[So, what you will find below - should you venture there - is a significant revision of the theoretical interlude and a massive overhaul of the section on TAS and its vision of its object of study, and yet another section which has no spiffy subtitle yet, though it concerns the connections, or more properly the lack thereof, between scholarship and politics. With regard to that last, what I say here might piss some folks off - specifically the many scholars that I quote - but, that said, that is the component of this which I am most proud of and which I could very much appreciate comments upon if anyone has a thought. As always, draft-alert - this is but a stage of this text's development and it could well change significantly before it reaches any final (abandoned) form. Eventually (when it is done) you'll have the bibliography]
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| You get it, right? |
Theoretical Interlude:
Lacan’s Discourse of the University
Lacan’s Discourse of the University
In Jacques Lacan’s seminar of 1969-70, he introduces the theory of the four discourses; master, university, hysteric and analyst. Each of these discourses presents one configuration of the social bond. The university discourse (which I will employ frequently below) is the discourse of the scientific and medical establishments, education and government, military and business, technology, NGOs and more. It is that discourse which breeds bureaucracy and establishes and rationalizes the values of any knowledge economy. That Lacan called it the university discourse implies a critique of the functioning of universities, but it is in now way limited to that, and as we will see, it can suggest significant homologies between seemingly quite dissimilar instances.
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| The positions of the graph on the left ... University Discourse on the right |
Each discourse is given in graph, the positions of which (Agent, Other, Product and Truth) are invariant. Four elements of the Lacan’s algebraic notation circulate amongst these positions: S1 (the master signifier), S2 (knowledge), $ (the split subject) and a (objet petit a, the object-cause of desire). In the university discourse, knowledge, S2 appears in the position of Agent, and its agency depends upon the exclusion of S1, the master signifier in the place of Truth. It addresses an Other, as object a. If the Other (a) is successfully marked by this and thereby resubjectified or interpellated then the Other’s efforts in response to the Agent’s demand entails a Product, the split subject ($). Each discourse can work within a single psyche, or in relation to large masses of people. But to exemplify its functioning in a restricted scenario is perhaps the easiest introduction.
Let us assume a typical psychiatrist that relies on psychopharmacological treatment corollated with The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. When, as Agent, the psychiatrist pronounces a diagnosis, he does so on behalf of knowledge, the encoded systematized knowledge given by the DSM (S2). The patient, as Other (objet a) is in effect commanded to accede to the signifier of the Agent (the specific diagnosis) and further to enjoy this, which amounts to accepting its “meaning” as self-defining (compare a professor giving a grade, a judge pronouncing a sentence, etc). By enjoy we must understand not unambiguous ‘pleasure’ but specifically the pain-in-pleasure and pleasure-in-pain that jouissance designates in Lacan’s thought. But the patient experiences this as a deepening of the split in their own subjectivity, a further alienation in the discourse of the psychiatric big Other. Some will experience this as a relief, as they now have a meaning, or at least a name to attach to their suffering and they can potentially eschew personal responsibility for it on that basis; it’s not my fault, I have a disease. But relief is not assured. What of the patient who believes herself understandably unhappy after the loss of a loved one, yet having sought help for her misery, now is said to have a “disorder”? The meaning that she had ascribed to her suffering is invalidated in favor of the judgement of the psychiatrist-Agent. In either case the patient, is marked by knowledge and receives jouissance at the same time (whether enjoyed or suffered, both are jouissance). The deepening of the split of the subject ($) is in the place of the Product, it is what this discourse produces in excess of what it explicitly aims at (diagnosis).
