ALL ABOUT U.S (UNITED STATE): Christopher Lasch

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Rabu, 06 Juli 2011

Back Issues of democracy

A request from Sarah Leonard, Editorial Assistant at Dissent (and also Editor of The New Inquiry’s print publication):

"I wanted to tell you about a project that Dissent magazine is undertaking, and ask the kind help of the community of intellectual historians who read and contribute to USIH. You probably know that democracy magazine was a short-lived creature of the early eighties, edited by Sheldon Wolin and Christopher Lasch, that published a brilliant but peculiar brand of Marxist anti-modernism. The issues have gotten a bit hard to find, and have never been digitized, but the ones I've read are really excellent.

Because Dissent took over democracy's subscriber list and obligations when democracy folded, I've started a project here to digitize all the issues (only twelve in all) and make them available on our site. I really fear that these will disappear altogether, or at least not used by researchers, if they aren't digitally preserved. We've scanned the ones we have, but are missing several issues. Do you think some of your intellectual historians might be willing to sacrifice some copies to the cause? The magazines have to be torn up to be scanned, so it is a bit of a sacrifice. I'd really like to see these preserved, and I'm sure some others would too. The missing issues are:

January 1981 (Vol. 1. No. 1)
April 1981 (Vol. 1, No. 2)
January 1982 (Vol. 2, No. 1)
July 1982 (Vol. 2, No. 3)
Fall 1982 (Vol. 2, No. 4)
Winter 1983 (Vol. 3, No. 1)
---------------
This is a good cause. If anyone is willing and able to help, either say so in the comments section, or send me an email and I'll get you in touch with Sarah. Thanks.

Back Issues of democracy

Jumat, 19 November 2010

“New Class” Thinking and Historiography

I am curious what our readers make of “new class” thinking. Is it a legitimate way of theorizing about the place of intellectuals in our postmodern, postindustrial society? Or is it anti-intellectual nonsense, an updated version of Julian Benda’s La Trahison des Clercs?

In my research on the culture wars, I credit the popularization of “new class” thinking to the neoconservatives. Out of their political repositioning, they developed a critical theory about a so-called “new class” of intellectuals, broadly defined to include all professionals tasked with manipulating language—although more narrowly applied to humanists and social scientists. Most members of this “new class,” so the theory went, had turned their backs on the society to which they owed their high-ranking status. A private memorandum written by Daniel Patrick Moynihan for his boss President Nixon in 1970 exemplified this withering mode of criticism: “No doubt there is a struggle going on in this country of the kind the Germans used to call a Kulturkampf. The adversary culture which dominates almost all channels of information transfer and opinion formation has never been stronger, and as best I can tell it has come near silencing the representatives of traditional America.”

In this sense, “new class” thinking seems more ideological than analytical, consistent with the anti-intellectual histrionics of Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck, amusingly portrayed by David Bromwich in his recent New York Review of Books piece, “The Rebel Germ.” Bromwich describes how Limbaugh mockingly portrays Democrats as the party of wimpish intellectuals—updating the egghead label applied to early Cold War era Democrats like Adlai Stevenson and his followers—“composed of superannuated aristocrats [and] pretentious arrivistes...” If this is the sole meaning of the “new class,” then there’s nothing much new about it. But plenty of historians and other intellectuals think the concept analytically useful.

Take Christopher Lasch’s biographer Eric Miller, who buys into Alvin Gouldner’s argument about the “new class,” made in his 1982 book, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class. In a passage cited by Miller to explain Lasch’s early theories about society, Gouldner writes that a “new class” intellectual “desacralizes authority-claims and facilitates challenges to definitions of social reality made by traditional authorities...” Miller continues, in his own disapproving words:

The unintended effect of this way of seeing was on the one hand to diminish the individual’s sense of agency while on the other to empower the individual to think of herself as subject to no authority beyond the particular, socially constructed, historically contingent institutions of her own circumstance. In the end, social-science-inspired historiography only buttressed a vision of the world in which humans, while shaped by powerful social structures, were morally on their own and finally responsible to no authority higher than their own. The atomizing, antinomian tendencies latent in this individualistic ideology did not bode well for communitarian political hopes—such as those that were fueling Lasch’s nascent historical work and political vision (72-73).

In other words, paradoxically, the early Lasch, and “new class” thinkers like him, laid the groundwork for postmodernism in their dismissal of traditional structures of intellectual authority. I say paradoxically because the later, communitarian Lasch worked so hard to put the pieces of traditional structures of intellectual authority back together. I also say paradoxically because the later Lasch used “new class” thinking in both its political and analytical senses, especially in The True and Only Heaven (1991) and The Revolt of the Elites (1995).

