Abstract
This article draws on evidence from a qualitative study of working-class readers in order to reflect on the ways in which readers can lay claim to, or can affirm a particular kind of meaningful relationship with, poetic texts. Drawing a lesson from the example of Bridget Fowler’s account of the reading of popular romances, it argues for the need to take seriously the question of the ‘uses’ of literary and cultural products. An account which construes the relationship between readers and literary texts only in terms of the accumulation of cultural capital within the context of a wider symbolic economy risks losing sight of the ways in which popular practices of using and sharing poems can be discordant with both the rationality of symbolic exchange and the wider rationalities which are characteristic of capitalism.
Introduction
In The Alienated Reader, her brilliant study of women readers of romantic fiction, Bridget Fowler places a striking emphasis on the importance of understanding the ‘use-value’ of these stories to those who engage with them (1991, pp. 30–48). Fowler’s account is a key contribution within a wider tradition of work interested in what ordinary readers do with the literary texts which they consume. Characteristic of that tradition, and of her account, is the refusal to treat such practices as straightforwardly an expression of social domination. Against such a view Fowler insists on the need to attend to the specificity of the relationship in question, asking ‘why women . . . should have turned to this form of cultural consumption. It was not an imposed taste’ (p. 19, italics added). Even if the stories told in romance fiction often act as ‘secret caches of obedience’ (p. 31) Fowler reminds us that we are still required to explain why these particular stories matter to these particular readers. That focus on the ‘uses’ of culture may bring to mind, of course, Richard Hoggart’s influential study The Uses of Literacy (1957/1984) but Fowler is, in many ways, closer to the contemporaneous position of Stuart Hall (e.g. 1981/2002) in her view of popular culture as a space riven by its own contestations and struggles. The cultural world which Hoggart portrayed as broadly unified, she suggests (with a typically arresting and perfectly turned iambic phrase), is actually ‘a braided plait of ill-matched strands’ (1991, p. 39). Strikingly, Fowler makes a similar point vis-a-vis Pierre Bourdieu’s account in Distinction. This too, she suggests, underplays the ‘heterogenous character of mass culture’ (p. 171).
That focus on the ‘use-values’ of culture also signals, of course, a particular theoretical alignment. It points, in other words, to Fowler’s belief that a convincing sociological account of the making and reception of literature needs to situate those practices within capitalism’s wider political economy. In The Alienated Reader Fowler makes good on that claim in a remarkably rich and multifaceted way. This includes tracing the history of the romance – ‘fairytales sieved through the net of realism’ (p. 12) – back to the emergence of a gendered division of labour in Europe’s early modern period and the establishment, over time, of the family as a kind of ‘regressive utopia’ (p. 17): an island of ethical value in the wasteland of capitalist instrumentalism, but also the site at which women’s unpaid work was articulated to that economy under the imprimatur of patriarchal authority. Her study includes, moreover, a series of deeply sensitive close-readings which explore how different traditions of romantic fiction articulate counter-hegemonic longings and frustrations, even as they offer to buy the acquiescence of readers with the promise of wishes fulfilled. And it includes, finally, a deft and rigorous empirical exploration of the ways in which practices of reading are delimited by the material and experiential realities of class. Fowler is attentive throughout to the fact that class is gendered and vice versa. Hers is a nuanced and undogmatic historical materialism, but it is a historical materialism nonetheless.
The article which follows draws on empirical evidence from a qualitative study into the reading of poetry in working-class communities around the west of Scotland in order to ask a particular question: what does it mean to lay claim to something like a poem; what kind of relationship is being asserted in such a claim? In reflecting on this question, I try to follow in the footsteps of Fowler’s commitment to a historical materialist account of reading practices and, in particular, to her foregrounding of the question of ‘use-values’. My interest here lies not so much with the content of specific literary texts nor with how particular poems might be said to refract or contest a hegemonic view of social relations. Rather, I try to situate what we might call everyday reading practices within the lived experience of capitalism, and to ask whether certain ways of relating to literary texts might entail a kind of resistance to aspects of that experience, a way of repudiating the consequences of a world made in the image of exchange-value.
Reading poetry today
The data on which I am drawing here derive from a qualitative study which I conducted in a number of working-class areas of Glasgow (Govanhill, Govan and Cardonald), as well as in adjoining towns (Clydebank and Dumbarton). My broad aim for the project was to explore responses to contemporary Scottish poetry amongst working-class readers. Although recent years have seen renewed sociological reflection on poetry as a practice and, indeed, as a potential methodology (e.g. Edkins, 2022), there are relatively few existing studies which address the reading of poetry as a distinctive form of literary expression with its own conventions and potentialities. Such accounts as do exist (e.g. Chasar, 2012; Rubin, 2007) are not often informed by primary research and insofar as they do incorporate the responses of readers these tend to be readers who are, already, aficionados of poetry. Consequently, much of this work ‘looks past’ the experiences of those who do not read poetry, either as a matter of choice or because they feel excluded by it. This leads, as might be predicted, to analytical conclusions which tend to celebrate readerly agency whilst saying little about how forms of symbolic violence take shape in the encounter between readers and texts, or about how those affected respond to these experiences.
