by
Ben Lerner
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I dwell in Possibility—
A fairer House than Prose—
More numerous of Windows—
Superior—for Doors—
Of Chambers as the Cedars—
Impregnable of eye—
And for an everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky—
Of Visitors—the fairest—
For Occupation—This—
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise—
[...] I, too, dislike it: That “too” in the Moore is important—poet and reader of poetry are united in a suspicion of the song of any “earthly poet,” and that suspicion is the ground for an intuition of the ideal. The hatred of poetry is internal to the art, because it is the task of the poet and poetry reader to use the heat of that hatred to burn the actual off the virtual like fog.
Great poets as different as Keats and Dickinson express their contempt for merely actual poems by developing techniques for virtualizing their own compositions—by dissolving the actual poem into an image of the Poem literary form cannot achieve. [...]
What we want to avoid at all costs is…an opposition between writing that accounts for race…and writing that is “universal.” If we continue to think of the “universal” as better-than, as the pinnacle, we will always discount writing that doesn’t look universal because it accounts for race or some other demeaned category. The universal is a fantasy. But we are captive, still, to a sensibility that champions the universal while simultaneously defining the universal, still, as white. We are captive, still, to a style of championing literature that says work by writers of color succeeds when a white person can nevertheless relate to it—that it “transcends” its category.
quoted in response to Mark Edmundson on Whitman
I remember speaking a word whose meaning I didn’t know but about which I had some inkling, some intuition, then inserting that word into a sentence, testing how it seemed to fit or chafe against the context and the syntax, rolling the word around, as it were, on my tongue. I remember my feeling that I possessed only part of the meaning of the word, like one of those fragmented friendship necklaces, and I had to find the other half in the social world of speech. I remember walking around as a child repeating a word I’d overheard, applying it wildly, and watching how, miraculously, I was rarely exactly wrong. If you are five and you point to a sycamore or an idle backhoe or a neighbor stooped over his garden or to images of these things on a television set and utter “vanish” or utter “varnish” you will never be only incorrect; if your parent or guardian is curious, she can find a meaning that makes you almost eerily prescient—the neighbor is dying, losing weight, or the backhoe has helped a structure disappear or is glazed with rainwater or the sheen of spectacle lends to whatever appears onscreen a strange finish. To derive your understanding of a word by watching others adjust to your use of it: Do you remember the feeling that sense was provisional and that two people could build around an utterance a world in which any usage signified? I think that’s poetry. And when I felt I finally mastered a word, when I could slide it into a sentence with a satisfying click, that wasn’t poetry anymore—that was something else, something functional within a world, not the liquefaction of its limits.
[...] I want to note only that each time the houselights dimmed—these were the first movies I’d ever seen in a theater without the emotional buffer of my family—I felt that other worlds were possible, felt all my senses had been reset and sharpened, that some of them were melding with those of the other kids with their giant Cokes in the dark beside me. This faded quickly as the film progressed and the image of a particular alternative world appeared before us on the screen; there was no trace of it by the time we were rereleased into the preternaturally bright day, but each time the lights went down and the first preview lit up the screen, I felt overwhelmed by an abstract capacity I associate with Poetry. Not the artwork itself—even when the artwork is great—but the little clearing the theater makes. [...]
Each of RCA's plant relocations represents the corporation's response to workers' increasing sense of entitlement and control over investment in their community. Capital flight was a means of countering that control as the company sought out new reservoirs of controllable labor. The search for inexpensive and malleable workers that shaped each location decision had its own subversive logic, however: the integration of production into the economy and social life of the new site irrevocably transformed the community into a new place of conflict with the corporation. In each location, a glut of potential employees shrank over time into a tightening labor market, once deferential workers organized into a union shop, and years of toil on the shop floor recast docility into a contentious and demanding, if isolated and ambivalent, working class. The geographic terrain inhabited by capital was far larger than labor's niche, however, and corporate leaders chose to move once the cultural resources of the old site no longer suited their needs. The shaping of the economic and social landscape, therefore, must be understood as a tale not simply of the unilateral power of capital but, equally important, of the resources wielded by workers who chose over time to fight for a position independent of management's well-laid plans and expectations.
