Phil Wegner on World Bank Literature
Review of Bret Benjamin’s Invested Interests: Capital, Culture, and the World Bank (University of Minnesota Press, 2007)
By Phil Wegner
“Another world is not only possible; she is on her way. On a quiet day I can hear her breathing.”
Arundhati Roy, “Confronting Empire”
Bret Benjamin’s new book, Invested Interests: Capital, Culture, and the World Bank (Minnesota 2007), represents a major contribution to a truly globalized cultural studies, offering as it does the first full-length assessment of the ways that the constantly evolving rhetoric and practices of the World Bank—“what is surely one of the most influential global institutions” (xi)— have impacted upon and shaped both the production and concept of culture in the emerging global reality of the decades following the Second World War. At the same time, the very shape and ambition of Benjamin’s intervention takes on special resonance in our current institutional context, in ways that I will touch on in my conclusion.
What impressed me the most about this study, in addition to its consistently thoughtful analyses of an impressively diverse set of texts and materials, is the intellectual generosity and openness that it displays. For while Benjamin offers rigorous and salutary critiques of the limitations of earlier work on transnational postwar culture, he also takes the time to acknowledge the importance of his predecessors and the ways they helped create the foundation upon which his own analysis has been constructed. This is evident, to take only one early example, in his engagement with some of the landmark texts in one of the most significant fields of literary and cultural studies scholarship to emerge in the last two decades, that of postcolonial theory. In his Introduction, Benjamin makes clear that one of his models is “postcolonial studies’ rich history with colonial discourse analysis, in which a vast array of texts from colonial archives were examined and interpreted with great nuance and insight and to great political effect” (xx). Indeed, this same combination of archival research, careful rhetorical analysis, political engagement, and an openness to interdisciplinary methods and the insights of critical theory are a hallmark of Benjamin’s study as well. However, he argues that the same subtly has not been used in discussions of the World Bank itself: thus, while postcolonial theory has in recent years begun to invoke the figure of the World Bank, acknowledging its role in shaping a neoliberal global order, such scholarship too often simply “reports” on the operations of this institution, relegating the Bank itself to “background context,” rather than using the critical tools that it has so effectively elaborated “to read the World Bank and its textual archive” (xix). Benjamin notes that this older approach is the product of an academic division of labor between the social sciences and literary and cultural studies—akin to “the one that Carl Pletsch outlines in his famous analysis of the division of social scientific labor undergirding the three-worlds system” (xx)—and this has the effect of limiting the “range and depth of analysis and critique” of this preeminent “cultural institution” (xviiii). Moreover, an invocation of a “caricatured figure of the Bank as a recurrent trope of postcolonial scholarship” may also have the inadvertent and unintended side effect of naturalizing the institution, “and by extension global capitalism itself, as permanent and inevitable” (xxii). Benjamin’s study challenges these divisions and naturalizations as it offers a dynamic and wide-ranging cultural studies analysis of the World Bank at once “as an institutional actor (a subject)” and “as a social text” (xiv). Invested Interests thereby contributes in a significant way to ongoing efforts to develop strategies that might challenge and ultimately aid us in moving beyond the global era of the World Bank.
The book is loosely divided into three sections. In the first, Benjamin offers a series of careful rhetorical analyses of a variety of public documents produced by the World Bank, in order to show the way it first establishes itself and then changes according to the contingencies of the world in which it is located: a world in which the U.S. takes up the global hegemony of the short “American Century;” in which the nationalisms and emergent states of the decolonization movement offer another set of challenges; and wherein a global politics of development comes to take on increasing significance. One of the real strengths of Benjamin’s readings is that they demonstrate that the World Bank is far from a fixed and monolithic institution; rather, it is one that “has repeatedly refashioned itself over the past sixty years in response to specific historical pressures from events, individuals, and movements” (xxviii). It is precisely this flexibility and adaptability that, paradoxically, accounts for the seeming permanence of the institution, and this further reinforces the bank’s one rhetorical constant: “its unshakable faith in capitalism and the power of the market” (7).
