Secular Stagnation, Moving Contradiction, and a George Stanley Poem In Midair

The concept of secular stagnation has made a reappearance in mainstream efforts to understand the period of slow growth that has followed 2008's financial collapse. My paper argues that while discourses of secular stagnation signal a pressing need theorize long-run crisis, they ultimately misread the deepening crisis of accumulation that has been in development since the 1970s. Turning to the British Columbian poet George Stanley's Mountains & Air as an early cultural response to the crisis, I explore how this serial poem revolves around a figure I call plane(crash) with passenger, in which fear of flight and fear of wagelessness unsteadily coincide.