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  • Ania Aizman— Playing the Policeman: Russian Art Before the War

    Ania Aizman— Playing the Policeman: Russian Art Before the War

    by Ania Aizman

    Russian anti-government protest has never been weaker. Decades of repressive policing have had the desired effect, successfully reducing the range of actions that protesters are willing to undertake. A new form of protest against Russia’s war on Ukraine, for example, consists of a lone picketer holding up a blank sheet of paper on a public street. The war has dramatically limited artistic range, and shifted the terms of public discourse away from visionary proposals such as the elimination of police. Before the war, though, artists were sounding the alarm about Putin’s expansion of policing, and resisting it through playful appropriation, by “playing the policeman,” repurposing police uniforms and weapons. This essay explores the potentialities and limitations of this artistic device.

    In 2018, the estimated one billion people who tuned into the World Cup final match—the largest live audience of any single event on earth—became unsuspecting witnesses to what may well be the most-viewed direct action in history. Four members of the group Pussy Riot, disguised as police officers, snuck onto the pitch. Evading referees and security forces, they turned the tense global event, highly choreographed by the Russian state, into a live-action farce. Eventually the members of Pussy Riot were caught and dragged off the field, and into prison. But not before the striking images of cops chasing cops were broadcast by media around the world. Meanwhile, Pussy Riot’s social media accounts released a list of demands: the liberation of all Russian political prisoners, an end to false court cases against regime critics, and, striking an absurdist note, the transformation “of the earthly policeman into the heavenly policeman” (Pussy Riot).

    This was an erudite allusion to the late Soviet conceptualist writer and artist Dmitry Prigov––in fact the entire action was called The Policeman Enters the Game. Up until the start of Russia’s war on Ukraine, in the 2010s, artistic representations of the police frequently cited late Soviet art in order to reflect on the ways in which Putin redeployed the police tactics of the Brezhnev era. The Brezhnev regime had indeed expanded the existing surveillance of students and members of the intelligentsia, broadly encouraging self-censorship and developing a strategy of imprisoning potential leaders before they criticized the regime in public or organized a demonstration. Thus “eliminating public acts of challenge without the use of severe force against crowds,” the Brezhnev regime sought to avoid Stalin and Khrushchev’s reputations for mass repressions (Beissinger 32). Prigov’s late 1970s poems about the “Militsaner” (Police-a-man) portrayed the Militsaner as a figure of “quasi-mythological” and “heavenly” authority, an abstract “principle of governmentality” and, simultaneously, of “earthly” mediocre, bureaucratic tastes and a penchant for casual brutality (Kukulin). Sporting a militiaman cap and reciting his poems in the tone of a pedantic Russian schoolteacher, Prigov satirized the hero of Soviet children’s books, Uncle Styopa the Policeman, popularized during the Brezhnev era (Callen).  Like Uncle Styopa the Policeman, the Militsaner of Prigov’s poems is a giant who sees into the horizon––and, simultaneously, blocks it from view, denying the existence of anything beyond his authority.

    Casting themselves as inheritors of Prigov, Pussy Riot also reinterpreted him: in their view, the “heavenly policeman” was useful as a concept or symbol, but his manifestation in reality, with its censorship and brutality, ought to be abolished. Unlike Prigov, they made explicit demands for the end of policing. Prigov, by contrast, hardly conducted direct political protest. On the contrary, because his performances were confined to the private apartment and the informal gallery space, they were basically compatible with Brezhnevite policies of concealing government criticism. Direct political critique was far from his goal: he declared that he wanted to “disappear” inside of authoritarian discourses rather than “rationalize” them or “extract anything real” (Shapoval 32). The scholar of Soviet art Gerald Janecek concluded that Prigov felt “genuine admiration for his policemen” and “loving nostalgia…for the culture of [his] ‘happy childhood.’” Prigov’s Soviet audiences, members of private countercultural circles, experienced the mere pleasure of laughing at Soviet bureaucratic language as politically provocative. But Prigov admitted that policemen, too, have enjoyed his work (Lipovetsky 253). By contrast, critique was explicit in Pussy Riot’s reinterpretation of the Militsaner.

    Other contemporary Russian artists, too, adapted the tools of their Brezhnev-era predecessors to expose the hypocrisy of policing while simultaneously rejecting their predecessors’ ambivalent irony and political neutrality. For example, the late 2010s performance art group Party of the Dead borrowed the black-and-white, zombie aesthetic of 1980s necrorealist cinema but dispensed with the necrorealists’ reenactments of assaults and crowd fights. The 80s necrorealists had been inspired by rumors that Brezhnev and other geriatric political elites were dead or near death and that their public appearances were elaborate faked. Dressed in zombie makeup and bloody bandages, the necrorealists engaged in various forms of senseless violence, including beating an actor dressed in a police uniform, and recorded these displays in 8mm and 16mm short, silent, black-and-white films. In this way, they “did not attempt to contest the system’s representations of reality” but rather to insist on a “zone of indistinction” between conformity and resistance (Alsavi 78). The 2010s Party of the Dead, by contrast, dispensed with political indistinction. To announce their opposition to the regime, they relied text, displaying copious banners and posters, and on context, demonstrating during patriotic holidays or in the aftermath of police suppression of demonstrations. At the same time, they eschewed militancy, and, like Pussy Riot in their absurdist 2018 action, opted for multivalent expression. Party of the Dead slogans such as “The dead are for peace,” “There are more of us, dead ones,” and “The dead don’t fight” can be read variously as foreboding, mournful, or ironic (see examples in Evstropov). In all these readings, though, the Party’s artists appear to identify with the victims of state violence in a relation of solidarity, acknowledging shared vulnerability––and discursive potential. Likewise, the graffiti artist Philippenzo’s mural Kisses explored “art therapy for working through fear,” portraying a SWAT officer’s ID badge that says “KISSES” against a camouflage pattern that reveals itself as a lipstick kiss print. The work cited a famous Brezhnev-themed mural: Dmitry Vrubel’s 1990 close-up of a kiss that Brezhnev shared with GDR leader Erich Honecker in 1979. Vrubel’s title God Help Me Survive this Mortal Love suggested that the viewers ought to feel disgust at the larger-than-life image of two old men kissing on the lips. Philippenzo, by contrast, dispensed with Vrubel’s homophobic and ageist gaze, proposing abstraction.

    These artistic references to Brezhnev himself and the Brezhnev era responded to profound similarities in policing styles. Before the war on Ukraine, the Putin administration’s approach to policing Russian citizens was informed by Brezhnev-era preemptive censorship, in which authorities repressed potential dissent in advance, controlling domestic and international perception, partly through extensive spying. Like Brezhnev, Putin deployed censorship out of public view––in small ways (for example by denying event permits to opposition groups) as well as large ones (framing activists with drug charges, staging the seemingly random assaults or murders of independent journalists). Putin’s own professional trajectory, begun at the height of the Brezhnev “Stagnation” era, is illuminating here. A former KGB/FSB agent, he brought covert intelligence tactics to the presidency. In one memorable comment in 1999, just as he had risen to immense power from a relatively obscure position, he joked that his ascent was a secret power grab: “I would like to report that the group of FSB officers dispatched to work secretly in the federal government has been successful in its first set of assignments” (Wood).