However, such an outcome was by no means guaranteed at the moment of the Bank’s founding. Essentially an afterthought to the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference (something even more so in the case of the activity upon which it would come to focus almost exclusively, development—“not only as a lender of capital, but as a lender of ‘technical assistance’ to the so-called underdeveloped world” [38]), the important role that the World Bank would come to play in emerging global economic and, as Benjamin now teaches us, cultural transformations, was unimaginable. Moreover, given that the United States would serve as the Bank’s major backer, Benjamin argues that its “only audience in 1945 (or at least the only audience it saw the need to address specifically in its publications) was that of the U.S. public opinion and U.S. political representatives” (19). Here we thus see the emergence of what Benjamin maintains was the “most pressing rhetorical challenge” of the earliest documents of the Bank, “the production and maintenance of public faith” (24), a challenge that would recur in various forms throughout its history.
With the announcement in 1947 of the Marshall Plan for European postwar reconstruction, the new mission of the bank begins to come more into focus. Its pedagogical efforts continue at this early moment to still be directed at a U.S. based financial sector that is deeply suspicious of the risks involved in any “liberal internationalist” agenda, and thus the marketing of “confidence” and “trust” in its program becomes one of the Bank’s first and foremost tasks: “nearly all of its early speeches and publications worked to establish a rhetoric of fiscal conservatism, emphasizing sound lending practices, traceable and transparent accounting practices, and a supplementary, never adversarial, relationship to private capital” (29). The bank also now adopts the “rhetorical trope of speaking from an alleged position beyond or outside of politics,” one that will assist in its “evolution from reconstruction to development” (37). This means too that the intended audience of these texts begins to shift to a U.S. public more generally, as the Bank now works to refashion itself as an institution involved in the Cold War-inspired development and proper education of the non-European world. This helps further foster neo-imperialist notions of a U.S. deeply embedded in a global reality, for whose health and security—and Benjamin offers a fascinating reading here of the role of the tropes of disease, contagion, and famine in the documents of this moment—it comes to deem itself largely responsible.
In the third moment he examines here, this audience shifts once again, as the Bank now also, if by no means exclusively or even primarily, directs its attention to the decolonized nations themselves, forming new “uncomfortable intimacies” with them (81): “the Bank of the 1960s was called upon to channel the seething rage and utopian longings of decolonization into forms more palatable to a world capitalist system” (55). This meant that the Bank was forced to take up a complex relationship to the discourses of nationalism, even helping bolster the nation-state in a moment of global crisis: “It needs nationalism to the extent that it needs the state: that is, because the Bank regards the nation state and the interstate system as the most promising apparatuses through which to manage the disaffections of impoverished and exploited populations around the globe, it understands nationalism to represent both the expression of that disaffection and the first steps toward its resolution” (78). This further necessitates that the Bank develop a rhetoric of responsibility that ignores the past of empire and looks solely toward the future: “Development’s responsibility is to expansion, not equity” (86). As its investments too begin to expand from the fiscally safe realm of larger infrastructural projects (for which there was little chance for default) to more risky projects of “poverty alleviation,” health care, education, and so forth, the Bank fashions a new discourse of development appropriate to these realities, “discovering” the “social” as a major site of its activities: “No longer convinced that infrastructure alone will lead to productivity, the Bank turns willingly (after a few years, eagerly) to superstructure—to culture, one might say” (68).
