Rashmi Varma on the Cultural Turn
Review of Timothy Brennan’s Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right
By Rashmi Varma
Though some would characterize the 2008 Democratic Party nomination process for a presidential candidate as being conducted in a “post-race” America, the moment is nevertheless haunted by purportedly older discourses of race and gender and of identity politics in general. As Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama negotiate this contentious terrain, questions of political belief, ideological commitment and policy concerning the Iraq war, the economy, health care, education and climate change have been more or less relegated to the margins of political debate. Many would in fact contend that after all both Clinton and Obama occupy the center of the political spectrum. They both traverse the proverbial middle way committed to free market economics, globalization and American dominance on the world stage.
Timothy Brennan’s book Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right provides a substantive and awesomely erudite account of the political and economic conjuncture that produced the culture wars of the 1980s, or what Brennan terms the “post-(culture) turn” in academic and intellectual life in the US. Although written in the shadow of 9/11, the book’s historical focus is on the legacies of the Reagan years. The book lays out the historical lineages of the contemporary evisceration of what Brennan calls the “politics of belief” in favour of identity politics, defined through narrowly conceived notions of race, gender and sexuality. This indeed is the first major thread that binds this book.
Although the book presents a dazzling array of interlocking critiques of globalization theory, cosmo-theory, identity politics and postcolonial studies, and presents a dense critique of some of the chief “dramatis personae in the tableau of theory” (22), what is central to Brennan’s project is an emphasis on exploring “how political belonging was ejected from the idea of identity” in a theoretical turn that privileged “forms of being” (identity politics) over “forms of belonging”. It is this sense of political belonging that Brennan terms “belief”, an aspect of identity that garners no legal protection and remains “unrecognized”. Brennan shows that a politics of “being” (which in the academy draws upon a Heideggerian philosophical tradition) has overshadowed the politics of “belief”. Brennan’s use of the term “belief” is in itself provocative and highly suggestive. In an era in which belief has acquired deeply religious overtones, Brennan rescues the term for secular political belief. For him, political belief, like race, gender and other forms of identification, can be inherited as well as acquired. Brennan here is referring in particular to the Left lineages he himself draws upon in his own work. As the book builds on this idea, “belief” also attains meaning as a form of political belonging, and finally, as an essential feature of the “wars of position”, in which Brennan draws upon Gramsci’s theorization of hegemony and of the necessity for a long struggle against the interests of capital. Brennan’s work extends that reading to neo-liberal US in which state, media, educational institutions and public discourse in general has been captured by anti-Left reactionary and authoritarian forces with the complicity of Left-leaning liberal intellectuals who have refused to take sides or challenge the state in order to wrest power for a genuinely social democratic polity.
In actual fact, as Brennan argues, there was little real public debate and certainly none that allowed for dissent and critique in the so-called culture wars. Instead, intellectuals and academics sought to embrace the “secular religion” of the “middle way” that operated in tandem with a generalized shift towards a neo-liberal economic and political paradigm. In this milieu, academic work acquired mind-numbing homogeneity even as it maintained a patina of radicalism in which (post-structuralist) “theory” came to stand in for politics. The middle way’s determining ideas—hybridity, migrancy and cosmopolitanism as well as a celebration of the multitude and “new social movements” (as against class struggle)—paradoxically constituted a theoretical orthodoxy in which any attempt to question its founding assumptions produced accusations of simple-mindedness or worse, Left conservatism.
According to Brennan, “theory” as it came to be popularly known, was an essentially conservative project that signalled a retreat from political engagement in the post-Vietnam war political settlement, in the name of theoretical radicalism. Thus capitalism came to be increasingly viewed “as an aleatory and chaotic system that is fundamentally ambiguous and therefore productive of both domination and liberation” (8-9). Deriding the influence of theorists such as Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Hardt and Negri, and Agamben among others, Brennan points to the ways in which even theory supposedly committed to Left politics and written under the name of communism (as in the case of Hardt and Negri) has negated any sense of political alternatives to the ongoing consensus of the middle way.
The book provides a most persuasive riposte to the dominant and even fashionable antipathy to Left thinking in the US academy in the name of “theory”. Brennan argues that this antipathy has amounted to nothing less than a censorship of Left views. Here Brennan is not simply referring to Left-baiting by right wing extremists in the media, the Republican Party or conservative think tanks, but by a purportedly radical theoretical establishment. Brennan argues that these more subtle forms of censorship precipitated a generalized retreat from politics in general and from any engagement with the state in particular. Had he taken on the 9/11 event more fully, Brennan might have also focused on the stunning examples of self-censorship that accompanied a collective outburst of patriotism among radical public intellectuals.