What then is the repressed master signifier that resides in the place of Truth? It is not what an old-style critic of ideology might reasonably assume; that behind this mask of instrumental knowledge feigning to function impartially, there lurks the historical and economic reality of the DSM - that of a manual imposed upon this field by insurance companies who demanded that they know precisely how little they must pay for any specific diagnosis. Rather, the Truth that the discourse represses here is something which it both embodies and yet cannot allow to emerge within the discourse itself if it is to continue functioning. Psychiatric discourse, much like academic and military discourses are nearly phobic when it comes to ‘hard’ truth claims. The results of our research suggest that... The consensus of the field at present is... The available intelligence implies that... These are prototypical instances the university discourse. The master discourse provides an instructive contrast. The Agent as master simply commands - it is, because I say it is. Such a statement, is extremely atypical in university discourse settings (though, as we will see, not entirely absent either). And yet, this very mastery is the repressed Truth that this discourse must aver. The psychiatrist (professor, judge, etc) may know very well at the level of their conscious reflective selves that their diagnosis (grade, ruling, etc) has no absolute guarantee in the realm of knowledge, but in marking the Other with it, what they actually do embodies the mastery which the discourse represses from the level of articulation. Žižek’s analysis of the fetishism of money as commodity can help to clarify this point. We all know that currency is simply printed paper of no great value in itself. Yet what we do with it, how we use it, how we treat it illustrates quite the opposite. We treat it as the unambiguous material instantiation of wealth. Žižek observes apropos of this that we “are fetishists in practice, not in theory” (Žižek MI 314-5). We might rephrase this to say that Agents of the university discourse are masters in practice, not in theory. They know they are not masters, but they act as masters because of their position within a field of knowledge and on on the plane of articulation, resolutely, on its behalf.
In Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s 2004 presidential address to the ASA, she discusses the exclusion of a poem by Gloria Anzaldúa from an Oxford anthology on the grounds that it was “not appropriate” for their “target audience” (FF18). This prompts her to say, “[i]t’s just a fantasy, but imagine this: if those young soldiers (...) in Abu Ghraib had had the chance back in high school to read and discuss and really confront Anzaldúa’s shocking poem about wanton brutalization, might one of them have thought twice before perpetrating analogous violence?” (FF18). We might remark that at the manifest level (its content) this thought experiment seems entirely unlike the psychiatrist pronouncing a diagnosis, but the discourse that underpins it, its latent structure as it were, is the same. Fisher Fishkin, as Agent begins with a disavowal “It’s just a fantasy, but...” which suggests that this “fantasy” is likely to have a closer relation to the repressed Truth of the discourse than otherwise, even if, as consciously articulated, it will still pertain more to the knowing than the doing in which its Truth is most resolutely embodied.
While Fisher Fishkin avoids actually claiming that exposure to Anzaldúa’s poem would have caused any of the soldiers at Abu Ghraib to “think twice,” nonetheless, the rhetorical thrust of her “fantasy” is clearly to claim that it would have done so. That is, if the canon and its deployment in U.S. high school curricula reflected the fluid, hybrid and profoundly transnational reality that contemporary scholars (like Fisher Fishkin and some portion of her audience) know and reveal in their scholarship, that things would be different, more people would “think twice” before engaging in “wanton brutalization.” And if this is so, then do we not have all the more reason to insist upon a transnational perspective whose positive effects would in time become manifest and contribute to a better world? The Agent, speaks on behalf of knowledge (S2 - Fisher Fishkin’s deep familiarity with the field of American studies and of the importance of a transnational perspective therein) and addresses an Other, in this case a plural Other comprised of her audience of fellow scholars and the potential audience of all Americanists (objects a, one and all). Her demand being for the Other(s) to conclude as she does.
How would being marked by this transnational demand (being interpellated or resubjectified by it) result in the deepening of the split in the subject? And what Truth underpins this discourse which cannot emerge directly within it? Here, because of the very disavowal of what follows as “fantasy” we are well placed to make a guess as to the master signifier (S1) in the place of Truth. We have already come close to a statement of it by discounting the disavowal, but some generalizing will make it more explicit. The Truth this “fantasy” depends upon but cannot directly avow is the belief that scholarship (perhaps particularly transnational scholarship) has political effectivity as such.
