–Abigail Hoffman, “Barclays [Bank] and the Fear of the Unknown,” Euromoney, 2007

Since Marx’s famous description of the talking commodity, we are accustomed to seeing economic forms brought to life. It is less common, however, to see such a form given life only to be put to death—yet this is what we find in the name for a contract on a real estate loan, a mortgage, which comes from the French for “dead pledge.” Trying to understand why this particular contract should take on such a mortal cast, the sixteenth-century jurist Sir Edward Coke explained, “It seemeth that the cause why it is called mortgage is, for that it is doubtful whether the Debtor will pay at the day limited such summe or not, & if he doth not pay, then the Land…is taken from him for ever, and so dead to him upon condition, &c. And if he doth pay the money, then the pledge is dead as to the Tenant.”¹ The mortgaged property exists in an ontologically perilous realm, alive to one but not another, rising from the grave and returning to life as it changes hands.  What is it about the real estate loan that makes all its paths lead to death?

The connection between borrowing and burying is encrypted in the etymology of the word “mortgage,” but the language of horror has also been manifestly present in contemporary representations of the ongoing financial and credit crises. From the ubiquitous “zombie banks” to muckraker Matt Taibbi’s description of Goldman Sachs as a “great, blood-sucking vampire squid,” a discourse of the gothic, the uncanny, and the terrifying is itself the specter haunting late capitalism. In this essay, I argue that this discourse does not merely reflect the anxiety and fear associated with current economic volatility, but is rooted in fundamental transformations in the economy itself: specifically, the financialization of credit markets and the power of securitized debt to penetrate the very fabric of daily life. To understand the increasing inextricability of horror and securitized credit, I turn to a text that brings them explicitly together: the 2009 horror film Drag Me to Hell (dir. Sam Raimi), in which the standard tropes of the horror genre are repurposed to represent the emerging horrors of our dangerous new economic order.² In Raimi’s film, I’ll show, the formal mechanisms of suspense become an index of the somatic tolls of risk; the visual excesses of gore are now the signs of financial contagion and toxicity. Like the characterization of complex financial derivatives as “Frankenstein’s monsters,” Raimi’s film draws on the traditions of horror to describe a new kind of terror—the deadliness of financialized debt and credit crisis.

In offering a surprisingly nuanced representation of the contemporary financial economy, Drag Me to Hell also allows us to track larger historical transformations in both markets and culture. I want to make two related arguments concerning these changes. First, unlike eighteenth-century novels of credit, early-twentieth-century financial panic novels, and a long tradition of horror-genre economic allegories, Drag Me to Hell refuses either to contain economic anxiety or to imagine a restored calculus for accountability. Second, I see this refusal as a consequence of a fundamental shift in the relationship between credit and financial markets, particularly the introduction of commodified risk into the credit transaction. I read the film’s divergence from the above generic forebears as a response to historical transformations in markets and their attending ideologies; Drag Me to Hell is in this sense both a representation and an effect of the contemporary credit economy. Dialectically situated between symptom and depiction, Drag Me To Hell is able to critique, rather than resolve, the economic contradictions it describes. In doing so, it suggests that the collapse of credibility and mutuality in the economy also entails a crisis in the ways culture is able to write—and underwrite—economic ideology.

In particular, I argue that Drag Me to Hell’s correlation of credit and debt with horror marks a shift in—indeed, constitutes a rejection of—the long-standing and seemingly intractable ideology of credit. Credit has long been understood as a salutary economic form, associated with communality, interdependence, and trust. Although indebtedness has often been represented as a hellish or shameful condition, credit typically seems “an extension of mutual aid” and thus “an extension of human society,” as David Graeber puts it in his magnum opus Debt: The First 5000 Years—or, as Richard Dienst suggests in his recent The Bonds of Debt, by presuming an exchange between trusting equals, credit enables “the purest, most transparent…form of mutual recognition.”³ According to most critical accounts, literary representations of credit likewise reassure economic actors that the social relationships on which the credit contract depends are equitable and stable. In terms that mirror Brook Thomas’s influential account of realism and the “promise of contract,” for instance, Jennifer Baker tells us that seventeenth-century American writers and thinkers saw the risks associated with credit money as “a means to build … communities and foster social cohesion,” defining communities by “soliciting … commitment.”⁴ The cultural forms of the emergent credit economy not only represented credit as a socially salutary economic form but also were, in Ian Baucom’s words, part of “a mutual and system-wide determination to credit the existence of imaginary values.”⁵ The realist novel—whose historical emergence was concomitant with the development of those new forms of paper credit Marx called “fictitious capital”—has been seen as particularly crucial in supporting and sustaining the credit economy; Mary Poovey has influentially argued that the novel “helped make the system of credit and debt usable and the market model of value familiar.”⁶ Itself a “a creature of credit,”⁷ realistic fiction taught economic subjects to accept the uncertainties of an economy dependent on credit: to confidently lend money out and expect to receive it back with interest; to “accept the deferral that was essential to credit…without feeling imperiled by risk,” making possible the faith and credulity on which the modern economy depended.⁸

