Worthless yet Priceless : The Truths and Economics of Poetry

Abstract

The essay tries to capture the epistemological status of poetry from the perspective of questions posed by the economy of literature. Selected theories of poetry – those of Jochen Hörisch, Viktor B. Shklovsky, Jean Baudrillard and Franco Berardi – can be regarded as a kind of “economics of poetry” due to their proposed treatment of the properties of the poetic medium from an economic perspective. In each of these theories, poetry is defined as uneconomical and useless, which, paradoxically, becomes its fundamental condition for existence as a place for breaking the linguistic circulation of signs, a point of resistance against conventionalized communication and automatization of perception, and thus a medium offering unique knowledge about reality.