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WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHY
(Published
in Minnesota Review 71-72 (Winter/Spring 2009: 211-19)
Although I completed my PhD in literary studies during the early 1970s,
I didn’t assert an explicit point of view, an identifiable critical
position, until the late 1980s. In an article I wrote in 1987, “Taboo
and Critique: Literary Criticism and Ethics,” I outlined my own project
of cultural critique, fusing poststructuralism with post-Marxist
cultural studies. First, I criticized the taboo on extrinsic criticism
promulgated by the American New Critics and tacitly conveyed to me by
most of my professors. Second, I sketched my own program by working
through faults with the 1980s critical projects of Wayne Booth (liberal
pluralism), Robert Scholes (structuralism), and J. Hillis Miller
(conservative deconstruction), all major critical voices of the time.
Where the New Critics focused on the literary text as an autonomous
aesthetic object and explicitly forbade critics from linking it with
society, history, psychology, economics, politics, or ethics, cultural
critics of all stripes, myself included, accepted and affirmed such
links. This is no easy road to travel. When Booth, Scholes, and Miller
all insisted that close reading precede ethical critique, they
foolishly retained a mandatory formalistic phase for all critical
inquiry, keeping the literary text as a privileged aesthetic object on
the way to broadened social concerns. They got things backwards.
This became the opening pages of my book, an unabashed credo, Cultural
Criticism, Literary Theory, Poststructuralism (1992), arguing a
handful
of positions on perennial literary topics consistent with a cultural
studies informed by poststructuralism. For anyone who might have been
paying attention, it appeared evident from my 1987 article that I had
bought into cultural studies, having been earlier identified with
poststructuralism, particularly Yale deconstruction. However, my first
book, Deconstructive
Criticism (1983), followed an arc from French
structuralism and poststructuralism through Yale deconstruction to the
Boundary 2
group (cast as an alternative deconstructive project) to the
wide-ranging anarchist projects of Michel Foucault and of Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari. In the end, it parodied Yale
deconstruction. Things became even clearer with my next book, American
Literary Criticism from the 1930s to the 1980s (1988), written
between
1982 and 1986. It covered thirteen schools and movements, starting with
Marxism and New Criticism, adding as a first for histories of American
criticism a chapter on the early engagé social criticism of the New
York Intellectuals, and ending with Feminism, Black Aesthetics (another
first), and Cultural Studies. The work traced over the course of 500
sober pages both formalist projects that dehistoricize, depoliticize,
and aestheticize literary studies and antiformalist movements that
deepen and extend cultural criticism. My trajectory was clear.
In 1987 I got divorced
after 17 years of marriage. Also I moved from working at a small
private Southern liberal arts college for 13 years to a large
Midwestern state university. When the dust settled, I ended up a single
parent with two young teenagers. Over the next ten years I shepherded
them through high school and college. These were rough economic times.
I learned about the economics and politics of postmodern families up
close and personal.
On the verge of
bankruptcy, having doled out $30,000 for expenses surrounding the
divorce, I managed after 18 months of hand-to-mouth apartment dwelling
to buy a house. It was done through creative financing by a Realtor
along with his banker and appraiser colleagues. I rented the house for
six months. That became the 5% down payment. I obtained a subprime
adjustable rate mortgage from a local bank, plus a small personal loan
on the side from the Realtor. It all seemed a miracle, going from near
bankrupt to homeowner in 18 months. Lucky for me, the interest rate did
not shoot up, nor did the price of houses drop. Eventually, I was able
to refinance with a new fixed-rate mortgage, which, however, cost
$2,000 in closing fees added to the principal of the loan. Debt
proliferates.
As you might imagine,
during this period I felt chronically insecure. I was fearfully
checking interest rates on a regular basis. I witnessed to my
astonishment the flexibility (moral relativism) of the real estate,
appraisal, and banking industries. By the late 1990s President Clinton
solidified the changes going on, radically deregulating banking and
investment, and tearing down key firewalls erected during the Great
Depression by President Roosevelt. Credit was increasingly easy to get.
