Review of: Timothy Brennan, Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of
Left and Right. New York: Columbia UP, 2006.
- What went wrong? How to explain the dismal state of today's political
landscape in the U.S.--with neoconservatism and free-market triumphalism in such
dominance and the left in a state of apparent haplessness? According to Timothy
Brennan in Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right,
much of the left's trouble can be traced back to the post-Vietnam
period of the late seventies. It was during this moment of "reassessment and
political fatigue" (x) that the left largely and mistakenly abandoned Marxism and the
social democratic politics of the 60s for an identity politics founded on the
coalescing field of "theory"--namely poststructuralism and variants of
postcolonialism--which has remained dominant to this day. (A partial list of those
whom Brennan includes among "theory's . . . shared canon of sacred texts"[xii] is
Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Butler, Kristeva, Arendt and the book's chief
theoretical foil, Heidegger.) Brennan claims that "theory," while portrayed as a
source of radical critique, has actually functioned
as a surreptitious adjunct to the rise of free-market triumphalism and
political neo-conservatism over the last several decades. It has done this by
disavowing and silencing meaningful and organized social democratic politics based
on discussion and debate in favor of a politics founded on the inarguable
"ontological virtue" (14) of identity or being. This has led the left, in turn, to
wallow in a narcissistic state of "virtuous inaction" (36) and to espouse positions
that re-iterate the very neo-liberal logic and values it purports to challenge.
"Theory," in the end, does not embody a vital counter-tradition of radical thought
but what Brennan refers to as an acquiescent "middle way," testifying to a deepening
convergence in this country since the dawn of Reaganism of "the cultural
politics of Left and Right."
-
Brennan develops his confrontational thesis by distinguishing between the book's two
key theoretical terms--a "politics of belief" versus a "politics of being." To
understand what these concepts mean for Brennan it is helpful to jump to the end of
Wars of Position and Brennan's concluding reading of Antonio Gramsci.
Brennan argues that contemporary theory has reduced Gramsci's work to a handful of
reified terms (e.g., "hegemony," "subaltern," "passive revolution," "common sense")
whose meanings have been divorced both from the larger context of his writings and from
the communist intellectual and material history out of which they directly emerged.
Nowhere is this more evident, Brennan argues, than in the case of "subalternity."
Within contemporary postcolonial thought, "subalternity" has come to occupy a highly
privileged position; indeed the term evokes one of the central ethical imperatives of
the entire field--subjugated knowledge whose recovery can provide a radical
counter-narrative to traditional history. More specifically for Brennan, subalternity
has become highly revered as a kind of ontological resistance or "ideational
essence"--that is, as defining a philosophical perspective whose value is measured and
cherished in postcolonial theory precisely to the extent to which it remains
removed from public life and any political engagement.
-
For Brennan, this received wisdom is a profound and telling misreading of Gramsci's
concerns. Gramsci never intended to privilege the standpoint of subalternity but
instead theorized it as a condition that needed to be overcome through political
action. "Having no desire to 'give voice' to the essential wisdom of the subaltern, or
to glorify subalternity as such, Gramsci repeatedly made clear in his writing the need
for the training and discipline provided by education, national-popular literature, and
other practices that would in essence eradicate subalternity" (263-64).
-
The distinction between these two versions of subalternity provides one of the more
elegant examples for the book's central polemic against the cultural left's shift
from a "politics of belief" to a "politics of being." Gramsci's vision of
subalternity expresses a "politics of belief"; it is intimately tied to a radical
social democratic vision and to specific political strategies to eradicate
subalternity and the inequality it describes. This has been replaced in
contemporary theory by a "politics of being"--a vision unhinged from political goals and instead devoted to subalternity as a marginalized identity whose
way of knowing should be revered (and indeed preserved) for providing a form of
ontological resistance to the political order from which it remains disenfranchised.
So indicative of the theoretical turn Brennan traces to the late seventies and
eighties, this latter version is not only devoid of any concrete democratic politics
or goals but is fundamentally cynical towards such political efforts as a form of
potential appropriation. "Rather than marking a condition to be overcome," writes
Brennan, "the latter portrays subalternity as a sacred refuge, a dark secret space
of revelation" (256).
