Introduction

It would be difficult to overstate the significance of Kevin Floyd’s work. The Reification of Desireis nothing less than a foundational text. It is a touchstone for anyone who wants to make sense of the vexing debates between queer theory and Marxism in the academy, as well as a striking and original contribution to Marxist thought in its own right—one that has paved the way for countless interventions.1 Floyd’s basic claim is that queerness names a specific standpoint onto capitalism: an “immanent perspective on social relations” that is capable of grasping certain features of those relations that might not be visible or thinkable from other, differently-situated perspectives. According to Floyd, both Marxism and queer theory share a “critical disposition toward particularizing knowledges”2; this means that both Marxism and queer theory in the last analysis involve an aspiration to totality, which registers a specific imbrication within the history and structure of global capitalism—an imbrication which finally makes both Marxism and queer theory critical, indeed possibly oppositional, perspectives.3

In this essay I will attempt to bring the insights of this work to bear on the avant-garde poetics of the Language poets, a Bay Area group that flourished provocatively in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I will proceed by way of a close reading of Steve Benson’s long poem “Blue Books,” which was written between 1979 and 1980 and published in 1988 in the near-eponymous collection Blue Book.In a long note on the text—to which we’ll return below—Benson describes the composition of “Blue Books” as a kind of “improvisation,” undertaken in a set of fifty exam blue books given to him by a friend teaching at Yale. Drawing on the conceptual resources that Floyd furnishes in The Reification of Desire,I will show how this concept of “improvisation,” and the aesthetic thinking that it frames in “Blue Books,” register the uncertain status of the avant-garde as a counterinstitution in the midst of the transition to a post-Fordist regime of accumulation—what we sometimes shorthand as neoliberalism.

By reading Benson’s work in this light, I hope to pay tribute to the memory of Kevin Floyd, and to remember him for his intellectual rigor and comradely warmth and generosity. At the same time, I hope to make a modest contribution to recent debates about avant-garde poetics, which have ineluctably centered around the history, genealogy, and legacy of Language poetry and poetics. In these debates Benson occupies a curious position. On the one hand, he is a core member of Language poetry, as evidenced by his participation in the Grand Pianoseries—an “experiment in collective autobiography” written by the ten writers who were most involved in consolidating this poetic tendency in the Bay Area.4 Benson is also one of the co-authors (with Silliman, Harryman, Hejinian, Perelman, and Watten) of “Aesthetic Tendency and the Politics of Poetry,” which initially appeared in print in Social Textin 1987, bearing the subtitle “A Manifesto”5: a work that lays out some of the basic tenets of Language poetics, most importantly the group’s focus on the materiality of the linguistic sign—a focus derived from, though by no means simply assimilable to, the teachings of structuralist linguistics about the radical non-identity of the signifier and the signified—and their consequent investment in a kind of theoretical anti-humanism. On the other hand, Benson’s poetry doesn’t really fit with the critical picture of Language poetry that has taken shape in the years following the group’s canonization, which revolves around the ideology of the literary or linguistic fragment. By contrast, Benson’s work seems much more concerned with how poetry can take up and explore epistemological questions about the relations between parts and wholes—questions, that is, about totality and totalization—than it is with fragmentation. I hasten to add that Benson is not alone among the Language poets in exploring totality, though he is certainly among the most explicit about his totalizing intentions. My wager in focusing on his work is that it makes it possible to revisit other Language poets, to see their work in new ways and perhaps reevaluate the stakes of their interventions without reference to the unfortunate shibboleth of the fragment.

But what really makes Benson a propitious touchstone for the present essay is that his totality thinking is directly articulated with a desire to address queerness in his work. Kaplan Harris has convincingly argued that this investment in questions about sexuality tendentially aligns Benson with the work of the New Narrative movement, another Bay Area avant-garde whose work emerged directly out of the revolutionary foment of the New Left—particularly Gay Liberation—and who mounted trenchant, if finally sympathetic, critiques of the Language poets for their failure to take identity and subalternity seriously. Here again, on the terrain of sexuality, we find Benson making references to the matter of improvisation. As we’ll see in a moment, Benson turns to improvisation in one of his most suggestive entries in The Grand Piano project, as a way to define his relationship to—and difference from—New Narrative writers where queerness is concerned. This difference responds to, is a mediation of, the defeat of the revolutionary movements of the 1970s; and it encodes Benson’s sense of the perceived viability of carrying on or resuming those revolutions into the 1980s.