Home ownership rates were rising. And single-headed households were
more and more common. Cultural critics today realize, primarily in the
wake of feminism, that the personal is linked with the social,
political, and economic. My personal story felt more and more like a
lesson in politics and economics.
The day the Clinton White
House announced a freeing up of student loans in the early 1990s, I was
overjoyed and relieved as, it turned out, were bankers, politicians,
and university administrators. My oldest child was just starting
college on her way to BA and MA degrees--and ultimately $46,000 in
loans, despite her scholarships, summer jobs, and Teaching
Assistantship. My youngest child soon racked up on his BA degree
$10,000 in loans. I don’t recall anyone in my 60s generation carrying
much debt for their college education, whereas my children, like the
majority in the US, face a decade or two or three of debt repayments.
(When I was a visiting Fulbright professor in Northern Europe in the
1970s, I witnessed free university education where students received
additional support from state stipends.) So I was misguided to be
overjoyed at President Clinton’s apparent munificence, not realizing
from the outset it was a way to shift financing from institutions to
individuals, enabling the state to withdraw from paying for education.
I did not recognize nor condemn this move to privatization, but I did
register it immediately in growing anxiety about interest rates, credit
scores, debt loads, and the financial future of my children. There is a
politics of feelings and everyday family intimacies that tells us
what’s really going on in the culture.
Around the time my
children moved in with me, the nationwide retirement system for college
teachers began to change after many decades of stability. When during
the 1970s I first entered TIAA--CREF (Teachers Insurance Annuity
Association--College Retirement Equities Fund), there were two accounts
where I could allocate my money (a sum equal to 10% of my annual salary
contributed by my college): (1) TIAA Traditional [Bonds and Mortgages]
(founded 1918) and (2) CREF Stock (established 1952). Most new faculty
members at that time split their funds 50/50% or 60/40%, with other
permutations possible. Arriving at a new university position in 1987, I
continued the split I had had at the previous job (this time the school
contributed a figure equal to 15% of my salary). But starting in 1988
things at TIAA--CREF began to change more and more tellingly over the
next two decades. In 1988 a new choice was added to the earlier
two--the CREF Money Market Account. In 1990 two additional investment
accounts appeared, CREF Bond Market and CREF Social Choice. Over the
course of the 90s five far more risky CREF options became available:
Global Equities (1992), Equity Index and Growth (both 1994), Real
Estate (1995), and Inflation-Linked Bond (1997). Then in 2002
TIAA--CREF opened 18 separate mutual fund accounts to retirement
contributions. 2004 witnessed seven brand new Lifecycle Funds,
complemented by three more such accounts in 2007. In 2006 nine other
TIAA--CREF retirement-class mutual funds emerged. If you’re counting,
this means that instead of the two previous choices, I and several
million other participants now faced four dozen choices within the
TIAA--CREF family of funds. Along the way, many of us, me included, got
befuddled.
At some point I wondered,
do I and my colleagues know enough about stocks, bonds, real estate,
indexes, rating agencies, and so on to make good investment choices? By
the mid-90s, like it or not, we were all being turned into investors.
That for me was a worrisome new burden. Before I did not read
investment account prospectuses and quarterly reports, nor did I
monitor investment news. When my home computer got linked to the
Internet in the late 90s, I began to monitor finances, as well as to
work, on a 24/7 basis. If it were not for their rules limiting the
number of trades each quarter, TIAA--CREF might have turned me into a
day trader over the course of the 1990s. This is my personal experience
with mainstream casino capitalism, the triumphalist neoliberalism and
free-market dogma spreading from the 1970s onwards. It has become
harder and harder for me not to talk about the recent reconfiguration
of money, mortgages, debt, work, education, retirement, and their
impact on the family as well as day-to-day life. The way I see it, this
is the kind of cultural critique we need. It is different from the
impersonal speculative way many do postmodern critique. Nearer home,
the industry calls it “financial literacy.”
