The whole Business of Man Is The Arts & All Things Common.
WILLIAM BLAKE
THIS BOOK NARRATES the Romantic excursion of an excess. It is of the nature of this excess to be elusive and unenclosable, even as it is common—it manifests never quite as such, as itself, but as the trace of an affect, a shard of time, a gesture, a rhythm, a flicker of strange light, a sensation, a threshold, a trembling, a haunting, a chapel’s shadow, a sliver of earth floating in a lake, an exclamation, an ache, a pun, an embrace, an otherworldly greenness, a bird’s alighting, a double flower, a swoon, an overgrown tangle of weeds, a stolen hour of sleep, the angle of an axe, and otherwise. This study pursues these and other particular passages of existence that break open a proper measure and overflow containment, unsettling orders of hierarchy and enclosure. In tracking these movements and moments of excess, especially as they appear in the Romantic era’s poetry and other literary modes of thinking collectivity, the book seeks to understand and recollect what such fragmentary traces disclose about community—about being together on the earth and with the earth.
Common Measures: Romanticism and the Groundlessness of Community addresses the question, What happens to the experience of community when the grounds of community dissolve and collapse? It articulates this question with and through Romanticism’s confrontation with the monumental crisis of community at the turn of the nineteenth century and follows the scattered chapters and legacies of this encounter through the twentieth century and into the present, tarrying with the lived hieroglyphs engraved on modernity’s ruins and at its margins. In disparate but interlocking ways, from Geneva to Jamaica, the Romantic writers studied herein imagine and inhabit the possibilities of a groundless community: an irreducible commonness or collectivity that is not based on any common measure, transcendent sanction, sovereign principle, or divine guarantee—a community without any master term, without wholeness, origin, telos, identity, or shared essence, only “an originary or ontological ‘sociality.’”1 Groundless community designates a sharing that precedes identity and displaces protocols of property, a common excess that is disclosed when enclosed identities and social forms shift, collapse, or fail to impose their terms of order fully; groundless community appears not as a separate, enclosed community over there but as a diaphanous film that surrounds, refracts, and connects forms of life, an aura of dispossessed shade. Where beings spill over is where they meet and where relation happens, along the fleeting, collective textures of everyday life. And this happening, I claim, is given to the particular techniques of literature. Romanticism, in this framing, unfolds in quest of community in a world unmoored; finding communal promise in and as this unmooring, it responds to the massive social changes at the outset of industrial capitalist modernity neither by retreating into individualism, whether melancholy, heroic, or possessive, nor by channeling collective energy into new grounds, new chimeras of capital, nation, race, and empire (though this is not to deny Romanticism’s collusion with these formations, such as might emerge in other analytic frameworks). For it so often turns out that these two poles are mirror images of isolation. Instead, this strand of Romanticism swerves from this Scylla and Charybdis by dwelling in the sweetness of pure shipwreck, without direction or captain. The untimeliness of this rich imaginative countertradition incites it to resurface and link up to unforeseen nodes and configurations, so that this current itself serves as a kind of commons or communal resource into the present and beyond. Common Measures unearths a poetic thinking of the common in Romanticism that is ecologically imbricated and nested in the everyday—a thinking that, moreover, has shaped the destiny of twentieth-century and contemporary thought in ways as decisive as they often are subterranean.
