Arguing the World

I finally got around to watching Arguing the World, Joseph Dorman’s 1998 film about four of the most important New York intellectuals: Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Irving Howe, and Irving Kristol. I’m not sure what took me so long getting around to this, since it’s a film all US intellectual historians should watch, especially those, like me, interested in postwar political culture. I’m currently in the midst of writing a chapter on the neoconservative response to the sixties New Left—important to the early formation of what would later come to be called the culture wars. Kristol, and to a lesser extent, Bell and Glazer, figure in this chapter, so it seemed like a good time to watch the film. (Plus, I recently noticed it is available to stream at Netflix.)

I really enjoyed Arguing the World. I think it nicely captures the intellectual history of these four men. It focuses on all the important episodes in recent American history that shaped and changed their ideas. Often, however, the film parrots the views of the subjects without interrogating them more thoroughly. For instance, echoing arguments he made back in the 1950s, Howe claimed that the anti-Stalinist leftists at Partisan Review were cultural highbrows while the Popular Frontists were cultural middlebrows. Trotskyists read Proust, Communists and Fellow Travelers read Howard Fast. Warren Susman later expanded on this analysis, calling the 1930s Popular Front culture conservative in its kitschy celebration of “the people,” made clear in how the Popular Front song, “The Ballad of the Americans,” was co-opted as the theme song of the 1940 Republican Party National Convention.

The film accepts these normative claims at face value. In his important 1997 book, The Cultural Front (the subject of my first ever USIH blog post in January 2007!), Michael Denning makes a compelling argument against Howe and Susman’s interpretations. Denning argues that what makes the Popular Front culture interesting, complex, and ultimately radical is not its celebration of “the people” but rather the way it “mediates on the absence of the people: on the martyrs, the losses, the betrayals, the disinherited.” I’m not here suggesting Arguing the Worldneeded to consult Denning, whose book likely came out just as the film was in the final stages of production. Rather, this is my mild way of saying that the filmmaker might have done a better job challenging the assumptions of the subjects.

As the film moves forward in time, as the subjects themselves began to take on very different points of view, the film gains an easier mechanism for challenging their ideas. They began to argue with each other, mediated through interviewers. For instance, in the early stages of the Cold War, all but one of these former leftists became Cold War liberals. Howe, the one holdover, started Dissentmagazine in his attempt to keep the flames of social democracy alive in what he thought of as a conformist intellectual culture. He even wrote a famous essay on conformity where he was critical of several of his former comrades. Kristol said he never took Dissent seriously because it seemed like nothing more than “echoes from the past.” Glazer said Howe and Dissent were too bitter about “sell outs.”

Conversely, Howe, Glazer, and Bell all had critical things to say about Kristol becoming one of the leading intellectuals of the conservative movement by the 1970s. Bell said Kristol had become the embodiment of the thing that the two of them hoped to stamp out when they founded The Public Interest in 1965: “ideological.” Bell was particularly taken aback by Kristol’s infamous claim in the early 1990s that his Cold War was just getting started—that it had morphed into a war against liberalism. Glazer, who, aside from Kristol, came closer to being a full-blown neoconservative than the others, was mildly critical of Kristol for having given up any hope that government can improve people’s lives. Howe, of course, was the most scathing. He said he still felt attached to most of his old Alcove No. 1 comrades, including Glazer and Bell, but not Kristol, for whom he wished “a long life filled with many political failures.”

One of the underlying assumptions made in the film—in interview after interview with the subjects and with scholars, including Morris Dickstein—is that no matter their political trajectories, these four New York intellectuals “carried over a cast of mind of Marxism.” What made this the case, according to Arguing the World? They sought to espouse a universal understanding of the world, and believed that any problem, no matter how provincial, should be related to larger forces at work. I agree with this assessment. In my chapter I argue that they maintained the analytical Marxist tendency for diagnosing problems in relation to root causes, internal logics, and overarching structures. Do you agree? Is this a Marxist thing?

America's Touch of Evil: The Contained Turmoil Of The 1950s

[Note: This is the fourth in a series of movie profiles at USIH in support the Film Noir Foundation. Please see the first post by Ben Alpers for more information. Click here to make a donation to the Foundation.]

-------------------------------------------

Touch of Evil, one of the last mid-century noir films, suffered the indignity of not even being nominated for an Academy Award in a year, 1958, when Gigi won best picture and took nine awards. To make matters worse, Orson Welles---the writer, director, co-star of Touch of Evil, and a star figure in the noir genre---was not even recognized for editing in relation to one of the most famous long tracking shots in film history.

Welles' long shot is famous not so much for its length. At 3 minutes and 28 seconds, a great many films exceed it (one recent film, Russian Ark, is 99 minutes of one shot!). Rather, Welles' shot is admired for its artistry, intricacy, and tension. Here it is:



I love the explosive climax.[1]

Touch of Evil's qualities as a film were, at the start, radically underestimated. After many editing controversies, Universal International came to view the film as having low (profit-making) potential. Wikipedia succinctly explains what happened next:

It was released as a B-movie, the lower half of a double feature. The A-movie was The Female Animal, starring Hedy Lamarr, produced by Albert Zugsmith and directed by Harry Keller, whom the studio had hired to direct the re-shot material in Touch of Evil. The two films even had the same cameraman, Russell Metty. Welles's film was given little publicity despite the many stars in the cast. Though it had little commercial success in the US, it was well-received in Europe, particularly by critics like future filmmaker François Truffaut.

