"We might possess every technological resource... but if our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be "revolutionary" but not transformative"
About this Quote
Rich is doing what her best poems always do: refusing to let the future hide behind shiny equipment. The line starts with a deliberately modern temptation - “every technological resource” - then snaps the reader back to a more intimate, more stubborn infrastructure: language. Not as decoration, but as the operating system for perception. If your words are stale, your “vision remains formless”: you can generate endless data, images, and “content,” yet still lack the conceptual shapes that let you see power, harm, desire, solidarity.
The subtext is a warning about false progress. Rich puts “revolutionary” in quotes to puncture the romance of disruption. She’s naming the difference between process and outcome: you can modernize the machinery of life (tools, institutions, workflows) and still reproduce the same hierarchies, the same scripts for who gets heard, who gets believed, who is allowed complexity. “Old cycles” carries the ring of history repeating - sexism, racism, militarism - made efficient by new devices. Language, for Rich, is where those cycles are either reinforced or broken, because it’s where we decide what counts as normal, inevitable, or unspeakable.
Context matters: Rich wrote through second-wave feminism, antiwar movements, and the culture industry’s expanding reach. Her project was “re-vision” in the literal sense: rewriting inherited narratives so different lives become thinkable. The sentence is an argument for transformation as a linguistic act first. Before we can build a new world, we have to invent the words that let us recognize it.
The subtext is a warning about false progress. Rich puts “revolutionary” in quotes to puncture the romance of disruption. She’s naming the difference between process and outcome: you can modernize the machinery of life (tools, institutions, workflows) and still reproduce the same hierarchies, the same scripts for who gets heard, who gets believed, who is allowed complexity. “Old cycles” carries the ring of history repeating - sexism, racism, militarism - made efficient by new devices. Language, for Rich, is where those cycles are either reinforced or broken, because it’s where we decide what counts as normal, inevitable, or unspeakable.
Context matters: Rich wrote through second-wave feminism, antiwar movements, and the culture industry’s expanding reach. Her project was “re-vision” in the literal sense: rewriting inherited narratives so different lives become thinkable. The sentence is an argument for transformation as a linguistic act first. Before we can build a new world, we have to invent the words that let us recognize it.
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