On Subsumption and Solitude

There is a word I picked up a year ago and have not managed to put down. It comes from Marx, and it is not one of the words that made him famous. The word is subsumption.

Marx uses it to describe something that presents itself, at first, as a liberation. The man who was owned leaves the land and enters the factory, where he is paid. He is free now. Free to sell the only thing he has left. Capital does not need to hold his body, because it has found an arrangement far more elegant than ownership: it takes his hours and leaves him the flattering conviction that he gave them.

The Latin is worth a moment, as Latin usually is. Subsumere: to take up from underneath. To place something under. Under a heading, under a category, under a general form decided somewhere else by someone else. What is subsumed is not destroyed. It is preserved, classified, and made to function. That is the part of this word that keeps me awake. Subsumption does not kill anything. It hosts.

And there is a second thing hidden in that grammar. A category, before it was a logical instrument, was an accusation. Kategorein meant to speak against someone in the open square, publicly, in front of everyone. Every time we place a work under a category we are performing, in a very faded form, a public accusation. This is what you are. This is the shelf you belong on. Answer to it.

FORMAL AND REAL

Marx separated two ways in which capital takes hold of a process, and the distinction is more useful to us than most of what we say to each other at fairs.

Formal subsumption leaves the work as it finds it. The workshop keeps working the way it always worked; what changes is who owns the product. In our terms, this is the acquisition. The imprint is bought, the colophon survives, the editor keeps the same desk and the same authors and a slightly better contract. We have all watched this happen. We have all learned to describe it with the vocabulary of opportunity, because the alternative was to describe it accurately.

Real subsumption is quieter and considerably worse. Capital stops taking the process and starts rebuilding it from inside, until the work becomes unimaginable in any other shape. In our terms, this is the morning the manuscript arrives already written for its market. The morning the author has internalised the pitch so thoroughly that the pitch has become the book. The morning we find that we have recognised a title's category before we have recognised a single one of its sentences.

Nobody bought us. That is the humiliating part. We simply began, at some point none of us can date, to think in the shape of the transaction.

EVERYTHING ELSE

And it does not stop at labour, which is the discovery that turns an economic argument into a biographical one. Capital subsumes the popular song, which was made by people who were not paid and is now sold back to their grandchildren. It subsumes cinema. It subsumes the novel, above all the novel, which was born as the form of the private individual and has proved the most obedient of all the forms we have.

Then it goes further, into territory that has nothing to do with production. It subsumes ambition, which used to mean walking around asking for votes and now means a graph. It subsumes the way we spend an evening. It subsumes desire, and here I want to be precise rather than rhetorical, because the vocabulary is the evidence: we have learned to say that we invest in a relationship, that a person is high maintenance, that affection requires emotional labour, that we should not waste our time on someone. Nobody imposed these words. We reached for them because they were the only ones available with enough dignity to describe what we were feeling.

A friend of mine would say that capital has won, has won, has won and has won, and that the question of against whom no longer has an answer, because what has disappeared is not the enemy but the consciousness of being a side at all. I find this difficult to argue with, and I have tried.

POETRY, POSSIBLY

There is one exception that people offer me whenever I say these things, and I want to take it seriously rather than accept it.

Poetry, it is said, escapes. The poet is a parrhesiastes: one who says everything, the whole of it, in front of power, without the protection of prudence. Poetry has no market to be subsumed into, no format to be reorganised for, no metric that would survive contact with it. It remains, in this account, the last unowned room in the house.

I would like to believe it. What stops me is the suspicion that poetry is free because it is unsellable, and not because it is brave. That would be a freedom of a very particular kind: the freedom of what nobody has yet found a use for. We did not protect poetry. We failed to monetise it, and then called the failure an ethics.

And yet parrhesia was never a market privilege. It was a right the city extended and could withdraw, granted by a community to someone it agreed to let speak. Which means the real question is not whether poetry is still free. It is whether anything we publish is still a place where the whole truth can be said, or whether that function has quietly migrated into the forms from which no one has ever earned anything.

A PRIVATE LANGUAGE

Anyone who has loved someone for long enough has built a language.

It happens without a decision. Two people accumulate a small lexicon: words with meanings that hold only inside one apartment, a tone that turns an ordinary sentence into a joke, an entire grammar of reference that would need footnotes for anyone else and would not survive them. It is the most sophisticated literary production most of us will ever be involved in, and it has a print run of two.

When one of the two leaves, the language does not die. That would be merciful. It becomes a language with one remaining speaker, which is not a language at all but a symptom. You go on knowing all the words. There is simply no longer anyone for whom they mean anything. I know of no more complete untranslatability, and no fellowship on earth is going to help it circulate.

I mention this because I have stopped being able to keep two things separate: what I have learned about the circulation of literatures, and what I have learned about the collapse of a private one. They taught me the same lesson from different directions. Meaning is not a property of what is said. It is a property of the relation in which it is said. Lose the listener and you have not lost an audience, you have lost the sense.

Cioran, a writer, born far from this sea, who died in a language that was not the one he was given, liked to observe that we do not inhabit a country but a language. He spent a long life explaining, with an elegance that always struck me as suspiciously well nourished, that being born is an inconvenience. I have come to believe in a smaller inconvenience, less literary and far more daily: that of being plural. Of having to constitute, with other people, a society. Solitude at least has the decency to be consistent.

WHAT CROSSES

Which brings me, finally, to why you are here and to the question I have asked you to spend three days inside.

What crosses this sea is not what deserves to cross. What crosses is what has been made crossable in advance: work that accepted, before it was written, the conditions of its own translatability. This is subsumption in its most efficient form. A border that stops books is a crude instrument and generates resistance. A border that shapes the book so that it will pass generates nothing at all, because there is no longer anything to stop.

I am not going to offer you the consolation of describing us as the victims of this arrangement. We are its administrators. We are the customs officers who have forgotten we are wearing a uniform, and the fact that most of us are underpaid, precarious and personally decent does not alter the function. What has been lost is not our integrity. It is our consciousness of being a class, of sharing a condition rather than competing inside one. Ten publishers in a room can be ten competitors comparing catalogues, or they can be something that recognises itself. I built this thing because I wanted to find out which.

This island has been described by others for a very long time, and it knows precisely the difference between being read and being categorised. It has gone on producing its own categories regardless. Cyprus arrives here this year as focus country, and I will not summarise in advance what it has to say. Three days exist so that I do not have to.

Last year I asked you for resistance. A year is enough time to notice that a word repeated becomes a decoration, so this year I am asking for something smaller and considerably harder. Name the categories under which you have agreed to file your own work. Say out loud whether you chose them.

Then go home and publish what does not cross.