The context of the film's release and reception mirror, in some ways, prominent noir themes: cynicism, skepticism, and the film as a victim of circumstance. Even Welles, despite his unlikeable role in the film itself, emerges as a kind of doomed hero in relation to his art.

From where does the film's story come? Touch of Evil is loosely based on Badge of Evil (1956), a novel written by "Whit Masterson"---a compact pseudonym for the authors Robert Wade and William Miller. The central character in that book is an assistant district attorney, Mitch Holt---given the name Ramon Miguel 'Mike' Vargas in the film, and played by Charlton Heston (Heston as a Mexican would become a joke in later films). Holt's wife is named Consuelo in the book, but named Susan 'Susie" Vargas in the film and played by a sexy Janet Leigh (lower right). Orson Welles plays police captain Hank Quinlan (right) in the film; the character has the same name in the book. Quinlan and his police partner become the primary suspects as the story develops, both in the film and the book. But the film takes a turn from the book's narrative in that Quinlan is the more powerful (and more guilty) of the suspected partners, the other being police sergeant Pete Menzies, played by Joseph Calleia and named Leron McCoy in the book.

Got it? Just remember that the most important characters are Mike Vargas (Heston), Susie Vargas (Leigh), Hank Quinlan (Welles), and Menzies (Calleia), and you'll successfully navigate the plot and avoid the "MacGuffins" that David Sehat rightly warned us against. If you haven't seen the film before, I recommend reading the AMC Filmsite summary here. Indeed, because of that detailed summary, I am going to discuss my idiosyncratic impressions rather than make any attempt at comprehensiveness.[2]

I have seen Touch of Evil only once, but the film's aesthetic, acting, and general cynicism impressed me as few others films before or since. As usual, scenes and performances leave the deepest marks.[3] First, Orson Welles was fantastic. He effectively played one the most unlikeable, fascinating, monstrous, and despicable figures I've seen on screen. The manipulative Quinlan has been described elsewhere as a "tragic figure who has a 'touch of evil' in his enforcement of the law." I also recall the tension of the Grandi family gang members coming to abduct Janet Leigh. I remember vividly the hotel scene where it appears that that the Grandi family gang is going to rape Leigh---again for the tension. I was impressed with the dark mood of the film—particularly the final scenes in an oil production facility (like the one below) near the film's climax.



The film's side characters are memorable. AMC's Filmsite sums up their mood-altering diversity:

Other unusual and seedy characters include a nervous and sex-crazed motel manager, a blind shopkeeper, a drug smuggler, a sweaty drug dealer with a poorly-fitting wig, a terrorizing gang of juvenile delinquents, and an intense good cop - an international narcotics officer who is honeymooning (but ignores his wife), all in a sleazy border town (and a number of dark hotel rooms) within a twenty-four hour period.

Zsa Zsa Gabor (right) makes a short appearance as the owner and madame of a strip club.

As a start toward bringing my impressions together, I offer first this sweeping contextual assessment---also from AMC's Filmsite:

It was regarded as a rebellious, unorthodox, bizarre, and outrageously exaggerated film, affronting respectable 1950's sensibilities, with controversial themes including racism, betrayal of friends, sexual ambiguity, frameups, drugs, and police corruption of power.

Indeed, to expand on this, I think something of the significance of film noir, at least in the 1950s, is in the way that the genre captures that slice of the repressed dissatisfaction, always roiling below the surface, of the decade. If the period's intense anti-communism resulted in idealist visions of America (i.e. as the proverbial “city on the hill”), then noir captures that city's messy undercurrents. The aesthetic beauty in those films alerts us to their artistry, but their mood reflects what every close-up of the decade reveals: flaws, cracks, and imperfections in the foundational narrative. The affluence and mood of containment in the period could not bottle up the dissatisfaction that emerged later, for instance in Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (published in 1963, and recently re-evaluated by Louis Menand in a New Yorker article titled "Books as Bombs"). But other books, articles, and works of art---as well as movements like the Beats (also known for their dark motif)---belie America's view of itself as noble, exceptional, and successful. Touch of Evil, then, appears right when Americans were least likely to see the relevance of its themes to their predicament, hence the relative failure of the movie at release.

The cross-border aspects of the film's plot, as well as the dirty nature of Hank Quinlan's means, speaks to America's growing realpolitik in dealing with its imperial interests in the 1950s. The imperative of the time was that Communism must be contained abroad, whether via idealistic public pronouncements like the Truman Doctrine, or by quietly sending "advisors" to Vietnam and secretly placing missiles in Turkey. Covert operations are planned in this period, if not enacted. Quinlan's character embodies a growing sense of controlling our enemies, communist or no, "by any means necessary." America uses what George Cotkin (channeling Jean-Paul Satre) calls "dirty hands," or what Welles labels the "touch of evil," to keep order.

