Answers will depend on who's answering—and what they understand by modern, lyric, and poetry. Academic and other cultural institutions will hardly have the only say; the most significant testimonies often come from poets themselves, who in relation to matters academic and institutional may have feet in more than one camp but who perhaps finally have, in proportion to the intensity and overall achievement of their art, no camp at all. Yet an at least century-long critical tradition, which Marjorie Perloff's 2006 MLA Presidential Address joins, has salutarily maintained that for all academia's evident weaknesses—including an often fatal distance from the realities of artistic making and audience engagement—it can still contribute crucially to the life of poetry. In that light, it's worth reconsidering a body of work that for decades has resonated in the larger poetry world but has also known academic prominence: Frankfurt school—and the wider spectrum of Marxian and Marxian-inflected—critical theory. What if, in ways that have mostly escaped notice, a signal exchange between Frankfurt school critics demonstrates (with lessons aplenty for poetry, criticism, and theory today) that, far from merely illustrating theoretical and sociohistorical dynamics, the development of modern lyric animates or generates the theory in the first place, locating itself at the heart of Frankfurt school and related attempts to take history's measure and to enable reflective judgment and critical agency?

We have no Adequate Lexicon for dealing with the transformation of racial orders. Recently, commentators have sought to pinpoint a shift in racial meanings by announcing the advent of a “postidentity,” “postracial,” or “cosmopolitan” social order. These appellations suggest that we are now past racial or identity politics in some crucial way. But it is not so much that we have gone beyond race as that race has gone beyond us, morphing at a speed with which academic expertise has not kept pace. The content of racial, gender, and sexual identities has been significantly transformed, and this change has, in turn, fostered the illusion that we no longer inhabit racialized realities—hence the proliferation of posts to tell us that temporally and politically we are no longer where we were. The representational strain of dealing with the elusive and dynamic qualities of racial and sexual identities makes us too eager to declare that we are over difference. The recourse to posts seems, however, more an admission of helplessness at identifying the nature of the shift than a sign of transcendence. It stems from our dependence on social schemas that offer us only two options: we are in the racial order or we are out of it. But we are not out of it, not yet. And herein lies a rare opening for the humanistic study of race.

There has never been a great age of science and technology without a corresponding flourishing of the arts and humanities. In any time or place of rapid technological advance, those creatures we would now call humanists—literary commentators, historians, philosophers, logicians, theologians, linguists, scholars of the arts, and all manner of writers, musicians, and artists—have also had a field day. Perhaps that generalization is actually a tautology. Great ages of science are great ages of the humanities because an age isn't a historical period but a construct, and constructs are the work of humanists. Throughout history, there have been many momentous scientific discoveries that simply drift into the culture, are adapted without any particular new social or philosophical arrangements. It is the humanistic articulation of the significance of scientific change that announces a new episteme, a world-altering, even metaphysical, transformation. While scientists and engineers are responsible for the discoveries and inventions, humanists consolidate those experimental findings, explain them, and aggregate their impact in such a way that we suddenly have not just the new but an epoch-defining paradigm shift. (E = mc is an equation; the concept of relativity is a defining intellectual model.) The humanistic turn of mind provides the historical perspective, interpretive skill, critical analysis, and narrative form required to articulate the significance of the scientific discoveries of an era, show how they change our sense of what it means to be human, and demarcate their continuity with or difference from existing ideologies.

I was invited by the MLA committee on the status of graduate students in the profession to speak at a convention workshop entitled “Keywords for a Digital Profession.” My keyword was obsolescence, a catchall term for a multiplicity of conditions; there are material obsolescences, institutional obsolescences, and purely theoretical obsolescences, each type demanding a different response. I spent years pondering theoretical obsolescence while writing The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television. The book argues, in part, that claims about the obsolescence of cultural forms often say more about those doing the claiming than they do about the objects of the claims. Neither the novel in particular nor the book more broadly nor print in general is dead, and agonized announcements of the death of such technologies and genres often serve to re-create an elite cadre of cultural producers and consumers, ostensibly operating on the margins of contemporary culture and profiting from their claims of marginality by creating a sense that their own values, once mainstream and now decaying, must be protected. Two oft-cited reports of the National Endowment for the Arts, Reading at Risk (2004) and To Read or Not to Read (2007), come to mind; like numerous other expressions of anxiety about the supposed decline of reading, each rhetorically creates a cultural wildlife preserve in which the apparently obsolete can flourish (United States). These texts suggest that obsolescence is, in this case at least, less a material state than a political project.

While sociologists generally do not deign to assume such a rhetorical mantle, Michael Omi and Howard Winant Suffuse the first edition of Racial Formation with the language of prophecy that they at once fear to articulate and hope to imagine otherwise. “What does the immediate future hold?” they anxiously wonder.

