Is there anything more to say about Bob Perelman's "China"?

"China," of course, is best known for being Fredric Jameson's target poem in "Postmodernism, or the Logic of Late Capitalism" (1984); but Jameson found the poem in the second issue of the San Francisco literary magazine Soup (1981), edited by Steve Abbott, opposite the title page of Bruce Boone's trenchant left critique of Language poetry, "The Pluses and Minuses of the New Formalism." My talk aims to presence the occluded relations between these texts.

In his essay, Jameson reads "China" for its manner of performing the "schizophrenic" disintegration of referential language, which is for him a principal characteristic of late capitalism's simulacral abstraction. Jameson's reading has been countered and overturned, most notably by George Hartley in Textual Politics and the Language Poets, as part of an effort to redeem not only this one poem, but Language writing more generally, as if what was at stake were that project's own political pedigree. Boone's essay, together with Soup #2 in its entirety, offers us a much needed corrective to these arguments, as it sets Perelman's work in relief against a wide range of emerging writing practices, thereby making a more dynamic social ecology legible.

Soup #2, focused specifically on what Abbott referred to as "New Narrative," which he situated in productive tension with an ascendant Language Poetry. Abbott glossed New Narrative in his editorial statement as being "language conscious, but arising out of specific social and political concerns of specific communities." He continued by noting that New Narrative "stresses the enabling role of content in determining form rather than stressing form as independent, separate from its social origins and goals." This contradicted Ron Silliman's programmatic formulation, which can be found in the same issue (in a piece called, "Modes of Autobiography"): "New content occurs within already existing forms; new forms contain already-existing contents". New Narrative complicates and resists Silliman's generalization insofar as it activated not only new narrative modalities, but aimed to potentiate future community content, rather than merely express the already given. The specific social and political concerns in and thru which New Narrative found its full articulation, of course, were those of the gay community at a time when community-targeted violence seemed relentless: from youth gang violence to police violence; from random harassment to calculated murder.

In my talk, I'll suggest that Jameson's critique of "China," as well as the various efforts to redeem the poem, have taken place abstractly and at the expense of real community histories. Indeed, Jameson's blindness to the social vectors traversing his "example" — if not his tacit dismissal of the actual pages from which he lifted the poem — has been reproduced by subsequent counter-arguments. By restoring "China" to its native habitat, we gain access to an otherwise submerged set of community-based tensions and collaborations within the rich and contestatory left poetry scene in late-seventies San Francisco.

I will go on to argue that the initial appraisal of Language poetry didn't occur in Jameson's essay, nor did it take place in the mid-80s during the so-called "poetry wars" in San Francisco, when the term "language-bashing" was first used to connote unfriendly attacks on the one group's aesthetic practices. This critique rather took place as early as 1979 by gay writers like Abbott and Boone in a more productive way — motivated neither by abstract theorizing nor by resentiment, but by a political need to recognize a set of shared stakes. The catachrestic transposition from gay-bashing to language-bashing can thus be read as a symptom, a memory trace, or residue of the specifically queer content of that "primal scene" where a debate between Language Poetry and a radical left critique was first enacted.

As for "language-bashing": language doesn't get "bashed," people get bashed, and in the 70s, gay people in particular were being bashed, even in safe havens like San Francisco. Significantly, the critique of Language Poetry's insufficiencies as an engaged writing practice came to early articulation from a Queer / Left position faithful to the more critical imperatives of Gay Liberation that aimed beyond the mere expression of reified identity, while seeking to activate non-instrumental social relations through new subjectivities and affects. This was part of a struggle to transform real conditions in the present, with the promise of a community to come.

Is there anything more to say about Bob Perelman's "China"?

"China," of course, is best known for being Fredric Jameson's target poem in "Postmodernism, or the Logic of Late Capitalism" (1984); but Jameson found the poem in the second issue of the San Francisco literary magazine Soup (1981), edited by Steve Abbott, opposite the title page of Bruce Boone's trenchant left critique of Language poetry, "The Pluses and Minuses of the New Formalism." My talk aims to presence the occluded relations between these texts.

In his essay, Jameson reads "China" for its manner of performing the "schizophrenic" disintegration of referential language, which is for him a principal characteristic of late capitalism's simulacral abstraction. Jameson's reading has been countered and overturned, most notably by George Hartley in Textual Politics and the Language Poets, as part of an effort to redeem not only this one poem, but Language writing more generally, as if what was at stake were that project's own political pedigree. Boone's essay, together with Soup #2 in its entirety, offers us a much needed corrective to these arguments, as it sets Perelman's work in relief against a wide range of emerging writing practices, thereby making a more dynamic social ecology legible.

Soup #2, focused specifically on what Abbott referred to as "New Narrative," which he situated in productive tension with an ascendant Language Poetry. Abbott glossed New Narrative in his editorial statement as being "language conscious, but arising out of specific social and political concerns of specific communities." He continued by noting that New Narrative "stresses the enabling role of content in determining form rather than stressing form as independent, separate from its social origins and goals." This contradicted Ron Silliman's programmatic formulation, which can be found in the same issue (in a piece called, "Modes of Autobiography"): "New content occurs within already existing forms; new forms contain already-existing contents". New Narrative complicates and resists Silliman's generalization insofar as it activated not only new narrative modalities, but aimed to potentiate future community content, rather than merely express the already given. The specific social and political concerns in and thru which New Narrative found its full articulation, of course, were those of the gay community at a time when community-targeted violence seemed relentless: from youth gang violence to police violence; from random harassment to calculated murder.

In my talk, I'll suggest that Jameson's critique of "China," as well as the various efforts to redeem the poem, have taken place abstractly and at the expense of real community histories. Indeed, Jameson's blindness to the social vectors traversing his "example" — if not his tacit dismissal of the actual pages from which he lifted the poem — has been reproduced by subsequent counter-arguments. By restoring "China" to its native habitat, we gain access to an otherwise submerged set of community-based tensions and collaborations within the rich and contestatory left poetry scene in late-seventies San Francisco.

I will go on to argue that the initial appraisal of Language poetry didn't occur in Jameson's essay, nor did it take place in the mid-80s during the so-called "poetry wars" in San Francisco, when the term "language-bashing" was first used to connote unfriendly attacks on the one group's aesthetic practices. This critique rather took place as early as 1979 by gay writers like Abbott and Boone in a more productive way — motivated neither by abstract theorizing nor by resentiment, but by a political need to recognize a set of shared stakes. The catachrestic transposition from gay-bashing to language-bashing can thus be read as a symptom, a memory trace, or residue of the specifically queer content of that "primal scene" where a debate between Language Poetry and a radical left critique was first enacted.

As for "language-bashing": language doesn't get "bashed," people get bashed, and in the 70s, gay people in particular were being bashed, even in safe havens like San Francisco. Significantly, the critique of Language Poetry's insufficiencies as an engaged writing practice came to early articulation from a Queer / Left position faithful to the more critical imperatives of Gay Liberation that aimed beyond the mere expression of reified identity, while seeking to activate non-instrumental social relations through new subjectivities and affects. This was part of a struggle to transform real conditions in the present, with the promise of a community to come.