Collective History: Thirty Years of Social Text

Contributors

Stanley Aronowitz is distinguished professor of sociology and urban edu-

cation at the Graduate Center, CUNY. He was a founding editor of Social Text and member of the Social Text collective until 1996. His latest book is Against Schooling: For an Education That Matters (Paradigm). John Brenkman is distinguished professor at Baruch College and the

CUNY Graduate Center. He was a founding editor of Social Text and member of the Social Text collective until 1983. His latest book is The Cultural Contradictions of Democracy: Political Thought since September 11 (Princeton University Press). Ed Cohen teaches cultural studies and directs the PhD program in women’s and gender studies at Rutgers University. His new book is A Body Worth Defending: Immunity, Biopolitics, and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body (Duke University Press). Ashley Dawson is associate professor of English at the Graduate Center,

CUNY. He is the author of Mongrel Nation: Diasporic Culture and the Making of Postcolonial Britain (University of Michigan) and coeditor of Democracy, the State, and the Struggle for Global Justice (Routledge), Dangerous Professors (University of Michigan), and Exceptional State (Duke University Press). Patrick Deer teaches in the English department at New York University,

where he focuses on war culture, modernism, the novel and film, and postcolonial and cultural studies. He is the author of Culture in Camouflage: War, Empire, and Modern British Literature (Oxford University Press). Ana María Dopico teaches comparative literature of the Americas and

the cultural politics of the Global South in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University. She is the editor of José Martí: Revolution, Politics, and Letters, an anthology of prose works by Martí (Oxford University Press, forthcoming), and is presently at work on a book “Cubanologies: Altered States of the Nation.”

Brent Hayes Edwards teaches in the Department of English and Compara-

tive Literature at Columbia University and is coeditor of Social Text. He is the author of The Practice of Diaspora (Harvard University Press) and coeditor of Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies (Columbia University Press). He is writing a history of “loft jazz” in 1970s New York. David L. Eng is professor of English, comparative literature, and Asian

American studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His most recent book is The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy (Duke University Press, forthcoming). He is coeditor of Loss: The Politics of Mourning, Q & A: Queer in Asian America, and “What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now?” (Social Text 84/85). Allen Feldman is a cultural/political/medical anthropologist and associate

professor of media, culture, and communication at New York University. He is the author of numerous ethnographic studies on political violence and visual culture and of Archives of the Insensible: Violence and Terror as Dead Memory (Duke University Press, forthcoming). Heather Gautney is assistant professor of sociology at Fordham University.

She is author of Protest and Organization in the Alternative Globalization Era (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming). She is also coeditor of Democracy, States, and the Struggle for Global Justice (Routledge) and Implicating Empire (Basic Books). Stefano Harney holds the chair in strategy, culture, and society at the School

of Business and Management, Queen Mary, University of London. Phillip Brian Harper is Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Literature at New York University, where he teaches in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis and the Department of English. He has just completed a book manuscript on the politics of abstractionism in African American culture.

Fredric Jameson is the William A. Lane Professor of Comparative Litera-

ture and Romance Studies at Duke University. He was a founding editor of Social Text and member of the Social Text collective until 1996. His latest book is Valences of the Dialectic (Verso). Tariq Jazeel teaches human geography at the University of Sheffield. He is coeditor of Spatializing Politics: Culture and Geography in Postcolonial Sri Lanka (Sage) and is currently completing a monograph on the politics of nature and environmental aesthetics in Sri Lanka. David Kazanjian is associate professor of English and comparative litera-

ture at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America (University of Minnesota Press) and the coeditor (with David L. Eng) of Loss: The Politics of Mourning (University of California Press). He has also coedited The Aunt Lute Anthology of U.S. Women Writers, vol. 1, Seventeenth through Nineteenth Centuries (Aunt Lute Books). Brian Larkin writes on media, the history of technology, and the circu-

lation of cultural forms in urban Africa. He is the author of Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria (Duke University Press). He is associate professor of anthropology at Barnard College, Columbia University. Eng-Beng Lim is assistant professor of English at Michigan State Univer-

sity, where he specializes in drama and performance studies and is also part of the core faculty for the Global Studies program and Center for Gender in a Global Context. His latest article, “Performing the Global University,” is forthcoming in Social Text 101. Julie Livingston teaches in the history department at Rutgers Univer-

sity. She is the author of Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana (Indiana University Press) and has published articles in various journals, including Radical History Review, Africa, and Medical Anthropology. She is interested in the human body in moral and experiential terms.

Randy Martin is professor and chair of the Department of Art and Public

Policy, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, and current president of the Cultural Studies Association (U.S.). His most recent book is An Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management (Duke University Press). He joined the Social Text collective in 1984 and was coeditor from 2000 to 2006. Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel is professor at Rutgers University. Her books

include From Lack to Excess: “Minor” Readings of Latin American Colonial Discourse (Bucknell University Press), Caribe Two Ways: cultura de la migración en el Caribe insular hispánico (Callejón), and Saberes americanos: subalternidad y epistemología en los escritos de Sor Juana (Iberoamericana). Rick Maxwell is professor of media studies at Queens College, CUNY. His

current work focuses on the environmental impact of media technologies and includes the coauthored articles “Green Smokestacks?” in Feminist Media Studies (2008) and “Ecological Ethics and Media Technology,” in International Journal of Communication (2008). Anna McCarthy is associate professor and associate chair of cinema stud-

ies at New York University. She is the author of Ambient Television (Duke University Press), coeditor with Nick Couldry of MediaSpace (Routledge), and coeditor of Social Text. Her new book, on governing by television in the 1950s, is forthcoming from the New Press. Micki McGee is the author of Self-Help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life (Oxford University Press). She recently served as the curator of the major exhibition Yaddo: Making American Culture at the New York Public Library and edited the accompanying eponymous volume, published by Columbia University Press. She teaches in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Fordham University. Toby Miller teaches at the University of California, Riverside. He is the

author and editor of more than twenty volumes and has published essays in well over a hundred journals and books. His latest book is Makeover Nation: The United States of Reinvention (Ohio State University Press).

Susette Min teaches Asian American studies, modern and contemporary

art history, and curatorial studies at the University of California, Davis. She recently published “Entropic Designs: A Review of Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes and Asian/American/Modern/Art: Shifting Currents, 1900 – 1970 at the de Young Museum” in American Quarterly. Fred Moten is associate professor of English and African and African

American studies at Duke University. Roopali Mukherjee is associate professor of media studies at Queens Col-

lege, CUNY. She writes on race and racial discourse in U.S. public and political culture and is the author of The Racial Order of Things: Cultural Imaginaries of the Post-Soul Era (University of Minnesota Press). José Esteban Muñoz is associate professor and chair of performance stud-

ies at New York University. His most recent book is Cruising Utopia: The Here and Now of Queer Futurity (NYU Press). His book Feeling Brown: Ethnicity, Affect, and Performance is forthcoming from Duke University Press. Alondra Nelson is associate professor of sociology at Columbia Univer-

sity. She is the author of Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Politics of Health and Race (University of California Press, forthcoming); editor of “Afrofuturism,” a special issue of Social Text; and coeditor of Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life (NYU Press). She is currently completing a manuscript on the social life of DNA in black cultural politics titled “Reconciliation Projects.” Tavia Nyong’o teaches in the Department of Performance Studies at New

York University. He is the author of The Amalgamation Waltz (University of Minnesota Press). His interests include performance and cultural history, queer and affect theory, psychoanalysis, and black expressive cultures. He is the Web editor of Social Text.

Shireen R. K. Patell is clinical assistant professor and associate director of trauma and violence transdisciplinary studies at New York University. She has recently published essays on mourning, the ethics and violence of reading, pedagogy, and untranslatability. She is finishing a book manuscript on violence and metaphor. Ann Pellegrini is associate professor of performance studies and religious

studies at New York University, where she also directs the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. She is the author of Performance Anxie­ ties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race (Routledge); coauthor, with Janet R. Jakobsen, of Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance (Beacon); coeditor, with Daniel Boyarin and Daniel Itzkovitz, of Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (Columbia University Press); and coeditor, with Jakobsen, of Secularisms (Duke University Press). Jasbir Puar is associate professor of women’s and gender studies at Rut-

gers University. Her book Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Duke University Press) won the 2007 Cultural Studies Award from the Association for Asian American Studies. She has published articles in Gender, Place, and Culture, Social Text, Radical History Review, GLQ, and Signs. Michael Ralph is assistant professor in the Department of Social and

Cultural Analysis at New York University.  He is a member of the Souls editorial working group and of the editorial boards of Sport in Society and Transforming Anthropology. A member of the Social Text editorial collective, he is the same age as the journal. Bruce Robbins is Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the humanities

at Columbia University. He was a member of the Social Text collective from 1984 to 2000 and was coeditor for much of the 1990s. His most recent book is Upward Mobility and the Common Good (Princeton University Press).

Andrew Ross is professor and chair of the Department of Social and Cul-

tural Analysis at New York University. He is the author of several books, most recently Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times (NYU Press). He has also edited or coedited the collections No Sweat: Fashion, Free Trade, and the Rights of Garment Workers (Verso); Anti-Americanism (NYU Press); and The University against Itself: The NYU Strike and the Future of the Academic Workplace (Temple University Press). He was a member of the Social Text collective from 1985 to 2001 and was coeditor for much of the 1990s. Teemu Ruskola is professor of law at Emory University. His writings on

law and sexuality, the intersection of corporate and family law in China, legal Orientalism, and the history and politics of Euro-American conceptions of sovereignty in the Asia-Pacific region have appeared in a variety of journals, including American Quarterly, Michigan Law Review, Social Text, Stanford Law Review, and Yale Law Journal. María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo is professor in the Department of Social

and Cultural Analysis at New York University, where she directs the Latino Studies Program. She is the author of The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas and the Age of Development (Duke University Press) and several articles on transnational racial formation, politics, history, and culture in such journals as American Quarterly, South Atlantic Quarterly, Radical History Review, New Formations, and Social Text. David Sartorius is assistant professor of history at the University of Mary-

land. His research addresses the relationships between race, empire, and nationalism in the Caribbean and Latin America, and he is currently completing a book manuscript titled “Ever Faithful: Race and Loyalty in Nineteenth-Century Cuba.” Sohnya Sayres is associate professor of humanities at the Cooper Union. She

was an editor of and contributor to Social Text and a longtime member of the collective. She is the author of Susan Sontag: The Elegiac Modernist (Routledge); her current project focuses on the cultural history of the 1970s.

Nikhil Pal Singh is associate professor of social and cultural analysis and

history at New York University. He is the author of Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Harvard University Press) and editor of Climbing Jacob’s Ladder: The Black Freedom Movement Writings of Jack O’Dell (University of California Press). Gustavus Stadler teaches English and gender and sexuality studies at

Haverford College. He is the author of Troubling Minds: The Cultural Politics of Genius in the United States, 1840 – 1890 (University of Minnesota Press) and diverse essays on American cultural politics. His current project is concerned with race and early sound recording. Anders Stephanson is James P. Shenton Associate Professor of History at

Columbia University. He joined the Social Text collective in 1980 and was an editor and contributor to the journal until 1996. He is author of Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy (Harvard University Press) and Manifest Destiny (Hill and Wang) and is working on a project titled “The United States as a Cold War.” Neferti X. M. Tadiar is professor of women’s studies at Barnard College.

She is the author of Things Fall Away: Philippine Historical Experience and the Makings of Globalization (Duke University Press) and FantasyProduction: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order (Hong Kong University Press and Ateneo de Manila University Press). Livia Tenzer is the managing editor of Social Text. Previously she was edi-

torial director of the Feminist Press at CUNY and worked at the women’s press Aunt Lute Books. She has taught classical studies in California, Tennessee, and Italy.

Introduction Brent Hayes Edwards and Anna McCarthy

The proposition that the history of a collective must be written collectively seems at once self-evident and impossibly ambitious. If the principle of collectivism implies a radical challenge to the conventional understanding of authorship, one that foregrounds the constitutive social mediation of any practice, any discourse, then the most accurate history of any collective would arguably preserve a multiplicity of (potentially dissonant) voices and avoid the pretense of a smooth, singular, magisterial narrator. But the practice of collective history ultimately involves more than assembling a compendium, gathering the polyphony of disparate perspectives on a shared past or endeavor. Can the act of assembling or gathering be itself a collective enterprise, or does it demand some “final, virtuoso orchestration” by an editorial hand?1 This thirtieth-anniversary issue emerges from two years of intensifying conversation among the current collective as to how to understand our history, and about the procedures we might use to curate it in this issue. As much as it is possible, the result is the editorial handiwork of all of the collective’s members; it falls to the two of us, as coeditors for the collective, to provide a recounting of the journal’s past that can help frame the following annotations from the present Social Text collective on the texts, arguments, and programs that constitute that past. Compiling this issue has involved a particular challenge in that the Social Text collective is not a coherent group that has remained constant over time, but instead is an institutional space that has provided an arena for “interested affiliation” among a changing cast of characters.2 What does it mean to write the history of an editorial collective after thirty years when no one from the initial collective is still affiliated with the journal? A history of such a collective must involve a history of its transformations — the

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history of its own internal tensions and shifts — without the illusion that the current collective is either the privileged inheritor or the enlightened culmination of prior versions of itself. When the current collective met in the spring of 2008 to begin to discuss the form of Social Text 100, it became clear to us that any attempt at collective history would require coordinated research into the history of the journal. It is remarkable, though perhaps not surprising, how common it is for intellectuals to take on editorial work with only a loose familiarity with the particular history of the journals they inherit. In some ways this is liberating, because it can undo the shackles of ingrained editorial practice and dissolve calcified visions of a journal’s core identity or audience. Indeed, this unstudied ignorance may be the condition of possibility for editorial innovation. But undertaking the history of a journal —  an exercise in speculative thought that develops a sense of contemporary and future needs out of an engagement with the past — demands that one “read hard” in the archive of the periodical as it transforms and reconstitutes itself serially.3 So we set ourselves a curriculum, diving into the entire run starting from the first issue in 1979. We also decided to compile an informal oral history of Social Text, interviewing many of the key figures in the history of the collective, including the three founding editors (Fredric Jameson, Stanley Aronowitz, and John Brenkman), all the subsequent coeditors (Sohnya Sayres, Andrew Ross, Bruce Robbins, Toby Miller, and Randy Martin), and a few of the collective members who had served as managing editors (Anders Stephan­ son, Wendy Graham, and David Wildman). 4 Drawing on the personal files of many of these scholars, we gathered an archive of the editorial history of the journal (minutes, memoranda, conference and event flyers, correspondence, photographs, notes, reader’s reports) that has been indispensable in the writing of this introduction, and that supplies the fragmentary artifacts that illustrate this special issue. Likewise, excerpts from the interviews have been culled and distributed in thematic clusters throughout the issue, starting with the initial section of comments, “The Collective as a Political Model,” that follows this introduction. The history of the Social Text collective begins with an encounter among two of its three founding editors. In the first part of the 1970s, Fredric Jameson was a professor of French and comparative literature at the University of California at San Diego. In 1972 Stanley Aronowitz had become an assistant professor of community studies at the College of Staten Island.5 In the first years of the decade, each published studies that were highly influential: Jameson Marxism and Form (1972) and Aronowitz False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness (1973). 6 As Jameson recalls, the events that led to their meeting and eventually to the conception of Social Text begin with his involvement with the Marxist 2

Edwards and McCarthy ∙ Introduction

Literary Group (MLG), which he had formed with a number of his graduate students (including James Kavanagh, Bill Langen, Gene Holland, June Howard, and John Beverley) at San Diego in 1969 – 1970.7 At the time, the MLG was an affiliated group of the Modern Language Association that was organized to foster discussion around the parameters and practice of Marxist literary criticism and theory. In fact, as Sean Homer has pointed out, “in the early 1970’s the MLG was the largest affiliated organization to the MLA, running 14 sessions at the 1975 conference.”8 Given the amount of scholarship produced under the aegis of the MLG, and the degree to which it catalyzed a broad conversation about the scope of Marxist theorization in relation to culture in the wake of the 1960s, it is unsurprising that there seems to have been a drive within the organization to find a venue for publication. In 1975 the MLG founded its newsletter, Mediations, which “provided at least sporadic communication among a couple of hundred students and professors in the academic humanities.”9 The same year, work from the MLG started to appear in the Minnesota Review, which since the inception of its new series in 1973 (under editors Roger Mitchell and Martha Bergland) had gained a reputation as a venue hospitable to Marxist literary scholarship. In the fall 1975 issue, there appears a “special supplement” titled “The Marxist Alternative to the Traditions” edited by Jameson and the MLG, with a dozen contributions from an intriguing array of academics, including H. Bruce Franklin, Jean Franco, David Bathrick, and Terry Eagleton, on a broad range of topics: Chaucer, Latin American literature and dependency theory, Sergei Eisenstein and montage, contemporary Chinese aesthetics, and Pierre Macherey’s theory of literary production. Jameson’s introduction to the section, “Notes toward a Marxist Cultural Politics,” describes the pieces as offering a “selection of the kinds of Marxist literary analysis practiced today.” Rather than a shared program, he writes, the pieces should be taken as “an on-going assessment of the concrete historical problems which face Marxist scholarship and Marxist cultural practice in the United States today.”10 On a number of levels, Jameson’s introduction resonates with what would become the animating concerns of Social Text at its founding: the need to historicize the upheaval of the previous decade, taking stock of dead ends (“everyone seems agreed that something ended with the 1960s,” he writes) as well as new possibilities (especially in “the whole countercultural heritage of the so-called New Left”); a commitment to Marxist theory as “the only complete explanation of the things that are happening to us,” even if it must be taken up “not as ready-made, knee-jerk diagnoses, but only on condition we are prepared creatively to think through the current historical situation in the light of classical Marxist theory and practice”; the need to theorize the dialectic between mass culture and Social Text 100

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“high culture”; the foregrounding of the implications of the university as a setting for radical criticism.11 He concludes with something of a call to arms: “We cannot pass up the chance of contributing to and shaping a new intellectual and cultural atmosphere from which some new cultural production might arise.”12 This chance would emerge through a series of encounters between Jameson and Aronowitz over the next few years. In 1974, Aronowitz was invited to UCSD to give a series of ten lectures based on False Promises. The next year, Jameson asked him to participate on a plenary session titled “Toward a Marxist Theory of Culture” organized by the MLG at the Modern Language Association convention in San Francisco.13 The two met again in December 1975, when Jameson came to the Modern Language Association meeting in New York and visited Aronowitz at his apartment in the city. Then, through Jameson’s initiative, in 1976 Aronowitz spent the winter quarter teaching as a visitor in the literature department at UCSD. (He subsequently accepted a tenured position as a professor of social sciences and comparative culture at the University of California at Irvine.) Over this series of interactions, Jameson and Aronowitz — along with others in New York and southern California — began to discuss the possibility of founding a journal in order, as Aronowitz recalls it, to “re-examine the salience of Marxist theory for cultural, political, and social thought.” Their discussions kept coming back to a core set of concerns, defining the agenda that would provide the subtitle of the initial Social Text: “Theory, Culture, Ideology.” At the center of these spirited dialogues, still vivid memories for both — Aronowitz remembers Jameson at his apartment in Manhattan in 1975, “talking a mile a minute” — was a curiosity with the argument then circulating on the intellectual Left that politics was no longer organized around political parties, but instead around journals. “So we thought,” as Jameson explains, “if we’re trying to build up a Marxist intellectual movement in this country, we would have to have a journal.” Building up this movement required a sustained social and scholarly context for the exchange of ideas. Two years later, in the summer of 1977, the MLG held its inaugural Summer Institute in Cultural Studies at St. Cloud University in Minnesota. Over three weeks, about forty participants met for an intensive series of lectures, seminars, panels, and discussions. One participant, Patrick Story, described the reading lists that had been distributed in advance as “staggering” and detailed a daily schedule devoted almost entirely to intellectual activity: breakfast between 7:00 and 8:00; mandatory attendance at the day’s lecture from 9:30 to 11:45; lunch from 12:00 to 1:00; two sessions of seminar papers and panel discussions from 1:30 to 3:00 and 3:30 to 5:00; dinner in the evening; and, on ten evenings, a film screening from 7:00 to 9:00, followed by further discussion. The featured lecturers were Aronowitz, who gave a series of talks 4

Edwards and McCarthy ∙ Introduction

called “The Theory of Culture,” Jameson, who offered “The Theory of Ideology,” and Terry Eagleton, who every third morning spoke on methodological problems in literary criticism, often turning to close readings of particular poems. According to Story, The crossover between Aronowitz and Jameson, in which the social scientist took on culture, and the humanist, ideology, may sound confusing, but it represents more than the polymath interests of these two. It shows the tendency of Marxist theory to re-unify the study of culture that was split and fragmented a century ago in an academic division of labor useful to the embattled bourgeoisie. This parceling out of the subject among economics, history, sociology, the various humanities, etc., has effectively served to mask and palliate the fundamental irrationality of capitalism as a social system.14

For Story, the reclaiming of the study of culture was central to the argument that developed in “crossover” among the three lecturers. All three speakers emphasized the limitations of anthropology as an academic discipline that, as Aronowitz contended, habitually projected culture onto “primitive social formations” rather than attending to the complex dynamics of cultural forms on a global scale, and all three were equally dismissive of the “laughable reductions” of culture in other disciplines, “such as the mystified ‘refined taste’ still emanating from English departments.”15 In the winter of 1977, during the Modern Language Association convention in Chicago, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak hosted a reception at her apartment where there was announced the formation of a new journal called Social Text.16 By this time, Jameson and Aronowitz had been joined by a third colleague, a former student of Spivak’s named John Brenkman, who in 1974 had started teaching at the University of Wisconsin at Madison as an assistant professor of comparative literature. Brenkman recalls meeting Jameson at a conference in the mid-1970s, 17 and later inviting him to give an intensive two-week seminar at Wisconsin. There was a thriving culture of young scholarly journals (including SubStance, founded in 1971, and New German Critique, which began in 1973) in Madison at the time, and Brenkman was able to get modest support for the journal, holding editorial meetings in his office in Van Hise Hall at the university. Nevertheless, when Social Text actually began publication nearly two years later, the journal remained “tremendously under-capitalized,” according to Brenkman. The first six issues were financed almost entirely by the three founding editors, with sales (mainly through newsstands and bookstores rather than through subscriptions) only providing a minimal return.18 Brenkman stored the issues in his garage. In founding Social Text, Aronowitz, Jameson, and Brenkman were attracted to the model of the “little magazine,” especially periodicals in the first part of the twentieth century that posed themselves as the “sponsors of Social Text 100

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innovation, the gathering places for the ‘irreconcilables’ ” of literature and political critique.19 There was an explicit decision, as well, that the journal had to be independent; it had to follow the line of what Ezra Pound long ago had evocatively called “the impractical or fugitive magazine” — that is, the periodical that refused to allow its editorial line and its political commitments to be dictated by commercial interest (subscription sales) or by the “strategic containment” of academic disciplines. 20 Rather than ignore their scattered geographical locations, they decided to make the “dispersion that affects intellectual life in America” into an organizational principle and initially set up editorial groups around each editor in La Jolla-Irvine, Madison, and New Haven.21 Although their sense of the paradigm was not necessarily uniform — Aronowitz looked more to the Partisan Review in the 1930s, for example, while Brenkman found inspiration in Tel Quel — the three founding editors shared a vision of a journal that would attend to the broadest range of inquiry into the understanding of culture across academic fields, striving for clarity at a level of abstraction to be named “theory,” and finding both a historical template and the most useful analytical insight in what the “Prospectus” that opens Social Text 1 terms “the Marxist framework.”22 The “fundamental elements” of Marxism were not taken as a set of polished and inviolable dicta to be parroted; instead they were understood to “define problems and directions of research that need to be worked out afresh and reinvented in terms of today’s situation.”23 The cowritten four-page “Prospectus” — composed in what Brenkman remembers as a “round robin” of collaboration among the three editors, who each revised and edited the document in turn — is perhaps the clearest statement of the editors’ initial aims. It is at once a statement of purpose and also something of a call for papers, sketching broad rubrics of inquiry they hoped the journal would cover: “Everyday Life and Revolutionary Praxis”; “The Proliferation of Theories”; “Symbolic Investments of the Political”; “The Texts of History”; “Ideology and Narrative”; “Mass Culture and the Avant-Garde”; “Marxism and the State”; “ ‘Consumer Society’ and the World System.” It is unavoidable that some of these rubrics seem opaque or outdated, even quaint, today. As Brenkman (whose essay looking back on the “Prospectus” is included in this issue) observes, “One of the great things about the beginning of a journal is that you have a certain kind of conception, but you can’t write the articles yourself. I mean, you can write some of them but you can’t write all of them. The journal takes shape out of what you happen to get.” As the interview excerpts on the first issue make clear, the juxtaposition of pieces the editors were able to acquire — the first two essays in the first issue are Edward Said’s devastating “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims” (one of the key sections of his book The Question of Palestine) and Bruce Boone’s groundbreaking essay on queer poetics, “Gay Language as Political Praxis: The 6

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Poetry of Frank O’Hara” — was itself a forceful statement about what the journal would strive to accomplish: it would force the reader to move, with the sustained intensity of theory, between “high art” and “mass culture,” between aesthetics and politics, between the particularities of contemporary culture and the grand currents of global history. In 1977 the MLG had named its summer program at St. Cloud the Institute in Cultural Studies, and indeed Social Text is still habitually described as a journal of “cultural studies.” But it is worth remembering that in St. Cloud, that phrase was a resonant neologism, an attempt to point to an inchoate space of investigation, rather than a declaration of any sort of direct link between the currents that led to the journal and the scholarship that was developing at the time at the Centre for Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in England. As Jameson puts it bluntly, Social Text “was founded as a Marxist journal. . . . We really had no access to the work coming out of Birmingham. They didn’t have a journal and so we just got rumors about what they were doing.” Brenkman likewise notes that although “in retrospect the journal did quite a lot to establish and give a shape to cultural studies in the US,” at the time of its founding the editors were not “particularly thinking in terms of trying to create a field or a new kind of discipline in the academy.” In the first issue, Michael Brown (discussing the work of Raymond Williams) calls “cultural studies” a “problematic” term. 24 Even among those who joined later in the 1980s, there is a consensus that “cultural studies” was not at the center of the journal’s concerns, nor the most accurate term to describe the mix of elements it brought together. That said, Social Text never held a posture of decided hostility to Birmingham cultural studies, and it proved hospitable to some of the first discussions of that work as it was “internationalized” in the 1980s.25 And a number of members of the Social Text collective were prominent participants at the conference that was organized by the MLG in collaboration with the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the summer of 1983, leading to the field-defining anthology Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. 26 But even a decade later, the Social Text position on “cultural studies” still struck a certain distance, as evidenced by the scare quotes in the title of Jameson’s 1993 essay “On ‘Cultural Studies.’ ”27 Social Text is also commonly described as an “interdisciplinary” journal, but that term had little or no meaning for the early collective. Embedded in the very notion of the interdisciplinary — the idea that one can work across or between disciplines — is an acceptance of disciplines as units or categories of inquiry with established methodological practices and standards of review and self-replication. And Social Text, if anything, begins with the rejection of that presupposition, with the aim to “break down barriers” in every sense, as Aronowitz phrases it, using the tool Social Text 100

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of theory. From the other side of the era of “high theory,” it is perhaps difficult to recall the leverage that term provided in the 1970s, the way it seemed to open up interpretative possibilities while retaining the allure of synthesis: the hope that with the right approach, one could still “understand the totality,” in the words of Anders Stephanson. It is a worthwhile exercise to note just how little of the work of the major twentieth-century intellectuals one might now list under the category of theory was available until the 1970s. Jameson’s Marxism and Form, for instance, was celebrated not only for its insights into the work of mid-twentieth-century French and German thinkers, but also for its deep work with the originals, given the fact that much of the work of Theodor W. Adorno, Georg Lukács, Ernst Bloch, and even Walter Benjamin was still then “inaccessible to the English-language reader.”28 In the early 1970s, there appeared for the first time translations into English of classic works by many of the major intellectuals of the European tradition, including Lukács, Max Horkheimer, Adorno, Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, and Pierre Bourdieu. 29 Social Text, although it never made translation central to its editorial goals (as did peer journals such as Telos and New German Critique), did play an important role in bringing foreign intellectuals into the U.S. academic conversation, and the collective worked hard, albeit with limited success, to develop a roster of international “corresponding editors” that at various times included scholars in Japan, Sweden, and Great Britain. One of the more striking features of the first decade is the prevalence of important translations of new work by thinkers such as Michel de Certeau, Jacques Attali, and Roberto Fernández Retamar.30 The impulse to break down barriers also led to one of the more unusual formal features of the early journal: the section of short essays, poems, and short fiction called “Unequal Developments” that appeared at the end of almost every issue. There was no generic expectation of “uniformity” to these pieces, as Aronowitz explains; they were “occasional, random, smaller.” Jameson’s metaphorical title, echoing the jargon of Marxist economics, was meant as a serious joke: it made the point that these “smaller interventions” (to use Jameson’s description) had to be taken somehow next to — and of equal importance to — the large, ambitious essays in the first part of each issue. They could take up a current film (Jameson wrote pieces on Diva and The Shining), muse on the historical implications of P. T. Barnum, consider the politics of cruising in gay culture, or discuss a recent book by Bruno Latour. Brenkman, who came up with the idea to include a section of short pieces — he was inspired by a similar section in Tel Quel as well as the aphoristic Denkbilder of Adorno and Benjamin — describes “Unequal Developments” as “one of my favorite parts of the journal,” and says he had hoped it would become even more central to Social Text’s identity. 8

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By the publication of Social Text 5 in 1982, Stanley Aronowitz had taken a teaching position at the City University of New York (CUNY). As the other founding editors were pulled into new commitments at different institutions (Brenkman moved to Northwestern University, and Jameson left Yale for the University of California at Santa Cruz and then Duke University), the New York collective became the de facto Social Text collective, and the core of the group began to be composed of scholars at CUNY, NYU, Rutgers, Princeton, and Columbia. Beyond its membership, the journal was deeply shaped by the intellectual and political conditions of Manhattan in the early 1980s. Lacking a permanent space, the journal held its editorial meetings on Sunday afternoons in people’s homes — sometimes uptown (at Serafina Bathrick’s apartment at 92nd and Amsterdam or Loren Shumway’s place at 108th and Riverside), but more often downtown (at the apartment shared by Sohnya Sayres and George Yudice on East 10th Street near NYU or later Andrew Ross’s loft in SoHo or Bruce Robbins’s place in Tribeca) — and, as evoked in the section of quotes on “the social life of the collective” in this issue, the intimate, nonacademic setting fostered open-ended, freewheeling (and sometimes heated) discussion and cultivated a sense of camaraderie among the participants. Manuscript review was often a time-consuming process since submissions were read by the entire collective (rather than parceled out to two or three “expert” field reviewers as in the peer review model of scholarly editing). Each submission was presented by an “advocate” on the collective and then discussed, sometimes in great detail, and finally voted on by the entire group. Generally, after submissions had been considered, the meeting turned into a general discussion centered on a recent article or book, current events, or contemporary politics. The topics could vary greatly, according to the interests and concerns of the members, from the specific (a Terry Eagleton essay in the last New Left Review) to the general (representations of the intellectual in contemporary theory or the state of the Green Party), and occasionally participants would offer informal presentations: for instance, at one October 1986 meeting, Cornel West initiated a discussion of John Rajchman’s book on Michel Foucault. The collective also periodically hosted open “soirées,” which attracted a broader and motlier audience of academics, activists, journalists, and artists. Most often they were hosted by Sayres and Yudice, or by Michael Brown at his loft on Sixth Avenue in SoHo. The entry fee provided access to an evening of speakers, discussion, and a simple buffet of food and drink. Typically, a soirée would focus on a particular topic, although these varied as widely as the discussions in collective meetings; one proposed in 1985 addressed the “hegemonic notion” of market socialism among the Democratic Socialists of America, while another the following year featured a lecture by Chantal Mouffe on communitarianism and right-wing Social Text 100

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politics, with a response by Aronowitz. In September 1985, the journal hosted a small panel (featuring Cornel West and John Gay) that discussed the antiapartheid struggle in South Africa and the divestment movement. The goal of the soirées was not simply to raise money — although the funds these events generated, along with membership dues paid on a sliding scale and yearly grants from the New York State Council on the Arts, constituted the journal’s primary means of support for the first half of the decade. More crucially, these events were a means for establishing Social Text as a forum for fresh debate and agenda-setting on the Left, providing an opportunity for intellectual and activist engagement beyond the confines of the university. There was a potent political symbolism at work in the fact that these convivial scholarly gatherings were staged outside the context of the university seminar room, away from the bite-sized blandness of institutional catering. Perhaps because of this sense of oppositional space, those who participated in the soirées talk about them today with some wistfulness. They speak of an atmosphere of intense engagement, with pitched debates lasting well into the evening. Such characterizations may sound romantic, even prelapsarian, but they are also in keeping with the political tenor of the period. Activist collectives were flourishing in 1980s New York. The real estate speculation that would ultimately gentrify the Lower East Side was an expansion opportunity for many collective-based groups that, like the Nuyorican Poets Cafe and Artists Space, purchased their downtown spaces in this period. Collectives like Paper Tiger, producer of the alternative cable-access programming network Deep Dish TV, were founded at the beginning of the 1980s, and toward the end of the decade, new activist collectives such as ACT-UP reawakened the sense of urgency in collective political practice. Members of the early Social Text collective circulated in these worlds and enabled varying degrees of cross-pollination in the process. However, the local organization with which the journal was most closely enmeshed was the annual Socialist Scholars Conference. Founded in 1983 by the CUNY chapter of Democratic Socialists of America, the Socialist Scholars Conference attracted a broad range of leftist intellectuals, as well as activists from the labor movement and student radicals from the United States and elsewhere. Panels at the Borough of Manhattan Community College in lower Manhattan would routinely draw crowds in the hundreds. (Barack Obama apparently attended this or a similar conference at Cooper Union when he was a student at Columbia; he recalled finding the discussions lacking in intensity compared to his experiences at Occidental College.)31 Social Text was a sponsor of the Socialist Scholars Conference from the beginning, organizing several panels each year and frequently publishing papers that had been presented there.32 There was 10

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a sense that the conference served as a form of political and intellectual life support in a period marked by the hegemony of Reagan populism and late – Cold War geopolitical unease. As Stephanson described it in a report on the third conference, the Socialist Scholars Conference was crucial in that it allowed socialist intellectuals “to feel that they are part of some kind of movement and not always in a precarious state of isolation.”33 It was also important in that it served as a space for dialogue among a variety of coalitions and collectives on the left, and in particular among progressive periodicals, many of which (including the Nation, Socialist Review, Semiotext(e), Monthly Review, and Radical History Review, in addition to Social Text) arranged panel sessions. The conference functioned, then, to “open up a public sphere where things can be ventilated and contested without sectarian control.”34 It gathered, in the words of Andrew Ross, the full “spectrum of the Left” in the United States. The commitment to sustaining a climate of intellectual and political community placed substantial demands upon the collective. Between the work of putting out the journal, the Socialist Scholars Conference, and extant institutional responsibilities, membership on the collective involved a significant expenditure of time and resources. Core members would end up meeting several times a month, and groups would branch off to study particular theorists, many of them newly translated European authors (including Bloch, Jürgen Habermas, and Mikhail Bakhtin) whose work had come to the collective’s attention. Being a member of the collective involved a formidable amount of reading in addition to submissions, as these study groups often assigned articles for discussion at general meetings as part of a broader project of self-education. There were also specific challenges inherent in the very nature of collective work. Meeting minutes, reports, memoranda, and sundry ephemera from this period register the complexity of putting out a serial publication under conditions of voluntary labor governed by a consensus-based decision-making structure. Keeping track of manuscripts, a thankless task that began with an unwieldy index card system and evolved through successive record-keeping formats, was a frustrating endeavor, dependent upon the responsiveness of collective members assigned to be “corresponding editors” for each submission under review. (It was the corresponding editor’s duty to collate readers’ reports and to supervise the process of revision and production for a given contributor.) Other aspects of collective work, like financial record keeping and grant writing, were vital to the ongoing viability of the journal, but although they required significant time and attention, they were not particularly visible within the culture of the collective. Alongside the effort to build and sustain an infrastructure were insistent countercurrents to the bureaucratic process, manifested in ongoing modes of internal debate and autocritique. Members of the collecSocial Text 100

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tive periodically wrote multipage assessments of the journal’s editorial organization and its political commitments. Many criticized the pull of rationalization, linking divisions of labor to the distribution of editorial power. In 1984, after the publication of the eighth issue, Omar Dahbour composed an internal critique of the journal’s direction, arguing that the collective had strayed too far from the rubrics of inquiry outlined in the “Prospectus” in the first issue.35 Even earlier, there had been debates about the organizational structure and editorial protocols of the collective itself. In October 1982, in response to the flux of membership and the need for organizational continuity, the collective had appointed a Committee for Administration (later renamed the “executive committee”) that was “charged with the general task of keeping things afloat.”36 Later the collective would begin electing two coeditors for the Social Text collective to take on this responsibility. 37 The collective flirted with such divisions of labor throughout the next decade, and they were the source of much debate: many worried that putting the management of the journal in the hands of an executive core of a few collective members would bring organizational stability at the price of the open interaction and self-determination of the collective as a whole. Still, even those who, like Stephanson, appreciated the “artisanal” and “self-consciously utopian” quality of the pure collective model recognized that over time the journal became “more of a centralized operation by default because people didn’t have the time.” Stephanson, perhaps the collective member most committed to finding ways to ensure the institutional stability of the journal, wrote a number of documents on the topic and regularly addressed it in his minutes when he was managing editor in the mid-1980s. In 1991, he penned a four-page memorandum titled “On the Present Organizational State of the Collective,” which reviewed the journal’s internal history over the preceding decade and concluded with a plea for a more sustained conversation about the relation between the journal’s structure and its broader political aims: “We have got to ask ourselves the larger question that I raised in 1984 and which in fact has been raised periodically ever since 1979 when I joined the journal: what are our aims, what are our political, theoretical and strategic aims?”38 Bound up in this process of periodic autocritique was a persistent acknowledgment of the onerous conditions of independent publishing. For years, the collective debated the advantages of signing with a university press as its publisher. The material benefits were obvious; there had been times in the journal’s history when there was no money to put out the next issue. Grants from the New York State Council on the Arts could not be relied upon and, at one point, even paying off a loan for purchasing desktop publishing equipment was a struggle. Starting in 1983, Stanley Aronowitz was able to arrange for Social Text to have access to mailroom and photo12

