Political Correctness: A Response from the Cultural Left

POLITICAL CORRECTNESS This page intentionally left blank POLITICAL CORRECTNESS A Response from the Cultural Left R...

Author: Richard Feldstein

70 downloads 1006 Views 12MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

POLITICAL CORRECTNESS

This page intentionally left blank

POLITICAL CORRECTNESS A Response from the Cultural Left

RICHARD FELDSTEIN

Foreword by Teresa Brennan

University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis London

Copyright 1997 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290, Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Feldstein, Richard. Political correctness : a response from the cultural Left / Richard Feldstein. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8166-2475-5 (he). — ISBN 0-8166-2476-3 (pb) 1. Political correctness. 2. United States—Moral conditions. 3. Right and left (Political science) 4. United States—Civilization—20th century. 5. United States—Politics and government—1989- I. Title. BD175.5.P65F45 1996 3O6'.O973—dc20 96-31332 The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

For Kate Mele


Contents Foreword Teresa Brennan

ix

Acknowledgments

xxi

1 . The PC Lexicon Politically Correct Fairy Tales—A Brief History of the Term Political Correctness—Contextualizing the Argument— Rhetorical Considerations in the Age of Paranoia

1

2 . Sound Bite Myth: Scholars Hate Students The Checklist of Grievances—Teachers Who Don't Teach— Spies in the Classroom—Deciphering the Parchments

13

3 . The Myth of Disinterested Scholarship Appropriating the Center—Constructing the PC Metanarrative—Much Ado about Gayatri Spivak and Stanley Fish—Think Tank Means to Foundational Ends

31

4 . Mythic Parameters: Fast-Food PC, McCarthyism, and McReaganism Inoculating the Body Politic—The Mythic Parameters of PC Discourse—McCarthyism into McReaganism

51

5 . Constructing the Enemy 75 57 Flavors of Intimidation—The Process of Paranoid Projection—An International Politics of Paranoid Projection— Freudian Projection and the Politics of Moral Hubris— McReaganism Today: The War to Impeach Clinton— Neoconservative Extremists and PC

VII

VIII

. Contents

6 . The Mirror of Manufactured Cultural Relations Paranoid Projection and the Lacanian Mirror—Paranoid Projection in the Cultural Mirror—Boys to Men to Gods— The Commodity Exchange in the Cultural Mirror— Mapping Images onto the Narrative of Political Correctness

126

7 . White Male Canon Formation and the End of History The Great Books Lobby—Male-Centered Canon Building— Scripting Modernity: Woolf's Acts as Case in Point— Interpellating the Subject of History—Induced Transference onto Big Brother—Left in the Mirror

156

8 . Where Do We Go from Here? Skip Porteous (Institute For First Amendment Studies)— Myrna C. Adams (OpenMind)—Curt Shepard (National Gay and Lesbian Task Force)—Sandra Coyner (National Women's Studies Association)—Gerald Graff and Gregory Jay (Teachers for a Democratic Culture)—Stanley Aronowitz (Union of Democratic Intellectuals)

187

Bibliography

221

Index

229

Foreword Teresa Brennan

On May 10 of 1995 in the Palais de Justice in Paris, the three presiding judges awarded damages to Professor Alice Jardine of Harvard University against Le Figaro magazine. The damages were for 150,000 franc (about $30,000, the largest amount ever awarded against Le Figaro). Th cause? Le Figaro had claimed that Jardine, and her colleague Professo Susan Suleiman, held their professorships only because of the American enforcement of political correctness. According to Le Figaro, Suleima and Jardine taught only courses on homosexual women of color. Moreover, it appeared that Harvard had appointed them merely because they were women; Jardine and Suleiman had, according to Le Figaro, no ba gage universitaire, meaning they had no qualifications. Jardine's adv cate, at one time the counsel for former premier Giscard d'Estaing, demonstrated that Jardine and Suleiman had in actuality very many qualifications. Indeed, he delighted in spreading their numerous books, articles, and diplomas over the advocate's bench. Needless to say, Alice Jardine and Susan Suleiman did not only teach courses on homosexual women of color. In fact, they taught no course on homosexual women of color. For those of us who have admired and used twentieth-century French philosophy, the decision was a relief as well as a victory. When, we wondered, are the French going to realize that they have been had7. For ha they have undoubtedly been. Thefictionthat American universities have been filled with unqualified women and black and brown people, and that basic civil liberties have been denied to qualified white men, has had IX

x

. Foreword

considerable currency in Paris. Its currency has been abetted by the fact that the French have no direct access to the history of le politiquement correct.

Richard Feldstein begins this outstanding book with a history of this much disputed term. Before political correctness came to represent a new Stalinism, it had been used, especially by Jews on the Left in the 1930s and 1940s, to criticize Stalinism. Later, it became a term of self-satire and light irony. In a vein similar to Feldstein's, Jardine, in one of her interviews following the successful lawsuit, tells this story: "In the seventies . . . a feminist might say, for example, 'Of course it is not all that politically correct, but I really love my red nailpolish.' Or a Marxist: 'It is not very politically correct, but I adore expensive restaurants.'5>1 So how did political correctness come to signify the Left—and liberal—putative imposition of a 'line'? In an entirely conscious decision, at one of its numerous think tank meetings, the Right adopted this term and used it in an Orwellian series of misrepresentations that have left the liberal center, and for that matter, the Left itself, seriously bewildered. Because the Right used the term for affirmative action policies, the Left, in trying to defend those policies, has somehow felt obliged to defend the phantom of political correctness. The problem then becomes: How does one defend political correctness when it sounds so illiberal and authoritarian? For Feldstein, one doesn't defend it. It was never meant to be anything other than satire or self-criticism. But one does need to expose what the Right has done with the term, and to analyze the political and psychological success of a brainwashing campaign on an international scale. This campaign has been waged with such effectiveness that the Right has had some success in claiming the virtue of liberality as its own. The degree of its success is reflected in the confusion prevalent among genuine liberals. The essence of negative liberty, in Isaiah Berlin's great definition, is not imposing one's will on another. I may have my freedom, provided I do not diminish yours. The campaign against political correctness has been so successful because it has portrayed the attempt to uphold the rights of disadvantaged groups as the infringement of individual rights.2 Its analysis of the neoconservative campaign is what marks Political

Foreword

. XI

Correctness apart from the few existing books on the topic. hese have been concerned primarily with debates on affirmative action, speech codes, and related issues. In other words, there are two issues involved in political correctness. There is the question of the way that "PC codes" have been applied, sometimes in ludicrous ways—to which some of us would want to say: "We have no defense." The examples that come to mind here involve especially the application and sometimes the institution of speech codes. Unfortunately, the Right does not have a monopoly on self-righteousness and the persecutory impulses that accompany it. But then there is the use by the Right of the PC issues to foster racism (not to mention sexism). That is Feldstein's concern. In addition, while Feldstein situates his analysis in a historical context, the nature of that analysis means that he is concerned mainly with those aspects of political correctness that embody projection, beginning with how the term itself has changed in meaning. In essence, projection means disowning something in yourself— denying that you do it, have it, or feel it—and projecting that thing onto another. For Feldstein, the Right projects its antidemocratic, authoritarian tendencies onto the center and the Left. The Right styles those concerned with the rights of minorities as denigrators of liberty who would deny the rights of'individuals' in the interests of women, African Americans, Native Americans, Hispanics, and homosexuals (who, taken collectively, add up to a fairly sizable majority and who, singly, of course, can all claim the rights of individuals). But perhaps what is most distinctive in this book is that Feldstein applies the much berated (by the Right) tools of poststructuralist and psychoanalytic criticism to analyze the rhetoric and the rationale of the Right's pronouncements on PC. He uses Freud's and Lacan's theories of projection to this end, applying them to a carefully culled collection of propaganda ranging from Dinesh D'Souza to Rush Limbaugh. In this application of psychoanalytic and poststructuralist theory, Feldstein proceeds with exemplary clarity. He has worked hitherto presenting Lacan's theory in as accessible a manner as can be done. He has a reputation for exactness, for being a good scholar, and for sharing the often inchoate ethical concerns of left and liberal intellectuals. He has attempted as well to draw out the political bearings of Lacan's concept of

XII . Foreword

the gaze, of what it means to see a self through the eye of the other, an other that can impose a direction upon you that is literally other than your own. In this book, he combines these skills with a flair for concrete analysis. That concreteness also makes the theoretical issues plainer. To a degree, these theoretical issues converge on the question of the past and its representation. One of Feldstein's main points is that the Right seeks to obliterate the memory of the past. Indeed, the whole political correctness campaign presupposes and grows in an ahistorical climate. The point of affirmative action is lost if one forgets that those it is meant to advantage are in fact coming from behind. They have been historically disadvantaged at the same time and because they have effectively advanced the lives of others. The problem with individual rights, as a concept, and it has been a problem with individualism tout court, is its assumption that people are born free and equal in the marketplace, without parents or pasts that advantaged or disadvantaged them. Because of its intrinsic ahistoricism, the discourse of the individual has been unable to deal with the challenge of inherited disadvantages. The Right can insist that the basic claims of African Americans are claims for special treatment only while it forgets that thirty years ago they had no claims to desegregated education, among other things. It can utilize the American peoples' remorse over McCarthyism only because the Right relies on those same peoples forgetting that McCarthy was on the far Right. The details are forgotten; the neoconservative two-step, as Feldstein calls it, goes rapidly on to its next move in this war of words. But while the Right moves quickly, the Left so far has been somewhat slow to respond. Yet, as Feldstein notes, the artist, the more imaginative person, has generally been drawn to the Left. I would go further, and suggest that as a rule, people on the Left are simply more intelligent than those on the Right. But in the political correctness campaign, waged by the Right against the Left, the latter seems bewildered. The Right's political correctness critiques represent an appropriation of the more quick-witted position. Why is this? I want to propose a two-part answer. The first part is about how the language of the Left has been appropriated by the Right. This appropriation in the long run means that the Left's power of conviction is cut out

Foreword

.

XIII

from under it. In the short term, it means that the Left no longer has a recognizable language in which to argue its case. Words such as revolution, radical, liberation, freedom are now employed by the Right. W we are witnessing is a co-optation of the language of change that has been the Left's hitherto (a process carried to absurd lengths in the film Bob Roberts, discussed by Feldstein). What this means for thecollege generations, the traditional source for so much radicalism in the United States, is confusion. If the language of change has been their prerogative, it is so no longer. To an extent, this confusion results from a systematic manipulation of language. The logistics of this are adumbrated in a Republican pamphlet that includes an appendix on how to describe things you like and things you do not. The appendix consists of adjectives. For things and people you support, you use words such as brave, resourceful, honest, scrupu For those you oppose, you say suspect, fast, sly, and so on.3 In its caric ture of political correctness, the Right projects onto the Left its own abuse of language. The Left is castigated for the crudity of speech codes, while the Right's own abuse takes the form of a more subtle attempt to police people by a language of redescription. Interestingly, this process of redescription has a longer history than the current language war. It was once part of the Ars rhetorica taugh in the Renaissance, and it was known as paradiastole. As with so muc else in Renaissance humanism, the term was adopted from early Roman applications of Hellenistic theory. Skinner, who resurrects the concept of paradiastole in a fascinating history of it and its significance fo seventeenth-century political philosophers, including Hobbes, offers numerous examples of what it is. Among them is a discussion of what paradiastole meant for the Roman rhetorician Quintilian. Quintilian ex plains (quoting Aristotle) that paradiastole is present when " 'slander ca pass for frankness, recklessness for courage, extravagance for copiousness.'"4 Similarly, one is "speaking paradiastolically'whenever [one calls oneself wise rather than cunning, or courageous rather than overconfident, or careful rather than parsimonious.' "5 By the time Hobbes entered a Renaissance debate on the description of virtue, there was considerable support for the idea that there was no sure way of establishing whether virtuous terms were being used appropriately. Machiavelli had

xiv

. Foreword

used paradiastole superbly, pointing out that cruelty could be redescribed as justice. Virtue became conceptually elusive. Hobbes disliked the implications of this, and, as with so much else, appealed to the idea of the sovereign's ultimate authority for a resolution. But while, as we shall see, the problem of the arbitrary assignation of meaning remains, more is involved in the current language war than redescription. The political correctness battles involve not only the language of virtue; there is also the appropriation of a language of resistance, a language with specific historical valences. And this takes us back to the confusion that has ramifications on the Left. What perpetuates this confusion is the absence of a metalanguage, or theory, for analyzing it. More than this: it is the fact that postmodern and poststructuralist theory actively support the notion that the connection between signifier and referent is arbitrary. I will try to make this clearer, beginning with the obvious objection to the notion that the Right has co-opted the language of change. That objection goes like this: It is one thing for the Right to use the language of change, but everyone knows that the "Republican revolution" is not about change in the real revolutionary sense; it does not entail a decrease in poverty or a redistribution of wealth. On the contrary. But now consider what is involved in this objection. It assumes that certain signifiers (revolution, radical, liberation) have real meanings. it is exactly this position that postmodern and much of poststructuralist theory is committed to overturning. That commitment, as I have implied, is the main obstacle in the way of comprehending the current language war. The language war is taking place in a philosophical era known as the "linguistic turn," known this way because most interesting twentiethcentury philosophy has been fascinated by language. The linguistic turn, of late, has converged on the idea that there is no fixed meaning. Meaning is not determined by the tie between word and thing, or signifier and referent, but by the relation between signifiers. This position, which has reached its apogee in the work of Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan, stretches the endless flexibility of meaning. This is why it is detested by those who uphold traditional values: the true, the beautiful, and the good.

Foreword

. xv

Now what we are witnessing in the political correctness war is a campaign wherein certain signifiers (we can add McCarthyism, liberal, a discrimination to those given earlier) have been thoroughly detache from their referents in left-inspired struggles against the oppression of the working class, women, African Americans, other peoples of color, and homosexuals. This means we confront a grand irony, where the Right is practicing what the Left is celebrating in theory. Feldstein draws attention to the homology between postmodern theory and right-wing practice, and suggests it can be understood partly in terms of the fact that we are living in an age where the advent of television in particular accelerates the detachment of signifiers and referents. In part, Feldstein argues, it can also be understood in terms of my account of the increasing objectification of people as well as things, and consequent shifts in historical, affective meaning. What I want to do here is unpack this idea a little. Historical, affective meaning refers to the emotional connotations a word has accrued. In other words, over time, a signifier acquires the power to mobilize certain emotions. It does not lose that power until and unless another signifier becomes the site of investment for the same historical affective meaning. Confusion enters when the same signifier, mobilizing the same affects, is in fact attached to, say, the welfare cutbacks, as in "The Republican Revolution." Revolution was meant to stir the blood and inspire courage to over throw the existing order. It was meant to inspire this if one was the proponent of revolution, or to produce apprehension and distaste if one was revolution's object. Or, to take a new example, the affect of compassion has traditionally marked the liberal position, and something is generally wanting on the Left when the affect of compassion is absent. More to the point, revolution and related words not only constitute the lan guage of the Left, they also map onto the range of affects that fuel a leftinspired struggle. In short, what the appropriation of the Left's language means is that signifiers and their traditional affective meanings are divorced. But the divorce, as suggested earlier, is not immediate in its effects. Because the Left's language still conjures the affects that it does, it is the case that those affects can be captured, at least for a time, by

xvi

. Foreword

causes that embody their antithesis in action. But eventually, the actions produce their own reactions, their own set of resistances. The point is that these resistances now lack a language. In psychoanalytic parlance, resistances that cannot be expressed are liable to constitute symptoms. The preeminent symptoms include depression, inertia, and lack of conviction. What remains to be established is how the divorce of historical, affective meaning and signifier is part of a process of escalating objectification. Objectification is a psychic as much as a social process. One person (group, class, or nation) may become the object guaranteeing the subjectivity of another (person, group, etc.). In other words, the subject and object positions are relational: one becomes a subject literally at the expense of the other. Moreover, and more crucially, the relation between these terms relies on an energetic and affective interchange, whereby the subject is empowered through projecting his, her, or their disordered affects not only on but into the other, who becomes relatively immobilized by this process. This argument utilizes Freud's theories of hysteria and obsessional neurosis. Respectively, these constitute the archetypal feminine and masculine neuroses. Just as femininity for Freud correlates to some degree with rigidity, so hysteria freezes and may literally immobilize the person concerned. In hysteria, both in the colloquial and the clinical sense, there is too much affect, particularly negative affects like anxiety. In obsessional neurosis, by contrast, there is not enough apparent affect. There is a splitting of affect and word, in which the obsessional neurotic is obsessional because he or she follows a linguistic chain, connecting psychic ideas solely through verbal signification, and neurotic because the affect is both split off and turned back against the self in the miserable convolutions of depression. In fact, both affect and language constitute systems of signification for Freud, systems that are split off and expressions of an original psychic energy. Through an analysis of the various contradictions in Freud's accounts of hysteria and obsessional neurosis, the details of which I will spare the reader here, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that those contradictions can be resolved by conceiving both neuroses as two positions in an energetic exchange. Or rather, both neuroses represent failures in an en-

Foreword

.

xvn

ergetic exchange that is successfully resolved in pure masculinity and femininity. The difference between the sexual identities and the neuroses is this: whereas in obsessional neurosis, the affect is split from language and turned back against itself, in masculinity the affect is projected into the other, who becomes a feminine object for the masculine subject. "Normal" femininity accepts some of this projected affect, but not too much, while hysteria overdoes it, and takes on more than it can carry. The model I have set up (and, needless to say, it is an ideal-typical model) is not restricted in its application to the masculine and feminine positions. Rather, it is the case that Freud's account of masculinity and femininity, and their archetypal neuroses, can form the basis of understanding the subject and object positions in a variety of contexts: it holds for the relation between men and most women; between womenin-power, other women and uncertain men; and between whites and people of color. But whatever his context, the subject lives in a world of language and cognition, while projecting out the affects that otherwise interfere with his or her ability to wander down the chain of linguistic signification without emotional impediments. This subject can shift from meaning to meaning without emotional jarring, for his affects are lodged elsewhere. It may be the case that the only affect he knows well is the anger or sadistic pleasure that accompanies the projection of his other, more confusing, affects beyond himself. But, as we have seen, there is a middle ground between the subject and object positions. This is the ground occupied by the obsessional neurotic. The obsessional fails in his masculinism, in that he refuses that same sadistic pleasure that is always involved in projecting negative affects into another. His affect, like the hysteric's, is immobilizing. The difference is that he turns this affect against himself, although he has lost contact with it. He experiences it, but he does not know what to call it. It has no name. But like the successful masculine subject, he remains in a world without apparent affect; he is just not as mobile, or energetically empowered, as the subjects who projectively dump on others without compunction. However, the "successful" subject is in trouble when the repressed returns, or, to say the same thing, when the object refuses the subject's pro-

xvni . Foreword

jection. To maintain a subjectivity based on empowerment through projection, the subject has to find new objects, new grounds for the disposal of what is unwanted in itself. We can view much recent history as the search for ever new objects, to replace those who resist what is imposed on them. As groups of women resist their objectification, other groups of women, or peoples of color, take their place as objects in the subject's imaginary. The question becomes: how does this lead to an increase in the selfreferential nature of linguistic signification, as I have suggested it does? After all, the arbitrary implications of paradiastole were debated some time ago, although, by Skinner's account, paradiastole disappears as a concept after the seventeenth century.6 As with so much else in the Renaissance, contemporary issues were foreshadowed in that initial social turmoil, only to go underground as long as the traditional affective referents continued to hold sway. But they hold their sway no longer, which takes us to two related explanations for why linguistic meaning is held to be arbitrary today, in the practice of the Right and the theory of the Left. Thefirstexplanation is often noted: it is the absence of transcendental guarantors. The second is that when the subject maintained an enduring tie to the object (as in the erstwhile relation between man and woman, or former long-term colonial relations), the affective referent was at least constant; there was a persistent connection between word and affect, even if the affect was at one remove. In addition, the instability resulting from the object's rebellion does not lead, as a rule, to the subject's turning inward in search of the split-off affects it once possessed. It does not lead in this direction because the economic, technological dynamics of capital ensure that subjectivity continues to be constituted in relation to a plethora of controllable, albeit inanimate, objects: namely, the world of commodities, objects that serve, without argument, the pleasure of the subject. It is virtually impossible to escape the world of subjects and objects, or to overcome one's constitution as a subject via the objectification of others. But some subjects—those on what remains of the Left—do seek to escape from or overcome their situation as subjects. This attempt is reflected in their concern for the other, where "the other" refers to those who have been or are being objectified. The difficulty lies precisely in

Foreword

. xix

how to theorize, let alone reestablish, an affective relation to the other that is not exploitative (a relation that is sometimes called love). What is clear is that this relation cannot be theorized, even though it is sometimes practiced, as long as it is assumed that meaning is arbitrary, constituted solely by the relation between signifiers, with no necessary connection to an affect. It is exactly here that postmodernism falters, leaving us with little more than a formalization of the very process it should be criticizing. It is to Feldstein's credit that he has put the problem squarely before us. This book should generate a debate on the theoretical rethinking that Feldstein himself does so much to advance. In the meantime, the language war continues, and it cannot be adjudicated by language alone. With accusations of McCarthyism, illiberality, fascism, and the denial of freedoms of all sorts on both sides, how does one tell who is really at fault? While postmodernism learns to deal with the question, there is an old answer. As always in such cases, one knows them by their fruits. Even in a language war, there is only one judge. If the fruits of the Republican 'revolution' are an increase in poverty, discrimination, and lack of opportunity, the revolutionary language is beside the point. They are guilty. Notes 1. Liberation, April 19,1995, p. 36. 2. Despite much hype, white men are not suffering because of affirmative action. See Eileen McNamara, "What Is It That We Fear? Race, Gender Issues Mask the Real Debate," Boston Globe, August 16,1995, pp. 1,27. 3. For an overview, see Ellen Messer-Davidow, "Who (Ac) Counts and How," Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 27,26-41; "Manufacturing the Attack on Liberalized Higher Education," Social Text 36 (1993): 40-80. 4. Quoted in Quentin Skinner, "Moral Ambiguity and the Renaissance Art of Eloquence." Essays in Criticism 44 (1994): 276. 5. Quentin Skinner, "Thomas Hobbes: Rhetoric and the Construction of Morality," Proceedings of the British Academy 76 (1991): 1-61, p.6. 6. Ibid., p.38.


Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Gabrielle Parello, Chris De Guilio, and Maria Cimini, students who helped me with this manuscript. I want to thank Karen Rubino, who configured the graphs for this book. I especially wish to thank Ericka McGowan for compiling the Index. I also want to say how grateful I am that Joan Dagle and Rich Weiner fought to ensure that the administration of Rhode Island College gave me a sabbatical so I could finish this book in a timely fashion. Many thanks to Juliet Flower MacCannell and Teresa Brennan for their encouragement. Finally, I would like to thank Biodun Iginla, who supported this project from its inception and who was kind when doing so.

XXI


i . The PC Lexicon

POLITICALLY CORRECT FAIRY TALES

If you ask a group of Americans what political correctness means, chances are many of them would link the phrase to a "repressive agenda" set forth by "tenured radicals" on college campuses today. Right-wing commentators have constructed this agenda, which many Americans find alien. They do not understand why it is necessary to refer to blacks as African Americans, Orientals as Asian Americans, and women as womyn (Beard and Cerf 4, 7, 92). They believe such changes are of the same order as substituting "domestic incarceration survivor" for wife, "melanin impoverished" for white, "follicularly challenged" for bald, and "processed tree carcass" for trees (Beard and Cerf 72, 91). They believe such rhetorical changes are not only ludicrous but dangerous, because the vocabulary of political correctness implies that mainstream Americans are sexist, racist, and homophobic. Because many people assume that the goal of political correctness is to impose a "radical ethos" on mainstream America, they consider it necessary to ward off imagined attacks from the PC bogeyman created by neoconservative imagemakers. As we shall see, neoconservatives have crafted disparaging images of PC academics for public consumption that have nothing to do with the liberal and leftist origins of the term political correctness, let alone issue associated with it. The PC debate is as much about rhetorical strategies used to establish 1

2 . The PC Lexicon

ideological agendas as it is about the diverse cultural movements related to them. Such discursive strategies are central to the ideological clash between the proponents of multiculturalism and neoconservatives who have gained political leverage in the past two decades. Neoconservative leaders know that those who disseminate information influence its reception by the general public. Moreover, they know that the lexical and iconic representational grid itself can be employed to shape a new moral order. To accomplish this goal, right-wing critics have researched cultural issues, polled the public, and conducted "vox pop" interviews before distributing the Republican party line through media outlets. This procedure has enabled neoconservative spin doctors to frame public sentiments within a right-wing context. They have reconstituted a moral vox populi—a set of popular opinions based, in this case, on a rhetorically generated consensus constructed from a collective polling logic. Implementing these methods, neoconservative imagemakers have bought time to sell mass-produced fantasies that affirm a very old governance. This governance is based on an oedipal linkage of family ties to the patriarchal political process, which celebrates the familial root cause of intergenerational relations. Thus, a strategy is produced that succeeds by supporting a fictive group identification allowing for collective illusions. These illusions commemorate intergenerational values and customary codes that help to shape the world around us. The debate over the influence of representational form is crucial to understanding the emphasis placed on the distribution of knowledge in the latter half of the twentieth century. The controversy over representation has become an important element in the dispute between rightwing critics, who insist on the existence of objectifiable moral certitudes, and professors at the academy, who reveal how the grid of representation is manipulated in a market economy to produce cultural identities. Neoconservatives have made a habit of selling behavioral paradigms that prize a one-dimensional normality. They do this to reinforce makebelieve roles that function as subjective prompts for our consumptionoriented society. Those who question right-wing icons are perceived as "enemies." Since "PC academics," or poststructuralists and postmodernists, critique the production of identities manufactured for public consumption, neoconservatives have scapegoated them as "anti-individual"

The PC Lexicon

. 3

radicals who are irredeemably out of the mainstream. In this way, cultural diversity is discouraged, and racism fostered together with attitudes toward women that make everything from rape to pay inequities much more acceptable. For neoconservatives, jokes about PC soften up the resistance to discrimination in the name of individuality and value neutrality. A depoliticized value neutrality promotes a politicized value-invested partisanship, whose agenda includes ideological interpellation. Interpellatio is a term that refers to subject formation: how a subject and, in this case, a group of subjects answer the call that identifies them in a specific manner. Over the last fifteen years, right-wing imagemakers have nourished an array of collective fundamentalist identities; while doing this, they have stigmatized left-wing academics as countercultural bandits who have held up the progress of free-market capitalism. Because left-wing academics critique rhetorical structures in the age of postmodernism, they have been characterized in neoconservative narratives as the signatories of repressive and censorious codes. Right-wing critics claim for themselves special access to ahistorical truths and universally valid moral judgments, which stand apart from the mediating function of representation. But, in the last two decades, the distinguishing mark of neoconservative analysts is their adeptness at reinventing the rhetorical wheel so that what once meant x now means y. For instance, neoconservatives, who have for so long used the word liberal as a curse word, are now in the process of reinventing it. Similarly, terms such as victim, political correctness, Afrocentric, and multiculturalism have been denig in a nationwide PR campaign to alter the values that many Americans previously prized. Representation, rhetorical structure, discursive footprint—neoco atives discredit these terms while using them to codify concepts they produce, valorize, and circulate in the cultural exchange of information. Right-wing rhetoricians are adept at combining language usage and political spin; they know how words affect politics, how words help to constitute the things they describe, how words ascribe cultural value to the definitions they present, how words have the capacity to decontextualize and recontextualize the concepts they represent. Once we see how terms like multiculturalism are turned on their head, it becomes all th

4 . The PC Lexicon

more important to trace the genealogy of political correctness, wh neoconservatives have used with complete disregard for its past connotations. A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE TERM POLITICAL CORRECTNESS

To demonstrate the success of neoconservative word crafters in defining the argument over political correctness, it is necessary to sketch a sh history of how the expression has been used over the past half century. Political correctness was initially invoked by members of the Left agai others who shared similar views but adhered to a rigid acceptance of "communist dogma." Herbert Kohl explains that he first encountered the term in the late 1940s when a debate raged between socialists and members of the Communist Party in the United States: During World War II, the Hitler-Stalin Pact caused many of these CP members considerable pain and often disgrace on my block—which was all Jewish and mostly socialist. The "correct" position on Stalin's alliance with Hitler (in favor) was considered to be ridiculous, a betrayal of European Jewry as well as of socialist ideals. Thereafter, I remember the term "politically correct" being used disparagingly to refer to someone whose loyalty to the CP line overrode compassion and led to bad politics. It was used by the socialists against the communists, and was meant to separate out their own beliefs in egalitarian moral ideas from those of the dogmatic communists who would advocate and defend party positions regardless of their moral substance. (33-34)

According to this account, the phrase political correctness was not coin by right-wing rhetoricians or left-wing ironists, as has been claimed by numerous scholars in the past ten years. Instead, the phrase was employed to mock those who unthinkingly took the official party line without considering the consequences of their actions. Political correness originally had a moral connotation wheHn employed by Jews to c demn members of the Communist Party who sided with Hitler. HIt als had an "anarchist streak" when utilized against "stakhanovites, the selfsacrificers, the grim holders of a 'line'" (Tim Brennan 17). The original application of the term, then, defied the neoconservative stereotype because it was used by left-wing socialist groups who took pride in thinking for themselves. But it also gave right-wing theorists a precedHent f

The PC Lexicon

. 5

condemning those on the Left who walked in lockstep behind an authoritarian dictator, a precedent they would later generalize into a sweeping condemnation of all radical academics, including any professor who diverged from the Reagan/Bush/Quayle/Gingrich agenda. By tracing the line of morphological development, we find that the expression was next implemented as a self-ironizing device by left-wing academics who accepted their colleagues' ideas but found their delivery to be mediocre at best. Eugene Goodheart explains this change in usage in the article "PC or not PC": I recall that thefirsttime I heard the phrase (PC) was from the lips of a person of the left. She was characterizing someone as a prelude to a critical judgment. "Her attitudes may be politically correct, but..." The person who spoke the phrase was a scholar of considerable intelligence and sophistication. She meant to say that she had no objection to the attitudes of the person she was judging, but that those attitudes were not enough to qualify that person. Moreover, the tone of irony with which she spoke the phrase was intended to distance her from the vulgarity and tyranny implied by "political correctness." (551-52)

Here irony is associated with this term for the first time. As in the previous example, the context is left-on-left condemnation, but here it is used ironically to distance the critic from the person being criticized as "vulgar" and tyrannical. As Goodheart states, irony is necessary because, while both the condemner and the condemned share the same ideological perspective, this compatibility is not enough to link the two. For this "scholar of considerable intelligence and sophistication" who criticizes her colleague, a professor should demonstrate a certain level of intelligence to "qualify the person" to speak (Goodheart 551). The implication is, if we extend this principle to the process of writing, that creative ability, research skills, critical judgment, and stylistic elegance are needed to produce a book that has merit in the field. Here PC is a term of judgment invoked as a wedge to separate two people who seem similar but who, upon closer examination, share very different values toward the scholar's role in academia. In Jacob Levy's "The Ennui of PC," we find political correctness d scribed in a way that is recognizable to most academics today. Levy states that PC

6

. The PC Lexicon first gained currency, to the best of anyone's recollection, in the lesbian feminist movement in the late 1970s and early '80s. It referred to a standard set of ideas about politics, religion, and other issues, and was used jokingly, good-naturedly, by people who sought to poke fun either at views that corresponded with that set ("I know, I k n o w . . . I sound pretty PC, don't I?") or at views that didn't ("That's not very PC of you"). (34)

In this quotation the term is applied to both politics and religion, which establishes political correctness as an expression ripe for appropriation the religious right, which was intent upon introducing born-again politics into the American mainstream during the Reagan revolution. Still, at this point in its lexical genealogy, PC is invoked "jokingly" to poke fun at like-minded persons who share a common identification, in this case, lesbian feminist activists. Feminists "good-naturedly" labeled themselves and kidded others, not to demarcate themselves from those whom they were rejecting, but to demonstrate their friendship, camaraderie, professional companionship, and shared purpose with their colleagues. Above all, they used the term to comment ironically on their inability to live up to their ideals, their acknowledgment of the complexity of human beings, and the limits of any cherished beliefs. Although some academics today still remember that PC was used in this manner, it was not, as Levy claims, "to the best of anyone's recollection," the point in its lexical history when the phrase "first gained currency" (34). For our purpose, what matters is how political correctness has been r cycled by neoconservatives intent upon confuting multiculturalist critics who foreground issues of class, race, gender, and sexual orientation in their analyses. Members of right-wing political and religious factions have created the myth of PC by appropriating the term as they drone on about the parade of robotic professors who mindlessly move in lockstep, adhering to a program of monotonic indoctrination. To sustain faith in their own enterprise, moral majoritarians have created a mythic form of political correctness that does not entirely suppress the original meanings associated with the term; it only impoverishes them by stripping each of its historical significance and then filling it with the puff and fluff of their own inflammatory remarks. In this way morphological twists and turns are put at a distance so that most readers are left without a historical point of reference against which to gauge the current use

The PC Lexicon

. 7

of the phrase by right-wing scholars. The term does, however, continue to retain the notion of mindless orthodox adherence and derisive irony. But, in one breathtakingly rapid stroke, PC has been transformed into an indictment of all left-of-center critics. Thus, meaning does not die; it merely gives way to a historical amnesia that eradicates previous connotations of the term, which become a reserve that can be tapped for rightwing purposes even as it is displaced for the general public. The myth of PC needs a historical basis to feed on, but only if it is dislocated in a game of hide-and-seek between previous connotations and the current denotation that poses as its own progenitor. CONTEXTUALIZING THE ARGUMENT When examining the debate about political correctness, it is important to recognize that more is at stake than meets the eye. Right-wing neoconservatives, who despise poststructuralist, postmodernist, and multiculturalist scholars, have constituted their identity in reaction to the youth movement of the 1960s. Since many professors in the 90s were countercultural dissidents in the '60s, it is easy to see why there is antagonism between these two groups. Those who know something about the genesis of the neoconservative movement are aware that some of its key spokespersons were old-line leftists who rejected the boisterous radicals of the Vietnam era, who showed no respect for their predecessors. Because many leftist intellectuals schooled in the '40s and 50s became disgusted with their ideological descendants, they renounced their previous political position and moved sharply to the right. Stanley Aronowitz describes his impressions of the split between the "new left" and the "old left" during that period: I do not want to deny that the cultural uprising of the 1960s was a sharp break with its past; surely, in comparison to the immediate postwar period, the intense focus on rock and roll and new explorations of sexuality and drugs that literally millions of youth experienced, made these original years. New Left politics rejected all forms of the old left, democratic as well as authoritarian; the counterculture proclaimed a "new morning" in communal ways of living. They rejected consumerism in favor of a different conception of desire, a conception that nurtured a mass ecology movement in the United States. (8)

8

. The PC Lexicon

Like other scholars who have written on the subject, Aronowitz here details the generational conflict initiated during the Vietnam era. One of the key components of current left-liberal thought is its emphasis on race, ethnicity, class, age, and gender. This is also a time when members of the gay and lesbian communities are fighting to resignify their position in American society. Because of the postmodern push into futurity, lower- and middle-class white males have felt dislodged and disempowered by the rapid impetus that has exploded tradition-bound preoccupations with familiar routines. This syndrome has provided neoconservatives experiencing future shock in the '90s with an emotionally charged issue to use against feminists, gays, lesbians, and people of color. Their reactionary stand against these groups and the fragmentary nature of postmodern experience itself has initiated the white man's last stand before the turn of the century ushers in a multicultural America. In Roll Over Beethoven, Stanley Aronowitz introduces Jean-Francois Lyotard's observation about the postmodern condition. Lyotard claims that postmodernism has presented us with such a radical change in circumstances that it can be defined as a "condition" rather than an ideological reassessment. Ideology, Lyotard explains, stands for "a system of beliefs that may or may not translate into practices," but a "condition" marks "a profound paradigm shift in the fundamental assumptions of the production and dissemination of knowledge" (quoted in Aronowitz 4). Although this "condition" is supported by ideological suppositions about fragmentation, radical incompleteness, and the heterogeneity of the social field, the profundity of the shift is so great it has brought about a countercultural attack by rearguard conservatives. This ideological warfare provides the context for the postmodern crisis over representation, which is about more than the ideological conflicts related to multiculturalism, postcolonialism, feminism, gay and lesbian rights, and political correctness. It is about more than splitting America into a cultural/subcultural binary wherein political parties vie to persuade the American public of their point of view. It is about the crisis in representation in a society where developing a political consensus about American values has become nearly impossible. It is about a crisis in the discursive nature of symbolization, about language-objects being displaced by semiotic stand-ins, about objects as they become referents. This is the

The PC Lexicon

. 9

profound paradigmatic shift that Lyotard designates when invoking the term condition to refer to the "production" and "dissemination" of knowledge. Later in this book we will look more closely at the dissensus dividing America at the end of the twentieth century. As we have already noted, this dissensus is driven by rhetorical considerations. In the first half of twentieth century, the study of structural linguistics focused on synchronic lexical and iconic analysis, the formal structures of language, and the binary interaction of phonemes and sentences that make up larger syntactical units. At that time, rhetoricians gave us a means of measuring phenomena by their structure rather than their content. In the second half of the century, the poststructuralist movement has emphasized (1) desire as a mediating factor in the construction of knowledge and (2) television as something that initiates reality (and in this sense is "hyperreal") rather than merely broadcasting a mimetic picture of it. In this poststructuralist era, the dissemination of information has become part of an ideologico-technological production process, as we have entered into a period of "Kantism without a transcendental subject" (Levi-Strauss), "process without a subject" (Althusser), "structure without a center" (Derrida), and "power/knowledge" without a localized base (Foucault). The cumulative effect of these new organizing concepts has been to erode traditional disciplinary foundations further and to repattern the field of intellectual attention. (Fekete xii)

In reaction to the way that textual strategies influence the construction of subjectivity, structure, and knowledge, neoconservative critics have substituted right-wing mythology for (post)structural organizing principles discovered in the twentieth century. The right-wing mythology we will study in this book substitutes a moralistic paradigm for an ethical discourse that is more concerned with semiotic discovery—the way words refer to the objects they displace—than with the superego, which divides experience into simplistic binaries such as good/bad, right/wrong, and politically correct/incorrect. There will be more to say about this subject in subsequent chapters, as there will be more to relate about the right-wing obsession with the

10 . The PC Lexicon

McCarthyite rhetorical strategy of linking terms like liberal and multi culturalist with Marxist. This was the neoconservative scheme for t past fifteen years: to dredge up cold war sentiment directed at Soviet Marxism and transfer it onto liberal politicians, who have been discredited as part of the disinformation campaign waged against the targets of right-wing dissatisfaction. Playing out the lexical string, neoconservatives have changed the connotation of other words; besides liberal an multiculturalist, they have tried to reverse the way the public perceive feminist, victim, and political correctness. As we have already seen, po cal correctness is a fluid term that has undergone a series of redefinitio We should, therefore, be suspicious of its contemporary application, especially when it appears to be its own guarantor. Such microwave terms are cooked and served as fast-food fodder for thought. Only in an age of rhetorical production can critics utilize these terms without regard for their historical contexts and get away with it. RHETORICAL CONSIDERATIONS IN THE AGE OF PARANOIA

We live in a rhetorical age. We also live in what Teresa Brennan calls the "age of paranoia," which is replete with technological nightmares— chemical warfare, stealth bombers, nuclear weapons—whose fury was unleashed during the first and second world wars. They were accompanied by low-level battles that have scarred the twentieth century. Besides the megawars that ended in 1945 after the explosion of nuclear bombs, this century has endured guerrilla warfare, sporadic terrorism, and constant rhetorical snipping. As we learned in Orwell's 1984, low-level ski mishes help to perpetuate an ongoing conflict, which proves beneficial to the empowered interests who have a stake in the outcome of events. As in 1984, the actual fighting is interspersed with a rhetorical war tha has sustained itself, in part, by calling attention to the performative nature of language. Consider that in the twentieth century radio, television, and film have become the dominant vehicles of persuasion and representational innovation. Born of the technological communications boom that marks this century as distinctive in that regard, the televisual industry in particular has helped to shape how life is lived at this time in history. Any-

The PC Lexicon

. 11

one analyzing life before the twentieth century must take into account the rhetorical strategies of past eras, since these are crucial in evaluating one's object of analysis. But the twentieth century is an age of rhetoric squared, so pervasive is the influence of the media in our lives. This has political ramifications. At the time of this writing, Republicans own a majority in Congress because they have manipulated the media to influence the debate through televisual persuasion. By emphasizing rhetoric and representation as well as the performative nature of language, neoconservative rhetoricians could more effectively write the neoconservative-fundamentalist narrative they would sell to the public. In this way, an emphasis on rhetoric is combined with the ideological tenets embraced by the Christian Coalition and their Republican political operatives. For neoconservative word shapers have politicized religion, polemicized conflicts with their enemies, and used rhetorical strategies to further their own ends. Through such tactics, the Republican majority has intensified its jihad to limit the influence of "big" government. Their battle cry is "return power to the states," an old slogan whose latest incarnation leaves one wondering if we are once again fighting the Civil War, but this time the South is winning. The war to control the agenda and shape the culture continues at a rhetorical level even though life is peppered by actual incidents (a clinic bombing, the murder of an abortion doctor, the slaughter of an innocent bystander) that give teeth to rhetorical combat. In this conflict we see expressed a desire to return to yesteryear and thereby recover an attachment to the panegyrized days of yore, when life was supposedly less centralized and power was distributed to local and state governments. This return has political ramifications in the fight over race and gender considerations in the '90s. The civil rights gains of the '60s can be rolled back, creationism can become part of the general curriculum, and public funding of public education can give way to public funding of private education—a code word for religious schooling. This is one subtext of the PC project put in place by right-wing neoconservatives, who have cordoned off public instruction as a facet of "big government" that must be relegated to the ash heap of history. The rollback depends on controlling the rhetorical flow of information, which in turn depends on a dominant fiction sold to the public through advertising campaigns

12 . The PC Lexicon

and fictional narratives on TV and radio. If the public is willing to entertain right-wing fantasies manufactured for their consumption, they would be willing to accept the roles assigned to them (on the level of the story) and the positions they occupy (on the level of structure). In the nostalgic Republican narrative, which sanctions the return of power to state and local districts, neoconservatives purport that people are perceived as people, not as taxpayers. It is interesting to see who is objectified and who is subjectified by the fundamental fantasies enacted by a particular society at a given point in history. In the 1990s, the "politically correct" occupy the object's position. The subject's role is denied them; they are depicted as objects that are somehow secondary to others. The entire subject/object gamut can be visualized as an "energetic" field of transfer, wherein "one is empowered, subjectified, by the energy of the other" (Teresa Brennan 185). As in a Highlander flick, those who exploit their objectified foes take in their power through an introjective process of internalization. This process ensures that those who exploit their enemies siphon off their power to subjectify themselves as they objectify others. In America, gays, lesbians, people of color, and women have been repeatedly objectified within the dominant American narratives that have held sway in this century: "Those who occupy the object position in interpersonal and economic terms are . . . most likely to be women and people of color" (Brennan 185). It is not for nothing that they make up the same group that is vilified as intolerant "politically correct" antagonists in these right-wing narratives. Neoconservatives hope that targeted opponents can be sutured into the structure as they are objectified in a paranoid age in which "paranoia is but a stage in an overall objectifying process" (Brennan 188). Revealing the foundational fantasy as a rhetorical construct and resisting objectification are two points of recognition that could enable one to avoid the objectposition reserved for "the unwhite, the female and the economically class-exploited" in America (Brennan 186). The game is to avoid being objectified in this manner while recognizing that the promise of a full and plenitudinous subjectivity is itself an idealized position in a reductive subject/object binary. This binary underpins the PC ideologies projected by the Right and so far successfully sold to the public.

2 . Sound Bite Myth: Scholars Hate Students

THE CHECKLIST OF GRIEVANCES Although right-wing critics have launched a series of rhetorical attacks in the last decade against progressive democratic forces in the academy, for the most part these attacks have gone unanswered. The big lie has been repeated so often there is a danger that the public will accept the charge of political correctness as an unassailable truth. Meanwhile, many professors have been so intent on fighting other political battles (trying to institutionalize studies in gender, race, ethnicity, and class) that they have lost sight of the larger war raging outside the narrow confines of the campus environment. In the past twenty years, academic scholars have been so absorbed in learning difficult postmodern and poststructuralist concepts and engaging in intercollegiate theoretical battles related to them that they have ignored critics outside the university who have been regularly lambasting them. Because neoconservative social critics allied with right-wing Christians often speak in sound bite prose targeted for public consumption, academic commentators consider their arguments lacking in theoretical sophistication. But this is precisely their power. Even Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party have learned the lessons of the 1992 presidential campaign: a charge repeated again and again without answer is a charge that sticks no matter what its merits. Professors in the academy must realize that right-wing ideologues are less concerned with the intellectual merits of their arguments than with having them heard on television and reproduced by USA 13


Today in comic-book form where the largest audience can be influenced The targets of PC-bashing must respond to their accusations and respond in a way that will reach a general audience. They must do this an bring the weight of contemporary critical theory to bear in order to influence the debate. In the cultural war against leftist "enemies," PC-bashers have mobilized their verbal attacks on multiple rhetorical fronts. In prose that purports to be objective, they have criticized teaching in the academy as pathetically inept, contemporary research methods as pretentious and unimportant, and the tenure system itself as antiquated. Tenure is a "right," they argue, that insulates professors from the moral monitoring needed to combat recent trends in academic thinking. In Impostors i the Temple, Martin Anderson presents a list of solutions he wants insti tutionalized to counter gains by "the PC left": "stop rewarding spurious research and writing," disallow faculty tenure, "prohibit student teaching," create a total reorganization of faculty responsibilities, ban "political discrimination" against neoconservatives, and root out institutional corruption (206-9). Speaking in oratorical lockstep, Charles Sykes rephrases the same "solutions" presented by Anderson. Sykes is a cultural guardian of the Right who wants to puncture "the research myth" in order to "cut off the life support systems to the centers of profthink" (258). This formulaic observation echoes the oft-voiced contention that tenure be replaced with "fixed-term renewable contracts"; that "all professors [in state universities] teach at least three courses a semester"; that in the traditional curriculum for undergraduates the canon be placed at the center of all studies of Western civilization; and that members of Congress, heads of foundations, research grantors, and parent groups become involved in community affairs to alter the distribution of "the billions of dollars in federal spending" dispersed to universities throughout the country (Sykes 257-62). The aim of these measures is obvious— "to send tremors throughout the academic culture," and, like the biblical Samson, to bring it down in rubble about its inhabitants (Sykes 262). From this checklist of grievances the anti-PC campaigners generate the terms of their complaint. Infierce,combative tones they target "the politicos" of academic theory while they villainize those who place gender, race, ethnicity, and class at the forefront of multicultural studies

Sound Bite Myth: Scholars Hate Students

. 15

today. Invoking the prime directive of McCarthyism, they reduce the vast differences in academic viewpoints to a monolithic point of view; it in turn is linked with the flash term Marxist—which is coupled with "the homosexual lobby," radical black militant organizations, and the drug-taking children of the '60s who are now the "purveyors of profthink" in the '90s. Through this linkage, neoconservative writers manufacture the un-American scapegoat that must be purged from decent society. In the name of decency and morality, they vilify their ideological opponents and delegitimate their opponents' enterprise. They thus hope to sustain their own faith by opposing an enemy who threatens the fabric of social relations as they know them. TEACHERS WHO DON'T TEACH As I noted in chapter 1, in recent years the Christian right wing of the Republican Party has become a predominant force in national politics. During Ronald Reagan's two terms in office, an alliance was established between the Republican Party and the fierce defenders of intellectual fundamentalism, who found that, with Reagan in the White House, they could manipulate the message broadcast by the media. The religious right realized that with the aid of friends in high places—in the government and the televisual and print media—they could disseminate their views in a discourse produced for public consumption. This is how they became prime movers who authorized their positions on political issues. Sustaining the criticism of PC professors has been one of the rightwing success stories over the past ten years, although many liberals who join in the fault rinding do not realize how useful they have become to neoconservative fundamentalists. Success is measurable here by the cultural assimilation of the term PC and its use by the media today. The Republican right did not merely label adversaries "politically correct" to pin the tail on the Democratic donkey. Instead they were looking for a means of access and a mode of address that was reusable in the production of issues related to political correctness. Aware that the discourse of political correctness was imbued with a quotient of power that would increase as the term PC was internalized by the public, right-wing writers reached out to the electronic hearth of the silent majority to influ-


ence their vote. In this way, an authoritative discourse was sanctioned as a vehicle of communication capable of shaping opinions and making further statements about related issues. Terms like PC could be created, authorized, and ruled over in discursive systems that would enable the distribution of socioeconomic and political power. Neoconservative word shapers realized that the success achieved in adopting terms like PC could be duplicated if they could infiltrate school systems, alter curricula, and teach their fundamentalist values to students in public and private schools. This form of fundamentalism has been used politically to challenge "the freewheeling relativism" of the new curricula, which provides a basis for instruction from grade school to college. But in politicizing their discourse, fundamentalists have employed rhetorical tactics when intervening in interpretive disputes. By polemicizing their argument, conservative critics have placed themselves in a position to concede that their claims have no other ground than the ideological and sociopolitical context of the statement itself, that interpretation is politically interested, that textual interpretation and rhetorical politics can never be separated (Mailloux 127-33). With the merger of right-wing politics and Christian fundamentalism during the Reagan era, the Bible-culturalists took a step that must be constantly denied. Denial replaces concession when they refuse to acknowledge that theirs is not an objective, morally pure discourse because it has been politicized for short-term gains. As I have noted, these self-appointed cultural guardians have projected themselves into curricular debates around the country. Acting as moral monitors, neoconservatives have influenced the agenda of local school board officials by helping them to determine what is acceptable and what is unacceptable reading material for students. Lately, they have added another dimension to their enforcement of moral etiquette, for now they want nothing less than to change the entire system of public education in the United States. Disavowing their own public dictum to keep government off the backs of people, right-wing legislators have called for the redistribution of tax dollars so that revenues will pay for students to go to private as well as public schools. We should be cautious here, because when right-wing legislators say "private schools," they really mean "religious schools [which] dominate


. 17

the private sector in education: 81 percent of private elementary and secondary schools [in the United States] are religious schools, and 84 percent of private school students attend religious schools" (Private School Choice). This plan to restructure the U.S. educational system could prove costly, because our tax dollars would be redistributed to pay for "vouchers for children already attending private school"; thus, those parent who have enrolled their students in private institutions would stand to benefit from such a transfer of income from the public sphere (Private School Choice). The aim of neoconservative strategists here is simple: to expand the organizational base of our educational system to include a curriculum that emphasizes the cultural visibility of their movement, perpetuates its values, and helps them sustain faith in their own enterprise. Of course, it would not hurt if they could persuade us to pay for their children's education while they retain their tax-exempt status. To accomplish these long-term goals, they have launched a twopronged attack against higher education in America. As we have seen, one assault has been leveled against primary and secondary schools. This is especially important, because, while professors become empowered by attaining tenure, teachers in pre-adult educational programs must often rely on administrators to voice their concerns. The other assault has been waged against academics in the "factories of junkthink" in a battle royal that has taken on epic proportions in a moral drama of Good versus Evil (Sykes 7). In ProfScam, Charles Sykes contends tha because "renegade professors" act selfishly to further their own interests, it is his duty to fire "a shot... across the bow of the obscurantists, sorcerers, and witch doctors of profthink" (264). Sykes believes these tactics are desirable because "the villains [of this book] have been the professors" (264). Martin Anderson, a member of the Hoover Institute, echoes Sykes when claiming that the purveyors of "profthink" demonstrate a monstrous symptom—"hubris"—which signifies an utter disregard for their students. According to Anderson and Sykes, professors have become unapproachable because they place their own needs before those of their students. The result is a "crucifixion of teaching" sanctioned by "the tyranny of the academic culture" today (Sykes 8). Such "hubris" comes from an "unchecked intellectual arrogance" that, Anderson asserts, leaves "academic intellectuals wrongly [to] conclude


that because they may be more intelligent and more learned, they are better. They believe that because they can think faster and reason more deftly that this somehow means they are wiser and morally superior, that they are natural leaders who should be followed by their intellectual inferiors" (124-25). Notice the insertion of the word moralhere and the linkage of intellectual perspicuity with moral superiority. The theme is developed further by Anderson a few pages later: intellectuals believe they are "bounded only by what they themselves believe is right and important, unfettered by the moral constraints that bind ordinary mortals" (129). Right-wing rhetoricians never concede that different groups within a particular culture have different moral beliefs that are equally valid. Their viewpoint never allows for such divergence. Instead, they propagate a heavy-handed absolutism based on one unassailable belief system pitted aggressively against alternate systems that are found to be threatening. In The Scapegoat, Rene Girard demonstrates that when system of cultural beliefs is perceived to be under attack, "there is a strong tendency to explain it by social and, especially, moral causes" (14). Thus, whether it be a perceived threat from without (the red menace of communism) or an internal threat to be eradicated ('60s hippies who have become professors), an obsessive discourse of repression is resurrected to determine where injustice begins and where it ends. Considering that neoconservative critics want the public at large to mirror right-wing moral beliefs, the question becomes: how can they wage a cultural jihad to achieve the goal of instituting intellectual fundamentalism? From past patterns of behavior it becomes evident that such goals have been achieved by casting aspersions in sound bite prose calculated to sway public opinion. To huff and puff and blow down the walls of academia, they have constructed an ideological narrative depicting academic relations as sordid and decadent. The narrative hardly paints a pretty picture: contemporary academics hate teaching, do meaningless research, and are overpaid, underworked scam artists who pursue their own interests. Neoconservative critics believe if these claims are repeated, the perception will be narratively substantiated. Here are some allegations made about teaching methods in the academy today— allegations so false that those who made them must surely be aware of the questionableness of their claims:

