Transnational American Studies: Vision, Politics, and the Truths of Discourse

Ok folks, I've started to follow my stats in a sort of off-hand way. They show me things like what posts are most viewed and what searches lead there, what countries my viewers are found in, etc. These posts on Transnational American Studies are not my most popular, but they're largely in the top ten. Below you will find two things. 1st, the abstract of the paper. 2nd, a stable link to a PDF of the entire text of the paper which is around 15K words, the complete bibliography of roughly 50 items. The text of the paper has changed in a variety of ways from how some of its sections appear here initially. I hope that these are all useful changes and that I caught all my typos and goofs, but who knows. One thing I do know…

Done is Good

ABSTRACT

This paper begin with a brief introduction to Lacan’s theory of discourses, with particular attention to what he called the university discourse which is explored through two examples, one of which is from Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s 2004 presidential address to the ASA. The section following explores the ways in which Transnational American Studies has reconceived both its object of study and its own disciplinary self-image. I then turn to a consideration of politics and the political offering a definition which is intended to clarify the political import or lack thereof in this scholarship and scholarship more generally. Armed with this definition, I then consider the fraught notion of American Exceptionalism, how it has been critiqued and more particularly how it is still being found in contemporary scholarship by a number of critics. My conclusion looks at a narrative of the field’s desire offered by Winfreid Fluck and offers a listing of problematic issues which will not be new, but which, in light of my earlier ruminations on politics, I will have specific positions on and, in some cases, answers to.  

Download the paper with this link.

Transnational American Studies paper, section 4 [in draft]

I suggest that you download the complete paper with this link. In it you will find the best edited version of what this post contains, and my complete bibliography of more than 50 items all in a single  PDF of about 53 pages and a bit more than 15,000 words. 

[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. 

Transnational American Studies paper, sections 1, 2 & 3 [in draft]

I suggest that you download the complete paper with this link. In it you will find the best edited version of what this post contains, and my complete bibliography of more than 50 items all in a single  PDF of about 53 pages and a bit more than 15,000 words.  

[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]

You get it, right?

Theoretical Interlude:
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. 

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

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).