    Preemptive censorship worked relatively well during the economic growth of the 2000s but the mass protests of 2012 (themselves partly a response to a stagnating economy) shifted the regime’s approach. On one hand, it continued to conduct its business of policing outside of mainstream attention, while encouraging political apathy in the Russian public (Jones). On the other hand, it increasingly responded to oppositional demonstrations with ruthless displays of violence. In August 2019, police officers beat and mass-arrested students and minors, producing hundreds of images of police brutality. Responding to these events, the artist Artem Loskutov bought a police baton from a retired officer of the Russian National Guard, applied the colors of the Russian flag to it like toothpaste to a toothbrush, and smacked a blank canvass. He announced the invention of a new style of painting called dubinopis’ (a term that recalls the Russian word for icon-painting, ikonopis’ and literally means “police baton-writing”) and proceeded to sell countless canvasses on social media as a fundraiser for the protesters. Loskutov’s dubinopis’ implied a comparison between the protest demonstration and the blank canvas, warning the police that they, too, create interpretable images.

    Loskutov’s dubinopis’ joined a genealogy of Russian artists using images of policing to enter a critical dialogue with their predecessors in anti-police art. These artists eschewed authoritarian self-representation. While “playing the policeman,” they used various forms of critical framing without reenacting violence, as in the 2011 action by Voina, in which performers forcibly kissed policewomen. They also rejected the practice of inviting violence, as in Oleg Kulik’s dog performances in the mid-1990s. Lastly, these artists criticized their artistic predecessors, the actionists and the conceptualists of the late- and post-Soviet era. They charged that the actionists conceal their authoritarianism and self-aggrandizement as art, presenting themselves as sages, martyrs, or outcasts, and leading to belated painful revelations of, for instance, reactionary attitudes––as in the support voiced by members of Voina for the annexation of Crimea or domestic violence (as in the case of Petr Pavlensky) (Gerasimenko). And they charged that the playfulness and political ambivalence of late Soviet nonconformist artists like Prigov and the necrorealists left them open for cooptation. Instead, they announced their political position and distributed images of their actions on social media to broadcast their political stance. In this way, they sought to enact a more transparent, public, and collective process of de-policing.

    Russia’s invasion of Ukraine spurred a mass exodus of the Russian creative class, prominently represented among the nearly four million Russians who have left the country during the war. As police target even the blandest forms of political expression, such as Ukraine-themed social media posts or blue and yellow clothing, the artistic language for de-policing employed before the invasion is rendered meaningless, or transformed beyond recognition. Thus, before the war, the painter Ekaterina Muromtseva’s 2017 cycle of canvasses called More (Of/Than) Us, spoke of the shared bodily experience of Russian protesters. Stood together, as if ordered by the police to raise their arms before a pat-down (or, possibly, execution), Muromtseva’s protesters are painted with a green camouflage pattern that bleeds across their bodies, suggesting that they share wounds, or organs. In their prewar context, these images implied the solidarity and vulnerability of demonstrators––their moral high ground, if not triumph over, police violence. Viewed during the war, however, the green camo print across the bodies of the protestors acquire a different meaning, suggesting the responsibility shared by agents of state violence with those who, in resisting it, capitulate before they have won. As Russian artists grapple with the extent of their own complicity in the war––or, as the Ukrainian artist Alevtina Kakhidze put it in her recent comic, “Russian culture is looking for an alibi that it is not a killer”––the strategy of playing the policeman looks decidedly short of radical protest. A future Russian art, if it is to be oppositional, will have to speak about the crimes committed by perpetrators of war and the trauma of their victims without playing at either.

    Ania Aizman is writing a book called Anarchist Currents in Russian Culture from Tolstoy to Pussy Riot. Her writing, translations, and book reviews have appeared with Columbia University Press and in Slavic and East European Journal, Slavic Review, The LA Review of Books, and The New Yorker. She is Assistant Professor of Slavic at the University of Chicago.

    Works Cited

    Asavi, Marina-Alina. 2017. “Art and ‘Madness’: Weapons of the Marginal during Socialism in Eastern Europe.” In Dropping Out of Socialism edited by Juliane Fürst and Josie McLellan. Lanham: Lexington Books.

    Beissinger, Mark. 2002. Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press.

    Callen, Patrick. 2015. “Street Art Contra Police Abuse.” Area Studies in the Global Age, edited by Edith Clowes and Shelley Jarett Bromberg. Dekalb: NIU Press.

    Evstropov, Maksim. 2020 “Partiia mertvykh: ot nekrorealizma k nekroaktivizmu.” Moscow Art Magazine no. 113. http://moscowartmagazine.com/issue/101/article/2230.

    Gerasimenko, Olesya. 2018. “A War on Many Fronts.” The Calvert Journal, 12 July. https://www.calvertjournal.com/features/show/10405/a-war-on-many-fronts-the-story-of-voina

    Janecek, Gerald. 2000. “The New Russian Avant-Gardes: Postmodern Poetry and Multimedia in the Late Soviet and Early Post-Soviet Periods.” https://umanitoba.ca/libraries/units/archives/media/Lecture_VII___Janecek.pdf (accessed May 5, 2022).

    Jones, Sarah and Greg Yudin. 2022. “Russia is Completely Depoliticized.” New York Magazine, April 7. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/04/sociologist-greg-yudin-how-russia-learned-to-deny-reality.html.

    Kakhidze, Alevtina. 2022. “Russian culture is looking for an alibi that it is not a killer.” https://www.instagram.com/p/Ca_dOR9qKji/ (accessed May 5, 2022).

    Kukulin, Il’ia and Mark Lipovetskii. 2022. Partizanskii Logos: Proekt Dmitriia Aleksandrovicha Prigova. Moscow: NLO.

    Lipovetsky, Mark. 2017. “Soviet ‘Political Unconscious’ in Dmitry A. Prigov’s Poetry of the 1970s-1980s.” Russian Literature no. 87-89: 225–260.

    Loskutov, Artem. 2019. “Dubinopis’ N1 (2019)”. https://www.instagram.com/p/B1mFSCwAl2z/ (accessed May 5, 2022).

    Pussy Riot. 2018. “Pussy Riot at the FIFA-2018 World Cup final match —Policeman enters the Game.” Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zQGV7XBkLE (accessed May 5, 2022).

    Shapoval, Sergei and D. A. Prigov. 2014. D.A. Prigov: dvadtsat’ odin razgovor i odno druzheskoe poslanie. Moscow: NLO.

    Wood, Tony. 2019 Russia Without Putin: Money, Power, and the Myths of the New Cold War. New York: Verso.

     

     

  • Eliot Borenstein — Police/State: All Bastards Are Cops

    Eliot Borenstein — Police/State: All Bastards Are Cops

    by Eliot Borenstein

    While I have never been one for fieldwork, it does occur to me that I have had several encounters with the post-Soviet police; fortunately, they were all in the 1990s, when the stakes for such incidents were relatively low.  Now I see that, when I was sitting in a Moscow militia van in 1999 after failing to produce documents 100 feet from my rented apartment, I should have anticipated that 21 years later, my need for data could have been satisfied if I had just asked the right questions.

