boundary 2

Category: boundary 2

  • Charles Bernstein–In Memoriam Pierre Joris (1946-2025)

    Charles Bernstein–In Memoriam Pierre Joris (1946-2025)

    boundary 2 and its community are mourning our friend Pierre Joris, whose work appeared in both boundary 2 and boundary 2 online:

    Charles Bernstein, “NoOnesRose: An Interview with Pierre Joris”

    Pierre Joris, “A Nomad Poetics Revisited: Poetry and Translation in a Global Age”

    In Memoriam Pierre Joris (1946–2025)

    Charles Bernstein

    Pierre Joris is a poet, essayist, anthologist, and translator, each an aspect of multidimensional artmaking rarely seen among American poets. His poetry and poetics are interwoven with his anthologies of twentieth century “free thinking” world poetry (with Jerome Rothenberg) and of the poetry of the maghrib (with Habib Tengour), which, in turn, are an extension of his translations (Celan, Adonis, Blanchot, Schwitters, Picasso, Safaa Fathy, Meddeb, &c).

    Joris’s works are never solemn, but they acknowledge the “darkness that surrounds,” as Robert Creeley once put it, that we are always behind our ideals, hopes, aspirations, premonitions, regrets, fears–behind both in the sense of supporting and after, trying to catch up, desperately for the most part, but in these poems not desperate but fortunate, in good humors and with humor.

    American poetry is born in second languages, it is our bounty and the secret of our success, if we have any, as much as Samson’s long hair was, once upon a time, the source of his strength. That’s why any attempt to homogenize and assimilate undermines the foundations of our poetics.

    Joris’s work is marked by a rare virtue for an American poet: courage: fierce and loving. Everybody is always talking about affect but no one ever does anything about it. We used to say “lifts your spirits” but that applies more to Thanksgiving balloons than to verse that challenges. I want a poetry and poetics, like Joris’s, that change my mind, puts me in the sway of currents of resistance and change. Where the courage is not just what is said but what is refused: the sanctity of the fixed place, nation or ideal, banner or standard. It’s not just the tyranny of monolingualism that Joris’s verse contests, it’s the tyranny of all forms of monomania: single-mindedness in perspective, style, politics, form, language, identity, desire. “I speak in voices / always always / other people’s voices / a thousand mouths.”–We all turned away from virtues when that meant some uppity guy telling us the way we lead our lives is base. What happens if the base speaks in a basso profundo, as in being pro fun with doing more than the done?

    Intellectus is not a dirty word. While so much of American poetry culture has run from thick historical context and wit as if they were a European disease, Joris has made a poetry that overthrows the hierarchies but not the minding, tending, churning, plowing, fermenting, and fomenting.

    I want to claim Joris as an American poet par excellence, but that is only if we understand “American” as dissolving into the “image nation” (Robin Blaser’s term)–“the city which is syntax”–of non-national possibility. To be neither here nor there, French nor German, Luxembourgish nor Americanische, is to inhabit a provisionality among and between, a toggling that creates a space of rhythmic intensities (“true movement unencumbered”) that confounds binaries and repels axiomatic allegiances.

    In “An Alif Baa,” Joris speaks of the a “zig” connecting to “orphaned” zag, evoking the nomadic condition of letters before they coalesce into words, what he calls in another poem the “zigzag nomad.” The distance from the orphaned “zag” to the “zig” of history or place or name is “irreducible.” The space from zig to zag is the antinomian space between (“between lips / be silk between / be between,” “between the ephemeral & the invariant”). This is a space Joris claims as the nomadic possibility of poetry and thought, what sometimes goes by the name of imagination but also fancy, emptiness, and negation.

    Joris’s poetry is an unexpected overlay of Expressionism (“eye turned inside out”) and Dada (“A fistful / of consonants / drifts from mouth to / mouth”), parataxis (“break the ice / to know”) and lyric (“what is is / shimmers, stammers / on the vocal-cords-bridge, in the / Great Inbetween / with all that has room in it / even without speech”).

    Voicings and thing language.

    His ever burning searching is tempered by the realpolitik (“postmortem”) of images, images that are uneasy, that propel a querical (queasy) inquiry.

    Joris’s “daily song” is a tracing of a definite but undefined course. The poet recognizes the necessity of a rhetorical address from “the center of my center of nowhere.” No where but still always here, at this long-delayed hearing that determines neither guilt nor innocence but rather makes ways (makes waves) to actualize copability (the ability to cope), which along with adaption, translation, miscegenation, and élan is a guiding force of Joris’s beguiling works.