The book can and must be read alongside the critical works of Marxist and dissenting postcolonial critics such as Aijaz Ahmad, Arif Dirlik, Neil Lazarus, Benita Parry and E. San Juan, Jr., among others. Brennan’s particular critical proclivities emanate from what he terms a Left Hegelian tradition and from a broad range of cultural materialist critics from Raymond Williams to Edward Said. What distinguishes this book from some of the earlier works is its very specific grounding in the US polity and in the role of the academy and of intellectual work in producing the hegemony of the “middle way”. In other words, one can approach this book as much for its range and breadth of critical reading as for its deeply engaged activist bent committed to political transformation.
One of the original points the book makes is through pointing out the paradoxical status of “theory” in US culture. Even as theory was “vilified” by the media and by Washington think tanks, it acted as “a buffer or proxy for a social democratic enemy considered too dangerous to represent itself” (9). In other words, theory was a safe object to whip, for even as it gained institutional clout within humanities departments in universities, it remained susceptible to pressures of an increasingly corporatized higher education system that was adept at domesticating dissent, indeed even marketing it. It is this double-facedness of theory, its ability to articulate “dissidence and compliance simultaneously” that Brennan so systematically and pointedly elucidates throughout this book (25).
Here one must also recall that the 1980s inaugurated the era of academic superstardom and of the seemingly new term “public intellectual” even as universities and particularly humanities departments became more and more exposed to a neo-liberal logic. In the concluding chapter to the book, Brennan provides a powerful analysis of the postcolonial intellectual in tandem with Gramsci’s writings on “southernism” and the Southern intellectual. Building on the selective and appropriative gestures by which Gramsci has been accommodated in postcolonial theory, including the ways in which Gramsci’s “signature terms” such as hegemony, subalterneity, common sense and passive revolution have been annexed in terms that are alien to Gramsci’s historical and political contexts, his “philological care for context and detail” (249), the chapter provides a sharp criticism of the “political quietism purveyed by intellectuals whose authority is enhanced by claims to foreignness—to transnational credentials that validate their consultative capacities in the imperial centres where they constitute an intellectual diaspora” (237).
The issue of the Southern intellectual becomes more complicated when one also looks at the phenomenon of the African American public intellectual who took the intellectual and cultural Left scene by storm in that very decade of the 1980s. Many of these public intellectuals occupied prestigious faculty positions in Ivy League universities, commanded high levels of remuneration and stayed in the eye of the liberal media for extended periods of time. Of course for many this phenomenon was the best instance of the American dream, even as questions of the numbers of African Americans in higher education and their working conditions remained sidelined. In time some of these public intellectuals styled themselves as public entrepreneurs, trading in identity politics and the free market in the most blatant of terms, as they produced rap cds and posed for advertisement campaigns.
It is a surprise that Brennan’s chapter on the Clinton impeachment affair misses taking a closer look into the role of the African American public intellectuals who lent support to Clinton in spite of his neo-liberal policies that helped diminish state supported welfare programmes that affected African Americans disproportionately. While the chapter astutely reads the impeachment affair as the product of the Left’s impoverished organizational imaginary that came up bankrupt against a newly emboldened Right, it also provokes thinking about the role of the intellectual. After all, Toni Morrison famously called Clinton America’s first “black” president. This is what she wrote in a 1998 article in The New Yorker:
Years ago, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard the first murmurs: white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children's lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald's-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas. And when virtually all the African-American Clinton appointees began, one by one, to disappear, when the President's body, his privacy, his unpoliced sexuality became the focus of the persecution, when he was metaphorically seized and bodysearched, who could gainsay these black men who knew whereof they spoke? The message was clear "No matter how smart you are, how hard you work, how much coin you earn for us, we will put you in your place or put you out of the place you have somehow, albeit with our permission, achieved. You will be fired from your job, sent away in disgrace, and--who knows?--maybe sentenced and jailed to boot. In short, unless you do as we say (i.e., assimilate at once), your expletives belong to us.
