Repeating Yourself - Part2

1 // The Art of Reproduction Copying Bodies in the Early Industrial Revolution “The same identity pervades all the arts of printing; the impressions from the same block, or the same copper-plate, have a similarity which no labour could produce by hand.” Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures “The great art, therefore, in managing the affairs of the Poor is to establish Systems whereby the poor man, verging upon indigence, may be propped up and kept in his station.” Patrick Colquhoun, A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis “These People know Enough of Artifice but Nothing Of Art.” William Blake, From “A Public Address To The Chalcographic Society” What was the sound echoing through 1790’s London, during the germinal stages of the Industrial Revolution? Saree Makdisi suggests an unusual answer — the clatter of the copperplate printing press, Blake’s own craft. After all, it was the engineer and philosopher, Charles Babbage, who devoted an entire chapter in his book, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, titled “Of Copying,” to extensively detail the major techniques of printing. Babbage concludes the chapter and generalizes its import as follows: “The principle of copying contribut[es] this, as in every other department of manufacture, to the uniformity and the cheapness of the work produced” (92). Indeed, the concept of reproduction would undergird the factory of the Industrial Revolution, mechanized by advancements in textile production, steam powering, and iron making. By the mid-19th century, England would account for 23% of global industrial production. This was because according to Babbage, “the efficient modern factory should ideally reiterate [the logic of copperplate printing], producing a stream of theoretically identical copies based on the same original ‘impression,’” (87) Makdisi writes. In this metaphor, the copperplate became the standard to which all reproductions must conform — an external reference point that determines the texture, shape, and size of copies. Deviations 8 Repeating Yourself from the standard prototype were not valued as unique features, but treated as instances for the larger mechanisms to intervene and troubleshoot, so as to extract a perfect conformity from each product. But we might stretch this metaphor outside Babbage’s original bounds and read copperplate engraving as not only a model for the factory, but society writ large. During this time, a large group of primarily conservative thinkers — among which were the familiar names of Jeremy Bentham, Patrick Colquhoun, and Babbage — were intellectually engaged with the social engineering and production of a working class, leading to an “explosion of interest in [and writing on]…London’s worker” (100). After all, factory goods were only as efficiently produced as their producers were efficient. It was this link between factory objects and citizen subjects that conservative thinkers emphasized, extending the economic reverberations of the Industrial Revolution to the political realm. At the opposite pole developed a progressive discourse familiar to the 21st-century subject. This thought erected a staunch — and perhaps wishful — divide between the economic and political domains, claiming an irreducible political freedom for the subject, regardless of his economic class. What emerged in practice from this broad spectrum of theory, however, was a set of conservative techniques that refined the mass of individuals which populated an overcrowded, urban London into a coherent, synchronized labor body — in short, the application of factory’s technology of conformity onto the human flesh. This strategy included an emphasis on surveillance, precise points of contact between authority and citizens, and the careful management of class systems. The most visible evidence of this new technology of conformity was the Thames River Police force that patrolled the Pool of London in order to prevent the widespread cargo theft that routinely occurred there. The theoretical roots for this preventative policing were conceived by the merchant, magistrate, and intellectual Patrick Colquhoun, nicknamed the “architect” of police by 19th-century historian Melville Lee. Colquhoun writes in the Preface of his 1796 book, A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis: Police in this country may be considered as a new Science; the properties which consist not in the Judicial Powers which lead to Punishment, and which belong to Magistrates alone; but in the PREVENTION AND DETECTION OF CRIMES, and in those other Functions which relate to INTERNAL REGULATIONS for the well ordering and comfort of Civil Society. The Police of the Metropolis, in every point of view, is a subject of great importance to be known and