    Adapted from The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays and Comedies (University of Chicago Press, 2025). See my conversation with Joris in boundary 2 50:4 (2023) and his contribution to 99 Poets/1999: An International Poetics Symposium, an issue of boundary 2 that I edited: 26:1 (1999). 

  • Experiments in Listening–boundary 2 annual conference

    Experiments in Listening–boundary 2 annual conference

    **PLEASE NOTE THE LOCATION CHANGE FOR SATURDAY DUE TO THE HUGHES FIRE**

    Experiments in Listening

    Friday, January 24-Saturday January 25, 2025

    University of Southern California and California Institute of the Arts

    Supported by the MA Aesthetics and Politics program and the Herb Alpert School of Music at the California Institute of the Arts; the USC Dornsife Experimental Humanities Lab; the Division of Cinema and Media Studies at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts; and boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture

    With additional support from the Dean of the School of Critical Studies at CalArts; the USC Dornsife Graduate Dean and Divisional Vice Dean for the Humanities, the USC Department of Comparative Literature, and the USC Department of English. 

    This event is also supported by the Nick England Intercultural Arts Project Grant at CalArts. 

    Organized by Arne De Boever, Kara Keeling, Erin Graff Zivin, and Michael Pisaro-Liu. 

    “To anyone in the habit of thinking with their ears…” Thus begins Theodor W. Adorno’s famous essay “Cultural Criticism and Society”. But what does it mean to think with one’s ears? How does one get into the habit of it? And what are the critical and societal (ethical and political) benefits of thinking with one’s ears?

    “Experiments in Listening” proposes to address these questions starting from the experimental performing arts. Conceived between an arts institute, a university, and a contrarian international journal of literature and culture, the conference seeks to “emancipate the listener” (to riff on Jacques Rancière) into considering their ears as not only aesthetic but also political instruments that are as central to how we think, make, and live as our speech.

     

    Friday, January 24

    University of Southern California

    10am-12n

    ROOM: USC, Taper Hall of Humanities (THH) 309K

    boundary 2 editorial meeting for boundary 2 editors 

    Lunch for boundary 2 editors and conference speakers

    *

    1:30pm-3:15pm

    ROOM: USC, SCA 112

    Listening session/ Moderator: Erin Graff Zivin 

    Gabrielle Civil, “listening: in and out of place”

    Fumi Okiji, “To Listen Ornamentally” 

    Josh Kun, “Migrant Listening”

     

    3:30-5:30pm

    ROOM: USC, SCA 112

    Listening session/ Moderator: Kara Keeling

    Michael Ned Holte, “Looking for Air in the Waves”

    Mlondi Zondi, “Sound and Suffering” 

    Leah Feldman, “Azbuka Strikes Back”

    Nina Eidsheim, “Pussy Listening”

     

    6pm-7:30pm

    Dinner for conference speakers — USC

     

    8:00-10pm

    ROOM: CalArts DTLA building. 1264 West 1st Street. 

    8pm: Reception

    8:30pm: Screening of Omar Chowdhury, BAN♡ITS (17m22s, 2024) (in progress).

    Out near the porous, lawless eastern border between Bangladesh and India, a diasporic artist returns to make works with a band of washed up ban♡its who are obsessed with Heath Ledger’s Joker. As they comically re-enact their glorified past, we confront the divergent histories and philosophies of peasant banditry and political resistance and its unexpected causes and contexts. The resulting para-fiction questions its authorship and morality and asks: when the art world comes calling, who are the real ban♡its?

    9pm: Performance by Notnef Greco (Deviant Fond and Count G).

     

    Saturday, January 25

    The REEF building (1933 South Broadway, Los Angeles, California 90007)

    10-11:50am: 

    ROOM: Screening Room, 12th floor 

    Coffee and pastries.

    Listening session/ Performance. Moderator: Arne De Boever

    Arne De Boever, “Silent Music”

    Michael Pisaro-Liu, “Experimental Music Workshop” (1 hour). Performance of Antoine Beuger, Für kurze Zeit geboren: für Spieler/ Hörer (beliebig viele)/ Born for a Short Time: For Performers/ Listeners (as many as you like) (1991). 

    Conference speakers will participate in the performance. Performance will be audio/video-recorded and posted at boundary 2 online. A livestream will be available here. Composer Antoine Beuger will be joining us for the Q&A after the performance via zoom. 

    Lunch for conference speakers–Commons, 12th floor

    1:30pm-3:15pm

    ROOM: Screening Room, 12th floor

    Coffee and pastries.