Much of the criticism on ekphrastic poetry, or poetry that takes visual art as its subject, focuses on a putative rivalry between the visual and the verbal arts. W.J.T. Mitchell provides a helpful summary of this long argument by surveying the responses of different historical periods to the relationship between these “sister arts.”  He describes an ongoing pendulum swing between ekphrastic fear and ekphrastic hope, with ekphrastic indifference falling in between (162). Some writers, he suggests, have responded to the otherness of the visual arts with an anxious call that the borders of the two media be patrolled and that each set of artists stick to what they do best, refraining from imitation or cross-pollination.  Others, he claims, have imagined writing and visual art that challenge their distinctiveness from other forms with the goal of achieving an undivided aesthetic utopia.

Young’s choice of Basquiat as a central subject might simply mark this as a work, perhaps one characteristic of a larger period, of ekphrastic hope.  As an artist working in mixed media, Basquiat rarely holds language separate from visual imagery—his early graffiti and his later paintings have elements of both.  Thus, Basquiat routinely blurs the line between writing and drawing.  Nor does Young, who plays with typography throughout his book and conceives the collection’s structure by analogy with a remixed record, uphold a strict division among the arts. A primary characteristic of Young’s ekphrasis is the incorporation into the poems of text that appears on Basquiat’s canvases.  To Repel Ghosts is by no means a book that insists on division.

To see To Repel Ghosts as hopeful about aesthetic union does not move us far beyond assertions about our increasingly visual culture or calls for poetry to borrow some of that popularity.  On the other hand, to consider how Young’s ekphrasis works against a central convention of the lyric, what Mutlu Blasing calls “virtual common subjectivity,” is a better way of getting at the ghost, that presence that seems both necessary and irritating to the poems (51).  This requires looking at ekphrasis not, as Mitchell does, as a minor genre, but instead considering it as a technique employed by poets within the lyric tradition.  As Blasing has argued, lyric depends more than other genres on creating the feeling of a speaker’s intention.  Readers need to feel that there is a subjective consciousness at work and play in the poem in order to go along as lyric pushes language closer to nonsense (29). In its reliance on the speaking subject, the lyric poem creates a feeling that the reader is eavesdropping, even as it frustrates that feeling of closeness to the speaker.  The intimacy of this situation, with the reader witnessing the movements of the self as it reflects upon itself, leads to the reader’s identification with the speaker.  Blasing’s “virtual common subjectivity” identifies as a central feature of the lyric the collapsing of boundaries between the self that articulates and the one that perceives, making them at least temporarily one subject.

However, ekphrasis disrupts identification in several ways.  While lyric fashions a subjective speaker and reflects on her qualities, ekphrasis extends outward from the self (as the Greek prefix ek- suggests) to the painting on the wall or the half-factual, half-imagined person who made it. While lyric can be understood as overheard soliloquy, ekphrasis often employs apostrophe, asking questions directly of the work of art, questions that will never receive any answers.  While lyric is most concerned with the enlarged moment, ekphrasis makes the passing of time an issue by commenting on the frozen stillness of the image in the midst of a dynamic world. The feeling of the writer being pulled inward by lyric while simultaneously pulled outward by the presence of the work of art is not only characteristic of To Repel Ghosts, but reveals something larger about the role of ekphrasis in contemporary poetry, its useful resistance to lyric subjectivity.  Looking at ekphrasis in this way can help us to see it as another in a series of projects to undermine or complicate the centrality of self in the lyric.  Other contemporary poets might achieve these ends by challenging the coherence of an “I” or by exposing it as a linguistic construct.  Ekphrastic poems undermine the “I” by knocking it out of its central position, where it might otherwise seem confidently poised at the center of its own universe.  This is one of the reasons that ekphrastic poems are often suffused with doubt about how they see and what they know.

I love Miéville’s sentences because they are simultaneously beautiful and political. I love them because their aesthetic power is that of a stylistic intervention into the idiom and ideology of fantasy as it is transmitted from J.R.R. Tolkien to George R.R. Martin. I love them because, especially in Miéville’s 2004 novel Iron Council, they intervene in that genealogy with a toolkit borrowed in part from the Cormac McCarthy of the baroquely existential Blood Meridian of 1985, even as they betoken the barer life of sentences in McCarthy’s 2006 bestseller The Road. I love them because in all of this they claim style as a locus of contemporaneity.

