In One-Dimensional Man Herbert Marcuse writes of how capitalism – in it’s capacity to regulate the subjectivity of the demos through its assignation of our values and occupation of our wants – has restructured language through a process of “functionalization.” Language has been modified in such a way that it is practically incapable of betraying depth or allowing for interiority and works instead to “[promote] the self-identification of the individuals with the functions which they and others perform.”i Inasmuch as language is preempted to circumscribe the identity of each individual within the mediated experience of themselves as a laborer and consumer it is subordinate to the metabolic reproduction of capitalism. By conditioning each individual to think of themselves only within the context of their work, subsistence, and monetized desires capital is positioned to weather its worsening crises by doubling down on its inequities. When morals are codified by markets, and exploitation is internalized as a virtue each crisis is an opportunity to further demand society take collective pride in its immiseration – in being held responsible for obtaining the barest conditions of living. István Mészáros elaborates this point, in concert with Marcuse, when he writes, “the imperatives and strictly instrumental demands of the system as a whole must be imposed on and internalized by the personifications of capital as ‘their intentions’ and ‘their motivations.”ii Words that act as either incipient consumption or embodied labor, such as placing an order or taking an order, comprise the dominant language of a culture that recognizes identity as being constituted in accordance with how one buys and sells oneself. As such, any language that is not useful to the project of capital is discarded, and through this process of repudiation language facilitates a catabolic conversion of consciousness enabling the articulation of the self as a digestible product of capital’s appetite.
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Cynthia Cruz writes: “[t]o live in a culture is to ‘eat’ its norms and beliefs. I take in all that is in the culture – through media, through constant socialization, through the desires and needs the culture introjects into me.”iii
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We inhabit the no-longer-conscious, where language is a vesicant to memory and the past is blistered in repression.iv
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In Name and Noun, Stephanie Yue Duhem’s debut chapbook, Duhem’s poems are dialectic investigations of her own identity. The entirety of her poem “or that disorder is called” reads: “believe-me-ah / i want to get better / i want to fit within the width / of the letter i.” The width of this “i” is delimited by cultural edicts, and to fit within it’s borders one must first be hypostatized as a self-possessed subject according to that culture’s understanding of individuality. I is an extrinsic not teleological category. Duhem contrasts this “i” with a stammered “ah,” which, in being nearly homophonous, worries the boundaries of the culturally allocated “i.” “Ah” is a surplus of speech – a self-designation that cannot be contained within the width of a letter. “Ah” is combinatorial. In it’s open ended pronunciation it is a vocable that invokes possibility, teasing the air with its transmutative potential, whereas the pronunciation of “i” is closed-off, containing the self within presumptive completion.
The dissolution of “ah” into “i” depicts the process of assimilation – which, as a tool of oppression, has historically been used as a corrective whereby the dominant language acts like a macrophage that eats through the diseased language of the Other – as being (mis)translated into confinement. To fit within the culturally defined “i” is to have the idiosyncrasies and deviations – the histories – of oneself exiled.
Having lived eating the language of American English Duhem explores the ways in which the “ah” of herself, of ephemera, variability, and auroric desire, exists in tension with the I of a culture whose precepts she’s been introjected with.
Throughout Name and Noun puns and accidents of language are used to reveal the self as mutable. The opening line of “the griffin,” which reads, “carved from oblivion i mean obsidian, the black griffin guards my neighbor’s house,” is simultaneously reparative and unfinished. The line is ostensibly corrected, but as the poem continues we understand the misnamed noun to have inaugurated the lability and doubt the poem takes as its subject:
I am afraid of it, a little bit.Not afraid that it will barkor bite,but afraid that it mightblink ormaybeshift a smidgen in the light.Making it known beyond a doubt thatwhile I was looking at it,it was looking at me.
Obsidian palimpsests oblivion rather than erases it. Oblivion is anticipatory in all that is extant until the time of each self is resorbed by the void upon death. Oblivion is inherently unknowable, despite founding all that exists. Language, in its functionalized state, tries to efface the unknowability that subtends our existence through the promotion of authority-bias and binarisms. Unknowability is permissive in that it allows for modalities of thought that challenge a given culture’s dominant language and it’s pretensions of permanence. By acknowledging that we all derive from, and return to, oblivion we are able to understand our functionality, and our language, to be historically contingent, and thus capable of transformation. The griffin hints at this possibility. Duhem is not afraid that the griffin will “bark or bite” to protect her neighbor’s house, thus fulfilling a discernible, capitalistic function, but that it will privately transgress its ornamental status. The fear is that the things we ascribe with permanence, such as our functional identities, are, in fact, our constraints; yet when we transgress these constraints and “shift a smidgen in the light,” revealing the multiplicity of ourselves, we remain trapped. The griffin is still a subject of capital – confined to private property.
The centerpiece of the collection is the poem “Nom et Nom,” which begins with these astonishing lines:
My name, now –a crumpled paper sail-boat around my brow, allcreases and vowels.How can I lick the rimof the basin it was brined inand not taste salt?Some oceans crossed and otherscrossed out.
The awkward manipulation of rhythm in the first stanza enforces the reader’s identification with the poem’s ostensible subject – Duhem’s “creased” and “crumpled” name. But this enforced identification also serves to depict language as an authoritarian site of control. Duhem’s meter in the first stanza is not collaborative – the reader makes no decisions regarding the placement of stresses, and is instead dragged downwards by the dislocated enjambments. The downward drag of the enjambments demonstrates how Duhem’s name, as a 1.5 generation Chinese-American, is submerged by a white supremacist nation. Her name and the history it suggests has been “crossed out” by the mercenary project of English.
And like a fragment of Lot’s wife, Duhem’s language turns to salt when she evokes the past.
Left to taste it’s traces.
iMarcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man (Beacon Press, 1968), 92.
iiMészáros, István. Beyond Capital: Towards a Theory of Transition (Monthly Review Press, 2010), 78.
iiiCruz, Cynthia. Disquieting: Essays on Silence (Book*hug Press, 2019 [Scribd Edition]), 89.
ivBloch, Ernst. https://www.marxists.org/archive/bloch/hope/introduction.htm