Late Capitalism and the Problem of Individual Agency: A Reading of the Poems of J. H. Prynne

Abstract

Geography’s relation to the creation of a national identity has indelibly influenced different forms of literary writing. In the late capitalist age, the incommensurability of the territorial entity of the nation and physically experienced space cause us to delve deeper into the practices that interpellate us as inhabitants of a democratic nation-space. The scalar fluidity of an individual’s identity is figured by the different ways in which language emulates the social and personal identity of the individual. The virtual nature of the modern democratic state-form where power essentially appears as an empty place is counteracted upon by the poetic language of the late modern British poet J.H. Prynne. Through a study of his two poems (published in the poetry collection Kitchen Poems, 1968) this essay will look into the ways in which individual lives are intertwined with the functioning of economic capital in the state. In an age following the proverbial incursion of the economic into the affective premises of life, Prynne’s language attempts to give agency to the individual caught in the functioning of multiple discourses, separating the everyday from the pervasive abstractions of high finance resource mobilizations. This task of locating the individual’s identity is done by identifying the connections that the individual shares with the land and by uncovering the material basis of political identity. Keywords: J.H. Prynne; Poetry; Agency; Capital; Subject.