With this in mind, in seeking prospective participants I reached out to as wide a range of existing groups and organisations as I could, including, wherever possible, those which were not focused on reading as an activity: groups of parents meeting in their children’s nurseries; community groups meeting in libraries or in other venues; and a range of groups meeting under the auspices of work being done by local third sector organisations. Once I had explained what the project entailed, I sent participants a booklet containing a selection of formally and linguistically diverse poems by contemporary Scottish poets as well as an audio disc on which the same poems were read aloud. Once they had had an opportunity to read or listen to these poems I arranged to meet with the groups – or, occasionally, with individuals – to talk about what they made of them. Sessions began with a general discussion about poetry and its salience, or otherwise, in people’s lives. Thereafter we listened again to the poems, one at a time. After each reading participants were invited to reflect on their responses to the piece in question. Sessions involved groups of between five and eight members, and lasted between 50 minutes and two hours.
These discussions were audio-recorded, transcribed and manually coded through an iterative process of reading, reflection and re-reading. My analysis of the resulting data was thematically orientated insofar as I was concerned to draw out continuities in the ways in which readers responded to the poems which they had been asked to consider. At the same time, understanding the dynamics of those responses also required careful contextualisation. This was because, on the one hand, readers frequently made sense of poems by referring them to aspects of their own lives and because, on the other, all responses involved some grappling with the details of the texts at hand. Given that, the process of analysis often involved something like close-reading, a tacking back-and-forth between the rich complexity of the poetic texts and the subtle ways in which those texts were interpreted, appropriated and creatively re-written in the course of these discussions. In all of this I was moving partly in a deductive direction, guided by the concerns which I have outlined above, but also found myself repeatedly stumbling across issues which emerged, unanticipated, from within the data itself. I report in more detail on the broader findings of the project elsewhere (Smith, forthcoming). The issue which I address in what follows is one that arose in a more inductive fashion, leading me back to Fowler’s pioneering study and back to a question about the ways in which literary texts are claimed by those who read them.
A poem of one’s own
Many of my participants made clear that they had little or no interest in poetry. For some of those who took part there was a sense, as articulated by these members of a group which met in Govan, that poetry was culturally irrelevant, not least because it no longer formed, in their experience, a meaningful part of the school curriculum:
I think poetry was more like, years gone by. It doesn’t seem to happen much these days. It’s an old thing, like you’ll find [it with] older generations [. . .]
Younger generations are no interested [. . .] I mean I think the biggest problem I’ve got as well, because it’s no being taught in the school either. It might be taught as [another participant] says, with the younger ones, but our boy’s in primary 7 and I havenae heard him saying anything about poetry fae what? Primary 4 upwards? So, if the schools arenae really teaching it, you’re no gonnae hear it.
For others the fault lay with poetry itself. It was certainly the case that some of the poems discussed in the groups were considered obscure and recalcitrant to readerly effort. Sometimes, moreover, that feeling took on an accusatory quality, leaving the reader with a sense that – despite my reassurances to the contrary – they had failed a test of interpretation, as suggested by the response of this man, who took part in one of the groups which met in Clydebank, to Don Paterson’s poem
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‘The Circle’:
Now Mr. Don Paterson is clearly a very clever man, and I couldn’t deduce anything out of this. I can’t understand it [. . .] See this: ‘We all resent / the quarter bled off by the dark / between the bow string and the mark’. That’s very clever [but] I don’t understand that. I understand, I understand it’s nicely written. It might make a good song, but it means nothing to me.
A little later, he added, in language that will be familiar to any reader of Bourdieu:
I can’t do it. I couldn’t crack this code [. . .] It’s not just Mr. Paterson. Most of these people appear to me, just me personally, to be writing in a code I can’t understand.
These were by no means the only kinds of responses that readers articulated and, moreover, views such as these often came to be qualified or reconsidered in the course of ongoing discussion. But I cite these comments here to establish a necessary contextualising point. For many of these taking part, poetry was felt to be something that belonged to others: to those who attended the sorts of school which grant their pupils a familiarity with poetry; to those who are in possession of whatever interpretive codes are required to wrest meaning from the poetic text.