    Listening session/ Moderator: Kara Keeling

    Gavin Steingo, “Whale Song Recordings”

    Natalie Belisle, “Inclination: The Kinaesthesis of Afro-Latin American Sound”

    Stathis Gourgouris, “The Julius Eastman – Arthur Russell Encounter”

     

    3:30-5:15pm

    ROOM: Screening Room, 12th floor

    Listening session/ Moderator: Erin Graff Zivin

    Edwin Hill, “On Acoustic Jurisprudence”

    Bruce Robbins, “Listening On Campus” 

    Jonathan Leal, “If Anzaldúa Were a DJ, What Would She Spin?”

     

    5:30-6:15pm

    ROOM: Screening Room, 12th floor

    Student Theory Slam/ Moderator: Arne De Boever

    Reina Akkoush 

    Jacob Blumberg

    Sean Seu

    Inger Flem Soto

     

    6:30pm-8pm

    Dinner for conference speakers–Commons, 12th floor

     

    8pm 

    ROOM: Screening Room, 12th floor

    8pm: Reception

    8:30pm: Tung-Hui Hu, “How to Loop Today”

     

    Listener Biographies

    Reina Akkoush is an award-winning Lebanese graphic and type designer currently pursuing an MA in Aesthetics and Politics at the California Institute of the Arts. Research interests include Middle Eastern design, Arabic typography, Marxist critical theory, cultural memory and decolonial thought in the global south. 

    Natalie L. Belisle is an Assistant Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at the University of Southern California, where her research and teaching focus on contemporary Caribbean and Afro-Latin American literature, cultural production, and aesthetics. Professor Belisle’s first book Caribbean Inhospitality: The Poetics of Strangers at Home will be published by Rutgers University Press in 2025

    Jacob Blumberg is an artist and producer working across the disciplines of music, film, photography, fine art, performance art, and religious art. Global in scope and local in focus, Jacob’s work as a collaborator and creator centers deep listening, voice, and play.

    Arne De Boever teaches American Studies in the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts. He is the author of seven books on contemporary fiction and philosophy, as well as numerous articles, reviews, and translations. His new book Post-Exceptionalism: Art After Political Theology was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2025.

    Omar R. Chowdhury is a Bangladeshi artist and filmmaker. He creates para-fictional installations, films and performances that animate the fault lines of diasporic life and its various radical histories. He has had recent presentations and performances at Busan Biennial 2024 (South Korea), Contour Biennial 10 (Mechelen), Dhaka Art Summit, Beursschouwburg (Brussels), De Appel (Amsterdam), and screenings at International Film Festival Rotterdam, Film and Video Umbrella (London), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), and Queensland Gallery of Modern Art (Brisbane) for Asia Pacific Triennial 8.

    Gabrielle Civil is a black feminist performance artist, poet, and writer, originally from Detroit, MI. Her most recent performance memoir In & Out of Place (2024), encompasses her time living and making art in Mexico. The aim of her work is to open up space. 

    Nina Eidsheim is a vocalist, sound studies scholar and theorist. She brings extensive knowledge, experience and innovative approaches to practice-based research that focuses on sound and listening. The author of Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice and The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music

    Inger Flem Soto is a doctoral student in Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture at USC. She is interested in issues of sexual difference, continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, and Latin American feminist thought. Her dissertation focuses on the mother figure in Chilean works of literature and philosophy. 

    Stathis Gourgouris is professor of classics, English, and comparative literature and society at Columbia University. He is the author of several books on political philosophy, aesthetics, and poetics, the most recent being Nothing Sacred (2024).

    Edwin Hill is Associate Professor in the Department of French and the Department of American Studies & Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. His research lies at the African diasporic intersections of French and Francophone studies, sound and popular music studies, theories of race.

    Michael Ned Holte is a writer, curator, and educator living in Los Angeles. Since 2009, he has been a member of the faculty of the Program in Art at CalArts, and he currently serves as an Associate Dean of the School of Art. He is the author of Good Listener: Meditations on Music and Pauline Oliveros (Sming Sming Books, 2024). 

    Tung-Hui Hu is a poet and media scholar. He is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Greenhouses, Lighthouses, which grew out of his graduate studies in film, as well as two studies of digital culture, A Prehistory of the Cloud and Digital Lethargy: Dispatches from an Age of Disconnection, an exploration of burnout, isolation, and disempowerment in the digital underclass. 

    Kara Keeling is Professor and Chair of Cinema and Media Studies in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. Keeling is author of Queer Times, Black Futures (New York University Press, 2019) and The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (Duke University Press, 2007). 

    Josh Kun is a cultural historian, author, curator, and MacArthur Fellow. He is Professor and Chair in Cross-Cultural Communication in the USC Annenberg School and is the inaugural USC Vice Provost for the Arts.

