Entries tagged with Marxism

June 9, 2025

Entry 66: Antagonism and Left Poetics

In 2013, I took the stage at a session of the Modern Language Association in Boston, on a panel hosted by the Marxist scholar Jason Baskin on “Marxism and Modernist Studies.” My hope was to extend an argument I raised about Language writing and neoliberalism at the 2008 Orono Conference to an account of modernist poetics—expatriate poet Eugene Jolas’s editing of transition magazine in the 20s and 30s. But I also wanted to start a dialogue, even a polemic, with the new school of Marxist poet-critics I had encountered there: Joshua Clover, Christopher Nealon, and Ruth Jennison. With Clover’s recent, untimely death, various tributes and memories have circulated, for example this Orono photo by Patrick Pritchett. I had some memories of Clover too, some of them benign and some less so, which when I mentioned them led to a considerable reaction and disclosure of an antagonistic post mentioning me, linked here. The link to Clover’s writing online led to the “blog” published in 2019 (see here for full discussion). It turns out Clover had published an anonymous hit piece on the “blog,” which up until then I could not place or interpret. The scene he describes, it turns out, was the session at MLA Boston in 2013. The main argument of my paper has since been published (see here), but without the opening polemic with Clover, Nealon, and Jennison. To understand, and refute, Clover’s anonymous “blog” post as participating in the larger group take-down of my work and person, it is necessary to return to the traumatic scene itself, which Clover describes in these terms: … More

October 4, 2024

Entry 62: The One Great Story

Remarks on Jameson and Narrative

Under any house is a basement of psychological dimensions, a surplus affective space. And as I read The Political Unconscious into the night, a sump pump in the basement would go on and off, shunting gallons of water out of its perpetual flood. An editor asked me for a theory of such drainage in the form of a critical review, which I refused as not entirely serious. —”Foxes,” Bad History, 60

The year is 1981. Carla Harryman and I are living in a working-class bungalow on Hampshire Street in San Francisco’s Mission District, competing with raccoon families and occasional gunshots to establish a relationship in an indeterminate time. Ronald Reagan has been elected, while the alternative arts are forging ahead on multiple agendas. Poets Theater is in full swing, with a character called “Jameson” in Kit Robinson’s play, as I discussed previously. Jameson has entered the Language and New Narrative debates and given his talk at 80 Langton Street, siding with Narrative while symptomatizing Language, but also has now published The Political Unconscious, a watershed work that would have long-term impact on questions of narrative and form. Jameson’s “questions of interpretation,” bringing together form and history, would anchor a more expansive, contextual methodology not confined to surface language—bypassing precisely the critique of Language’s dissociation of sensibility in the postmodern. The “turn to history” via poetic form begins right here. … More

December 28, 2015

Document 39: Transvaluations II

Barrett Watten, “The Poet/Critic:
Transvaluations of Value after Modernism”
MSA, 20 November 2015

I continue my discussion of the poetics of value in modernism (Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams) in taking up political economy and poetics as twin forms of historically specific making, twin discourses of the determination of value. For poetics as value making, let me advance that the thirty-six individual essays in our recent Guide to Poetics Journal, along with the editorial and publication work involved in soliciting, editing, rethinking, and repurposing their content, counts as such. Each essay in our Guide—for example, Ron Silliman on “the parsimony principle,” George Lakoff on avant-garde framing, Susan Howe on Emily Dickinson, Lyn Hejinian on “the rejection of closure,” in the volume’s first section—demonstrates how poetry is a value-making activity, in giving value to it. … More

Event 55: Transvaluations I

Transvaluations of Value: Poetics and Political Economy
Session P28, 8:30–10:00 A.M., Friday, 20 November 2015
Modernist Studies Association

Herman Rapaport, “Transvaluations of Value: Fredric Jameson, Jackson Mac Low”
Barrett Watten, “The Poet/Critic: Transvaluations of Value After Modernism”
Tyrone Williams, “‘The Changing Same’: Value in Marx and Amiri Baraka”

This panel takes up debates between poetics and political economy after the recent turn to Marxist political economy as a materialist interpretive strategy for poetry and poetics. In a contrary move, a return to the aesthetic as a construction of value, sited in a more classical reading of modernist form by Charles Altieri, appropriates the concept of “value” for self-reflexive poetic forms. The three presenters will develop approaches to the concept of value that are irreducible either to economism, especially the commodity form, or to the aesthetic, e.g. modernism, and will seek to articulate more inclusive accounts of value that extend political economy to other value-producing registers in the horizons of art, history, ethics, and politics. [See next post.]

January 20, 2013

Document 20: Modernism and Value

Modernism and the Abstraction of Value:
Poetry and Political Economy in transition (1927-38)

During this recent era, linguistic understandings of political economy found purchase for a wealth of reasons, many of which have a grounding in actual conditions. Nonetheless [. . .] the literarity of such conceptions ended up participating in, and sometimes generating, serious analytic errors . . . . The misrecognitions of value engendered by modes of literarity thus pose a radical limit to the history of the present. —Joshua Clover, “Value/Theory/Crisis” (107, 109)

[Introduction]

In my lecture at the Poetry of the 70s conference at University of Maine (under the rubric “Late Capitalism and Language Writing”; 2008), I made a strong claim that the “turn to language” in poetry must be seen as simultaneously a response to the emergent horizon of neo­liberalism after 1973 along with an anticipatory illumination, undertaken at the level of form, of what the new order of intensified commodification and mobility of capital would look like—and how it might be comprehended and opposed. … More