capacity enables it to resist and to limit fungibility, to preserve uniqueness from equivalence.
Currency performs its generalizing by substituting price for value, a substitution that erases any distinction between price and value. Currency, in other words, pretends that price just is value. Only in a medium other than currency can the substitution of price for value be challenged. Identifying language as such a medium grounds an apology for poetry, and proposes an ideal for poetry. That is, it explains why poetry is necessary and what poetry at its best might be.
In Lyric Philosophy, Jan Zwicky recognizes language’s capacity for challenging the substitution of price for value, by proposing a way of seeing that she calls “lyric comprehension,” which “does not distinguish between a thing’s being and that-it-is-valuable.” Lyric comprehension, by maintaining a thing’s being as integral to its valuation, contrasts with pricing, which performs its valuation by substituting a uniform measure for a thing’s being. Lyric comprehension opposes the economic comprehension manifest through currency. Zwicky extends this idea in Wisdom and Metaphor, invoking “ontological attention,” a sister to lyric comprehension, as “a response to particularity: this porch, this laundry basket, this day.” Because its object “cannot be substituted for, even when it is an object of considerable generality (‘the country’, ‘cheese’, ‘garage sales’),” ontological attention “is the antithesis of the attitude that regards things as ‘resources’, mere means to human ends.” That the object cannot be substituted for means that its value has been preserved in distinction from price, which makes anything substitutable for anything else. In contrast to the voracious equivalences imposed by price (a $1,000 porch = any hundred $10 laundry baskets), thisness insists that no porch can substitute for this basket, no basket for this porch. Such linguistic and literary comprehension pushes back against the homogenizing imposed by economic comprehension.
The capacity of language to retain the uniqueness of a thing as integral to its identity and the being of a thing as integral to its valuation, is a capacity, one we can realize effectively or not. Which suggests an ideal for poetry: to fully realize the particularizing capacity of language, its resistance to the economic substitution of price for value. The ideal receives elegant formulation in Wysława Szymborska’s Nobel Prize acceptance: “In daily speech,” she says, “we all use phrases such as ‘the ordinary world,’ ‘ordinary life,’ ‘the ordinary course of events.’” But in poetry, which realizes the particularizing capacity of language by weighing every word, “nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone’s existence.” In Szymborska’s terms, nothing is usual or normal; in Zwicky’s terms, nothing can be substituted for. Either way, poetry resists the global economy’s pressure to make anything substitutable for anything else, and thus to make everything susceptible to market exchange.
Technology and economy have changed our world, but they also have changed us. We live in different circumstances than ever before, and we ourselves are different. Humanist and posthumanist accounts concur in the assessment that our reach now exceeds our grasp, and that this exceeding is not the unqualified, heavenly good that Browning’s Andrea del Sarto sought.
Martha Nussbaum formulates the difference elegantly in her humanist manifesto Not for Profit. In our world, she declares, “people face one another across gulfs of geography, language, and nationality. More than at any time in the past, we all depend on people we have never seen, and they depend on us.” Our most pressing problems are global, with no hope of solution “unless people once distant come together and cooperate in ways they have not before.” The global economy “has tied all of us to distant lives. Our simplest decisions as consumers affect the living standards of people in distant nations” and “put pressure on the global environment.” To some small extent, it was ever so. Hunter-gatherers pressured other species, and left a rubble of tools and shelters. A northerner’s cotton blouse in the antebellum U.S. subsidized the enslavement of an African-American on a plantation down south. The difference in degree, though, is now so great as to amount to a difference in kind. My shoes subsidize child labor in Singapore, the car I drive sanctions the circumstances in which female factory workers are routinely raped and killed at the U.S./Mexico border, my trash is dumped into a vast dead zone in the Pacific, and on and on. Nussbaum finds it irresponsible of us “to bury our heads in the sand, ignoring the many ways in which we influence, every day, the lives of distant people.” Until I reckon with that influence, my human interactions will be “mediated by the thin norms of market exchange in which human lives are seen primarily as instruments for gain,” and I will continue to harm distant others.
If Nussbaum’s humanist manifesto emphasizes the synchronic extension of our reach, its expansion across space, Timothy Morton’s posthumanist manifesto Hyperobjects emphasizes the diachronic extension of our reach, its expansion across time. Morton distinguishes, as the fields through which our reach has come to extend, three timescales, “the horrifying, the terrifying, and the petrifying.” The horrifying is the scale of five hundred years, beyond the time of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII to the time of the events the play depicts, “historical” even to Shakespeare. Morton notes that I participate now in activities that will affect humans as far into the future as Henry VIII is in the past: “75 percent of global warming effects will persist until five hundred years from now.” As at the “horrifying” timescale, so at the “terrifying” timescale of thirty thousand years. This is the distance into the past of the Chauvet Cave paintings, yet my current actions will have effects that far into the future: 25 percent of the carbon compounds my car releases the next time I drive to the market will remain in the atmosphere thirty thousand years from now. Even at the timescale Morton calls the “petrifying,” my effects will linger: “7 percent of global warming effects will still be occurring,” and “form built structures (skyscrapers, overpasses, garnets for lasers, graphene, bricks)” will have created “a layer of geological strata.”
Morton’s point is that “the future hollows out the present.” Because it can be imagined, infinite duration — eternity — is forgiving. Because it can’t be imagined, time at the scales Morton considers, the time of “very large finitude” rather than of infinity, is unforgiving. Morton describes us as participating in the construction of “hyperobjects” such as global warming, the very large finitude of which starkly reveals the degree by which my reach exceeds my grasp. Even my most trivial-seeming decisions/actions affect others far into the horrifying, terrifying, and petrifying futures: “A Styrofoam cup will outlive me by over four hundred years.”
Changed circumstances and changed selves entail changed responsibilities. My indirect actions now are more potent than my direct actions; the unintended consequences of my actions always and necessarily exceed the intended consequences. The asymmetry between effect and control has switched. When others’ effects on me exceed my control (the old situation) the result is tragedy: my destruction looms. For the Greek tragedians, my agency is inadequate to my circumstances (a fact personified as Fate, Necessity, and so on): my effects are too small to fulfill my intentions. For us, now, my agency is overadequate: my effects are too large for my intentions to manage. Now that my effects on others exceed my control (the new situation) the result is disaster (war, climate change, structural violence): our destruction looms. The state in which contemporary technology and the contemporary global economy have placed us differs from the “state of nature” Hobbes depicts. In Hobbes, we are each threatened with destruction: any human might be destroyed. In current circumstances, we are all threatened with destruction: humanity might be destroyed. In Hobbes, the bind is the prisoners’ dilemma: we need a way to remove agency from the individual. Now the bind is Midas’s touch: we need a way to restrain the agency of the individual.
This inversion of the relationship between agency and volition invites a contrast between the ethopoesis I am advocating, and the prevailing cultural norm, which I’ll label ethotechne. Pairing