    Instead, I just passed the time giving unsatisfactory answers to inquiries about my background until the cop finally asked straight out if I was Jewish.  This had nothing to do with any legal jeopardy I might have been in, and admitting to being Jewish would not have gotten me into any trouble. Quite the contrary: I was usually stopped by police in their ongoing attempts to round up suspicious “people of Caucasian nationality” (“Do you ever stop blonds?” I asked once, but only after brandishing my boss-level immunity in the form of the magic American passport that I had neglected to carry the day of the police van incident).  The Jewish Question (to coin a phrase) was more a matter of satisfying a mutual, if inconsequential need: his to peg my ethnicity, and mine to make him say it. After most likely missing several hints about possible bribes, I was let go, with a stern warning to carry my passport with me at all times.

    All of which is to say that, in interacting with the post-Soviet militia, I never was quite sure what sort of institution I was dealing with. Were they supposed to be stopping crime, or were they the Russian equivalent of ICE, keeping the city safe from the threat of undocumented dark hair?  Besides doing a poor job of ethnic profiling (they really could have learned a lot from their much more efficiently racist counterparts in the U.S.), and despite doing an even worse job at catching criminals (if the news was any indication), what were they really for?

    But the police are only one half of the theme of this collection of essays; the other is prisons.  Policing and prisons seem like an obvious pairing, like love and marriage (if only from a post-divorce point of view).  But in terms of their symbolic resonance for the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia, they are not equal partners.  As portrayed by critics and dissidents, the Soviet prison camp system was the country’s master metaphor:  the USSR was one vast carceral “zone,” but with less freedom of speech.  It worked well with the American Cold War metaphor of the Soviet Union as a penitentiary for “captive nations.” I bring these ideas up not to endorse them; the portion of the non-incarcerated Soviet population that saw themselves as “prisoners” was probably miniscule.  The power of these metaphors did not reside in their empirical accuracy, but in their rhetorical force.  From an oppositional point of view, they made intuitive sense.

    But that metaphorical power rested on the dissident’s familiar distinction between the “political” criminal and the “real” criminal.  Well before the Soviet Union ended, a romantic subculture surrounding the thieves’ prison life made its way outside the “zone,” particularly in the form of the blatnaya pesnia, a musical genre glorifying th life of the outlaw.  By the 1990s, prison became the source of important segments of popular culture: providing slang, serving as the setting for various flavors of criminal melodrama, and inspiring fashions and behaviors among the gopniki in a rough analog to the prison/hip-hop connection.

    It was only in the shift from medium- to high-Putinism that prison started once again to make inroads into the public political consciousness, thanks to high-profile cases (Khodorkovsky, Magnitsky, Pussy Riot). The post-Pussy Riot “Media Zona” project is important not just for the obvious reason (activism on behalf of the incarcerated), but also for the shear linguistic novelty of putting those two words (“Media” and “Zone”) together. As for their other activist endeavor, “Zona prava” (Zone of Law), the irony speaks for itself.

    The path of the “police” from the late-Soviet to the post-Soviet is more complicated.  I would like to put forward the proposition that the police as police occupied only a small corner of the country’s psychic real estate; the USSR was relatively short on police, but long on policing.

    Technically, there were no police, but rather the militia. The term initially signaled a break with the Tsarist-era police, and carried a whiff of spontaneous self-organization (even if that whiff was deceptive). Favoring a military-style hierarchy to a greater extent than its Western counterparts, the militia exemplified the Soviet tendency to turn the military into the template for an unofficial Table of Ranks: you get to be a general, and you get to be a general–everyone gets to be a general!

    In the (technical) absence of police, the USSR had hypertrophied police functions, shared not only by those very same military and militarized bodies (including, but not limited to, the KGB), but also Party structures, enterprises, and medical authorities.  The fight against crime (as we would understand the word) was never the cornerstone. If statistics have even minimal validity, crime was not a significant, widespread problem, or at least not framed as such. Instead, these institutions policed the borders of the behaviorally and ideologically permissible.  Crossing certain lines led to serious policing of the violators, but by bodies that were not, technically, police. It was not that all cops were bastards, but that all bastards were, in some way or another, cops.

    Some, but not all of this changes after 1991.  As crime becomes central to the news, it also colonizes popular entertainment: a perceived boom in robbers yields a similar growth in cops. The popularity of crime genres was already apparent in Soviet times, but kept under wraps by limited publication and scant imports of foreign crime film and fiction, and the ideological strictures that limited the ability to represent crime as a home-made phenomenon.  Actual cops (that is, militiamen) become heroes and anti-heroes, from the early days of the television series  Menty (Ulitsy razbitykh fonarei) (Cops/Broken Streetlights) (1998-2019) down to the more recent series  Mazhor (inexplicably plucked out of the Russian linguistic ghetto by Netflix and renamed Silver Spoon) (2014-).

    At the same time, the militia (now police) are more recognizable as a problem. It is the various divisions of the police and similar state organizations who are responsible for arresting and beating protesters, for example. The police are now more appropriate as a symbol of state repression, but they still do not have a monopoly on policing.  Those same repressive functions exercised by schools, enterprises, and medical establishments still have a policing role. In the case of the first two, it is they who are still responsible for mobilizing their constituencies to vote “correctly,” for example, while medical experts continue to be called upon to declare (or try to declare) inconvenient people “unfit.”  If this all sounds Foucauldian, I apologize, because I intend for it to be more along the lines of “Foucault-adjacent.” These institutions do not constitute power/knowledge, but rather enforce it. In other words, they police.

    As for the police/militia themselves, post-Soviet conditions require a level of visibility from them that was not as necessary under Late Socialism.  The police, and particularly OMON (the Russian equivalent of SWAT) are deployed not just operationally, but operatically, that is, performatively. With a dynamic weirdly inverted later by Pussy Riot, their masked anonymity and displays of overwhelming superior force help constitute the Putinist paradigm of strength and order. And technically, the Russian police, even when local, are the ground-level instantiation of a federal authority (serving within the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD)). In the state imaginary, federal authority replicates itself anywhere and everywhere, a structure that is as much fractal as it is hierarchical.

    The police function as both a symbol of state biopower and its most immediate physical manifestation.  Their bodies are sacred and untouchable in a way that those of ordinary citizens are not; think of the Bolotnaya Square Trial, where no officer got in trouble for beating protesters, but protesters were prosecuted for the equivalent of hurting the cops’ fists with their faces.[i] In such an unequal contest between differently valued and empowered bodies, what kind of resistance is available?

    To address this question, I want to end my talk by bringing in Actionism, and in particular, the collective known as Voina.[ii] The immediate audience for most of Voina’s actions in the Medvedev years (the feast in the subway car, the cats thrown at McDonald’s cashiers, and so on) are the by-standers: this is art that leverages physical presence and emphasizes the use of bodies in space (as they did during the Biological Museum orgy).[iii] The second, much larger audience, is on the Internet—most of what they did would have been local and ephemeral without video uploads.  But there is a third audience whose role is undeniable, even if that audience is not always physically present:  law enforcement.

    Law enforcement, or, put more simply, the police, are always a potential restraint on their activities. In fact, I would argue that the police play the same role of productive restriction as meter and rhyme do for traditional poetry: nearly all of Voina’s performances took place within short time frames limited by the inevitable arrival of the police.  Either the police’s arrival was part of the act, or a successful action relied on the complementary distribution of Actionist bodies and police bodies:  it all worked out as long as they weren’t in the same place at the same time.

