is finally all that we might ask."