understood; since every innocent and useful Member of the Community has a particular interest in the correct administration of whatever relates to the Morals of the People, and to the protection of the Public against Fraud and Depredation. Colquhoun’s capitalization properly stresses the shifted focus on the internal machinery of law, which intercepts the crime before it can be carried out and processed retroactively by justice. His criminology retracts the study to embryonic stages of infraction and places the necessary apparatus, policing, at the very cusp of crime, so as to preempt and render unnecessary the punitive ends of the courtroom. The historian Peter Linebaugh notes the economic logic of Colquhoun’s theory when he writes, “It combined law and economics, the protection of property and the protection of production” (427). But even more than this, Colquhoun’s prose is inflected with the discourse of privacy and its disturbance — “prevention,” “detection,” and “internal” all connote the invasiveness of this type of policing. This is a policing which forces itself into the cracks and crevices of society and turns its incisive gaze onto the consciousness of the individual. It is a 10 Repeating Yourself policing which must impress itself on “every innocent and useful Member of the Community.” As Colquhoun continues later, it must be “one general Law, comprehending the whole of the excellent regulations made for the City of London … extended to every part of the Metropolis, and its suburbs; that a perfect uniformity might prevail” (599). The Blakean rebuttal to Colquhoun’s mono-law would be, as written in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, that “One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression.” What Blake instinctively grasps is that although a uniform code would seem to present the paradigm of a individual liberal democracy, it actually reinforces the counter-strategy: the homogenization of subjects, thereby transforming individuals into citizens who behave uniformly. The creation of a homogenized citizenry included the formation of a reliable population of laborers. Before a crime was even enacted, Colquhoun was interested in calibrating the ideal conditions of poverty in which to keep a subject, which Linebaugh describes elsewhere as “Newtonian in its obsession with enumerating the ‘flux’ of wealth and crime” (427). Colquhuon writes in his chapter “The State of the Poor” that “Labour is absolutely requisite to the existence of all Governments; and as it is from the Poor only that labour can be expected, so far from being an evil they become under proper regulations, an advantage.” He continues, under his classification of the first class of poor — the useful poor — that “the great art, therefore, in managing the affairs of the Poor is to establish Systems whereby the poor man, verging upon indigence, may be propped up and kept in his station” (36-367). And indeed, Makdisi points to the creation of a whole swath of social institutions including the school, orphanage, asylum, and workhouse, whose broader project was the “careful production from the raw material of the children of the indigent and poverty-stricken classes, of ‘industrious’ laborers” (102). Michel Foucault’s seminal Discipline and Punish gives us a clearer and more encompassing picture of the “production” of the proper citizen, emphasizing the direct physical contact between disciplinary mechanisms and soldier’s bodies. In the chapter “Docile Bodies,” Foucault describes the process of military training: “By the late eighteenth century, the soldier has become something that can be made; out of a formless clay, an inapt body; the machine required can be constructed; posture is gradually corrected; a calculated constraint runs slowly through each part of the body, mastering it …” (135). Foucault’s precise syntax contains a profusion of passive voice — an expository technique that effaces the identity of monarchical disciplinarian and foregrounds the anonymous mechanisms of discipline. Lurking at the level of Foucault’s mechanical vocabulary is the suggestion that the soldier is a not a subject so much as a factory object, something to be produced. Power insinuates itself into every fiber of the soldier, leaving a precise outline and shape, thereby replacing the living contours of the individual with a uniformly tooled stamp of its own design. It was through this technique of contact between power and individual that the laborer was formed. From policing to social institutions to the factory line, these multiple points of disciplinary contact corresponded to a much larger social design, which could seize the individual under its press and leave no surplus space of his identity unorganized by its force — not unlike the process of copperplate engraving which inscribes its design on the bare sheet. 