Ultimately, I will suggest that this contradictory deployment of improvisation in Benson’s work—as a figure for poetic militancy, and a concept of non-militant (though by no means anti-militant) queerness—both responds to the transitional moment within capitalism that gives rise to post-Fordism, and speaks to debates about avant-garde and revolutionary poetics in our own crisis-ridden moment. These debates essentially recapitulate the older debates about Language poetry, hinging on a familiar false choice between formal experimentation and the direct representation of the miseries of capitalism. We recognize this choice as the basic crux of debates about modernism and realism—the Adorno/Lukács debates. In this context, reading Benson’s work can help us sublate this stale binary and reorient ourselves toward recent histories of militant poetics that unfold around the question of totality, rather than specific positions about form, content, or the correct political relation between these terms. This in turn will lead us back to the militancy in our own moment, and help us listen to the poetry that has arisen and is arising within and alongside a resurgence of communist politics.

Improvisation and Totality

Let’s ease into thinking about Steve Benson’s poetics in the 1980s by examining a more recent prose piece: his contribution to the sixth volume of the collaborative Grand Piano. In this essay, written in 2008, Benson responds to a framing question about writing and the body posed at the beginning of the book by recounting his ambivalence toward the queer aesthetics and politics of gay liberation—what he calls the “gay revolution” of the 1970s. This ambivalence stemmed from the sense that the struggle for gay liberation, which began in earnest in 1969 with the rebellion at the Stonewall Inn in New York City, had been coopted by capitalism by the mid-1970s; a once-utopian vision of sexual self-determination had been replaced by a “consumer-oriented construction of sexual identity, on the presumption of an essence in fact cultivated through a concert of visual impressions and autoarousal.”6 Even the most militant cultural productions that developed in the wake of gay liberation seemed unable to address the nuances and contradictions of a queer everyday life lived in the wake of a global capitalist crisis. On this score, Benson singles out and praises the work of Bruce Boone and Bob Glück, the two founders of the New Narrative movement, for being “exemplary of a new gay literature: hilarious, moving, generous, and wry”; but, he continues, “I did not feel narratives of my own life and reflections could be so.”7 Which leads to a concern with totalization: “I didn’t feel I could make being gay count to a culture I couldn’t easily embrace as a whole, as I felt it demanded, and that couldn’t be expected to endorse my unstable positioning.”8

Enter improvisation. Toward the end of his essay, Benson sketches out an alternative to the commodified movement writing of the 1970s. In a stunning paragraph, he imagines a utopian poetics that is attuned to any fleeting glimpses of disalienated life that might flare up from within the depths of late capitalism. This poetics, Benson wagers, attempts to align the reader with disalienation, and orient them antagonistically toward the capitalist social relations that stand in the way of realizing this disalienation in a more permanent and enduring way. In short, Benson’s poetics aspires to totality; in the context of describing this aspiration, he introduces the curious figure of improvisation for his compositional labors:

I think any actual sexual liberation, for me, entailed a largely private, idiosyncratic fantasy to loosen, spread, roll all over, fly—a fantasy in which being and coming were indistinguishable, apparent only as becoming. This wish for sensual, proprioceptive, bodily release from ground-bound rules of responsibility, for free encounter with the air and any matter, finds form to some degree in the open fall (a.k.a. negative capability) of reorientations within barely constrained performances of oral improvisation, in elaborated experiences like writing fifty blue books, filled out without looking back, persistently foregrounding present effort to write as assertively and well as possible without revising, and in extended serial works like “Briarcombe Paragraphs” and “Reverse Order,” for which I dissected, altered, revisioned, and fantastically transmuted each paragraph or stanza into its replacement, with no obliged sort of fidelity to it, presented subsequently in a series. Through writing I wanted to realize this wanton will to release innate, untested, and perhaps unfounded capabilities through meeting the other—language, and therefore human culture and shared knowledge—engaging the medium as something elastic, tensile, porous, mutable, everywhere resistant and yielding, immanent and ready to be overthrown.9

The first thing to notice about this passage is its general resonance with Floyd’s account of the aspiration to totality that unites Marxism and queer theory. Benson is openly critical of any particularization that might forestall the experience of “find[ing] form” in an “open fall (a.k.a. negative capability).” For Benson, improvisation seems to be the condition of possibility for this attainment of self-consciousness. The term appears in the middle of the second long sentence—full of shudders, shocks, and dips—as a mediation of a series of classical dialectical shifts: from private to public, from individual to collective, from particular to general, and—consequentially in the present context—from subject to object (from the “self” to the “other” of language). All of which calls our attention to the fact that the paragraph itself enacts a macro-level transition from the abstract to the concrete: it moves from a putative description of “any actual sexual liberation” from Benson’s singular, individual perspective, to a poetics that tries to discover the possibilities for overthrowing a given situation that are immanent in that situation.