    Voina’s last action, which now looks like a transitional, pupal stage between the larva of Voina and the butterfly of Pussy Riot, exposes the dangers in conflating the police as symbol and the police as body.  “Commemorating” the new law transforming the militia into the police, “Kiss the Pig,” consisted of female members of Voina (including Nadia Tolokonnikova and Katia Samutsevich, two future Pussy Riot trial defendants) surprising female cops and kissing them on the lips without permission.  Though Tolokonnikova says she wanted men involved, this was really the only arrangement unlikely to end in serious physical violence:  women kissing male cops could not be sure of getting away safely, men kissing female cops would be arrested for assault, and men kissing male cops would be lucky to escape with their lives. Faced with the obvious (and in my opinion, entirely valid) criticism that what she and her colleagues were doing was a kind of sexual assault, Tolokonnikova responded that when a person puts on a cop’s uniform, they stop being a person and become only a cop.

    In other words, she sees the symbolic cop as overriding the physical cop. Cops, like kings, have two bodies, but for the purposes of the action, only one of them really matters: the physical body is exploited as a weakness in the symbolic cop body.  In a way, this is a brilliant reductio ad absurdum of the symbolic prominence that the police have attained under High Putinism.  But it also means assenting to that very logic and deploying personal biological power in the cause of the negation of state biopower. This is a conundrum that cannot be solved, even by performance art.  It is a losing proposition, transforming the political protester into something akin to an actual criminal, thereby validating the state’s framework.

    When I was working on my book Pussy Riot: Speaking Punk to Power (2020), this was the only moment when I was truly disappointed in Tolokonnikova. For the most part, Actionists and the 2012 protesters had avoided the trap of binary, Manichaean thinking that caught so many Soviet-era dissidents (who, in their crusade for freedom, developed an ideologically rigid maximalism and became the mirror image of the regime they despised). The demonstrators and Actionists sidestepped this trap through absurdity, but also came close to the bodily self-sacrifice of the non-violence of Gandhi and King.

    The final irony is that the Actionist who seemed to literally embody this ethos was Pavel Pavlensky, notorious, for among other things, nailing his own scrotum to the cobblestones of Red Square. But now his former partner Oksana Shalygina has written a book detailing the sadistic abuse she suffered at his hands. Shalgyina ends her interview with Wonderzine with a statement that says it all:

    He was sincere in his struggle, but he was the same [repressive] authority as the one he fought against.

    Power, authority, the law –they are like quicksand: the more you fight, the more you are sucked in. Or, in the words of Sonny Curtis and the Crickets: I fought the law and the law won.

    Eliot Borenstein is Professor of Russian & Slavic Studies at New York University. His most recent books include Plots against Russia: Conspiracy and Fantasy after Socialism (winner of the 2020 Wayne S. Vucinich brook prize and the 2020 AATSEEL book prize), and Meanwhile, in Russia…: Russian Internet Memes and Viral Video  (2022).

    Works Cited

    Borenstein, Eliot. 2020. Pussy Riot: Speaking Punk to Power. London: Bloomsbury.

    Taratura, Iuliia. 2020 “’Eto byli ne bytovye izbieniia, a sadizm’: Oksana Shalygina o zhizni s Petrom Pavlenskim.” Wonderzine, November 2. https://www.wonderzine.com/wonderzine/life/life-interview/253377-intervyu-oksana

    References

    [i] The case refers to a protest that took place in Moscow on May 6, 2012. More than thirty protesters were charged with various offense, twelve of whom received prison sentences from two to four and a half years.

    [ii] Founded in 2007, Voina was a political performance art group with branches in both Moscow and St. Petersburg.

    [iii] On February 29, 2008, right before Dmitry Medvedev was elected president, 10 members of Voina protested by having sex in the Moscow Timiryazev Museum of Biology.

  • LI Zhimin and Daniel Braun — The Linking Matters: An International Poetics of Sense-Making and Innovation

    LI Zhimin and Daniel Braun — The Linking Matters: An International Poetics of Sense-Making and Innovation

    by LI Zhimin and Daniel Braun

    This article was peer-reviewed by the boundary 2 Editorial Collective.

    A subtle chain of countless rings

    The next unto the farthest brings;

    The eye reads omens where it goes,

    And speaks all languages the rose;

    And, striving to be man, the worm

    Mounts through all the spires of form.

    ——Ralph Waldo Emerson

    Charles Bernstein has been, of all contemporary American poets, the one who has done the most to bring back those important words and phrases that tend to be “excluded” from circulation.

                                          ——Marjorie Perloff

    When a mother gives an egg to her child and says “egg” at the same time, she is helping her child establish “a link” between language and the world. But what is the nature of this link? As the great Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure explained, langue (by which he meant particular languages, like French, or English, or Mandarin Chinese) is a system of signs which parcels out the world of sense into discretely sayable things. The signs that comprise this system are complex: they are composed of a signifier – the acoustical image, as he called it, that is formed from a combination of a given language’s phonemes – and a signified – the conceptual image or item recalled and indivisibly linked with that string of phonemes. The linguistic sign is not the thing in the world which it names.[1] In the scene described, the mother teaches the child the link between all three elements in a single stroke, bringing the child irrevocably into the world of language – both the particular language, through which this introduction is made, and language in general, what Saussure called langage. Eventually, the child will learn to draw a self-conscious distinction between language and the world which it denominates, between what is sometimes called the linguistic functions of use and mention, as when he refers to ‘egg’: not the reproductive ovum and its nutriment, but the three-letter word spelled /e/g/g/. The creation of these links is the foundation for all human thinking, upon and out of which all of our most complicated thoughts are built. It is from the perspective of these links that we can examine some of the most pressing questions concerning what I will call international poetics, the communication of innovations and norms within and between the poetry of particular languages and cultures, and beyond.[2]

    The best recorded story to demonstrate how the first links between a signified, a signifier, and the real world are created is that of Helen Keller. As she recalled: “As the cool stream gushed over one hand, she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten—a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that ‘w-a-t-e-r’ meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free!”[3 In this passage, Keller vividly describes the moment when “the link” between the word “water”, and the wonderful cool flowing water of the world that was impressed upon on her mind. Though the signifier of the linguistic sign is objective, common to all speakers of a language, the cognitive image to which it is linked, and the emotional associations it bears, are personal, subjective and changeable. The significance of this division between the objective elements of language, and the subjective half to which they are bound and supported, is significant to the study of poetics.

    T.S. Eliot’s theory of an “objective correlative” is a case in point. He states: “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.”[4] Eliot is correct in suggesting that such an emotion can be “evoked”. However, it is mistaken to assume that “the link” between “the evoker” and “the evoked” is objective. In fact, as exemplified in the case of Helen Keller above, the emotional association with the image of a particular object in one’s mind is formed by a combination of personal experience and collective instruction, the results of which are at once common enough to allow communication among speakers, yet irreducibly individual, and variable among one another, such that we can never know if our signifieds are identical to each other’s. This is indeed one of the great mysteries and miracles of language. Beyond this brute difference of other minds, there are the idiosyncrasies and vagaries of experience that contribute to the formation of our sense of our language. For Helen Keller, the emotional response evoked by the word “water” included the unique joy and enlightenment she experienced when she learned the word. The word retained for her a sense of the discovery of its link to the world. Another reader, one perhaps not deprived of their senses in the way Keller was, might have a completely different emotional response to “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events,” not only with respect to other readers, but to the artist endeavoring to evoke the objective correlative itself.