12 Repeating Yourself “We find that these human beings are only regarded as parts of the machinery which they set in motion, and with little attention to their moral welfare,” (157) Charles Wing writes in Evils of the Factory System, Demonstrated by Parliamentary Evidence. But there was a great deal of attention paid to their moral welfare. After a visit to a factory, the labor theorist Andrew Ure wrote in the The Philosophy of Factory Systems, “Such is the factory system, replete with prodigies in mechanics and political economy, which promises in its future growth to become the great minister of civilization to the terraqueous globe, enabling this country, as its heart, to diffuse along with its commerce the life-blood of science and religion to myriads of people still lying in the region and shadow of death” (18). Interchangeable with commodity objects, cultural objects, (e.g.: “science and religion”) were equally fair game for Empire to diffuse into the hearts, minds, and pockets of consumers. Where is William Blake in this environment? Makdisi chooses to position Blake’s philosophy within the conservative discourse, with the obvious caveat that Blake was of a pre-Foucauldian bent, in that his concern was how to wrest the subject out of this social machinery, rather than jam him in more snuggly. This social machinery undergirds the texture of despotic Urizen’s universe in The Book of Urizen. As we will see in the next chapter, Urizen — illustrated in certain extant copies with a burin and quill — stands in for the factory master who reproduces and reproduces and reproduces. Like the conservative social theorists of Blake’s time, Urizen conceives of a universe that runs with the logic of a well-oiled machine, populated by conforming bodies that operate under a universal belief system. To reveal these parallels, Blake dramatizes the mechanics of this fictional universe so that it will reveal the moral fault lines, hypocrisies, and psychological toll taken by the problems of his time. 14 Repeating Yourself 2 // Secrets of Wisdom Repetition in The Book of Urizen “Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement are the roads of Genius.” William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell “That of the cameraman consists of multiple fragments which are assembled under a new law.” Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” “One command, one joy, one desire, One curse, one weight, one measure, One King, one God, one Law.” Urizen, The Book of Urizen In the previous chapter, we traced the copy as a structural unit of value through various registers of 18th-century London: from the humble copperplate and its stream of identical pages to the roaring Industrial-era factory and its reproductions, and finally, the superseding social system and its labor force. But where is the copy in The Book of Urizen? In the historically and politically opaque universe of The Book of Urizen (where form and narrative elements are an ingenious protection from stringent sedition and treason laws) the Industrial-era reverberations of reproduction can be hard to hear. Yet its politically neutral sister, repetition, echoes throughout The Book of Urizen. Words are repeated: in the first five stanzas, the word “unknown” is repeated as many times; in the rest of the chapter, “dark” and “unseen,” four and three times, respectively — all of which describes its eponymous character. Why does the poem prolong its epistemological uncertainty even though it is equipped with the authority of a narrator? More than this, Urizen repeats his dreadful labors; Chapter 4 appears twice in some versions; the characters genetically repeat themselves; and in formal terms, the narrative repeats itself, rewriting its origin story three different times. In each of the three cases, repetition degrades the outcome: the products of Urizen’s labors are steadily miniaturized; characters conceive “trembling and pale” “spectral repetition[s]” instead of proper children (Goss 426); and the poem never condenses into a conclusion from its retelling. But even if these repetitions do not cohere into an aesthetic grammar, as a compendium, they correspond to Blake’s larger narrative scheme, which “undergoes a progressive decrescendo, a self-contradictory fall into the facticity of the present” (Cooper 187). Reproduction and repetition are symptoms of this troubled facticity of present. In the last chapter, we positioned mechanical reproduction as a defining feature of Blake’s milieu; and while the poem predates the school of psychoanalysis, it still sketches out many of the revelations that Freud and Lacan would later formalize into an infrastructure of repetition. These discourses are useful, for if Blake intentionally embeds the