And yet, at the same time, there were numerous moments in the course of the research when I caught glimpses of a different kind of relationship, if not with poetry as a literary institution then with specific, individual poems. For example, at the end of one session which ran in Dumbarton one of the women who had taken part came over to speak to me. During the preceding conversation she had said almost nothing. In contrast to most of the other groups which I ran, there had been, in this setting, a couple of participants who were retired professionals and who were very comfortable talking about poetry. When this woman had spoken it had been, for the most part, to indicate her agreement with what these more self-assured members of the group had said. Given this her silence had seemed to me to be in keeping with the silence of those who, as Bourdieu puts it, lack the sense of a ‘right to speak’ about political or aesthetic matters. That is to say, I took her silence to indicate just what Bourdieu describes: a ceding of symbolic ground, a ‘resigned recognition’ (1984, p. 417) of the fact that the territory in question was already owned by others.
As the group was breaking up, however, this woman sat down next to me and drew a book from her bag. She did this, she explained, because she wanted to show me what she called ‘my favourite’: a poem by Charles Kingsley entitled ‘The Sands of Dee’. Everything about how she handled the book, about the way in which she recited part of the poem aloud without really looking at the words, spoke of how much she valued this particular text. She shared it just as one might share a cherished possession. In my fieldnotes at the time I wrote: ‘It clearly meant a lot to her to be able to show not just that it was her favourite poem but that it was her favourite poem’.
Elsewhere, in a session which ran in Cardonald, something similar happened. This also occurred towards the end of the meeting, as the conversation was starting to wind down. The man sitting next to me – who was interested in poetry – was telling me about a piece by Dorothea Mackellar that he loved and about one line in particular: ‘I could talk about that one line for weeks’, he said. As he finished speaking a younger woman, who had not said all that much during the course of the session, turned to me: ‘I wouldn’t normally seek out poetry’, she said, ‘because it. . . I have to think about it, and maybe I’m just like, well, if I don’t get it, you know, I’ll move on.’ She paused for a moment and then added:
But I got a picture once. It was called ‘Annabel Lee’. And it had the line of a poem, poetry underneath it. And I sought out the poetry, because it said it on the picture. It was by Edgar Allan Poe. And it’s a beautiful poem. I really like that. Very haunting, lovely poem.
Here too, it seemed to me, I was being told a story about a certain kind of relationship to poetry, about the way in which readers can be hailed, as it were, by the happenstance encounter with a specific text, a text in which they find something that speaks to them such that they choose to lay claim to it, to take hold of it, rather than ‘moving on’.
A third example comes from an interview I carried out, also in Govan, with a remarkable older man, a former engineer who told me – amongst other things – about his time working alongside the erstwhile comrades of the revolutionary organiser and writer John Maclean. It is perhaps unsurprising, given this, that he was sharply critical of the way in which the canonisation of poetry tends to elide working-class voices (see, famously, Leonard, 2001). He talked, for instance, about a friend whose great uncle had fought in the First World War:
. . . this guy was just a foot slogger, he, he had written poetry in some of his letters home, you know? [. . .] And I saw some of this fella’s stuff and it was so simple and direct, you know?
But that kind of poetry, he said, which offered a ‘real history of what life was like in the trenches’, had been ignored, whilst the poetry of the ‘officer class’ was celebrated and remembered even though much of it was full of ‘words that you would need to go for a dictionary’. Often, he said, he found that published poetry – including most of the poems we discussed – reproduced these classed exclusions. Often, indeed, he felt that poetry was written largely as a way of flaunting the poet’s cultural riches, of celebrating their superiority over ‘the lower legions’. Besides, he added, ‘when you look at the thousands of poems that have been written, good God, you couldnae live long enough to read them all’.
And yet, at one point in the interview, when we were talking about how poetry was taught at school he quoted, spontaneously and from memory, the five verses of a satirical poem that had been written by a classmate from his school days. It was about one ‘Sean Mackay’, a Highlander who joins the police and proves himself to be an apt candidate for promotion when he refuses to take a risk on anyone else’s behalf. The poem ends:
Said Sergeant Speck to him one day, ‘Noo, Sean Mackay, I want to say a word or two about the way we dae things in the polis.’ ‘If you was at the Broomielaw
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and in the Clyde a poor man saw, what wid you dae?’ Said Sean ‘I’d blaw my whistle for the polis.’ ‘That’s very good’, the Sergeant said, ‘I see that you can use your head you’ll be a Sergeant yet, instead of a big fat Glasgae polis’.
Although the poem had apparently been published in a school magazine at the time, it is quite possible that it survives now, as a living text in the world, only in and through the interviewee’s remembering of it. It seemed that at least part of the reason why he had kept hold of it in this way for so long was because it served as a demonstration that poetic creativity is not, after all, the exclusive property of a particular group of people. Once he had finished his impromptu recital he paused for a moment, and then reflected: ‘There was a boy at 12 year old, that wrote that. I often wonder, that guy must have made his way somewhere in the letters, you know?’ His recounting of the poem felt like one way of salvaging and preserving something from the long record of working-class poetry largely consigned to the forgetfulness of literary posterity.