What might have happened had this been stated directly? I’d wager that few would have been comfortable saying “yes, this is absolutely true” even if they also depend unconsciously upon just such a belief. Many would have rejected the claim outright for its refusal to conform to the rules of the university discourse which require not statements of mastery but of knowledge (as in, studies have shown that students exposed in high school to poems which depict the devastation wrought by violence are 17% less likely to engage in violence themselves). As long as this conviction, quite common to academics, remains unspoken in the place of Truth, it can lend libidinal support to what if scenarios such as this, without subverting the function of the discourse. The Product here would be various, resulting from the vast numbers of Others addressed. We must allow that there will be those who do not conclude as she does that Anzaldúa’s poem has great and untapped political potential within high school curricula. But these people (of whom I am one) would not then be truly acceding to her demand as they fail to conclude as she does. So what then of those who are persuaded, or who perhaps already agree and thus believe that the soldiers at Abu Ghraib, had they read Anzaldúa’s poem, would have “thought twice” and refused to participate in such violence? They would then be beholden to join the cause and become subjects of the transnational demand. This is I believe quite close to the real demand here.
The downside of this is the Product. If the academic subject of the transnational demand fully engages the demand, it seems to me that their alienation therein could easily be profound. The demonstration of academic effecting political change (rather than mere “consciousness raising” or a change in knowledge, as opposed to change in collectively embodied actions) is quite hard to come by because there is little one can point to as an unambiguous example of this happening. This is the reason that so many discussions of the political import of scholarship rely on what if scenarios inevitably staged at the level of consciousness (knowing) rather than with reference to beliefs embodied in actions (doing). If the hypothetical scholar in question can maintain their faith in the Truth they cannot avow, rather than attending to what their work actually does relative to the political injustices, they stand a chance of maintaining their fantasy about this and deriving jouissance by having joined the cause. But jouissance results even if they conclude later that their scholarship has nearly no demonstrable effect in relieving the sufferings of those it studies or combatting the forces that imposed these sufferings, here though it is a negatively inflected jouissance.
Transnational American Studies:
Its Vision of its Object
Its Vision of its Object
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 “View”, Robinson, Rowe, etc). I have focused primarily, if not exclusively, on texts that consider it as a paradigm, whether to survey, argue in favor of, or interrogate TAS. Thus I am assuming with the scholars cited above, that the many sub-currents often cited (border studies, diasporic studies, trans-atlantic and trans-pacific studies, ethnic studies, critical race studies, feminist studies, subaltern studies, queer studies, post-national studies, postcolonial studies, etc) and the many terminological differences within such a heterogenous ensemble, can, at least for analytical purposes, be treated as component aspects of something reasonably called TAS, without grossly distorting their individual particularities and differences. That assumption is undoubtedly contestable. At the same time the explicit invocations of TAS as a paradigm, perspective or “field imaginary” (Deloria n.8, Hong , Hornung “3arts”, extensively by Kennedy beginning at 1, Levander and Levin , Radway 2 and in Sandivar we are given a specifically “transnational imaginary” 1) seem invariably to catalog these many perspectives and position them as both contributions to and instigators of TAS as emergent paradigm, a procedure that I am repeating here, even as this analytic decision risks “a certain boxing-with-shadows quality” (Briggs et. al 626) due to the internal differences its seeks to encompass.
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) and Heinz Ickstadt argues that the two “do not compete but coexist” (“as Area Studies” 636). As such, in writing about TAS I will perforce also be writing about American studies. But TAS is also, quite frequently posed a corrective to American Studies. There is then something of a disavowal haunting the relation of TAS and American Studies, which we might simplify as; TAS is American Studies, but then again, it‘s not. Why isn’t it though, given statements like this from 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” (2)? Or yet again, from Philip J. Deloria, “American studies might be defined by this pithy phrase: ‘it’s not what we choose to include, but what we refuse to exclude.’ That is a powerful statement about the antipathy to boundary setting that produced American studies as we know it: capacious, expansive, and engaged" (2). These passages and many others which could be cited present American Studies as already, as it were, in harmony with TAS (see Ickstadt “Age of Globalization” 545 and Kelly 3, for parallel claims about American Studies’ openness). But that there is still a difference here is indicated by Fisher Fishkin’s remark that “[t]here’s important work that scholars in American studies are doing that is not transnational” (22), an observation which 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 which Fisher Fishkin does not name as such, and whatever else “political” can be said to signify, it is always an index of an ‘us versus them’ antagonism (I will expand upon this claim in a later section).
