Reaganism in Literary Theory , livre ebook

Reaganism in Literary Theory
Reaganism in Literary Theory
Negative Moralism and Hermeneutic Suspicion
Jeremiah Bowen
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com
This edition first published in UK and USA 2020
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Copyright © Jeremiah Bowen 2020
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-278-3 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78527-278-0 (Hbk)
This title is also available as an e-book.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Essay One Interpretive Politics: Reading Systemic Oppressions with Eve Sedgwick, Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus
1. Reading the Lines
Obsolete Suspicions
Bad Faith
2. Paranoid Projects
Conspiracy Theory
Superman Cape
Narcissistic Rebellion
3. Defining the Opposition
Bad Religion
Noninterference and Neoliberalism
Privilege and Self-Censorship
Essay Two Devotional Scholarship: Reading Academic Reaganism with Edward Said, Stanley Fish and Walter Jackson Bate
1. Neoliberalism and Religious Intellectualism Neoliberalism and Religious Intellectualism
Culture and Legacy
Emulation Pedagogy
2. Neoconservatism as Negative Devotion
Bate’s Trivial Titles
Indifferent Opponents
3. Professional Privilege
Mirrored Positions
Essay Three Negative Moralism: Reading Literariness, Materiality and Revolution with Paul de Man and J. Hillis Miller
1. The Disqualification of de Man
Singular Circumstances
2. Reference to Nothingness
Discrepancies of Desire
Negative Moralism
3. Misreading Materialism
Culture and Soil
Overturning and Displacement
Progress and Determination
Index
Acknowledgments
For all my teachers, whether I encountered them as allies or as opponents.
Essay One
INTERPRETIVE POLITICS: READING SYSTEMIC OPPRESSIONS WITH EVE SEDGWICK, STEPHEN BEST AND SHARON MARCUS

We can say of the eighties what Orwell could say of the forties: “In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’”
W. J. T. Mitchell, “The Politics of Interpretation” (1982)
The current era of political polarization and culture war in the United States is often measured against a fantasy, an imaginary era of nonpartisan harmony in the wake of a war that established “The American Century.” 1 And yet this depoliticized image signifies the same age Orwell describes as inescapably political, in an essay written to span the ocean between allies. 2 Like the forties, the eighties is now often mythologized as a time of American triumph, when good struggled against an Evil Empire, and freedom overcame tyranny. This mythological narrative of holy war is presaged by Ronald Reagan’s depoliticized image of the 1962 election in “A Time for Choosing”: “There is no left or right [...] only an up or down—up to man’s age-old dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order, or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism.” 3 Reagan is apparently undeterred by the manifest contradiction between his disavowal of partisanship and the ostentatiously partisan occasion of his speech, televised in support of Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. That disavowal itself also depends on Reagan’s image of the Democratic Party as drifting toward a Stalinist authoritarian version of socialism. The bad faith of his trope is undeniable, especially when one recognizes that Reagan ostensibly refuses partisanship only to immediately define his own party as agents of “man’s age-old dream” of freedom, and dehumanize the other party as a mindless colony of insects bent on dystopian oppression. We will see homologous rhetorical gestures repeated throughout this book, as various characters deny or conflate the differences of left and right, claiming for themselves universality and agency, while objectifying others as mere negations of universal value, truth and right.
Reagan’s frame and premises—defining the struggle between left and right in the United States in terms of individualism, freedom or liberty, the same terms used to define the reasons for US opposition to the USSR—have essentially been accepted as the default explanation for the national turn away from the progressivism of Roosevelt’s New Deal. Within this frame, US democracy is defined as consistent or even coterminous with private property, both subsumed by the signifier “liberty,” and this is placed in opposition to Stalinist authoritarianism, the signifier under which the socialism of the USSR is identified with any system of communal ownership or wealth redistribution. Never mind that none of these identifications are rigorously defensible, let alone self-evident, as they ignore contradictions internal to each society. In both the US and the USSR, a professed adherence to principles of equal distribution of power is belied by traditions of terrorist governance that have maintained disproportionate power for elites. While the United States touted its principles of political equality, its unequal distribution of wealth and privilege guaranteed inequities in political and legal representation and enforcement. And while the USSR boasted of its principles of economic equality, its inequitable distribution of political and legal enforcement and representation guaranteed inequalities of wealth and privilege. In both cases, mutually reinforcing inequalities and inequities ensured that, for most citizens, their nations were neither a pure heaven of freedom and opportunity, nor a pure hell of oppression.
Reagan calls analytic attention to one such contradiction internal to US democracy in this period by means of the caveat he places on freedom, specifying that it should be “consistent with law and order.” In a speech given in support of Barry Goldwater, famously an opponent of the Civil Rights Act, this caveat carries significant semantic weight—just as it would for Richard Nixon in elections to come. The record of the Nixon and Reagan administrations demonstrates that freedom “consistent with law and order” meant freedom inconsistently distributed and defended along lines of race, sex, class and religion. His record marks Reagan as a counterrevolutionary figure in the trajectory of US democracy, in which the rejection of aristocratic rule has progressed incompletely and unevenly toward broader inclusion. And yet his inconsistent support for individual freedoms places him in the mainstream of US history, as the rhetoric of liberty has always been partly inconsistent with structural inequities in production, law and policy.
This inequitable recognition of citizens’ equal right to liberty is the condition for a function of Reagan’s rhetoric of depoliticization that is not so much persuasive as it is permissive, and which remained durably effective even in his post-presidency and after his death. This permissive gesture is also occasioned by the unpopularity of Goldwater, whose extreme views would win over only the five states of the Deep South and his home state of Arizona, earning him the smallest share of the popular vote ever received by a major-party candidate for US President. By positioning himself as voice of the unassailable center and standard, and by presenting his views as an expression of universal values, not partisan agendas, Reagan invites supporters of the far-right candidate he endorses to shelter under the strength and confidence of his rhetorical persona. It is a protective and permissive rhetorical posture, a claim to universality that guards against the disapproval of others, in which his audience is invited to share. That rhetorical posture would persist throughout his presidency, helping to normalize the polarizing policies that would constitute his administration’s putative ascension toward freedom—which included support for dictators, 4 paramilitary death squads 5 and apartheid regimes at home and abroad, 6 as well as agitation against women’s reproductive rights, 7 and the neglect of tens of thousands of queer citizens dying of an unchecked epidemic. 8
In one sense, this relational pattern of assimilation or destruction of every difference, this aggressivity toward outgroups, is a function of what Slavoj Žižek calls “the totalitarian Master,” whose calls for discipline and renunciation provide cover for an invitation to transgress “ordinary moral prohibitions.” 9 One follows such a figure so that one may unleash one’s own aggression on those who are designated as enemies, outsiders or subalterns, surrendering the rights and responsibilities of self-determination to the Master in exchange for permission to violate the rights of those “beneath” or outside the hierarchical order. While Žižek opposes this totalitarian Master to Theodor Adorno’s “authoritarian personality,” these explanations are not precisely at odds, as both define the consistency of an excessive deference toward those above one in a social hierarchy with demeaning violence toward those below. 10 This relational structure behaves in accord with Jacques Lacan’s definition of madness