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copying facilities at the CUNY Graduate Center, but the journal received no funding or office space. As is evident in the interview excerpts gathered in this issue under the title “Production,” many collective members still remember sitting in the hallway outside Aronowitz’s office, sorting manuscripts and licking envelopes. A procession of unpaid or underpaid managing editors, many of them graduate students and assistant professors at CUNY, Columbia, NYU, and Rutgers, shouldered the main burdens of publishing a journal in the pre-Internet, pre-desktop publishing age. In the 1980s, the collective members who took on managing editor duties (not all of whom were acknowledged on the masthead) included Lou Amdour, Wendy Graham, David Wildman, Philomena Mariani, Anders Stephanson, Sohnya Sayres, Nancy Anderson, Michael Denning, Bruce Robbins, Betina Zolkower, and Trish Rosen. Every element of the production process was handled in-house: the distribution of submissions to collective members; the tracking of manuscripts through the submission process; correspondence with contributors; copy-editing; typesetting; layout and design; art; the production and proofing of galleys; correspondence with the printer and distributor; the solicitation of advertising exchanges with other journals; the management of subscriptions; billing and account management; and correspondence with subscribers, whether individual or institutional. This precarious reality meant that there was little controversy when in 1991 (during the period when Social Text 31/32, the special double issue “Third World and Post-Colonial Issues,” was being prepared) the journal was given a staff line with benefits for the managing editor at the Center for the Analysis of Contemporary Culture at Rutgers. 39 Starting in 1991, for the first time in the journal’s history, those who held the managing editor position (Philomena Mariani, Monica Marciczkiewicz, Michèle Sharon, and Livia Tenzer) found themselves working in an actual dedicated Social Text office, and this remains the situation at Columbia, where the journal moved in 2007. The move to an institutional home was generally viewed as a necessary and fortuitous development. But signing the contract with Duke University Press in January 1992 was another matter. It involved signing over ownership of the journal, and with it the intellectual independence that had made Social Text such an influential organ in leftist scholarly culture. At the core of the concerns about signing with a publisher was the question of editorial control. The contract for the book series with Minnesota University Press, sparked by the success of The 60’s without Apology — which originated as the journal’s first special issue, Social Text 9/10, in 1984 — had shown that university collaborations could prove beneficial, providing royalties as well as a vehicle for broadening the journal’s readership. But the Duke contract was taken by some collective members Social Text 100

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to signal the closing of “the frontiers of what the journal could be and do,” as Randy Martin recalls. The collective debated the merits of affiliating the journal with a publisher for a number of months, and held tentative conversations with a number of presses (including not only Duke but also Oxford, Chicago, Minnesota, and Guilford). Even after the Duke contract, many collective members continued to express reservations about the consequences of the move. According to the minutes of meetings in this period, these members were not only concerned about the potential loss of editorial autonomy; they also worried that the loss of flexibility in the publishing schedule would make it harder to devote the necessary time to the preparation of issues. Before the contract, the publication schedule was sometimes erratic — for instance, in 1982 there were two issues of Social Text, but in 1985 there was only one — but starting with issue 30 the journal became a quarterly, assembled according to the fixed timeline expected by the press and by institutional subscribers. As Sayres puts it (in the selection of interview excerpts titled “Independent Publishing” included in the pages that follow), the production schedule imposed “a kind of bind” on the editorial process: previously, “when we were in whatever discursive breakdown we were in, we had time to recollect, to think about it, and start afresh. But with a press, it’s rationalized, you’re in a mechanical production problem: that commercial machinery puts you on a conveyer belt of some kind. If you want to gather in for a year or two and really think through new avenues, new ways of doing things — suddenly there’s no time.” Even collective members who strongly supported the move recognized the potential problems. In the meeting where the collective discussed what to say in an editorial note for the first issue published by Duke, coeditor Robbins took notes on the conversation that capture some of these concerns: “not defeatist!” “refusing the narrative of the fall,” and “chance to reaffirm commitment to get non-academics.” But the sense of anxiety these notes capture did not find its way into the actual statement that ran. A brief avowal of the journal’s continued independence, the note cited as reasons for the move “a decline in the funding of cultural organs (especially those of a political nature), the expansion of the university sector to incorporate most of the critical areas of intellectual life, and, in the case of Social Text, a depletion of its editors’ capacity to attend to all of the labor-intensive details of desktop production.”40 The stress exerted by all of these factors is readily apparent in the archive of the journal’s first two decades. Indeed, in their very obsolescence the material forms of its contents — mimeographed typescripts, dot matrix printer fonts, chalky-thick fax paper, square black floppy disks — convey the challenges of publishing in the paleodigital era. But equally evident in the archive is a sense of what changed around 1992. The soirées stopped 14

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happening. The journal gradually stopped publishing poetry and fiction, and the “Unequal Developments” section was dropped. Meetings became more businesslike — there were fewer discussions of assigned readings. And there were fewer mentions of the Socialist Scholars Conference in the minutes. Still, these changes were not direct results of the move to Duke. The transformation of the collective’s work that occurred in this period was also symptomatic of changes in the milieu in which it operated, including broader shifts in methods of political organizing and the increased professionalization of the academy. 41 For most of the 1980s, prior to the widespread adoption of e-mail and the Internet, the evolving project of leftist intellectual politics depended upon continuous face-to-face discussions and the outreach activities that sustained them. With its soirées and its visible presence in the Socialist Scholars Conference, as well as its links to the collective-oriented culture of New York activism and art, Social Text provided a powerful space for consolidating a leftist intellectual community in and around print culture in the 1980s. It is worth asking whether the emergence of digital life and its demands upon attention supplanted the interpersonal dynamics of self-education and political networking that sustained the journal in its first decade. If this question is impossible to answer, it is not simply because of the unavoidable indeterminacy involved in trying to identify the impact of an absence. It is also because of a more general problem that any effort to narrate the history of the journal in the 1990s must face, namely, the catastrophic event of the Sokal hoax. From the perspective of the presentday collective, the effect of this 1996 event is as much historiographic as it is political. Not only does it threaten to blot out everything else that happened in the journal in this period, but it also imposes a sense of historical rupture, introducing a before and after into the narrative of Social Text — and indeed, of leftist cultural critique more generally — in the 1990s. This historiographic distortion plays out in a number of ways, most notably in the way it positions the politics of collective work. Alan Sokal’s subsequent enshrinement by some as a whistle-blowing hero, taking on the cultural studies mafia all by himself, is a narrative of individual agency that obscures the hoax’s debt to modes of radical intervention developed by collectives — groups such as the Situationists, the Yippies, and the British anarcho-punk collective Crass. Indeed, after the hoax was perpetrated, at least one member suggested that the Social Text collective perpetrate its own political prank in response, a suggestion one might read as an effort to reclaim the collective dimensions of such strategies. Moreover, although Sokal and his supporters attributed his success to the slipshod tyranny of a collective-based editorial process that eschewed the disciplinary gatekeeping mechanisms of peer review, it is also possible to see his actions as the result of a gradual weakening of collective bonds, associated in part with Social Text 100

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the journal’s institutionalization. Considering the episode from today’s vantage point, at a welcome remove from the maelstrom of the “culture wars” in the 1990s — and at an even greater distance from what one might describe as the “golden age” of collectivism in the 1970s — there seems more than a little irony in the fact that Sokal’s authorial duplicity was championed so vociferously by conservative forces intent on restoring accountability in scholarly publishing. The point here is not so much to adjudicate between interpretations, nor to rehash tired arguments from more than a dozen years ago, but rather to historicize the hoax within a continuous and dynamic concern with the politics of collective work in the editorial milieu of Social Text. Readers who are familiar with the journal only through the Sokal hoax might be surprised to see how little attention it receives in the pages of this anniversary issue. But the process of stock taking demanded by the occasion has made clear how little the event means within the broader history of the journal as a collective endeavor. As Ellen Willis pointed out in a perceptive essay at the time in the Village Voice, Sokal’s role in political culture was less transformative than diagnostic. 42 For those who were already worried that something called “postmodernism” or “cultural studies” was corroding the leftist intellectual project, the episode was a decisive symptom, confirming their belief that work on the politics of culture was intellectually bankrupt and methodologically fraudulent, an intellectual poison pill that left us intoxicated by indeterminacy, staggering away from our “true” goals. For members of the so-called cultural Left, positioned by Sokal as a hegemonic force rather than a marginalized one (as it clearly was in the mid-1990s), the episode condensed and simplified the political positions at stake in cultural critique into a one-dimensional stance for or against antifoundationalism. 43 But when the moment of the hoax is bracketed off, the 1990s can be recognized as a moment during which the journal developed new commitments and modes of collective accountability. Queer politics, cultural citizenship and policy, and the labor struggles of university employees emerged as pivotal concerns of the journal in this period, and with these commitments came links to external forms of collectivization — groups such as ACT-UP and Queer Nation, artist and community groups, and trade unions. From the perspective of today’s collective, the significance of the period ultimately has more to do with these broad shifts in political affiliation than with the noisy controversy of the affair, as exhausting and embarrassing as it must have been for the collective in 1996. The Sokal affair also recedes in significance for us today insofar as the process of historical reflection is always refracted through the concerns of the present moment. In the current decade, what we think of as a political hoax has taken on far higher stakes. The United States is in the midst of a savage and ruinous war on the basis of duplicitous assertions about weap16

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ons of mass destruction, and scientific fudgery is now a form of political practice far more closely associated with the Right, most notably in efforts to legitimize “intelligent design” and to undermine evidence of climate change. These conditions provide leftist blagueurs with targets far more important than a small academic journal with a largely volunteer staff. It is not surprising that the Bush-Cheney years saw the rise of collective groups such as the Yes Men, which began in 1999 with the publication of a fake campaign Web site, www.GWBush.com, and which has helped to reinvigorate the prank as a leftist tactic with a number of high-profile stunts in the intervening years. 44 Since then, the loose-knit collective has produced a series of viral gems, such as the 2004 intervention where a member pretended to be a spokesman for Dow Chemical and convinced the BBC that the corporation was ready to apologize for the 1984 Bhopal tragedy and the 2008 ersatz edition of the New York Times in which headlines trumpeted the end of the war in Iraq, the passage of a national health insurance act, and the nationalization of the oil industry, among other things. 45 As hoaxes, these collective projects were far more successful than the efforts of any individual prankster in focusing attention on the relationship between the media, corporate power, and government. Just as it is possible to chart the transformations in Social Text over its first two decades, one could attempt to outline the ways the journal has changed since the late 1990s. Clearly there are a number of new rubrics of inquiry that have been elaborated, often in individual essays or special issues that have come to be influential in subsequent scholarship; these include globalization, secularism, diaspora, corporate culture, and trans­ national history. At the same time, although there are central areas of concern that have fallen into dormancy or obsolescence — most notably, the focus on mass culture in the first few issues of the journal and the debates around postmodernism that were so prominent in the late 1980s — the current collective has continued to support work in areas of concern to Social Text for decades, such as the politics of academic labor, the complexities of war and imperialism, and, perhaps above all, postcolonial theory and queer theory. Recently, we have started again to publish a section of shorter, occasional essays and Denkbilder (though without the title “Unequal Developments”), and in this way we hope to retain the impulse to break down barriers that animated the founding of the journal. Rather than attempt here to offer an overview of the present decade, however, we will let the collective speak for itself, as it were, in the essays that follow, which are as much a dialogue about the future of Social Text as a perusal of its past. Originally we were thinking of the deliberately broad terms used as titles of the essays here (“Affect,” “Art,” “Aesthetics,” “AIDS,” “Body,” etc.) as something like “anchored keywords.” That is, the collective conceived of Social Text 100 as being composed of pieces Social Text 100

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that would use particular points (single essays) or threads (themes that are taken up in a number of essays over the years) in the publication history of the journal as the starting point for a consideration of broader issues of knowledge production, critique, or methodology. One model would be the entries in Raymond Williams’s Keywords, if one imagines a keywords approach that attempts to apprehend not a “vocabulary of culture and society” in the widest sense, as Williams does, but instead a shared vocabulary active in a particular journal as an index to a broader set of dialogues in scholarship, political discourse, and culture. 46 But our motivation here is less etymological and less pedagogical than Williams’s book and the numerous projects it has inspired.47 We are less interested in providing historically nuanced definitions of important terms and concepts for use in future scholarship than in producing, through a critical reading of the past of this journal, a conversation about its future direction, and about the stakes of journal publishing at a radically different conjuncture than the one that gave rise to Social Text. This is to say that this issue is at once an effort to speculate on the future of the collective through its history and an insistence that any such effort must itself be a collective endeavor. Notes Assembling this issue would have been impossible without the editorial assistance and dedication of Livia Tenzer, who oversaw the entire process by which members of the collective wrote and revised their individual entries, even setting up a wiki Web site where contributors could read and comment on each others’ work-in-progress. We are deeply appreciative of the extraordinary time and effort she put into every stage of this issue’s production. We would also like to thank editorial assistants Hiie Saumaa and Alexander Kupfer, the Social Text graduate student employees at Columbia and NYU, respectively, who were instrumental in the collecting, organizing, and photocopying of the editorial archive as we gathered it from various former collective members. We are especially grateful to Hiie Saumaa, who transcribed all the interviews, an enormous task that proved crucial for the preparation of this volume. 1. James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Authority,” Representations 2 (Spring 1983): 139. 2. The phrase “interested affiliation” is adopted from Ron Silliman, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Steve Benson, Bob Perelman, and Barrett Watten, “Aesthetic Tendency and the Politics of Poetry: A Manifesto,” Social Text 19/20 (1988): 272. In the literary realm, one example of an attempt at collective history would be the ongoing serial The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography by ten writers associated with the rise of the Language poetry movement in San Francisco in the 1970s (Rae Armantrout, Steve Benson, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Tom Mandel, Ted Pearson, Bob Perelman, Kit Robinson, Ron Silliman, and Barrett Watten): see www.thegrandpiano.org/. See also Watten’s essay “How the Grand Piano Is Being Written,” available at www.english.wayne.edu/fac_pages/ewatten/posts/ post34.html. Another recent provocative model is George E. Lewis’s ambitious his-

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tory of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, which explicitly discusses the burden of writing “an autobiography of a collective”: see Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), xxvii. 3. The Hegelian understanding of a dialectical history based in speculative thought is perhaps best expounded and exemplified in the work of C. L. R. James; see, for instance, Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Lenin (Westport, CT: Hill, 1980), 8, 10; and “Lectures on The Black Jacobins,” Small Axe, no. 8 (September 2000): 72. The phrase “read hard” — as in “I read that book very hard” — is one of James’s habitual colloquialisms (see “Lectures,” 67); as the phrase implies, speculation does not involve flights of fancy, but instead a dogged, almost tactile grappling with the archive. 4. Brent Hayes Edwards and Anna McCarthy, interview with Stanley Arono­ witz, Jackson Heights, Queens, 4 October 2008; Edwards and McCarthy, interview with Bruce Robbins, New York, New York, 13 October 2008; Edwards and McCarthy, interview with Sohnya Sayres, Department of Cinema Studies, Tisch School of the Arts, NYU, New York, 22 October 2008; Edwards and McCarthy, interview with Andrew Ross, Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, NYU, New York, 25 November 2008; Edwards and McCarthy, interview with John Brenk­ man, Department of English, Baruch College, CUNY, New York, 6 December 2008; Edwards and McCarthy, interview with Randy Martin, Department of Art and Public Policy, Tisch School of the Arts, NYU, New York, 18 December 2008; Edwards, telephone interview with Fredric Jameson, 16 January 2009; Edwards and Livia Tenzer, interview with Anders Stephanson, Department of History, Columbia University, 5 February 2009; Tenzer, e-mail interview with Wendy Graham, February 2009; Tenzer, e-mail interview with David Wildman, February 2009. All subsequent quotes from former collective members, both in the introduction and in the selections grouped under thematic headings and interspersed throughout this issue, are taken from these conversations. 5. Although he had already published widely and gained an international reputation as an organizer and sociologist, Aronowitz did not receive his PhD until the fall of 1975, from the Union Graduate School (now the Union Institute). 6. Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972); Stanley Aronowitz, False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness (New York: McGrawHill, 1973). 7. Sean I. Homer, “A Short History of the MLG,” mlg.eserver.org/about/ a-short-history-of-the-mlg (accessed 23 April 2009). 8. Homer, “A Short History of the MLG.” 9. Patrick Story, “The Spirit of St. Cloud: A Report,” Minnesota Review, n.s., 10 (Spring 1978): 131. Early issues of Mediations are extremely difficult to find, and we have unfortunately not been able to consult copies from the relevant period (between 1975 and 1980). Although the publication was founded as a newsletter, it seems to have contained some theoretical deliberation as well. In the early 1990s, Mediations was expanded into journal format by members of its editorial board (including Ron Strickland and Chris Newfield), and it is still active online as the journal of the Marxist Literary Group. See mlg.eserver.org/mediations. 10. Jameson, “Notes toward a Marxist Cultural Politics,” introduction to “Special Supplement: The Marxist Alternative to the Traditions,” Minnesota Review, n.s., 5 (Fall 1975): 35. In the next issue of the Minnesota Review, Jameson is listed as an associate editor and there is another supplement of work from the MLG, titled Social Text 100

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“Marxism and Utopia,” with contributions by Darko Suvin, Mark Poster, Paul Buhle, and Serafina Bathrick, among others. See “Special Supplement: Marxism and Utopia,” Minnesota Review, n.s., 6 (Spring 1976): 51 – 139. 11. Jameson, “Notes toward a Marxist Cultural Politics,” 36, 37. With regard to the university, he argues that it offers “an opportunity; but it is also an institution which has very specific social functions to perform — some of them practical and immediate, like government contracts in the sciences or the formation of a technocratic personnel of this or that type — some more deeply ideological through the programming of students to certain life routines and modes of thinking and it is also, on occasion, the setting for a more specific type of political demand and political action. These are not alternatives but dimensions of the same phenomenon of which we must make our students aware just as we maintain our own sensitivity to them: for it would be fatuous to imagine that we are able to use the university without a keen sense of the way in which, in return, it uses us” (38). 12. Jameson, “Notes toward a Marxist Cultural Politics,” 38. 13. The session “Toward a Marxist Theory of Culture” included the following presentations: Aronowitz, “Cultural Politics”; Sylvia Wynter (who was then a colleague of Jameson’s at UCSD), “Literature and the Third World”; and Carol Lopate (who was a colleague of Aronowitz’s at Staten Island), “Marxism and Feminism.” See “The Ninetieth Annual Convention of the Modern Language Association of America,” conference program, PMLA 90, no. 6 (November 1975). It is worth noting that this initial conjuncture privileged a number of topics — not only Marxist theory but also feminism and what would come to be called postcolonial literature — that would prove to be crucial elements in Social Text. 14. Story, “Spirit of St. Cloud,” 132. On the Summer Institute, see also Gaylord C. Leroy, “The Marxism of the Marxist Literary Group,” Minnesota Review, n.s., 10 (Spring 1978): 133 – 41. 15. Story, “Spirit of St. Cloud,” 132. Story’s account notwithstanding, the collective has historically included strong representation from both of these fields. 16. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, personal communication with Brent Hayes Edwards, April 2009. 17. Brenkman recalls: “One of the key things in how the journal got off the ground is that Fred was absolutely a magnet for new work. He traveled a lot, he gave a lot of lectures, he went to a lot of things. People would just come up to him and hand him manuscripts and so on. I met him that way.” 18. According to the narrative in the New York State Council on the Arts grant applications submitted by Social Text in the late 1980s, each editor contributed $10,000 out of pocket; issues 4 and 5 were funded by an equivalent contribution by Conrad Johnson. 19. Frederick J. Hoffman, Charles Allen, and Carolyn F. Ulrich, introduction to The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1946), v. 20. Ezra Pound, “Small Magazines,” English Journal 19 (1930): 702. The phrase “strategic containment” comes from the cowritten “Prospectus,” Social Text 1 (1979): 3. 21. By 1979, Aronowitz was teaching at the University of California at Irvine, and Jameson had left UCSD in 1977 to take a position at Yale University. 22. Aronowitz, Brenkman, and Jameson, “Prospectus,” 3. 23. Ibid., 4. 24. Michael E. Brown, “The Politics of Anti-Theater,” Social Text 1 (1979): 157. He writes that “cultural studies” “is not an original category of Marxism, 20

Edwards and McCarthy ∙ Introduction

nor does it name something real that is objectively prior to theory. To accept the identification of cultural studies and the recommendation that those studies take account of ‘economic determinations’ without regard to the ‘restoration of the whole social material process’ is to do too little and presume too much. It is already to have agreed that theater, literature, the visual arts, and music can be extracted from the social material process with impunity if they are also shown within a causal matrix that includes similarly extracted factors of social and political economy. In that case, Marxism is not distinctive; it simply clarifies a material situation that no one had seriously denied. But Marxism does more than that. It establishes that culture is not merely limited by society but is itself a social material process constituted by the social relations of capitalism. Moreover, Marxism, as the critique of capitalism, begins as a critique of categories, including ‘culture.’ ” 25. One scholar central to the conversations at Birmingham, Richard Johnson, published one of the first overviews of the center’s work in the journal: see “What Is Cultural Studies Anyway?” Social Text 16 (1986 – 87): 38 – 80. See also the dossier of essays on Raymond Williams in Social Text 30 (1992). 26. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988). 27. Fredric Jameson, “On ‘Cultural Studies,’ ” Social Text 34 (1993): 17 – 52. 28. Jameson, Marxism and Form, x. 29. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971); Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Seabury, 1972); Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971); Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971); Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1977); Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). 30. See Michel de Certeau, “On the Oppositional Practices of Everyday Life,” trans. Fredric Jameson and Carl Lovitt, Social Text 3 (1980): 3 – 43; Jacques Attali, “Introduction to Bruits,” trans. Jean-Joseph Goux and Fredric Jameson, Social Text 7 (1983): 6 – 8; Jean-Joseph Goux and Fredric Jameson, “Interview with Jacques Attali,” Social Text 7 (1983): 9 – 18; Roberto Fernández Retamar, “Our America and the West,” Social Text 15 (1986): 1 – 25. Lindsay Waters, the editor who would acquire The 60s without Apology at the University of Minnesota Press, recalls that Jameson functioned for a number of years as a sort of ad hoc conduit for new theoretical work from around the globe, and his recommendations (produced often through Social Text connections) led directly to publications such as Attali’s Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi, with a foreword by Fredric Jameson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985); and Retamar’s Caliban and Other Essays, trans. Edward Baker, with a foreword by Jameson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). Waters, personal communication to Brent Hayes Edwards, April 2009. 31. Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995; rpt., New York: Three Rivers, 2004), 122. 32. The range of topics on panels organized by Social Text at the Socialist Scholars Conference was remarkably broad: at the 1987 conference, for example, the overarching theme of which was “Against Domination: State, Class, Race, Gender,” the thirteen Social Text panels included “The Crisis of Socialism” (featuring Chantal Mouffe and Bogdan Denitch, among others); “A Black Postmodern Culture?” (with Social Text 100

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Cornel West and Greg Tate); “Critical Legal Studies as a Critique of Domination” (with Kendall Thomas); “The Political Significance of Ecology” (with Barry Commoner and Kirkpatrick Sale); “Popular Culture and Sexual Politics” (with Andrew Ross, James Kavanagh, and Laura Kipnis); “South Africa and Israel — Alliance in Crisis” (with Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, Yerach Gover, and Nubar Novsepian); “Intellectuals and Subalternity” (with Bruce Robbins, John McClure, Aijaz Ahmad, R. Radhakrishnan, and Caren Kaplan); and “Abortion: Women and Moral Agency” (with Patricia Mann, Beverly Harrison, and Francis Kissling). 33. Anders Stephanson, “On the Socialist Scholars Conference 1985,” Social Text 12 (1985): 124. 34. Ibid. 35. Omar Dahbour, “Fulfillment of the Original Prospectus” [internal memorandum to the Social Text Collective], 9 September 1984, Social Text editorial archive, Columbia University; Omar Dahbour, “Original Prospectus and Subsequent History of Social Text; A Theoretical Critique” [internal memorandum], 19 September 1984, Social Text editorial archive, Columbia University. 36. Anders Stephanson, “On the Present Organizational State of the Collective” [internal memorandum], 7 January 1991, Social Text editorial archive, Columbia University. 37. Although Aronowitz, Brenkman, and Jameson are listed as editors on the masthead of early issues of Social Text, the journal was run as a collective: decisions were made by majority vote, and any member was allowed to propose essays for publication, topics for issues, or subjects for discussion in the meetings and soirées. Many former members of the collective in the early and mid-1980s, especially the graduate students and untenured professors, recall with fondness the unique atmosphere of such radical collectivism. (Of course, this is not to imply that the journal was egalitarian on every level: as is to be expected, some took on more of the intense labor of producing the journal than others, and some had more influence on editorial policy than others — in ways that had to do both with their ambition, articulateness, and charisma and with their seniority and connections as writers and intellectuals in various circuits beyond Social Text — and this unevenness in the distribution of labor created certain minor resentments and jealousies.) Some time after the collective began electing an executive committee in the late 1980s, one or two members started to be identified as editor on the masthead, apparently in recognition of their work in managing that body. Sohnya Sayres was the first named editor, in Social Text 25/26 (1990); for issues 27 and 28 the next year, which debuted a new cover design, Stanley Aronowitz is listed in that capacity. By issue 29, when the journal had taken its office at Rutgers, Bruce Robbins and Andrew Ross are listed as editors; with issue 34 (1992), the second issue published by Duke University Press, Robbins and Ross are described as “editors for the Social Text Collective,” as though to make clear that their function is not that of a traditional editor in chief with full authority over journal policy and contents. 38. Stephanson, “On the Present Organizational State of the Collective.” Other internal documents offering searching (and at times polemical) considerations of the publication history, editorial organization, and future direction of the journal include Anders Stephanson, “To the Social Text Collective: Regarding ‘Sabotage’ and Other Matters,” 3 May 1993; Randy Martin, “Some Thoughts for Social Text,” 22 October 1993; Jonathan Lang, “Letter to the Editorial Collective of Social Text,” 10 December 1993; Sohnya Sayres, “ST/Future,” c. 1993; Nanette Funk, “On Socialtext,” c. 1993, Social Text editorial archive, Columbia University.

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39. The founding director of the center, George Levine, taught in the English department at Rutgers with collective members, including Bruce Robbins and John McClure, but Levine was not himself involved with Social Text. According to the informal arrangement, the managing editor was a member of the center’s staff, but the journal was expressly not supposed to serve as a “house organ” that would publish work developed through the yearly faculty seminars or colloquia at the center. 40. “An Editorial Note,” Social Text 33 (1992): 1. 41. A number of former collective members emphasized the factor of increased professionalization and careerism in describing the changes in the journal in the late 1980s. As Jameson observes, by the end of the decade, “everybody had to be so specialized to get their jobs; people just didn’t have the luxury of this kind of collective work.” To put it differently, according to Brenkman there was unavoidably a “tension” between the innovation of the journal (which in its first decade published material that could not have been published in discipline-specific journals) and the need for scholars to “foster their career and establish their credentials.” Indeed, the very success of Social Text was part of this dynamic: as the journal came to be viewed as a respectable, even privileged place to publish, and as the academy began to value what came to be called “interdisciplinary” scholarship in appointment and tenure decisions, it was, as Aronowitz puts it, “natural that people began to see the journal as a site of certain career opportunities.” 42. Ellen Willis, “My Sokaled Life,” Village Voice, 25 June 1996. 43. One of the sorriest results of the Sokal affair is that, given the hue and cry around the hoax, almost no one actually bothered to take the time to read the special double issue in which Sokal’s essay appeared. The issue was organized as a “forum” of direct and indirect responses by scholars in a variety of fields (including the natural sciences, sociology, anthropology, history, and literature) to Paul Gross and Norman Levitt’s book Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), which spuriously accused the “cultural Left” of attacking science as an institution. (See Andrew Ross, introduction to Social Text 46/47 “Science Wars” [1996]: 7, 12.) The great irony of the hoax is that the issue ended up reproducing the very dynamic it was attempting to diagnose: that is, the fact that Social Text was duped into publishing Sokal’s selfprofessed “satire” was taken as a sign of the ineptitude of the “cultural Left” and its purported attack on scientific rationality. Nevertheless, as is obvious from even a cursory perusal, the other essays in Social Text 46/47 are not based in a “postmodern” critique of Enlightenment rationality per se. Aside from Sokal’s piece, the contributions are concerned not with physics in particular, but instead with the politics of the applied sciences (agribusiness, military technology, waste management, biotechnology, genetic engineering) in corporate capitalism and national security. As Andrew Ross’s introduction to the issue makes clear, the point of the issue is to consider the political and ethical stakes of the applied sciences and to reject the obfuscation of those stakes with claims that all scientific inquiry is automatically “value-free.” Such a consideration is neither “postmodern” nor “anti-science.” 44. On the Yes Men, see theyesmen.org/. The story of the fake Bush campaign Web site can be found at www.rtmark.com/bush.html (accessed 23 April 2009). 45. See theyesmen.org/hijinks/bbcbhopal and theyesmen.org/node/142 (accessed 23 April 2009). 46. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).

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47. For example, Keywords: Experience, ed. Nadia Tazi (New York: Other Press, 2004); Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg, and Meaghan Morris, eds., New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005); Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler, eds., Keywords for American Cultural Studies (New York: New York University Press, 2007).

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The Collective as a Political Model

Fredric Jameson : We decided to try to found a group. It was founded on

the principle, enunciated by some comrade of Stanley’s, that we both felt was very interesting and that I still feel is very interesting: namely, that politics today isn’t organized around parties, it’s organized around journals. So we thought, OK, if we’re trying to build up a Marxist intellectual movement in this country, we would have to have a journal. Anders Stephanson : Fred’s strategic position was always that journals

would somehow take the role of the avant-garde parties in the U.S. So journals are the new parties, or journals are the new kind of avant-garde revolutionary groups or radical groups. And they very much believed this. Coming out of the European background, I was not equally convinced. Stanley Aronowitz : My argument at that time was that we don’t have a

political party worthy of the name, so journals have to be the surrogate political party. The journal was established as an intellectual journal, not to stimulate activism. Or, if you want to talk about activism, the activism we wanted to stimulate was people starting to meet together to do politicalintellectual work together, not political work in the practical sense but political work in the intellectual sense. John Brenkman : The aspect of the journal that I most identified with was

not so much that it was going to be connected to social movements, but instead a sense that the sixties were over, dramatically over, and that in the lingo of the time we were now involved in the “long march” through the institutions. The idea would be to use your research and intellectual work to preserve the critical spirit of the sixties and to think in a more systematic way about movements in society. It was necessary to consolidate at some other level the gains that had been made, or the new prob-

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lems that had been brought to light. This was now a work that we could do through the journal. Fredric Jameson : It had to be collective, and it went along with other

kinds of writing projects. We had a great project at UC-San Diego, I remember. It was myself and some students, but we were all equals and we all wrote papers. And it was critical; they criticized me as much as anybody else. But I remember what we had to do to enforce it: we had to say we’re not going to talk about your paper unless you read everybody else’s. That was finally the ideal image of this sort of collective work. But not just collective in a sense of work like that, but also interests from all kinds of directions coming together. The idea was that the journal would be the clearinghouse — that it would be the place where we learned collective theory and practice, because our idea was that these things were political issues. Work on all of these things was meant to achieve political advance. Andrew Ross : There was a lot of work that went into Social Text that some

folks, including myself, in retrospect might have preferred to put into activism. But at the time the production of the journal was seen as something activist, something integral to the left. And especially as part of the post – New Left movement away from sectarian alliance. Everything in Social Text was political but there was no real line. Sohnya Sayres : Collectives are sort of passé now. People don’t think in

those terms; they don’t want to worry through these processes. Collectives take a lot of time; they’re very difficult to manage. I think we were there to keep a certain kind of creative energy alive. Randy Martin : The draw of the collective was that it offered some promise

of a cauldron where political theory could matter for something. It seemed like a practical embodiment of radical democracy: we were coming up with political interventions that had a kind of theoretical cast, that were urgent, that were of the moment.

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The Collective as a Political Model

Aesthetics Susette Min

All art is political, the problem is that most of it is reactionary, . . . passively affirmative of the relations of power in which it is produced. . . . I would define political art as art that consciously sets out to intervene in (and not just reflect on) relations of power. . . . And there’s one more condition: This intervention must be the organizing principle of the work in all its aspects, not only in its “form” and its “content” but also its mode of production and circulation.  — Andrea Fraser, quoted in Gregg Bordowitz, “Tactics Inside and Out,” Artforum 9 (2004)

To break free from the cycle of commodification has been one of many underlying motivations for the resurgent interest in collectives such as the Situationists and in the aesthetics of the everyday. And yet art’s power as cultural resistance and convivial exchange has been viewed with skepticism and increasing cynicism by those who are most invested in art’s potential — perhaps a feeling or sensibility shared by the editorial board of Social Text in recent years, as evidenced by the virtual absence of essays that directly engage with art and aesthetics. For some, the questions of aesthetics are flatly obsolete and have long been so: think back to Arthur C. Danto’s 1964 essay “The Artworld,” in which he, according to Belinda Bowring, “heralded the end of art’s inextricable relationship with aesthetics,” or Dave Hickey’s good riddance to aesthetics as that “old patriarchal do-dah about transcendental formal values and humane realism.”1 Aesthetics as a politics-free autonomous space is surely a dead, or at least moribund, notion; but consider, too, that aesthetics beginning with Plato and Aristotle (tragedy is civic politics) has always been political, explicitly formulated in close relation to politics, and in some cases more a matter of politics than anything else.

