[ok, same provisio as always, this is rough, needs citation work, editing, etc - no bib yet. But it is the last section of the paper. This follows from my previous posting of sections 1-3 here. I'll be trying to get a draft of the conclusion today. I decided against an Introduction and opted for an abstract instead. I'm hoping for a link to a completed paper before Wednesday night.]
Elusive Exceptionalism or,
“Politics” without a them?
Given the sheer frequency with which American exceptionalism is referenced as what TAS scholars and Americanists are collectively struggling to avoid, critique, transcend or kill outright, might it be worth asking where it can be found? Many point to its presence in older scholarship, but the emergence of the critique of exceptionalism within the field of American studies now some thirty years gone, has already been mentioned. And as Traister perceptively points out,
too much criticism of 'nationalist-exceptionalist' Americanist critique proceeds as straw argument, either attacking earlier field-formation statements from notable and long-dead scholars (…) or making generalized and unsubstantiated claims about contemporary Americanists pursuing the nationalist-exceptionalist dream with, apparently, great zeal. (8-9)
Yet, if TAS is “by definition political” then against whom is it struggling? Is, or perhaps, can, American exceptionalism be its antagonistic other? If so, where are its contemporary exponents who must in turn be struggling against those who would displace exceptionalism?
The answer appears to be that there is no such group within the academy. I stress the “appears” as the field is large, and I can claim no synoptic view of it. All the same, I cannot find any organized group of scholars espousing this perspective against its many critics, even as there surely could be scholars who hold such views. But given the widespread, even ubiquitous, negative critical charge that “American exceptionalism” has within the field it seems that battle against it has largely been won there. Telling in this regard is Traister’s gloss on Kaplan’s attempt to call a ‘truce’ between the “frequently published and often cited” anti-exceptionalist “proponents of transnationalism” and the “largely unnamed and infrequently published” who might hold to the ‘ur-theory’ Leo Marx proposes (14). That is, a truce in a war which seems, save perhaps for the lone figure of Leo Marx, to have no clear other manning the guns and planning the offensive from the exceptionalist side. What can be easily found are criticisms of this or that scholar for more or less covert dependence upon exceptionalist presuppositions and while such criticisms are not without interest I am attempting to consider the field as a whole and not the work of some lone “exceptionalist” scholar. Of the many sources I have looked into, only a few stand out as launching this sort of criticism against the field as a whole, it is to these I will attend now.
Djelal Kadir evokes Foucauldian “regimes of truth” and a number of cognate conceptions in order to indicate the effectivity of tacit unreflected knowledge and contends that the “explanatory power of such knowledge constitutes its object even while claiming to seek knowledge of it” (10). He continues;
Thus, the knower is inevitably in the shadow of his or her object of knowledge (...) this is also true of America in its studies, particularly American American studies—that is, American studies as pursued by those scholars who are, tautologically, inevitable objects of their sought-after knowledge. (10)
In this passage, and as a regulating notion within his text, Kadir references a problem which has often been framed through the concept of ideology, which, in both its least and most subtle articulations seeks to show how knowledge never achieves any neutral position and always remains tied in more or less demonstrable ways to vested interests. The biggest problem for ideology critique has not been presenting a coherent argument, but in spelling out precisely how it is that the ideology held acts to support those vested interests, to what degree (that is, is this ideological position crucial to the sustenance of a power dynamic in and of itself?), what consequences follow, and how this situation can be counteracted. Kadir directs his critique at “American American studies” and poses transnationalism as the best hope to counteract the disciplinary ‘false consciousness’ (there seems no more fitting term) which he sees reigning in the field. Only by means of transnationalizing the discipline “can we temper with an ethical impulse the hegemonic impetus of our own critical interventions and institutional representations” (Kadir 22). What immediately strikes me as questionable in this quote is the positioning of ethics as a force which might accomplish ends which seem to require a political engagement, unless Kadir really only wants to “temper” this “hegemonic impetus” rather than actually counter it. Though the thrust of his article suggests that his aims are greater than tempering would tend to imply.