    Yet people do share certain common experience, which is what makes Eliot’s theory possible in the first place. All human beings, being human, share certain life experiences and outlooks upon the world that enable them to enjoy the same literary works. The notion of a classic work, enjoyed by people of all nations around the world, is tacit proof of the commonalities across regional differences that make international literary and artistic success possible. People of the same national or cultural background will of course share more personal experience than those of different national or cultural backgrounds. There are artistic works that are highly favored in one culture while not well regarded in others. A good example is the novel A Dream of Red Mansions (《红楼梦》，1744-1754)[5] which is regarded as the best novel ever written in Chinese, yet hardly read in the west.

    Literature often serves a pedagogical function. The degree to which works are read, and continue to enjoy success, often depends on their ability to continue to teach readers something about themselves, and their world. Ezra Pound, another remarkable theorist of literature (and poet), is among the most vociferous exponents of this theory of literary efficacy. He vividly describes the rewards a fruitful reading experience offers as “that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art.”[6] Indeed, rewarding reading experiences are those that enlighten and develop our minds, stimulating them to great satisfaction. At the root of any literary judgment, the overall motive force by which literary traditions are sustained, is this affective dimension of reading. To read in an engaged way, to persist in reading, is to be somehow moved by it.

    How does this affective core of reading, which binds traditions and communities together in spite of their differences and distances, hold for the international communication of modern poetry, not least when even the most highly experienced reader of one culture can feel lost in the works of another. Bewilderment occurs not just with respect to the idiomatic sense of another language and culture but, when it comes to poetry especially, the ways in which an artist plays and puns with every level of that language. A story told by the distinguished scholar Huang Yunte about his colleague Zhang Ziqing, is illustrative. Reading Charles Bernstein’s poem “Fear of Flipping,” Zhang persistently asked the poet for the lexical meaning of the words in the poem. Huang explained, “the poet is more invested in the ring of echoes of wall, ball, fall, all, and even the half- rhyming repel, than the lexical meaning of these words. The ricochet of sounds and syllables, creating the titular fear of flipping, like a flip or slip of tongue, looks to walls to keep it inside or floors to hold it up.”[7] In other words, Bernstein is experimenting with the sonic dimension of poetic lines; indeed, one could say that the ‘meaning’ of his verse here is produced by his play effects with the reverberation of rhyming syllables across the poem. Poetic meaning is therefore not restricted to, or even primarily, lexical here. The title of the poem sets the terms for this play by punning on the phrase “fear of falling,” a substitution of one term / phobia for another, which flips the sense of the phrase on its head. The echoing internal rhymes create a verbal image which gives shape and body to this gesture of flipping, retaining the ghost of the original phrase even as it ricochets across the altered soundscape of the lines. This practice will no doubt be recognizable to readers who are familiar with the poetics of the Language School. The play serves as a framework for linking mind and world beyond and between the confines of individual languages, and is definitive of Bernstein’s practice.

    Huang Yunte’s interpretation is not difficult to understand. However, it was wholly foreign to Zhang Ziqing, and would almost certainly be to anyone who did not come to Bernstein’s work with the framework of sound and cognitive play in mind. Modern poetry like his is not unique in being theory-laden – that is, constructed and expounded according to the unique poetics of its practitioners. Nevertheless, modern poetry and poetic theories are two sides of a coin; they stand by working together – all the more so as poetry becomes esoteric in form, further removed from the conventions of ordinary language use, and governed increasingly by rules of composition unique to it. Without knowledge of the theories which govern such an esoteric art, therefore, one can find oneself at sea while reading a modern poem.[8] This is especially true of poetry where innovation does not occur at the lexical level either: indeed, where the poetry at stake is not a matter of lexical play. The divergence of modern poetry from the rules which governed previous traditions – rules of a more subtle kind of artifice intelligible to a broader literate class – has made the dissemination of its doctrines and theories a necessary part of its reception and interpretation. The difficulty a lay but native reader faces with work like Bernstein’s is exacerbated in the international context, where neither fluency in the language of composition, nor education within a broadest concept of the originating culture, can serve as sure guides. It is paramount that Chinese scholars introduce both modern poetry and modern poetic theories together, teaching them as two facets of the same literary phenomenon.

    Many modern poems make good sense in a lot of ways other than the traditional lexical one, which is why they seem quite difficult to understand. T. S. Eliot once said: “We can only say that it appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.”[9] Indeed, modern poetry is as difficult to comprehend as modern civilization. The difficulties are comparable, mimetic even, in so far as the poet is driven, in Eliot’s reasoning, by a vocational maxim to both reflect and train the sensibility of his audience to his work through the dislocations of language he performs. The difficulty of modern poetry is a difficulty inherent in its context: modern civilization. What of its value, the other aspect (ever present) of Eliot’s judgment. A difficult poem is good not because it is difficult. In fact, the difficulty of many poems is not that difficulty of modernity refracted, but rather a failure to adequately make sense of the incoherence the poet intuits. It is a subtle difference, one with which Eliot was principally concerned. A difficult poem is good only when it creates one more possibility, “forcing language into meaning,” in an unconventional way. Again,“Fear of Flipping” is exemplary. From the perspective of linking, it is an exploration of more possible ways to make new, and possibly more efficient, thought ways and patterns. The poem’s difficulty is likewise a function of the way in which it is approached. Though Eliot would demur to such a consequentialist proposition, perhaps the test of a difficult poem’s quality may be the very satisfaction of mind, its inspiration and development, that has affectively and cognitively bound generations of poetry readers to one another in a tradition millennia-old, and world-wide.[10]

    What then of the transposition of these difficult poems into foreign contexts. From one perspective, it would be easy to conclude that poems like“Fear of Flipping” simply cannot be translated into Chinese. Semantics are not what a translator ought to target here, yet there are no characters in the Chinese language that reproduce the poem’s soundscape either: wall, ball, fall, all, and repel, are constructions of the sound system of English. Chinese phonology simply does not permit their formation. Yet this perspective is impoverished, for the link the poem creates (the link which is its essential, creative practice and energy) is certainly “translatable.” The poem’s signature effect, its ‘fear of flipping’ so to speak, can be reached in the target language of Chinese, and the minds of readers from this or another culture, like those of its author and his native culture, can be enlightened and developed by a translation which ‘translates’ those effects. From the linking perspective, the reward for reading a poem is to build up some new and better links, so that the minds of its readers can grow. In bringing, i.e., “translating”, poems like “Fear of Flipping” to readers in China, we need to explicate them in detail, line by line, giving more detailed interpretations than what Huang Yunte does in his essay; but we also must consider the general theory and framework of mind that the poem conjures. For it is only by doing both that Chinese readers will be rewarded in their encounter with the difficulty of works like those of Bernstein, or his Language School peers. This is the true project and mission of translation.[11] To deal with such poems that stand closely with the linguistic features of the particular language in which it is written that cannot be replicated in Chinese, the strategy for translation is not to focus on the technical details of linguistic features, but on helping readers in China in understanding the ways, i.e., the frameworks of mind presented in the poems, so that they could not only understand them but also create links in Chinese in the same spirit – and to replicate the features where possible, according to the rules of Chinese.

