Tradition and the Black Atlantic
Page 9
Adam Gopnik, with unusually clear foresight as the canon wars raged around us, warned of this some fifteen years ago: “The left’s ambitions are political and its triumphs cultural,” he noted, “while the right’s ambitions are cultural and its triumphs political.”2 Perhaps because of our own success with canon reformation within the university, for a long time I would find myself startled, even amused, by the use of the phrase “culture wars” in the popular press to refer to a melee that seemed to be explicitly political and only indirectly cultural, but most certainly not “cultural” in the sense of the English department and the canon of American literature. In a recent column, for example, Frank Rich wrote that “Americans have less and less patience for the intrusive and divisive moral scolds who thrived in the bubbles of the Clinton and Bush years. Culture wars are a luxury the country—the G.O.P. included—can no longer afford.” 3 It is clear that the canon was nowhere on Frank Rich’s mind. And if you do even a cursory search of the Internet for “culture wars,” as I just did, it is clear that few people even remember the canon wars when they use the term. Of 1 million results for “culture wars,” 217,000 referred to “abortion,” 182,000 related to “evolution,” 139,000 pointed to “immigration,” 103,000 were concerned with “gay marriage,” and almost 333,000 were about “Obama.” Multiculturalism? 44,800 results. It is clear that what many of us among the professoriate thought was the war was merely a battle, a skirmish—an important one, certainly, but judging from the ferocity of the anger being vented, symbolically, upon President Obama’s proposals for health care reform, for example, a skirmish nonetheless.
Although the “culture wars” in the early 1990s was an umbrella term that gathered under one rubric the flare-ups over abortion rights, gay rights, the use of federal funds to display Robert Mapplethorpe’s nude images of black male bodies, feminism, affirmative action, Vice President Dan Quayle’s “Murphy Brown” speeches, and the road show featuring Stanley Fish and Dinesh D’Souza, among other things, the conflict was always, in retrospect, burbling outside of academia, too. That’s why even when the right was winning all the major battles—after all, George H. W. Bush’s presidency was effectively the third term of Reaganism—people on the right remained crazily embittered. The ideological turn in the academy that I’ve been mentioning was something they latched onto, but their anger was part of a general sense that there was a broader substrate of social change that they were powerless to affect. The ire that we generated by what we were attempting to do in the classroom, especially protecting the diversity to which the best affirmative action programs aspire, was symptomatic of a phenomenon much, much larger, one that we see, at this writing, manifesting itself in an unprecedented degree of naked, financed, systematically organized, and sometimes quasi-racist venom directed at the nation’s first black president.
But because the culture wars as these pertain to the study of culture and the canon provided the salient context and backdrop for the growth and appropriation of Cultural Studies in the United States, for the Black Arts Movement in Britain, and for the reappropriation of the critical writings of Frantz Fanon as a central theorist of post-colonialism, I would like to attempt a sort of genealogy of those thrilling days of yesteryear before proffering my own brief for cultural pluralism, lest this curious history be forgotten, or its importance to the theoretical terrain that I am exploring in this book be underappreciated. And the locus classicus of that war would, without a doubt, be a speech delivered by a Republican presidential candidate in the summer of 1992.
The Culture Wars: The Prequel
“There is a religious war going on in this country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America.” These words, you may recall, were spoken by Pat Buchanan at the 1992 Republican National Convention. (Some people were disturbed by his remarks, I know; one commentator did suggest they probably sounded better in the original German.)
As Buchanan had explained earlier that year, an adversarial and libertine culture was jeopardizing the very integrity of the republic. “As America’s imperial troops guard frontiers all over the world,” he said, “our own frontiers are open, and the barbarian is inside the gates. And you do not deal with the Vandals and the Visigoths who are pillaging your cities by expanding the Head Start and food stamp programs.”4
You cannot buy off cultural combatants—we might charitably read this passage as saying—with material concessions. Those who rioted in response to Rodney King’s beating by the police in Los Angeles, Buchanan told us, were merely enacting a script prepared for them by these same combatants of the cultural left.
Yes, 1992 was a summer of discontent for those who believed that the so-called culture wars had subsided into an uneasy civility, or were soon to do so. Attempting to engineer the rehabilitation of Vice President Quayle, his chief of staff, William Kristol, introduced into common parlance the term “cultural elite,” evidently an adaptation of the term “new class” that intellectuals such as Midge Decter and Irving Kristol had tried to popularize in the mid-1970s. If it was less than clear exactly who was designated by the term “cultural elite,” Vice President Quayle himself declared that he “wore their scorn as a badge of honor.” He did not specify whether he wore everyone else’s scorn as a badge of honor, too, or if he wore it in some other way, or if scorning the vice president automatically earned you a position in the cultural elite, in which case approximately 85 percent of Americans who were surveyed would have qualified for this selfsame elite. It was also left unclear whether criterion for membership in the elite was attitudinal or positional or some combination of the two.
