Poetry of the Possible

Poetry of the Possible

Spontaneity, Modernism, and the Multitude

Joel Nickels

The abstractions of modernism reimagined as figurations of collective self-organization

296 Pages, 6 x 9 in

  • Paperback
  • 9780816676095
  • Published: July 5, 2012
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Poetry of the Possible

Spontaneity, Modernism, and the Multitude

Joel Nickels

ISBN: 9780816676095

Publication date: July 5th, 2012

296 Pages

8 x 5

The Poetry of the Possible challenges the conventional image of modernism as a socially phobic formation, arguing that modernism’s abstractions and difficulties are ways of imagining unrealized powers of collective self-organization. Establishing a conceptual continuum between modernism and contemporary theorists such as Paulo Virno, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and Alain Badiou, Joel Nickels rediscovers modernism’s attempts to document the creative potenza of the multitude.

By examining scenes of collective life in works by William Carlos Williams, Wyndham Lewis, Laura Riding, and Wallace Stevens, Nickels resurrects modernism’s obsession with constituent power: the raw, indeterminate capacity for reciprocal counsel that continually constitutes and reconstitutes established political regimes. In doing so, he reminds us that our own attempts to imagine leaderless networks of collective initiative are not so much breaks with modernist forms of knowledge as restagings of some of modernism’s most radical moments of political speculation.

Setting modernism’s individual and collective models of spontaneity in dialogue with theorists of political spontaneity such as Antonio Gramsci, Herbert Marcuse, and Theodor Adorno, Nickels retells the story of modernism as the struggle to represent powers of collective self-organization that lie outside established regimes of political representation.

Joel Nickels is assistant professor of English at the University of Miami.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Modernism and Spontaneous Organization
1. Rising from Nowhere: Self-Valorization in William Carlos Williams’s Poetry
2. Wyndham Lewis, Constituent Power, and Collective Life
3. “An Instantaneous Sympathy of Communication”: Laura Riding and the Politics of Spontaneity
4. Rhapsodies of Change: The Location of the Multitude in Wallace Stevens’s Poetry
5. Conclusion: Beginning Again

Notes
Index