boundary 2 recent issues

American Poetry After 1975: Editor's Note

Bernstein, C. — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:32:00 PST

Bios / The Logosphere / The Finite-Made Evolver Space

Rosenberg, J. — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:32:00 PST

This piece is an essay describing my precompositional "semantic method" and placing my poetics in the context of prior poetries, such as Projective Verse. It was originally written for the conference "BIOS: The Poetics of Life in Digital Media," held at the University of West Virginia, Morgantown, September 15-17, 2006. When I present this piece in a performance context, it is simultaneous with a kind of multimedia slide show illustrating some of the text materials and text operations discussed.

Eclogues

Gizzi, P. — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:32:00 PST

Two Dots Over a Vowel

Bok, C. — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:32:01 PST

Current writers among the avant-garde have begun to subvert the romantic bastions of sublime creativity and eminent authorship by adopting both piracy and parody as sovereign, aesthetic values. Such exponents of what critics have now dubbed "conceptual literature" disavow the lyrical mandate of self-conscious self-assertion in order to explore the readymade potential of the "uncreative." They resort to a diverse variety of antiexpressive, antidiscursive strategies (including the use of forced rules, random words, copied texts, boring ideas, and even cyborg tools), doing so in order to erase any artistic evidence of "lyric style." Such writers call into question the concepts of both "intentionality" and "expressiveness" in literature. They constrain the cognitive functions of the self on behalf of other aesthetic functions in the text (be these functions automatic, mannerist, or aleatoric in their conceptualization). Such writers have thereby expanded the concept of writing beyond the formal limits of any expressive intentions, doing so in order to conceive of, hitherto, inconceivable preconditions for the act of writing itself.

Docents of Discourse: The Logic of Dispersed Sites

Shaw, L. — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:32:01 PST

This essay proposes a revision of the dominant critical vocabulary for site-based practices in contemporary art and poetry through a critical engagement with the work of art historian Miwon Kwon. Focusing on recent art and poetry that sites itself not in relation to physical places but instead in relation to "discourses" (like anthropology or archaeology), the essay contests Kwon's arguments that artists like Mark Dion and Renée Green relativize artistic practice in relation to other disciplines and that their work breaks with the concerns of art history. Demonstrating instead how they recode disciplinary boundaries and modes of authority, I show how such new and expanded models of contextualization became central to the history of site-specific art since the 1960s, once the concept of site began to organize not only literal sculptural objects but the notion of an artistic context (both synchronic and diachronic) more generally. Without acknowledging the contingency inescapable in such modes of contextualization, art historians have presented the discursive site as a stable and authoritative frame. To address this problem, the essay then turns to a range of site-based contemporary poetries (Flarf, Rob Fitterman, Lisa Robertson) in which "discourses" (of Web commerce, nationalism, and urbanism, among others) function similarly as sites. But rather than merely assert such sites as stable frames of reference, contemporary poetry tends, often perversely and playfully, to anatomize the legibility of these very frames. They thus call our attention to what might count as the raw materials, scales, and intertextual logic or coherence of a discursive site.

Rakim's Performativity

Morris, T. — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:32:01 PST

"Rakim's Performativity" considers the influence and relevance of pioneering Rapper Rakim's influential track "Follow the Leader" through the lens of J. L. Austin's theory of performativity presented in his philosophical work How to Do Things with Words. The author reflects on Rakim's writing and performance as an MC by referencing performance studies theoretical frameworks from Erving Goffman, Martin Heidegger, and African American cultural iconography. Morris emphasizes Austin's constructed dichotomy in the first half of How to Do Things and his more expansive framing later in the book, and applies both overarching breakdowns to Rakim's work. This article not only praises one of Hip Hop's most important writers and utterers, it also seeks to affirm Austin's theoretical applicability through an unconventional lens. The twenty-page article is divided into four sections: a preface that outlines the context in which Rakim's work was heard by the author; section 1, "Follow Him into a Flow," which contrasts Rakim's work with that of other Rappers at the time the track was released; section 2, "Austinian Performativity," which diagrams Rakim's lyrics in the context of Austin's constative and performative distinctions, among other philosophical references; and section 3, which emphasizes the applicability of Rakim's work to Austin's three locutionary delineations. In addition to analyzing Rakim's iconic lyrics, Morris conveys a poetic and cultural nostalgia for the cultural time frame that epitomized Rakim's work (known as the "Golden Age of Hip Hop") as well as a deep affection for J. L. Austin's theory as an infinitely applicable and a fundamentally democratic ethos.

Versus Seamlessness: Architectonics of Pseudocomplicity in Tan Lin's Ambient Poetics

Scappettone, J. — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:32:01 PST

This article examines the critical ruptures and dilutions of a contemporary "ambient poetic"—a tendency in sonic, visual, and textual arts to aspire toward an atmospheric condition—through analysis of Tan Lin's verse architectonics across book and digital media. Setting the assertions of Lin's works against his multigeneric poetry's effects, the essay tests their seeming complicity with a late-capitalist ambience that Rem Koolhaas has identified as "Junkspace": seamless and stupefying coagulation of the disjointed landscape left over by modernization. Lin's boring or "relaxing," absorptive reading environments aim to dampen the shocks associated with both modernist fractures and postmodern counter-absorptive verse, canceling themselves out as they release the reader/spectator into a state of distraction. However, their reception by a reader trained to forge connections and to follow narrative trajectories produces a more disquieting condition. The seam of the book in BlipSoak01, the lacunae between flashing terms onscreen in "Dub Version V.01," the page enjoined to have turned before one's arrival in the volume Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary compel readers to link the texts' feeds and bits, grappling in turn with what is missing from them. Those immersed in Lin's hyperdemocratically sampled lines and narrative emanations find themselves falling adrift of the dictates of outmoded form; as such, their inattention is experienced as historically subject—the outcome of annihilated figures and grounds.