But one thing we were assured was that this elite had contempt for the values of the ordinary American—possibly exempting the 85 percent of Americans who reportedly agreed at the time with a poor estimation of the vice president, an estimation worn as the aforementioned badge of honor. And possibly exempting, too, the teeming masses of Americans who watched their television shows and read their magazines with an avidity that guaranteed maximal advertising revenues. For the cultural elite, as it turned out in subsequent discussion, actually designated the capitalists of mass culture—that is to say, people who secured their position, much like our elected officials, by maintaining a competitive audience share. (What the derogation of the cultural elite—an enantiomer of the left and liberal admonitions concerning the corporate elite—reminds us is that for our electoral conservatives, enthusiasm for the free market does not extend to the free market in culture.) The salient difference between Quayle and his network counterparts was, of course, that Quayle wasn’t canceled midway into his first season. A four-year run was guaranteed—even if the speeches were mostly reruns.
Politicizing “Politics”
But why dwell on the inanities of cultural warfare in popular political discourse in the early 1990s? I suppose because if you’re interested in the history of the role assigned culture—so called—in the American political arena today, it’s an obvious place to pause and consider. On another occasion, and in another context, I remarked that those who were with great anguish wringing their hands over an allegedly “politicized” academy were missing the irony of the outcome: the creation of a politics that was, in the worst sense, merely academic.
Let me elaborate on this. What do critics have in mind when they speak of a politicized curriculum? In part, they have in mind the explicit claim that the curriculum is political. Now, I won’t bore you with a recitation of the doxa that there is no pristine and Archimedean space exempt from the political; by now we all know this by heart, and so long as politics is defined in an inclusive enough sense, I’m sure this is true enough. But that copula “is,” is a fabulous laborsaving device. Pronouncing that the curriculum is political saves you from having to investigate and then to specify precisely how it comes to have political efforts or functions and what the nature of those effects or functions might be
. For too many years, the academic left employed a grandiose political vocabulary in what was, in fact, a highly etiolated fashion. There was an embarrassing disparity, as I’ve pointed out, between the rhetoric of our discourse and its actual effectivity. Typically, the rhetoric had to do with emancipating Fanon’s wretched of the earth; the reality had to do with English department meetings.
Back then, it was the conservative backlash to canon reformation that blew hot with the gusty rhetoric of politics. On the right, we heard dire pronouncements about a radical conspiracy to imperil the republic—here, I’d say the locus classicus remains George Will’s remark that Lynn Cheney’s charge, of policing the humanities, was even more imperative to our national security than her husband’s charge, as secretary of defense, merely to defend our borders.5 But there were a thousand variations. In this case, the rhetoric had to do with the end of civilization as we know it, but the reality still had to do with English department meetings.
One of the most agile polemicists of the cultural conservatives, Dinesh D’Souza, urged his fellow conservatives to borrow a leaf from the left and emulate its moral intonations, if not its substance. The rhetoric on the right, he complained, had tended to be the rhetoric of cynicism. The rhetoric on the left, he noted, was the rhetoric of righteous indignation. That tone of righteous indignation, he concluded rather cynically, was precisely what conservatives had to borrow. Having little stomach myself for extended bouts of self-righteousness, I might have been inclined to say, “Take it away; it’s all yours.” But the fact is, they already had. And if you don’t believe me, you missed the GOP convention that year (and in 1996, in 2000, in 2004, and, especially, in Sarah Palin’s stunningly powerful revitalization of these old animosities in the Republican National Convention of 2008).
To be sure, the conversion of academic debates into media hype and campaign fodder had, by the summer of 1992, enjoyed more than a running start. When President George H. W. Bush, speaking in 1991 at the University of Michigan, warned against the rampaging threat of “political correctness,” he was, it turns out, merely upholding a venerable presidential tradition. As historian Maurice Isserman reminds us, Calvin Coolidge had had much the same thing to say. In the spring of 1921, Vice President Calvin Coolidge warned that radicalism was “infecting women’s colleges” “under a cloak of academic freedom.” To bolster his thesis, he cited alarming quotes from student newspapers at Smith, Barnard, Bryn Mawr, and elsewhere. The result, Coolidge concluded, was “the ultimate breaking down of the old sturdy virtues of manhood and womanhood, the insidious destruction of character, the weakening of the moral fiber of the individual, the destruction of the foundations of civilization.” 6 No doubt much has changed since 1921, and yet those menacing, minor-key organ tones that suffuse Coolidge’s prose—the grim forecast of the end of civilization as we know it—remain familiar to the point of banality.
The ironies abound. Freedom of expression, which once had been a reliable issue for the left, became a rallying banner on the right. Whereas once the academic left had stood accused of jockeying for victim status, we found that the right had taken over the vocabulary of victimization and oppression, depicting themselves as lonely martyrs to the jackal hordes of “PC.” As a result, the debate frequently degenerated into a sort of playground posturing, more appropriate to Pee Wee’s Playhouse than the MacNeil Lehrer News Hour: “You’re hegemonic.” “No, you’re hegemonic.” “I know you are, but what am I?” I believe this fairly summarizes several reams of learned prose upon the subject.