In this sense it would be better to grasp queerness as a point of departure for Benson’s poetics, rather than as something that he attempts to represent or narrate. Which doesn’t mean that we do not find local depictions of sexuality in his work. Even limiting ourselves to “Blue Books,” there are dozens of beautiful moments in which Benson discusses his fantasies, desires, and pleasures. This, for instance, from the seventh blue book:

He
was a hang glider, I met him
in the pool. Only I didn’t say
anything and he was blind.
Our forms moved around
each other for a while, and
we touched twice. I was swimming
a breast stoke [sic] that dipped deep
in the water to feel the slowness
of time (no watch) and he hit
me from behind. He was stand-
ing next to me and another
swimmer was coming straight for
me so I moved over to him
rather than the other way, out
of preference, and glanced
his cotton swimsuit with my
hand, then he crouched, pushed
and swished away—the sound
of take-off. If I had talked to
him, I’m afraid I would have
found a being whom I could not
imagine and would have been des-
perately flustered.10

The anecdote related in this passage is obviously sexual: Steve Benson encounters a gorgeous swimmer at the pool, and has two instances of fleeting physical contact with him, both of which he scrutinizes from the standpoint of his nervous queer desire. But the immediacies of this anecdote are not interpreted or digested in and of themselves; they are rather possibilities embedded in the situation Benson relates, forming the basis for a broader meditation on homoeroticism as such. Thus the accidental collision (“he hit/me from behind”); Benson’s move “over to him … out/of preference”; and the brushing of “his cotton swimsuit with my/hand”—these don’t crystallize into a thesis about queerness or depict a queer encounter or experience directly, so much as they invite readings that would align themselves with their queer aspiration to totality. So, for example, one such reading might focus on the way the diction and arrangement of the text on the page calls our attention to all the questions and problems that constellate around these incidental erotic encounters.

In this approach, this excerpt dramatizes and estranges the social calculus of cruising and casual sex, which in practice would occur very quickly, in a matter of moments; but here is stretched out across more than twenty lines of verse, as we come to “feel the slowness/of time” with “no watch” alongside Benson’s speaker. A line break leads us to pause on “out” before moving on to “of preference” which in its turn brings to mind the ideological language, ridiculous in 1980 and ridiculous now, of “sexual preference.” Similarly, the word “straight” is imbued with additional valences, not only as a kind of oppressive norm (i.e., heterosexuality) but as a possible threat of violent retaliation in response to any overture of desire. And then there is the concluding deflation of the whole scene: Benson confesses that nothing came of this encounter because he feared he might find “a being whom I could not/imagine and would have been des-/perately flustered”—which raises questions about whether the being Benson can’t imagine would be flustered by any conversation, or if it would be Benson himself. And what does it mean that he can’t imagine the being? As someone who shares in the sexual attraction? As someone who is straight and rebuffs the advance?

This reading of a passage from “Blue Books” is not, or not yet, an interpretation of the text’s queer standpoint. Two key components are missing. First, we have to take into account a key feature of “Blue Books,” namely that it is framed by a note on how it was written. In other words, Benson presents a two-page note on the text alongside “Blue Books” in Blue Book. This will concern me in the next section of this essay. Second, we still need to locate “Blue Books”—to say nothing of Benson’s work more broadly—within a history of queer collectivity. In this context, the spatial practice of cruising is not just the social basis for parataxis; it is a window onto the transformations of queer life brought about by the advent of gay liberation and the economic crisis of the long 1970s. Chief among these changes is the transition away from what Jeffrey Escoffier has described as the pre-Stonewall “political economy of the closet”: a set of institutions and practices that prevailed in queer collectivities and gay ghettos in the 1950s and 1960s. In general, we can describe this “closet” as the result of the exclusion of queer people from many aspects of society, forcing them to lead an everyday life overshadowed by secrecy, indirection, and informal exchanges and encounters—or else risk homelessness and unemployment (which to my mind are more systemic and more deadly than, if not determining factors of, various discrete instances of gay-bashing).11 Thus the question of revolutionary politics is immanent to the move of queer life out of the closet. I’ll take up this question by way of conclusion. But first: a note on the note on the text.

A Note on a Note on the Text

The notes on the text that Benson frequently includes alongside his poems should not be mistaken for glosses, annotations, or any other kind of extra-textual scaffolding designed to prepare us for the main event of the text itself. They are a part of the poetry, and must be considered as such. This proposition is a way of answering in advance one of the longstanding objections critics have made about the role of “theory” in Language poetry; an objection that the following pithy comment by Steve Abbott, from his introduction to an issue of Poetry Flash dedicated to the Language poets, exemplifies: “Usually I find it exciting to talk with [the Bay Area Language poets]. Sometimes I notice a tendency toward circuitous reasoning, for instance: ‘Look at the text, not the theory.’ ‘But the text doesn’t make any sense to me.’ ‘Then consider this theory.’ ‘Now about this theory…’ ‘Look at the text.’ And so on.”12 There’s some truth to this joke; otherwise it wouldn’t be funny. But I think that the problem is far more general than Abbott lets on. Indeed, the question of how to conceive of the relationship between an explicitly-articulated, systematic poetics, and the poems that are so many examples or implementations of that system—this question is at least as old as bourgeois society. In English, we can date it back to the appearance of William Wordsworth’s “Preface” to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads,in which Wordsworth responds to criticisms of his and Coleridge’s work by offering up a worked-up theory of poetics designed to mitigate readers’ shock and anger about the poetic “experiments” (Wordsworth’s word!) they find in this book.13