Sound Bite Myth: Scholars Hate Students . 19 The rape of classroom teaching in the universities takes several forms. First, of course, is the refusal to teach at all. (Sykes 62) No responsibility for the quality of teaching? Professional ethics completely neglected? Professors who are bullying and lying punks? (Anderson 47) Modern professors would rather have root-canal work than spend time with any undergraduates. (Sykes 4) These cases are dramatic, irrefutable evidence that the academic culture is not merely indifferent to teaching, it is actively hostile to it. In the modern university, no act of good teaching goes unpunished. (Sykes 54) Tenured Radicals is about the privileged beneficiaries of the spiritual and material achievements of our history who, out of perversity, ignorance, or malice have chosen to turn their backs on the culture that nourished them and made them what they are. It is about intellectuals who have defiled reason with sophistries, and teachers who have defrauded their students of knowledge. (Kimball 207) I see an increasing number who thoroughly enjoy the prestige of being professors but who dislike what professors are supposed to do. Most of them don't like to teach, few of them do important research and writing, and at least one or two aren't very intelligent. (Anderson 37)

The overheated rhetoric, shrill attacks, and obsessional intellectual curlicues performed here offer a compendium of untruths concocted for obvious polemical reasons. They claim that the purveyors of "profthink" not only demonstrate "malice" and "perversity" in their relations with students but are "actively hostile" to teaching, preferring dental surgery to time spent in the classroom. If this ideological finger-pointing were not enough, rearguard conservatives have triggered the ethical trip wire when stooping to label contemporary professors as "bullying and lying punks" who engage in "the rape of the classroom" (Sykes 62). Such spit and fire characterizes a rhetorical form of character assassination that discredits professors as "profscam" artists. What does it matter that these descriptions bear little resemblance to conditions on most college campuses? All right-wing character assassins must do is repeat these unsubstantiated charges and hope such improbable details will stick in the collective memory to their long-term advantage. In their attempt to ensure moral purity, neoconservative writers have

20

. Sound Bite Myth: Scholars Hate Students

chosen a select group of scapegoats who espouse viewpoints different from their own. Forget the credibility of selected facts. Forget the accumulation of believable data. Forget the interpretive shenanigans. In their place is the tabulated disproportion of right-wing claims versus what can be observed on college campuses today. In the neoconservative attempt to arm posterity against their foes, this group invents fictions about the moral monstrosity of the "accused" in order to trigger a collective persecution of these discredited "enemies." Pretending they are involved in the disinterested pursuit of truth, the media-sawy defenders of right-wing values deny their own actions while creating a new atmosphere of selective tolerance in the interested pursuit of half-truths. Neoconservative critics have adopted these measures to discredit forms of thought considered threatening to Reaganism, the ruling ideology of the '80s in the United States. Those who created policy in the Reagan and Bush administrations inserted themselves as intermediaries between the subject and the body politic, not only to mediate political disturbances, but to shore up "the foundation of the cultural order, the family and the hierarchical differences without which there would be no social order" (Girard 15). In The Scapegoat, Rene Girard states that when men and women feel powerless in the face of "the eclipse of culture," they invariably turn against "a small number of people, or even a single individual, despite his relative weakness" because these people are deemed "harmful to the whole of society" (15). Scapegoats are chosen because there is a "loss of distinctions resulting from the crisis" at hand, so invariably "they are accused of crimes that eliminate [these] distinctions" (Girard 21). In the psychological profile of the scapegoat, these distinctions must never be acknowledged as having emanated from within the system itself as the mere play of subcultural differences. There must be historical amnesia on this point. Instead, "a victim's selection results not from the difference within the system but from the difference outside the system, the potential for the system to differ from its own difference, in other words not to be different at all, to cease to exist as a system" (Girard 21). Here internal difference is exteriorized—projected outside the system so it is seen as having emanated from that site. In this process of repositioning the scapegoat-as-victim, the Bible-culturalists who want to reverse the generational shift within the academy create cultural villains who, in


. 21

this make-believe scenario, must be expelled from the civil society of which they form a part. This is accomplished by projecting "undesirables" to the outreaches of society while branding them "subversives" who seek to undermine shared cultural and moral values. So "the purple-haired semioticians" and "fierce neo-Marxists" and "vicious feminists" are cast in this drama as multicultural radicals who threaten the system (Sykes 198). Because they believe that cultural norms have been called into question and social unity has splintered into group fragmentation, PC-bashers obsessively decry "recent developments in the humanities which will 'subvert the moral order'" (Kimball 37). To Roger Kimball, the "multicultural experience cloaks the abandonment of traditional humanistic culture," which must be objectified as universal (63): if we speak of universal human interest, it is "to acknowledge faith in a community of human endeavor that transcends the contingencies of race, gender, ethnic heritage, and the like. As multiculturalists realize, some such faith is central to the tradition of liberal education" (Kimball 205). If we examine this accumulated list of complaints, it becomes evident that the scapegoat is identified with a group of professors who apparently pose a threat to civilization as we know it. According to Kimball et al., the scapegoat-victim, then, is that pedagogical monster who has abandoned the canon, shirked traditional values, and subverted the moral order. But if the facts are examined, the multiculturalist monster is nothing more than a linguistic construct produced by choral condemnation. For no such monstrosity actually exists in nature. Linguistic monsters are outlaws assembled from an assortment of elements pieced together by right-wing ideological fantasy. The multicultural outcast is an unstable hallucination constructed from ideological intent. Through the process of retroactive reconstruction the scapegoat coheres into a stable form. It coheres from blurred perceptions that prove troubling to right-wing ideologues. These vague perceptions that trouble the senses are transferred into a perceptible villainy whose visibility becomes the magnet for collective angst expressed in relation to it. This retrospective reconstruction allows society to buttress itself in its attempt to regain systemic stability. In this reconstruction the articulation is all, for the narrative organizes a recognizable historical continuity through which, among


other things, the exiled victim is positioned within diachronic narrative relations. One can see this process in play in many passages. I have chosen a particularly illustrative example from Martin Anderson's Impostors in the Temple: The avalanche of books and articles that have poured over us in recent years has demonstrated convincingly that not only is all not well on America's university campuses, but that some things are really rotten. Few defend the transgressions, and none deny they exist. We know about the smothering impact of "politically correct" thought. Wfcknow of the assault on the history and values of Western civilization. Wfeknow of the financial corruption. We know of policies that judge, not by intellect and achievement, but by skin color—all in the name of anti-racism. We know of the demise of teaching, how little it is valued by faculty and administrators. We know of the blatant abuses concerning student athletes. We know of the political bias—to the left—of most members of the academy. Yes, we know all this. We deplore it. We fear for some kind of education our children will receive when they leave home and enter the hallowed halls of higher education. (26; my italics)

Who is this we that appears and reappears here? It certainly is not, as the author implies, the all-inclusive referent repeated ad nauseam in the quoted paragraphs. Rather, it refers to those propagandists who have written this "avalanche of books" on political correctness in the past ten years and to the right-wing fringe that feasts upon such propaganda. It also refers to the we of mythic proportions that stands outside a cultural critique of historical relations. Whatever the relationship between sign and referent, Martin Anderson coerces his readers to identify with this impartial we, and from those lofty heights make pronouncements like these: professors today no longer judge students by a standard of academic excellence; they critique racism yet are really racists themselves; they play the gender card to their own political advantage; they are smug and arrogant and corrupt, sometimes all three on the same day. The we of neoconservatism exists in the imaginary as a fundamental fantasy dreamed up by cultural conservatives and religious fundamentalists, who have plotted a dogmatic path to control the American agenda in the '90s. If one listens to Charles Sykes, Martin Anderson, or Newt Gingrich speak, it appears as if they were cloned from the same comic-


. 23

book character on television, whose flat one-dimensional body becomes a prop for a two-dimensional mouth that is the only animated aspect on its one-dimensional face. Keeping this model in mind, one could imagine the dissemination of right-wing fantasy in thirty-second sound bites by the likes of a Sykes, Anderson, or Gingrich, whose two-dimensional lips would be superimposed over a comic-book persona mouthing lines choreographed for him in advance by those neoconservative scriptwriters in charge of dispersing information to the public. Haven't you ever noticed how, before neoconservatives took over Congress in the 1994 elections, this faction of the Republican Party always seemed to be on the same page? There was a reason for their rigidity: neoconservatives wished to disperse a unified fundamental(ist) fantasy of communal identity to the masses for the purpose of wholesale consumption. Once the Republicans gained control of the House and Senate in the 1994 elections and became the majority party on Capitol Hill, they began to disagree publicly on some policy issues, but even today they try to present a unified front by distributing information that reinforces a phantasmic structure produced for a mass audience. Their we always implies they, who become the antagonists of a narrative scenario that links the narrator-protagonist with a group of "second person" subjects forming the communal category of "you, me, and us"; this assemblage invariably stands against a "them" of scapegoated outsiders (Lyotard 25). This becomes especially important when the main purpose of the narrative scenario is to support a "cultural war" against a perceived threat to American society. In this rhetorical two-step, contemporary academics are vilified as the reader is encouraged to identify both with the "reliable" omniscient narrator who pretends to be incapable of prejudice in the presentation of his or her position and with the narrative structure which must be posited as "a full system of representation" (Girard 40). In a full system of representation internal differences are denied, then projected onto a scapegoat in an external field of contestation. In this way a unifiedfieldis assembled that induces readers to identify with it. Caught in this logic of representation, the far right wing of the Republican Party has utilized terms like political correctness to purge "t community of impure elements that corrupt it, the traitors who undermine it" (Girard 16). Anderson's condemnatory we of collective identifi


cation helps to link the subject with the discursive structure of the neoconservative argument in its narrative performance. We becomes a narrative prop, the support of insupportable generalizations. We indicates that the ultraconservative Right has the capability of being objective, standing outside what they judge, and if readers identify with their born-again politics, they too can entertain the illusion that their perspectives are guaranteed by the system. SPIES IN THE CLASSROOM

In Illiberal Education, conservative critic Dinesh D'Souza poses asa mild-mannered reporter when narrating his travels through the corridors of academia. D'Souza uses the flat journalistic style of realism, which presumes direct access to objective reality. His narrative documentary places its characters in a reality that is subject to commonsense observation and that can be grasped by consciousness in order to be processed as knowledge. D'Souza's realist style is loaded with sound bites to verify the accuracy of his depiction and the soundness of his judgment. Through the adoption of this depersonalized style, D'Souza's narrative persona melds with his profile of the average American, and this allows him to conceal the conservative tilt of his ideological viewpoint. Although D'Souza targets the swing vote that invariably influences election returns, he works in the employ of the radical religious right. His credentials include having served as a "domestic policy analyst in the Reagan White House" and having solicited "the Catholic vote for the Bush/Qualye campaign" (Jardine 27-28). Considering D'Souza's credentials, it becomes absurd that his book is entitled Illiberal Education. In this treatise, he claims that academicia who have set the curricular agenda in the past twenty years have lost their liberal bearings. But when D'Souza uses the word liberal, he mean that which relates to the cultivation of general knowledge in the humanities rather than that which favors civil liberties, democratic reforms, and the use of public resources to promote social progress. Even so, why would D'Souza and like-minded writers call for a return to any program that describes itself as liberal? I suppose when black is called white and two and two equal five, then neoconservatives can adopt the word lib-


. 25

era/. Yet isn't D'Souza aware that radical right theorists, with as little sub tlety as possible, had stigmatized the word liberal in the '80s as they hav stigmatized political correctness in the 90s? If we separate D'Souza's sire from that of his narrator in Illiberal Education, it becomes appare that he is an operative of the Reagan/Bush/Gingrich coalition, which advocates a conservative fundamentalism that is not liberal in any sense of the word. In unctuous sermons, political ministers like Falwell, Robertson, LaHaye, and Robison have joined hands with cultural neoconservatives like D'Souza to write an educational platform that will supposedly save American students from the "moral decay" of modernity in its current postmodern guise. Let us take a closer look at how D'Souza operates. In 1989 he attended a class in feminist theory offered by Alice Jardine at Harvard. On that day he pretended to be a university student who innocently sat in on a lecture, while in actuality he was a spy in her classroom, hiding his intentions from Jardine in the same way that he hid his intentions when he wrote Illiberal Education. When Agent D'Souza entered Professor Ja dine's classroom, it was with the intention of finding material for his book. He posed—in an act of bad faith—as a student, then narrated his account in that beguilingly Mr. Bland and transparent tone of his. He writes as if things are what they seem, while what he seems is not what he is. In Illiberal Education, D'Souza begins his account by explaining th Jardine's class "was almost entirely female: twenty-five females versus three males" (208). Then, almost as an afterthought, he casually blurts out that "there were no blacks in the class," immediately followed by the disclaimer, "a couple of the women were Asian" (D'Souza 208). Notice how D'Souza establishes a dichotomy (twenty-five females "versus" three males) before implying there was race bias in Jardine's classroom. In this way he tries to demonstrate that this class provides a threat to the American way of life. To influence public opinion, he carefully assembles details to implicate professor and students alike in his condemnation. These students are "radical feminists"—"a student went to the board and put up a poster of a 'Fifty-Foot Woman'; everybody smiled at this emblem of female power" (208). And Jardine is a Marxist: "First, she advertised a lecture by a Marxist feminist on 'Killing the Patriarch'" that


"should be quite fun to go to" (208). Then, predictably, there appears the following homophobic swipe at lesbian sexuality: "Jardine's student thought she spotted something interesting between the tribal woman and a female friend. She didn't say it was lesbianism, but she did say it was 'important'. Her only regret was that heterosexual union comes at the price of female relationships in Maru" (D'Souza 209). The aim is to discredit Jardine and dehumanize her students before that segment of the population which is threatened by communism, disturbed by the women's rights movement, and confused by their own reactions to lesbian sexuality. Also notice how D'Souza plays the "class" card when characterizing Harvard students as upper-class elitists alienated from his mainstream audience. They are renegades without a reason whose methodology is "vulgar ... freewheeling ... dogmatic ... futile," like, he implies, their teacher and the university he visits. Alice Jardine wrote a response to Dinesh D'Souza's allegations, in which she explained that he reminds her of "the covert agent, of the intellectual spy, of infiltration . . . of flying false colors and of adopting a rhetorical style to match" (27). To defend herself against such covert classroom tactics, Jardine has been forced to set an uncomfortable precedent: whenever strangers visit her class, she asks all right-wing reporters to stand up and identify themselves. Jardine has adopted this approach because PC-bashers, who believe they have special access to empirical truth, have shown up in her classroom unannounced to accumulate the specifics of their research. They employ these tactics because they believe the communist threat has come home: as in the '50s "the Big Threat is located Over There—then in Korea, now in Iraq—and then brought Back Home. As in the fifties, 'Back Home' is the terrain of intellectuals and artists, and of their institutional affiliations ... the National Endowment for the Arts, public media . . . [and the] power-hungry liberals, women's groups, civil rights groups and homosexuals" (Jardine 28). D'Souza pleads his case, like Joseph McCarthy before him, by pretending to be a lecturer in the court of televisual justice and a defender of the American way of life. Through the institutionalization of this pose, right-wing writers claim the center, as the center moves far right, and even moderate Democrats run to the high grass to avoid appearing


. 27

too liberal—in league with "radical leftists" who want to undermine shared cultural values. Jardine answers D'Souza's slanders by examining the rhetorical basis of his political position. Like Anderson in Impostors in the Templ D'Souza appeals to a predominantly white middle-class audience that believes in the realist fairy tale of disinterested objectivity. To accomplish this goal, bits and pieces of narrative data (pertinent details of the plot) are stitched together. These details pin down the particulars of empirical experience, which purport to reveal the object through the construction of a narrative that guarantees the position of the subject as the overseer and judge of a discourse of knowledge. This is accomplished by transforming the narrative of political correctness into a metalanguage capable of sanctioning other discourses as spin-offs of this main subject. Foucault describes a metalanguage as "the discourse through which the elements and the rules of construction of a language are defined" (75). A metalanguage is structural, a discourse of elements that interact dialectically; it is also legal, that is, concerned with the rules of construction. A metalanguage is neither one nor the other but both in their relationship to each other. For the weight and bearing of the "neutral" structural dimension is bound up with a political analysis of the metalanguage's privileged relation to discourse. Applied specifically to literary theory, a metalanguage is a superrepresentation of a dominant perspective sanctioned by the narrative in the unfolding of its structure. In this context a metalanguage places "other languages between inverted commas and regarding them as certain material expressions which express certain meanings, regards those same meanings as finding transparent expression within the metalanguage itself" (MacCabe 35). Understood in this way, a metalanguage is so visible it disappears from view, so obvious it escapes scrutiny. A metalanguage is everywhere, yet stands behind what is most evident. It has the status of a preexisting existent that "achieve [s] perfect representation—to let the identity of things shine through the windows of words" (MacCabe 35). Such perfect representation is what D'Souza seeks to assert as his privilege: that discourse is capable of achieving transparency of form, identity between subject and object, correlation between narrative agent and neutral observer, and,finally,a guarantee that the function of knowledge is assured


by the metalanguage, which subordinates all other discourses to the hegemony of its dominant perspective. But D'Souza is a secret—not a neutral—agent. His use of empirical details provides him with a persona, and it deflects attention away from his advocacy of neoconservative causes. D'Souza and his crowd have been "polishing their 'reasonable,' 'apolitical,' 'middle ground' image," presenting themselves as realist writers who each hope that "by providing 'the details' (name, date, place, title, brand, quoted dialogue), he or she becomes authorized to generalize, even universalize about—lots of things, but especially about 'the human condition'" (Jardine 28-29). As we have seen, the attempt to universalize experience gets enacted at various levels: at the level of the sign, with the enumeration of details; at the level of form, with the construction of the seamless web of metalanguage; and at the level of communication, with the induced transference of audience onto the narrator-as-neutral-agent. In this way a mythic ideology is fabricated and passed off as truth. The whole truth and nothing but the truth. D'Souza's truth. A truth located where he situates his readers, within the ideological parameters of his neoconservative position. DECIPHERING THE PARCHMENTS I will conclude this chapter by looking at a paradigmatic example of empirical closure. At the end of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude there is a sequence where Aureliano Babilonia reads a historical document that provides a broad overview of family relations during the past hundred years. It includes the following passage, which takes place when Babilonia deciphers the parchments as it has been prophesied he will. At this moment there is perfect alignment between writer, reader, and text, which manifests the instant he reads the manuscript: Aureliano skipped eleven pages so as not to lose time with facts he knew only too well, and he began to decipher the instant that he was living, deciphering it as he lived it, prophesying himself in the act of deciphering the last page of the parchments, as if he were looking into a speaking mirror. Then he skipped again to anticipate the predictions and ascertain the date and circumstances of his death. Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for

Sound Bite Myth: Scholars Hate Students . 29 it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth. (Garcia Marquez 422)

While deciphering the holy parchments, Aureliano Babilonia arrived at the empirical juncture where experience is absorbed into the logocentric order. While reading about his family tree, Babilonia came to a reflexive juncture or mirroring point in the narrative where he read about himself reading the parchments at the moment he did so. It is then, when Babilonia's knowledge of experience caught up with the history of literary events, that the narrative leaped beyond history to myth. Garcia Marquez writes, "when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments . . . everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more" (442). When the history of events meets its narrative unfolding, Babilonia recognizes himself in the mirror of historical relations, and, as a consequence, he must die because it has been prophesied that Babilonia will attain future-perfect divination just before this civilization is erased from the collective memory of history. Ironically, the final object cast off in One Hundred Years of Solitude Aureliano Babilonia himself, who becomes the victim of his own curiosity. In the novel the power of logocentric presumption is given even as it is taken away. For Aureliano Babilonia becomes aware of his destiny only when the hundred-year cycle of solitude is broken. The solitude stems in part from the lack of communication that is symptomatic of the social body severed into segments of population left to their own devices. But there is an instance of magical realism at the end of the book when Babilonia reads the parchments and the invisible metalanguage becomes visible. This is a moment of pure presence where the founding source is discovered in a metanarrative of legitimation. In the context of this metalingual transformation, as Aureliano Babilonia witnesses his "act of deciphering the last page of the parchments," there is a manifestation of complete closure that has frequently been associated with absolute knowledge (Garcia Marquez 422). But,fittingly,Babilonia reads the text of solitude as "a speaking mirror" that isolates him even as it reveals an

30

. Sound Bite Myth: Scholars Hate Students

image of events to come. For in this epiphanic moment it is predicted that the "city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men" (422). Truth for the neoconservative is based on a similar fantasy that relies on a supposedly absolute knowledge that cannot possibly be available to us but that "we" are nonetheless invited to share. We have already seen that, in Impostors in the Temple, Martin Anderson assumes there is a objectified we—a like-minded readership that, in breathtakingly rapid fusion, shares his rearguard opinions in their entirety. In Illiberal Educa tion, D'Souza formalizes this appeal to objectivity in the bond forged between the narrator and his audience. In ProfScam, Charles Sykes sells his nonideological agenda to readers through an advertising campaign of disinformation. When Sykes calls for a "non-partisan, non-ideological, non-sectarian Consumers Union" to police the academic culture, he is not expressing a disinterested concern: What is desperately needed is a national association or union for parents and students that will serve as a counterweight to the institutional power of the professors. Ideally, it would be an academic version of groups like the Consumers Union. It would be non-partisan, non-ideological, nonsectarian, and would have as its specific mission the role of watchdog and advocate for quality in American higher education. Such a national organization would recognize that although reform will be local, the issues are essentially the same everywhere; whether thefightis being waged in Vermont or Berkeley, the enemy is the same academic culture. (273)

The difference between D'Souza and Sykes is that the latter calls for a legal commission to investigate activities in the academy, while D'Souza does it himself. This considered, even a cockeyed optimist would have to admit that Sykes's proposal presents a classic case of dissociated doubletalk. For while he speaks of the need to establish a nonpartisan, "objective" commission to institute academic reform, in the next breath, he calls for citizens to arm themselves to depose a common enemy—members of the academic culture. Once we witness neocon artists like Sykes at work, it becomes patently obvious that the "academic culture" itself has become a designated scapegoat singled out for ridicule by neoconservatives. As in Hitler's time, the academy has become a site of contestation, and those in it are targets of a monumental propaganda campaign.

3 . The Myth of Disinterested Scholarship

APPROPRIATING THE CENTER

We have seen how right-wing commentators redescribe familiar terms and switch meanings as a means of reclaiming the center ground occupied by middle-class values. Because far right extremists only attract about 25 percent of the vote in the United States, they have pretended to moderate their beliefs by repositioning themselves front and center. To understand how they have accomplished such subterfuge, let us call up the image of a football field and pretend it is an area of ideological combat. I invoke the image of the athletic contest to mimic the new iconographic symbols being disseminated by Pat Robertson and other televangelists. For years they have used the icons of war to attack their enemies, but the images of armaments and body bags backfired so they have altered their tactics. So let us mime their latest strategy by picturing an end zone on both sides of a 100-yard field, which is marked with a white stripe every ten yards. In aerial overview from left to right, visualize the left end zone giving way to equidistant markers that indicate in succession the 10-, 20-, 30-, 40-, and 50-yard lines; continue to scan the field to the right of the midstripe and you will see the 40-, 30-, 20-, and 10-yard lines before the right end zone. Now if one drew a circle around the center of the field, it would encompass an area from one 40-yard line to the next. In the rough-and-tumble game of Left-Right U.S. politics, the ideological goal is not what it appears to be—to drive the opponent into its 31


end zone, as it is in football. Frequently, right-wing ideologues are less interested in annihilating their enemies than in diminishing their capabilities even as they ensure their own continued existence. As in 1984 combatants that trigger collective persecutions need an enemy to prop up their own position, which is dependent on the existence of a scapegoat to ridicule as a significant force to be reckoned with. In the United States, the real game is to keep the war going, and, in the process, to win the hearts and minds of mainstream America. To do this, right-wing critics must perpetuate the gridlock of national politics as they appropriate the center for themselves and redefine its parameters in the process. How is this done? Simply by reconstituting what indicates the acknowledged center ground on the field of conflict. Instead of the original circle of influence, which encompasses an area from one 40-yard line to the other, the center must be reconfigured to encircle an area of influence from the 50- to the 30-yard line on the right side of the field. In this parodic depiction of the neoconservative iconography, the superimposed circle constitutes a new circumference of cultural intervention. The newly formed circle presents a sphere of positional coherence whose radius carries significant ideological breadth and weight. For the superimposed circle is a three-dimensional trajectory that expands above and below thefield.This graphic illustration enables us to determine how neoconservative writers sway more and more of the American public, which is willing to identify with its repositioned framework of influence: with the ideas, values, and emotional responses connected to the ultraconservative ideological construction that poses as a centrist political position. Now visualize a domed stadium containing the football field we have been observing. Within these environs the immediate aim of right-wing critics engaged in ideological warfare is to extend their circle of influence to the top of the dome so that the anticipated numbers of newly con-

The Myth of Disinterested Scholarship

. 33

verted Americans can be accommodated within this three-dimensional province of power. The aims of these intellectual calisthenics, however, do not stop here. Instead, they go through the roof straight to the guarantor of all knowledge, the power(s) residing in the heavens themselves. In the sublation of knowledge to Knowledge, neoconservatives produce the magical two-step that attends the transcendental gesture, which mimics the leap of faith people equate with the hurdle overcome when finite beings merge with the infinite. This sublation does not produce the God who created us, but the one we created—in this case, the omniscient figure associated with raising discourse to a mythic level. Consequently, the knowledge used to impart wisdom to all those within the sphere of influence becomes a Knowledge that in some way sanctions the aims, means, and goals of right-wing discourse. As if this theological hubris were not enough, neoconservative mythologists lay claim to what exists below the field of play, for the circle of redrawn cultural boundaries needs a foundation to secure belief in the right-wing political project. Seen from this perspective, the sphere of mythic sleight-of-hand extends down through the earth to the graveyard of mortal dust and debris. There right-wing archivists tap the solemnities of historical origins, which must be reconstituted in memory in the same way as knowledge is reconstituted in the novel 1984. I that book, political operatives working for Big Brother reconfigure the past so that itfitswithin the parameters of their present aims. The writers in Big Brother's employ have only one purpose: to create a revisionist historical account while they destroy present records of past actions by throwing them down memory holes that induce collective amnesia. This allows for perpetual confusion between the so-called present offshoots of error-prone thinking and the unassailable original truths invoked by Big Brother's suprahistorical perspective. In the same manner, U.S. citizens are asked to forget that what constituted centrist mainstream

34 • The Myth of Disinterested Scholarship

thought in the '60s and '70s has become a distant landmark with fewer and fewer reference points of recognition. To accommodate such groupthink, neoconservative writers have had to alter the ideas of the dead fathers and mothers, whose words exist today in the dusty tombs that fill our libraries. Their ideas must be suppressed or reinterpreted to become socially manageable—linked to historical categories that reinforce far right policies cohering around their ideological agenda. The dead daddies and mommies become the dead dummies and mummies, mere vehicular mouthpieces for conservative propositions strung together, framed, and ordered for young people whose primary source of information is the televisual reconstruction of events. A dead father like Karl Marx, whose ideas cannot be altered to fi in the blank of ideological persuasion, must be scapegoated as an enemy of the State. Ideas generated by others, such as JFK and Martin Luther King, have been appropriated for right-wing purposes of legitimating the production and distribution of learning. They hope that the past fades into an evanescent inconclusiveness that is indistinguishable from the neoconservative infomercial presently staged for viewers entranced by the televisual narratives written for them. Thus, it becomes absurd when Ronald Reagan quotes John Kennedy for his own purpose, as if JFK were really a card-carrying member of the neoconservative righ rather than a liberal Democrat. Although they grudgingly concede that Kennedy belonged to the opposing political party, neoconservative revisionists have set about to appropriate his ideals, values, and triumphs as their own. For the aim of Reagan, Bush, Quayle, Gingrich, and many of their compatriots has been to strip history of its previous meaning, set a new sequence of ideas in circulation, and, once this imaginary historical assembly was established, close the circle upon itself, invoking its final meaning as a way to conserve right-wing values for posterity. Their game has been to reconfigure the center and move mainstream Americans to the right. But there is something else at stake. For in the game of resituating cultural boundaries, those who originally occupied the middle ground and those who leaned slightly to the left (liberals and left-of-center moderates) have recently been cast as undesirable extremists that must be marginalized on the fringe. All those who are not in the reconfigured center have become fair game for ideological persecution;


. 35

they can be ostracized, cast beyond the periphery, and, in the present example, stigmatized as liberals by rearguard Reagan reactionaries. This new group of sacrificial lambs has become a touchstone to measure what right-wing "centrists" are not. In other words, liberals transposed into contrapuntal scapegoats have witnessed neoconservatives like Rush Limbaugh carping about their shortcomings as Americans. In the past decade, moderate leftists have served as a locus for crossreference, an element used to reestablish right-wing identification as that which is not what they scorn. To do this successfully, neoconservatives have not only widened their circle of influence using the techniques described above but, at the same time, have characterized all left-ofcenter Americans as aflattwo-dimensional caricature of themselves. These tactics provide a way for leftist activists to serve a definite purpose. They become useful in confirming the out-of-boundary potential that enables right-wing theoreticians to posit their own boundaries. Seen from a psychoanalytic perspective, we can determine that, on some level, judges need the accused or they would have no one to judge but themselves. Cops need "criminals" or they might have to investigate their own unacceptable impulses more closely. The State needs revolutionaries to consolidate its own power. Republicans need Democrats to identify themselves as distinct from their adversaries. All judge others to avoid evaluating aspects of themselves that lie outside socially prescribed boundaries of acceptability. By concerning themselves with suppressing an external threat, they have less time and energy to recognize repressed facets of their personalities, which must remain unknown to them. In this way, they expend an enormous amount of energy policing their environment to ward off any "wayward" impulses they find unconscionable. They bury a knowledge of "unreformed" urges in a mass of disowned associations that persists in haunting them in societal behavi enacted by others that they reject. The return of the repressed often g rise to such projections. Although neoconservative critics constantly speak about the essence of the soul, their politics reveal an insecurity about their claims. In other words, they do not practice what they preach, for their actions indicate that identity relates less to an immanent object, form, or force than to a

36

. The Myth of Disinterested Scholarship

distinguishing trait that derives its basis from a contrast with other antagonistic aspects of personality: Nowhere is this process more transparent than in the construction of the first pair of oppositions, where it is the category of the Inhuman in general that allows us to assimilate the Monstrous to the Deformed, that permits us therefore to correlate the slaying of the monsters (as a triumph of man over the dark forces) with that physical deformation of life which marks a partial defeat at their hands. (Jameson 12)

Fredric Jameson traces the dynamics of this binary conflict back to its interpersonal origins, where the emerging ego draws its lines of selfdefinition as a way to apprehend itself as "I." To constitute the boundaries of personality, the emergent ego must ward off emotional experiences of fragmentation from a body that was previously bits and pieces of an incoherent self-image wholly dependent upon its environment. According to this paradigm, the ego emerges from a coupling of subjective and objective processes through a (mis) recognition of its own unity, which is substantiated through an objectification of its image mirrored back from an external perspective. Because of such doubling, the egoimage settles into itself, reinforced through a series of oppositions in the introjective process of owning its identity. This is how the ego is constructed: as a "subjective object" constituted in the objectification of the self. Once the emerging ego recognizes itself as "I," the previous emotional experience of fragmentation is quite often resisted, then projected onto the environment, from which it returns periodically in the guise of the tormenting other. As the child grows into an adult, it seeks to retain its independence by isolating any threat to its autonomy as an enemy that, in instances of regression, invokes uncomfortable feelings of fragmentary dependence associated with its humble origins. While independence is a desirable ideal, some people do not realize independence is bound up with a precarious self-image formed from dependent infantile relations. So a binary logic is established: the ideal of an independent form is reinforced at every turn against a "debased" dependent image that is rejected. All the while, interdependency is rarely considered as an option that is not distinct from the other two. For interdependency is but


. 37

one option in the circulation of dependence, independence, and interdependence, which forms an ongoing cycle of interpersonal relations that enables one to identify with a variety of positions at different moments. These positions are not really in opposition to each other except from an imaginary perspective of a fragile ego that, falling away from itself, needs to redefine the boundaries of identification. From this boundary of self-insistence are born the monstrous powers that threaten to produce emotional traumas associated with the body of bits and pieces. As Fredric Jameson says, from this genesis of personality, the monstrous is graphed onto the deformed: that which threatens to deform the form of our fragile self-image. Since society shares common boundaries, which implies the formation of shared ego beliefs, the monstrous becomes bound up with an internal menace projected outward into a scapegoat that threatens social parameters reidentified as "us" versus "them." This paranoid psychology gave rise to the McCarthyite purges of the '50s, to the exorcism of liberals from the mainstream during the Reagan era, and to the current smear campaign of political correctness used against academics who have become the latest perceived menace threatening the narrowly defined neoconservative view of acceptable society. CONSTRUCTING THE PC METANARRATIVE

I turn now to a second narrative component—the unrelenting attack on academic research—that has been linked with the current assault on influential societal spokespersons today. Once the common thread running through these two biased accounts of experience is exposed, the narrative underpinning becomes evident and the inauthenticity of the narrator's stance exposed. Here is what they are saying about researchers in the academy today: Taken as a whole, academic research and writing is the greatest intellectual fraud of the twentieth century. (Anderson 85) It is not necessary to insist that no worthwhile or valuable research is being done at the universities to recognize that much of what passes for knowledge creation makes only the most piddling contribution to the pool of human wisdom. Much of it is merely humbug. (Sykes 103)

38 . The Myth of Disinterested Scholarship The dirty secret of the academic intellectuals is that much of what they write and hold up to themselves and to the rest of the world as the highest expression of what they do is inconsequential and trifling. (Anderson 85) The research ethos that now dominates the academic world has been tragic for many professors. They delude themselves when they claim their research is important, a significant contribution to knowledge—when most of it is irrelevant and unimportant. The tragedy is that most of them probably know what they write is not important. And when they act as if it were, when they allow others to assume it is, when they accept promotions and salary increases because of it, they are engaging in a subtle form of intellectual corruption. They begin by lying to others, and end up lying to themselves. (Anderson 118-19) The humanities have become overspecialized and needlessly obscure,... have repudiated the ideal of disinterested scholarship to pursue various politicized educational agendas, and... have in many instances abandoned the study of the great works of the Western tradition to lavish attention on material that is secondary, trivial, or of dubious intellectual importance. (Kimball 36) Through professionalized jargon, however meaningless, critics assert their claims to special expertise and consequently to special recognition and privilege. And these intellectual gymnastics of the new scholarship have now become very profitable in the academy. The au courantcritics have invented, within the academic world, a new form of literary consumerism. The author supplies a product—a novel or poem—which the critic or reader fashions to his own use. University departments have generated a sophisticated interpretation industry, which includes product variation, division of labor, diffuse franchises and markets, government and philanthropic subsidy; critical careers rise and fall, academic fortunes are made and lost, depending on the laws of supply and demand in the literary bazaar. Because of their large salaries and lavish lifestyles, the Duke critics have been variously described as 'closet capitalists' and 'the richest Marxists in the country.'" (D'Souza, Illiberal Education 181) As Ronald Reagan would say, "here they go again." In this sequence of quotations, right-wing detractors make a series of sweeping accusations while claiming to offer an objective critique of the current status of academic research. According to them, professors are intellectual "frauds, liars, and cheats." Right-wing archaeologists believe they have unearthed a "dirty secret"—that contemporary academics have perpetrated "the


. 39

greatest intellectual fraud of the twentieth century," that contemporary critics "begin by lying to others, and end up lying to themselves" about the importance of their research, that left-of-center critics have cheated the public by accepting promotions and salary increases under false pretenses and thus engage "in a subtle form of intellectual corruption." If professors are frauds, liars, and cheats, it follows that their research is unimportant piddling humbug. This critique supposes that contemporary academics have not pursued "disinterested" scholarship when preparing their research for publication. After launching such verbal assaults, however, it is absurd for neoconservatives to paint themselves as objective, unbiased, and disinterested while denigrating left-wing critics as impostors in the temple. One has only to notice the vehemence of their vitriolic attacks to wonder what is hidden behind such shrill rhetoric. It is important to see that the narrative falsehoods constructed in this series of accusations are related to those exposed in chapter 2. For they have attempted to hook point A, that contemporary academics are incompetent teachers who hate their students, with point B, that these unfit professionals have pulled the wool over the eyes of their students, colleagues, and university administrators, who are responsible for giving them promotions for that most unethical of practices—doing their research. But let us consider the following circumstance: long before today's crop of professors gained influence in academic circles, others received raises for producing articles and books. One has to wonder, then, why is this such a heated issue now? Why are professors condemned for having created "a sophisticated interpretation industry" when it has existed in its present state since the 1940s? The answer is simple if one cares to examine the production and distribution of knowledge-as-power in the citadels of higher learning: in a phrase, left-wing academic critics no longer know their place. As long as they kept to the margins and accepted their disempowered status, they were excluded from the inner circles of distributed power. But once they steered hiring committees, conferred tenure, and directed changes in the curriculum, the system no longer remained on automatic pilot. Cary Nelson describes this process when explaining how psychoanalysis was received by the New Critical conservatives of the 1950s: "Acquiescing in New Criticism's growing dominance of literature depart-

40


ments, psychoanalysis had begun to make the same Faustian bargain with the close reading of the sacralized literary text that every radical theory—from Marxism to psychoanalysis to deconstruction, it seems— would come to make upon arriving in the New World" (12). The Faustian bargain critics struck forced them to focus exclusively on a "close reading of individual texts or studies of authorial careers," for they dared not consider "the larger philosophical, social, political, and epistemological questions" (Nelson 13). The real problem, then, is not that there has suddenly sprung up an "interpretation industry," but that poststructuralist critics have exposed the New Critical premise of disinterested scholarship as a political stance that implicates any reading (from the Right or the Left) as an attempt to influence the construction, dissemination, and legitimation of the terms of discourse. These ideological terms were once sanctioned as authoritatively objective, but in the past twenty years they have been revealed as aspects of competing narratives of knowledge, which vie to influence the politics of rhetorical construction. That is the "sin" of contemporary postmodern and poststructuralist cultural critics: they have revealed the political bias of the New Critical agenda that once went unquestioned. For demystifying New Critical precepts as anything but objective, disinterested, and unbiased, contemporary cultural critics must be constantly berated until their influence wanes and the myth can be reinstated. As I stressed at the outset of the book, thefictionof the evil, politically correct academic is just one piece of a larger narrative that right-wing ideologues have woven through the fabric of American culture since World War II. According to this story, political "correctniks" (notice the Soviet slur) are part of a larger group of left eclectics—neo-Marxists, feminists, and multicultural critics—who have gained control of our universities and colleges in a subversive attempt to impose their godless ethos on unsuspecting American students who are currently subject to such propaganda (Alter 510). The narrative goes something like this: left eclecticism, though "not identical with Marxism, exactly,... represents any of a wide variety of antiestablishment modes of thought from structuralism and poststructuralism, deconstruction, and Lacanian analysis to feminist, homosexual, black, and other patently political forms of criticism" (Kimball 32). This narrative overview represents left eclecti-

The Myth of Disinterested Scholarship . 41

cism as an evil force, not only because it leads an assault on the cherished canon and its inherited beliefs and values, but, more importantly, because it undermines "the moral grounding" that has "nourished and given meaning" to the now deposed tradition (Kimball 33). Thus, political "correctniks" become cast as shallow intellectual purveyors of a radical ethos who in fact call into question the hypocrisy of the neoconservative system of values. Feeling displaced by these new approaches of cultural criticism, right-wing politicians and educators feel it necessary to amass a defense against "enemies" who have been demonized as atheistic PC-monsters. MUCH ADO ABOUT GAYATRI SPIVAK AND STANLEY FISH

The biased condemnation of the current state of academic research takes a bizarre turn when Charles Sykes criticizes Gayatri Spivak in A Nation of Victims. Look at the following passage from that book and ask yourself what is wrong with this characterization: Gayatri Spivak, a professor of English and Cultural Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, argued, for example, that it is unreasonable to expect minorities to practice the sort of tolerance demanded of white students. "Tolerance is a loaded virtue," he explained, "because you have to have a base of power to practice it. You cannot ask a certain people to 'tolerate' a culture that has historically ignored them at the same time their children are indoctrinated into it." His position was echoed by a group of professors at the University of Michigan who declared, "behavior which constitutes racist oppression when engaged in by whites does not have this character when undertaken by people of color." (Sykes 174)

To anyone familiar with Gayatri Spivak, it is obvious what is wrong here. If Sykes had done his research, rather than berating others for the worthlessness of theirs, he would have learned an obvious fact: Gayatri Spivak is a woman! Speaking about Spivak, Sykes says," 'Tolerance is a loaded virtue,' he explained." Is this reference to Spivak's gender merely a typo? Not likely, because Sykes compounds his mistake further on in the paragraph by stating, "His position was echoed by a group of professors at the University of Michigan." Now, Charles J. Sykes is the same man who said, "It is not necessary to insist that no worthwhile or valuable research is being done at the universities to recognize that much of what passes


for knowledge creation makes only the most piddling contribution to the pool of human wisdom. Much of it is merely humbug" (ProfSca 103). This quotation from ProfScam leads one to ask: who is scammin whom? How could Sykes repeatedly write on political correctness and not have a clue as to the gender of one of the most prominent feminist writers in academia today? Has he read those whom he critiques? Has he read Spivak? In other words, has he done his research? The quotation on Spivak appearing on page 174 of A Nation of Victim refers to footnote 27, which cites Dinesh D'Souza, not Gayatri Spivak. Had Sykes bothered to take the time to read Spivak's introduction to Derrida's Of Grammatology or one of her more famous books, In Oth Worlds or The Post-Colonial Critic, Sykes would have known that she "feminist Marxist deconstructivist" (Spivak ix). But none of Spivak's books is discussed in A Nation of Victims, and there is no citation of he work in the notes to the book. Several notes refer to Adorno and one refers to a New York Times article by Henry Louis Gates; in other word one finds a citation here and there to this or that contemporary critical theorist, but the majority are to an old boys' network of right-wing writers that have appeared in newspaper articles and popular magazines like Harper's and Esquire. The same can be said for ProfScam, except th are a few more citations to academic theorists. But when one reads what Sykes has to say in these citations, it is obvious he has not taken the time to study these books. He relies too much on secondary sources. Odd for one who is concerned with the quality of research. If one looks at the other would-be reformers who have played political hardball with the Left (Martin Anderson, Dinesh D'Souza, and Roger Kimball), the same tactic of appealing to their readers' most seasoned prejudices while avoiding their research becomes apparent. In Impostor in the Temple, Martin Anderson remains almost oblivious to the recen academic trends he criticizes; his discussion of left-wing academic texts is thin and his list of citations is even more abbreviated than in Sykes's attempt to present a vital, informative discussion. Roger Kimball at least tries (rather unsuccessfully it seems) to read a few of the works he critiques, but D'Souza relies on unsubstantiated innuendo (interviews with unnamed sources), a plethora of newspaper articles, and an occasional reference to Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, and Jacques Lacan. These


. 43

latter references are sparse, which was in keeping with D'Souza's avoidance of responsible, in-depth research when he wrote his best-seller. Instead, neoconservatives dig up right-wing newspaper articles that support their opinions, name unnamed sources to criticize their enemies, and repeat points made previously by someone else in their old boys' network. Let us return to our original example to take a closer look at how this cynical game is played. When Charles Sykes attempts to attack Gayatri Spivak, rather than doing his research (taking the time and effort to read at least one article by her, think through her position, and devise a criticism of her ideas), he reads a prefabricated blurb provided for him by Dinesh D'Souza in "Racism 101": In the same vein, Gayatri Spivak, Andrew Mellon Professor of English and Cultural Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, argues that while it is essential to teach white students sensitivity to cultural diversity, such qualities as tolerance cannot reasonably be expected of minorities. "Tolerance is a loaded virtue," said Spivak, "because you have to have a base of power to practice it. You cannot ask a certain people to 'tolerate' a culture that has historically ignored them at the same time [that] their children are being indoctrinated into it." (43) What we have here is Sykes citing D'Souza's quotation, which is used again by D'Souza in his book Illiberal Education. It is there we find that the reused quotation first appeared in Harper's. This stop along the circuitous route of citations provides us with yet another instance demonstrating how right-wing critics use newspaper articles and popular magazines as their primary source of information. If one reads the coordinated attack against Stanley Fish, it becomes apparent that the same methods used to discredit Gayatri Spivak have been enlisted to sully the reputation of the chairperson of the English Department at Duke University. As many academics know, Stanley Fish became chair of English at Duke and resuscitated a "tired and traditional" program of study (Heller 12). Upon taking over the department, Fish marked Duke as a desirable site on the map for lecturers who travel the academic circuit to present papers before faculty and students. He matched financial offers from other universities for professors who were in demand. He instituted interdisciplinary studies as a compelling program for students interested in new trends in the profession. And, most

44 • The Myth of Disinterested Scholarship

importantly, he altered the curriculum to reflect the current interest in critical theory, feminism, queer theory, and cultural studies. With the help of other professors hired during this period of transition, Fish did all this at a breakneck pace, as if he were taking off in "a rocket ship that's gone into overdrive" (Heller). Because Fish was instrumental in initiating widespread modifications at a prominent university like Duke, he has become a target of rightwing critics in the forefront of the PC debate. Is it surprising that they have treated him as shabbily as they have treated Gayatri Spivak? Is it extraordinary that they have criticized him while reading little, if any, of his work? In Impostors in the Temple, Martin Anderson absurdly lum Stanley Fish together with other proponents of deconstruction who he claims believe that "when words no longer have any meaning, anything goes" (149). By labeling Fish as "one of its [deconstruction's] leading exponents," Anderson once again demonstrates how to criticize his opponents without reading them (149). For, if he had thumbed through just a few of Fish's many essays or books, Anderson would have recognized that reader-response theory, not deconstruction, informs the work of this influential critic. Feminist, deconstructionist, reader-response theorist—all of these terms are interchangeable for neoconservatives who raise the roof about the value of academic research while abrogating their responsibility to do any themselves. In ProfScam, Charles Sykes, like other critics of political correctnes has recycled information on Fish that appeared in Scott Heller's piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Using an article by Heller, one Stephen Balch and Herbert London from Commentary, and another b Jameson himself as the basis for his criticism, Sykes yokes—in a classic instance of neo-McCarthyism—Duke's curricular changes with Fredric Jameson's use of Marxism (192). Even if one acknowledges Jameson's considerable influence at Duke, it is still patently absurd to link all theoretical approaches at Duke with Jameson. But Sykes does this, just as Anderson collated the entire Duke school of criticism under the single rubric of "deconstruction." If Sykes is going to take this inadvisable step, he could at least have spelled Jameson's name correctly. On page 192 he refers to him as "Frederic Jameson," a mistake he reproduces in note 41 on page 284 and in the index on page 298 (ProfScam). Misspelling


. 45

Fredric Jameson's name is not on a par with mistaking Spivak's gender, but these errors indicate how little neoconservatives such as Sykes and Anderson know about the people they regularly criticize. It reveals volumes about their research methods. THINK TANK MEANS TO FOUNDATIONAL ENDS

Uninformed critiques of left-wing critics, like those analyzed in the foregoing section, reveal a very specific agenda that is reaping tangible rewards for ultraconservative theorists. As in the 1950s, when McCarthy led an assault on university libraries, neoconservative policymakers today have tried to silence professorial debate to produce a subdued atmosphere on college campuses across the country. During the McCarthy era, conservative legislators pressured libraries to "remove arbitrarily suspect books and magazines from their shelves," including such "subversive" texts as"Einstein's Theory ofRelativity, Thomas Mann's Joseph in Egypt The Magic Mountain' (Lipset 136). In the 1990s, neoconservative activist have targeted the "liberal monopoly of higher education" as a site of contention ripe for their coordinated propaganda campaign featuring a barrage of think tanks, training groups, foundations, grassroots programs, and regulatory assemblies at legal centers (Messer-Davidow 47). This coalition of right-wing groups, driven by a self-righteous moral fervor bordering on hysteria, has lambasted postmodern and poststructuralist multicultural critics as part of their rite of ideological purification. Since the 1980s, the think tank system has become so formidable a force in American politics that it had better be taken seriously before it is too late to check its growing influence in local and national affairs. As Ellen Messer-Davidow has shown in her detailed expose of the neoconservative assault leveled against the university, "while some conservative think tanks existed before 1975, notably the Hoover Institution (1919), the American Enterprise Institute (1943), and the Heritage Foundation (1973), dozens of national ones were established by the mid-1980s, which have been augmented in recent years by somefifty-fivestate-level think tanks" (51). One of the central activities of these think tanks has been to funnel corporate funds through a network created to influence the curricular debate, to organize a confrontational presence on campuses to


monitor professors and check the spread of progressive ideas, and, most importantly, to organize an academic rollback to return us to a more quiescent period in American history when professors and students knew their "place." It is interesting to note that many of the neoconservative policymakers who currently implement key decisions in right-wing think tanks were originally members of the Democratic Party and heirs of the Truman Doctrine. Some were socialists, liberals, and/or Jewish intellectuals with strong populist roots rather than constituents of the old right machine that McCarthy used so effectively to harass his enemies (Hoeveler 306). So it is ironic that these "reformed" socialists and New Deal liberals (many of whom were "students or colleagues of the New York literary critic Lionel Trilling and contributors to opinion journals such as Parti san Review and Commentary") turned on their younger counterpart during the contentious Vietnam era (Bright 53-54): It was the political events of the 1960s that brought the Cold War Liberals and the Old Left together to form a new ideological movement. Their common reaction to the contemporary criticism of the American foreign policy and political system led them to work for many of the same think tanks and universities, write for the same policy and opinion journals, share the same social and professional circles, and support the same political causes and candidates. (Bright 55)

The group they joined, "dubbed 'neoconservatism' by Leftist critic Michael Harrington," included such notables as Norman Podhoretz, leane Kirkpatrick, Ben Wattenberg, and Nathan Glazer, who became disillusioned with the burgeoning antiwar movement of the 1960s (Bright 56). Later, they began a discursive onslaught against the McGovern wing of the Democratic Party and the Nixon-Kissinger faction that had initiated the Republican strategy of detente. This in turn led to the establishment of neoconservative task forces, which have recently asserted their oppositional presence on university campuses. Once Ronald Reagan took office, he rewarded right-wing efforts to direct the cultural production of ideological fantasy. Conversely, the Reagan administration "withheld government grants from think tanks that were left-of-center, forcing them to reduce their activities, go under, or shift rightward" (Soley 418). In their attempt to influence government


. 47

policy, right-wing think tanks funded training hubs like the Leadership Institute and the National Journalism Center (Messer-Davidow 56). Such groups placed journalists at media posts to disseminate propaganda and influence legislation, while they retained the "tax-exempt status of educational organizations" (Messer-Davidow 56). As Ellen Messer-Davidow explains, these groups have passed themselves off as nonpartisan assemblies organized for "literary or educational purposes," while they trained hard-nosed ultraconservative activists to influence the political debate (56). Sophisticated in their manipulation of the media and funded in a manner that enables them to do so, these "tax-exempt" organizations have been able to place "press releases, send thousands of op-ed pieces to newspapers, volunteer speakers for talk shows, and provide sound bites for television programs" (Soley 418). They have done all this to distribute a doctrinal body of information to achieve their stated goal of rightwing acculturation. Their shrill assault mounted against the "biased" liberal media is belied by their political posturing and transparent attempts at self-promotion. Although Dinesh D'Souza and Roger Kimball complain bitterly about the liberal bias in Hollywood and the radical agenda on college campuses, they themselves have sought to manipulate the media debate about political correctness. As we know, neoconservative strategists portray themselves as unbiased, objective arbiters of public opinion, but, if one follows the money trail of these inside traders of ideological consumables, a different story emerges: they have received large grants from think tanks such as the Madison Center as well as organizations that fund journals like The New Criterion, where much of Kimball's Tenur Radicals was published (Messer-Davidow 67). As Messer-Davidow re veals, once D'Souza's and Kimball's books were published, neoconservative groups that shepherded their projects through the production process now promoted their efforts to manage the cultural production of knowledge. Recent studies have revealed that groups like the National Association of Scholars (NAS), which is funded by far right political foundations, appeal to such principles to back their claims. The NAS "holds conferences, publishes a journal, Academic Questions, . . . makes pronounc ments about academic culture,. .. mobilizes the membership to lobby


government officials and churn out writings on the excesses of 'tenured radicals,' . . . assembles stories of alleged conservative victims of leftacademic abuses and also is rumored to compile data of left academics" (Messer-Davidow 63-64). The Collegiate Network is another organization supported by large foundation grants. The CN receives the bulk of its money from the Madison Center for Education, which enables the network to publish "impartial" collegiate newspapers on over sixty campus sites nationwide. Still other groups—like the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, which publishes Heterodoxy, Accuracy in Academi which spies on faculty members; and Students for America, a "fundamentalist pro-military student network"—were formed to target a collegiate audience they hope to convert to the neoconservative cause (University Conversion Project 10). These organizations claim to be academic in conception and objective in the execution of their duties, but they really form staged fronts for conservative spin masters who reject scholarly research as a legitimate means of substantiating one's claims. They have found that it is much easier to weave a mythic narrative so they can produce the "expert" knowledge they could not generate from within the academy. They have done so by conflating "expertise" as pertains to knowledge produced by scholarly methods and "expertise" as pertains to the aura of authority surrounding those who produce this knowledge. In this way, the think tanks have constituted an "academicized" aura of authority upon which conservatives have capitalized to advance their political agenda Their involvement in politics, which has been interpreted as a "scientification" of politics, turns out to be the "politicization" of [academic] science at the same time. (Messer-Davidow 54)

Thus, think tank politicos, backed by groups such as Coors, Reader's Digest, Noble, Olin, Pew, and Bradley seek to produce a very specific product—the pretense of objective academic knowledge—which is disbursed throughout their intricate network of communications established on university campuses throughout the country. Prominent rightwing spokespersons like William Bennett have argued that information can be transmitted in a manner that enables one to overcome any subjective bias in the presentation of events. For Bennett, a communicational model that shuttles objective data to its recipients is fundamental


. 49

to a just, noble, and enduring approach to teaching students the core curriculum canonized by neoconservative groups. David Bromwich notes that in his pamphlet, To Reclaim a Legacy, Bennett "assembled 'study group' of teachers and administrators with long experience in higher education, among them David Riesman, Hanna H. Gray, Wayne C. Booth, and William Arrowsmith" (Bromwich 462). Bennett enlisted these academics to add their voices to his claim that it is possible to transmit information that does not require interpretation: A civilization, says Bennett, is transmitted by its teachers—"transmit" being a favorite word with him, as it is for [George] Will. Accordingly, he does not speak of teachers as "expounding" or "interpreting" their subjects. These last words would imply for the student a kind of thinkingthat Bennett wants to supplant by reception. Proper transmission, then, with proper reception, is to rescue from utter decadence a pedagogy which, at present, offers students a choice between two unpleasant extremes. It can be "lifeless or tendentious, mechanical or ideological." These make a curious pair of antitheses, as Bennett himself appears to recognize later on, when he writes that teachers "cannot be dispassionate about the works they teach." If we take this last remark cited above, we arrive at a distinct but perplexing sense of Bennett's proposals. Teaching is to be passionate in some way, but tending to no conclusion, and least of all an ideological one. (Bromwich 463)

Although William Bennett attempts to rationalize the existence of a transparent transmission of information, he has difficulty justifying the claim that the dissemination of knowledge isn't biased. For any attempt at interpretation tilts to the left or right, and with it, the theoretical enterprise to validate its criteria. Such criteria work in the service of a proof that proposes an ideological solution resulting from a politicized aim that precedes the subject's investigation of the object in question. O some level, all intellectual undertakings are bound by an "ideological captivity" that disallows closure even as it presents a misrecognition of the data under consideration. For the "raw material" transformed in the process of communication, whether it be sensuous, ideological, technical, narrative, or scientific, is not the same as the "production of knowledge," which operates in the register of logic (Althusser 43). As Althusser states, the raw material that forms the object of knowledge ("as distinct from the real object") mu

50


pass through a production process acted upon by an intervening logical order (43). The production of knowledge acts upon the "natural order" in the same way that interpretation intervenes between the subject intent upon analyzing information and the object under consideration (45). Although empirical rationalists like Bennett deny that they blatantly manipulate "facts" for their own purposes, there is no one-to-one correspondence between the production of information and its expression or the interpretation of knowledge and its transmission. In other words, the production of knowledge and formation of theoretical conjecture are but facets of a complex dispersal of cultural data. And who was better at manipulating the process of communication in the 1980s than Ronald Reagan? "The Great Communicator," as he was called, handled the media as effectively as any president in this century, invoking hyperreal strategies for disseminating thirty-second sound bites to control the production of political opinions. In the next chapter, we will examine how the forces of Reaganism expropriated such strategies in order to make the medium the message in the age of cable simulation, where the wholesale satellitization of experience has become a leitmotiv of the times.