psychological profile of the fallen world into his poem, the symptomatic aporia and hypocrisies that bubble to the text’s surface are not structural impasses, but deliberate architectural features, intended to critique the political and psychological systems of the present. Therefore the symptom is a positivity, one that will be examined and classified within the two familiar discourses of Marx and Freud. In later chapters, we will reach the point of the symptom’s exhaustion, the point where The Book of Urizen is able to transcend its fallen world horizon. I Time on times he divided, & measur’d Space by space in his ninefold darkness Unseen, unknown; changes appeard Like desolate mountains rifted furious By the black winds of perturbation (BU, 3:8-10) 16 Repeating Yourself While The Book of Urizen contains a narrative proper, a poetic stratum forwards a critique of creation that has turned mechanical and repetitive. The lines quoted suggest that fixation on repetition of a specific order, that of the factory assembly line, which would become the prime economic generator in the late 18th and 19th centuries. Prior to that, however, still in the prenatal “abominable void,” the poem constructs the conditions necessary for the factory we examined in the last chapter to produce its stream of ontologically stable objects and laborers. In these lines, Urizen renders the two foundational dimensions — time and space — fixed, objective, and stable, condensing or pressing them as a manufacturer might into the discrete and interchangeable units of seconds, minutes, hours, inches, feet, and miles. Once these sublime forces are neutralized by Urizen, the action of the poem continues to shrink down to the scale of the terrestrial, while still retaining the reverberations of the factory, shown in this characteristically dense passage: “& the rolling of wheels / as of swelling seas, sound in his clouds / in his hills of stor’d snows, in his mountains / of hail & ice; voices of terror, / are heard, like thunders of autumn, / when the cloud blazes over the harvest” (3:30-5). From this wonderful chaos of mechanical and natural symbols, the poem transposes the industrial “rolling of wheels” and the authoritative “voices of terror” across the four spatial coordinates of nature: earth (mountains), water (swelling seas), air (cloud), and fire (blazes), all of which is anchored to the prudent season of harvest, in which one does not waste its agricultural bounty but “[reserve] for the days of futurity” (4:9). However, this cataclysmic refining of the elements turns out not to be the unique act of a fascist genius, but an iteration of a process that is continually repeated, recycled from Urizen’s first speech in the second chapter, which retells how he first subdued the four elements (3:14-23). The poem foregrounds the steady de-escalation of creative action, the rote cycles into which Urizen feeds various bits of infinity, and the barren “desart” landscapes into which they harden. Instead of the spontaneous acts of creation that follow the through-lines of desire (“Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.” (MHH, 10:68)), Urizen creates, or rather produces, according to calculated strategy. His actions are merely the compulsory shadows that follow a thought, rather than meanings in and of themselves. In this way Urizen’s psyche operates like a factory. “[Becoming] what you behold” works in both directions, so it is logical that Urizen’s mechanical mind can only conceive of, and therefore produce, the inhospitable terrain of Earth. In a University of Michigan dissertation on Blake, John N. Cords echoes this thought, writing, “In other words, [Urizen] is acting less like a paragon of reason (as he is often depicted) and more like an automaton with no mindful guidance” (289). Elsewhere Cords writes, “Urizenic error — and this includes Urizen’s labor — once initiated, can only be repeated” (283). But the poem is equally concerned with how exactly this inhospitable terrain can be inhabited and maintained — a problem that benefits from considering the aesthetic qualities of Urizen’s mechanical art, especially in the context of Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay on the subject. In Benjamin’s essay “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” he writes of the estrangement between the film actor and the market through which the image of his visage is distributed: But now the reflected image has become separable, transportable … The market where he offers not only his labor, but his whole self, his heart and soul, is beyond his reach. During the shooting he has as little contact with it as any article made in a factory. This may contribute to that oppression, that new anxiety which … grips the actor before the camera (11). 