Autumn of the System: Poetry and Financial Capital

If the reign of finance in the cycle of capital accumulation is always a “sign of Autumn,” we seem finally to have arrived at the onset of Winter (Braudel 246). Or so one must suspect from the collapse of the global economy that began its run-up around 2006 and manifested itself in full over the course of 2007–2008. Whether this crisis is terminal remains a matter of open debate.1 Certainly if this is indeed the end of a cycle of accumulation, in some way like the end of the British Empire (or that of the United Provinces or the Italian city-states), each such conclusion is always different in its particulars. It would be presumptuous to propose what the shape or meaning of this finale might be, much less the nature of the transition to some next cycle or the nature of the next cycle itself. The problem of imagining this sequence, we might say, is the fundamental narrative problem of our historical moment. But this is quite different from saying that the fundamental problematic of the historical moment is necessarily narrative in nature. In beginning to develop a mind of Winter, it does not seem too early to wonder: what then may we say about Autumnal literature? By which I mean to ask, what form will prove to have been best suited to grasp the contours of that still mystifying and elusive regime which rode American hegemony downward