This creates the context for the book’s second section—and what Benjamin claims to be its “central argument”—as he shifts to an examination of the role of the Bank in the production, maintenance, and circulation of a concept of “culture” that “comes to be critically reevaluated and revalued by mid-century cultural theorists” (xxxi). Taking as his starting point Michael Denning’s contention that what the latter names the “age of three worlds” (1945-1989) witnesses a significant “cultural turn,” Benjamin unpacks the role of the Bank in this moment as both responding to this turn and as one of its chief “underwriters.” It is here that I would like to take a moment to expand a bit upon the account of this change offered here. In an effective critique of Denning’s claim that the moment of cultural studies comes to an end in 1989, Benjamin writes, “An alternate, more plausible historicization of the contemporary moment of globalization might logically follow from Denning’s own schematic periodization of the age of three worlds into three distinct moments, emblematized by the emergence of a New Left in the 1950s spurred by decolonizing movements, the uprisings and insurgencies of 1968, and the retreat of the New Left during the 1980s. Rather than a new, postcultural world, globalization may productively be read as a fourth moment in the global cultural turn” (94). I will suggest in a moment possible reasons for what are in fact both Denning’s optimistic recognition, highlighted by Benjamin, of a change in the discourse of cultural studies in the 1990s, and his post-9/11 disquietude about that project’s future. For now, I want to underscore Benjamin’s point that the “cultural turn” becomes global in the period that is of interest to both his book and Denning’s. As Susan Hegeman demonstrates in her landmark study, Patterns for America: Modernism and the Concept of Culture (1999), it is this particular cultural turn that develops first through exchanges and debates that take place within the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. After the Second World War then, this “American” concept of culture becomes as significant an export as U.S. industry and consumer cultural goods—what Benjamin calls the “the idea of Detroit” (102)—and the World Bank, with its particular conceptualization of development, at once plays, as Benjamin helps us understand, a crucial role in the global expansion and circulation of all three.
Benjamin’s recovery of the Bank as a prominent institution in the development of the post-war cultural turn enables him to offer a number of insightful and original readings. He sheds new light on the deep contradictions and radical potentials made available through an emphasis on the sphere of culture: “At the same time, however, global circulation of mass culture—motion pictures as well as mega-dams—carries within it critical utopian potentialities. Impatience might just as easily be read to signal an awareness of systemic exploitation and deprivation; at minimum, it expresses a deep dissatisfaction with the status quo” (108). Similarly, Benjamin traces the central absent presence of the Bank in the “theorizations of liberation and culture” (117) crafted in the anti-colonial writings of figures such as Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and Richard Wright, as well as at the landmark 1955 meeting in Bandung, Indonesia of representatives of many of the new Asian and African nations. The latter in particular, Benjamin suggests, “offers perhaps the best illustration of my claim that the Bank underwrites culture in the age of three worlds” (118). The Final Communiqué of the Conference advances an understanding of culture, in “response to the radical theorists of culture and liberation,” as “a sphere of consensus and commonality rather than protest and critique” (123)—a stance, Benjamin argues, with a deep kinship to that taken by the Bank itself. Crucially, however, he concludes, that then as well as now, “The Bank’s ability, in collaboration with private capital and the nationalist elites at Bandung, to provide the appearance of resolution has effectively deferred but not dissolved many of the contradictions” (134).
Although the “World Bank drifts hazily in and out of critical focus for the cultural radicals of the 1950s and 1960s,” this is no longer the case, Benjamin argues, as, in part a response to the debt crises of the late 1970s and 1980s, the Bank has come to be understood “as a force of global immiseration” (135-6). This has forced the institution into “a posture of chronic public defensiveness,” and resulted in “one more in a long line of rhetorical makeovers by the always-protean Bank” (137 and 143). In order to highlight these latest shifts, Benjamin turns his attention to recent productions of “literary” texts by the World Bank, narratives produced in collaboration between loan recipients and the Bank itself and focusing upon success stories of investment, or “development as bildungsroman” (147). Benjamin names these productions, drawing upon the concept first developed by Amitava Kumar in a collection to which both Benjamin and I are contributors, “World Bank literature,” “a very specific genre of narrative promotional document” (145). As pedagogical tools aimed primarily at Northern and U.S. audiences, “World Bank literature, then, functions as a core element within the Bank’s extensive commitment to education, which in turn must be understood as an ideological cornerstone in the production of neoliberal globalization hegemony” (162). These stories deploy what Raymond Williams names the “residual” as “rhetorical gesture,” and through them, “the Bank attempts to authorize its own work through an appeal to the alternative residual values signified within the literary: values that circumscribe the individual through an appeal to humanism, and the social through an appeal to civil society; values that appear to be outside of and prior to the dominant logic of global corporate capitalism, but in fact serve to prop it up” (158-9). Crucially, however, “The Bank’s choice to adopt the residual authority of literature as a principle form of self-representation illustrates not a position of creative security, but rather the degree to which it finds itself as an institution, in an embattled posture” (159). I will suggest in a moment that current appeals to literature within the university signal a similar set of anxieties—and, not coincidentally, emerge in response to a similar set of imagined opponents, “both global capital and alterglobalization social movements” (160).