Hypermnesia

Dworkin, C. — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:32:01 PST

"Hypermnesia" sketches the historical, theoretical, and technological contexts for the Eclipse archive of radical poetry (http://english.utah.edu/eclipse). Engaging Jacques Derrida's argument in Mal d'archive, the essay posits the archive as a species of gift and teases out the contradiction at the heart of all digital archives: on the one hand, the dream of lossless reproduction; on the other hand, the distorting and degrading compression necessary for communicating between networked machines. Through close bibliographic readings of poems by Lyn Hejinian, Lorenzo Thomas, Tina Darragh, and Charles Bernstein, the essay further argues for the importance of material specificity to literary critical analyses, demonstrating that the material substrates of poetry and its modes of production—from typeface and ink type to binding and paper stock—are an inherent and inextricable aspect of the printed poem's meaning.

Poetry Animal

Skinner, J. — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:32:01 PST

For William Carlos Williams, poetry was a war machine, a "small (or large) machine made of words." If the war is a human war on other species, do poetry machines become poetry animals? Can we read Christopher Dewdney's "Permugenesis," Marianne Moore's "An Octopus," or Francis Ponge's "Notes Toward a Shell" as recombinant textual animals? Attention to intimate form locates structures of feeling in procedures that distribute agency. Jonathan Skinner's warbler poems ("Magnolia," "Northern Parula," "Myrtle") compose with field-based constraints to make poetry an instrument of perception and interspecies research, a "singing with," not just about or like, the nonhuman animal. The infrahuman sounds of Lila Zemborain's jellyfish ("Mauve Sea Orchids") or the revolving phonemes of Emily Dickinson's hummingbird ("A route of evanescence") organize perception and citation along indeterminate somatic pathways, where deep listening operates a reading machine. Faced with an age of extinction, remembering Cecilia Vicuña's and Antonin Artaud's call for a poetics of volatile agency and of bodily change, let us write island preserves of animality into the subject.

Poetry animals are "thoughts on things," like the plumage of Lorine Niedecker's "Mergansers," that "fold unfold / above the river beds." In voicing the meandering pitches of Maggie O'Sullivan's "Starlings," do we undergo kinship with animals? Poetry animals lose sight of teleology and move with periodic, inhuman intensities, allowing foreign organizations into the sphere of the human nervous system. To locate their "animalady," poets might become reading and writing machines, to deconstruct the singular animal and listen as human animals.

A Liquid Hand Blossoms

Rapaport, H. — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:32:01 PST

This essay speaks to two New Critical taboos generally held by literary critics, whatever their training. The first concerns the poet's use of a preestablished referent that functions as a sentimental attachment that carries the poem along. This is usually considered a form of cheating, a loading of the dice. The second taboo concerns the poet's tossing "sweet nothings" into a poem, delicious turns of phrase that don't mean anything.

Again, critical readers generally take this to be a cheat. My article explores why readers of poetry should be more open to the sentimental attachment and the sweet nothing, given how central they are to poetry. This article is a short section from a book I'm working on that is composed of many short pieces on all manner of topics that concern contemporary poetry.

In Barry Bonds I See the Future of Poetry

Goldsmith, K. — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:32:01 PST

Barry Bonds is not only the future of athletics, but he's also emblematic of the future of poetry. More machine than man, chemically enhanced, Bonds is our first mainstream posthuman public figure. Bonds's milestone signifies an end to the humanist discourse; he is a martyr for the future.

Disabled Texts and the Threat of Hannah Weiner

McSweeney, J. — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:32:01 PST

This paper considers Hannah Weiner's collage practice as a species of bricolage in keeping with early twentieth-century practitioners such as Tzara and Schwitters. In operating in this disparaged modality and refusing the closure of conventional able-bodied texts, Weiner's work may thus be construed as a "disabled text."

Grammar Trouble

Reed, B. — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:32:01 PST

In recent years, scholars have begun declaring obsolete the old post-World War II opposition in U.S. poetry between avant-garde and mainstream poetics. This article responds that the celebrated new "hybrid style" in fact represents a new normative consensus against which future avant-gardes will define themselves. After examining a typical "hybrid" poem, the essay proceeds to discuss Craig Dworkin's Parse (2008), a sample of twenty-first century "conceptual poetics." Dworkin suggests that the U.S. avant-garde, in its next phase, will aggressively target educational methods and institutions as part of a larger radical challenge to the contemporary routinization of intellectual labor.

The '90s

Spahr, J. — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:32:01 PST

At a certain moment, a moment that extends from the late '80s to the turn of the twenty-first century, something interesting happens within literature in English: some of the more provocative literatures in English from various literary schools and various national traditions blatantly turn away from standard English in order to say something about English. This article argues that literature in English in the '90s is distinctive for the number of works that turn away from standard English by including other languages and/or are written mainly in the pidgins or creoles that resulted from English-language colonialism. The '90s are a unique moment when writers of disparate aesthetic, political, and philosophical concerns, writers from disparate nations that are united and separated by shared histories of imperialism, and writers with disparate relations to the English language do some really interesting thinking at the same time about what it means to be writing in the English language. This article reads these works in the context of the very public debates about the English language that happen in the '90s in the United States. It examines what this literature of the '90s has to say about globalization and indigenous and immigrant rights through its insistent turn against standard English. And it concludes by looking briefly beyond the '90s at the rise of lyric and plain speech poetries after the U.S. 9/11, which in turn are contested by the turn to appropriation-heavy writings such as Flarf and Conceptual writing.