So which is it? (I ask somewhat rhetorically, knowing one does not preclude the other.)

“New Class” Thinking and Historiography

Kamis, 04 November 2010

What is postmodernity and how does it relate to the culture wars?

I am the new regularly scheduled Friday blogger, but since I’ll be on a plane to Boston tomorrow for the annual History of Education Society meeting, I’m going to jump the gun by a day. My post relates, I think, to the excellent ongoing discussion between Paul Murphy and Michael Kramer in the comments section of my earlier post on the “Intellectual History for What?” plenary from our recent conference. How can we speak to a public when no such public, singular, exists? I think it also relates to Ray Haberski’s intriguing post yesterday about how war seems to be the only thing to draw Americans together anymore, the only thing around which a civil religion still exists.

At the risk of beating a dead horse, I want to briefly answer the following two questions, or at least, get a discussion going: What is postmodernity? And how does it relate to the culture wars? These are really important questions that pertain to my thinking about the culture wars.

I define postmodernism as the fragmentation of what was once understood to be a singular public culture. Prior to the 1960s, which I consider the watershed years in U.S. history between modernity and postmodernity, it was possible for politicians, intellectuals, filmmakers, writers, etc., to address a single, common, if imagined public. The imagined part of this equation should not be forgotten, since people were always marginalized from the common American culture. But this speaks to my point. Once more people were brought into the common public—racial and ethnic minorities, women, gays and lesbians— by the movements of the 1960s and 1970s, it became more difficult to sustain a single, if flawed public or political culture. Fragmentation reigned supreme. The culture wars are best understood in terms of this fragmentation, and in terms of failed attempts to reestablish a common culture. This was a truly distressing turn of events for a public intellectual like Christopher Lasch. His biographer Eric Miller writes that “the crisis that so stirred Lasch is bound up in what we call ‘postmodernity,’ the vacuity of the name itself an indicator of the nature of the crisis.” “Lasch spent his life,” Miller believes, “slowly hammering out a way of seeing and living that could sustain hope amidst the grand fracturing of the age.” Such a temperament is so obviously imprinted upon Lasch’s students.

I also think postmodernism, and thus, the culture wars, relate to large social and economic shifts. This is not the same as saying the culture wars were epiphenomenal, which is to say that culture wars were unimportant relative to the economy. The writings of Fredric Jameson help me make sense of this vexing issue. In his famous 1984 New Left Review article, titled, “Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” Jameson attached the cultural particulars of postmodernity, especially fragmentation, to the postindustrial transformations of capitalism. The displacement of industry from the nation’s urban centers, accompanied by the new technologies of imagery that allowed capital to invade the human psyche beneath consciousness, spelled this out. “In psychological terms,” Jameson observed, “we may say that as a service economy we are henceforth so far removed from the realities of production and work that we inhabit a dream world of artificial stimuli and televised experience.” Such a dream-like existence helped explain the prevalence of fragmented or postmodern thinking: “never in any previous civilization have the great metaphysical preoccupations, the fundamental questions of being and of the meaning of life, seemed so utterly remote and pointless.” In a nation like the United States, premised on great metaphysical preoccupations—where God and the Constitution both made the nation a City on the Hill—fragmentation proved especially difficult to accept. The culture wars were how people responded to this.

After I presented some of this at USIH, I was asked by one astute audience member why other nations going through the shift from modernity to postmodernity, such as in Western Europe, did not also experience culture wars, at least nowhere near as intensely. This was a great question. And this is where history matters. The changes to American society in terms of race and sex relations were much more profound, akin to throwing gasoline (altered racial and sexual landscapes) on a fire (postmodernity).

What is postmodernity and how does it relate to the culture wars?

Selasa, 02 November 2010

Hartman on Livingston

Review of James Livingston, The World Turned Inside Out: American Thought and Culture at the End of the 20th Century (New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2010). ISBN-13: 978-0-7425-3541-1. 179 pages.

Review by Andrew Hartman
Illinois State University
November 2010

“Keep arguing.” James Livingston, 2010

Professor Livingston needn’t worry. His new book will keep people arguing. For The World Turned Inside Out is nothing if not maddeningly counterintuitive. Some of my friends and colleagues who have read it inform me that they agree with nothing in it. Of course, these same friends and colleagues also tell me they have never agreed with a single word Livingston has written. And yet, they keep reading. And they keep arguing.