Certainly there are Language poets who proceed in this Wordsworthian fashion, appending critical discourses about their theory of poetry, language, and consciousness to their work, asking the reader to refer back and forth to the theory and the poetry. But Benson stands this idealist gesture on its head. His notes on texts are quite literal, focusing on poiesis,the activity of making his texts. This can be as ornate as describing a particular live performance governed by certain rules and later transcribed from a tape recorder; or as simple as telling readers what he did or did not allow himself to write about as he filled up fifty exam blue books with improvisatory writing. In short, Benson does not try to interpret his own work, or to dictate the correct ideological position from which readers should interpret his work. Rather, he superimposes an image of his compositional labor onto the finished work, making it impossible to analytically separate out the text from the consciousness of the author—that is, the author’s aspiration to totality.

We have already discussed a few features of “Blue Books” that are included in the note on this text. First, Benson filled up fifty exam blue books given to him by a friend, between May 1979 and April 1980 with writing. This served as the raw material for his poem, which he tells us is composed of “excerpts, either whole pages or groups of whole pages or, in a few cases, whole sittings” of improvised textual notations.14 As for the writing process itself, Benson describes it in terms that recapitulate the link between the concept of improvisation and the category of totality—discussed in the previous section of this essay. Note the tension here between a matter-of-fact report of the empirical details, the literal contours of a writing process; and, on the other hand, the vertiginous parataxis of the prose style. This contradiction tells us as much about “Blue Books” and Benson’s aspirations to totality as the content of the passage:

I set no rules or limits as to form, content, diction, or syntax. Some censorial tendencies were remarkable, though: by preference I avoided neologisms and, even though I had committed to not anticipating publication, I was too self-consciously apprehensive to essay extended fantasies of sex and violence, explicit gossip or personal vituperation. Still, I didn’t rule these out either. I would write whatever I chose to, without feeling obliged to make it count to anyone else but me, at the time.15

The first thing we notice is how difficult it is for Benson to represent how he wrote in his blue books. He tries to tell us what constraints (“censorial tendencies”) he used to guide his improvisational sessions of writing, but none of these rules actually end up ruling anything out: “I didn’t rule these out, either.” Thus, no sex, until sex shows up; no gossip, till there was that, too; no vituperation—but here, vituperation!—and so on. It is as if improvisatory composition were hostile to any attempt to particularize, even those that would make the work palatable for presentation to readers other than Benson.

Benson returns to the question of the reader, and the difficulty of representing his writing process, a few paragraphs later. This time he presents the dilemma from the perspective of a dialectic of form and content: writes Benson,

I was interested to see what would turn up, along the way, and whether any tendency, shape, or qualitative change would manifest in the writing. Most of all, I was interested in submitting my writing (as an ongoing practice, at once part of and distinguishable from writing in general) to this wandering in the desert of an ostensibly objectless search or exploration—a search in the course of which it would leave rather than pick up traces, leave them behind for some other attention to sniff at.16

Benson basically abdicates in advance any responsibility for the contents of what he’s written. The task of the poet, he seems to say, is to search and explore. The reader, meanwhile, is tasked with paying attention to this wandering, with making sense out of whatever’s been left behind. There’s a strong resonance here with the calculus of cruising discussed above. The basic dilemma that attends public sex is that of hiding in plain sight. Cruising is the informal system of signification through which possible partners find one another without alerting anyone who might be hostile toward them—most notably because of their queerness—in the process. Thus the imaginary of cruising is shot through with plausible deniability: the elaborate indirection of the various gestures, glances, dress codes, turns of phrase, and so forth are all a necessary part of trying to pass unnoticed in front of an inhospitable audience. “Blue Books” risks much less than all this: Benson will not lose his job or his housing if a reader vociferously rejects his poetic experiments (though he could be gay-bashed). The point is that the plausible deniability Benson attributes to the project of improvising—his indifference to any eventual publication, to any kind of evaluative rubric, or even to any readerly judgment of quality—this wandering objectlessness is a window onto a specific conjuncture of queer life, even as it is not reducible to a comment or representation of that life directly. He underscores this a moment later when he distinguishes between “what the writing can be construed to be about” and “a totality of whatever the whole would be,” in which “the particularity and difference of each instance could stand out at once specific and dependent, concrete but without actual boundaries.”17