The Stevens Wars

Filreis, A. — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:32:01 PST

What reputation and influence has Wallace Stevens had in the years since 1975? The infamous Stevensean disaffection has tended to prohibit definitive legacy, and yet this, in the end, has been productive, forestalling closed arguments among poetics Lefts and Rights, keeping Stevens's work from theoretical alliances until past the point when such would fix its standing in contestations between, for example, theoretical as distinct from historical approaches. To the extent that Stevens can seem anything to anyone, the legacy is of little impact. The many imitations of Stevens's special rhetoric tend to riff on a single poem or idiomatic stance, quick-take attempts at posing in a particular ironic position, one abandoned as quickly as assumed. Among contemporary poets whose own writing contemplates Stevens's overall position, however, a larger pattern does emerge—two Stevenses. First, a meditative Stevens: unagonistic, verbally ruminative, romantic (but called "postromantic"), a repository of human responses, post-Christian yet lyric—a poet whose verse does not make truculent, discordant claims but rather "eke[s] out the mind," forming "the particulars of sounds." Secondly, a languaged Stevens: theoretical, serial, and nonnarrative, metapoetically radical, sometimes satirical (and antinarrative), always obsessive about the state of poetics and insisting on consciousness of the compositional mode as itself a pressure inducing the poem to be composed—a poet whose middle and late seriatic styles befit rather than reject the cyclonic modernist historical modes adopted early and briefly by Eliot, grandly and insistently by Pound, and later by Williams.

Not Ideas about the Bling but the Bling Itself

Gordon, N. — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:32:01 PST

"The Rattle of Statistical Traffic": Citation and Found Text in Susan Howe's The Midnight

Perloff, M. — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:32:01 PST

This essay studies the particular conjunction of documentation ("hard facts") and highly wrought lyric verse and prose in Susan Howe's book The Midnight, a collage text consisting of historical extracts, archival fragments, biographical information, photographs, drawings, cited poems, folk songs, letters, and the original lyrics of the "Bed Hangings" sequence—the whole designed to create an elegiac memoir of the poet's mother, Mary Manning Howe, that is also an autobiographical account of the poet's own discovery of her vocation and her place in her maternal family history. In Howe's text, various bits of documentary "evidence" jostle and contradict one another, providing a portrait of both mother and daughter as mysterious as it is complex. The seemingly unrelated items begin to coalesce even as the text foregrounds its "textile" production—its awareness of itself as an example of bookmaking. The Midnight is thus a new sort of poem—at once documentary and visionary—whose language play is everywhere charged with meaning.

Lyric Dissent

Willis, E. — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:32:01 PST

"Lyric Dissent" discusses the social structure and context of lyric address, particularly the lyric's propensity for multiple voicings beyond the personal. Reading the poems of William Carlos Williams in the context of modernism's evolving countertraditions and the violent backdrop of the First and Second World Wars, this essay reconsiders the pressures within lyric poetry to respond to—or reveal—the pressures of global politics on poetry in times of war. How can the labor of a poem be measured against the demands of paid labor and of political action? Can the treatment of such issues suggest a generational coherence within diverse and dissenting practices?

SOFT INDEX (OF repeating PLACES, PEOPLE, AND WORKS)

Lin, T. — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:32:01 PST

A "SOFT INDEX (OF repeating PLACES, PEOPLE, AND WORKS)" comprises, hors-texte, a generic document, where the generic is understood to be a frequency of the unpublishable. As anecdote, it forms one of the unwritten limits (i.e., poetry) to the published, on a spectrum that includes an author, bibliographic and textual materials, biographical details, and the scholarly apparatus of a journal, including page references and index. See boundary 2. All poetry herein is the apparatus (ambience) of an index to its publication, i.e., all poetry is generic in its [publishable or unpublishable] outcomes/affects.

After Petrarch (In the Rigging)

Friedlander, B. — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:32:01 PST

Books Received

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:32:01 PST

Contributors

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:32:01 PST

Introduction

Robbins, B. — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:17:10 PDT

"The Death of the Novel" and Its Afterlives: Toward a History of the "Big, Ambitious Novel"

Greif, M. — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:17:10 PDT

The category of the "big, ambitious novel," circumscribing works by authors such as Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, David Foster Wallace, and William Vollmann, has come to constitute one of the major forms through which postwar U.S. fiction is sorted and evaluated. A history of this form must not start in the 1970s, however, nor with distant forerunners such as James Joyce's Ulysses, but from 1945. After the Second World War, critics and novelists negotiated the sort of literature that would count as great after the end of high modernism, in service of a new humanism. The novels Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison and The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow succeeded stylistically and thematically where Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea and William Faulkner's A Fable did not. They offered a new vitality to overcome critics' discourse of the "death of the novel" and probed new forms of human peculiarity that managed fears of the decline of the will of "man." This long history helps to extend our understanding of the origins and significance of interminable and system-centered fictions denounced by critics such as James Wood as mere "hysterical realism." It reorients contemporary criticism of these books to the shared, credible subjects of enforced liveliness and endlessness in narration, and a longer-term questioning of the human in a wider range of American fictions. It also shows how the novelists' apparent betrayal of humanist concerns actually emerged from earlier stages of interaction between novelists and mistrustful critics.

The Liberal Form: An Interview with Jonathan Franzen

Connery, C., Franzen, J. — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:17:10 PDT

Christopher Connery and Jonathan Franzen recorded this interview at a moment when Franzen's new work in progress was morphing into something quite different from the original plan. The discussion was fairly wide ranging—it touched on topics of regionalism, character, the novel versus the short story, and contemporary politics, but it was centered on the social and political capacity of the modern novel, the form's ability to reflect on or respond to its times, the novel's relationship to society, and the nature of politics in the current period, a period marked, in contrast to the nineteenth-century heyday of the realist novel, by a host of other media allowing for more immediate, constant, and comprehensive representations of the social and political. What can the novel add, in this mediated environment?