4 . Mythic Parameters: Fast-Food PC, McCarthyism, and McReaganism

INOCULATING THE BODY POLITIC

In the April 22,1991, issue of Newsweek, George Will described the curret skirmishes over political correctness as a "low-visibility, high-intensity war" with a domestic enemy (72). His description appears in an article on the nomination of the conservative Carol Iannone to the National Council on the Humanities. For George Will, Iannone's nomination is one skirmish in a battle whose lines of conflict are clearly demarcated: on one hand, there is a group of "philistines [who] are in the academies shaping tomorrow's elites, and hence tomorrow's governance," and, on the other, there is a group of scholars in a "burgeoning organization resisting the politicization of higher education" (72). Supporting Iannone at the time of her nomination was Lynne V. Cheney, a former Reagan administration official whom Will calls the "chairman" of the National Endowment for the Humanities. In a scathing critique of literary politics, Will anoints Lynne Cheney the "secretary of domestic defense" who stands against enemies so formidable that "the foreign adversaries her husband, [former Defense Secretary] Dick, [Cheney] must keep at bay are less dangerous, in the long run, than the domestic forces with which she must deal" (72). In a humorous response to Will's self-righteous condemnation of the PC movement, the Renaissance scholar Stephen Greenblatt asks, "who are these homegrown enemies, more dangerous even than Saddam Hussein with his arsenal of chemical weapons? The answer: professors of literature. You know, the kind of people who be51

52 . Fast-Food PC, McCarthyism, and McReaganism

long to that noted terrorist organization, the Modern Language Association" (Bi). Who is more dangerous than the IRA? Why, the MLA, because its members are all things to all people: both Multicultural Leftist Atheists and members of the "PC clergy" composed of "the academy's new ayatollahs," who function by repressing "politically incorrect views on campus" while propagating "attitudinal readjustment" and "generational groupthink" among their students in an attempt to impose a new verbal order upon them (Leo 22). The support for these claims is as absurd as Will's notion that the MLA is an organization of philistines fostering "social disintegration" and "collective amnesia" (72). To maintain his ultraconservative bias, Will is forced to posit a series of uninformed observations like this one: there has been a "reduction of the study of literature to sociology, and of sociology to mere ideological assertion," and this has a central tenet: All literature is, whether writers are conscious of it or not, political (72). Although many of us agree that literature is highly politicized, writers like Kristeva, Cixous, Irigaray, Derrida, Barthes, Lacan, Deleuze, Guattari, Jameson, Gates, Baker, and Spivak could hardly be described as sociologists. Feminists, philosophers, psychoanalysts, semiologists, deconstructionists, or cultural theorists, yes, but not sociologists. To label them as such is to show how unfamiliar Will is with the work of those whom he condemns. To compound his ignorance on this matter, Will trots out a song and dance that right-wing writers have been performing for the public at every available opportunity for the past five years; radical leftists, he asserts, have produced a "political agenda of victimology" backed by a "proliferation of groups nursing grievances and demanding entitlements" (72). According to this line of reasoning, women, African Americans, Hispanics, and gays merely perceive themselves as victims, while they indulge in the narcissistic attempt to deny their collusion in their own fate. For Will and other right-wing columnists, members of these groups have not really been victimized since they have a stake in remaining dependent on society, in denying their responsibility for having created their current circumstances, and in blaming others when they should blame themselves. Thus, these "pseudo-victims" brandish their victimhood upon white, mainstream America, which has done nothing to warrant such a display of "misdirected" sentiment.

Fast-Food PC, McCarthyism, and McReaganism

. 53

In this regard, Will merely echoes writers such as David Sidorsky and Charles Sykes, who blame the victim to deny their own aggressive impulses toward those whom they denounce. Sidorsky writes that professors interested in multicultural curricular revision justify establishing interdisciplinary studies "around [their] perceived victimized communities" (715). For in such interdisciplinary approaches the victimized groups are "freed from some of the disciplinary constraints that require a forum on literary form and aesthetic value, in order to celebrate group identity" (715). In other words, standards become lax around the "sacred texts" of multicultural victimology, which are "immune from standards of criticism" (715). In this way, Sidorsky merely parrots the standard line appearing in most conservative critiques of "PC groupthink." The most definitive statement on the subject comes from Sykes, who wrote A Nation of Victims, a 255-page study that peppers its readers with sarcastic one-liners: currently we live in the age of "the Annoyed Person" (20) where "dysfunction is, in every respect, a growth industry" (13), an age that celebrates "an ethos of victimization," which has led to an "epidemic of disability" (13). Sykes assures us that Americans have a long tradition of showing sympathy to "genuine" victims but today their nerves are sorely tested by the growing list of malcontents (12). Gays, Lesbians, African Americans, Hispanics, women, and the poor are not on Sykes's short list of "genuine" victims as the following remark indicates: "the feminist self, the ethnic self, the addicted self [notice the linkage of dysfunction with feminism and ethnicity in this series] . . . need to be seen ultimately as projections from the Imperial Self—self-cleansing, selfserving, self-demanding poses, cloaking themselves in the garb of idealism and the armor of victimism" (22). There are at least two important points to make about such conservative claims. The first I will leave to Cornel West, who elegantly addresses this subject in Race Matters: Conservative behaviorists also discuss black culture as if acknowledging one's obvious victimization by white supremacist practices (compounded by sexism and class condition) is taboo. They tell black people to see themselves as agents, not victims. And on the surface, this is comforting advice, a nice cliche for downtrodden people. But inspirational slogans cannot substitute for substantive historical and social analysis. While

54 • Fast-Food PC, McCarthyism, and McReaganism black people have never been simply victims, wallowing in self-pity and begging for white giveaways, they have been—and are—victimized. Therefore, to call on black people to be agents makes sense only if we also examine the dynamics of this victimization against which their agency will, in part, be exercised. What is particularly naive and peculiarly vicious about the conservative behavioral outlook is that it tends to deny the lingering effect of black history—a history inseparable from though not reducible to victimization. In this way, crucial and indispensable themes of self-help and personal responsibility are wrenched out of historical context and contemporary circumstances—as if it is all a matter of personal will. (14)

Second, it is important to see that Charles Sykes demonstrates an aggressivity toward disempowered elements of our society, which George Will and David Sidorsky mirror in their obvious attempts to inoculate themselves against the accusation of being insensitive victimizers. As Roland Barthes indicates, political inoculation is accomplished through the injection of "viral" ideas into the body politic so that a localized impression can be created to deflect attention away from a more virulent form of this ideological "disease."1 In this way, racist, sexist, and homophobic victimizers project their own "disease" onto their scapegoated victims. The purveyors of racism, sexism, and classism also use inoculation as a means of accusing multiculturalists of their own aggressions in order to defend against the accusation being leveled against them. Political inoculation is not the stated goal of right-wing efforts to discredit their opposition; it is, rather, the performative aspect of their discourse, and the effect of their performance is clear. They desire to convince the public that their left-wing adversaries suffer from the very disease they 1 The term virus was used disparagingly during this century by fascistic factions to condemn their enemies, so its invocation troubles some critics who remember how it was implemented as a tool of right-wing propaganda. But in 1957, Roland Barthes used the term in his essay "Myth Today," which I cite at length in the following pages. Because this chapter bases its argument in part on that analysis, I think it is not only appropriate but crucial to invoke Barthes's notion of inoculation in this context. Here is some of what Barthes says on the subject: "The inoculation. I have already given examples of this very general figure, which consists in admitting the accidental evil of a class-bound institution the better to conceal its principal evil. One immunizes the contents of the collective imagination by means of a small inoculation of acknowledged evil; one thus protects it against the risk of a generalized subversion" (150).


. 55

themselves deny as their own. This is how victimizers protect themselves against the charge being leveled against them. To use another metaphor to illustrate the process of projection, I would say they send out a test balloon, paint the face of their rivals on it, and, if it flies and the public accepts the perception being circulated, they pump it up over and over again until people associate the painted face on its surface with the behavior of those on the balloon. One such strategy floated before the public spread the false notion that political correctness was a form of ideological cleansing created to miseducate students. Another characterized multiculturalists as educational tyrants who hate their students. A third cast professors as bigheaded narcissists who have perpetrated the greatest intellectual fraud of the twentieth century by declaring that their research is valuable. Through such accusations, the weavers of right-wing fantasy have devised the following formula to inoculate the body politic: 1. Anticipate all left-wing criticism of a right-wing agenda. 2. State it first so that it is precoded in a sarcastic context by far right imagemakers intent on presenting themselves in the most positive light possible. 3. Have as many neoconservative writers as possible repeat in a neverending drumbeat of criticism the anticipated observations that have been sarcastically contextualized so that the public will be diverted from discovering the unstated aims of the right-wing agenda. 4. Hope that the mainstream press, which does not take the time to read critical theory, accepts the far right argument and repeats it themselves.

Voila, neoconservatives have succeeded in shifting blame to left-wing multiculturalists, which gives cover for future attempts to partition meaning and contextualize criticism of a chosen scapegoat. This was what happened in the year 1990, when the national media finally weighed in on the debate about political correctness:"Newsweek, Time, The Wa Street Journal, The New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, and New magazine all carried articles or editorials explaining political correctness to their readers, and then sharply attacked it. The backlash had gone mainstream" (Levy 36). Once the press picked up the story, the tables were turned so that multicultural critics were depicted as victimizers, a


characterization that stuck when it was reported that the MLA/PC clergy hated their students and used research as a means of making a fortune while defrauding the public by having absolutely nothing valuable to say. In other words, far right writers struck a pose of moderation, disseminated the party line, and inoculated the body politic with this verbal "virus." And the results were catchy: the cause of the PC disease shifted from right-wing critics who constantly demarcate correct from incorrect conduct to poststructuralist academics who deconstruct superegoistic dyads such as good/bad, right/wrong, and acceptable/unacceptable behavior. This is the problem with the neoconservative charge of political correctness; it is really a projection of their dyadic moralism concerning right and wrong onto those more interested in an ethical— not a moral—discourse that deconstructs such naive dyads. The rightwing discourse of moral certitude initiates carrot-and-stick superego designations that claim a basis in the Bible, whereas a poststructuralist ethics is based upon the subject taking on a cultural mandate, which requires the subject to assume a cultural desire that is not its own. In other words, right-wing imagemakers established the ground rules for thinking in terms of political correctness even as they slyly accused other groups of perpetuating a litmus test of acceptable behavior: groups like "radical feminists" who were redefining the debate about patriarchal bias, African Americans interested in legitimizing cultural diversity, gay and lesbian groups wishing to attain basic civil liberties, and academics who celebrated difference and respect for otherness. Reintroducing their well-worn arguments, right-wing political and religious leaders claimed that these groups not only disdained Christian values but had embarked on a course to institutionalize "politically correct" behavior in our schools, government, and churches, and, so the argument goes, had become a threat to the students of America. During the fall of Communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, right-wing political and religious leaders in the United States joined in an alliance to wage a cultural war on the so-called politically correct. Today it is imperative that the American public recognize that the anti-PC coalition forged in the Reagan-Bush years has substituted a domestic adversary for the "godless communists" that right-wing factions had so long criti-


. 57

cized. This new straw man is the MLA/PC-ayatollah, a political construct that has attained mythic proportions. THE MYTHIC PARAMETERS OF PC DISCOURSE In chapter 1,1 traced the history of the term political correctness. First, saw how socialists used the term to condemn members of the Communist Party in the United States who supported Stalin's alliance with Hitler. Later, it was employed in another form of left-on-left self-criticism, this time to distance academic critics from colleagues of like ideological persuasion who wrote "vulgar" exposes of the subjects under analysis. More recently, Jacob Levy showed how feminist critics applied this phrase to each other even though they shared a common identification and sense of camaraderie. Today, right-wing critics seeking to disparage "politically correct" multiculturalists have created the PC myth by appropriating the phrase for the purpose of parodying "professorial automatons" portrayed as "ideological taskmasters" who indoctrinate students along predictable lines of dogmatic thought. The mythic version of political correctness concocted by right-wi neoconservatives partially suppresses the previous meanings of the term, impoverishing but not eradicating its original connotation. In this way, political correctness is stripped of its historical significance bef being filled with a newly manufactured meaning. I noted in chapter 1 that, because of this process, the earlier connotations of political correc ness have been forgotten, leaving contemporary readers without a historical point of reference to measure its use today. In this lexical dislocation of past from present connotation, political correctness becom unrecognizable to all but a few historians who have studied its etymological development. To understand better how political correctness has been adopted right-wing critics who strip the term of its past connotations, I turn to a theoretical model of lexical myth illustrated by Roland Barthes in his article "Myth Today." According to Barthes, there is no substantial element to myth since it is not an "object, concept, or an idea," but a "mode of signification, a form" (109). Myth is a type of speech, defined not by a natural object that has been mythologized, but by the way in which the


message is uttered (Barthes 109). If myth does not consist of a series of substances, how then can we understand what composes its components? It presents, Barthes says, a mode of communication, whether that be iconic (pictorial writing) or lexical (alphabetical writing), and this mode of communication is semiological in nature, as semiology presents a science of forms that allows for the study of signification apart from its content. Barthes stresses that myth comprises two semiotic systems of discourse: a linguistic system, which represents for the reader the languageobject, and a metalanguage, which presents a second language that comments on and supersedes the first one. Before we apply this to the PC myth constructed by right-wing ideologues, let us first look at a political example of mythic transformation detailed by Roland Barthes. Barthes relates an instance of mythic formation he first discovered when picking up a copy of Paris-Match, whos cover featured a black Algerian soldier in uniform saluting the French flag. Barthes states that this picture presents a semiotic sublation in which the mythic signifier, a black soldier giving a salute, mixes with a new signified, "a purposeful mixture of Frenchness and militariness" (116). This generates a new range of connotations which cohere around the notion that France is such a great empire "that all her sons, without any color discrimination, faithfully serve under herflag,and that there is no better answer to the detractors of an alleged colonialism than the zeal shown by this Negro in serving his so-called oppressors" (116). Barthes goes on to say that this mythic signifier has such presence it cannot simply be equated with a symbol of the French empire. No, the black soldier's presence is too richly depicted, too imagistic, too self-referential to be subsumed initially by its symbolic depiction. For in the double stroke of erased meaning and re-created form, the presence of the picture is "tamed, put at a distance, made almost transparent" until it recedes by


. 59

degrees, giving way as an accomplice to the concept of French imperiality presented in the superimposed mythic structure. All too quickly a new concept occupies the mythic signifier, filling it with "causes and effects, motives and intentions" that hold no allegiance to the former significatory end product. As a mythic signifier it becomes a placeholder of form that drains the evaporating meaning from the first-order system until it is refilled with a new rationale for France's colonial adventures in Africa. Actually, what we see here is a hodgepodge of confused facts appended to a mythic form so that we can glimpse a series of "shapeless associations"—a "formless, unstable, nebulous condensation, whose unity and coherence are above all due to its function" (119). Since politicians intent on distributing propaganda that supports their own interests construct myths as the foundation of their claims, we can use Barthes's semiotic paradigm to explain the miraculous ahistorical birth of political correctness in the '90s. As Velina Hasu Houston states in her introduction to The Politics of Life, "I consider 'political co rectness' to be a term created by the European American far right in order to maintain its position of power and privilege in this society, a position achieved by a long legacy of racial and sexual oppression" (quoted in Lehman, Partisan 599). In a manner of speaking, Housto makes sense, because the version of political correctness that gained c rency in the '90s was produced by the purposeful exclusion of earlier uses of the term so they could not be subjected to a retrospective recounting of its previous meanings. Instead, the latest version of PC evangelism has been delivered in unctuous sermons by right-wing critics who have tried to stigmatize the term by shrouding it in an aura of misunderstanding and confusion born of an evaporation process that has rid it of past contexts. These have been held at second remove as its explanatory force was muted and its history erased. The former use of the term that associated politically correct behavior with the socialist's attack on Communist Party members who sanctioned Stalin's alliance with Hitler has been almost entirely forgotten. Buried along with it is the recognition that political correctness was the offspring of left-on-left i terchanges: here used to distance condemner from condemned, there used to signify similarity with others. These connotations have been subsumed beneath a new signifier and evaporated into a mythic form

60

. Fast-Food PC, McCarthyism, and McReaganism

that has served to facilitate the unfolding of right-wing fantasy. According to this paradigm, an imperceptible slippage occurs as the patternmaking functions of the second-order mythic system gain ascendancy; values become devalued, and myth, through this sublated sleight of hand, erects monuments to itself that lack a discernible past. Look at the following examples of mythic construction in the Partisan Review by academic critics who seek to link the origins of political correctness with a multiculturalist agenda that they associate with the perceived threat of "ideological cleansing": Egregious examples of political correctness have been so numerous (and the impotent, hand-wringing commentary that accompanies them so common) that it is easy to forget that the term gained currency only three or four years ago. It is even easier to forget that the epithet originated not with conservative commentators, as most academic radicals would have you believe, but with impatient college students. "Politically correct" described the self-righteous, non-smoking, ecologically sensitive, vegetarian, feminist, non-racist, sandal-wearing beneficiaries of capitalism—faculty as well as students—who paraded their outworn sixties-radicalism in the classroom and in their social life. Mostly, it was a joke. Who could take these people seriously? Thus it is that the acronym "PC"firstwon larger notice in a student cartoon strip out of Brown University, an institution still distinguished for its overweening quotient of political correctness if little else. (Kimball 564-65) It is worth recalling that it was undergraduate students at some of our most liberal universities who were the first to protest the hypocrisy of PC. The term "political correctness," in its current usage, was coined by these undergraduates to ridicule the kind of instruction they were receiving from faculty recruited through affirmative-action hiring practices. Such ridicule—almost always ascribed by PC apparatchiks to racist, sexist, or homophobic motives—had to be quelled, however, to allow the policy of affirmative action to complete the task of enforcing race- and genderbased quotas and the race- and gender-based teaching that followed in their wake. Hence the introduction of speech codes and other official prohibitions restricting the open expression of all opinion that could be construed as casting doubt on the new ideologies of race and gender. For the juggernaut of affirmative action to succeed in its mission, derision had to be made a punishable offense. In a great many areas of cultural life, it now is. (Kramer 571)


. 61

Notice how these political texts displace their historical contexts in order to conceal their oppressive intentions. Observe how Roger Kimball, one of the most prominent PC-bashers, creates an imaginary circuit that strategically avoids all recognition of the term's past connotations. While it is true that political correctness did not originate with conservati commentators, the record is clear: the epithet was not introduced by students at Brown University. It seems more probable that conservative, not liberal, college students borrowed the term to use against professors whose politics they disdained. Or did they? For one has to wonder if this tiresomely repetitive phrase was not passed on by right-wing powerbrokers in direct contact with think tank intellectuals who sought to influence the debate in academic circles. When neoconservatives use loaded rhetorical slurs such as "the selfrighteous, non-smoking, ecologically sensitive, vegetarian, feminist, nonracist, sandal-wearing beneficiaries of capitalism," it becomes obvious how intent they are on discrediting their enemies by appropriating the PC terminology for their born-again politics. If the previous connotations of political correctness have dissolved into a new mythic form signification, PC has been refilled with a repetitive overvaluation of mean-spirited assertions concocted to fight the "raging 'cultural war' that has replaced the struggle over [the external specter of] Communism as the primary locus of partisan conflict in American intellectual life" (Loury 608). It becomes obvious from reading such comments that the overheated mythic signifier of political correctness is charged wi signifieds that generate a predictable series of complaints. As we saw in chapter 2, the first complaint aims to discredit today's academic as an unworthy teacher who detests his or her students, a strategy used in the service of a broader context: to prevent curricular changes from being instituted at the university. In chapter 3, we saw that all that is said and written by academics today has come under suspicion. In this chapter we have witnessed the neoconservative attempt to shirk any notion of transgenerational responsibility by building up a psychological wall of denial, which enables them to claim that women, people of color, and other historically marginalized groups share, according to their standard line, a mind-set of victimology that seeks "special privileges." But victimology is a racist code word like the phrase


"special privileges," which has been used against gay and lesbian groups seeking to attain their basic civil rights. Both have become right-wing targets scapegoated to rally conservative opinion against them. Through such extreme measures, neocon artists hope to ensure that empowered interests retain their privilege by continuing to practice exclusionary tactics that deny marginalized groups access to government and media centers of authority. Finally, ultraconservative critics accuse their multiculturalist adversaries of acting like the Thought Police by conducting a "reign of intolerance" of Orwellian proportions that seeks to silence everyone who disagrees with their point of view (Lehman 598). Thus, writers such as Hilton Kramer claim that "PC has been responsible for a corruption of our language on a truly Orwellian scale . . . (and) our language has suffered as a consequence of this atrocious assault on our culture" (573). And Roger Kimball exclaims, "No wonder the adjective 'Orwellian' is so often used to describe the rhetoric of political correctness. It is a perfect illustration of Orwellian 'doublethink' and the principle enunciated in Animal Farm that 'all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others'" (567). This inoculation of conservative bias into the body politic also helps to explain the current hoopla over the enforcement of "raceand gender-based quotas" based on "speech codes and other official prohibitions restricting the open expression of all opinion that could be construed as casting doubt on the new ideologies of race and gender" (Kramer 571). Charges like these have been mobilized to protest the new awareness on campus concerning atavistic racist and sexist epithets used disparagingly to characterize women, African Americans, gays, and lesbians. In addition, there has been a concerted effort to convince the public that PC professors are so intolerant of free speech rights that they have legislated as "a punishable offense" all opinions that diverge from their own. To this end, hard-core right-wing critics rail against the tyranny of the Left and the "massive violation of free speech . . . underway in higher education" to convince the public that if students innocently state opinions that diverge from the current academic conventions of acceptability, they will be labeled as racist, sexist, or homophobic reactionaries and then booted out of the university in the


. 63

same way that "dissident" actors, directors, and producers were blacklisted, then sent packing during the McCarthy era. Although there is some small precedent for students being expelled from school for violating speech codes, they are not routinely blacklisted as were those in Hollywood during the Republican reign of terror. To believe in this similarity is to accept a faulty line of reasoning that claims that PC-think is equivalent to a New McCarthyism of the Left. Orwellia and McCarthyite are terms right-wing opportunists have floated re cently to persuade the mainstream electorate that multiculturalists are monsters that seek to snatch away the souls of unsuspecting students. Neoconservative mythmakers wish to incite fear and unearth corrosive doubt, which are the effects of the big lie and reckless smear. "Debates within and between different academic fields are conflated," profound differences between left-wing critics are elided, liberals and radicals are homogenized into a common group that speak with one unified voice, gradations of opinions within and between groups with different agendas are ignored until a shorthand fiction is produced "of a singular 'political correctness' pushed by the left" (Phelps 49). In this way, a catchall term is created to provide right-wing revisionists with a discernible target of derision to mount their campaign of disinformation. So the tale is told from a framework of narrative dissemination calculated to inoculate the body politic and divert attention from the hidden purposes of right-wing propaganda. MCCARTHYISM INTO MCREAGANISM

Current accusations of left-wing political correctness find their precedent in the McCarthyite witch-hunts of the 1950s. If this historical connection is considered, it becomes ironic that disgruntled neoconservatives have turned the tables on McCarthy's accusers. They are waging a campaign of disinformation against the very people who accused them of McCarthyism when the senator overstepped his authority and was deposed in congress by a group of his peers. The tactics that neoconservatives employ today against the academic intelligentsia are the same ones McCarthy used against those who opposed his militant political objectives. Invoking Orwell when they berate "PC militants," neoconser-

64 • Fast-Food PC, McCarthyism, and McReaganism vatives repeatedly accuse multicultural critics of doing what they do to the Left. The case for a McCarthyism of the Left was stated most persuasively by Peter Collier and David Horowitz in "McCarthyism: The Last Refuge of the Left." Their argument begins with the compelling point that "McCarthyism retains the power of a political curse" (37). But rather than base this observation on the notion that a fascist element still exists in American society and can be ignited to explosive ends, they assume the opposite viewpoint. To them, McCarthyism was "brief in its moment, limited in its consequences, and complete in its purgation from the body politic" (Collier and Horowitz 37). Therefore, it galls Collier and Horowitz that these charges continue to resurface, so they pretend that the threat is over and that "the danger exists less on the Right than on the Left which has integrated many of these techniques into its political repertory" (37). They find it particularly disturbing that anticommunist sentiment has lately become suspect in and of itself, and that left-wing critics who are quick to complain at the first hint of redbaiting themselves employ the exact political methods that McCarthy used to such undemocratic ends. Although Collier and Horowitz are smart enough to reject McCarthy as an intolerant demagogue, they still make excuses for the massive violations of free speech that were commonplace at that time. According to such right-wing apologists, because there really were Marxists who successfully infiltrated the government, these invasive Communist cells had to be exposed and purged, though perhaps more quietly than McCarthy set about accomplishing the task: The testimony of former Communists and KGB intelligence defectors, together with evidence revealed under the Freedom of Information Act, shows that the American Communist Party throughout the entire period was indeedfinancedand directed by Moscow; and that it was devious in its political agendas, duplicitous in its public face, and conspiratorial in its organizational form. (Collier and Horowitz 38) For such critics there really was a "Communist fifth column," and McCarthy's only mistake was to go too far too fast, so that his approach actually "hurt the anti-Communist cause and turned many liberals


. 65

against legitimate efforts to curtail Communist activities in the United States" (39). This type of thinking neatly segues into a wholesale condemnation of the "rock-and-roll" radicals of the '60s and the "profscam academics" who teach in the "centers of junkthink" in the '90s. Drawing parallels between the cold war Communists of the '50s and the "unkempt longhairs" of the '60s, neoconservatives argue that while the "Old Leftists had pretended to be progressives and liberals, [the] New Leftists insisted on being recognized as Marxists and revolutionaries, pro-Castro and pro-Vietcong, up against the wall and tear the mother down" (39). This type of reasoning presupposes that the entire '60s cultural revolution was based on a Communist plot against the government, and that the pot-smoking hippies of that period were politicized radicals rather than laid-back idealists who followed the smoke rings of their dreams to a Utopian end where peace and love prevailed in our society. In truth, both groups existed during that period along with the civil rights movement and the women's movement, but they were anything but the homogenous assembly depicted in Collier and Horowitz's article. Whereas Collier and Horowitz threw these old chestnuts in thefireto enflame public opinion in the 1980s, today writers like Ronald Radosh have attempted to connect the non sequitur of left-wing McCarthyism with the current debate on political correctness. But while the former did their research, Radosh only uses the term twice in the article "McCarthyism of the Left," which demonstrates how successful right-wing critics have been in shifting the terms of the debate. Rather than spend ink proving that such a phenomenon exists, Ronald Radosh assumes it as a given, which frees him to perform the very McCarthyite tactics he condemns. He begins by attacking queer theory, which he associates with the "many members of the former Marxist left" who, he claims, have replaced Communism "with the advocacy of the new PC" (Radosh 680). In the very next sentence he adds to the linkage queer theory-Marxism the term madness, as if he were detailing a chain of natural associations: "o has only to read the scary reports appearing in each issue of Heterodox to realize the extent of the madness" (680). He draws upon this associational inference several times in his article, carefully preparing the cultural connections he is establishing. Queer theory and Marxism are yoked with Afrocentrism and Houston Baker in particular, who, as presi-

66


dent of the MLA, Radosh believes, has capitulated "to this madness" (683). After a long invective about the current Afrocentrist, multicultural curriculum, which he claims has betrayed the "very African-American youths" it has sought to help, he states yet again that "the academy seems more and more mired in madness" (Radosh 684). He closes with the inevitable ideological tic by engaging, as if he could not help himself, in some old-fashioned McCarthyite red-baiting; he states, "the Marxian project never dies; it just lives on in academia" (Radosh 684). In the Radosh and Collier/Horowitz accounts of left-wing McCarthyism, these writers project their own agenda onto their enemies, erect a framework favorable for reading events from a right-wing viewpoint, and erase the historical perspective that would enable us to understand their tactics. Alice Jardine demonstrates how Dinesh D'Souza, like these writers, mounts a campaign against left-wing McCarthyism by positioning himself as a defender of truth, justice, and the American way. She states that "like McCarthy before him," D'Souza draws "together (often hodge-podge) items that are verifiable on the level of detail, decontextualizes them, and then reasserts them within a new code system of his own right-wing making" (28). To put in place this strategy, D'Souza and other members of the far right intelligentsia pretend to hold moderate views. One of the ways they appear as "reasonable people" to the public at large is to adopt the narrative personae of that segment of the electorate whom they are targeting. They can also disguise their intentions by disavowing their aggressive impulses, as they project their persecutory agenda onto left-wing rivals. Look closely at left-wing McCarthyism, which is supposedly coextensive with political correctness, and you will find that both are really forms of projection that include psychoanalytic and cultural objects of reference. Projection has long been understood as a psychic defense. In the projective process, the subject places outside its purview ideas that are unacceptable to consciousness. If there are tension-generated excitations, psychical ideas inadmissible to consciousness are displaced onto the other, so that the subject sees its own ideas reflected back from that external position. According to this scenario, "unsuitable" ideas are first denied, then recognized as coming from another person. But when we examine cultural projection, which is central to an un-


. 67

derstanding of the so-called McCarthyism of the Left and its correlate, political correctness, it becomes apparent that the projective process can be adopted for political purposes. In this instance, neoconservative extremists consciously project moral attitudes concerned with right/wron good/bad, and correct/incorrect behavior onto those interested in ethics, not in morality. Theirs is a projected political correctness precisely because they attribute a moral discourse to those who reject such carrotand-stick superegoistic dyads as naive. Unlike the psychological process of projection, where consciousness transfers onto the other what it cannot tolerate, ideological conservatives engaged in cultural projection intentionally transfer onto (postmodern and poststructuralist) multicultural critics the granitelike moral beliefs they themselves celebrate as the basis for consciousness. When making accusations of political correctness, right-wing writers transfer their paternalistic fervor onto "radical feminists," African Americans, and gay and lesbian groups interested in legitimating cultural diversity. After the Communist "red menace" became less of a concern, neoconservatives turned their attention to an internal enemy, the radical intelligentsia who work in the universities today. As in the McCarthy period, an "un-American" antagonist has to be discredited. Therefore, an attempt has been made to label such minority activists as a "regnant orthodoxy" that espouses a rising hegemony controlled by academy members derisively called "multi-cults" (D'Souza xv). Neoconservative tactics like these have become so blatant that in an article appearing in Newsweek on December 24,1990, Jerry Adler asked the most ironi of questions: "is this the new enlightenment on campus or the new McCarthyism" advocated by those who direct the PC project (48)? Correct behavior, orthodoxy, hegemony, thought police, McCarthyism— terms usually applied to intolerant members of the religious right— become suspect when used to label their adversaries. A good parody of these tactics can be found in the film Bob Roberts. I this contemporary cult film, the protagonist is a politician who offers his audience a wink, a nod, and a folk song in his attempt to become the Republican senator from Pennsylvania. Raising his voice in song to mimic Bob Dylan, Roberts releases the album The Times Are Changing Back, which he croons about "self-determination, the choice to be what you

68


want to be," and Corporate Bob makes it clear that he always "wanted to be rich." Primped in a three-piece suit and expensive shoes, the senatorial candidate who was once called "a Crypto-Fascist Clown" by Spin magazine proves his critics had vastly underestimated him when he successfully adopts the persona of a freethinking dissident, turns it on itself, and poses as a rebel conservative. From this uncanny position he sings the praises of fast capital, corporate spending, maximized output, and technology and profit. Of particular interest in this saga of greed and determination is Bob Roberts's ability to derealize the familiar by parodying what he detests most even as he appropriates the tactics of those whom he criticizes. He thus becomes a poet and a folk singer, although he depicts the '60s "as a dark stain on American history," for "at no other time has lawlessness and immorality been so widespread." Even more cynical is the candidate's mock assassination, where he again borrows from his enemies when mimicking the horrific events that downed Kennedy, King, and Kennedy. In an event staged for the electronic media, he offers the public the semblance of an assassination, an event concocted for the cathoderay tube that is planned so successfully it catapults him into the Senate. Presented as a documentary, the film caustically depicts how Roberts short-circuits reality, displacing it with the mythical evocation of prescreened TV images. In this way the failed assassination of Bob Roberts is calculated to upstage the actual event, turn it upon itself, exterminate the dialectical logic between reality and image, and insert in its place a simulation of appearances. Through their performance, these simulated images proclaim the power of the media to reshape political events by implementing hyperreal strategies, which represent a succession of far right tactics employed in the past fourteen years. Such hyperreal strategies present forms of character assassination conducted in the name eradicating political correctness from the curriculum in American colleges and universities. In the film, however, Roberts imitates the Republican operatives who worked in the Reagan and Bush administrations, projecting their far right moral agenda onto opponents whose reputations they sought to destroy. Through both character assassination and the assassination of all but a few sanctioned signs, Republican image-


. 69

makers have sought to control the ordering of events and the production of meaning. Ironically, although McCarthy was censured in 1954, his form of intimidation, repressed during the '60s and '70s, was resurrected in 1980 by an actor, Ronald Reagan. I suggest, however, that the purges of the '50s and '80s were different in one regard: McCarthy was the real McCoy, while Reagan, like the mythical Roberts, presented us with so many staged, hyperreal gestures that we can label this period of American history "McReaganism." McReaganism consists of three elements: moral McCarthyism; McDonald's fast-food multinational capitalism, which has pervaded the American business community in the postmodern era; and the conversion of the president to a master of ceremonies who tries to control information placed on television and radio for public consumption. Thus, the much ballyhooed morality preached under Reagan's presidency was really a McMorality that espoused MeValues governed by a McLogic that was unreal, more a show of morality, values, and logic than a constituted belief. The weapon Reagan wielded to enforce his agenda was a toughtalking discourse based on a morality that apparently he himself did not share. In effect, he waged a series of televisual wars through the media that combined the worst aspects of McCarthyism with an emerging internationalist corporate commitment that held little real allegiance to the values it pretended to support. The result was a fast-food patriarchy that presented us with vatic signifiers proclaiming their own mythological importance. That is why Ronald Reagan could preach that old-time religion while Nancy Reagan called on astrological advice to help guide our country. Why Ronald Reagan could call for a doctrine of less governmental intervention while he joined with "pro-life" groups to institute governmental control over a woman's body. Why he called for the overthrow of Iranian leaders while he worked secretly with "Iranian moderates" behind the scenes of power. Why Reagan and Bush gave us a regime advocating implicit rules of acceptable "American behavior" while they declared that their domestic enemies had carved out a set of politically correct commandments. Reagan and Bush (and now Gingrich) have presented us with an era of pure show and a reality in search of itself—in search of meaning even as it has asserted a form of

70


McMeaning backed by televisually dramatized wars funded by corporate America and staged for significatory consumption. I have suggested that the bullyboy tactics practiced by Joseph McCarthy until his decline were suppressed until the ascension of Ronald Reagan and the Moral Majority, which came to power precisely when cable television became a prominent media form in the United States. This televisual factor helps to distinguish the purges of the '50s from those of the '80s. While McCarthy believed in the Truth of his crusade, Reagan's gestures were staged in a succession of special effects that recognized the supremacy of the televised event. Reagan's hypermorality was crafted for the camera in the same way that pious ultraconservative televangelists pitched their sermons in an ideological storytelling that mocked the mythos of faithful representation. This is the first element of McReaganism—a moral McCarthyism linked to the ascension of unprincipled religious leaders. Unfortunately, many of these evangelicals were more interested in wielding political power than in adhering to the Christian values they espoused. Some, like Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart, preached sexual morality in the white glare of the camera, but did not conduct themselves accordingly when offstage. Others, like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, used cable TV to insinuate themselves into the political debate, calling for America to arm itself to the hilt, distorting the Bible's call to "love thy neighbor." The second aspect of McReaganism is informed by the rise of fastfood capitalism during the postmodern period. The plastic toss-away, eat-and-run values epitomized by the McDonald's food chain demonstrates international capitalism at its worst. McDonald's has held little allegiance to America, its country of origin. With Reagan's blessing it instituted low wages while seeking to expand its empire of burgers and fries across the world. It is from this abbreviated logic that fast-food PC was constructed, a tract-housing philosophy built for short-term gain, which has grown in prominence through media overexposure of this simulated travesty of depiction that asks to be read as a reliable picture of events. In many ways an understanding of the hyperrealism of simulation is requisite knowledge in Reagan's America. Jean Baudrillard's comments on this subject, published about the same time that Reagan attempted to master the thirty-second sound bite, present a full-blown


. 71

theory of the wholesale "satellitization of the real" that became commonplace in the past decade ("Ecstasy" 128). During the Reagan era, right-wing spin doctors made it exceedingly difficult to distinguish the event from its depiction on the televised landscape of political advertising, which left the American people confused and increasingly pessimistic about the present age of neoconservative telecommandments. This leads us to the third aspect of McReaganism, which deals directly with the presidency itself. Under Reagan the presidential office was converted into a soapbox for an MC, that is, for the President as Master of Ceremonies, who, along with his scriptwriters, instituted spin control to direct the flow of media information for public consumption. Of course presidents before Reagan knew the importance of setting the agenda and receiving favorable press; however, the "Great Communicator" concentrated less on reacting to the media than in manipulating the stories it presented before they were written. His depiction of reality was crafted by shrewd media handlers who redirected the flow of information in their quest to anticipate analytic reconstructions. These reconstructions were all too often foiled, because Teflon Ron's three-dimensionless "simulacrum" remained resistant to an attempt at definitive analysis. In this way, McReaganism did not reflect reality, nor mask it. For in the Reagan age of simulated politics, the private and public space (both individual secrets and the common space of spectacle) have given way to an imagery bathed in the brash light of information overload. This in turn has produced an "all-too-visible . . . more-visible-than-the-visible" travesty of communication, which threatens to force an "extroversion of all interiority" and to trade "bodily movements for electronic commands" ("Ecstasy" 131,128). I have placed the roots of this political dynamic in a repressed form of McCarthyism that gained ascendancy in the Reagan era. One of the problems with McReaganism—which refers less to Reagan and Bush as figureheads than to a political position still advanced today by neoconservative Republicans like Newt Gingrich—is that it denies its historical agency, replacing it instead with the latest televisual version of events presented for the public. Because the public is addressed during this period as "cells-for-reading" induced to frame questions in relation to "media bundles," the real is displaced by a tele-electronic snow of forget-


fulness that settles over the collective memory (Simulations 105). In this way historical continuity is short-circuited, cultural amnesia ensured, and a direct experience of the unsymbolizable real denied. All facets of experience have been displaced by a hyperreal informational model bent on exterminating its historical referent. Directed by the command and control centers of televisual propaganda, the hyperreal model of simulation has gained influence through so many choreographed gestures that invade, instruct, and colonize the general public according to a given political agenda. This is scripted by media moguls who sensationalize events, create hysterical trends to captivate their audience, and provide a hallucinogenic intensification of our normally humdrum and familiar routines. The liquidation of the real is related to an age-old obscurantist policy of withholding knowledge from the general public by presenting information in a deliberately vague or abstruse manner. To pinpoint how this is accomplished in the age of information overload, we turn back to the mythological model of code making presented by Roland Barthes earlier in this chapter. Barthes states that myth authenticates what it posits by appealing to a second-order metalanguage that comments on a firstorder semiological system from a privileged site of viewing, which in turn places itself out-of-bounds to analytic scrutiny. In the mythic lexicon, there is a term-by-term reconversion through which myth takes itself for its own starting point. This point of initiation is constructed from a constant slippage wherein the product of the first-order language system slides beneath its own vanishing point as the annihilated sign. As the sign is transported to the adjacent realm of mythic formation, its historical context is lost and political obscurantism is insured, especially when this transformation occurs in the white glare of information overload. This process describes McCarthyism in its most virulent form. The political leader from Wisconsin was proficient at conjuring up mythic signifiers—Communist, un-American, conspirator—to provide a coherent foundation for transcendental signifieds that were accepted by the American public. During his reign of terror, the demagogic McCarthy authorized officials to conduct witch-hunts in search of subversives that were possible only as long as the transcendental signified—detestable un-American infiltrator—retained currency with the public. The big lie,


. 73

reckless smear, and disregard for due process were not censured as long as the American public bought wholesale the myth that the Communist Party harbored a "nest of spies" intent on overthrowing our government. All this was acceptable as long as the suppression of Communism was recycled as the identifying symptom of American culture and "the cornerstone of American foreign policy, domestic politics, and bourgeois consensus" (Phelps 43). But eventually, cultural identities change, and this one partially faded with time until it was revived in another form with the advent of McReaganism in the '80s. Once again the cold war emotionalism of the '50s was generated against an "Evil Empire," but this time the red scare became a product increasingly promoted for consumption at home. For in the '80s and '90s, the anti-Communist fervor became a byproduct of a hyperreal advertising campaign that did not completely take itself seriously. Rather than use mimetic tactics of derision and parody, the Republican majority created a series of mythic signs that appropriated the real for its own ends by anticipating it "to the point that the real no longer has time to be produced as such" (Baudrillard, Evil Demon 16). If, during the McCarth era, the cultural real related to the battleline traumas of World War II displaced onto the emergent "Communist monsters," during the age of McReaganism, a hyperreal simulation of trauma has been invoked to fill the void left by the cessation of the cold war between America and the Soviet Union. So the war slowly came home. If we were fighting an external menace in the beginning of Reagan's term, by the time Bush left office, "the socialist scourge" was found under every nook and cranny of your local university. For the age of McReaganism is typified by charges of left-wing McCarthyism "meant to disembody the name from history, to erase the memory of the right's legacy of repression and reaction while a new attack is waged against progressive social movements" (Phelps 47). This is a calculated effort based on the cynical notion that events no longer have any meaning outside their performance on the cathode-ray tube or celluloid screen. What we are left with today is a media-produced cold war scenario that internalizes the enemy-as-academic. Although Reagan initially had some anti-Communist affect to draw upon when he took office, by the time that charges of left-wing McCarthyism surfaced along

74 • Fast-Food PC, McCarthyism, and McReaganism

with the cries of PC censorship, we had arrived at a point in history where transcendental signs had transfigured the geopolitical landscape into an absurd caricature of a 1950s Hollywood production number. Finally, we are left with a hodgepodge empiricist presentation featuring a group of postmodern Bonzos wielding morality as a weapon even as they appropriate the tactics of their adversaries. This explains how neoconservatives can sing the praises of the "pacifistic" Lord while arming themselves to the teeth. How they can criticize left-wing critics as MLA/PC-ayatollahs while they bow down to Mammon, the almighty dollar. How they can encourage corporate growth yet create the conditions for downsizing the workforce. How they can belittle the Democrats for fiscal irresponsibility while sending the national debt beyond what was thought believable fifteen years ago. How they can preach middleclass values while shrinking the middle-class, then subdividing it along class lines into the wealthy and the poor. How these capitalistic colonialists can cry "America First" while selling America to foreign investors. How they can point the middlefingerof scorn at PC tactics while engaging in ideological McCarthyism. Next thing you'll know, when neoconservatives look in the mirror, they will see their adversaries peering back at them.

5 . Constructing the Enemy

57 FLAVORS OF INTIMIDATION

One method right-wing critics have used to stigmatize their enemies has been to disseminate fear as the main ingredient of their ideological perspective. In this chapter, we will examine the neoconservative use of fear (especially paranoia), which is often tied to projection. Lacan argued that the modern period was especially marked by an escalation of paranoia and projections. Teresa Brennan has drawn out this aspect of Lacan's work while explicating the historical dynamics that underpin it. While in broad agreement with Brennan's argument, I want to suggest here that McCarthyism marks the beginning of what she terms the Age of Paranoia. In other words, the paranoid "ego's era," which Lacan and Brennan situate as starting in the seventeenth century, has not been uniform in its acceleration; rather, it bursts upon us unbridled in the 1950s. As Brennan observes, this is where we see subjects and their affective meanings float away from the flesh and down the chain of signification into the world of metaphor in a way that they had not previously. I will also show in this chapter how more extreme right-wing critics today practice distortions similar to those of politicians in the McCarthy era. It is not only the anti-PC campaigners who twist words and make unsubstantiated claims. These topics have a longer history and broader compass for conservative politicians in the latter part of the twentieth century. In part, it is because they share these tactics with neoconservatives 75

j6

. Constructing the Enemy

today that we can identify the ideological impulses behind the current "anti-political correctness" campaign. Right-wing ideologues of the 50s seemed to know that if they could authorize paranoia as a dominant cultural discourse, they would not only set the emotional tenor of the times, but control the debate over what issues were important to their overall project of social engineering. To do this effectively, they were forced to conjure up a universe of suspicion that, above all, did not reflect back on them. How could they pen an incendiary series of political accusations yet deflect criticism that could return to sender? By selling the public paranoid perceptions that helped them to instate a political program which vilified their enemies. This tactic worked for a while in the early '50s before it backfired in McCarthy's face. During that period, he was able to produce a chilling effect on academic freedom and to subdue the liberal expression of ideas in the federal government and Hollywood. Just as McCarthy went after Marxists who taught on campuses across the country during that period, neoconservatives today have targeted gays, women, people of color, and Marxists who disagree with their political perspective. By raising a din about "special interest groups," these ultraconservative reactionaries have embarked on a campaign to set the agenda, control the debate, and silence those voices raised in defense of constitutional freedoms. What better way to accomplish this mammoth task than to institute a politics of projection to deflect attention from their publicly unstated designs, while they practice the lessons McCarthy taught them so well forty years ago. In chapter 4, we saw that "McCarthyism of the Left" was afictionused to accuse "politically correct" academics of conducting witch-hunts in search of subversive elements on campus. But if we examine how McCarthy conducted himself in the '50s, a direct parallel can be drawn between the intimidating rhetorical tactics he used to batter cold war electoral rivals and those employed today by neoconservatives who persist in redefining '60s activists, liberal bureaucrats, and the MLA/PCayatollahs as part of their revisionist history. Both McCarthy and his successors have utilized strategies that turn events on their head by deliberately ignoring the structure of evidence so that the innocent become

Constructing the Enemy . 77

guilty, damned by their very innocence, which, through the reconfiguration of narrative details, becomes a proof of their guilt. Any study of an American politics of intimidation could start with "Joltin' Joe" McCarthy. When casting aspersions on the character of his ideological adversaries, one of McCarthy's most famous tactics was to equivocate to protect himself against counter attacks that would call into question the details used to support his accusations. The most noted instance of McCarthy's equivocation can be found in the infamous Wheeling speech offered in his Lincoln Day offensive: While I cannot take the time to name all of the men in the State Department who have been named as members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring, I have here in my hand a list of 205 . . . a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department. (Fried 23)

As the quotation indicates, McCarthy initially accused 205 Communists of constituting a "spy ring" in the State Department, but he quickly amended that figure to 57 "card-carrying Communists" who had infiltrated this division of government—the "Heinz 57" he bandied about in subsequent speeches. To explain his dramatic alteration of data, McCarthy claimed that 205 public servants played "a lesser role" in this sordid affair, afigurelater changed to 207,300, and 285 before it became "over 200" departmental "bad risks" (Fried 23-25). The final number McCarthy submitted for consideration was 81 department employees who displayed questionable loyalty to the government of the United States. They were taken from a list of 108 loyaltyfiles,"57 of which remained in the State Department at the time the 108 list was drawn up— hence McCarthy's '57 Communists' " of questionable persuasion (Fried 25-26). In this way, Americans were presented with a classic case of equivocation wherein McCarthy repeatedly changed his story to provide a rationale for the wide numerical variance of his claims. The problem was that the anti-Communist fervor ran so rampant in America at this time that McCarthy was able to exploit these feelings with the aid of his Republican colleagues, who were well aware of the propaganda value of this issue. But there was another problem: the Dem-

j8


ocrats' ineptitude in countering McCarthy's strategies. Richard M. Fried states that, initially, Senator Scott M. Lucas, the Democratic majority leader, did interrupt McCarthy at the hearings, but "he gave the impression of having lost sight of the distinction between rebuttal and harassment . . . [and] his thrusts lackedfinesse"(27). History has proven that Lucas's rebuttal was as ineffectual as the Democratic strategy in general. As a result, McCarthy and his red-hunters gained prestige and power through the brutal tactics of name-calling, sloganeering, and character assassination. Considering the high-voltage charges McCarthy leveled against the "arch-villains" he created in his smear campaigns, the Democratic silence on this issue was deafening. So there is a lesson here for contemporary academics who are under the same type of attack today: silence can be construed so that the public believes "PC professors" have something to hide behind the walls of academe where they are supposedly barricading themselves. After he was called before the McCarthy Committee, James A. Wechsler, an editorial page editor and columnist for the New York Post, e plained how silence could be used as an admission of guilt. When answering the famous question—"Do you have any other people who are members of the Young Communist League, who were or are members of the Young Communist League, working for you?"—Wechsler understood that his refusal to answer the question would condemn him as someone who had something to hide from the light of public scrutiny (29). Wechsler told McCarthy, "I answer the question solely because I recognize your capacity for misinterpretation of a failure to answer . . . [so] I answer it with the protest signified" (30). When facing down McCarthy and his protege Roy Cohn, Wechsler learned that, because The Great Equivocator used a number of other methods to conduct his sham interrogations, silence was an inadequate response to such calculated legalistic shenanigans. One tactic McCarthy used was to shift quickly from point to point without amassing "credible" evidence along the way, for he was not interested in establishing the believability of his points. Instead, he danced adeptly along the edge of his research, introducing innuendo, forcing those on his enemies list to defend themselves against an accumulation of often bogus, damning information.