In his first major contribution to intellectual history, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850-1940 (1994), Livingston argued against historians who made the Populists out to be history’s tragic, if fallen heroes, celebrated for their resistance to the corporate order. In contrast, Livingston marveled at the material surpluses offered by the new corporate order and, furthermore, contended that the emergence of corporations merited intellectual innovation in the eyes of pragmatists, especially John Dewey. “In the narrative form of pragmatism,” Livingston wrote, “the decline of proprietary capitalism loses its pathos, and the triumph of corporate capitalism appears as the first act of an unfinished comedy, not the residue of tragedy” (1994; xvi). Livingston thus inverted the historical trajectory posited by Christopher Lasch in his 1991 The True and Only Heaven: whereas Lasch understood “progress” to be mere ideological cover for the bureaucratic and technocratic constraints of the corporate order, Livingston pointed to the newfound freedoms made possible by that order. Unfortunately for us all, Lasch died in 1994, unable to respond to Livingston’s provocations.

In his next significant book, Pragmatism and Feminism: Rethinking the Politics of American History (2001), Livingston contended that the intellectual revolutions otherwise known as pragmatism and feminism were very similar in structure, largely because both were made possible by consumer capitalism’s obliteration of older bourgeois restraints. In opposition to most feminist theorists, especially those who framed their ideas in the Marxist tradition, Livingston theorized that feminism not only worked well alongside consumer capitalism, but that the latter created a context that allowed for the former. He wrote: “So if the cause (in both senses) of modern feminism is the extrication of women from an exclusive preoccupation with domestic roles—a process that both presupposes paid employment and permits the detachment of female sexuality from familial objects or reproductive functions—and if modern feminism is by definition a cross-class social movement because it claims to speak for all women, it would seem to follow that the necessary condition of modern feminism is the rise of corporate capitalism” (2001; 176). Somewhat ironically, Marxist theorist Nancy Fraser recently came around to this view, not to celebrate consumer capitalism, as Livingston, but rather, to critique second-wave feminism.

And now, in The World Turned Inside Out (2010), Livingston makes a whole series of counterintuitive claims that serve as an intellectual defense of consumer capitalism and the corporate order. Here are a few of his central points that should keep us arguing:

1. The left won the culture wars, and in fact, most political struggles since the 1960s.

2. Postmodernism and poststructuralism are American inventions, prefigured by pragmatism and other American intellectual revolutions.

3. Mass consumer culture (television, film, music) anticipated even the most radical forms of postmodern thinking, such as deconstruction.

4. All of these developments were good, and happened despite Livingston’s recognition that a spike in economic inequality caused the financial crisis of 2008.

This review will focus on Livingston’s first point, that the left has been largely victorious, since, more than the others, it will likely engender the most cognitive dissonance in those who lived through the past thirty years, when even the eight-year interruption to conservative rule, in the form of the Clinton administration, needs to be qualified by such pesky facts as Ross Perot, NAFTA, and Welfare Reform.

“The cultural and intellectual revolution that changed North America and the world after 1975,” Livingston writes, “was so successful—it was so formative, causative, and measurable—that we can take it for granted, and then look past it, to the point where some of us even argue that conservatism took over American thought and culture after 1980” (2010; xiii). At first glance, it seems Livingston is making an argument similar to that made by historian David Courtwright in his new book, No Right Turn: Conservative Politics in a Liberal America. Courtwright shows that where the cultural right failed, the economic right succeeded; where the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition fell short in turning back the tides of secularism, the American Enterprise Institute and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce achieved lower taxes and fewer regulations. Courtwright’s thesis is that contemporary American life is dominated by both cultural and economic libertarianism, the twin legacies of the boomer generation. Like Courtwright, Livingston accentuates the cultural effects of “the fabled 1960s,” arguing “that the tendencies and sensibilities we associate with that moment decisively shaped intellectual agendas and cultural practices… in the 1980s and 1990s” (2010; xv).

But unlike Courtwright, Livingston thinks conservatives failed in the economic arena as well. In other words, the Reagan Revolution was not very revolutionary, at least, not in the sense we are accustomed to thinking about it. Livingston offers up as evidence the ineluctable growth of government, even its redistributive arm, which for him includes the military, a redistributive agency for the poor. Livingston says that an “unspoken socialism” became an entrenched national consensus, as transfer payments—“income received by households and individuals for which no contribution to current output of goods or services has been required”—“were the fastest-growing component of income in the late twentieth century, amounting, by 1999, to 20 percent of all labor income” (19). This is compelling stuff, though it requires a mild suspension of disbelief, since, in this instance, Livingston ignores that transfer payments likely increased in response to the loss of millions of well-paying unionized jobs. To this extent, deindustrialization better describes recent U.S. political economy than does socialism, and the growth of transfer payments should be understood as necessary to political stability in the face of growing inequality. At a more basic level, the fact of growing inequality calls into question the premise that the left is winning the national political battle. By what political spectrum does a society with a victorious left equate to an increasingly unequal one?