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To dismiss aesthetics is fruitless; aesthetics continues to make judgments on what the establishment sees or defines as both art and meaningful experience. Today, political art tends to be judged by both its timeliness and its timelessness — a limited framework that ignores historical differences, formations of multiple modernities, and current conditions that have radically transformed the production, circulation, and distribution of artistic production. In the late 1980s and 1990s, there was a brief period of resurgent interest in the term, an open invitation to reevaluate and rework the frameworks of aesthetics, in light of productions of knowledge on its historical exclusions based on outdated criteria. The gains of these efforts have been revisited in a spate of recent exhibitions that focus their attention on feminism, multiculturalism, and identity politics — only to conclude that we have a long way to go. Despite appearances, Social Text has always been open to issues of art and aesthetics as they intersect with its aims to explore “art’s capacity to stall or spur our social transformations in a given historical situation,” and to present work that is “open to experimentation with form but sill theoretically engaged” (Brent Hayes Edwards and Randy Martin, “Rallying Social Text,” ST 20, 2002). The following essay samples contemporary art practices in order to introduce productive ways Social Text can and should engage art and aesthetics. The global expansion and transformation of the art world since 1979 and the market’s nimble dexterity at coopting and stultifying the criticality of oppositional art have both created a wider understanding of our definition of art and what it can be, and at the same time led to a profound ambivalence. This ambivalence toward politically or socially engaged art or toward questions about the political role of aesthetics has become prevalent beyond the pages of Social Text as well. For example, in the 2008 issue of October — one of the leading journals on contemporary art — guest editors Benjamin Buchloh and Rachel Churner asked a diverse array of art historians, curators, and artists a series of questions about socially engaged art, leading off with “In what ways have artists, academics, and cultural institutions responded to the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq?”2 The questions seemed to anticipate a defeatist response, underlining the indifference or impotence of the professionalized artist and the futility of political activism in art. Interestingly, the responses from those making their debuts in the pages of October exposed these assumptions, questioned the editors’ belated and sudden interest in socially engaged art, and/or complicated the set of questions by discussing how artists and non-artists (or those outside the art world’s radar) perceived the Iraq War not as an isolated, exceptional incident, but as part of a continuum of U.S. militarization, global capitalism, and American exceptionalism. A contemporary artist whose work occupies this reopened channel 28

Min ∙ Aesthetics

Figure 1. Sharon Hayes, In the Near Future, London (detail), 2008. Multiple-slide-projection installation. Courtesy of the artist

between political activism and art is Sharon Hayes. Her slide-projected images of herself, standing alone at charged sites of protest or controversy in Manhattan, London, and Warsaw, holding large handwritten signs, such as WHEN IS THIS GOING TO END, from her series In the Near Future (2005–8) (fig. 1), on one hand, exemplify or question the use-value of certain modes of political activism in the streets: her images become more stark when juxtaposed with memories of artists mobilizing en masse against the Vietnam War, U.S. activity in Central America, and the inaction of the U.S. government regarding the AIDS crisis. On the other hand, Hayes’s low-tech art practice, which includes borrowing protest poster language from the 1980s, but especially the 1960s, and tweaking and situating it in contemporary social and political contexts, can, as art historian James Meyer suggests, “induce [us] to imagine less romanticized forms of opposition . . . these practices instead construct a periodized sixties without illusion, a sixties we can use.”3 Since the 1960s, corporations and governments, alongside wealthy individual buyers, have enabled intercultural flows, investing money in art and increasing its value to the point of concretizing money’s superiority to art. As anticipated in the pages of Social Text in the early 1990s by Laura Kipnis (ST 15, 1986), Abigail Solomon-Godeau (ST 21, 1989), Hal Foster (ST 21, highlighting how much of contemporary art constitutes the “infrastructural reality of late capitalism”), and Rosalyn Deutsche (ST 33, 1992), the art world’s incestuous relationship with the market and Social Text 100

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the long-reaching shadow cast by global capital over the art world have led to a number of phenomena: art criticism’s obsolescence, the corporatization of the museum, the devaluation of art’s emotional and spiritual value, and art’s interdependence with the market. In other words, Social Text’s lack of direct engagement with contemporary art due to its relationship with the market is understandable. At the same time, the market is not all-encompassing, as select artists have worked outside the status quo in order to address similar or overlapping concerns to those raised in recent issues of Social Text, such as the corporatization of the university, the erosion of academic freedom, and the establishment of neoliberal multiculturalism. More important, art’s potential remains unsettling — at times, a concrete threat. Both random and systematic attempts by the state to contain art’s production and presentation raise questions, especially since 9/11, regarding the kinds of artistic practices and products that are prohibited or proscribed in this (post) modern age. For example, in an exchange with a fellow airline passenger, artist Allan deSouza was confronted with the following warning: “As an American citizen, I want you to stop taking them.” Taking what? Photographs of deserted areas of airports and airport runways or, from the point of view of his passenger-mate, images for reconnaissance (fig. 2). After Figure 2. Allan deSouza, Divine 1881, 9/11, regulatory policies put forth by New 2007. 16" 3 24", C-print (original in York City’s MTA and other municipal color). Courtesy of the artist and Talwar organizations to ban photography, film, Gallery, New York and video recording on subways and buses without authorization, and requiring permits to photograph and film in public spaces not only delimited freedom of expression, but also highlighted the battle for power being played out through competing images. 30

Min ∙ Aesthetics

Figure 3. Walid Raad, BEY82_Onlookers (from the series “Untitled [1982–2007]”), 1982–2007. 44" 3 67", archival color inkjet print. © Walid Raad. Courtesy of the Paula Cooper Gallery

In the Otolith Group’s film essay Otolith I, the fictional character named Usha, in exile after the 2003 demonstration against the Iraq War, laments: “Earth is out of bounds for us now; it remains a planet accessible only through media.” Usha and her new species of fellow mutants urgently take on the task of sifting mediated images from an “aging history from the tense present in order to identify the critical points of the twentieth century.” Usha declares: “For us there is no memory without image and no image without memory. Image is the matter of memory.” Likewise, the Atlas Group’s PowerPoint presentation constructing the contemporary history of Lebanon through an archive of real and fabricated photographs, counterfactual documents, and testimonials is one of many intriguing, unresolved, contradictory contemporary art projects that document an overlooked and disavowed history while acknowledging how memory exceeds representation (see fig. 3). At the same time, the politics of memory and the perceived truth value of images or iconography led to misunderstandings, clashes between the citizens of New York City and its art institutions. In 2005 The Drawing Center was one of four organizations selected to be part of the new cultural center at the new World Trade Center site. A group of family members of victims of the September 11 tragedy, as well as others, including then New York governor George Pataki, criticized the well-respected twenty-eight-year-old arts organization for its exhibitions that challenged Bush administration policies. Artworks such as Amy Wilson’s A Glimpse of What Life in a Free Country Social Text 100

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Can Be Like (2004) and Zoë Charlton’s Homeland Security (2004) led to Pataki’s impossible demand that organizations like The Drawing Center absolutely guarantee “total respect for the sanctity of the [World Trade Center] site.” Yet the 2003 retrospective of Mark Lombardi’s work at The Drawing Center, curated by Robert Hobbs, was hardly mentioned by the media or Figure 4. Mark Lombardi, George W. Bush, Harken Energy, the parties involved in the and Jackson Stephens ca. 1979–90 (5th version), 1999. controversy about whether 16.5" 3 41". Private collection, courtesy of Pierogi, Inc. to pull The Drawing Center from the planned new World Trade Center. Lombardi’s mesmerizing, intricately drawn diagrams linking the Bush family to Osama bin Laden, George W. Bush, Harken Energy, and Jackson Stephens ca. 1979 – 90 (5th version) (fig. 4), ironically underscored how The Drawing Center — never really seen as a radically progressive political space — actually embodied the concept of freedom more than the then-proposed International Freedom Center. Parallel to Lombardi’s researching prowess — taking advantage of the Freedom of Information Act and mining a growing global archive of media images, incorporating data that hover between the evidentiary and the counterfactual — the scholarly performances by Trevor Paglen (fig. 5), Walid Raad, and others in both academic and art institutional settings reveal how the cultural realm remains a crucial alternative avenue for the dissemination of information in our current state of exception.4 In addition to their art practice, through daily blogs, listservs, and networks, artists such as Raad, Sagar, and Naeem Mohaimen, and curators such as Rasha Salti, offered alternative perspectives and by turns eloquent and agitated eyewitness observations of the effects of violence and everyday events happening on the ground. For example, in the summer of 2006 Salti presented daily “siege notes” on her blog and Raad published observations in Artforum, both on the Israeli bombings in Beirut. Since 2001 Sagar’s listserv, Multitudes, has disseminated consistently informative reports from all over the globe and diverse perspectives on events ranging from the 9/11 attacks to, more recently, the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks. In exhibitions ranging from the Museum of Modern Art’s depo32

Min ∙ Aesthetics

Figure 5. Trevor Paglen, The Salt Pit. Northeast of Kabul, Afghanistan, 2006. Courtesy of Altman Siegel Gallery

liticized Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking, an exhibition on contemporary art by Islamic artists, to Brian Wallis’s Inconvenient Evidence: Iraqi Prison Photographs from Abu Ghraib at the International Center of Photography, the figure of the terrorist replaced, or at times merged with, the previous generation’s fear of and fascination with queer bodies as in the case of the NEA 4/Robert Mapplethorpe controversies in the 1980s.5 Wallis’s spare presentation of the photos in a museum space, where one could see simultaneously and discretely the dehumanization of the detainees, raised questions of the status of the photos as “quasiaesthetic artifacts,” in the words of New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman. Amid current discussions of classifying or declassifying such photos, Wallis’s endeavor also highlights the ethical dimensions of aesthetic practices and the necessity for aesthetics itself to remain a category of interrogation. Rather than see art as a materially finite object or event, I’d like to end with how art is also a critical and incomplete encounter. What remains to be explored further is the role of the relational within aesthetic experience. In contrast to focusing on how an autonomous object emanates the very elements that lead to the transcendent experience of a viewing subject, how might we, for example, expand on George Yudice’s or Grant Kester’s work on artists who engage dialogically with a community, who foster an experience that leads to the radiation, touch, conversion of an aesthetic’s Social Text 100

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distributive value — an attentive looking — into the caring for the other? Taking up Deutsche’s call to “enlarge the space of politics,” Social Text has a unique opportunity on the page and on the Web not only to document and track such transformative activities, but to explore critically, from different perspectives, ways to engage with art practices that will open up possibilities of art taking place both within and external to the marketplace. Artists, curators, and collectives, with the discursive support of Social Text, have the potential — by forging alliances across fields and disciplines, flexing their formidable organizational and networking skills, recombining different talents and expertise to organize large-scale exhibitions, long-term projects, and sustained weekly forums — to create an unforeseen, vigilant, multidirectional, multicellular, counterhegemonic force field. Such collaborations would play against and resist the media’s persistence and the market’s prowess, in order to glean, expose, and make both transparent and marketable these remarkable efforts. Notes 1. Belinda Bowring, “Art after the End of Art,” Frieze 98 (2006): 44; Dave Hickey, The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty, Revised and Expanded (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 15. 2. “In What Ways Have Artists, Academics, and Cultural Institutions Responded to the U.S.-Led Invasion and Occupation of Iraq?” ed. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh and Rachel Churner, special issue, October, no. 123 (2008): 9–10. 3. James Meyer, “The Return of the Sixties in Contemporary Art and Criticism,” in Antinomies of Art and Culture, ed. Terry Smith, Okwui Enwezor, and Nancy Condee (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 331. 4. Among Trevor Paglen’s many art projects is his comprehensive investigation of the U.S. rendition program by tracking unmarked CIA planes to black sites, secret prisons such as the Salt Pit, an old brick factory just northeast of Kabul. See his Web site, www.paglen.com/pages/projects/CIA/black_sites.html (accessed 1 June 2009). 5. In the 1980s, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) was besieged by neoconservatives because of the NEA’s granting of money and support to “obscene” artwork by artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano. But in particular, it was the virulent and widespread responses to the NEA 4 — artists Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, John Fleck, and Tim Miller, whose performances, with the exception of Finley’s, involved queer sexuality — as indecent and filthy that made apparent the government’s repressed fear of homosexuality.

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Affect Ann Pellegrini and Jasbir Puar

As for expression and feelings or emotions, the liberation, in contemporary society, from the older anomie of the centered subject may also mean not merely a liberation from anxiety but a liberation from every other kind of feeling as well, since there is no longer a self present to do the feeling. This is not to say that the cultural products of the postmodern era are utterly devoid of feeling, but rather that such feelings — which it may be better and more accurate, to call “intensities” — are now free-floating and impersonal and tend to be dominated by a peculiar kind of euphoria.  — Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”

In his 1984 article “Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” Fredric Jameson famously declared postmodern culture to be proliferating a “waning of affect” characterized by “a new kind of flatness or depthlessness.”1 The integrity of the unitary modern subject was now dissolving into schizophrenic fragmentation, its depth displaced by multiple forms of discombobulating surface articulations. This waning of affect, laments Jameson, does not deflate or eradicate expressive forms, but rather shifts their register from the realm of substantive feelings to fleeting “intensities.” Jameson’s concerns represent the culmination of an argument he began outlining in the pages of Social Text. If, in the inaugural issue of Social Text — in an essay titled “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture” (ST 1, 1979) — Jameson can yet hold out for cultural forms whose manipulation and containment of conflicting social anxieties do not close down “their Utopian and transcendent potential,” by the time he alights on “On Diva” (ST 6, 1982), he is ready to diagnose “the disappearance of ‘affect’ in the older sense, the sudden and unexpected absence of ‘anxiety.’ ” Bye-bye chatty unconscious with all its anxious

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outpourings of repressed desires. Behold “the silence of affect” and a “new gratification in surfaces.” These are claims he returns to and refines in an interview with Anders Stephanson, which originally appeared in ST 17 (1987) and was reprinted in ST 21 (1989), a special issue/book titled Universal Abandon? The Politics of Postmodernism. There Jameson spells out more clearly the transformation he has in mind: from “hermeneutic emotion” (anxiety was his paradigmatic example) to “what the French have started to call intensities of highs and lows.” These intensities, he says, “really don’t imply anything about the world; you can feel them on whatever occasion. They are no longer cognitive” (ST 17, emphasis in original). Ironically, some thirty years after Jameson’s first exploration of these questions, it is postmodernism that has ceased to be sounded as a term of, and for, critical analysis. Nor have Jameson’s fears about the waning of affect been realized, at least not in the terms in which he predicted affect’s demise. Indeed, it may be that this misdiagnosis has itself helped to generate or, more accurately, regenerate critical interest in the cultural politics and claims of affect. We could thus say, reading against the grain of Jameson’s linked essays, that he was in fact extraordinarily prescient about the growing centrality of theories of affect to conceptualizations of subjecthood, being, corporeality, and politics. On one hand, whether or not Jameson was correct about the waning of affect may depend on what definition of affect is being mobilized. According to Jameson’s analysis, the demise of affect was due to the death of the depth psychological subject; their twinned obituaries were themselves linked to the end of left politics. In the wake of these linked deaths arose surface relations to commodity culture, a flattening of politics and feeling. On the other hand, in his desire to distinguish the modern subject’s integrity of feeling from the ephemeral surface intensities of the postmodern subject who is not one, Jameson himself could not have more symptomatically staged the terms of debate of the recent emergence of affect studies. What some have hailed as a recent “affective turn” in fact draws across older formations of sentiment studies; theories of emotion; “structures of feeling” (to invoke Raymond Williams’s oft-cited formulation); the work of Gottfried Leibniz, Baruch Spinoza, Henri Bergson, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, among others; and science and technology studies. Thus, what appears to be a “new” critical, conceptual lens that has gained significant intellectual and scholarly cachet in the last decade is in fact indebted to multiple, and often contradictory, genealogical threads. These contradictions have produced rich and fruitful debates over what affect “is” and/or “does,” as well as exposed intellectual tensions about the relation and difference between affect and terms such as emo36

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tion, feeling, and sensation with which it is sometimes used interchangeably (Jameson himself uses affect and feeling interchangeably). In the rough schematic, hardly exhaustive, that follows, we are less interested in delimiting the boundaries of what affect is or is not and more compelled by the generative and productive multiplicity of its deployment as an analytic and political frame. Affect may anchor claims about the materiality of bodies and physiological processes that are not contained or representable by language or cognition alone. Philosophical inquires into bioscience, for example, propose affect as both a “precognitive” attribute (not in terms of a telos, but in terms of a quality) of the body as well as emotion’s trace effect. This conception of affect poses a distinction between sensation and the perception of the sensation. Affect, from this perspective, is precisely what allows the body to be an open system, always in concert with its virtuality, the potential of becoming. As Jameson’s own references to the death of “the older psychological subject, with its anxieties and its Unconscious” (ST 6, 1982), suggests, psychoanalysis, too, has had much to say on the matter — and topography — of affect. Recent and forthcoming work at the intersection “between” psychoanalysis and affect attempts not so much a return to the modernist subject of depth as a reopening of the relations between ontology and epistemology, and between psychoanalysis and phenomenology. 2 Finally, much productive critical work has been invested in how concepts like affect, emotion, and feelings aid in comprehending subject-formation and political oppositionality for an age when neoliberal capital has reduced possibilities for collective political praxis. The provocation of all of these critical approaches is to ask how affect — and emotions, feelings, and sensation (call it what you will?) — might be mobilized toward different political ends. While we are not particularly interested to settle these terms, as such attempts may be seen as semantic quibbles or demands for genealogical purity and loyalty, it is interesting that some theories of affect foreground affective (and affected subjects) while others see the promise of politics working through precisely the surface intensities of bodies that Jameson so quickly dismisses. While Jameson registers his complaint about the waning of affect predominantly in relation to aesthetic production — architecture and painting — he does so out of concern and worry over precisely this question of left political resistance. More recently, two major special issues of Social Text have continued these lines of inquiry regarding affect and politics — Patricia Clough’s “Technoscience” (ST 80, 2004) and “What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now?” coedited by David L. Eng, Judith Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz (ST 84 – 85, 2005). Both these collections foreground work that understands affect as simultaneously vital to the conditions of possibility for identity politics yet indicative of their limitations. Jameson worried that the death of the modernist subject meant the end of Social Text 100

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politics — and let us be clear, a certain kind of politics. However, recent work in affect studies — across manifold interdisciplinary and genealogical influences — points not only to different ways of conceiving bodies and subjects of politics but also, and perhaps more crucially, takes on the imperative of (re)imagining the terrain of politics “itself.” Notes 1. Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review, no. 146 (1984): 53 – 92. 2. See the essays collected in “Between Psychoanalysis and Affect: A Public Feelings Project,” ed. José Esteban Muñoz, special issue, Women and Performance 19 (2009).

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AIDS Ed Cohen and Julie Livingston

The AIDS epidemic doesn’t always make sense. In fact, it often challenges the very ways we come to make sense. The usual lenses — academic or otherwise — fail to bring its immense devastation into any clear focus. Yet, despite the radical epistemological and emotional blur, we nevertheless discern that a chasm has opened before us and that multitudes have fallen, are falling, into the abyss. We have lost too much: friends, family, communities, networks, vast constellations of vital human potential and heartfelt connection are gone. We grieve them. Over the last twenty-five years, AIDS has evolved from a highly mysterious and terrifyingly efficient killer into a scientifically identified and popularly recognized threat to life. In the passage from cipher to acronym to nominal agent to narrative form, it has gathered being — and life — within itself, both imaginatively and materially. Through its newly attained ontological force and its repeated allegorical invocation, it constitutes both thing and event. AIDS effaces life, not just as an incarnation of virulence but as a way of telling a story. Within its embrace, the particularities of experience disappear. Black boxes are built and maintained. An industry forms. Secrets are kept, violent decisions enacted, communities created and devastated, all under the sign of AIDS. In one generation, AIDS has become an incredibly, almost wildly, popular way to die, an apocalypse. Talk about a critical event! So how can we learn from it? Or can we? Social Text shares its life span with the AIDS epidemic. In reflecting on these odd age-mates, we also contemplate an intellectual and moral moment: one in which new ideas and technologies arise, even as distributive gaps widen, and in which critical community constitutes a matter (or the matter) of life and death, even as geopolitical borders are violently shored

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up and policed. As Joao Biehl asked in ST 80 (2004): “How are disease, misery, and marginality governed through the AIDS response?” In order to consider such questions we need to recognize that, as an epidemic and as a pandemic, AIDS also troubles our beliefs about separation and hierarchy. It reveals our ability to touch one another, even across tremendous distances and socioeconomic differences. Contagion, after all, literally means “together touching.” As both affective and material connection, AIDS thematizes an experience of being connected in the world. It locates entire histories of power, origins, circulation, distribution, appropriation in collective expressions of mortal terror as well as in the atomized experiences of diarrhea, sores, and funerals. But eventually, over time, it aggregates and circulates in predictable patterns among those whose resources are most limited. Inequality does not name a natural imbalance; it bespeaks systematic and relentless devaluations. And, as with all instances of (d)evaluation, the hierarchies it inscribes result from decisions, a word whose etymology reminds us of the violent rending they enact. Suffering and immiseration depend on context, and AIDS tracks the gradients of their distributions. Yet AIDS is far more than death and misery. People live with AIDS and in the shadow of AIDS. And they live in determined ways. Though we say that people have AIDS, AIDS actually happens between people. Or more to the point, AIDS lives in the world and so do we. Whatever it “is,” it shapes how human beings live together and how we come to know (or think we know) one another. By providing a horizon of expectations, by underscoring our deep and at times desperate need for one another, and by constituting the political as a vital investment in human ecologies, AIDS lives in us, it informs us, and it acts through us in ways we cannot ever know. So much, perhaps too much, is done in its name. This happens, in part, because of the existential crisis this event provokes. AIDS troubles worldviews. For some, it disturbs teleologies of science and modernity. For others, it forecloses the promises proffered by postcolonial remappings of global economies. Into these anxiety-provoking gaps, where previously imagined futures perish, AIDS calls forth different, heretofore unthinkable alliances and attunements that (we hope) might make living with AIDS possible — for individuals, families, communities, nations, regions, species, and the biosphere as a whole. Epidemics simultaneously evince collective vulnerabilities and the vulnerabilities of collectives. After all, epidemics only become epidemics (a word that leans on the same root as democracy) when they precipitate biological effects that transgress the threshold of the political. Otherwise it’s just illness. Thus, epidemics inevitably reveal, albeit in painful and often life-threatening ways, how living together exposes us to one another

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and to the broader life world. For Michel Foucault, biopolitics attempts to encompass the risks inherent in “population,” that is, the risks of living together with others of our species and of other species (both those other others on whom we live and those who live in us). Yet this biopolitical parsing of universe into individuals and populations does not sufficiently appreciate the paradox that underwrites it. The threats that address us when we live together coexist with the impossibility of living alone. We are — and must be — both hurt and sustained by others. This inexorability suffuses the tension between the etymological opposites immunity and community, which mark the paradoxical social nature that AIDS manifests (see Ed Cohen, “Immune Communities, Common Immunities,” ST 94, 2008). AIDS literally names this paradox. Though we might no longer recognize it, the acronym A(quired) I(mmune) D(eficiency) S(yndrome) also orthographically and audibly doubles the word “aids” in the sense of assists, helps, supports, succors. As a result of this weird irony, when we speak of aids for AIDS, we evoke our paradoxical situation as dangerous and necessary to each other. Unfortunately, since we usually ignore one crux or the other, our approaches to AIDS tend to fall onto one side or the other of the individual/population divide. Thus, immunology and epidemiology draw up the authorized maps of the terrain. Based on this official emplotment, governments and corporate laboratories have conjured up a new world-historical agent, HIV/AIDS, whose status as public enemy number one legitimates outpourings of money, resources, knowledge, concern, and care. Yet what exactly does this diacritically inflected provocateur incarnate? How do we read the relation between the entities it slashes together? HIV/AIDS forms and performs a narrative, a plot. It emplots people — and peoples — within a story of cause and effect, as James Dawes argued in “Narrating Disease: AIDS, Consent, and the Ethics of Representation” in ST 43 (1995). When we say someone “has” HIV/AIDS, when we say someone dies of HIV/AIDS, we inscribe their lives within this temporal and causal frame. We now think we know something crucial about them, about how they live(d) and how they die(d) — though, in fact, no one dies “of” HIV/AIDS. It’s as if the black box of HIV/AIDS becomes a black hole whose intense gravitational force sheers off any vital singularity and condenses it into a superdense viral mass. No doubt, the technologies that produce this black box — bioscientific, pharmaceutical, governmental, nongovernmental — all have different investment strategies and interests. Knowledge, profit, public health, philanthropy, and genuine and profound compassion all commingle promiscuously within AIDS plots. However, the values that HIV/AIDS secret(e)s mostly remain obscure in such stories. If science and politics coalesce around interests — from the

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Latin interesse, meaning to be between, to differ, make a difference, to concern, be of importance — then what makes HIV/AIDS so interesting are the myriad ways it makes “between-ness” make a difference. And if we are concerned, if it is important to us, then we might want to disinter some of the values that we bury along with those whom we consign to HIV/AIDS.

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(Theorizing the) Americas Ana María Dopico

America is saving herself from all her dangers. Over some republics the octopus sleeps still, but by the law of equilibrium other republics are running into the sea to recover the lost centuries with mad and sublime swiftness.  — José Martí, “Our America,” 20 January 1891

Theorizing the Americas is a long tradition in the United States and not always a felicitous practice.1 When José Martí’s 1891 essay “Our America” was published in Mexico City in 1891, the United States had been publicly debating the annexation of Cuba for a half century. The Americas, having cast off one empire, had suffered nearly a century of imperialist theorizing, beginning with the articulation of the Monroe Doctrine and culminating with the seizure of half of Mexico’s territory following the Mexican-American War. But during the neoimperial campaigns of the Spanish American War, a reinvigorated opposition to empire had reached a new crisis, and a resistant critique denouncing U.S. imperialism was being voiced not only by revolutionaries like Martí, but by U.S. citizens in the Anti-Imperialist League, the first national peace movement mobilized in response to a foreign war. In the league’s platform, they wrote: We hold that the policy known as imperialism is hostile to liberty and tends toward militarism, an evil from which it has been our glory to be free. We regret that it has become necessary in the land of Washington and Lincoln to reaffirm that all men, of whatever race or color, are entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We maintain that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. We insist that the subjugation of any people is “criminal aggression” and open disloyalty to the distinctive principles of our Government.

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The league included luminaries, celebrities, ex-presidents, national poets, and philosophers, many of whom saw U.S. imperialism in the Americas and the Pacific as a distorted and distorting expression of U.S. republicanism and U.S. power — one that would leave a permanent disfiguring mark on the national psyche and the global reputation of the United States. But this engaged response to U.S. incursion into the Americas was not without thorns. Even as the league denounced U.S. atrocities in the Philippines and the occupation of Cuba and Puerto Rico, some of its members framed the anti-imperial argument by affirming that “tropical peoples” were incapable of governing themselves and thus useless subjects for an experiment with U.S. republican models of governance. From that prophetic collective naming by Martí, the American republics have been framed by the power of U.S. hegemony and by the threat of U.S. imperialism. The denunciations of imperialism at the beginning of the twentieth century marked a new phase in U.S. theorization about the Americas. It also established a new model for solidarities and engagements between intellectuals, statesmen, civic and religious institutions, cultural critics, and writers and artists. Oppositional thinkers in the United States were alarmed by the grotesque image of the state that imperialism revealed. This theorizing of a hemispheric plural entity, “the Americas,” was thus primarily a mirror for U.S. national identity and hardly an integrated geopolitical critique. It was something else entirely to think the Americas, and to understand the Americas, from a hemispheric perspective beyond the United States. In Latin America and the Caribbean, appeals to cultural and political solidarity across the hemisphere were crafted by negotiating the competing imperialisms of Europe and the United States. However troubled, however compromised, and precisely because it is troubled and compromised, theorizing about the Americas through Social Text inevitably carries that historical legacy of the Anti-Imperialist League and its successors in the U.S. Left across the twentieth century. For Social Text’s theorizing of the Americas in the United States, antiimperial thinking is a foundational tool. The intellectual and political brief of Social Text changed the history and critical practices of U.S. anti-imperialism, yoking it to Marxism’s critique of capitalism as a world system dependent on empire, militarism, colonial economies, and uneven global development. Born in the late cold war and at a moment of intense social crisis in the Americas, Social Text gathered in its pages the writing of committed intellectuals from Latin America and of politically engaged U.S. Latin Americanists who were conscious that they were witnessing a prolonged social emergency and facing the violent extermination of socialist and left oppositions across Latin America. When Social Text published Hernán Vidal’s “The Politics of the 44

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Body: The Chilean Junta and the Anti-Fascist Struggle” in the summer of 1979 (ST 2), America was far from safe from all those dangers that Martí invoked in his eternal present tense of 1891. As Social Text published its first issues and its first essays on Latin America, the Americas were living the disastrous consequences of a hemispheric cold war in the forms of dictatorships, military rule, and brutal state violence; confronting popular and institutionalized revolutions; and suffering American interventions in open or secret civil wars that would kill millions and devastate civil society through the end of the century. The essays in Social Text’s first hundred issues offer an instructive map of engagements with Latin America from the American academic Left. As the American academic Left crossed the threshold into the long Reagan years and engaged in new ideological struggles, Latin America would play a prominent role in political and ideological debates, in engaged scholarship, and in movements of solidarity and resistance that challenged U.S. hegemony in the hemisphere. The Americas had long functioned as a familiar historical backyard for capitalist exploitation, “democratic” propaganda, racist condescension, and strategic uneven development. But with the cold war, the colorful subalterns of the Good Neighbor policy were transformed into unreliable ideological subjects. From Jacobo Arbenz’s election and ouster in 1954 Guatemala, to the Cuban Revolution, to the invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965, and onward into the hard lines of the Global South’s cold wars, the Americas suffered a new and devastating attention from the United States as Washington’s imperialist paradigms morphed into the strategic experiments of a globalized cold war. The workshop of empire in the Americas became a new social and military laboratory where the United States could redeem its cold-war credentials after its humiliation in Vietnam. Across the thirty years of Social Text’s existence, for both the Left and the Right, the Americas became the prime example of new political orders, new dystopic states, new revolutionary potential, and new subjects and methods of resistance in the late cold war. If Left intellectuals wished to engage the U.S. state as a monopoly of violence or as a franchise of multinational capital, if they wished to challenge cold-war ideology, or a popular complicity with sustained U.S. neoimperial violence in the third world, Latin America was example one. If they wanted to talk about monoculture economies or import substitution, Latin America was example one — a singular referent, a proliferating political archive. For those seeking resources of hope, Latin America was also example one — for institutionalized socialism victorious over U.S. hegemony (Cuba), for socialist agrarian revolts (Nicaragua, El Salvador), for anti-imperial guerrilla movements (Colombia, Bolivia), for Maoist revolutionary victories (Peru), for indigenous movements and collectives (Guatemala). Networks of alliance and support flourished in the United Social Text 100

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States. Solidarity movements and organizations forged through churches, universities, and secular institutions mobilized U.S. citizens around the practical urgencies of refugees, protests, lobbying, and nonviolent resistance. Throughout the 1980s, millions of U.S. citizens were engaged in theorizing the Americas at grassroots levels. Organizations emerged, like the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) or the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES). Sharing a common brief of solidarity, witnessing, sanctuary, and anti-imperial critiques of U.S. violence, these organizations and their members were targeted as subversive entities and agents by the U.S. government. Thus for Social Text, theorizing the Americas across the eighties meant renewed anti-imperial critiques, scholarship in solidarity with socialist agendas and besieged resistance movements, essays that chronicled social disasters and creative resistance to authoritarian violence. Writers offered descriptive histories of embattled Latin American republics like El Salvador, literary and cultural criticism that exploded the ideological logic of conservative canons, new readings of gender and queer subjects in the repressive gray years of the Cuban Revolution. Looking back on that archive of work, one recognizes the names and the interventions of authors who transformed Latin American studies, who articulated major critiques of liberal capitalism and the state, who analyzed not merely the immediate consequences, but the long histories and dangerous alliances connecting U.S. capital and military power to systemic political violence in Latin America. The archive of essays placed cultural marketplaces, communities of reception, and academic politics under interrogation and sought to reveal Latin America through critical methods that engaged and challenged Euro-American theory. Hence the politics of the body, the Marxist critiques of advanced capitalism, the transformative optics of feminist and queer analysis. Throughout the eighties Social Text offered a space of engagement with the present of the hemisphere and the long aesthetic resonance of its political battles. In ST 4 (1981), we find Jean Franco’s magisterial “The Utopia of a Tired Man: Jorge Luis Borges,” where the reader encounters an impious debunking of the literary market’s avidity for Borges and its sanctification of the author as the sole Latin American genius, one whose exceptionality proves the rule of a barbarous cultural scarcity. Franco offered a devastating analysis of the critical love affair with Borges, reading it as a political symptom wherein mastery, enigma, rivalry, privacy, and know-how offer a closed literary pleasure machine — one among many available in advanced capitalism. She traces the eradication of community, dependency, or loyalty in Borges, arguing that this symptom of a violent separation makes possible a freeing transition from the social to the private.

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Franco demystifies the high-culture Borgesian enchantments and their appeal. She writes: Little wonder that Borges has become the guru of University circles, since his stories flatter the reader’s smartness while diverting skills into the harmless zone of a game of solitaire . . . they school the reader into that free-floating adaptability which becomes the very requisite of modernization under advanced capitalism. Thus it seems that the Latin American writer must not only make a sacrifice in order to be invited to the banquet of civilization . . . but must persuade himself and others that no sacrifice has been made.

In the same issue, Julianne Burton’s reflection on Cuban cinema puts gender, sexuality, and feminism at center stage (see “Seeing, Being, Being Seen: Portrait of Teresa; or, Contradictions of Sexual Politics in Contemporary Cuba”), offering one of the first and most incisive feminist readings of Cuban cinema’s engagement with sexuality and gender equality. The mirror that such writers offered the American Left was not always comfortable, and the intensity of their solidarities and their critiques of American power left them exposed as thinkers considered “too ideological” for conventional disciplinary journals in the United States. The journal attracted other signal interventions that mapped the Latin American crisis and also the ongoing ideological battles across the eighties. In ST 5 (1982), a reader could find an extraordinary historical and political briefing on El Salvador by John Beverley, complete with empirical and demographic data, national history, contemporary political analysis, and regional contexts. In reading Beverley, the reader wishes for entire volumes capable of contextualizing Latin American nations for the American academic Left. Poignantly, Beverley’s piece is followed by a short collection of eleven poems by the Salvadoran revolutionary leader Roque Dalton (1938 – 75), who was assassinated by political rivals. Beverley introduces Dalton to the reader: Dalton represents a new type of Latin American writer: no longer the genial “fellow traveler” of the revolution like Pablo Neruda, but rather the rank and file revolutionary activist for whom the intricate cabbala of clandestine struggle — passwords, safe houses, escape routes, forged documents, sectarian squabbles — is as familiar as Parisian surrealism. . . . That today there exists a Democratic Revolutionary Front, that there is a unified guerrilla army, that together they represent a whole people’s struggle against imperialism — these are the legacies of Roque Dalton’s voice and example.

The scholarly work of authors like Hernán Vidal, Jean Franco, and John Beverley was framed and supplemented by activism in solidarity movements and university politics in the long cold wars of the Americas. These

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writers took unfashionable stands during times when doing politics in the academy had immediate and subtle costs, since the United States was not only a space of free speech but also a site of surveillance. In 1983 Social Text continued its focus on Central America with Michael Fleet’s “The Church and Revolutionary Struggle in Central America” (ST 7), as well as with James Petras’s “Marxism and World Historical Transformations” (ST 8), which uses Latin America as a case study in thinking the transition to socialism. The Petras essay marks the sociological stakes for theorizing the Americas in Social Text, analyzing collectivities through political economy. Looking through a Latin American lens at capital, class, labor, and revolutionary movements, it reveals the transition to socialism in the third world as denoting the failed normative models and theoretical impasses at the heart of the crisis of Marxism. In 1984, Social Text published The 60’s without Apology (ST 9/10), and, in “South of Your Border,” Jean Franco returns to theorize revolution and the sixties for Latin America. It becomes clear in reading the Social Text archive that Franco’s political voice found a special home and resonance within the journal, a place where both the specificity and the significance of Latin America could be asserted among the American Left, and she is unsparing in making clear what is at stake in intellectual judgments about the Americas. “There were two Latin American 60s,” she writes. “The first started in Cuba in 1959; for ten years Cuba became the pacemaker of both revolutionary literature and politics on the continent.” But, she cautions: “All the while, however, another revolution was going on — the silent revolution of multinational corporations and their allies — the conservative and the military.” Franco argues that 1968 was the crisis point for both revolutions, a crisis point whose consequences can still be measured in political terms, in literary terms, and in the new consolidations and alignments of loyalty and antagonism. Thinking the sixties after the Sandinista Revolution, Franco weighed the cost of the confrontational politics that isolated Cuba and isolates Nicaragua. Interestingly, Franco’s closing denunciation of capital outrings her measured solidarity with a Cuban Revolution by then mired in the policing practices and banal bureaucracies of repression. Franco ends the short piece with a startling reminder: “We have to remember that in Latin America capitalism has never brought into being any freedom other than the freedom of the very rich based on the genocide of the poor.” For Social Text, theorizing the Americas through the immediate context of the cold war closes, it seems to me, in 1986. With ST 15, Roberto Fernández Retamar and Fredric Jameson share the discursive stage, theorizing, respectively, the relation between “Our America and the West,” and the role of “Third World Literature in the Era of Multi­ national Capitalism.” Here Fernández Retamar takes up the mantle of 48

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Martí to think through the terms of occidental privilege. An erudite poet, critic, and cultural statesman of the Cuban Revolution, author of “Caliban: Notes toward a Discussion of Culture in Our America,” and president of the Casa de las Américas, Retamar launches an impressive survey of Latin America’s struggle with occidental legacies and epistemologies and the inherent and painful contradictions between Western Enlightenment values and Latin American exploitation in colonialism and neocolonialism. For Retamar, Martí’s injunctions to throw out the “archons of Greece” in favor of autochthonous values, practices, and archives still resonate. The opposition between the vision in “Our America” of a virtuous, just, and anti-imperial hemispheric culture and the imperial universalisms of Western culture persist as an antagonism that only socialism can engage. Martí’s project of cultural and political liberation, Retamar writes, like those of a free Haiti or an Anglo-Antillean culture, “could not be fully developed nor implemented in Our America until Marxism-Leninism took root in the twenties.” Retamar’s masterful review of Latin American revolutionary and socialist thought offers the reader an overdetermined functional model for theorizing the Americas, one whose historical teleology and discursive trajectory culminate in the Cuban Revolution: “With the Cuban Revolution, Our America has taken its first steps in this new universe where ‘West’ and ‘East’ will turn out to be the most ancient cardinal points in the planetary (and now interplanetary) adventure of the total human subject.” In a moment of ideological crisis for the revolution, Retamar’s defensive cold war poetics claims Cuba as the exception where oppositional thought and liberatory epistemologies reigned long before their adoption into Western intellectual practices. Set against the notorious essay by Jameson (a U.S. intellectual star in nominal solidarity with socialist movements) in the same volume, with its famous affirmation that “third world texts . . . necessarily project a political dimension in the form of national allegory: the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third world culture and society,” Retamar’s analysis argues for specificity, cultural genealogy, sophistication, autonomy, and difference. But it insists on a teleological determinism, a developmentalist logic, that echoes Jameson’s essay. The reader of Latin America, confronted with Jameson’s masterful comparatism, his third-world cognitive structures, his now-notorious and much-maligned reductionism, grows conscious of the uneven discursive power commanded by these two giants, remembers the extraordinary power of a U.S. interpreter, and briefly despairs. In our retrospective reading, however, we are swiftly heartened by the responses to Jameson articulated by Aijaz Ahmad (ST 17, 1987) and Santiago Colás (ST 18, 1987). Social Text’s attention to the long Latin American cold wars found Social Text 100

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new expressions through the culture wars of the George H. W. Bush years. In the late eighties and early nineties, scholars articulated new paradigms in thinking the Americas that engaged multiculturalism, border studies, and queer subjectivities. The early nineties were accompanied by a new attention to the human subject in the Americas — in particular, the Latin American not merely as a citizen of the Americas but as the Latino or Hispanic U.S. citizen —and a new archive of work engaged these syncretic and recombinant identities, their distinct cultural, linguistic, and political syntaxes, and their long history within U.S. hegemony. In 1990, Juan Flores and George Yudice published their seminal “Living Borders/Buscando America: Languages of Latino Self-Formation” (ST 24). With the end of the cold war, the crumbling of authoritarianisms, and new transitions to democracy, Social Text covered social subjects and social movements that had been marginalized or overshadowed in the long Latin American cold wars, and scholars revealed a long history for women and indigenous, multiracial, and queer subjects in the Americas and began theorizing U.S. subjects with Latino identities. With the beginning of the nineties, Social Text mapped new intellectual projects and marked a watershed for theorizations of Latin America within the U.S. academy — theorizations that would connect the political projects of feminism, queer studies, and gender studies to Latin American history and Latin American contexts. In ST 31/32 (1990), Sylvia Molloy founded a field, in part, with her essay on Oscar Wilde and Latin American queer subjectivity. Her work and that of scholars like Daniel Balderston, José Quiroga, José Esteban Muñoz, and Ricardo Ortíz produce a radical critique of the relationship between gender, sexuality, cultural discourse, and the state, producing new theories of nationalism and masculinity, new historical mappings of queer poetics. The double issue underlines the conjugations between Latin American culture and postcolonial theory, between old anti-imperial agendas and new critiques of international capital and a burgeoning globalization. George Yudice’s “We Are Not the World” turned from cultural cold wars to the subjects and discourses of globalization, questioning the logic and markets of neoliberalism and tracing the challenges that Latin American thinkers and Latin American situations posed to U.S. paradigms. Writers thinking the Americas in Social Text since the nineties have proceeded on the firmer theoretical and contextual ground claimed by these thinkers, returning to these earlier political struggles to mark distance or recognize enduring paradigms. This essay will not do justice to an impressive corpus of writing in more recent years by writers engaging the force of neoliberalism, unbridled capitalism, and economic crisis in the Latin American turn of the century. But it is clear in reviewing the more recent interventions that, although thinking Latin America no longer involves 50

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the social emergency that framed Social Text’s cold-war beginnings, the theoretical and pedagogical engagements, the archival and critical practices, and the political solidarities should be just as urgent. The categories and thematics have shifted and the North American academy now looks to Latin America to understand new imperialisms, new global urgencies in radical unevenness, explosive slum urbanization, mass migrations, hyperviolent narcostates, and ecological dispossession. But the Americas are also revealing reinvigorated claims to democratic socialism and participatory populisms, and new indigenous and subaltern movements that continue to challenge U.S. hegemony. With the United States engaged in a more distant hegemonic and military struggle, Latin America now offers a social map that has outstripped imperial and cold-war logics — revealing new and sometimes alarming geopolitical realities that the United States has long ignored and can only falteringly address. Beyond economic instrumentality, understanding a globalized hemisphere, and theorizing the social, political, cultural, and ecological spaces and subjects of these Americas is an indispensable task. It requires that scholars find old and new models for scholarship and political critique. Thirty years of Social Text’s engagement with Latin America offers a heartening archive. Note 1. America, América, Latin America, Latinoamérica, Nuestra América, Las Américas: to think the Americas, or to theorize them, necessarily involves reflecting on a name. This essay is not about “Latin America,” although that is what it essentially focuses on. “The Americas” is that which lies outside what a U.S. citizen would call America. This essay uses the plural noun, a plural feminine in Spanish. To do so breaks up the singularity, the identity, of the single noun. The definite article escorting the plural connotes to any Spanish speaker a Spanish origin for the name. The subject is not “America,” in the singular or the singular collective, not “Nuestra América,” or “Our America,” from José Martí’s fantasy of syncretic identity and collective redemption in 1891. Rather, it is “the Americas” as in Las Américas, as in Casa de las Américas, that publishing house and Latin American cultural archive founded with the Cuban Revolution. Dedicated to publishing, to giving prizes to and to serving the engaged writers and Left literary communities of Latin America, its directors and its ideological chiefs have measured the revolutionary and socialist legitimacy and the aesthetic promise of literary texts for half a century. Its choices, exciting and deplorable, mark the uneasy relationship between state power and cultural freedom, between engaged writing and decadent thought. Perhaps the connotations might be allowed to rest there, with the cold-war struggles, the cultural solidarities, the discursive and political critiques of the hard eighties as the founding thought of the Americas in Social Text.