The interview touches on the blurred distinctions between the public and the private in the contemporary United States. Franzen reflects on the challenges that this situation of cultural entropy poses to the novelist, and on the capacity of the novel to respond to or affect this situation. Recognizing and rejecting the temptation in fiction to convey authoritative knowledge of or judgment on the social world, Franzen is inspired by fiction's capacity—when it is true to its exploratory, inventive, and creative character—to convey something significant about individual and social life, and about the complicated intersection of public and private. Throughout the interview, he shows a deep commitment to his readers and to the pleasure of reading.

Violence and the Human Voice: Critique and Hope in Native Speaker

Arac, J. — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:17:10 PDT

Chang-Rae Lee's Native Speaker (1995) demonstrates the work a novel can do in speaking (up) for the human in the current life of the United States, even though the novel as an institution has become residual, as print literature yields to other media forms. Through his epigraph from Walt Whitman and his structural echoes of American first-person narratives such as Moby-Dick, The Great Gatsby, All the King's Men, and Invisible Man, Lee troubles the autoethnographic mode that he employs, in common with other important Asian American writings. Lee's work combines imaginative political vision with a commitment to the interpersonal intimacies of language in the human mouth, speaking across ethnic and racial lines.

The Brand as Cognitive Map in William Gibson's Pattern Recognition

Konstantinou, L. — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:17:10 PDT

This essay analyzes William Gibson's eighth novel, Pattern Recognition, and argues that Gibson uses literary style to invite his readers to embrace the ethos of the coolhunter. Modeled on but not identical to Cayce Pollard's "violent reactivity to the semiotics of the marketplace," Gibson's proposed coolhunting ethos treats the brand name as a cognitive map of the multinational economic supply chains that underlie the glossy surface of the brand.

The need for such a mapping exists because, across many industries, the brand has been transformed from a way of insuring product quality into a piece of intellectual property valuable in and of itself. As multinational corporations have outsourced less profitable areas of production, and brand ownership has become relatively more profitable, the connection between any particular brand name and the supply chains supporting it is increasingly concealed within a global maze of anonymous subcontractors.

Gibson's coolhunting aesthetic seeks to transform the reader's relationship to the "logo-maze," to reconnect the free-floating brand to the hidden supply chains behind it. I relate this project of relinking to what Bruce Robbins has called the "sweatshop sublime" and to popular notions of ethical consumption and argue that Gibson's coolhunter is a modified type of ethical consumer, a person able to map economic systems onto personal meanings as meanings, translating the behavior of the market not into a more just price point at the mall but into an aesthetic sensibility.

Looking for the Good Fight: William T. Vollmann's An Afghanistan Picture Show

Hardesty, M. L. — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:17:10 PDT

William T. Vollmann is one of the most ambitious U.S novelists and essayists of the past twenty-five years. At his most admirable, Vollmann is a writer who crosses boundaries of nation, class, culture, and doctrine to understand and represent those on the other side, while acknowledging how those same boundaries protect his own privileges. Yet Vollmann's work is often troubling. Both his investment in the exotic and his tendency to generalize contradict his desire to empathetically represent "others," and they are linked to another troubling aspect of Vollmann's work, which is the focus of this essay: how the way he represents himself—his border-crossing, empathetic narrative persona—is invested in the symbol and myth of American character, and especially the American character abroad. I argue that Vollmann both critiques and reinvents this archetypal character in a book based on a trip he made to Afghanistan and Pakistan when he was twenty-two years old: An Afghanistan Picture Show: Or, How I Saved the World. I suggest that Vollmann's narrative persona, which he develops in Picture Show, is a reflexive representation of the American abroad as a well-intentioned failure, a character that resonates with the contemporary imagination of U.S. foreign relations.

Do They Believe in Magic? Politics and Postmodern Literature

McClure, J. A. — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:17:10 PDT

In "`Do You Believe in Magic?' Literary Thinking After the New Left," Sean McCann and Michael Szalay argue that postmodern American novelists, by celebrating "the spontaneous, the symbolic, and ultimately the magical" undermine the good sense of progressive thought and contribute to the hegemony of neoliberalism. That literary thinking in the contemporary American novel breaks with conventional progressive thinking in several ways is undeniable. But that it does so in a manner consistent with the "magical thinking" of the sixties and inconsistent with the broader progressive project is not. On the contrary, many of the writers McCann and Szalay indict—Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, and Toni Morrison, for instance—are as aware of the limits of magical politics as they are, and as committed to a chastened, melioristic model of social struggle. Where the novelists break with McCann and Szalay, this article argues, is in their readiness to grapple with the profound crisis of ideas and strategies that overtook the Left in the second half of the twentieth century, as the tenets of traditional progressive thought and struggle came to seem ever less efficacious. The break with conventional ideas and strategies of struggle, the turn to spirituality, and the exploration of practices of retreat in this literature needs to be seen as an effort to negotiate this crisis and imagine new forms of progressive becoming. In developing this argument, the article draws heavily on William Connolly's efforts to imagine a new progressivism in Capitalism and Christianity, American Style.

"Eerie Serenity": A Response to John McClure

McCann, S., Szalay, M. — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:17:10 PDT

Rwanda's Bones

Guyer, S. — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:17:10 PDT

The genocide memorials in Rwanda that preserve and expose the bones of the dead, including Nyamata, Nyarubuye, and Murambi, reflect a complex, unstable distinction between the commemoration of the destruction of a population (genocide) and the commemoration of death in general. At the moment that these memorials bear witness to genocide as genocide, by viewing the victims anonymously, as the perpetrators also viewed them, they also show that the difference between genocide and mass death cannot be represented by bones. In this way, they collapse the foundations of two apparently, and necessarily, opposed ways of seeing. Thus, far from solving problems of testimony by displaying hard evidence of death, the memorials reveal anew the necessity of an impossible testimony, that is, a testimony of the dead.