18 Repeating Yourself In the passage, Benjamin echoes Blake’s own private angers about the pressure of commercialization that his artisan craft was registering in the 1790’s, albeit of engraving not film. In a letter, Blake noted that that the practice was undergoing a tranformation into “the Life’s Labour of Ignorant Journeymen, Suited to the Purposes of Commerce no doubt, for Commerce cannot endure Individual Merit; its insatiable Maw must be fed by what all can do Equally well.” (Blake’s observation proved not to be paranoid, as labor theorist Babbage would use the engraving process as a conceptual model for the factory.) What both critiques articulate is the fragmentation of a whole into discrete and interchangeable parts so as to be circulated within the market. Both choose the language of cannibalism, though Benjamin’s graphic rhetoric even surpasses the violence of Blake’s. By the end of his essay, Benjamin, via a chain of rhetorical logic, will overcome these visceral reactions to mechanical reproduction, arguing that the ability to obliterate and re-shape is the medium’s revolutionary potential. Yet Benjamin concedes that this purpose of art exists more in theory than in capitalist practice. The Book of Urizen, by enacting this theory, illuminates its critical junctures and flaws and may suggest Benjamin’s vanguard creator, and a certain breed of artist that was Blake’s peer, is a Urizenic one. Benjamin argues that this mechanical automaton leaves no room for aura1, but a Blakean view reveals that the aura is the very congealing gunk that binds all those disparate fragments and shards together. From the god’s eye perspective of the reader, 1 Miriam Bratu Hansen describes Benjamin’s aura as “shorthand for the particular qualities of traditional art that [Benjamin] observed waning in modernity, associated with the singular status of the artwork, its authority, authenticity, and unattainability… [Aura] is defined in antithetical relation to the productive forces that have been rendering it socially obsolete” (336). Benjamin imbues the term with a negative valence. The Book of Urizen scrubs all Romantic idealization from its barren Earth. But that does not mean that the same happens at the smaller level of narrative. In fact, we see the Earth stuffed into its thick, impenetrable envelope of the aura: “And a roof vast petrific around, / On all sides He fram’d.” (5:28-9) Blake names the final stages of this encasement the “net of religion,” but it is equally a Benjamin-like “fabric of tradition” that holds the inhabitants at arms-length, and perhaps most like Marx’s fetish that conceals the “relations of production [and] assumes a material shape which is independent of their control and their conscious individual action” (187). For if the dronish hordes did not have their senses paralyzed and shrunken, they would be able to see the metal rivets and oppressive defects of Urizen’s supposedly airtight “iron law.” The metal imagery that the poem perpetually links together — like links in a chain — are themselves yoked back to the Brass Books. The Brass Books encapsulate the poem’s awareness of itself as such, exemplifying what Paul Mann means when he calls the poem “a book about books” (49). As a bona fide Symbol, Urizen’s oeuvre holds the privileged status of being the Universe’s first art object, while simultaneously being a tool of oppression. Indeed, the nexus between art and weapon, between liberatory and propagandist modes of expression, that the Brass Books occupy is crucial to Blake’s view of art. The contents of the Brass Books are “secrets of wisdom” that Urizen will “unfold” to the world in Chapter 3. Far from suggesting a transcendent esotericism, the meaning of the “secrets of dark contemplation” — and the aura they emit — hinges on the double meaning of the word “secret.” Secret is derived from the Latin verb sēcernĕre, which logically means “to separate, divide off.” But the meaning comes into sharper relief when we examine its other etymological offspring, the word “secrete;” Oxford English 20 Repeating Yourself Dictionary defines it as “the action of a gland or some analogous organ in extracting certain matters from the blood or sap and elaborating from them a particular substance, either to fulfill some function within the body or to undergo excretion as waste.” The physiological connotation elegantly coheres with the poem’s scheme, which is populated with organ-related and bodily terms, as well with reference to Urizen’s “body” of work. Armed with this, the etymological dialectic between “secret” and “secrete” can articulate the formal dialectic of the aura — a substance whose omniscience (in terms of its authority and circulatory secretion) is mechanized by its secrecy and self-abstraction, or the distance it forces between its art object and observer. From