-
At times persuasively and always polemically, Brennan makes a similar theoretical move
throughout Wars of Position, as he takes to task many of the most
influential texts, writers, and discourses of current poststructuralist and
postcolonial theory. Be it in his critique of Hardt and Negri's Empire,
postcolonial readings of Salman Rushdie, the work of Giorgio Agamben, the discourse of
cosmopolitanism, the received wisdom of Edward Said's debt to Foucault, or
globalization theory, Brennan finds evidence of an overarching and pernicious pattern
at work: the rewriting of the past by contemporary theory. Each of Brennan's chapters
and analyses hinges on exposing how a certain "social democratic" vision of
politics--namely Marxist and Left Hegelian--has been expunged or censored by
contemporary theory and replaced with a politics of ontological belonging--roughly
poststructuralist--whose ethical undercurrent "stipulates that any larger ambition than
the self risks an imposition on others, a transgression on alterity itself" (25). For
Brennan, theory today has made a near ethical virtue out of shunning organizational
politics, adhering instead to the proposition, which Brennan describes in his typically
caustic fashion--"I am, therefore I resist"(159).
-
Brennan is at his most trenchant and effective in savaging contemporary theory's
abandonment of democratic political action as a public practice. Since the
nineteen-eighties, he argues, an increasingly orthodox and self-indulgent academic left
has become disengaged from the social and the civic--disposed against offering any
programmatic goals. Without a concrete democratic political agenda, much of the
language of contemporary theory has dissipated into "metaphors of irrelevance"(177). In
the cultural and academic left--and the graduate seminar is one of Brennan's favorite
targets--the invocation of terms like "hybridity," "difference," "ambivalence," and
"pluralism" is understood in and of itself as a progressive political gesture towards
freedom, requiring no real explanation and no justification. Rarely does it seem
necessary even to ask how these cultural expressions might "link
constituencies or organize them into a politically potent force? And once linked,
around what set of goals?" (161). Instead, they have become mere ethical givens in the
common sense of poststructuralist thought.
-
Brennan takes this polemical, if not completely unfamiliar line of attack, a step
further to make the book's central and most dubious argument. The turn from a politics
of belief to a politics of being has not simply rendered the academic and cultural left
"irrelevant"--spinning out an increasingly pre-fabricated vocabulary--it has led to a
fusing of the cultural politics of left and right. Brennan makes his indictment on the
charge that the cultural left in general and poststructuralism in particular have been
willing accomplices in dismantling a still viable political tradition of Marxism and
Left Hegelianism, in turn opportunistically stepping into its vacated position as the
locus of political "dissent." "At different levels of awareness, the practitioners of
theory in the poststructuralist ascendant saw their task as burying dialectical
thinking and the political energies--including the anti-colonial energies--that grew
out of it" (10). Brennan suggests there has been a kind of bad faith argument
taking place. The cultural and academic left is vilified by the media and government
for being dangerous, out of touch, "politically correct," communist, etc., yet all the
while this hostility masks an underlying acceptance --or at least an undetected sigh of
relief--for as long as the adversarial left is immersed in "theory" and advocating an
identity politics devoid of any organizational imaginary, then the much more dangerous
and unruly tradition of Marxism and its political energies can be left
out of the discussion.
-
Conversely, "theory" has enabled the academic left to preserve its diminishing but much
cherished self-image of dissent, all the while proffering a set of terms that are in
point of fact largely agreeable to (and thus rewarded by) the institutions and
marketplace upon whose support it depends. "I want to suggest that theory subscribes to
the middle way of American liberal dogma in essential respects, reinvigorating the
cliché's of neoliberalism by substituting the terminology of freedom,
entrepreneurship, and individualism for the vocabulary of difference, hybridity,
pluralism, and in its latest avatar, the multitude" (11). That the academic and
cultural left remains largely unaware of these convergences is evidence of how
thoroughly they have dissipated the type of theories that would enable them to see
them. Brennan thus sets out in Wars of
Position to re-establish these connections by dialectically
resituating and rereading theory in the context of the radical social-democratic
historical and theoretical traditions it has helped to elide, and in so doing expose
how "theory's" "dissident" language, while packaged as a radical epistemological break,
masks an underlying juncture between the cultural Left and Right.