We can approach this using the university discourse. To return to the “fantasy” that Fisher Fishkin provided, surely some were not re-subjectified by her hail. We can easily imagine a scholar whose work in no way exhibits transnational concerns, and who immediately senses the added alienation they would suffer if they embraced this demand. As Doris Friedensohn notes, this new paradigm “asks us to negotiate a landscape of incalculable multiplicity and instability, with fewer boundaries and more blind alleys than any we have ever traversed” (84). TAS requires its subject to attend to “the limitless complexity of history” (Frisch 194) which invokes “a sense of powerlessness, of the ultimate impossibility of the project: too many languages, too little time, an inexhaustible range of material” (Giles “Hemispheric” 653-4, my emphasis). Ickstadt, citing the preeminent postcolonial ‘patron saints’ of recent Americanist scholarship observes that;
Gayatri Spivak, although herself a proponent of transnational culture studies, calls such overextension “sanctioned ignorance,” “now sanctioned more than ever by an invocation of ‘globality’ or ‘hybridity.’” She sees the danger that studies of such global scope “become so diluted that all linguistic specificity or scholarly depth in the study of culture is [...] ignored.” (Ickstadt “Age of Globalization” 554)
Ickstadt (like Giles above and others), highlights TAS as "an impossible redefinition of American studies as an at once locally decentralized and globally comprehensive field" (“Age of Globalization” 553, my emphasis). Obviously my emphases here, serve to draw attention to the consequences of TAS and the impossible demand of the university discourse. The political stakes of which could be to create an us and a them, one of which is re-subjectified by the vision of TAS while the other is not. Clearly, paradigm shifts are not produced by those for whom the reigning paradigm works, and new paradigms have a demonstrable 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.
Yet, TAS does present itself, if sometimes only obliquely, as against American Studies. Or, perhaps more accurately, 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. But the critique of American exceptionalism itself 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), then opposition to it alone would seem to again unite American Studies with TAS, and yet, there remains a need, variously expressed, for something more. There are also other ways of thinking about the relation of American Studies to American exceptionalism that serve as justification for conceiving of TAS as a corrective to American Studies.
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, it is claimed, is “inextricably entangled with nationalist politics” (Robinson) and “still US-centric in its terminology, its questions, and its periodicity” even in “its hemispheric modes” (Bost 266). As such, in the words of Winfreid Fluck "[t]he theoretical starting point here seems to be the assumption that extending the field of study beyond the nation-state can finally destroy the imaginary hold of American exceptionalism (“inside and outside” 25-6). That is, to the extent that the nation remains the central analytic category for American Studies, many scholars appear to feel some version of what Djelal Kadir expresses here; “[a]s an academic field that came by its institutional status in a time of ideological Manichaeanism, American studies is a product of this symbiosis and, as such, congenitally fated to be a symptom of its history" (10). Kadir is notable for the absoluteness of his claims (and, at least in the material I have available, the way that the repeated assertion of them significantly outnumbers any gestures towards their substantiation).
Is there perhaps a ‘short circuit’ between the entanglements of “nation-based knowledge,” “nationalist politics” and exceptionalism as necessary consequence. Ickstadt draws attention to this assumption as “curious” before saying “I do not see why my own scholarly commitment to understanding the United States as a nation should be a sign of an ideological commitment to American exceptionalism" (“as Area Studies” 636). Nonetheless, this linkage is consistently made, and TAS is the proposed corrective “[w]here” 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 from the field’s problematic.
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” (Fisher Fishkin 24). 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). TAS is thus said to represent "an acceptance of a transcultural condition in our times" (Hornung “Response” 72) and to be an attempt to respond “to the very different international order that is emerging" (Frisch 204) and even “a necessary recognition of a historical reality” (Athanassakis and Martinsen 2). The consequences of this being that “in the age of globalization, the argument goes, borders have become porous and permeable and this, in turn, has weakened American national identity and created an identity crisis, which should be regarded as a new chance for critical intervention” (Fluck “inside and outside” 28-9).