The anti-imperialist message, I confess, is my gloss. In The Cultural Front, Michael Denning's brilliant 1997 book about the laboring of American culture, Welles emerges as the pre-eminent anti-fascist of American theater and cinema. Denning first mentions Touch of Evil as an "allegory of fascism." For Welles, the Popular Front's fight against fascism "was a matter of politics and aesthetics." But Denning's narrative contains other quotes from Welles that allows us to see his repulsive Quinlan character in a broader light. In a 1958 interview with Cahiers du Cinéma, Welles reflected: "Quinlan is the incarnation of everything I struggle against, politically and morally speaking." Indeed, Touch of Evil was glossed by Welles himself an anti-racist film. At another point, Welles also asserted that Quinlan reflected a "hatred of the abuse of police power." [4] Finishing the logic of my own interpretation, U.S. military might---despite the rumblings of 1950s domestic ideologues---was pre-eminent in the 1950s. America acted as the world's policeman and was a de facto, relatively benevolent imperial power. My more particular 1950s gloss, then, goes to Touch of Evil's capacious themes.

Though marketed as a B-Film and underappreciated in its own time, Touch of Evil gained critical appreciation by the century's end. In 1993, the Library of Congress selected it for the National Film Registry, citing the film as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." Along with Gigi, however, Touch of Evil did not place in the top 100 of the American Film Institute's latest list (published in 2007, though Touch did make a 2001 list of the top 100 thrillers).

Unlike Ben Alpers, I have no direct experience either screening a noir in class or discussing a singular example with my students. I show a lot film in my U.S. surveys as a way to enliven material the text presents dryly. I primarily use documentaries (e.g. The Weather Underground, The Fog of War, Roger and Me) or films that dramatically represent materials from an interesting angle (e.g. Band of Brothers episodes, The Birth of a Nation). But observing the discussion of noir this week makes me think that I should reconsider fiction-based film as emblematic of the dark undercurrents of the late 1940s and 1950s. In so doing, I will also have to get over the fear that an outsider observer (e.g. dean, senior professor) or a cranky student will accuse me of wasting valuable history class time with a feature film unrelated to an explicit historical topic.

So, if a noir makes an unscheduled appearance this term in my classes---a direct, tangible result of this year’s Film Noir Foundation blogathon(!)---which film should I show? Touch of Evil is a bit long at 112 minutes (the 1998 version). I could show clips, but I severely dislike this practice in relation to screening. To me, either the whole film is relevant and worthy, or it isn't (yes, I'm an extremist). Perhaps the best question to ask is this:

Which noir most efficiently conveys the greatest number of noir themes in the least amount of time? - TL

-------------------------------------------

[1] Directors Martin Scorcese and Paul Thomas Anderson have the distinction of being famous for two long shots each: Scorcese for Goodfellas and Raging Bull, and Anderson for Boogie Nights and Magnolia.

[2] AMC Filmsite summaries are awesome. I use the summary for The Birth of a Nation (a film that needs all the aids it can get) with students, and they seem to appreciate it universally.

[3] I'm pretty sure I saw the 1998 version, edited by Walter Murch and produced by Rick Schmidlin.

[4] Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1997): 365, 375, 395, 400, 533n29.

America's Touch of Evil: The Contained Turmoil Of The 1950s

[Note: This is the fourth in a series of movie profiles at USIH in support the Film Noir Foundation. Please see the first post by Ben Alpers for more information. Click here to make a donation to the Foundation.]

-------------------------------------------

Touch of Evil, one of the last mid-century noir films, suffered the indignity of not even being nominated for an Academy Award in a year, 1958, when Gigi won best picture and took nine awards. To make matters worse, Orson Welles---the writer, director, co-star of Touch of Evil, and a star figure in the noir genre---was not even recognized for editing in relation to one of the most famous long tracking shots in film history.

Welles' long shot is famous not so much for its length. At 3 minutes and 28 seconds, a great many films exceed it (one recent film, Russian Ark, is 99 minutes of one shot!). Rather, Welles' shot is admired for its artistry, intricacy, and tension. Here it is:



I love the explosive climax.[1]

Touch of Evil's qualities as a film were, at the start, radically underestimated. After many editing controversies, Universal International came to view the film as having low (profit-making) potential. Wikipedia succinctly explains what happened next:

It was released as a B-movie, the lower half of a double feature. The A-movie was The Female Animal, starring Hedy Lamarr, produced by Albert Zugsmith and directed by Harry Keller, whom the studio had hired to direct the re-shot material in Touch of Evil. The two films even had the same cameraman, Russell Metty. Welles's film was given little publicity despite the many stars in the cast. Though it had little commercial success in the US, it was well-received in Europe, particularly by critics like future filmmaker François Truffaut.

The context of the film's release and reception mirror, in some ways, prominent noir themes: cynicism, skepticism, and the film as a victim of circumstance. Even Welles, despite his unlikeable role in the film itself, emerges as a kind of doomed hero in relation to his art.

