[n.b. Draft, as always, but maybe not too far from completed. This is the 1st section after the theoretical interlude and builds upon it somewhat though it is focused more on other things. Cites are barely there yet, and you have no bib here chase them so live with it. Also some lost diacriticals on names and so forth.]
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| Google Image Search: TAS |
The field of those self-consciously engaged in Transnational American Studies (henceforth TAS), or whose endeavors nonetheless could be said to fall under its conceptual purview is large. The many catalogs of such work offered by scholars surveying the field bears witness to this fact (see Fisher Fishkin, Hornung, Robinson, Rowe). As this field is not my own I have focused primarily, if not exclusively, on texts that attempt to argue for TAS as a perspective, survey it, offer it philosophical grounding, or interrogate it. Thus I am assuming with many of the aforementioned scholars, that the many sub-currents often cited (border studies, diasporic studies, ethnic studies, feminist studies, post-national studies, postcolonialism, etc) and the many terminological differences within such an ensemble, can, at least analytically, be treated as component aspects of something reasonably called TAS. Greg Robinson remarks that “transnationalism has remained for the most part an approach and a trope within the larger field of American studies, rather than establishing itself as a distinct category” (3arts). But it is also posed a corrective of sorts to American Studies, and as consideration of its object will show, it might well be the larger rubric. There is then something of a disavowal haunting the relation of TAS and American Studies, which we might simplify as; it is, but it‘s not. We find statements like this from Shelley Fisher Fishkin, “[o]ne of the reasons many of us were attracted to American studies in the first place was its capaciousness, its eschewal of methodological or ideological dogma, and its openness to fresh syntheses and connections” (19). Or this, from Liam Kennedy, “American studies has arguably been more prone to ‘paradigm dramas’ than most disciplines, a state of perpetual conceptual transformation that characterizes the field imaginary” (Kennedy 2). These two passages and many others which could be cited present American Studies as field “open to fresh syntheses” and engaged in a “perpetual conceptual transformation” and so already, as it were, in harmony with TAS. Fisher Fishkin, also says that “[t]here’s important work that scholars in American studies are doing that is not transnational” (22), an observation that acts as a reassurance to those either explicitly critical of TAS or whose work cannot be assimilated under its banner. That is to say, this comment indexes a political dimension to the emergence of TAS within American Studies and whatever else that political can be said to signify, it is always an index of an ‘us versus them’ antagonism. We can easily think about this using the university discourse as our guide. To return to the “fantasy” that Fisher Fishkin provided, there must be Others who were not re-subjectified by her hail. We can easily imagine a scholar whose work in no way exhibits transnational concerns, and who, having struggled to reach whatever position they have, immediately senses the increase in alienation they would suffer if they embraced this demand. Paradigm shifts are not produced by those for whom the reigning paradigm continues to work, and new paradigms have a tendency to reposition their predecessors as either oblivious to, or in some way productive or sustaining of the very problems the new paradigm seeks to redress (a dynamic visible in many fields, consider art and philosophy).
Yet, TAS also distinguishes itself, sometimes obliquely, against American Studies. Or, better said, it positions itself as quite resolutely against American exceptionalism which functions in many discussions of TAS as its self-defining, or even self-constituting antipode or bête noire. The critique of American exceptionalism emerged in “the 1980s, when many American studies scholars challenged both the study of the United States as an ‘exceptional’ or ‘unique’ nation and the inherent limitations of nation-based knowledge” (Rowe 3 arts). And if, according to Fluck, this “revisionism that has been dominant in American studies in the last decades has focused almost exclusively on refuting the liberal theory of American culture that stood at the center of American exceptionalism” (Fluck inside & outside 29), there is nonetheless a need for more.
This something more would then be to avoid, not simply exceptionalism, but the “limitations of nation-based knowledge” by decentering the nation within the field, because such nation-based thinking is “inextricably entangled with nationalist politics” (Robinson 3arts). There is here perhaps a tiny slippage, between the entanglements of “nation-based knowledge” with “nationalist politics” and exceptionalism. “Where” to quote Bryce Traister, thus far “postnational America, borderlands critique, postcolonial America, and the more general turn to cultural studies [have] failed to emancipate us completely from ‘America,’ transnational America will now save us” from the “repeated errors of the Americanist critical imagination,” i.e., exceptionalism (Traister 5). It is here that the specific innovation of TAS emerges, an innovation that exceeds the project of decentering the nation-state.
Many discussions of TAS begin by referencing the changes wrought upon the world by globalization and the perceived decline of the state-form, many of whose sovereign prerogatives have been opened to revision, coercion or imposition by international bodies. Thus, if we live in a global world, and if the nation state is in retreat, now jostling with transnational corporations, the IMF, the World Bank, etc, then are we not required by these developments to update our concept of “America”? TAS attempts to provide this “update.” Transnational scholars are enjoined “to focus less on the United States as a static and stable territory and population whose characteristics it is our job to divine, and more on the nation as a participant in a global flow of people, ideas, texts, and products” (FF24). Rodica Mihaila asserts that “the transnational perspective discloses two extreme aspects of American culture and society. At one end, America is viewed as being shaped by the global system—by displacements, migrations, dislocations, diasporas and borderlands. At the other, it exists only in the collective imaginary—it is invented, constructed, turned into virtual reality” (11). Robert Gross writes that “[t]he immediate import of transnational thinking lies in the scholarly arena. For American Studies, the effect is akin to looking through the reverse lens of a telescope. What once loomed large has shrunk to insignificance. To globalize American Studies is to displace American perspectives on the subject” (qtd in Robinson 3arts). Transnational America is not a self-enclosed totality but an object always in process.