Miéville is a peculiarly contemporary creature. Born in 1972 and raised in late twentieth-century London, his contemporaneity is not only generational but also generic. In a recent Guardian profile, Miéville himself confesses to feeling like he became “‘exemplary of a moment’” in the early 2000s, when the generically hybrid mode known as the “New Weird” emerged. As Justine Jordan puts it in that profile, the New Weird was known for “dark, politically aware urban visions that explicitly rejected the consolatory, escapist strain established by Tolkien.” This anti-Tolkien strain streams visibly through the novels for which Miéville is best known to date: the Bas-Lag trilogy, which includes Perdido Street Station (2000), The Scar (2002), and Iron Council (2004). Often seen as Miéville’s anti-Lord of the Rings, this trilogy represents a mix of dark fantasy and politicized steampunk that brings together the Victorian novel, Lovecraftian horror, Melvillean maritime adventure, the Marxist marriage plot, and the American Western. As with his more recent fiction—the comically apocalyptic Kraken (2010), for example—these novels are the products of a socially sprawling and politically creative imagination, not to mention the imaginative actions of a citizen who at one point ran for Parliament as a Socialist.¹

Even more, Miéville’s fiction reveals a novelist in love with excavating and exploring the modernity that he denounces Tolkien for avoiding in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. “In opposing what he called the Robot Age,” insists Miéville in a 2000 interview with the International Socialism Journal, “Tolkien counterposes it with a past that of course never existed. He has no systematic opposition to modernity—just a terrified wittering about ‘better days.’” This terrified wittering is meant to soothe readers disturbed by the onslaught of modernity in the form of world wars, political revolutions, unceasing technological developments, and widespread socioeconomic injustice. “In Tolkien,” says Miéville, “the reader is intended to be consoled by the idea that systemic problems come from outside agitators, and that decent people happy with the way things were will win in the end. This is fantasy as literary comfort food. Unfortunately, a lot of Tolkien’s heirs—who may not share his politics at all—have taken on many tropes that embed a lot of those notions in their fantasy.”

One of the most interesting features of Miéville’s critique of Tolkien’s “comfort food” is that it focuses not merely on fantasy conventions of storytelling such as the happy ending in which decent people are victorious, or the character system in which the outsider is evil (and evil is therefore always from the outside), but also on style. In a 2002 essay for The Socialist Review, Miéville continues his argument against the conservative conventionality of Tolkien, adamantly maintaining that The Lord of the Rings is both a “fairyland version of genetic determinism” and “a conservative hymn to order and reason—to the status quo.” Crucially, however, he also locates Tolkien’s conservatism in his anti-modern style. Tolkien “deliberately tried to sound antique and ‘epic,’” Miéville contends. “Clichés constantly snuffle up to us like moronic dogs. Laughter comes in ‘torrents,’ brooks ‘babble,’ and swords never fail to ‘flash.’ The dialogue sounds faintly ridiculous, like opera without music. Even 50 years ago this cod Wagnerian pomposity was stilted and clumsy. ‘Fey he seemed,’ says J.R.R.—in Middle Earth, rare the clause is that reversed isn’t.”

First, though, a restatement of what I was doing in my essay. The piece had two aims, namely to advocate for the addition of computational methods to our critical repertoire and to give a sample of recent computational work of the sort I find useful. I mention these goals up front because I think some of Rosen’s criticisms follow from the failure (mine, to be sure) to specify exactly what my essay was and was not doing and arguing. So to be clear: it was an argument for methodological expansion, especially for those of us working with contemporary sources, and a high-level synopsis of the results of that expansion.

Rosen raises three main points, considered here in roughly the order in which his essay presents them.

1. It is possible to misinterpret data.

On this point I agree entirely. It is not only possible but inevitable that we can and will make mistakes as we produce and interpret quantitative results. If what’s wanted is a method that’s proof against error, we’ve never yet found one and I’m sure we never will. To this I would add only that the same is true of the methods we’ve long employed, which are certainly riddled with errors of fact, logic, and interpretation. Neither I nor anyone else argues that newer methods should be held to a lower standard. But neither should new techniques be required to meet standards that we quite rightly do not demand of our existing work.

But here I am perhaps letting myself off too easily. Rosen’s complaint isn’t only that quantitative results can be misinterpreted but that I did, in fact, misinterpret some of the data I presented. Specifically, he claims that the unexpectedly “diversely outward looking” landscape of American fiction circa 1850 that I detected by way of geolocation extraction collapses on closer inspection into both logical error and simple confirmation bias. But the issue is largely explained by a difference of understanding of the phrase “diversely outward looking,” which Rosen reads as a synonym for “broadminded” but which I used without the implied moral valence to mean, well, outward looking in diverse ways.

