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:

At MLA, I attended a talk where Barrett was one of the speakers. Some portion of his talk was about my scholarly work, in hostile terms (enough so that other attendees were looking over at me to see my reaction). In the Q&A I asked a question of the other speaker, an innovative scholar and, perhaps significantly, a woman. When it was over I made to leave. At a later moment (I can’t recall if it was immediately after the talk), Barrett approached me in the hallway and asked why I hadn’t asked him any questions. I explained that I didn’t have any questions for him, we simply disagreed. I walked down the hallway, trying to depart. He accompanied me uninvited, berating me more and more intensely both for “not engaging” with him and for speaking critically of Language poetry. [Clover’s anonymous post]

Up until this point, I recognize the scene. Clover and Nealon were both in the audience; the second talk was being given by Jennison (but why the effort to cover up the participants; why an anonymous post?); Nathan Brown, who was scheduled, did not show up and there was ample room for both papers and Q&A. The discussion of Clover’s work was anything but hostile, as the passages below show. The “value crew,” as I call them, were however not disposed to engage; their supportive remarks went to Jennison alone: she was one of them and I was an outsider, obviously. My opening, in any case, followed Clover’s own polemic on Language writing in a widely known article in PMLA. All this seemed within the norms of critical debate; also I knew Clover on more informal terms (there is an amusing history about our meeting at an earlier MLA)[1]. I did, I recall, try to engage him in the hall—though this is where his account diverges from what actually took place. I will turn here to what I actually read from my opening sections of “Modernism and Abstraction of Value,” beginning with the epigraph:

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)

While there are a number of “linguistic understandings of political economy,” Clover focuses on their “literarity” or poetics; his point is that the “turn to language,” as may be found in poetry, “generate[s] serious analytic errors” as “the misrecognitions of value.” An example of such literarity might the notion that the New Sentence, as theorized by Ron Silliman and developed by me, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, and others into a formal device that negotiates ideology and value in the neoliberal regime we live in and suffer, without any hope of “standing outside it.” The use of the New Sentence, as part of the general foregrounding of language, as a materialist critique is widespread in early and late in Language writing (most recently in Hejinian’s Positions of the Sun). As well, the connection between Language writing and materialist poetics was the topic of my keynote at the Orono conference in 2008, one of the several occasions where Clover and I met, which I then referenced:

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. The experience of poets [. . .] in the 1970s was of necessity framed by a new political and economic horizon, with the end of the long wave of capital accumulation after 1945; parallel recessions in the major industrialized nations; increased capital fluidity through changes to the monetary system; and the combined authoritarian/free market repression in Chile and elsewhere to come. The “turn to language” in poetry (as in other arts and cultural theory) that followed was an irreducibly complex negotiation between literary and philosophical influences and historical conditions that did result in a structural analogy between poetic form and political economy at that formative moment. This analogy has been overly simplified, however, in casting the saturation of commodity culture and global penetration of the market in terms of the separation of signifier from signified within a dominant postmodernism, to the extent that it can be reduced to a portable operative term. . . . [Text here]

I was setting the ground for how I understood a poetics of value intersected with the turn to language, and referencing Clover’s work in doing so. This is standard critical practice: define an issue; cite a counterposition; and develop an alternative. One might have found it somewhat flattering, but it seemed to touch a nerve. I continued:

My audience for the Orono talk included three critics of poetry who have done much to refunction material signification in terms of political economy—Joshua Clover, Christopher Nealon, and Ruth Jennison. I want take up the challenge offered by all three, insofar as they have collectively absorbed and gone beyond two positions that dominated Marxist accounts of modernist literary production—Adornean critical negativity and Jamesonian periodizing narrativity. My approach to poetry of the 70s is without question located at the intersection of both—focusing on the device of the “radical particular” (paratactic form from Dada to the New Sentence) within the nonnarrative form of extended texts such as Ron Silliman’s The Alphabet, Carla Harryman’s Adorno’s Noise, or Rob Halpern’s Music for Porn . . . . This move to political economy within a refunctioned Marxism has the direct benefit of a presentist account of the crisis of capitalism after 2008, demanding a reflexive analysis in which poetry and political economy are read in like terms. . . . The unmediated directness of this move does, at least with Nealon and Clover, participate in the presentism demanded by the financial crisis and, subsequently, by the politics of Occupy. . . . I see this particularly in Clover’s innovative reading of a nonnarrative poem by Clark Coolidge, which he used to show how poetic devices can provide insight into the discursive construction of finance capital’s mobility and crises (“The Double Dip and the Politics of Crisis”).