Let's start with the old new lyric studies. W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley begin their classic essay “The Intentional Fallacy” with a few propositions, “abstracted to a degree where they seem to us axiomatic.” To elucidate the first of these (that although a poem is an intentional object, its author's intentions are not the standard by which artistic success is to be judged), the authors cite in passing Elmer Edgar Stoll's remark that “the words of a poem … come out of a head, not out of a hat.” Wimsatt and Beardsley do not linger long enough to provide a source for Stoll's aperçu; they move swiftly on from their initial metaphysical claim that the work of art is caused by the intentions of a “designing intellect” to the epistemological problem that the poem poses for the reader and critic: “How is he to find out what the poet tried to do?” (4). In answer, they famously declare that a poem, like a pudding or a machine, must “work”; that the evidence of its working is entirely “internal,” located in “the art of the poem itself” (4), its “semantics and syntax” and its “feats of style” (10, 4); and that these features, like puddings and machines or like the human beings that poems are about, are “object[s] of public knowledge” (5). Together, these propositions systematized for a second generation the program of reading—demanding, democratic—that had come to be known as the New Criticism.

[Les critiques] ont en commun avec les tyrans de plier le monde à leurs désirs.

[Critics] and tyrants have this in common: they bend the world to their desires.

—Yasmina Reza, L'aube le soir ou la nuit (9)

If there is anything that radically distinguishes the imagination of anti-imperialism, it is the primacy of the geographical element. Imperialism after all is an act of geographical violence through which virtually every space in the world is explored, charted, and finally brought under control.

—Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (225)

Denis Diderot's Encyclopédie is explicit about “Les Indes” ‘The Indies.‘ in explaining why distant landmasses were charted under the incorrect rubrics “East Indies” and “West Indies,” the Encyclopédie states in 1765 that these designations refer to countries situated on either side of the Cape of Good Hope, the southern extremity of Africa:

[L]es modernes moins excusable que les anciens ont nommé Indes, des pays si différens par leur position & par leur étendue sur notre globe, que pour ôter une partie de l'équivoque, ils ont divisé les Indes en orientales & occidentales. … De-là vint l'usage d'appeller Indes orientales, ce qui est à l'orient du cap de Bonne-Espérance, & Indes occidentales, ce qui est à l'occident de ce cap. … [P]ar un nouvel abus, qu'il n'est plus possible de corriger, on se sert dans les relations du nom d'Indiens, pour dire les Amériquains. (“Indes”)

[T]he moderns, who are less forgivable than the ancients, have called Indies countries so different by virtue of their location and their size on our globe that these had to be divided into East and West Indies in order to correct the ambiguity. … Hence the custom of calling East Indies what lies to the east of the Cape of Good Hope and West Indies what lies to the west of that cape. … [T]hrough a new misuse, which can no longer be corrected, the name Indians is used in travel relations to refer to Americans.

The line between a contact zone and a comfort zone is a thin one. I can imagine that line drawn in many ways, but the color line of which W. E. B. DuBois spoke is the one that concerns Michael Omi and Howard Winant. In Racial Formation in the United States, when they declare that “race has no fixed meaning” (71), they mean that this color line is always being redrawn, by different hands and differing hearts. It is this possibility of racial transformation, not just racial formation, that makes Omi and Winant's theory powerful and compelling. With transformation in mind, we can conceive of racial formation as another version of Mary Louise Pratt's contact zone, where friction sparks unpredictable futures and where, by implication, our racial present may not look like our racial past. At the same time, racial formation is also reformation, affirming identities with which we feel at ease. In these comfort zones of inherited identities, we encourage others and are encouraged ourselves to toe the (color) line. These racial tendencies, toward change and constancy, innovation and cliché, are evident in both politics and culture. Although Omi and Winant's sociology of race is not concerned with literature, their insightful model of racial formation is manifest in literary culture, in aesthetic form and in literary institutions: the publishing industry, the literary marketplace, and the department of literature, where racial politics are always present.

From a certain standpoint, Marjorie Perloff's lament, in her 2006 MLA Presidential Address, that literary study has been relegated to a secondary position in the research framework of our profession has merit. This standpoint, however, rests on a retrospective (if not nostalgic) comparison of today's institutional parameters with the enviable autonomy that literary study once enjoyed, a self-authorization that demarcated not merely the practice of literary study (or literary criticism) but even what we might call a literary way of thinking. This was how the institution of theory in American universities took hold, and it is elementary to recall that many other disciplines, principally in the social sciences but also in the arts, conceded to literary studies the vanguard of the methodological and epistemological reconfigurations of their own disciplinary boundaries. Anthropologists, historians, film critics, and art historians, who suddenly acceded to the position of theorist, came to regard literary studies as an inventory for whatever new terms or concepts they deemed necessary in unsettling their own disciplinary givens.

“The sound of poetry, the poetry of sound” resonated as Marjorie Perloff's theme for the 2006 MLA Convention, where one could hear about this topic at panels, poetry readings, and the Presidential Forum. Addressing a large audience at the forum, Charles Bernstein tapped the microphone and loudly intoned, “Is this working? Can you hear me?” The moment was a self-conscious performance, perhaps parody, of lyric utterance addressed to “you” from “me”: even before beginning his speech, Bernstein called our attention to the amplification of voice. Instead of addressing any particular you, singular or plural, he seemed to address the microphone, a mediating apparatus that makes possible but also interrupts the intimacy of address that lyric poetry (after John Stuart Mill) invites us to overhear. Through the microphone, Bernstein gave new overtones to Mill's definition of poetry as “overheard,” which could also mean hearing it too much, making it too loud, overworking the metaphor of the voice that we think is speaking directly to us. Although we tend to think of sound as immediate (is it?), the sound of poetry is never heard without mediation, and we should attend to the medium.