In support of his claim, Rosen, made of sterner stuff than I, reads Joseph Cobb’s Mississippi Scenes, in which he finds references to slaves and slavery in connection with Africa, concluding that because these scenes describe American issues, their references to Africa are either misleading or irrelevant. On this point I’m afraid we simply disagree, and for two reasons. First, the ways we use place to frame issues of origin or belonging and to construct related metaphors matters deeply. If slaves are described as sons of Africa rather than as sons of the South, for example, that’s an important part of how the institution of slavery, domestic race relations, and the United States’ place in the world were and are constructed. It doesn’t mean, of course, that every mention of Africa (or anywhere else) indicates a deep investment in that location, but patterns of usage and attention do matter. If forty percent of the named locations used in U.S. fiction of the mid-nineteenth century fall outside the United States (as is indeed the case), that fact strikes me as tremendously significant, not because each and every occurrence is especially important, but because such pervasive use of foreign places tells us something new and unexpected about the imaginative geography of the period.

This in turn raises my second point, namely that what’s interesting about corpus-level work is what it reveals about exactly these broad patterns and their evolution over time.  If we really want or need to understand Cobb in detail, we should read Cobb. Doing so will tell us far more about Mississippi Scenes than any computational work likely ever will. If we want to understand place in the literary production of the mid-nineteenth century, on the other hand, we have a choice: we can do it relatively quickly through a combination of text mining, selective close reading, and historical and theoretical contextualization (not all of which was possible in my few hundred words of synopsis), or we can spend most of our careers repeating our approach to Cobb across the remaining texts written in 1851 and hope that someone else will take up the project for 1852, 1853, 1854, and so on. Each approach will be better on some issues and weaker on others. The point isn’t that one or the other of these choices is the right one, but that there is indeed a choice (or, if you prefer, a matter of emphasis and extent) involved, one with what should be obvious benefits and costs on both sides.

The rise of American conservatism, as James Scott has argued, is reflected in mainstream Hollywood films of the past thirty years such as The Right Stuff (1983), the Rambo series (1982-2008), and The Terminator franchise (1984-2009).¹ As a corporate machine, the Hollywood studio system creates these tributes to American rugged individualism and the triumph of free-market ideology to yield vast profits. Simultaneously, however, these decades have produced a new form of popular independent film seemingly with the very different aim of offering diverse, global perspectives that seek to challenge American cultural insularity. Taiwanese-American director Ang Lee embodies this new independent film by blending diasporic cultural alignments, political resistance, and gender swerving with striking cinematography and American screenwriting. While directing box-office hits, Lee has made a career as an independent artist who can put an avant-garde flourish on traditional Hollywood fare, whether as director of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), Hulk (2003), or Brokeback Mountain (2005). But throughout this same period, Lee and his creative and business partner James Schamus have increasingly envisioned their films within the structures and demands of mainstream corporations. The neoliberal endorsement of individual free agents, global free enterprise, and evolved capitalism characterizing Rambo: First Blood also typifies—both thematically and, more unexpectedly, formally—Lee’s and Schamus’s films. Looking at Lee’s cinematography and Schamus’s screenwriting, we can see a studio use its “alternative” vision as a way to identify and uphold their valuable brand within the international contemporary economy, even bolstering this corporate identity with Schamus’s performative management style.

Take the nine-minute Chosen (2001), Lee’s short film for BMWFilms.com.² A sophisticated driver escorting a Tibetan child-monk from a city dock to suburbia skillfully avoids thugs driving far less elegant, resilient, or stable cars: a wobbly Jeep Grand Cherokee fishtails (recall that pesky rollover problem?), a Mercedes and Dodge Neon are smashed up, while the BMW zooms safely away. Upon delivering the boy to the authentic monks, the driver opens a tiny gift containing an Incredible Hulk bandage, cheekily making a product-placement for Lee’s next film.³ By purchasing an elegant, technically superior BMW—“The Ultimate Driving Machine”—a debonair commuting parent can experience a more exciting, cosmopolitan life while protecting their own “chosen” cargo in the backseat (which is also why, as a supplemental testimonial, Lee’s son plays the buckled-up child-monk). We might note too that the title “Chosen” aligns various types of exceptionalism: as Lee puts it, “I like that title, ‘Chosen,’ whether it’s the chosen little Buddha, or the chosen driver, or the chosen car.”⁴ What he likes is symbolically aligning the consumer choice to buy a BMW with a political decision to support Tibetan sovereignty through the driver’s decision to save the “little Buddha.” By linking the Tibetan struggle for independence, American luxury consumption, artistic filmmaking, and a powerful European brand, the film promotes globalization beyond BMW’s mandate, implying that indirect, effective support of Tibetan autonomy can mutually benefit producer and consumer alike.⁵