How should we understand these fugitive, often deeply personal, instances of cultural reception? What struck me most about these moments, at the time, was the sense that what was being articulated in each case was a claim of ownership. A form of ownership which was, moreover, being asserted in response to the way in which I had organised the research. I had, after all, asked participants to consider poems which I had chosen on their behalf. In that respect the research was guilty of reproducing the dynamic of a wider politics in which working-class subjects are expected to take what they are given, culturally speaking. Against that, what these readers held up were poems of their own choosing. Against a sense that the field of poetry was a place where they did not belong they insisted on the extent to which these particular poems belonged to them. When, for example, my participant in Dumbarton chose to show Charles Kingsley’s poem to me, she was showing me a text that is, of course, available to anyone who can read English and who has access to a library or to the internet. Yet, nonetheless, the way in which she handled her copy of that text and repeated a part of it aloud made clear that in a significant sense she was sharing something which was ‘hers’. I felt as if I were being given a gift, an object which did indeed entail something of the spirit of the giver (Mauss, 1950/2002). In the same way, it was clear that for the man with whom I spoke in Govan, the poem that he recalled mattered to him, not least, because it was one which was – over and against the ‘thousands of the poems that have been written’ – indisputably his or, at least, in his keeping. In that sense, his remembering of that poem for so many years was, in its own way, a repudiation of the exclusionary politics of culture which he had described elsewhere in the interview. It was a means of staking a claim in poetry’s vast and long-since occupied terrain.
Symbolic appropriation
One way of conceiving of the relationship between the poem and the reader in cases like these is given to us in Bourdieu’s concept of ‘symbolic appropriation’. This idea is well established in the sociology of culture, but because it bears on what follows, I risk a brief reprise. For Bourdieu ‘symbolic goods are a two-faced reality’ (1971/1993b, p. 113) in the sense that their worth is defined both commercially, as objects of potential economic exchange, and aesthetically, as objects belonging to the symbolic economy of a relatively autonomous cultural field. So far as the reception of cultural objects is concerned that Janus-faced quality is reflected, most immediately, in the tension between ‘material’ and ‘symbolic’ appropriation. ‘The whole relation to the work of art is changed’, Bourdieu notes laconically, when the object in question can bought and owned, ‘thus taking its place in the series of luxury goods which one possesses and enjoys without needing to prove the delight they give and the taste they illustrate’ (1984, pp. 273, 278). Against that possibility, the cultural field defends the ‘other-worldly’ purity of the cultural or aesthetic object, insisting that it instantiates a form of value irreducible to any price-tag. One index of the autonomy of the cultural field is thus the extent to which it is able to sustain this claim as to the ‘incommensurability of the specifically cultural value and economic value of a work’ (1971/1993b, p. 120). Symbolic appropriation thus describes a relationship to the work of art by which a viewer or reader ‘lays claim’ to that work not by buying it, but by virtue of their capacity to render it symbolically meaningful or to derive aesthetic pleasure from it.
Crucially, of course, Bourdieu insists that this is not a possibility which is equally open to everyone. What puts the ‘appropriation’ into ‘symbolic appropriation’ is the ‘rarity of the instruments with which [aesthetic objects] may be deciphered’ (1971/1993b, p. 120) and the unequal distribution of access to those instruments. The cultural field objectifies the principle that, in a spiritual if not material sense, aesthetic objects properly ‘belong’ to those who are best equipped to decipher them; to those who, to recall the words of my participant above, are in possession of the requisite symbolic codes. ‘Symbolic appropriation’ is thus appropriative in the further sense that those who are able to lay claim to aesthetic objects in the ways that are deemed ‘legitimate’ within the field are able to accrue benefit from so doing. Bourdieu talks, for instance, about ‘apprentice intellectuals’ whose ‘symbolic appropriation of the work’ at hand is governed by the expectation that they will derive ‘the symbolic profit of their practice from the work itself, from its rarity and from their discourse about it’ (1984, p. 270).
Bourdieu thus helps us recognise the extent to which the inequalities structuring the cultural field are made evident not only at the threshold of consumption (e.g. whether someone is or is not able to understand a particular poem) but in a further series of symbolic differentiations over how they do so. Because the ‘doxic’ principle of the cultural field is that of the self-valuable quality of the work of art, the most ‘legitimate’ ways of ‘appropriating’ art are those which celebrate aesthetic qualities in their own right, turning their back on any ‘extra-aesthetic’ references in the work and focusing intently on its literary or artistic aspects. By contrast, Bourdieu argues, working-class readers are unlikely to share that indifference to the ‘meaning’ or subject of the work which characterises ‘legitimate’ ways of appropriating art. In this sense, for Bourdieu, the distinction between a ‘functionalist’ response to the work of art – a response which places ‘value on what is “instructive”’ (1968/1993, p. 222) or moving – and the ‘pure’ appropriation – which decries both utility and affect in art – is one way in which classed inequality is refracted and redoubled in our relationships to culture.