It is well known that Romanticism traverses the “age of revolution” in Europe and the Americas, when the grounds of communal life were in upheaval in the face of industrial modernity’s onset and all solids were melting into air. The French Revolution—along with its dashed utopian promise of ushering in a new universal community—reverberates through the period as what Friedrich Schlegel called a “universal earthquake” (Erdbeben) and “immeasurable flood” (unermeßliche Überschwemmung) exposing the real fragility of any sovereign ground of community.2 “The [French] Revolution was in the first instance the founding of a new community,” as Lynn Hunt writes, and the problem was precisely its founding.3 In the precarious, vertiginous interregnum between the collapse of the old ways of organizing community and the consolidation of the new regimes of capitalist modernity, Romanticism carves out its imaginative space and generates its speculative grammar. It develops its poetic thought of groundless community in parallel to, but also at a distance from, the radical practical experimentation in community that flourished at the time, in projects such as Coleridge and Southey’s idealistic and ill-fated Pantisocracy, Babeuf’s proto-communist “conspiracy of equals,” the Spencean ultraradicals in London, maroon communities in the Caribbean, Jacobin communist insurgents in Vienna, Robert Owen’s New Lanark cooperative, revolutionary clubs and secret societies, and various other utopian movements and collectives. These developments index the immense sense of communal possibility in the air—but this book is not about those projects. The Grundstimmung of groundlessness that suffuses the Romantic era and constitutes its structure of feeling and condition of possibility—the feeling of “the absence of an absolute ground”—was not only a sense of exhilarating openness and blissful dawn;4 it was also inextricable from the defeat of these utopian projects, the descent into revolutionary terror in France, the breakout of imperial wars, the surge in repression and surveillance within England, the rise of market society and the disastrous socio-ecological changes augured by land enclosure, the failure of the parliamentary abolition bill of 1791, and the brutal doubling down on the colonial slave system after the Haitian Revolution broke out that same year. These and other disorienting developments called into question not just the particular principles organizing social life but the very possibility of grounding community in any principle at all, however seemingly enlightened. Such a context elicits Romanticism’s communal imaginary, and relatedly, its characteristic intertwining of the visionary and the everyday. Groundlessness means that collective—or social, communal, ecological—forms are not preordained; they emerge immanently out of encounters in common life’s inherent and unenclosed multiplicity. Nothing, ultimately, can serve as the basis for community. And it does.5
If the revolutionary fervor across Europe and the Americas provoked a sense that not just the traditional forms of organizing society but the very principles that legitimated and grounded them were in decay, within Britain itself there was a particularly acute development regarding groundlessness in the most literal sense: the enclosure of common lands. The Romantic period was the “epoch of enclosures”;6 the decades leading up to and just after 1800 saw the “high tide of enclosure,” in the words of E. P. Thompson, when commoners “finally lost their land” and their communities.7 Nearly a third of all farmland in England was enclosed between 1750 and 1820, and parliamentary acts of enclosure were passed with overwhelming rapidity during the early years of the nineteenth century, especially after the General Enclosure Act of 1801.8 Romanticism thus coincides with the twilight of the commons, when countless rural commoners were dispossessed of their shared lands and grounds—open fields for cultivation, common pastures for livestock, wastes for gathering food, supplies, and fuel, and much more. Commoners were also deprived of the forms of sociality, everyday habits, subsistence practices, and ecological rhythms that flourished on and around these commons, which served as the “social cement” of a large commoning social, ecological, and agricultural milieu.9 Owing to this process of privation and privatization (which also developed, if along different lines, in Germany, France, and elsewhere in Europe, while spreading to swaths of the globe colonized by Europe), the feeling of “groundlessness” was not just confined to the revolutionary disappointment of radicals or the speculative intellectual abstractions of poetry and philosophy, but permeated the whole period. Especially among the rural poor, there was a sense that, as one anonymous anti-enclosure protest song from the early nineteenth century put it: “Now they’ve taken the poor man’s ground / . . . / Now the commons are taken in.”10
Since Marx’s analysis of “so-called primitive accumulation” in the eighth and final part of Capital, the enclosure of the commons has marked an essential condition for the development of the Industrial Revolution and global capitalist modernity; enclosure gave rise to a scarred and forever altered environmental landscape, uprooted a newly impoverished population it baptized in violence as a landless proletariat, and helped consolidate the notions of property, work, improvement, and measure that would dominate the nineteenth century. The imagery of enclosure haunts all of the writers in this book, from the traces of earlier communal landscapes in Hölderlin, to Rousseau’s influential retelling of the primal scene of enclosure in his Discourse on Inequality, to Blake’s preoccupation with enclosure, boundedness, and measure (“they inclos’d my infinite brain into a narrow circle,” his character Oothoon laments), to the disenclosing thought of Nancy and Bataille, to the dispossessed landscapes of the Wordsworths and the stricken, landless vagrants they so often meet, to the direct reckoning with the trauma of enclosure in John Clare’s writing, and through Robert Wedderburn’s radical critique linking the enclosure of the earth to colonial slavery.