here it becomes impossible to separate definitively, as Benjamin does, the secreted aura from the mechanical medium. Read literally as “secret(e)s of wisdom,” the Brass Books are spliced-up bits of wisdom held together by the formal constraints of a book. It is logical that Urizen’s art object corresponds with Benjamin’s revolutionary conception of art that “consists of multiple fragments which are assembled under a new law.” The Book of Urizen shows that in practice mechanical reproduction is still clogged with the gunk of aura, which will be harder to wipe off than by merely altering the medium. While the Urizenic model of art certainly anticipates and critiques a conception of art that Benjamin would not theorize until much later, this mechanical art had a very real resonance in the Blake’s life. David Wagenknecht notes that the traditional art schooling that the engraver received “took the form of an economic process whereby works of art were technologically reproduced and “translated” — imitated, illustrated but also plagiarized, bowdlerized — by means that, for Blake systematically devalued artistic qualities he favored” (327). Wagenknecht specifically highlights the artistic techniques “translated,” “reproduced,” “illustrated,” and “plagiarized” — terms that are united by the reproductive functions inherent to them. II Here it will be useful to clarify the link between repetition and reproduction, so that we can shore up the distance between the economic and psychological regions of the text. Both repetition and reproduction are contracted to a prior instance of time or space: repetition is obligated to rework an original traumatic event (a temporal coordinate), while the labor of reproduction is to recreate an archetypal object (a spatial one). In uniting repetition and reproduction, trauma and commodity, a Urizenic figure exercises control over Newtonian time and space in his mechanical universe. By integrating these two definitions into one unit, we can characterize repetition as a traumatic symptom that industrial reproduction is entwined with in the poem’s schme. It is these simultaneous intonations that the poem entertains which allow commodity to register as trauma, to dramatize historical patterns at the level of psychological symptoms. But we need to determine the nature of the original trauma-cum-commodity that sparks this series of repetitions-cum-reproductions is2. In short, what is the event that precedes, provokes, and shapes the poem’s course? In The Book of Urizen, this traumatic primal event coincides with the formation of Urizen’s identity. The fall from a formless void into the structured reality of Earth corresponds with Jacques Lacan’s mirror stage, which, the French psychoanalyst notes, is “the transformation that takes place in the 2 Here I am augmenting Freud’s scheme of trauma and repetition with the earlier economic discourse. Freud first theorized repetition in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in which he classified a type of painful repetition that not only disobeyed the pleasure principle but which was in fact regulated by a perverse separate drive, thanatos. 22 Repeating Yourself subject when he assumes an image [the ideal I]...which will always remain irreducible for the individual alone” (76). To conceptualize this stage geographically, the subject is cut from the continuous and indeterminate space of the real by the violent penetration of the symbolic and forced into the constructed world of the imaginary. Practically, because the real exists beyond the threshold of language, it can only be conceptualized vis-a-vis its relationship to the symbolic and imaginary domains. Referring to this, Lacan writes, “The cut made by the signifying chain is the only cut that verifies the structure of the subject as a discontinuity in the real” (678). His statement suggests that the real and the symbolic have a symbiotic relationship that props the subject up between them. In this section, we will examine this subject — how Blake dramatizes Urizen’s violent rupturing from the Eternals (“rent from his side”) who represent the real, the locked interplay between Eternals and Urizen, the embodiment of Urizen’s form, and finally how Blake conjures the hazy shadow of ideal I that remains permanently beyond the cusp of Urizen’s realization. To illustrate the effects of the traumatic ejection from the real, Blake foregrounds the emergence of Urizen’s delineated form against the nebulous backdrop of the poem, which deploys an ambivalence towards narrative order and character identity. Mitchell refers to some of these instances as “cosmic schizophrenia…[with characters] capable of becoming one another” (91). The Preludium, in particular, enacts this cosmic schizophrenia, as power struggles morph from clear