It is at this point that the deep activist commitments of Benjamin’s scholarship come to the fore, as he explores in the book’s final section some of the specific challenges that have emerged in recent years to the World Bank and the global order that it helps support. Benjamin’s penultimate chapter offers an outstanding reading of Arundhati Roy’s much-discussed novel, The God of Small Things (1997). What makes his reading such an effective and moving one is that it is not content to focus simply, as others have done, upon the novel’s pointed critiques of the devastations—cultural, environmental, and personal—wrought by global neoliberalism, World Bank-supported development projects, state-based political institutions such as the bureaucratic Party, and the “patriarchy, caste, racism, and the various measures of social hierarchy that have stratified the subcontinent for millennia,” which “may actually provide the base onto which more recent foreign impositions of authority have been grafted” (170). Exposure of injustice alone is insufficient, Benjamin maintains; and he thus turns our attention to the utopian figuration that occurs in the novel’s latter sections of new forms of collectivity “that can encompass not only economic and political well being, but also the affective needs of desire, pleasure, comfort, risk, courage, rage, and the like” (182). This leads Benjamin to a daring, if fully persuasive, reading of the novel’s “twinned couplings as an act of figuring the impossibility of a productive collective social body that assumes a form alternative to a nation, a people, a caste, a class, and so on” (186). Crucially, he concludes that this is not a substitute for the hard political work of realizing these new forms of being in the world; “Taken as a literary object, however, the novel may be said to name a horizon of possibility” (188). It is at this point that I feel the closest kinship between Benjamin’s work and my own recent writings, as his analysis helps me recognize in this novel another important contribution to the efflorescence of radical cultural imaginaries that, as I argue in my forthcoming book, Life Between Two Deaths: U.S. Culture, 1989-2001, occur in the open and experimental global period that was the 1990s—the same moment in fact in which occurs what Benjamin rightly describes as another modification in the global cultural turn—and which came to an end on 9/11.
In his final chapter, Benjamin extends this discussion further and shifts his focus one final time, as he explores the potential and the limitations of one of the most significant real world institutions to emerge in this period, that of the World Social Forum (WSF). Benjamin rightly locates the WSF as one formation among others in the “post-1994 era of global opposition to neoliberalism” (190). Moreover, he notes, “Significant, too, is the fact that the WSF is a forum, not (solely) a protest; it has at its core a commitment to the intellectual work of collectively theorizing the contemporary moment, even as it seeks to change it” (191). Drawing upon his experience as a participant in a number of these gatherings, as well as a careful rhetorical reading of the documents that have been produced around and about them, Benjamin finds a fundamental contradiction at work in the institution itself: “The Forum, paradoxically, may represent the fullest expression of a democratic culture of protest and movement, and at the same time an ineffectual and accomodationist culture of global civil society—a World Bank culture,” one that very much includes the World Bank itself as a participant (192). It is this indeterminateness, this potentiality to move in a number of different directions, that again I see as characterizing the specific global period in which the WSF comes into being.
However, maintaining his fidelity to the radical political energies, the “utopian boldness” (202), opened up in the WSF, and by extension this historical moment, Benjamin then shows how the forum also offers the intimations of an emergent alternative to the dominant conceptualization of global civil society, and the beginnings of calls for specific concrete actions that might facilitate its coming into being. He concludes the book with a reading of Roy’s 2003 and 2004 addresses at the Forum, finding in the exuberance of the former, “the performance of a participatory, affective collectivity” (214), and in the concept articulated in the latter of the “minimum agenda,” “to bridge internal differences among activists,” an effort “to spur the WSF in the direction of mobilization” (212 and 218). We have, he thus rightly concludes, a great deal still to learn from the Forum, not the least of which is the significant role of culture, pedagogy, and cultural studies in any transformative political agenda: “But the work of producing collectivities, though not reducible to culture, cannot take place outside of the communicative, affective realm of culture, either. The real labor of imagining and actualizing collectivities of struggle is always cultural work” (220). It is in bringing home in so many ways this important lesson that this book realizes Benjamin’s expressed hope “to contribute to an emancipatory transnational cultural studies” (221).
