What Went Wrong? Reappraising the "Politics" of Theory

Joseph Keith
English Department, Binghamton University, SUNY
jkeith@binghamton.edu


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 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.

Joseph Keith
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

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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.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979.
Said, Edward. "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 
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