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Art Tavia Nyong’o

Was the photograph Shepard Fairey used as a basis for his “Hope” image of Barack Obama a social text? The Associated Press (AP) thought not. Mannie Garcia, the freelance AP photographer who snapped the 2006 referent for Fairey’s iconic 2008 print, did not originally recognize his handiwork when the poster first began its viral spread throughout political and popular culture. But when someone identified his own work to him, Garcia told National Public Radio (NPR) that he was “disappointed that someone was able to go onto the Internet and take something that doesn’t belong to them and use it.”1 Fairey, who as late as January 2009 was unaware of Garcia’s identity, preemptively sued the AP, citing “fair use.” Meanwhile, Garcia held his own doubts about the AP’s claim that they and not he owned his handiwork. As the legal machinery swung into action, the National Portrait Gallery quietly invited Garcia to hang a signed print of his original photo next to the Fairey print they had earlier acquired. Artistic rebel, meet working stiff. The Madison Social Text collective, writing in the journal’s first issue, analyzed the appropriation of the mass media as a political strategy and posited a contradiction between “nostalgic, ideological content” and its “contemporary, historically conditioned form of ideological dissemination” (ST 1, 1979). While they were discussing right-wing media strategies, their insight into the contradictory nature of appropriation seems applicable to the cyberutopianism that sees in the Obama victory — buoyed by initiatives like Fairey’s grassroots poster campaign — a confirmation that its time has come. Shepard Fairey, a left-libertarian purveyor of revolutionary kitsch, is only the latest in a lineage of American appropriation artists. That appropriation must itself be considered a nostalgic artistic strategy by now

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merely underlines the importance of insisting upon the contradiction that the “free culture” of the remix moves a bit too hastily to paper over. The image of Fairey as a street or graffiti artist making remixes merely reflects a slack reliance upon hip-hop patois as cultural jargon for all things youthful and creative (see “Hip-Hop” in this issue). From his “Obey Giant” stickers, to a recent cover design for George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Fairey’s fascinations with how the authoritarian personality can be manipulated by visual media suggest that he makes a quite slippery agent of progressive renewal. The legal defense of his right to appropriate skips over the form and content of these nostalgic appropriations. In a public forum about his work, the lawsuit, and the role of the remix in a “hybrid economy,” Fairey related an early career epiphany, when his first anonymous sticker campaign ignited intense and surprising media attention. The very presence of compelling public images that were not advertisements, he inferred, provoked public curiosity verging on anxiety. It was as if “free” images, illegal art expertly done in the visual language of advertising, opened up a temporary gap in the society of the spectacle. Hal Foster, reflecting in Social Text on appropriation art at the end of the 1980s, extolled its attempt “to break apart the mythical sign, to reinscribe it in a countermythical system and to recirculate it in the distribution form of the commodity-image.” But he worried: “When is appropriation a counterappropriation and not a replication? When does [it] recode, rather than rehearse, the dissolution of the sign by capital?” (ST 21, 1989). Reflecting upon the claims put forward on behalf of artists like Fairey by the legal scholar Lawrence Lessig, the author of Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy, it seems that Foster’s questions remain pertinent and unresolved. It is one thing to dispose of the AP’s fatuous reduction of Fairey’s “Hope” image to a “copy” of their copyrighted property. But to relegate Garcia’s contribution to the alienated status that the AP’s profit-driven calculus assigns it would entirely miss the broader question of how strategies of appropriation work within the visual economy of capitalism today. For what is crucial is not the extent of Fairey’s transformation of Garcia’s previously anonymous original; it is the fact of that very anonymity. To seriously explore the contested relationship between the respective creative labors of Shepard Fairey and Mannie Garcia requires unpacking that ubiquitous but undertheorized word, appropriation. In one of Social Text’s more extended attempts to do this, Meaghan Morris began by ruefully observing that appropriation often amounted to “a vague essentialist wave in the general direction of intertextuality” (ST 21). Expanding upon this insight, I would posit that underlying the discourse of appropriation lies a specific essentialism around the twin concepts of property and theft. Appropriation is simply a particular term for identifying relations of power 54

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through the emotive language of stolen property, or what is “proper” or essential to one. Put this way, one can see why a straightforwardly antiessentialist critique of appropriation won’t do. Instead we see that an unqualified defense of property right stands no better a chance of sustaining a radical analysis of aesthetic practices of the remix than would an unlimited valorization of theft. For missing from both cases are precisely the questions of scale, force, and accumulation that we would need to answer before differentiating, for instance, the AP and Mannie Garcia as prospective claimants to the product of his labor. Garcia was a bit too polite to describe Fairey’s actions as theft, but he clearly understood his photo, even if he couldn’t at first identify it, to be his property. As he told NPR, freelancers take hundreds, even thousands, of images a day. Describing the working day in which he took the original photo, Garcia portrayed himself as a skilled laborer, waiting patiently and composing carefully, accumulating diligently, and eventually selling only a select few. That he demurred from the tag artist, with its accruing cultural capital, should in no way detract from his self-perception as consciously creative. Indeed, given the determination of contemporary art to define itself around what is credentialed and exhibited “as art,” Garcia’s refusal to describe his work as art seems just a way of avoiding its redescription by an elite and aloof art world. Ironically, however, the “fair use” provision that distinguishes between works of artistic creativity and works that document fact would likely assign photojournalism to the latter category. So Garcia’s claim of ownership based upon the time, effort, and skill he put into the image, rather than upon his artistic intentions or even his ability to remember what he had created, serves as a kind of anti-antiessentialist critique of appropriation and postmodern remix culture. Only by an accident of scale (the astonishing success of Fairey’s poster) did Garcia move from anonymous to known creator. But his articulation of a labor theory of culture spoke less for himself than for that anonymous mass of intelligence that makes the Internet, from which privileged rebels like Fairey then dip. One problem here is the left-libertarian consensus that the free culture of the remix is always good, because always subversive of the society of the spectacle. This is particularly worrisome in the case of Lessig’s populist attempt to define remixing as potentially the cultural dominant of our present, if only the misbegotten agents of corporate capital would stop hounding moms for uploading videos of their infants dancing to a Prince song (an actual example he used in the forum with Fairey). Here we might take Lessig’s catchphrase hybrid economy seriously. What this economy apparently consists of is an (undifferentiated) human aesthetic or creative capacity merging or blending with a (properly restrained) rule of law. But underlying this image of free culture lie disquieting ideological assumptions about the universality of free markets. Copyright is, in Social Text 100

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essence, a legal monopoly. Competition, igniting a loose constellation of images, from “virally” recombinant and infectious images and videos, to marketplace competition, to evolution itself, then becomes the thing to be protected against the stultifying inflexibility of monopolistic capital. Lessig’s understanding of human creativity as fundamentally appropriative and recombinatory reflects, at a deep level, the ideologeme that, as Tom Moylan acidly put it in these pages in 1995, “Free competition, it seems, has not only produced wealth but indeed humanity itself” (ST 44). Thinking through the effects of free culture from the vantage point of Garcia, rather than that of Fairey, produces a different take on the status of the “creative class” than that which sees only utopian solutions in the saturation of Internet communications throughout human work, leisure, and creative lives. (See my entry on “Social Text” in this issue.) Remixers who treat the Internet as a sort of free-for-all, all in the name of some putative commons, can indeed more closely replicate what Marx called “primitive accumulation,” or the outright expropriation of those commons. The historical commons, after all, were not simply a state of nature, but a precapitalist state of culture, in which local relations of access, right, and responsibility managed resources collectively. As James Scott argues in Seeing Like a State, the classifying, ordering, standardizing, and forcibly rendering accessible of the commons by the modern state — whether capitalist or communist — was and remains extraordinarily deleterious to the lifeworlds of the commons. The Internet, although we speak of it and attempt to think of it as a single, reified thing, might better be approached as a relation or set of relations between technologies, economies, cultural forms, and forms of life. It is the site of, among other things, a class struggle. Considering the aesthetic and political issues raised by the “Hope” controversy, one might want to add to them a series of different questions. What has been the story of photojournalism, and of photojournalists, as a form of life? How has that form of life been appropriated on the Internet? What new contracts, rights, options, and provisions were innovated in the ever-shifting calculus of control through which press agencies and media conglomerates profit from the risk-taking of their freelancers? How has the digitalization of photography not only transformed the techniques and skill requirements of photographers, but altered the “nature” of the claims a photographer, whose business it now plausibly is to take thousands of images at a time, to own her work as discrete images, rather than flows or patterns of image-taking? How might the anonymous contributors to the material support of the Internet as the physical space where an image now is stored, distributed, and viewed be factored into a radicalized understanding of photographic production? What claims of ownership, or contribution to the ecology of the commons, might they also possess? 56

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One thing is certain, however. Arrogating to a creative commons the accumulated endowment of photojournalism, as a form of precarious labor, simply because it can be crawled by a Google search, is surely an incongruous and incomplete form of homage to the resisters to primitive accumulation gone by. Those resisters resisted in the name of some ideal, even some deity, whose propers they saw to be at risk. They even destroyed some property to stand up for those propers. Luddites of the world, unite! Note 1. “Mannie Garcia: The Photo That Sparked ‘Hope,’ ” Fresh Air, NPR, 26 February 2009, www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=101184444.

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Body



Micki McGee

It is glory that these body-loss-obsessed men and women [in weight loss groups] seek, in making themselves “lost,” rapacious glory in a society constraining them in rituals around limitless loss. They externalize the return of the repressed in this society which, more than others, is rationalized around the ledger sheets and the accountants of gain, whose most serious intonations are about the “bottom line” — which has remade the “full plate” into the latest idiom for dealing with bad news.  — Sohnya Sayres, “Glory Mongering: Food and the Agon of Excess,” ST 16 (1986)

While Barack Obama began his historic presidency with a “full plate” of economic and political challenges and an athletic build complete with a “six-pack” duly captured by the long lens of a paparazzo, the woman who had arguably paved the way for his election with her early endorsement began her year on a rather different note. Oprah Winfrey started 2009 by appearing in a series of television spots castigating herself for regaining the weight that she had once lost (and gained and lost and gained again over the course of her nearly three decades in the public eye). In this spectacle of self-rebuke that promoted the newest season of her Live Your Best Life series, Winfrey asserted that everything she has accomplished in every other arena was rendered meaningless unless she controls her weight. “All the money and all the fame and all the attention and the glamorous life and the success,” Winfrey said, “doesn’t mean anything if you can’t fit into your own clothes . . . if you can’t control your own being.”1 Winfrey’s epic battle with herself, waged as a battle over her weight, has always guaranteed ratings hikes for the talk show host and now overshadows (and perhaps serves to camouflage) the immensity of her cultural

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and political influence. Indeed, her televised confessional concerned itself in part with whether she would fit into the gown that she’d chosen for the inaugural festivities. Would she fit? Would she fit in? is the perennial selfdoubt available to anyone who has ever felt themselves an outsider whether on account of size, or shape, or color, or the objects of their desire, or their manner of elocution, or their differences of ability, or belief, or disposition. In this moment of unprecedented historical achievement — with the inauguration of the first African American president — the woman who has been welcomed into the living rooms of millions of Americans and had helped to make way for the Obamas to claim their place in the people’s house publicly expressed her concern about how she’d fit — not on account of her race, but now on account of her size. The cultural fantasy that body size and shape are largely functions of individual willpower, rather than of genetic predispositions and socioeconomic environment, renders this ongoing saga of Oprah’s battle with her weight a morality tale where her legitimacy and moral authority are both threatened (“not walking the walk”) and maintained (through confessional spectacles of self-reproach). 2 Epic battles of personal strength are waged not against oppression or inequity or social or economic injustice, but against one’s appetites. While Oprah’s public battle with her weight shared the spotlight with Obama’s historic inauguration and the global financial implosion, the mainstream press had already begun to comment on Michelle Obama’s figure, suggesting that her elegant and athletic physique may help dispel the stereotypical image of the African American woman as the rotund Aunt-Jemima-mammy, lush and nurturant to everyone but (presumably, in a fitness-preoccupied culture) neglectful of herself.3 A November Newsweek magazine cover story titled “The Meaning of Michelle” noted that Michelle Obama’s dedication to a fitness regimen might serve as a positive model for African American women: “A self-proclaimed fitness junkie who works out every morning, Michelle could actually encourage women of color to take better care of themselves.”4 Women who heretofore had not “put themselves on the top of their own to-do list” (in the language of Oprah’s best-life advice) would somehow find a way to make personal fitness their top priority. Somehow they would find the time for the workouts amid the multiple jobs and extra shifts necessary in a subminimum-wage economy. Somehow they would eke out the money for the gym membership or the treadmill or the stepclimber. Michelle Obama’s personal appearance would, somehow, render such personal change possible (and desirable) for millions of African American women who work two or three low-wage jobs as they struggle to support their families, who have ready access primarily to nutritionally compromised food in low-income neighborhoods where fast-food restauSocial Text 100

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rants proliferate, and who find themselves famished for sleep as they juggle their many responsibilities. The same Newsweek article that asserted that Michelle Obama would break through stereotypes for black women also noted her ability to tone down her personality: “Early on in the primaries, after she was labeled too forward and too loud, Michelle demonstrated selfrestraint and discipline by dialing back” (emphasis added).5 By announcing herself as Mom-in-Chief — and downplaying what must have seemed to many to be a surfeit of talent, intelligence, beauty, and professional accomplishment — Michelle Obama proved that she, too, could fit in to the traditionally diminished expectations of women. By exercising such self-discipline, she helped ensure that her husband would be deemed fit to govern the nation. At the end of an era of both unprecedented expansion and inequality, the Obamas appear fittingly and fit: as the antidote to an epoch of excess, as the embodiment of the virtues of self-control and self-discipline that had long been abandoned in an era of free-marketeering and unabashed extravagance. Barack Obama has been catapulted to the presidency on the wave of our dreams of racial equality, but also on the hope that he can limit our collective losses as the model of free-marketeering unravels. Michelle Obama shows herself not only fit, but willing to diminish herself in an effort to fit in. And Oprah Winfrey serves as our avatar of limitless loss with her claim that “nothing I’ve done is of any worth unless I can lose (weight).” In their respective capacities for limiting (and limitless) loss, all three of these groundbreaking African American cultural icons gain their highest ratings, quantified in the metrics of approval polls and television audience shares. These three Os, Oprah and the Obamas, call upon the nation to revel in a new era of belt-tightening and personal restraint. One might ask if fitness, long associated with fitness to govern — with the governance of the self as a prerequisite for the governance of others — has become the new white? 6 Will corpulence be inaugurated as the new negritude in the wake of the historic advancement marked by Obama’s ascendancy to the highest office in the nation? Readers of Social Text familiar with Sohnya Sayres’s prescient 1986 essay “Glory Mongering: Food and the Agon of Excess” (ST 16) would find the drama of Oprah’s self-flagellation and the Obamas’ fitness regimens — along with the public’s fascination with both — utterly unsurprising. As with the best of cultural studies, her insights remain remarkably relevant as a consequence of the deep structure of her analysis. Back in 1986, Sayres noted the aggravation expressed by many African Americans when faced with an emerging cultural demand that they conform to a new lean model of beauty: “I remember too from so many other kinds of fat discussion and weight control groups how piqued some black woman felt

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about the shift to glamorous slenderness in the new black woman. They had had to be the rock and the earth and the daintiest dancers in chiffon and heels you could imagine. Big mammas and nymphs of the cornucopia.” (As a point of reference, the Somalian beauty Iman had broken the color barrier of Vogue’s pages in 1976, following swiftly on the heels of Leni Riefenstahl’s 1973 photographic chronicle The Last of the Nuba.) Indeed, Sayres contended that the 1980s mean vogue for slenderness had “niggerized” the self-described “food addicts” whom she chronicled: “All those less than physically ideal know in their gut how this current or that current style has niggerized them; what fear they then think they spy behind those white masks of the not-natural beauties.” Sayres directed her readers to Georges Bataille, quoting his essay on expenditure in Visions of Excess: “Fortune does not serve to shelter its owner from need. On the contrary, it functionally remains — as does its possessor — at the mercy of a need for limitless loss. . . . Connected to the losses that are realized in this way — in the case of the ‘lost woman’ as well as in the case of military expenditure —  is the creation of unproductive values, and the one that makes people most rapacious, is glory.”7 Although one might quibble — perhaps even argue full-tilt — with Bataille’s formulation of a general economy in which a natural excess (“the accursed share”) always requires an ongoing expenditure of this excess in displays of luxury, spoilage, or carnage, his observation that economic surpluses are dispatched in wasteful displays, such as destructive wars, seems incontrovertible. Fortuna requires virtue and sacrifices both small and large: the mornings on the treadmill and the diminution of all one has ever achieved, the high ratings of The Biggest Loser gleaned from its contestants’ capacity for loss. In its earliest days, in the days of the emerging field of cultural studies, Social Text concerned itself with an analysis of these everyday or quotidian concerns — with aspects of daily life and popular media read as social texts to be unpacked not only as symptoms of systematic social malaise but with an eye toward social and political remedies. Denigrated in the popular press as “Oprah studies”8 — yet ironically carried out in the pages of its newspapers and magazines9 — the cultural studies imperative of Social Text seems to be an almost lost project in our own ranks. The work of intervening in the multiple and seemingly trivial social texts that surround, envelop, and produce us has been gradually supplanted by a focus on grander narratives of globalization, empire, and urgent political economies. As Social Text looks back and ahead on the occasion of its thirtieth anniversary and one-hundredth issue, perhaps the radical nature of the everyday will return as an entree at our tables, however full we may find our respective plates.

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Notes 1. The Oprah Winfrey Show, 5 January 2009. 2. Micki McGee, “Resolute We Are,” OUP Blog, 16 January 2006, blog.oup .com/2006/01/resolute_we_are/. 3. See Micki McElya, Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in TwentiethCentury America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 1 – 5. 4. Allison Samuels, “What Michelle Can Teach Us,” Newsweek, 10 November 2008, 42; online as “What Michelle Means to Us,” www.newsweek.com/ id/170383. 5. Samuels, “What Michelle Can Teach Us,” 42. 6. See, for example, the use of the theory of Michel Foucault on self-mastery and fitness in Jennifer Smith McGuire, Fit for Consumption: Sociology and the Business of Fitness (New York: Routledge, 2007), 135 – 36; Toby Miller and Alex W. McHoul, Popular Culture and Everyday Life (London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998), 65; and Jeffrey Louis Decker, Made in America: Self-Styled Success from Horatio Alger to Oprah Winfrey (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 127 – 30, 132. 7. Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927 – 1939, trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 128, as cited in Sohnya Sayres, “Glory Mongering: Food and the Agon of Excess,” Social Text 16 (1986): 94. 8. Amy Benfer, “Broadsheet: Spanking Oprah,” Salon.com, 27 January 2009, www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/feature/2009/ 01/27/oprah_depression/index .html. 9. For example, Maureen Callahan, “Bloated, Depressed: As Oprah Goes, So Goes the Nation,” New York Post, 24 January 2009, www.nypost.com/seven/ 01242009/postopinion/opedcolumnists/the_oprah_syndrome_151684.htm?.

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China David L. Eng and Teemu Ruskola

A revolution is not a dinner party.  — Chairman Mao

Whatever the Chairman might think of it, the Cultural Revolution Dinner Theater (紅色經典, literally, The Red Classics) is located east of the Fifth Ring Road in Beijing, well beyond the newly constructed skyscrapers and glitzy hotels of the central Chaoyang business district as well as the private gated communities of the rich, both of which continue to creep eastward in Beijing’s ever-expanding urban sprawl.1 We visited the theater one evening in early July, about a month before the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. (It took some cajoling as well as several detours before the taxi driver managed to deliver us to this freestanding building situated on the edge of yet-to-be-developed fields.) The Cultural Revolution Dinner Theater is a dark and cavernous rectangular space, constructed of rough-hewn lumber, with a large stage on one end, numerous circular banquet tables in the center, and a number of smaller dining areas on a U-shaped elevated platform surrounding this arrangement, lining three sides of the room. From its out-of-the-way location to its exclusive use of Mandarin for all transactions (pricey food, ordering, and entertainment), the Cultural Revolution Dinner Theater caters not to a Western audience but to an upwardly mobile and urbane Chinese middle class hungry for amusement and delight. Indeed, on the night of our visit, we appeared to be the only Westerners in an audience of a couple hundred people, the overwhelming majority of whom appeared to be in their late twenties and thirties, with a smattering of folks in their forties. (There were no elderly diners.) In other words, much of the Chinese audience imbibing food and drink that evening amid spectacular re-creations of revolutionary tableaux, Red Social Text 100 • Vol. 27, No. 3 • Fall 2009 DOI 10.1215/01642472-2009-009  © 2009 Duke University Press

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Guard denunciations, and passionate song and dance were in fact born after the Cultural Revolution (1966 – 76). For them, the Cultural Revolution is literally history. In a country in which it is still an interdicted topic of official political discussion in the classroom, state media, and other public fora — perhaps unsurprisingly — can be represented only when it is commodified, bought and sold as a pleasant evening of food and song. Paradoxically, analysis of the Cultural Revolution, and of the legacies of Chinese socialism more broadly, seems to be permissible only when it is privatized and rendered a function of the market. In Social Text 55 (1998), a special issue titled “Intellectual Politics in Post-Tiananmen China,” Wang Hui insists that a new understanding of the achievements and tragedies of China’s socialist legacy is an urgent matter in need of immediate address. 2 Yet, he asserts, Chinese intellectuals have thus far been unable to respond adequately. China has always been an Other to the West — a social text to be deciphered and dissected by missionaries, Sinologists, economists, political scientists, and human rights advocates. Judging from the diners’ reactions that evening, China is also now an Other to itself. And while we could not help but think that the re-creation of Revolutionary scenes paraded before us that July evening must have engendered some sort of ambivalent, even uncomfortable, admixture of emotions with its Chinese audience members, the distracted consumption and conversation that was punctuated by moments of collective singing (revolutionary ditties learned by all Chinese schoolchildren) and impassioned flag waving (we all had pennants on our tables within easy reach) also made us think that this was nationalism without history. How might we go about interpreting, understanding, and reading this extraordinary social text called “China,” in the face of persistent Orientalism and self-Orientalism and in an age when the ghosts of socialism are still all around us? Bertrand Russell wrote an entire volume titled The Problem of China, emblematic of an insistent tendency to regard China as a puzzle to be solved, an inscrutability to be rendered transparent. 3 Such “problem of China” approaches tend to imply not only that China is a problem but also that there is also a solution, one that can be applied with relative ease once the problem is identified. Yet the issue is not that we merely need to obtain more, and more accurate, information about the Middle Kingdom (although we could certainly use it). Nor is the problem simply a cognitive one, insofar as we try to fit new information about China into preexisting Western categories (although we inevitably tend to do so). The problem — if we choose to call it that — is in fact much deeper and much more intractable because it is ultimately epistemological. That is, the challenge is to understand China as a problem of knowledge — as a problem of history and theory — not a problem to be solved, but a Problematik to be reckoned with. 64

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This Problematik is both historical and theoretical. Coming to terms with it demands dismantling the false opposition between history and theory. Historicized, theory inevitably becomes a question of the politics of knowledge, and indeed of the geopolitics of knowledge. For one thing, the proper name China is not even China’s own name for itself, but a Western appellation. How did the multiethnic Qing empire become a modern nation-state, reconstituted as one formally equal sovereign nation-state among others? What conceptions of space, time, and politics have been erased, and how successfully? Given China’s semicolonial history and its tensions between (state-) capitalist and communist visions of modernity, it cannot be studied in isolation, as a preexisting thing in and of itself. Nor can China’s existence be reduced to Western (for lack of a better adjective) representations of China. Rather, China and the West must be studied in relation to one another. At the risk of being overly schematic, Western studies of China have been, historically, more or less Eurocentric in their assumptions. In contrast, and for some time now, the field of Chinese history has moved largely beyond such assumptions and turned to more “China-centered” approaches, to borrow Paul Cohen’s term.4 That has been an indubitably productive shift, and it has generated many detailed regional studies and rich local knowledge. Reading China as a social text, however, highlights the ultimate impossibility of isolating the text from the context, the impossibility of locating a fixed border between the two. China becomes not a problem as such, but a comparative problem. Such an understanding moves us beyond both Eurocentrism and Sinocentrism to a third, more dialectic location, which allows us to tell decentered stories. The potential that this approach holds is exemplified by the recent tendency to focus on the margins and the borderlands of the Qing empire and of earlier dynasties.5 At their best, such accounts seek to avoid the pitfalls of both Eurocentrism and Sinocentrism. Instead, they hold the potential to tell stories about how different historical, political, cultural, and social entities come to be constituted as oppositional to one another.6 Although these are comparative accounts, they are at the same time doubly decentered, neither Eurocentric nor Sinocentric but seeking to deconstruct the very categories that they are comparing. In a more contemporary context, we might note that commentators in both the West and in China largely assume that China is a “transitional state”: neoliberal practices and policies will eventually come to absorb it into a teleology of Western capitalist development. Yet given the fact that a “developing” Chinese socialist state now props up a significant segment of the flagging U.S., and indeed global, economy as the holder of enormous amounts of Western debt, we should also consider that it may be China that comes to absorb Western globalization into its particular national and Social Text 100

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political logics. As Gan Yang suggests in Social Text 55, such a consideration works to delink (neo)liberalism from its privileged presumptions of democracy and freedom.7 In short, reading China as a social text demands, most of all, that we not reduce it to a preconstituted object of knowledge. Rather, we need to ask how China and the objects in relation to which it exists have come into being, and how they become stabilized — and destabilized — discursively as objects of knowledge. The answers to these historical and theoretical questions must be sought both within and beyond Beijing’s Fifth Ring Road, inside as well as outside of “China” — whatever the ultimate referent of that term might be. Notes 1. Indeed, there are numerous Cultural Revolution – themed restaurants all over China. 2. See Wang Hui, “Contemporary Chinese Thought and the Question of Modernity,” trans. Rebecca E. Karl, in Social Text 55 (1998): 9 – 44. See also Wang Hui, “The 1989 Social Movement and the Historical Roots of China’s Neoliberalism,” trans. Theodore Huters, in China’s New Order, ed. Theodore Huters (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 43 – 115. 3. Bertrand Russell, The Problem of China (London: Allen and Unwin, 1922). 4. See Paul Cohen, Discovering History in China: American Historical Writings on the Recent Chinese Past, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). 5. The most notable study of the margins of the Qing empire is Peter Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). 6. See, for example, James Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar: Qing Guest Ritual and the Macartney Embassy of 1793 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); Lydia Liu, The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Haun Saussy, Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2002). 7. See Gan Yang, “A Critique of Chinese Conservatism in the 1990s,” trans. Xudong Zhang, Social Text 55 (1998): 45 – 66. In the same special issue, Wang Hui calls for a challenge to the “teleology of modernization that has dominated Chinese thinking for the past century.” Indeed, Social Text 55 is a notable example of such critical approaches contesting a discourse of capitalist development.

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Cold War Nikhil Pal Singh

Totalitarianism was, in the words of George Kennan, the authoritative “nightmare” of liberal democracy. Kennan’s formulation betrayed considerable skepticism about the empirical validity of the concept he helped to author, one in which the primary divisions of the post – World War II world were understood in ethico-political terms and predicated upon a transvaluation of the wartime opposition between fascism and democracy. Yet Kennan, as William Peitz suggests in “The Post-Colonialism of Cold War Discourse,” a prescient and underappreciated essay in ST 19/20 (1988), was merely one participant in a much wider and more profoundly dishonest historical conversation. As the “theoretical anchor” of cold-war political culture, the theory of totalitarianism enacted a displacement of fascism outside the main historical currents of Western moral, political, and intellectual life. In the hands of its most important intellectual architect, Hannah Arendt, it short-circuited her prior recognition of Nazism within the family of Western imperialisms and as the exemplary modern instance of rationalized, technology-driven state terror. Peitz expanded his argument in ST 22 (1989), citing Aimé Césaire’s famous charge in Discourse on Colonialism that “Hitler applied to Europe colonialist procedures, which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India and the Blacks of Africa.” By contrast, the theory of totalitarianism not only linked fascist destruction of what Arendt termed “authentic political life” to the Soviet regime, it also suggested an extended chain of reasoning about existential dangers posed by “terrorist uses” of technology by those lacking proper philosophical conditioning and historical preparation for exercising state power. Thus, for midcentury cold warriors like Arthur Koestler, the “the yogi and the commissar” exemplified “the irrational credulity of all minds that have not

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reached the stage of science.” Likewise, Karl Popper described “enemies” of the “open society” as those whose response to the shocks of modernity led to rejection of the “anti-magical scientific empirical mode of thought,” even as they accessed modern technologies of governance and instruments of violence.1 Even if its primary explanatory terrain concerned the post – World War II division of Europe, conceptual elaborations of totalitarianism provided a generous field for rearticulating racist and colonialist divisions of the world and its peoples that had allegedly been left behind in the U.S.-led break from the logics of fascism and empire. In his generative misreading of Peitz, Anders Stephanson claims that Kennan’s account of totalitarianism viewed the Soviets as a “gigantic mediation between East and West,” and had little to do with considerations of the non-West (“Comment on an Aspect of Peitz’s Argument,” ST 19/20, 1988). Yet, in a sense, this underlines a more important claim, namely that the cold war elaborated new metonymic chains by which heterogeneous figures of non-Western alterity could be read along a single “sociological spectrum.” The cold war both required and provided conceptual and linguistic innovations for adjudicating decolonization within a historical discourse that remained in an exemplary sense that of colonial modernity. For example, in Present at the Creation, U.S. secretary of state Dean Acheson described the post – World War II “threat to Western Europe” as akin to “that which Islam had posed centuries before, with its combination of ideological zeal and fighting power. Then it had taken the same combination to meet it: Germanic power in the east and Frankish in Spain. . . . This time it would need the added power and energy of America, for the drama was now played on a world stage.”2 As a belated fulfillment of what Karl Kautsky once called “ultraimperialism,” the cold war was not only a coordination of military and economic affairs on new and increasingly global scales, it marked out a correlative space of cultural and intellectual work in which the variegated colonial inheritances of Western modernity were articulated into new global identities and divisions that sought to underwrite a more durable civilizational compact. Put another way, the theory of totalitarianism became the hinge connecting the frame of U.S. global power to the teleological door of modernization that opened and closed on new nations according to a more deeply embedded set of norms and assumptions about obedience, deference, emotional “maturity,” trustworthiness, rational capacity, and fitness for self-government. The ever-increasing ability to kill from a distance that constituted the economic and military infrastructure of colonial power was still unable to fully dispense with the vast superstructure of racist culture. Vietnam needed to be bombed back to the Stone Age, so that Asians could finally learn to appreciate the value of human life. 68

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Casting a cold eye on her progeny, Arendt argued that the authentic conflicts of our time might only become visible when totalitarianism was a thing of the past. Her nemesis, Carl Schmitt, lamented that the two World Wars had broken the duelist’s compact of the jus publicum europaeum that had once erected boundaries around war, separating combatants and civilians and ridding war of its criminal and punitive character. Agreeing with Césaire (though from the other side of the human divide), Schmitt acknowledged that rebels and criminals, as well as colonial and civil conflict, remained perpetually outside this bracketing. 3 Containing Soviet totalitarianism, the sine qua non of the official cold war, might thus be seen as a transitional phase in the colonial bracketing of war. What U.S. cold-war historians have dubbed “the long peace” in Europe and North America was purchased at the price of making applications of militarized force a normal state of affairs — a global civil war, or as Frantz Fanon put it, a world steeped in universal violence. Viewed from a truly global perspective, such as Odd Arne Westad applies in his recent work, the cold war was framed by (the failure of) decolonization, not the reverse. Ironically, the Soviet “empire of justice,” rather than contradicting, often played second fiddle to the U.S. “empire of liberty.” Both were invested heavily in bringing backward and deficient peoples into the orderings of science and state.4 Edward Said’s Orientalism (a work that is now perhaps too easily dismissed for its monological account of the workings of colonial discourse) remains an important touchstone for this discussion. The ill fit of the book’s final chapter on U.S. global power as the “latest phase” in the geostrategic and conceptual course of modern imperialism signals precisely the break/ nonbreak constituted by the cold war. Where Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri frame this period retrospectively as part of a move from imperialism to empire in which “global society must be defended,” this process occurs through rather than against the discursive and material orderings of colonial violence (see Leerom Medovoi in ST 91, 2007). The “inner solidarity” between democracy and fascism that Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and others so tantalizingly observe remains obscure lacking this insight. As I have written elsewhere, though “democratic liberalism comes to imagine fascism as its monstrous Other, fascism might be better understood as its doppelganger or double — an exclusionary will to power that has regularly reemerged, manifesting itself in: those zones of internal exclusion within liberal-democratic societies (plantations, reservations, ghettos, and prisons); and those sites where liberalism’s expansionist impulse and universalizing force has been able to evade its own ‘constitutional restraints’ (the frontier, the colony, the state of emergency, the occupation, and the counterinsurgency).”5 Officially, the U.S. cold war was marked by the development of Social Text 100

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expressly nonracialist and anticolonialist foreign policy and military cultures against the backdrop of the Holocaust experience and under pressure from cultural pluralist influences and civil-rights struggles inside the country. Yet, none of this contradicts the development of the United States as a permanent warfare state, mobilized through the manipulation of an omnivorous culture of fear, whose terrain of reference is explicitly biopolitical in the sense that it repeatedly links biological and quasi-biological threats to populations defined as national and civilizational entities. The preeminent U.S. cold-war historian John Gaddis has written that we were “all irradiated on that morning of September 11, 2001, in such a way as to shift our psychological make-up — the DNA in our minds — with consequences that will not become clear for years to come.” In turn, he suggests that the U.S. foreign-policy response, freed from the totalitarian threat, could now return to a truer origin: “There were, as well what we would call ‘non-state actors’ — native Americans, pirates, marauders and other free agents — ready to raid lightly defended positions along an advancing frontier . . . An expanding ‘civilization’ spread out along an insecure frontier had the right of preemption. . . . In responding to the horrors that took place on September 11th, 2001 . . . the Bush administration, whether intentionally or not, has been drawing upon [this] set of traditions.”6 Violence over the land is rationalized as a civilizing mission and biopolitical imperative. From westward expansion to the West Bank, this was something that Arendt foretold but also forgot: the protototalitarian scene of settler-colonialism continues to haunt the posttotalitarian world. Notes 1. See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958); Arthur Koestler, The Yogi and the Commissar, and Other Essays (New York: Macmillan, 1945); Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (London: Routledge, 1945). 2. Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (New York: Norton, 1987 [1969]), 376. 3. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951; New York: Schocken, 2004); Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of Jus Publicum Europaeum (1950; New York: Telos, 2004). 4. Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 5. Nikhil Pal Singh, “The Afterlife of Fascism,” South Atlantic Quarterly 105 (2006): 79. 6. John Lewis Gaddis, Security, Surprise, and the American Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 4, 107.

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The Social Life of the Collective

Andrew Ross : One thing that I will not ever regret is being part of a

collectivity — I like collectivity and all that it entails, even as laborintensive and energy-intensive as it is. It’s a fairly rare experience, I think, and at that time it felt that way. Sohnya Sayres : The feeling was that something new was happening. A really different mix was taking place and a different kind of agenda was taking place. There were challenges in the air. How do you make it work, how do you turn it into everyday life — how do you lift up people’s boat, in a sense. Bruce Robbins : We never really developed anything like a procedure for recruitment. It tended to be people being attracted into the gravitational field and either working or not working for a certain period. I mean, it had a lot of flux to it. People would move to New York or move away from New York. And of course there were political fights because people naturally wanted allies on the collective. Randy Martin : There was quite a lot of elasticity to the collective. With different people showing up for every meeting and open discussions, it could take a year to get a piece vetted. It’s funny to think about those as the glory days of collectivity, given the trade-offs for any kind of production. Sohnya Sayres : Oh, we weren’t efficient, we weren’t polite. It was very

fractious. Andrew Ross : I was always for the face-to-face thing, yeah, absolutely.

