Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely, Infographic Maps, and Subject-System Identity in Contemporary Political thought

Claudia Rankine's 2004 poem Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric is often hailed as experimental, combining documentary photographs, custom-made graphics, and written-word poetry. I argue that we can best understand the book's lyric project by anchoring it in one of the book's images, and reading both in conjunction with a genre with a related social project, the contemporary infographic map of the United States. These all display something crucial about twenty-first century political thought: a tendency to conflate, confuse, and equate the individual political subject with the wider system to which s/he/they are joined. Not only does articulating this mode of thought contextualize lyric subject experimentation as part of a wider socio-cultural trend, it also displays an impasse in contemporary political struggle.

When we think systemically, we can link one instance of suffering to our social whole, and the racist, misogynist, transphobic, capitalist system that shapes our lives. But this mode of thinking displays a new political problem in the instant it seems to clarify another: though we understand that our social whole operates within and through every person, we cannot simply excise oppressive systems by targeting individuals. We can no more eradicate systemic racism by firing one racist police officer than we can eradicate homophobia by censuring one homophobic person. In contemporary political organizing, this impasse appears in the general experience of hopelessness many of us have when we look at our political landscape, one in which we are so full of desire for better lives, and so bereft of clear ways to give them to each other.

Rankine's subtitle makes clear that her experimentation attempts to move beyond the single, limited lyric subject, aiming to be adequate to the social whole of the United States. While Rankine interrogates this poetic question textually, she does so more directly through one image of a human figure's internal anatomy, which shares a marked formal resemblance to contemporary infographic maps. Custom-made for the book, Rankine's image says immediately what more circumscribed poetic interrogation does not: we are our wider social system. The dynamics of the social whole of the United States exist in every one of us. Reading Rankine's image alongside the infographic maps, I show how this internet news media form popularizes and indexes what emerges in Rankine's text: a tendency to see the subject and system as one and the same. I elucidate the wider cultural heft of the infographic, which is explicitly associated with systemic thought and a collapse of epistemic distance between subject and system. The reading practice I employ in this argument is an instance of the enlivened methodology so urgently necessary in this social moment, one that requires us to reach outside of the text to the wider cultural world it aims to speak to and serve.