The popular aesthetic
In many ways the concept of symbolic appropriation does makes analytical sense of the examples that I described above. Insofar as those readers ‘laid claim’ to the poems in question they did so because of the fact that they had made them meaningful, had found in them expressive qualities or pleasures which mattered to them. If there was, indeed, a sense of ownership at stake here that sense was certainly mediated by an idea of cultural rather than economic value. And, yes, it is also true that these examples could be taken to demonstrate the force of the symbolic distinction between ‘pure’ and ‘popular’ modes of appropriating art that Bourdieu describes, not least insofar as they tended to emphasise the work’s ‘sensual’ qualities (its loveliness or its beauty, say) ahead of a concern with how it was constructed or how it might relate to other literary works.
This was, indeed, in keeping with an aspect of what I found in the research more broadly. The features of the ‘popular’ aesthetic as Bourdieu describes it – a preference for function over form; for the concrete interpretation over the (inter)textual one – were frequently evident in how members of the groups engaged with the poems we discussed. It was often the case, for example, that responses to those poems moved first to a reprising of their substantive content, as if to haul poetry down out of the aesthetic clouds and claim it on behalf of lived experience. One example will have to suffice here. After we had finished listening to Jackie Kay’s poem 3 ‘Bed’ (2007), in a second group which met in Clydebank, this woman was the first to respond:
See that is, to me, a mother that’s brought up her children and for some reason she’s been ill and she’s stuck now, she’s bed-ridden, and the daughter’s taking care of her, but she’s no taking care of her. You, it’s just like ‘aye, whatever’. I know how that feels, because my mother took no well, and I would go over, every day I went over, but it didn’t matter what I did, it was never good enough.
This comment then opened out into a long subsequent discussion, covering nearly 10 pages of transcript. This discussion used the poem as a spur for unravelling the ethical complexities and interpersonal dynamics of the situation that Kay imagines. Thus the meaning of the poem was approached, not as something which needed to be chiselled out of the poetic text itself, but as something that could be best revealed through an effort to explicate the material and human circumstances that the poem describes. I would add here, however, a slight qualification to Bourdieu’s characterisation of this mode of reading as one involving the ‘bracketing of form in favour of “human” content’ (1984, p. 44). In this case, at least, these readers remained deeply attentive to questions of poetic form. The difference, however, was that they treated form not as an aesthetic matter, but as a clue to what might ‘really’ be going on in the poem. The question of why Kay chose to present the poem as a first-person monologue was thus one that was answered, not on the literary critical grounds of poetic technique, but in and through an empathetic concern with embodied experience:
But, is it because the mother maybe can’t speak that there’s no conversation, you know, has she lost being able to talk? And that’s why there is no any conversation, and that’s why she’s feeling as if like. . . it’s all going on in her head, because, I mean, if she’s had a stroke and she’s no just stuck in bed, you know, if it’s a bad one, she’s no going to be able to do anything for herself, she’s maybe no able to speak, she’s no able to. . .
It is true, in short, that this was a way of responding to poetry which was less interested in deciphering the poem’s significance as a purely literary object and more concerned with its human utility; which sought to put the poem to use as a way of making sense of social relationships and subjective experiences.
Maybe she is staying with her daughter, maybe she’s not in her home, maybe it isn’t her home?
Maybe.
It’s her daughter’s house [. . .] I must admit that when I had my accident I wasn’t over the door for what. . . quite a while. Three and a half months before they sorted anything. I felt like the house was a prison [. . .] Because I was so used to being able to go out and all of a sudden I couldn’t. I couldn’t get down the stairs myself and you do feel claustrophobic. Once I was able to get out and about again I was fine.
But, do you think it’s telling you then, you should appreciate, like every day that you live then?
Oh aye.
Because there’s her at that age and she’s. . .
Wishing herself away.
. . .she’s looking at, I don’t know, looking at things.
Well, to me that’s what it is there. She’s wishing that she wasn’t there any longer. Saying: ‘Am jist biding time so am ur’.
The uses of poetry
It is at this point, however, that Bourdieu’s account may be guilty of leaving something on the table. Reflecting on these examples, I wonder about the consequences of the fact that the central question that Bourdieu asks, in relation to cultural consumption, is concerned with the inscription of various ‘symbolic distinctions in the manner of using such goods’ (1968/1993a, p. 236, italics added). I wonder about what might be overlooked as a result of this stringent focus on how our use of culture comes to be accorded, or measured in terms of, varying degrees of symbolic value.