-
To Brennan's credit, Wars of Position provides a bracing re-evaluation of
"theory's" politics. At the same time, it is hard not to hear in Brennan's condemnation
of "theory" a certain idealization, however perversely inverted, of theory and its
significance in social and civic life. "Theory" is, after all, not "dead" or
"irrelevant" in Brennan's critical picture (as others have recently pronounced), but
vital and even necessary. Brennan makes statements such as the
following often: "Throughout the book, I take the view that cultural scholars in
universities were instrumental in shaping public sentiment and that their influence was
for the most part mixed, at times even disastrous" (x). "When I summon the word
'theory,' I am talking about a broad social phenomenon that is essentially mainstream .
. . widely practiced and believed in the culture at large, not least because of the
successful dispersion of those ideas by academics" (2). "Considering the economic
function of the humanities intellectual, it is very easy to misunderstand the venomous
hostility toward academic theory among the journalist watchdogs and government
intellectuals" (212). What is most startling about these claims is less their
counterintuitive and damning conclusions than their implicit assumptions--that cultural
scholars are "instrumental in shaping public sentiment," that theory is "essentially
mainstream," that humanities intellectuals perform an appreciable "economic function."
In the end, my problem with Brennan's caustic analysis is not that he gives "theory"
too little credit but that he gives it too much.
-
Throughout Wars of Positions, Brennan exhibits a remarkable knowledge of
theoretical and historical traditions, and an ability to move across them with
deftness, fluently summarizing deeply complex arguments. At the same time, Brennan also
shows a penchant for sweeping condemnations of the theoretical positions against which
he situates himself. In his chapter on "globalization theory," for instance, Brennan
critiques its "hostility" to the nation-state and its uncritical embrace of the ethics
of various forms of mobility, deploying a quasi-celebratory cadre of terms such as
"migrancy" "nomadism" "hybridity" and "decentering," which are hard to distinguish from
the "myth-making" policy language of the small group of national and financial
interests that are globalization's champions. How accurate a depiction of
"globalization theory" does Brennan actually present? His formulation relies on broad
characterizations about what "globalization theory" (as some synthesized discourse)
thinks, and what it has as its "underlying logic." Can we really generalize so
dismissively, for instance, that "globalization theory"--in some collective
way--"carefully dissociates the process of globalization from national
identifications . . . since unless it does so the continuities between its purportedly
'new' and liberatory panorama and old exploitative arrangements would be obvious and
uncomfortable" (142-43)? There is discussion in cultural studies about how the
relationship between globalization
and the nation-state is not a zero-sum game but how the state has been
transformed and in the case of certain states and state-functions strengthened
through multinational capital. And what of the work on globalization by several
theorists at various distances from the field of cultural studies and/or
poststructuralism--Lisa Lowe, Pheng Cheah, and William Spanos come to
mind--who specifically focus on exposing these uncomfortable "continuities"
between globalization and national identifications and earlier forms of
"exploitative arrangements"?[1]
-
Similarly, Brennan argues that cosmopolitanism's worldly vision of open-minded freedom
from national limitations aligns the political ethic of cultural theory with the
pervading corporate theory of globalization. "There is, in a prima facie sense, a
continuity between the discourse of globalization in government planning and the
discourse of cosmopolitanism in the humanities; or between the use of the term
'cosmopolitan' in corporate advertising and global culture in a comparative literature
seminar" (211-12). Again what is questionable is not Brennan's caustic assessment of
cosmopolitanism's synergy with corporate America but his assumption that these links
are not already addressed by theories of cosmopolitanism. Brennan argues that
"cosmo-theory," as he pejoratively terms it, assumes that national sovereignty has
"been transcended, the nation-state relegated to an obsolete form, and the present
political situation is . . . one in which newly deracinated populations,
nongovernmental organization and Web users are outwitting a new world order in the name
of a bold new transnational sphere" (219). This characterization is selective at best.