    Marjorie Perloff has noted: “Charles Bernstein has been, of all contemporary American poets, the one who has done the most to bring back those important words and phrases that tend to be ‘excluded’ from circulation.”[12] In other words, the contribution Bernstein’s works have made is not only to serve an individual reader by promoting his/her intellectual and emotional growth, but also, and more importantly, to serve contemporary American language and culture as a whole. With poems like“Fear of Flipping”, Bernstein has been constructing and reconstructing some delicate links to promote the growth of contemporary American thought capacity. That is to say, his work has contributed to the growth of the thinking capacity of the American cultural being, which, if well “translated”, can help other cultural beings develop in similar, relevant areas too.

    Different from lyrics, narrative works, both in verse and prose, tell stories that define the formation of certain links, as well as the associated emotions, so that they can often be translated in the traditional way. Story travels across cultural borders much more freely than poetic technique.

    In the field of international cultural communications, a mind, or a culture at large, grows in two ways: one is of transplantation, the other of inspiration. The key difference between these two learning ways is that the former offers something that cannot be logically developed out of the exercise of the learner’s own mind or the recipient culture’s institutional self-renewal, while the latter brings something that can be logically achieved by the recipient person or culture.

    Here are a few examples to further demonstrate the difference. When Sun Yat-sen established the Republic of China in 1911, he attempted to “transplant” the whole American political system into China, which was a failure because it did not function well in the Chinese culture by then. After the May Fourth Movement in 1919 (五四运动), the western ideology of free love and free marriage were introduced into China, which inspired many young people, who totally understood them, cherished them and were willingly guided by them, because in Chinese history there had been many people who had fought for their freedom of love and marriage, though they had not developed the theory of these practices to the degree the west had. In some cases, the transplantation model and the inspiration model are combined together, such as in the Socialism with Chinese Characteristics; Socialism was transplanted from the former Soviet Union, while Chinese Characteristics refers largely Chinese people’s own innovation, partly on basis of traditional Chinese political practice, and partly inspired by Western political practices.

    When a Chinese student learns English, s/he needs to learn a vocabulary and a grammar / syntax (words, and the rules for their formation and combination). In this way, his/her mind grows by “transplantation”. When a Chinese scholar learns Charles Bernstein’s poetics, acquiring a totally new way of thinking, it is also of transplantation. Inspiration, by contrast, is the event of learning something that can be interpreted, understood, and made good sense of in the context of one’s already established knowledge. For example, all traditional western poetry, especially Romanticist’s works, such as those by William Wordsworth, can be easily understood by Chinese readers, as they share much of the spirit with traditional Chinese poetry.

    Where do these processes of transplantation and inspiration fit in the current world of international poetics? Among the most interesting instances in the communication of inspirational learning is what one may call mis-interpretive innovation. These are cases defined by a fortunate mistake, in which the application of a norm in the target language and culture to the translation of a work produces something incongruous with the original cultural perspective. One famous example is Ezra Pound’s invention of the “Ideogrammic method”. As Xie Ming said, “This etymological, compositional theory of the ideogram, from which Pound derived his ‘ideogrammic’ method, had an enormous impact on his thinking about poetry and other cultural matters, and on the writing of the Cantos.”[13] The method has influenced many poets in the west: “An American mind, brought to ideographs by an art historian of Spanish descent who had been exposed to Transcendentalism, derived Vorticism, the Cantos, and an ‘ideogrammic method’ that modifies our sense of what Chinese can be.”[14] Indeed, it is for this reason that Pound is said, in a well-known oxymoronic idiom, to have ‘invented Chinese poetry in English”. And yet, as explained on the back cover of the book The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, the Chinese language is just a set of signifiers, like the English language or any other languages.[15] This now seems to be common knowledge to most English readers. However, Ezra Pound’s invention of the “Ideogrammic method” made perfect sense in its context, and it was a wonderfully productive method for the composition of his works. It was an extremely valuable invention in poetics in English, inspired indeed.

    There are many more examples of mis-interpretive innovation. Let us offer a personal one. When Li Zhimin was invited to give a talk on Ezra Pound’s lyric “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter”, Li found the other three panelists interpreted the poem as a war poem, the context for which was England’s involvement in WWI.[16] This appeared quite strange to him, as Li had been accustomed to interpretating the poem in the cultural context of its original author, the great Chinese poet Li Bai (701-762). In the traditional Chinese cultural context, this poem is normally taken as a love poem that romanticizes the mutual love and devotion of a young couple, which is considered a key virtue of the family ethics highly valued by Confucianism. Li found his American colleagues’ new (to me) interpretation compelling, making good sense as it does of the historic context in which the poem was translated and read in England. In fact, this new interpretation is inspiring and fascinating, and has contributed to the growth of Li’s understanding of the original and translated poem. What we can see from this example is that poetry not only exists in its original or translated context, but between them, in the historical and cultural rhymes that mutually illuminate diverse regions of the literary tradition.

    Let us give another example that illuminates the importance and shifting influence of context. A famous Chinese scholar prof. Yue Daiyun once held a seminar and discussed a novel entitled “Marriage of Xiao‘erhei (小二黑结婚)” with her American students. In the novel, there is a character named Sanxiangu (三仙姑) who often makes herself up to look more beautiful, which is meant to be inappropriate as she is of the working class, so that the conventional comments in the proletarian literary circle in China on this character is always negative. However, Yue Daiyun found all her American students were supporting Sanxiangu, as they thought there was nothing wrong with her making herself up. On the contrary, they considered Sanxiangu to be an admirable woman, as she seemed to them to love life.[17] Yue Daiyun came to agree with her American students’ comments, and has been retelling their views to her students and colleagues back in China, which is surely a contribution to the interpretation of the character Sanxiangu as well as the whole novel in China.

    The purpose of international interactions is not to make all cultures the same. Rather, international interactions can make all parties more perfect in their own way. We learn from each other in the transplantation model only when there is no alternative. We apply the model of inspirational learning in most cases. The overriding principle to decide whether any international communication is fruitful or not is whether it makes good sense in terms of the recipient individual or culture, indeed, whether it enriches the recipient through the change it rings.

    In the model of inspirational learning, the exchange can move in both directions: the innovative knowledge produced by the recipient may depart from the codes and conscience of the original culture, and yet in doing so inspire something novel in return, within the original culture. With the back and forth of such international communications, human knowledge on the whole is greatly expanded. In fact, the method of international communication, especially of the mind-expanding forms of poetry, is perhaps the best way for humanity to develop itself by diversifying itself: that is, to resist the pull of sameness.