More unusual than its ideological claims is the film’s sophisticated alignment of its formal devices with this familiar rhetoric of joint profitability. Lee instructed the musical editor to compose a hybrid piece combining traditional Tibetan music with classical baroque music, the latter deliberately evocative of the German aesthetic tradition and alluding to the elegance of BMW cars. We learn that certain East/West fusions can be exquisite, a veiled slight to the other kinds of East/West amalgams with which BMW contends for market share (Lexus, Acura, and other Asian brands modeling their less expensive products on European luxury cars). From a visual perspective, by turning the car chase into a finely choreographed quadrille that uses the full depth of the mise-en-scène—most other car chases look entirely two-dimensional in comparison—the film not only implies that BMWs can outmaneuver Jeeps and Mercedes, but that BMWs and their drivers are able to perceive their worldly situation from an altered, more wide-ranging perspective. Demonstrating this aesthetic and symbolic space, one striking scene first shows the cars chasing one another around shipping containers from the perspective of the baffled drivers: perplexed mice scurrying around the maze of late capitalist logistics (figure 1). In the next shot, however, Lee suddenly provides us with a different, aerial perspective, revealing the BMW and its driver effortlessly winding through the maze while the other cars blindly attempt to trail them (figure 2). A literally shifted perspective—from lateral to aerial—suddenly opens up an entirely new vision and understanding of the car chase, as we begin to understand that we can best maneuver through the thorny contemporary universe of global commodity purchases and political subversion in a BMW. More generally, through this quick change in visual perspective the scene opens up a newly perceived space that aligns precisely with the position Lee’s films seek. Previously unrecognized connections between child Buddha, hired driver, and luxury product, and thus between world politics, corporate firms, and commodities, become newly discernable and desirable through this freshly seen space.

Figure 1. Chosen, dir. Ang Lee.

Figure 2.

Chosen is a commercial, albeit a particularly sophisticated and well-crafted one, and we expect it to express corporate ideologies. But this film’s narrative-political homologies and formal perspectival tropes—that is, shifts in perspective opening up different spaces—illustrate a widespread story extending beyond film-commercials to millennial indie films’ collaboration with the business world. Instead of operating in opposition to Hollywood’s financial demands, such films reveal a screenwriter’s and a director’s vision not only merging with the corporate bottom line but articulating and visualizing a newly imagined corporate subjectivity in which companies locate value and profit in perspectivalism and pluralism. Formal synergy between outlaw, corporate benefactor, multinational producer/screenwriter, and an arty, diasporic director, symbolized here through the cultivation of BMWs as progressive commodities, marks Lee’s films, providing a fascinating case study of neoliberal independent—what I am calling neo-indie—filmmaking at the millennium. The neo-indie film instantiates a political economic model in which, to quote David Harvey, “the social good will be maximized by maximizing the reach and frequency of market transactions” and the global corporation is the inevitable institution for such expansion.⁶ In the best of these films, the aesthetic shifts, cinematography, screenwriting, and score reflect a precise identification with the corporation and its definition of social good—that is, with additional market transactions, additional consumers/spectators, additional profits, and so on. By the late 1990s, multipronged expansion required the pursuit of more consumers—and found those consumers through collaborations that crossed the East/West divide, as in Chosen.⁷

The video begins with a radio announcer’s description of Kennedy’s motorcade, recorded moments before the President was shot, and grainy footage of Badu driving up to the Plaza in a 1965 Lincoln Continental.¹ Once Badu’s simulated death has fulfilled the analogy, the video abandons its realist conceit. Blood-like ink spills from Badu’s head to form the word “groupthink,” and Badu’s voiceover drives home the contrast between “groupthink” and the term “evolved,” which the viewer has now had occasion to see tattooed on Badu’s bare back: “They play it safe, are quick to assassinate what they do not understand. They move in packs, ingesting more and more fear with every act of hate on one another… They are us. This is what we have become. Afraid to respect the individual. A single personal event or circumstance can move one to change. To love herself. To evolve.”² During this voiceover, the camera pans up to the American flag waving in the blue sky. When it returns to Badu, she is standing and wearing a long beaded wig that covers her body. She smiles at the camera and walks out of its frame.