The social as well as
economic transformations of our times have affected me in dramatic
ways. It first started to register on me and my family in the late
1980s and early 90s. Before my generation, there were two divorces in
my huge Irish-Italian American Catholic family, a social network rooted
in Islip and Babylon Townships on the south shore of Long Island. In my
generation there have been several dozen divorces, plus lots of
mobility given a nationwide job market. Personally, I feel I have been
living in exile since I got my first job in the South, followed by
positions in the Midwest and the Southwest--three decades away from
home and counting. The single-headed household, often uprooted from the
extended family, caught up in mortgage and student debt, increasingly
worried about health care expenses plus retirement, and befuddled by
financial choices, describes not only my reality but that of so many
others in the shrinking middle class. I hasten to add that my two
siblings, an older sister and a younger brother, have long shuttled in
and out of the working poor, a new and growing class of the nicked and
dimed, without retirement accounts, college loans, or mortgages. So
much for the world of family values.
The psychological syndrome
that fits postmodern social insecurity is, I believe, panic attacks.
I’ve had them. This is different from the paranoia typical of the Cold
War period of my youth. Panic attacks involve more or less continuous
stress, anxiety, and distraction, compounded by overwork, caffeine,
sugar, excessive options at every turn, speed, multitasking, a 24/7
reality, too much news and media, an absence of quiet time and
relaxation, not to mention leisure. Some people seem to thrive on this
regimen. The rising generation appears more adapted to it, texting like
bandits while popping anxiety pills in record numbers.
The mode of criticism that
is best suited to these times, it has seemed obvious to me, is a
renewed cultural critique with political economy, particularly finance,
at center stage. It should pay attention to the feelings, emotions, and
intimacies that financial tides set in motion. Increasingly since the
1980s, I have felt that my job as a university professor entails
teaching not only cultural literacy but intimate critique. Sadly, this
world has bad effects on many, too many, of my students and their
families.
Unplanned happenings,
unexpected events, and accidents have played a decisive role in my
personal life and career. Early on my economics teacher at the state
Merchant Marine academy in New York told me to consult Heilbronner’s The Worldly Philosophers
for my course project on nineteenth-century economic theory. When I
asked a librarian about worldly philosophy and Heil-something, he sent
me to Heidegger. A fateful event. I was 18 years old and just opening
to the world of literature, philosophy, and economics, but with neither
direction nor mentor. Two years later, following a do-it-yourself
immersion in existentialism, Beat literature, and left Keynesian
economics, I walked out of the academy liberated (no more uniforms) and
became a literature major.
The month after I started
on my new road, my younger brother, a high school senior, died in a
drunk driving car accident. That had the effect of solidifying my
dawning agnosticism into bouts of atheism. My eleven years of rigorous
Cold War American Catholic education, all in uniform, predating the
liberalizations of the Vatican II Council and teaching dreadful
medieval dogmas, prepared me poorly for the world. Not surprisingly, I
am a longtime secularist, who believes in freedom from religion as well
as freedom of religion. I have little good to say about
fundamentalisms, which have visited my family as well as my country.
And I am nonplused, if bemused, by New Age spirituality. I keep a wary
eye on religion.
I had to play catch-up on
literary studies, being two years behind my cohort. So I undertook a
three-semester MA to compensate and satisfy my curiosities. The week I
graduated a military draft notice arrived. It was a few days before
Christmas, and I was applying for PhD programs. Quickly I took a
six-month spring semester teaching job in a local high school to earn
money and to forestall the draft. It was 1968, and I decided
unequivocally I would go into exile to Canada if I were drafted into
the Army. Vietnam changed forever my feelings about nationalism and
taught me the necessity of critical patriotism. The Vietnam War was
stupid, immoral, and criminal as is the current war in Iraq.