Again, setting the stage for how to talk about political economy and poetics, particularly after 2008, I use the word “presentist” in the sense that analysis of poetic texts will be undertaken from diagnoses of the crisis of capitalism we are now in, not in its historical development. This keyword would be later misunderstood.

In Clover’s reading, the use of enjambment to foreground semantic ambiguity in Coolidge’s improvisatory writing immediately suggests the retroactive determination (Nachträglichkeit) of mobile capital’s determination of price at a specific temporal moment, irrespective of the structural determination of value in terms of labor or exchange. Let us adapt, to poetic form, the following problem from our life as we know it: How much is my house worth? It is not the labor and materials it cost to build and maintain it, nor is it is value in exchange with comparable houses on the market. Rather, its value as price is determined by a specific moment of finance capital, subject to the global markets for equities and secondary derivatives; price cannot be determined in advance, rather it retrospectively constructs the market. Time is of the essence, as is true of every real estate deal, but not in a narrative unfolding; this is where poetry’s nonnarrative forms can be instructive. Just so, Coolidge’s line breaks [suggest] how value as price is determined in its nonnarrative unfolding, in the same way that options for meaning are realized through the formal stabilization of its sliding signifiers: “I smoke and burn. I am moving in / opposite directions at once. / Like a sentence, when written, seems to / move backwards to complete its hold / on itself. The dialectic of forward / and reverse. Weigh on which end / will the work be completed today?”

Being the dutiful critic, I follow the extract of Coolidge’s poem with Clover’s reading (he sent me his paper):

Note the relatively gentle use of disjunction in breaking lines that nonetheless insists on the specific problem of unity and non-unity: how “at once” gets a full stop, a point de capiton, while “hold / on itself,” with its surprising turn, does not, neither “dialectic of forward / and reverse.” Note even moreso the opening move and how its contradiction will not make sense until the logic of retcon [retrospective construction] has been fully set forth, forward and reverse, until the term can be grasped precisely because it is both first and last, smoke and burn. [Clover MS]

To keep the audience engaged and amused, I made a slight joke referencing our common alma mater, the Workshop: “Clover and I share a common methodological perspective of the Iowa Writers Workshop, where discussion of line endings was symptomatic (of a denial of larger claims for poetics?). It is thus ironic that the turn to language here becomes the framework of political economy, whose shifting values are seen as linguistic and structural, through a point de capiton which stabilizes discourse like the nonexistent imaginary buttons on an overstuffed chaise longue.” This was a mild tease turning edgy, as a lot of weight is being placed on Coolidge’s line breaks, paralleling a cliché of readings one might hear in the Workshop in former times. This suggested an alternative:

What also strikes me is that so many mediating considerations are left out of this reading: why should political economy turn to poetry; what are Coolidge’s aesthetics and larger poetics; what about contexts of all sorts? The first I can think of (and did) was the formal logic of “push/pull” common to Abstract Expressionism, promulgated by Hans Hoffman and other painters, as interpreted by New York School poets from Frank O’Hara (“I do this, I do that”) to Ted Berrigan (“turn to the left, turn to the right”)—before the flatness of Warholian postmodernism took over, one may add. The formal use of (dis)ambiguating enjambment is all over Berrigan’s Sonnets, within a larger tradition of collage art and concomitant dismantling of its formal unity. An entire history of poetics is thus left out, along with its connections to political economy not only through formal devices but other determinants of poetic value. And nothing precludes discussion of other “values” at the intersection of aesthetics, production, and reception in the poem. . . .