such a good summary which explains why labor organizing is the shadow of capitalism
This book, therefore, focuses on the relationship between industrial investment and social change, and it is only peripherally concerned with the well-studied impact of "deindustrialization." The firm that abruptly closes down and abandons its workers to the streets, although perhaps the dominant image of the problem, is actually much less typical than the plant that undergoes a more subtle process of cutbacks, attrition, and the gradual relocation or elimination of industrial jobs. The closure of any plant is of political and social concern, but the final shutdown of a factory-the act that draws the public's attention-usually comes only at the end of a long, silent process of job relocation. These evolutionary changes in the employment structure often mask much of the subtle drama of labor history and hide from the actors themselves both the profundity of the transformations and the continuities in the pattern of events. Such is the case with this history of RCA's radio and television assembly, which can be understood as a "runaway shop" only in the loosest sense, as the corporation shifted employment opportunities over the course of decades rather than simply relocating entire factories wholesale.
As each community is unique, however, so is each industry. A word on the idiosyncrasies of the consumer electronics industry is therefore in order. This sector suffers most acutely from one of the most enduring problems of free enterprise: overproduction. The constant revolution in materials and manufacturing has produced more goods ever more efficiently with fewer inputs, and this phenomenon has continued to lower prices and undermine the rate of return on investment for firms willing to enter this fiercest of industries. Since the advent of both radio and television, each generation of consumers has been able to purchase a better product at a lower price than the previous one. Crisper pictures, clearer sounds, and more compact sets have all been delivered to consumers with a shrinking price tag. With a relentless downward pressure on production costs, the search for cheap labor has held a pivotal position in firms' strategies to beat their competitors. This pressure has placed the burden of low prices on the shoulders of people toiling on an assembly line that stretches from New Jersey to Chihuahua. Because of the particularly brutal competition that shapes this market, the RCA story offers a more compressed and heightened example than is likely to be found in other industries. The tale of this company's flight, rather than emblematic of larger trends, might more appropriately be regarded as a bellwether for the broader path of industrial employment.
The corporation that transformed the Victor works into such an industrial giant, the Radio Corporation of America, began in 1919 as a government-supported monopoly financed by the biggest names in the electrical industry. Before World War I, the wireless communications industry had been foreign-owned and chaotically organized, but when the United States committed itself to the war effort, President Woodrow Wilson placed the industry under the monopoly power of the U.S. Navy. Although the government did not, as some people advocated, establish absolute control over the industry, it did facilitate the creation of the Radio Corporation of America as a patriotic "marriage of convenience" of private electrical corporations as a way to keep wireless communication in American possession and to develop it for the national good.
Under an agreement to pool patents and capital forged by General Electric's Owen D. Young, the ownership of RCA belonged to GE (30.1 %), Westinghouse (20.6%), AT&T (10.3%), and United Fruit (4.1 %), with a variety of other holders accounting for the remaining 34.9 percent. The agreement also stipulated that RCA would sell radio equipment manufactured by its principal owners, which the new corporation could purchase from the parent corporations on a simple formula of cost plus 20 percent. As early as 1926 RCA broadened its original plan from "narrowcast" communications to public "broadcast" by organizing the National Broadcasting Company (NBC). The growing network of radio stations formed in the 1920s helped to make RCA one of the key growth stocks during the heady investment years of the Jazz Age, but it was actually manufacturing and licensing of patents that made RCA the instant giant of the communications industry.
im sorry what??? united fruit??
Of the 9,800 workers employed at RCA in 1936, approximately 75 percent were women. They did all the wiring, crimping, and soldering on the radio sets. On the main production floor, which stretched the length of two football fields, each female line worker performed the labor-intensive operations on 400 to 800 radio chassis each day. Male inspectors stood at intervals of every ten to fifteen female workers to monitor their performance as the women applied the heavy 200-watt irons to the 300 solder joints necessary to build the average radio in 1935. Women working on an incentive piece-rate system also labored on the feeder lines that built intricate subassemblies and components to be placed on the main assembly lines. In contrast, men's part in the production process was to perform the test and repair procedures, build the large and elaborate wooden radio cabinets, staff the machine shop, and design and build the models and prototypes of products that would soon be rolling off the assembly lines.