Enclosure begins long before the Romantic period, but perhaps only in the middle and late eighteenth century does it become cemented as something like a metaphysical principle, an altar at the temple of “improvement,” that “idol of the age” in one great poet of the period’s phrasing.11 In this era of “the great transformation,”12 moreover, the same logics of work, property, improvement, and accumulation propelling enclosure were essential to the expanding global British Empire, with colonialism and slavery as the other chapters in primitive accumulation’s book of blood and fire. As Thompson also writes: “The concept of exclusive property in land, as a norm to which other practices must be adjusted, was now extending across the whole globe, like a coinage reducing all things to a common measure. The concept was carried across the Atlantic, to the Indian sub-continent, and into the South Pacific.”13 Thompson’s connection of property to the violent reduction of “all things to a common measure”—which he also names as a defining event in “global ecological history”—is apt, especially because this formulation works as a telling perversion of my book’s motto and underpinning idea, the title of this introduction: all things common. This phrase derives from the Acts of the Apostles and surfaces in various haunted and hunted-down corners throughout history, but for me it is drawn in the first instance from William Blake’s Laocoön print of 1827: “The whole Business of Man Is The Arts & All Things common.”14 For Blake and the other figures in this book, “all things common” is only possible as a refusal, evasion, rupture, suspension, and neutralization of “all things reduced to common measure”—community emerges through the cracks in the world’s externally imposed measure, as the common excess that precedes property, identity, enclosure, commensurability, and their sovereign hierarchies. And it emerges as the common in both senses of the word: shared and everyday. The literary expression of this intimate antagonism between “reducing all things to a common measure” and “all things common” is this book in a nutshell. The particular details of this antagonism—the fraught tensions, vagaries, tactics, techniques, collisions, collusions, and interactions—conduct the specific itineraries and procedures of the chapters. The book thus seeks to think along and in the folds of this tension, and to investigate how literature imagines and enfleshes the generalization of this common incommensurability in the course of building an inventive repertoire outside of and against property. Common Measures reads Romantic literature primarily as a set of communal, convivial tools—tools for thinking and imagining, for pleasure and connection, for concertedly “acting without principles” (Reiner Schürmann).
Measure is the central concept of this book, the shadow looming over the excess that Common Measures tracks, reveals, and celebrates—the fugal counterpart to excess’s fugitivity. Measure functions as the single term that holds all the book’s concerns together, in large part because it allows many of the central and otherwise disparate social, political, economic, aesthetic, ecological, and philosophical issues of the period to come into a unified focus and field of thought. What is measure? Measure, in sum, is a framing of existence. Measure, as imposed from a central source of authority, value, or being, thus secures a grounded community, as one remarkable recent history of measure in Europe argues: “Measuring does not enact order, but is the process that interlocks various practices, enabling forms to exist through them and through society. Measuring . . . constantly joins the source of legitimization to its destination.”15 As with the notion of groundlessness, there is a literal and empirical dimension to measure that operates on varying levels of concreteness: to begin with, enclosure was always a detailed process of measuring, where common land was measured, surveyed, and parceled out into individualized plots of property while being converted to a cash value. To eradicate the commons, as the most prominent anti-commons text of the twentieth century put it, it is necessary to “commensurat[e] the incommensurables.”16 The commons were, in an important sense, outside of or in excess of measure, and provided a degree of independence from the measured time of the wage. But the enforced consolidation of capitalist production, private property, and the cash nexus seals the reign of money (the general equivalent, the common measure) and the commodity (a word that literally means “common measure”), the latter not as a kind of object but as a totalizing social logic of commensurable exchange; this shift was entangled with the new fossil fuel regime of “energy commensurability” and its modes of commensuration powered by fossil capital, along with the transition to imperial measurements and the standardization of space and time, the metric system, and the “new technologies of measurement” characterizing “the Romantic era.”17 It was generally a time of what Jason Moore, drawing on historian Witold Kula, calls the “metrical revolutions” of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a phrase that could just as easily describe innovations in poetic verse but here encompasses the globalizing sweep of “capital’s efforts to control and commensurate extra-human nature.”18 These developments coincided with all the ways that the “Atlantic proletariat . . . was numbered, weighed, and measured,” most brutally of all in the measured and weighed human flesh of racial slavery, the institution that was integral to all the others.19 With slavery, the terror of measure and the destruction of community reach their entwined apex, and so Common Measures’ concluding chapter takes up Robert Wedderburn’s radical abolitionist vision of community without ground.