"Empire of the Machine": Oil in the Arabic Novel

McLarney, E. — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:17:10 PDT

Mechanization of human life is the main subject of the oil novel, a genre that charts the explosion of industrial production in the remote regions of the earth. One of the products of this process is a nostalgic vision of nature, imagined as an untouched, utopian paradise. Agrarian existence becomes infused with authenticity, valorized as a site of cultural origins, and envisioned as an antidote to the globalizing force of the military-industrial complex. This essay examines two seminal works in the canon of Arabic literature, Ghassan Kanafani's Rijal fi al-Shams (Men in the Sun, 1963) and `Abd al-Rahman Munif's Mudun al-Milh (Cities of Salt, 1984). Both depict metaphysical, transcendent worlds that are destroyed by the inexorable march of modernity. These narratives begin with idealized agrarian communities but climax with the metamorphosis of humanity into a machinelike entity. Machines preside over—and embody—the ritualistic state of transition to the age of technology. There is a spiritual cost to this material transformation. Apocalyptic imagery permeates the novels' climactic scenes, as the natural order is turned upside down, man falls from the garden, and paradise is lost. The world is abandoned by God, Lukács very definition of the novel. Paradoxically, it is precisely through this loss that Kanafani and Munif become modern novelists, producing a sacralized aura of authenticity that they then proceed to destroy.

Promises of Violence: David Cronenberg on Globalized Geopolitics

Lowenstein, A. — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:17:10 PDT

In his two most recent films, Eastern Promises (2007) and A History of Violence (2005), the director David Cronenberg turns his attention more specifically than ever before to the conjuncture of violence and globalized geopolitics. The resulting illumination of how violence circulates in a global era where we are shown so much but see so little represents a crucial political turn for Cronenberg. Analyzing this turn invites consideration, through a particularly ambitious case, of how commercial narrative cinema might imagine globalized geopolitics after 9/11. These two films bring to light something too often invisible in today's world: the imbrication of America with Russia, of London with Indiana, of Iraq with Chechnya at the level of shared violence. Shared, that is, in the most intimate sense of the body, not some abstractly conceptual "global village." When we fail to see and feel globalized geopolitics in this way, Cronenberg suggests, we risk the worst kinds of political and ethical blindness.

Another Avatar of the Circle: Philip Rieff's Counter-Enlightenment

O'Hara, D. T. — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:17:10 PDT

The essay examines two interrelated questions with respect to the work and career of Philip Rieff: (1) why does the career have the anomalous shape that it does, and (2) does this situation have anything to do with the claim throughout Rieff's work, but especially in his last work, that the sacred in human society always entails interdicts, that is, imperative sacrifices of satisfactions in the name of what somehow counts more for the society?

Confucianism, Humanism, and Human Rights

Waters, L. — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:17:10 PDT

Although Westerners are apt to say, without much on-the-ground knowledge of China, that China's population is irredeemably conformist, in fact both Chinese and American societies have a strong inclination to conformism, which is why great American thinkers have, again and again, through the life of the Republic, condemned that propensity to submit to government authority and the opinion of the majority. The Chinese praise the rebel against authority in a way that would shock foreigners who think only in stereotypes. The problem at the present time in the world, and especially in the United States and China, is that the bureaucrat and the authoritarian have a tendency to dominate their societies, and the system thus squashes the individual. Waters suggests we need a new theory of fascism to analyze how insidiously authoritarianism is creeping into power worldwide. Against the demands of the group, Waters sees the individual as a countervailing force.

Books Received

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:17:10 PDT

Contributors

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:17:10 PDT

Introduction: The Still Vacillating Equilibrium of the World

Connery, C., Spillers, H. J. — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 08:52:23 PST

March 1968 in Poland

Godzich, W. — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 08:52:23 PST

Since the three partitions it suffered in the eighteenth century, Poland has been eccentric to the main currents of European history, sometimes lagging behind them, sometimes anticipating them. In March 1968, Polish students and intellectuals anticipated their European and American counterparts by challenging the regime in power. This essay traces the intellectual genealogy of the March 1968 movement, focusing on the importance of nihilism and on the coming to grips with evil in human history. A summary account of the events of 1968 in Poland is provided.

The Philosophy of Restoration: Alain Badiou and the Enemies of May

Power, N., Toscano, A. — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 08:52:23 PST

Alain Badiou has defined his philosophical project in terms of the attempt to account for the abandonment and betrayal of the revolutionary impetus in the 1970s. This article examines this contention by tracking the way in which the definition of different antipolitical or anti-emancipatory figures plays a crucial role in the development of Badiou's theory of political subjectivity. How are we to think subjects which oppose, betray, or neutralize egalitarian militancy, or what Badiou would call fidelity to a truth-procedure? The article combines an account of this little-explored aspect of Badiou's theory of the subject with a historical contextualization and periodization, touching on the importance of the theory of "revisionism," the development of an account of reactive subjectivity, the humanism and antihumanism debate, and Badiou's cartography of a "philosophical front" in terms of "deviations" from a militant line. These various elements will converge in Badiou's portrait of the subjectivity proper to the moment that followed les années rouges of the sixties and seventies—the period which he calls the Restoration, and whose latest incarnation he has identified in the "transcendental Pétainism" of French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Rethinking the Armed Struggle in Latin America

Beverley, J. — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 08:52:23 PST

Representation of the period of armed struggle in Latin America, which extends from the early 1960s to the mid-1980s, has been dominated by a paradigm of disillusion that equates the armed struggle as a political strategy with an excess of youthful idealism or voluntarism. Waning of neoliberal hegemony and the resurgence of the Latin America Left in recent years has brought a need to revise this paradigm. The eventual defeat of the armed struggle, and the problems experienced in countries where it triumphed, such as Cuba or Nicaragua, does not mean that it was an error from the start. There were good reasons in many Latin American countries to suppose that armed struggle might be a viable, or in some cases even a necessary, strategy. For awhile, the international conjuncture of forces in fact favored armed struggle. Much has been made of the limitations of the cultural politics of the revolutionary movements, particularly around questions of race, gender, and ethnicity, and sexual preference. But the very fact that these questions can be raised is due in part to the fact that the revolutionary movements put them centrally on the agenda of modern Latin American life. Rather than seeing, as is fashionable, the new social movements as clearly separate from the armed struggle's goal of capturing state power in the name of the people, it would be more appropriate to see them as outgrowths of the same force that fed the armed struggle.