Earlier I said that Benson’s notes superimpose some account of a text’s composition onto the results of that writing process itself. We are now in a position to see that this means that Bensonian improvisation proceeds by way of a buried analogy to the spatial practice of cruising. That is, where before we noted that an instance of parataxis in an excerpt from “Blue Books” raised the question of cruising, now we can see how cruising governs the totality of the compositional process. It is, in a sense, the political unconscious of this text. I hasten to add that this doesn’t mean Benson convokes an identification with queerness, or that queerness is a skeleton key or secret code that can reveal some hidden meaning in the text. Indeed, it would be a gigantic mistake to reduce the question of queer standpoint, as Floyd theorizes it and as Benson exemplifies it, to one of identity, just as it would be outrageous to boil down the question of the meaning of a work to its depiction of this or that identity. Once again, we see how queerness is a point of departure for a cognitive exercise—albeit one with determinate social horizons—rather than a fixed subject-position with readymade content that can be represented (or whose story can be told). Setting out from queerness, Benson wanders, “objectless,” in the desert of an unrepresentable system of social relations, leaving clues and hints for the reader who follows him, in the hopes that this reader will discover in these some “unfounded capabilities” (to return to the language of his Grand Piano essay) worth sniffing at with their attention.

Queer Horizons

We are now in a position to historicize the queer motivations for Benson’s devices. That is, the question before us is: Why adopt a literary stance analogous to the practice of cruising after the Stonewall rebellion? On our way to answering this question let us briefly look at the opening lines of “Blue Books,” which contribute two things to the present inquiry. First, they dramatize the dilemma of improvisatory writing and help us see how the note on the text frames the text itself; and, second, they introduce us to some thinking about political consciousness, which, as I will argue in this section, we have to superimpose onto any thinking of queerness in a reading of Benson’s work. “Blue Books” begins with page eight of the first blue book: a joke about the convention of beginning a work in medias res. There are at least two middles here; we start out mid-sentence and mid-blue-book. There may even be a third, if this is mid-“sitting.” Unlike an epic, the problem here is not narrative temporality, but the question of how a part summons up, displaces, and otherwise relates to the whole from which it has been excerpted:

have his bottle and so forth the vibrations
of a real heart with piano runs for 3
figures. Corroboration needed I like music
very much performing that night + where you
coming from? Don’t mention is this is Leonine
lead on diamonds essays and going for him.
Came in French. His heart pulsed with their songs
of liberation, are you listening.18

These lines swirl disjunctively around the theme of music. This is on one level a self-reflexive commentary on the use of the word “improvisation” in the frame of this work, which brings to mind an analogy between poetry and music, between poet and musician. There is also a formal displacement of music onto the material of the language: “Leonine”sonically begets “lead on diamonds” (“lead” here rhyming with “read,” on this reading), which primes us to read the sibilant word “essays” as a condensation of “is this is” in the preceding line. This Stein-inflected shift also serves to spatialize what has hitherto been presented to us in temporal terms; music, in addition to being an art whose insuperable horizon is that it happens in time, is also pinned to an event, the “that night” of its performance. But Benson continues to shift registers and perspectives, turning back to hearts and songs (an oblique allusion to, perhaps continuation of, the thinking in the second line of the poem). We can never really be sure whether we are reading primarily for language’s materiality (indexing words to other words in the stanza) or for some symbolic dimension (tracing the theme of music as it is developed in the unfolding of the poem). It becomes impossible to choose between space and time in our reading.

The final sentence in this passage—”His heart pulsed with their songs/of liberation, are you listening”—indirectly brings us to some reckoning with the relationship between politics and aesthetics. Specifically, Benson’s use of what he calls “arbitrary, prosoid lines” raises the question of how revolutionary culture differs from bourgeois culture more broadly. The sentence is peopled with unpredicated pronouns; we don’t know who “he,” “they,” or “you” are. But we do know that all three are triangulated by some relationship to “songs/of liberation”—to some potential revolutionary or oppositional cultural production. And yet to put it this way is to lose out on the delay that subtly separates out culture from politics: we pause with “songs” at the end of the line, only subsequently understanding that what was meant were “songs of liberation.” This in turn doubles the pulsing of “his” heart, which we can say pulses generally, in response to “songs” in the abstract, before pulsing in the next line to the more specific (I am tempted to say “concrete”) songs “of liberation.” Things are further complicated by the fact that the songs are “their” songs, not “his” or even utopianly “ours.” The “he” is not part of the collective who sing songs of liberation; neither are “you” nor even Benson, the presumed “I.”