Livingston is on firmer ground when he limits the scope of his analysis to the culture wars. On this battleground, the left did much better, even if, again, Livingston overplays his hand. It is beyond doubt that the United States is now more tolerant than it was sixty years ago, when many more forms of discrimination were still legal, and that this tolerance led to conservative frustration in the culture wars. “Whatever the issue—whether sexuality, gay rights, reproduction, education, women’s rights, racial equity, equal opportunity, affirmative action, or freedom of expression—the domestic debate was… always lost by the so-called cultural conservatives who kept citing ‘family values.’” The key to Livingston’s point here lies in the recent history of the university, for, as he writes, “the New Left of the 1960s grew up and got jobs in all the right places, especially, but not only, in higher education” (20). In accentuating the importance of higher education, and in claiming that the left controls the “commanding heights” of the university, Livingston is rehashing conservative culture war contentions, most famously argued by Lynne Cheney, Dinesh D’Souza, Roger Kimball, and Allan Bloom. But whereas these right-wingers lamented left-wing academic hegemony, Livingston brags about it.

Livingston is certainly correct in asserting the centrality of the university to American society: the university credential system has become the principal gateway to the professional world, a sorting mechanism for white-collar hierarchy. The numbers tell the story: in 1960, there were about 3.5 million Americans enrolled in universities; by 1970, this number had more than doubled to around 7.5 million, as the size of faculties grew proportionally. Livingston nicely relates this demographic explosion on the nation’s college campuses to the culture wars, or to what he generally describes as the “debates about the promise of American life.” “By the 1970s,” Livingston writes, “the principal residence of that promise was widely assumed to be the new ‘meritocracy’ enabled by universal access to higher education” (21). To this extent, class resentment aimed at intellectuals—and tropes about “political correctness”—made sense, in a misplaced sort of way, since intellectuals indeed held the levers to any given individual’s future economic stability. Similarly, Eric Hobsbawm recently related the growing importance of a university education to the redirection of class animosity against “toffs of one kind or another—intellectuals, liberal elites, people who are putting it over on us.” But whereas Hobsbawm detects false consciousness in this rhetorical arrangement, Livingston, rather, implies there is truth in such charges since, by his estimation, the left did indeed control the university, the culture, and thus, the postindustrial, postmodern political system.

If Livingston is correct to place the university at the center of American cultural politics, he is mistaken to assert that the left controls the university. Of course cultural leftists gained positions of power in departments of English, American Studies, and to a lesser degree, history, sociology, and political science. But so what? This fact needs to be weighed against the ever-decreasing percentage of students who major in the disciplines of the humanities and the social sciences. What does it mean that leftists occupy English departments when the largest and fastest growing major is business? Furthermore, I am genuinely curious as to how Livingston would respond to the research conducted by Marc Bousquet and others that details how universities are increasingly organized as profit-making institutions that slash labor costs by replacing tenured faculty with adjuncts and graduate students. Reorganizing the university along the lines of a corporation that offers a product to consumers—to students and their tuition-paying parents—has lessened the impact of the university as a creator of culture, at least, of the type of culture I would call leftist.

Another less noticeable yet no less significant problem with Livingston’s postulation that the left won the culture wars is that he unintentionally repeats the vital centrist theory of American history: those who disagreed with the American consensus— whether it be the Cold War liberal consensus of the 1950s, or the postmodern cultural consensus of the 1990s—stand in the way of progress and, as such, deserve scorn and condescension. Just as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. labeled both communists and right-wing isolationists dangerous reactionaries in 1949, Livingston implies that both modernist Marxists like Fredric Jameson and traditionalist conservatives like Robert Bork were atavistic remnants of a culture that had passed them by. While silly Marxists like Jameson persisted in anachronistically prioritizing material conditions over language, crazy conservatives like Bork made wild arguments about how the 1960s enshrined the radical individualism of the Declaration of Independence. Livingston ignores that both responses to the postmodern condition were no less innovative than, say, deconstruction. Take Bork, for instance. While his argument was undoubtedly strange coming from a notorious conservative figure, especially given its anti-American implications, it was also, paradoxically, straight out of the book of Nietzsche (though Nietzsche looked nihilism much more squarely in the face, and dated its modern beginnings to Christ not Jefferson).