But Wilkens neglects other equally pressing problems with the computational practices he advocates—limitations that reveal themselves in the very analysis he proffers as a sample of the kind of scholarship such practices might enable. Two problems with Wilkens’s method strike me as most urgent. First and most glaringly, he inadvertently demonstrates how easily data may be misinterpreted to serve conclusions that are sought by the analyst. And second, though he and others doing similar work purport to offer analysis of neutral data sets—say, all the fiction published in a given year—by working with existing bibliographies they perpetuate the selection criteria that governed the initial compilation. Doing so artificially reifies bodies of texts that might in fact be far more heterogeneous and unruly.

Both of these problems, I would like to argue, could be avoided by combining digital and computational methods with traditional modes of literary analysis. Scholars who take Moretti’s polemics for abandoning close reading as an actual course of action insist on a methodological absolutism that, to quote a colleague, amounts to “working with one hand tied behind your back.”¹ Further, there are many reasons to question Wilkens’s fundamental assumptions: that abundance is a problem; that being able to say conclusively what the entire field of cultural production at a given moment looks like is necessary or desirable; and that we should aim for a practice that gives equal weight to obscure, unread cultural products and well-received, widely-disseminated, popular ones. Ultimately, these assumptions derive from a false dichotomy between quantitative and qualitative methods that leads the proponents of distant reading to pose it as a replacement for, rather than a supplement to, traditional close reading practices.

At the end of this essay I suggest that a flexible application of genre analysis—one attentive to the fact that generic categories are not static data sets composed of identical terms, but rather what Michael McKeon calls, pace Marx, “simple abstractions” that yoke together heterogeneous and dynamic histories of literary and cultural production—is a particularly useful methodology to be deployed in conjunction with the burgeoning field of digital humanities.² The particular utility of genre study lies in the way it facilitates oscillation between levels of analysis. Genre helps us access answers to large-scale questions by aggregating kindred texts, but without losing sight of the details and divergences of individual works. Genre analysis suggests that, while scholars ought to be excited about the research and analytic benefits made possible by searchable digital archives and data analysis, they needn’t abandon the more supple procedures of literary and cultural study that attend to the complexity and contingency of historical phenomena.

Data and statistics can be seductive, perhaps even more so to those of us trained in “softer” disciplines.³ But data needs to be analyzed and interpreted; arguments must be made about the meaning and significance of findings. Though Wilkens’s article points to the potential utility of computational approaches, his practice ends up demonstrating how misleading data can be, how easily it may be misinterpreted to support desirable (usually surprising or counterintuitive) conclusions. The susceptibility of data to misinterpretation and inaccurate generalization are most evident in Wilkens’s section on “Geolocation,” where he analyzes points plotted on a worldwide map which correspond to all the proper geographic names mentioned in thirty-seven (“those available in machine-readable form from the Wright American Fiction collection”) of the one hundred and eleven works of fiction published in the U.S. in 1851 (according to Wright’s bibliography). From the wide geographic spread of points on this map, Wilkens disputes scholarly consensus, the “standard answers” that U.S. fiction at that time was concerned with “‘New England’ and ‘Americanness’ (understood to include issues of slavery and union).” This map, he concludes, reveals that the “imaginative landscape of American fiction in the mid-nineteenth century appears to be pretty diversely outward looking in a way that hasn’t received much attention.” This claim suffers from what (I hope) my students would easily recognize as a “warrant problem.” The quick warrant test I offer those students is to construct the generalized if-then statement that provides the justification for the claim, and to check if that statement logically holds. The resulting warrant for Wilkens’s claim would look something like: “If a set of texts mentions locations all around the globe, then the texts are diversely outward looking.” It’s pretty easy to see what’s wrong with the logic of this claim; it determines a qualitative character (“diversely outward looking”) from a piece of quantitative data, the mere fact of a place name being mentioned, regardless of the nature of that mention. If I were to say, “Gosh, I never want to go to Timbuktu,” I have just mentioned a far-away place, but have hardly established myself as broadminded.

In 1996, a young journalist named David Lipsky met US author David Foster Wallace on the last leg of his book tour for Infinite Jest, the thousand-page tome that was to define Wallace on the literary scene. The two men spent five days together, across the country, in airports, diners, and, most of all, in the enforced intimacy of a Pontiac paid for by Jann Wenner, the Rolling Stone editor who had sent Lipsky on this assignment. Nothing lends itself to conversation more than long days on the road. And all along the way, from Bloomington to Chicago, Lipsky’s tape recorder was spinning in the vicinity of the writer’s caffeinated commentaries on everything and more.

