Citations for “The Sweatshop Sublime” by Bruce Robbins

1) Robbins portrays the consumer’s momentary insight into the complexity and immensity of the labor process as something that is sublime; in doing so, he quotes passages from George Eliot’s Middlemarch, including the following:

“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all
ordinary human life, it would be like
hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s
heart beat, and we should die of that roar
which lies on the other side of silence” (88).

Here, Robbins is able to connect Eliot’s poetics with his argument that one’s realization of being “the beneficiary of an unimaginably vast…social whole” (84) is often so transcendental that it makes one become a “purely disinterested” (88) person of apathetic inaction. In other words, when we “hear the grass grow” by recognizing the tremendous intricacy upon which the commodities of our daily life depend, we “die” and accordingly retreat back into the safety of our “everyday smallness” (Robbins 85) to escape the world’s deafening “roar.” My interest lies in how the effects of the latter compare with the influence of the inherent inaction that Robbins states is “built into [our] conceptual structure” (89) and that appears when action is called for. Does our failure to act then result from the stagnation that already exists within our natures or from the inertia that overwhelms us after we experience moments of “hearing the grass grow?” After reading this passage, I was thus intrigued by the relationship between these two seemingly separate descriptions of the origin of our inactivity in light of the sweatshop problem.

2) In addition, Robbins makes use of the term “national-popular” that appears in Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (compiled by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Smith). Specifically, Gramsci expounds on the capability of linking “the thoughts and feelings of ordinary people to the fate of others” (Robbins 86) in order to trigger nationalism. I was interested in how Robbins extended Gramsci’s idea of collectivizing fates from a national to an international domain in order to spur anti-sweatshop action [hence his conception of the “international-popular” (86)] and how specifically he would suggest the implementation of this. Where would the movement start – at the level of the individual consumer or at that of a global organization?

*3) Frederic Jameson states in his Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism that “in consuming culture, [we do not] particularly want, let alone need, to forget the human producer” (95), and thus effectively makes the claim that there is a common desire to not hide the “traces of production” (Robbins 95) that go into the making of art. Jameson justifies his point by arguing that because these products of culture are “signed” (Jameson 315), the consumer wishes to recognize the artist behind the signature. According to Robbins, if this yearning to actively acknowledge the human producer in art can be channeled into realms that generate other products, it can be used as a motivational force for action in support of the anti-sweatshop movement. The shared sentiment of wanting to “remember” (Robbins 95) the human producer, in other words, can serve as a means of uniting people and inciting universal action through a shared recognition of the many actors who occupy the stage of global labor. I was interested in this citation because of the way in which Robbins compares its original conception of the consuming of art to the consuming of other parts of culture (in the sense that in both these cases, the consumer may want to know who “signed” the product). In short, I wondered whether another parallel between the two “products” also applied, namely that of the “artist” sometimes forsaking his signature and preferring to remain anonymous. Even if we desire to know the identity of the human producer, the creator of the culture we consume, is it possible that the individual artist might conversely desire to shield what we want to remember in an effort to preserve his or her anonymousness? Or does that phenomenon occur solely in the realm of art, and thus should we assume that other human producers (including those working within the division of labor) generally do wish to sign their products and have their presence be known?