By contrast, it is worth casting our minds back to Marx’s original formulation of the idea of use-value. In those much-thumbed, early chapters of Capital, Marx not only sets out to unravel the mysteries of the capitalist economy, he also offers a proto-phenomenological account of what life under capitalist conditions feels like. Integral to this account is the distinction he draws between ‘exchange-’ and ‘use-’ value. Famously, he contrasts two modes of economic relationship. This first is that in which a commodity (C) is exchanged for money (M) in order to purchase another commodity (C). Marx’s example is a weaver selling yards of linen so that they can purchase a family Bible – or, perhaps, a copy of The Lyrical Ballads? – ‘which is destined to enter his house as an object of utility and of edification to its inmates’ (1887/1999, p. 72). Of this trajectory, Marx writes: ‘Consumption, the satisfaction of wants, in one word, use-value, is its end and aim’ (p. 105). The second – which comes to be characteristic of life under capitalism – is that in which money is used to purchase commodities which are destined to re-enter the circuits of exchange in pursuit of further profit (M-C-M’). In this case, Marx says: ‘Its leading motive, and the goal that attracts it, is . . . mere exchange-value’ (p. 106).
My interest here is in recognising the tendential outcomes, in terms of human experience, which Marx suggests are the consequence of living under the dominion of exchange-value. Firstly, and as Peter Stallybrass explored in a wonderful essay, objects as commodities for exchange achieve their ‘purest form . . . when most emptied out of particularity and thingliness’ (1998, p. 183). Exchange-value, in other words, places the qualitative specificity of objects under erasure. Opening up a line of thought that will later be developed more fully by Georg Simmel (1900/2004), Marx writes:
The name of a thing is something distinct from the qualities of that thing. I know nothing of a man, by knowing that his name is Jacob. In the same way with regard to money, every trace of a value-relation disappears in the names pound, dollar, franc, ducat, &c. (1887/1999, p. 70)
Notice that for Marx the ‘particularity’ of ‘things’ is not dependent on their phenomenal uniqueness but on their incorporation within a ‘value-relation’: objects acquire meaningful significance in and through the way in which they matter to, are made useful by, particular human beings.
Secondly, and relatedly, the dominance of exchange-value brings about a radical shift in the purposive orientation of human activity. Use-value is directed towards the ‘satisfaction of wants’, it looks towards or finds its ‘end’ in the specificity of human need. By contrast: ‘The circulation of money as capital is . . . an end in itself, for the expansion of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement. The circulation of capital has therefore no limits’ (1887/1999, p. 107). Thus, For Marx, use-value and exchange-value look in entirely opposite directions: one back, towards the human being; the other outwards, towards the ever-receding horizon of accumulation.
Thirdly, and implicit in what has already been said, use-value is to exchange-value as satiation is to insatiability. For Marx, exchange-value is not simply a technical or theoretical term. He uses it to describe the interior landscape of capitalism, a way of relating to the world that capitalism establishes and requires. What defines that orientation is, precisely, a sense of boundless-ness, a ‘passionate chase after exchange-value’ which ‘has no limits’ because it comes to no point of rest in the satisfaction of a situated human need. For the capitalist, Marx writes:
The expansion of value . . . becomes his subjective aim, and it is only in so far as the appropriation of ever more and more wealth in the abstract becomes the sole motive of his operations, that he functions as a capitalist, that is, as capital personified and endowed with consciousness and a will. Use-values must therefore never be looked upon as the real aim of the capitalist. (1887/1999, p. 107)
Hence the vampire – a being possessed of an unslakable and fundamentally inhuman thirst – is the literary analogy upon which Marx draws most frequently in order to personify for the soul – or soullessness? – of capital.
In many ways, it seems to me, what the readers whose accounts I began with were demonstrating was the ‘use-value’ of poetry. In saying this I do not mean merely that they described how and why a given poem mattered to them, how they had made use of it. I mean, rather, that their accounts demonstrated a relationship to these poems in keeping with the standpoint of ‘use-value’ as Marx describes it. That is to say that, in the first case, what they described was not a relationship to poetry as such; it was a relationship to this poem, to precisely these words, encountered in this context – in a school magazine, on the frame of a picture. These poems were precious to them in their particularity, and by virtue of what they had meant to them in their lives. If, as Stallybrass has it, ‘Capital was Marx’s attempt to give the coat back to the owner’ (1998, p. 187), these accounts from my respondents offer a glimpse of a way of relating to culture which instinctively sought to claim the poem back for the reader, as it were; which treated poetic value as a consequence of the situated specificity of the ‘value-relation’ between a given reader and a given text.
By the same token, what these readers described was an orientation to poetry which turned its back on the question of symbolic competition and the gathering of symbolic profit. I don’t think any of these readers would have asserted that the poems in question were the best poems ever written. But this is just the point: these poems mattered to them in a manner that runs entirely counter to the logic of a judgement which makes poetic value a function of a wider symbolic economy, and which depends on the extent to which the speaker embodies a mastery of that economy. The readers who, in the face of a poem like Jackie Kay’s ‘Bed’, worked together in order to render the poem meaningful by bringing it to bear on lived experience – and by bringing lived experience to bear upon it – may be articulating the ‘naïve realism’ of the popular aesthetic. But if this is all we see then we end up reading these practices only through the lens of a symbolic economy; we end up making ‘use’ a function of ‘exchange’. We risk missing, to put it more directly, the oppositional quality of these readerly practices, the way in which they force cultural objects to ‘look away’ from the question of symbolic accumulation and back towards the question of human need.