From where does the film's story come? Touch of Evil is loosely based on Badge of Evil (1956), a novel written by "Whit Masterson"---a compact pseudonym for the authors Robert Wade and William Miller. The central character in that book is an assistant district attorney, Mitch Holt---given the name Ramon Miguel 'Mike' Vargas in the film, and played by Charlton Heston (Heston as a Mexican would become a joke in later films). Holt's wife is named Consuelo in the book, but named Susan 'Susie" Vargas in the film and played by a sexy Janet Leigh (lower right). Orson Welles plays police captain Hank Quinlan (right) in the film; the character has the same name in the book. Quinlan and his police partner become the primary suspects as the story develops, both in the film and the book. But the film takes a turn from the book's narrative in that Quinlan is the more powerful (and more guilty) of the suspected partners, the other being police sergeant Pete Menzies, played by Joseph Calleia and named Leron McCoy in the book.

Got it? Just remember that the most important characters are Mike Vargas (Heston), Susie Vargas (Leigh), Hank Quinlan (Welles), and Menzies (Calleia), and you'll successfully navigate the plot and avoid the "MacGuffins" that David Sehat rightly warned us against. If you haven't seen the film before, I recommend reading the AMC Filmsite summary here. Indeed, because of that detailed summary, I am going to discuss my idiosyncratic impressions rather than make any attempt at comprehensiveness.[2]

I have seen Touch of Evil only once, but the film's aesthetic, acting, and general cynicism impressed me as few others films before or since. As usual, scenes and performances leave the deepest marks.[3] First, Orson Welles was fantastic. He effectively played one the most unlikeable, fascinating, monstrous, and despicable figures I've seen on screen. The manipulative Quinlan has been described elsewhere as a "tragic figure who has a 'touch of evil' in his enforcement of the law." I also recall the tension of the Grandi family gang members coming to abduct Janet Leigh. I remember vividly the hotel scene where it appears that that the Grandi family gang is going to rape Leigh---again for the tension. I was impressed with the dark mood of the film—particularly the final scenes in an oil production facility (like the one below) near the film's climax.



The film's side characters are memorable. AMC's Filmsite sums up their mood-altering diversity:

Other unusual and seedy characters include a nervous and sex-crazed motel manager, a blind shopkeeper, a drug smuggler, a sweaty drug dealer with a poorly-fitting wig, a terrorizing gang of juvenile delinquents, and an intense good cop - an international narcotics officer who is honeymooning (but ignores his wife), all in a sleazy border town (and a number of dark hotel rooms) within a twenty-four hour period.

Zsa Zsa Gabor (right) makes a short appearance as the owner and madame of a strip club.

As a start toward bringing my impressions together, I offer first this sweeping contextual assessment---also from AMC's Filmsite:

It was regarded as a rebellious, unorthodox, bizarre, and outrageously exaggerated film, affronting respectable 1950's sensibilities, with controversial themes including racism, betrayal of friends, sexual ambiguity, frameups, drugs, and police corruption of power.

Indeed, to expand on this, I think something of the significance of film noir, at least in the 1950s, is in the way that the genre captures that slice of the repressed dissatisfaction, always roiling below the surface, of the decade. If the period's intense anti-communism resulted in idealist visions of America (i.e. as the proverbial “city on the hill”), then noir captures that city's messy undercurrents. The aesthetic beauty in those films alerts us to their artistry, but their mood reflects what every close-up of the decade reveals: flaws, cracks, and imperfections in the foundational narrative. The affluence and mood of containment in the period could not bottle up the dissatisfaction that emerged later, for instance in Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (published in 1963, and recently re-evaluated by Louis Menand in a New Yorker article titled "Books as Bombs"). But other books, articles, and works of art---as well as movements like the Beats (also known for their dark motif)---belie America's view of itself as noble, exceptional, and successful. Touch of Evil, then, appears right when Americans were least likely to see the relevance of its themes to their predicament, hence the relative failure of the movie at release.

The cross-border aspects of the film's plot, as well as the dirty nature of Hank Quinlan's means, speaks to America's growing realpolitik in dealing with its imperial interests in the 1950s. The imperative of the time was that Communism must be contained abroad, whether via idealistic public pronouncements like the Truman Doctrine, or by quietly sending "advisors" to Vietnam and secretly placing missiles in Turkey. Covert operations are planned in this period, if not enacted. Quinlan's character embodies a growing sense of controlling our enemies, communist or no, "by any means necessary." America uses what George Cotkin (channeling Jean-Paul Satre) calls "dirty hands," or what Welles labels the "touch of evil," to keep order.

The anti-imperialist message, I confess, is my gloss. In The Cultural Front, Michael Denning's brilliant 1997 book about the laboring of American culture, Welles emerges as the pre-eminent anti-fascist of American theater and cinema. Denning first mentions Touch of Evil as an "allegory of fascism." For Welles, the Popular Front's fight against fascism "was a matter of politics and aesthetics." But Denning's narrative contains other quotes from Welles that allows us to see his repulsive Quinlan character in a broader light. In a 1958 interview with Cahiers du Cinéma, Welles reflected: "Quinlan is the incarnation of everything I struggle against, politically and morally speaking." Indeed, Touch of Evil was glossed by Welles himself an anti-racist film. At another point, Welles also asserted that Quinlan reflected a "hatred of the abuse of police power." [4] Finishing the logic of my own interpretation, U.S. military might---despite the rumblings of 1950s domestic ideologues---was pre-eminent in the 1950s. America acted as the world's policeman and was a de facto, relatively benevolent imperial power. My more particular 1950s gloss, then, goes to Touch of Evil's capacious themes.