Because it was all about persuading other people to come over to your side. If you were advocating for a manuscript, you had to get four advo-

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cates. You had to get four folks to vote yes. For a long time it was four. And so you had to persuade people who were on the line. John Brenkman : An article would start another great debate internally,

not over what to do but what to think. It was a very lively environment. It certainly made being an assistant professor a whole lot more interesting than it otherwise probably would have been. Andrew Ross : We were pretty clear that the bulk of the collective meetings were for the discussion of a topic. That the manuscript reviews were important but they got them out of the way first so that someone would propose a topic or someone would present and then we had a debate. And that was an important part of it. Then there were things like the Socialist Scholars Conference. We always put on the more intellectual panels. I remember Fred put on the first ones about the AIDS crisis. I don’t think anyone else there at the time would have considered putting on a panel about the AIDS crisis. So there was the sense that we would be out in front, introducing new kinds of activism or thinking to other segments of the Left. And we were doing other things, as well, like the soirées. Bruce Robbins : At the soirées, an invited visitor would give a talk and we’d have a respondent. We did quite a number of them. There was food and drink. People would bring stuff, and you’d pass the hat — or maybe there’d be like a till at the door and people could put in $5 or something like that. And there was lots and lots of conversation, formal and informal. Probably more informal than formal. And there was, you know, Social Text had a circle around it. There were actually various circles now that I think about it. There was an inner circle — people who did most of the work and whose ideas for the journal probably imposed themselves more than others. There was a slightly looser circle around that, and then lots of people who just knew people — who were friends of friends and would come to these things in the audience. Anders Stephanson : The soirées were all at Michael Brown’s loft down

on Spring and Sixth Avenue. We would buy an immense amount of wine and cheese and then we would charge a kind of cover fee, but it wasn’t as though we made any money. Those were the kind of social gatherings for Social Text aficionados — for people who wanted to come and have a chat about serious stuff and have a little cocktail and have a little wine. Those were important things. Stanley came out with the idea of purposefully, pompously calling them “soirées.” So we always put that into the invitation. Sohnya Sayres : There were also branch-off things like the Bakhtin circle,

which met at our house all the time. That was another quality of the 72

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time: people said, there’s this incredibly interesting critic who’s coming to attention now, big books; we need to sit down and study these together. And sometimes that was part of the meeting. We got through the business part, we got through all the other, and if you had time to catch up with all of that, then you’d sit down and read a couple of chapters of Husserl. I guess in some way with Mike [Brown]’s loft and the loft where George [Yudice] and I lived, it circulated around a number of locations downtown. This nexus, this neighborhood, it made it pretty easy to do that kind of thing, to extend into the evening. Randy Martin : There were these huge meetings in lofts, so obviously there

was a New York real-estate component to Social Text. Andrew Ross : In the early 1990s, the meetings alternated between Bruce’s

loft and my place on Hudson Street. But it was important to meet in someone’s house and that the actual space was big enough — they had to be lofts. They had to be big enough so you could all sit. Sohnya Sayres : The fun part was that we felt that we really had a vehicle. So if we were in a conference, we could go up to people and say: “I know this is a long shot, but would you consider letting us publish your work?” At the best moments, we all felt empowered to be out there in the world with our antennae up, bringing things back and discussing them with the group, keeping our senses open. I remember walking up to Bertolucci and saying, “Hi, I’m from Social Text and I would like to talk to you.” It was sort of that craziness. I got a press pass to some screening. And as it turned out, Bertolucci was delighted to have an intellectual conversation.

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Collective



Brent Hayes Edwards, Anna McCarthy, and Randy Martin

Editorial collectives share features with artistic and political collectives. To compare them is first of all to recall that any collective is inherently, as Andrew Ross reminds us in his essay in this issue, an “adventure in mutuality.” At every level, a collective operates not by deference to hier­ archy, much less by the fiction of unanimity, but instead by the premise of the “reciprocity of practice,” as it is phrased in the collectively authored essay on the aesthetics of Language poetry that appeared in Social Text 19/20 (1988). As is obvious throughout this anniversary issue, collectiv­ ism can involve but does not necessitate collaboration, the difficult process of directly making something together. “Reciprocity of practice” implies something broader and harder to define: a mutual attention — a poetry collective is “a community of writers who read each other’s work,” as the Language poets put it — that is taken to be the sign of a set of shared inter­ ests or commitments that can only be discovered and recalibrated in the active self-reflexivity of the group. Whether it involves a farm, a protest march, a dance, or a periodical, the recourse to collectivism also involves a conviction that social organization is necessarily itself political. Or, as it is announced in the prospectus in the first issue of Social Text: “the jour­ nal’s editorial organization is, we believe, an integral part of its theoretical and political project” (ST 1, 1979). The artistic collective offers a critique that sits at the intersection of authorship and ownership: a project-driven ensemble, it treats historical conjuncture as both occasion and material for its work. The creative process is above all a means of intervention with the goal of enlarging an engaged community. The artistic collective sacrifices durability for relevance and devises technical solutions geared to maximize impact on an audience that it could directly claim to have gathered and furthered. The manifesto, the

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improvised performance, the interventionist public work — all of these vehicles for art-making insist upon a radicalism of form adequate to the demands of the world outside the work. To note the experimentation at the core of collective poesis is also to recognize that aesthetic form itself is the ground that is shared and explored; as Raymond Williams has argued, the artistic collective becomes “a community of the medium, of their own practices.”1 The political collective, animated by what is sometimes referred to as praxis, seeks to install or instantiate, in its own ways of being, ways of thinking and relating that suggest alternatives to (or repair deficiencies in) the prevailing state of social affairs. Embodying the change it seeks in the world, the political collective expresses a confidence in the force of shared commitments as compensation for the debilitating effects of conventional socialization, while germinating a conviviality that would produce politi­ cal action of undeniable relevance and efficacy. Collective political work thus implies a kind of public demonstration and provides a medium of practice in which the performance and circulation of ideas and actions allows sustained theorization to take place. As a form of organization and model of labor, the collective has undergone a distinct modulation over the course of Social Text’s publi­ cation history. The journal was initially founded with not one but three editorial groups — in La Jolla-Irvine, Madison, and New Haven — and its “decentralized structure” was taken to be “symptomatic of the disper­ sion that affects intellectual life in America” (“Prospectus,” ST 1, 1979). Within five years, however, Social Text became centered in a single collec­ tive based in New York, and — especially as the politics of academic labor became increasingly central to its concerns — the contents of the journal have often reflected its particular interinstitutional and urban setting. In the early 1990s, the journal’s affiliation with Duke University Press further reshaped the editorial functioning of the collective, as the artisanal, often painstakingly slow and irregular way the journal had been produced in its first decade, issue by issue, was replaced by the rationalized standard timeline of the scholarly quarterly. In the context of the academy, the story of the Social Text collective begins with the desire to establish a counterpoint to possessive individu­ alism and singular authorship, insisting instead on the social conditions and ramifications of knowledge production. Against the deadening met­ ric of disciplinary accountability, the journal turned to the putative high ground of theory and insisted on the flexibility and relevance of Marxism as a problematic in the analysis of culture and society. Peer review might once have served the purpose of ensuring professional autonomy, but the politics of late-twentieth-century disciplinarity demanded that the peerreview editorial system trade blindness for oversight. This profoundly Social Text 100

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altered the contract of professionalism, linking judgment over the validity of knowledge to its determinate forms of production (manifest as tenured lines bestowed with academic freedom). As the university’s aims and methods increasingly find justification not in the model of a public good of enlightened citizenship, but rather in the realm of “value-added,” protocols of empirical evaluation become the technology par excellence of higher administration, fueled by the ratings-driven demands of inces­ sant comparison. To this condition, the collective held out a modest and partial antidote. In the case of committed academic journals, editorial collectives are a kind of subvened labor, with support for participation predicated on preexisting salaried work and on institutional input. The political com­ mitments of teaching, activism, administration, research, presentation, or other facets of academic life are partially transferred into publishing, without the presumption that the publication per se could substitute for or summarize all these other kinds of engagement. The editorial collective foments a deliberative process that aims to set its own context and hence to make something generative of its internal disciplinary difference. Issues under development may reflect a concern afoot in a particular intellectual domain or may be topical to a political or cultural critique. The mix of disciplinary backgrounds at the editorial table creates pressure for each contribution to achieve a kind of internal translation: to consider readers beyond its own formative circuits; to assemble literatures, criticisms, and interests from outside its initial conditions. In this regard, the editorial collective enacts a kind of mediating force — not only among potential publics, but also between its own immediate context of encounter and its subsequent applications. This mediating force lives on through published work even beyond the immediate context of the journal, in the ways that essays resonate laterally, beyond their initial topics and fields. At the same time, even as particular pieces reverberate at a distance from the journal as they are taken up through reading, citation, and reappropriation, the editorial collective continues to orient a horizon of assembly for further intervention. As a form of intellectual culture, the collective depends upon the intimacy of face-to-face encounter. Editorial decision making takes place through discussions that involve unexpected changes in current as much as obstinate positioning; the patterns of influence cannot always be antici­ pated. There is a romanticism here, which risks ignoring the ways that personal affinity and intellectual charisma come to play a crucial role in any group dialogue, and which risks overlooking the ways that disciplinary expertise can come in through the back door, as it were, giving authority to advocacy or critique at certain moments in the process of deliberation. On another level, there is a temptation to imagine that the will of the col­ 76

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lective, appropriately honed through the medium of the journal, can find a definitive purchase in the public realm, offering a needed corrective to the latter’s omissions or ill-considered positions. Nevertheless, the mode of collective editing is meant to call the bluff of the romanticism of peer review, which is designed to conceal (rather than to confront) these same risks under the guise of “neutrality” and “disinterest.” It is precisely what seems dépassé about collectivism — its fragility, its frank avowal of inter­ ested affiliation, its conviction that the difficulties it brings to light cannot be avoided or rationalized away — that makes it so crucial today, in an age of accounting and quantification. A final dimension of the collective as a kind of editorial agency bears noting: its capacity to mutate and remake itself as times, and members, change. This is not to say that the Social Text collective, in any of its variet­ ies, has somehow transcended the conditions or contradictions it sought to remediate. Still, the capacity to restaff and rally with shifting participants under the name of an abiding project is one way that collectives insist upon the continuity of predicament while allowing for transformation in the ways that it is met. Adaptability is of course a condition of any institution that strives for longevity. But it takes on a special poignancy in an organization centered not around the vision of a single ego, mission, or disciplinary foundation, but instead around the reciprocal practice of a changing group that agrees to discover and rediscover its political common ground in the very ways it comes together. Note 1. Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (London: Verso, 1989), 45.

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Commodity



Michael Ralph

A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.  — Karl Marx, “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof” (1887)

This somewhat enigmatic passage is useful for thinking about why the commodity resists neat categorization: whether it is illusory or real, scientific or “theological,” a fundamental problem for social thought or a “trivial” matter, of a piece with the reality we all share or a “very queer thing,” the commodity has — since the time when this phrase was first penned and in the first one hundred issues of Social Text — provoked a series of critical conversations about a modernity that isn’t nearly as secular as we had anticipated it might be — nor as modern.1 In rejecting the evangelical frame of a capitalist modernity that would split the world into those who have and haven’t been brought into alignment with the conversion it proffers (whether through enslavement, colonialism, or structural adjustment), we now recognize that the intersections between economic systems — and regimes of value — are more complex and variegated than thinkers like Marx initially surmised. Yet, in the continuity that obtains between drastically different social formations, our most sophisticated theories of economy and society have settled on “the commodity” when referring to anything that is bought or sold, borrowed or traded, suggesting that any entity that can be objectified and reified — and set into an exchange equation — can be commodified (which could conceivably apply to any entity). If commodification is endemic to the logic of capitalism, it is perhaps because the space of the sacred — that which cannot have a market value

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affixed to it — has apparently receded. On the flip side, even a commodity that is produced using the most sophisticated technology available comes into being, initially, as a secular revelation. This suggests that there is plenty more to be said about the “metaphysical subtleties” and “theological niceties” that occasion its arrival. We have, at least since the days of scientific socialism, come to realize that secular societies produce their own forms of religious thought and practice (ST 64, 2000, “Word Secularisms at the Millennium”) — their own techniques of sorcery. If capitalism is something like a religious phenomenon — if indeed neoliberalism might be glossed as “market fundamentalism”2 — the financial crisis of 2008 has occasioned a crisis of faith. Crisis is, in its inception, a medical term, referring to the moment when the human body encounters an illness that will lead to recovery, if the proper remedy is introduced, but death, if not.3 If the commodity is to capitalism what the communion wafer is to the body of the Christ — a fragment that reproduces the essential features of the whole — the Fall (of 2008) and its attendant financial crisis demand that we reappraise the wisdom of the Father. Perhaps we need to consider more carefully what it means to have monetary value affixed to the work we produce — to the human body (not to mention its parts and products). We might then wish to reevaluate what it means to believe the capacity for labor is something that we “own,” that human rights are something we “possess.” Transplant organs could be dismissed as medical prostheses separate and distinct from their former owners if only they did not need to be inserted into debilitated bodies while they are still “alive.” What about the shrines that practitioners of the Afro-Cuban religious tradition regla ocho assemble using blood, hair, and pieces of bone? They require, for their ritual efficacy, the consent of the deceased spirits whose human remains are deployed in these spiritual technologies.4 This suggests the prevailing idea that people ought to be able to control their own bodies — the errant notion that every human being is made up of a master and a territory or capacity to be controlled — is itself part of the problem. In that vein, Geeta Patel’s sense that sexuality and capital are “thoroughly integrated and implicated in the constitution of persons and subjects” (ST 89, 2007) is especially instructive, since it calls attention to the particular forms of historicity and alterity that are structured by differential access to state resources and emotional and commercial endeavors. Yet, despite the role that commodification plays as the central feature of a capitalist architecture that has proven more resilient than anyone could have anticipated, it remains rife with contingencies. So it is productive to ponder the range of historical events that occasion commodity speculation (natural catastrophes, military invasions, and fatal accidents). As close to a third of Social Text’s first one hundred issues have been published Social Text 100

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since the debut of the “war on Terror,” we perhaps ought to be especially concerned with thinking about how and why war remains such a reliable “technique for converting uncertainty into calculable gain,” as Randy Martin puts it (ST 91, 2007). This harkens back to the formative years of a global infrastructure we now discuss in benign terms as the “international monetary system”: recall that military excursions furnished the first opportunities for massive investment at the dawn of European exploration. From the early medieval idea that money was a gift from God (and that it was therefore sinful to profit or gain interest from it), by the sixteenth century European monarchs routinely fought wars and sponsored overseas voyages using credit provided by the continent’s wealthiest bankers. Meanwhile, the transition from medieval notions of commerce to early modern conceptions of exchange value was structured by a series of contradictions. While wealthy British landowners shared wealth derived from their fiefdoms to finance diplomatic skirmishes as early as the thirteenth century, prevailing conceptions of profit generally attributed the success of a choice harvest to the natural bounty of select estates and not to the economic prowess of the lords who governed them. Thus there was little regard for the role of financial expertise in the production of merchant capital where Christian conceptions of customary feudal commerce were concerned. This partly explains why, as soon as the Norman conquest of 1066 was complete, William I invited Jewish merchants to England in the effort to bolster national trade and industry. Freed from the suspicion of profit that characterized Western Christendom, they served as financiers, moneylenders, and pawnbrokers, eventually obtaining an official bureaucratic designation in the Great Exchequer (or Exchequer of the Jews) by which they levied and collected the king’s taxes — that is, until the tense relationship between religion and commerce that obtained in feudal England generated suspicions that congealed in the Edict of Expulsion of 1290, which called for all Jews to leave England (a policy that would not be formally overturned until 1656). Where we are concerned with the transition from quasi-theological conceptions of sovereign debt and medieval diplomacy to modern democracy and the sense of freedom that accompanied it, we might pin one origin of the modern credit-debt system that undergirds “secular” capitalist modernity to the Fatal Accidents Act of 1846, which displaced the law of deodand as a mechanism for resolving tragic collisions. In the previous conception of “accidental” death or injury, any such event was attributed to a capricious spirit, making the object — the deodand — “accursed”; thus the only legitimate form of redress was to transfer the culpable object, or the value of it, to God’s earthly sovereign, the Crown.5 In the new formulation of the problem, damages were now shared with the family of the victim, and instead of the value of the personal object (the chattel) responsible, what 80

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was now at stake was the value of a human life, which would eventually be based on a calculation of the individual’s projected future earnings. (This was the case in British law, at least, though not necessarily in other realms of sovereignty. The French tradition in tort law, for instance, departs from nineteenth-century workers’ compensation cases, then was developed more systematically during early-twentieth-century automobile collision cases.) It is no coincidence that the 1830s and 1840s represent the moment when corporate ownership would no longer consist of a charter granted by the state (e.g., the Dutch West India Company, the British East India Company). Corporations would now derive their efficacy from the “right” to participate in market competition through the legal shield of limited liability, which enabled a financial institution to become incorporated as a single social actor, in the eyes of the law, and to be protected from exorbitant losses through the prevailing idea that corporate research and development — and the products it generates — benefits society as a whole. Thus, while there would clearly be other new forms of modern subjectivity (i.e., the corporation), the human body became a secular object in profound new ways. The Anatomy Act of 1832 licensed the use of cadavers of ordinary citizens for surgical training (whereas before, only the corpses of convicted murderers could be used for medical research). Soon the coroner (derived from the Latin corona, meaning “crown”) was no longer a state official responsible for examining corpses and accident scenes to determine if and when the sovereign was responsible for a death (and how much the state would need to pay in damages, in that case); she or he would now work with and for ordinary citizens, whether elected or appointed to office. In this way, tracing the advent of modern techniques for adjudicating the value of a human life back to the Fatal Accidents Act of 1846 sets the stage for thinking about forensics as a means for healing breaches in civil society (by assessing damages in civil cases, and determining guilt in criminal cases). In this connection, the Fatal Accidents Act fits snugly in the middle of a series of legislative initiatives (Britain’s Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, Joint Stock Act of 1842, and Limited Liability Act of 1855) that reshaped modern capital. This example is instructive since it points the way back to theories of the commodity that emerged in a postsocial movement moment. In trying to explain the post – cold war demise of prospects for a socialist utopia, some Marxist scholars have cited the commodification of one’s craft — and, by extension, one’s self — as the chief explanation for why intellectuals and artists now appear more concerned with personal, rather than collective, prosperity. This is ultimately a theory of sin camouflaged as a theory of the commodity. Ironically, the insistence by some critical theorists that all art and scholarship needs to be “political” — the sense that it must service the lofty goal of Revolution — inadvertently reproduces the founding logic of capitalist modernity where, at Social Text 100

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least in its most popular iteration, métropoles funded ships that would sail the world promoting Christianity, commerce, and civilization. These essential features of modernity — most European sovereigns, philosophers, and explorers would have it — were needed to displace a savage tradition of fetishism, which lacked the capacity for a transcendent image of religion (God, the Father) and a transcendent theory of value (where money would eventually serve as the universal equivalent). Only in this version, artists are too mired in the dirty world of money to serve the transcendent goal of Revolution (as opposed to revolution, where part of the goal would be to avoid the certainty of mission that tends to undermine progressive social change, leaving power in the dubious hands of a few sanctioned leaders). Though Social Text has, from its debut, defined its mission by the effort to frame Marxism in “the broadest sense of the term” (“Rallying Social Text,” ST 70, 2002), critical social theory enmeshed in the revolutionary disenchantment of the past few decades has played host, on the one hand, to theorists who had started to believe Marx had been wrong (as if there is a single way to be right) about how capital works and, on the other hand, to Marxists who fought ever more fervently to defend their faith in its orthodoxy. Given these trends, the oeuvre of this (in)famous German philosopher might seem an odd place to end a discussion of the commodity form. On the flip side, this might be just the way to spark renewed interest in this particular category of historical object, including more careful attention to the intriguing proposition that use-value and exchange-value are not aspects or features of the commodity, but two different dimensions of it that each appear at different moments in the process of exchange, as part of the structure of recognition that commerce entails. But if Marx is much appreciated and much maligned, it is my sense that a few of the key suppositions with which people tend to proceed in their study of his scholarship are patently wrong, and these have implications for everything I have said here about how we might think about the commodity. The most egregious error by Marxist scholars — and their sworn enemies — is the tendency to read Marx as an atheist and to translate that suspicion of religion into their reading of his work. Marx’s version of religion was an ethical humanism that offered principled strategies about how to build a just society without evacuating a sensuous engagement with the world that is central to the human experience (though in the era of critical social theory’s “posthuman” turn, we might extend this consideration to all living organisms). If Marx was not religious in the way we might generally use the term, he was intensely mystical, intrigued by a capitalist modernity that remained mired in enchantment. Whatever his personal beliefs — and despite the ubiquity of that tired phrase “religion is the opiate of the people” — Marx’s theory of the commodity fetish was designed to illustrate that capitalism is not nearly so sophisticated (or 82

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rational, or scientific) as its adherents imagine it to be. If Christianity conceived of itself as superior to primitive religion, Marx found something compelling about those savage traditions (read by Enlightenment thinkers initially as animism, then later as trifling superstitions) that privileged a material, embodied engagement with spiritual forces, with social systems that remained mired in a sensuous experience with the world, instead of seeking to transcend it. Just as our systems of political authority have never ceased to incorporate mystical elements, our most rational discourses on the economy never cease to include our gravest fears about how value accrues and depreciates. For this reason, our most sophisticated theories of the commodity treat it as a historical object that is constituted under particular conditions and regimented through discrete forms of situated practice. In other words, like the human body, the commodity is best apprehended as a phenomenon whose contours are solidified by the broader configuration of power in which it takes shape, though — because it surfaces in economic transactions which presume that the object is utterly reified — people continue to frame commodification (in particular, the commodification of the human body) as a process that could potentially evacuate human agency, though it never succeeds in this regard. Instead, the commodity unfolds in a historical process whose outcome is always uncertain. Thus, despite the different academic traditions in which these perspectives obtain, clearly there is something of a thematic resonance in Freud’s decision to label as “fetish” those forms of desire that we deem “primitive,” “savage,” and “taboo” (even as they captivate us) and Marx’s decision to use the same term as a strategy for unraveling the universalist pretensions of Western secular modernity. Fetishism was, for Marx, “the religion of sensuous desire,”6 something we should bear in mind when reading his discussion of the “commodity fetish.” The commodity is defined by its distance from that which has already transpired and its relationship to a form of historicity that has not yet arrived, as with modes of sexuality that likewise resist neat circumspection.7 This complicated medium of desire reveals the fallibility of institutional designs to harness its power. Instead we see, in the modern economic polity, an ungeheure Warensammlung, a “monstrous collection of commodities,” 8 where the “uncanny return of the monster” (Jasbir Puar and Amit Rai, ST 72, 2002) that resists containment never ceases to pose a problem for the kind of social formation that we have been calling “neoliberal.” The commodity is a very queer thing.

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Notes 1. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 2. David Graeber, “The New Anarchists,” New Left Review 13 (2002): 62. 3. Gregory A. Beckett, “The End of Haiti: History under Conditions of Impossibility” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2008). 4. See Stephan Palmié, “Thinking with Ngangas: Reflections on Embodiment and the Limits of ‘Objectively Necessary Appearances,’ ” Comparative Studies of Society and History 4 (2006): 852 – 86. 5. See William Pietz, “Death of the Deodand: Accursed Objects and the Money Value of Human Life,” Res 31 (1997): 97 – 108. 6. Karl Marx, “The Leading Article in No. 179 of the Kölnische Zeitung,” in Collected Works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, vol. 1, ed. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 189. 7. José Esteban Muñoz, “Cruising the Toilet: LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Radical Black Traditions, and Queer Futurity,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 13 (2007): 353 – 67. 8. Karl Marx, Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (1859; Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1972), 7. I follow Thomas Keenan in translating ungeheure Warensammlung as a “monstrous collection of commodities,” in place of the inadequate phrase “an immense collection of commodities” that prevails in Englishlanguage publications. See Thomas Keenan, “The Point Is to (Ex)change It: Reading Capital, Rhetorically,” in Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, ed. Emily Apter and William Pietz (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 157. This formulation resonates with Hegel’s sense that modern forms of economic exchange constitute a “‘monstrous system’ (ungeheures System) of mutual ‘dependency’ (Abhängigkeit)” (Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History [Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009], 52–53n90, as quoted from Georg W. F. Hegel, Jenaer Systementwürfe: Das System der spekulativen Philosophie, ed. Klaus Düsing and Heinz Kimmerle (Hamburg: Meiner, 1986), 229–30.

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Culture Patrick Deer

Modern cultural criticism, like the younger discipline of cultural studies, has long struggled to reconcile the antagonistic logic at the heart of the idea of culture. Social Text’s project as a journal has been energized throughout by the contradictory genealogy of the term itself — the inner dynamism and instability generated by the pull between culture defined, in Arnoldian terms, as the highest “cultural” achievements of a civilization’s elites set apart from both nature and politics in a separate, disinterested sphere, and its contrary anthropological definition as a “whole way of life.” This ethnographic expansion of the range of culture, generated in part by the colonial encounter with the “primitive,” which must be understood on its own terms, and by the collision with working-class voices and cultural practices at the heart of Marxist social theory, allowed it to include the whole way of life of other populations: now culture could include the popular and demotic, the marginalized and oppressed subjects of modernity. This contradictory inheritance from the nineteenth century was complicated and enriched by the emergence in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries of successive instantiations of culture within mass communications, signifying systems, and subaltern cultural productions generated out of decolonization and continuing class struggle. The picture is complicated by culture’s intimate ties to the state: to administration, governmentality, and war. By now, the culture concept’s combination of expansionist energies and inner antagonisms makes it a slippery and untrustworthy idea: it offers at once too much and too little. Social Text’s long romance with culture offers some invaluable lessons about its continuing viability, or what it means, as editors Brent Edwards and Randy Martin asked in 2002, to pursue “the question of cultural politics after cultural studies” (“Rallying Social

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Text,” ST 70). While the modernization of ideas of culture has generated rich responses from its critics and analysts, especially in the emergence of the oppositional project and institutionalized practices of cultural studies, this seemingly ubiquitous and inescapable concept remains haunted by its constitutive contradictions. There is no escape, it seems, from culture. How to track this trajectory through the pages of Social Text? This, in a journal that was instrumental in its early years in opening up a space for cultural studies in the United States by importing its theoretical avatars, that subsequently and vigorously intervened in the debates spurred by the very success of that upstart discipline’s institutionalization within the U.S. academy, that found itself as a result a target — notoriously — in the neoconservative “culture wars” but rebounded, reinventing itself as a space precisely for “this elaboration of the question of cultural politics after cultural studies” (Edwards and Martin, ST 70). One way of telling the story of Social Text’s long romance with the culture concept would be to see the journal’s engagement with culture as a sustained playing out of the contradictory genealogy, expansionist energies, and the unresolved antagonisms of the term itself. The elite vision of high culture, as Matthew Arnold influentially observed, “implies the idea of the state.”1 Indeed, in this version, as David Lloyd and Paul Thomas have memorably argued — adapting Marx’s formulation — the modernizing state declares that citizens cannot represent themselves, therefore they must learn to be represented — by culture (“Culture and Society or ‘Culture and the State’?” ST 30, 1992).2 But there is the other side to culture: by giving its name to the halting cries, the “barbarous yawp,” and the roar in the street of the excluded and oppressed, the cultural critic claims the right to include their voices and tell their stories along with those of the “sweetness and light,” the brightest and the best. In the long history of the idea of culture, which is the shadow history both of subaltern political struggles and of the institutionalization of the modern humanities and sciences, the uses of culture have of necessity required the defining, policing, and expelling of its others. It is a modern idea that offers those who wield it the promise both of social cohesion and a community of interests, and of endless antagonism. This is the now familiar genealogy of culture elaborated so influentially by Raymond Williams in the “keyword” entry for the term that was generated out of his research for his book Culture and Society (1958), that strange and lonely product of his postwar isolation and his own personal struggle to free himself from his Leavisite training as a literary critic and to “alienate his knowledge,” as Stuart Hall put it, in the cause of the whole way of life of the British working classes.3 In this issue of Social Text we have followed the keywords route in a variety of directions, familiar and unfamiliar. 86

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From the start, as Williams’s example makes clear, culture has been bedeviled by its improper origins. Counterposed to both “nature” and to the depredations of commercialized commodity culture in nineteenthcentury “civilization,” it might in Matthew Arnold’s formulation offer a realm uncolonized by the market, by religion, and by politics, the autonomous realm of arts and letters imbued and sacralized as the very highest point of a civilization’s development. This is the seduction of culture, its appeal as an irreducible particularity that energized Catherine Gallagher’s critique of Williams (and, by implication, of U.S. cultural studies) in ST 30, the memorial issue for Williams. Yet, as Williams himself argued, the elitist versions of high culture that emerged so forcefully by the mid-nineteenth century already had to contend by the late nineteenth century with both the institutionalized “cultural” practices of arts and letters and the anthropological definitions of culture as a whole way of life generated out of colonial ethnography.4 How ironic for those whom culture offered an escape from the colonization of the aesthetic by the commodity, the Arnolds and the Eliots, like their latter-day heirs, that culture found itself reinvigorated by the violent worldliness of the imperial encounter and the working-class struggle for literacy, education, and political representation: the culture concept’s expansionism was both spiritual and abstracting and intensely material and particular. The question has been from the very start: if culture can be co-opted and appropriated so successfully, as it seems to have been so flexibly and fluidly designed to serve, then what is left of it for the purposes of either consolation, edification, or resistance? In thirty years of publishing left cultural criticism of an exceptionally high quality, Social Text has showed a sustained willingness to engage the constitutive antagonisms of the modern idea of culture. In the first issue’s “Prospectus” (ST 1, 1979), in a section titled “Mass Culture,” the editors, Stanley Aronowitz, John Brenkman, and Fredric Jameson, drew on these constitutive contradictions in the name of a reinvigorated Marxist engagement with “Theory, Culture, Ideology.” Their founding manifesto echoes Williams’s own theoretical shift as he moved in the late 1970s from the richly generative yet often critiqued “culturalist” conception of a “whole way of life” to the more theoretically nuanced semiotic conception of culture as a “signifying system.” The theoretical move left many unanswered questions. The editors declared: Recognizing the inadequacies of earlier Marxist aesthetics, in particular the reflection theory of art and the interpretation of aesthetic discourse in terms of reductive ideological categories, Social Text calls for a view of artistic practices that sees them as actively responding to the entire set of discourses, symbolic formations, and systems of representation that define a particular society’s cultural and political life. We are especially interested Social Text 100

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in analyzing art’s capacity to stall or spur social transformations in a given historical situation.

Here is a more semiotic and broadly expansionist conception of the purview of the cultural critic: we can analyze any aspect of the “systems of representation that define a particular society’s cultural and political life.” This is the moment of the first full wave of high theory’s importation in UK and U.S. circles, a time that we might look back to with some melancholy nostalgia. The astute reader will note with a jolt the use of the word art in that last sentence. It is a reminder that “culture” has also become a pervasive conceptual and categorical coverall: where we might hesitate at the use of the words literature, art, or even society, we can blithely use the word culture and sound respectable, even hip. But the Social Text founding editors counterposed their use of the inclusiveness of culture, of its imperial or globalizing tendencies, we might say, to a more antagonistic deployment of their terms of analysis, by opposing dialectically “mass culture” to the “avant-garde”: “Social Text, therefore, proposes to raise the following question: How can the relation between mass culture and the avant-garde lead us to grasp the interaction between the emancipatory and repressive, critical and reproductive, utopian and integrative tendencies in each?” This is the dialectical, indeed antagonistic, approach to culture that has yielded some extraordinary moments in Social Text’s publishing history across the years. What are the landmarks? First, the moment of emergence: In the same opening issue, there is Fredric Jameson’s “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” arguably an essay that stands favorable comparison to his later, less dialectical “Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.”5 The insistence on the bounded category of “mass culture” generates both Jameson’s rigorous readings of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws as allegory for seventies oil shock and fear of recession and a simultaneous insistence on the emancipatory potential of mass cultural forms that is less evident in the more dystopian and totalizing later analyses of postmodernism. Free, as yet, of the need to abstract “mass culture” into the “cultural dominant” of his mid-eighties theorizing, Jameson’s analysis still reads like a generative road not taken. A landmark of the journal’s shift toward a Birmingham School – style cultural-studies approach can be found in Lawrence Grossberg’s five theses in “The Politics of Youth Culture: Some Observations on Rock and Roll in American Culture” (ST 8, 1983), in which rock itself is a protean other to the essay’s rigorous cultural analysis, submerged into forty-three wonderful footnotes like the chords of a rackful of punk and post-punk LPs. In Richard Johnson’s bracing and still salutary survey of the field, “What Is Cultural Studies Anyway?” (ST 16, 1986), we see a humane response to the emergence of a dual antagonism, both 88

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within and without the idea of culture. For Johnson, cultural studies must respond, urgently yet patiently, to both the attacks of the new right neocons on the legitimacy and politics of left cultural studies and also to the threat posed by institutionalization and codification to the outsider project of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) of the Birmingham School. In like spirit was Gallagher’s 1992 critique of Williams, mentioned above, that drew spirited responses from editors Aronowitz and Andrew Ross (ST 30). Jameson articulated his own critique of “the desire called Cultural Studies” in a compendious review essay of the landmark Routledge cultural studies anthology edited by Larry Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler (“On ‘Cultural Studies,’ ” ST 34, 1993). But the bracing skepticism of critiques of cultural studies published in the journal’s own pages couldn’t stem the expansionist energies of a guest issue on “Corporate Culture” edited by Evan Watkins (ST 44, 1995). And the journal also responded to profound changes in academic culture wrought by the neoliberal restructuring of higher education by publishing several issues on academic labor and unionization struggles (see ST 49, 1996; ST 51, 1997; ST 70, 2002; ST 90, 2007). This is the context, I would suggest, of an antagonistic logic at the heart of the idea of culture itself, within which we should read the turn toward the rhetoric of the “culture wars” in the 1980s and 1990s. The truth of the matter is that “culture” wars are not about culture. They are about ideology and about attacking institutions and theories and practices held by those whose ideas are deemed illegitimate or “uncivilized.” Nor are the culture “wars,” as any military veteran could point out, real wars. They are ideological skirmishes in which words and cultural artifacts are used as weapons to serve other noncultural and worldly agendas. But careers can be derailed, journals damaged, and, worst of all, voices silenced. That was the lesson of the Sokal affair, triggered by an essay published in ST 46/47 on “The Science Wars.” A hoaxer took advantage not of a journal’s refusal to believe in gravity, nor of its credulity in the face of a science writer manipulating his mastery of his opponents’ rhetoric (not an act of war, but of ironic imitation), but rather of Social Text’s long-standing engagement with the antagonistic energies of culture. In this case, the scientist as hoaxer merely ensured that the gulf between the “two cultures” of science and the humanities that C. P. Snow famously lamented in the 1950s was forced a little farther apart. How convenient for those committed to blocking dialogue, to silencing dissent, and to masking the conflicting energies within culture and to subordinating them to the ideological. The journal adapted and rebounded, energized in large measure by its continual commitment to wrestling with the idea of culture. Defending the oppositional potential of culture and exploring the gendering of culture, for example, Judith Butler took on various adversaries of Social Text 100

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“merely cultural” theorists and of the “merely cultural” political activities of new social movements, especially queer activists, in the 1997 double issue “Queer Transexions of Race, Nation, and Gender,” edited by Phillip Brian Harper, Anne McClintock, José Esteban Muñoz, and Trish Rosen (ST 52/53). Butler’s essay drew a spirited response from the feminist philosopher Nancy Fraser. Jameson’s 1993 critique of cultural studies would generate a delayed, but rather triumphant, rebuttal in George Yudice’s guest-edited issue on cultural policy (ST 59, 1999), which used Social Text to announce the revival of a reinvigorated form of cultural studies, already pioneered by Yudice, Randy Martin, Toby Miller, and Tony Bennett, which both contested the privatization of culture spurred by neoliberal globalization and engaged with state policy makers.6 Miller followed up the move into cultural policy with an issue on cultural citizenship in ST 69 in 2001. The same desire both to expand the reach of cultural analysis and to bound and limit the expansionist energies of the idea of culture during the era of neoimperial war making motivated the “Ends of War” issue which I edited more recently (ST 91, 2007). This issue sought to expand the rival definitions and uses of culture to include war culture, a modern cultural tradition constructed out of total warfare and mobilized to serve the technologies of violence.7 Social Text offers thirty years of responses to the question of what a “cultural politics after cultural studies” might look like. One answer would be that no one owns the idea of culture, yet all seem to lay claim to it, and those who wield it will often get burned by its antagonistic energies. Another would be that history teaches us that there are no culture wars, only wars on culture in the name of ideology, struggles that are driven by the idea’s infectious contradictions. Notes 1. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, with Friendship’s Garland and Some Literary Essays, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965), 135. 2. For a fuller discussion, see David Lloyd and Paul Thomas, Culture and the State (New York: Routledge, 1998), and Michael Denning’s excellent discussion in Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (New York: Verso, 2004), 75 – 96. 3. See Raymond Williams, “Culture,” in Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana, 1983), 87 – 93; and Stuart Hall, “The Emergence of Cultural Studies and the Crisis of the Humanities,” October 53 (1990): 11 – 24. More recently, the keywords approach has also yielded the following immensely useful collections: Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg, and Meaghan Morris, eds., New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005), and Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler, eds., Keywords for American Cultural Studies (New York: New York University Press, 2007). 4. On the colonialist genealogy of culture, see Robert J. C. Young’s invaluable discussion in Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (New York: 90

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Routledge, 1995), 29 – 54. For classic studies of the struggle for a working-class culture, see, for example, E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1966); Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1998); and Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). See also Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein (New York: Routledge, 1991). 5. Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review, no. 146 (1984): 53 – 92. 6. See also Toby Miller’s authoritative edited volume on the field, A Companion to Cultural Studies (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), and George Yudice, The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 7. See Patrick Deer, Culture in Camouflage: War, Empire, and Modern British Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

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Departures

Stanley Aronowitz : First, you do it a long enough time . . . The second

reason was that I wanted to give other people — younger people, I guess is the word, but really other people — a chance to make their mark. I had too much authority. Unless I moved away or moved back it would be very difficult. The third reason was that I felt there was — and in a peculiar way — a certain depoliticization of the project. It was not that it didn’t have any interest in politics, but the project had lost some of its edge. Toby Miller: It was good that people regularly left the journal and permitted others to reinvent it — that was a strength, I now see, though I tried to persuade Bruce and George [Yudice] to return after they had departed, and I felt a wee bit sad just to have left myself and not heard from the journal again for seven years. John Brenkman : You know, I missed Social Text the day I left. I love

doing a journal and I love editing and I love the kind of interaction you have with people who are doing work. It’s incredibly gratifying and you learn so much. I think it’s an unbelievable learning experience to edit a magazine. Randy Martin : I certainly think it is important to have some kind of cycling

of leadership. That actually is very satisfying to witness. I’m personally interested in that whole question of left succession. Something that moves and changes — and maybe changes beyond the parameters of what you would have anticipated. Dealing with it can arouse nostalgic impulses. At the same time, it’s pretty pleasurable to come to collective meetings and to meet new people and to hear what people have to say. That itself is a good reason to stay around: everybody goes through all kinds of changes — but to have the pleasure of surviving your absence is a great thing.

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Bruce Robbins : There was no yelling or bad feeling. It’s true that I had

enormous frustration with some of the people I had to work with. I thought, this doesn’t express me anymore; let’s see whether it turns into something else with the younger generation in charge of it. I’m still committed to it. I have a certain cultural capital invested: you know, you work on something for fifteen years, you want it to continue to be well thought of. So I always wished it well. Randy Martin : You’re cycling off and not doing it anymore but I think — 

whether it’s in your intellectual work or your political work or your personal life — to imagine that something of a longer durée within a human’s life is also sustainable is pretty interesting.