What I am saying is that Clover’s reading really is formalist and presentist, in bracketing the many historical and poetic reasons for the shifting lingual emphasis that takes place in Coolidge’s work from line to line. I argue that “values” of this aesthetic context (especially materiality and abstraction) cannot be left out of the account:

While combining materiality and abstraction in a manner derived from abstract painting, Coolidge adopts a minimalist diction after postwar existentialism in Samuel Beckett and Robert Creeley, whose commitment to material conditions is enacted in their radical focus on temporality; and he follows the Beat writers in combining self-reflexivity with open-form improvisation. None of these “values” can be excluded from a reading of Coolidge’s negotiation of value in the poem, and all may be accessible to political economy in one way or another—in literal, metaphorical, and allegorical terms. Only a combined reading can point the way to-ward that great inexpressible engine of modernity, capital.

This is the payoff for poetics: the focus on the device of the line break has any number of values without being reduced to a particular equation of value, as Clover proposes with his model of “Retcon,” or retrospective construction. However sophisticated a reading of Marx on value and price he may bring, there is more to the poetics. Thus while I agree that current economics may call for a “presentism” in reading poetry, I also look at the historical development of the turn to language in the device of the “radical particular,” for me the placeholder for value thinking in Language writing (versus the “vanishing mediator” of the line break). My paper went from there to describe a modernist poetics that brought together multiple authors and languages, resulting in an aesthetic of “abstraction” in poetry in the postwar period, produced in the journal transition. In that context, the materialism is in the production of multiple authors, a fact of poetic community if not proto-communism. Material production of poetry, as an accumulation of value, faces off theoretical speculation on line breaks.

That was the argument, but the reaction on the part of the “value crew” was to close ranks; there was also a gender politics, in the move to split my discussion from Jennison’s work (I count her as a friend). “Splitting” is the operative psychic mechanism here; it is, in Kleinian terms, a defense. Whatever threatens is split off, resulting in an exclusion that guarantees psychic coherence: this is what “Left antagonism” does in forming the nucleus of its political formation. It may be then, in the sense of Nachträglichkeit, that my opening gambit to call out Left theoreticism was playing a dangerous game that could only lead to a “split” in poetics:

He told me that my criticism was Oedipal and presentist. At some point I saw a friend who was there for job interviews and I tried to disengage from Barrett again to speak with my friend. He would not leave. I walked on as he grew increasingly agitated that I both disagreed with him and wouldn’t debate him. By this time we were in the convention center’s large atrium. I tried one final time to disengage, saying I was going back to my hotel. He put his forearm around my neck to stop me from leaving. I was having trouble dealing with it; it was so bizarre and disturbing. [Redacted] came hustling out of a café in the atrium and in his gentle way physically removed Barrett’s arm and stood in his way. I was very shaken and went back to my hotel, immediately telling my friend [redacted] about it. [Clover’s anonymous post]

This is where the retrospection get dicey. First, I did not accuse Clover of “Oedipalism”; that must have been in his head, and perhaps a part of our relationship, as we will see. I did use the term “presentism” in my paper, which was the point of the argument: to set up the historical construction of value as abstraction in transition. Then, the narrative goes wild. I may have pestered him a little, but I absolutely did not touch him or “put [my] forearm around my neck to stop [him] from leaving.” Where this material came from in retrospect is anyone’s guess, but because the post is anonymous there is no fact checking—no opportunity to rebut this falsehood. It is important to note also that I am several inches shorter than Clover (see photo); it would be difficult to put my arm around his neck. He without question made this up.