Shortly after returning from the road trip with Wallace, Lipsky sat down to condense hours of talk into a linear narrative. But the subject eluded him. His admiration for Wallace overpowered any attempts at the kind of professional distance needed for analysis. The man seemed to have followed Lipsky to his desk, hovering over his shoulders, probing and, ultimately, blocking his mind. Thus the words didn’t flow.¹  And Rolling Stone lost interest. Lipsky was sent to Seattle to write about heroin addicts and for more than ten years the Wallace transcripts languished in a drawer.

In 2008, Wallace killed himself and everything changed. Suddenly, any word ever written about the man seemed to miss something important and Lipsky was grateful that he had abandoned his earlier essay. However, by the Morrison-Lennon-Cobain-equation, premature death turns a star into a martyr. Wallace’s words now seemed like a testament, something definitive, something people would listen to more than ever. Also, something people would shell out money for more than ever. If he hadn’t already, Wallace now truly became a brand – the sound of his initials, DFW, deliciously reminiscent of the day- and nightside of genius. And, like sex, goosebumps sell. A veritable Wallace industry broke loose and it is hard to imagine any publisher with rights to the man’s work not having dollar signs in his eyes.

Hence Little, Brown’s 2009 decision to publish This Is Water – Wallace’s famed commencement speech at Kenyon College, which had circulated on the internet for years, but was pulled after the publishing house purchased the rights. The speech is fabulous, an accessible introduction not only to the man’s thought but also to the challenges of adulthood. Its presentation in book form, however, displays all the characteristics of what Wallace, with a trademark honesty informed by nothing less than true philosophia, would probably have called a rip-off. Indeed, the editorial choice to turn a twenty-minute speech into a book by devoting an entire page to each sentence, no matter how short or dangling that sentence may be, is shamelessly devoid of any attempts to veil its baseline commercial interests.

It was in this cultural environment, then, fifteen years after his encounter with Wallace, that Lipsky’s biography finally arrived – somewhat surprisingly, bearing in mind the journalist’s initial reluctance to approach his subject in writing. So is his book on Wallace, like This Is Water, nothing but an instance of cashing in on a private tragedy, similar to the rushed appearance of a deceased rock star’s most minuscule performances in bootlegged form? The timing of Lipsky’s publication would suggest so. Moreover, like a bootleg, his biography appears to be largely unedited. In fact, though happily advertised as contributing to that genre, the label “biography” is a bit of a red herring. Rather than a full-bodied biography, readers of AOCYEUBY get the skeleton, the transcripts, the raw material underlying what could have been a longer prose piece – a book-length version of Lipsky’s 2009 award-winning Rolling Stone essay that, after news of Wallace’s suicide spread, became the first to shed light on the tragedy of the writer’s last year.

While the large-scale consequences of neoliberal economic policies have been laid bare in our moment of protracted crisis, the material conditions and lived experiences of the chronically jobless and destitute continue to enter public discourse largely by way of statistics: the unemployment rate, the number of long-term unemployed, rates of foreclosure and household debt. The multitude of the marginal, at once pervasive and socially invisible, might be seen as the exemplary figure of globalized capitalism and its logics of accumulation by dispossession.  In turn, this collective figure troubles the frameworks of recognition, belonging, and agency on which conceptions of the liberal subject are based. Recent theoretical characterizations of what Zygmunt Bauman terms “wasted lives”—“or more correctly wasted humans … which are the waste-products of globalization”—all point to a category-crisis wherein economic dispossession entails a negation, a “waste,” of personhood itself (5, 66).²  As Denning puts it, “To speak repeatedly of bare life and superfluous life can lead us to imagine that there really are disposable people, not simply that they are disposable in the eyes of state and market” (80).

Among poets, Nowak, Roberson, and Kim in particular turn their attention to forms of collective being subsisting at the margins of the marketplace. Their work, however, is animated not only by an attempt to restore visibility to the unemployed and poor but also by an inquiry into the larger representational problems their subsistence raises. What does it mean to be socially unrecognized, “disposable in the eyes of state and market”? And what distinctive resources might poetry offer for encountering the limits of social recognition? This poetry raises these questions of representation, in other words, not to offer solutions but to illuminate their very intractability. In place of straightforward documentary methods or prosopopoeia as means of redeeming the other’s lost ‘voice,’ these poems engage various practices of “measuring silences” (to borrow Pierre Macherey’s key phrase) (87). Such practices might, in turn, highlight poetry’s distinctive capacities for addressing the recalcitrant and minimized forms of life characteristic of contemporary economic crisis.