One of Livingston’s problems is that he does not take conservatism very seriously. Following Roger Kimball, he claims that the culture wars were largely an “intramural sport on the left” (53). From my view, it goes without saying that conservatives were also deeply engaged in the culture wars. Think about Mississippi evangelical Donald Wildmon and his organization, the American Family Association, which coordinated protests against Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ and Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ. Also remember that it was the American Legion and other conservative veteran’s groups that derailed the Smithsonian’s proposed Enola Gay exhibit. The list goes on. Even in academia, where the “intramural sport on the left” characterization is most accurate, conservative culture warriors had their say, made evident by the critical and commercial success of such conservative missives as Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education, and Lynne Cheney’s non-ironically titled, Telling the Truth. Livingston mentions these thinkers only to brush them aside, and to conflate their worldview with anti-postmodernist thinkers such as Alan Sokol, the physicist who wrote a hoax article in 1996 for the journal Social Text to prove the bankruptcy of the entire postmodern project. Livingston writes of Sokol: “Like Mrs. Cheney, he believed in a fixed external reality governed by scientifically proven laws of motion and… he believed the academic Left had lost its way when it made the linguistic turn and decided, following Charles Peirce’s semiotic lead, that ‘matter is effete mind’” (51).

Livingston lumps Fredric Jameson together with the Sokols and Cheneys of the world, as equally conservative, even reactionary. But Livingston does not analyze Jameson’s work in any depth. This is unfortunate, because had he done so, he might have found a way to reconcile the contradictory claim that the left was winning the political struggle in spite of increasing inequality. Or not, which is perhaps the point. Livingston is correct that Jameson eschewed postmodern trends and continued to categorize reality and perception differently, particularly in his famous 1984 New Left Review essay, “Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” On the one hand, Jameson scoffed at the idea that social classes had disappeared in real terms, made evident by the “ever greater quantities of structurally unemployable subjects.” On the other, he understood why the perception that class no longer mattered resonated in a postmodern context, inasmuch as the new forms of capitalist organization had “flung workers in archaic factories out of work, displaced new kinds of industry to unexpected parts of the world, and recruited work forces different from the traditional ones in a variety of features, from gender to skill and nationality…” In this way, by bracketing off reality from perception, Jameson was pretty convincing, to me at least, in explaining the link between postmodern epistemologies and what he considered “pure” capitalist economic policies.

Livingston is absolutely right that there is no return from pragmatism, which he argues anticipated deconstruction at every level. Pragmatism (and deconstruction) endowed human beings with a history. In other words, pragmatism (and deconstruction) was a theoretical move that explained how humans could not have preceded the first attempt to understand humans, through the social use of language or signs. Livingston writes: “These propositions become downright threatening when you realize that they drive nails into the coffin of the modern individual… For it suggests that individuals are not somehow prior to any social contract or political community or linguistic convention… and that language is not the transparent medium of the truth-seeking capacity we call reason” (43). This is intoxicating stuff. But it still does not explain inequality, nor help us overcome it. For Jameson, such postmodern epistemologies made Sartre’s existentialist version of Marxism a tempting if flawed resolution. In the fanciful world of the postmodern, where political identities, like gender, were as fluid as performance, Jameson seemed to suggest that inventing a new leftist political subject, a necessary precondition of liberation from capital, would have been no less fanciful. Such a suggestion, however, did not create a way out of the postmodern condition so much as represent the hopelessness of the left. To me, Livingston’s book also represents such hopelessness in that, even in the so-called left-wing victory, inequality reigns supreme (not to mention war!)

This review only touches the surface of The World Turned Upside Down. The book includes several chapters on popular culture, one on American empire, and an appendix dedicated to analyzing the recent financial collapse. All of it is grist for the mill. Readers will find Livingston’s takes on mainstream films like Blade Runner and Robocop, “perhaps the two best movies of the 1980s” (61), alongside B-movies like the disgusting I Spit on Your Grave (recently remade!), equal parts fascinating and frustrating. Readers will either love or hate Livingston’s scatological exploration of South Park. Either way, if you pick up this book, you will not be bored. And you certainly will not stop arguing.

