Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune (1988)

In The Emergence of Social Space, Kristin Ross examines the cultural movement in and on the peripheries of the Paris Commune — an oppositional culture that consists of political language, postures, values and strategies. Employing a close textual analysis, Ross considers Rimbaud’s poetry contextually as one aspect among others in the experience of an entire generation of Communards, using it to examine developments in the history of geography, anthropology, worker’s culture. political theory and aesthetics. She demonstrates that the very notion of ‘social space’ emerges as one of the by-products of the Commune and that it leads to a far-reaching rethinking of social and cultural strategies. In so doing she also examines shifts in the conception of work and the role these play as textual operators in significant poetic and theoretical texts of the day and, indeed, of subsequent periods.