Though marketed as a B-Film and underappreciated in its own time, Touch of Evil gained critical appreciation by the century's end. In 1993, the Library of Congress selected it for the National Film Registry, citing the film as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." Along with Gigi, however, Touch of Evil did not place in the top 100 of the American Film Institute's latest list (published in 2007, though Touch did make a 2001 list of the top 100 thrillers).

Unlike Ben Alpers, I have no direct experience either screening a noir in class or discussing a singular example with my students. I show a lot film in my U.S. surveys as a way to enliven material the text presents dryly. I primarily use documentaries (e.g. The Weather Underground, The Fog of War, Roger and Me) or films that dramatically represent materials from an interesting angle (e.g. Band of Brothers episodes, The Birth of a Nation). But observing the discussion of noir this week makes me think that I should reconsider fiction-based film as emblematic of the dark undercurrents of the late 1940s and 1950s. In so doing, I will also have to get over the fear that an outsider observer (e.g. dean, senior professor) or a cranky student will accuse me of wasting valuable history class time with a feature film unrelated to an explicit historical topic.

So, if a noir makes an unscheduled appearance this term in my classes---a direct, tangible result of this year’s Film Noir Foundation blogathon(!)---which film should I show? Touch of Evil is a bit long at 112 minutes (the 1998 version). I could show clips, but I severely dislike this practice in relation to screening. To me, either the whole film is relevant and worthy, or it isn't (yes, I'm an extremist). Perhaps the best question to ask is this:

Which noir most efficiently conveys the greatest number of noir themes in the least amount of time? - TL

-------------------------------------------

[1] Directors Martin Scorcese and Paul Thomas Anderson have the distinction of being famous for two long shots each: Scorcese for Goodfellas and Raging Bull, and Anderson for Boogie Nights and Magnolia.

[2] AMC Filmsite summaries are awesome. I use the summary for The Birth of a Nation (a film that needs all the aids it can get) with students, and they seem to appreciate it universally.

[3] I'm pretty sure I saw the 1998 version, edited by Walter Murch and produced by Rick Schmidlin.

[4] Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1997): 365, 375, 395, 400, 533n29.

An Intellectual History of Culture as Becoming

The term “culture” denotes several meanings. As opposed to the more commonly held notions of culture—i.e., as reference to how a specific group lives, or as tastes, high or otherwise—I am interested in the concept of culture as a state of becoming. More specifically, I am curious about the intellectual history of culture as becoming.

My curiosity is piqued thanks to Allan Bloom. I am currently re-reading his bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind, as I prepare for a paper I am giving at the upcoming OAH. (Aside: The paper is part of a session of potential interest to USIH readers. It is titled “Relativism and Its Discontents in Modern American Thought.” Casey Nelson Blake, who is on the plenary slate at our next USIH conference, is chair. Bruce Kuklick is commenting. I am joined on the panel by fellow USIH blogger Ben Alpers, and USIH conference regular Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen.)

In seeking to understand why all of his students were relativists, Bloom analyzed the distorted importation of Nietzsche into American thought. Bloom held that one of the key Nietzschean premises that gained traction in the United States is the belief that there is no text, only interpretation. “This observation is the foundation of the currently popular view,” Bloom wrote, “that there is no is but only perspectives on becoming, that the perception is as much reality as there is, that things are what they are perceived to be. This view, of course, allied with the notion that man is a value-creating, not a good-discovering, being” (CAM, 159-160). For Bloom, the idea that humans create their own values and that, as such, values are not natural, was how he defined culture. Conceptualized in such a way, culture ran opposite to nature. Furthermore, cultural theory, as such, ran opposite to Bloom’s epistemology, rooted in natural rights doctrine.

Bloom believed that Enlightenment thinkers such as Hobbes and Locke discovered that the surest path to social equilibrium was to harmonize nature’s laws with those of humankind—to ensure people the right to pursue happiness, or self-interest, by securing property. Such "rights are ours,” Bloom argued. “They are our common sense.” For Hobbes and Locke (read through Bloom), society functioned best when humans were reconciled to the truth that nature made them self-serving. This was a universal truth. “The spring that makes the social machinery tick is this recognition, which generates the calculation that, if he agrees to respect the life, liberty and property of others (for which he has no natural respect), they can be induced to reciprocate. This is the foundation of rights, a new kind of morality solidly grounded in self-interest” (CAM, 166). (To the degree that Bloom posited humans as naturally self-serving, he surely agreed with his University of Chicago colleagues across campus in the economics department.)