Let me jump ahead. By
chance I was asked to referee a proposal in autumn 1994 for a “Norton
Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism.” The publisher turned to
me, I supposed, because of my prior books. I ended up endorsing the
idea of a Norton anthology on theory, but not the specific proposal,
recommending against the proposer, sketching what shape a proper
anthology should take, and listing who should be considered for the job
(not me). A few months later the editor showed up in my office and
asked me if I would be interested. I hesitated but ultimately accepted
with two understandings: that I could recruit a team of editors, and
that revised editions, if deemed desirable, would happen on roughly
eight-year rotations. I didn’t want the anthology to become a way of
life and a full-time job. And I believed a collective approach to the
task, never tried before with large theory anthologies, made the best
sense. This was summer 1995. Luckily, it was an opportune moment for me
because I had just finished the manuscript of my book, Postmodernism--Local Effects,
Global Flows (1996). Happily, as it turned out, my next book was
the Norton Anthology of
Theory and Criticism (2001), with me as general editor along
with a team of five handpicked editors. The opening page of the
Preface, drafted by me and approved by the team, defined “theory” this
way for new generations of students and faculty:
Today the term encompasses
significant works not only of poetics, theory of criticism,
and aesthetics as of old,
but also of rhetoric, media and discourse theory, semiotics,
race and ethnicity
theory, gender theory, and visual and popular culture theory. But
theory in its newer
sense means still more than this broadly expanded body of topics
and texts. It entails a
mode of questioning and analysis that goes beyond the earlier
New Critical research into
the “literariness” of literature. Because of the effects of
poststructuralism,
cultural studies, and the new social movements, especially the
women’s and civil rights
movements, theory now entails skepticism toward systems,
institutions, norms;
a readiness to take critical stands and engage in resistance; an
interest in blind spots,
contradictions, distortions (often discovered to be
ineradicable); and a habit
of linking local and personal practices to the larger
economic, political,
historical, and ethical forces of culture.
This is what I believe. And I came by it the hard way.
My motivation for
undertaking the Norton anthology project was largely missionary. After
I completed my PhD on the history of poetry and poetics, I converted to
criticism and theory as a specialty. There were no such specialty
programs when I was coming up. Over the next decade I reengineered
myself through self-directed study, research, and teaching interrupted
with short periods of formal education: NEH Summer Seminar (1976),
School of Criticism and Theory (1978), Fulbright-Hays Theory
Lectureship (1979), International Institute for Semiotic and Structural
Studies (1981), Alliance Française in Paris (1982). I also completed a
bachelor’s program in French while I was working as a beginning
professor during the 70s. In its post-formalist renaissance, theory in
America was vital, exciting, life-enhancing, not the narrow and
deadening dogma of the previous era. I was a convert.
For me the Norton Anthology of Theory and
Criticism was designed to accomplish several missions: to
dignify and monumentalize theory; to consolidate the many gains of
contemporary theory; to defend theory during the culture wars, which
were started by the right-wing in the mid-1980s and persist today; last
but not least, to introduce students and faculty, in the US and abroad
(where half of its sales happen), to a wide-ranging, provocative, and
accessible textbook that was both scholarly and up-to-date, being
constructed from the standpoint of twenty-first-century cultural
critique. (Forgive the promo.) I see myself as both an insider and a
populizer. I make no apologies to my hierophantic colleagues. At the
moment I’m happily completing work on an updated version of the Norton Anthology of Theory and
Criticism, Second Edition (forthcoming 2010). The mission lives
on.
Here is a piece of
illuminating background. I was flabbergasted and bitterly angry when I
heard ex-CIA agent Philip Agee on a 1970s late night television
interview explain how in the 1950s and 60s the CIA recruited candidates
at Catholic colleges. Why Catholic colleges? It turns out the CIA
preferred to recruit there because Catholics understand hierarchy,
discipline, and duty. “Son of a bitch,” I spluttered. From kindergarten
to tenth grade (ages 5 to 16 years), I was enrolled in Catholic
schools. I wore a uniform every day and marched to class, went to
confession on Saturdays, attended 9:00 AM mass in uniform each Sunday.