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 litany of postmodern ‘key words’ all in contemporary academic currency, the thought of Jacques Derrida is not difficult to discern, as where Pease, while avoiding the specific lexicon of deconstruction, nonetheless offers a deconstructive analysis of how the unparticularized universal subject of nationalist myth depends for its internal coherence upon the exclusion of others (4). Some make explicit use of deconstruction at points as an exemplification of what a turn toward TAS allows critical practice to accomplish (Giles “Hemispheric” 640, Muthlaya 98). That said, this influence is in many cases diffused through other admirers of deconstruction, particularly postcolonialists who have arguably done more than most to instrumentalize and apply Derrida’s thought to culture(s) at large, with, in my view, sometimes problematic results. Here we might evoke the words of Cathy Davidson in an earlier presidential address to the ASA, “post-colonialism is the theory, inter-American studies in the practice” (qtd in Radway 20), an assertion which might be seen to qualify the many protestations of a reigning methodological openness we considered above. Ickstadt’s observation that the “idealizing pathos of much postcolonial discourse might be more of a burden here than of assistance to concrete analysis” (“as Area Studies” 638) stands out starkly against much scholarship connected with TAS. Giles observes that postcolonialism has achieved “mainstream status” (“Postcolonial Mainstream” 214). My point here being that there is something of a shared theoretical project in TAS that is distinct from, though intertwined with, its vision of its object, and that it links TAS, via postcolonialism to Derrida, and arguably to cultural studies.
TAS’s vision of its object is expansive and diversely articulated, but there appears to be general agreement that it embraces all the nations of the western hemisphere even as it decenters them as nations, their interconnections and interdependencies, as well as the Atlantic and Pacific that surround its terrain. For some, the word “America” is ill-suited to designate all of these interests (see Radway, Kadir, Muthlaya) and “Western Hemispheric Studies” has been suggested (Rowe 3arts), though as Rowe’s text and others underscore, for partisans, Western Hemispheric Studies would fall squarely under TAS as paradigm. 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 contact zones, flows of people, ideas, products, etc and in addition to the much expanded geographical territory, there is also the need - at least at the level of TAS as project - for an expanded and much more fully integrated interdisciplinarity so as to meaningfully coordinate all this knowledge. And in addition to this, insofar as TAS also aims 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) it would logically attend to such things... anywhere on the globe. Though here, precisely when the consequences of the newly conceived object of study, lead us outside the bounds of the western hemisphere, there is an increase the centrality of the U.S. over its hemispheric neighbors (which, though it reflects the greater international impact of the U.S. as compared to Uruguay, is still perhaps a potential reduction that needs scrutiny).
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” (“View”). 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 totality results inevitably in totalitarianism. Rather, to forbid thinking totality would seem to relegate one’s analyses to micro level pertience. 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. I agree whole-heartedly with Shaobo Xie who writes that “[t]o talk about globalization is actually to talk about the global dissemination of the capitalist mode of production, the consumerist culture-ideology, and digital technology. All the other socio-cultural changes are derived therefrom” (8). And as a consequence, in my view, critical paradigms which cannot reflect the expansiveness that global economic capital already effectively commands, tacitly accede to capitalism as the horizon under which they will unfold.
But this vision can be read with the 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. At this moment I can imagine a disagreement, have I not after all been talking about this object, detailing its conceptual bounds and territorial reach, so in what sense do I not thereby comprehend it? The difference I am insisting on here, a difference which makes all the difference to the claim I am making, is exemplified perfectly in a line from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. “When I say ‘all animals’, this expression cannot pass for a zoology” (§20). That is to say, “zoology” (and TAS’s vision of its object) must be articulated with its many and varied concrete contents in order for it to be more than an empty abstraction. And this fact is not lost on commentators, who counterpose to the megalomaniacal aspects of this vision its critics point to, a notion of the individual scholar contributing only what they are able (Hornung “View”). But isn’t this response is something of 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 all things with meaning or reveal their essences. Lacan gets at this same issue his claim there is no metalanguage (XX).