This moment informs the conduct of Left poetics in larger terms: the use of call-out and cancel culture after the crisis in poetry around 2015 (Kenneth Goldsmith and Vanessa Place’s racialized conceptualism; the canceling of the Berkeley Poetry Conference; the online tactics of Mongrel Coalition and Cathy Park Hong’s attack on the avant-garde’s “whiteness”). I would never reduce these politics to mere “splitting,” though splitting does occur as a collective psychic mechanism, and it is part of what I experienced in the mobbing attack in 2019. The second issue is “Oedipalism,” and this bears discussion.[2] While the strictly Freudian account is too much, or too little—it is, in his view, a psychic universal—the “band of brothers,” their murder of the totem father (see photo), and the position of women in the collective (see detail) are activated. Something like a “Gen-oedipalism” is involved; an antagonism toward the prior generation (mine, postwar, the badly named “boomers”) from the perspective of Gen X, who lack the historical emergence from the Zero Hour of 1945. That lack is displaced from the father figure (Power), which they want to preserve, onto a disposable generation of obsolete rivals, which summarizes a dynamic that occurs throughout this material.

Clover advertised his role as editor of Commune Editions as “purveyor of antagonisms.”[3] Antagonism, for Slavoj Žižek, is the “traumatic kernel” of ideological fantasy; it is the psychic mechanism that keeps one from being oneself. An antagonism is what one cannot get past. It is also a contestation of power that provokes ideology as false consciousness. Is it politically progressive or regressive? The fabled debate between me and Amiri Baraka may be seen in both terms: two competing versions of antagonism as politics (Black liberation; anti-war resistance).[4] Somehow, early on, I was internalized in Clover’s head as “antagonistic kernel” that would displace him from Oedipal resolution. The series of interactions that followed—at the 2000 Politics of the 60s conference at Orono as well as the 70s conference in 2008—were a continual reenactment of his antagonism. Was this justified as a politics, or was it merely personal? This would be for Clover to resolve, except that he off-loaded it onto me in 2019 (and was recirculating it as late as 2022, as we see here). It has been destructive for my person and work that it went on so long, and it is too bad that Joshua is no longer with us, if it were possible to set this right. In the political present we should not be trashing others along the way, to put our sights on bigger issues ahead.

Notes, readings, links

[1] I first met Clover at the 1991 MLA in San Francisco; this was very early on. We both attended a session where Marjorie Perloff had valorized Nathaniel Mackey’s work, which gave rise to my comment to the young poet, exiting the session, that he recorded in a poem: “Modern Language Association Annual (Near Mission Dolores),” Zyzzyva 9, no. 1 (Fall): 8, which reads, “Marjorie is a racist, says Barry.” I wrote Clover a strongly worded letter saying that if he wanted to call someone a racist, he needed to do so on his own dime.
[2] Note that Clover introduces the term, but also that his account of Coolidge is Lacanian, referring to the point de capiton or “quilting points” of the analysand’s speech, and Freudian, in the concept of Nachträglichkeit—the “back formation” of suggestion that is everywhere in gossip and mobbing.
[3] His book Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings is now being promoted by Verso [here] during the event of the Los Angeles resistance to ICE.
[4] Clover (as a member of Commune Editions) and I engaged in a contentious debate on Jacket2 concerning the 2000 Orono Poetry of the 60s conference; see Jasper Bernes, Jasper, Clover, and Juliana Spahr, “Baraka / the divide,” Jacket2, 4 January 2014 [here]; and Barrett Watten, “Entry 3: More on Orono,” Jacket2, 6 January 2014 [here]. This erupted a year after the 2013 MLA.

Image: Jasper Bernes, Christopher Nealon, Tim Kreiner, and Joshua Clover, Poetry of the 1970s conference, University of Maine, Orono, 2008. Photo: Patrick Pritchett.

Texts: Joshua Clover, “The Double Dip and the Politics of Crisis,” paper presented at ACLA, Providence, 2012. For my record of attendees, a veritable roll call of “Left poetics,” see “Event 28: I Met (ACLA)” here.
———. “Value/Theory/Crisis,” PMLA 127, no. 1 (January 2012): 107–14.
Barrett Watten, “Dark Night of the Universal: transition (1927–38) as Region of the Modern,” Music, Avant-Gardes, and Counterculture: Invisible Republics, ed. Anabela Duarte (London: Palgrave): 97–112; available here.
———. “Late Capitalism and Language Writing,” Questions of Poetics: Language Writing and Consequences (Iowa City: U Iowa P, 2016), chap. 2.