Hartman on Livingston

Rabu, 17 Maret 2010

Radical Conservatives? Some Thoughts on Paul Murphy’s THE REBUKE OF HISTORY

I finally had the pleasure to read The Rebuke of History: The Southern Agrarians and American Conservative Thought, written by our USIH colleague Paul Murphy. It was the topic of discussion during my graduate seminar last night. My students found the history of the Agrarians fascinating, in no small part due to Paul’s masterful telling of it, but also because, being from Illinois—the “Land of Lincoln”—it was a shock to their system to learn that serious intellectuals found complex ways to defend the antebellum South.

The thing I found most compelling about The Rebuke of History is Paul’s notion of “radical conservatism.” He considers Southern Agrarianism, as originally formulated in its founding 1930 text, I’ll Take My Stand—written by “Twelve Southerners”—both conservative and radical. Its conservatism is obvious in its idealization of a southern past rooted in the hierarchy of slavery. But the radicalism of southern agrarianism is also evident, in its antipathy to industrial capitalism. Paul sets out to understand how this radicalism dissipated, as the postwar conservative movement sopped up aspects of Agrarianism. In his words:

“The burden of this study has been to document the deradicalization of the Agrarian tradition and to identify the ways in which a cultural criticism originally insistent on the interconnection between culture and the economy came to be replaced by a traditionalist conservatism oriented around the image of the South as a synecdoche for Christian orthodoxy and a patriarchal social order.”

My questions for discussion: What makes a radical conservative? Paul clearly defines a radical conservative as someone who understands that the cultural critique of modernism must, logically, extend to an economic critique of capitalism. In his epilogue, he classifies Eugene Genovese and Wendell Berry as radical conservatives. Paul writes: “Genovese’s [prior] radicalism.. was informed by the same hostility toward bourgeois culture and radical individualism that shapes his current conservatism.” Paul describes Berry in similar fashion: “Berry is at once profoundly conservative in his views on marriage, sexuality, and community and radical in his condemnation of modern agribusiness, the military establishment, and global capitalism.”

In these terms, Christopher Lasch clearly qualifies as a radical conservative, as I have argued elsewhere. Who else? Were radical conservatives more common prior to the postwar conservative movement, which fused the libertarian and traditionalist strains of social thought? More common prior to the polarizing effects of the culture wars?

Radical Conservatives? Some Thoughts on Paul Murphy’s THE REBUKE OF HISTORY

Kamis, 03 Desember 2009

Hollinger’s “Affiliation by Revocable Consent”: From Postdiscipline to Postethnic to Obama

By Andrew Hartman

At our most recent U.S. Intellectual History Conference, the final panel was also the most anticipated: “Assessing the Legacy of the 1977 Wingspread Conference.” The panelists were Dorothy Ross, Thomas Bender, David Hall, and David Hollinger. I would like to address one of Hollinger’s central contentions, which has lead me to reexamine his most famous work, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (1995).

In reiterating a point he made in the recent Historically Speaking forum on the state of U.S. Intellectual History (which the USIH blog analyzed extensively—see posts by me, Paul Murphy, and not 1, not 2, but 3 by Tim Lacy), Hollinger argued that intellectual historians should guard against ghettoization. Rather than follow the path of the diplomatic historians, who have formed their own society (SHAFR) so as to largely avoid the mainstream societies (AHA and OAH), Hollinger would like to see intellectual history as analogous to political and social history, which are pervasive within the historical discipline writ large.

Some might say Hollinger’s advice is sound only insofar as it speaks to professionalism. In fact, the tone of the entire Wingspread panel was hyper-professional. On the one hand, this is helpful to younger scholars seeking tenured employment in a horrible job market. But, on the other hand, it’s also depressing—the job scene is such that many of us would probably rather the panelists had focused on something more exciting or uplifting. From my perspective, I would have been more interested in what they might have had to say about the workings of intellectual history in the broader public and political culture—past, present, and future.

But the more I thought about Hollinger’s warnings, the more familiar his postdisciplinary approach seemed. In other words, something other than professionalism seems to be driving his thinking. I vaguely recalled that a similar framework guided his theorizing about race and ethnicity in Postethnic, which I first read over a decade ago, before graduate school. I’ve been meaning to return to this book in researching the culture wars, since it speaks to the debates over multiculturalism that rocked the academy and beyond in the 1980s and 90s.

Sure enough, re-reading Postethnic confirmed my suspicions. Not to make too much of the comparison, especially since Hollinger’s discussion of racial and ethnic boundaries is much better theorized, not to mention more important than his discussion of disciplinary boundaries, but the two arguments do seem somewhat parallel. In both cases, Hollinger is suspicious of prescribed boundaries.

