^{What are the outlines of the National Question for World Literature? If the origin of national literary studies can be attributed to the generation following the French Revolution, a development that in English is associated with Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, two centuries later, the logic of history neither dictates nor determines but should indicate end points to the fiction that the cultural fields called American or British or French or German literature can continue to perpetuate themselves with impunity. The task of dismantling nationalist literary studies falls on postcolonialism, whose founding error was multiculturalism or ethno-national accommodations to institutions of scholarship and research that, forged from the ascent of colonial empires, must either recognize the historical infamy of their structures of study, or accept their irrelevance. Just as classes refuse to surrender their economic and symbolic power during times of crisis, the social layers of intellectuals and individuals annointed with advanced degrees cannot reform their institutions from within. The corruption of clerics during Chaucer’s and Langland’s adjacency to the Peasants’ Revolt offers the insight that today the struggle between society and university is like the struggle between church and state. There is no nice way to phrase an accommodation to war-making empires. Any number of alternative social forms for collaborative and intersectional research groups can be found in every century and during every protest movment in the West. For every Frankfurt School, more cooperatives and related collaborative forms than can be counted aspired to creative autonomy. Can pre-revolutionary workers’ councils furnish an example of vibrant and dynamic social experiments resolutely opposed to the bureaucracies of philosophy, philology, and the arts? The ease with which Stalinism occupied larger political bodies during the 1930s needs to be more widely known. Any writer, artist, or intellectual with a political stake in the question recognized, with or without accepting, the Berlin-Moscow pact. The conditions for the cultural crisis leading to this world-historical catastrophe were long in the making, and they happened in international writers’ congresses among mutations in the rise of a mass party. The long train of prominent writers and artists visits to the Soviet Union in the 1930s should be reassessed in the light of Chris Marker’s error: Le tombeau d’Alexandre. More than twenty years ago Rancière in The Politics of Aesthetics does not see the problem. There is a good reason why it is missing from Howe’s Sorting Facts, or Nineteen Ways of Looking at Marker. Rancière only sees the contradiction between documentation and narration, that is to say, he only sees the formal problem. He does not see the political problem. Ought the names of Medvedkin and Walter Genewein (Jabłoński, Fotamator 1998) occupy the same sentence? Stalin’s 1932-1933 forced collectivization in Ukraine, against the glare of 24 February 2022, is one line that must be drawn and quartered for a cognitive remapping of 1930s fault lines for which less immediate forms of information cannot take the blame. Whether this is a European or an International question lays bare the problem of national cultural identity for the West. Fanon will be cited for the necessity of subaltern national cultural identity whenever Marx and Engels on the Irish Question are forbidden and permanent revolution is a phrase coined by Kristeva. In North America, the will to amnesia and determination to rewrite history, crystallized in George Oppen’s “for years I lived with friends who spoke of a public justice / I forget what we said” (quoted from memory) must be exposed. Kabakov’s “Not everyone will be taken into the future” is a provocation that strikes fear in the heart of every writer and artist patronized by ruling class bureaucracies. Can Kabakov’s provocation be translated, or mistranslated, to read:}

^{Anthony Braxton, Tri-Axium: The level of commentary has gone from bad to worse. We have been colonized by so-called experts, the scholastic-type (but aren’t) and this misuse of interpretation has moved to damage the whole of this time period with the use of academic inquiry terms, academic definitions, the simulacra of textual commentary that influences how we have come to either approach living, or approach understanding about living. “Psychological penetration.” Maximum interchange. The challenge of solidifying positive redefinitions, transformational solutions, along a progressional continuum to the degree that grounded definitions can provide a healthy pivotal factor. In other words, I am saying these are my terms, but what do you think? (With respect to your own perception dynamics). There can be no room for accusation if the writing is concerned about what is really true (to refrain from attacking individuals) (even when an attack would clarify a viewpoint) (not to mention that the state of the Art is not about only one or two). We must move to seek out a more human understanding free of the petty accusations of race or gender ideologies. The total approach runs from open interpretation possibilities (i.e., doing your own thing, your own affinity dynamics) to practicing exacting definitions for the new proletarian integration code. We need to use every kind of transference affinity position whether or not it corresponds to what is now called Reason. I have tried to accept many more readily to utilize only one level region, a fragile body of writing, and ask that I be given another ten, twenty or thirty years on this planet to continue my learning and work. Note: Oberlin College Conservatory Library, 1995. “Proletarian integration code” is likely one of a number of textual emendations, or corruptions, after the practice of textual substitutions by copyists in the late middle ages.}