Nominal Devolutions

The economics of J. H. Prynne's "A Note on Metal" (1968)--devoted to the recovery of a notion of "substance" which antedates, subtends, and potentially outflanks both the political significations of economy proper and the structures of historical value which attend it--lies situated somewhere between geology and anthropology, its method somewhere between the lyric and the tract. 1 Prynne's prose-poem or essay suggests as a simultaneous thesis and conceit an antinomy between two general modes of circulation and production, one defined metaphorically in stone and the other in metal, two modes related first as successive developmental or cultural stages and subsequently as opposed models of signification or value. The piece therefore marks a theoretical excursion into historiography of a sort, an abbreviated poetic Grundrisse perhaps, as relentlessly compelled as any of its high modernist precursors to carve its own ideological position in the broader economic phenomena of modernity and to account for those systems of value which underpin the production of poetry. For Prynne, the history of that modernity is a long one indeed, originating technologically in "the concentration of theoretic power by iconic displacement of substance" (127), which is to say, in the invention of economic value and in the cultural passage from a world of stone to a regime of metal

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