Mihaila offers that “the discourse of transnationalism has developed in contexts dealing with the postmodern fluidity of borders and boundaries and revolves around such notions as “hybridity, hyperspace, displacement, disjuncture, decentering, and diaspora” (3). We might add to this the injunction to “interrogate the ‘naturalness’ of some of the borders, boundaries, and binaries that we may not have questioned very much in the past, and (...) probe the ways in which they may have been contingent and constructed” (Fisher Fishkin 2). Behind this listing of so many ‘key words’ of postmodern academic currency, the thought of Jacques Derrida is not hard discern, though it may be Derrida as diffused through other admirers of deconstruction. It is surely the case that postcolonialists have done more than most to instrumentalize and apply his thought to culture(s) at large.
TAS’s vision of its object is expansive, embracing the Americas (north, south and central), Caribbean cultures, the Atlantic, Pacific and more (3arts). For some, the word “America” is ill-suited to designate all of these interests and “Western Hemispheric Studies” has been suggested (Rowe 3arts), though as Rowe’s text and others make clear, for the partisans of TAS, Western Hemispheric Studies still falls under TAS. Kennedy too, points to the problem of “America” being retained in TAS, when, writing of the “postnational” work of Donald Pease, he remarks that this perspective has “worked to dislocate the nation from its geopolitical and intellectual axes while remaining in a complex supplementary relationship with the national narratives of American studies” (Kennedy 6).
In addition to the privileging of borders and flows of people and ideas, and in addition to the much expanded geographical territory, there is also the need - at least at the level of TAS as project - for interdisciplinarity so as to meaningfully coordinate so many diverse areas of interest. And in addition to this, TAS also wishes to be open to “the varieties of American culture and of American experience(s) in a larger framework that stretches beyond the national borders of the United States” (Robinson) and thus would logically attend to the reception of works of American literature, the influence of American social movements, and the presence of American popular culture within the cultures of... anywhere on the globe. And what is true of these would perforce be true of any and all “American” economic, political and technological influences.
It is worth taking a moment to ponder the enormously expansive vision that TAS has of its object. Though the term totality seems, perhaps symptomatically, absent from the texts that I have encountered, it is hard not to think of the TAS vision of its object as one which seeks to know it in its totality. Indeed, Hornung ends an essay by speculating that the “final stage, which seems to emerge from TAS, is the concept of planetarity—a worldwide academic consideration of the dangers to Planet Earth—determined by an ecological concern and the acceptance of alterity in a mode of conviviality” (3arts). I am divided about this vision. I reject out of hand the assumption, common to many at least since Adorno, that to dare to think the totality results inevitably in totalitarianism. Rather, to forbid thinking the totality is to accept that one’s analyses will have little resonance outside of the micro level. And given that capitalist economic globalization and its neoliberal market philosophy is a brute fact of our time, new ways to think totality are urgently needed.
But this vision can be read with via university discourse as repressing its Truth and eliding its Product.
What occupies the place (of the agent) is this S2, which is specified as being, not knowledge of everything [savior de tout]—we’ve not reached that point yet—but all-knowing [tout-savoir]. Understand this is what is affirmed as being nothing other than knowledge, which in ordinary language is called the bureaucracy. (Lacan s17, 31)
This vision of a “worldwide academic consideration” of an object this radically expansive is a near perfect demand to be subtended by what Lacan claims to be the ur-statement of all university discourses, the infinite demand “to keep on knowing more” (XX). What subject can we point to that is able to truly comprehend this object? None. And this fact is not lost on commentators, who counterpose to the megalomaniacal aspects of this vision, a notion of the individual scholar contributing only what they are able (see Hornung). But this response is a red herring. If there is no human subject that can be said to truly grasp the totality of this object, then who or what does? The immediate answer is the Lacanian big Other, that purely suppositional agency from whose perspective, all the diversity and contradiction found in symbolic products, can be said to make sense. But one of Lacan’s most famous formulas is that the big Other does not exist (XX). The symbolic order does exist, but what does not is any position outside of it which would imbue it all with meaning or reveal its essence. Lacan gets at this same issue his claim there is no metalanguage (XX).
The Agent of the TAS vision (S2) addresses its Others (a), interpellating them as subjects of TAS in its “all-knowing” futurity. That no individual scholar-subject of TAS can ever satisfy the impossibility of this demand should be evident. Any scholar that truly attempts to, rather than accepting the role of adding more knowledge to existing knowledge, will feel the bite of jouissance that much more as they are alienated in discourses and disciplines too numerous to truly profess (that is, speak on behalf of the all-knowing S2). For those who accept the minor role, on the faith that they are nonetheless contributing to the grander vision... Their position is comparable to Christian believer who holds to his faith in world awash in sin, knowing that from the perspective of heaven, that all will be resolved justly in the future.
That Truth which cannot be spoken within this expansive vision might be articulated variously. The best statement of it in my view is that, knowledge is capable of encompassing its object whole while standing apart from it, or, in a Lacanian inflection, that the big Other really does exist. Were there nothing corresponding to this belief repressed from this discourse’s manifest level, it could not effectively create subjects. But here again we must invoke the distinction between knowing and doing elaborated by Zizek. Faced with my attempt at stating the repressed Truth of this vision, most scholars identifying with TAS would reject it. They know very well that all the scholarship there is or ever will be can never truly encompass their object of study (that is, render as knowledge). It is ridiculous to think so. But, to the extent that they accept this vision as the horizon under which they labor and to which they seek to contribute, what they do contradicts what they know. What they do effectively believes in their stead.
There are a number of threads left in abeyance here. I have yet to delve into the issue of politics in any depth, have not finished with American exceptionalism, nor looked at how partisans of TAS reiterate and respond to criticisms of it. It is to these issues that we will now attend.
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| This then is the object of TAS, though not all of it still |
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