In the words of one major global historian, then: “The nineteenth century can be seen as the century of counting and measuring.”20 Modernity—the very word, like its historical sibling (or parent) “commodity,” in fact ultimately derives from a Latin word for “measure” (modus)—is the time of “lost grounds” and new measures: regimes of governmentality, property, and commensurability.21 At the turbulent threshold of this still-regnant modernity, the Romantics negotiate the transition of various social formations to open them to excess, to inhabit them differently, groundlessly, in common. Poetry, in tugging at the seams of social life, serves as one key site of crises of measure, a site where measure’s groundlessness becomes (the) material, manifested in the cuts and cracks of form. The German Romantic writer Karoline von Günderrode’s brief poetic fragment “Antiquity, and Modernity” (“Vorzeit, und neue Zeit”), written around 1800, is instructive in framing Romanticism’s confrontation with modernity as the time of measure in relation to groundlessness. The poem begins by evoking the earth in premodernity as a “narrow” but firm road of certainty between the “abyss” (Abgrund) of hell and the open sky of heaven; but modernity fills in the abyss (Abgrund ausgefüllt) and flattens the earth by imposing a universal measure: “And on the flat Earth understanding strides, / And measures everything out in fathoms and feet [Und misset alles aus, nach Klafter und nach Schuen].”22
Modernity imposes measure and general equivalence on communal existence to paper over the “ungroundedness of all socialities,” the real groundlessness of community among human beings and their inseparable relation to the earth.23 The writers discussed in this book sought to tear away the blanketing veil of equivalence and reveal all things common, a project to “restore the Golden Age” (Blake) hidden in ordinary and everyday relations; this endeavor was put summarily, once again by Blake, as a rejection of commensurability: “Since the French Revolution Englishmen are all Intermeasurable One by Another Certainly a happy state of Agreement to which I for One do not Agree” (E 555, 783). Against the backdrop of these particular historical developments falling under the rubric of measure and “intermeasurab[ility],” Common Measures explores measure in a more general sense, as the very question of the common.
Social forms tend to spiral away from their illusory authorization and legitimation. Groundless community—ecologically imbricated, immanent in shared everyday life itself, and imaged in literature—is what exceeds, escapes, disrupts, deforms, destitutes, unworks, and suspends common measures imposed from a ground, central point, or father; it heralds “what happens . . . when the open field of presencing is no longer understood as occupied or possessed by a measure-giving first,” whatever form this ground or “measure-giving” first principle may take, “be it ‘the cause’ or ‘the father’” or God, King, Man, Progress, Citizen, Civilization, Reason, Nation, and so forth.24 Schürmann’s investigation into “ontological anarchy”—that is, acting and relating without grounds or principles—proceeds on the highest levels of abstraction, but his recourse here to the figurative language of “measure” and “open field” is apposite, for in the Romantic era, an “open field” was usually synonymous with the commons, or common fields collectively managed and unenclosed. In this way, an open field emerges when relationality is ungrounded and unmeasured, when life is allowed immanently to generate its forms and unform them in turn. Again, we can think of this both in the most literal sense, as when common fields were “reopened” by commoners destroying fences and enclosures, and also in the register of ontology, the inquiry into the saying of being. The threshold at which these two registers coincide is the habitual place, or “fundamental field,” fundamental without foundation, where literature thinks.25
For Marx, the destruction of premodern communal forms and the triumph of capitalism were sealed when capital “conquered the field” through enclosure and “the theft of the common lands.”26 Against this conquest of the field, the Romantic poem cultivates a counterfield of groundless thinking, acting, dwelling, sharing, and imagining in common. The effect of this insurgent counterfield at the commons’ twilight is not to recover a lost ground or presence as recompense or Reconquista, nor to replace the commons in any strict sense, nor to rescue the shipwrecked revolution, but to preserve what remains of the conquered field’s anoriginary ungroundedness and ungovernability, its overflowing, earthen abundance, and to make this available for unforeseen future uses and collective transfigurations. Literature holds open the channels for the “persistence of the commons,” as Carolyn Lesjak explores in her study of Victorian fiction.27 Hence Common Measures reads literature—primarily and paradigmatically poetic verse, but also comprehensive of other acts of imaginative verbal and social poiesis such as autobiography, political and philosophical texts, diaries, speeches, letters, pamphlets, prayers—in order to sense what persists, beneath measure and property, beneath exchange: “[T]he common perseveres as if a kind of elsewhere, here, around, on the ground, surrounding hallucinogenic facts.”28