Considering the “New Americanists” Kadir writes that,
This New Americanist program could serve as springboard (...) for launching a new phase in the official Americanization of American studies on an international plane, duly refitted for the age of globalization and America’s renewed, unique, and indispensable place in the world as master coalition builder of incontestable good against ubiquitous evil. (Kadir 20)
What Kadir sees in the New Americanists and post-nationalists, the American Americanists, and even non-American Americanists if their work is grounded in “mimetic professional practices” (10), we might call Exceptionalism 2.0. I find it impossible to maintain that scholars such as Donald Pease or John Carlos Rowe have been laboring for years to present a ‘false front’ while receiving their secret directives from the state, though such a perspective seems possible given certain of Kadir’s statements as we will see. But it does appear that we are being asked to see the 2.0 version of American exceptionalism as operating outside the conscious awareness of American Americanists, at odds with their manifest intentions and yet still present in a way not unlike the role of Truth in Lacan’s discourses, as that which cannot emerge within the discourse but nonetheless sustains it. Traister, using rather different analytic presumptions arrives at the same point as Kadir (though in reference to TAS itself) when he writes that the “transnational claim of critical emancipation from 'America' is the sign of America itself" (21). We might see Kadir’s basic position here, to redeploy distinctions already used, as discounting of the knowing and focused on the doing (though his text does not extend that insight and so largely reverts to a critique of knowing which simply posits a different sort of knowing as solution). An argument such as this demands considerable documentation which would show precisely how the conceptual work of these and other American Americanists serves to consolidate state power, how it is that U.S. state power sets the exceptionalist agenda, overtly or through covert means and mechanisms, such that scholars are consistently and collectively duped; unable to see how the field of which they are a part acts via the knowledge they produce for ends quite contrary to those they intend or imagine. What evidence does Kadir offer to ground his claim? Less than one might wish, is the unfortunate answer to that question.
Kadir inquires into the constitutively vague reference of the signifier “America” and how its hemispheric reach is reductively grounded in the United States, a process of reduction and exclusion which he sees replicated in American studies. Similar observations are not hard to find in the scholarship and we’ve already seen Kennedy remark upon the “complex supplementary relationship” in “the postnational project” to “the national narratives of American studies” (6). More noteworthy perhaps is a comment by Leo Marx, a scholar who was a part of the field during the heyday of American exceptionalism 1.0, and surely exemplifies the status of an “American Americanist.” Marx writes that “American studies always has been, and still is—for all practical purposes—‘United States studies’” (130). In other, if still similar ways, Kadir’s position is not very far from criticisms considered earlier which argue that if the nation state is retained as a primary object of its analysis that exceptionalism is also unavoidably retained.
The central supports of Kadir’s critique concern the establishment of the field during the cold war period, and its refashioning in recent decades in a period of expanding U.S. dominance secured in part through economic globalization, both of which are understood as mutually self-constituting, or isomorphic to use his term (10). “Under the aegis of the United States Information Service,” he writes “now openly a part of the State Department, the current command cohort of American studies has been formed with the patronage of the United States government since 1947” (Kadir 12). It is statements like this which would tend to license thinking that prominent Americanists have been secretly receiving their directives from the state. Kadir’s phrasing is worth reflecting upon though. What list of names, not simply from the field’s early days, but in the present, is referenced by “the current command cohort”? Presumably they know who they are, even if I remain unsure, not simply about the precise people referenced, but about the viability of this rhetorical tactic which doesn’t seem well chosen to convince those not already convinced.
We are asked here to assume that patronage is inevitably coercive, and that in this case American Studies’ own “regimes of truth” weren’t simply “instituted by” but, to choose a better word, determined by “official policy” (Kadir 12). To what end? To “perpetuate the illusion of the United States of America as self-identical to its national and nationalist myths, symbols, and images” and in Kadir’s view, all of the refashioning, self-criticism, and change of focus within American Studies in the time since, if “[l]ooked at in a historical context” leads to the conclusion that it is still “coterminous with a hegemonic, nation-based discourse groping for its ideological and cultural parameters through borders and diversities, internal and peripheral” (12). I will draw attention to Kadir’s evident certainty when he speaks not for an historical view, but seemingly as the view of history himself, though not draw out the consequences of that here.
And again, aspects of his position here are not lacking in the scholarship. Here is one such instance by Friedensohn, who wonders if she and other Americanists “are—whether willingly or reluctantly—participants in a great imperial adventure: bringing our news of our culture and our strategies for studying it to foreign ‘outposts’ all over the globe,” she even references an edited collection organized around this very concern (72). The manner in which a transnational paradigm in some ways mirrors globalization is also made by many scholars (Bost 269, XXXXX). And Amy Kaplan writes that “the State Department has a revived interest in American studies as an export to foster the ‘soft power’ of empire” (11).