Thus, 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 that truly attempt 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, to speak on behalf of). For those who accept the minor role, on the faith that they are nonetheless contributing to the grander vision... Is their position not equivalent to that of the Christian believer who holds to his faith in world awash in sin, knowing that from the perspective of God, that all will be justly resolved in the afterlife?
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, how could it effectively create subjects? Here again we must invoke the distinction between knowing and doing elaborated by Žižek. 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 it in the medium of knowledge). It is patently 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. My precise criticism could easily be mistaken here, so let me attempt to clarify. We all believe (via our knowing and our doing) in much more than we could possibly justify to ourselves through reason, but it would seem that any large scale paradigm which seeks to reorient scholarly work, should be alert precisely to the degree to which it is grounded ultimately in a ‘leap of faith.’ Especially when the object of that faith can be credibly read as a sort of reflection of what many would posit as the opposition; the hegemony of capitalist economic global dominance (this issue too will be taken up in more detail below).
Politics
I’ve already posited that the unspoken Truth in Fisher Fishkin’s “fantasy” above is that “scholarship has political effectivity as such.” But let us look at another equally submerged “political” claim in an essay by Caroline Kyungah Hong. She begins by evoking the role of the media in recent world events, specifically “the first antigovernment protest in Egypt (...) organized largely online” (“Networks” 1). Hong then mentions the online status of the journal which she co-edits and writes, “[t]hough an academic e-journal is obviously not a social-networking website, JTAS shares with those forums commitments to open access, ease of use, speed of connection, facilitation of larger change, and we certainly envision the journal as a kind of transnational network” (“Networks” 2). For Hong, the Journal of Transnational American Studies is obviously not a social-networking site, but then as it shares all of the positive defining features which allow social networking sites to facilitate change, it all but is a social-networking site. I know that it’s not, but yet it also is - this is the disavowal operant here. Reading this back into what came before, we are presented with social networking cites as facilitating instruments of antigovernment protest, and the JTAS as sharing in so many of such sites’ emancipating qualities and like them, engaged in the “facilitation of larger change”. This sequence appears to imply a change wrung upon the ‘guilt by association’ fallacy such that it might be called a fallacy of ‘political salience by association’. Whatever weight one wishes to give to the disavowal and the hint of logical fallaciousness that I find in Hong, similar instances of the proximity of something called “political” and the term “transnational” which imply an inherent politicality in the latter term without making that precise claim are not uncommon (Briggs et. al. 633, Frisch 271).
For those who question the validity of uncovering political claims via disavowals or the positing of unconscious prerequisites to conscious statements, there are many explicit statements linking TAS and politics. A survey of some of these claims reveals that the precise referent of “politics” and “political” is quite mercurial and that precisely how it is that scholarship relates to these things, especially where it is positioned as an actor or agent, is decidedly unclear. “This concept of a transnational American studies is by definition political” (Hornung “Response” 68). "The essays in our collection exemplify a hemispheric politics of location by excavating the intricate and complex politics, histories, and discourses of spatial encounter that have generally been obscured in US nation-based inquiries" (Levander and Levine 399)."An adequate understanding of the New Americanists' status as liaisons (...) would require an account of their emergence from and continued interconnection with different emancipatory social movements" (Pease 3). "[P]ostcolonial studies has come a long way in terms of investigating the social, cultural, ideological, and political effects of colonialism, interrogating and dismantling Eurocentric or West-centric structures of knowledge and power, and decolonizing the world, the text, and the mind (Xie 10, my emphases). "[W]e talked about sites and forms of resistance to the global system of capitalism” and concluded that an academic journal “has the potential to provide a discursive space for thinking through emergent questions in various fields of critical inquiry and intellectual pursuit and for mobilizing counter-hegemonic energy and consciousness" (Xie 10-11) “Dimock’s eloquent advocacy of a ‘literature for the planet’ is appealing because it shows that literary criticism can be politically and theoretically engaged” (Adams 730). “To transnationalize American literary studies (...) following a distributive ethics of justice, would entail using paranoia politically to weaken the system of delusional democracy that keeps America in the grip of a homogenized cultural program” (Apter 386). "Both fields [American Studies and Ethnic Stuides] took seriously—though in different ways—the importance of scholarship that laid claim to social and political consequence" (Deloria 10). "In this time of deep political division, national paranoia, and global uncertainty, scholars [must] continue to broaden the range of ideas needed to bring about change" (Elliott #?). Fluck, who has a knack to getting at the root of so many aspects of these discussions suggests that the primary goal which unites American Studies in all of its varied articulations is "to investigate the possibility for resistance in American culture" (“Theories” 74).