Americans, according to Bloom, internalized the rights doctrine like no other people, which explains the degree to which Americans of all classes seemed to lack a servile temperament, and which also explains why the importation of the Nietzschean concept of culture as becoming is experienced by Bloom as cognitive dissonance. It seemed out of place for Americans to believe that everything could be remade, nature be damned, and yet still hold onto their natural (some might say “God given”—not Bloom, he was an atheist) right to the pursuit of happiness.

Bloom believed culture—as becoming—rationalized human behavior in the wake of nature’s death. God is Dead, Culture is Your New Maker. Bloom posited that in a post-Robespierrean world, “changing human nature seems a brutal, nasty, tyrannical thing to do. So, instead, it began to be denied that there is such a thing as human nature. Rather, man grows and grows into culture; cultures are, as is obvious from the word, growths. Man is a culture being, not a natural being” (CAM, 190).

So my question to you, gentle reader: Is the intellectual history of culture as becoming worth thinking about? What are its parameters? Although Bloom dated this history as far back as the French Revolution—actually, further back, since he saw the nature/culture tension as internal to Western thought going all the way back to the Greeks—in an American context, surely pragmatism, which Bloom hardly mentions, is more formative to such cultural theorizing than the continental nihilism of Nietzsche. And according to John Dewey, the best method for understanding how humans behaved was to understand how they were conditioned or acculturated. What Dewey termed the social habitude—culture—was more important in forming the individual than was a hypothetically static “human nature.” “The meaning of native activity is not native, it is acquired,” Dewey wrote in Human Nature and Conduct. “It depends upon interaction with a matured social medium.” Culture was something we became for the pragmatists.

Whether or not you agree with Bloom that we should lament that culture conquered nature, or even that this victory was total—I don’t—it is worth pondering the degree to which the notion of culture as becoming shapes American scholarship, if not broader social sensibilities.

In the graduate seminar that I’m currently teaching—the topic, “Left and Right in U.S. History Since the 1930s”—I’m learning anew that many contemporary historians of the American left describe the legacy of the leftist movements they research as decidedly mixed. They all understand these movements, from the Popular Front, to the New Left, to Black Power, to have largely failed at the political level. How could one examine the current political terrain with eyes wide open and think otherwise? But they all, also, think these leftist movements attained cultural success, or left an indelible cultural mark. Americans became different, better, they argue.

For example, in his influential tome, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture, Michael Denning argues that the sprawling culture of the 1930s Popular Front, from the radical folk music of Woody Guthrie to the modernist-realist literature of John Dos Passos to the “ghetto pastorals” of Richard Wright and other plebian artists, inexorably reshaped American culture. From then on, American culture took on a working-class or “laboring” accent. Americans became something different.

Similarly, William Van Deburg, in his provocative New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975, concedes political defeat. The hollowed-out landscape of the urban black ghetto is proof of such defeat. At the biographical level, the fact that some of the most militant Black Power leaders became shills for “whitey” (Black Panthers Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver became, respectively, a barbeque sauce vendor and an anti-Communist Christian evangelical!) serves as similar such evidence of defeat. But at the cultural level, Van DeBurg maintains that Black Power achieved success, as seen in the irreversible attitudinal shifts of blacks. Counter-historically, rap music is made to seem impossible minus Black Power. For Van Deburg, such cultural promise was written into Black Power from its inception, resting as it did on the cultural power of becoming. “It was their hope and expectation that the revolutionary psychological process of becoming black would initiate a social revolution of great magnitude” (NDB, 55).

As culture increasingly came to be about becoming, its political significance was ratcheted up. This might help explain the culture wars. Bloom loathed this historical development, even though, somewhat ironically, The Closing of the American Mind is considered one of the primary culture war texts. Bloom wished to return to a time when politics was proper, when it was bracketed off from culture and other seemingly non-political realms. “The disappearance of politics is one of the most salient aspects of modern thought and has much to do with our political practice. Politics tends to disappear either into the subpolitical (economics) or what claims to be higher than politics (culture)—both of which escape the architectonic art, the statesman’s prudence” (188-189). A prudent statesman, presumably, would understand the lasting brilliance of the social contract and the universal truths upon which it rested. Prudence, in other words, was not becoming.

An Intellectual History of Culture as Becoming

The term “culture” denotes several meanings. As opposed to the more commonly held notions of culture—i.e., as reference to how a specific group lives, or as tastes, high or otherwise—I am interested in the concept of culture as a state of becoming. More specifically, I am curious about the intellectual history of culture as becoming.

My curiosity is piqued thanks to Allan Bloom. I am currently re-reading his bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind, as I prepare for a paper I am giving at the upcoming OAH. (Aside: The paper is part of a session of potential interest to USIH readers. It is titled “Relativism and Its Discontents in Modern American Thought.” Casey Nelson Blake, who is on the plenary slate at our next USIH conference, is chair. Bruce Kuklick is commenting. I am joined on the panel by fellow USIH blogger Ben Alpers, and USIH conference regular Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen.)