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Diaspora



Michael Ralph

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) reported on 29 January 2007 that a pilot had discovered the body of an as-yet-unidentified stowaway aboard a jet that was refueling in Los Angeles on its way back to London: “The victim has not been named but a spokesman for the FBI said he was a young black male.” More than likely he was from the African continent, since that is where the aircraft had been most recently. What sort of work is the term black asked to do here? Speculation linked this case to the victim of a tragedy that had unfolded under similar conditions a few weeks prior. On 12 January 2007, the Los Angeles Times reported, “the body of a young African man was discovered in the wheel well of a Delta plane that landed in Atlanta from Dakar, Senegal.” Thanks to Vince Brown’s The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery, we finally have a way to think about death (as in wills and inheritances, severed limbs and battered corpses, the spiritual magic of ancestral guides and the mystique of martyrdom) as a structuring principle of diasporic articulation.1 How do we apply his insights to these perilous excursions? The fatal accidents cited here happen more often than we might care to note: each year thousands of Senegalese “youth” ( jeunesse, in local parlance, meaning unemployed men who do not own property and who are “not yet” married) perish while trying to flee north, through the Sahara, to Europe, in search of escape from Senegal’s 48 percent rate of joblessness (of which “urban youth” make up 40 percent, by conservative estimates), as I discuss in ST 97 (2008). On 30 January 2007, USA Today reported that the stowaway discovered on 29 January most likely climbed aboard the British Airways vessel

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in Cape Town, South Africa, his presumed country of origin. Might these disparate scenes inscribe a latent theory of diaspora? If so, what are the implications that one node of a global trade diaspora — a nation that boasts a Senegalese population so expansive that a Harlem, NY, neighborhood is now affectionately known as Le Petit Sénégal — also receives the mangled corpses of youth who hope to join this community but who don’t possess the means to do so? As with the brutalized body of the enslaved African that forms a touchstone for the diasporic nightmare, can we discern, in the skin of the deceased stowaway forced into too tight a compartment, the sort of “undecipherable markings” on a “captive body” that Hortense Spillers has termed a “hieroglyphics of the flesh”?2 Brent Hayes Edwards develops an elegant strategy for grappling with the semiotics of subjugation in “The Uses of Diaspora” (ST 66, 2001), where he mines the coordinates of periodical print culture produced in the period between World War I and World War II to show how writers from the United States, and different European colonies, produce a shared experience of blackness — one that problematizes, though it does not derive from, notions of shared descent from Africa. Such a theory of diaspora demonstrates how a more complicated reading of black internationalism might be put to the service of intellectual and political projects more transformative than reactionary. In this effort, Edwards makes exquisite use of décalage, a term he arrives at through his own translation of prose by the famed poet Léopold Sédar Senghor, Senegal’s first president: “Despite appearances, the difference between Negro-Americans and Negro-Africans is more slight. In reality it involves a simple décalage — in time and space.” Using this French term for jet lag to suggest a gap in time and space, Edwards elaborates the disjuncture that structures diasporic “articulation” (where, as in the work of Stuart Hall, the latter term means to conjoin and not simply to express). Décalage is, for Edwards, a way of framing diaspora as a kind of prosthetic. As a prop, it levels a prior unevenness, which suggests that all racial alliances are temporary, artificial, and contingent, but no less real for all the circumstantial historicity they entail. This is even true in diasporic performance traditions, like playground basketball at the Centre de Bopp in Dakar (Senegal’s version of Harlem’s Rucker Park), where, despite the fact that coaches insist on a goal-oriented “European” style of team play that they hope will facilitate recruitment by NCAA and NBA and professional league franchises from around the world, young athletes rehearse aspirations to become professional basketball players by elaborating upon and enhancing the signature moves of their favorite African American basketball players, who they’ve seen in DVDs from the United States that enter the country along remittance circuits sustained by global trade networks. But this diaspora is not available to all athletes in the same way. Social Text 100

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Senegal has produced more NCAA basketball players than any country besides the U.S. and Canada, but the nation’s female players have yet to attract a comparable level of interest from international scouts, despite the fact that the national women’s team has twice the number of continentwide victories as the men’s team. Even less attention is paid to Senegal’s robust tradition of wheelchair basketball, despite the fact that local teams participate in and host international competitions. Edwards’s notion of diaspora-as-prosthetic is not so much a metaphor as a metonym (a part that reproduces the essential features of the whole): it is meant to signal the disjuncture that structures the experience and format of diasporic articulations, forms of political belonging that emerged in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education in the United States and the independence movements that swept most of Africa and the Caribbean and much of Latin America during the 1960s. As Edwards reminds us, diaspora surfaced as a way to displace Pan-African conceptions of solidarity in the midst of an era that generated new forms of contradiction and contrast as well as conviviality (which partly explains why this concept, “so attractive to our analyses, does not appear in the literature [of black culture and politics] until surprisingly late after the Second World War,” as he notes). The term diaspora has thus been used to signal an era of disenchantment, as African nations became independent but not necessarily free; meanwhile, U.S. freedom movement traditions gave way to a statesponsored “war on drugs” that paralleled domestic drug wars between rival gangs, triggering new forms of surveillance and militarized policing that would ultimately be used to wage a different sort of war against an enemy who was pervasive, if elusive: “terror.” This latter-day crusade signals a relentlessly unstable displacement of domestic threats that has not yet released African Americans from perpetual surveillance, whether in the form of the police cameras that would ultimately be installed in urban enclaves toward the end of the twentieth century or the 24/7 news coverage of the African American candidate for the U.S. presidency who would emerge a short time thereafter. If Barack Obama’s ascent as the forty-fourth president of the United States has been celebrated as a victory for the black world, one wonders whether it might signal an end to the structure of uncertainty and angst — disappointment, frustration, discomfort — that has shaped black internationalism in what some scholars have called a “postsocial movement” era, as a somber mood washed over scholarship produced by some of the most prolific theorists of the African diaspora (see Paul Gilroy’s Postcolonial Melancholia, David Scott’s Conscripts of Modernity, and Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother). This sentiment may not be universal; still, it is acute in the quarters where it resonates. Recall that Edwards arrives at décalage by translating the experience of jet lag. In what sense is this a clue to the historical void of disenchant96

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ment — of loss . . . longing — through which these scholars frame black internationalism? Might we, in retrospect, use the untimely assassinations of social-movement leaders in the 1960s to bracket one side of a historical continuum that ends with a candidate who restores hope to electoral politics for disenfranchised peoples of the African diaspora? Or is this merely a fantasy that relies on the kind of presumed community diasporic discourses were designed to complicate? In what sense does décalage encourage us to think of the period between the dawn of formal decolonization and the present as not merely a structure but an atmosphere of disenchantment: a reminder that diasporic bodies inhabit tactile economies, data streams, born of emotional and financial trajectories that make it impossible to anticipate the ingenious forms of belonging — and exquisite strategies of exclusion — they will ultimately help to erect, however unwittingly. Edwards’s sense of the way that black internationalism is produced —  manufactured — suggests that it is possible to develop a theoretically robust, antiessentialist theory of diaspora that attends to the difference constitutive of transnational linkages without privileging descent from Africa as a criterion; it likewise demonstrates that translation is an appropriate analytic for explaining how these projects are forged. But if these two foci — Africa and translation — help Edwards clear new ground, they also prepare the terrain for even newer approaches that are only implicit in his work. Because while, in the intellectual moment when the “The Uses of Diaspora” was written, it was incredibly beneficial to delimit a conception of diaspora that was not beholden to the continent, the term diaspora in many quarters now refers to the historicity that people of African descent produce beyond the site of origin (as specialists of the African diaspora not trained as Africanists outnumber those who are). Consequently, the relationship between Africa and people of the African diaspora remains underspecified. To gain traction on this problem, we might return anew to the vexation that structured twentieth-century attempts to reconstruct the African past a few decades beyond the interwar period that forms the basis for Edwards’s study. In the 1950s, Afrodiasporic longing would sometimes take the shape of an intellectual excursion through antiquity as part of a quest to combat an Enlightenment discourse that rationalized enslavement and colonialism, in part, by casting Africa as a “land of childhood,” as Georg W. F. Hegel would have it, “a place whose history could be summed up in a single word: barbarism.”3 Senghor, as a cofounder of Négritude, sought to defend the black world by delineating a capacity for emotion that was equivalent if not superior to reason; meanwhile, the Senegalese physicist, chemist, and Egyptologist Cheikh Anta Diop elected to combat an ethnocentric Western intellectual tradition on scientific grounds. Diop was fond of saying that Social Text 100

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“Egypt is to Africa what Greece is to Europe.” If the limits of Hellenism are apparent in this axiom, the analogy is still suggestive. Philology is a nationalist undertaking — a language game — no matter how you slice it. Meanwhile, classics departments remain deeply entrenched in European and American universities, however flawed we consider the fundamental premise of that intellectual vocation. Diop’s interest in linguistic archaeology ultimately sought to dismantle a pervasive belief, which Hegel exhibited most stridently, that Egypt properly belonged to the “Asiatic or European” spirit of a world-historical taxonomy and not to the African continent, which had no historical movement to exhibit. Diop’s rebuke became the basis of heated controversy among specialists and noninitiates when he, some seventy years after Hegel, suggested the ancient Egyptians were not simply African, but “black” (nègre). It is, no doubt, anachronistic to label ancient peoples “black,” given that race-as-phenotype is mostly a modern convention. While the ancient Egyptians traced their origins to southern and central Africa, there is still plenty of work left to be done for archaeologists and historical demographers interested in the political geography of social differentiation that characterized ancient Nile Valley civilizations (though Josep CervellóAutuori has added regional specifity to this problematic by comparing ancient Egyptian dynasties to African empires and not simply to ancient Mediterranean—and medieval and modern European—polities, as had been the practice).4 At any rate, the most fascinating aspect of Diop’s intellecual intervention is the animus it generated. Mary Lefkowitz’s 1996 book Not Out of Africa bore the polemical subtitle How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History, indicting, as coconspirators, Diop, the political scientist Martin Bernal, the audodidact Yosef ben-Jochannan, the mason George G. M. James, and the rhetorician Molefi Asante, though they had little in common apart from a shared skepticism of the project to sever ancient Egypt from African history.5 Diop’s intellectual arc suggests a global constellation of black peoples and nations (Nations négres) born from the trauma of Napoleon’s forced penetration. If Senegalese soldiers (Tirailleurs Sénégalais) earned respect for their territory in a privileged sphere of diplomacy by dying for the métropole — by paying what French colonial officials called a “blood tax” (l’impot de sang) — Diop establishes political belonging through his quest to narrate the tarnished legacy of Egypt’s lost heirs. Egyptian hieroglyphs—Medu Netcher (Mdw ntr), for the ancients—is a graphic language where, apart from the symbols that make up different parts of speech, each noun features a determinative that helps the reader know how to decipher it. The linguistic evidence Diop ultimately marshaled in his claim that the ancient Egyptians were black centered on the 98

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Figure 1. James P. Allen’s Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) exemplifies the orthodox interpretation of kmt as a term for “the black land,” with reference to the complexion of the soil along the banks of the Nile.

determinative that appears in Kemetyw, a term the ancient Egyptians used to describe their place of residence. The controversy hinges on whether this term means “land of the black people,” as Diop argued, or “people of the black land,” as the orthodox reading would suggest (see fig. 1). While professional Egyptologists typically take the image of the town to be a reference to “black soil,” Diop claimed the ancient Egyptians were referring to themselves as such, insisting that they would have used an irrigation tool as the determinative if they were trying to describe the natural landscape.6 That the aerial view is of a town — a civilization — suggests a preoccupation with fecundity and social reproduction, themes that pervade Diop’s writing. Diop’s intellectual reversal of European ethnocentrism rested on the claim that Africa was the origin of all civilization, as he framed a tension between Southern (African) and Northern (European) “cradles” structured through a series of oppositions (matriarchal/ patriarchal, sedentary/nomadic, prone to bury the deceased/prone to cremate the deceased).7 Diop’s body of work proffers an endorsement of the nuclear family as the bedrock of any nation — and, therefore, any civilization — which underscores a Pan-African conception of the black world that is somewhat at odds with the notion of diaspora that achieved currency in the same moment when his scholarship was first being translated into English. But it harkens back to a slippage present in the décalage that structured the way this Greek term, diaspora, transferred to the Jewish experience in the world: from διασπορh, meaning to “scatter, as in seeds” — as in semen, the proverbial source of human society — to a broader narrative of exile from one’s homeland. This all makes one wonder about the many intriguSocial Text 100

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ing determinatives that lurk within the secret language of hieroglyphs (mdw ntr, in the transliteration of specialists; Old/Middle/Late Egyptian, in the periodization of scholars working within the purview of Near Eastern studies). Given the way it arms academic outfits with precise weaponry, might we consider the determinative — as a linguistic device — its own sort of prosthetic technology? Diop’s most influential books were published in the United States and United Kingdom by independent presses (Lawrence Hill and Karnak House, respectively) between the 1970s and 1990s, but his intellectual intervention was born of a PhD thesis that he completed at Paris I, Sorbonne, after a nine-year battle with his dissertation committee concerning his proposition that the ancient Egyptians were black. Apart from historical and linguistic evidence, Diop conducted melanin tests on human remains taken from the mummified monarch Ramses II to legitimate his assertions before he could finally receive his degree in 1960. 8 Diop died in his sleep on 7 February 1986, not before building a team of Egyptologists of African descent who now live in Paris and publish the journal Ankh, but too soon for us to know where he would stand on the emergent state politics that police categories of political belonging in Senegal in line with some of the same problematic presuppositions present in his work. In January 2009, in a nation that prides itself on teranga (Wolof for “hospitality”) law enforcement officials invaded the home of Diadji Diouf, a prominent gay activist; they ultimately charged the nine men they arrested with conducting “unnatural acts” — for practicing homosexual lifestyles. The raid occurred almost three months to the day after Pape Mbaye, a beloved vocalist, was granted refugee status in the United States after a Senegalese magazine published photos of a gay wedding in which he was implicated. This, the New York Times reported, was “one of the rare instances when such protection has been granted to a foreigner facing persecution based on sexual orientation.”9 A month after his arrival, Mbaye was no doubt able to see Barack Obama become the forty-fourth president of the United States — and to see California’s Proposition 8 repeal the right of same-sex couples to marry. Décalage conjures a problematic of loss and longing, distance despite proximity (and vice versa). It is not so much a way of resolving contradiction as a mechanism for appreciating the antagonisms — what Edwards has elsewhere called the forms of “productive dissonance” — that structure any sense of shared plight.

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Notes 1. Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). 2. Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 2 (1987): 65 – 81. 3. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. John Sibree (1899; New York: Dover, 1956), 91. 4. Josep Cervelló-Autuori, Egipto y Africa: Origen de la civilizacion y la monarquia faraonicas en su contexto africano (Sabadell, Spain: Ausa, 1996). 5. For this array of argument, see Mary Lefkowitz, Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History (New York: Basic, 1996); Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987); Yosef A. A. ben-Jochannan, Africa: Mother of Western Civilization (Baltimore: Black Classic, 1988); George G. M. James, Stolen Legacy: Greek Philosophy Is Stolen Egyptian Philosophy (Asmara: Africa World Press, 1993); Molefi Kete Asante, The Afrocentric Idea (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987). 6. Chiekh Anta Diop, “Origen of the Ancient Egyptians,” in General History of Africa: Ancient Civilizations of Africa, ed. G. Mokhtar (Paris: United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, 1981), 42. 7. Cheikh Anta Diop, The Cultural Unity of Black Africa: The Domains of Matriarchy and Patriarchy in Classical Antiquity (London: Karnak House, 1989). 8. Cheikh Anta Diop, The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality, trans. Mercer Cook (Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1974). Originally published as Nations Nègres et Culture (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1955). 9. Kirk Semple and Lydia Polgreen, “Persecuted in Africa, Finding Refuge in New York,” New York Times, 6 October 2008.

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Interdisciplinarity

Stanley Aronowitz : There was nothing else out there that was going to make those kinds of links and connections. We used this term interdisciplinary but we were not talking about that. What we were talking about was something that tried to understand the totality from the perspective of culture and politics and would not exclude, would not be disciplinary in the sense of its exclusion of certain topics or certain kinds of work. Randy Martin : When I first starting working with Social Text, I was also

involved with the New York Marxist School and the journal Socialism and Democracy, so I was very aware of that divide between cultural Marxism, cultural politics, and cultural economy. It was aesthetic, it was the way people spoke about things, it was what they’d admit as politics, it was what counted as writing. It seemed like it was very difficult to find spaces that would negotiate or mediate between those kinds of differences. Stanley Aronowitz : We wanted to reexamine the salience of Marxist

theory for cultural, political, and social thought. We wanted to break down barriers between political economy, which is the traditional interest of Marxism, and cultural and social theory. We wanted to break down barriers, that’s what we really wanted to do. And at the same time, we wanted to introduce some of the new ideas that were coming out of various places — like Bruce Boone’s essay on queer poetics in the first issue. John Brenkman : We were always looking for more social science. We

had the Frankfurt School in the background as the model for the kind of intellectual enterprise that refused to make a huge divide between social sciences and humanities but instead framed questions that cut across and engage both. But it was hard to find the people. Getting people in politics or sociology to have more than just a very passing interest in literarycultural subjects is very hard.

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Toby Miller : I managed to recruit some papers by people beyond the

humanities during my time at the journal, but these were sometimes derided as “crude” or not up with the literature by others more wedded to textualism, while the idea of expanding to look at the areas I proposed didn’t catch on. Stanley Aronowitz : It’s not possible yet to have publications within the

university that are genuinely across the disciplines. This is a real problem with a lot of people who enter university work — teaching and writing. At a certain point, the discipline gets its hooks on them and they can’t see beyond the discipline — the disciplinary protocols completely strangle them.

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Disciplinarity



Shireen R. K. Patell

Social Text as both a collective and a publication has always troubled disciplinarity, with its commitment to various praxes and theories of the multi-, inter-, and trans-disciplinary. If the very word disciplinarity now seems somehow outmoded, that may point to the success of the ongoing critique of rigid disciplinarity. Indeed, even the university itself has adopted, if not co-opted, the multi-inter-trans, as the sign of a cultural capital well positioned to increase financial capital in the form of grants and philanthropic giving. The cultural and other capital is not evenly distributed among the disciplines, however; while multi-inter-trans initiatives in the natural sciences, medicine, law, and economics might be lauded as signs of innovation, too much multi-inter-trans in the humanities may be perceived as a dilution of the epistemological strength of the university. In fact, the success of the multi-inter-trans has not eclipsed or weakened the traditional disciplinary structure; rather, its force has reinvigorated and thus strengthened the disciplines from within, intradisciplinarily. Thus, for example, an English seminar may include psychology and neuro­ science research in the syllabus or a psychology study may take cues from literature and philosophy, but the multi-inter-trans ironically becomes a sign of the contemporary relevance and epistemological robustness of the home discipline. If only superficially, a certain multi-inter-trans is now normative, and the ambivalence that it inspires reveals to what degree disciplinarity is the site of a vast array of competing and complementary forces and fantasies. Social Text was an early adopter of the critical force of postdisciplinarity. It may have been precisely this discipline problem that attracted the attention of fraudster and physicist Alan Sokal. The disciplinary free range of cultural analysis propelled a crisis in reference for him so profound that, in defense of his discipline, Sokal disregarded the

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protocols of collegial interaction, as if the university, broadly construed, and the critical space of Social Text, specifically, weren’t precisely the kind of places to mount a public discussion of these very matters. The journal was founded specifically as a multi-inter-trans place of production, dissemination, discussion, and debate. In its inaugural document, the “Prospectus,” Stanley Aronowitz, John Brenkman, and Fredric Jameson announce Social Text as “a new journal devoted to the problems in theory, particularly in the area of culture and ideological practices. These are areas shared by the social sciences, philosophy, and the humanities; Social Text is designed to offer a place in which theories developed in the various specialized disciplines can be made available for wider discussion” (ST 1, 1979). The “Prospectus” goes on to link political crisis and disciplinary crisis and, as an avowed space of theoretical praxis, Social Text declares its belief “that the dialectical framework of the Marxian tradition is the only one in which these issues can be adequately raised and discussed.” This commitment “is not, however, a claim that Marxism has all the answers”; thus, at the same time that Social Text advanced the theoretical primacy of the Marxist dialectic, it also recognized the contributions of a proliferation of potent theories associated with the signatures of Jürgen Habermas, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, and Noam Chomsky, among others. The dialectical framework, however, would restore and elucidate what these theories in one way or another had obscured and neglected: “history and historical perspective.” This rehistoricization is the very “vitality of dialectical thinking.” From its inception a vehicle of multi-inter-trans theoretical inquiry, Social Text, however diverse its forms and practices, has been committed broadly to empiricist, historicist, materialist interpretive practices and methods because of this original Marxist framework. The meanings and interpretations of empiricism, historicism, and materialism and the relationship among them may be dynamic, but the broad framework of Marxism accommodates versions of all of them. Largely secondarizing or bracketing particular kinds of “formalist” literary approaches, however, cultural analysis may obliquely reinscribe the same disciplinary metaphysics that gives the natural sciences the largest share of epistemological authority and renders literature epistemologically ambiguous, at best, and irrelevant or dangerous, at worst. The empiricism, historicism, materialism of cultural analysis, however expressed, may be distorted anamorphs of scientific and logical positivism that partially blunt the critical insights and interventions of cultural studies. The complex if not ambivalent relationship of Social Text to literary epistemology is a morph of the tension of universality and particularity, which may be the governing tension of both empiricism and Marxist theory and praxis. What is often neglected by both is the political force of literature Social Text 100

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as the concomitant interruption and upsurge of representation. It could be argued that the original, broadly Marxist, theoretical orientation of Social Text is in a dialectical relationship with the empiricisms and referentialities associated with cultural analysis; at the same time, the tensional structure between theoretical critique and empiricism might also be construed as a pseudodialectic that obscures the possibility that Marxist theory/critique and empiricism are part of the same complex. Oddly enough, an episode extracted from the history and philosophy of science may be instructive here. Discussing the positivism of Rudolph Carnap and the antipositivism of Thomas Kuhn, Peter Galison suggests that both shared the notion of a primary vantage point for understanding: “in the case of the positivists it is from the ‘observational foundation’ building up, in the case of the antipositivists, it is from the theoretical ‘paradigm,’ ‘conceptual scheme,’ or ‘hard core’ looking down.”1 Although all allegories are to some degree unjust, this description could be an allegory of the relationship of empirical cultural studies and theoretico-critical Marxism. Like the positivist, the empiricist of whatever stripe builds up from the “observational foundation,” while the theoretical Marxist is positioned with the antipositivist, “from the theoretical ‘paradigm,’ ‘conceptual scheme,’ or ‘hard core’ looking down.” Both empiricist and Marxist, however, stand in a mimetic relationship to reference (world and narrative/theory correspond), articulating a desire for the weight of a reference that would be peer to, if not part of, the scientific referents of both the positivists and antipositivists. This attachment to a particular kind of mimetic reference seems to exclude from the start a specifically literary kind of reference — that is, reference without referents — with an epistemology and critical force that both participate in mimetic grids and appear as interruptions of the mimetic allure, interruptions that mark different possibilities for political intervention. The inaugural issue of Social Text recognizes that the Marxist framework must be refreshed from below, in a gesture that enfolds the empirical method into the dialectical movement itself: “Even the fundamental elements of Marxism . . . are not some litany to be repeated but rather define problems and directions of research that need to be worked out afresh and reinvented in terms of today’s situation.” This empirical refreshment of Marxism staked out in the “Prospectus” is informed by a kind of contemporary ethical pressure to displace the “usual oppositions” of Marxism so as to be defined by “the problems and issues we feel it is most urgent to address.” It is in this spirit that the “Prospectus” introduces Social Text’s primary areas of intervention. These areas and their descriptions, with repeated references to symbols, narratives, texts, discourse, and other terms that might be part of the lexicon of literary studies, reveal that literature and the kind of interpretive methods

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it engenders have made a significant impact on the multi-inter-trans space of Social Text. Literature appears as both a complex object of analysis, disclosive of social and other structures, and as the original referent of styles of interpretation now transferred to the social text. In the first instance, literary specificity may be overshadowed by its allegorical allure and force; in the second instance, literature has been overshadowed by the power of the critical methods its singularities inspired. Thus “literature” in some form may be everywhere in the multi-inter-trans space, but still absent from it in crucial ways. Absent, sometimes absented, and ever present: this is one form of the ambivalence to literature — a desire for it and a suspicion of it in its unattached form. Close kin of literature, form and formalism become sites of ambivalence, too, variously desired and denigrated. A quick look at two renderings of “cultural studies” in the journal illustrates the differential construction of formalism. In ST 34 (1993) Jameson reads “cultural studies” “as a symptom rather than a theory,” rich and provocative, but in need of more formalism, specifically in the form of more Marxist analysis of commodity. This textual encounter with “cultural studies” marks the possibility of a version of the empirical refreshment of the Marxist framework suggested in the Social Text framework. Writing on cultural studies from another shore and other maps in ST 16 (1987), Richard Johnson diagnoses a key rift within it — roughly, the tension between “experience” and abstraction/formalism — a rift he judges to be “in the long run . . . a sure impediment to the development of cultural studies.” Despite having located a formalist/abstract strain within cultural studies, he also names “a terror of formalism” that seems to inhibit its productive hybridization with other strains of cultural studies. The aversion to formal abstraction may have to do with the just suspicion of particular determinations of universality, the unmasking of which have been crucial to much multiinter-trans-disciplinary work. According to Johnson, the welcoming of specifically literary formalisms rethought, along with other hybridizations, will not only renew cultural studies, but political possibilities. This prescription for a type of formal attention differs from Jameson’s suggestion that cultural studies needs more formalism, specifically commodity analysis. Jameson diagnoses the neglect of these analyses as possibly stemming from a fear of cultural products “be[ing] swept off in the purely formal process of consumption. . . . But that need not be the case for an analysis of the right complexity . . . although it is certain that . . . the act of consumption is an empty one, indifferent to the specific contents” (ST 34). Here Jameson posits a formalism that is both referential and empty of content. This particular kind of literary formalism eclipses the kind of literary specificity or form that cannot be emptied of content:

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the tropological and rhetorical specificity of every text, its singularity, resistant to every theoretical formalism. In this way, literary, rhetorical readings are not formalist, but specifically deformalist, which accounts for some of their potential political force. The political force of literature lies not only in its representational power, but also in its simultaneous power to suspend representation and interrupt concept. The tension between literature as mimesis and literature as interruption of mimesis gives it an odd kind of dialectical force. David Harvey, meditating in ST 42 (1995) on the tension between universality and particularity, turns to Raymond Williams’s literary practice as a theoretical practice that generates insights into the seeming political incompatibilities and impasses between “militant particularism and global ambition.” Although focusing on the mimetic force of literature rather than its linguistic and formal dimensions, Harvey argues that Williams’s literature theorizes in ways that his cultural theory cannot, concretely revealing that “personal and particular choices made under given conditions are the very essence of historical-geographical change.” The novel articulates the abiding tensions and competing forces that resist dialectical overcoming. This staging of the nondialectical does not lead to political paralysis, according to Harvey; to the contrary: “by perpetually keeping [these tensions] open, we keep a primary resource for the creative thinking and practices necessary to achieve progressive social change.” Harvey understands literature’s capacity to hold tensions and their reverberations without synthesis as a significant theoretical and political force, locating its power to break through what Charles Bernstein calls “ideational mimesis” —  the notion that “ideas are static objects that can be accurately portrayed. The controlling impulse to ‘catch and pin’ collects much more than the putative idea; the desire to represent overwhelms the idea represented” (ST 16). Ideational mimesis names the violent conceptual grip that produces an object of analysis at the risk of destroying it; according to Bernstein, conceptual thought attempts to seize the singularity of an idea and thus betrays it. Thus Bernstein, proximate to but on a vastly different register than Harvey, also argues for the importance of literary practice as a theoretical and epistemological source, as a force that can puncture stultifying, paralyzing, rigid conceptualizations and shake up mimetic certitudes of all kinds. A significant share of the dialectical value of literature is its ironization of dialectic, its nondialectical traces and moments. Bernstein links the political force of literature to its specifically nonmimetic power, its illocutionary potential, its positing, productive force: “Poetry explicitly holds open the possibility of producing, rather than reproducing ideas.” Bernstein also points to the nonmimetic articulations of ideology (syntax and form, for example) and connects these to different interpretive and critical methods. But no matter the multi-inter-trans 10 8

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approach to these interpretive interpellations, the critical method itself is always caught up in a sacrificial economy, another version of ideational mimesis: “There is a trade-off involved — clarities or predictions can be achieved only by focusing on ‘relevant’ phenomena and discounting ‘extraneous’ ones.” The absolute singularity of the literary text, its particular idiom, can only partially yield to critical methodologies — for what is “extraneous” in literature, and by what authority would it be so judged? Literature interrupts and resists the grasp of theories built according to the plans of ideational mimesis; especially resistant, according to Bernstein, are those literary forms and practices that anticipate and contain the very critiques that the reading methodologies seek to advance. Literature is itself critical theory, challenging the prevailing discursive forms of knowledge and enacting new possibilities through a dynamic intimacy with form, syntax, and all the other nonmimetic articulations of language and art. Literature as a form of critical practice has always had an important place in Social Text, but this recognition does not always smoothly translate into the critical methodologies of the multi-inter-trans. One telling example of this ambivalence to specifically literary epistemology is legible in “Interdisciplinarity in Public: The Rhetoric of Rhetoric” (ST 25/26, 1990) wherein Bruce Robbins explains that the new disciplinary mobility of rhetoric (made possible by jettisoning the aesthetic concern of literary studies with literariness) may introduce as many obfuscations as elucidations of its analytic objects. The obfuscatory potential of rhetoric, what Robbins himself repeatedly describes using a rhetoric of deviousness and promiscuity, threatens the critical potential of rhetoric, its political edge. Too much rhetoric, undisciplined or undetermined, rhetoric to the second power, what he calls the “rhetoric of rhetoric,” is menacing, comporting “a deviousness which informs but also restricts various politicizing projects of interdisciplinarity.” Too much rhetoric and it risks slipping back into literariness, a curious aesthetic object with a peculiar heteronomous autonomy that is granted no political or social force or meaning. If rhetoric is to play a proper public role, according to Robbins, it cannot be “merely” as interruptive trope, showing how discourse departs from its own norms, as Derrida and Paul de Man might have it, for rhetoric as trope can only reveal a “formal, content-less, ‘literary’ incongruity . . . rather [than] the historically specific lack or incompleteness opened up within any given field by its relations with the other fields and — though the two are really one — with the ‘public.’ ” It may be, however, that the formal interruption of rhetoric as trope is intimately bound up with the particularized, idio­matic potential of “the public.” If thirty years ago, the original “Prospectus” called for more historicization, it may be that Social Text has been too successful in this direction and become too congealed in a kind of “militant particularism” without sufficient attention to its necessary toggling to a Social Text 100

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“global ambition” that would take place through some kind of formalism/ abstraction and decontextualization. Literature’s tropological singularity is one that both resists abstraction and invites it; critical attention to this literary specificity might play an important part in refreshing the complex relation of universality and particularity. Renewed attention to rhetoric as trope and its interruptive, unsettling force can help locate specific areas in the social text where stultifying representations are weak or incoherent, revealing strategic points for critical intervention. But there is another political and ethical force to this putatively formal, contentless, tropic interruption: it marks the absolute singularity of the linguistic subject — the way in which the subject inhabits and lives off elements that are not reducible to any system. The subjective forms and instances of social being are not fully accessible to any kind of analysis and this secret of singularity, this reserve, also contributes to the public performances of the subject. While semiological forms of psychoanalysis also aim at this idiom of the subject, ultimately they submit trope to a system of readability even if only to understand it as a symptom of unreadability that structures. Without reducing singularity, one can see that idiomatic, private practices exceed their particularity by maintaining the illocutionary space, holding it open for all the other idiomatic, private practices past, present, and future. Multi-inter-trans approaches certainly honor the incalculable complexity of the multiply socially embedded singularity, but this methodological complexity may also be another version of ideational mimesis: conceptual complexity designed to capture absolute singularity. Attunement to the other, to the subject of lived experience, means also being attuned to the singularity who is embedded in history, in and of social and symbolic texts and networks, but who is also absolute idiom or hapax, a word appearing but once in a text. Social Text, which editors Brent Edwards and Randy Martin once described “as a collective project of knowledge production . . . open, unfinished, uneasy, composed of dialogue and debate, counterpoint and compromise across disciplinary boundaries, academic and cultural institutional affiliations, backgrounds, and personalities” (ST 70, 2002), attempts to attend to and hold this singularity without containing it. The open, unfinished, uneasy quality of the collective work touches on the singularity that cannot be accounted for but that compels all political and ethical action. This singularity both inhabits particularity and resists it as too limiting and localizing. Slavoj Žižek argues that social protest arises from “the standpoint of universality” as the articulation of an insufficient particularization: “Actual universality appears (actualizes itself) as the experience of negativity, of the inadequacy-to-itself, of a particular identity.”2 And it is this type of emergent singularity as an other universality — what I might call a literary singularity — that can help reconnect “militant particularism” to “global 11 0

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ambition” with renewed political possibilities. Understanding singularity in specifically literary terms — focusing on formalist and deformalist, narratological, syntactic and nonmimetic elements — can refresh the movement of the multi-inter-trans to which it gives rise. Notes 1. Peter Galison, “History, Philosophy, and the Central Metaphor,” Science in Context 2 (1988): 207. 2. Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (New York: Picador, 2008), 157.