When I read these words now, after having read Brennan’s book, I see more clearly the ways in which he argues how a politics of being has excised the politics of belief in the US. In this remarkable piece by Morrison, it all comes down to style, one defined by racialized tropes and discursive assignations of blackness that can be seamlessly tagged on to the seemingly abjected body of Bill Clinton. The world’s most powerful man is seen as subjected to the worst kinds of humiliation because of his metaphorical blackness that subsumes and trumps his white trash/working class cultural origins! Bill Clinton’s victimization at the hands of the media and the political establishment is only readable in terms of racial markers, thus expunging issues of political belief (glaring in the context of the rise of the Right) and political economy from analysis.
In a book marked by political audacity and courage, one of Brennan’s boldest claims is that the political conjuncture in which theory emerged and became dominant also produced the conditions in which humanities intellectuals and the political Right were both aligned against the state. This constitutes the second key thread that connects the various chapters of the book. Brennan might not be the first critic to point to this convergence between Left/liberal and Right wings in the US, but he is certainly among the more astute and thorough interpreters of it. Refusing easy explanations of this convergence that typically suggest either coincidence or conspiracy, Brennan’s account attempts to understand the very process by which the particular conjuncture took form and the ways in which cultural hegemony produced the middle way. Thus, only a commitment to “wars of position” can hope to effectively challenge this. It is this acute insight into the making of cultural hegemony that lends power to Brennan’s book. As he clarifies in the concluding chapter, hegemony is not to be understood as a “one-sidedly ideological element of rule in a specifically non-governmental power” (234), but as a contestation of ideas, positions, organizations and alliances.
Far from lapsing into pessimism at the state of theory of the world and in the world, Brennan provides his readers crucial tools for not just reading the world in better ways than theory has provided us so far, but in helping us understand how change can materialise. For Brennan, the cultural sphere is deeply interlinked with political economy such that “wars of position” in the civic sphere are also about state power. The problem with Left/liberal theorists has been their disengagement with this process.
Above all, Wars of Position is essential reading for all teachers and academics. It casts a critical eye on the classroom in the US university and the politics of who teaches what and how. As someone who was a graduate student in that theory-heady decade of the 1990s, this book is a sober reminder of the ways in which the decade’s embrace of the new as theory also constituted “a pervasive rewriting of the past” (1). The entire apparatus of conferences, journal publications, academic presses and most importantly (for a generation coming out of economic recession)—job placements, ensured a level of homogeneity in the theoretical canon that was reproduced in a variety of venues. As the politics of representation edged out political economy, as the politics of identity ejected the politics of positions, as ethical concerns about the other triumphed over political struggles, Brennan argues that “an entire generation has been taken out of politics” (25). Such a claim comes as a major blow to the self-representation of theory and its practitioners for whom radical theory has provided a powerful alibi for political engagement and critique. Brennan argues that a preoccupation with ethics, focused on the subaltern as the irretrievable other of modernity and political reason, has eclipsed the political project of challenging subalterneity as a social and economic class position. On this view, subalterniety is “not an inequality to be expunged but a form of ontological resistance” (17).
Reading with Brennan, it becomes clear that theorists either misrecognized institutional influence in terms of faculty appointments and humanities curricula as an intervention in state or sought to build the academy as an autonomous cultural sphere. Brennan argues that such an abdication by humanities intellectuals has rendered them incapable of responding to the political extremism that has gained dominance at the center of public life. It is this particular challenge of political extremism, whether it is that of the Christian or the Islamic Right (not to mention the Hindu Right) that makes Brennan’s book an important intervention in contemporary theorizations of culture and economy, of culture as economy. It reminds us that the work we do as academics is profoundly shaped by the political conjuncture we inhabit, even as dissent and critique can be activated to challenge our time’s suffocating obeisance to the middle way.
Of course there are areas where the book leaves us with more questions than answers. In a book as rigorously argued as this, Brennan surprisingly relies on a quick analysis of the contemporary “war on terror” as signifying a shift from Left baiting to Muslim baiting: I am not sure that the two are as easily substituted, if they can be seen as interchangeable at all. His analysis of a global shift towards religiosity and the politics of being as “terror in the face of capitalism” that is “expressed in the distorted language of devotion” (23) seems to suggest that the book has run out of a bit of steam on this issue. To be fair to Brennan, though, that is not what his book is about. This is a book that, in my reading, promises to transform not only the theory but the practice of academic work both as a pedagogical project as well as critique.
Rashmi Varma teaches English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick.
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