The key principal of Postethnic is “affiliation by revocable consent.” In other words, in the context of ethnic and racial identities, “blood” should not determine affiliations of solidarity. Affiliations should be voluntary. This is not to say that Hollinger is against the use of racial categories in political matters. For instance, since black Americans, by their color, and by their history, cannot easily overcome the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow, they are entitled to legal and political remedies in the form of affirmative action, a temporary and imperfect solution. But politics in this form should be decoupled from culture. A black American might need and deserve affirmative action, but he or she should not be obliged to remain tied to the cultural identity of “black America.” Such cultural rigidity drove the identity politics of the 1980s and 90s, which in turn made it more difficult to expand the circle of the American “we” to include, say, poor black Americans living in the urban ghettoes.

To the extent that Hollinger wants to expand the circle of “we” to more Americans, he is unapologetically a liberal nationalist. He assumes, correctly in my view, that the best way to make our society more egalitarian is to build upon our commonalities as Americans. He writes: “A stronger national solidarity enhances the possibility of social and economic justice within the United States. This is a simple point, but an extremely important one. Any society that cannot see its diverse members as somehow ‘in it together’ is going to have trouble distributing its resources with even a modicum of equity.” Along this line, Hollinger is quick to blame economic inequality for the tribalism of identity politics. The type of nationalism he supports is close to the fallen social democratic thinking outlined in Tony Judt’s recent New York Review of Books essay, “What is Living and What is Dead in Social Democracy?”

I would even go so far as to say that Hollinger speaks the language of civil religion (as outlined below in Ray Haberski’s compelling analysis of Obama’s civil religious rhetoric). Hollinger is much more nuanced and qualified in his critique of identity politics and his defense of a national community than, say, a Christopher Lasch or a Robert Bellah. Hollinger links the postethnic together with cosmopolitanism, which negotiates the terrain between pluralism and Kantian universalism on the one hand, and between identity politics and communitarian nationalism on the other. But despite such carefulness, I would put Hollinger in the civil religion category. In this light, my re-reading of Hollinger has compelled me to rethink how I might conclude my book-in-progress on the culture wars—the concluding chapter is to be a reflection on the age of Obama in relation to the culture wars.

In Postethnic, Hollinger sees three distinct constituencies in relation to the U.S. nation-state, circa 1995: 1) the business elite who saw little need for the nation in an era of multinational capitalism (except to enforce their interests around the world); 2) members of the various diasporas who saw the nation “more as a site for transnational affiliations than as an affiliation of its own”; and 3) the “great variety of Middle Americans, evangelical Christians, advocates of family values, and supporters of Newt Gingrich and of Rush Limbaugh… suspicious of the state except as an enforcer of personal morality, but [who] claim the nation as, in effect, their own ethnic group.”

Hollinger’s formulation is clever, and mostly correct in the context of the 90s. Constituencies two and three battled it out in the culture wars as constituency one made out like bandits. But I would add a fourth constituency, one that has waxed and waned in its influence: those Americans who claim the nation for social justice. Such a strain might include everything from populism to Popular Frontism to racial liberalism to communitarianism to, I would add, postethnic thinkers like Hollinger. This social justice variant was overwhelmed during the culture wars. Hollinger’s major achievement in Postethnic is to revitalize such a strain for those sensitive to the needs of ethnic and racial minorities.

It is hard not to read Postethnic through the lens of Obama’s electoral victory. In fact, Hollinger has written about such a connection. In an article titled “Obama, the Instability of Color Lines, and the Promise of a Postethnic Future,” Hollinger contends that the major significance of Obama’s victory is to make clear that race, formulated as class and historical legacy, is more constraining, in the twenty-first century, than race, formulated as color. This separates slavery and Jim Crow’s descendents from black immigrants, African or Caribbean. Hollinger writes: “The African-American descendants of slavery and Jim Crow are the only population group in the United States with a multicentury legacy of group-specific enslavement and institutionalized debasement, including hypo-descent racialization (“one drop of blood” makes a person black) and antimiscegenation laws (black-white marriages were against the law in most states with large black populations until 1967), carried out under constitutional authority. Neither Obama nor any other African-American of immigrant background is a member of this population group. The success of Obama in becoming [president] is, like the success of other black immigrants in other domains, an indication that something other than color-prejudice in the eye of empowered white people is at the root of structural inequality in the United States.”