Addressing these passages in detail would take more time and space than I have available. But, my hope is that the catalog of political claims for scholarship above is sufficient to ground the observation that politics here has no unitary meaning and that it presents us with something of a conceptual jungle. Faced with that conceptual jungle, I wish to forward a definition of the political to act as a sort of machete, with which to precede. Earlier I claimed that designating something as political required an ‘us versus them’ antagonism. Let me now expand upon that statement. If there is no actual, living antagonism wherein an ‘us’ and a ‘them’ are engaged in a struggle for some concrete ends, the political dimension has not been reached. If this sounds deflationary, that is precisely as it’s intended. I’ll offer two thought experiments in which I will try to make clear what I have in mind.
1. Imagine an impressively researched and brilliantly presented hypothetical book about the folk songs of some exploited subgroup of workers in the U.S. during the early part of the twentieth century which shows the ways that the songs are affectingly expressive of the exploitation suffered. Imagine that some of the songs can be shown to concern themselves with specific documented historical incidents of injustice, and that some songs were used as a means of galvanizing resistance. This academic study is not, as yet, political. The antagonism between the workers and their bosses clearly was a political struggle, but a book about this is not. This determination has nothing to do with whether the author, or we as readers, perceive a political situation in the book’s narrative account. Nor does it become political if its author explicitly sides with the migrant workers and argues persuasively for their position as having been on the side of justice, law or values. Even if this hypothetical text argues that contemporary migrant workers face many of the same issues of exploitation as those the study is focused on, and that history in this case might aid them in their struggle, it still remains outside of the political as I am defining it. That is, unless and until the author takes a side in the reality of an actually existing struggle against a “them” which is also struggling to thwart an “us” and somehow this book is used as an instrument of that struggle, the book remains non-political. How worthy we see the human subjects of any historical study of being granted the “rights” and recognition that we deem they deserved is not political. It might become political, if, within the academic field, there was a sizable body of scholars who explicitly denied its claims such that the book became a focal point between opposed sides each seeking for their own views to dominate. Though it is hard to imagine this situation taking place in academia if the book truly is well researched and in accordance with academic discursive standards, but if it were to occur, it would be an instance of the political within the academic field at that moment, the book would remain non-political with reference to the milieu it studies, as that particular political battle is no longer extant.
2. So that a reader is not left with the impression that it is merely the historical lag which positions the hypothetical book above outside the political, imagine that a U.S.-based transnational corporation (TNC), has labor camps, replete with guards, dogs and barbed wire in a remote third world location. In these camps they employ forced child labor whose horrifying conditions, high mortality and injury rate, and prison-like character make it appear as slavery in all but name. If an academic publishes the details of this situation, and a group emerges to struggle for such concrete goals as closing these work camps, shutting the TNC down, liquidating its assets, and imposing criminal charges on the executives, board, and everyone involved - at that point the information published has become political. Whether the article in question takes this political stand, or does not, does not diminish the importance of the information, though it does index whether the author is engaged in the political struggle him- or herself. Whether people care about exploitation anywhere in the world is politically irrelevant if it remains purely a matter of concern or outrage, what matters is what they do to combat this. This distinction is what seems lost, even repressed, in so much contemporary academic criticism which claims itself as political. Žižek makes a point which has resonance with my discussion here.