    Jonathan Leal (he/him) is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Dreams in Double Time (Duke University Press, 2023), which received an Honorable Mention for Best Book of History, Criticism, and Culture from the Jazz Journalists Association. His next book, Wild Tongue: A Borderlands Mixtape, is under contract with Duke University Press. 

    Fumi Okiji is Associate Professor of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. She arrived at the academy by way of the London jazz scene and draws on sound practices to inform her writing. 

    Michael Pisaro-Liu is a guitarist and composer. Recordings of his music can be found on Edition Wandelweiser, erstwhile records, elsewhere music, Potlatch, another timbre, ftarri, winds measure and other labels. Pisaro-Liu is the Director of Composition and Experimental Music at CalArts. 

    Bruce Robbins is Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. He is the author of Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture (1993), Perpetual War: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Violence (2012), and, most recently, Atrocity: A Literary History (2025).

    Gavin Steingo is a professor in the Department of Music at Princeton University. He is working on a series of books and articles about whales, music, politics, and the environment. 

    Sean Koa Seu practices dramaturgy, theater direction, and production. He has credits with the National Asian American Theatre Company, Transport Group, and Lincoln Center Theater. He produced the short documentary The Victorias, which was acquired by The New Yorker in 2022. 

    Erin Graff Zivin is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California, where she is Director of the USC Dornsife Experimental Humanities Lab. She is the author of three books—Anarchaeologies: Reading as Misreading (Fordham UP, 2020), Figurative Inquisitions: Conversion, Torture, and Truth in the Luso-Hispanic Atlantic (Northwestern UP, 2014), and The Wandering Signifier: Rhetoric of Jewishness in the Latin American Imaginary (Duke UP, 2008)—and is completing a fourth book entitled “Transmedial Exposure.” 

    Mlondi Zondi (they/he) is an assistant professor of comparative literature at the University of Southern California. In addition to scholarly research, he/they also work in performance and dramaturgy. Mlondi’s writing is forthcoming or has been published in TDR: The Drama Review, ASAP Journal, Liquid Blackness, Contemporary Literature, Text and Performance Quarterly, Mortality, Canadian Journal of African Studies, Safundi, Performance Philosophy, Espace Art Actuel, and Propter Nos.

  • Christian Thorne–After Jameson

    Christian Thorne–After Jameson

    After Jameson

    Christian Thorne

    Fredric Jameson, who was a member of the boundary 2 editorial board for several years, died on September 22. One wishes to know what we have lost in his passing, and to know, too, something about what comes next, about who to read once we have leafed our way through his Nachlass; about what we had been counting on Jameson to do on our behalf that we will have to figure out how to do ourselves now that he is gone. Did Jameson leave a to-do list? Such questions are, in this case, unusually hard to answer, and this difficulty has something to do with the character of Jameson’s own thought, which, after all, had a lot to say about endings and aftermaths. His most quoted, if often misattributed, sentence concerns What Ends and What Obstinately Refuses to End: “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” He was drawn at an early date to the term “postmodern”—not his coinage, of course, but sometimes treated as his contagious invention—which communicates the paradoxical claim that something can come after the definitionally and self-regeneratingly new. The word that he and others came up with for the book series they started at Duke went “postmodernism” one better. “Postcontemporary Interventions” they called it—whatever is later than now, which presumably just means “the future,” as in: interventions from the future. Or for it. One chapter in Jameson’s Postmodernism book offers to identify “Utopianism after the End of Utopias.” The corresponding chapter in The Antinomies of Realism announces a “Realism after Realism.” To this we should add a certain Jamesonian penchant for calling things “late”—late capitalism, late Marxism, late modernism—as well as his repeated claim that there are entire genres that we “no longer know how to read”: literary utopias, Renaissance allegories. Anything we would want to say about the end of this particular thinking life will jostle uncomfortably against that life’s many observations about what it means to perceive a terminus (or a survival or a novum).

    These several threads are best bundled under the rubric of “periodization,” which was itself one of Jameson’s abiding preoccupations. There was an interval of some twenty years when he seemed unable to finish an essay without introducing his 2 x 3 scheme of literary-and-economic periodization: realism, modernism, postmodernism; national capitalism, monopoly capitalism, late capitalism. (The only thing that changed over that span was that Giovanni Arrighi got swapped in for Ernst Mandel, as the argument’s catch-all citation for economic history.) The tributes and callings-after that have appeared since Jameson’s death themselves all flirt with periodizing claims. It is hard not to feel that theory has, in his person, died another of its serial deaths. Terry Eagleton’s After Theory was published all the way back in 2003; Jameson outlived that “after” by a handsome one-and-twenty. Along the way, in 2015, Rita Felski tried to bury the “critical” part of “critical theory,” with Jameson as its avatar. Jameson himself, in a book published after his death, said that theory came to an end with the election of François Mitterand in 1981, though anyone who has read 1994’s Seeds of Time or 2005’s Archaeologies of the Future knows that this can’t be true.