Constructing the Enemy . 79 James A. Wechsler was forced to speak on his own behalf because McCarthy was skilled at rhetorically altering his evidence, so what appeared at first glance to be obvious became shaded by this cynical politician, who used any means at his disposal to discredit his witnesses. Wechsler recognized the need to present an articulate rebuttal after he asked permission to introduce into the record a statement issued by the National Committee of the Communist Party, which complained about the policies of the "Reuthers, Dubinskys, Wechslers et al who paralyzed independent political action" (31). Wechsler submitted this document to demonstrate that the "most effective opponents of communism in America have been the liberals and labor leaders associated with the noncommunist Left" (31). But a coalition of conservative groups found this claim to be an anathema since many of them shared the omnibus belief that the Left was somehow less patriotic because of its political stand on issues. Wechsler found that, rather than proving Communist groups were disaffected with his politics, the statement read into the record provoked McCarthy to ask if the editor had "anything to do with the passage of that [very] resolution [which condemned him]," and if he was thus, really, by inference, a frontman for those "un-American dissidents" who wished to topple the U.S. government from within. Shocked into inarticulate confusion by McCarthy's line of questioning, Wechsler groped to deny that he was behind the polemical attacks leveled against him by communists who disagreed with his editorial policies. Only then did the unprepared Wechsler recognize that McCarthy had introduced into American politics a daring new concept in which the existence of evidence of innocence becomes the damning proof of guilt. This is the way it must feel to be committed to a madhouse through some medical mistake; everything is turned upside down ... [and this leads to] the formula under which our whole society could be transformed into a universe of suspicion. What a man had said or done could no longer be accepted as bearing the slightest relationship to what he was or what he believed. More likely, it was a disguise to conceal his hidden allegiances to exactly the reverse of what he claimed to stand for. (32-33) McCarthy's political tactic of determining guilt by lack of association is connected to the political use of the psychological defense mechanism

80


of projection. This is especially relevant here, because McCarthy employed the politics of projection to transpose the site of origin between crime and punishment, so that the line of demarcation between ethical and unethical behavior became questionable. As Wechsler learned, in one fell swoop McCarthy was able to link a politics of projection with a cultural agenda that created paranoia among the body politic; all he had to do was pursue a strategy of implying guilt by nonassociation. Wechsler's testimony makes it evident that McCarthy's tactics—his tendency to offer a summation before the hearing even began, his scurrilous attempts at character assassination, and his fast-and-loose numbers game (was that 300, 285, or 57 flavors of intimidation?)—undermined the democratic ideals he purportedly sought to protect. McCarthy's verbal assaults enabled him to project his own undemocratic reductionist tendencies onto the "pinko-front" he created for his single-track redhunters, while he pretended to defend the United States from a sinister internal enemy that wished to undermine bourgeois society as we know it. Not coincidentally, this enabled the grand inquisitor to create a culture of paranoia. Even Roy Cohn, the controversial New York attorney who absurdly believed that McCarthy was "a champion of First Amendment rights," agreed that this master interrogator was really a master of overheated rhetoric and extralegal distortion. Cohn was certain that history would vindicate his boss, whom he believed "may have been wrong in details, but was right in essentials" (61). But he was forced to admit that McCarthy "was a salesman . . . selling the story of America's peril [because] he knew that he could never hope to convince anybody by delivering a dry, general-accounting-office type of presentation ... [so] he stepped up circumstances a notch or two" (Cohn 59). Here Cohn presents the rationalization for McCarthy's sale of a paranoid fantasy calculated to bamboozle the American public into fearing the regnant Communist bogeyman. Even Cohn admitted that this scapegoat-demon was fashioned from hyperbolic distortions to ensure that other politicians would follow McCarthy's ideological lead and participate in the reactionary infringement of civil rights occurring at this time. McCarthy was successful because his rhetorical domination of highly charged emotional issues in the early '50s enabled him to recruit mem-


bers of the private sector to create assigned war zones on the domestic front. To do so, people had to be designated as objectionable, then punished accordingly. This strategy provided the contours of "the two stages of McCarthyism" that Ellen Schrecker identifies in her article of the same name: "First, the objectionable groups and individuals were identified—during a committee hearing, for example, or an FBI investigation; then, they were punished, usually by being fired" (98). Prime movers like McCarthy and his Republican colleagues took care of disseminating the propaganda of paranoia against internal enemies identified as seditious, but they needed the private sector to dismiss people from their jobs. Because of this warlike mentality, thousands of innocent people became unemployed and many more feared the same would happen to them. They had a right to fear for their safety because groups like General Motors, General Electric, CBS, the New York Times, the New York Board of Education, the United Auto Workers, and numerous public and private employers fired employees targeted by McCarthy and HUAC (Schrecker 99). Of special interest to a study of political correctness are the devastating effects that McCarthy's vendetta had on academic circles in the 1950s. Twenty percent of the witnesses who came before national and state committees were teachers and students, and, unfortunately, "most of those academic witnesses who did not clear themselves with the committees lost their jobs" (Schrecker 99). Because McCarthy's hyped-up war to discredit members of the intellectual community succeeded in triggering repercussions against the accused, the academic world proceeded to police students and professors in a form of self-censorship that produced for McCarthy and his cohorts the desired chilling effect: Marxism and its practitioners were marginalized, if not completely banished from the academy. Open criticism of the political status quo disappeared. And college students became a silent generation whose most adventurous spirits sought cultural instead of political outlets for their discussion. (Schrecker 100) One far-reaching effect of McCarthyism on the academic community was to bar Marxist critics from the university for several decades. For unlike Wechsler and other members of the liberal professional class,


Marxist intellectuals were unable to mount a defense against McCarthy's recriminations on their attitude toward U.S. foreign policy. But the Marxist intelligentsia was not the only group that absorbed the brunt of the Republican's blame-and-brand tactics of the '50s, for an academic culture of noninvolvement grew up at this time as a result of the broadbrush smear campaign conducted in the name of triumphal McCarthyism. As we have seen, such campaigns resulted in the academic community absorbing these violent attacks, which produced a compliant self-censorship on campus. As a result, political activism became almost nonexistent as college students became the silent generation that gained a voice only after a decisive turnabout in political fortunes. Another effect of McCarthy's alienating policies of rebuke and recrimination was that New Criticism, the philosophy propounded by I. A. Richards, William Empson, Cleanth Brooks, and W. K. Wimsatt, Jr among others, became the dominant discourse within academic English departments during this period. The tenets of New Criticism emphasized close reading with scrupulous attention to the specifics of the sacredincensed text as the privileged site of meaning. For the New Critics, ideological readings that appraised the text in light of theoretical, ideological, and cultural perspectives were cast out of the circuit of textual acceptability. Yet New Criticism itself advanced an ideology of disinterestedness that was anything but disinterested. Its conservative ordering of referential acceptability became a part of the political relay McCarthy established between different sectors of society. As Terry Eagleton cogently argues in Literary Theory: An Introduction, this "serene, specul tive, impeccably evenhanded rejection of anything in particular . . . drove you less to oppose McCarthyism or further civil rights than to experience such pressures as merely partial, no doubt harmoniously balanced somewhere else in the world by their complementary opposites" (50). In other words, New Critical conservatism allowed its practitioners to present the academic world with a prescription for retro politics and cultural quietism; this threw an ideological blanket over all initiatives that encouraged diverse opinions that diverged from the agreed upon, and thus sacrosanct, underlying rhetorical structure of the text. In New Criticism, as in McCarthyism, diverse opinions were acceptable only if they supported the underlying rationale sanctioned by the textual and

Constructing the Enemy . 83 political authorities who proclaimed the truth of their readings, which, in effect, allowed the ruling political party to retain its ascendancy. THE PROCESS OF PARANOID PROJECTION

We have seen how McCarthy forged a link between a politics of projection and his agenda of authorizing paranoia as a dominant cultural discourse. Later, Reagan and his neoconservative constituency advanced this process as a hand-me-down once-over of social engineering. However, before we examine how they sutured anxiety onto the cultural field of intersubjective relations, let us look at the theoretical model that rivets paranoia to projection. According to Freud, what constitutes the psychoanalytic defense mechanism of projection? When discussing projection, Freud showed how some unacceptable aspect of the ego that is inadmissible to consciousness must be denied before it is directed onto another person from whom it appears to originate. The traditional psychoanalytic model posits denial and a redistribution of affect from the interior to the periphery, from internalized zones of psychic consciousness to an externalized point of address, from the subject to the other. In The Languag of Psychoanalysis, Laplanche and Pontalis define projection as the psycho-analytic operation whereby qualities, feelings, wishes or even "objects," which the subject refuses to recognize or rejects in himself, are expelled from the self and located in another person or thing. Projection so understood is a defense of very primitive origin which may be seen at work especially in paranoia, but also in "normal" modes of thought such as superstition. (349)

In this twofold dynamic, the subject disavows desires before recognizing them in other people whom she or he detests. In this blueprint of selfdeception, the impulse, affect, or content of the psychical idea is disowned—buried in the psyche, then resurrected in the other. The person who acts as a container for the repressed psychical idea earns the subject's distrust for embodying the very attribute that the subject, in a previous state of consciousness, had repressed. Apprehending the other's inimical intentions based on disavowing psychical ideas establishes a correlation between paranoia and projec-


tion. Looking at the history of these two terms, we find that at the outset of his investigation into this correlation, Freud introduces projection in a footnote when developing the psychic significance of paranoia and projection. Shortly thereafter, on page 206 of Extracts from the Fliess P pers, he juxtaposes the terms again when outlining the representational patterns of a woman who deflects her inner commentary onto another to escape labeling herself as "bad": "earlier it had been an internal selfreproach, now it was an imputation coming from outside ... in this way the judgment, the reproach, was kept away from the ego" ("Draft H. Paranoia" 208-9). Freud goes on to explain that "the purpose of paranoia is thus to fend off an idea that is incompatible with the ego, by projecting its substance into the external world" ("Draft H. Paranoia" 209). Later in The Fliess Papers he clarifies his theoretical model, using t economic paradigm as a basis for his formulations. In paranoia, he states, the repression of ideas coheres around the release of unpleasurable affect, which manifests without any attendant self-judgments; instead, such disagreeable judgments are shuttled onto others along with a paranoiac distrust, whose response to this projective defense returns in the form of hallucinations and displaced voices. The disturbing tone of the voices emanating from the unsettling hallucinations takes on added importance since "a direct reference from the content of remarks to the repressed memory is inadmissible to consciousness" ("Draft K. Neuroses" 226-28). In Further Remarks on the Neuro-Psychoses of Defense, Freud states

that in paranoia repression is "the nucleus of the psychical mechanism" ("Chronic Paranoia" 183). For the paranoid personality, the debilitating self-judgment is repressed, then deflected onto the other so that the split, noncoherent subject not only withdraws acknowledgment of the reproach but is, in the process, deprived of self-judgmental accusations. These then manifest in delusional ideas, in hallucinations of being watched or of hearing voices ("Chronic Paranoia" 183-84). Finally, in Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Para-

noia, this neurosis is characterized by the "detachment of libido" from a previous loved one, a withdrawal of affect that happens so silently it can only be inferred from events. Following Freud's theoretical drift we learn that, in this projective paradigm of shifts, ellipses, and breaks, the


psychoanalyst makes a subtle distinction: it is "incorrect to say that the perception which was suppressed internally is projected outwards; the truth is rather, as we now see, that what was abolished internally returns from without" ("Mechanism" 71). No longer does Freud talk about suppression of the ideational context; he stresses instead its utter abolishment before, from its ashes, the effaced representation rises phoenix-like in its projected transmittal. Although projection was first identified as one mechanism of the paranoiac system of defenses, Freud later relates it to a whole range of psychical phenomena including mythical projection, which functions in superstition and animism as the belief that natural phenomena and inanimate things have souls. This is especially relevant if one considers the tie between paranoia, distrust, and the demonization of people as scapegoats. In Totem and Taboo, Freud develops the commensurate terms of the mythical lexicon by interrelating the hostility the living feel for the dead with the mythological fata morgana attributed to demonic forces that paranoid subjects find threatening ("Emotional Ambivalence" 60-66). In this way, the recently deceased are transformed into demons that haunt the living, gloat over their misfortunes, and, in some cases, attempt to kill them. What is important in Freud's formulations is the psychogenesis of such ahistorical monstrosities. In Totem and Taboo, Freud gives a rationale for the transformation of the dead into demons that have passed into the realm of a double-valued stratification: (1) as the souls of loved ones who have died, and (2) as incorporeal images that have entered into the zone of projected phenomena. These loved ones are restructured as demons by their survivors to protect them from their own hostility, which emanates from a bipolar ambivalence transmuted into a defense against death. In the following passage, Freud states as much when he identifies projection with the construction of this extrapolated image: But this hostility, distressingly felt in the unconscious as satisfaction over the death, is differently dealt with among primitive peoples. The defense against it takes the form of displacing it on to the object of the hostility, on to the dead themselves. This defensive procedure, which is a common one both in normal and pathological mental life, is known as a 'projection. The survivor thus denies that he has ever harboured any hostile feel-

86 . Constructing the Enemy ings against the dead loved one; the soul of the dead harbours them instead and seeks to put them into action during the whole period of mourning. ("Emotional Ambivalence" 61)

This passage demonstrates how survivors perpetuate a cycle of punishment and remorse that is at once denied—ejected from internal perception—and then displaced onto an external object. The psychical event of relieving internal pressure is exchanged for a perceived external persecution from ghosts, demons, and other avenging spirits. Freud argues that if the task of mourning to detach the memories of the living from the dead is inadequately performed, instead of a diminution of remorse and self-reproach toward the departed there will be ambivalent feelings that remain unresolved. AN INTERNATIONAL POLITICS OF PARANOID PROJECTION

In the first part of this chapter, we saw how McCarthy created a climate of fear and suspicion used to impugn the reputations of those accused of being un-American subversives. In making these accusations, McCarthy set a precedent by authorizing paranoia as a dominant cultural discourse, which, after Reagan became president, the far right resurrected as a process of social engineering that furthered their ideological aspirations. With the advent of the Reagan doctrine, a new age of policy criticism and personal vilification became the norm in the politics of smear and division, which emulated the worst tactics of the McCarthy era. As a means of partitioning power and extending the political dynamic of presidential teleguidance, Reagan and his cohorts revived the politics of paranoid projection to ensure signifying supremacy. Reading these tactics through a Freudian model, we can say that far right extremists sought to fend off ideas incompatible with their worldview by first denying, then projecting repressed phenomena onto their electoral enemies. In keeping with this model, neoconservative politicians exhibited a distrust of other people who were cast out of the sanctioned circuit of social affiliations. In this way, a paranoia of distrust meshed with a politics of character assassination, helping them to conduct an ideological crusade to influence the critical debate. Neoconservative distrust is based on the pretense of an indisputable


given: their adversaries will stalk them in the same way that paranoids are invaded and colonized by demons. The only difference between the paranoid personality that projects unacknowledged feelings onto the dead and right-wing politicians that displace their anger onto electoral opponents is that the latter know they are suppressing power-related desires even as they confront their foes on camera; this political facade allows them to pretend that the country is under siege from a group of demonic agent provocateurs. Because neoconservative mythmakers have been successful in mapping their paranoid projections onto the political landscape, they have become bold about taking the next illogical step: they presume to have access to a higher moral standard as they employ whatever immoral means at their disposal to cast ridicule upon targets and to camouflage the paranoid reality of their own right-wing making. We have already determined that McReaganism signifies an acerbic form of moral McCarthyism. To inflate this culturally fabricated retread, ultraconservative recyclers claim their political opponents exhibit a sub par moral standard that is somehow un- Christian and somewhat unAmerican. To a great extent the mind-set of McReaganism was formed as a result of collusion between the Christian right and hard-core political neoconservatives that assumed control of the Republican Party. In their attempt to transform the Republican Party into the Christian Republican Party, far right activists and evangelical fundamentalists sought to convince the American public that the liberal intelligentsia and their Democratic sponsors have demonstrated a nihilistic cultural ethos that is immoral. To support such claims, they decided, in a dangerous retrograde gesture, to issue "'report cards' rating candidates according to 'biblical standards'" (Bole 24). Obviously, the evangelical right did this for overtly political reasons: to defeat Democratic candidates, in this instance Frank Church, George McGovern, and Birch Bayh, who flunked the moral accreditation test because of their positions on specific issues. After their success in discrediting the accused in the court of public opinion, the American Coalition for Traditional Values, which helped in the formation of the Moral Majority, Christian Voice, and the Religious Roundtable, offered a list of ten overriding moral concerns they had for the country:

88 . Constructing the Enemy The group calls for Bible reading and prayer in public schools, an antiabortion amendment, laws against pornography, an end to state regulation of Christian schools, defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment and gayrights legislation, more defense spending and less spending on social programs. (Bole 25)

To implement these stated goals, the founder of the ACTV, Thomas LaHaye, gained access to the White House while Ronald Reagan and George Bush were in power. Thus, the merger between neoconservative politicians and Christian evangelicals was accomplished on a formal level in the recesses of institutional power. It is worth noting that the prime movers of the Grand Old Party forged a bond as the Christian caucus sought broad-based popular appeal by conducting a grassroots campaign to sanction their point of view among the electorate. For in the 1980s, the American electorate was faced with a wry wink and a smug smile as the Christian Coalition flexed its political muscle while pretending to be a nonpartisan group deserving of their tax-exempt status. Yet, the ACTV'S own "voter manual opens with a letter of endorsement from President Reagan, and its principal organizing tool was the Christian Voice's highly partisan 'Presidential Biblical Scoreboard,' which branded Walter Mondale as a 'Humanist-Presbyterian'" (Bole 25). Neoconservative militants are fond of condemning liberals for supporting a policy of moral relativism. Liberalism, they derisively declare, is based on the relativistic conception that each subject retains his or her own moral code, none of which is superior to any other. But they don't realize that at the basis of liberalism is a belief that Americans are an ethical people who respect the rights of others to conduct themselves in accordance with their own particular codes of conduct. Liberals "will apply your moral code to you to see if you live by it," but they "will not interfere unless you are hurting somebody else" (Lowi 3). While liberalism does not explicitly endorse imposing one moral system over another, conservatism elevates one moral principle to a transcendental position that can be identified as the basis for government policy decisions. Because of their smug certainty that one moral master term has universal sway over all secular matters, neoconservative lawmakers strive to impose "a parochial vision to the national government—parochial in both senses of the word: religious and local" (Lowi 3).


One problem with this overrapid universalization of secular phenomena is that neoconservatives have become convinced they are engaged in a Manichaean struggle between "the forces of light (democracy) and the forces of darkness (Marxism-Leninism)," or, put another way, between the forces of morality (the Christian Republican Party) and the forces of immorality (those on their enemy's list) (Johnson 514). The difference between the Manichaean paranoia of the McCarthy era and that of the Reagan period is that the latter has been expanded beyond the immediacy of the "communist threat" to include liberals, feminists, African Americans, gays, and lesbians. While conservatives in the '50s sought to indoctrinate women to take their place within the paternalistic family structure and to dishonor the civil rights of blacks and gays as they had for countless centuries, the moral McCarthyism of the Reagan era is far more dangerous than its aforementioned predecessor if only because more people are ignorant of it. Another problem associated with the paranoid Manichaean worldview is the assumption that any means is acceptable to arrive at a perceived moral end, a philosophy which has had implications for policy decisions. Since the 1950s, doctrinaire conservatives have believed that all communist regimes were part of an overriding threat posed by the Soviet Union. They therefore have applied the following logic to the geopolitical landscape: "the means employed in implementing a policy (for example, guerrilla war) raise serious moral objections"; however, if "the purposes of policy and its probable consequences are morally supportable, those objections might be overridden in a comprehensive moral calculus" (Johnson 518). Thus, neoconservatives discounted informed opinions based on historical evidence, which demonstrated that insurgent movements throughout the third world were capable of acting independently of the Soviet Union and, in many cases, were supported by large segments of their own population. Since conservative policymakers were intent upon pitting the U.S. against the S.U. (notice the mirror reversal of the abbreviation), they opposed this "demonic ungodly force for evil" while peddling the tale that the Soviets would use any means at their disposal to curb U.S. influence in the world. Because of this paranoid perception, the McReaganites of the '80s sanctioned guerrilla warfare, political assassination, and cover-up tactics to hide

90


their actions from the U.S. public and Congress. They carried out their actions in the name of a triumphal moral standard exalted to annex political profit for their far-reaching agenda to reorient America along the axis of fundamentalist Christianity where it segues with multinational capitalism. In the 1980s we witnessed how this sanctimonious social drama was presented for public opinion, wherein war was waged for "morally justifiable" reasons by those who posed as paragons of virtue. By using the third world as a screen for their paranoid projections, members of rightwing religious organizations and their neoconservative allies turned Christian values on their head. Instead of honoring sayings like "the meek shall inherit the earth," "love thy neighbor," "let he who is without sin cast the first stone," and "turn the other cheek," they undermined possibilities for peace in the world by promoting guerrilla warfare when it served their purpose to do so. Because the neoconservative sensibility is based on the hope that the strong shall inherit the earth, they have lobbied intensely to appropriate more money for defense spending. Rather than turning the other cheek or refusing to cast the first stone, they have greeted their foes with bitterness and hostility because rightwing policymakers demonstrate a paranoid distrust of nation-states that fall outside of their immediate circle of influence. They have been convinced since the McCarthy era that the United States is the object of a worldwide conspiracy concocted by ghoulish, ungodly communists whose single-track obsession is to export their subversive philosophy throughout the world. Thus, we have been subjected to pronouncements like this one by President Reagan in his 1985 State of the Union address: Our mission is to nourish and defend freedom and democracy... we must not break faith with those who are risking their lives—on every continent, from Afghanistan to Nicaragua—to defy Soviet-supported aggression and secure rights which have been ours from birth Support for freedomfightersis self-defense, (quoted in Johnson 509) This was typical Reagan fare, in which "the Great Communicator" outlined a global containment program that became the cornerstone of his foreign policy to halt the advance of communism. The Reagan doctrine


aggressively affirmed its presence in third world countries because it presumed that "the balance of power in the world is precarious and unstable and that America's overseas commitments are interdependent" (Layne 76). Assuming the United States was not doing its best to combat the Soviet cold war challenge during the Carter administration, Reagan galloped out of Hollywood to the rescue, establishing a neoconservative blueprint for action that equated a free market capitalist economy with democracy while it claimed that no institution, organization, or nation should be capable of vetoing American actions (Heritage 54). The Wild West mentality of the Reagan-Bush coalition enabled them to "ignore the immorality of means and consequences" of their actions "which contributed to ... the most fundamental moral flaw of U.S. policy—the strong tendency toward moral hubris ... dramatized, for example, in the testimony of Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North in the Iran-contra hearings" (Johnson 528). This moral arrogance stems from the belief that, because God is on our side, we are a privileged country superior to our ideological opponents. This reveals a holier-than-thou outlook that recasts the Soviets from the role of international antagonist to demonic force. No one is denying the obvious: that there was a cold war and that both the United States and the Soviet Union competed ideologically to win that war. The situation, however, was compounded by conservative national extremists on both sides who gained from the perpetuation of the conflict. They superimposed on the political problems existing between these two countries a pandemic paranoia that sought out and found international rivals everywhere. In their excessive preoccupation with the global anti-communist crusade, Reagan and Bush reduced the third world to a projective schoolyard battleground between good and evil, which led to a high-stakes military buildup, fed their limitless appetite for defense spending, unleashed the "democratic freedomfighters,"and generated an attempt by the United States to remake the world in its own ideologically compatible image. The neoconservative obsession with providing aid, guns, and soldiers to "non-democratic totalitarian regimes" has also engendered the same type of suspicions on the domestic front. For they have determined that these threats exist in the United States as well, and, conse-


quently, they are using the same immoral means to combat the "ideological menace" at home. Thus, a reactionary multilateral international policy has been paired with a crusading interventionist national agenda to discredit the liberal intelligentsia and the "PC militants." FREUDIAN PROJECTION AND THE POLITICS OF MORAL HUBRIS At this juncture it would be helpful to recall the basic precepts of projection as they relate to the creation of paranoid perceptions. At the outset, there is an idea or affect that must be fended off. In this psychic sequence the ideational representative is repressed into unconscious oblivion, then resurrected along a projective trajectory that displaces it onto the other so that the original representation appears to emanate from the external world. Connected to this process is a paranoid defensiveness that embattles the ego with imagistic and/or auditory hallucinations perceived to be hostile. The paranoid subject, who has an investment in denying repressed self-reproaches, feels attacked and thus becomes distrustful of others. As we saw, Freud later added a theory of demonic retribution to his formulations on projection. In this instance, hostility against the dead is harbored by survivors, who have repressed their ambivalence toward past loved ones. But Freud expanded these theoretical elaborations when linking projection to dream mentation, ego and superego formation, and the general construction of the external world from internal stimuli. Here we should return to Totem and Taboo, especially to a passage pertaining to a generalized theory of projection. In this text Freud evolves a rationale for how the external world is articulated from a phantasmic structure created from the pulse of internal stimuli: The projection outwards of internal perceptions is a primitive mechanism, to which, for instance, our sense perceptions are subject, and which therefore normally plays a very large part in determining the form taken by our external world. Under conditions whose nature has not yet been sufficiently established, internal perceptions of emotional and thought processes can be projected outwards in the same way as sense perceptions; they are thus employed for building up the external world, though they should by rights remain part of the internal world. This may have some

Constructing the Enemy . 93 genetic connection with the fact that the function of attention was originally directed not towards the internal world but towards the stimuli that stream in from the external world, and that that function's only information upon endopsychic processes was received from feelings of pleasure and unpleasure Before that, owing to the projection outwards of internal perceptions, primitive men arrived at a picture of the external world which we, with our intensified conscious perception, have now to translate back into psychology. ("Emotional Ambivalence" 64)

With this passage Freud explores new territory, imparting psychic specificity to his account of how the external world is structured through the redistribution of protective perceptions. Once again this psychological process is a determinant factor in the construction of the intersubjective interchange, but this time its purpose is not to function as a defense mechanism. In this case, projection becomes a vehicle connecting the subject's sense perceptions, emotional cathexes, and thought processes with external stimuli that streams in from the world at large. According to this theory, we erect the external world upon an arc of projective formation that personifies the inner aspects of our psychic structure. Although it is problematic that Freud establishes a binary pairing of inner and outer psychic phenomena, the logic of his argument cuts against the terms he uses to develop it. For in Freud's formulation of the projective/introjective dyad, the inner/outer binary is undercut by a counterlogic suggesting that these two psychic mechanisms are in play between these two poles of demarcation. On the next page of Totem and Taboo, Freud posits that "projecte creations of primitive men resemble the personifications constructed by creative writers; for the latter externalize in the form of separate individuals the opposing instinctual impulses struggling within them" ("Emotional Ambivalence" 65). This passage provides a basis for his theory of doubling, wherein internal stimuli divided into acceptable/unacceptable, good/bad, and right/wrong have been used by some creative writers when they devise protagonists and antagonists. Much ink has been spilled by writers to account for a creative process that supports Freud's theory of psycho-aesthetic determination. For our purposes, however, this hypothesis gives us a basis for understanding the political genesis of

94 • Constructing the Enemy

the Manichaean binary that divides the world into forces of mythic good and evil. The binary comes into focus when Freud develops the interlinkage between character development and psychic defenses in which spirits are fabricated into figural aspects of emotional disavowal. Freud declares that man "turns his emotional cathexes into persons, he peoples the world with them and meets his internal mental processes again outside himself" (92). This passage expands upon the doubling process just explicated, which comments on creative writers and the psychogenesis of characterization. Freud closes this theoretical loop on the next page of Totem and Taboo when he conjoins the creative and projective processes with his ongoing discussion of spirit birth as a problem for the living who confront their psychic representations of the dead. During this discussion, he introduces a distinction relevant to the relentlessly moral politics related to projected paranoid behavior. Freud explains, "thus man's first theoretical achievement—the creation of spirits—seems to have arisen from the same source as the first moral restrictions to which he was subjected—the observances of taboo" (93). Here Freud indicates that survivors, in order to sustain their faith, feel compelled to relinquish an aspect of their omnipotent narcissism to fear-inspiring demons. They relinquish this narcissistic aspect of personality precisely when they sacrifice "freedom of action" to its cultural correlate, the aggressive superego, which, through its moral dictates and reactionary infringements, requires its pound of flesh. When discussing symptom formation in Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, Freud illustrates how the paternal threat associated with the superego fills the ego with fear. In phobia, the ego's reaction to the superego's moral tyranny requires a flight response. He posits that the punishment threatened by the superego must be an extension of the punishment of castration. Just as the father has become depersonalized in the shape of the super-ego, so has the fear of castration become transformed into an undefined social or moral anxiety. But this anxiety is concealed. The ego escapes it by obediently carrying out the commands, precautions and penances that have been enjoined on it. If it is impeded in doing so, it is at once overtaken by an extremely

Constructing the Enemy . 95 distressing feeling of discomfort which may be regarded as an equivalent of anxiety and which the patients themselves liken to anxiety. (128) This passage further illustrates the threat posed by the superego, for once again there is an overbearing moral scrutiny, the threat of punishment, and the consequent anxiety produced from the ego's interaction with the superego that lords over it. In this segment from Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, the superego is depersonalized as one of the va ious agencies of consciousness. But if we reflect on the particulars of the protective process, the personified superego as father is cast in this psychodrama, through an adept use of psychosocial positioning, as the purveyor of male castration anxiety. This personified paternal influence is projected into a moral imperative that can be claimed by one political group or another that identifies with the flag and subsequently wraps it within the folds of projection. In this way, id-like behavior is ideologically monitored, then equated with demonic possession by a superegoist imperial paternalism, which first McCarthy and then contemporary neoconservatives claimed as their own. To institute their political agenda, far right operatives have used the process of political projection as a means of throwing into question the psychogenesis of events, which in turn casts doubt on the origins of political phenomena. Although confusion persists in this don't-blame-me situation, neoconservatives are convinced that projected ideas originated with their opponents because the ideational representative has been abolished from conscious awareness. But what about their "enemies" who are the objects of these projected phenomena? They know nothing about the origination of phenomena as described in the narratives of right-wing activists. So projected ideas are disavowed a second time and thrown into limbo—a space of indeterminacy that exists between the two groups. Questions thus arise about the source of conflict, the aims behind it, and the structure of evidence that supports the claims being made against the party initially accused of projective hostility. In the case of McCarthy, this indeterminacy about phenomenological origins is a recursive symptom that repeatedly resurfaced during his reign of power. Look at the famous declaration at Wheeling, where he threw into confusion the number of Communists accused of infiltrating

g6


the State Department. McCarthy's confusion about the number of subversives—205,57,300,285, or 300 Communists—proves symptomatic of a more relevant problem revealed in the inconclusive findings of HUAC during that period. For at the conclusion of the hearings, McCarthy could not prove many of his assertions; still, he succeeded, without conclusive evidence, in providing an atmosphere of suspicion where many people lost their jobs. Considering this situation, one may ask, "Where did the Communist threat originate7." Was there really a Marxist threat such magnitude that it warranted the repressive tactics McCarthy unleashed, or was his preoccupation with Communist infiltrators deployed as an extension of his own paranoid mind-set? From the inconclusive results of his public inquisition and the contempt McCarthy's name has subsequently evoked among the general public, it appears that the latter is the case. Judging from his actions, it seems the demagogic McCarthy was really intent on undermining the democratic processes of free speech guaranteed in the First Amendment. According to this scenario, McCarthy's own undemocratic impulses were suppressed, then deflected onto the Marxist-Leninist scapegoats he routinely excoriated in an ideological exercise in obfuscation. McCarthy's crusade was based on his disavowal of discomfiting thoughts and feelings that would compromise consciousness with the rude shock of his autocratic aspirations. He believed that his first-strike politics represented perfect good and that the godless communists served as a facilitator of supreme evil. Sociologists Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, who wrote on McCarthy's career, indicated that "the campaign was religious. God and Joe, with the voters' help, would emerge victorious" (135). McCarthy himself put it even more clearly when he passed judgment on those who did not share his religious views: "The great difference between our western Christian world and the atheistic communist world is not political... it is moral" (quoted in Lipset and Raab 135). As Lipset and Raab put it, McCarthy's aim was to establish his anti-Communist fervor as "the religion of America, with Communism as the anti-religion" (135). During the early 50s, this was a leitmotiv that found cover behind the more apparent political issues that rocked Hollywood and the nation at that time, but today contemporary neoconservatives have foregrounded

Constructing the Enemy

. 97

the moral aspects of McCarthyism when correlating their beliefs around the exclusion of sentiments they wish to disown. As a matter of course, these sentiments have been habitually projected onto their antagonists, which has resulted in comic contradictions mixed with blatant hypocrisy. Thus, Dinesh D'Souza could complain about the Internal Revenue Service investigating Christian schools, while he traipsed around the country attending lectures, pretending he was a student, hiding his real intentions, all the while accumulating information for his book on political correctness. We have already seen how he attended a class in feminist theory in 1989 offered by Alice Jardine at Harvard. In a clear case of paranoid projection, he complained about the IRS snooping around Christian schools as he impersonated a student to spy on Professor Jardine. By undertaking actions like these, D'Souza revealed a mind-set replete with conscious denial, deflected object of scorn, and anticipatory hostility directed at others for his own actions. D'Souza self-righteously assumes this political position because he believes that "the famous 'wall of separation' of church and state ... [has been] scaled and transgressed by the state" (D'Souza 56). He thus indulges in this paranoid flight of fancy based on a contradictory logic that D'Souza himself affirms a few pages later when he boasts that "in 1980, candidate Reagan found himself the fortunate beneficiary of the relentless activism of scores of animated Christian groups and strategists" (57). Most observers who have written about the political unrest of the past twenty years have pointed to the renewed activism of Christian fundamentalists, to their transgression of the boundaries between church and state, to their wish to retain tax-exempt status while playing hit-and-run hardball politics. Even D'Souza admits that NCPAC ran "devastating negative commercials" when using attack dog tactics to target liberals in the 1980 election. Actually, the evidence is overwhelming that the religious right has "stolen" money from their own contributors in order to fund political operations for Republican candidates. In January of 1992, the IRS warned Jimmy Swaggart that his ministry violated his tax-exempt status by endorsing Pat Robertson for president (Porteous, "IRS Warns" 223). Jerry Falwell, another member of this "theopolitical junta," was fined after the IRS determined that "assets from his non-profit Old Time Gospel Hour


organization were inappropriately channeled into a political action committee that backed conservative candidates for public office" ("IRS Fines Falwell" 233). In the fall of 1992, the Christian Broadcasting Network withdrew from the Better Business Bureau after it failed to meet the bureau's strict standards of accountability for fund-raising (O'Keefe 235). Finally, Robertson's Christian Coalition, which incorporated as a nonprofit group, was investigated by the IRS for illegally using millions of dollars accumulated from their contributors. On Thursday, September 10, 1992, the Washington Post stated that the "results of that aud have never been publicly disclosed and Robertson officials declined to discuss them this week" (Isikoff 226). As Frederick Clarkson states, this "pattern of exploiting the tax code to conceal the agenda, strategy, and flinders of the Christian Right is integral to their capacity to win elections at all levels" (239). D'Souza, Falwell, and Robertson are but a few of the many neoconservative double-dealers calling for a more stringent moral standard, one they themselves break whenever the opportunity furthers their political goals. Consider the case of George Will, who mounted an all-out offensive on the liberal ethics of the 1960s, which he blames for the political climate that led to the Watergate fiasco. David Bromwich reports that in Will's 1968 Ph.D. dissertation, Beyond the Reach of Majorities: Clos Questions in the Open Society, the future TV commentator made one his first forays in the politics of hate by presenting this paranoid assessment: "A specter is haunting American liberals . . . [who demonstrate] the kind of open mind that is a political menace" (quoted in Bromwich 449). In subsequent books Will called for an "economy of intolerance," whose task it was to legislate morality—"outlaw pornography, obstruct abortions, and qualify the legal application of constitutional rights to gays"—legalese evoked to induce society to deny gays, lesbians, and bisexuals the same civil rights provided for heterosexual Americans (quoted in Bromwich 449). In Statecraft as Soulcraft: What Governm Does, Will defines his title term, soulcraft, as a tactic "to supervise educ tion in good morals, pursue a steady surveillance of personal conduct, and, where necessary, censure and punish delinquent morals" (quoted in Bromwich 449). Does this prescription for political action sound hauntingly familiar?


Isn't the call for supervision, surveillance, censure, and punishment the formula of intimidation that D'Souza used to intimidate his "enemies"? For D'Souza implemented these tactics in his surveillance of classroom conduct before writing his scathing attacks that debased politically correct academics. If other right-wing zealots follow D'Souza's lead, the next advance against free speech rights will feature neoconservative monitors scrutinizing academic books to find potentially libelous quotations so they can bring lawsuits against professors as a means of paralyzing their research. Even Rush Limbaugh is aware of the connection between the superego-driven desire to censure and punish moral trespassers and the phenomenon of paranoia. But in The Way Things Ought to Be, he equates paranoid conduct with the "civil libertarians" who become the purveyors of evil in his book: Morality is a system of virtuous conduct based on the principles of right and wrong. If we can't teach the difference between right and wrong because some paranoid civil libertarians determine that it is an imposition of religious views, then we are adrift in a dangerous sea. There may be legitimate philosophical arguments over what is right and wrong, but they would have to be esoteric in nature. Fundamental right and wrong, such as denned in the Ten Commandments ("They are not the Ten Suggestions," as Ted Koppel likes to point out) is not arguable, nor should it be. (276; my italics)

Here, Rush-to-judgment Limbaugh opens a space for the interpretation of philosophical difference before he abruptly closes it off by quoting Ted Koppel (!) as his source of certainty. According to Limbaugh, there is only one incontrovertible rule of belief—the Judeo-Christian system— since, this font of theological knowledge assures us, all other religious, philosophical, or psychoanalytic theories of ethics are fundamentally incorrect. Anyone who resists the imposition of this fundamentalist master-theory is paranoid, a curious reversal if we consider the treatise on projection developed in this chapter. On closer examination, we can determine that Limbaugh provides us with one more example of the far right effort to scramble the accuser with the accused and to cover the distinction with equivocation and doublespeak; in this way, they seek to confuse unsuspecting readers who don't recognize what is at stake in

ioo


this effort to impose a programmatic platform for America while using "democratic processes for anti-democratic purposes" ("The Christian Right 1993"5) Like Rush Limbaugh, George Will applies a different moral standard to himself than to the public as a whole. That is why he can call for a regime of "civic virtue" that implements an "enforcement of morals," while he inappropriately plays fast and loose behind a veneer of assumed sanctity. Look at the following examples of questionable ethical conduct on Will's behalf. The Wall Street Journal has stated that, on more than one occasion, George Will dined with the Reagans at the White House "just to relax"; he was also, it reported, one of those who introduced Reagan to members of the Washington elite once the new president took office (quoted in Bromwich 461). But Will passed over the line of ethical demarcation when he "coached Ronald Reagan for his debate against Jimmy Carter, then went on the record with praise for Reagan as the superior debater, without ever declaring that to do so made him a double weight in the scale, the first time as a participant and the second time as a reporter" (quoted in Bromwich 461). Talk about confusion of ends with means. For all their talk about sharply defined boundaries and moral commandments set in stone, Limbaugh, Will, Falwell, and D'Souza have demonstrated through their shenanigans that they believe in the Ten Commandments only if the rules can be revised when applied to them. As in Animal Farm, privilege built around the "but" of syntactical equivocation leads to revisionary measures that exempt certain parties in high places from following the dictates that precede it. Look how Orwell characterizes "THE SEVEN COMMANDMENTS" presented to the animals of "Manor Farm" once it became known as "Animal Farm": THE SEVEN COMMANDMENTS 1. Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy. 2. Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend. 3. No animal shall wear clothes. 4. No animal shall sleep in a bed. 5. No animal shall drink alcohol. 6. No animal shall kill any other animal. 7. All animals are equal. (16)


Not only are these commandments overturned after the chief pig, Napoleon, gains power, but his betrayal is objectified for all to see on the final pages of the book when the seventh commandment is rewritten: ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS. (88) So a hypocritical standard is established. It is defended by verbal provocations, overheated double-talk, and the double stroke of protective disavowal that seeks out and finds conspiratorial tendencies on the part of civil libertarians. All the while far right extremists, in a state of denial and deflection, sanction their suspicions as if they emanated from the cold logic of rational thought processes. This leads to a whole series of moral proclamations—interrupted by the privileged "but" of equivocation—which are ambiguous if not comically ironic. For instance, Americans have witnessed the open-ended contradiction of neoconservatives carping about marriage and divorce while they backed Ronald Reagan, a divorced ex-actor from Hollywood, against Jimmy Carter, "an avowed born-again Christian from the South" (D'Souza57). One might overlook the level of bigotry displayed, for instance, by James Robinson's rantings. Or ignore that fundamentalists want to retain their tax-exempt status while engaging in an unrestrained electoral activism that has them doing some fancy bookkeeping for God's cause here on earth. Or forget that Pat Robertson invokes McCarthyite sentiments on un-American activities when he claims, "the Constitution of the United Sates is a marvelous document for self-government by Christian people," but "the minute you turn the document into the hands of non-Christian people and atheistic people they can use it to destroy the very foundation of our society. And that's what's been happening" ("Christian Coalition" 156). But at least remember that the impulse to feed rhetorically upon one's fellow Americans, which has become the neoconservative norm in the past fifteen years, has changed the way the political game is played in this country. For the injection of puritanical moralism into the body politic has consequences for us all in the age of McReaganism.

102 . Constructing the Enemy MCREAGANISM TODAY: THE WAR TO IMPEACH CLINTON

It is important to understand that the term McReaganism does not refer strictly to the period in which Reagan, Bush, and Quayle occupied the White House. McReaganism is very much with us today, symbolized by a hypocritical moral McCarthyism, a fast-food capitalism epitomized by McDonald's overrapid international expansion, and the hyperreal teleguidance of the president (or, in 1995, of the Speaker of the House) as a master of ceremonies who utilizes spin control to redistribute power in a postmodern hyperspace that affects political outcomes. One has only to consider the ideological grooming undertaken on a repeated basis by conservative think tank groups like the Heritage Foundation and the Hudson Institute as well as the antigay/antifeminist venom spewed out by the Eagle Forum and Concerned Women for America to recognize that these ideologically kindred groups have networked in a systematic manner in the Clinton era. There are also more than a dozen groups with "annual budgets ranging from $100,000 to $1,000,000" that exist primarily to fund more than "100 Right-wing campus publications reaching a million students" ("Un-PC" 3). These issue-specific political coalitions have created entitlement programs with one purpose in mind: to effect a counterrevolution on campus. These groups are funded by corporate foundations including Coors, Aetna, Lilly, Hewlett-Packard, United Parcel Service, Earhart (the Amway Corporation), and Hearst ("Key Private Foundations" 39). If one follows the money trail to determine how these conservative coalitions have coordinated their efforts in the '90s to influence public opinion, it becomes apparent that McReaganism has been transformed into a grassroots campaign backed by multinational corporate sponsors, think tank theoreticians, and over fifty conservative campus newspapers supported by the Madison Center for Educational Affairs. Do not make the mistake of believing that McReaganism is a movement whose sharper features have faded into the dustheap of recent history. McReaganism presents us with an ongoing process of retropolitical activism that indicates what luliet Flower MacCannell calls a "future repeatable structure" (personal communication). This structure has taken on new personal incarnations in the 1990s under the tutelage of Newt Gingrich.


Currently, the proponents of McReaganism are involved in a cultural war to turn back the clock and deny that in the foreseeable future the white population in the United States will become a minority. Practicing a politics of demonization, the neoconservatives of the '90s hold a worldview haunted by radical monsters (feminists, gay men, lesbians, and people of color) who have been cast as subhuman miscreants that threaten traditional forms of cultural representation. Right-wing social critics believe this strategy is especially important today because cultural pluralists have exposed racism and challenged hierarchical class structures to disclose the mythical foundations of neoconservative claims. Such strategies provide a rationale for the neoconservative backlash that has gained strength in the pastfifteenyears. This backlash has spawned an antagonistic ethnoviolence funded by neoconservative foundations, promoted by groups like the National Association of Scholars, disseminated by a collegiate network of campus newspapers, and implemented by right-wing professors and students, who have joined in a concerted effort to smear the multicultural movement with the broad brush of political correctness. The game is afoot, and its aim is to discredit cultural pluralists as PC dogmatists, while archconservatives slyly project their own dialectical agenda of correct and incorrect behavior onto the university environment. In its entirety the cultural war encompasses more than the PC skirmishes described here. This point is crucial to acknowledge, because the PC conflict is but one battle in a larger war for the heart and soul of the American body politic. At the Republican Convention in 1992, Pat Buchanan openly declared that neoconservatives should take back "our culture" from those forces that threaten to subvert it. In The Way Thing Ought to Be, Rush Limbaugh echoes Buchanan's clarion call by exclaim ing that feminists (whom he alternately describes as "feminazis" and the "battalion of Amazons with PMS") are "at war with traditional American values and fundamental institutions such as marriage and the American family" (187). In his second book, See, I Told You So, Limbaugh expan his enemies list to include all those who do not follow "a set of divinely inspired moral absolutes" (81). On one side are the relativists who insist that morality is simply a personal decision. On the other are the neoconservatives who believe they hold a direct hot line to god-the-superego,


who has instructed his chosen people to conduct a holy war against all "un-Christian" elements in American society. These "un-Christian" elements include Jesuits in Central America, left-wing Christians in the United States who reject right-wing politics, and presidents of the United States such as Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. During the Clinton presidency, right-wing cultural antagonism has been structured around certain predictable issues like abortion, gay rights, multiculturalism, and feminism. It has been revealed that before Dr. David Gunn was brutally murdered for performing legal abortions at a clinic, Operation Rescue disseminated a "wanted poster" identifying him as an enemy ("The Christian Right 1993" 5). Operation Rescue was not alone, however, in marking targets on their enemies list, for other right-wing extremists have condemned pro-choice spokespersons on the abortion issue. The Reverend Leonard Coppes, a pastor of the Providence Church in Colorado, has stated in unequivocal terms that since abortion is murder and homosexual behavior has been outlawed in the Bible, both of these "transgressions" should be punished by death (Porteous, "SWAT" 11). Because most neoconservative reconstructionists know that such extremism will be rejected by the majority of American citizens, they have limited their activities for the time being to marching at abortion clinics, passing high-profile reactionary ordinances, and influencing the selection of judges who will oppose the gay and lesbian lifestyle as a viable alternative. Because this moral minority—which claims to be a majority—must hide their real agenda from public scrutiny, they have launched stealth campaigns at the grassroots level to build their influence from the ground up. Using tax-exempt funds to fuel their efforts, neoconservatives have sought control of school boards and governmental offices through the implementation of stealth tactics that enable them to fabricate a facade to pretend to be what they are not. This has been necessary because if they reveal their true opinion of themselves—that neoconservatives are divinely appointed Christian soldiers doing battle with debased secular humanists—they would not be able to muster a social consensus to support their doctrinal crusade. But the attempt to mobilize goes beyond a grassroots campaign to install stealth candidates in office. We can find evidence of how active this


coalition remains by examining their concerted effort to topple Bill Clinton from power before his term ends. To accomplish this goal, they have orchestrated a series of minor brouhahas to muddy Clinton's reputation through the sheer number of incidents brought to public light. The first, of course, was the Gennifer Flowers fiasco, which featured Flowers selling her story for profit to the tabloid press even as she was promoted by Clinton's enemies. Then there was the much publicized "travelgate," which was depicted in the American Spectator as "a story about influence-peddling and sleazy deal-making one year ago in the Clinton White House" (Brock 30). Although "travelgate" was at best a minor incident compared to the full-scale illegal activity carried out under recent Republican presidents, this hasn't stopped neoconservative caricaturists from playing to the converted to pillar the composite monster Biliary—which they created to demonize the president and the first lady. Then the neoconservative minority turned their attention to Whitewatergate, which at the time I am writing this chapter is still being investigated by a special prosecutor. When the "scandal" originally broke, Republicans declared they wanted a hands-on special prosecutor to investigate the accusations against Clinton; after one was appointed, they beat the publicity drum for congressional hearings, although the special prosecutor (himself a Republican) stated publicly that such hearings would interfere with his investigation. At this time it appears that Whitewater, which the American Spectator has depicted as "a story about influence-peddling and sleazy deal-making fifteen years ago in Arkansas" will have minor ramifications for the Clinton presidency outside of its propaganda value for neoconservatives, who will frontload it into their arsenal for the '96 campaign (Brock 30). Actually, if one examines the advertisements placed in the American Spectator and other quick-on-the-draw journals circulated in the neoconservative network, it becomes clear that the aim of right-wing political profiteers is nothing less than outright character assassination. Here are a few of the many pejorative classified ads the American Spectator has printed to lambaste the Clintons: IMPEACH BILLIARY: Buy This Sticker Call 1-800-You-Liar (89) IMPEACH CLINTON AND HER HUSBAND TOO (89)


WHO DIED AND MADE HILLARY PRESIDENT (87) CLINTON IS A SLEAZY SCUMBAG (90) GET THE WHITE TRASH OUT OF THE WHITE HOUSE (88) HOW DO YOU SPELL SOCIALISM? C-L-I-N-T-O-N KARL MARX WAS A DEMOCRAT (90) TEN REASONS WHY I CAN'T VOTE FOR LIBERALS ... THE TEN COMMANDMENTS (89) IT'S NOT MY FAULT HE WON BY DEFAULT (89) AMERICA IS ABOUT TO BE JUDGED! (89) ABORTION... HOMOSEXUALITY... CRIME... MURDER WHAT'S NEXT?? JUDGMENT (89) For a homophobic depiction of this barnyard mentality, examine the cover of a right-wing rag, Slick Times, which features Ross Perot and Bill Clinton in bed having a homosexual tryst (2). On the following page is an advertisement for a "queer" three-dollar bill with Clinton's face beneath the words, "The Disgruntled States of America." At the bottom of the page is the characteristic pitch for money: buy this "bundle of Queer" (ten pads) for just $24.95 delivered to your door by a uniformed employee of the United States of America! But the sleaziest sequence of hate commentary I found appears in "Parental Discretion Advised," a section of the Flush Rush Quarterly, which monitors the lies that Super-Patriot Limbaugh relates on a daily basis to his TV and radio audience. In "Parental Discretion Advised," the editors list messages they have received from far right "dittoheads" who call Limbaugh's show to offer "mega dittos" to every word uttered by this superior being. Here is what Limbaugh's dittoheads are saying: I'd like to have one of your Flush Rush subscriptions and I'd like to flush it right down your f liberal stupid motherf throat, you spineless motherf c sucker. If I ever ever find you, find out where you are, you think you got death threats so far, I'm gonna punch you right in your f liberal c -eating f throat. Good bye scum ball —Voice Mail 1-5-94

Constructing the Enemy . 107 The main critics of Rush Limbaugh are Jews because he threatens their control of the mass media, including TV, radio, magazines, newspapers, books. So don't do the Jews' dirty work! Support a moral, patriotic, Christian who is trying to save America from alien forces and ideas. —J.W., Ft. Lauderdale, FL You must be one real faggot. They and the rest of the freaks of the world are the only ones who oppose Rush. I would love to see you beaten bloody. Myself, when my friends and I go to Scum Francisco to beat up queers, we prefer to use the traditional thick broom handle. That is what I'll use on you if I get the opportunity. —E.D., San Jose, CA P.S. May you die miserable—may it take a long time—you deserve to suffer. In the same magazine is a report that Limbaugh threw a tantrum on TV after a caller suggested that his verbal barrage against Clinton mirrored the types of attacks launched against John F. Kennedy on talk radio in Dallas the night before he was assassinated. Limbaugh, who struts and preens before the dittoheads that hang on his every word, describes himself as "a harmless little fuzzball" rather than an instigator of violence who inspires the type of vicious commentary his followers disseminate. But some of Limbaugh's dittoheads "write graphically obscene death threats, filled with images of homosexual violence" (Nelson 7). Just listen to the testimony of Brian Keliher, the editor of the Flush Rush Quarterly, who reports "10 death threats and innumerable obscene phone calls from Limbaugh's defenders" (Nelson 7). In the article "Sticks, Stones, Words Too," which reports on Limbaugh's antics on talk radio, Lars-Erik Nelson concludes that far right propaganda was also a central component in the murder of Dr. David Gunn, the abortion provider who was gunned down by Michael Griffin. Should we be surprised? In "Politics of Hate," editorial writer Anthony Lewis complains that throughout history "those who disagreed with some person or group have painted them as not just wrong but treasonous: 'The paranoid style in American politics.'" This paranoid style has elicited symptoms of anger and jealousy over Hillary Clinton's intelligence and independence, just as it has provided an atmosphere of suspicion for hatching lies about Bill Clinton's sex life, which right-wing strategists hope will savage

io8


the Clinton legacy before it is fully written. Lewis argues that while talk radio continually pillories Clinton's character, the most egregious violator is "the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, which pounds away at Clinton so shrilly that it often seems on the edge of clinical hysteria." When asked about this acerbic policy of burn and savage, editor Robert Bartley told David Broder on Meet the Press that he did not really acce the legitimacy of Clinton being the president of the United States because "he won the election with 43 percent of the vote" (Lewis A17). Through the many examples I have presented herein, we can determine that Bartley is not alone in this opinion. But Anthony Lewis reminds us that Margaret Thatcher won three elections in Great Britain with 42.9 percent of the vote, and "Abraham Lincoln in i860 had 40 percent." These statistics, however, will not convince Bartley, Will, Limbaugh, and their mega ditto groupies that Clinton is the people's choice for president of the United States. In the spring of 1994 a new tactic was employed to discredit Clinton, for this marks the period when Paula Jones stepped forward to accuse the president of violating her civil rights. In the post-Hill atmosphere, many women who were victims of sexual harassment have come forward to charge their accusers of crimes previously dismissed by the legal system and the court of public opinion. But in a cynical reversal, Paula Jones sued Clinton for making a crude pass at her after a state trooper asked her up to the then-governor's hotel suite. Once there, she claims that William Jefferson Clinton dropped his pants and requested she fellate his penis. Jones's case against Clinton raises questions as soon as one notes that her "coming out party" was planned by the president's archconservative rivals, who are reportedly paying her legal expenses. Further questions arise when we consider that Jerry Falwell and Bob Dornan have warned us that many other women will soon step forward under the neoconservative banner to accuse the president of similar indiscretions. Considering these facts, it becomes apparent that Clinton's adversaries are engaged in a coordinated effort to hound him from office. As soon as Paula Jones accused Clinton of violating her civil rights, her sister Charlotte went on the Sally Jessy Raphael show to impugn her testimony. Charlotte went on television to affirm that on the day in question Paula Jones paid her "a normal visit" during which the two had

Constructing the Enemy

. 109

"a normal conversation" for about an hour before Paula casually mentioned that Clinton had committed the acts in question. Charlotte said, "When she told me this she was laughing about it. It was like it was flattering to her. She was not in any way upset. She was not crying. She told me not to tell anyone. I just blew it off." Asked by Sally Jessy Raphael if she believed the characterization against the governor, Charlotte exclaimed, "I know my sister, and if anything had happened that day, if she had been sexually harassed, she would have done something about it then; she would have been angry, and she would not have been telling me about it in that manner." Charlotte then makes her most damaging assertion. Paula Jones had said to her that "whichever way it went, it smelled money." The irony, of course, is that neoconservative groups that attacked Anita Hill when she accused Clarence Thomas of acting inappropriately in her presence have suddenly become converted champions of sexual harassment. As soon as the case broke and women's groups refused to condemn Clinton, a chorus was raised to discredit feminists as hypocrites for "shunning Paula Jones." Almost immediately, Mike Rosen wrote in the Denver Post that "the Paula Jones-Bill Clinton Affair is cau ing no end of embarrassment to partisan, radical feminists of the Pat Schroeder variety. The PMS Brigade is tying itself in knots trying to rationalize its lack of sympathy for Jones, and its sudden temperate atti tude toward the heretofore, heinous crime of sexual harassment." This is just one of the many articles written to accuse "feminist partisans" of shunning Jones because of political and class biases. But many observant activists have countered that neoconservatives never cared about sexual harassment until Paula Jones stepped forward to accuse a Democratic president of criminal behavior. Kim Gandy, the executive vice president of the National Organization for Women, went on the Sally Jessy Raphael show to explain that "Operation Rescue has a lot of business criticizing NOW'S work on sexual harassment, as if they cared about women's rights." Gandy told a national TV audience that "women weren't born Democrats, Republicans, or yesterday, and we don't check our commonsense at the door." But the damage done to Clinton was massive, and proof of his political hemorrhaging is evident if one examines the results of the 1994 midterm election.

no . Constructing the Enemy The most salacious story released in this hypercritical atmosphere of double-valued accusations was presented on Crossfire by the Reveren Jerry Falwell. On March 12,1994, in a segment titled "The Clinton Enemies," Falwell went on the air to launch a searing assault on Clinton's character. Indulging in shock journalism in a public forum, he threw around the type of accusations that Sykes, D'Souza, and Anderson have perfected when concocting unsubstantiated charges against the "politically correct" monsters of academe. With no proof to back up his outrageous account, Falwell openly accused Hillary Clinton of being an adulteress and Bill Clinton of being a murderer. Here is the transcript of "T Clinton Enemies" that appeared on CNN'S Crossfir MIKE KINSLEY [a liberal commentator]: Jerry Falwell, you're peddling videotape that essentially accuses President Clinton of murder in Arkansas. Let's listen to a bit of it. LARRY NICHOLS: [a man on Falwell's videotape]: People are dead in Arkansas. There are people that are dead, yeah. When I started this I knew that I might be one of the unsolved mysteries in Arkansas. There were boys on a railroad track. There were countless and countless people that mysteriously died that as it turned out had some connection to Bill Clinton. I believe this is going on today. KINSLEY: Jerry Falwell, where is your evidence? Who has died by opposing President Clinton. Bill Clinton in Arkansas? REV. JERRY FALWELL, Founder, Liberty University: Well, first of all, Michael, you have bad eyes and ears. That wasn't Jerry Falwell you just saw there. That was Larry Nichols who formerly worked— KINSLEY: Oh, come on, you're peddling this tape. FALWELL: YOU just listen. He was working for Mr. Clinton when Mr. Cli ton was governor there, and everybody on the tape that we are shipping out, which the national media should have been doing and has been hypocritically quiet on, we would not have to do. It appears now that thousands of people are getting the facts, so we're not making any charges. We're not saying Paula Jones is correct. We're not saying any of these things are true. KINSLEY: You're not making any charges? You accuse President Clinton of killing people. FALWELL: NO, we are not. We're saying—we're repeating the evidence tha is being put forth by others. KINSLEY: What evidence? There's no evidence. You have this guy Larry Nichols—

Constructing the Enemy . FALWELL: Well, we'll find out. There is a lawsuit filed right now, and the courts, if they're allowed to hear it, will make the determination. By the way— KINSLEY: There's no lawsuit filed accusing President Clinton of murder. What the heck are you talking about? FALWELL: NO, nobody's even said that. KINSLEY: Jerry Falwell— FALWELL: Michael, you just have a problem— KINSLEY: IS that not— FALWELL: If these charges had been brought against Bob Dole or Jesse Helms or Jack Kemp or years ago against Ronald Reagan or George Bush, you would have been doing back flips and the Washington Post with you and the New York Times. You'd have—you'd be in hysteria. KINSLEY: I am in hysteria.