These pronominal slippages are formally of a piece with the paratactic near-romance with a beautiful boy we discussed above. There, we saw how parataxis was essentially bound up with a question of agency, and indexed to the practice of cruising; here there is less clarity about who is doing what, or is capable of doing what—most notably concerning those “songs/of liberation.” Which strikes me as a canny insight into the conjuncture Benson is writing in at the end of the 1970s—on the other side, that is to say, of the revolutionary upheavals of gay liberation and other New Left movements. The defeats of these movements are a key determinant of Benson’s poetics, and of Language poetry’s itinerary more broadly. But these defeats are not simply presented melancholically; they are rather registered through a kind of scrambling, an indeterminacy that does not abandon revolutionary possibility so much as suggest that it is not clear where one might look for that possibility, or how to go about organizing it. There is a kind of plausible deniability draped around the passage about “songs/of liberation,” which ends with a question, albeit one punctuated as a declarative: are you listening to them—the songs of liberation, their singers?

This brings us to the contradiction that lies at the heart of “Blue Books.” On the one hand, Benson organizes his aesthetic thinking around cruising, in a way that presupposes a residual social basis: the political economy of the closet, which gay liberation sublated into the “territorial economy” (to return to Escoffier) of the expanding—that is, gentrifying—gay ghetto. The ideological heft of this closet, its ability to predicate an entire 80-page poem, would seem to suggest that gay liberation changed very little. The revolution came out and went away, and when the dust settled the closet was still standing. On the other hand, the “closet” is not simply a synonym for clandestinity. It names a whole set of possibilities immanent within capitalism and visible to those forced to live in the long shadow of bourgeois society.19 That this is still the case in 1980—that capitalism has not yet begun to give ground to the revolutionary movements contesting it around the world—is certainly cause for alarm. But it is also the beginning of a sober assessment of this particular period. This is why the songs of liberation, however suggestive, will always remain open-ended, no matter what perspective we approach them from. But this open-endedness is itself the determinate historical content of this image: it summons up the question of revolutionary potential in a moment where that potential is disorganized on the other side of the long 1970s. In this context, the immanent perspective on social relations that queerness names becomes peculiarly useful, as indirection becomes the primary means of engaging in revolutionary politics, at least in the United States.

All this is to say that Benson’s queer standpoint grasps the inter-revolutionary character of the late twentieth century. My phrasing is a bit awkward, but hopefully it makes up for that by being precise. For what I want to convey is not only that Benson correctly identifies the defeat of revolutionary movements in the US and elsewhere, but also that he makes this determination from the standpoint of a fidelity to some future revolution. Which explains the role played by figurations of transition across the entirety of “Blue Books.” Consider for example the following passage, again from the seventh blue book:

Am I not my book? It grows
dark, outside, and different
inside: warmer, cozier, more
necessary, less restless. Coffee
is in China—what did I read
about? The white man tortured
or held by the Communist
Chinese—not that. Books to
read. I would like to embody this
knowledge too. Sometimes the
body balks—introductions are
seductions or warnings.20

These lines stage a contradiction between inside and outside. They are bookended by figures of modernist totalization that correspond to the outer reaches of interiority and exteriority: respectively, Mallarmé’s infamous book of the world, and William Carlos Williams’s bizarre prose work The Embodiment of Knowledge—which imagines a utopian projection (it’s more like a propulsion, honestly) of education beyond the walls of the school in a way that definitively negates the division between mental and manual labor. Between these two references, communist China appears, in what appears to be a reference to some kind of propaganda. Benson evinces a reflexive suspicion about this. But China, “communist” China, is also a cipher for historical transition and revolutionary defeat in this moment, as Deng Xiaoping’s market reforms were well on their way to undoing the inroads achieved by the People’s Republic of China.

Along similar lines, in the forty-second blue book Benson raises the question of a revolutionary transition before utterly undermining the seriousness of the enterprise through a bit of scatological humor. Of note is the miniaturization of the whole question of revolution, its figurative application to the minutiae of writing, which is then juxtaposed to a friend declining (in an unprincipled manner?) to listen to the criticism he has just accepted:

Neatly arranged on the tabletop,
people, instruments, places. Ink
smears on my hand. I plan to
upgrade the modes of production,
I do so, talking to a so-called
friend. He is a friend, “is” in
quotation marks, I offer him
some criticism, and he accepts
the offer but declines the position,
walks away into the toilet to unload
a big shit.21

These are funny lines, and the basic juxtaposition—a tiny, desktop revolution; a big shit—seems almost completely divorced from any serious thinking about revolution. And yet the bit about criticism here seems to resonate with our previous discussion of plausible deniability, as if the “friend” in question were a figure for the reader. Never mind the fact that the friend is not really clearly situated with respect to Benson’s speaker. He’s a so-called friend; he emphatically isa friend; and he is finally a “friend” in scare quotes. What kind of relationship do the speaker and this man have? How intimate are they with one another? How personal or impersonal is this friendship?