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Empire



Neferti X. M. Tadiar

“Every idea or system of ideas exists somewhere, it is mixed in with historical circumstances, it is part of what one may very simply call ‘reality.’ ” Edward Said wrote these words to critique the political idea of Zionism as a historical project whose concrete realization somewhere — present-day Palestine — reveals both its intellectual/political provenance in nineteenthcentury European imperialism and its practical effectivity as a system of accumulation and displacement, crucially dependent on the political, economic, and cultural apparatuses of twentieth-century U.S. global hegemony. Said’s emphasis on the place of the idea of Zionism, historically and geographically (against the placeless world of abstraction within which ideas are said to exist), was also a passionate affirmation of the embodied locus of social experience of Zionism’s violent effects —  Palestinians, as its victims — from which standpoint an oppositional knowledge of and struggle against this effective reality could be produced. The theoretical/political accent on somewhere opposed not only the abstract idealism that upholds international liberal hegemonic support of Zionism, but also the practical and symbolic erasure of Palestinian being and human value — somebody/ some people — that the imperialist presumption of the emptiness of the land sought to achieve. In light of the horrific Israeli assault on Palestinians in Gaza at the close of 2008, which underscores both the unmitigated genocidal principles of Israel’s constitution as a nation-state and the undaunted refusal of the Palestinian people to disappear, Said’s 1979 essay “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims” (ST 1, 1979) could not be timelier. And yet, without diminishing the specific relevance of this piece, and of Said’s critical interventions as a whole, to the Palestinian plight, the anti-Orientalist, anti-imperialist position he stakes out here as elsewhere is timely for

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reasons beyond this specific context. For though in the main Said’s aim was to uncover the unexamined links between the Zionist project and European imperialism of the nineteenth century, he practiced a keen sense of the contemporary legacies of that turn-of-the-twentieth-century world-making project and in particular of the privileged role of the United States in maintaining the Western cultural and ideological hegemony that imperialism secured and that it inherited upon its own assumption of world power from its European predecessors. That sense as well as our own awareness of the special role accorded Israel within the framework of U.S. imperial ambitions in the Middle East and in the world at large put before us the problem of the present moment of global power — the problem called “empire” — in terms of the specific intellectual/political task Said set for himself with respect to Zionism; that is, to bring out its concealed history, as it was exacted from somewhere and some people. We are urged to ask: How do we critically understand the idea of empire and the reality it is a part of? What does it mean to examine empire from the standpoint of its victims? Today’s empire would seem vastly different from the model of nineteenth-century imperialism that Said saw protracted in the colonial occupation of Palestine. For Said, as well as for many others, imperialism was a matter of territorial acquisition and expansion, and while Said warned against considering territory too literally, advocating an understanding of imperium as a matter of constitutive and appropriative power over a domain, consisting of ideas, people, and land — in short, power over a designable reality — imperialism was undoubtedly a spatially conceived moral and epistemological vision as well as a geographically organized political and economic order. In contrast, formulated either in the image of, or in definitive relation to, globalization (a concept, together with empire, hardly hatched in the public sphere at the time of Said’s writing), the historical epoch and global project called empire appears to be a much more deterritorialized affair. Unbridled transnational processes of capitalist accumulation in the constitution of global imperial power (including transnational practices of militarist adventurism in fitful relations of mimicry, alliance, and rivalry with finance capital) appear to scramble or at least continuously fudge the fixed boundaries, categories, and coordinates of social stratification of the older political geography, particularly the spatial configurations of land, people, and ideas that were for Said the primary units and objects of imperialism’s representational project of domination. It would seem that the very representational categories of territorialized identities through which the objects or victims of imperialism historically emerged as oppositional political subjects, and perhaps representational politics as a whole, have now been rendered obsolete. Most critics of empire distinguish the new global moment and sysSocial Text 100

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tem from the old imperialism on a number of fronts, which support this scrambled effect: the divergence of economic and political-territorial interests under empire in contrast to their convergence under imperialism; the fragmentary, haphazard (irrational or arbitrary) character of the new imperialism as opposed to the totalizing, spatially continuist vision of the old imperialism; the transnationalization of production as well as capitalist accumulation (the creation of a transnational capitalist aristocracy) under the new global dispensation as opposed to their centralization in metropolitan nations under the previous imperialist regime; and the deterritorialization of core and periphery today as opposed to their fixed, territorial locations on the world map of the past. The radical or epochal change that such systemic differences aim to define effectively displaces the very political crux of anticolonial, antiimperialist critique: that is, the charge that the universal aspirations and ideals upheld and propagated by the civilizing mission of imperialism (humanist freedom and enlightenment, justice and equality, prosperity and progress) were cut to the particular measure of white Western man and founded on the ontological negation and impeded and destroyed life possibilities of the West’s colonial others. If a fully globalized (universalized) capitalism is the manifest “real” referent of empire — “pure” geoeconomy stripped of the older civilizational, modern developmentalist, racist humanist categories of place-based, bodily identities that were the operative codes of an older imperialism — the atrocities of U.S. imperial wars against the external and internal enemies of American democracy both since the war on terror and in the murky covert history that preceded it have only raised questions about the specific character of empire as a U.S.-led enterprise (the United States as global capitalism’s emperor? monarch? symptom?). Rather than challenging the claimed eclipse or supercession of imperialism’s imaginary, the recent domestic and international enactments of U.S. power have urged only a greater refinement in the conceptualization of empire’s specific configuration of forces and logics of political sovereignty and dispossession and the forces and logics of economic value-production and accumulation. However, as valuable as these conceptual refinements have been, the apparent continued salience of older geosocial categories of difference in the bodily materialization of the enemies and victims of empire — whether exterminable terrorist brutes or warehoused criminalized populations or global urban excess or border-crossing illegals or disposable feminized labor or a disappearing, wasting indigeneity — has hardly provoked a radical anti-imperialist interrogation of the very idea or system of ideas of empire. Instead, attending the U.S. global war against terrorism, a general embrace of empire as status quo, whatever its valence as a positive or a negative reality, marks this dire political, historical hour. As Aimé Césaire 11 4

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wrote of the metropolitan citizenry, each time a brutal act of contemporary colonialism is committed, they accept the fact. While the search for the inner rationality of empire continues (providing the integrity, if not systematicity, of the concept and the facticity of its referent), a rationality pursued in such questions as whether and how neoliberalism is continuous with neoconservatism, liberalism, or any other designable global ideology and its normative ideals; whether capital, in its foremost aspect as finance capital, has reached an apogee or made a qualitative leap in the ordering of global life and its apparatuses, from the state form to forms of subjectivity; what the status and reach is of a sovereign politics of exception or necropolitical rule, and the character of its rapprochement with the economics of the global market; and whether the rise of political Islam in rival and alternative transnationalisms tells us something fundamental or essential about the Christian secular liberalism of empire today — while such inquiry continues, entire swathes of human life as sources and examples of divergent and insurgent rationalities and political ontologies are wiped out from theoretical consideration as having any bearing on the idea of empire except as the vast areas of surplus populations, disposable life, and social, cultural wastage created and cast off by empire’s political and economic machinations. To highlight empire’s existence as a reigning idea or political ontology, one might very well invite the same objections that Anders Stephanson made to William Pietz’s critique of the colonialist elements informing the idea of totalitarianism during the cold war (both articles are in ST 19/20, 1988). Casting suspicion on “the vast Saidian totalization known as ‘orientalism,’ ” indeed dubious that a “colonialist vision” ever dominated Western Europe in the last two centuries, Stephanson argued that rather than any such totalizing ideological narrative, “war and sacrifice” constituted the real, lesson-imparting historical event and experience that sanctioned the totalitarian narrative. Stephanson’s distinction between narrative or cultural discourse as the stuff of ideological visions, on the one hand, and historical events as the stuff of political and economic policies, on the other hand, which he mapped onto a division of scholarly enterprise between the “lit-crit industry” (the domain of suggestive interpretative readings) and more proper historical work (the domain of solid historical claims), continues to mark current divisions of intellectual work in the emergent, belated field of U.S. empire studies, though the division is undoubtedly unsettled by many exceptions. Writing in the late 1980s at the very end of the cold war, when the ideological ramparts of the free world appeared to be superannuated by the viral workings of the globalizing free market, it is not surprising that Stephanson should consider the narrative and metaphorical devices of an older geographical imperialist imagination to have lost their relevance. For many across the disciplinary divide, the Social Text 100

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disaggregating real practices of global capitalism seemed to have rendered representational logics (and imperialism itself as an analytical category) irrevocably outmoded. For those of us who would want to critically examine the idea of empire as part of the reality it designates, Pietz’s response (ST 22, 1989), which insisted on the crucial role of language in the making of the “very real economic and political facts,” is instructive. Beyond Pietz’s own argument about how colonialist discourse shaped the pragmatic realist subject-position of cold-war theorists and actors, however, language — or more broadly, figuration or codification — also matters to the extent that it is constitutive of the concrete material processes that sustain the idea of empire as well as the standpoint from which those processes, as the very facts that others accept, can be critically contested. If we understand this critical standpoint as the site of the concealed history of empire “as it has been exacted” from its victims, as Said put it with respect to Zionism’s toll on Palestinians, it is important to consider such exacted historical experiences in terms of hidden forms of lifetimes — bodily and political existences; social capacities and potentials; pasts, presents, and futures — whose suppression, diminishment, and fatal consumption empire depends on for its continued hegemonic existence. More, it is crucial to recognize the role of dominant codes of understanding and figurations of practice, including those of theoretical critique, in the very process of that imperial subsumption. While Marxist and feminist perspectives point to the unacknowledged values, collective capacities, cooperative relations, and social power that disenfranchised and devalued social strata produce for and as capital and dominant rule, subalternist, queer, and indigenous perspectives point to the importance of the figuration and codification of such energies, agencies, relations, and potentials in the processes of their expulsion from or foreclosure by the norms of imperial social reproduction. To view empire from these combined perspectives is to recognize that the importance of language and figuration does not lie only in their role in empire’s operation as a system of representation but also in their role as crucial means of organization, production, exploitation, and dispossession of social life. Empire is, one might argue, a utopian image insofar as it captures the dialectical contradiction between total global wealth and power and complete planetary subjection to both — for conservatives picturing an ideal state, while for progressives picturing the very condition for its radical reversal in the form of global revolution. It is critical to note, however, that the idea is an overestimation of the achievement of globality. This utopian image, moreover, bears few, if any, dreams of empire’s actually existing subalterns, who figure too often merely as the constitutive negation, internal limit, or sacrifice of imperial power. If we are to challenge rather than 11 6

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accept the facts of empire, it may be vital to suspend the language of its ontology, with which the epistemology of its critique tends to coincide, and instead to further the force and flourishing of those exchanges, associations and acts, social capacities, aspirations, and practices of living that exceed imperial protocols for viable and valuable existence — to cultivate and build on the tangential, fugitive, and insurgent imaginations of those whose very thriving in spite of and beyond the exactions of empire does not only testify to the operation of new and long-standing forms of political potential. Such thriving also bears within it our last remaining resources of radical hope.

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Environment



Ashley Dawson

As we enter the thirtieth year of Social Text, the United States, and with it the rest of the world, is weathering an unprecedented emergency brought on by three intertwined factors: a credit-fueled financial crisis, radically erratic energy prices linked to a speculative bubble brought on by the imminent peaking of oil supplies, and an accelerating climate crisis. If the unfolding climate crisis means that we should make a transition to a zero-carbon economy with the greatest possible dispatch, the coming energy crisis will constrain us to transform our behavior over the next decade as fuel supplies become tighter and hence more expensive. The lineaments of this change remain an open site of political conflict, although the terms of current debates are not really all that new. In fact, some of the key analyses of environmental issues in Social Text over the last several decades have not lost their bite and should help orient us in these harrowing times. Today’s triple crisis resembles in many ways the conditions and contradictions apparent during the years when Social Text was founded. From the establishment of Earth Day in 1970, to the publication of the clarion call The Limits to Growth two years later, to the meltdown of Three Mile Island at decade’s end, this was a period marked by a sense of environmental emergency and, in some quarters, sweeping apocalypticism. The turn to neoliberal economics as a solution to the crisis of accumulation that characterized the era played out equally damagingly in the rollback of environmental regulations and in a savage new round of enclosure of the global environmental commons during the following decades. As markets were deregulated and progressive environmental regulation was pruned or simply disregarded, commodification of the environment proceeded apace in forms as varied as genetic bioprospecting among indigenous peoples,

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the patenting of unique seed varieties developed over millennia through the care of peasant farming communities, and the dividing up of rights to access that most precious of natural resources, water. What new forms of critical knowledge and agency have emerged in this age of neoliberal environmental enclosure? Social Text contributors such as Yrjö Haila, David Harvey, Lassi Heininen, Cindy Katz, and Andrew Ross have tended to approach the serried environmental crises of the last decades by emphasizing the mutual constitution of social forms and the natural environment. Human history must be theorized, these and other contributors have suggested, using a dialectical lens that captures the constant interplay and friction between ecological and social relations. This insight builds on Marx’s assertion that “the history of nature and the history of men are mutually conditioned” because “by acting on the external world and changing it, [we] at the same time change [our] own nature.”1 If the environment furnishes particular societies with a specific set of obstacles and possibilities, in other words, this original natural realm is reshaped and transformed into a second nature through human agency. This second nature then constitutes the matrix for further iterations of the dialectical dance of nature and culture. Such an emphasis on the dialectical gestation of environmental history offers a radical critique of the dualist traditions inherited from the European Enlightenment, which posit nature as a physical entity separate from and external to human society. Social Text contributors have consistently highlighted the conditions under which this reified form of nature is produced, underlining the social embedding of environmental science and the parallels between hubristic attempts to dominate the natural world and Enlightenment models of thought that posit society as a governable whole. A hallmark of Social Text’s theorization of the environment could therefore be said to be critical inquiry into the modes through which biopower has shaped both society and the natural environment over the last several decades. One of the initial issues that journal contributor David Harvey grappled with (see ST 42, 1995) derives from endemic clashes between the labor and environmental movements over the last several decades. Desperate fights against corporate retrenching during the neoliberal era by workers underlined a difficult truth during these years: radical movements born under oppressive conditions may at times cling to those very conditions. In the face of militant working-class struggles to keep auto plants or coal mines open, for example, how, Harvey asked, were activists and theorists to adjudicate conflicting spatial and temporal scales of political engagement? What constitutes a privileged claim to knowledge in such thorny conjunctures? With initiatives such as the Apollo Project Social Text 100

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putting the U.S. labor movement squarely in the environmentalist camp today, there is less bad blood between reds and greens now than in the past. Nonetheless, the insights that emerged from these debates remain generative: an emphasis on the search for fresh combinations of old and new “militant particularisms,” to use Harvey’s phrase, a refusal of theoretical and political closure, and an insistence on the many ways that people are embedded in nature. The environmental conflicts into which Social Text intervened were not always so politically and ethically ambiguous. In addition to discussing red-green conflicts, commentators like Cindy Katz also anatomized the impact of hegemonic projects of environmental transformation such as the Green Revolution. The imposition of intensive agriculture in so-called developing countries had cascading effects that ruptured established social relations. As Katz documents through her discussion of a Sudanese village, in the course of the Green Revolution, agriculture for export was imposed by central governments, mixed cultivation was wiped out, commodification of previously free goods accelerated, households were dislocated, local populations were proletarianized, and exposure to toxic levels of pesticide became widespread (ST 28, 1991). The transformation of the landscape and of agricultural practices catalyzed by the Green Revolution therefore should be seen as part of a broader pattern of accumulation by dispossession that has characterized the neoliberal era. The growth of the paradigmatic environmental form of the twenty-first century, the slum-choked megacity (discussed in special issues ST 81, 2004, and ST 95, 2008), needs to be historicized in relation to this sanguinary transformation of the global countryside over the last several decades. Social Text contributor Andrew Ross also intervened early in another environmental issue with global ramifications: climate change (see ST 18, 1987, and ST 28). The polarized debates about climate change that unfolded during the 1990s were but the latest installment, Ross reminded us, in the agonistic social construction of the climate in the modern world. What was new, however, was the global purview conjured up by such debates, a shift that was part of a broader articulation of transnational forms of subjectivity and governance. Just as was true of the forms of “free trade” codified during the 1990s through agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, Ross argued, the global consciousness conjured up by representations of climate change often obscured and even exacerbated dramatic forms of inequality. The moral panic over global warming as it was articulated in the global North thus tended to shift the burden of climate remediation onto humanity as a whole and thereby to elide questions of race, class, and historical and geographical culpability. In addition, what once was an almost exclusively regional discourse about

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shifting climate regimes had now become an issue of global management that offered an uncanny parallel with the discourse of global economic management. A corporate logic of costs and benefits clearly organizes both sectors, as the expanding regime of pollution-emission rights demonstrates. Linked to this analysis of discourses of environmental crisis has been inquiry into the forms of governance to which human populations are subjected under the rubric of biopolitics and parallel dispositions of power within the realm of the environment. This turn to what Arun Agrawal calls “environmentality” entails the creation of new social institutions and new technologies of governance that help produce particular forms of subjectivity rather than simply repressing politically marginal groups. 2 According to Yrjö Haila and Lassi Heininen (ST 42), however, one of the most prominent trends in recent decades is the increasing representation of ecological crises as a security problem to be addressed by the military. For fellow travelers of the security establishment such as Thomas HomerDixon and Robert Kaplan, shortages of land, water, or raw materials resulting from increasing population lead inevitably to violence within and between states, and even to the wholesale collapse of the current state-based order.3 For Haila and Heininen, security almost always gets defined in these discourses as the health of the nation-state rather than the well-being of its citizens. The result, they argue, is to cede authority to deal with environmental crises to closed, secretive, and hierarchical organizations such as the military, which are of course themselves one of the major causes of our present environmental crisis. The combination of new modes of securitization with novel forms of discipline has made issues of environmental sustainability an increasingly central node of politics in the twenty-first century. We are surrounded today by images of ecoapocalypse. From academic tomes such as Jared Diamond’s Collapse to dystopian films such as Children of Men, texts that limn the coming environmental holocaust are legion. 4 Such works are perhaps salutary admonitory responses to the official know-nothingism and galloping enclosure that has prevailed during the life of Social Text. We should not, however, allow the apocalyptic tenor of such works and of public discourse in general to choke off the resources of hope implicit in the insight, central to the work of the journal and its contributors, that we make our own nature.

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Notes 1. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 173. 2. Arun Agrawal, Environmentality: Technologies of Government and the Making of Subjects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). 3. See, for example, Thomas Homer-Dixon, Environment, Scarcity, and Violence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Robert Kaplan, The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War (New York: Vintage, 2001). 4. Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Penguin, 2005).

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Feminism Livia Tenzer

When I was working at the Feminist Press and decided to move to the job of managing editor of Social Text, some of my women friends were skeptical. With eyebrows raised, one of them asked, “You’re going to that boys’ club?” Although working at women’s presses had not always been a utopian experience for me, I suddenly doubted the wisdom of my planned departure from a world of purely feminist labor to a more broadly construed left project. In particular, the raised eyebrows made me wonder if the group I had taken to be a diverse gathering of progressive academics —  the Social Text collective — was in fact an old-style left organization, dominated by “rebel” male egos. My understandable if cliché doubts bespeak the fraught relationship of feminism with broader progressive movements and, so to speak, with itself (what is it to be purely feminist?). In ST 9/10 (1984) Ellen Willis details the intense debate within feminism in the late 1960s and 1970s about whether the movement belonged within larger socialist/left political work or should be separate. This was a debate about whether capitalism is the source of women’s oppression or, as Willis and other radical feminists thought, “male supremacy was itself a systematic form of domination.” It was also a debate about how to relate to established political movements, and whether “the male-dominated left would inevitably resist understanding or opposing male power.” In describing the work of separatists in the 1970s, Willis reminds us, reading today, of the far-reaching cultural impact feminist groups had, speaking for themselves on their own terms, broadcasting their theories in small publications such as Feminist Revolution and Meeting Ground (two Willis cites) while a host of women’s presses and feminist studies journals sprang into being. Given the wealth of feminist publishing happening outside of Social Text at the time of its origin, it’s not surprising that the journal might be Social Text 100 • Vol. 27, No. 3 • Fall 2009 DOI 10.1215/01642472-2009-021  © 2009 Duke University Press

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viewed by some as a “boy’s club.” Its mission as set out in the “Prospectus” in ST 1 (1979) does not take notice of the burning issues feminists were discussing. Was the triumvirate of founding editors too focused on Marxist high theory to consider gender alongside economic class as an important mode of social organization and oppression, or had they simply decided to leave feminism to the feminist journals? Either way, they did not engage feminist ideas, and (to use an old feminist measure) among the many thinkers they cite as important inspirations for the work of the journal only one woman appears: Rosa Luxemburg. The story that plays out over the thirty years of the journal’s history, however, suggests that the “Prospectus” contained the seeds of its own feminist undoing. The founders demarcated fields of focus for the journal that could hardly be explored without attention to gender, sexuality, and the historical experiences of women. They were interested in “everyday life,” “mass culture,” and “consumer society”; they promised a journal focused on culture and ideological practices and the new theories that addressed them. Equally important, the journal was from the start a collective whose membership included people invested in feminism, to gauge from the work they contributed to or accepted for publication in Social Text’s pages. Reading the early issues of the journal is like watching green shoots emerge at the edges of a parched lawn. To be sure, it is in the realm of cultural analysis, not revolutionary praxis, that feminist work first appears in Social Text, and often buried at the back of the book in “Unequal Developments,” the section that offered reviews and experimental writing. ST 2 (1979), for example, features John Mowitt’s look at Disney television and its socialization of suburban children as a phenomenon of late consumer capitalism. Focusing on The Mickey Mouse Club, he treats the “kids” who appeared on the show, and those who watched it, as homogenous, missing an opportunity to question whether girls and boys experienced the Magic Kingdom in the same way. As if to balance the inattention to gender in Mowitt’s work, in “Unequal Developments” Christine Holmlund performs a thorough feminist dissection of the then-current Disney film The North Avenue Irregulars, showing how this comedy about a group of church ladies who take on the local mafia superficially celebrates but finally deflates the idea of women’s activism, and along the way reinforces gendered roles at every level of social life. It may be worth noting that Holmlund and Mowitt were both members of the Social Text collective in Madison — the dialogue between their papers must reflect dialogue within the collective. Again in ST 3 (1980), “Unequal Developments” provides a key feminist contribution — Susan Willis’s discussion of The Dollmaker, the 1954 realist novel by Harriette Arnow — and a necessary complement to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s article in the same issue, which takes pains to generate feminist readings of Dante and Yeats. The foregrounding of Spivak’s 124

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work is in tune with Social Text’s emphasis on theory and marks an important moment for feminist critique of the canon, deflecting the tendency of some to misuse theory (especially deconstruction) to absolve literary texts of misogyny and generally depoliticize them. But Willis’s work offers the excitement of this era’s feminist discovery of women writers and transports us into women’s historical struggles in the shift from preindustrial to industrial capitalism. The loss of autonomy and selfhood experienced by Arnow’s “hillbilly” protagonist, Gertie, when her family moves to Detroit for wartime factory work and she is no longer matriarch of the farm and the provider of bounty on the table but “plummet[s] into commodity culture,” reveals intersections of capitalism and patriarchy, macroeconomy and family microeconomy, that Social Text needed to pursue. With Julianne Burton’s analysis of the film Portrait of Teresa in ST 4 (1981), cultural analysis moves closer to politics, and the journal begins to examine the contradictions faced by contemporary (Cuban) women negotiating new relationships to sexuality and work. This break with the focus on the literary, the past, and U.S. mass culture sets the stage for the landmark article by Ellen Willis in ST 6 (1982), which finally plants Social Text directly in the heat and ferment of the feminist movement. In “Toward a Feminist Sexual Revolution” Willis argues for sexual freedom as a core feminist value and vehemently against what she labels neo-Victorian and pro-family feminism, bent on shielding women from aggressive male sexuality and confirming motherhood as woman’s essential role. Drawing on the revelations of women’s consciousness-raising groups, she finds not only that sexual double standards still oppress women (despite the liberating experiments of the 1960s), but also that they are impossible to detach from sexism overall and its foundations in family and economy. In linking sexual liberation to the full project of anticapitalism, Willis and Alice Echols, writing in ST 7 (1983), established a Social Text line on feminism, traceable throughout later issues of the journal, that held sexuality and gender to be constructed, insisted that the basis of patriarchal formations is material, and positioned itself against antipornography and “family values” claims. Privileging neither feminism nor the broader Left, but making them codependent, they closed off the possibility of separatism as a viable feminist strategy (as Willis also does in ST 9/10). However, they left open, and very problematic, the question of how to achieve feminist goals in tandem with a broad progressive praxis. A major obstacle to envisioning radical change for women was the reliance on psychoanalysis to explain sexuality. To read the second half of Willis’s “Sexual Revolution” is to take a cold bath in an all-too-familiar account of the nuclear family as destiny, and of childhood within it as leading inexorably to traditionally gendered subject formation. Rachel Bowlby, in her acticle in ST 7 on Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, and Michèle Montrelay, detects a similar problem in these thinkers’ accounts of biology as Social Text 100

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a basis of subjectivity. But the new attention that Social Text was paying to feminist theory and philosophy in the 1980s eventually provided alternatives to psychoanalytic notions of identity and affirmed feminism’s connection to the critique of capitalism — especially its manifestation as empire. First, in ST 17 (1987) the journal paid homage to Simone de Beauvoir, who had died the year before. In her article on The Second Sex, Sonia Kruks emphasizes de Beauvoir’s understanding of oppression as occluding the existentialist project to freely make oneself. Diverging from Sartre, as Kruks shows, de Beauvoir argues that a subject’s “situation” is always mediated by others, that freedoms are interdependent and, for women, delimited by social institutions established by men. In a telling analogy cited by Kruks, de Beauvoir likens man’s relationship to woman as his “Other” to a colonial administrator’s relationship to his “native” subjects, marking both power relations as distinctly historical and cultural. Second, encounters with postmodernism reframed feminism in the context of postcolonial thought and a global setting. In ST 21 (1989), for example, echoing de Beauvoir, Laura Kipnis moves toward seeing women as a colony and feminism as a decolonizing movement. More helpful than psychoanalysis in explaining consent with oppression, she points out, is third world feminism and its clarity about the cultural, as opposed to natural, differences between the empowered and disempowered. The scope of feminist work in Social Text expands in the aftermath of the postmodern, postcolonial moment to take in women’s lives in Eastern Europe (ST 27, 1990), Filipinas in transnational space (Roland B. Torentino in ST 48, 1996), gender and South African apartheid (Sarah Nuttall in ST 78, 2004, and Leola A. Johnson in ST 82, 2005), and Indian “untouchable” women and development politics (Sarah Pinto, ST 86, 2006), to name just a few of the internationally focused articles from the 1990s and 2000s. Other articles paid new attention to women in U.S. economic and racial subclasses (for example, Julie Bettie on Roseanne and working-class women and Joan Morgan on hip-hop and urban black poor women in ST 45, 1995), In addition, the journal published two special issues looking at gender, sexuality, and work: ST 37 (1993) on sex workers and sex work, edited by Anne McClintock; and ST 61 (1999), “Lesbians, Gays, and the Struggle for Workplace Rights,” edited by Kitty Krupat and Patrick McCreery. There is, no doubt, a risk for feminism of falling into gendered Orientalism, racism, or classism when it abandons autocritique for cross-cultural critique. Dohra Ahmad, writing in ST 99 (2009) on popular American views of Muslim women, quotes Leti Volpp on this problem: “The discourse of feminism versus multiculturalism assumes that women in minority communities require liberation into the ‘progressive’ social customs of the West.” But especially now, when some in the West might like to think we’ve moved beyond sexism, analysis of everyday life is essential for revealing what is really happening to patriarchy/capitalism under globalization and how liberatory possibilities for women often get foreclosed (to apply a 126

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term much in use right now). The reality of family life, in particular, has changed much faster than the ideology of the family. Where Judith Butler could argue in ST 52/53 (1997) that capitalism requires the heteronormative family in order to reproduce itself, the desideratum of capitalism today is workers without family — transnational migrants whose reproduction always occurs elsewhere, or homegrown workers whose families are rendered invisible by the pressures of the labor market. Women have largely been absorbed into this market, making social adaptations such as long-distance motherhood and women as breadwinners commonplace across the economic spectrum. Yet wages have not translated into independence for women, especially where family microeconomies trap them between inexorable demands and respositilities. Meanwhile, the family, however fragmented, remains a primary site for the inculcation of gender norms, a place where children in developed and developing countries consume mass culture mythologies such as the Disney princess, now available in multiple languages across multimedia channels. No princess in these popular tales, however “brave,” goes to work, and every princess needs and gets a prince. The same technologies that deliver Disney offer adults new modes of personal interface with transnational finance and security. But these technologies interrupt users’ supposedly self-determining activities with specters of gender as destiny: Miss California, a Swat Valley beating, Susan Boyle (each a complex story, but all reminders in spring 2009 of women’s continuing subordination to harsh regimes of beauty, religious and cultural restrictions, and economic exclusion).1 At this moment of retrospect for Social Text, it’s clearly time to revisit the discards of our feminisms gone by, like Silvia Federici’s call for pay for housework (ST 9/10, 1984), Joan Morgan’s reading of misogyny as a “mask that hides and expresses pain,” and Ellen Willis’s fear that the unconscious is holding us back. Oh, and by the way, the collective is a diverse group of progressives, in various stages of reconstruction, who happen to be a delight to work with. Note 1. I refer here to three women who, during the writing of this essay, were unavoidable on the Internet and television: Carrie Prejean, Miss California USA 2009, who created controversy with her stance against gay marriage and was dethroned after being exposed as having breast implants and posing for seminude photographs; an anonymous teenage girl in Pakistan’s Taliban-controlled Swat Valley who received a punitive beating for hosting a man in her home; and Susan Boyle, the singer discovered on Britain’s Got Talent, whose meteoric rise from obscurity and poverty led to her breakdown. See respectively: Jesse McKinley, “Donald Trump Fires Miss California,” New York Times, 10 June 2009, www.nytimes. com/2009/06/11/us/11pageant.html?_r=1; Declan Walsh, “Video of Girl’s Flogging as Taliban Hand out Justice,” Guardian, 2 April 2009, www.guardian.co.uk/ world/2009/apr/02/taliban-pakistan-justice-women-flogging; “Susan Boyle,” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Boyle (accessed 7 August 2009). Social Text 100

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Film and Mass Culture Anna McCarthy

The early Social Text collective turned to film analysis and mass culture critique as a way of exploring, in Fredric Jameson’s words, new “interpretive possibilities” for Marxism.1 It is clear from the journal’s “Prospectus,” published in the first issue, that the ultimate object of such interpretation was not, in fact, cinematic. It was, rather, the problematic bounded by the question of culture’s relationship to economy and state, a problematic the collective initially characterized in terms of ideology and narrative and the avant-garde’s dialectical engagement with mass culture. Social Text, the “Prospectus” proposed, would probe “the interaction between the emancipatory and repressive, critical and reproductive, utopian and integrative tendencies” in forms routinely polarized along axes of “high” and “mass” art (ST 1, 1979). Jameson’s film essays explored these questions directly, not only the first issue’s well-known “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” which examined Jaws and the Godfather movies, but also short pieces on films such as The Shining and Diva. They were not intended as works of criticism as much as heuristic examples of what a renewed practice of leftist cultural critique within the humanities might look like, a practice that pushed beyond paranoid models of manipulation, populist anti-intellectualisms, and the “unsatisfactory” elements of Frankfurt School aesthetic hierarchies. “It was my contribution to problems that we were all working on,” Jameson explains today.2 Stanley Aronowitz, whose essay “Film: The Art Form of Late Capitalism” also appeared in the first issue of the journal, puts it more baldly. “You’re just supposed to aestheticize everything,” he recalled recently, referring to existing paradigms for film studies at the time. “And that I refused to do.”3 Like Spielberg’s shark, film emerges from the pages of Social Text as a polysemic object, capable of organizing social anxieties and uniting

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disparate, conflictual positions. Both are behemoths that demand to be attacked and that promise, in the ensuing chase, the thrill of discovering utopian pathways to new forms of social integration. Of course, in the case of Jaws, this integration turns out to be, to quote Jameson, a “new and spurious kind of fraternity,” one that excludes and disempowers even as it raises the faint possibility of alternative forms of social organization. For the early Social Text collective, however, writing and thinking about film, or television, or avant-garde theater (all represented in the first issue’s dossier on mass culture) was integral to the effort to reimagine what a journal could do — how it could awaken “the ineradicable drive toward collectivity,” identifying bonds across previously polarized cultural realms that might jog intellectuals into creating new kinds of alliances with each other and with leftists outside the university. In the ensuing three decades, the initial vision of Social Text as a venue for a revitalized mass culture critique has been supplanted by divergent agendas, symptomatic of the shifts in leftist cultural politics taking place in these years. In its first decade, the journal published numerous important and intellectually innovative efforts to read films, television programs, and other mass cultural forms from the Left. Then the terrain shifted; a war had started, requiring a different set of political energies. A 1990 article by Patricia Mann offered incisive remarks on the (im)possibility of a collective response to the war emerging through its mediation (ST 27), and the following year a piece by Ella Shohat reflected on the forms of historical mythmaking mustered by media institutions in their efforts to affirm the war’s legitimacy (ST 28). But mass cultural critique in Social Text — with some important exceptions — seems to have turned away at this moment from the original program outlined in the “Prospectus,” insofar as it became concerned not only with reading mass cultural works but also with arguing about how to read them, and their audiences. This was a period in which emerging movements in U.S. intellectual and political life, coming from both left and right, significantly raised the stakes in debates about the place of popular culture within leftist politics. Something called “cultural studies” was raising a tempest within the teacup world of the disciplines, and at the same time, the so-called culture wars waged by the Right required leftist intellectuals to revisit their “first principles,” as Andrew Ross put it when he argued for a focus on “cultural justice” in his introduction to a symposium on “Popular Culture and Political Correctness” in 1993 (ST 36). In retrospect, the heuristic freedom that characterized the first decade of writing on mass culture in Social Text seems very much a product of its moment. Mass culture had not yet been fully constituted as a terrain of political struggle — at least not in the way it would be ten years later, when attacks from conservative forces inside and outside of the university meant 13 0

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that immersion in the politics of popular culture was a bit like swimming with sharks. For some, the period defined by the culture wars and their aftermath might mark a postlapsarian era in Social Text’s history of engaging with mass culture, as it involved a departure from textual politics. But such determinations are themselves inextricably bound up with the agenda set by the culture wars. If the period saw the demise of textual critique, it also reinvigorated the possibilities for collective-making contained within mass cultural writing. In the 1990s, Social Text published more articles about music than ever before (hip-hop at home and abroad, gangster rap, radio in India, to name a few examples); it began to look at alternative television and other sites of practice bent on challenging the mainstream media; its conceptualization of audiences and their uses of culture became far more concrete and variegated than a term like mass could ever encompass; and its cinematic focus shifted away from Hollywood to encompass articles on topics such as Islamic movie stars, Hoop Dreams, Chinese mass culture, and television in Hong Kong, to name a few examples (from ST 42, 1995; ST 50, 1997; ST 55, 1998; and ST 58, 1999, respectively). Hollywood still made an appearance — articles on film noir, B-movies, and West Side Story appear in two consecutive issues at the turn of the twenty-first century (ST 62 and ST 63, 2000) — but the historicist and geopolitical concerns of these pieces, and their blithe disregard for the language of “cinema studies,” mark the journal’s commitment to a continual rethinking of the heuristic possibilities of mass culture critique. At the end of the nineties, this commitment involved a conceptual relocation of “mass culture” from superstructure to base, as part of the journal’s sustained engagement with culture (and education) as domains of value creation. Neither film nor television occupied a particularly privileged place in the articles about cultural labor, cultural policy, and cultural citizenship published by Social Text in this period. Their specificity as media forms had little to do with the political problematic defined by contemporary cultural production. Nor, for that matter, did adjectives like mass and popular. Freighted with idealist implications — the disinterested critic, the imaginary audience — such terms, like the fetishization of one particular medium, obstructed the advance of a program of cultural politics focused on process rather than product. I do not interpret this turn as inherently hostile to the program for leftist cultural analysis outlined in the first issue of the journal, back when its cover announced its commitment to the analysis of ideology in the subtitle “Theory/Culture/Ideology.” If moving away from ideology has involved emphasizing the social over the text, it has also accomplished the rewriting of “high” and “mass” cultural relations the “Prospectus” proposed. And the commitment to examining the production of culture in relation to broader programs of governmentality still involved specifying the “utopian and integrative” tendencies Social Text 100

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of cultural work, to say nothing of reification and instrumentalization, albeit within a conceptual and political framework very different from that imagined by the journal’s founders. Still, to interpret the last decade of cultural analysis in Social Text in such a way does much to blunt the sharply agonistic, even hostile, debates over the relationship between the social and the text in the history of the journal. If the hostilities have receded, it is perhaps a by-product of the general trajectory of the journal, its institutionalization as a title published by a university press, and its easy assimilation as a domain within the professional lives of the collective’s members rather than, as it often seemed to be in the beginning, an adjunct to professional life — a place where people did the work they were unable to do in their day job, work which often involved venturing beyond their disciplinary backwaters to talk about film, television, and other mass cultural forms. As my own day job involves me so much in “classical” cinema studies, and as the area of the U.S. humanities in which I conduct my research (television studies) is a small one, I have turned to Social Text as a way of forming collective bonds beyond the discipline. Social Text provides access to ideas and debates about political culture that exceed the capacity of film and television analysis, and it has seemed less constructive to fish for contributions within the discipline than to seek out new ways of defining the kinds of leftist political work a journal can accomplish at this particular moment. This one-hundredth issue is part of this process of redefinition; perhaps more germane to the topic of mass culture, however, is the development of the Social Text Web site. The promise of the latter lies, it seems to me, in the possibility of reconfiguring the agenda laid out in the “Prospectus” yet again. Going online in order to create a space of immediate and polemical dialogue; going “mass” in the unclear, even contradictory, way that the Internet is a mass medium; going forward from the project of commenting on cultural texts or their modes of production to actual participation in the process of multimedia, hypertextual production — this trajectory seems like the logical next step in the narrative I’ve sketched here. If this narrative sounds both utopian and conservative — Social Text evolving from manifesto to Gesamtkunstwerk — it is also in keeping with the spirit of risk and exploration that has defined the journal since its inception.

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Notes 1. Fredric Jameson, telephone interview by Brent Hayes Edwards, 15 January 2009. 2. Ibid. 3. Stanley Aronowitz, interview by Brent Hayes Edwards and Anna McCarthy, 3 October 2009.

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The Future of Journals

John Brenkman : Journals get started when some group of people — even if it’s small — comes together around some thing they want to write and they have no place to put it. And if you can tap enough creative sources for whom your journal serves that function, it’ll float, I think. But it’s still an uphill struggle in terms of the financing and the marketing and so on. I think materially it’s going to be harder and harder to launch journals and to get people to actually buy them because of the Internet and particularly because a journal is something that most people don’t read cover to cover. They only want a couple of things out of any given issue. In that sense, anybody doing a journal these days is swimming upstream. Anders Stephanson : When I talked to Fred about Social Text in retrospect

sometime around 1994, he — in just, in a typical Fred way — said, “The moment of journals is over.” It was really good for me because I reconciled myself with that. I gave eleven to twelve years of a very important period of my life to this. It was centrally the most important intellectual and political thing I did. Just like it was the party of 1979 for him, in 1994 he says, “the moment” — in a Hegelian sense — “is now expired.” Now it’s another thing. Sohnya Sayres : There’s so much out there now. It would be wonderful if every month people could go to their mailbox and find something that they could not otherwise find. Shake down old thought patterns, bring in the new. But this country is so large and so strangely constructed, with collapsing empires and military ambitions and confused ideas about itself. Who knows what energy people need? And some of the blogs are about as useful as you’re ever going to be on these subjects. So is that the way to go? I don’t know.

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Bruce Robbins : Yes, I absolutely still believe in the little magazine — partly

because the big magazines have let us down. There’s an opportunity to say certain things that are very, very hard to say in the New York Times, right? I’ve had some great experiences — finding out that Tony Kushner read Social Text, finding out that James Schamus read Social Text! Who would have thought that Tony Kushner would know about Social Text? But he was moving in those circles. And I guess I believe the chains of connection, most often invisible but every once in a while becoming visible, are real things and the little magazines really do sustain a kind of culture.

