Demonstrategy. H. L. Hix

       Article 1:Make another world, make this world otherwise.

1.1: Poetry Against Growth

      One take on contemporary life sees technology as having displaced poetry, rendering it irrelevant or at best compensatory. On this view, we live in the information age, under the sign of Moore’s Law, and poetry, as Wittgenstein observed even before digital supplanted analog, “is not used in the language game of giving information.” Absence from popular culture confirms poetry’s reduction to insignificance. Gaming and film and television reach billions worldwide, and generate billions in revenue; poetry reaches a tiny, tenuous, negligible audience, and operates at a loss, propped up by patronage, burdening rather than bolstering economic growth.

      Consider, though, this contrary view: technology’s influence makes poetry more urgent than ever, so urgent that it conditions the continued survival of the human species. Exclusion of poetry from popular culture symptomatizes not poetry’s illness but culture’s. Poetry is not dying for want of an audience; humanity is dying for want of poetry. In Charles Bernstein’s words, we suffer “not the lack of mass audience for any particular poet but the lack of poetic thinking as an activated potential for all people.” In fulfillment of that contrarian understanding, as a response to our want of poetry, I propose ethopoesis. The ethopoetic would recognize the urgency, even the necessity, of poetry, and envision a poetry adequate to this cultural need.

      Technology and economy now enmesh the globe in ways, and to a degree, beyond precedent. Transportation has overcome regional limitations to the movement of goods; digital technology has overcome the limits distance once imposed on communication; corporations now enjoy worldwide market reach; resources from any region are accessible to exploitation by entities in distant regions; and so on. The economy has raced toward total globalization, but cultures and concepts of citizenship have lagged, remaining local and sectarian. Corporations have become thoroughly multinational, but political institutions remain stubbornly national; natural resources and manufactured products move easily from one place to another, but movement of humans is tightly restricted by nation al boundaries; those with capital find safety and security for their money more readily than those without capital can find safety and security for their persons; and so on.

      This disparity between a global economy and local cultural and civic values has as one upshot structural violence: violence, as Paul Farmer puts it, perpetrated “by the strong against the weak, in complex social fields” in which “historically given” and “economically driven” conditions guarantee “that violent acts will ensue.” Political democracy cannot be had without economic democracy; cultural and civic values must also check, not only be checked by, economic forces. Farmer does not identify poetry as an ally, but poetry urges, and furthers, the revaluation for which he calls. Until we construct, and enact, a global culture and global citizenship, our global economy will only be destructive: exaggerating the disparity between rich and poor, exhausting resources and generating waste faster and faster, prompting ever more terrorism and war and genocide.

      Among the many ways to articulate why this is so, Janet Dine’s is especially lucid. Capitalism, she affirms, in its essence is simple, and its primary tool, the contract, is functional and ethically sound. But “like any other human institution it [contract] can be corrupted,” and the dominant contractually-based institutions, namely multinational corporations (e.g. banks) and international financial institutions (e.g. the IMF), have been corrupted. In a market economy, commercial law ought to allocate risk, but, Dine observes, it has not done so equitably. Instead, both international and national laws, “written,” Dine reminds us, “mostly by wealthy élites,” have participated in creating poverty the results of which include: more than one in eight humans is undernourished; one in eight humans does not have access to safe drinking water; two in five do not have access to adequate sanitation. That combination of factors kills 1.4 million children every year (4,000 children every day, one child every 20 seconds). In creating laws about contracts, commercial law establishes rules defining and protecting property, regulating how it is acquired and disposed of, but Dine emphasizes that “property rights are not rights over things but, on the contrary, rights against other people,” specifically the right to exclude them. Laws constructed by and for those who already own property will pursue “the widest concept of property and freedom to trade” without regulatory control, inviting “accumulations of property without imposing countervailing responsibilities.”

      Dine depicts the global economy as not merely out of step with, but dependent upon the suppression of, valid conceptions of global culture and citizenship. Such an exposition suggests a condition for any suitable response. To mitigate the structural violence of our economy, we need cultural and civic parameters able to stand up to, and to modify, economic activity. Without what I call here the “ethopoetic,” our attempts even to envision, much less to implement, such parameters cannot but be impoverished and futile. That impoverishment and futility is revealed by contrasting the medium of economic exchange with the medium of cultural and civic exchange. Along at least one vector, the contrast is stark. The medium of economic exchange, currency, homogenizes and distorts value. It makes everything fungible: by means of it, anything can be rendered equivalent to anything else. So many tons of rice equivalent to, and traded for, one automobile; so many hours of a person’s labor at a certain job for one month’s rent on an apartment. The medium of cultural exchange, language, recognizes value in its full variety and particularity. Its differentiating 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