Here a further and wider point might be added. Insofar as the symbolic appropriation of something like a poem, our capacity to enjoy or take pleasure from it, does not depend upon material appropriation of that object – in that we do not have to have exclusive ownership of a poem in order for it to be symbolically meaningful to us – practices of cultural reception can allow us a glimpse of a relationality which is ill-conformed to the standpoint of exchange-value. It is true, of course, that there is a commercialised production of poetry subject to the rationalities of the market and that volumes of poetry are produced and sold as commodities. Yet the poem which is learnt ‘by heart’, or borne in the memory over time, even over decades, is a demonstration of the ways in which a non-commodified relationship to culture can survive and flourish in the margins of that market. The ‘favourite’ poem which is shared between one reader and another as a kind of gift is, after all, not lost to the giver in the giving; its ‘value’ is not diminished by being gifted. Quite possibly, indeed, that value is enhanced by being shared. ‘Private property has made us so stupid and partial’, wrote a younger Marx, ‘that an object is only ours when we have it – when it exists for us as capital’ (1844/2013, p. 112). These small acts of reading suggest that everyday relationships to poetry may be one context in which we can work to unlearn that stupidity, can envisage or experience a way of having something which does not depend on denying it to others. Bourdieu’s account remains salutary in many ways, yet that account also tends to subsume the question of the reception of cultural products within the context of a symbolic economy; it tends to bend ‘use-value’ back towards (symbolic) ‘exchange-value’. Perhaps, in so doing, it risks losing sight of the ways in which popular practices of using and sharing things such as poems can be discordant with both the specific rationality of symbolic exchange that defines the cultural field and the wider rationalities of a capitalist market.
Picking up words to use later on
Properly substantiating these claims would require more space than I have. It would require, not least, a fuller consideration of the specificities of poetic ‘use-value’, of the particular affordances that poetry offers to those who lay claim to it. I can perhaps offer one final reflection, by way of indication of how such an account might proceed.
It is noteworthy that all three of the poems which my respondents shared with me were poems which had a discernible formal structure and rhyme scheme. Rhyme and metre, of course, provide some of the ways of working on language by which poets grant their works an internal consistency and create the much-recognised sense that ‘a poem, like a picture . . . stands away from us as an object of its own’ (Stokes, cited in Robinson, 2020, p. 202). Both practices have been symbolically devalued in Anglophone poetry across the course of the twentieth century, coming to seem increasingly contrived, a ‘kind of false harmony’, as Terry Eagleton puts it (2007, p. 132). For the most part, discussion over the question of rhyming verse in the groups that I ran revealed a non-committal acknowledgement of this critical orthodoxy. Here, for example, are the words of participants from a group from which I quoted earlier:
I like [poetry] rhyming for some reason, yes.
I think because it always did when you were at school, most of the poems that you read the stuff did rhyme, very few never, and I suppose you are so used to poetry rhyming that when it doesn’t you’re thinking, I don’t understand this. You read it again and then it’s like ‘read it again’ and you sit there and think, maybe I’m trying to make too much of what’s in here.
It is certainly possible to make out, here, a tacit recognition of the assumption that rhyming poetry is old-fashioned or out-of-time. Other participants, like this man that I interviewed in Govan, made the point more assertively:
If you’re gonnae talk about poetry, if you want to use the canon of poetry, like the ‘lay’ and the ‘comeback’, this and that, fair enough. People are no dae’n it anymore, they’re no dae’n it anymore [. . .] formal writing. Instead of rhyming poetry or see like two stanzas and then the anti-stanza [. . .] they’re no using that now, they’re just writing down their thoughts as they come. . . this is the modern way.
Or, as this man who was part of a group which ran in Cardonald, said: ‘Sometimes, in poetry, the words might be better than having it rhyme.’ That is to say, as he went on to explain: a poetry unburdened by rhyme forces the reader to ask themselves: ‘what’s he meaning, you know [. . .] what’s he wrote down on that bit of paper, what’s he describing?’
Yet as Sandra’s previously quoted comment suggests it was exactly this possibility – the way in which unstructured poetry throws the onus on the reader to create their own frame for interpreting the meaningfulness of the poem – which made ‘free’ poetry feel less valuable, less useful, to many readers in these groups. As Claire, one of my interviewees who wrote poetry herself, reflected:
. . . rhyme and metre are unfashionable these days, you know [. . .] it’s kind of frowned on, a little bit, by academics and, apparently, editors and publishers don’t want rhyme, you know. But see the people, they enjoy rhyme, and they don’t go ‘Oh God, there’s a rhyme, that so passé’, you know? They love rhyme and, you know, it works for them.