I turn, first, to Nowak’s Shut Up Shut Down (Coffee House Press, 2004), which offers a portrait of the decline of the American steel and auto industry, the rise of Rust Belt unemployment, and the transformation of productive workers into the wageless. Over the course of five long poems, Nowak collages photos of Rust Belt towns, newspaper reports, testimony, and historical accounts to trace key moments in the disenfranchisement of American manual laborers. Shut Up Shut Down addresses the value of the person in materialist terms, examining the economic sphere as a determining force in producing a narrative of personhood. This narrative becomes visible in the face of its absence for those cast aside by industrial decline. Shut Up Shut Down tends to be read as a new form of proletarian “oral history,” a work of documentary poetry that reveals the class interests at work in Detroit, Youngstown, Buffalo, and other sites of deindustrialization. I want to suggest, instead, that Nowak uses the juxtapositional techniques associated with documentary form to track the effects of social negation itself. We might read Nowak’s poetic mode less as straight oral history than as a framework for making audible the social silence that accompanies deindustrialization.

Nowak’s book suggests that the person under capitalism is not merely identified with labor, but produced by it, such that being unemployed is synonymous with being “shut up shut down.” To be rendered redundant is quite literally to be rendered speechless. What this sounds like is stutter, syntactical breakdown, halt and gap: in a kind of self-hushing stumble over the word “shutter,”one line simply reads “ssh…shutter. sssh…shhh..shutter shutter. shhh” (155). Another poem’s white space and syntactic distortion erode a protest chant into halt and stammer:

“His father died and left him a little farm in New England.”

So begins Patti Smith’s “Birdland” on her first album, Horses (from 1975).

Although this is a plain declarative sentence rooted in truthful non-fiction narrative, pretty much nothing is as simple as it appears.

“He” is the child Peter Reich, who will grow up to write the acclaimed 1973 memoir “Book of Dreams” – a book which would have been among the final season of titles that the young Patricia Lee Smith, Manhattan bookstore clerk, shelved before leaving the world of everyday employment for pop stardom.

His “father” was Wilhelm Reich, the radical psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, who did in fact pass from the world of the living on November 3, 1957, supposedly from a heart attack, while serving a sentence in the Federal Penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.

The “little farm in New England” was not, in fact, left to Peter, nor was it a farm. Most of the woodsy land in Rangeley, Maine which was known during the elder Reich’s lifetime as Orgonon was left in trust to the people of the future in order to preserve Reich’s scholarly work and protect it from misinterpretation. Peter Reich inherited a small cabin on the property.

The protection of his scientific legacy was paramount in Reich’s mind when he made his will, because for the past decade he had been subject to threats both real and mind-forged, culminating in his incarceration on charges perfectly suited to ensnare a paranoid genius hooked on martyrdom.

The anxiety that was born out of Reich’s troubles with the U.S. government would spawn a story which dispersed widely in the decades after his death, contributing to the shaping of new mythologies and inspiring artists in varied genres to produce powerful, highly personal works.

Most notably for our purposes, two important female pop artists would use Reich’s fantasies, as filtered through his son’s memoir, as a path to inhabit a male identity — in the process creating signature performances.

This talk is just one more manifestation of how contagious Wilhelm Reich’s nightmares remain.

His troubles began in April 1947, when freelance writer Mildred Edie Brady included a sustained smear of the scientist in an article in Harpers entitled “Sex and Anarchy.”

Mrs. Brady, who Reich came to believe was a Soviet agent, may just as likely have been a bluenose slumming amidst Northern California’s burgeoning neo-bohemian culture. Whether with Soviet aid or by her own wits, she sold in quick succession two widely-read articles in which Reich played the role of cultural bogeyman: peripherally in Harpers (“Even at the poetry-reading sessions you are likely to find someone carrying a volume of his turgid and pretentious prose”), and a month later, with a full frontal attack in The New Republic (“The Strange Case of Wilhelm Reich: the man who blames both neuroses and cancer on unsatisfactory sexual activities has been repudiated by only one scientific journal”).

The author visited Reich under false pretenses, and penned a vicious and alarming portrait that reached about 100,000 readers, among them high-ranking American government officials. Adaptations and reprints brought the readership into the millions, and did lasting damage to Reich’s reputation. To many in post-war America, Wilhelm Reich was a sex-mad nut selling a crank cancer cure — the orgone box — to credulous loons. They cared less about his cloudbusting precipitation experiments. Something had to be done. The Federal Trade Commission stepped in, alerted the FDA, and the years of investigations began.

Had Reich been a native-born American scientist without a history of traumatic interference from hostile government agencies, it all might have been different. But this man had fled Germany in 1933, when his writings on youthful sexuality were attacked by a Nazi newspaper. In Denmark and Norway, where he sought shelter, Reich and his work were again derided. In America, where he had time to stop long enough to catch his breath, amass followers and get some work done, Reich’s contempt for authority figures would combine with paranoia and a rigid idealism that left him very few options.