Mutating Axes: Unsettling Form

If the becoming of a revolution and the subsequent christening of its aftermath set limits on what can be thought, then what can be thought about time seems to have gone through at least two important transformations—Kant’s Copernican Revolution and the birth of industrial capitalism.  Each event appears to work in tandem with the other to mark a shift in the fundamental categories of modern subjectivity.

The Copernican Revolution reversed the idea that thought and sensation conform to the external world. The external world conforms to the subject, insofar as space and time are the forms of human intuition—Kant’s fundamental insight.  Capitalism converted value into socially necessary labor time.  Surplus value, capitalism’s supreme invention according to Marx, is what you get when labor time exceeds what is socially necessary. 

Consider then, the following maxim: “Thoughts without content are empty, and intuitions without concepts are blind.” If conceptual sight depends on time as a form of intuition, then what can be more invasive than capitalism’s conversion of time into surplus value?  The very intuition that structures thought gets wrenched from the subject and put to work for the capitalist.

 As Joshua Clover notices, in the autumn of capitalism’s history, time appears to have gone through another transformation.  Clover considers how to read Marx’s general formula of capital—M-C-M’ ( the movement of money to commodity to more money)—within the context of financial capitalism.  Clover’s argument starts with financial capital’s impact on the organic composition of capital—constant capital (capital put in machines, technology etc.) rises while variable capital (capital put in labor) decreases.  When this occurs, says Clover, something crucial happens to time when C in the M-C-M’ formula changes.  He  states, the “mutation M-M’…turns out to be monogram of Autumn, of finance capital as such...[I]t can be seen easily  that the removal of C is always the subtraction of time, when one recalls that the commodity par excellence is that of labor power, the value of which is measured in time.” (42)  According to Clover, the “social logic of Autumn” becomes the transmutational process of the temporal converting to the spatial.  (43) This social logic manifests in literature. 

Ben Lerner’s Mean Free Path, insofar as it radicalizes form into seemingly null category, provides choice material for us to explore Clover’s concept at its limit. The “ceaseless internalization of labor time as world space…cannot be grasped even symptomatically as narrative…poetry [is] better situated to grasp the transformations of the era.”(49)  Perhaps, then, when Mean Free Path appears to explode form as such, what is in fact occurring is an incessant transformation of the temporal and the spatial. Where the breaking of logical succession permeates the text, the larger canvass of a  dreamscape operates to thematize individual breaks in thought.  Here we have poetry moving in two opposing directions—toward formalization and deformalization.   But when one considers these poles dialectically, spatiality  (the actual separation or interruption of lines on the page) becomes the middle term which mediates formalization and its opposite.  

The dialectic becomes clear when we read, “I decided I would come right out and say it/ Into a hollow enclosure producing/ The aural illusion that we are in a canyon/ They call this an experience of structure/ Or a cave.  If it weren’t for Ari/ In the literature./ It has to do with predicates/ But it is…” (45)  The spatial organization of the lines permits multiple readings that bend particular temporal trajectories of successive ideas.  Succession is mutated by spatial arrangement.  For example, we can read “I decided I would come right out and say it into a hollow enclosure producing the aural illusion that we are in a canyon.  They call this the experience of structure.”  We can also read "I decided I would come right out and say it into a hollow enclosure producing the aural illusion that we are in a canyon or a cave.  If it weren’t for Ari, but it is.”  However we read the passage, space becomes the arbiter of understanding.   Perhaps this double movement reveals the very symptom of late capitalism noticed by Clover—“time is colonized as if it were space.”  (45)