One of the reasons why ‘rhyme might work’ – one aspect of the kind of work it might do for non-academic readers – was suggested, finally, by Thomas, a delivery driver who took part in the group which met in Govan. He pointed out that rhyme was often related to the way in which poetry could be retained and made useful: ‘if it’s rhyming fae start to finish they’ll pick it up and they’ll pick up words that they can use later on as they go on in life. “I remember that fae that poem when I was younger”.’
What are these comments teaching us about the ‘use-value’ of poetic practice? Many of the historical roots of contemporary poetry lie, we might remember, in popular practices of oral creativity and expression of the kind studied, historically, by Albert Lord (1960), Ruth Finnegan (1988), Isidore Okpewho (1979), etc. That includes, for instance, the traditions of balladry which, as Suzanne Gilbert (2015) describes, created a demotic and flexible form in which broader historical events were refracted and reflected upon. It includes, also, of course, the traditions of work-song by which labouring people bent the rhythms of working practices into something aesthetically useable and collectively enacted. In other words, the use of rhyming, or of metrical forms such as the ‘common measure’, is part of what allowed poetry in these contexts to be passed from person to person, often in the absence of a written record, and almost always in ways that were open to further innovation and creative elaboration. Any aspect of literary technique is amenable to many different uses, of course, but there is a sense in which rhyme and metrical arrangement thus bear the hallmark of a world of a popular and collective creativity not conformed to market rationality or the standpoint of exchange-value. They carry the trace of a mode of non-accumulative cultural exchange.
All of this bears, in turn, on how these poetic potentialities can be put to use. Amongst other things, rhyme and recognisable metre lower the threshold on the ‘symbolic appropriation’ of a given poem – they enhance the ease with which they can be shared in ways that also serve to undercut the economics of symbolic rarity which Bourdieu describes. The poet Glynn Maxwell puts this with great elegance in a passage in which he speculates about the tendency of students in his writing classes to avoid rhyme in their work:
At any point in the evolution of any language, certain words connect aurally in a way that has nothing to do with meaning. You may turn your back on this wealth if you choose, but it won’t stop shining. And because this is language and not capital, you could have taken all you could carry. Not a jewel of it would be gone. (2012, p. 110)
Just so: the potentialities of something like rhyme may be one way in which poetry is resistant to conversion into (symbolic) capital, a part of what allows it – in the words of my respondent – to be ‘picked up’, held in the memory, and retained as something of use for the future. It is one demonstration of the way in which popular practices of using and sharing culture may defend forms of value, may enact forms of relationality, offering us shelter against the withering cold of what E. P. Thompson called ‘the winter of money’ (1994, p. 339).
Conclusion
In The Alienated Reader Bridget Fowler offers a tantalising example of a popular practice of cultural reception that speaks to the issues I have considered here. In the empirical section of her study Fowler draws an analytical distinction between four different groups of readers. The last of these were those whose preferences were for generic romances in the style of Mills and Boon. For this group, Fowler reports, romantic fiction was used – by their own account – as a way of managing the monotony or exhaustion of their working lives: ‘They consciously linked romance reading to the harrowing or enervating experiences they had had during the day: reading at night was an equivalent to a strong drink’ (1991, p. 129). For these readers, thus, loyalty lay with romance as a genre rather than the work of a particular writer. ‘This has led’, Fowler tells us,
. . . in at least one library in the West of Scotland to the development of an elaborate hieroglyphics amongst the readers. In order to eliminate the undesirable potential for re-reading, each reader resorted to her own mark – a flower, initials, etc., under the lending slip, as a permanent tally of her use. (pp. 129–130)
At first glance it would be easy to interpret these covert insignia as a record of cultural accumulation, a kind of ‘book-keeping’ by which individual readers inscribed and tallied up their symbolic ownership over given texts. In many ways Bourdieu’s model of the cultural field inclines us towards that kind of interpretation. Yet given the fact that, in this case, the reading of a given text by a given reader would in no way alienate that text from any other potential reader, and given that these insignia appear to have been deliberately anonymous, it hardly seems to make sense to understand them as evidence of the competitive processes characteristic of a symbolic economy. Rather, we might say, each of those marks is the inscription of use, of a usage wrested from the clutches of culture’s commoditisation, but resistant also to the force of a symbolic economy which works by according differential value to the cultural choices that social actors make. They are an instance, perhaps, of what I have sought to consider more broadly in this article: the endurance of a popular relationship to cultural phenomena which approaches those phenomena first and foremost from the standpoint of ‘use-value’, for which cultural value emerges in the situated relationship by which given readers make given texts matter in their lives.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.