Marti in His (Third) World

Retamar, R. F. — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 08:52:23 PST

This essay on Cuba's national poet, José Martí, written originally in the early 1960s for a non-Cuban audience in the wake of the victory of the Cuban Revolution, acquires a new context with the neo-imperialism of the Bush regime and the recent resurgence of the Latin American Left. Martí was one of the first thinkers of revolutionary anticolonial struggle, and in that sense it is legitimate to see him as the main ideological inspiration of the Cuban Revolution itself some sixty years after his death. Yet Martí's own relation to Marx—his near contemporary—and socialism was ambiguous. Martí's work cannot be contained within the formula of bourgeois-democratic nationalism. Rather, as in the case of other thinker/poet/activists of the periphery, who form his legitimate "family," he represents the case of a maximum possible radicalism, at once aesthetic and political, which responds directly to the concrete character of Cuban society in his time, the struggle against Spanish imperialism, then in decline, and a U.S. imperialism in ascendancy, and the concrete evolution of the Cuban independence movement, more and more obliged to rely on the popular classes. Martí developed the key concept of a multiracial and multicultural "our America" as a counterweight to the menace of U.S. hegemony in the region, on the one hand, and Latin American development schemes based on the imposition of European or North American models, on the other. While he did not himself embrace socialism, the character of both his thought and political goals suggests an affinity with the socialist character assumed by the Cuban Revolution.

1960s East and West: The Nature of the Shestidesiatniki and the New Left

Kagarlitsky, B. — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 08:52:23 PST

Boris Kagarlitsky examines the rise of political dissent in the East and West during the 1960s. The shestidesiatniki (sixties' generation) in the Soviet Union, he argues, have much more in common with the New Left than was realized at the time, or has been acknowledged since. They shared common sources, ideals, and objectives, drawing on Marxist tradition and striving for "socialism with a human face." Both movements took shape in the relative prosperity of the postwar period, when frustration grew over the betrayal of democratic and socialist ideals. The mutual unintelligibility of the two movements is ascribed to certain key differences in their demographics and strategies. While the New Left took shape as a youth movement, the shestidesiatniki represented a generation that had been through World War II and identified with the reforms undertaken from within the Soviet government in the 1950s. Where the former aspired to subvert established power, the latter still believed that the system might continue to be changed from within. Thus the two movements looked quite different, even as they espoused similar ideas and shared many common experiences. Both groups took the "long path through the institutions" to finally attain power, though not in the form that they had originally sought, and, for the most part, without the anticipated results. William Nickell's introduction comments on the historiographical aspect of the work, emphasizing its interest as a "cultural tectonic" description of common ground that was obscured by the antagonism of the cold war years.

Revisiting the Sixties and Refusing Trash: Preamble to and Interview with Peter Schumann of Bread and Puppet Theater

Spitta, S. D. — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 08:52:23 PST

This essay frames an extended 2008 interview with Peter Schumann, founder and director of the Bread and Puppet Theater collective, through a discussion of how the sixties spread like wildfire across the world. The author rescues the sixties' understanding that liberation could only be achieved through the liberation of the body from revisionist histories that downplay the era's stunning political achievements. The enormous success sixties' activists had in mobilizing millions ("people power") resulted from the coupling of theory and action through music, art, ritual, and theater. The article discusses two theaters: one in Honduras (Teatro Basura) and one in Vermont (Bread and Puppet Theater), both of which were greatly influenced by Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which stressed recycling, making do with what is at hand, and underlined the importance of local and native epistemologies.

Black Power, Decolonization, and Caribbean Politics: Walter Rodney and the Politics of The Groundings with My Brothers

Bogues, A. — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 08:52:23 PST

The October 16, 1968, riot, popularly known as the "Rodney Affair," was a watershed moment in Caribbean political history. The riot was triggered by the Jamaican government's banning of the revolutionary scholar Walter Rodney. This essay discusses the 1968 riot and the political practice and thought of Walter Rodney as one moment in the historic moment of Black Power as an international political banner under which significant sections of the Black World were mobilized.

"Long Time": Last Daughters and the New "New South"

Spillers, H. J. — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 08:52:23 PST

This essay looks at aspects of new southern culture against the backdrop of the 2007 Supreme Court ruling on school desegregation and its impact on our understanding of the sixties. Incorporating two book reviews, the essay argues that the "long" perspective on the period of radical change would suggest that the sixties were not only not a "failure" but in certain respects loom ahead of us.

The End of the Sixties

Connery, C. — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 08:52:23 PST

The essay considers the sixties as a global irruption of political and cultural revolution, of world-making of various kinds: decolonization, new subjectivities, new forms of daily life and politics, and new scenes of the political. It holds the sixties to be a global phenomenon, whereby events as disparate as the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the rise of the U.S. counterculture were linked through their contemporaneity, through the shared global situation to which all uprisings were responses, and through the extraparty character of radical politics in the realm of the every day. The essay's central focus is on the Sino-Soviet split, on how one of the most radical elements of sixties' ideology became the impetus for rapprochement with the U.S. and attendant deradicalization. In considering the sixties' end, the essay rejects a discourse of failure or unintended consequences, and seeks to consider, through an examination of ways in which the energies of the period were transformed, a new way of approaching the temporal politics of the period.