FALWELL: Because it's against a liberal and a darling president that you adore it gets you all upset. The fact is that the national media, if these charges had been made against someone conservative, would be doing all this themselves. We're simply saying these charges are being made, look at them and determine what is true. KINSLEY: Jerry Falwell, you're making the charges. You are— FALWELL: I am making no charges whatsoever. KINSLEY: YOU don't have an informercial that is selling this videotape we just saw? That isn't your product being sold there on television? FALWELL: We absolutely are offering that and other videos. We have done now—we actually have twelve women who are making similar charges as Paula Jones, as Gennifer Flowers. KINSLEY: I want to stick to murder for a second. You are— FALWELL: Why has this never happened to Al Gore? Why has this never happened to Sam Nunn? Why has this never happened to Bob Dole and to other persons, public servants? The reason is because they're not guilty of that kind of thing. KINSLEY: We'll get to the sex thing. Let's stick to the murder thing briefly. You are selling, as you now concede, a tape of which we just saw a bit, in which a man accuses President Clinton of murdering his political opponents in Arkansas. I'm asking you, shouldn't someone, before they sell a videotape like that, have some evidence to support it? Where is your evidence? Who are these people who are allegedly getting murdered? FALWELL: We are making it very clear that we are simply giving hours and hours of testimony from individuals in Arkansas who are saying these things, and these persons, if they're not telling the truth, why doesn't

ill


someone sue them? Why doesn't somebody bring libel or slander charges? These people are saying— KINSLEY: YOU know the president of the United States can't bring libel charges against anybody he's— FALWELL: Well, you could, Michael. You seem to be most upset about it. KINSLEY: I can't sue him. He hasn't said anything about me. If he said that about you, you'd sue him for libel in two seconds. FALWELL: Because I'm not guilty. KINSLEY: Are you saying that President Clinton is guilty of murder? FALWELL: NO, I'm saying that if the president is not guilty of these things that are on the tapes and these dozen or more women who are saying he has misconducted himself with them, then he should say so or someone should say so. KINSLEY: Don't you think Bill Clinton is justified in saying that his enemies will stop at nothing to get him, when Jerry Falwell is peddling a tape that accuses him of murder and then I ask Jerry Falwell, "Where's the evidence?" and Jerry Falwell blathers on and basically admits you have no evidence at all to support these charges? So here we have it: an unrestrained Jerry Falwell unmasked as the bigot that he is, doing his best imitation of Joe McCarthy in the age of McReaganism. Offering no evidence but a lot of chutzpah, this pious man embarks on a search-and-destroy mission on national television to undermine Bill Clinton by producing a tape that accuses him of being a cold-blooded murderer. When asked to produce hard evidence to support these outrageous claims, Falwell hees and haws that Clinton is a "liberal." Then, in the next breath Falwell does his best imitation of Joe McCarthy, lambasting Clinton as the "most radical, left-wing president this country has every had . . . sitting in office." For those who remember the war of words that was widely reported in the press between Jerry Falwell and Larry Flynt, this spurious attack on Clinton proves to be a hypocritical gesture. In 1983 Flynt published a parody of Falwell in Hustler that depicted him having drunken sex with his mother in an outhouse. Faiwell's attorney argued that words are weapons used in Flynt's parodic ad to inflict emotional distress to the tune of $200,000. In the Hustler lawsuit, Faiwell's attorney claimed that the First Amendment has discernible limits, a position sanctioned by the jury which ruled that, although Flynt's ad was indeed parodic, it did inflict sufficient distress to entitle Falwell to a cash settlement. Unsatisfied


with this ruling, Larry Flynt appealed this judgment before the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that the ad in Hustler had not inflicted emotional distress upon Falwell. And so the $200,000 judgment was overturned. If one considers the 1983 case in which Falwell asserted that the First Amendment has discernible limits, it becomes problematic when he rakes Clinton over the coals of political judgment eleven years later. By branding Clinton a liberal/radical/socialist draft-dodger who supports gay and lesbian rights, neoconservative strategists hoped this characterization would excuse any rhetorical offensive they might launch against him. They thus transform Clinton into a malevolent double who symbolizes repressed psychic functioning that returns in the guise of the demoniac scapegoat. According to this form of indirect representation, the other is coded by imaginary fantasies based on a disidentification of self-aspects that are projected onto the disowned, externalized, and demonized scapegoat. As Julia Kristeva states in Strangers to Ourselves, we witness a protective process of crossing boundaries wherein the subject flees drive-generated impulses that were originally internalized but later exiled into a "strange land of borders and otherness ceaselessly constructed and deconstructed" (191). When neoconservative Republicans reject their own drive-generated impulses and attendant psychic representations, this denial allows for an idealized self-conception that affirms a false certainty based on a make-believe subjective coherence. This set of developments produces a certainty that arrogates to itself an omnipotence of thought we have seen displayed by Jerry Falwell, who equates conservatism with godliness and liberalism with evil and its pathological offspring, demonic Clintonism. This tactic is used by the Hezbollah wing of the Republican Party to circumscribe contemporary academics as PC monsters as well as to link the melodramatic narrative of demonic Clintonism with experiences of death, sexual anxiety, doubling, repetition, and revenge. NEOCONSERVATIVE EXTREMISTS AND PC

In the PC skirmishes and abortion wars, the stated raison d'etre of rightwing moralists is articulated in sound bite prose. These zealots have foisted upon the public an ideal model of representation which they de-


pict as neutral and objective, even as they attack various dispossessed groups, accusing them of undermining the "givenness of the present order." Listen to Norman Podhoretz, editor in chief of Commentary magazine, who states that the ground of principle has been cut out from under them by the liberal culture, and it's not the liberal culture only of this week or last month. It's the liberal culture of the past century, which has been working very hard to destroy the ground of principle on which these values have rested. ("A Conservative People") Podhoretz is not alone in bemoaning the deterioration of the cultural ground and the chaos it has wreaked upon the American way of life. Curiously, at this conference Michael Joyce spoke about the same problem, but instead of repeating the predictable neoconservative line about reestablishing the foundational ground of civility, Joyce arrived at another realization. Recognize, Joyce prompted, that the cultural war never existed! For left-wing theorists won this conflict in a "cultural coup" solely because "the major centers of cultural influence in our nation—the journals and newspapers, television, and Hollywood, the universities, the intellectual salons, the major foundations—have been quickly and quietly and all but bloodlessly occupied during the past several decades" ("A Conservative People"). According to Joyce, the street corners of America "are patrolled" by anti-Western multicultural bureaucrats who have instituted the regime of political correctness. A member of the Bradley Foundation, Joyce visualizes the neoconservative project as an authentic attempt to conserve Western culture, a notion challenged by leftist scholars who have parodied right-wing depictions of history as decidedly biased. Joyce believes they have prevailed because neoconservatives "simply don't possess the weapons and the expertise to wage successful cultural warfare" ("A Conservative People"). Although conservatism is grounded in the "intellectual, analytical, the rational components of culture," which unmask the ideological fantasies of liberalism, he concedes that culture is composed of "image, story, myth, vision, picture . . . poetry as well as prose, fiction as well as nonfiction, motion picture as well as journal article" ("A Conservative People"). And conservatives, Michael Joyce surmises, "simply do not make


[as good] poets, novelists, artists, or filmmakers" as left-wing aestheticians, who are adept at appealing to the imagination of the average American ("A Conservative People"). According to Joyce, earlier in the century some muckrakers were successful in stigmatizing moneyed interests as corrupt and uncaring—in depicting each of them as "an octopus, a vulture, a serpent, whatever captured in a pictorial fashion the political problem of the age" ("A Conservative People"). He believes this liberal vision of capitalistic avarice holds sway today because the imagery of corporate greed taps a well of sentiment found in archetypal narratives that have historically structured the American dream. Joyce suggests that when Americans become distraught with the oppressive forces that exploit them, they rise phoenix-like from the ashes of corruption to overthrow their exploiters and renew the American ideal of rugged individualism and self-sufficiency. Joyce warns his neoconservative audience that the "great American story" must not be ignored, dismissed, or argued away with rational explanation, for aesthetic information appeals to the American imagination more thoroughly than analytic appraisal. He urges that the American narrative be pondered anew, then appropriated by neoconservatives so that "liberalism" can be placed on the "wrong side of the American story." Because populist sentiments existing in opposition to entrenched governmental interests resurfaced recently, neoconservative storytellers have sought to turn left-wing narratives on their head so that the "social therapists" of the Left can be cast as antagonists in this rewrite of the old Hollywood script: This should of course sound familiar; it is the great American story being played out again, but this time the leading roles are reversed. The entrenched corrupt interests are the towering bureaucracies of liberalism, not the corporations, not the railroads. And this time if only we have the eyes to see and the imagination to seize the opportunity presented to us, conservatism can stand with the average citizen against the intrusive institutions of liberalism that seek to dominate and manipulate his life. ("A Conservative People") In other words, dehistoricize events from their past contexts and narrativize experience anew. Appropriate your enemies' tactics and accuse them of being "left-wing McCarthyites" while declaring "power to the

n6


capitalists!" The point is simple. Americans can be captivated by a narrative rearrangement of details, so rescript the story around a perceptual role reversal and emphasize it as the salient feature of this mythic drama. This accomplished, the existing cultural machinery of the age will enable neoconservatives to attract artists, populists, novelists, and other aesthetes whose imaginations will be captivated by this carefully staged presentation. Right-wing imagemakers have capitalized on the resentment of African Americans and women who have expressed outrage over the historical circumstances that have marginalized them in this country. These imagemakers have accomplished this feat by supporting white-identified people of color like Dinesh D'Souza, because he privileges racial bigots who have traditionally oppressed African Americans; it's in their name that he speaks when attacking progressive forces for change in this country. Satisfied with being a token person of color in a predominantly white male political group, D'Souza has been content to do the dirty work of denigrating African Americans who, one might think, would be his allies. The same tactic has been utilized to denounce women on campus. Recently, Christina Hoff Sommers, a professor of philosophy at Clark College, blasted the feminist community in her book Who Stole Feminism? Sommers's title is revealing, because it points to an obvious duplicity on the part of this self-proclaimed "liberal." Although Sommers claims to favor abortion rights and to represent a faction of the women's movement known as equity feminism (as opposed to gender feminism), her writings prove her to be a reactionary moralist who supports rightwing causes (Jaschik). Guided by a conservative strategy seeking to steal the term feminism and to appropriate its agenda, women like Sommers have tried to remake this designation into something unrecognizable to contemporary feminists by stripping the term of its historical significance. Her strategy is so transparent it is laughable to anyone at the university who has the vaguest idea about the debate between right-wing conservatives and women's groups over the pastfifteenyears. Yet, Sommers continues to playact in hopes of convincing people who already believe the disinformation disseminated about political correctness in the modern university. From this vantage point she complains about the bogus re-


search of contemporary gender feminists, which in actuality is quite theoretically sophisticated. But Christina Hoff Sommers has adopted the right-wing, old boys' argument against women's rights, and this purposely distorted position allows her to condemn left-wing feminists as hysterics, weepers, "new-agers, goddess worshipers, psycho-babblers, twelve steppers, and 'I'm dysfunctional-you're-dysfunctional' types" (quoted in Todd). Sommers belittles gender feminists, characterizing them as "amusing, in a pathetic sort of way," even if they are hostile, irrational, and childish: I kept waiting for the adults to arrive I was astonished that no one was blowing the whistle on the horrible outbreaks of intolerance, the violations of academic freedom, and the miseducation of a whole generation of young women, (quoted in Todd) In short, Sommers admonishes her feminist "sisters" to act like mature adults rather than run to " 'healing circles' to share their 'ouch experiences' " (quoted in Todd). Sommers knows she can get away with this unintellectual attempt to brand her enemies and mischaracterize their efforts because certain factions of the Republican Party have reduced the debate on political correctness to the combative "they said, we say" of divergent opinion. As Sandra Lee Barky explains, Sommers's aim is "not to engage in good-faith philosophical disputation but to discredit the entire field, this in line with the general backlash strategy of the National Association of Scholars." Sommers is adept at following this counterproductive strategy, for she has learned her lessons well from D'Souza, who turns arguments on their head by repeatedly quoting people out of context to bias the debate. Echoing Alice lardine's critique of D'Souza presented earlier in this book, Allison M. Jaggar explains that Sommers acts just like her male counterpart by snipping "from the sidelines, taking things out of context, and attacking people" (Jaschik). D'Souza and Sommers pretend that they, like Paul Hill and Michael Frederick Griffin, are morally superior to those whom they criticize. These hypocrites have convinced themselves that they walk the ethical high ground even when they lie to accomplish their goals. Whether the aim is to assassinate their enemies or to assassinate the character of their enemies, some moral justification must be presented for public con-

n8


sumption. While PC-bashers maintain a public front as conservative liberators of Americans who are overburdened by a cumbersome federal bureaucracy, in actuality they are hard-nosed political operatives whose goal is to depose the circulation of multicultural images in a pluralistic culture. For they wish to replace the heterogeneous vision of America as an ethnic and racial melting pot with a moralistic system calling for mass conformity on the part of the public. It is telling that D'Souza wrote an admiring biography of Jerry Falwell, the leader of the moral majority, and that Sommers was trained as an academic with a specialty in "moral philosophy." Although they impersonate emancipators of the oppressed, these poseurs act in the same manner as their ideological cohort, Operation Rescue leader Randall Terry. Terry recently attended a right-wing conference in Wisconsin where participants "discussed forming militias and arming children" for the battle against pro-choice forces (Hall). Fortunately, members of Planned Parenthood made a videotape of Randall Terry and other "super patriots" who have been calling for violence as a legitimate means of combating pro-choice forces. Although Terry denies he has advocated using violence against abortion doctors, a tape of the proceedings in Wisconsin demonstrates otherwise; it shows him directing Christians "to raise up militant,fierce,unmerciful men and women—particularly men" to do what (Hall)? To kill in the name of God? No, says Terry—at least that's what he says now. Reinterpreting his plea in a revisionist rescripting of his past statement, Terry now says he meant that fundamentalists should be "militant for proclaiming God's words" (Hall 3A). But it is likely that he meant at the time to "form militias and teach children how to use guns, as Terry's brother in battle, Matt Trewhelia, suggested at that conference (Hall 3A). Caught in the act of advocating violence, Terry acts much like D'Souza and Sommers, who pretend publicly to be what they are not. Publicly, D'Souza assumes the persona of a rational, just, objective arbiter of opinion, while Sommers identifies herself as a feminist in league with her sisters against patriarchal forces. But these rightwing charlatans speak out of both sides of their mouths: consciously lying to the public while speaking candidly behind closed doors in assemblies convened to establish extremist neoconservative policies that must be disguised if they are to be accepted by a majority of Americans.


Recently, the lies and misrepresentations associated with their highwire act have taken a bizarre turn. Aware that the Democratic Party lost credibility with the American public in 1994 and that, as a consequence of this situation, Christian fundamentalists have gained power, neoconservatives have become desperate to remake their public image in order to capture congressional seats in the 1996 general election: "someone on high has finally figured out, two years after a Robertson speech helped speed the debacle at Houston, that the far-right road to victory at the G.O.R convention is the road to defeat the November after" (Rich). This revelation "led to behavior as weird as if a saboteur had dumped acid in the conference's Kool-Aid" because in recent weeks Dan Quayle has "sounded almost pro-choice, and Phyllis Schlafly signaled a willingness to soften the pro-life plank in the Republican platform" (Rich). Faster than a speeding bullet, in a New York second William Bennett is no longer berating gay and lesbian groups; instead, he is trashing "Oliver Stone and 'trophy wives (Rich).' " Even more incredibly, the Christian Coalition has pretended to inch back from its pro-life stand, having become "pro-family" instead—a code word for its assault on drugs, violent crime, and so forth (A27). Before you can say ideologico-technologi production, the call has come down from the think tanks on high to modify their scripted behavior. Considering the recent assault on abortion clinics, we can assume that these new changes are still test balloons circulated in the endeavor to con the American public, who they hope will develop amnesia, forget this group's past history, and thus allow neoconservatives to reconceptualize themselves in an effort to redistribute power at the federal and state levels. The basis of these right-wing sentiments is the incontrovertible belief that neoconservatives speak the Truth (with a capital X). Like Rush Limbaugh, who daily pats himself on the back for being one of the lone voices of veracity in a wilderness of disinformation, Sommers indulges in a triumphal display of self-aggrandizement. Recently, she offered this backhanded compliment to herself in the Chronicle of Higher Educati "inside the academy, it would take only a courageous few to launch the long-overdue critique that will puncture the intellectual affectations of the gender feminists." I wonder who she means by a "courageous few"— Christina Hoff Sommers herself; Camille Paglia, who applauds Som-


mers for taking on "the wildly overinflated feminist reputations sitting like big fat ducks in academe"; or both of them as well as a smattering of other, less visible reactionaries (Jaschik)? Besides offering narcissistic kudos to herself, Sommers confers "mega dittoes" to those ordained truth sayers that transmit "objective" information to the public, people like George Will and William Bennett who believe they have the moral authority to address the fundamental issues of life. As secretary of education in the Reagan White House, Bennett enlisted a "study group" of conservative scholars to back up his claims on the "bankrupt" nature of scholarship at the academy in the '80s. Some members of this group—David Riesman, Wayne C. Booth, and Hanna H. Gray—considered it their task to help Bennett "reclaim a legacy" based on the unquestioned moral authority deployed to shape campus life in the '50s. To secure their claims, they appealed to an atavistic authority that once sparked the imaginations of students and professors alike, but that today seems like an academic antique lifted out of a time capsule: A civilization, says Bennett, is transmitted by its teachers—"transmit" being a favorite word with him, as it is with Will. Accordingly, he does not speak of teachers as "expounding" or "interpreting" their subjects. These last words would imply for the student a kind of thinking that Bennett wants to supplant by reception. Proper transmission, then, with proper reception, is to rescue from utter decadence a pedagogy which, at present, offers students a choice between two unpleasant extremes. (Bromwich 463)

In the pamphlet To Reclaim a Legacy, William Bennett identifies the jective transmission of truth with a core curriculum that would reinstate the authority of the traditional canon. Bennett pairs the call for the production and transmittal of foundational meanings with the privileged texts of canonical suitability. To carry the cultural tradition into the twentieth century, Bennett and his "study group" endeavored to prop up the exhausted canon so that "the great task of transmitting a culture to its rightful heirs" could be continued (quoted in Bromwich 462). This group considers those who promote the influx of nontraditional multiculturalist ideas in the classroom to be the wrongful heirs of the white male canon; they insist it is an indisputable given that the canon be elevated to a level of ideality, so they can continue to aggrandize the sane-


tioned dead fathers and their "rightful heirs" The enthronement of canonical ideality, the selection of designated heirs, and the objective transmission of information describes the constituent elements of the elitist triangle of high culture. When speaking about the current decline of traditional standards in the humanities, Bennett indulges—with a straight face—in some predictable efforts to propagandize the public with his highly selective version of events. Like D'Souza, he cries out against the "degradation of standards" caused by the insertion of ideology in the place of objectivity and the displacement of direct transmission by subjective interpretation. Commenting on this subject, David Bromwich explains that Bennett thinks "ideology and subjectivity are [not] the twin perils of a single epoch. Rather, subjectivity came first and prepared the way [for its successor, ideology]: it is, in effect, the liberal parent of a radical child" (463). This familial/political paradigm introduces a linkage of social determinants that, according to neoconservatives, have corrupted the intellectual authority of the curriculum, displacing it with the "cultural relativism" of the '60s, updated and institutionalized by the "ProfScam academics" of the '90s. According to far right opinion makers, campus radicals have mobilized a dissensus of adversarial perspectives, which promotes a revolutionary consciousness that discredits the moral authority of the traditional curriculum. There is some truth to this claim, but critics like Bennett and D'Souza often overstate their hand when making a case against left-wing critics. For instance, while Dinesh D'Souza was criticizing Leonard Jeffries on Crossfire for making racist statements, he linked his critique of Jeffries to the denigration of all Afrocentric programs across the country. It is a matter of historical record that Jeffries has made some very controversial statements against the Jewish lobby in Hollywood: In his speech, Mr. Jeffries said Jews and the Mafia in Hollywood had conspired to denigrate blacks in the movies. The scheme, he said, was "planned and plotted and programmed out of Hollywood," by people "called Greenberg and Weisberg and Trigliani." He also referred to a colleague as the "head Jew" at City College and discussed the role of "rich Jews" infinancingthe slave trade. (Magner)


While Jeffries's remarks caused a furor in 1991 that has since died down, they have provided right-wing neoconservatives with lasting ammunition to target all programs in African American Studies in the United States. On Crossfire, D'Souza wasted no time in arguing that the Jeffri affair be used to condemn all women's studies and black studies programs, which "were not set up for academic reasons but in response to demonstrations, protests; they were political departments" ("Code of Silence"). D'Souza then generalized from the Jeffries case that there has been a "degradation of standards that is characteristic of these departments," but Professor Ruth Sidel from Hunter College of New York, who was appearing on Crossfire with D'Souza, would not allow this insu portable generalization to go unanswered: "You really cannot use a Jeffries case and a Levin case in order to criticize and really slur all the black studies and women's studies departments ... I know an awful lot of people who are really good at what they do, and I think that to spread it with one brush is really a mistake" ("Code of Silence"). Later, when fielding Pat Buchanan's question about left-wing intolerance in allowing dissent from people like D'Souza, Professor Sidel reminded CNN viewers that, as the editor of the Dartmouth Review, D'Souza "printed scurrilous thing about blacks . . . it is written and it's published and it is true" ("Code of Silence"); D'Souza ever so briefly denied this assertion, but then let the matter go without further protest. While people like Dinesh D'Souza and William Bennett base their claims on the ability to access a natural language rooted in universal truth, in actuality they have orchestrated efforts funded by neoconservative think tanks to oppose institutionalizing the multiculturalist agenda on university campuses today. The neoconservative goals are clear: to publish an array of right-wing newspapers on campus, to raise suspicions about PC activity there, and to harass faculty who disagree with their point of view. This has led to confusion around the issue of stated goals versus actual political procedures. Not only do right-wing critics give lip service to presenting neutral, objective information while playing partisan politics, but they also indulge in propaganda analysis by appropriating the strategies of their enemies while projecting their own emotional, intellectual, and political inadequacies onto those whom they criticize. Furthermore, their tactic of introjecting appropriated information and


projecting disavowed strategies upon their adversaries has provided a cover for defensive tactics employed by neoconservative dissemblers. One of the most blatant examples of their bait-and-switch tactics can be found in Campus: Americas Student Newspaper. This magazine is published by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, whose stated goal in the issue I am citing is to expose "the New Fascism" of the Left. On the cover of Campus is a scrambled message depicting a left-wing politically correct Nazi pointing to a white sign with the following words printed on it: PC-101 RACISM

HOMOPHOBIA

SEXISM

AGEISM

Behind the Nazi/PC professor are the famous Orwellian slogans from 1984: IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH FREEDOM IS SLAVERY WAR IS PEACE Besides presenting a highly inflammatory dig at left-wing academics, the cover of Campus purposely mixes its messages so that several contradictory claims can be put forth at once. On one hand, the Nazi storm trooper on the cover is identified with the multicultural "ProfScam artists" who teach in the academy today. This wrenches the Nazi soldier (who has Hitler's mustache and ss boots) out of its historical context. Readers are supposed to forget that Fascism in Germany was a rightwing phenomenon. Neocon artists count on their readers having disposal memories so they can print these words on the cover—"The New Fascism: Political Correctness on Campus"—and still be successful in disavowing historical precedents while displacing blame if it originates with them. In this way, neoconservatives dissociate themselves from their adversaries by projecting their historical albatross upon left-wing scholars, who are stigmatized within the neoconservative network of operations.


The cover of Campus is comical if one considers another contradictory allusion appearing there: this one refers to the Orwellian quotation on the blackboard behind the "PC storm trooper." Those familiar with Orwell know that in Animal Farm and 1984 he parodie members of the Left with whom he disagreed, for the writer was embroiled in a left-on-left dispute for many years of his life. But in Campus, right-wing imagemakers recast left-wing critics in the role of the new McCarthyites. We have already seen how such strategists, having grown tired of being labeled as McCarthy's backers, decided to project the term onto left-leaning academics. Neoconservatives believed this would provide them with due recompense for the antipathy they have suffered since the '50s. The comedic aspect of this hodgepodge of insults not only manifests in the projection of McCarthyism, but in the attack on the "fascist-left" who are simultaneously identified through the Orwellian allusion, as "communists!" This open-ended slur, promoted to chastise professors as ayatollahs in one breath and godless leftists in the next, demonstrates a politics of resentment whose aim is to dehistoricize cultural representations from their past contexts. This scattergun attack, which utilizes introjective appropriation and projective labeling as its modis operandi, crystallizes on the cover of Campus. If one looks closely, it becomes apparent that the Orwellian triad depicted on the cover is reversed in a type of fun-house mirror image that reveals volumes about their strategies in fighting the PC war. In 1984, Orwell describes this famous triad as WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH But on the cover of Campus a reversal is effected that represents the central strategy of right-wing imagemakers—to employ introjective appropriation and projective disavowal as a means of transposing blame from one party to another:


IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH FREEDOM IS SLAVERY WAR IS PEACE The procedure involved in transposing introjective and projective processes relates to a mirror-image transposition I develop in chapter 6 by asking the following questions: How have strategies associated with the process of identification been appropriated by right-wing activists? How do neoconservative critics project their moral agenda upon an academic profession concerned less with dyadic superego designations like political correctness/incorrectness than with an ethics of lack? An ethics of lack is concerned with the gap between signs and objects and how that gap is bridged. It is also concerned with the good or bad faith employed when negotiating the gap, and with the appropriation of forms of representation for a particular political purpose. An examination of the interaction of signs, signifiers, signifieds, and the objects they designate requires an investigation of the gap between the objects represented and the semiotic indicators that mark these objects. In the mirror stage, the gap marked by x degrees of separation between the person peering into the looking glass and her or his virtual image objectified there will be foregrounded. To develop the implications of these distinctions, I will invoke a Lacanian paradigm that could easily be traded for another methodological model (semiotic, deconstructive, new historicist) to critique the neoconservative construction of the PC narrative. Since my concern is to analyze the phenomenon of projected political correctness, however, I use psychoanalytic an post-psychoanalytic paradigms to decipher how neoconservative theorists have constructed a mirror of manufactured cultural relations in which they reflect the aims and aspirations of their constituency. By positioning a cultural mirror to reflect events in a light favorable to the neoconservative cause, PC critics have constructed stigmatized scapegoats that can be represented only indirectly through the intermediary of right-wing caricature.

6 . The Mirror of Manufactured Cultural Relations

PARANOID PROJECTION AND THE LACANIAN MIRROR

For Lacan, paranoia is related to the mirror-stage attempt to attain a future-perfect mastery over a fragmented body image. In the Lacanian mirror-stage paradigm, there is a gap between the child who peers into the mirror and the objectified virtual image that seems to stare back at the child. The child attempts to cross this gap by finding a unified self in a series of "movements assumed in the [mirror] image," movements connected to an attitude acquired when the child leans forward while anticipating in the mirror a "mirage" of maturation. This mirage manifests when a gestalt of imagistic bits and pieces are assembled into a whole form that assures the infant of an imaginary self-unity ("Mirror" 1-2). When the child visualizes its body in the mirror as a coherent shape, it crosses a spatiotemporal borderline. This crossing creates a transfiguration that helps it to elide the gap between the child as a biological organism and its virtual image of itself. In the mirror stage this gap is elided spatially when fragmented body parts are reinscribed phantasmically into a unified image of the self. At this mistaken site of integration, the gap between the child and its virtual image is crossed, then reformulated into an imaginary spatiotemporal union assembled in this process of specular interaction. The temporal logic of the mirror stage presents the following scenario: a child peers into the looking glass and experiences an anticipatory jubilance when piecing together a body image related to 126

The Mirror of Manufactured Cultural Relations . 127

the ego's conception of itself. As the amorphous ego projects itself into a rigid body image, it constructs the conceptual contours of subjectivity and experiences a jubilant anticipation of a future mastery that is connected to the acquisition of motor skills associated with this totalizing image of itself. Thus, in the process of identification of the ego with its virtual image, the infant not only traverses the gap of spatial difference, but experiences itself as a unity framed through temporal shifts and modifications that project it forward in anticipation of the time when it will be "master" of its own body. We have seen how a unified body image becomes an extension of the ego. The conflation of image and ego acts as a defense against anxiety-producing images of the body conceived as dissociated bits and pieces. Through this process, the infant seeks to avoid the paranoia associated with the fragmentation it has jubilantly trans/ormed in the creation of an idealized image of itself. As I stated previously, for Lacan, paranoia is related to the mirror-stage attempt to manufacture a futureperfect mastery, which seeks to overcome the "fragmented body" that sometimes appears in nightmares of the "aggressive disintegration" of the subject. Such fragmentation usually appears in "the form of disjointed limbs, or of those organs represented in exoscopy, growing wings and taking up arms for intestinal persecutions" ("Mirror" 4). In the mirrorstage essay Lacan explains that these persecutions are related to the "paranoiac alienation which dates from the deflection of the specular I into the social I" (5). In "Aggressivity in psychoanalysis," he elaborates upon this proposition, claiming, "what I have called paranoiac knowledge is shown, therefore, to correspond in its more or less archaic forms to certain critical moments that mark the history of man's [and woman's] mental genesis, each representing a stage in objectifying identification" (16). In Seminar III he provides further details of this account: Here we are dealing with another sort of otherness. I can't repeat all I once said about what I have called paranoid knowledge, since I shall also have to take it up again constantly over this year's discourse, but I am going to give you some idea of it All human knowledge stems from the dialectic of jealousy, which is a primordial manifestation of communication What takes place between two young children involves this fundamental transitivism expressed by the fact that one child who has

128 . The Mirror of Manufactured Cultural Relations beaten another can say—The other beat me. It's not that he is lying—he is the other, literally.... [This is only possible] because the human ego is the other and because in the beginning the subject is closer to the form of the other than to the emergence of his own tendency. He is originally an inchoate collection of desires—there you have the true sense of the expression fragmented body—and the initial synthesis of the ego is essentially an alter ego, it is alienated. The desiring human subject is constructed around a center which is the other insofar as he gives the subject his unity, and the first encounter with the object is with the object as object of the other's desire. (39)

In this passage, Lacan ties paranoia to all "human knowledge" that stems from "the dialectic of jealousy," which is "a primordial manifestation of communication" and its interrelation to the dialectic of desire (39). Although Lacan later distinguishes the term desire from need an demand by equating the former with the chain of signifiers that is shorthand for the Other, which structures the field of the unconscious, he here introduces the term not to designate the desire of the symbolic Other, but to refer to an incoherent sequence of "inchoate desires" springing from the mirror stage. In the Lacanian paradigm, the mirror stage is associated with an imaginary topology, which exists prior to the symbolic register and yet is retroactively constructed from it. If we take this distinction into consideration, it becomes apparent that, at this stage in his writings, when Lacan provides an account of "the body in bits and pieces," he is indicating not only a part-object logic of fragmentation but an incipient collection of dissociated impulses (here labeled as desires). Implicit in this analytic model is the notion that such incipient "desires" are related to body parts that, in their radical estrangement, summon forth contradictory wishes allied with the paranoia that attends such hybrid, disparate desires. One of the agendas of the mirror stage is to center a dissociated circuit of body parts around the nucleus of the ego's visual image of itself. According to this logic, the emergent ego connects divergent body parts with a constellation of "desires" formed around a unified image of the ego in the mirror. In the passage on transitivism (wherein "one child who has beaten another can say—The other beat me"), Lacan claims tha the aggressor becomes confused with the victim because of his or her

The Mirror of Manufactured Cultural Relations

. 129

all-inclusive identification with the other. This identification is really a misidentification that alienates the child in the desires of the other in the same way that an infant before the looking glass takes its mirror image to be itself. The connection between the two instances—the intrapsychic and the intersubjective—rests on the proposition that "the initial synthesis of the ego is essentially an alter ego, it is alienated" (Lacan, Semina III 39). In other words, the "desiring human subject is constructed around a center which is the other insofar as he [or she] gives the subject his [or her] unity, and the first encounter with the object is with the object as object of the other's desire" (39). This explains the passage from the specular to the social interaction indicated in the difference between the ego visualizing itself before the mirror and the subject finding itself in another subject's desire. It also explains how paranoia is a form of projection that is further decentered by the identificatory transition between the intrapsychic and the intersubjective relation, which becomes infused with an aggressive edge represented earlier by the phenomenon of transitivism. PARANOID PROJECTION IN THE CULTURAL MIRROR Turning our attention back to the issue of political correctness, we find right-wing critics busily defending themselves against multicultural theories. Neoconservatives excoriate multiculturalists because even a passing glance in the cultural mirror calls into question idealized images of biological formation that right-wing icon peddlers have projected upon the American public. Conversely, part of the multiculturalist agenda involves deconstructing all substantializing views of identity formation; it also involves denouncing any stable, unified, and agreed upon cultural identity as conventionally constituted in a totalizing frame of reference fraught with contradictions. For instance, in Nation and Narration, Homi Bhabha details how an account of radically incomplete communal identification might be approached to map cultural relations as instances of ideological misrepresentation: Freud uses the analogy of feuds that prevail between communities with adjoining territories—the Spanish and the Portuguese, for instance—to illustrate the ambivalent identification of love and hate that binds a com-

130 . The Mirror of Manufactured Cultural Relations munity together: "it is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left to receive the manifestation of their aggressiveness." The problem is, of course, that the ambivalent identifications of love and hate occupy the same psychic space; and paranoid projections "outwards" return to haunt and split the place from which they are made. So long as afirmboundary is maintained between the territories, and the narcissistic wounded is contained, the aggressivity will be projected onto the Other or the Outside. But what if, as I have argued, the people are the articulation of a doubling of the national address, an ambivalent movement between the discourses of pedagogy and the performative? What if, as Lefort argues, the subject of modern ideology is split between the iconic image of authority and the movement of the signifier that produces the image, so that the "sign" of the social is condemned to slide ceaselessly from one position to another? It is in this space of liminality, in the "unbearable ordeal of the collapse of certainty" that we encounter once again the narcissistic neuroses of the national discourse with which I began. The nation is no longer the sign of modernity under which cultural differences are homogenized in the "horizontal" view of society. The nation reveals, in its ambivalent and vacillating representation, the ethnography of its own historicity and opens up the possibility of other narratives of the people and their difference. (300)

Although Bhabha uses the feuds between the Spanish and Portuguese as a model of hostility generated between two countries, his example is applicable to the divisions between ultraconservative policymakers and multicultural critics in academia today. Bhabha proposes that the same "psychic space" of iconic signification can be traversed by those who hold an opposing or ambivalent set of identifications, which means that those marked as idealized love objects and detested scapegoats can coexist within the same frame of reference as competing representations. But how is this done? When those who disseminate dominant ideological perspectives to members of the postwar culture face a cultural dissensus, they set about imposing their viewpoints on society by employing psychic maneuvers like splitting and projection to accomplish their goals. From Bhabha's example, we can determine that modern ideology is "split between the iconic images" linked to the mirror-stage emergence of the ideal ego and its successor, the ego-ideal that eventually supplants it. For Lacan, the ideal ego (idealich) gives the child a vision of completeness because it presupposes a perfect fit between the


child and his or her virtual image (Seminar III 137). In the "Ego-ideal and ideal ego" in Seminar I, Leclaire describes the ideal ego as the seat of idealization of the self-turned-object viewed in the mirror, "which has been ennobled, elevated" by the ego that has established an intrapsychic tie between itself and its image (134). The ego-ideal, on the other hand, induces an identification of the subject with the parent of the same sex via the image proffered as its ideal. Sometimes equated with the superego, the ego-ideal takes on the appearance of a foreign, external entity that requires the subject to fulfill the dictates of its idealized mandate. This mandate becomes aggressive, if not savage, once the carrot proffered by the ego-ideal is rejected. From this comparison we can see that the imagistic ideal ego is eventually overwritten by the ego-ideal/superego. The latter is associated with the voice by Freud and Lacan, and by Bhabha with the sign and its offspring—the signifier and signified—that help to produce the image. For Bhabha, "the nation is no longer the sign of modernity under which cultural differences are homogenized in the 'horizontal' view of society."1 Because cultural configurations have a vertical dimension, Bhabha declares that the liminal space submerged in the surface of the mirror of intersubjective relations must be recognized as contributing to the acculturation process. Bhabha notes that the unidimensional, "homogenized" version of the nation-state does not reveal the "chinks and cracks of the powerknowledge apparati," which Teresa de Lauretis locates in "the blind spots, or the space-off, of its representation" (25). De Lauretis borrows the term "space- off" from film theory to point to "the space not visible in the frame but inferable from what the frame makes visible" (26). Thus, the "space-off is, in fact, erased, or, better, recontained and sealed into the image by the cinematic rules of narrativization ... [so that it exists] concurrently alongside the represented space" (26). While de Lau1

Judith Butler reminds us, however, that if we map the horizontal and vertical vectors of a particular cultural paradigm, we should avoid linking a "discrete, sequential coexistence along a horizontal axis" with a vertical plane that unearths fraudulent foundational images, which are "summarily ranked, causally related, distributed among planes of [vertical] 'originality' and 'derivativeness'" (13). Instead, when peering into the cultural mirror, we find unreflective cracks on the surface that are indentations without vertical or metaphysical depth.


retis employs this terminology to describe the effects of patriarchal strategies that disproportionately gender attributes in the construction of subjectivity, in a psychoanalytic paradigm of cultural identification we detect strategies of idealization, aggression, and projection used by right-wing spin doctors to configure the gestalt they present as well as the frame of reference itself. This referential borderline allows for the reflection of "respectable" attributes while aspects of otherness are often devalued as politically subversive, usually excluded from the domain of iconic and discursive representation, and frequently projected "outwards" before returning "to haunt and split the place from which they are made" (Bhabha 300). I believe that the mirror of manufactured cultural relations both legitimates and excludes icons of the body politic according to ideological standards of gender, race, ethnicity, class, and age. Certain representations—whether political, historical, social, and/or psychological—can be visualized within sanctioned contexts, while others are discredited or not reflected in the socialfield.Beginning in the 1980s, media-sawy propagandists associated with the Reagan administration began to equate right-wing fantasy with mythologized images manufactured for public consumption, so that Americans were induced to envision themselves as part of this constructed ideological hall of mirrors. To accomplish this feat, neoconservatives propagated the notion that televisual images accurately reflect the illusion of individual identities ("rugged individualism" is one example) against a background of "shared signifiers"; together, imagisticfigureand signifying ground fortify the subject's participation in an orchestrated group fantasy. In this way, those who found themselves in the cultural mirror as "individuals" were confirmed and reconfirmed by such shared fantasies. In other words, those who saw themselves mirrored by this process found a place for themselves as sub jects as well as a position in the social array of sanctioned sites guaran teed by the dominant social fantasies produced for the masses. Moderate Republicans, ultraconservatives, middle-of-the-road liberals, as well as more progressive political forces, continue to vie with each other to mirror their version of corporeal identities against (depending on the group) mythic or historical backdrops that convey images, values, and tastes that are declared desirable. To establish such "acceptable"


. 133

backdrops for their iconic depictions, these political groups carefully select meaningful props that signify specifiable values in carefully planned photo-ops calculated to influence public opinion. Contentious attempts to sway the public through the introduction of stereotypical images set against signifying backgrounds spur members of the mass culture to find their likeness in instances of identification that are validated as integral to society. Let us look at a specific example to illustrate the process. Nowhere is this competition to sway the public more clearly demarcated than in the abortion debates, which have pitted conservatives against liberals. Both groups have proffered images for consumption that have been produced, marketed, and distributed on a repeated and predictable basis. In their dissemination of televisual propaganda, right-wing fundamentalists have presented images of traditional women who celebrate domesticity in a patriarchal family setting. These male-identified women are invariably visualized against a hypermoral background of biblical proportions. To counter impressions that promote domestic servitude, progressive feminists have produced, valorized, and circulated in the American mass market images of independent working women who can fend for themselves. In this way, they have disinvested traditional images of women of their negative value-bearing form; through a feminist perspective, images depicting women as domestic servants that labor against a fundamentalist ground of mythical signification are denigrated as misogynist. Feminist critics take this tack, in part, to emphasize that gendered subjects marked by race, ethnicity, class, and age cannot be degendered by an ahistorical macroperspective passing itself off as an idealized cover-fantasy. To counter such tactics, right-wing imagemakers flood the media with real images that are obscene in their brash and repetitive quality. In this manner, they reinforce valorized notions of mainstream Americans that can be found in the viewfinder of predictable images and the backdrop of determinant signifiers. This gestalt enables some members of the public to discover discrete types that mirror them. These people confuse the type with the person, believing that the mirror of manufactured cu tural relations objectifies them within the purview of the American context. Through the distribution of images coded as recognizable stereo-

134 • The Mirror of Manufactured Cultural Relations

types, right-wing opinion-shapers have promoted icons of "mainstream citizens." These icons have been hurled into motion in an ongoing saga that narrativizes them as desirable representatives of an "authentic" American lifestyle. In this dominant fiction, Americans who do not answer the clarion call of mythic interpellation are cast as outsiders. In the process, neoconservative critics project "dissident" radical groups beyond the boundaries of their fundamental(ist) fantasy, which is demarcated at the nexus of desire and law. In such textual dispersions, leftist radicals are typecast as "subversives" who are unable to find a subject position within the mirror of manufactured cultural relations. Instead, they are marginalized to the extent that when the cultural mirroring process occurs, they cannot find themselves reflected within the gestalt—in the foreground or backdrop of shared cultural signifiers offered by mainstream politicians and the media. Since the late '8os, we have seen how neoconservative writers and their right-wing religious allies have cast proponents of multiculturalism as un-American scapegoats who pose a threat to students in their classrooms. To political conservatives intent upon consolidating a stable image of themselves and their followers, heterogeneous multiculturalism itself has become a symbol of the very chaos that the fundamentalist) fantasy of neoconservatism was designed to overcome. We have already seen how the child seeking itself in Lacan's mirror finds an idealized form that isfictiveby design. Right-wing fundamentalists maintain the opposite viewpoint, however, when they assert a version of identity politics that promotes socially constructed images they claim to be absolutely accurate. Some consumers internalize these snapshots of themselves because they experience a cultural urgency to overcome the proliferating and contradictory demands of contemporary life, demands that leave them feeling fragmented and confused about their roles as citizens. So they accept the juridical images of cultural law and order placed in circulation by right-wing practitioners, who promise them a corporeal unity incapable of disintegrating back to the part-object logic associated with the body of bits and pieces. The "truth" of such imagery is based on cultural givens that are, in actuality, hotly contested, not only because they pledge to harmonize the discordant elements of postmodern life, but because they purport to transform the


radical incompleteness of life-terminated-by-death into the transcendental promise of heavenly transport based on the moral worthiness of a select group of people. How do right-wing mythologists produce such conceptual hocus-pocus? They deny the entire heterogeneous social field of signification, replacing it instead with their micropolitical theories generalized into macropolitical "facts," which generate the presumed universality of a Truth that is applicable to everyone. I have indicated that in this attempt to reassert a hegemonic fundamental fantasy based on the reactive design of identity politics, neoconservatives have denied diversity while consolidating a self-shaping dynamic to which many of their followers pay obeisance in lockstep fashion. Those who have followed the paper trail left by neoconservative think tanks have determined that politicians cooperating with rightwing religious factions have, with rare exceptions, offered the electorate a unified front on each succeeding issue brought before public consciousness. Although neoconservative politicians and religious leaders do occasionally reveal the particularity of their desires, they have been very successful in speaking with a united voice on the salient issues of the day. More importantly, they have managed to delineate a pseudounified image of themselves by adhering to the scripts presented to them by neoconservative think tanks. Neoconservatives have also mounted a concerted protest against competing groups that mirror a divergent set of American values; as we have seen, these attempts are disparaged as illegitimate and, in certain instances, as un-American. For the past fifty years, right-wing imagemakers have peddled the illusion of a unified leftist front that has infiltrated American society only to topple it. These imagemakers have sold this scenario as a mythic certainty of consciousness while encouraging public fears of contradiction, multiplicity, and heterodoxy that undermine any totalizing image of society in which Americans can find themselves placed—their positions reinforced, thei images signified as legitimate, and their values idealized as patriotic— within a conventional gestalt of inter subjective relations. To institute the grand fiction of their fundamental fantasy, neoconservative power brokers must regulate any aspect that remains at odds with the matrix of intelligibility they establish. To accomplish this objective, they must split off discordant elements, then project them onto vil-

136 . The Mirror of Manufactured Cultural Relations ified scapegoats, who return as the embodiment of these disavowed traits. Catherine Clement, quoting Levi-Strauss from Sociologie et anthropologie de Marcel Mauss, describes this process: The same goes for women as for madmen: in a manifest position of exclusion, they keep the system together, latently, by virtue of their very exclusion. Crisis signifies that as well. "In every society it is inevitable that a percentage... of individuals find themselves placed ... outside of the system or between two or several irreducible systems. The group asks and demands of those people to figure certain forms of unrealizable compromise, on the level of the collectivity, tofigurecertain imaginary transitions, to embody incompatible syntheses Their peripheral position in relation to a local system, does not keep them from being by the same token, an integral part of a total system." (134) What Clement states about women is true for the mythic construction of those "nefarious" politically correct "monsters," whose "integral" value lies in their posing a threat to society. As we have seen previously, some reactionaries equate PC-ers with "madmen" in order to sequester them in the Siberian margins of reference, to project them beyond the very frame itself, or to suppress them in the unreflective, opaque cracks within the reflected surface. Thus, monoculturalists manufacture the scapegoated other through an oppositional process that is not dialectical but imaginary, since it is brought into being at the level of sadistic fantasy, which cannot be owned by right-wing reactionaries intent upon disavowing aspects of their own personality. When the subject identifies with the punitive superego in the mirror of intersubjective relations, there is usually a counteridentification that reflects some degree of ambivalence. Since the belief in a unified field grounds the certainty of neoconservatives who believe they know the incontrovertible Truth, these theorists must disavow any counteridentification existing within the margins of consciousness that might affect their behavior through its return in repressed phenomena. Neoconservatives who consider themselves purists at heart are forced to disidentify with any rebellious counteridentification that surfaces as a dissident counterimage. To disavow these images, they project denied self-aspects onto left-wing critics, who reject the hypermoral "paranoia of self punishment and the paranoia of righteousness" as "determined . . . by ar-


rested development of the personality at the genetic stage of the Superego" (quoted in Borch-Jacobsen 31). Thus, certain mirroring aspects are so unacceptable for neoconservative purists that they must first deny them and then project these facets onto elements of the body politic that become tabooed—unable to be mirrored against the shared gestalt of damental cultural fantasies. In this way, psychic projection becomes means of excluding traumatic desires that would otherwise implode unregulated fantasies and revive anxiety associated with the body of bits and pieces. In order to avoid this inevitability, superegoistic desires gain ascendancy to regulate anxiety related to unformed aspects of the ego's body image that threaten to deform a unified conception of the self. Such regulatory desires create a psychic "space" for selective amnesia, which enables right-wing strategists to sell their emotionally charged, high-voltage fantasies to members of the general public interested in making an identitarian leap of faith. BOYS TO MEN TO GODS

I have emphasized mirror-stage phenomena because, as we saw in chapter 4, while Freud ties projection to paranoia and the process of demonization associated with it, Lacan links projection with paranoia and the instance of primary identification enacted before the looking glass. In the sketch of psychoanalysis presented in this chapter, we have seen how a subject's experience before the mirror is appropriated politically to reinforce a process of cultural mirroring that recurs, not just in infancy, but throughout one's life. The importance of these instances of secondary identification are based on the premise that from time to time people feel compelled to reconfigure themselves against a backdrop of shared signifiers that present them within a communal context. Because of this conflation of primary and secondary identifications, image crafters are able to engage icon consumers in a multifaceted specular interaction. First, to manipulate their constituency to do their bidding, politicians of various persuasions seize control of powerful media institutions to circulate stereotypical images as prompts for identification. Second, to induce consumers to identify with the images manufactured for them, politicians plant ideological signifiers in the background gestalt offered for identificatory consumption. Third, to identify with


one or more of the stereotypes distributed for mass consumption, members of the community must deny their difference from these imagistic prototypes as they place themselves within the frame of reference that incorporates them. Finally, to identify with these image types, subjects must reconfigure themselves within the selection of pictorial role models presented by politicians and broadcasters who seek to influence public opinion. Differences manifest when divergent political groups vie with each other to establish media profiles for the disbursement of propaganda to specified target groups. We know right-wing imagemakers project upon the public images that support thefictionof a self-shaping, self-aggrandizing individualism that reinforces the single-vision pretense of identity formation. Such purveyors of iconic myths deny the basic formulation of the mirror stage: that the construction of the figure in the mirror leads the ego to misread its imagistic correlate. This occurs because the inaugural act of identity formation is established from a false unity that denies the experience of fragmentation associated with the body of bits and pieces. Turning this theory on its head, neoconservatives induct their constituency into the cultural mirror by elevating idealized images of the ego and superego as prompts for the status quo to revere. As these exalted pictures circulate through our image-dominated consumer society, media-sawy neoconservatives "bestow" upon the body public contextualized images that promote identity positions. These select positions reinforce social institutions guaranteed by juridical structures that bolster right-wing values. As I have previously indicated, neoconservatives have inscribed a hypermoral metaphysics of substance in the cultural mirror as part of a repressive juridical gestalt presented for identificatory consumption. In this staged spectacle where desire intersects with the law, an imagistic never-never land is established for gay men, lesbians, feminists, people of color, Marxists, and "politically correct" academics. They find themselves inscribed in "the margins of hegemonic discourses"—in the "social spaces carved in the interstices of [sanctioned] institutions and in the chinks and cracks of the power-knowledge apparati" (de Lauretis 25). Although liberals are sometimes graphed within neoconservative


. 139

lines of demarcation, "members of the radical fringe" are first effaced, then reinscribed, as two-dimensional parodies of themselves. In response to this effacement, the task of cultural critics is twofold: to expose right-wing tactics that reduce perceived adversaries to cartoon scapegoats and to deconstruct nonhistorical subject positions promoted to disseminate right-wing propaganda. To this end, postmodern and poststructuralist critics have argued against the possibility of a subjective individualism that maintains one's identity yet is separate from the internalization of cultural representations. Such internalized representations become the backdrop of narcissistic fantasies that foreground the grammatical subject as the center of image clusters coded with cultural data. In the cultural mirror wherein images are produced for intersubjective consumption, feminists, Marxists, multiculturalists, and proponents of queer theory have framed within historical boundaries the neoconservative iconography that connects universal assumptions about the subject with juridical structures determining its position within society. It is not for nothing that theorists like Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Teresa de Lauretis have politicized the production of subjectivity tying it to the economic influences and cultural factors that determine it. For her part, Judith Butler reminds us that "politics must be concerned with this dual function of power: the juridical and the productive," because the law produces a dense discursive text, then conceals its legal underpinning beneath cliched precepts that reinforce the subject's assumed identity-to-itself. In the United States, women are unfailingly inscribed within this tangled web of deception, which is legislated by a marketplace autologic that simultaneously produces and restrains them in accordance with repressive structures of power (Butler 2). Gender thus becomes a stratified mark that designates the subject within the aforementioned categories of class, race, ethnicity and age. These related categories are part of a cultural construction whose attributes are projected upon sexed subjects of desire. As such, this cultural production gives testimony to a radical incompleteness between the biological attributes of the subject and the cultural traits used to render them. When reconceptualizing a model of gender distinctions applied to sexual difference, Judith Butler explains that gender is something people


"have" rather than something people are said "to be" (7). In Butler's analysis, the "universal subject" appears within the field of representation equated with—depending on the paradigm presented—masculinity as the privileged gender or the symbolic as the phallogocentric structure of representation itself. When fleshing out a sketch based on the former premise, Butler depicts Simone de Beauvoir's belief that the feminine gender is indicated by particular attributes while masculinity is equated with universality itself. Butler goes on to demonstrate that, for de Beauvoir and also Monique Wittig, femininity comes into focus as an absence, lack, or expression of masculine otherness-to-itself that is projected onto women. For Irigaray, however, both the subject and the process of symbolization reveal a system of masculine representation produced in a "between-men" phallogocentric system (je, tu, nous 45). Thus, whether fem inists critique the equation of femininity with the otherness of men, which has been projected onto women in the masculine confusion of femininity with the displaced aspects of male subjectivity, or, whether the subject/other binary is considered as a manifestation of the logocentric economy of representation itself, the pretense of a neutral model of representation is undermined. In this way, images of objectivity and paradigms of originality are contested. To reveal the partisan nature of universal values proposed by neoconservatives, feminist critics have demonstrated how claims of subjective originality can be deconstructed at the intersection of "differentials which cannot be summarily hierarchized either within the terms of phallogocentrism or any other candidate for the position of 'primary condition of oppression'" (Butler 14). Feminist strategies remain in stark contrast to the neoconservative mirror-phase sleight-of-hand that postulates the subject as anterior to any knowledge of itself. Neoconservatives ground their global/natural representations in universal/spiritual images proffered for graphic consumption by the American public. In so doing, right-wing critics combine global phenomena with regulatory images guaranteed by the mirror as a neutral, founding source that enables the subject to arrive at some "greater" reality. But if one looks closely, the only warrant guaranteeing this metaphysical colonization of unconscious sites subject to repression is the ego-ideal associated with the father, the phallus, the


logos, and the phallogocentric desire to possess suprahistorical information about the object world and the subject's unproblematic relation to it. Writing about this phenomenon, Luce Irigaray explains in je, tu, nous that patriarchal traditions were further solidified when men seized "hold of the oracle, of truth" and thus became "the gods-men" who severed the oracle and truth "from their earthly and corporeal roots" (17). Thus, a "new logical order was established, censuring women's speech and gradually making it inaudible" (17). But there was another aspect to this appropriative exploit: the privilege accorded to men in general and the father-son genealogy in particular. In any neoconservative bid to establish a metahistorical site of universal proportions, there is an equation of the ideal ego/ego-ideal with the father's name and its sanction by "the gods-men." These psychic agencies and the personified figures that symbolize them are in turn sutured to the signifying ground of the mirrorgestalt and the formative images that emerge from it like televisual wavelengths from the indistinct background of channel-surf. In the following quotation from Irigaray, notice the linkage of familial privilege with the formation of the masculine genealogical line of succession: The difficulties women have in gaining recognition for their social and political rights are rooted in this insufficiently thought out relation between biology and culture. At present, to deny all explanations of a biological kind—because biology has paradoxically been used to exploit women—is to deny the key to interpreting this exploitation. It also comes down to remaining with the cultural naivete that dates back to when the men-gods established their reign: only that which manifests itself in the form of a man is the divine child of the father, only that showing an immediate resemblance to the father may be legitimized as a valued son. The deformed or the atypical are to be hidden in shame. And as for women, they have to reside in darkness, behind veils, indoors; they are stripped of their identity insofar as they are a non-manifestation of forms corresponding to male-sexed chromosomes, {je, tu, nous 46)

In this passage, Irigaray demonstrates how social and political rights are constituted upon a divine paradigm that privileges the god/father/ son succession, whose parallel includes god-the-father, god-the-son, and the holy ghost as the metaphysical guarantee of the other two positions.