In seeking to understand why all of his students were relativists, Bloom analyzed the distorted importation of Nietzsche into American thought. Bloom held that one of the key Nietzschean premises that gained traction in the United States is the belief that there is no text, only interpretation. “This observation is the foundation of the currently popular view,” Bloom wrote, “that there is no is but only perspectives on becoming, that the perception is as much reality as there is, that things are what they are perceived to be. This view, of course, allied with the notion that man is a value-creating, not a good-discovering, being” (CAM, 159-160). For Bloom, the idea that humans create their own values and that, as such, values are not natural, was how he defined culture. Conceptualized in such a way, culture ran opposite to nature. Furthermore, cultural theory, as such, ran opposite to Bloom’s epistemology, rooted in natural rights doctrine.

Bloom believed that Enlightenment thinkers such as Hobbes and Locke discovered that the surest path to social equilibrium was to harmonize nature’s laws with those of humankind—to ensure people the right to pursue happiness, or self-interest, by securing property. Such "rights are ours,” Bloom argued. “They are our common sense.” For Hobbes and Locke (read through Bloom), society functioned best when humans were reconciled to the truth that nature made them self-serving. This was a universal truth. “The spring that makes the social machinery tick is this recognition, which generates the calculation that, if he agrees to respect the life, liberty and property of others (for which he has no natural respect), they can be induced to reciprocate. This is the foundation of rights, a new kind of morality solidly grounded in self-interest” (CAM, 166). (To the degree that Bloom posited humans as naturally self-serving, he surely agreed with his University of Chicago colleagues across campus in the economics department.)

Americans, according to Bloom, internalized the rights doctrine like no other people, which explains the degree to which Americans of all classes seemed to lack a servile temperament, and which also explains why the importation of the Nietzschean concept of culture as becoming is experienced by Bloom as cognitive dissonance. It seemed out of place for Americans to believe that everything could be remade, nature be damned, and yet still hold onto their natural (some might say “God given”—not Bloom, he was an atheist) right to the pursuit of happiness.

Bloom believed culture—as becoming—rationalized human behavior in the wake of nature’s death. God is Dead, Culture is Your New Maker. Bloom posited that in a post-Robespierrean world, “changing human nature seems a brutal, nasty, tyrannical thing to do. So, instead, it began to be denied that there is such a thing as human nature. Rather, man grows and grows into culture; cultures are, as is obvious from the word, growths. Man is a culture being, not a natural being” (CAM, 190).

So my question to you, gentle reader: Is the intellectual history of culture as becoming worth thinking about? What are its parameters? Although Bloom dated this history as far back as the French Revolution—actually, further back, since he saw the nature/culture tension as internal to Western thought going all the way back to the Greeks—in an American context, surely pragmatism, which Bloom hardly mentions, is more formative to such cultural theorizing than the continental nihilism of Nietzsche. And according to John Dewey, the best method for understanding how humans behaved was to understand how they were conditioned or acculturated. What Dewey termed the social habitude—culture—was more important in forming the individual than was a hypothetically static “human nature.” “The meaning of native activity is not native, it is acquired,” Dewey wrote in Human Nature and Conduct. “It depends upon interaction with a matured social medium.” Culture was something we became for the pragmatists.

Whether or not you agree with Bloom that we should lament that culture conquered nature, or even that this victory was total—I don’t—it is worth pondering the degree to which the notion of culture as becoming shapes American scholarship, if not broader social sensibilities.

In the graduate seminar that I’m currently teaching—the topic, “Left and Right in U.S. History Since the 1930s”—I’m learning anew that many contemporary historians of the American left describe the legacy of the leftist movements they research as decidedly mixed. They all understand these movements, from the Popular Front, to the New Left, to Black Power, to have largely failed at the political level. How could one examine the current political terrain with eyes wide open and think otherwise? But they all, also, think these leftist movements attained cultural success, or left an indelible cultural mark. Americans became different, better, they argue.

For example, in his influential tome, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture, Michael Denning argues that the sprawling culture of the 1930s Popular Front, from the radical folk music of Woody Guthrie to the modernist-realist literature of John Dos Passos to the “ghetto pastorals” of Richard Wright and other plebian artists, inexorably reshaped American culture. From then on, American culture took on a working-class or “laboring” accent. Americans became something different.

Similarly, William Van Deburg, in his provocative New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975, concedes political defeat. The hollowed-out landscape of the urban black ghetto is proof of such defeat. At the biographical level, the fact that some of the most militant Black Power leaders became shills for “whitey” (Black Panthers Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver became, respectively, a barbeque sauce vendor and an anti-Communist Christian evangelical!) serves as similar such evidence of defeat. But at the cultural level, Van DeBurg maintains that Black Power achieved success, as seen in the irreversible attitudinal shifts of blacks. Counter-historically, rap music is made to seem impossible minus Black Power. For Van Deburg, such cultural promise was written into Black Power from its inception, resting as it did on the cultural power of becoming. “It was their hope and expectation that the revolutionary psychological process of becoming black would initiate a social revolution of great magnitude” (NDB, 55).