If “measurements entered history through documents concerning fields,” literature maps the exit routes.29 Its “vocation” is nothing other than “to recover this incommensurable” that is constantly suppressed and regulated.30 The inoperative field of literary poiesis brooks no improvement and no work, no external measure, no owner; it discloses the improper commons of language and the senses. Like the commons, language is essentially used but not owned. In this situated, ordinary, but open field of language that the poem names, another kind of social ontology, another kind of thinking, another kind of (un)measuring flourishes: the communization of excess. As Blanchot writes: “Romanticism is excessive, but its first excess is an excess of thought.”31 Unlike the thinking seized, held, and enclosed only within concepts (from Latin capere, to seize), the excessive thinking of Romantic literature spills over; this poetic procedure attenuates every form of the proper. While Common Measures finds this excess in the forms of everyday and ecological sharing that poetry and imaginative writing portray, a more purely speculative philosophical passage from Wordsworth’s 1798 notebooks provides an apt point of departure in its formulation of ontological excess:
All beings have their properties which spread
Beyond themselves, a power by which they make
Some other being conscious of their life,
Spirit that knows no insulated spot,
No chasm, no solitude, from link to link
It circulates the soul of all the worlds . . .
All things shall live in us, and we shall live
In all things that surround us.32
The double meaning of “properties” here—as essential quality and as owned possession—is instructive, for this is in fact a passage about dispossession. The “properties” that are proper to “all beings” belong to them only as an excess that spills over enclosures and flees away, that “spread[s] / Beyond themselves” and radiates (as) life. This inappropriable power of life that exceeds all measure and property, this excess, is only ever shared; it flows from beings only to “make / some other being conscious of their life,” but “their” life is not theirs, it discards any possibility of ownership or of an atomistic, isolated being: “Spirit that knows no insulated spot . . . no solitude.” The way each thing overspills itself is its singularity—its form. No transcendent ground coheres this communal array; the “soul of all the worlds” is not some overarching totality or essence that binds community together but some underdwelling sensation, an aura that “circulates” fugitively as this excess (this notion of circulating excess is the central idea in my chapter on Blake). A communism of “spirit” unfolds. Wordsworth thus intimates a movement of “spread[ing]” that prevents the kinds of everyday community I trace from being insular but that also deflects from the general imposition of property or propriety (as in Thompson’s passage about the British Empire’s violent global imposition of the “common measure” of property); it names only a spreading and sharing of impropriety, of incommensurability. In this one life, “all things shall live in us, and we shall live / in all things that surround us”—all things living and sharing as all things common. The chiasmus of these last lines unworks the boundaries between “us” and “all things,” merging them into the indifference of singular common life, or in the phrase of Jean-Luc Nancy, “being singular plural.”33 The “surround” of life in common is the surrounding environs, the unenclosed open milieu, of the everyday.
Before the twentieth-century avant-garde notions of poetic “composition by field,” or “the opening of the field,” the Romantics, in the time of the enclosure of open and common fields, embrace the poem as a field of thinking communal existence.34 The laureate of the lost common fields, John Clare, cast Wordsworth’s poems as “fields” and said of his own work: “I found the poems in the fields, / And only wrote them down.”35 The poem’s counterfield yields an open harvest of gestures and techniques—linguistic and affective potentialities, volatilities, trajectories, operations, spillages—that become convivial instruments for aesthetic and communal experimentation: free and common uses of relation. In this field flower other socialities and sodalities, other ecologies, other relations to work, time, embodiment, measure, and the earth. The poem, an anarchic foundry of sensation, is less a motor or model than a modulation of social experience, shifting to a different key of sensing in common.