The most salient point of reference here, however, distinguishes the formation of the son in the father's image. In other words, when the father looks at his son, he is really searching for a manifestation of his own image. If "deformed" or "atypical" traits become predominant, the son is cast out of the loop because he is unable to mirror the image projected upon him by his father, who wishes to perpetuate the god/father/son lineage as a triadic hybrid reflecting the idealized aura of masculinity. In this androcentric model of genealogical succession, the motherdaughter link is suppressed and, in many cases, eliminated altogether whenever the gods are summoned to ratify the rites of passage from generation to generation. As we have seen, this covenant is partially engendered by mirror-phase phenomena, which warrants the masculine form as the universal designate much in the way that the Bible grants as primary the relationship between Yahweh and Adam. For Yahweh creates Adam first, and then, almost as an afterthought of anatomical destiny, makes Eve from him—from a spare rib, as if Yahweh were ordering takeout. As Mary Wollstonecraft reminds us in A Vindication of the Rights Women, Eve stands in relation to Adam as he does to God: as a direct descendant that enables the birth of the second term. This secondhan genesis gives us the precedent for mirror phenomena that replicates th patriarchal myth in which women and other marginalized groups are commodified, then exchanged, in our Anglo, between-men culture. THE COMMODITY EXCHANGE IN THE CULTURAL MIRROR

In the back-and-forth sweep of introjective and projective cycles of identity formation, categories of gender, class, race, ethnicity, and age become valued or denigrated factors within the matrix of cultural opinions set up by groups that have an agenda for the American public. Such agendas are packaged for promotional merchandising and iconic distribution to our desire-infused economy. In the competition to influence the formation of public sentiment, members of the mass culture are implicitly instructed to square themselves with images promoted by special interest groups in the construction of group identities. In this technoculture of aesthetic production and mass consumption, one group is not inherently superior to another; superiority and inferiority are sutured


. 143

into the gestalt that reckons self-worth, as self-worth is designated by the desires of others whose self-presence stands in for a semiotic absence. Because discursive references figure a "being there" that enables the subject to see itself front and center, it accrues influence in direct proportion to the avoidance of an experience of "not being there." Of being dispersed in the cultural mirror that is fundamentally empty, since it is primarily a product of iconic and lexical signifiers determined by market forces that help to determine its characteristics. The cultural mirror is filled with objectified images whose desirability increases or decreases in an exchange mediated by money, which is not, however, the only arbiter of value in the commodity system. For the categories of time and space also help to set the standards of production practices that transform the identity of workers who recognize themselves as having positions within the institutionalized structure. Teresa Brennan argues in History after Lacan that we bind nature physically inert forms that cannot reproduce themselves. This means that the rhythms of generational time, of natural reproduction, become slower while the world of socially produced time—the world of commodities or money—becomes faster. A combination of increased natural entropy, on the one hand, and heightened, even dizzying, natural speed on the other has this result. It fosters the splitting of the subject between the real and the symbolizable. Signifiers become more detached from their affective referents because of this split, and metaphors become the only mode of experience—something that postmodernism has taken for an ahistorical reality. That this is not true is shown by the way that neoconservatives, I have argued, use words and concepts without regard for the historical connotations of the terms in question. As Mumford notes, "the clock, rather than power-machinery as such, is the prime element in [the] modern mechanical culture"—time as it is allied with space to place constraints on the mobility of laborers in the workplace (quoted in Giddens 12). Giddens concurs with Mumford that commodified time and space are "integrally related to the coordination of activity involved in labour discipline in the workplace" (Giddens 12). In other words, time and space are mapped upon the subject as visible tokens announcing the divide between labor and management. Although both groups are dependent upon the clock to quantify time


spent on the job and both are placed spatially in accordance with their status at the work site, members of labor and management internalize different spatiotemporal gestalts, which, like images in the cultural mirror, are brought home at night. But there is another, less obvious aspect to the steering activity of time and space upon the subject. Giddens explains that "the 'substance of time-space' has become overshadowed by time as quantified form, and space as quantifiable extension" (12). We have already seen how this dynamic operates in the mirror-phase transaction: when the dependent infant who cannot walk raises its head to find an image to appropriate as its ideal ego, it reconfigures space insofar as the infant is able to project itself through a future-perfect temporal dimension. This temporal projection establishes a "quantifiable extension" of its spatial dimension. The projection enables the child tofictionalizeits body image as a totalized unity based upon two factors: its capacity to thrust itself into an idealized future of projected mastery and its capability to center its physical form upon the historical stage where the human being is objectified. As Lacan states, "the mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from [motor] insufficiency [in the infant's inability to move rapidly through space] to [the temporal] anticipation''' of a future mastery dependent upon an unfragmented body-image ("Mirror" 4). In Lacan's mirror, this image coheres in space only to the degree that the infant can anticipate its mastery over itself at some future time. This dynamic enables the subject produced in the cultural mirror to circulate in an exchange of desires factored in terms offinancialconsiderations as well as the time-space quotient that undercodes the interchange of commodities. Each object located in the mirror of manufactured cultural relations is assigned a plus or minus factor of desirability in a system that venerates the exchange, extracts an excess of surplus value as its end product, and generates massive confusion pertaining to the "relations between people with [the] relations to things" (Foley 87). Desire is thus tied to the production and circulation of subjects in accordance with the laws of the marketplace, where small segments of society attain a privileged position, where the majority become the proles who form the lower middle class, and where scapegoated "others" are devalued as less than human. To sell the American public images of them-


selves that are sewn into the gestalt of cultural relations, an intermediary step must be layered into the iconic network to accomplish this goal. This intermediary step is predicated upon the internalization of numerous variables: the objedification of self-images that reinforce massproduced generic identities and cultural stereotypes, the codification of image-generated desires as the desires of others, the wholesale distribution of the spatiotemporal dynamic used to police the workplace, the launching of promotional campaigns to influence the mass production of images for iconic consumption, and the polysemantical organization of institutional relations that operate systematically upon the exchange process. These are a few of the factors that combine to form the parallel modes of transfiguration capable of altering the ways we view ourselves. In America, various forms of production, dissemination, and consumption of images are mobilized to establish perceptual identities within institutional relations. Such images of the body politic couch ideas and values that are internally configured in the background commentary of the visual gestalt sold to Americans daily in oversimplistic sound bites. I use the word commentary here because, even in instances of primary identification wherein the infant traces its image in the mirror, the background gestalt contains icons that are "potential signifiers" whose meanings are realized retroactively at some future date. In the array of subsequent identifications constituted from images graphed onto the screen of lived experience, the iconic likeness used to identify one's body with oneself does not always remain separate from the narrative that inscribes events within its discursive structure. Because the process of identification is mapped onto a narrative accounting of events, the narrative becomes more than a formal construction of structural elements that orders relations between subjects. MAPPING IMAGES ONTO THE NARRATIVE OF POLITICAL CORRECTNESS The theoretical model developed here enables us to determine how neoconservative mythologists have stylized narrative scenarios to induce icon consumers to find themselves in texts produced for their reception. The implementation of this model prompts those who are suspicious of


its declared purpose to pose an important question: what specific narratives are fashioned for our textual economy? To answer this question, I turn to the exponents of right-wing propaganda—George Will, Dinesh D'Souza, and Roger Kimball. In their reductive moral narratives of good versus evil, they have assumed the roles of protagonists who believe it is their business to defend the American public against indoctrination from the "communist fascist feminist deconstructionist multiculturalists," whom they cast as the overdetermined antagonists of their political satire (Berube 130). In this yarn of grand "epic" proportions, these selfappointed guardians of high culture and transcendental values see themselves besieged by a group of "card-carrying multiculturalist[s]." The "strident denunciations" and "ideological bias" of this group are cast as un-American traits in morality plays that neoconservative commentators produce for their target audience. If we study the specifics of the PC narrative, it becomes apparent that, in the protagonist/antagonist dichotomy, the former position is assigned to right-wing moral custodians who appropriate the narrator's privilege for themselves in order to relay their suprahistorical version of universal truth to the public. Another element they factor into their moralistic fairy tale is the PC storyline that produces headlines like these: "MLA critics have instituted censorious speech codes at colleges and universities across the country." According to this highly partisan claim, Multicultural Leftist Academics have censored students who repudiate "special privileges" for gays and lesbians, who deny people of color basic rights that Anglo-Americans have enjoyed for centuries, and who bar women from the circle of distributed political influence. In D'Souza's version of the PC narrative, students have felt so intimidated by their professors' political views that they have refrained from confronting them for fear of being sent to "sensitivity classes" where they would be indoctrinated in the requisite PCthink of the '90s. How does D'Souza back up such far-fetched assertions? By making insupportable claims. With cosmic superiority oozing from his pen, he asserts opinions disguised as unequivocal facts. These "facts" support the premise of widespread student dissatisfaction based on a scant selection of interviews with neoconservative students whose reactionary perspectives are made to stand for that of the college population as a whole. By examining such tactics, we can determine that all o


. 147

D'Souza's observations are grounded in a narrative ruse based on the premise that he can read minds. The last of these claims reveals how the narrative of political correctness is sustained by right-wing ideologues who pretend their point of view is apolitical, if not neutral, even when it is advanced solely for the purpose of striking out against their adversaries. The "political correctniks" they demonize are always subjective, ideological, dogmatic antagonists who repeatedly block any advancement within the profession "according to merit" (Kimball 65). On the other hand, the "judicious," "objective," and "level-headed" neoconservative protagonists defend the ideals of disinterested criticism, universal human interest, and transcendental values. Such ideals are exalted by these fundamentalist politicos even as they demean the "agents" of political correctness as ideological profiteers who have infiltrated our society for the purpose of toppling it. This comedic depiction becomes even more preposterous when neocon artists portray themselves as objective and apolitical as they fabricate tall tales of political inequality on campus when, in fact, they have gained an enormous amount of power outside the university. At the time I am writing this sentence, Republicans constitute a majority of governors, senators, and representatives in the House, yet they continue to cry foul because their attempts to organize students on colleges and universities across the country have met with stiff resistance. Although they exercise increasing power in government circles and in the media (on talk radio in particular), their inability to consolidate a base at the university has left them so cross they have declared war against the "activist fringe" that opposes them there. Here is George Will on this issue: Such skirmishes in the curricula wars occur because campuses have become refuges for radicals who want universities to be thoroughly politicized as they are. Like broken records stashed in the nation's attic in 1968, these politicized professors say: America is oppressive, imposing subservience on various victim groups. The culture is permeated with racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism (oppression of the working class), so the first task of universities is "consciousness-raising." This is done with "diversity education," which often is an attempt to produce intellectual uniformity by promulgating political orthodoxy. (259)


Part of Will's strategy is obvious: to link the longhaired radicals of the '60s with the "politicized professors" who currently work in the factories of "junkthink," where they supposedly entertain a comprehensive plan to impose their rigid belief system upon others. As I noted in chapter 4, neoconservatives like Will often try to inoculate right-wing critics against charges of racism, homophobia, and elitism, which they deny when pretending to mirror universal truth for the public. To accomplish this goal, George Will ("America's favorite reactionary nerd") invariably takes the offensive, anticipating the critique that will be used against him and his ultraright allies (Kavanagh 318). To this end, Will recontextualizes narrative details by anticipating any damaging criticism, sutures it within a lexicon of his own right-wing making, and casts scorn upon those who would criticize him. Against the charge of unfairly appropriating universal truth for their own political gains, right-wing critics like Will and Kimball must first establish that values can indeed be considered universal. In the narrative of political correctness, this argument crystallizes around the issue of the canon, which supposedly houses great literature inscribed by "masters" with a direct hotline to universal truths that preserve the "classical heritage of mankind" (Howe 160). These "masters" have become literary monuments erected to the white male tradition. Although it seems quite suspicious that Anglo male writers have traditionally been lauded as the primary group capable of generating millennial "staying power," rightwing theorists assure us that canonical literature has an ever widening comprehensiveness reflected in its ability to speak to us across the barriers of time, geography, social system, religious belief, to say nothing of the currently favored barriers of sex, class, race, and ethnic origin. "Transcendent," like "universalist," is a naughty word for the politically correct multiculturalist largely because, if taken seriously, it suggests that the qualities that unite us as human beings are more important than the contingencies that separate us as social and political agents. (Kimball 69) Notice how Kimball pretends to be a "custodian of Western culture" that protests against "the irruption of politics into something that has always been political" (Gates 195). Enacting a compulsive pattern of defensive self-promotion, Kimball never tires of launching preventative


strikes against the reviled PC enemy. Through such strategies he hopes to snooker the public into believing that God is a cultural neoconservative, that right-wing mythmakers have the ability to transcend petty political concerns, and that they can conflate themselves with the omniscient narrators who detail the PC chronology cooked up by think tank Republicans. As Jon Wiener states in Professors, Politics and Pop, gro like the John M. Olin Foundation have poured "millions of dollars into universities in an effort to reshape the curriculums" and have bestowed large sums on the likes of D'Souza, Kimball, and Martin Anderson so they could continue to churn out their propaganda (99). That is why many neoconservative story lines state the same objectives, present identical narrative details, and invite the public to find themselves within a repetitive fantasy of intersubjective relations. This is often accomplished in sound bite jargon disseminated as an ideological narrative that passes itself off as a full-fledged research tract. These tracts are given the stamp of authenticity because their work appears in hardbound books published by presses that, interested in increasing their profits, lend their name to sanction such propaganda as credible. In these quick-read, scantily researched texts, neoconservative authority is reinforced by a narrative omniscience that purports to be objective in relating events to readers. The most obvious appropriation of the omniscient narrator occurs in D'Souza's work when he writes about the Afrocentric menace whose "black supremacist" policies are dividing the American masses against themselves. As D'Souza puts it, a "liberal education should be about integration, about bringing groups together"; however, the Afrocentric professorate have instituted the big chill of "a new separatism on campus, what some have called a new segregation on campus" (30). When fabricating this narrative, D'Souza invokes an Orwellian doublethink in which " 'diversity' really means strict intellectual conformity, and 'tolerance' is reserved exclusively for those who subscribe to one's own perspective"—one that precludes all middle Americans who believe in God, country, family, and that idealized slice of corporate pie (34). In this upside-down world where deceptive stereotyping is the norm, neoconservative mythmakers like D'Souza pit their religious idealism against academics, whom they parody in malicious distortions that


form the theoretical particulars of their promotional campaign. For instance, look at what D'Souza has to say on the issue of racial separatism: I'm a native of India. I was raised in Bombay. I came to this country in 1978.1 became a citizen last year. I'm a first-generation immigrant to the United States. I think that America is becoming a multiracial society and the whole issue is transcending black and white. We are going to hav or more groups, whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians [notice how he leaves out Native Americans] in this diverse culture. It's very important to have a fair set of rules to arbitrate the differences among these groups. And the problem is that universities and to some extent society at large are moving away from a fair or neutral set of principles and are engaging a politics of expediency, of racial rationing, of racial preference. I think this is a formula for division, for Balkanization, and ultimately for racial hostility. (35; my emphasis)

D'Souza, who came to this country after the great civil rights conflict of the '50s and '60s, proves here that he has a selective memory. He gives weight and gravity to the ornamental ideal that America is "the home of the brave and the land of the free"—an old cliche that has been belied by the treatment of, among others, African Americans, Native Americans, and women in our country's brief history. D'Souza has forgotten that African Americans were brought here like cattle, dragged from their homelands, torn from their families so they could toil in the fields as slaves in a foreign land. He has also blotted from memory the fact that Native Americans were either slaughtered in the name of westward expansion or rounded up, then herded into societal cages euphemistically called reservations. And D'Souza denies that all women—Asian American, Native American, Hispanic American, African American, and Anglo American—were legally disenfranchised, kept from voting until the early half of this century. Such inequality considered, it makes one wonder how free D'Souza's America really is and how brave were those who committed such acts of enslavement. In Moving the Centre, Ngugi wa Thiongb provides a category for peo ple like D'Souza who are quick to deny that the "wealth of the West is rooted in the poverty of the rest of us," that, in fact, "Western Europe and North America accumulated capital through the slave trade, slave labour and colonial labour" (118). According to Ngugi, such a deep-rooted and


. 151

pervasive pathological denial can only be accomplished through the implementation of ideological methods of persuasion: (1) an "obscurantism" that not only hides the economic advantages of the few in society who rule the many, but that inverts the terms of gratitude so workers actually feel guilty when they recognize the capitalistic engine could not run without their labor power; (2) a strategy of "divide and conquer" wherein workers are pitted against other workers who defend their job security against those whom they could join in solidarity; (3) a form of "political domination" that is virtually transparent in countries like South Africa but camouflaged in the Euroamerican orbit, where ideological brainwashing is implemented to convince workers to betray one another; (4) finally, as a result of these three stratagems, an "exploitation" leading to more profit and accumulated wealth for both the empowered elite and those crossover figures who support their cause. Unfortunately, this leads to a cycle of "oppression" built on an institutionalized racism that pits "whites of European stock" against "the dark races of the earth" (Ngugi 116-20). But there is an exception to this rule, and D'Souza fits the case: The Western bourgeoisie has its allies among the dominated nations of Asia, Africa and South America. This is because they have brought up, from among the colonies, semi-colonies and neo-colonies, a native elite imbued with an almost pathological self-hatred and contempt through years of racist cultural engineering. Racism has thus produced an elite endowed with what Frantz Fanon once described as an incurable wish for the permanent identification with the West. (120) These turncoats are like Gulliver in Book 4 of Gulliver's Travels, for in that segment he visits the land of the Houyhnhnms, undergoes a crossspecies identification, identifies with the perspective of the Houyhnhnms, and sees himself as a Yahoo, which leaves him intolerant once he encounters human beings again. For after he returns home to his family, Gulliver prefers the smell of horses to humans, suffers to eat with his wife and children in the same room, but enjoys conversing with horses at "least four hours every day" (Swift 234). While Gulliver undergoes a cross-species identification that leads him to detest members of his own species, D'Souza undergoes a cross-racial identification that leaves him white-identified. Because of this crossover identification, he can com-


fortably fight on the side of a Euroamerican elite that has traditionally oppressed people of color. When one looks beneath the cover of D'Souza's camouflaged opinions, it becomes readily apparent that he is really pushing his readers toward a perceptible goal that has little to do with objectivity, universality, or neutral reportage: I'm in favor of a multicultural curriculum that emphasizes what Matthew Arnold called the best that has been thought and said. Non-Western cultures have produced great works that are worthy of study, and I think young people should know something about the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. To do so, it's helpful to be exposed to the Koran. Young people should know something about the rise of lapanese capitalism. Is there a Confucian ethic behind the success of Asian entrepreneurship in the same way we hear about Max Weber, the Protestant ethic, and the spirit of capitalism? (31) Is there any wonder that a man selling the American dream of making millions of dollars would foreground "entrepreneurship," the "rise of Japanese capitalism," and "the Protestant [work] ethic" as distinguishable signs that celebrate "the spirit of capitalism"? In this amalgamation of corporatist dogma, D'Souza's "multiculturalism" is a code word for fast capital allied with religious foundationalism, in this case, with the celebration of "Islamic fundamentalism" (31). For D'Souza's brand of multiculturalism venerates a reactionary professionalism that marries international capitalism with a market-driven fundamentalist politics, whose purpose is to influence American consumption habits by targeting specified markets to placate consumers. In this regard, D'Souza takes a page out of Pat Robertson's book, for Robertson markets himself as a minister while he sells products to members of his flock, a ready-made audience if there ever was one. In fact, since 1990 Robertson has amassed a business empire that grossed over $100 million ("Kingdom of Pat"). In 1990, the nonprofit Family Channel was sold to a company Robertson had formed with the backing of TCI Cable, the telecommunications octopus, which desired that the Robertsons retain controlling stock of a new company created to buy the Family Channel For a stock certificate of $183,000, TCI gave Robertson controlling interest in this new company, an investment that has recently


. 153

skyrocketed. Later, CBN recognized that the Family Channel was makin so much money it had to be sold to preserve CBN'S tax-exempt status: it "got a good deal, cash, stock and other benefits now worth 'in excess of an astounding $600 million dollars" ("Kingdom of Pat"). With this money, Pat Robertson, who often rails against the Hollywood elite, bought the MTM (Mary Tyler Moore) Studio as well as the Ice Capades ("Kingdom of Pat"). As if this were not enough, Robertson has now entered into another corporate venture—KaloVita—a company that markets "vitamins, cosmetics and discount shopping coupons" to a gullible public that believes Robertson is more interested in the immortal soul than the ol' mighty dollar. Although he is a religious leader, Pat Robertson has been able to profit from his business dealings because the narrative framing the American Dream connects corporate capitalism with religion and politics. Earlier in this book, we saw how right-wing critics linked Marxism with other terms they sought to stigmatize: liberal, political correctnik, multicul alist, Afrocentrist, and victim. By evoking one term, neoconservativ hoped to delegitimize the others that followed in its wake. In this way they tried to dissuade the American public from identifying with those cardboard caricatures who were associated with these terms. The demeaning caricature of the politically correct academic is but one facet in a larger adversarial narrative. After the Second World War, a marriage of sorts was established between the two predominant American narratives—the Christian fundamentalist one and the corporate fable of capitalism's triumphant ordering of world relations. The overriding fundamentalist narrative offers the promise of a second coming ushering in a new millennium. This moment of transformation will occur, according to contemporary neoconservatives, after a religious war to end all religious wars, a global conflict between the forces of good and evil that, ironically, will give way to an unprecedented period of love and peace. This legendary site of afterworld identity formation is the most unlikely candidate to be paired with the narrative of international capitalism, which has emerged in its technological incarnation in the latter part of the twentieth century. The customary codes of fast capital present an improbable corollary to the Christian myth of the paradisal completion of history in the not-distant future. Why, one might ask, is it


improbable? Because, throughout the twentieth century it has been common knowledge that "godless" capitalism would sell whatever it could to whomever would buy its mass-produced products. And that includes the sale of worldly identities that defy intergenerational Christian codes of conduct traditionally evoked to ensure the smooth transition of theological influence. For international capitalism thrives on the principle of planned obsolescence, which requires the re-creation of goods and value-invested identities that have need of these particular goods every so many years. Because capitalism must repeatedly sponsor new fantasies that depend on the production, circulation, and consumption of the latest goods from secular heaven, it is peculiar, to say the least, that it would join forces with right-wing religious fundamentalism, which, in the last stages of the twentieth century, would act as its coguarantor. Considering that money constitutes the heart and soul of a commodity system, it seems surreal that fundamentalists would be so probusiness. Yet that's the case. In fact, it is one of the most predominant aspects of McReaganism, this unholy match of opposing positions inaugurated as a means to accomplish conservative ends. How else could we explain the inexplicable reliance of neoconservatives on hyperreal sound bite technologies? Or the outrageous contradictions posed by the National Association of Scholars, who deny that "the traditional curriculum 'excludes' the contributions of all but males of European descent" as they back the male-whites-only canonical list offered by Charles Sykes and Brad Miner in The National Review College Guide (quoted in "Is th Curriculum Biased"). Many people in the academy have come to expect such inconsistencies, for how else could one explain the National Association of Scholars purporting, at one moment, to be "in favor of ethnic studies, the study of non-Western cultures, and the study of special problems of women and minorities," while, in the next, criticizing multicultural studies as an attempt to add "inferior works" to the curriculum ("Is the Curriculum Biased"). These examples of double-talk show in microcosm how the overarching narratives of fundamentalist neoconservativism brought forth during the age of McReaganism are at odds with themselves yet are presented as if they had no contradictions. Right-wing critics reinforce these white, middle-class narratives over and over to exploit the racist and sexist social arrangements currently in


existence in America. The narratives linking multinational capitalism with fundamental(ist) social fantasies privileging those who are politically empowered acquire even more influence once the conservators of past traditions couple them with media images disbursed to their target audiences. As we have seen, this happens because the production of manufactured cultural images can be packaged in such a way that icon consumers will ignore their contrived, made-up character. By ignoring the fabricated aspect of the manufactured image and the ideological identity established between narrative occurrences, the public can better identify with the programmed narrative agenda that contextualizes images distributed for group identification. If the narrative of Christiancapitalism is accepted by enough people as the "natural" locale of identity formation, triumphant neoconservatives will be able to sell mercantilized images that ensure a transcendent metareality guaranteeing the ego-ideal as the God of commercial relations. In this way, a cornmodified deity can be appropriated for political as well as religious purposes by groups that decry the "apocalypse now" of postmodern times, yet are doing everything in their power to ensure that a telecommunicational Creator guarantees the paradisiac project of right-wing information processing.

7 . White Male Canon Formation and the End of History

THE GREAT BOOKS LOBBY In the introduction to The National Review College Guide, William Buckley, Jr., openly proclaims that the "impulse behind this book is one part political" (9). Those who have read right-wing critics over the past fifteen years might be amazed that Buckley would admit the obvious: neoconservative scholars who hurl accusations at "PC professors" are not objective observers. Buckley's concession is refreshing because he forthrightly sets neoconservatives in opposition to what he calls the leftwing "ideological biases against God or man" (9). But candor turns into audacity when Buckley assumes that God implicitly backs his right-wing ideological agenda. According to this fantasy, neoconservatives have privileged access to "His" consumption-oriented technological wishes while "He" disdains the multicultural stance proposed by progressive critics in the universities today. Buckley's adversarial stance resorts to the most unsubtle type of self-justification, revealing why the Buckleys, Sykes, Miners, Blooms, Kramers, and Silbers of the world are a "rather dour collection of scholars and diatribists," who, Katha Pollitt claims, "are not, to my mind, a particularly appealing group of people. They are arrogant, they are rude, they are gloomy, they do not suffer fools gladly—and everywhere they look, fools are what they see" (201-2). They turn "fools" into "agents" of a unified front of scholars working in the trenches of "The Academic Gulag" (National Review 239). Neocon servatives grumble about a sovietization of the university environment 156

White Male Canon Formation and the End of History

. 157

that encourages "draconian gag rules, politicized curriculums," and "the imposition of an ideological orthodoxy onto campus life... [which] represents an assault on the fundamental values of liberal education" (National Review 239). According to Charles Sykes and Brad Miner, the ed tors of The National Review College Guide, two of the worst offender the Marxist "Gulag" are Brown University and Harvard University: About the best thing we can say about Brown is that it plays an indispensable role in academia. Ask a college administrator about political correctness, watered-down curricula, trendy post-structuralism, bans on free speech, and overall nuttiness at his school [notice the sexist assumption that the administrator is a man] and he's likely to say, "Well, we're certainly not as bad as Brown!' And he's right. Few schools have gone quite so far in embracing ideological purity or dismantling the liberal arts as has Brown, the designated bad boy of academia. (243) College rankings may come and go, but Harvard remains pretty much alone at the top of the ziggurat. There is no way to minimize the impact of Harvard either on the nation's intellectual life or on academia itself. More's the pity. Despite its enormous prestige, Harvard simply does not live up to our standards of either quality teaching or curricular coherence. (247) Rather than promote "debased" schools like Brown and Harvard as

appropriate institutions of higher learning for students to attend, The National Review College Guide extols the likes of Lynchburg Colleg Transylvania University, and Grove City College. Sykes and Miner append the phrase "Impressing the Ivies" to Lynchburg College so that students "who are willing to stray from the beaten path of the big-name universities (and we assume that the readers of this guide are at least willing to consider straying) will find that many of the traditions that have been scrapped or deconstructed in the Ivy League are undergoing a dramatic resurgence in smaller liberal arts institutions" like Lynchburg (125-26). The Guide also alleges that Transylvania University is a genuine "Bluegrass Thoroughbred" (205). A school that might consider changing its name, Transylvania is ironically "affiliated with the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)" (205). This affiliation accounts for "Transy's" twocourse sequence in "Images of Human Nature and Images of Civilization," which is "part of the school's freshman studies program" based on


preserving its ultraconservative canon (204). In the Guide, Grove City i lauded for "Defeating the Philistines" because it has done battle with the federal government (95). Because Sykes and Miner think so highly of Grove City, they turn to an absurd source to prop up their recommendation: "although we hesitate to cite other college guides, we do note that Money magazine has consistently rated Grove City among the top five private schools nationwide ... in its Value rankings'" (95). What do neoconservative writers mean by "value rankings"? This term refers to a strata of moral attributes that provides a basis for sanctioning schools and demonstrates a direct relationship between Christianity and a core program of learning based on a canonical course selection comprised of the Great Books. But these "value rankings" devalue institutions like Berkeley, Dartmouth, Duke, Penn, Smith, Stanford, and Yale, which have a proven record of providing students with a distinguished standard of academic excellence. Although neoconservatives are loath to admit it, these institutions (even in a neoconservative lexicon) have "stood the test of time" (265). The "shared values campaign" sponsored by the National Association of Scholars has been intent upon dodging multicultural diversity while embracing "traditional standards in the classroom" that encourage a strict doctrinal adherence to the canon. Taking its cue from this group of reactionary scholars, The National Review College Guide does not re ommend any "non-Western course" that advocates the "recognition and affirmation of difference" or the promotion of those "Mad, Bad and Imbruted Women" (264-65). Keep this racist and sexist agenda in mind as you peruse the following selection of "Great Books" that the Guide recommends: Homer, The Iliad; The Odyss Herodotus, History Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian W Aeschylus, Prometheus; The House ofAtre Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus; Oedipus Colonus; Antigone, E Euripides, Alcestis; Medea; Electra; Hippol Aristophanes, The Frogs; The Clou Percy Gardner, Principles of Greek A

White Male Canon Formation and the End of History . 159

Plato, Symposium; The Republic; Dialogues Aristotle, Ethics; Poetics Lucretius, De Rerum Natura Virgil, Eclogues; Georgics; Aenei Horace, Odes; Epodes; Satires; Epistl Plutarch, Lives Marcus Aurelius Antonius, To Himself St. Augustine, Confessions; The City of God The Song of Roland The Nibelungenlied St. Thomas Aquinas, Of God and His Creatures Dante, La Vita Nuova; The Divine Comedy Galileo, Nuncius Siderius; On the Authority of Scripture in Philosophical Controversies; Four Dialogues on the Two Great Systems of the World J. J. Fahie, Galileo, His Life and Work Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace Montaigne, Essays Shakespeare, Hamlet, Much Ado about Nothing Cervantes, Don Quixote Bacon, The Advancement of Learning; The New Atlantis Descartes, Discoveries of Method Hobbes, Leviathan Milton, Paradise Lost Moliere, Les Precieuses Ridicules; Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Le Mi anthrope, Tartuffe, VAvare Meredith, On Comedy and the Comic Spirit Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws Voltaire, Candide, Toleration and Other Essays S. G. Tallentyre, Voltaire in His Letters Rousseau, Discourses on Inequality, Toleration and Other Essay Gibbons, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations Kant, Critique of Pure Reason Goethe, Faust


American State Papers: Declaration of Independence; Constitution of the United States; The Federalist Victor Hugo, Les Miserables Hegel, The Philosophy of History Sir Charles Lyell, The Principles of Geology Balzac, Old Goriot Malthus, Essay on the Principle of Population Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles ofMorals and Legislation Mill, Autobiography, On Liberty Darwin, The Origin of the Species; Autobiography Pasteur, either The Life ofPasteurby Rene Vallery-Radot; or Pasteur: The History of the Mind by Emile Duclaux Marx, The Communist Manifesto; DasKapital Tolstoy, Anna Karenina Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; preface to The Dawn of the Day William James, Psychology Here is what Charles Sykes and Brad Miner have to say about this "definitive" secular canon: "Finally, we present here a list of Great books . . . [which] deserve to be called 'great,' and which ought to be part of the curriculum, or just read by educated people" (265). For these neoconservative critics, some books are verifiably "great" while other texts promoted by "tenured radicals" in academia are merely "political." The editors of the Guide are of the opinion that all books selected for a multicultural curriculum are measured by their "immediate revolutionary power" (265). Books celebrated by right-wing critics, however, are allegedly neutral in representing the Western tradition, which has been transformed in part by such texts (265). Their belief in a neutral canon can be traced to the way it was originally perceived: as a code of laws established by the ecclesiastical councils of the Christian church. Later the term canon stood for a more general principle, standard, or criterion of judging the suitability of secular works deemed worthy of being classified as "sacred" literary texts. This provides a rationale for why neoconservative critics link the literary canon with Christian fundamentalism.


Having fashioned a fictional distinction between "great" books and "political" texts, the editors of the Guide begin the inevitable process of rationalizing their choice of books. John Erskine from Columbia University, they explain, drew up the list reproduced here. They concede that Erskine could have chosen King Lear over Much Ado about Nothing or substituted Pascal or Hume for Jeremy Bentham, but they never address the more absurd aspects of their critical assessments. According to Sykes and Miner, the timeless luminaries Percy Gardner, J. J. Fahie, and S. G. Tallentyre are more important than writers such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. When considering such omissions, one might wonder why the Guide prints, "you can pick em, but for their literary value, not because of sex or politics" (265; my emphasis). This rationalization becomes patently obvious once one considers their reluctance to include a representative group of women and writers of color on their list. Are we to believe that "well-known" texts such as the Principles of Greek Art and Galileo, His Life and Work are worthy of being included as "Great Books," yet those by the Brontes or Jane Austen are not? If the canon does not contain the classics Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice, is it little wonder that it does not contain works by Alice Walker or Helene Cixous? Are we to accept the claim that neoconservatives disregard race, gender, and cultural affiliations when they determine which writers can enter their closed precinct of textual relations? MALE-CENTERED CANON BUILDING

In "Canons to the Right of Them," Paula Bennett quotes Toni Morrison's observations on the political stakes of canon building: Canon building is Empire Building. Canon defense is national defense. Canon debate ... is the clash of cultures. And all of the interests are vested. (165) Like most cultural critics today, Bennett and Morrison are aware that even New Criticism, which excludes all information not emanating from the literary text itself, is a politicized discourse. Yet, whether or not New Critics concede the point, any stance—no matter how neutral it seems— must provide a perspective for reading the text. It also must furnish a


raison d'etre for its establishment and continuation. In other words, it must perpetuate itself by maintaining an ideological inclination, which explains why Morrison declares that "a//" interests are "vested." When as respected an African American critic as Louis Gates edited The Norton Anthology of Afro-American Literature, he had to "negotia position between those on the cultural right who claim that black literature can have no canon, no masterpieces, and those on the cultural left who wonder why anyone wants to establish the existence of a canon, any canon, in the first place" (Gates, "Whose Canon" 195). When deciding whether to accept, reject, or alter the canon, Gates demonstrated what most students and professors in the academy already know: there are a variety of stances that can be taken on this hotly contested issue. Some think the canon is salvageable only if women and people of color are included in any list of writers. Some believe the notion of canonicity itself is completely outmoded. Others are suspicious that "the canon is hierarchical, patriarchal and otherwise politically suspect" (Gates 196). But as long as the educational system resembles the one in place today, we will live with the canon. As I see it, the question is not whether there should or should not be a canon, but whether it presents a rigid sedimentation of textual groupings or a fluid possibility for change. The changing of th literary, philosophical, and scientific guard is important, but so is the possibility of change, for this empowers the writers of future generations who will succeed those of our own era. The question, then, becomes one neoconservatives wish to avoid. How do we allow for the conditions of our own erasure and, simultaneously, provide for circumstances favorable for succeeding generations to develop their own tastes, values, and agendas? This possibility of change is precisely what neoconservatives wish to block. For, by definition, conservatism hearkens back to a time when children were seen and not heard, women "knew their place," and people of color were ostracized in a racist caste system. S C R I P T I N G M O D E R N I T Y : W O O L F ' S ACTS AS CASE I N P O I N T

As a feminist writing in the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf was concerned with specific questions such as who was empowered to write, from what privileged place of enunciation would discourse originate,


for what political purpose, and to what aim? (See her A Room of One's Own.) Woolf knew that, historically, there have been few slots reserved for women writers in the classical canon. In preceding centuries, women poets, dramatists, and novelists were accorded limited public access for their work, since few avenues were available to those seeking institutional sanction for their writing. Some writers—Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell—defied historical odds by publishing influential works of fiction, while others like Mary Anne Evans, Charlotte Bronte, and Emily Bronte adopted pseudonyms to disguise their gender so that their work would be validated. We know that the politicized question "Who is empowered to write?" has been repeated in successive historical eras. Today it is commonplace to say that in the nineteenth century women fought for agency and voice, constructing themselves as gendered subjects who demanded political empowerment. We know that, in the nineteenth century, feminists attempted to establish a public forum for their ideas while avoiding the hysterical position assigned to them by a homosocial culture, wherein the enactment of hysterical symptoms was sanctioned as it was condemned by the medical-juridical establishment. With regard to their craft, feminist writers of the nineteenth century encountered a petrified canon displaying the all-too-visible contours of male privilege. This precedent considered, it becomes ironic that for feminists and other writers of the twentieth century the mode of representation itself becomes the site of controversy, and the issue of agency is problematized as the subject becomes understood as an ideological construct. Because the issue of agency is foregrounded in twentieth-century studies of subjectivity, critics often avoid drawing overarching parallels between the recent feminist appropriation of theoretical discourse and the way feminist novelists, dramatists, and poets engaged the literary establishment last century. For one thing, the boundary distinguishing literary and theore ical has become blurred, even as the lines that demarcate the split subject of (post)modernity have shifted with each new position adopted. The effect of this rapid shift in positions is that subjectivity itself has become understood as an effect of discourse. The experimental maneuvers of literary modernism inform Virginia WoolPs last novel, Between the Acts. It does not present a summarize


overview, retrospectiveflashback,or visionary projection of future possibilities. Instead, Between the Acts weaves a poetics of ambiguity epito mized by the mirror sequence that occurs at the end of the literary pageant staged for Miss La Trobe's audience. Assembled on the lawn at Pointz Hall to watch the pageant, the audience is confronted with villagers who present historical scenes from the Renaissance to the modern period. Whereas the pageant's presentation is primarily mimetic in conception, once the scene shifts to the twentieth century, the audience is forced to observe themselves in an array of mirrors that reflect their own images. After this switch in technique, the play is no longer presented for the audience. Instead, the audience members become both the players in the modern psychodrama and the spectators observing it. As they gaze into the "hand glasses, tin cans, scraps of scullery glass, harness room glass, and heavily embossed silver mirrors," the audience attempts to find their historical positions dramatized as one part of the sequence of vignettes from previous centuries of English history. In this display of reflexive referentiality, Woolf adds to Lacan's "personal" process of mirroring (of objectifying the "self" as a reflected image) a collec tive mirroring process arising out of the historical context presented in La Trobe's skits. Above all, the audience's reaction to finding themselves in this paradigmatic example of modernistic representation enables their impromptu responses to the historical mirror held up to their gaze. In this dramatic mirror sequence, narrative and theory are intermixed, making all the more ambiguous the distinction between the dramatic players and their receptive audience. This dynamic in turn undermines two aspects of traditional representation that neoconservatives are seeking desperately to preserve: first, the pretense of empiricism in the presentation of events that appear to be external to the subject, and second, the traditional representation of the unified subject that witnesses this empirical presentation. Both of these possibilities are introduced in Between the Acts only to be undermined—the former by the mirror sequence, which implicates the audience in its staging, and the latter by the split subject of desire that emerges from it to symbolize itself in the divide between the subject-as-subject and the subject-as-object. "Who speaks what?" is one of the silent probes La Trobe's audience never poses, although many of them do question their circumstances

White Male Canon Formation and the End of History . 165 when recovering their composure after being taken unawares by the deviation in the play's format. This deviation from normative expectation prevents members of the audience from placing themselves in the discernible historical trajectory presented previously as part of the play's format. After the onlookers are lulled into expecting a predictable scripting of transmitted events, there occurs a disorienting dramatic shift, which wrenches the audience from its comfortable self-identical position as audience. This dramatic shift manifests as a future-perfect transferential "moment" when those who view the play are reflected as objects of a scopic spectacle by the actors-turned-audience, who watch how the audience-turned-actors react to this collective shift in positioning once they find themselves mirrored by the players: Children? Imps—elves—demons. Holding what? Tin cans? Bedroom candlesticks? Old jars? My dear, that's the cheval glass from the Rectory! And the mirror—that I lent her. My mother's. Cracked. What's the notion? Anything that's bright enough to reflect, presumably, ourselves? Ourselves! Ourselves! Out they leapt, jerked, skipped,flashing,dazzling, dancing, jumping. Now old Bart... he was caught. Now Manresa. Here a nose ... There a shirt... Then trousers only... Now perhaps a face ... Ourselves? But that's cruel. To snap us as we are, before we've had time to assume ... and only, too, in parts.... That's what's so distorting and upsetting and utterly unfair.... So did they all—hand glasses, tin cans, scraps of scullery glass, harness room glass, and heavily embossed silver mirrors—all stopped. And the audience saw themselves, not whole by any means, but at any rate sitting still. The hands of the clock had stopped at the present moment. It was now. Ourselves. So that was her little game! To show us up, as we are, here and now. A shifted, preened, minced; hands were raised, legs shifted. Even Bart, even Lucy, turned away. All evaded or shaded themselves—save Mrs. Manresa who, facing herself in the glass, used it as a glass; had out her mirror; powdered her nose, and moved one curl, disturbed by the breeze, to its place The mirror bearers squatted; malicious, observant, expectant, expository... "Must we submit passively to this malignant indignity?" the front row demanded. Each turned ostensibly to say—O whatever came handy—to his neighbor. Each tried to shift an inch or two beyond the inquisitive insulting eye. (Acts 184-86)


Kept sequestered from the players and the audience, Miss La Trobe still directs the significative interchange by casting out a net of illusion to capture her audience's attention. Although the audience does not see itself as "whole by any means" (in fact, they see themselves in bits and pieces), a collective image is still theatrically evoked through the reenactment of a literary chronology that finds its terminus in the temporal logic of modernism. Woolf's shift in emphasis to a cultural mirror stage attributes material weight to historical signifiers like the war planes that fly over England's skies during the pageant. They form a floating frame of reference for La Trobe's spectacle and, by historical extension, to the bombs that, with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ushered in a logic of nuclear exchange. Woolf's subject becomes the-subject-in-assembly, a member of a cast of characters that comprises a collective set of egos situated in a line of fiction. This fiction emerges from the chronological accounting of literary history presented earlier in the novel. Although La Trobe generates confusion about whether the subject's position as agent is distinct from the subject's position as witness or observer, most of her audience identifies with each other as a means of defending against the director's probing mirror-phase scrutiny. Although the players-turned-audience mirror themselves as the audienceas-spectacle for the gaze of the Other, audience reaction is collective in its identification as "Ourselves." This identification refers to an imaginary collectivity that joins together in reaction to La Trobe's theatrical tactics. For her strategy includes the use of multiple mirrors that emphasize the fragmentary aspect of individual and collective identity formation. Behind La Trobe is Woolf depicting modernism as a literary and culturalfieldof displaced values, which, even today, drives neoconservative critics to distraction. Neoconservative critics would be much more comfortable if Woolf had presented a succession of dramatic scenes offering mimetic vignettes from English literature. They could then equate these periods with onedimensional metanarratives that maintain influence over the development and dissemination of values during succeeding historical eras: for instance, it is common knowledge that the neoclassical age is referred to as the Age of Reason and that the Victorian era is characterized as a time of moral balance and sobriety. These points of ideological address are


used to stereotype eras that are really constituted by dissimilar elements that cannot be framed coherently under overarching philosophies of history. But Woolf had something else in mind when she deconstructed the chronological fiction developed in the first half of Between the Act that is one of the reasons why this feminist novelist has proved elusive to neoconservative critics. Woolf implies that each historical period is bound together by a conceptual overview whose only support is a fictional narrative tying together multiple attributes into a perceptual theory. For Woolf and other modernists, the metanarratives of periodization arefictionalbecause they raise to the level of a macroperspective a dominant fiction that goes unquestioned during a specific historical interval. Truth is accepted as thefictionalbinding of periodicity, which be comes the salient aspect of a conceptual apparatus challenged by thinkers, artists, and writers of subsequent eras. This paradigm has relevance for the phenomenon of cultural projection, because when right-wing writers project their realist agenda onto poststructuralist and postmodern multiculturalists, they not only transfer their own attributes onto others (which they do quite consciously), but they also project their values (rooted infictionalizednarrative accounts of reality) onto a group of people that reject the very metalinguistic basis of their assumptions. Woolf s subversion of mimetic representation creates conceptual havoc for those interested in preserving the illusion of chronological certitude, in this case, for Miss La Trobe's audience. Ironically, as the pageant proceeds, the audience's collective identity is reinforced through the dramatic enactment of the play. But once the mirror sequence becomes the stage of engagement and the dramatization of English literary history becomes conflated with the desire for self-dramatization, the identification of group boundaries becomes problematic. After Woolf's depiction of the historical mirror-stage sequence, the question becomes "how to end" Between the Acts without reverting the artificial closure associated with a traditional narrative conclusion. Avoiding teleological finality must have been especially difficult for Woolf, because the novel appears to close with the promise of verbal conciliation between Isa and Giles, the married protagonists whose most prominent trait until the novel's finale was familial strife, which


demonstrated the lack of sexual rapport between them. To alter the way we read the end of the book, Woolf introduces the following passage: Before they slept, they mustfight;after they had fought, they would embrace. From that embrace another life might be born. Butfirstthey mustfight,as the dog foxfightswith the vixen, in the heart of darkness, in thefieldsof night It was night before roads were made, or houses. It was the night that dwellers in caves had watched from some high place among rocks. Then the curtain rose. They spoke. (219) Through the heart of darkness, Woolf finds the ideal route leading past the protagonists' lack of sexual rapport. By constructing a heterosexual fantasy that enables the curtain to rise and the play to end, Woolf indicates that the protagonists might fight, talk, and procreate, which promises a full, if not pregnant, speech to redeem their heterosexual relationship. The problem is that the mirror interlude cuts against any pat ending to the novel, because this reflexive sequence refuses to be incorporated into the conclusion. The structure of the novel insists on a difference that cannot be overcome by concluding, and that is one reason why a novel entitled Between the Acts does not simply end. When the curtain rises for the novel's last scene, the narrative has been altered to emphasize the fragmentary nature of identity formation, which recasts La Trobe's audience as a group of subjects whose desire is split from itself. This structural alteration recasts the bourgeois, heterosexual housewife Isa in relation to the lesbian playwright La Trobe, whose historical pageant undercuts the expectation of the traditional narrative conclusion. By the end of the novel, it becomes apparent that Woolf resists the "happily ever after" chronological conclusion, preferring instead to leave her readers with a final novelistic gesture: an overwritten narrative portraying the desire of the protagonists as divided from itself after being recast in the mirror of La Trobe's manufactured cultural dynamic. In other words, La Trobe's strategy enacts Woolf's desire to establish a corrective to the traditional narrative, which has propped up patriarchal assumptions implemented to maintain the contours of the white male heterosexist canon. Woolf has become, of course, a symbol of the feminist revisionism devised to alter the patriarchal tactics that neoconserva-


tives would like to reinstate. But what happens when we enter the postmodern period? How does one proceed when postmodernism, like neoconservatism, shares the tactic of destabilizing meaning? How do feminist and multicultural critics respond to neoconservative attacks after they stop asking, "Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?" All of these questions are addressed in the next section, but first we must step back in time— to the outset of modernity—to gain some historical perspective on these issues. INTERPELLATING THE SUBJECT OF HISTORY The regime of the father, which lasted from ancient times through the Age of Reason, was marked by a very particular signifier: the King as the primary signifying power of the realm. In some cultures, the King was considered to be an intermediary figure who gave his subjects an indirect apprehension of the sublime. The King, however, was not the only figurehead sanctioned as a mediator between the masses and God, for the same logic held true for the Pope, who acted as an intercessor between Catholic parishioners and their deity. But, with the Enlightenment, conditions changed significantly, since there was a cultural mandate for the subject to establish a direct relationship with the object of his or her theological desire. We know that immediately before the Enlightenment, there were apocalyptic religious wars between Catholics and Protestants (and different Protestant sects) over the interpretation of religious doctrine. People killed each other over issues like whether a designated wafer represented the body of Christ or was in fact the body itself. Protestants also resented the Pope's brokered position as a figurehead capable of interceding between a religious pilgrim and God almighty. In secular society, the same logic applied to the upheaval that led to the dethronement of King Charles I. But there was one significant difference in this case: instead of a head of government beingfigurativelydecapitated, Charles was literally beheaded during the era of religious tumult and political strife that preceded the Enlightenment. Such dramatic changes signaled the ascendancy of the middle class in Europe, although the monarchy did make a temporary comeback in "the Glorious Revolution of 16881689" (Literature of Western Worldi-2).