As culture increasingly came to be about becoming, its political significance was ratcheted up. This might help explain the culture wars. Bloom loathed this historical development, even though, somewhat ironically, The Closing of the American Mind is considered one of the primary culture war texts. Bloom wished to return to a time when politics was proper, when it was bracketed off from culture and other seemingly non-political realms. “The disappearance of politics is one of the most salient aspects of modern thought and has much to do with our political practice. Politics tends to disappear either into the subpolitical (economics) or what claims to be higher than politics (culture)—both of which escape the architectonic art, the statesman’s prudence” (188-189). A prudent statesman, presumably, would understand the lasting brilliance of the social contract and the universal truths upon which it rested. Prudence, in other words, was not becoming.

Proposition For Debate: Change In The Objects Of Study For Intellectual Historians

[Updated: 8/20/09, 9:35 CST]

Intellectual historians have traditionally been concerned with high and complex thought---traditional philosophical topics (Deweyan instrumentalism, Jamesian pragmatism, etc.) or practical applications thereof (Deweyites in education, Jamesians in psychology, etc.). These concerns might involve iterations of larger, more evident ideas or topics (e.g. freedom, democracy, knowledge, truth), or it might involve history books that make explicit subtle points of method (e.g. language theory, logic, arguments). The point is that a kind of top-down movement pervades this tradition---from complex ideas and/or prominent thinkers, to historical evidence.

But because higher thought exists and is on record, this does not necessitate that intellectual historians should neglect “lower thought.” By lower thought I mean that which is not recognized or always respected by philosophers or intellectual historians. This includes non-Western thought processes, the varieties of emotion, the appearance of unreasonableness (e.g. popular culture frivolity, ideologues), and less articulate attempts to rise above everyday circumstances. Of course this may involve occasional speculation on the part of historians to fill the gap inevitably left by the less articulate.

I do not mean to assert that a move toward the broad study of less complex thought should necessitate the neglect of higher modes of thought. A move toward more popular expressions of the intellect is meant only to (a) show the appeal of intellectual history to more readers and citizens, and (b) serve as a bulwark against the charge of elitism in intellectual history (e.g. concern only for those who express themselves well or in a complex fashion in the archives).

Be it resolved, then, that some significant portion of intellectual historians should, if not already doing so, concern themselves with classes of people traditionally considered less or in-articulate, irrational, emotional, or whose apparent actions would formerly indicate irrationality or radical differences in reasoning method.

-------------------------------------------

What am I forgetting? Is this proposition so obvious as to be irrelevant? Per the 1977 Wingspread Conference, has the history of culture, or cultural history, fulfilled this obligation? If so, has it done it satisfactorily? Is forwarding this proposition just another case of one forgetting about the “hidden intellectual history” of the past 30 years or so—--the kind of intellectual history that is now scattered over many other subfields? An example that might prove this point could be Michael Denning’s much-discussed and admired study, The Cultural Front. Are there not enough of those kinds of books? But have books on immigration history and the history of emotions, for instance, made an effort from the bottom up to connect historical actors to traditional streams of intellectual history? - TL

Proposition For Debate: Change In The Objects Of Study For Intellectual Historians

[Updated: 8/20/09, 9:35 CST]

Intellectual historians have traditionally been concerned with high and complex thought---traditional philosophical topics (Deweyan instrumentalism, Jamesian pragmatism, etc.) or practical applications thereof (Deweyites in education, Jamesians in psychology, etc.). These concerns might involve iterations of larger, more evident ideas or topics (e.g. freedom, democracy, knowledge, truth), or it might involve history books that make explicit subtle points of method (e.g. language theory, logic, arguments). The point is that a kind of top-down movement pervades this tradition---from complex ideas and/or prominent thinkers, to historical evidence.

But because higher thought exists and is on record, this does not necessitate that intellectual historians should neglect “lower thought.” By lower thought I mean that which is not recognized or always respected by philosophers or intellectual historians. This includes non-Western thought processes, the varieties of emotion, the appearance of unreasonableness (e.g. popular culture frivolity, ideologues), and less articulate attempts to rise above everyday circumstances. Of course this may involve occasional speculation on the part of historians to fill the gap inevitably left by the less articulate.

I do not mean to assert that a move toward the broad study of less complex thought should necessitate the neglect of higher modes of thought. A move toward more popular expressions of the intellect is meant only to (a) show the appeal of intellectual history to more readers and citizens, and (b) serve as a bulwark against the charge of elitism in intellectual history (e.g. concern only for those who express themselves well or in a complex fashion in the archives).

Be it resolved, then, that some significant portion of intellectual historians should, if not already doing so, concern themselves with classes of people traditionally considered less or in-articulate, irrational, emotional, or whose apparent actions would formerly indicate irrationality or radical differences in reasoning method.

-------------------------------------------

What am I forgetting? Is this proposition so obvious as to be irrelevant? Per the 1977 Wingspread Conference, has the history of culture, or cultural history, fulfilled this obligation? If so, has it done it satisfactorily? Is forwarding this proposition just another case of one forgetting about the “hidden intellectual history” of the past 30 years or so—--the kind of intellectual history that is now scattered over many other subfields? An example that might prove this point could be Michael Denning’s much-discussed and admired study, The Cultural Front. Are there not enough of those kinds of books? But have books on immigration history and the history of emotions, for instance, made an effort from the bottom up to connect historical actors to traditional streams of intellectual history? - TL