In this labor, Invested Interests also represents a significant intervention in our contemporary institutional context. In his back cover blurb, Michael Hardt notes, “Bret Benjamin shows us how important it is to break down the traditional academic barriers between economics and culture. By taking economics and economic institutions seriously, he opens up new, exciting avenues for literary and cultural studies.” This is a sentiment with which I heartily agree; and I furthermore think that it indicates the degree to which this book boldly brushes against the grain of certain intellectual tendencies in the present. The historical period that is of central focus in the first part of Benjamin’s study, that of the post-war 1950s and 1960s, has been characterized by Fredric Jameson in A Singular Modernity (2002) as that of “late modernism.” One of the additional benefits of Invested Interests is that it contributes to the growing body of literature addressing this crucial conjuncture in the development of both U.S. and global culture. It is in this moment, Jameson argues, that we see the crystallization of an “ideology of modernism” that would dominate literary studies in the university for the next few decades: “all the great theoreticians and ideologists of the autonomy of art, the ideologists of modernism (as opposed to its genuine practitioners), from Greenberg to Adorno, and passing through the American New Criticism, are in agreement that the concept of culture is the true enemy of art as such; and that if one opens the door to ‘culture’, everything currently reviled under the term of cultural studies pours in and leaves pure art and pure literature irredeemably tainted” (177). Culture, he goes on to contend, represents a “blurring of boundaries,” a space of “mediation,” and if “one feels a malaise in the face of this blurring of the boundaries, an anxiety about the indeterminacy in which it necessarily leaves the work of art itself, it then becomes crucial to break the link, to sever this dialectical movement, to challenge and philosophically to discredit the concept of culture, in order to protect the space of art against further incursions or contamination” (177-8). “It is with this late modernism,” Jameson then suggests, “that postmodernism attempts radically to break, imagining that it is thereby breaking with classical modernism, or even modernity, in general and as such” (210).
However, Jameson goes further to argue that this late modernist stance has again risen to prominence in our present, in the form of those who advocate a “return” to Literature or “the canon,” variously cloaked in the calls for a renewed commitment to disciplinarity, aesthetics, ethics, or what Marjorie Levinson describes as a “normative formalism,” a “campaign to bring back a sharp demarcation between history and art, discourse and literature, with form…the prerogative of art” (PMLA 122.2 [2007]: 559). Thus, we have Marjorie Perloff, in her 2006 MLA Presidential Address, extolling us to “to trust the literary instinct that brought us to this field in the first place and to recognize that, instead of lusting after those other disciplines that seem so exotic primarily because we don’t really practice them, what we need is more theoretical, historical, and critical training in our own discipline” (PMLA 122.3 [2007]: 662). In this rear-guard action, these new ideologists of an old late modernism attempt to reinstate the academic division of labor that was part of the Cold War tripartite world and thus preserve a space for traditional literary study in the face of the onslaught of both the corporatization/ instrumentalization of the university, in which any form of reflective critical engagement has no place in the basic skill, pre-professional training, and entertainment complex that is the University, Inc.; and the challenge of humanist radicals—the popular front of cultural studies, historicism, theory, multiculturalism, interdisciplinarity, and political criticism—who champion a thoroughgoing transformation of our scholarship, teaching, and even our institutions themselves (or, in other words, a challenge to how we read, what we read, and finally, the contexts in which such reading takes place). Benjamin’s book flies in the face of this (re)turn, and exemplifies something of the other possible (intellectual) worlds made available by these approaches. It also demonstrates beyond a doubt that if there is any hope of achieving the agenda proclaimed in the final line of the book—“to place culture in the service of democratic movements for equity” (221)—it will come about not through a retreat to the past, “the good old days” of a narrowly disciplinary literary studies, but through a common building upon the possibilities, as Brecht would put it, of “these bad new ones.”
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