    But those multiple and contending dates are enough to remind a person of one of Jameson’s most consequential insights into periodization: that periods are not facts, not realia there to be discovered in the historical record; that they have to be posited and can always be posited otherwise. Exactly when do you think “the years of theory” ended (if, indeed, you do think they’ve ended)? When the University of Minnesota retired its Theory and History of Literature series in 1998? When Edward Said died in 2003? When Derrida died in 2004? When dissident thought got routinized in dozens upon dozens of tenure-track positions across North America, codified in C.V.-ready certificate programs and European prizes? Or when that one generation of theorists retired and the English departments decided they didn’t need replacing? Jameson was always quick to concede that the periods to which he dedicated some eight published books were devices or even contrivances—the mind’s way of organizing miscellaneous historical materials to particular (and nameable) ends. The history journals are crammed by the hundredfold with articles naming this or that previously unknown revolution—the Second Scientific, the Third Industrial, the antibiotic, the cybernetic, the “civil rights revolution”—all of them countered by an equal number of essays insisting that x turning-point in history “wasn’t really a revolution,” that 1789 (or 1917 or the fall of the Roman Empire) didn’t change anything we would care to call fundamental. Jameson always held to the entirely commonsensical position that in any historical conjuncture, some things will have withered away or been replaced and other things will have persisted, and he enjoyed rolling his eyes over the historians who argued as though the archive could tell you which it was really. The members of the AHA stand in opposite wings of the conference hotel yelling the words “Continuity!” and “Rupture!” across the bewildered lobby. This aspect of Jameson is most fully on display in A Singular Modernity, which argues that “modernity” is neither a date nor a datum; that it is a concept, rather; or, no, not a concept, but a narrative template, a story form. He then sets out to enumerate the features of the modernity narrative, as though it were just one more entry in the list of recognized genres, alongside the historical romance and the legal thriller, before scanning the ranks of theorists in order to show that they were all actually telling the kind of Big Stories about History that postmodernism officially disavowed.

    Those narratives were, of course, many and varied. A genre spins many stories—and not just one. The next point to grasp, then, is that Jameson did not just collect multiple modernity narratives—Heidegger’s and Foucault’s and Weber’s and de Man’s. His own efforts at periodization were themselves multiple. Even the most ardent readers of Jameson were slow to realize that he thought of most of his writing as so many volumes in One Big Book, a Hegelian world history of narrative types that we have come to know as The Poetics of Social Forms. That title itself went through stages, creeping into print in an early ‘80s footnote (“I discuss x in my forthcoming…); slowly worming its way onto the copyright pages of late-career monographs, where it hugged itself into the fastness of eight-point font (“The present book constitutes the theoretical section of the antepenultimate volume of….”); before finally breaking forth into reference-book entries and scholarly reviews and Verso promotional copy. The second surprise, after the initial awe of watching this narratological epic accrete surreptitiously and out-of-sequence over the course of forty years, arrives with the realization that Jameson was not in its pages telling the story that you might have thought he was always telling: from realism to modernism to postmodernism. Those stages were still there, each in a virtual volume, plus two more—a volume on post-capitalist narrative and a presumably unfinished volume on pre-capitalist narrative—but his characterization of those familiar literary-historical periods had begun to shift and multiply.

    Whenever Jameson inserted his threefold scheme into an essay on the fly, in that one compressed paragraph that he must have composed in fifteen or twenty variants, his position was always fundamentally Lukacsian: 1) The work of literary realism was to make complex social systems experientially intelligible. 2) Modernist literature pulled the plug on this intelligibility, letting the socius fog back over—or, if you prefer, faithfully replicating the opacity of everyday life—while offering as compensation a set of writerly and stylistic experiments that the sensitive reader would experience as so many “intensities.” 3) Postmodernism then neutralized these intensities in turn, withdrawing into flat affect and mimeographed irony while allowing opacity to spiral into full-blown spatial and temporal disorientation. Anyone who suspected that Jameson’s Marxism was finally a tad vulgar could see that he had, for an instant, vindicated Adorno and Brecht at the expense of Lukacs—reprieving modernism from its banishment by the Party—only then to reinstate the Lukacsian verdict against the newer art of the 1970s and ‘80s.