The other peculiar feature of the so-called PC debate was that few people on the defense could be described as “pro” political correctness. Conversely, those most actively opposed to political correctness often appeared to be advocates of political correctness in its other ideological flavors. For in another venerable American tradition, ideology is always what the other guy has. Politics is short for the wrong politics. (As the old joke has it, “I have convictions, you have politics, and he has ideology.”) Now when William Bennett, as secretary of education, actively campaigned for curricular change, defended such change on political grounds, and enlisted the political capital of the White House to that end, you might be forgiven for thinking that he was, well, politicizing the curriculum. But Bennett would have been quick to set you straight: A politicized curriculum was just what he was opposing. (Do you remember the days of the Vietnam War when we sometimes had to destroy a village in order to save it? I think there’s a similar logic at work here.)
At a time when liberalism became the unspeakable “L word,” it was bemusing to hear conservatives insist, from well-upholstered positions in the policy establishment, that PC was enjoying some sort of pernicious ascendancy in the political realm. PC, which began life as a facetious term of self-parody, became enlisted in political battles that had very little to do with what actually happened in the academy. It took on a life of its own. So that one is tempted to dismiss the whole thing as a chimera. And of course it wasn’t. The academy does breed orthodoxies, on the left and the right alike, and it is particularly true that the left cannot survive without self-criticism. I emphasize the left only because, having been isolated from actual power for so long, it has tended to lose touch with the practicalities of power. After all, in the grand theater of American politics, the “left” is shorthand for “left out.”
The Free Speech Movement: The Sequel
I think it is also true that some figures on the academic/ cultural left too quickly adopted the strategies of the political right. Here, I’m thinking principally of the somewhat shopworn debate over “hate speech” as a variance from protected expression, and it may be a topic worth reviewing because the question of free speech has surfaced as the right increasingly employs blackface caricature in parodies of Barack Obama.
As Michael Kinsley once pointed out, most college statutes restricting freedom of expression were implemented by conservative forces in the early 1970s. Under the banner of “civility,” their hope was to control campus radicals who seized on free speech as a shield for their own activities. (Remember the Free Speech movement? Dates you, doesn’t it?) Today, ironically, the existence of these same statutes is cited as evidence of a marauding threat from the thought police on the left.
At the very least, I think the convergence of tactics from one era to another ought to give us pause. Another example of such uncomfortable convergences: In drafting legislation to constrain the National Endowment of the Arts, Senator Jesse Helm’s office borrowed language from an anti–hate speech statute from (I believe) the University of Wisconsin. If you were wondering why Senator Helms was so intent that the NEA not fund art that could be seen as demeaning to the handicapped, you have your answer. In a similar arena, anti-pornography activists such as Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon found themselves working in alliance with conservative municipal groups around the country, and in Canada, at least, the Supreme Court promulgated their sweeping definition of obscenity as the law of the land.
Let me be clear on one point: I am very sensitive to the issues raised in the arguments for hate speech bans. Growing up in a segregated mill town in Appalachia, I sometimes thought there was a sign on my back saying, “Nigger,” because that’s what some white people seemed to think my name was. So I don’t deny that the language of racial prejudice can inflict harm. At the same time—as the Stephen Sondheim song has it—“I’m still here.”
The strongest argument for speech bans are, when you examine them more closely, arguments against arguments against speech bans. They are often very clever, often persuasive. But what they don’t establish is that all things considered, a ban on hate speech is so indispensable, so essential to avoid some present danger, that it justifies handing opponents on the right a gift-wrapped, bow-tied, and beribboned rallying point. In the current environment of symbolic politics, especially with our first African American sleeping in the master bedroom of the White House, the speech ban is a powerful thing: It can turn a gar
den variety bigot into a First Amendment martyr.
My concern is, first and foremost, a practical one. The problem with speech codes is that they make it impossible to challenge bigotry without it turning into a debate over the right to speak. And that is too great a price to pay. If someone calls me a nigger, I don’t want to have to spend the next five hours debating the fine points of John Stuart Mill. Speech codes kill critique. For me, that’s what it comes down to.
Given the fact that verbal harassment is already, and uncontroversially, legally proscribed, given the fact, too, that campus speech bans are rarely enforced, the question arises, Do you need them? Their proponents say yes—but they almost always offer expressive , rather than consequentialist, arguments for them. That is, they do not say, for instance, that the statute will spare vulnerable students some foreseeable amounts of psychic trauma. They say, rather, that by adopting such a statute, the university expresses its opposition to hate speech and bigotry. The statute symbolizes our commitment to tolerance, to the creation of an educational environment where mutual colloquy and comity are preserved.