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). 

The University in Turmoil: Global Perspectives

We are writing to solicit work for a boundary 2 online dossier on “The University in Turmoil: Global Perspectives.” With a nod to Immanuel Wallerstein’s book on the 1968 student protests at Columbia University, the dossier seeks to provide selected snapshots of the student protests that are being staged across the world against authoritarian regimes, tuition increases, complicity in genocide, and a host of other issues (flashpoints include Bangladesh, Gaza, Algeria, India, Hong Kong…).

What do these protests reveal about the state of the university today? About its complicity in state, financial, military, and corporate interests? To what extent can student protests chart a way forward for the university? What do the protests reveal about what we want the university to be, today? These are some of the questions the dossier will consider across a broad range of settings and writerly forms.

If you are interested in contributing, please contact boundary 2 online’s editors, Arne De Boever and Christian Thorne.

**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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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