    International interaction follows more or less the same principles in other fields. For example, in the field of politics, China and the West have learned and benefited from each other, and will continue to do so in the future. Jacques Gernet has said: “China furnished the first example of a disciplined, rich, and powerful state which owed nothing to Christianity and seemed to be based on reason and natural law. It thus made a powerful contribution to the formation of modern political thought, and even some of its basic institutions were imitated by Europe.”[18] Indeed, he convincingly argues that what the West has learned from China it has learned in the inspirational model. In return, China has learned a lot from the West as it developed during the modern age, much of which has transformed Chinese society to a great extent, such as in the fields of education, industrialization, urbanization and so on. And again, perhaps in the future, some of modern China’s successful institutions might serve as good examples from which the West might learn, and so on in perpetuity.[19]

    Ralph Waldo Emerson believed that all forms of life are linked: “A subtle chain of countless rings/ The next unto the farthest brings”[20] as he writes in the poem which prefaces his essay “Nature.” Helen Keller’s story about the creation of the link between the signifier “water,” the concept water the signified on her mind, and the water out there in the world, is a story about the origination of thought, without which she would have lived in a kind of intellectual darkness all her life. But the story is general: if human beings could not create links between the world and the world of signs, human beings would have lived in the darkness as well. Without poetry to further enhance these links, or to break and remake them, and without its transposition between languages, in which it is once more remade into a monster of linguistic and cultural confusion (in the etymological sense of this word), our thought would be even darker. The linking is everything; it is, as Emerson reminds us, life itself.

                                              2022/04/18

    _____

    LI Zhimin is “Guangzhou Scholar” Distinguished Professor of English at School of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou University (Guangzhou, China, 510006). He serves as President of Foreign Literature Society of Guangdong Province. His research interests focus upon studies on modern poetics, culture (philosophy) and English Education (Email: washingtonlzm@sina.com).

    Daniel Braun is English Lecturer with Special Honor at School of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou University. He got his PhD in English literature Studies in Princeton University in 2019.

    Back to the essay

    _____

    Notes

    [1] Ferdinand De Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, Trans. Wade Baskin, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959), 65-66.

    [2] More discussions on the formation, nature and functioning of such links are made in Li Zhimin’s monograph The Good and the True of Knowledge (Beijing: The People’s Press, 2011) [黎志敏：《知识的“善”与“真”》。北京：人民出版社2011年版。]

    [3] Helen Keller, Story of My Life (C. Rainfield, 2003), 11. This ebook was produced by Project Gutenberg. It is available at: http://www.CherylRainfield.com.

    [4] T. S. Eliot, “Hamlet and His Problems,” in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Methuen, 1920), 92.

    [5] TSAO Hsueh-Chin and Kao Heo, A Dream of Red Mansions, Trans. Yang Hsien-Yi and Gladys Yang (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1994). TSAO Hsueh-Chin and Kao Heo are of the Wade-Giles System. In modern Pinyin system, they are Cao Xueqin and Gao E respectively.

    [6] Ezra Pound, “A Retrospect”. Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (Toronto：George J. Mcleod Ltd., 1968), 4.

    [7] Yunte Huang, “Ten Plus Ways of Reading Charles Bernstein: Improvisations on Aphoristic Cores,” boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture, Vol. 48, No. 4, 2021, p. 275.

    [8] Please refer to LI Zhimin, “Modern English Poetry: Innovation through Theory,” Foreign Language and Literature Research, Vol. 35, No. 5, 2020, pp. 27-34. [黎志敏：《理论主导下英语诗歌的现代转型》，《外国语文研究》2020年第5期。] In this essay, Li argued that modern poetry and modern poetic theories have to be read side by side to make good sense of both of them.

    [9] T. S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” Selected Essays, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1954), 289.

    [10] Please refer to LI Zhimin, “Innovative Spirit of Modern Poetry: To Develop Human’s Intellectual and Emotional Capacities,” Foreign Languages and Cultures, Vol. 16, No. 2, 2021: 1-8. [黎志敏：《现代诗歌的创新精神》，《外国语言与文化》2021年第2期。] In this essay, Li argues that one major function of modern poetry is to promote the development of human’s intellectual and emotional capacities.

    [11] In fact, this is what we have done in our on-line bilingual course on modern poetry in English. This on-line course can be reached at: https://www.ulearning.cn/course/25598. In this course, Charles Bernstein is invited to have given a talk on an excerpt from Dark City, in which he gives a line to line interpretation. This is indeed the best way to “translate” a difficult modern poem.

    [12] Marjorie Perloff, “Introduction to Charles Bernstein’s Distinguished Wenqin Yao Lectures at Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Fall 2019,” boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture. Vol. 48, No. 4, 2021, p. 86.

    [13] Ming Xie, Ezra Pound and the Appropriation of Chinese Poetry: Cathay, Translation, and Imagism (New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1999), 236-237.

    [14] Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), 162.

    [15] See the note on the back cover in the book: Ernst Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. Ezra Pound (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1936).

    [16] A discussion of Ezra Pound’s “The River-Merchant’s Wife” by Al Filreis, Emily Harnett, Josephine Park, and Li Zhimin. https://media.sas.upenn.edu/app/public/watch.php?file_id=208367

    [17] Yue Daiyun and others, “Feminism and Literary Criticism,” Free Talks on Literature, No. 6, 1989, p. 19. [乐黛云等：《女权主义与文学批评》，《文学自由谈》1989年第6期。]

    [18] Jacques Gernet, A History of Chinese Civilization, trans. J. R. Foster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 523.

    [19] Please refer to LI Zhimin, “The One Way Model of Cultural Interaction: Literary Interactions between China and Cambridge,” The Cambridge Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 1, 2012: 111-127.

    [20] R.W. Emerson, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: The Modern Library, 2009), 18.

    _____

    Works Cited

    • Eliot, T. S. “The Metaphysical Poets.” In Selected Essays, edited by T. S. Eliot, 281–291. London: Faber and Faber, 1954.
    • ——. “Hamlet and His Problems.” In The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, edited by T. S. Eliot, 87–94. London: Methuen, 1920.
    • Emerson, R.W. The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by Brooks Atkinson. New York: The Modern Library, 2009.
    • Gernet, Jacques. A History of Chinese Civilization, translated by J. R. Foster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
    • Huang, Yunte. “Ten Plus Ways of Reading Charles Bernstein: Improvisations on Aphoristic Cores.” boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture, no. 4 (2021): 255–278.
    • Keller, Helen. Story of My Life. C. Rainfield, 2003. This ebook was produced by Project Gutenberg. It is available at: http://www.CherylRainfield.com.
    • Kenner, Hugh, The Pound Era. London: Faber and Faber, 1972.
    • Perloff, Marjorie. “Introduction to Charles Bernstein’s Distinguished Wenqin Yao Lectures at Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Fall 2019.” boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture, no. 4 (2021): 85-90.
    • Pound, Ezra. “A Retrospect.” In Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, edited by T. S. Eliot, 3-14. Toronto: George J. Mcleod Ltd., 1968.
    • Saussure, Ferdinand De. Course in General Linguistics, translated by Wade Baskin, edited by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye. NY: Philosophical Library, 1959.
    • Xie, Ming. Ezra Pound and the Appropriation of Chinese Poetry: Cathay, Translation, and Imagism. New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1999.
    • Yue, Daiyun and others. “Feminism and Literary Criticism.” Free Talks on Literature, no. 6 (1989): 18–24.