    Except this isn’t at all what we read in The Poetics of Social Forms, which went out of its way to scramble his beloved three-stage progression. The difference is clearest in the cycle’s two volumes on realism: The Political Unconscious, which traces the survival of the pre-modern romance across the entire body of nineteenth-century realist fiction (a fiction whose realism accordingly comes to seem less steady); and The Antinomies of Realism, which describes the swelling of literary affect across the same decades and in the same canon of novels. Realism thus preserves the storytelling impulses of its predecessor and rival (the magically heroic adventure story), while also undertaking in advance the very production of “intensities” that Jameson elsewhere told us was the work, distinctively, of modernism. What Jameson did not write is the one volume you might have expected from his hand—that neo-Lukacsian tract in which he enumerated all the vanished techniques of Balzaco-Dickensian cognitive mapping. The closest thing we have to that missing disquisition is his short book on Chandler, The Detections of Totality, which explains how one modernist-era writer was able in some fresh way to do the very thing that modernist writers were supposedly unable to do any more.

    Jameson’s writings are full of phase shifts of this kind, which we can conceptualize in a few different ways. The easiest approach would be to say that Jameson was unusually committed to the Raymond-Williamsite categories of the “residual” and the “emergent”: We must make the effort to discern historical periods, while also insisting that periods are never clean and discrete, that they all come before us bearing contamination and articulation and overlap. At the same time, Jameson’s variously romantic and modernist realisms are clearly dialectical figures, since one of the theorist’s more obviously Hegelian tasks will be to trace the incubation of a new mode in whatever seemingly inimical form preceded it—and then to trace its survival, as Aufhebung, even after its apparent obsolescence. If, meanwhile, you prefer your dialectics more negative than this, you could get away with saying nothing more than that Jameson seemed to prefer realism when it was least itself—and that he consistently looked to other literary modes to do the realist work that realism could no longer convincingly do.

    The issue, for now, is this: Measuring Jameson’s achievement (and our loss) requires us to periodize, and it was Jameson himself who did more than any other theorist to insist that periodization was both a) necessary, unavoidable; and b) a complex, non-empirical operation. So let’s reach back two paragraphs and say again: Periods are not realia; they have to be posited. Once you’ve grasped that point, it should be easy enough to make it, iteratively, for pretty much all of Jameson’s other master concepts. He was committed to periodization, but insisted over and over again that all periods were devices or mental constructs. Similarly, he was committed to thinking in terms of totality—to detailing what an anti-totalitarian thinking gives up when it tries to do without the very category of totality—while making it clear even so that the totality cannot be known, that all totality-talk is thus a conceit and model and more or less ingenious attempt at Darstellung, at representing a hyper-object about which we can properly say nothing. (Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must tell stories.) This makes it harder than one might have thought to distinguish Jameson from the post-structuralists with whom he kept company and who are typically regarded as his adversaries. For Jameson was as much an anti-foundationalist as any other left-wing Francophile writing in the ‘70s and ‘80s: a philosophical skeptic and resolute anti-positivist, careful not to get caught making strong knowledge claims, quick to point out that what one had all along thought to be things were actually fictions or arbitrary categories or discursive contrivances. His erudition was legendary: It was Jameson who, in reply to some visiting Spinozist, would have remarks at the ready about Jan de Witt and the fate of seventeenth-century Dutch republicanism; Jameson, too, who would sit up front at the Pacific historian’s sparsely attended talk and toss off questions about modernist architecture in Hawaii. And yet Jameson’s general conception of history was itself more or less skeptical. For to say that “history is what hurts” is to ask us to think of history above all as failure and limitation—our failure and our limitation—as the world’s recalcitrance, its hard check on our desires. This is a materialism, no doubt, but of some traumatic and non-cognizable kind, a materialism of the Real, in which history announces itself only in the occasional and crushing realization that we had history all wrong.

    What was it, then, that distinguished Jameson from any old literary Lacanian? We can come at the matter this way. Your run-of-the-mill anti-foundationalist typically makes two moves in quick succession: First, they declare all grand narratives (or what have you) to be fictions; and then they withdraw belief from all such fictions, retreating into a wary and disabused agnosticism, embarrassed by their former gullibility. It is this stance of negation that Jameson, in this respect entirely unlike Adorno, dispensed with. Enthusiastic about fiction in all its forms, he set out to catalog all the grand narratives; and he proved deft at reconstructing the Big Stories about History that subtend even those philosophical systems that thought they could do without them; and, crucially, he devised two or three Big Stories of his own, to place alongside these others, constructions among constructions. This stance, of course, separated him from more than just the skeptics. If even Marxist readers have sometimes struggled to get the hang of Jameson, then this is surely because he extended his attitude of affirmation even to historical materialism’s most fearsome bogeymen, the things you might have thought that no Marxist could make friends with: ideology, say, which Jameson told us was just the other side of utopianism, and even reification, without which, he concluded, no politics was possible. (The lesson of a lifetime spent thinking about allegory boils down to: If you want to fight it, you have to reify it.) The post-critical types who have nominated him the paranoid taskmaster of Kritik have to that extent got him exactly wrong. Hegelianism is that peculiar point of view from which you can look out over a field of contention and see that everyone is right.