With regard to the cold war period, Kadir refers to the work Michael Bérubé in the journal issue he is introducing, as providing grounds for his claim. Bérubé’s article inquires into both the “relations between American studies and the state” and “between American studies and the corporate multiversity” which he deems to be intertwined though he says that “the corporatization of the university does not seem to have had much impact on the substance of intellectual work in American studies” (103). While Bérubé’s statement does not preclude the possibility of impact, he does not think there has been much. On the face of it, wouldn’t this counter, rather than support Kadir’s position regarding American Studies in the present?
Initially concluding that the work produced by American Studies scholars is functionally irrelevant to capital as it “produces no profit-generating products” (103) Bérubé ultimately decides that it is not utterly irrelevant to the state because in the “hegemonic imaginary (...) the nation-state has been doing just fine, on campus and off, in part because of Americans’ and American universities’ possessive investment in Americanness” (104). I agree in large measure with the first part of this, the U.S. nation state doesn’t seem to have declined in the “hegemonic imaginary” at all, indeed between the actuality of Homeland Security and the fantasy-space of a popular television show like 24, it seems that the U.S. is gaining ground quickly in the collective imaginary, making it more hegemonic than ever. Many other scholars too have questioned this ‘decline’ (see CITE OTHER DISPUTERS OF THIS DECLINE). But I do wonder how much of a part Bérubé means by “in part” as it refers not to “Americans’” (or, as I would prefer, “U.S. residents”) but to “American universities’ possessive investment in Americanness”? That is, can we imagine, purely hypothetically, a university system in the U.S. in which there was no institutionally defined “American Studies” (or history or literature or culture) and ask whether, in a hypothetical U.S. of this kind, whether we think that the status of the nation state as literally hegemonic, as well as reigning in the hegemonic imaginary, would be demonstrably weakened? And further, can we not all too credibly imagine an academically dystopian future wherein U.S. universities had no humanities departments at all (which seems to be the end point of the current corporatizing drift) and pose the same question?
It is precisely in relation to these hypothetical queries that Bérubé’s essay is quite helpful. While he does give a great deal of credence to the suspicions we might have about the interdependence of American Studies and the state during the cold war by relying heavily on a book by Frances Stonor Saunders,The Cultural Cold War which details a “secret programme of cultural propaganda” executed “in great secrecy, by America’s espionage arm, the Central Intelligence Agency” which through a variety of false fronts, such as “the Congress for Cultural Freedom” and a bewildering number of publications, news outlets, conferences and more attempted to pursue its mission “to nudge the intelligentsia of western Europe away from its lingering fascination with Marxism and Communism towards a view more accommodating of ‘the American way’” (Saunders, qtd in Bérubé 105, Bost also considers some of these issues, though in less detail at 626). What is most interesting relative to my questions above is what comes next as Bérubé catalogs the many ironies of how this propaganda program functioned to support artists of the European avant garde who clearly had no mainstream appeal for the people of the States, and admits to bemusement to imagine that art and cultural productions were taken so seriously by the state. He then tries to envision what this might mean had it been the case during “the 1990s culture wars” and imagines,
a high-ranking CIA official’s securing covert funding for Karen Finley, Andres Serrano, and Robert Mapplethorpe over the objections of a Jesse Helms, because the propaganda value of such artists in international courts of opinion outweighed the domestic outrage their work provoked. (Bérubé 107)
The reason why this is amusing and instructive for my questions should perhaps be clear already. As I claimed earlier, the ‘common wisdom’ of neoliberal globalized economic capitalism (and surely its partners the US nation state and its intelligence organs as well), has long since recognized what is or is not political, which is to say what is or is not a threat to its dominance. The scenario Bérubé gives us is funny, because we too recognize this, with regard to both artworks, as in the example, and I suspect about the oft-claimed “political” import of scholarship which I critiqued earlier. In the absence of easily referenced incidents wherein scholarship was an instrument of political struggle which was a threat to U.S. hegemony, or documentation of the state preemptively thwarting scholars through some punitive measures, I am tempted to conclude that the state sees no need to censor scholarship in the humanities as it poses no meaningful political threat.
