The Dialectic of Electricity: Kenneth Fearing, Walter Benjamin, and a Marxist Aesthetic

This essay reads Kenneth Fearing's Depression-era poetry as an innovative body of Marxist verse, one that attempts to craft an aesthetic reaction of shock and disorientation in the reader. In order to explicate the use-value of aesthetic shock to a Marxist politics concerned with anti-capitalist praxis, it draws on Susan Buck-Morss's interpretation of Walter Benjamin, an interpretation that focuses on the latter's theorization of aesthetic sensation in the modern period. Because the modern condition is one of anaesthetized sensory existence (an existence managed by and conducive to hegemonic capitalism), the use of poetry to spark sensation in the reader can be a revolutionary project. Fearing accomplishes this project by confronting the primary agent of shock in the modern period, electricity, and exploring it in its full dialectical complexity. Fearing is a Marxist poet, but of a different sort than most Depression-era proletarian poets. His poems do not provide ideological guidance in the manner of propaganda, nor do they stop at ideology critique. Instead, they act upon the senses of the reader in order to awaken him or her from the dreamworld of modern capitalism to the real need for transformative struggle.