    But then what about postmodernism, which is, after all, the word with which Jameson’s name will permanently be linked? Did he affirm that? We would do well to remind ourselves here of a remark he made frequently around 1990, at the height of the postmodernism debates, which is that he had grown weary of interlocutors asking him whether he liked postmodernism. Did he think it was a good thing? Or was he, when all was said and done, calling for the revival of a Left modernism? Postmodernism, he said, was not the sort of thing that could be either celebrated or condemned. It was—and here we can refine our formulation a bit—the bad thing that had to be affirmed. This position has everything to do with Jameson’s implicitly Hegelian ethics—with Hegel’s resolve not to be alienated, with his warnings against the romance of marginality and the heroics of total refusal; and this, in turn, leads directly to a Hegelian political orientation, which holds that any future we might build will have to go by way of the dominant. The better society will not be a fresh start; we will get there only by traversing the most powerful institutions, the most public discourses, the most official culture and by transposing these where possible. Postmodernism might mark the epochal victory of consumerism and media society on the terrain of art and inward experience—that, too, was Jameson’s claim—but the task in front of is nonetheless to figure out what else can be built with its materials.

    It becomes possible to wonder, at this point, whether Jameson wasn’t himself a postmodernist—not just a student of postmodernism, but a postmodern writer in his own right, to be ranked alongside Ballard and Barthelme and Calvino. The jumbling of high and low? When you are done reading his article on Proust, you can queue up his essay on The Godfather and Jaws—or on Spenser or on spaceships or on Conrad or on a Stephen King story. Flat affect? Has ever a Marxist written with more equanimity, without the tones of indignant sarcasm and subaltern pathos that mark the entire tradition from the Communist Manifesto onwards? The triumph of the image and the canceling of the referent? It was Jameson who pointed out that Doctorow had given us, in Ragtime, a historical novel in which history seemed blocked and unknowable, in which “real history” had given way to mirages and animatronics, a “hologram” of the past that differed from the fictions of Walter Scott in that it wanted you to know that it was a hologram. But then didn’t Jameson re-do Marxism to Doctorow’s specifications, preserving all the old historical materialist schemes while confessing upfront that these were and always had been stories? Wasn’t it Jameson who gave us Marxism with a buried, never appearing, thoroughly mediatized historical referent?

    And with that, it becomes possible to explain why it is so hard to say what comes after Jameson or where his leaving leaves us. His thinking was so intertwined with postmodernism that to imagine a time after Jameson is to imagine a time after postmodernism. His passing thus compels us to ask: Are we still postmodern? Or are we now after postmodernism? And the answers to those questions are surprisingly uncertain. That ours is no longer the moment of Robert Venturi and John Barth and Terry Riley seems clear enough. And yet doesn’t the Berlusconi-Trump era of Western politics strike you sometimes as Baudrillard’s bad joke? Aren’t memes an intensified and grassroots postmodernism for the Internet age? Brian de Palma may not be making movies anymore, but Quentin Tarantino sure is. Should one therefore propose the term “late postmodernism” and see if it sticks? But then what do we make of the rise of “world-building,” as both a term and a narrative practice (in blockbuster film and video games and long-form television), so different from the discombobulated worldlessness of high postmodernism? Or what do we make of radical philosophy’s ontological turn, which has traded the epistemological skepticism of the post-structuralist decades for a downright neo-scholastic metaphysics? Or again, if we conclude that postmodernism is or was art in the age of neoliberalism, then what do we make of the breakup of the neoliberal consensus? Equally, though, if we are really beyond postmodernism—if we have passed through it and out the other side—shouldn’t we be able to describe the present and maybe even name it and then say in some detail how the 2020s are not like the 1980s? Are we still postmodern? If that question has gone largely unasked—if the very formulation is perhaps a bit embarrassing—this is precisely the sign of the Jamesonian intelligence that has gone missing. The good thing is not yet here. But can we name at least the new bad thing and say how we plan to affirm it?

