Myung Mi Kim's Vegetal Imaginary and the Poetics of Dispossession

As war, regime change, wageless labor, and environmental degradation persist on a global scale, they magnify the vulnerability of the hundreds of millions of people who have long been displaced by capital accumulation.¹ The identity-stripping conditions of social dispossession—what David Harvey calls an "accumulation by dispossession" (110)—pose representational problems for literary studies, whose scholars have long debated the efficacy of reviving "lost histories" in literary form.² While much of this conversation has focused on recovering a particular set of identities under historical erasure, representing lost lives under global capitalism presents a distinctly different challenge. In a representational conundrum that Rob Nixon calls "slow violence," incremental histories of uncounted lives exceed event-based and time-bound representations of crisis. The question remains, however, whether Nixon's own solution to this problem—for "writer-activists" to "amplify the media-marginalized causes of the environmentally dispossessed"—is possible without first troubling the politics of border demarcation that have made these subjects so unimaginable (5).

In this essay, I contend that a poetics oriented toward social dispossession must wrestle with the perpetual violence waged on the representability of people themselves. In this way, lost histories—in their making and survival—are made visible in the act of bearing witness to dispossession across multiple generations and locales. Korean American poet Myung Mi Kim takes up this practice by turning to subjects without subjecthood, whose presence attends to granular scales of life hidden in plain sight. Her sparse approach to poetics is particularly visible in Commons (2002), where artifact and sediment, weed and flower persist in excess of stable and discrete representational categories. Eschewing references to personal identity, subjective experience, and historical specificity, an essentially vegetal imaginary in Commons models the way capital accumulation makes the margins of cultural spectacle invisible. In so doing, it foregrounds social dispossession by upending both the narrative shape of historical crisis and the perceptual practices by which readers come to recognize it.

Building on a range of studies focused on alternate ontologies of withdrawn life, this subject-less history maps globalized human exclusion through the minimal presence of plant life. Michael Marder's concept of plant-thinking, for instance, praises plant life's ability to survive through its "minimum of irritability," which flies under the radar of spectacular and event-based forms of accounting ("What Is Plant-Thinking?" 128). Plant life's "precariousness, violability, and, at the same time, its astonishing tenacity, its capacity for survival" is an essential model for embracing a world that has been made vulnerable across temporal, geographical, and identity-bound categories of experience (Marder, Plant-Thinking 19). In this way, the subject-less particularity of a vegetal imaginary puts pressure on repetitive patterns of historical knowledge as a matter of survival.

The elevation of an object world over subject-centered narratives resembles a larger cluster of object-oriented ontologies, many of which (like studies of plant life) have been thought to be unconcerned with the quagmire of global capitalism and human action more generally.³ Vegetal life in Commons, however, differs from both object-oriented and plant-thinking critical frameworks by taking up an ambient attention to all life, whose histories spill over the representational boundaries that guide crisis thinking as we know it. This turn to the relative smallness and outside-ness of vegetal life presents capital accumulation's material consequences as overlooked historical evidence. In the process of becoming visible, plant life begins to accumulate on its own, which activates the possibility for the reader to recognize multiple scales of subjectivity that have been obscured by event-driven spectacle.

As Commons builds historical shape into what might otherwise be a purely naïve materialism, it also responds to the oppositional tenor central to the poetics of literary activism. In the spirit of Nixon's call for writer-activist amplification, poets have responded to crises under late capitalism with a variety of poetries of documentary, mourning, and protest that oppose the violence done to particular identities, locales, and narratives.⁴ We can see the impetus behind these texts in...