Once Charles was decapitated, the Pope was deposed by Protestant reformists, and parliament was established in England as a legitimate seat of power, Europe passed into the modern age. As I have stressed in this book, one way of understanding modernity is to trace the displacement of a figural logic dominated by images of representation by the signs that act as a stand-in for their referents. Just as the authority of the figurehead was deposed at this time in history, so too did figural imagery lose some of its capacity to shape textual "reality." This transformation can be better understood through the following graphic example: once the figurehead was decapitated (or "castrated," to use the psychoanalytic term), power rushed from the King or Pope to the body politic. In this transformation, the working hands, talking heads, foot soldiers, genital libertines, and all-toopious hearts combined to work structurally as a systematic group in relation to each other. In "the best of all possible worlds," they worked as a systematic unit in integrated cohesion, but, more often than not, they vied with each other for the power that pulsed through the doctrinal body. According to this model, a structural dynamic replaced the power of the figural potentate as power surged through the body politic. Moreover, the sign became the predominant negotiator of information, as science, with its emphasis on instrumental reason, began its ascendancy as the force that eventually supplanted God as the arbiter of secular experience. After the Age of Reason, the power to shape individual experience did not rest solely with a supreme being, because another force was at work: natural laws that were subject to rational confirmation by the reading public. Writing about the transformation occurring at this time, Allan Touraine suggests that modernity poses a break with thefinalismof the religious spirit, which always invokes the end of history, meaning the final fulfillment of the divine project or the destruction of a perverted humanity which has betrayed its mission. The idea of modernity does not preclude the idea of the end of history, as we can see from Comte, Hegel and Marx, who are the great thinkers of historicism. But for them the end of history means, rather, the end of a prehistory and the beginning of a developmental process resulting from technological progress, liberated needs and the triumph of Spirit. (9) According to Touraine, the "break with the finalism of the religious spirit" diverted history from a course promising to conclude with a tele-


. 171

ological endpoint that sanctioned the father's privilege. With the advent of Enlightenment modernity, "the cult of the ancestor" gave way to another logic espousing liberty, equality, and fraternity (MacCannell 11). For the Enlightenment narrative guaranteed a "non-patriarchal egalitarian norm," a fraternal, secular orientation that Juliet Flower MacCannell labels "the regime of the brother" (12-13). This regime, which precipitated a series of revolutions, has instituted the law of the brother with its "reign of pleasure and terror" (MacCannell 13). After the literal and figurative beheadings that preceded the Enlightenment era, when the brothers initiated their infamous reign of terror, the patriarchal privilege was dispersed throughout the body politic. Touraine reminds us that one result of this historical redistribution of sociocultural power is the secular break with the religious vision of ahistorical finality. MacCannell suggests that, as a result of this phenomenon, the traditional Oedipal signifier gave way as a potent universal indicator to the "pseudo-Oedipus" that diminished patriarchal power as the dominant element underwriting intergenerational codes of conduct (16). Thereafter, we can still talk about patriarchal relations, but they derive from a different historical dynamic during the regime of the brothers. Lacan believes, as Teresa Brennan points out in History after Lacan, that a demise in patriarch power ushers in the modern paranoid period. But, in Brennan's account, what she terms the "age of paranoia" is generated by the shift in timespace relations effected when capital, through an objectifying technology, literally gathers steam. The father loses power, but men do not. The father still retains some residual authority during the paranoid regime of the brothers, but the paternal mandate is subsumed by an unconscious reserve that impinges upon the egoistic system. As for the brothers' position within the fraternal model, MacCannell states that the superegoistic lawgiver is not pitted against an id-like narcissist: "far from being a paternal moral lawgiver or a self-governed liberated self, the modernized fraternal superego is both ego and it [id], changing roles whenever it suits him" (17). During the father's reign, intrapsychic and intersubjective roles were fixed in such a way that little displacement occurred. But once the brothers' initiative became the binding agent of historical privilege, the disbursement of power became as "fluid" as the signs that dominate role-playing and the participants' ability to shift


roles within their culture. Once a structural model replaced a figural paradigm as the dominant form of representation, the symbolic body was restructured by the impetus that drove the fraternal Protestant, French, and American revolutions. Only then did the Oedipus begin to lose its universal status as an overarching model capable of structuring social space. In our posturban age, the sign not only displaces the figural image as the preeminent lexical indicator, but the sign itself has been subverted by the signifies As we know, the "age of paranoia" was initiated by a scientific revolution, which was succeeded by revolutions in industry and technology during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the twentieth century, structuralism and modernism have emphasized signs rather than content as the most significant representational markers in the cultural exchange of information. Today, the sign that represents something for someone has been subverted by the signifier that forms part of its basis to exist in the first place. Before the twentieth century, the sign blended almost imperceptibly into its signified-concept; in our semiotic age, the signifier that represents the subject for another signifier provides a subversive logic undermining the sign's dependency on its signified. As we learned in chapter 4, the signifier structures the field of language—not by organizing the meaning-making process but through the opposition of one signifier to another. In "The Subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the Freudian unconscious," Lacan explains this process: the signifier is "constituted only from a synchronic and innumerable collection of elements in which each is sustained only by the principle of its opposition to each of the others" (304). With the twentieth century, the chain of signifiers, which organizes the subjectivefield,loses its affective tie to meanings. In the past 100 years, the paranoid age has been predicated upon the assassination of premodern signifieds. This is readily apparent when one examines the avant-garde and structuralist projects of the first half of the twentieth century. From the enlightenment organization of the sign to the postmodern institutionalization of the signifier that constitutes the locus of the Other as a signifying chain, forms of representation have changed so dramatically that even the signifier has been undermined in the second half of the twentieth century. In the pastfifteenyears, lexical


. 173

and iconic signifiers that mark ideological privilege have been co-opted by hyperreal signifiers produced as a result of a new televisual reality. These neosignifiers celebrate the media-as-first-cause while implying, by their very existence, that the signifier-signified system has been compromised. For neosignifiers float in disrelation to historically determined meaning in the symbolic-cultural field. In these unsettled times, the paranoid regime of the brothers has been undercut by the very signifiers that had previously propped it up—by the structural markers of linguistic and cultural difference that signify the subject. Moreover, some of these signifiers have given way to neosignifiers constructed by the imaginary process of identification taking place in the mirror of manufactured cultural relations. For as signifiedconcepts are codified into the laws that bolster the cultural privilege of the empowered few, they are inflected by hybrid formations that superimpose the imaginary figure over the symbolic signifier. Since the subject establishes a path in the signifying battery as its desire is alienated in the Other, I argue elsewhere that governmental power based on phallic privilege reveals a male castration anxiety that is projected into systemicity itself. Thus, the very establishment of patriarchal rule discloses a structural weakness in the system, for both the brothers and fathers before them were already symbolically "castrated." Because of this situation, the phallic signifier "veils the true site of penis envy— within men themselves—who, already castrated, imaginarily backtrack, wishing for what they never had"—the imaginary phallus—which, in fantasies of omnipotence, was never barred by the signifier (Feldstein 46). Confronted with these options, patriarchal power brokers have tried to control the symbolic order by ascending to positions of dominance where they can equate themselves with the unbarred Other—with God. Patriarchal fantasy, haunted by castration anxiety, has idealized its unbarred status, and that is why both paternal and fraternal patriarchs have appropriated the symbolic register for themselves in the attempt to control its codes and deny its most basic lesson: if psychosis is to be avoided, one must give up some primal jouissance or "sexual being" to society when introjecting its demands (Laurent 25). Because male sexuality poses both desire and the possibility of its unfulfillment, there is an attendant castration anxiety that must be denied. This phenomenon

174 • White Male Canon Formation and the End of History

provides a rationale for why women have been projected to the far reaches of the symbolic register where the uncodifiable real intersects the symbolic. For this denial is constructed through the process of projecting onto women a fear that originated with men. This phenomenon also explains why the "sex crime" of copulation was outlawed by Big Brother in 1984. INDUCED TRANSFERENCE ONTO BIG BROTHER To demonstrate how man can become inflated into the idea-becomeideal, I will read 1984 to show how neosignifiers are instated as televisua desire becomes a model of ideality and censorship. 1984 presents an ap example of how the thought police of Oceania up the ante when attempting to interpellate the masses under a single phallic signifier of desire—the Big Brother of fraternal relations. Although we are examining George Orwell's 1984 from the vantag point of the '90s, the novel still seems to take place in the not-distant future. This nightmarish epoch occurs after World War III, when Earth is divided into three huge countries: Oceania, Eastasia, and Eurasia. In this futuristic dystopia, each superstate is a fascist mirror image of the other. Each wars with one of the other countries as a means of diverting attention from the real aim of warfare: enacting an insurgency against one's own people, who must endure their government dropping bombs on them while blaming this action on a scapegoated enemy. 1984 shows us the duplicity of Oceanic culture, which is ruled b INGSOC, a vicious organization that preaches doublespeak like "WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH" as a means of

confounding its own citizens. In Oceania, clocks strike thirteen, two and two equalsfive,children spy on their parents and other adults in hopes of denouncing them to the Thought Police, who take their captives to the dreaded Ministry of Love, where the most sadistic procedures are practiced upon the citizens of Oceania. Every day, people are watched by one of the many two-way telescreens set up to spy upon them. Everywhere in this hyperreal environment there are telescreens—outside on each street and inside in every room of each party member's home. There seems to be no escape from these two-way TV screens or the many


. 175

posters of the supreme ruler of Oceania—Big Brother, whose "blackmustachio'd face" gazes "down from every commanding corner" while beneath each poster reads the same infamous caption: "BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU" (4). This is the perfect emblem of a paranoid age. The narrative of 1984 concerns Winston Smith, a protagonist wh commits thoughtcrime in an age of uniformity and doublethink as he searches for precedents from bygone ages when he believes thought was free. But his search for information from other eras is futile because the Party continuously destroys past news clippings in the Ministry of Truth. By dumping sections of books, articles, and newspapers down memory holes, the Party alters past records to control present knowledge in a display of informational combat that reflects the Party's motto: "who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past." Ironically, Winston's job is to help alter historical data by dumping records down memory holes so that information can not be verified through a symbolic consensus; the only verification one has other than what is presented by Big Brother's apparatus is access to one's feelings, dreams, or memories. But how do you trust your memory when for years you've been told that Oceania has been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia only to wake up one day to be informed that the reverse has always been true? How do you trust your feelings when sexual intercourse between unmarried consenting adults is considered a sexcrime against the Party and Big Brother? This is precisely Winston's dilemma. He wants to personalize an impersonal symbolic system of neosignifiers that structures his society. He wants to be more than a subject in a society that disregards his humanity, more than a barred subject of desire. Like the neoconservative critics we studied, Winston wistfully believes in a nostalgic self with individualized boundaries, a personalized dimension to humanity that is safe and secure from the cut of signification. Searching for a sense of himself is not enough, however, for he must also find a woman to replace his wife of a loveless, forced marriage consummated only to do his procreative duty for Big Brother and the Party. When his beloved Julia finds him, they conspire to defy INGSOC by committing sexcrimes in an affair where sex and love are gilded ideals held up in place of Big Br(O)ther, who nonetheless is there in every opening, however fleeting it may be, in the


intersubjective unconscious. Winston believes that their relationship will help him to feel human—to recover aspects of himself lost in the cut of the signifier when he had to sacrifice a quotient of bodily jouissance to the dictates of society. But once the Thought Police learn of thei "illicit" affair, their relationship is doomed, and they are tortured with such severity that they gladly betray each other—not just with words but in their hearts. Winston also searches for a personal dimension of Big Brother, which he finds in the figure of O'Brien, the Inner Party member who pretends to be a political ally only later to reveal himself as Winston's personal nemesis. One can make a case that Winston is unconsciously driven to find O'Brien, who comes to embody the party for Winston, because, though the society is ruled by posters of Big Brother and his video image on the telescreens, no one in Oceania can verify if he is alive or dead, if Big Brother was ever a person, or if it is 1984, 1985, or 1996. Facts like these escape even Inner Party members, the privileged few who sit atop the pyramidal society that idolizes B. B.—the personified facade that induces transference onto the Big Other of Oceania, the structure of the society rather than its content, a signifying structure that levels personality to ground zero. For Oceania wants total adherence to its laws and codes but also, more importantly, to the societal signifiers introjected individually. The result is predictable: all Party members are conquered from within, programmed to watch themselves and others to determine if any one cell falls out of sync with the overarching totality of cells representing the Party's perspective. Winston wants to counteract this introjected ground of experience by personalizing history, giving it a perceptible face, seeing himself in historical perspective, perceiving his lineage as so many historical shards that mirror the human image through the trajectory of time and that impart significance through sheer generational repetition. Once Winston and Julia are captured in the flat where they periodically meet to have sex, they are sent to the Ministry of Love. There they are propagandized, beaten, and sent to Room 101, where the Party makes certain their worst fears are realized. The end result is always the same; the subject breaks down before betraying his or her coconspirator. Overseeing Winston's punishment is O'Brien, who directs everything. "It was


. 177

he who set the guards onto Winston and who prevented them from killing him. It was he who decided when Winston should scream with pain, when he should have a respite, when he should be fed, when he should sleep, when the drugs should be pumped into his arm. It was he who asked the questions and suggested the answers. He was the tormentor, he was the protector, he was the inquisitor, he was the friend" (247). In fact, it was O'Brien who had studied Winston for the past seven years and who now was charged with breaking down his spirit to create a new transference onto the subject supposed to know—the Big Brother of Oceania. As a representative of INGSOC, O'Brien recognizes that in the transference, there is, of necessity, a "transfer of powers from the subject to the Other, what I call the capital Other (le grand Autre), the locus of speech and, potentially, the locus of 'truth' as it is guaranteed by the structure of society" (Lacan, Four Fundamental 129 Because the Party recognizes the weight and breadth of the discourse of the Other, it attempts to manipulate the transference to avoid the necessity of sending citizens to the Ministry of Love. It tries to accomplish this strategy in two ways. First, INGSOC rewrites the lexical landscape by destroying as many words as possible that introduce concepts inimical to its purposes. By creating a language called Newspeak, the Party is also able, with each new edition of the Newspeak dictionary, to shrink the size of available words, so that language reflects a compilation of partyapproved concepts. The Party hopes that citizens of Oceania will eventually stop translating words from English to Newspeak and begin thinking in the language itself as a matter of course. Second, the Party aims to eradicate all nonprocreative sexuality to effect a triumph of cultural indoctrination over the orgasm. By implementing an Anti-Sex League that requires Outer Party women to take vows of celibacy, INGSOC seeks to conquer the biological impulse that influences primary process "thinking." In accomplishing these two tasks, INGSOC tries to alter the relay system of unconscious responses, which link the articulation of neosignifiers to the libidinal sexual reality. In other words, they strive to control the construction of desire by instituting a sequence of manufactured hyperreal signifiers that have no linkage to a past that is anything more than a sequence of sound bites broadcast for public consumption.


But they inevitably fail. With so many citizens raised before the advent of Big Brother, the Party is forced to spy on the Winstons of the world and, eventually, to send them to the Ministry of Love to effect a new transference. How is this done? Invariably, through incarceration, brainwashing, and the establishment of an incontrovertible link between Big Brother and God. For in fraternal Oceanic society, at the apex of the pyramid comes Big Brother. Big Brother is infallible and all-powerful. Every success, every achievement, every victory, every scientific discovery, all knowledge, all wisdom, all happiness, all virtue, are held to issue directly from his leadership and inspiration. Nobody has ever seen Big Brother. He is a face on the hoardings, a voice on the telescreen. We may be reasonably sure that he will never die, and there is already considerable uncertainty as to when he was born. Big Brother is the guise in which the Party chooses to exhibit itself to the world. His function is to act as a focusing point of love, fear, and reverence, emotions which are more easily felt toward an individual than toward an organization. (209) In other words, the televisual figure of Big Brother is a personalized version of the big Other. But if Oceanic society reveres the atemporal ideal of B. B.'s omnipotence, the party must repeatedly conjure its citizens into believing that the Other is unbarred: in possession of God-like attributes that go beyond the symbolic, reaching into the realm of the real itself. During this transition from a familiar world to a fascist future ruled by INGSOC, citizens still have memories of a past clouded by present circumstances. Therefore, the transference onto the big Other is doomed to fail with a segment of Oceanians. That is why the Ministry of Love invented Room 101, where Party members break down the will and refill the mind with programmatic images of Big Brother. They are so successful in Winston's case that he not only betrays lulia but also loses his desire to personalize history. To break down Winston's defenses, in the psychoanalytic sense, means to locate the moment for the subject when the unconscious pulsation opens ever so briefly only to close shut again. In that split second, O'Brien endeavors to insert a neosignifier marking "the moment when doubt is recognized as certainty" (Lacan, Four Fundamental 126). Induced through torture to doubt his reality, Winston will find a new certainty based on the identity given to him by the party.


. 179

This identity is created from the introjection of an interpellated neosignifier that accompanies his reaction to the pack of rats that threaten to attack him. In that magical moment of reinterpellation, everything is turned upside-down for Winston. O'Brien, his greatest nemesis, becomes O'Brien his dearest friend. Julia, his own true love, becomes Julia, the woman he betrays. His love for Julia is replaced by the dictum, "there wil be no love, except the love of Big Brother" (270). In the topsy-turvy world created in Room 101, God is replaced by Big Brother at the top of the pyramid. Slavery becomes freedom, Newspeak is substituted for English, and the fluid lies disseminated on the telescreen become the renewable truths he believes no matter how absurd or contradictory are their claims. Finally, his entire quest to personalize experience is brought to a crashing halt when he recognizes himself as symbolizing "the last man," a principle of lonely humanity that stands against the "immortal" Party (272-73). The transformation is complete when Winston sacrifices the last vestiges of his humanity to the structural principle that drives the regime of the brother. Only then can he take his place within the system of injustice and coercion. Like the neoconservative propagandists of the 90s, Inner Party members who administer Big Brother's directives claim that their culture is perpetually under attack from enemies who wish to destroy life as they know it. To prevent such a "catastrophe," INGSOC tries to control Oceanians through the dissemination of PR puff conveyed by neosignifiers relayed from the network of telescreens throughout the city; if this strategy does not work, they implement brainwashing procedures to traumatize citizens in Room 101. In that room they alter aspects of the real through the creation of simulated traumas, which are so terrible Oceanians invariably convert to the televisual religion forced upon them. For the members of INGSOC understand that if they can control biological pleasure and pain—the sexual orgasm and bodily traumas that evoke their citizens' worst fears—reinterpellation is the probable outcome of their indoctrinating tactics. Whereas INGSOC attempts to sever the ties of generational succession to establish total allegiance to Big Br(O)ther, neoconservative critics in the '90s decry the loss of family values as they displace "the generational


time of natural reproduction" with the "artificial time of short-term profit" (Teresa Brennan 147). As I noted earlier, Brennan shows in History after Lacan how "substances in bound commodities are cut out pe manently from the generational process of natural exchange, at the same time as they are inserted, in their newly acquired objectified . . . [and] movable form" into social circulation (148). Because commodities exhibit this versatility, they can be removed "from the circumstances in which they can reproduce themselves" (148). This enables neoconservatives, who laud the acquisition of fast capital, to reinforce consumer habits and "the consumptive mode of production" itself, so they can pursue their internationalist agenda in the American arena. Ironically, this maneuver helps to centralize governmental control—not decentralize it—as so many right-wing spokespersons claim. Such centralized control is secured through the dissemination of right-wing narratives constructed to cover holes in the Other, which reveal the inadequacy of the symbolic system to be whole-unto-itself. In their rush to sell selffulfilling narrative prophecies, neocon artists attempt to make capital God because it, like the Big Brother of Oceania, has the ability to redirect "nature at its own speed and from its own subject-centred standpoint... altering the physis of the world, adjusting the inbuilt logic of nature and the spatio-temporal continuum to suit itself" (Brennan 151). As Teresa Brennan states, in order for state-run agents to impose their will on the populace, they must alter the direction of "physical processes," establish an inorganic foundation that consumes "the real foundations" controlled by "the logic of natural substances," and replace it with an "artificial space-time of speed" that regulates fast capital (147,151). LEFT IN THE MIRROR

In chapter 6 we examined the mirror-phase dynamic responsible for the construction of the ego from a mass of diverse attributes projected onto a self-image that is reflected back from the external environment. We saw how the self is represented in the mirror as a unified image that does not appear to be lacking in any way. This idealized image, however, is an ideological construction depicting a totality that emerges out of a conglomerate of half-created gestures and fragmented part objects. It is im-


portant to remember that some aspects of the emergent ego have been repressed, some emerge into consciousness in tandem with fragmented body images the ego endeavors to deny, and some meld with the dominant self-image that appears against background signifiers that modify the construction of subjectivity. It is also important to recognize that the ego projects consciousness into a bodily envelope conceived through an intermediary figural image that remains under the sway of the superego. What the superego deems unacceptable is buried in unconscious oblivion like a psychological waste product. But psychoanalysis teaches us that some repressed mnemonic traces return upon the impetus of an emergent aggressivity, which challenges the idealized state standing in opposition to it. Lacan added his own particular twist to this observation. He determined that the construction of the idealized ego through the projective manipulation of bodily boundaries, the repression of interdicted thoughts, and the aggression arising from the superego-id conflict related to this interdiction have palpable political consequences. Lacan theorized that "the inclination of the plane mirror is governed by the voice of the other," which emerges from a structured relation dependent upon "the symbolic connection between human beings" as they are governed by "the law as gobetween" {Seminar 1140). Because there is a demonstrable gap betwee subjects attempting to communicate with each other and because this gap manifests both in the mirror-phase dynamic and the symbolic disconnection between the subject and the Other of language, a breach is created that is denied, then appropriated politically as the mythic site of transvaluation. Because human beings are social creatures, they encounter an intersubjective passage fraught with interpersonal frictions related to the heterogeneous nature of the social interchange. Aware of the divide that manifests in the subject's radical difference from itself as well as in the communicational impasses revealed through the intersubjective relationship, astute politicians have rushed into the breach to veil the site of ethical difference. We have seen how they have covered it with a projective fantasy that provides the subject with the means to conceptualize itself. Previously, I demonstrated how this complex process is often accompanied by a projection of distinctions that must not be acknowledged as


having emanated from within the intrapsychic system. Because shrewd civil servants know that people often dismiss internal differences in order to disown painful aspects of their experience, they play on this pattern of disavowal by encouraging their constituency to exteriorize denied self-differences and project them onto scapegoated others who embody such "undesirable" traits. Calculating politicians realize that the selection of the scapegoat results in part from translating self-difference into structural difference as indicated by the norms of the culture, and they predicate structural difference upon certain assumptions: (1) they count on the public to evince historical amnesia about their previous emotional inclinations; (2) they anticipate the masses will project disturbing self-aspects onto a tabooed other chosen as the emotional repos itory of inadmissible self-difference; (3) they contour their advertising campaigns to measure repressed details against idealized systems of evaluation as a means of recruiting potential true believers. Right-wing spin doctors are especially adept at punching ideological hot buttons to induce the public to transfer unreadable internal information onto others who do not fit within the parameters of idealized neoconservative cultural fantasies. This calculated strategy has the capability to produce the desired right-wing result: a designated other becomes the scorned figure perceived to be an aggressor in a paranoid mirror-phase plotline sold to the public through chosen media circuits. By incorporating these tactics into their repertoire of political tricks, neoconservatives have been able to valorize their stance upon the issues while casting left-wing critics as miscreants in their mirror-phase scenarios. Multicultural critics in the university must recognize that such hegemonic formulations can be successfully executed if people see themselves occupying a common ground within the same reflecting surface. The aim of this ideological scheme is to suture as many people as possible within the boundaries of right-wing fantasy so that a social consensus can develop, not as a matter of rational agreement, but as an outgrowth of imaginary affirmation. This affirmation is coexistent with the construction of subjectivity in the cultural mirror of manufactured relations. This mirror phenomenon is constantly updated and augmented by the bombardment of signifiers sold to the masses, who are interpellated within corporate fantasies that require public recognition of the


parameters established to confirm the fantasy. These commodified fantasies call out to the public to respond to them. If people respond to the solicitation of the electronic media, which aspires to place them within the "hey you" of the interpellating call, then they are confirmed as existing within the structure of society as it is informed by a particular ideological bent. This form of interpellating the masses works so effectively because the mirror stage (often thought to posit an imaginary indicator of primary identification based on an intrapsychic transaction with one's image) can be read as an important facet of the symbolic give-and-take constituting the cultural exchange. If one recasts the chronological reading of the mirror stage to represent a retroactive rescripting of events, the entire sequence makes it problematic to posit an initial identification which somehow stands outside the "social determination" of later identifications. What Lacan calls "primary identification" can be seen to be the reconstitution of an earlier event, from a position well within language and sociality. Secondary identification thus in a sense precedes primary identification. (Silverman 20-21) Kaja Silverman's observation is noteworthy because it gives the lie to the before-and-after chronology of events linked with the identificatory process. Silverman points out that all mirror-stage phenomena are subject to retroactive readings that cast earlier interpellations within the fantasmatic structure currently being sold to the public by politicians and media moguls who control the airwaves. In this way, they create an imaginary endorsement of subjectivity that is synonymous with the construction of the subject along discernible political lines of thought. According to this model, the gendered semiotic subject is sutured in an imaginary relation; if she or he answers the call of ideological interpellation, the subject is cast back into the mirror relation of idealization and aggression that we have been studying. This has particularly devastating results for cultural critics who accept the projected status given to them by neoconservatives that have the money and influence to flood the televisual and talk-radio markets with ideological propaganda. It is crucial that left-wing cultural critics do not accept the "politically correct" label that neoconservatives have fabricated to stigmatize them. To do so is to accept the act of projection associated with this demeaning

184 • White Male Canon Formation and the End of History

classification. If this happens, multicultural and poststructuralist critics will find themselves left in the mirror—caught in a binary mapping that pits Right against Left in a never-ending doomsday dance of antagonism. To accept the projection of neoconservative scorn is to enter into an imaginary mirror-stage relationship. To enter into the dyadic mirror relationship is to adopt a role of the defamed addressee. To be demeaned as such is to confirm the phantasmatic fiction of the addresser, to verify the identification used to interpellate the addressee, to validate the structure that slots both in assigned positions in an imaginary system that contextualizes them as binary opponents, and to assure the audience watching this contentious psychodrama that it is in fact real. No doubt there is a grain of truth in right-wing exaggerations. Few academics would proclaim their views to be infallible; most are far too sophisticated to declare their description of events to be the one and only acceptable interpretation. To do so would be to idealize and denigrate right-wing theorists in the same way that they typify and debase their left-wing "counterparts." Even if one concedes there is a grain of truth in the neoconservative allegations that political correctness ushers in a rigidly orthodox reformation on college campuses today, this hardly excuses the proponents of McReaganism from exaggerating beyond all measure any vulnerability they find in their political foes. These exaggerations must be constantly foregrounded. It is not sufficient to just say no! It is fruitless to say that their formulations are full of lies. Most cultural critics know that the majority of neoconservative critics are intellectual impostors, but members of the mass media still believe what they say. It seems to me that the task facing scapegoated academics who wish to intervene in this ongoing debate is multifold: to critique right-wing tactics by bringing the full weight of contemporary theory to bear when analyzing their strategies, to incorporate this analysis when presenting information to the media, and,finally,to refuse the projection of political correctness as an interpellated identity that has rechristened multicultural and poststructuralist critics as the bogeymen and -women of academia. If neoconservatives can formulate a theory of political correctness that characterizes gays and lesbians, feminists and people of color, multicultural and ethnic critics, and poststructuralist and postmodern theo-


. 185

reticians as the illegitimate children of American society, then this distorted family metaphor will become part of the dominant narrative they sell to the public on a daily basis. If "politically correct" academics accept this label, they will oblige right-wing critics by assuming their assigned narrative role in a binary network of fantasy that leaves them left in the mirror. Not only will they be reduced to playing a bit part in an aggressive/regressive mirror-phase production, but they will be treated as moral refuse that must be swept out of the American mainstream to preserve the purity of right-wing fundamental(ist) fantasies. In other words, left-of-center critics will become leftover scraps to be disposed of so society can purge itself of disavowed tendencies that do not conform to the imaginary narrative currently being manufactured in the cultural mirror of intersubjective relations. Rather than accept the term political correctness as valid, members the academic community must reemphasize that, historically, McCarthyism is a reactionary phenomenon masterminded by conservatives in America in the second half of the twentieth century. Otherwise, academic culturalists run the risk of being interpellated as miscreants in an ahistorical construction. By accepting right-wing projection, targets of neoconservative propaganda run the risk of answering the wolf's whistle, "the policeman's ... hailing of'suspects,'" and the sexist catcalls that summon women on the street to identify themselves as designees in the designator/designee interchange (Macey 150). In this book I have tried to show why it is preferable for academics to reject the projection of political correctness. For this transhistorical fabrication devised from right-wing psychic fantasy can only lure them into an either-or argument that favors neoconservatives. Their neoconservative intent is to translate this psychic fantasy into a cultural fabrication that is generally accepted as demonstrating the "truth" about social relations in America. But how do cultural critics expose this truth as an ideological falsehood? Not by accepting a projected part to play. Not by just saying no. Not by claiming, "Lies, lies!" every time neoconservative imagemakers utter an untruth. Instead, "PC-ayatollahs" need to analyze right-wing strategies as they make a concerted effort to reach the general public that believes the fictions circulating through media outlets. Finally, heterogeneous academic factions on campuses might pause long


enough from arguing with one another to organize a network of scholars to combat highly organized and well-funded neoconservative groups. To that end, I have included chapter 8. In it members of different groups have answered questions that are relevant to determining a strategy to offset the propaganda campaign so effectively mounted against them.

8 . Where Do We Go from Here?

I conclude this book by questioning representatives from several groups that have been actively engaged in debating right-wing critics for a number of years. To this end, I have asked these representatives two questions: 1. In the past ten years, right-wing neocons have appropriated the term political correctness to undermine feminists who were redefining the bate about patriarchal bias; African Americans, Asian Americans, and Hispanics interested in legitimizing cultural diversity; gay and lesbian groups wishing to attain basic civil liberties; and academics who celebrate difference. How successful have neoconservatives been in linking the PC debate to their overall agenda of organizing an academic rollback of civil liberties, and what strategies do you see right-wing critics employing in the next phase of their struggle to disseminate propaganda against professors and students who oppose them? 2. Recently, neoconservatives have argued that "campus radicals" who teach in the "factories of junkthink" have embarked on a course to institutionalize politically correct behavior in our schools, thus threatening to brainwash unsuspecting American students. For those of us who know how absurd yet damaging these assertions are, the question becomes: how can we mobilize against such insidious reactionary forces? How can your group help us to do so? Some of these critics answered both questions, some answered only one, and some used these questions as a springboard to fashion their own thoughts on the matter. I began by directing these questions to Skip Porteous, who has been monitoring the activities of neoconservative groups. 187


Skip Porteous Institute for First Amendment Studies P. O. Box 589 Great Barrington, MA 01230 Telephone 413.528.3800 Fax 413.528.4466 E-mail: [email protected] Response to Question 1 Neoconservatives exert considerable influence on campuses through the publication of ultraconservative campus newspapers. One such paper, Campus Review, a self-described right-wing student newspaper on the campus of the University of Iowa, regularly attacks lesbians, gays, feminists and pro-choice people. Funded by neoconservative organizations, these newspapers have sprung up on campuses across the country. In May of 1994, leaders from thirty-five religious right groups met at a secret conference in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The group convened to discuss strategy on eliminating gay rights in America. Focus on the Family, the best-funded of all the religious right organizations, sent three representatives. One was Frank York, an editor for Focus, who instructed the audience on how to use technology to implement the antigay agenda. Part of the strategy consisted of sending articles and information to conservative campus newspapers. Not only do these ultraconservative papers need outside funding to remain solvent, but they also depend upon outsiders to supply them with material. Other organizations, such as Campus Crusade for Christ, keep the neoconservative agenda on track on college campuses. They serve as a focal point for conservative Christian students, and also as a base for campus missionaries. The one who frames the issue usually wins the debate, and neoconservatives have been particularly successful at framing the issues. For example, when talking about lesbians and gay men, neoconservatives use terms such as sodomites, perverts, and phrases like "the unhealthy hom sexual lifestyle." They emphasize the supposed sexual practices of gay men and lesbians, and link these practices with the spread of AIDS. In another clever ploy, neoconservatives have successfully framed the

Where Do We Go from Here? . 189

gay rights issue as one of homosexuals seeking "special rights," not equal rights. In this regard, they approach the African American community saying, "You'vefittinglygained equal rights, but homosexuals don't want equal rights: they want special rights." This is an effort to get the African American community to side with the neoconservative agenda. They have framed the debate so when one thinks of a pro-family agenda, it is their model that comes to mind. Now, who isn't pro-family? However, early on, the neoconservatives framed the issue to make it look like they were the only pro-family Americans. In some areas, California especially, the "illegal alien" debate rages on. It is difficult to argue for allowing "illegal" aliens into the United States. The truth is that neoconservatives don't want any immigrants entering the United States. Since many immigrants are "illegal," it is easy to frame the issue around "illegal aliens," when, in reality, the issue is about foreigners. One of the neoconservatives' latest tactics is to label as "anti-Christian bigotry" any criticism of, or opposition to, the religious right's political agenda. Buzzwords such as "anti-Christian bias," or "anti-family bias" have come into vogue for the far right. Along the same lines they subtly refer to themselves as "people of the faith." In the matter of a woman's legal right to an abortion, "pro-life" became the term used to paint neoconservatives in the best possible light. For "pro-life" implies that "choice" (an example of liberals' framing the issue) actually means "pro-death." Liberals, though, have not assassinated anyone, whereas "pro-lifers" have murdered a growing number of "pro-choicers." Finally, campus neoconservatives have Rush Limbaugh. Speaking in half-truths and sometimes outright lies, the most popular talk-show host in American history to date holds daily court, offering uninformed criticism about life in America and simplistic solutions to complex problems. To millions of Americans, on and off campus, Limbaugh is a messiah. Rather than striving for real education, students heed the words of an uneducated loudmouth. Rush Limbaugh, like many neoconservatives, strives to teach young people what to think, not how to think.

190 . Where Do We Go from Here? Response to Question 2 The question becomes: how can we mobilize against the trend to institutionalize politically correct behavior in our schools, and how can the Institute for First Amendment Studies help us to do so? While mainstream America may lean somewhat toward conservatism, most Americans are tolerant of others. Americans generally believe in a woman's right to have an abortion under some circumstances. Most Americans believe in "to each his or her own" with regards to homosexuality. Neoconservatives have a mission; they are on a crusade. It seems that since the civil rights movement of the 1960s, liberals have fallen asleep. One of the functions of the Institute for First Amendment Studies is to wake up the citizenry. Always attempting to predict trends, the Institute began warning people in 1984 about the fledging religious right. Now that they are a present reality, the Institute has shifted gears to educate grassroots activists on how to counter the neoconservative agenda. This is accomplished through the publication of an eight-page monthly newsletter, "The Freedom Writer," and other publications. One popular book by the Institute is Challenging the Christian Right—The Activi Handbook. Thousands of activists and groups employ this handbook in local battles against the religious right. While a number of good organizations are active in opposing neoconservative activists, no one national organization can do it all. It is a local problem that can be won only through grassroots organizing. Myrna C. Adams OpenMind c/o Affirmative Action Programs University of Illinois at Chicago 1737 W. Polk St. Room 304 AOB (M/C 602) Chicago, IL 60612 Telephone 312.996.8670 Fax 312.413.0055 OpenMind, The Association for the Achievement of Cultural Diversity in Higher Education


Diversity is required for colleges and universities to maintain their excellence as academic institutions. Yet available data (e.g., the National Research Council's Survey of Earned Doctorates) document a progressive decline in the proportion of people of color who receive doctorate degrees. More critically, the climate for effecting the kinds of changes necessary to reverse this trend has worsened in recent times. Misleading and inflammatory slogans such as political correctness, which emerge even the highest governmental levels, appear to have supplanted rational debate. The concept of affirmative action has been corrupted into a fear of quotas, which in turn has affected the credibility of higher education accrediting authorities. Well-funded organizations, principally the National Association of Scholars, are able under the cover of academic "standards" to gain hearings in governmental and academic policymaking bodies without the fear of an organized presentation of alternative views. OpenMind is needed to balance the equation. OpenMind exists to amplify the voices of those who seek to move beyond slogans and on to serious intellectual study and contemplative discourse on issues of equity, diversity, and academic excellence. As student bodies in the United States become increasingly more diverse, professionals who can lead institutions of higher learning in an appropriate way without pandering or proselytizing must be developed. To do this, all people, but especially those in academia, must learn to work collaboratively in interdisciplinary and multicultural modes. OpenMind represents a distinctive vehicle for this to be accomplished. Founded in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1989, OpenMind grew out of a national conference organized in 1987 by the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Participants resolved to create a permanent association to ensure excellence and diversity through the fullest participation of people of color in the faculty and administrative ranks of institutions of higher education. This national organization brings together faculty, administrators, public officials, trustees, graduate and professional students, and individuals active in pursuit of the following goals: • Increase the numbers and scholarly achievements of culturally diverse graduate and professional students and faculty by advocating, guiding, and facilitating their professional advancement in higher education.

t

• Explore mentoring and other means by which faculty members can directly enhance successful scholarly commitment and development of culturally diverse graduate and professional students. • Broaden disciplinary canons in search of fresh perspectives and broader based inquiry by challenging those definitions and practices within fields of scholarship that are arbitrary, conventional, and exclusionary—determined more by historical accident than by factors essential to a given discipline itself. • Illuminate omissions, errors, and biases in the curriculum that distort, diminish, or deny the contributions of people of color to the development of knowledge. • Foster research on the obstacles to full participation of culturally diverse populations in institutions of higher education. • Contribute to the development of public policy at local, state, and federal levels related to the promotion of cultural diversity and culturally diverse scholarship in higher education. • Increase the number of culturally diverse decision makers at all levels of higher education. • Use or change the current system of incentives and rewards to bring African American, American Indian, Asian/Pacific American, and Hispanic men and women, where they are underrepresented, into scholarly careers. • Promote understanding and collaboration among the groups we seek to serve in their quest for equity and justice. • Define and realize the culturally diverse campus, one that is free of racist and prejudiced behavior that negatively affects individuals and groups. We work toward these goals by providing a forum for people concerned with diversity in higher education, especially for those who desire to move beyond dogma to concepts and action adequate to today's and tomorrow's changing social, economic, and demographic realities; a net work of support, communications and information; publications an other media presentations that give policy and action guidance to indivi uals and institutions grappling with the requirements and implications of diversity in higher education; a clearinghouse for research on issue


and conditions related to diversity in higher education; consultation fo institutions, associations, and individuals; workshops for policy, trainin and action; and a source of information for the print/broadcast media OpenMind's activities to this point have been done on a strictly voluntary basis. Except for grants received to support the inaugural invitational conference at Stony Brook in 1987, it has survived, barely, on individual private donations, modest membership fees, limited travel support afforded some members by their home institutions, and in-kind and staff support by some higher education associations and academic institutions. While the dedication and energy of its members are truly remarkable, an organization that seeks to further interests of diversity and to increase the pool of people of color needs sustained and continued support. Our conferences, our publications, our presentations, while wellreceived, have not attracted anything like the support lavished upon NAS. Though we successfully engaged Dinesh D'Souza in public debate in Philadelphia, we were chagrined to learn that he was being feted by the city's corporate and governmental establishment at a breakfast the following morning, while we were dining at McDonald's. When Lamar Alexander, as secretary of education, convened a hearing to consider whether the Middle States Association should be reauthorized as an official accrediting agency, those of us who came to speak in support of their diversity standard were obliged to hear and to observe the opposition, largely consisting of NAS members, address Mr. Alexander's "Advisory Council," which also consisted largely of NAS members. Through a perversion of the democratic process, public policy was being made by neoconservative forces who were clearly in control of that situation. It was frighteningly reminiscent of the days of McCarthy. Curt Shepard, Campus Project Director The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Campus Project 6030 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 200 Los Angeles, CA 90036 Telephone 213.934.9030 Fax 213.937.0601 E-mail: [email protected]

194 • Where Do We Go from Here?

Response to Question 2 My response to this theoretical question is to mobilize against "insidious reactionary forces" on campus by establishing strong and healthy queer campus organizations. During the spring of 1993, while serving as cochair of NGLTF'S board of directors, I had the opportunity to take what I fondly refer to as the "Curt Shepard Goodwill Tour of America." I visited more than twentyfive campuses throughout the country—large, small, public, private, urban, rural, coastal, mountain, plains and prairie—in an effort to find out what queers on campus were up to. What were their issues? What challenges were they facing? What victories had they achieved? And how could a national organization work with and support them? I wanted to hear mostly from students, a group that over the years has soundly— and justifiably—criticized the national organizations, including NGLTF, for ignoring the voices and concerns of our youth. My visits to these schools convinced me that there are three major components to creating positive change on campus. They all are related, and they all have to do with empowerment: (1) empowerment through healthy queer leadership and organizational development; (2) empowerment through visibility; and (3) empowerment through allies and coalitions on and off campus. Nothing I observed during the 1993-94 academic year, in my new role as campus project director, changed my views appreciably. At the base, then, we need some basic training in leadership and or nizational development. I'm not suggesting that this is a strictly que problem—it's a student problem—but the closet and homophobia impose some additional challenges for queer student groups. Some readers may be familiar with the National Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Student Caucus (NLGBSC) of the United States Student Association. They utilize, to great effect, in my opinion, a program developed by USSA called GROW (Grass Roots Organizing Weekend) designed to assist campus groups with leadership and organizational issues. These programs cost $3,250 (or $2,500 for USSA member schools) and are well worth the expense of your organization. I urge everyone to find out more about the GROW program by calling 202/347-ussA. At the Task Force we have had tremendous success with our Campus


Organizing Institutes, offered in conjunction with our annual Creating Change conference, the largest gathering of queer activists, leaders, organizers, thinkers, and educators in the country. The only problem with these institutes is that relatively few students can afford to travel to wherever the conference is being held to take advantage of them. A Vassar student recently offered the suggestion that NGLTF take these institutes on the road and offer them in enough places around the country so that no student has to drive more than ten hours to get to one. It's a worthy goal to shoot for, and we are currently working with a group of students to see how we can realize it. Closely related to these issues of leadership and organizational strength—and one that we are working on at NGLTF—is communication among campuses. There is a tremendous amount that we could learn from each other if we could only figure out how to communicate. Chances are that the campus across town, in the next town, or in the next state is dealing with the same issues you are (combating right-wing radicals and working to secure domestic partner benefits for queer faculty, staff, and students). They might even be a little further along the path than you are, and perhaps whatever they are doing could work on your campus. But you're so preoccupied with your own troubles that it doesn't occur to you to pick up the phone (or punch in your e-mail handle) to see what they're up to. This simply has to change; we are spending far too much time inventing the same wheel (and not just on campuses, by the way). And I think the NGLTF Campus Project can help campus organizers and activists stop spinning their wheels by becoming a one-stop shopping information clearinghouse. At least that's our goal. This brings me to the second challenge: student empowerment throug visibility. Queer campus activism is part of a continuing struggle for so cial justice in this country that reaches back to the abolitionist movement. Today we in the queer movement stand on the shoulders of women and men who fought for racial equality, for gender equality, for religious freedom, for fair labor practices, and for economic justice. June 1994 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Stonewall riots in New York City, when a bunch of pansies, bulldykes, and drag queens of all colors and classes rioted against police abuse. Prior to Stonewall there was a homophile movement and a handful of gay organizations,


but nothing like what was to come after. Today, there are literally thousands of organizations of all shapes and sizes, representing—and advocating on behalf of—the broad diversity of this queer movement of movements. These organizations are overtly and covertly political. They are social, they are radical, they are Republican, they are Democratic, they are cogender, they are single-sex, they defy categories. They all have in common an important sequence of traits: they are the result of—and they create—visibility. As Kevin Berrill, founder of the Campus Project and organizer extraordinaire, once said, "It is visibility that enables us to identify one another and reach out to one another to build self-esteem, relationships, organization, institutions, and communities. It is visibility that allows us to organize around, educate about, and challenge bigotry." The third challenge involves empowerment through allies and co tions. Felice Yeskel, who for ten years has directed the Program for Les bian, Gay and Bisexual Concerns at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, sees to it that on her campus queer identity is celebrated not just during LGB Awareness Week, but at every opportunity, including Black History Month. During this time, pictures of notable lesbian, gay, and bisexual African Americans, including Bayard Rustin, James Baldwin, and Audre Lorde, are displayed around campus. During Women's History Month, the campus is reminded that such greats as Gertrude Stein and Martina Navratilova kept or keep the company of women. These and countless other examples demonstrate that, in addition to getting our own houses in order by building strong and healthy queer organizations for ourselves as a defense against those who would oppress and silence us, we can also foster equality and create safety by educating heterosexuals. Approximately one-third of Americans attend college. Out of that one-third come virtually all of our leaders in government, religion, business, and academe. College provides us with a window of opportunity to reach people who will be making decisions that will affect our lives and whom we may never be able to reach again. We need to change the campus consciousness about queers and create a new generation of thinkers and leaders who come to their work with a new understanding of our sexual orientation. I view this piece of work as an opportunity to move away from a defensive posture and to work toward a big-picture, proactive strategy for Creating Change. Most


straight people have a distorted vision of who we are—a vision based on myths and stereotypes. The best way to change that is to come out and be out, to teach our heterosexual colleagues, students, teachers, and administrators about our lives: What prejudice gays face every single day of our lives. What gay rights means. What it doesn't mean—"special rights." What the movement is all about. What conflicts exist within our movement, for we're not a monolithic, static group, but an unwieldy jumble of people and ideas and philosophies and strategies. Finally, we need a comprehensive depiction of what it means to be queer in America. All straight America usually gets, primarily through the media, is fragments of our lifestyle. But this does not mean that gay, lesbian, and bisexual people should have to shoulder alone the responsibility of countering anti-gay prejudice any more than people of color should assume sole responsibility for countering racism, or Jews anti-Semitism or women sexism. Homophobia is not just a gay problem; it is a straight responsibility. That is why, in an increasing number of schools and communities, heterosexuals are coming out as allies and even forming ally groups— "Friends of Lesbians and Gays," "Harmony," "Straight But Not Narrow." As Kevin Berrill has suggested, "Their mission is to use heterosexual privilege to fight homophobia." As such, they are educating their peers about the myths and facts about homosexuality and bisexuality, and they are acting as allies. But if we want other groups and individuals to join us in our efforts, we have to be ready to do the same when they need us. We need to educate ourselves about the connections among oppression against women, oppression against people of color, oppression against the economically deprived, and then we need to act accordingly. When one group is oppressed, we are all oppressed. When social justice is gained by one group, we all benefit. We need to take a stand against all forms of bigotry and hatred, even when our status as targets is not immediately clear. Arming Ourselves against "Insidious Reactionary Forces": Some Practical Steps As with other forms of oppression, homophobia undermines the educational mission of academic institutions through silence, intimidation,


and abuse. Homophobia and heterosexism are systemic problems that require systemic responses, including: • multicultural training for staff on LGB issues. • well-publicized and vigorously enforced policies to counter harassment and discrimination. • classes in which our issues are not ignored or marginalized. • counseling, health, and other services that are competent and sensitive. • cultural and social events that reflect and celebrate our diversity. These and other measures are not special privileges; they are not special rights. They are simple necessities for ensuring that all people, regardless of sexual orientation, receive an equal education. How do we go about enacting these things? Kevin Berrill has identified six steps for creating positive change on campus: 1. We must set an agenda for change. On each campus we have to decide what we want, set goals and priorities, and decide tactics. When this process includes everyone in the group, rather than just an elite few, we can expand the range of ideas and provide everyone with an opportunity to get excited about, and invested in, the effort. It's important that goals are realistic and that there are some easy victories to keep people hopeful. 2. We need to make injustice visible. Documenting discrimination doesn't guarantee we will get justice, but we're almost certain not to get justice without documentation. Recording antigay incidents, copying hate mail, photographing vandalism or physical injuries, logging hate calls, and conducting surveys are useful ways to demonstrate the need for institutional action. 3. We need to ask for what we want. So often LGB people are overlooked and underserved because the administration and faculty are unaware that we exist, let alone have needs. We need to remind them. 4. We need to build awareness and coalitions. One good strategy for moving our agenda forward is to ask other student groups and faculty governing bodies to pass resolutions to support our agenda. It is also helpful to ask students, parents, faculty, alumni, and other influential outsiders to write or talk to key officials within your institution. Before


setting an agenda, it's often a good idea to meet with other groups to find out whether they are interested in working with us on issues of common concern. Building coalitions can be extremely difficult work (and again, not just on campus), but at their best, coalitions can accomplish far more than any individual group that tries to go it alone. By working with and standing up for each other, coalition partners may eventually become allies and friends who are deeply committed to each other's issues. 5. When we have been negotiating in good faith and our reasonable requests are unanswered or refused, it is sometimes necessary to take a more confrontational approach, including legal action, media advocacy, or direct action such as sit-ins, teach-ins, or demonstrations. These tactics are most appropriate after other means of persuasion have been exhausted. 6. We need to build strong, healthy, and effective groups. If visibility is essential to our success as a movement, community provides us with the support and strength to be visible. But there can be no community without strong, healthy, and effective organizations. Developing and maintaining them is perhaps our greatest challenge as campus activists. Sandra Coyner, NWS A president, 1994-95 National Women's Studies Association 7100 Baltimore Avenue, Suite 301 College Park, MD 20740 Telephone 301.403. 0525 Fax 301.403.4137 E-mail: [email protected] NWSA Responds to Backlash In July 1993, an appeal went out over the internet to women's studies people. A right-wing student campus newspaper at an eastern state university had been attacking the Women's Studies Program (and other women's groups and feminists on campus) in a particularly vicious way. Beyond just calling for the elimination of funding for women's programs, the right-wing paper had ridiculed women's studies events and writings and launched personal attacks against individuals. They had taped women's studies classes and quoted them—contemptuously out

200

. Where Do We Go from Here?

of context. Women had appealed to the university president, without result, perhaps because a trustee publicly backed and financially supported the right-wing group attacking the women's studies program. Ultimately, some women students acted on their own, collecting copies of the publication from its distribution racks and using them to fuel a bonfire. Then lines hardened even more: some people offered new help to the right-wingers. The police threatened, and eventuallyfiled,charges of theft and criminal conspiracy against two of the women students. Women's studies and feminism have been attacked on other campuses; right-wing newspapers have been stolen several times. But this particular incident sparked the "Backlash Project" of the National Women's Studies Association (NWSA). AS the internet discussion developed that July, it had the familiar expressions of outrage and support, offers to write letters, and tactical suggestions. But it also included an appeal to NWSA, the national interdisciplinary scholarly organization for women's studies (i.e., feminist teaching and scholarship). This overture quickly sparked a parallel discussion within NWSA, which focused on our limited resources. Though unique, we are a smallish organization, with volunteer (i.e., unpaid) leadership, very little money, and a mission very large in contrast to our budget. Where would wefindthe dollars or the people to respond to the mounting right-wing attack? And how should NWSA respond? Trashing right-wing newspapers is clearly not a first-choice strategy. Much of our discussion thus centered on whether we could help each other find more effective ways to counter the increasingly numerous attacks from right-wing critics. Women's studies and feminism are among the central targets of rightwing neoconservatives. The breadth and rationale of the more general backlash against women is vividly detailed in Susan Faludi's popular book Backlash. Faludi emphasizes the broad campaign through the 1980 against the gains women had begun to win in the 1970s, especially regarding work, family, and the mass media. Attacks specifically targeted to women's studies, feminist scholarship, and campus feminism have, by 1995, been published in various periodicals and in splashy books by Camille Paglia, Christina Hoff Sommers, and Katie Roiphe. These books met immediate critical response in many media—scholarly and popular, and print, video, and electronic. (It is telling, however,


that the attackers are more notorious than the defenders. Painstakingly highlighting, and trying to correct, somebody else's myriad distortions, inaccurate statements, malicious misinterpretations, and downright falsehood is a thankless and all-too-invisible type of "response.") From the standpoint of NWSA as an organization, moreover, the written response to more or less "intellectual" attacks is clearly no area of weakness, NWSA has contributed its own voice a few times. During my term as NWSA president, I sent an official letter to the New York Times Book R view supporting Nina Auerbach's critical review of Christina Hoff Sommers's diatribe against women's studies. In the fall of 1993, NWSA also sent a letter to Mother Jones after it published a grossly misleading an underresearched attack on women's studies teaching. But NWSA'S letter was edited almost beyond recognition, so there is ample evidence to suggest that letters coming from NWSA are no more valuable than letters submitted by the public. NWSA'S strength, and its proper mission, must go beyond joining the chorus of articulate voices. As recapitulated in our constitution, NWSA was founded in 1977 to further the social, political, and professional development of Women's Studies throughout the country and the world, at every educational level and in every educational setting. To this end, this organization is committed to being a forum conducive to dialogue and collective action among women dedicated to feminist education and change. NWSA'S role

is to facilitate the work of women's studies teachers, scholars, and programs by promoting collaboration, dialogue, and networking—not to regulate, define, or prescribe. The primary activities we have emphasized (so far) to promote this mission are conferences and publications, NWSA'S annual national conference attracts thousands of people for four days of papers, workshops, readings, exhibits, and performances on the myriad aspects of feminist teaching, research, creative arts, and literature. Some smaller conferences have been organized for and by program administrators—people who coordinate or direct women's studies programs, or chair women's studies departments, NWSA publications include a scholarly journal, a newsletter, and books, pamphlets, videotapes, and audiotapes.


How can these tools be brought to bear in responding to the rightwing backlash? The conference and publications are naturally important media for communicating about the reality and nature of right-wing attacks, and for sharing response strategies. Yet, the crisis is urgent; we need something more. Obviously, the intellectual attack on women's studies programs is troubling. For about twenty-five years, feminist teachers and scholars have struggled to create women's studies courses, scholarship, and programs in colleges and universities throughout the country. As many as 700 such programs had been established by the 1990s; for virtually all, however, the struggle continues for support and stability. As programs grow, they must compete for their fair share of institutional resources (faculty, budgetary support); if institutional resources decline overall, women's studies must struggle to prevent disproportionate cuts. In this atmosphere, these right-wing attacks are especially dangerous. What is at stake for women's studies is not academic luxury or frills, but institutional survival. Our first thought in 1993 concerned the individual case that precipitated our concern. The association president from 1993 to 1994, Viven Ng, offered to write and speak in defense of women's studies in the case mentioned earlier. A new set of guidelines now specifically authorize the NWSA president to take action in individual cases. But this obviously is not enough. Women's studies people need to know what is happening on other campuses. People who have experienced a right-wing attack were almost always surprised by what happened: the attack was more vicious, more personal, and more prolonged and relentless than ever anticipated. Surprised and confused by the unexpected assault, women's studies people saw that their ability to organize a rapid, effective response had been dulled. Unprepared for the length of the struggle, our response may not have the resilience and staying power to survive. We need to share information about how these attacks begin and proceed; we cannot wait for the "normal" processes of conference papers and journal publication. We all need to know, for example, that our sexuality will usually be attacked, frequently with pornographic images, as well as our own "objectivity."


therefore decided to publish a "Backlash Manual." In debt and with a tight budget, we launched an internal appeal for special gifts and raised enough to prepare the manual and publish it in 1995. It will contain: NWSA

A survey of women's studies programs to document the extent and nature of right-wing attacks. Appreciating the seriousness of the situation may depend on our documenting its extent and its viciousness. Our focus is "sustained, systematic, politically driven attacks, particularly those backed by conservative political, religious or 'academic' organizations or by the new 'former' feminists. Less attention to random acts of nastiness." Reports or "case studies" from individual campuses to make the numbers come alive and to show how an attack might develop and proceed. Strategies: reports on what's been tried, what seems to work well or poorly, and opinions and recommendations. Our goal is to show the breadth of possible responses, so women's studies programs can choose whatever seems most likely to work on their campus. Resources: lists of people and organizations to approach for help and support. Women's studies programs must not "go it alone" in responding to these attacks. Bibliography: sources for information on how right-wing critics think and act, and access to published responses that will relieve us from having to "re-invent" these basics over and over again. Besides this new publication, we have other ideas: we need to organize a network of consultants who can provide quick responses to programs under attack. We'd like to use the resources of the Internet itself to provide more access to written materials that document right-wing strategies and distortions. We need more money and more volunteers to get even this far. As Ellen Messer-Davidow's work clearly shows, the right-wing assault on feminism is extremely well organized and well funded, NWSA, and all our allies, can never hope to match the resources of the Olin Foundation and the National Association of Scholars. We cannot, and don't want to, centralize or dictate women's studies' response to backlash. But we can

204

• Where Do We Go from Here?

provide resources to the thousands of women's studies teachers, students, and allies around the country who are struggling to defend themselves against an extremely well-funded opposition. In this year, 1995, the seventy-fifth anniversary of the winning of women's suffrage, we can remember Susan B. Anthony's words as she reflected on her likely demise before her lifelong struggle would be achieved. She knew the cause was just. She therefore said: "failure is impossible." Gerald Graff and Gregory Jay Teachers for a Democratic Culture P.O. Box 6405 Evanston, IL 60204 Telephone 312.743.3662 Fax 312.743.4548 E-mail: jkw3@ amber.uchicago.edu Response to Questions 1 and 2 In responding to your specific questions, we think it's necessary first to raise the issue of whether the anti-PC campaign should be attributed entirely to "right-wing neocons," as your phrasing implies. We're sure you're aware that many traditional liberals have actively joined in recent attacks on political correctness, and we don't think it's sufficient to assume that these liberals are simply dupes. Nor can we dismiss the fact that many of these liberals believe their anti-PC position is fully consistent with democratic, liberal-left principles, and that it is the academic and cultural left that is behaving in a totalitarian fashion. Insofar as the long-term survival of the academic and cultural left depends on winning back these traditional liberals (and there is good reason for thinking that it does), we think that their defection needs to be taken seriously. That is, the conversion of present or former liberals and Marxists to a neoconservative agenda needs to be treated as a specific event that is separate from the history of the American right and as part of the larger crisis of liberalism. To put it another way, those of us who identify with multicultural, feminist, and other "progressive" trends in education and culture need to respond to these defecting liberals rather than just stigmatizing them as "insidious reactionary forces," as you put it in your second question, and lumping them in with the Right. Insofar


as the Left surrenders these liberals to the Right it weakens itself and strengthens the Right. When we speak of winning back ex- and would-be liberals, we aren't suggesting that it would be worth anybody's while to try to convert, say, the editors of Heterodoxy or others of their type. We are talking about the need to make an appeal to those in the large middle ground, many of them our students, who are not yet committed either to the Left or the Right (and who maybe are vaguely alienated from political labels and affiliations) but who find much that seems convincing in the account of the current scene that is presented in books like The Closing of the Ame ican Mind, ProfScam, Tenured Radicals, and Illiberal Education.