In the absence of the sorts of documentation and support that Kadir’s argument so desperately needs, and which is not provided by Bérubé as unambiguously as Kadir seems to claim, it risks collapsing in upon itself. Kadir makes many good points, and I am more than willing to grant the possibility that current manifestations of American Studies scholarship (including TAS) may serves ends not intended by its theoreticians, but the burden of proof remains unsatisfied. While it may be unfair to Kadir to say this, given that his text is but the introduction to a journal issue, and not the book or books which would in all likelihood need to be written to support such a claim, but we might still inquire, when considering his critique, where are those books? Surely Saunder’s monograph cannot be all that exists on this topic. Bérubé observes, that the “two key terms (...) most likely to secure funding and generate excitement at the highest administrative levels [are] new technologies and international studies” (104). In light of this, the wide-spread corporatizing of higher education in the US and Europe, and the prevalence now even in the humanities of large-scale interdisciplinary scholarly projects involving multiple PhD.s and host of graduate students, I wonder about proposing such a project or projects myself.
First, how about such a project, headed - why not - by none other that Kadir, which would seek to substantiate the hypothesis that underlies his essay concerning the role of American Studies in the New World Order? Could such a proposal get funding? What academic with a real stake in this question could, in good conscience, not be interested in what such a project would find? Second, what about other research projects which sought to propose feasible economic alternatives to neoliberal capitalist globalization? Or a project which would seek ways to circumvent, or even, undermine the power of the IMF, WTO or World Bank’s stranglehold on economic development worldwide? That is, if academics truly desire change, and want to use their talents to that end and do not wish their scholarship to be co-opted by the forces that they would see challenged, why aren’t these (and many other similar possibilities) the sorts of large-scale, interdisciplinary, international projects being proposed? Why do successive presidents of the ASA in their annual addresses to the field not argue for putting one of these goals at the center of American Studies? That they do not, that such projects do not seem to exist, that many will read my suggestions as hyperbole if not outrageous fantasy, that I am, sadly, to again quote Anzaldúa “shouting against the wind” is, I would argue, a consequence of the lack of overlap between politics and scholarship, and more tellingly an index of where scholarly commitments truly lie.
The countermeasure to combat Exceptionalism 2.0 that Kadir puts forth is largely of a piece with calls for TAS that we looked into in an earlier section of this paper (save perhaps that he might like to see a version of TAS without the participation of American Americanists at all). Such that, if one then turns to Traister’s critique of TAS itself as the new American exceptionalism, one can easily turn this very critique upon Kadir. Briggs, McCormick and Way observe that transnationalism has frequently been criticized “as never more than a celebration of neoliberal or corporate globalization, as just another Yankee imperialist assault on productive Third World nationalisms” (626-7). Lisa Marie Cacho, reviewing a book by David Harvey, observes that “capitalism produces uneven geographical developments, differentiates workers by race, gender, nationality, and degree of class exploitation, and creates divisions within, between, and among local, national, and international regions” (378) a listing which might incline one to wonder whether it is capital itself which produces the divisions which transnational scholarship then dutifully studies. Hong wonders about scholarly “responsibility when the most vividly felt version of American ‘transnationalism’ currently takes the form of war, terror, and destruction?” (“Ghosts” 33). And finally, though such observations could be extended for pages more, there is Traister’s claim that the “mimetic fit between transnationalized American Studies and the recent history of US geopolitics (foreign policy, diplomatic initiatives, and military interventions into other countries) is too close to be easily denied" (16-7). Which again leads me to pondering a research project intended specifically to inquire into what more can be said about this matter beyond an observation of the “mimetic fit” or the purportedly “isomorphic” aspect involved.
And then what of the substance of Traister’s criticism of the TAS project itself as exceptionalist? Traister observes that while proponents of TAS regularly maintain that failure to adopt a transnationalist perspective in favor of one which maintains the nation as a primary object of study, in effect "sustains the 'nationalist-exceptionalist' model of American Studies” and in so doing “the anondyne, conservative, or reactionary critical and real politics of the nation" (10) and that there is an irony in this, as TAS "proposes a paradigm in the service of releasing us from servitude to paradigmatic authority" (12). And, more pointedly, that TAS’s vision embodies an "ambition (...) no less breathtaking than that of Perry miller or F.O. Mathiessen in their day" (Traister 16) and he asks whether there is "something uniquely American--indeed, exceptionalist--about a restless critical search for a failsafe method to do American Studies without repeating the errors of its past or reasserting America in some essentially unchanged form?" (Traister 6). Here Ickstadt makes a point which underscores much of this discussion. He draws attention to development of the field as dialectical, and says that from such a perspective “transnational studies is indeed the radical inversion, the Hegelian ‘sublation,’ of American studies: its inherent nationalism transcended and redeemed by the transnational" (“as Area Studies” 636). But we need to push that insight further still to see how, from this perspective, many of the concerns about lingering exceptionalist sympathies within the field, might perhaps be better understood. That is, what is given in English translations of Hegel as sublation (aufhebung) implies both the canceling of the dialectical other as well as its preservation in the new synthesis, and thus contrary to the erroneous views often attributed to Hegel (which are of a piece with Ickstadt’s “transcended and redeemed” though there may be more than a bit of irony in his choice of words), the tension of the dialectic is not dissolved in the moment of synthesis, but rather becomes constitutive of that very synthesis. Is this not very much what Kadir, Traister (and other critics) appear to be finding and refinding in American Studies (Kadir) and TAS (Traister), of an exceptionalism ever-opposed but somehow lingering and producing effects?