This brings me to the last passage from “Blue Books” I’ll discuss before concluding. Fittingly, it’s the last run printed in the poem, an excerpt from Benson’s fiftieth exam blue book. Most of it is written in the third person and presumably addressed to Benson—the “Steve” toward the end—by himself. But at the last minute we shift from third to first person, and Benson projects himself utopianly into the audience, imagining himself among the readers who might discover and make use of this text, possibly as the basis for their own sets of improvisations:

A
penchant for distraction dogs him. He
is a boy, a man, constituted with or
by a best friend, another boy/man
arranged by fantasy out of the
elements that have been given him
to feel responsive to. Hopelessly defeatist,
he rows out into the middle of a lake
and refuses to holler there for fear of
his echo being heard by others.
He never runs out of things to
read, he runs his life like a
metronome poking over a metaphor.
Never enough. Not today. The
remainder. Holds nose and stinks.
Sacrifices product over the falls.
Wretched elusive project wasted
in garret clumsiness. Looks at
the flies buzzing while he does
sit-ups. So many little issues,
all really. Don’t talk down to
the lowest common denominator
Steve unless that’s the best you
can do. To join everyone I know
in one audience is witnessing me,
not satisfactory. I had to get
rid of the dust but shaking it
off not only displaced it but
seemed to generate more, from
the air, from the road—Whitman22

“Running” does a lot of figurative work here, referring both to the passage of time (“run out”), physical movement, and a kind of top-down organization (one “runs” one’s life with a datebook by writing down appointments and so forth). The figure for this organization—”like a/metronome poking over a metaphor”—contributes to this shifting back and forth between space and time, introducing as well a distinction between quantity and quality: metronomes organize a quantitative perception of time; metaphors compare the qualities of things to one another. Metronome also sounds like a distortion of the structuralist binary opposite of metaphor: metonymy, which is a spatial trope (having to do with touching or contiguity) and thus opposed to the metronome of which it is the sonic shadow. This kind of alternating between quantity and quality—time and space—persists throughout the passage, in a series of sentence fragments that sound like headlines or bullet-points more than complete thoughts, until the shift from third to first person mentioned above. This shift is mediated by a second-person address to “Steve,” which is followed by the emplacement of a speaking “I” in the midst of the audience (which in turn doubles the slippery, homoerotic lord and bondsman dialectic adumbrated in the first half of this passage). Here we find ourselves at the outer limit of improvisation and Benson’s totality thinking: for the subject of improvisation has hitherto been the writer, the poet, the performer, whose work the audience encounters and sets about interpreting. This is a utopian gesture, I am tempted to say even a revolutionary one; it anticipates a situation in which Benson might once again join a collective agent, the readers, in paying a disciplined attention to certain objects. But the gesture is “not satisfactory.” We end up stuck in a first-person perspective that follows the shaken-off dust metonymically into the mysterious and abrupt invocation of Walt Whitman, that queer revolutionary poet (albeit a bourgeois revolutionary) whose “I” remains a kind of goad on the horizon of revolutionary politics, as a dispatch that still feels like it lies ahead of us in time.

Thus “Blue Books” ends by displacing its aspirations to totality onto another writer: Walt Whitman. Whitman, we may recall, is himself a cosmos; he contains multitudes; and he affirms his own internal contradictions (which is presumably a form of handling them). Whitman is also at the antipodes of Benson’s poetic practices. He published one book repeatedly over the span of forty years, revising incessantly, adding material and chipping away at what was already there, fashioning and refashioning his work as though some ideal Leaves of Grassmight eventually be reached. So not only does Benson leap out of the driver’s seat at the end of his poem, but he encourages us to push back against some of his propositions, figures, and concepts. He solicits more and more contradictions, and, presumably, more and more poetry—the better to lay into place “unfounded capabilities” with, for a (militant, queer) reader to sniff out and make use of in the future.

Conclusion

My reading of “Blue Books” in this essay is by no means exhaustive. I have mainly set myself the task of bringing forward one aspect of this text, which I hope to have shown can be propitiously read in the light of Kevin Floyd’s account of queerness as an aspiration to totality in The Reification of Desire. Benson’s poetry, not incidentally like Floyd’s theory, is far too complex to pin down in a short piece like this one. They are both exemplary dialectical productions, in the sense that Lenin describes dialectics in Hegel: they both contain “living, many-sided knowledge (with the number of sides eternally increasing), with an infinite number of shades of every approach and approximation to reality (with a philosophical system growing into a whole out of each shade).”23 My invocation of Lenin here—not to mention thisLenin, the Lenin who studied Hegel in the leadup to the October Revolution—is no coincidence. I think that reading Benson teaches us something about how to read what I’ve called the inter-revolutionary poetics of the post-New-Left avant-gardes. These poetics are obviously anti-capitalist in some way, but they are not fortunate enough to take shape in the midst of a revolutionary movement. On the other hand, they arise alongside and out of such movements; they know, however indirectly or abstractly, what it’s like to participate in a revolutionary process, and attempt to communicate that experience aesthetically. For Benson the form this aesthetic communication takes is improvisation, which remediates the spatial practices of cruising. Other Language poets come at this problem of being between revolutions in different ways; their work might be rewardingly reread in this light.