This is not to say that we should simply capitulate to the assumptions of these middle-ground people. On the contrary, it is rather to say that we should open the kind of discussion with them that would enable us t begin effectively challenging what they now believe about the state of education and scholarship. No such discussion now exists, and it is not likely to come into existence as long as many of the academic left use liberal as a term of contempt, talk as if entering into debate with liberals and conservatives would be a form of complicity or co-optation, and consequently use a rhetoric—the rhetoric of most oppositional academic writing—that is persuasive only to those who already share its assumptions (the use of oppositional is a case in point). The too simple talk about "right" and "left" fails to distinguish between the kind of "left" formed by liberals around Enlightenment ideas of individual rights, on the one hand, and on the other the kind of "left" formed by cultural activists organizing around the group identities of African or Native Americans or gay and lesbian people, for example. The transformation of some members of the "old left" into today's neoconservatives follows directly from this difference between individualist liberalism and identity politics, a difference also played out in the middle ground being charted by "communitarians" such as Charles Taylor. "Old left neocons," if you will, and "old left liberals" are uncomfortable with a cultural politics that emphasizes race and gender and thereby flies in the face of humanist universalism of the Enlightenment, which originally arose in reaction against the oppressive use of class distinctio in feudal society. "Old left neocons" and liberals see any emphasis on

206


"difference" as a regressive threat to humanism and liberty, whereas cultural leftists see the defense of humanism and individualism as having stopped at the borders of race and gender. The "right," on the other hand (which is riven by its own deep division between free-market economic conservatives and culturally traditionalist conservatives) represents a broad and often contradictory alliance of morally oriented social critics, some of whom wish to use the state to enforce their particular religious and political agenda. Now often conflated with the religious right, America's right wing has always been in part a cultural right, which explains why it has mobilized so dramatically to oppose the cultural left, and why the cultural right focuses as much on homosexuality and family values as it does on the free market and defense spending. Collapsing Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., into Jerry Falwell, or Elizabeth Fox-Genovese into Phyllis Schlafly, or Stephen Carter into Clarence Thomas, doesn't help much to chart a path out of the current confusions. None of this is to deny that the PC-attacks have seriously misrepresented the changes that have been taking place on American campuses or that conservatives have disseminated and profited from these misrepresentations. Our aim in forming Teachers for a Democratic Culture in 1991 is still our aim today: to combat and correct such misrepresentations of recent changes and to get into the media our sense of why they represent positive and necessary gains. Nor do we minimize the need to expose and combat the threat to democratic education represented by a right that clearly and programmatically aims to use its considerable money and influence to purge the university of radical dissent. In this project, however, we think it is important to make distinctions between what is valuable and what is questionable in current academic progressivism (admittedly, such distinctions are often no easy task). The favorite tactic of the anti-PC critics is to locate examples of the silliest, most fatuous, and most doctrinaire manifestations of academic progressivism and then present these examples as typifying the mainstream of the new movements. Thus, multiculturalism becomes the view that "dead white males" should be expelled from the reading lists; feminism equals the belief that only women can understand writing by women; and so forth. We believe, however, that, as a description of the new


movements as a whole, this caricature is so patently absurd and offensive that there is a tendency among those who react to it on the Left to ignore the fact that it is sometimes accurate and justifiable. PC is a real problem even if Bill Bennett and Lynne Cheney say it's a menace. Many stupidities and follies have been committed in the name of cultural difference or sensitivity to the other, and some of these have been authoritarian and undemocratic. Not to call attention to folly and authoritarianism in our midst is only to give a good cause a bad name. For this reason, we think it's important that an organization like TDC, which is committed to supporting the new movements, must be careful not to fall into a merely defensive or protective attitude. We also think it is better, for both ethical and strategic reasons, to encourage debate with conservatives and anti-PC liberals rather than dismissing them as reactionaries. To come back to TDC'S own efforts, one thing we have tried to do is to make our periodic magazine-newsletter, Democratic Culture—whi has published four issues at this writing—into the sort of forum for debate on such issues that we think has been long needed on the Left. That is, instead of aping in reverse the practice of the National Association of Scholars, whose journal Academic Questions virtually never deviat from the straight NAS party line in its excoriations of the Left, we have resisted letting Democratic Culture become an organ of left-wing sel justification and have encouraged as much left self-criticism as possible. Indeed, we have recently published an article by a member of NAS itself and built an exchange around it. We have also tried to extend this kind of dialogue in articles that the two of us have coauthored for the journal. In one of these, "A Necessary Debate," which appeared in the first issue of DC (Fall 1992), we recall the fact that political correctness was at one time used by leftists themselv as a sympathetic but satiric term of self-criticism, and we warn against adopting the self-righteous postures of our antagonists even when faced with patently unfair attacks. In "Some Questions about Critical Pedagogy" (Fall 1993), we survey the current popularity of "radical" or "oppositional" pedagogy and argue that progressive teachers need to find ways to bring politics into their classrooms without simply advancing a single political agenda, as radical and oppositional pedagogues are often prone to do. We argue


that (in Richard Feldstein's words), some instructors "have embarked on a course to institutionalize politically correct behavior, thus threatening to brainwash unsuspecting American students." Like those in the critical pedagogy movement, we too are committed to a radical politics (as long as such a politics does not reject coalitions with liberals and moderates), and we too are sympathetic with the best of the new work in feminism, multiculturalism, gay studies, poststructuralism, and cultural studies. Where we differ from the exponents of critical pedagogy is in wishing to challenge the assumption, which seems to us to function widely as an unreflective premise today, that the natural and most effective way to inject radical politics into education is for teachers to try to radicalize their students. In other words, we question the assumption that there can and should be a transparent relation between the politics of the teacher and the political effect of the curriculum or of the educational institution. We question whether the best and most effective way of getting students to entertain radical political perspectives directly, an activity that, given the inevitably superior authority of the teacher over the student, will be inherently fraught with the dangers of authoritarianism and will therefore give some substance to charges of political correctness. On the other hand, we believe that the real source of political correctness in the classroom (whether of the Left or the Right) lies not in the mentality or behavior of teachers so much as in the structural isolation of courses and classrooms, which protects all strongly held professional viewpoints from peer criticism. The dangers of classroom indoctrination and coercion would be significantly lessened if the classroom ceased to be the isolated space that it usually is now and became a dialogical space in which strong views were answerable to their critics. Under such dialogical conditions, teachers would be free to be even more aggressive in expressing their political commitments with less danger of coercing students since these commitments would be immediately accountable to peer criticism. How would institutionalizing political conflicts rather than politic agendas serve progressive ends? First, one of the most successful big lies of the PC wars has been the accusation that it is really only the left wing that imposes its political views in class. Traditional and conservative


views on controversial issues are represented as "common sense," "normal," or just nonpolitical. Often this is because such views have never had to defend themselves in a forum with people who oppose them. The Right invites Jeane Kirkpatrick or Lynne Cheney to campus and has its pet assumptions reinforced while the Left invites Angela Davis or Catharine MacKinnon and has its pet assumptions reinforced. In the classroom we see much the same one-person show and onesided syllabus. We think such practices help explain why the oppositional teacher who tries to expose the political interests of the status quo is often perceived by students as the one who "imposes" politics or is "ideological," whereas conservatives and liberals are presumably just teaching their subjects. And this perception is unlikely to change as long as conservatives and liberals are allowed to sit idly by without having to articulate or defend their positions. Such self-defenses, rather than always helping a cause, often expose its interests and weaknesses better than do the critiques of its opponents, as long as the forum is designed with some diversity. By teaching the conflicts, the Left can effectively challenge the commonsense view—so long-standing and pervasive in the United States—that conservative or liberal-humanist beliefs are not "ideological" or "political." But this will only happen if both the Left and Right stop talking just to themselves. Second, institutionalizing conflicts rather than agendas will force us to act upon the vexed issue of the "level playing field." Critics of the notion of "teaching the conflicts" often point out that engaging the Right in debate is inherently unfair and foolish, given the uneven playing field. Conservatives and liberal humanists, after all, control most of the academic resources, most of the college and university administrations, and (with perhaps a few exceptions) most of the academic journals. Having fought so hard to get a toe-hold on campus for women's studies or multiculturalism or gay studies, it seems perversely self-defeating to think of empowering the opponents of these gains by inviting them to articulate their opposition. This might be a good objection except that this opposition is already loudly proclaiming itself without invitation, and is doing so (as we say) in forums where its views, and the prevailing "common sense" that supports them, are rarely challenged. The two of us have been divided about this issue, however, as you can


see if you compare the emphasis in Graff's Beyond the Culture War (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992) with that in Jay's "The Struggle for Re resentation" (College English [January 1994]). Jay argues that the co flicts cannot be taught if the parties to the conflict are not well represented in terms of power and resources, and this means supporting the strong autonomous development of agenda-driven programs and curricula while also urging the kind of debate-oriented curriculum Graff advocates. Graff argues that the issue of the level playing field is precisely the sort of political issue that would be brought into public view and discussion by the kind of debate he advocates, whereas at present the level playing field remains the private concern of those who happen to care about it. If we have to wait for a level playing field in order to start a debate about the lack of one, says Graff, the level playingfieldwill never materialize. Jay answers that, in the absence of a political struggle for resources, such a debate is doomed merely to legitimize the current distribution of resources by giving it a public face of Enlightenment liberality. We rehearse this discussion a bit here not only because we think it's important, but because it illustrates how TDC originated in and continues to foster exchanges among progressive academics who nonetheless differ in many of their premises and tendencies. In writing and working together, we have each had to listen to more uncongenial arguments than we would have heard in isolation, and we have produced texts that neither of us, writing alone, would have written. We encourage our colleagues to engage in more of such collaboration, as in fact many feminists have been doing for a number of years (as witnessed by a volume such as Conflicts in Feminism, ed. Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Kel [New York: Routledge, 1990]). While a deep skepticism about "collaborating with the enemy" may be healthy, it can also be a way of avoiding hard questions about the weak points of one's own beliefs. In our view, then, the best way to protect against accusations of PC is not to deny the existence of would-be pedagogical brainwashing, but to honestly examine and debate the question of how we are bringing politics into the classroom. It is not a question of whether to bring politics in—we agree that they are always already there, and always have been. Nor is it even primarily a question of which politics to advocate. The real issue is how to politicize education democratically.


Stanley Aronowitz Union of Democratic Intellectuals c/o Ph.D. Program in Sociology CUNY Graduate Center 33 W. 42nd Street New York, NY 10036 Telephone 212.642.2428 Fax 212.642.2419 The End of Academic Freedom? Despite massive evidence to the contrary, the image of the university as a site of disinterested inquiry lingers, most of all as an enduring cultural ideal of the professoriate. Rather than repeating the standard refutation according to which such judgments may be viewed as supremely self-interested, I want to suggest that the idea of self-directed scholarship is deeply etched in the Enlightenment tradition for which the skeptical intellectual may be the archetypal figure, including those who can be counted among the tradition's detractors. Indeed, many if not most people who choose an academic vocation are motivated by, if not smitten with, this ideal; few would enter teaching to achieve the twin objectives of money and power (although for some fame is, clearly, the spur). Inscribed in the institutional practices of unfettered research and curricular and pedagogic autonomy, the imaginary as well as the practice of academic freedom has become one of the central criteria of civilized society, even where freedom remains a distant horizon. Indeed, the institution of tenure, according to which a teacher may not be dismissed except for the most egregiously offensive personal behavior, was an innovation of, precisely, the predemocratic epoch in western Europe. Even when most citizens were denied civil liberties and other "human" rights, tenure was meant to protect the dissident or conformist scholar from the vicissitudes of arbitrary political authority. In this century, despite such events as the state-sponsored Mexico City massacre of 1968, even many Latin American dictatorships felt obliged to observe, if not entirely respect, the tradition of the independent academy. When government troops violated the space of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), the nominally democratic


party in power lost considerable domestic credibility and suffered censure from world opinion. And, of course, one of the more outrageous features of Soviet-style Communism was that it violated intellectual freedom; in addition to mobilizing the university for purposes of scientific and technological research, the party and the state demanded the university remain an ideological instrument of state policy and, on thi basis, justified frequent violations of its intellectual independence. The most recent instance of state socialist suppression of intellectual freedom, the Chinese government's jailing of student and other intellectuals who protested the lack of democracy in the regime at Tiananmen Square, was sufficiently notorious to generate a crisis for the Chinese government's desperate efforts to join the world economy. So, historical example does not warrant a frivolous attitude toward academic freedom; the professoriate's autonomy may be not only a measure of a given state's respect for human rights, but a symptom of its ability to learn from those who are furthest removed from everyday exigencies. Of course, the pressure on the university from antidemocratic forces in any society is exacerbated by its relative isolation and, in many countries, the tendency to concentrate such freedoms within its wall especially in countries where enforced conformity is the norm. In the United States, universities and their faculties have, until recently, enjoyed a unique place. In contrast to the considerable academic freedom enjoyed by the tenured professoriate in most universities, elementary and secondary schools, and community colleges, let alone corporations and other workplaces are marked, precisely, by the degree to which the teacher is required to use prescribed textbooks and follow a statemandated curriculum. Most industrial and clerical workers enjoy almost no autonomy in the performance of their tasks. Workplaces, especially factories and large corporate offices in all democratic—let alone authoritarian—societies are routinely exempt from many of the imperatives of those rights conventionally reserved for citizens. In the United States, workers' rights are restricted to health and safety issues and cases of employee discharge (but only in workplaces under union contract or for reasons of sex or race discrimination). In effect, most workers do not enjoy workplace ci izenship, and this is not regarded as a deprivation by the body politic,


much less by workers themselves, except those occasions when they feel constrained to act against managerial injustice. Except for a tiny free-wheeling elite, scientists, engineers, writers, and teachers are, typically, subsumed, as employees, under virtually unchecked managerial authority. The proletarianization of technical and scientific intellectuals has led, in most countries of late capitalism, to widespread unionization, especially among professionals such as nurses, teachers, social workers, and technical categories in public employment—an event that had led to relatively higher salaries and benefits, but also to a widening of the power gap between line employees and supervision. In fact, the very concept of academic freedom in the public school classroom, the commercial magazine or newspaper, or, indeed, in most of the art world, has long been buried beneath corporate rules or, in the case of education and health, legislative curriculum mandates with their inevitable prescriptions, no less than the requirement that teachers and health workers submit to the authority of supervisors within the school or hospital. Since the discourse of the corporation, with its presumption of managerial efficiency, is entirely hegemonic in virtually all walks of American life, freedom's tacit enemies ask: why should the university not be held to the same set of rules as, say, a large corporation or government agency? These rules entail a top-down command structure that obliges employees to follow the direction of management(s) and the lower order to submit, in the last instance at least, to the higher. Notwithstanding the Supreme Court's infamous Yeshiva decision, which designated privat university faculty as managers, the overwhelming majority of private no less than public universities routinely invest ultimate power over hiring, promotions, and salaries to the administration rather than to faculty committees. In effect, even though most administrations use their veto of peer recommendations sparingly, most faculties have been formally relegated to advisory status. In fact, increasingly, much of academic politics consists in a tug-of-war between faculties seeking to protect the shred of residual sovereignty they still possess and an administration that insists on an absolute as well as ultimate power over hiring, firing and curriculum. In the regime of administration-driven university life, officials in-

214 • Where Do We Go from Here?

creasingly see themselves as corporate leaders rather than scholars on temporary leave from their research and writing to perform service. They are loyal to the legislatures and boards of trustees rather than to the school community and, in turn, are frequently perceived by faculty as natural enemies rather than as colleagues invested with specific functions. Although the scholar-administrator is by no means an anachronism, in recent years, more universities and colleges are recruiting top officials from corporate, military, and government organizations rather than from the ranks. The attack on the universities, which began in earnest in the 1980s, may be ascribed to at least four developments: the end of the regulation era corresponding to the acceleration of economic globalization, an event that has led to restructuration, stagnation, and decline of public and quasi-public investments; the end of the cold war, which played an enormous role in the 1960s expansion in the number and size of U.S. universities and colleges, especially in the immediate post-sputnik years; technological change, one of whose effects is to reduce the number of professional and technical employees in public and private enterprises and the quality and income of jobs; and the rise of neoconservative discourses, which, accurately, regard intellectuals and the system of higher education as potentially subversive to efforts to achieve a national consensus around moral values and retrograde political goals. These developments have resulted in the relative shrinkage of public higher education budgets, austerity programs in some private schools, and pressures for privatization, the most dramatic instance of which is the virtual mortgage of most scientific and technical research and development to private corporations. With the maturing of scientifically based knowledge industries, knowledge has begun to feed off itself. That is, technological applications of scientific discoveries not only replace manual and technical labor, but also eliminate knowledge work. Columbia, Pratt, and other universities have closed engineering and library science schools; medical schools have experienced declining enrollments, and, as teaching and research jobs disappear, some liberal arts graduate programs have attempted to limit admissions. In sum, we are in the midst of a major reversal of the post-World War II legacy of democratic access to higher education. This democratic


movement began with the GI Bill of Rights, among whose provisions was government-subsidized education made available to returning veterans. Between 1946 and the mid-1950s, almost three million former members of the armed services availed themselves of this benefit. A substantial number attended vocational and technical schools, but many swelled the ranks of the universities and colleges and, in the process, changed the size, budgets, and culture of many of them. After a short interregnum in the expansion of higher education from the mid-1950s, the universities resumed their rapid growth in the post-sputnik years. In contrast to stubborn states-rights-inspired resistance to federal funding for elementary and secondary education, in the booming 1960s, the Department of Defense became a major vehicle for transferring federal funds to higher education. The perception that the Soviets had outdistanced the United States in space exploration and other military and scientifically based technological endeavors was not the only motive force behind the spurt of public attention to higher education. Equally important was the scientifictechnological revolution in industry and commerce, which required, at least throughout the '60s and '70s, the training and employment of a fairly large cadre of scientific and technical personnel, especially computer programmers, engineers, and, of course, managers and other administrators. With the advent of a more open university system, the political and ideological climate dramatically changed within these once relatively hallowed walls. Becoming and being a student became one of the characteristic forms of life in U.S. society—by the 1980s, more than thirteen million adults were enrolled in colleges and universities. And the gender, racial, and class composition of the student body dramatically changed. Conjoined with the rise of a new student left in the 1960s, and with the emergence of antiwar and civil rights struggles on campus as well as in the "streets," some elite universities, public as well as private, became ideological battlegrounds. Some faculty perceived these changes as a threat to academic freedom. Liberal opponents of the student left sought to link student radicalism with authoritarian tendencies. Beneath this critique was the deeper fear that even if the university administration was not necessarily


imbued with the values associated with academic freedom, especially faculty autonomy to teach what it pleased, most student activities were even less committed to freedom. Never mind that ROTC, military research, and corporate-associated scientific research abounded on many campuses. Even if administrators were prepared to accommodate them, these "outside" forces did little to restrict faculty rights. On the contrary, students, most of whom were no longer self-defined as leftist, especially in the conservative '80s, insisted upon radical revisions of disciplinary canon(s) in order to acknowledge the legitimacy of marginal and minority discourses, and were inclined to censure faculty views that did not correspond to the multiculturalist program of diversity. The debate has focused, particularly, on the phenomenon of Political Correctness in all of its manifestations. Among them, the tendency of university administrations to respond to the appearance of a new right on campus by restricting "hate" speech of some of its more virulent proponents has elicited considerable criticism from civil libertarians as well as conservatives. And, there is the matter of student-generated censorship, or at least censure, of some faculty members who, in the classroom and in public, have made remarks that are viewed as something less than politically correct. While efforts to curtail politically incorrect behavior and speech are by no means generalized in the academy, the appearance of authoritarianism on the Left has fueled the Right's efforts to neutralize what it considers to be the last bastion of '60s radicalism. Although there are many zealots on the Left for whom conformity presents few problems, long before the political correctness debate most radicals had, for the most part, been safely contained by the exigencies of professional careers. Twenty years ago, there were leftist national organizations of newly minted faculty and graduate students, notably the New University Conference and its magazine Leviathan. The NUC—whose leading lights were recruited largely from the humanities and social sciences—vanished in the 1970s, but left a network of professional caucuses in the disciplines (some of which were organized outside its framework), most importantly in English, history, economics, and sociology. These caucuses were able to elect some of their number to high offices, even president, of the professional associations. More to the point, the


Left, broadly conceived, succeeded in changing the dominant discourse of some of these disciplines. In the 1970s, the battle for discursive hegemony was waged in English between the New Criticism, already on the wane and, mainly, structuralist Marxism. In the 1980s, poststructuralism became the new literary fashion, while, owing to their antitheoretical bent in the social sciences, "radical" rather than "Marxist" described the dissenting voices better. And, it must be said that Marxists and poststructuralists, together with feminists, were in the forefront of academic minority hiring, and these groups were active promoters of the multicultural curriculum within universities. So, the stakes in the struggle over political correctness were by no means confined to legitimate concerns over the right of the intellectual mainstream to dissent from the recently powerful, even if not prevalent, regimes of truth. The arrogance of the new intellectuals in power has simply exacerbated the ire of many liberals who, under pressure from the Right, have felt constrained to take a stand against the upstarts. In this context, the political correctness controversy may be seen as a convenient marker as well as an egregious event. What became known as the culture wars were curiously out of sync with the despair that afflicted left and liberal circles during the Reagan era, of which the Clinton presidency maybe simply a slightly less reactionary version. These days it is quite common to hear how the culture wars are relatively trivial in comparison to "Bosnia" or "Somalia" and to economic ills such as joblessness and poverty that afflict most of the globe. But this judgment forgets what the real culturalfightis all about. In thefirstplace, the cultural insurgency of the late 1980s and early 1990s marks the struggle for subaltern voice, which is intimately linked to the ongoing process of globalization; second, the university is a battleground precisely because it is the principal producer of scientific and technical knowledge and the discourses of political and social rule. The major weapon of the Right may be academic professionalization, which often implies the progressive disappearance of relevant intellectual debate about large public issues and its replacement by "research" in the service of policy. The Union of Democratic Intellectuals (UDI) was formed as the result of a series of consultations in 1991 and 1992 among mostly university-


based intellectuals in the face of clear indications that the Bush administration had embraced the neoconservative cultural agenda: to abolish or severely curtail the National Endowments for the Humanities and the Arts since these agencies were embodiments of libertine and radical evil; to elevate the hitherto local issue of political correctness to a subject for presidential oratory; and to re-evoke dark reminiscences of the cold war with its images of political repression. Many on the Left saw the militant conservative defense of free speech as a veiled attack on their not-too-entrenched positions within academic precincts. While many of us were equally concerned that free speech not be censored from the Left, we found particularly unwelcome the newfound allegiances to the "cause" among those whose political forebears were ardent cold warriors, some even open defenders of McCarthy and his anti-Communist crusade. Together with Teachers for a Democratic Culture (TDC), UDI began, in 1991-92, urging intellectuals to protest efforts to defund these agencies and to encourage their leaderships to resist pressures from within Congress and without to sharply restrict the scope and the orientation of grants. We argued the duty of a democratic state is to protect the freedom of artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe and Karen Finley, whose work on sexuality was bound to offend conventional sensibilities, to receive public funds for their dissenting work. At the same time, Ellen Messer-Davidow, a TDC member, adduced ample evidence that revealed the degree to which the National Association of Scholars (NAS), a leading vehicle for the conservative attack on multiculturalism and political correctness, was generously funded by the Olin Foundation and other notorious right-wing sources. UDI distinguishes itself from others that tend to be exclusively concerned with the preservation of intellectual freedoms against concerted conservative ideological attacks by its insistence that freedom was equally endangered by the budget cuts that have afflicted many public institutions of postsecondary education in the past five years. Paul Lauter, a UDI member, has argued that the political correctness debate may, in part, be a shield for sharp program and funding curtailment. In UDI'S view, the "downsizing" of some private as well as most public colleges and universities represents a threat to the democratic principle,


now viewed by even liberal policymakers as an expendable "entitlement," that the working class as much as the middle class and the rich be able to attend these institutions. For the reduction of public funds means that more of the educational costs be shouldered by students and their families. Consequently, with the reduction of financial aid, many can no longer afford to go to school, thus narrowing the social base of higher education; or, to be more precise, higher education would tend to resemble its pre-World War II character as a finishing school for the higher orders and professional school for a select minority. In the coming years we can expect a significant challenge to tenure, the very idea of full-time university employment, and the notion that education rather than training is the chief mission of higher learning. In these respects, such "experiments" in nontenure and the replacement of tenure by term contracts such as at Hampshire and Bennington may no longer be the exception but will become a new fashion among college and university administrations. And the tendency to replace vacated full-time faculty lines with adjuncts has already become a normative practice in most public schools and a large portion of private institutions as well. Columbia, New York University, the New School, and man arts colleges have elevated the part-timer to the rule, especially in continuing education programs, but also in their traditional faculties. Community and four-year public colleges are breaking up faculty lines into six or eight parts to save money on salaries and benefits. Of course, from the perspective of legislatures and public officials, school budget cuts are merely a consequence of deindustrialization and its effects, especially revenue reductions for states already strapped by soaring costs to pay for federally mandated programs such as aid to families with dependent children, food stamps, environmental protection, and services to the physically and mentally handicapped. However, the particularity of the attempt to reduce higher education access is overdetermined by the political correctness debate. During the Reagan era, many intellectuals became genuinely alarmed by the attacks on higher education. With the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, many of them heaved a sigh of relief, not recognizing that Clinton's party affiliation and political promises were not genuine indications of change, that we are still in the Reagan era. Clinton has shown little incli-

220


nation to reverse the attacks; on the contrary, he has proclaimed his fealty to the conservative program of smaller government, manifested chiefly in privatization (deregulation) and to closing the debt gap by reducing social expenditures. The election of a Republican Congress in 1994 merely ratified policies that have spanned four administrations beginning with that of Jimmy Carter, who was the first to admonish his fellow citizens to get accustomed to austerity. There has been no clear indication that academics and other intellectuals are prepared to defend the Endowments and other communications and arts agencies, which, lacking a counterattack from Democrats, are certain to be reduced to shells. Nor can we more than hope that a relatively complacent tenured professoriate will rise to the occasion to defend their own institutions. Yet, if there is any time less propitious than the present for a new wave of resistance, it would be hard to imagine. In contrast to the early 1990s, when the Left retained some purchase on public debate, it has been so marginalized that hope seems to have temporarily vanished. For, in the last instance, hope rather than mere numbers is the main component of effective discursive power. There is a pressing need for a militant faculty organization—independent of the unions and advocacy and professional associations—to address the threat of conservative ideological attacks and the equally virulent political and economic assaults on higher education. This need is driven home by the limited scope of many advocacy groups, but also by the apparent inability of the NEA, AAUP, and AFT, by far the largest and best financed—to effectively address the fundamental transformations under way in higher education that threaten both democracy and the economic interests of their own members. The role of such a group is not to replace these more entrenched and important organizations, but to continually raise the issues that need to be discussed. Through the production and dissemination of analysis about the emerging crisis in higher education, holding conferences and other public activities, and engaging in limited but strategically direct actions, such an organization might be able to ignite some hope in an otherwise dispirited faculty. This is the real motive force behind the Union of Democratic Intellectuals.

Bibliography

1. The PC Lexicon Aronowitz, Stanley. Roll Over Beethoven: The Return of Cultural Strife. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1993. Beard, Henry, and Christopher Cerf. The Official Politically Correct Dictionary and Handbook. New York: Villard Books, 1992. Brennan, Teresa. History after Lacan. London: Routledge, 1993. Brennan, Tim." ' P C and the Decline of the American Empire." Social Policy 22 (1991): 16-29.

Fekete, John. The Structural Allegory: Reconstructive Encounters with the New French Thought. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Goodheart, Eugene. "PC or Not PC." Partisan Review 4 (1993): 550-56. Kohl, Herbert. "The Politically Correct Bypass: Multiculturalism and the Public Schools." Social Policy 22 (1991): 33-40. Levy, Jacob. "The Ennui of C PC " Brown Alumni Monthly. October 1991: 34-37.

2. Sound Bite Myth: Scholars Hate Students American Federation of Teachers. "Myth and Facts about Private School Choice." American Educator 17 (1993): 26. Anderson, Martin. Impostors in the Temple. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992. D'Souza, Dinesh. Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus. New York: The Free Press, 1991. Foucault, Michel. "An Historian of Culture." Foucault Live. Translated by John Johnston. Edited by Sylvere Lotringer. New York: Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series,i989. Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Translated by Gregory Rabassa. New York: Harper & Row, 1970. Girard, Rene. The Scapegoat. Translated by Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. Jardine, Alice. "Illiberal Reporting." Women's Review of Books 14.5 (1992): 27-30. Kimball, Roger. Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991. 221

222

.

Bibliography

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Explained. Translated and edited by Julian Pefanis and Morgan Thomas. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. MacCabe, Colin. Tracking the Signifier: Theoretical Essays: Film, Linguistics, Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. Mailloux, Stephen. "Interpretation." Critical Terms for Literary Study. Edited by Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Sykes, Charles J. ProfScam: Professors and the Demise of Higher Education. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988.

3. The Myth of Disinterested Scholarship Alter, Robert. "The Persistence of Reading." Partisan Review 60 (1993): 510-16. Althusser, Louis, and Etienne Balibar. Translated by Ben Brewster. "From Capital to Marx's Philosophy." In Reading Capital. New York: Verso, 1968. Anderson, Martin. Impostors in the Temple. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992. Bright, Christopher. "Commentary in the Public Interest." World Affairs 153:2 (1990): 53-60. Bromwich, David. "Moral Education in the Age of Reagan." Dissent 36 (1986): 447-69. D'Souza, Dinesh. Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus. New York: The Free Press, 1991. . "Racism 101." Wisconsin Interest 1:1 (1992): 36-46. Heller, Scott. "A Constellation of Recently Hired Professors Illuminates the English Department at Duke." Chronicle of Higher Education 27 (1987): 12-14. Hoeveler, J. David, Jr. "Conservative Intellectuals and the Reagan Ascendancy." History Teacher 23:3 (1990): 305-18. Jameson, Fredric. "Metacommentary." The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971-1986,1. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. Kimball, Roger. Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991. Lipset, Seymour Martin, and Earl Raab. "An Instrument Rather Than Creator." In McCarthyism. Edited by Thomas C. Reeves. Malabar: Krieger, 1989:132-41. Messer-Davidow, Ellen. "Manufacturing the Attack on Liberalized Higher Education." Social Text36 (1993): 40-80. Nelson, Cary. "Psychoanalysis as an Intervention in Contemporary Theory." Psychoanalysis and... Edited by Richard Feldstein and Henry Sussman. New York: Routledge, 1990:11-20. Soley, Lawrence. "Right Thinking Conservative Think Tanks." Dissent (1991): 418-20. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. London: Methuen, 1987. Sykes, Charles J. A Nation of Victims: The Decay of the American Character. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992. . ProfScam: Professors and the Demise of Higher Education. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988. University Conversion Project. Study War No More 1:1-2 (1994): 1-51.

Bibliography

. 223

4. Mythic Parameters: Fast-Food PC, McCarthyism, and McReaganism Adler, Jerry. "Taking Offense." Newsweek December 24,1990:48-50. Baudrillard, Jean. "The Ecstasy of Communication." In The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Edited by Hal Foster. Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1983. 126-34. . The Evil Demon of Images. Translated by Paul Patton and Paul Foss. Sydney: Power Institute Publications, 1987. -. Simulations. Translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983. Barthes, Roland. "Myth Today." In Mythologies. Translated by Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972.109-59. Bob Roberts. Directed by Tim Robbins. With Tim Robbins, Alan Rickman, and Gore Vidal. Paramount, 1992. Collier, Peter, and David Horowitz. "McCarthyism: The Last Refuge of the Left." Commentary 85 (1988): 36-41. D'Souza, Dinesh. Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus. New York: The Free Press, 1991. Greenblatt, Stephen. Chronicle of Higher Education 37 (1991): B1-B2. Houston, Velina Hasu. Quoted in Lehman, David. "The Reign of Intolerance." Partisan Review 4 (1993): 598-603. Jardine, Alice. "Illiberal Reporting." Women's Review of Books 14.5 (1992): 27-30. Kimball, Roger. "From Farce to Tragedy." Partisan Review 4 (1993): 564-69. Kramer, Hilton. "Confronting the Monolith." Partisan Review 4 (1993): 569-73. Lehman, David. "The Reign of Intolerance." Partisan .Review 4(1993): 598-603. Leo, John. "The Academy's New Ayatollahs." 17. S. News & World Report. December 10, 1990: 22. Levy, Jacob. "The Ennui of'PC.'" Brown Alumni Monthly. October 1991: 34-37. Loury, Glenn C. "Self-Censorship." Partisan Review 4 (1993): 608-20. Phelps, Christopher. "The Second Time as Farce: The Right's 'New McCarthyism.'" Monthly Review (1991): 39-57. Radosh, Ronald. "McCarthyism of the Left." Partisan Review 4 (1993): 677-84. Sidorsky, David. "Multiculturalism of the Left." Partisan Review 4 (1993): 709-22. Sykes, Charles J. A Nation of Victims: The Decay of the American Character. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992. West, Cornel. Race Matters. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993. Will, George F. "Literary Politics." Newsweek April 22,1991: 72.

5. Constructing the Enemy Advertisement. Slick Times 2 (1994): 2. Bole, William, Larry Cohler, David Earle Anderson, A. James Rudin, and Adam Simms. "New Christian Rights: Looking Toward 1988." Present Tense 2 (1985): 22-30. Brock, David. "The Travelgate Cover-Up." American Spectator 27 (1994): 30-37. Bromwich, David. "Moral Education in the Age of Reagan." Dissent 36 (1986): 447-69. Campus 2:2 (1991): Cover.

224 . Bibliography "Christian Coalition." Challenging the Christian Right: The Activist's Handbook. Great Barrington: Institute for First Amendment Studies, 1993.153-57. "The Christian Right: 1993 and Beyond." In Challenging the Christian Right: The Activist's Handbook. Great Barrington: Institute for First Amendment Studies, 1993.1-6. Clarkson, Frederick. "Valuable Deductions." Challenging the Christian Right: The Activist's Handbook. Great Barrington: Institute for First Amendment Studies, 1993.237-39. "Classified Advertisements." American Spectator 27 (1994): 87-90. "The Clinton Enemies." Transcript of Crossfire. CNN, Providence, R.I., May 12,1994. "The Code of Silence." Crossfire. CNN. Providence, R.I., June 17,1993. Cohn, Roy. "History Will Vindicate Him." In McCarthyism. Edited by Thomas C. Reeves. Malabar: Krieger, 54-62. "A Conservative People, a Liberal Culture." National Review Institute Conservative Summit C-Span. Providence, R.I., January 24,1993. Cowan, Rich. "Key Private Foundations Who Fund the Right on Campus & Where Their Money Came From." Study War No More April 1994:39. D'Souza, Dinesh. "Out of the Wilderness: The Political Education of the Christian Right." Policy Review 41 (1987): 54-59. Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. Fried, Richard M. "The Discovery of Anti-Communism." McCarthyism. Edited by Thomas C. Reeves. Malabar: Krieger, 19-27. Freud, Sigmund. "Analysis of a Case of Chronic Paranoia." In Further Remarks on the Neuro-Psychoses of Defense. Standard Edition 77/. 174-85. . "Animism, Magic and the Omnipotence of Thoughts." In Totem and Taboo. Standard Edition X7/7.75-99. . "Draft B. The Aetiology of the Neuroses." Extracts from the Fliess Papers. Standard Edition 7.179-84. . "Draft H. Paranoia." Extracts from the Fliess Papers. Standard Edition 7.206-12. . "Draft K. The Neuroses of Defence (A Christmas Fairy Tale)." Extracts from the Fliess Papers. Standard Edition 7. 220-29. . Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety. Standard Edition XX. 87-175. -. "On the Mechanism of Paranoia." Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides. Standard Edition X77.59-79. . "Taboo and Emotional Ambivalence." Totem and Taboo. Standard Edition X777.

18-74. Hall, Mimi. "Tape Shows Anti-Abortion Conspiracy, Group Says." USA Today. August 18, 1994. Heritage Foundation. "Making the World Safe for America: The Heritage 'Blueprint' and Its Critics." Policy Review 61 (1992): 50-69. "IRS Fines Falwell For Partisan Politicking." In Challenging the Christian Right: The Activist's Handbook. Great Barrington: Institute for First Amendment Studies, 1993. 233-34Isikoff, Michael. "Christian Coalition Steps Boldly into Politics." In Challenging the Christian Right: The Activist's Handbook. Great Barrington: Institute for First Amendment Studies, 1993.225-26. Jaschik, Scott. "Philosophy Professor Portrays Her Feminist Colleagues as Out of Touch and 'Relentlessly Hostile to the Family'" Chronicle of Higher Education January 15, 1992: A15-A16.

Bibliography

.

225

Johnson, Robert H. "Misguided Morality: Ethics and the Reagan Doctrine." Political Science Quarterly 103 (1988): 509-29. Kristeva, Julia. Strangers to Ourselves. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Laplanche, Jean, and J.-B. Pontalis. The Language of Psychoanalysis. New York: W. W. Norton, 1973. Layne, Christopher. "The Real Conservative Agenda." Foreign Policy 61 (winter 1985-1986): 73-93Lewis, Anthony. Editorial. New York Times May 2,1994: A17. Limbaugh, Rush. See, I Told You So. New York: Pocket Books, 1993. . The Way Things Ought to Be. New York: Pocket Books, 1992. Lipset, Seymour Martin, and Earl Raab. "An Instrument Rather Than Creator." In McCarthyism. Edited by Thomas C. Reeves. Malabar: Krieger, 1989.132-41. Lowi, Theodore. "Mr. Reagan's Revolution: An Unfinished Task." Center 18 (1985): 2-9. MacCannell, Juliet Flower. Personal communication. Nelson, Lars-Erik. "Sticks, Stones, Words Too." Flush Rush Quarterly 2 (1994): 7. O'Keefe, Mark. "CBN Withdraws from Better Business Bureau." In Challenging the Christian Right: The Activist's Handbook. Great Barrington: Institute for First Amendment Studies, 1993. 235. Orwell, George. Animal Farm. New York: Knopf, 1946. . 1984. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977. "Parental Discretion Advised." Flush Rush Quarterly 2:1 (1994): 8. "The Paula Jones Case." Sally Jessy Raphael. CBS. WLNE, Providence, R.I., May 20,1994. Porteous, Skipp. "IRS Warns: 'Shun Politics.'" Challenging the Christian Right: The Activist's Handbook. Great Barrington: Institute for First Amendment Studies, 1993. 223-24. . "SWAT Teams for Jesus." Challenging the Christian Right: The Activist's Handbook. Great Barrington: Institute for First Amendment Studies, 1993. 9-21. Rich, Frank. "Holier Than Whom?" New York Times September 22,1994: A27. Rosen, Mike. "Feministas Shun Paula Jones." Editorial. Denver Post May 20,1994:11B. Schrecker, Ellen W. "The Two Stages of McCarthyism." In McCarthyism. Edited by Thomas C. Reeves. Malabar: Krieger, 1989.98-101. Sommers, Christina Hoff. "Melange." Chronicle of Higher Education June 1,1994: B3. Todd, Alyson. "A Dissenting Voice." Heterodoxy. May/June 1994:11. " 'Un-PC Activity on Campus: UCP Campus Survey Results, Fall 1993." Study War No More April 1994:3. Wechsler, James A. "To Be Called Before the McCarthy Committee." In McCarthyism. Edited by Thomas C. Reeves. Malabar: Krieger, 1989.28-44.

6. The Mirror of Manufactured Cultural Relations Berube, Michael. "Public Image Limited: Political Correctness and the Media's Big Lie." In Debating PC: The Controversy over Political Correctness on College Campuses. Edited by Paul Berman. New York: Dell, 1992:124-49. Bhabha, Homi K. "DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation." In Nation and Narration. London: Routledge, 1990. Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel. Lacan: The Absolute Master. Translated by Douglas Brick. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991.

226

.

Bibliography

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Clement, Catherine. "Warnings." In New French Feminisms: An Anthology. Edited by Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron. New York: Schocken Books, 1981. de Lauretis, Teresa. Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. D'Souza, Dinesh, and Robert MacNeil. "The Big Chill? Interview with Dinesh D'Souza." In Debating P.C.: The Controversy over Political Correctness on College Campuses. Edited by Paul Berman. New York: Dell, 1992.29-39. Foley, Duncun. A Dictionary of Marxist Thought. Edited by Tom Bottomore. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. "Whose Canon Is It, Anyway?" In DebatingP.C.: The Controversy over Political Correctness on College Campuses. Edited by Paul Berman. New York: Dell, 1992.190-200. Giddens, Anthony. "Modernism and Post-modernism." In Postmodernism: A Reader. Edited by Patricia Waugh. London: Edward Arnold, 1992.11-13. Howe, Irving. "The Value of the Canon." In Debating P. C: The Controversy over Political Correctness on College Campuses. Edited by Paul Berman.New York: Dell, 1992.153-71. Irigaray, Luce, je, tu, nous: Toward a Culture of Difference. Translated by Alison Martin. New York: Routledge, 1993. Kavanagh, James H. "Ideology." In Critical Terms for Literary Study. Edited by Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Kimball, Roger. "The Periphery v. The Center: The MLA in Chicago." In Debating PC: The Controversy over Political Correctness on College Campuses. Edited by Paul Berman. New York: Dell, 1992. 61-84. "Kingdom of Pat." Primetime Live. ABC. WPRI. Providence, R.I., October 27,1994. Lacan, Jacques. "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I." In Ecrits:A Selection. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton, 1977.1-7. . "Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis." In Ecrits: A Selection. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1977: 8-29. . The Seminar ofJacques Lacan: Book I: Freud's Papers on Technique, 1953-195 Translated by John Forrester. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. . The Seminar ofJacques Lacan: Book III: The Psychoses, 1955-1956. Edited Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by Russell Grigg. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993. National Association of Scholars. "Is the Curriculum Biased?" A Handout Circulated at Rhode Island College. Ngugi, wa Thiong'o. Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1993. Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver's Travels. Edited by Louis A. Landa. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, i960. Wiener, Jon. Professor, Politics, and Pop. London: Verso, 199 Will, George F. "Radical English." In Debating PC: The Controversy over Political Correctness on College Campuses. Edited by Paul Berman. New York: Dell, 1992. 258-61.

7. White Male Canon Formation and the End of History Buckley, William F. The National Review College Guide: America's 50 Top Liberal Arts Schools. Edited by Charles Sykes and Brad Miner. New York: National Review, 1991.

Bibliography

.

227

Bennett, Paula. "Canons to the Right of Them." In Beyond PC: Toward a Politics of Understanding. Edited by Patricia Aufderheide. St. Paul: Graywolf Press, 1992.165-75. Brennan, Teresa. History after Lacan. London: Routledge, 1993. Feldstein, Richard. "Subject of the Gaze for Another Gaze." In Lacan, Politics, Aesthetics. Edited by Willy Apollon and Richard Feldstein. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1996. 45-61. Gates, Louis. "Whose Canon Is It Anyway?" In Debating PC: The Controversy over Political Correctness on College Campuses. Edited by Paul Berman. New York: Dell, 1992. 190-200.

Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton, 1977. . The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book I: Freud's Papers on Technique, 1953-1954. Translated by John Forrester. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. -. "The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the Freudian unconscious." Ecrits: A Selection. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton, 1977Laurent, Eric. "Alienation and Separation (I)." In Reading Seminar XI: Lacan s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Edited by Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink, and Maire Jaanus. Albany: SUNY Press, 1995.19-28. MacCannell, Juliet Flower. The Regime of the Brother. London: Routledge, 1991. Macey, David. "Thinking with Borrowed Concepts: Althusser and Lacan." In Althusser: A Critical Reader. Edited by Gregory Elliott. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994.142-58. Orwell, George. 1984. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977. Pollitt, Katha. "Why Do We Read?" In Debating PC: The Controversy over Political Correctness on College Campuses. Edited by Paul Berman. New York: Dell, 1992.201-11. Silverman, Kaja. Male Subjectivity at the Margins. New York: Routledge, 1992. Sykes, Charles, and Brad Miner. The National Review College Guide: America's 50 Top Liberal Arts Schools. New York: National Review, 1991. Touraine, Alain. Critique of Modernity. Translated by David Macey. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995Wilkie, Brian, and James Hurt. Literature of Western World: Volume II. New York: Macmillan, 1992. Woolf, Virginia. Between the Acts. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969.


Index

Abortion, 113,118-19,133,189-90 Adams, Myrna C , 190-93 Althusser, Louis, 9,49-50 Anderson, Martin, 14,17-19,22-23,27, 37-38,42 Animal Farm. See Orwell, George Aronowitz, Stanley, 7-8,211-20 Bakker, Jim, 70 Barthes, Roland, 54, 57-58, 72 Bennett, Paula, 161 Bennett, William, 48-50,119-21, 207 Bhabha,Homi, 130-31 Binary logic, 56,94 Bob Roberts, xiii, 67-68 Brennan, Teresa, 10,12, 75, 143,171-80 Bromwich, David, 49,121 Buchanan, Pat, 103 Buckley, William R, Jr., 156 Bush, George, 5, 25, 34, 56, 68, 91 Butler, Judith, 139-41 Christian Coalition, 11,98 Clinton, Bill, 13,102,104-5,107-8,112, 217,219 Cohn, Roy, 78-80 Coyner, Sandra, 199-204 Cultural projection, process of, 55,66,80, 83,85,92-96 de Lauretis, Teresa, 131-32,139 Derrida, Jacques, xiv, 40,42, 52

D'Sousa, Dinesh, xi, 24,27, 30,43,47, 66-67,97-100, 118-22, 146-49,150-52 Dyad. See binary logic Falwell, Jerry, 70,98,108,110-13,118,206 Fish, Stanley, 43 Foucault, Michel, 9 Freud, Sigmund, xvi, xviii, 84-85,92,129, 131,137 Garcia Marquez, Gabriel, 28-30 Gates, Henry Louis, 42,52,162 Gender feminism, and Christina Hoff Sommers, 116-19 Gingrich, Newt, xiii, xiv, 5, 22-25, 71,102 Girard, Rene, 18,20 Graff, Gerald, 204-10 Gulliver's Travels. See Swift, Jonathan Hitler, Adolf, 4, 30,59 Hollywood, 63, 74,76,91,96,114-15, 121 Horowitz, David, 64,66 Imposters in the Temple. See Anderson, Martin Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety. See Freud, Sigmund Irigaray, Luce, 140-42 Jameson, Fredric, 36-37,44, 52 Jardine, Alice, x, xi, 25-26,66,97,117 229

230

. Index

Kimball Roger, 42,47,61,146-48 Kinsley, Mike 110-12 Kohl, Herbert, 4 Kristeva, Julia, 113 Lacan, Jacques, xi, xiv, 42,52, 75,125-37, 143-44,164,171-82 Levy, Jacob, 5-6 Limbaugh, Rush,xi, 35,99-100,106-7, 119,189 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 8-9 MacCannel, Juliet Flower, 102,171 Marxism, 10,21,34,40,64-65, 81-82 McCarthyism: xii, xv, xix, 10,15,26,37, 45-46, 63, 67-70, 75-77, 80-91,100, 185; and James A. Wechsler, 78 Messer-Davidow, Ellen, 45,47,203 Metalanguage, 27-29 Metanarrative (PC), 37 Miner, Brad, 157-60 Modern Language Asssociation, 52,146 Multiculturalism, 2-3. See also Lyotard, Jean-Francois Mythological signs. See Barthes, Roland Nation of Victims. SeeSpivak, Gayatri; Sykes, Charles National Association of Scholars, 47,103, 117,154,158,191,203,218 Neoconservatism, 2-3, 7-9,13,15,20,30, 32-35,45, 55, 63, 65, 67, 75,86, 95, 101, 103-5,116,119,121,134-38,156,160, 163,179,185,188,204,214 New Criticsim, 82,39-40,161-62 Orwell, George, x, 10,32,33,62-64,101, 124, 149, 174-78 "Other" (legrand Autre) in relation to mirror phase, 177,182; as signifying chain, 172. See also Lacan, Jacques

Porteous, Skip, 187,190 Postmodernism, xiv, 169 Poststructuralism xi, xiv, 56,184,217 ProfScam. See Sykes, Charles Psychoanalytic criticism, xi, 35, 39 Quayle, Dan, 5,34 Raab, Earl, 96 Radosh, Ronald, 65,66 Reagan, Ronald, 5,15,20,25,34-35,38, 46,50,51,56,68-71,86-91,100,102, 132,217-19 Republican Revolution, xv, xix, 15-23 Robertson, Pat, 31, 70,97,98,101 119, 152,153 Roll Over Beethoven. SeeAronowit Stanley Semiotic systems, 58. See also Barthe Roland Shepard, Curt, 193-99 Signifier, xiv Skinner, B. F., xiii, xviii Spivak, Gayatri, 41,44,52 Stalin, Joseph, x, 4, 57, 59 Suleiman, Susan, ix Swift, Jonathan, 151-52 Sykes, Charles, 14,17,19,22,23,30, 41-44,53-54,154,157-60 Tenured Radicals. See Kimball, Ro Thomas, Clarence, 109 Totem and Taboo. See Freud, Sigmu wa Thiong'o, Ngugi, 150-51 Will, George, 51,52, 54,98,100,120,146, 147-48 Woolf, Virginia, 161-69

Richard Feldstein is a professor of English at Rhode Island College. He has coedited numerous collections, including Feminism and Psychoanalysis (with Judith Roof) and Psychoanalysis and... (with Henry Sussman), and published numerous articles on the intersections of textuality, feminisms, and psychoanalysis. He is currently writing a book on the rhetoric of rock and roll. Teresa Brennan is a professor of philosophy and psychoanalysis at the New School for Social Research.

Political Correctness: A Response from the Cultural Left

Beyond Political Correctness (German Monitor)

New Consensus for Old: Cultural Studies from Left to Right

New Consensus for Old: Cultural Studies from Left to Right

Left and Right: The Significance of a Political Distinction

Implications of the Euro: A Critical Perspective From the Left

PC, M.D.: How Political Correctness Is Corrupting Medicine

Marxism, Socialism, Indian Politics: A View from the Left

Political Correctness and Higher Education: British and American Perspectives

Cultural Identity and Political Ethics

Response

Something Happened: A Political and Cultural Overview of the Seventies

Political Correctness: A History of Semantics and Culture (The Language Library)

Formal Correctness of Security Protocols

Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right

The Correctness-by-Construction Approach to Programming

Computer Architecture, Complexity and Correctness

Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right

The Left Left Behind (Outspoken Authors)

The Left and the Jews: The Jews and the Left

Target Response - J A Johnstone

The Future of Socialism: Perspectives from the Left

The Year We Left Home: A Novel

The Correctness-by-Construction Approach to Programming

The Left-Handed Hummingbird

The Left-Handed Hummingbird

The Child Left Behind

The Sandinista legacy: lessons from a political economy in transition

Rethinking multiculturalism: cultural diversity and political theory

Political Correctness: A Response from the Cultural Left

Beyond Political Correctness (German Monitor)

New Consensus for Old: Cultural Studies from Left to Right

New Consensus for Old: Cultural Studies from Left to Right

Left and Right: The Significance of a Political Distinction

Implications of the Euro: A Critical Perspective From the Left

PC, M.D.: How Political Correctness Is Corrupting Medicine

Marxism, Socialism, Indian Politics: A View from the Left

Political Correctness and Higher Education: British and American Perspectives

Cultural Identity and Political Ethics

Response

Something Happened: A Political and Cultural Overview of the Seventies

Political Correctness: A History of Semantics and Culture (The Language Library)

Formal Correctness of Security Protocols

Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right

The Correctness-by-Construction Approach to Programming

Computer Architecture, Complexity and Correctness

Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right

The Left Left Behind (Outspoken Authors)

The Left and the Jews: The Jews and the Left

Target Response - J A Johnstone

The Future of Socialism: Perspectives from the Left

The Year We Left Home: A Novel

The Correctness-by-Construction Approach to Programming

The Left-Handed Hummingbird

The Left-Handed Hummingbird

The Child Left Behind

The Sandinista legacy: lessons from a political economy in transition

Rethinking multiculturalism: cultural diversity and political theory

Recommend Documents