transactions into tangled knots: “Of the primeval Priest’s assum’d power, / When the Eternals spurn’d back his religion; And gave him a place in the north,” (Preludium:1-3). This narrative detail prompts more questions than answers: is Urizen banished by the Eternals or does he escape to the North? The action immediately following in the first chapter suggests that the “selfclosd” Urizen voluntarily disbanded for the North. But Mitchell fruitfully complicates the coordinates of this banishment by anchoring Urizen’s exodus to the “place in the north” to the poem’s literary predecessor, Paradise Lost, which harbors a contradictory geography. Lucifer is ejected from the “place in the north,” or heaven, to a “place eternal Justice had prepar’d / For the rebellious.” As in later work, Milton, in which Blake writes the eponymous character into the poem in order to salvage his artistic and moral fallacies and redeem his legacy, here, the poem receives inspiration from a divine source, only to scramble its origins and distort its relations. Unlike the traditional literary reference that validates the artistic gesture, this poem’s intellectual diversion only introduces epistemological uncertainty. Heaven is Hell and forced ejection is voluntary exit. The poem can’t even produce Urizen’s definitive identity. “Some said it is Urizen,” (3:5-6) and the inertia of the repetition of this phrase grants it the questionable status of a fact. Briefly emerging as “I” in the Preludium, the narrator drops below the surface of the poem, never to appear again. Lacking the status of an author, which superimposes a narrative and meaning onto the chaotic tangle of action, this lost narrator is merely a vessel for the turbulent, barely contained “dark visions of torment.” At a level beneath narrative, identity and psychic state are also amorphous categories. Mitchell points out that the Eternals’ actions are forced into reactive lockstep with Urizen: “The Eternal’s reaction … is really only an imitation of his activity” (91). Over the course of the poem, Los progressively mirrors Urizen’s identity, articulating the wordless and primordial moans of Urizen’s “unorganized” state and later his wounds 24 Repeating Yourself healing where Urizen’s do not. Together, the Eternals and Los are fluid substances, filling in the negative space of Urizen’s actions. Later in the poem, from Los’ enclosed world, he “look’d back with anxious desire / But the space undivided by existence / struck horror into his soul” (3:45-47). “Anxious desire” is the key phrase; it suggests that Los is suspended between the tyrannical enclosure of Earth and the boundless, infinite abstraction of Eternals, with a mediated desire too weak to tunnel him out. Upon this plane, which persistently destabilizes narrative and character facticity, is Urizen, who is distinguished by a oppressive forcefulness that instates a perimeter of bounding lines around his creation and his own identity. At the outset of the poem, Urizen is described in formless terms — “unknown,” “unprolific,” “soul-shuddering vacuum” — in much the same way that Lacan conceptualizes the real, writing that the real is that which “resists symbolization absolutely.” Yet by subjecting Urizen to linguistic description and naming what he is not (known, prolific, a positivity), the poem hitches these features onto Urizen’s identity. By the end of Chapter 5 and through the procession of seven ages, he has coagulated from a “soul-shudd’ring” vacuum into a positive body with proper organs and shape, albeit of Brobdingnagian scale (“till a roof shaggy wild inclos’d / In an orb, his fountain of thought” (10:33-34). “ribs, like a bending cavern (10:39)). From the tangled net of narrative and character, Urizen’s “bounding line” (a Blakean term) triumphantly cuts through spatial and temporal coordinates, breaking up the dreary, formless stagnation of the Eternals: “Enraged & stifled with torment / He threw his right Arm to the north / His left Arm to the south / Shooting out in anguish deep” (13:12-15). But Urizen’s “bounding line” lends itself to two different interpretations. On one hand, the line restrains, working to enforce traumatic separation. On the other, restraint, delineation, and rational order are a necessary precondition of the Enlightenment episteme that Urizen produces from his “self-contemplating” labor — as compared to the incurious equilibrium of the Eternals that has neither bounding lines nor creative contributions. Yet to cross the threshold into the domain of the imaginary and symbolic, as Urizen does, is to construct a totalizing vision of the self, or ideal I, that is forever beyond the horizon of language and action. Mitchell expresses this sentiment (absent of the Lacanian connotation) when he writes that “Urizen is the personification of the