Recent work in cosmo-theory (see for example, Bruce Robbins's and Pheng Cheah's
Cosmopolitics) has precisely tried to rethink cosmopolitanism as
consistent with or even supportive of the nation or nation-state. Secondly, much of
what makes recent efforts to theorize cosmopolitanism interesting is their attempt to
keep the progressive as well as the acknowledged imperializing legacy and potential of
cosmopolitanism in critical tension (see for example, Robbins's "Some versions of U.S.
Internationalism" in Feeling Global.)
-
This tendency to (over)generalize the positions of his adversaries reflects a problem
with the book's underlying thesis, namely the opposition between a politics of belief
and a politics of being--and, by extension (though Brennan does not explicitly describe
it as such), between post-structuralism and Marxism. Brennan's central
argument hinges on such a stark political opposition between the two that he leaves
himself little or no room for negotiation. There are no partial disagreements here:
one is either part of the solution--i.e., a politics of belief--or part of the
problem--i.e., a politics of being. There is not even a grudging acknowledgement of
what "theory" might facilitate for progressive politics, or how it might enable
different political subjectivities. Ultimately, it is in order to maintain this radical
and unbridgeable division between the two that Brennan constructs overly unified--or
convenient--foils out of his adversaries. In this respect, Brennan's book falls into
the trap he sets for "theory"--that is, of strategically erasing histories whose
recovery might serve to complicate the political purity or--in Brennan's argument,
"impurity"--of their opposition.
-
While I am sympathetic to Brennan's trenchant critique of the cultural
left's abandonment of democratic politics as a public practice, a nagging question
remains: is this depoliticization inherent to the ideas of
poststructuralism or is it a result of what has happened to
"theory"--i.e., how it became institutionalized? Brennan leaves the clear
impression it is the former. I think, however, one might push the discussion in
the other, and I would argue more compelling direction by looking more closely at
Brennan's own forceful reading of Edward Said, whose work clearly had an enormous
influence on Wars of Position and whose model of intellectual and
political work the book in many ways positions itself as carrying on. (Brennan was
one of Said's former students and the book is dedicated to his memory.)
-
In his chapter on Said, Brennan attempts to wrestle Said's work away from a prevailing
understanding of its deep affinity with Foucault's and to replace it instead within the
intellectual lineage of Lukács and left-Hegelianism. Brennan reads in Said's
work--from Beginnings up through Orientalism and The
World, the Text, and the Critic--an increasingly staunch critique of "theory"
and of Foucault. Brennan rightly praises Said for fighting against "the 'division of
intellectual labor' that Said took to be a pernicious 'cult of professional expertise'
designed to force intellectuals to sell themselves 'to the central authority of a
society'" (116). Instead, Said worked vigilantly to connect literature with
extra-literary disciplines and forms of knowledge, in what Brennan commends as a form
of "intellectual generalism" (116). Brennan argues that Said's thinking in this regard
is deeply indebted to the influence of a brand of literary Marxism, including the work
of Lucien Goldmann and Georg Lukács. And it is within this dialectical tradition
that Brennan, in turn, resituates Said's Orientalism and reads it in
critical opposition to, rather than as inspired by, poststructuralism in
general and Foucault in particular. Lukács's "Reification" essay, writes
Brennan, "forcefully articulated the primary themes of Said's attacks on the system
thinking of theory--a theme that permeates Orientalism" (118). Brennan
later concludes that Orientalism's success "had much to do with bringing
the humanities into a battleground that poststructuralism seemed in the 1980s to be
abdicating--one involving the politics of government, of network news, of political
parties, of media exposes, of liberation wars" (121).