What is the function of the “new” in all of this? Traister points to the demand felt by younger scholars to at least appear to be proposing some new critical stance (21) which I would argue is a common pressure in the humanities in general. Further, its parallel within consumerist ideology is surely of some importance. Consider the response I received when I asked an early Americanist at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz about something I had heard from a student at that university, that one could not really propose a dissertation whose theoretical framework was Marxist. The professor in question disagreed with this, though he was aware of its negative effects for the hypothetical scholar in question. But tellingly for the general point I am making here, he also remarked that to obtain funding for a large scale research project, one could not risk suggesting structuralism or Marxism as one’s theoretical framework because funders would see these as essentially over and done with already. If this is accurate, and I have no reason to doubt it, then it would seem that to the extent that scholarship is beholden the appearance of the new to secure such funding, that it is effectively coercive in ways that harmonize quite rightly with something Bérubé has to say about the cold war period in American Studies’ history, that during those times the field served “double duty, exempting the United States from Marxist analysis” and acting (Bérubé is now quoting Michael Denning) “as a substitute for a developed marxist culture” (108).
I’ve linked TAS to cultural studies above, and other scholars too have made this point. If, "in order to energize itself American literary study must take the form of an Americas Cultural Studies" (Rowe qtd in Traister 11) and if "the most compelling postnationalist challenges to the study of the Americas as primarily (if not exclusively) coherent nation-states are the consequences of the impact of cultural studies on American studies and related area[s]" (Pease and Wiegman qtd in Traister 11 my emphasis), then perhaps certain criticisms of Cultural Studies might also have purchase on TAS? Stuart Hall admits to being “completely dumfounded” by the “rapid professionalization and institutionalization” of cultural studies in the US (285), and worries this would “formalize out of existence the critical questions of power, history, and politics” (286). That an institutionalized Cultural Studies might be a complex reflection of capitalist ideology is not an uncommon criticism either (see Bourdieu 1998, Readings 1996) and John Mowitt has argued along similar lines that Cultural Studies is not able to “grasp its own condition of possibility” for the reason that “the concepts at its disposal (...) are forged out of a structural mis-recognition of their corporate and ultimately US corporate derivation” (178). Compare Traister’s observation that TAS emerges “for the most part, from American-based academics publishing in American-based university presses and journals" (18). Žižek asks us to consider whether knowledge, perhaps even most of all purportedly objective knowledge is not constitutively and inescapably “part of the social relations of power” (“Totalitarianism” 225). Might we not also ask whether the explicit focus on difference, hybridity, contesting of binarism and much else might not be profoundly in accord with neoliberalism’s market philosophy? Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri make a similar point when they observe that in the present that “power itself” upholds the same ideals as postmodernists, postcolonialists and many “political” academics, chanting “Long live difference! Down with essentialist binaries!” (139). They contend that “Power has evacuated the bastion” that leftist academics and radicals “are attacking and has circled round to their rear to join them in the assault in the name of difference” (Hardt and Negri 138). Here one of Kadir’s most interesting points is pertinent, he argues that “difference” is itself primarily productive of identity rather than diversity, difference being what allows identification to take place at all (21).
American exceptionalism is surely a really existing problem. But where it can be most readily and unambiguously found doesn’t appear to be within the academy but in government rhetoric and policy, in the more crucially formative education that U.S. students receive before they ever reach the university, and as held, often quite passionately, by large numbers of the people of the United States. This last fact is disquieting for an academic who recognizes the dangers and injustices that exceptionalism facilitates, and may go some way toward accounting for the polemical excesses which circulate within the academic field, because to truly engage this issue politically would be to recognize a large swath of ‘the people’ of the U.S. as them, the enemy.
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