Although this point is valid and significant, for my purposes, Obama represents something different. As alluded to by Haberski, Obama taps into the fourth strain of thinking in relation to the American nation. Call it civil religion or liberal nationalism. Furthermore, Obama’s victory is a watershed moment, not only because he is the first black president, but because he has given common cause to constituencies number two, those who have viewed the American nation as a meeting place of various diasporas, and four. In short, black nationalists have inched closer to American liberal nationalism. Obama implicitly makes these connections in his writings and in his speeches. That said, the degree to which this “community” is real or lasting is debatable, especially since, in practice, the Obama administration has seemingly favored constituency number one (the business elite) by co-opting numbers two and four. Number three simply thinks he’s un-American.

Now, to conclude by way of returning to Hollinger’s postdisciplinary framework: this is pure speculation—not to mention intellectual gymnastics—but perhaps Hollinger views the relationship of U.S. intellectual history to the larger historical discipline as he views the relationship of, say, Chicano nationalism to the American nation. Chicano nationalism might be necessary in specific contexts, to improve the legal and political position of Latinos vis-à-vis the American nation. But the American nation is the ultimate guarantor of justice to those Chicanos who reside in the United States. I think Hollinger has come around to the view that our endeavors, via the blog and conference, have been necessary to improving our position vis-à-vis the larger historical discipline. He seemed enthusiastic about the conference. But allowing ourselves to be ghettoized would be, in his eyes, the academic equivalent of identity politics. “Affiliation by revocable consent.”

Hollinger’s “Affiliation by Revocable Consent”: From Postdiscipline to Postethnic to Obama

Senin, 16 November 2009

Reversing the Vector of Intellectual History

One of the many memorable moments of our second conference was the first: James Livingston’s plenary address, “Seeing, Hearing, and Writing the End of Modernity: From Reading Pragmatism to Watching Movies.” I found intriguing the way he used Warren Susman’s theory about “reversing the vector of intellectual history” to frame the discussion. Livingston explicitly referenced Susman’s framework in his introduction, stating: “Ideas cannot be ahead of their time.” In other words, intellectuals merely express preexisting modes of understanding already out there in the ethos. In his conclusion, although he did not reference Susman by name, he rephrased this “bottom up” theory of intellectual history, arguing that the end of modernity was already deeply felt, exemplified by the turn in film history that began in the 1970s—a turn to more graphically apocalyptic visions that accompanied the implosion of modern narratives, such as patriarchy and nationalism. Postmodern theorists merely put such popular sentiments into word.

Had Livingston stuck to a historical narrative that began in the 1970s, his talk would have been pretty conventional, at least from a film studies perspective. But Livingston extended his historical analysis back, in ways both provocative and confusing. For he also argues that pragmatism, which predates the 1970s transformation in film by almost a century—and is the topic of his last two books—is the most eloquent expression of the postmodern normalization of nihilism. For, according to Livingston, James and Dewey’s anti-subjectivity were more radical than any of the more recent postmodern theorists, including Deleuze and Guattari, who are often considered at the extreme end of postmodernism.

The question I posed Livingston at the conference, and that I now pose to you, the reader: How does this make sense, at least chronologically, if we are to hue to the Susman theory that reverses the trajectory of intellectual history from the bottom to the top? In other words, if the turn in film history is the major piece of evidence that the end of modernity was already felt prior to the explosion of postmodern theorizing in the 1980s, then where does pragmatism fit in this order of things? Livingston responded that cultural forms predated pragmatism, in the form of money, which was conceptualized as “a sign of a sign,” and that Dewey and James put such seemingly banal market relations into a philosophical framework.

I am very familiar with Livingston’s argument about the relationship between the “Money Question” and pragmatism from his 1994 book, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850-1940. In fact, I find this argument extremely convincing in that specific historical context, as I make clear in the first chapter of my book, Education and the Cold War, where I frame Dewey’s pragmatic theories of education as transformational, and in opposition to otherwise astute critics, such as Randolph Bourne and Christopher Lasch.

But, to me, Livingston’s recourse to the money example is not an answer to my question, because I find the turn in film history gives expression to a much more radical break with subjectivity, or at least a much more widely felt break. So, if pragmatism was the extremity of end-of-modernity nihilism, as Livingston maintains, then it predates the turn of film history by many decades, thus rendering the Susman thesis less plausible. What I was looking for is more specificity with regards to historical context. My thinking is that pragmatism does not decenter subjectivity to the degree Livingston maintains.

This is hopefully the first of several posts I plan to write on the conference, which was a resounding success from my vantage point. I will be taking a much more active role in organizing next year’s conference. I only hope we can duplicate some of the energy we created this year.

Andrew