By the same token—and by way of conclusion—we might think of Kevin Floyd as a kind of exemplary inter-revolutionary militant. The Reification of Desireappeared in print in 2009, the culmination of a decade or more of careful study of Marx, Lukács, and other writers. Now, in 2020, in the midst of yet another capitalist crisis, liberal identity politics are coming increasingly under fire for their inability to solve problems like homelessness and unemployment. Revolutionary movements are springing into being, demanding an end to racist policing, guarantees of food, shelter, and employment, and the construction of a lifeworld worth inhabiting for all people. In this context, Floyd’s work offers an historical account of the capitalist crisis we’re faced with; an account of the limits of liberal attempts to respond to it; and, most importantly, a model for thinking that aligns itself with the wretched of the earth and will settle for nothing less than communism.

1. The most notable recent work on this score is Holly Lewis, The Politics of Everybody (London: Zed Books, 2016), which links questions of queer knowledge or standpoint to political debates about sex work, transphobia, and international solidarity. Jordy Rosenberg, meanwhile, stages the confrontation between totality thinking and particularization in a different vein, offering a brilliant critique of object-oriented ontologies and new materialisms: see Rosenberg, “The Molecularization of Sexuality: On Some Primitivisms of the Present,” Theory & Event 17:2 (2014). More broadly, it is worth noting the way that Floyd anticipated the recent historical work by Emily Hobson and Christina Hanhardt: Emily Hobson, Lavender and Red: Liberation and Solidarity in the Gay and Lesbian Left(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016); Christina B. Hanhardt, Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence(Durham: Duke University Press, 2013). Both these writers have revisited the queer politics of the 1960s and 1970s—the politics, that is, of Gay Liberation and radical lesbian feminism—with an eye toward the way these New Left configurations, often denounced for their embrace of totalizing optics, offer us a way forward beyond the seeming impasses of queer studies in the present.
2. Kevin Floyd, The Reification of Desire(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009) 6.
3. The obvious analogy is between queer consciousness and the class consciousness of the proletariat famously described in Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness.
4. Besides Benson, these writers are: Rae Armantrout, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Tom Mandel, Ted Pearson, Bob Perelman, Kit Robinson, Ron Silliman, and Barrett Watten. In the penultimate volume of The Grand Piano, Alan Bernheimer, a comrade of the Language poets, contributes an essay as well.
5. On his website, Benson writes that this subtitle was added by the editors of Social Text,who also made a number of other changes to the text of “Aesthetic Tendency” itself. In 2013, Benson released a PDF of this essay that was more faithful to the manuscript edition of the text. I have compared the Social Textcopy of “Aesthetic Tendency” to Benson’s 2013 reconstruction, and found it hard to pinpoint any significant differences of substances between the two texts—with the exception, of course, of the use of “A Manifesto” as a subtitle, which completely changes how you read the essay, both in its relation to the collective project of Language poetry (if this text “manifests” the group’s core concerns, then we are invited to see it as a document of their poetic intentions, and to measure their poetry with this yardstick), and as a theoretical intervention more broadly. See: Benson et al., “Aesthetic Tendency and the Politics of Poetry: A Manifesto,” Social Text 19/20 (Autumn, 1988): 261-275; and Benson et. al., “Aesthetic Tendency and the Politics of Poetry,” http://www.stevebensonasis.com/?p=150.
6. Steve Benson, et al., The Grand Piano, Volume 6 (Detroit: Mode A, 2008) 26.
7. Benson, Grand Piano 26.
8. Grand Piano 28.
9. Grand Piano 30-31.
10. teve Benson, “Blue Books,” in Blue Book(Great Barrington: The Figures, 1988) 42.
11. Jeffrey Escoffier, “The Political Economy of the Closet,” American Homo (New York and London: Verso, 2018 [1999]).
12. Steve Abbott, “Language Poets: An Introduction,” Poetry Flash(May 1979).
13. William Wordsworth, “Preface,” in William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
14. Steve Benson, “Some Notes on the Texts,” Blue Book(Great Barrington: The Figures, 1988) 11.
15. Benson, “Some Notes” 10.
16. “Some Notes” 10.
17. “Some Notes” 10-11.
18. Benson, Blue Books 35.
19. On this score see especially John D’Emilio, “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” Making Trouble: Essays on Gay History, Politics, and the University(New York: Routledge, 1992).
20. Benson, “Blue Books” 43.
21. “Blue Books” 104.
22. “Blue Books” 115. Emphasis in original.
23. Vladimir Lenin, “On the Question of Dialectics” (1915), trans. and pub. Marxists Internet Archive (2008).