Poetic thinking unfurls a counterontology of the common, a loosening of how being is said—a “poetic ontology” (to use Antonio Negri’s term, together with its communist implications, prompted by his engagement with a Romantic poet’s work).36 A word to unvex the term “ontology”: the discourse of ontology here is not concerned with some separate and abstracted realm “outside” of materiality or history or politics, as is sometimes charged, but pursues the frayed zone where history, politics, and materiality produce, encounter, incorporate, and disavow their own constitutive “outsides,” their unacknowledged excess that cannot properly appear in their domains, which are domains of legitimacy and orders of hierarchy. This excess’s immanent and labile laws show up uniquely in the unacknowledged legislation that is literary language, where they are ceaselessly put in play. The elusive, lambent, atopic zone I invoke here under the heading of ontology is pursued but does not properly “exist,” except as the fraying of what can appear within the enclosures of the world. It is pursued because it flees and is an accessory to life’s inherent flight from enclosure—as Moten writes, glossing a key Romantic trope: “According to Shelley, poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Let’s say the world is a zone from and within which life is constantly escaping. Poets sing the form of that endless running.”37 Poetry’s thinking thus runs in the friable parallax between the statements “History has no outside” and “History’s outside is nothing (for history).” The poem is neither determined by history, as if it were a grid of locatable points and unidirectional material causes, nor does it transcend history by appealing to or channeling some supersensible essence; the poem, the work, is instead a cartography of excess. It traffics in “everything of language that exceeds that order of signification, together with the human share in this ‘excess’ that is the (non)ground of history and the material site of all relationality.”38
Orienting thinking toward this problematic—which recalls but is irreducible to the Adornian question of aesthetic autonomy—can help reframe some methodological impasses in Romantic and literary studies around questions of form, critique, and historicism, by holding Romanticism’s unique historical positioning in productive tension with its persistent uncanniness and untimeliness. We can ally these modes and affects of solicitation to what Jacques Khalip, in a beautiful book that shares a number of concerns and figures with mine, calls Romanticism’s “lastness,” its penchant for “groundlessness” and “unworking.”39 Indeed, it is one of my book’s wagers that a kind of general bearing toward ontological groundlessness, such as that received from deconstruction and its legacies (themselves closely entangled with Romanticism), can usefully be set alongside a more historically grounded, as it were, account of social formations and shifts in the dawning modernity around 1800—and moreover, that Romantic-era literature and thought is an ideal site for such a synthesis. To tarry with ontology in this way is to “multiply / the spiritual presences of absent things,” to quote from the same 1798 verse notebooks of Wordsworth as above.40 Here the “spiritual” is not opposed to matter but is precisely the “spirit” that the Wordsworth passage above speaks of as the common fleshly life “in all things.” Poetry intensifies and multiplies the singular presences of what has been absented by the world’s enclosures.
1. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter O’Connor et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 28.
2. Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Ausgabe (Munich: F. Schöningh, 1958–2018), 2:247–248.
3. Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press: 2004), 46–47.
4. Kir Kuiken, Imagined Sovereignties: Towards a New Political Romanticism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 17.
5. Political theorist Roberto Esposito casts community as nothing, or “precisely the no-thing of the thing that is our common ground.” Esposito, Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community, trans. Timothy Campbell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 8.
6. Peter Linebaugh, Red Round Globe Hot Burning: A Tale at the Crossroads of Commons and Closure, of Love and Terror, of Race and Class, and of Kate and Ned Despard (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019), 249.
7. E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York: New Press, 1993), 163, 18; my emphasis (hereafter, and contrary to usual practice, emphases are mine unless otherwise noted).
8. J. M. Neeson, Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure, and Social Change in England, 1700–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 329, 45.
9. Neeson, Commoners, 41.
10. Quoted in C. Ian Dyck and Alun Howkins, “‘The Time’s Alteration’: Popular Ballads, Rural Radicalism and William Cobbett,” History Workshop Journal 23 (Spring 1987): 22.