  • Hortense Spillers awarded honorary degree

    Hortense Spillers awarded honorary degree

    b2o is pleased to announce that our fellow bounder, Hortense Spillers, has been awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Humanities by Yale University in recognition of her “pioneering achievement or exemplary contribution to the common good”. As the citation puts it:

    Inspiring Black feminist theorist and critic, your foundational work, embedded in your deep historical and literary knowledge, challenges received thought and provides us a profound understanding of how race and gender shape the modern world. In three books and dozens of essays, you rewrite the American grammar book, claiming the insurgent ground as you revolutionize how we consider and write about our nation’s history and culture. Pioneering thinker, we celebrate the marvels of your inventiveness, and your enduring contributions to letters, as we proudly confer on you the degree of Doctor of Humanities.

    Please join us in congratulating Hortense on a recognition that is well-deserved!

    boundary 2 recently published a dossier on Hortense’s work that was edited by Paul Bové.

  • Paul Bové wins CELJ Distinguished Editor award

    Paul Bové wins CELJ Distinguished Editor award

    The Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ) has announced Paul Bové, who recently retired as boundary 2’s long-time editor, as one of two winners of the CELJ award in the “Distinguished Editor” category. The award will be announced at the annual Modern Language Association Convention, at the end of CELJ Session #276, Friday 01/05, from 1:45–3pm. boundary 2 and its community joins the CELJ in congratulating Paul on this outstanding achievement!

    According to the judges’ comments, Bové stood out among several exceptionally strong candidates for having served at least three decades at the helm of boundary 2. The judges credit Bové with instituting a new editorial vision for boundary 2 when it was struggling in its initial years of publication, and with building the journal’s reputation and influence over the past thirty years. The judges further praise Bové for developing an effective editorial collective rather than a strictly hierarchical approach to leadership, all to the benefit of a journal that has been consistently interdisciplinary and has published work that has been significantly influential across several fields.

  • R.A. Judy receives Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism

    R.A. Judy receives Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism

    b2o: the online community of boundary 2 would like to congratulate our fellow bounder, R.A. Judy, on receiving the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism for his book Sentient Flesh: Thinking in Disorder, Poièsis in Black (Duke University Press, 2020).

    Noting Judy’s outstanding work for decades prior to this landmark book, the selection committee emphasized that Judy’s “work as a philosopher, a literary and cultural critic, a teacher, an editor, and a colleague is a unique and emphatic announcement of what a certain fundamental strain of and in black studies has long been—namely the irruptive, disruptive turning and overturning of the ontological, metaphysical and epistemological foundations of modernity”.

    Previous winners of the award include Fred Moten, who recently interviewed Judy for boundary 2 and b2o.

    Judy is currently leading the team of 5 that edits boundary 2.

  • In Memoriam: David Golumbia

    In Memoriam: David Golumbia

    b2o: the online community of boundary 2 is mourning our friend and co-editor David Alan Golumbia. David had recently been elected as part of a six-person team to edit boundary 2 after the journal’s longtime editor Paul Bové stepped down. Apart from having been a founding and driving force behind b2o, where so much of his work remains visible through the reviews he solicited and special issues he edited or co-edited, David was also a passionate teacher at Virginia Commonwealth University, where he was Professor of English. At b2o and in the editorial collective of b2, we knew David as a generously critical scholar whose expertise in computation studies and media studies (and far beyond) we appreciated and learned from.

    As a scholar, David will be remembered for his landmark book The Cultural Logic of Computation (Harvard University Press, 2009) and its critique of what he called “computationalism”. David worked closely together on this project with his editor at Harvard, our fellow bounder Lindsay Waters. David’s short polemic The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), a book from which I date my own conversations with David, began to sketch what would become his highly anticipated second book, Cyberlibertarianism (to be published by the University of Minnesota Press).

    David presented materials from Cyberlibertarianism the last time I saw him, at the boundary 2 conference at Dartmouth in April 2022. Perhaps because I had initially encountered his voice on Twitter (now known as X) where David (in spite of his dislike of the medium) was often engaged in important and at times heated debates, his real-life presence always struck me as soft-spoken, kind, and caring in its delivery of his sharp insights. Many of us still saw David at the most recent boundary 2 event in April 2023 and we are deeply shocked by his sudden passing. Our community has lost, in the words of Paul Bové (who brought David into the boundary 2 collective), “an outstanding bounder: a good friend, a fine correspondent, a generous person, and a rigorous intellectual” whose work and spirit we intend to memorialize in future projects.

    –Arne De Boever, on behalf of boundary 2 online: the online community of boundary 2

  • 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

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    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

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    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.

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    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.

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    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).

  • 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