"Word, Work, & Wish": Labor and Productivity in William Blake.

Abstract

This dissertation addresses the political valence of labor in William Blake. That scenes of labor occupy a pivotal position in Blake’s poetry is widely acknowledged by critics who examine the political or ideological significance of his work. The general scholarly tendency has been to fit labor in Blake into critical narratives that herald a broadly liberatory thrust of Blake’s art, aligning it with various discourses about freedom. Blake was highly attuned to the historical, economic, and ideological shifts that were gradually taking place in the realm of material labor in his lifetime, and while he may indeed have attempted to re-imagine the determined and coercive forms of capitalist production in favor of liberatory practice, there is another strain in his work that is deeply ambivalent about this very project. Blake’s enduring concern with modes of production (in his poetry, images, and other writings) represents a complex, multi-faceted, and ultimately thwarted attempt to envision alternative modes of liberatory praxis. Employing Adorno’s notion of aesthetic negativity and critiquing the recent work of scholars such as Saree Makdisi, Guinn Batten, and others, I examine the theoretical discourse on labor from Hegel, Marx, and their heirs as it relates to aesthetic theory and Blake’s aesthetic practice. Extended readings of “The Chimney Sweeper” of Songs of Innocence, America a Prophecy, and The [First] Book of Urizen focus on the negativity of labor and its disruptive effects in order to understand Blake’s presentation of the abnegation of labor; the laboring dead rising from the grave; the ghostly subject of labor; and the unmooring of the concept of labor from the themes of activity, energy, and creation in favor of stupor, sleep, and the dissolution or decay of the body and sensorium. I argue that Blake’s approach to labor involves an interference without resolution between two opposing views: on the one hand, a liberatory narrative of how oppression might be redeemed via aestheticization; on the other hand, a view of labor that refuses to enter into any of the compensatory strategies of modern ideologies of productivity, economic, aesthetic, or otherwise.