Speakers > Sutherland Keston

Communisation theory in its various forms has argued that rather than 'generalising its condition to the whole of society', the proletariat 'dissolves its own being through the abolition of capitalist social relations' (in the words of Endnotes). According to this theory, the communist community will not be a community of proletarians, but the community that will exist only once there is no proletariat. This paper will consider whether object relations theory in the tradition of Klein and Bion might help us to think about the implications of this argument for people who work now, under capital. What does it feel like to fantasise about the dissolution of the proletariat, and what sort of content or material is found in those fantasies? What does contemporary poetry do with these fantasies, and what does it teach us about them? 

Keston Sutherland is Professor of Poetics at Sussex University. In 2013 he worked at UC Berkeley as the Holloway Poetry Fellow and in 2015 at Princeton as the Bain-Swiggett Professor of Poetry. Since 1995 he has co-edited Barque Press with Andrea Brady. Together with Joe Luna, Natalia Cecire and Sam Solomon, and previously with Sara Crangle and Daniel Kane, he has run the Sussex Poetry Festival since 2010. His research and critical work extends into a number of fields and contexts.