Books Received

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 08:52:23 PST

Contributors

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 08:52:23 PST

The Measure of the Contingent: Walter Benjamin's Dialectical Image

Friedlander, E. — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 11:56:46 PDT

The present essay sketches in broad outlines the philosophical armature of Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project by analyzing the central theoretical notion in that incomplete manuscript of his: the dialectical image. So as to bring out the uniqueness of Benjamin's use of image, I consider his account of its relation to language. Rather than setting an opposition between language and image, I argue that language is the medium in which the dialectical image can emerge at all. I further think of the emerging image as characterizing the mode of presentation of the material of the investigation as a whole, or in other words, the dialectical image is what constitutes the presentation of what Kant calls an idea with the material of experience. The image so revealed is not a representation of reality, but rather Benjamin thinks of it, after Goethe, as an archetype, a standard for judging the significance of historical reality. The possibility of recognizing the image of the past further depends on being attuned to a peculiar temporality, a movement within the medium of memory in which the meaning of the past is realized in the present. Finally, as I argue, the past emerges in authentic historical remembrance initially in a distorted form which Benjamin compares to the form of meaning in dream experience. The recognition of the image must then be understood as the traversal of that space of semblance which brings out its truth, as the awakening from the dream.

Homo profanus: Giorgio Agamben's Profane Philosophy

de la Durantaye, L. — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 11:56:46 PDT

Giorgio Agamben's work first achieved international recognition—and notoriety—through his study of the sacred in Homo Sacer. This recognition and notoriety grew with the subsequent installments in this still ongoing series, Remnants of Auschwitz (Homo Sacer III), State of Exception (Homo Sacer II.1), and The Kingdom and the Glory (Homo Sacer II.2). Agamben's recent work, Profanations, is, however, not a part of that series. As its title indicates, it turns from the sacred to the profane, and in so doing reveals the most profound intentions of Agamben's philosophy. Agamben's naming the profane rather than the sacred in the title of this work does not, however, represent a turn to a new topic. Beginning with his first books in the 1970s, he has shown himself deeply interested in the idea of the profane, in significant part through terms and concepts employed by Walter Benjamin such as "profane illumination" and "the order of the profane." In his Homo Sacer project, this idea of the profane has followed Agamben's studies of the sacred like a shadow. With this new work, however, it has moved to the center of his reflections and in doing offers his reader a glimpse of hitherto unseen elements in his personal trajectory, his philosophical vocation, and his political project. The works in the Homo Sacer series have compellingly and persuasively argued that the creating of sacred and sovereign states of exception has often been responsible for the dire states of political affairs we find ourselves in. Profanations seeks to offer a solution.

Messages in a Bottle: An Interview with Filmmaker Masao Adachi

Harootunian, H., Kohso, S. — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 11:56:46 PDT

In the summer of 2006, Sabu Kohso, an independent writer, translator, and activist, and Harry Harootunian, a historian at New York University, interviewed the prominent filmmaker and political activist Masao Adachi. The occasion for the interview was the completion of his first film in Japan after years of imprisonment in Lebanon and Japan. Adachi's career and activities spanned the crucial decades of the 1950s and 1960s, perhaps the most intense period of radical protest in Japan's postwar period. His experimental work constituted a significant intervention in these years of revolutionary promise and failure. After the failed revolution in Japan, he spent almost a quarter of a century in exile in Lebanon and Palestine, often working for Palestinian organizations.

Gramsci, Passive Revolution, and Media

Landy, M. — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 11:56:46 PDT

The last decades of the twentieth century witnessed a restructuring of capital and redistribution of wealth to the top of an economic pyramid on an international scale. This neoliberal "reform" involves the gradual dismantling of the welfare state, relegation of the employed and unemployable to the bottom of the social and economic pyramid, and perpetual warfare on national and global fronts. Antonio Gramsci's analysis of "passive revolution" seems cogent for this moment, particularly for the ways media and other cultural forms play a significant role in mobilizing or disorganizing consent. The Prison Notebooks, published in 1948, influenced the thinking of Italian and postwar European intellectuals and filmmakers on the left, and they continue to be a reservoir for an examination of the character and relevance of passive revolution, forms of coercion and consent, relations between the State and civil society, and the position of intellectuals in the creation of hegemony. Visconti's films on the Risorgimento, The Leopard and Senso; Pasolini's films and writings on the cultural and political transformations wrought by the "Economic Miracle"; the critical work that emerged from Stuart Hall, among others, at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Study in the UK; and research generated by the Indian Subaltern Studies group are testimonials to Gramsci's ongoing legacy. These texts followed Gramsci in performing a multifaceted examination of language, political, and social institutions; however, despite prolific research on media, there is scant concerted attention to their contributions in the passive revolution begun in the 1970s.

Dialogue on Post-capitalism

Huibin, L., Dirlik, A. — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 11:56:46 PDT

The influential marketing analyst Peter Drucker's idea of post-capitalism has attracted considerable attention in recent years in the People's Republic of China. One of its proponents is Professor Li Huibin of the Contemporary Marxism Institute of the Central Compilation and Translation Bureau of the Communist Party of China, who has written extensively on questions of economics and philosophy. The dialogue was initiated at the invitation of Professor Li when Professor Arif Dirlik of the Chinese University of Hong Kong was a visiting scholar with the Contemporary Marxism Institute during the summer of 2006. The dialogue takes up questions of the relationship between Drucker's theory and Marxist theories of capitalism, the intellectual usefulness of "post-capitalism" in understanding contemporary developments in capitalism, and its possible relevance to the developmental strategy of "socialism with Chinese characteristics."