-
But here is where I would return to my question above: are Brennan's conclusions
about Orientalism intended as conceptual critiques of poststructuralist
theory in and of itself (i.e., its "system thinking") or is it a historical critique
of how it was being practiced ("in the 1980s"). In the book he slips back and forth
between the two points as if they were one and the same. But if for Brennan the
distinction is not particularly relevant, for Said it was crucial. In his essay
"Secular Criticism" from The World, the Text, and the Critic, Said
describes the emergence of theory in the late 1960s as "insurrectionary." "Theory,"
he writes, "proposed itself as a synthesis overriding the petty fiefdoms within the
world of intellectual production, and it was manifestly to be hoped as a result that
all the domains of human activity could be seen, and lived, as a unity"
(3). Clearly one can hear in this passage the type of dialectical thrust to which
Brennan rightly refers. But what is also striking is how closely Said's depiction of
theory's "insurrection" mirrors what Brennan lauds about Said's "intellectual
generalism" and about Orientalism--but which he reads in stark
opposition to "theory" and its "system thinking." Said does go on to lament
"theory's" retreat into its own "petty fiefdoms" of "textuality" during the late
seventies (singling out Derrida and Foucault) that led to the betrayal of its initial
interventionist move across disciplines and into history. But this is not the same
thing as saying Said's work represents a critique of "theory" or of poststructuralism.
Indeed, if we agree with Brennan that Orientalism's success was due to
its effort to bring the humanities out of its petty fiefdom and into critical contact
with the "politics of government, of network news, of political parties, of media
exposes, of liberation wars"--then might we see Said's efforts not as a renunciation
of "theory" and its "system thinking" but as the fulfillment of "theory's"
potential, as Said himself envisioned it? In the end, I think it is important to
distinguish between a critique of "theory's systemization" and "the system thinking of
theory." The former--with its historical emphasis on theory's reification--has the
potential to enable a more productive and nuanced discussion about the politics of
"theory," one that could build on Brennan's trenchant critiques while avoiding his
sweeping and ideologically driven dismissals of theory as inherently conservative,
which threaten to end the discussion before it has had a chance to begin.
-
This raises a final question as to where Brennan's critique of theory leaves us
politically. Does the book, to put it bluntly, suggest anything more than a dismissal
of today's bad new left identity politics of being (roughly postcolonialism and
poststructuralism) for a return to the past's good old Left politics of belief (namely
Marxism)? There is nothing wrong with calling for a return to or a reinvigoration of
Marxist and Left Hegelian thought and politics--on the contrary, such a call is one
of the most compelling aspects of the book. Granted, the book is concerned more
with exposing the underlying conservatism of theory than in detailing alternatives, but
one might have hoped for some elaboration of what concrete form a "still viable"
tradition of "politics of belief" might take (aside from somewhat vague appeals to
"party solidarities," "shared beliefs," and "organizational imaginaries"), and for some
consideration of the perceived blind-spots of the Marxist tradition that "theory" saw
itself--whether misguidedly or not--addressing. While Brennan argues that his book is
concerned "not with the idea of turning back the clock" (xiii), it is hard to see in
what other direction his polemic pitting a bad new politics of being against a
good old politics of belief points us.
English Department Binghamton University, SUNY
jkeith@binghamton.edu
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Notes
1. See, for example, Lowe's Immigrant
Acts--in particular the chapter, "Immigration, Racialization and
Citizenship"; Cheah's recent Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human
Rights, and Spanos's America's Shadow: An Anatomy of Empire.
Works Cited
Cheah, Pheng. Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human
Rights. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2007.
Cheah, Pheng, and Bruce Robbins, eds. Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling
Beyond the Nation. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1998.
Foucault, Michel. The Archeology of Knowledge. Trans. A.M. Sheridan
Smith. New York: Pantheon, 1972.
Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics.
Durham: Duke UP, 1996.
Lukács, Georg. "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat."
History and Class Consciousness. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. London:
Merlin, 1971; Cambridge: MIT P, 1971.
Robbins, Bruce. "Some Versions of U.S. Internationalism." Feeling Global:
Internationalism in Distress. New York: New York UP, 1999.
Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993.
---. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979.
---. "Secular Criticism." The World, the Text, and the Critic.
Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983.
Spanos, William V. "American Studies in the 'Age of the World Picture': Thinking
the Question of Language." The Futures of American Studies. Eds.
Donald E. Pease and Robyn Wiegman. Durham: Duke UP, 2002.
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