Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Argument about Things in the 1980s: Goods and Garbage in an Age of NeoliberalismThe Half-Life of Deindustrialization: Working-Class Writing about Economic RestructuringRemainders: American Poetry at Nature’s End

2020; Duke University Press; Volume: 92; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00029831-8056686

1527-2117

Brent Ryan Bellamy,

Political and Economic history of UK and US

Phil A. Neel’s 2018 book Hinterland could easily have been included in this review. The book tracks social upheaval from the long downturn begun in 1973 to the class dynamics of the contemporary economic hinterland in the United States. Neel’s book analyzes the hard facts of unemployment alongside the incapacities of the political class to correct the ongoing social catastrophe. In her 2018 Los Angeles Review of Books review “Wageless Life,” cultural materialist Sarah Brouillette situates Neel’s book within an emergent body of critical scholarship focused on the ruins of the Keynesian gambit and the ongoing ravages of capital accumulation, which includes Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Golden Gulag (2007), Joshua Clover’s Riot. Strike. Riot (2016), and Annie McClanahan’s Dead Pledges (2017). I am compelled to add further recent publications and forthcoming manuscripts to my reading list in order to develop a response adequate to the three texts I have been tasked with reviewing and the unfolding situation they outline. I am thinking, for instance, of Jasper Bernes’s 2017 The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization and Aaron Benanav’s forthcoming A Global History of Unemployment, since 1949. Neel’s text and, to varying degrees, the others mentioned here offer proscription as well as diagnosis, whereas The Argument about Things in the 1980s, The Half-Life of Deindustrialization, and Remainders focus on particular archives in order to frame each author’s journey toward understanding. Despite the need to reach for solutions, in the case of the three texts under examination here, taking time with material matters most.The impulse to catalogue approaches to the terrain of deindustrialization, including its products and remainders, is precisely the problematic under examination by Tim Jelfs, Sherry Lee Linkon, and Margaret Ronda in their respective works. Together the three books provide a rich introduction to the material culture of US decline. Each offers a distinct methodological approach grounded in, respectively, a rethinking of thing theory, the refinement of working-class studies, and scrutiny of the political unconscious of US poetry. Such approaches to objects, identity, and form overlap in their shared investment in bringing some level of order to the chaos of late capitalism in the United States.The archives Americanists choose will fundamentally impact the manner in which they might engage the ongoing and deleterious effects of capitalism in regard to the decline of the global hegemon. Whose voices are included and how those voices ought to be read is a matter of contest for American literary studies. One might stand to learn just as much from a study of the studies of US literature and culture as from a less mediated approach to the materials themselves. It is telling, then, that Jelfs begins his interrogation of the argument over the materialistic attitude of the long 1980s by describing US environmentalist Wallace Stegner’s Discovery! The Search for Arabian Oil (1971). Stegner had produced the text during the 1950s for Aramco (Arabian American Oil Company), which he accompanied to the Arabian Peninsula. Surprisingly imperialist in tone, the text provides Jelfs with the narrative piece to establish the prehistory of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries embargo in the early 1970s and the oil shock in the late 1970s, two events that would fundamentally shape the United States’ relation to oil and fossil fuels’ relation to culture in the 1980s. The prehistory and periodization that Jelfs’s book offers establishes oil as a source of things in the United States and, when read alongside Linkon’s and Ronda’s books, compellingly situates the imperialistic mechanics of the energy regime as a powerful force for industrialization and its remainders.Here, Jelfs’s book establishes the historical background to situate Linkon’s investigation of working-class writing after deindustrialization. Linkon’s book is not missing this background, but read together, the two texts take on a fuller explanatory power. For instance, in a description of one moment in Philipp Meyer’s American Rust (2009), Linkon describes one character’s realization that dead-end jobs cannot satisfy or nourish one for long: “Poe also recognizes that such work would end one day, and he is troubled by the idea of helping to erase America’s industrial history” (63). However apt Linkon’s reading is in terms of working-class identity, there is another way to interpret Edgar Allan Poe’s realization. He thinks to himself, “There would be no record, nothing left standing, to show that anything had ever been built in America” (quoted in Linkon, 63–64). In light of Jelfs’s reading of the proliferation of things in US culture, this worry of Poe’s transforms into a utopian aim. Karl Marx’s own assessment of the proletariat was of a class that would seek to abolish itself. Linkon’s social view of class obscures the economic and, indeed, utopian revelation on offer here. Through an inversion of capital’s own process of creative destruction, dead-end jobs reveal the prospect of a whole series of projects aimed to reclaim the spaces of industrialization, the remainders of fossil capital, and the piles and piles of things made in America and elsewhere. Poe, and the others caught in a similar holding pattern, could take on a project across the continent of destructive creation, of degrowth, of downsizing.Rather than turning to the detritus of US consumerism or the folks who used to produce such discarded objects, Ronda’s contribution forges a conceptual tool for tracking what Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin collaboratively theorize as natural history. Ronda posits, “The aesthetics of nature no longer obtains in a time of accelerating ecological crisis” (11). Thus, poetry becomes a site to register the “non-synchrony” and “friction” of poetics and ecological discourse (4, 5). Poetry itself becomes a kind of remainder. The “remainder,” writes Ronda, “operates as a means of considering the relations between ecology, history, and form as they become newly visible in the devalued remains of capital’s circuits of production, circulation, and consumption” (13). An expansive and robust term, the remainder buttresses with Linkon’s nuclear half-life metaphor and with Jelfs’s discussion of the Mobro—a New York City garbage barge that journeyed as far south as Belize in search of a site that would accept its load before returning to the city. In these examples capital’s logics rub up against its lived reality. Ronda’s book offers literary history and environmentalism each a new path for considering what remains.One conspicuous absence across each text, but in Linkon’s in particular, is the use of the term unemployment. Perhaps the lack of this term is definitional. How can a class be described as the working class in the absence of work? Linkon’s use of the metaphor of the half-life instructs us on one way to answer this question: the working class will exist until its work is no longer felt, even residually. Despite the rise in unemployment in the current conjuncture, the working class of Linkon’s book still exerts an influence over the shape of class identity, belonging, and solidarity in the present. In this sense, then, Linkon offers a useful contribution to thinking through Ronda’s category of the remainder and Jelfs’s interest in things—commodities, refuse, garbage, and so on. What’s on offer specifically is the dimension of time. All three authors touch on the profound impacts of the mid-twentieth-century development and proliferation of plastics, chemical compounds, urban restructuring, living wages and benefits, union power, and anything else one might add to this well-nigh Borgesian list. That’s just the point here, though: each author finds a meaningful archive in the midst of the phantasmagoria of fossil capital’s output of oil-soaked, carbon-rich stuff, people, and spaces, especially on American soil.