The Infinite Rehearsals of the Critique of Religion: Theological Thinking After Humanism

Walker, C. D. B. — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 11:56:46 PDT

What are the conditions of possibility for a critique of religion in a moment when the languages of religion and politics saturate and (over)determine critical discourse? How does one critically interrogate the contemporary manifestation of the phenomenon of religion when the imbrications of religion, power, and authority are such that religion is always already reduced to a function of either power or authority? How are we to formulate the question of a critique of religion when the very languages, concepts, and theories of critique are in question? In wrestling with these questions, this essay develops the notion of theological thinking as a form of critique and a critical theoretical practice for a moment bisected by the (re)turn to theology and the seeming permanence of the theologico-political. Following the examples of James Baldwin and W. E. B. Du Bois, theological thinking outlines a practice of criticism that responds to our moment not by rejecting or reducing the presence of the theological but rather by thinking through the very heart of it in order to expose the totalizing logics within the theologico-political, all the while locating and mobilizing those discarded critical practices that illuminate new directions for constructing alternative futures.

Reading for the Stimmung? About the Ontology of Literature Today

Gumbrecht, H. U. — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 11:56:46 PDT

For some years now, inside observers have felt that literary studies has arrived at a moment of stagnation. Not only has a fifty-year-long sequence of changing "paradigms" come to a standstill since the final years of the twentieth century; not only are we longing for new "master thinkers" who do not appear; but, epistemologically, we seem to be stuck in the extreme (and unfruitful) tension between seeing literary texts as "allegories" of the impossibility of language to refer to any outside referent (following the dogma of "deconstruction" and the linguistic turn) and a somehow naïve optimism regarding the capacity of literary texts to refer to an outside world as it is implicitly carried and sometimes professed by "cultural studies." In this situation, the concept of Stimmung (most frequently illustrated by metaphors of being wrapped into, say, weather, or the sound of music) offers an alternative view of the ontology of literature, without falling back into the long-frustrated attempts to "define literature." Many (if not all) of the texts that we call "literary" provide us with exactly this impression of "being wrapped" into the material world—a material world in which texts can evoke a material impression (the "lightest" possible material impression, however) through effects of prosody. "Reading for the `Stimmung'" can connect us with unusual immediacy to the Stimmung of a past historical period and a different cultural environment. "Reading for the `Stimmung'" may open new perspectives for the historical analysis and aesthetic appreciation of literary texts, and, at the same time, bring us back to a number of scholarly concerns that we have abandoned since the late 1970s.

Ang Lee's Lust, Caution and Its Reception

Lee, L. O.-f. — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 11:56:46 PDT

This essay aims to gauge the different receptions of Ang Lee's recent film Lust, Caution between American and Chinese publics and across a cultural landscape of the pan-Chinese regions of Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. It also brings a contextual and historical dimension to bear on Ang Lee's intentions in making this film as well as on the differences of style and approach between Ang Lee and Eileen Chang, on whose original story the film is based. The essay pays particular attention to Ang Lee's diasporic background as a Chinese filmmaker from Taiwan with a cultural sensibility that makes his films not imitations of Hollywood products but manifestations of a particular sense of "repression" that stems from this background. Such symptoms of repression must be understood in terms of the historical context in which the story and film are based—Japanese Shanghai under the repressive collaborationist regime of Wang Jingwei (1939–1945). The film's plot takes off directly from this context, which in turn informs Ang Lee's adaptation. The competing "structures of domination" come from two rivaling regimes of the Guomindang (Nationalist Party) as well as the Japanese military, which imprisons both the young heroine, a novice spy, and the villain, a security police chief of the "puppet" regime. Their sentimental and romantic entanglement, not pronounced in the original Eileen Chang story, bears a distinct trait of Ang Lee's directorial style as an artistic articulation of this sense of repression.

Hindutva and Informatic Modernization

Basu, A. — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 11:56:46 PDT

This essay is a critical evaluation of contemporary urban Hindutva in the light of Carl Schmitt's famous assertion that all liberal political concepts are transposed theological ones. Without agreeing with Schmitt's hard-right nationalism, one can see that from the discursive beginnings of Hindu nationalism in the latter half of the nineteenth century there has been an effort to "monothematize" a pan-Indian Hindu identity. That is, in the absence of an axiomatic church of "Hinduism," there was a literary-modern effort to telescope myriad devotional traditions, eclectic beliefs, practices, and customs into a single edifice of Hinduness. This effort, however, failed to overcome the historical differences of caste, gender, class, and region and invent a singular, constitutive discourse of Hindu being. The essay speculates that perhaps, in recent times, this project toward a Hindu normative literary modernity has been displaced by an "informatic modernization." A new urban Hinduness asserts itself more by its affects and spectacles than through the act of narration. This "informatic" public culture can orchestrate signs, emblems, mantras, and doctrines of disparate affiliations without completing a "story" as such. That is, it can do so without trying to resolve historical disputes that have dogged the career of Indian modernity (e.g., how exactly can caste be squared with scientific and democratic tempers?). The image of a "shining" Hindu normative metropolitanism is consolidated by groundless and nonobligatory mergers between neoliberal postulates and the pieties of a so-called tradition. The essay illustrates this phenomenon through some examples from popular Hindi cinema.

Of Accumulation: The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley

Lerner, B. — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 11:56:46 PDT

This essay attempts to take the measure of Robert Creeley's some sixty-year commitment to poetry as a medium for tracking the processes of thinking and speaking, not for the production of finished thoughts. By reading Creeley against Wallace Stevens, I hope to both identify the significant formal signatures of Creeley's poetry and to document how a projectivist poetics attempted to distinguish itself from an influential modernist predecessor, a poetic reorientation inseparable from the history of boundary 2.

Contributors

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 11:56:46 PDT