    _____

    Additional Reading

    Read more about Charles Bernstein’s writing and see responses to translations of his work in the boundary 2 special issue “Charles Bernstein: The Poetry of Idiomatic Insistences” (volume 48, issue 4).

  • In Memoriam: George Lamming

    In Memoriam: George Lamming

  • A Space of Poetry: An Interview With Douglas Messerli

    A Space of Poetry: An Interview With Douglas Messerli

    Read A Space of Poetry: An Interview With Douglas Messerli. This interview was conducted by Martin Nakell [March-June 2022].

    Also see the boundary 2 special issue on Charles Bernstein (volume 48, issue 4); and, Douglas Messerli’s poems “Carried Away” (boundary 2: volume 14, issue 1/2) and “Scared Cows” (boundary 2: volume 26, issue 1).

     

  • 2022 boundary 2 Annual Conference-50th Anniversary Meeting Videos Available Now

    The 2022 boundary 2 Annual Conference was held from March 31-April 2 at Dartmouth College. The meeting also celebrated the 50th anniversary of the journal. Talks from the conference are now available online below and via YouTube.

    Paul A. Bové: The Education of Henry Adams

    Charles Bernstein: Reading from his Poetry

    Arne DeBoever: Smears

    David Golumbia: Cyberlibertarianism

    Bruce Robbins: There Is No Why

    Christian Thorne: “What We Once Hoped of Critique”

    Jonathan Arac: William Empson and the Invention of Modern Literary Study

    Stathis Gourgouris: No More Artificial Anthropisms

     

    Donald E. Pease: Settler Liberalism

    Lindsay Waters: Still Enmired in the Age of Incommensurability

    R.A. Judy: Poetic Socialities and Aesthetic Anarchy

    Hortense Spillers: Closing Remarks

     

  • Charles Bernstein in Different Reflections with Bengali Poets

    Charles Bernstein in Different Reflections with Bengali Poets

    Watch Charles Bernstein and Runa Bandyopadhya’s recent bilingual poetry reading and subsequent conversation with several Bengali poets.

    Read the boundary 2 special issue “Charles Bernstein: The Poetry of Idiomatic Insistences” (volume 48, issue 4), which features Runa Bandyopadhya’s essay “Pataquericalism: Quantum Coherence between the East and West,” among others.

     

  • Charles Bernstein’s Reading for ENCLAVE

    Charles Bernstein’s Reading for ENCLAVE

    Charles Bernstein is the author of Near/Miss and Pitch of Poetry, both from the University of Chicago Press. ROOF recently published The Course, a collaboration with Ted Greenwald. University of New Mexico Press is publishing a reprint L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine, a volume of related letters, as well as the late 1970s collaboration Legend. He lives in Brooklyn.

  • New Works: boundary 2 Fall 2019 Conference

    New Works: boundary 2 Fall 2019 Conference

    The fall 2019 conference will be at the University of Pittsburgh, from November 15-16.

    The event schedule is listed below. Events are free to the public and in the Cathedral of Learning in Room 501.

    Friday, November 15, 2019

    1:30 pm – 3:30 pm Panel One

    Neetu Khanna, The Visceral Logics of Decolonization

    Chris Taylor, Life Here: On Self-Enslavement, Civic Longing, and Anarchic Refusal

    Respondent: Kara Keeling

    4:00 pm – 6:00 pm Panel Two

    Arne De Boever, In Management as in War: Efficacy in the Work of François Jullien

    Leah Feldman, The (Post)Soviet Sensorium

    Respondent: Nancy Condee

    Saturday, November 16, 2019

    10:00 am – 12:00 pm Panel Three

    Sarah Brouillette, Literary Publishing and Underdevelopment

    Bécquer Seguín, Literary Realism and the Great Recession

    Respondent: David Golumbia

     

  • Charles Bernstein’s Retirement and Upcoming Events

    Charles Bernstein’s Retirement and Upcoming Events

    Charles Bernstein is retiring from the University of Pennsylvania at the end of May. Below is his newsletter, which includes MIXTAPE, a collection of poems and narratives put together by Orchid Tierney and Chris Mustazza; and upcoming readings.

    I am retiring from Penn at the end of the month. Al Filreis, Jessica Lowenthal, working with Susan Bee, gave me a great farewell party on April 4, 2019, with many friends, from far and near and some exuberant words were spoke! The video and audio is now on-line here.

    Orchid Tierney & Chris Mustazza put together an AbFab book, MIXTAPE, with poems, narratives, anecdotes, commentaries, cartoons, apocrypha, and comic tales — pdf here & POD here.

    ••
    The Language Letters: Selected 1970s Correspondence of Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, and Ron Silliman, ed. Matthew Hofer & Michael Golston (U of NM Press). 25% discount with code 16SP19A2. Craig Dworkin: “This collection makes a compelling argument for reassessing the poetics of language poetry as emerging from an epistolary base. Accordingly, it reframes the various essays and reviews that appeared in the notorious L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E newsletter as extensions of epistolary form, postal formats, and intimately personal correspondences. The implications for the history of late twentieth-century poetry are provocative and revelatory.”

    ••
    The Netherlands:
    I will be performing at the 50th Poetry International Festival Rotterdam on June 13 at 8pm, June 15 at 9:30pm, and June 16 at 4:30pm. Then on June 21st at 7:30pm, Susan Bee and I will be at PERDU in Amsterdam in a program on “The Politics of Poetic Form.” Samuel Vriezen has translated “The Ballad Stipped Bare” and “Our United Fates,” for the festival and I will be reading those two, both from Near/Miss. Here is Vriezen’s introduction to my work (in English).

    Paris:
    I will be reading in Paris with Pierre Joris and Habib Tengour (who translated a book of my poems) on June 25 at 7pm at Atelier Michael Woolworth, 2 rue de la Roquette, cour Février

    ••
    • The May/June Penn Gazette (Penn’s alumni magazine) features an interview with me by Daniel Akst.
    • Penn Current on Near/Miss (Louisa Shepard), Oct. 14, 2018
    • Runa Bandyopadhyay (West Bengal), conversation, Kitaab, March 8, 2019
    •Fredrik Hertzberg “The Shimmering of the Transitory: An Interview with Charles Bernstein” (2001) with an Introduction by Lauri Ramey, Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures 2:2 (December 2018): pdf
    • “Poetry in Solidarity with the Iranian People”: an interview with Kourosh Ziabari on the Iran sanctions in Fair Observer.
    • Penn School of Arts and Sciences’s OMNIA: Podcast –– “You Can’t Hurt A Poem, And Other Lessons from Charles Bernstein”: full episode.
    • Yi Feng, “The Negative Economy of Nothingness in Charles Bernstein’s Poetics,” International Comparative Literature, 2:2 (2019):pdf.

    ••
    Some new poems on-line:
    “Procuring Poetry” (translation of Drummond) in PN Review
    “Karen Carpenter” in Australian Book Review
    “Cardio Theater,” “Rime and Raison” from The Course (with Ted Greenwald) in Big Other
    “Shields Green” in The A Line
    “Alphabet of the Tracks” in Politics and Letters

    ••
    Near/Miss is available in paperback, digital, and as an audiobook. Recalculating and Pitch of Poetry available in paper.