If you accuse a big corporation of particular financial crimes, you expose yourself to risks that can go even as far as murder attempts; if you ask the same corporation to finance a research project on the link between global capitalism and the emergence of hybrid postcolonial identities, you stand a good chance of getting hundreds of thousands of dollars. (“Puppet” 44)
What this passage underlines is that the ‘common wisdom’ of neoliberal globalized economic capitalism, has long recognized what is or is not political, which is to say what is or is not a threat to its dominance. Given this, Fisher Fishkin’s reassurance that there is much “important work” to be done in an American studies which is not transnational acts to diffuse or deny the political aspect of TAS’s emergence within its own field. Here, with a nod toward Alain Badiou, we might remark that in a world operating under the “generalized sway” (lacanXX) of the university discourse, that the political has been displaced, and where we might have expected it, we find instead management and administration, i.e., the rule of knowledge (S2).
In this light, Hornung’s claim that the “concept of a transnational American Studies is by definition political” would hold, if this “concept,” TAS, could be shown to be held by a definite group of scholars against some others (scholars or not) and used in an engaged struggle with at least two sides and waged for concrete ends. So, if the concept of TAS truly is political “by [my] definition” then what is the opposed side against which it struggles?
Before I turn to what appears to be the obvious candidate for the role of “them” in the purportedly political situation under discussion, I want look at few of many political claims above through the lens of my definition of politics. Let’s begin with Xie who claims that postcolonialism has dismantled “Eurocentric or West-centric structures of knowledge and power” and decolonized “the world, the text, and the mind” (10-1). Xie seems to assume here that providing an account of how some injustice is perpetrated amounts to spelling an end to its continuance, were this true, would not Marx have long ago toppled capitalism simply by publishing his many works? Apter claims that transnationalizing American literary studies would “weaken the system of delusional democracy that keeps America in the grip of a homogenized cultural program” (386) but nowhere does she get down to the details of precisely how this would take place, leaving a reader to conclude that the transnationalizing American literary studies would simply entail this end. But as a result of what exactly? A mere change in our consciousness? Deloria offers us scholarship said to have “laid claim to social and political consequence" (10) though he does not say what exactly these consequences are, or how it is that scholarship, no matter how progressive or even radical its contents may be, serves to effect these unnamed consequences simply on the strength of a claim to do so. Elliott is more restrained, though he does does charge scholars with producing the “ideas needed to bring about change" (Elliott #?), which would be more compelling if some demonstration were given of academic theories having unambiguously effected social change. Which leads me again to Fluck’s suggestion of the motive uniting American Studies (and TAS as well I suspect) as "to investigate the possibility for resistance in American culture" (“Theories” 74, my emphasis), and by emphasizing possibility in that statement, I want to make a few more claims that follow from my definition. To be “politically aware” or “sensitive” or “astute” does not require being engaged in politics. These idioms do no more than express a perception of something political without requiring actual political engagement. Likewise, looking for the places where resistance might be possible, is in no way political, unless upon finding such places, one acts to produce politics in that place. I trust that my definition is by this point clear.
But at the same time, and this point is a crucial component of my views about these matters, I see no reason that scholarly work must be political. I would wish to see greater awareness of how the false promise of political effectivity, as much as it is surely libidinally satisfying in fantasy (if only those soldiers at Abu Ghraib had previously read this poem), contributes significantly to the failure to see politics where it is actually taking place and by seeing it where it is not taking place at all, and it thereby misconstrues the value that good scholarly work has simply by being good scholarly work. There should be no shame in producing scholarship with no immediate or inherent political importance, the vast majority of scholarship is of this sort. But with this more instrumental understanding of the political, we might hope to better assess what contribution scholarship might aspire to make to real political struggle and have a mean to cut through the aura of politics in which so many scholarly works are shrouded. To conclude this somewhat axiomatic and polemical section, I’d like to quote Gloria Anzaldúa who it seems is quite cognizant of the distinction between real politics and the enticing aura of fake politics; “‘Basta de gritar contra el viento todo a palabra es ruido si no está accompañada de accíon.’ [Enough shouting against the wind. All words are noise if not accompanied with action.]” (qtd in Kelley 15).
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