They taught me acquiescence to authority, selflessness, and endless
rules (preconditions for fascism). As a theorist, I teach skepticism
towards authority, self-assertive cultural criticism, intimate critique.
My Postmodernism--Local Effects,
Global Flows was followed by Theory Matters (2003) and Living with Theory (2008).
All three books are essay collections of cultural criticism and
defenses of theory. What holds this later work together is an ongoing
project of mapping as well as evaluating postmodern culture. I construe
postmodernity as neither a philosophy nor style, but a new period that
started in the 1970s and 80s. Unapologetically, I am working in the
wake of Fredric Jameson, David Harvey, and especially the British New
Times project, all dating from the late 1980s and continuing today. My
experience and observations confirm that we are living through a
distinct post-Welfare State period, more or less helpfully labeled
postindustrial, post-Fordist, consumer society, late capitalism,
globalization.
What most characterizes
postmodern culture for me is disorganization. Think of the TIAA-CREF
case. On the one hand, financial consumers are offered an excessive
array of choices of investment pitched to their tolerances for risk,
time frames, and preferences. On the other hand, who has the time and
expertise to make intelligent choices? I’m confused, stressed,
perplexed. I seek a guide for idiots or dummies, the latest edition
since the pace of change is rapid. This is a symptomatic genre for our
times. As a wine drinker (my Italian heritage), I am befuddled by the
number of decent Chardonnay and Syrah/Shiraz wines under $20 a bottle.
This largesse dates from the wine revolution that started in the 1970s
and 80s. Wine Spectator
magazine (established 1976) nowadays evaluates 20,000 wines annually. I
have a similar experience in a bookstore (for example, the self-help
section), a supermarket (the cereal aisle), a footwear store (walls of
sneakers). The speeded-up proliferation of commodities and choices,
plus the disaggregation of niches and spheres, render the big picture
inaccessible and, strictly speaking, unknowable. Hence, the need for
mapping.
One last unexpected turn
of events helps explain what I believe and why. I couldn’t find a
position the year I received my PhD, the job market having crashed
several years earlier (1970 to be exact and continuing today). So I
ended up teaching on a one-year interim appointment in the Department
of Humanities at the University of Florida. There I met Gregory Ulmer,
a new PhD in Comparative Literature who had just secured a full-time
tenure-track job. Two decisive things occurred during that year. First,
Ulmer introduced me to French structuralism and poststructuralism. That
shook me up and helped me get past my New Critical frame of mind.
Second, the job required me to teach multiple sections of Humanities
211, 221, 231 during the fall, winter, and spring quarters. The course
content was set by the department, with only a few open spots. One step
ahead of the students, I learned and taught Ancient & Medieval,
Renaissance & Enlightenment, and Modern Western Humanities. The
curriculum programmatically juxtaposed art history, literature,
philosophy, religion, and music (with the latter handled by a
musicologist in large lectures). A typical module would be the
Parthenon, Plato’s Republic,
Sophocles’ Antigone,
and Aristotle’s Poetics
or Abstract Expressionism, Existentialism, Beat Literature, and Bebop
Jazz. Although it covered old-fashioned intellectual rather than social
history, the program put me in touch with big pictures. It struck a
resonant cord within me. Early and late, my work aims for wide-ranging
comparative history.
The program also
introduced me to art history (specifically architecture, sculpture, and
painting). Out of this latter came a life-long interest in contemporary
painting, plus modern museums, galleries, art journals and books, and
local art scenes. When I came to address postmodernism, I naturally
turned to painting as well as literature, philosophy, and popular arts
(I am a child of the 60s). One of the genuine benefits of construing
postmodernism as a period, not just a school of philosophy or a style,
is the necessity to investigate political economy and society as well
as the arts high and low. Postmodern fusion, pastiche,
multiculturalism, and backlash manifest themselves, I find, in the
period’s food, wine, fashion, film, music, art, philosophy, religion,
and literature. Through accidents and blindly, it appears, I was being
prepared and preparing myself early on for a job of cultural criticism
and critique. Our times demand it.
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