imagination striving for this illusion of the absolute and the objective.” Urizen’s ideal I takes the shape of the “laws of prudence,” (28:6) “reserv’d for the days of futurity” (4:9) — abstractions projected into the future that dictate present behavior. It is important to note that Urizen is forced into this scenario of over-determination in order to escape the Eternal void. In Donald Ault’s analysis of a Blake illustration (a precisely drawn human figure against an indeterminate background), he suggests how contraries can function together in Blake’s economy: “[The] figure is constructing a limited, fixed, and unchanging model of his fundamental experiences to stave off the sense of the dissolving quality of the outer world. Yet it is the very act of constructing the model that separates the worlds into inner and outer, definite and indefinite … The background is both the cause and the effect of the central action.” Similarly, there is no inspired answer in The Book of Urizen, only a set of actions driven by necessity and desperation rather than illuminated creativity. Neither is there any real independence of ideas, only a reciprocal determination. Thus, Urizen’s lot to repeat is an extension of this 26 Repeating Yourself inevitability. “Rent from his side,” Urizen’s fall into bounded form is a traumatic event that echoes through the series of repetitions and reproductions of the poem. It is important to note, however, that these iterations are not pure repetitions or reproductions. Using the thermodynamic map, Freud theorized in Beyond the Pleasure Principle that repetition was energy deployed and redeployed through a hardened psychic channel, through a multiplicity of contexts, i.e. “repetition with a difference.” Similarly, even as the homogeneous product is designed for a homogeneous market, the factory also accommodates, and relies on, this “repetition with a difference” as new variations of products are continually turned out for consumption. But while the constantly tweaked commodity may differ in specificities, it is produced by the same mechanisms (or to use Freud’s language, drive) of all other commodities and, therefore, functions identically in the marketplace. In both uptakes of repetition and reproduction, as Edward Larissy suggests, “plurality may suggest the arbitrariness of the sign” (63). So it is this “arbitrariness of the sign” at which the cycles of Urizen’s reproduction arrive — rhythms of creation that erode existing meanings and fail to produce new ones. Like a copperplate which has a finite amount of copies that it is able to produce before the quality of the copies’ details are degraded, Urizen’s original is eventually lost to abstraction and nothing new arises. Inhabitants of Urizen’s generation are “shrunk up from existence” (25:40) and whittled down and bound by their “narrowing perceptions” (25:47). What emerges from these preoccupations with repetition and reproduction is a critical theory of art that Blake is advancing, one that reflected on the historical conditions surrounding his craft. In theory and poetic practice, art (and especially etching) was subject to the deadening effects of Urizenic reproduction. The poem displays a meta- textual awarness, Mitchell argues, in versions of the poem’s illustrations, where “Urizen is holding a quill pen in his right hand, and a burin, or a similar engraving tool, in his left, indicating that he is to be seen at least partially as an emblem of a certain kind of relationship between the arts of poetry and engraving” (84). But this emblem, and the various mechanisms that were producing it, ran up against Blake’s utopian project for reading, which Makdisi characterizes as “a kind of reading that would open out from the text, rather than trying to seduce the reader into its hidden confines” (162). This transparent, yet also pliable anti-esotericism is the antipode of Urizen’s Brass Books that dominate his creation. If this reproduction of the fallen world exhausts its significance with every turn, the Blakean copy must accumulate meaning through its recreations. Therefore, Blake’s artistic method occupies a unique juncture that accommodates these alternate preoccupations of reproduction, at once representing the subtractive “similarity with a difference,” as well as opening up the possibility to be a copy that enriches itself through reproduction. So on one hand, Blake’s reproduced poetry is conceived by and between Marxist and psychoanalytic understandings; yet on the other, the poetry as Blake conceives it must move beyond fallen world reproduction. Blake’s art is necessarily mechanized by reproduction, but in order to create a working aesthetic theory not hindered by it, he must find a way to accommodate reproduction, so that his method is not the blind spot in his scheme.