11. William Cowper writes in The Task: “Improvement too, the idol of the age, / Is fed with many a victim.” The Poems of William Cowper, ed. John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–1995), 2:183. As Linebaugh explains: “The land was fenced off and hedged, permanently altering the landscape. It was a major intervention in the economy and its social relations, augmenting rent rolls, dispossessing commoners, and criminalizing customs. With the plantation, the ship, the factory, and the prison, the enclosed arable field defined the epoch, the epoch of enclosures. Certainly, enclosure of land in England refers to a major process of world economic significance that lasted several centuries . . . [But] [t]he first years of nineteenth century were exceptional, inasmuch as enclosure became a central, generalized policy” (Red Round Globe, 249).
12. See Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), which characterizes the English milieu around 1800 as subject to “improvement on the grandest scale which wrought unprecedented havoc with the habitation of the common people . . . an avalanche of social dislocation,” 41–42.
13. Thompson, Customs, 164.
14. William Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David Erdman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 273; hereafter cited parenthetically as E.
15. Emanuele Lugli, The Making of Measure and the Promise of Sameness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 193.
16. Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162 (1968): 1244.
17. Tobias Menely, Climate and the Making of Worlds: Toward a Geohistorical Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 28; Siobhan Carroll, An Empire of Air and Water: Uncolonizable Space in the British Imagination, 1750–1850 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 11. See Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (London: Verso, 2016).
18. Jason Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (London: Verso, 2015), 57, 273. See Kula’s classic Measures and Men (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986).
19. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 332. Brenna Bhandar casts racialization as bound up with technologies of measure: “Emergent concepts of race and racial inferiority were smuggled into new forms of value, constructed, ostensibly, on logics of measurement and quantification.” Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 47.
20. Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 29.
21. See Tora Lane and Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback, eds., Dis-orientations: Philosophy, Literature, and the Lost Grounds of Modernity (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015).
22. I use Anna Ezekiel’s translation from her forthcoming edition of Günderrode’s Philosophical Fragments, posted on her blog: https://acezekiel.com/2021/03/30/karoline-von-gunderrode-antiquity-and-modernity/.
23. Anna Kornbluh, The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 7.
24. Reiner Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 254, 286. It is significant that the figure of the absent or nullified father—Blake’s “Nobodaddy”—explicitly appears in each writer taken up in this book, culminating in Wedderburn’s audacious declamation of groundlessness and refusal of transcendence: “Acknowledge no father.”
25. See Jeff Malpas and Kenneth White, The Fundamental Field: Thought, Poetics, World (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021). On the “field” as a polyvalent notion and a gate to the philosophical dimension of Romantic poetry, see Marjorie Levinson, Thinking through Poetry: Field Reports on Romantic Lyric (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
26. Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin, 1992), 895.
27. Carolyn Lesjak, The Afterlife of Enclosure: British Realism, Character, and the Commons (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021), 15.
28. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013), 18.
29. Lugli, Making of Measure, 163.
30. “De là que la vocation de la littérature, du moins à l’époque moderne, soit bien de récupérer cet incommensurable qu’on noie à tout moment dans le silence, la décence, l’in-différence.” François Jullien, L’incommensurable (Paris: Éditions de l’Observatoire, 2022), 16. See also Ralf Konersmann, Welt ohne Maß (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2021).
31. Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 353.
32. William Wordsworth, Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 676, 680.
33. Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000).
34. It’s no accident that an anthology of important manifestos of poetics titled Toward the Open Field, ed. Melissa Kwasny (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), begins with Wordsworth’s “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads. Daniel Eltringham elegantly explores this Romantic legacy in twentieth-century poetics in Poetry & Commons: Postwar and Romantic Lyric in Times of Enclosure (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2022), while tracking the radical agrarian “poetics of commoning” and “equal measure” that runs parallel to canonical Romanticism (59).
35. Clare’s tribute sonnet to Wordsworth begins: “Wordsworth I love; his books are like the fields.” The Later Poems of John Clare, ed. Eric Robinson and David Powell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 1:25, 19.
36. Antonio Negri, Flower of the Desert: Giacomo Leopardi’s Poetic Ontology, trans. Timothy Murphy (Albany: SUNY Press, 2015).
37. Fred Moten, B Jenkins (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 86.
38. Christopher Fynsk, Language and Relation: . . . that there is language (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 1.
39. Jacques Khalip, Last Things: Disastrous Form from Kant to Hujar (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 34, 63.
40. Wordsworth, Major Works, 678.
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