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Governmentality



Tariq Jazeel

Since the publication of Michel Foucault’s 1978 lectures on governmentality, it has become increasingly commonplace to understand the circulation of power as a decentered process.1 Instead of identifying government with the centralized locus of state rule, a burgeoning governmentality literature has argued that governmental power operates through the production of discursive normalizations, political rationalities, and techniques of regulation that ultimately produce subjects that behave as they ought. In Social Text 43 (1995), David Scott’s article “Colonial Governmentality” developed this line of thinking to move toward a better understanding of the operation of colonial power. His influential piece set forth ways of understanding the political terrains that colonial power made possible: what new forms of subjectivity, society, and normalcy Europe’s insertion into the lives of the colonized organized and produced. He did so by working through one particular historical instance: the formation of Sri Lanka’s modernity, which he traced back to British Ceylon’s ColebrookeCameron constitutional reforms of the early 1830s. These institutional changes, Scott skillfully shows, constituted a crucial break with the past, ushering in Sri Lanka’s modernity by way of “the introduction of a new game of politics that the colonized would (eventually) be obliged to play if they were to be counted as political” (emphasis in original). “Colonial Governmentality” has created an extensive series of critical openings for a range of work that has subsequently explored the dispersed strategies and effects of colonial power and its relationships to political modernity. 2 But I am not so interested in mapping these wide, wavering, and hugely productive proliferations. Rather, and in line with this thirtieth anniversary issue, I am more interested in how a reading of Scott’s article speaks to some of the things that a critical leftist journal like Social Text must take seriously in its continual pursuit of responsible and effective Social Text 100 • Vol. 27, No. 3 • Fall 2009 13 6

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interventionary modes of critical thought. In what follows I want to suggest, first, that the very composition of Scott’s article says much about the role that journals like Social Text play in the task of critical knowledge production more generally. And second, leading from this, I want to suggest that we can productively think critical knowledge production itself through the notion of governmentality to signal some useful questions about the relationships between any journal’s institutional locatedness and the terrains of modern critical rationality. What interests me about Scott’s article is a productive tension between the universal and the particular. That is to say, the more or less universal theoretical argument the article puts forward about the political rationalities that colonial power makes possible (hence its influence) is only enabled by a quite particular engagement with the trajectories of colonial power in the postcolony Sri Lanka, the case study. Indeed, this is a tension common to the wider governmentality literature wherein a general theory about power is advanced by engaging very particular “texts of rule.”3 But more than this, a close rereading of Scott’s article suggests how “colonial governmentality” was only useful insofar as it enabled him to critically work through pressing, quite particular, social and political questions in the Sri Lankan context. The article itself reveals a number of clues regarding this particularism. As early as the first page, for example, Scott refers to the article as a set of “notes”: “inasmuch as they are, in many ways, only the tentative explorations of a working paper.” Indeed, at the time, the article was a step toward a monograph on the making of political modernity in colonial Ceylon that was intended as an intervention into debates around Sri Lanka’s constitutional history and the ethnic conflict.4 Though that book was not written, the article became the first chapter in Scott’s excellent 1999 monograph Refashioning Futures, roughly half of which is an in-depth exploration of culture, political rationality, and colonial power in Sri Lanka. And, in the acknowledgements to that book, we learn that “Colonial Governmentality,” together with other chapters, was drafted in Colombo, Sri Lanka, during a period when the author was a fellow at the International Centre for Ethnic Studies (ICES). “Colonial Governmentality,” it seems, owes much to the conversations Scott had with Colombo-based critical scholars and activists, all of whom at the time were working through pressing social and political questions concerning Sri Lanka’s violent, ethnicized conflict. Finally, Scott’s article is consistent in its persistent claim that understanding the effects of colonial power requires attentiveness to colonialism’s specific targets in any given historical (one could add, geographical) instance, lest we “run the risk of a too hasty homogenization of colonialism as a whole.” On this reading, “Colonial Governmentality” is mired in Sri Lanka’s particularities. Location matters. Social Text 100

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At the same time, however, Sri Lanka is barely mentioned until the fourteenth page of a twenty-four-page article. The first half of the article works in detail through a theoretical argument about “colonial governmentality” as a way of approaching colonial power. Only in the article’s last half are the particularities of colonial power’s productions of political rationality in the Sri Lankan case (study) addressed. So despite the article’s engagement with the particular in all the ways I have suggested above, it works by advancing “colonial governmentality” as a theoretical intervention into the problem of how we can conceive of colonial power in general. In fact, it is worth stressing that “Colonial Governmentality” is positioned as a sympathetic response to Partha Chatterjee’s prior argument about colonial power’s distinctiveness from modern power.5 In such ways are advances in theoretical work and understanding performed and achieved. The point I want to emphasize here is that the play between, on the one hand, the demands of speaking to quite particular social and political vexations in place and, on the other, making a contribution to the universal terrain of a “broader theoretical literature” (what David Harvey refers to in ST 42 [1995] as the play between “militant particularism and global ambition”) is I think symptomatic of the effects of the metropolitan locatedness of leftist knowledge production institutions such as Social Text. In other words, it is simply inevitable that for Social Text to carry the article it would need to address a picture bigger than just Sri Lanka’s postcolonial social and political modernity. Understandably, it would need to advance a theoretical position vis-à-vis colonial power in general to satisfy the demand that the article be of interest and use to those whose work lies beyond the provincial domain of the specifically Sri Lankan. Once again, we can say location matters. Social Text’s location within the Euro-American metropolitan spaces of critical, interdisciplinary thought places quite particular demands on the shape of critical academic knowledge production. Articles we publish — particularly those that focus on the global South — must manage to advance thought first and foremost around theoretical and political questions of concern beyond the particularities of place. Addressing the nuances of a politics located specifically in non-Euro-American places is at best a secondary requirement. To be clear, these demands are not unique to Social Text. They apply equally to demands most peer-reviewed journals make of their contributors. Neither should these demands be taken simply as disabling. They are wholly desirable inasmuch as the privilege of learning and tackling the theoretical and political conundrums of our time from a kaleidoscopically worldly array of case studies is central to the intellectual freedom that propels the dynamism of intellectual work. But this aspect of knowledge production is a privilege, and for the 13 8

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sake of humane, responsible, and, not least, effective modes of critical, leftist knowledge-production-to-come, at Social Text we must be aware of this politics of institutional location. We must be aware that this is another case of Europe’s insertion into our lives, into the life of critical knowledge production itself. The question heuristically posed is: how do the demands we make on theory objects and theoretical rigor connect with specific political demands located in place? And in posing that question, one of our aims at Social Text must be to avoid the easy abstraction of theoretical knowledge such that it becomes disconnected from the places in and through which critical thought must be set to work. As Edward Said reminded us in his essay “Travelling Theory,” a theory, lest we work it through the specificities of context, perennially runs the risk of moving up into a sort of “bad infinity” that expansively claims to singularly frame the world in its entirety. 6 David Scott’s article is an object lesson in how to effectively tack back and forth between the particular and universal; of how to satisfy the demands of a metropolitan readership by advancing critical thought beyond the particular while not losing any of the social and political incisiveness that the call of place demands. But his article is instructive in other ways as well. Its focus on governmentality reminds us that part of what critical, leftist knowledge production institutions like Social Text do is train, foster, and secure the contours and conduct of critical intervention itself by placing such demands on authors. The very industry and infrastructure of the intellectual work in which most EuroAmerican academic journals participate produces its own field of power effects: a governmentality that secures an ongoing production of critical thought that, in order to make it to publication, must seek out global theoretical impact and ambition first, and only then address a more provincial and grounded politics of place. I return then to Scott’s articulation of his own task in setting forth, in ST 43, to explore the political rationalities that European colonial power created in Sri Lanka. The question he usefully poses is What then is the conceptual level to be assigned to “Europe,” understood not merely as a geographical space but as an apparatus of dominant power-effects? My question, it is easy to see, presupposes that the critique of European hegemony in the construction of knowledges about the non-European world —  the so-called “decentering” of Europe — ought not to be confused (as I think it very often is) with programmatically ignoring Europe, as though by seeking to do so one would have resolved the problem of Eurocentrism.

If we take “Europe” as metonym for the Euro-American institutional locatedness of the criteria, checks, and balances that arbitrate on the quality of critical leftist knowledge production, we are left to ponder the role that Social Text plays in a kind of governmentality of critical knowledge producSocial Text 100

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tion, what Dipesh Chakrabarty may call the artifice, not of history, but of critical leftist knowledge itself.7 This is to raise a necessary, if uncomfortable, question over the theoretical generalizations and rationalities that drive Euro-American intellectual work in the present. Specifically, what challenges does this governmentality of critical knowledge production pose for seeking out effective, creative, and generative intellectual representations in place? Thought this way, governmentality offers a provocation to regard the role of the collective theoretical expertise and professional certainties of journals like Social Text in a broader politics of knowledge production. An ongoing and humble introspection into our own practices and effects on the conduct and terrain of critical rationality is, I suggest, crucial for Social Text’s effective political and interventionary longevity; for the ST 200 to come. Notes 1. See Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France, 1977 – 78, trans. Graham Burchell (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 2. See Tania Murray Li, The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); James Duncan, In the Shadows of the Tropics: Climate, Race and Biopower in Nineteenth Century Ceylon (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); and Margo Huxley, “Space and Government: Governmentality and Geography,” Geography Compass 2 (2008): 1635 – 58. 3. Pat O’Malley, Lorna Weir, and Clifford Shearing, “Governmentality, Criticism, Politics,” Economy and Society 26 (1997): 502. 4. Personal correspondence with David Scott, 10 November 2008. 5. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). 6. Edward Said, “Travelling Theory,” in The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 239. 7. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for ‘Indian’ Pasts?” Representations 37 (1992): 1 – 26.

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Hip-Hop Michael Ralph

Christopher Holmes Smith, in ST 77 (2003), charts the rise of the hiphop mogul — the young, black, male multimillionaire — whose commercial viability derives from the strategic deployment of a personal biography tailored to the marketplace, as he secures sales from people who may well share his hometown but not his close ties to the nation’s wealthy elite. This familiar trope — the rags to riches triumph of an outlaw, redeemed — has a particular resonance for a generation born in the wake of social movements that created unprecedented opportunities for education, employment, and civic engagement. But as much as his (at times, her; but, usually, his) profit potential, the rapper’s public persona is structured by specific techniques for framing and narrating the past. Consequently, the stage is set for scholarship on hip-hop that is likely to reframe the debates in which this genre has been enmeshed for the past few decades. At the risk of contradicting all scholarly work, journalistic accounts, and even what practitioners, themselves, usually say about hip-hop, I would like to tender the proposition that it did not arise organically in the late 1970s. Hip-hop is, instead, an artifact of the late 1980s/early 1990s. When this subculture first surfaced in New York, the terms hip-hop and rap music were used interchangeably. Hip-hop emerged as a distinct cultural form as part of two interrelated developments. First, the commercial potential of the genre defied all expectations. While rap music was deemed unfit even for music award competitions well into the 1980s, it would, a decade later, surpass staples like alternative and rock music in sales and popularity. By the turn of the millennium, rap music would dominate award shows and expressive culture more broadly. Then, there was the persecution rap music faced during the 1990s, when the U.S. Congress debated its detrimental effects amid a moral panic

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that viewed inner-city gangbangers and drug dealers as obstacles to American democracy and decency.1 In the wake of 1980s fiscal conservatism, and the chronic unemployment that subsequently besieged U.S. cities, new technologies emerged for producing “crack,” creating a pervasive and inexpensive substitute for cocaine. To defend territory and maximize profits, domestic cartels acquired assault weaponry. Meanwhile, the criminal justice system developed stiffer penalties for crack distribution than for cocaine, as the path to the White House was paved by politicians tough on crime and critical of the music produced by a population now seen as the foremost domestic threat (along with the looming presence of Islamic terrorism). In this moment, the interests of professional scholars, fans of hiphop, and rap pioneers converged to create criteria that ultimately sought to distinguish the genre’s most innovative, and progressive aspects from “rap music,” which they considered crass, violent, and misogynistic — devoid of any aesthetic criteria worth discussing. There soon emerged a consensus that hip-hop consists of four elements: DJ-ing, graffiti, break dancing, and emceeing (rhyming). In the process, they retroactively erected an aesthetic resilient enough to withstand criticism; they reproduced a generational cleavage similar to the one that was already being used to condemn the musical sensibilities of the “post-Soul” generation (though the idea that young people today have no taste in music, like the idea that they are apathetic, relies on a fantasy that the 1960s and 1970s mark an era defined exclusively by social transformation and immense artistry). If few people noticed that hip-hop was actually being created when fans and practitioners erected the aesthetic standard they would subsequently use to define it, it is because the scholarship has been concerned primarily with defending the art form against attacks by conservative politicians who believe that rap music fans and practitioners are responsible for social decay (and, by extension, the social problems that surface in the lyrics). Meanwhile, more critical scholars have been so keen to dismantle the knee-jerk reactions of people who are not interested in or who don’t understand hip-hop that they frequently overlook the way hip-hop surfaces uncritically as an aesthetic ideal in conversations designed to disarticulate it from its commercial counterpart (where “hip-hop heads” do it for the love, while “rappers” do it for the money). 2 The tendency for hip-hop enthusiasts to measure the genre against an imaginary golden age evidences a curious brand of nostalgia: a mixture of homesickness, loss, and longing that coheres in the angst of a generation (see Joan Morgan’s “Fly-Girls, Bitches, and Hoes: Notes of a Hip-Hop Feminist,” ST 45, 1995). Meanwhile rappers and politicians blame each other for the demise of disadvantaged communities, as each discourse harkens back to a time of prosperity that never existed. Put another way, the idea that commodification has displaced a genuine

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concern with social change is what rappers and public intellectuals tend to say about each other. Thus while a fuller treatment of hip-hop should include substantial attention to its global reach and to the oft-neglected musical influence and production of female emcees, executives, and producers, there is also an urgent need to reframe the ongoing discussion about male emcees and the idea of masculine authority that structures the way that conversation tends to unfold. The tension between the civil rights and post – civil rights “generations” appears caught in a moment of “parallax,” like the difference between a camera’s viewfinder and its lens: they apprehend the same scenario, but from perspectives that can’t possibly align.3 Maybe these vantage points aren’t meant to be reconciled but to enhance and enrich each other? Both generations rely on problematic conceptions of masculine authority, yet there is a persistent cleavage between them that emerges from the difference between an abiding — versus a crisis of — faith in U.S. democracy and from vastly different strategies for managing desire: this is the central distinction in what has become a debate about the relationships among art, gender, sexuality, and politics that obtain in black expressive culture of the past few decades. Hip-hop’s most promising intervention grows from its preoccupation with desire and fantasy. This tends to be a chauvinistic male fantasy, but hip-hop actually narrates a range of sexual practices. Some rappers develop coded queer personas, even if they refuse to identify that way. And rap music that reveals an abiding interest in erotic power remains indebted to feminism while, ironically, expressing callous disregard for the female, queer, and gender nonconforming populations offended by its licentious messages. While feminist scholarship on hip-hop has made invaluable contributions to an ongoing critical conversation by highlighting the overriding tendency for rap artists to figure women as vehicles for sexual satisfaction and emblems of status, it has inadvertently contributed to political projects that are primarily invested in ridding music of sexual content, altogether. The literature on hip-hop tends to celebrate music deemed “positive,” “conscious,” or “progressive,” though these stances breed music that, ironically, tends to be no less patriarchal: instead of “bitches” and “hoes,” the conversation centers on female virtue, which is often oppressive in its own right, given the way that women, as “wives” (as “mothers”), are expected to do the work of solidifying and reproducing the heteronormative black family privileged as the bedrock of a black community — a black nation. If not all scholars working on hip-hop sanction this particular stance on gender politics, they have not yet developed an alternative critical tradition. For all its insight concerning racial exclusion and sexualized violence, “black

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feminism has,” as Jennifer C. Nash has noted, “permitted a pernicious sexual conservatism, wearing the guise of racial progressivism, to seep into the analytic framework,” where “sexual conservatism” is defined by the “tendency to foreground examinations of black women’s sexual exploitation, oppression, and injury at the expense of analyses attentive to black women’s sexual heterogeneity, multiplicity, and diversity” (see “Strange Bedfellows: Black Feminism and Antipornography Feminism,” ST 97, 2008). A sincere investment in artistic and political freedom would need to distinguish between lyrics that discuss sexual desires and the slimmer category of those that encourage or enable sexual violence. Some of the same scholars who critique and challenge the disproportionate incarceration rates of African Americans (and black men, in particular) often seem incapable of managing unhealthy attitudes about sex and gender without resort to policing the kind of music rap artists produce. This form of political engagement is, in a sense, more violent than profane lyrics, where the impulse to repress sexuality is symptomatic of — and a causal factor in producing — traumatic sexual experiences. And to the extent that commercially viable rappers create personas that are only partly based on their true beliefs and perceptions about the world, the discourse on women in hip-hop might well be a proxy for the broader range of intimate liaisons rappers develop but are reluctant to discuss, perhaps because they conflict with the idea of masculinity they would prefer to promote (or the brand of manhood they have been contracted to produce and market). When confronting this exploitative economy of female labor and expertise, analysts might consider substituting greater deliberation concerning the emotional, political, and economic maneuvers through which women navigate the intricate matrix of desire that structures the hip-hop experience for the moral indignation that too often defines the scholarship on this subject. In the academic literature critiquing hip-hop’s misogyny, we find a reversal of sociologist and U.S. senator Daniel Moynihan’s dogmatically heteronormative report concerning the alleged preponderance of emasculating women who are forced to manage African American households by themselves due to a dearth of adequate male partners: the black female is, this time, not the villain but the hapless victim.4 Meanwhile, the black woman as an archetype in what we might, to borrow a term, call “the anatomy of national [perhaps even, nationalist] fantasy” remains undertheorized.5 Insofar as historical specificity may be of value here, it seems useful to point out that the signal trope of the misogynistic hip-hop music video — the scantily clad, sexually overcharged video vixen — is a rather more recent invention than the prevailing literature would suggest. This particular figuration of female sexuality became prevalent in the early 1990s, in the aftermath of the exorbitant profits, and high rates of death and incarceration, crack cocaine trafficking generated in urban enclaves. 14 4

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Much of the scholarship that sets itself the task of trying to explain how and why male rappers exploit video vixens fails to integrate the firsthand account of women who have worked within the hip-hop music video industry. In her Confessions of a Video Vixen, Karrine Steffans remarks that she was the only woman willing to wear the nipple pasties she was handed on the set of Mystikal’s “Shake It Fast” video shoot. The rest of the women who performed alongside her, she insists, were “professional” models, thus unwilling to don the attire or perform the sexual acts for which she would eventually became legendary.6 Despite these sorts of nuanced insights, the critique of brash female sexuality in the rap music industry centers on the unfounded allegation that hip-hop has some kind of “hold” 7 over black women, instead of trying to understand what might motivate young women to position themselves — or lead them to be positioned — in these particular sorts of ways (see Morgan, “Fly-Girls, Bitches, and Hoes,” ST 45, 1995). Scholars who are justifiably concerned that hip-hop promotes easy access to women — and African American women, in particular — might wish to heed insights born from the scholarship on sex work, which suggests that undoing the social stigma around prostitution and helping to make sex work legal would offer social actors greater protections and greater flexibility in terms of how they grant access to their bodies. As Anne McClintock has noted in ST 37 (1993): “Far from ‘selling their bodies [indiscriminately] to men,’ sex workers” instead tend to “exchange specific services, often for very good money, carefully negotiating the time, the terms, the amount, and the exact service, demanding, though too seldom receiving, the respect that other workers in the social service sector receive.” The politics of respectability — like the conservative discourse on sex education —  ultimately has unintended effects that harm the populations these political projects claim to be serving, for disempowering sex workers places control of the industry in the “hands of police, abusive clients, and pimps.” Respect for women should include respect for female entrepreneurs even if they exhibit a moral code that is uncomfortable for a social movement tradition that stresses the moral exemplar. If I have suggested the critique of misogyny in hip-hop is inadequate, it is only because I consider it to be incomplete. What if the video vixen was treated — and theorized — as a kind of sex worker? What if sexually explicit hip-hop was treated as adult entertainment? As pornography? What if you had to be eighteen — or twenty-one — to purchase rap music that was categorized thusly? This sort of reconfiguration would change the structure of the entire industry, shifting the focus from rappers to label owners and executives. The key issue would cease to be a production problem (“Why do rappers produce obscene music, riddled with profanity?”) and would become a distribution problem (“What laws ought to govern the sale of music filled with violence, sex, and adult references?”). Social Text 100

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These changes in the marketplace would also, no doubt, raise other issues that the scholarship on hip-hop has neglected to explore in depth. While many rappers have, in the past fifteen years, become incorporated as record label owners, none of the distribution companies with which they partner are owned by African Americans. Why hasn’t any black billionaire — or any contingent of hip-hop moguls — tried to purchase or establish a distribution company, when we know that such a venture would necessarily result in greater autonomy? This line of inquiry ought to likewise provoke a shift in the way we study and discuss hip-hop. Why, if 70 to 75 percent of the people who purchase and own hip-hop music are white, hasn’t hip-hop become a robust field of inquiry in whiteness studies? Taking questions like these more seriously is one way to ensure that future scholarship on hip-hop is even brighter than its glorious past. Notes 1. Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994); Robin D. G. Kelley, “Kickin’ Reality, Kickin’ Ballistics: ‘Gangsta Rap’ and Postindustrial Los Angeles,” in Race Rebels: Culture, Politics and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1994), 190. 2. In her landmark study Black Noise, Rose writes that “hip-hop culture began taking shape in New York City” during her “teenage years” (ix), though the phrase “hip-hop culture” would have been unthinkable at the moment she is describing. Likewise, Jeff Chang, in his authoritative study Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2006), refers to the slew of rappers, DJ’s, breakdancers, and graffiti artists he interviewed about their pioneering efforts to create a new performance genre in New York City during the latter 1970s as “hip-hop heads” (90), though this phrase is an artifact of the 1990s. 3. On “parallax,” see Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), and Kojin Karatani, Transcritique: On Kant and Marx (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). 4. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Labor, 1965). 5. See Lauren Berlant, The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 6. Karrine Steffans, Confessions of a Video Vixen (New York: Harper Collins, 2005). 7. T. Sharpley-Whiting, Pimps Up, Ho’s Down: Hip Hop’s Hold on Young Black Women (New York: New York University Press, 2008).

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Ideology Stefano Harney

I do have an ideology.  — Milton Friedman, Financial Times, 2008 Hard Core Republican Is Turning Cisco into a Socialist Enterprise  — Headline in Fast Company magazine, November 2008

When Michael E. Brown published his “Ideology and the Metaphysics of Content” (ST 8, 1983), Marxian analysis of ideology, so prevalent in the 1960s and 1970s, was only beginning to yield to the insights and practices of cultural studies. Brown’s brilliant piece still teaches us what was at stake in that transition. The essay warns us against starting from the premise of a politics that knows itself as complete. Under such circumstances, a fully formed politics can only confront a subject as an external force. The analyst is left with this clash of subject and text, and of what is true and what is false in this face-off. It is little wonder that this kind of analysis fed a metaphysics of correct content on the Left that was ultimately alien to historical materialism. To help us avoid this trap of a text whose meaning is revealed and guarded by analysts, Brown makes a distinction between what he calls analysis and something he calls simply reading. He demonstrated what he meant by reading by taking us through a close reading of the first chapter of Marx’s Capital, as an example of how the subject of politics might be present at her own making, in a selfeducative confrontation with the materials that remain in the moment and in history. Rather than presenting us with a text that unfolds its eternal truth, to an empty or misinformed subject, Brown shows the way that Marx’s writing teaches before it instructs in a style that allows the reader to build her own case. We learn that every new reading of this writing is

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a process of self-development in which the materials and the subject are transformed anew in another historical moment. Here politics only knows itself in the encounter and the subject only becomes herself in the same encounter. The question of how ideology relates to the subject could no longer be posed under these conditions of reading. And yet, today, ideology again trips from the tongues of those who can be heard, and politics presents itself as known and knowing. The only question, once again, is one of choice or imposition, truth or falsity. Financial crisis and a looming depression provoke comment in the media, in government, and in universities about the ideology of neoliberalism and its falsity. Lack of regulation is said to have created the crisis. Globalization is said to have made it worse, and the dominance of markets over states to have made it more difficult to fix. The airwaves and conference halls are full of talk about ideological error and excess. There are attempts to purge these deviations, aimed at both banks and bankers. But the purges are curiously weak and ineffective. All this talk imagining a public sphere is what Brown called chatter, and it accumulates as those listening invest in certain meanings. At the time of this writing, it is that the failure of Lehman Brothers precipitated the crisis, but already chatter about the nature and cause of the crisis is accumulating again, and will require some new investment if it is not to descend entirely into noise, or perhaps one should say ascend. It is not unusual for voices in these centers of power to talk about ideology or to use the word. But in the past this term has normally been applied to someone else. Classically, democracy and capitalism were not ideologies but optimal states of human existence, particularly as they were understood by antagonists of the cold war. This understanding was updated in the Bush Doctrine, which tended in its analysis to substitute one for the other more freely than in the past, in a kind of collapse of disciplines that mocked interdisciplinarity. But if there is something new here in the return of ideology, it is certainly this: Why has this term now been made safe for democracy, and even for capitalism? Why does Milton Friedman now have an ideology? In a sense ideology had already made a return in response to the provocation of the latest announcement of the end of ideology, distributed during the global victory parade of neoliberalism. That periodic bulletin always implicitly meant the victory of democracy and capitalism over ideology, both its internal infection and external plague. Still it did not announce the victory of neoliberal ideology over cold-war competitors, but the death of the only ideologies, those of these competitors. Taking up the traditional cold-war challenge, and perhaps sensing that cultural studies had allowed itself to be misread as neutral in this battle, scholars like Slavoj Žižek heralded a bold return to ideology and ideology critique.1 Žižek, for 14 8

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instance, suggested in one update of Louis Althusser on the commodity fetish that it is not a question of people thinking that a car or a suit is some independent and magical object, and not just a car or a suit, but rather that they are forced to behave in daily life like a car or a suit does indeed carry these properties. In another attempt, he says that ideology is most effective when it is true. But is such a defense necessary? Brown begins his 1983 essay with an account of the rise of academic Marxism and the price it paid for acceptance, a price it soon forgot was a tactic and started to regard as a quality of its own work. Marxism became a discipline among others, guarded and interpreted its texts like others, and regarded those texts as having a meaning independent of their reading and history. This turned any teaching of such texts into a relationship of master and slave. Žižek is too dialectical a thinker to be caught in this academicism, although there are certainly still plenty of examples of those on the Left who would like to get the diagnosis of the current crisis right for us. But his reinvigoration of ideology critique hides an inescapable fact, and one to which that this academic Marxism contributed. And that fact is that there is indeed an end to ideology, or rather there are now ends to ideology, because ideology has entered the world of things. Neoliberalism and its mirror opposite, post-Marxism, both coming into force at the time Brown’s essay was published, could not by themselves, of course, enact this disenchantment with ideology, a disenchantment that has led to its tame use today as an identity category. Certainly neoliberalism has long been shown to have little to do with an ideological commitment, freely producing antistate statism, as Ruth Gilmore calls it in the United States, and a fortress in Europe based on the restriction of commodity trade and commodity labor. 2 But to be able to wear ideology like a garment in the way we see routinely in the chatter of the current crisis required a certain laboring of ideology, a putting to work of politics. This is not a matter of what used to be called commodification in ideology critique, of Che on a T-shirt.3 It is rather the way politics has come into the workplace not as interference with production, or a lubricant, but as a tool of production. We are familiar with its symptoms: swarm intelligence, humane workplaces, wikinomics, cultural diversity, and corporate social responsibility. Here immaterial labor that cannot be easily identified, cognitive and affective capacities not already attuned to labor-power, are gathered through politics, through ideology, and put to work. This includes also reflection on this use of politics through the discipline of business and management studies.4 To see these symptoms as ameliorations of contradiction in the workplace is to miss the dependence of capitalism on this politics of organization, and to fall back into an ideology critique. It is not that this new laboring of ideology does not require critique, but rather that such a critique should work outward from the labor process in Social Text 100

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an updated version of what Italian Marxists would call the social factory. Still the risk remains that the corpse of the old ideology critique will be animated by the gathering storm. Indeed it is tempting to think that this storm will clarify the content of capitalism, making the formulation of a political strategy possible in light of this clarity. It is equally tempting to think the crisis will reveal the domination that would make such a strategy popular. But if Brown’s essay teaches us anything, it is that this kind of objective analysis of capitalism leaves no room for the development of politics, since what is complete in capital will necessarily demand its opposite in politics, in pedagogy, and ultimately in the subject. Instead, it seems important to think about crisis as the disruption of any settled notion of content or text, and of any analysis. Randy Martin did just this in his reading of the financialization of daily life during a period when capitalist crisis was ordinary rather than extraordinary.5 In a similar way, I would like to use a brief account from my own experience teaching undergraduate students strategy in a University of London business school to see if I can make some sense of the pedagogy Brown inspires at this present conjuncture where banking is declared to be in crisis. Instead, we wanted to approach the crisis phenomenologically, as something unpredictable, unraveling, and unknowable on its own, something that only gathers meaning and is transformed by our own encounter with it over time, in history. We were determined to start with the encounters as we found them, in daily media reports, in the lives of students and their families, in observations about the rest of their education, and in examinations of the personal strategies students brought with them and in which they placed, if not faith, then hope. For our part, we tried to meet the crisis with the students, not suppressing our critique so much as allowing it to be led on by the materials, events, and experiences of the economic crisis in London and the undergraduate students who had chosen to study business “to help them get a job.” We began the conversations in this lecture hall each week and we brought material and information, but we allowed questions and comments to move the conversation. We ended the semester talking about this hold on us and our hold on others as a kind of possession. From thinking of a house as a possession we moved to thinking about how our debt meant we possessed each other, with all that meant for us, from the worst aspects of human property to spiritual inflection to something like debt as responsibility to others, something like love.6 We concluded by asking how we could have the freedom that these personal strategies implied, given the necessity that seemed to go with this mutual possession. How could we get from this necessity and responsibility to others something more, and something different? At this point in our encounter with the crisis, we started to formulate what we wanted. We 15 0

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wanted the wealth that came from making promises to each other, but we wanted also some initiative, some say in what kind of promises we made. But we also agreed we should give the same to others in their debt to us. Most of all we wanted to organize this around a principle where everyone who wanted to make promises and receive promises could do so, where debt was possible, not impossible, where promises are possible. Brown begins his article by warning presciently about the production of a metaphysics of politics on the Left, and we can see today that this Marxian academicism helped prepare ideology for its entry into the world of things. Today a politics that promises what it cannot deliver is now a feature both of government and workplace. But this claim of politics to know itself completely, at Cisco Systems and Shell just as at the New York Times and the Financial Times, to say nothing of that claim in the mouths of politicians, does not just fail to secure a world of promise but burns promise as its fuel. Brown concludes his reading by saying that one cannot find oneself by obliterating one’s moments. The students’ commitment to debt, to promises, and to their strategies gradually produced from these moments a politics of promise itself. This politics would measure debt not by its repayment but by the different strategies it could sustain. It falls to us to elaborate with them this politics of the mutual possession into which they have already placed us. Notes 1. See, for instance, Slavoj Žižek, Did Someone Say Totalitarianism? (London: Verso, 2001). 2. Ruth Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 3. An anachronistic version of this commodification critique is the recent book by Luc Boltanksi and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (London: Verso, 2007). 4. Stefano Harney, “Why Is Management a Cliché?” Critical Perspectives on Accounting 16 (2005): 579 – 91. 5. Randy Martin, The Financialization of Daily Life (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003). 6. See, for instance, Michael Hardt, “About Love. European Graduate School Seminar 2007 4/6,” YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndnkjnMxxLc (accessed 3 June 2009).

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Independent Publishing

John Brenkman : We started out kind of idealistically, you’d have to say.

We didn’t want institutional support; we were committed to the idea being completely independent. You know, Social Text, TELOS, New German Critique — we were all what Germans called “tendency” journals that tried to put a position forward in the world on certain questions. Stanley Aronowitz : We didn’t want to go to any university press or anything

like that, to begin with. We wanted to be self-published. And the reason we wanted to be self-published was because we felt that we had to establish a track record and we had to establish our will to being independent. Fredric Jameson : Nobody wanted to publish anything like this in the old

days, so we really had to do this ourselves. Later on, evidently, the presses were buying these journals up and at that point they were very interested in doing it. Andrew Ross : There was the issue of the independence, the self-reliance of the journal. That was a huge political issue. The conditions of production of the journal. There were a lot of people who felt very fiercely devoted to independent production. We had a distributor who got the journal into bookstores, local bookstores. And there was the idea that there was a politics to that. And in the course of time there issued a big debate about whether to take the journal to Duke. Sohnya Sayres : I remember I opposed it very hard — and I was one of the

people making all the dinners! So why was I opposing this move so much? We needed the money, we needed the regular help, we needed editorial support. We needed all those things. But being tied to a university press, you get caught in a kind of bind: when you want to get truly creative, you still have this production schedule you have to meet, and that’s not how

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we worked before. When we were in whatever discursive breakdown we were in, we had time to recollect, to think about it, and start afresh. But with a press, it’s rationalized, you’re in a mechanical production problem: that commercial machinery puts you on a conveyor belt of some kind. If you want to gather in for a year or two and really think through new avenues, new ways of doing things — suddenly there’s no time. What bothered me about centralizing, commercializing, was the fear that that kind of marvelously contentious moment would dissipate into regularity. And without that edginess — without those fierce tugs-of-war — the journal would become a fine vehicle for new disciplines out there (which is a perfectly good use for any journal), but it wouldn’t have that other quality.

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Labor and Class Rick Maxwell

In its first decade, Social Text published work on labor and class that fell within the journal’s broader project to define the contours of a Marxist cultural critique, a cultural Marxism. This offered a forum for studies on labor’s representation in popular culture alongside conventional Marxist concerns with the conditions of work, relations of production, the reproduction of class strata (in mostly sociological terms), and class consciousness (via ideological analyses à la Frankfurt School, Louis Althusser, British cultural studies, etc.). Commodification was a key context — in particular, the role of commodity fetishism in erasing labor and labor practices from public consciousness in parallel to the decline of the labor movement. The journal had an abiding interest in the place of labor and the labor movement within the ongoing development of Marxism (see especially Stanley Aronowitz in ST 2, 1979; 9/10, 1984; 12, 1985; and 18, 1987). There was also new leftish interest in spontaneous and unruly quotidian modes of resistance (in the West), which stood at variance with the old left view of organized labor at the center of historical change (for example, Michel de Certeau et al., ST 3, 1980). This made the journal a natural home for cultural studies (homegrown and British) as a transitional, at the time, mode of analysis of class/labor and the intersections of class, gender, race, and nation (see Paul Willis and Philip Corrigan, ST 7, 1983). Meanwhile, attention also turned to workers and activism in the third world and Eastern Europe — though not yet framed as aspects of a new international division of labor (NIDL). Historical work continued on the labor movement, transformations in relations of production, labor market, skilling and deskilling, and so on. By the end of its first decade, as the journal became more interested in questions of “multinationalism” (later globalization), the “crises” of Marxism, and the end of the Soviet Union, there was a more explicit uptake of interest in the NIDL. Social Text 100 • Vol. 27, No. 3 • Fall 2009 DOI 10.1215/01642472-2009-028  © 2009 Duke University Press

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The next ten years began by processing a number of theoretical and empirical challenges from the previous decade, including analyses of the place of the labor movement vis-à-vis new social movements and of postFordist or postindustrial characteristics of the NIDL (global dispersion of assembly lines, fragmentation of labor/class consciousness, deunionization, decline of the welfare state, industrial relocation, working conditions in the third world, command and control over the NIDL via communication networks and international trade agreements [e.g., the North American Free Trade Agreement], etc.) (Norman Finkelstein, ST 24, 1990; Stanley Aronowitz, ST 25/26, 1990; Fredric Jameson, ST 28, 1991; ST 31/32, 1992, focusing on third-world and postcolonial issues; Cindi Katz et al., ST 33, 1992; Philip Neisser and Stanford Schram, ST 41, 1994). Other continuities: class and critical theory (Stanley Aronowitz, ST 58, 1999); social and cultural reproduction of class (Marianne Conroy, ST 54, 1998); race and class (Curtis Márez, ST 48, 1996); gender and class; workingclass depictions in popular culture (Julie Bettie in ST 45, 1995), as well as in the discourse of postindustrialism; the state of the Left and the labor movement (Stanley Aronowitz, ST 44, 1995). Attention turned to the “information society” and a new “class” of information worker (hackers, computer designers, and the like) (Kelly Anderson and Annie Goldson, Andrew Ross, Grant Kester, ST 35, 1993). This was also the period in which the journal began to publish work on academic labor and the changing working conditions in higher education, inspired in part by graduate student and adjunct activism/unionism (ST 39, 1994, on the Yale strike; ST 51, 1997, on academic labor). In the last ten years, editorial interest in class and labor provided space for work on the impoverishment of the American middle class (Randy Martin, ST 65, 2000), on the worsening conditions of academic labor (Ellen Willis, ST 70, 2002; Christopher Newfield, ST 79, 2004), and on theorizing “nonindustrial” informational work of symbol makers and symbol users, described variously as “immaterial labor,” “no-collar workers,” “knowledge workers,” “creative labor,” or “mental labor” (Andrew Ross, Tiziana Terranva, ST 63, 2006). The latter was part of an effort to find a theoretical framework to understand working conditions in media, information, design, advertising, fashion, and other areas of the culture industries — seeing such work not merely as a form of creative effort but also as a source of novel cultural sensibilities, tastes, and temperaments (and, as such, as a linchpin in research and development of cultural policy). Historical and sociological writing on class and labor from the past ten years included new work on class formations in Asia and Latin America (Eric Tang, ST 62, 2000; Mike Davis, ST 81, 2004) alongside essays on American labor movement history (the latter virtually the sole enterprise of Stanley Aronowitz, who began to insert more and more personal recol156

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lections into his contributions). More continuity in this decade: the idea that class struggle is the motor force of historical change was still seen as a Jurassic form of Marxist thought (the exception might be found in the essays on academic labor). The primacy of class-based politics was based on illusions of an “economistic left” that had not come to terms with contemporary processes: for example, class “decomposition and recomposition”; the inextricable links between class structure and gender, race, nation (deterritorialized, reterritorialized); how class identity is “mutually constituted” with race, gender, and sexual identities (not to mention green politics and various defining institutional identities); the fragmentation of class consciousness and fracturing of class solidarity (ST 61, 1999, on gay and lesbian workplace struggles; editorial, ST 70, 2002; Sara Ahmed, ST 79, 2004). If class struggle wasn’t what it used to be, attempts to rethink class and labor during this time could still be found in essays deploying concepts of Marxist political economy along with those using less abstract means of understanding everyday practices of survival, pleasure-seeking, affection, and communication (Andy Merrifield, ST 62, 2000). One could still find a few essays using the technical-analytical language of Marxist theory (labor-power, surplus labor, variable capital, etc.). In contrast, most of the work on labor and class used descriptive but analytically expedient phrases in which the noun labor was modified by a pertinent adjective: female, industrial, creative, subaltern, casual, day, rural, urban, agricultural, academic, domestic, and so on — all terms of critical specificity though not necessarily rooted in Marxist notions of labor and class. Some contributions focused on class as an established “system,” while others examined the fluid, contingent aspects that characterize periods of systemic destabilization where micropolitics play a vital role (Swati Ghosh, John Gilliam, ST 83, 2005). An abiding interest in reproduction of labor through cultural consumption and education hovered around these studies (Stanley Arono­ witz, Tony Tinker, ST 79, 2004). One can also appreciate the long-standing interest in how “work” is depicted via media and other institutions (labor unions, state agencies, the World Bank, the International Labor Organization, Left political parties, etc.) (Michael Denning, ST 92, 2002). Whether focusing on the physical nature of work, the organized movement of labor, or the representation and visibility of work and workers (white, male, female, queer, immigrant, African American, Latino, of the global South, and so on), Social Text’s contributions to the study of labor and class have enriched the cultural critique of the global political economy and the international division of labor. As the crisis in the global political economy deepens, critical perspectives on labor and class will become increasingly urgent and will hopefully fill even more pages in the next hundred issues of Social Text.

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Marxism David Kazanjian

“The framework of the journal is Marxist in the broadest sense of the term.” So begins the second paragraph of the “Prospectus” for Social Text 1 (1979). Framed like this, a reflection on Marxism and Social Text thirty years later seems to have a lot to answer for. Indeed, John Brenkman tries to answer for that framework in his entry for Social Text 100 on the “Prospectus” that he helped to draft. Writes Brenkman, in this issue: “Why at the moment that Social Text was founded did Marx seem so relevant and liberalism so bankrupt, whereas today — a scant thirty years later — Marxism might reasonably be thought to be dead, while the fundamental elements of liberalism are in need of vigorous defense?” Brenkman’s effort to answer for Social Text’s Marxist framework leads him to repeat the familiar old and new American left plot of nostalgic reflection (on wellmeaning but misguided origins), decisive renunciation (of Marxism as an inevitable “illiberalism”), and sober adoption of former foes (“embrace the ordeal of liberalism,” he advises). Rather than “answer for” Marxism in Social Text — as if it were an accusation, an original sin, or a silly delusion of one’s juvenilia — I’ll treat Marxism as, well, a social text. The word framework appears three times on the first page of the “Prospectus” in Social Text 1: in the sentence quoted above, as well as in references to “the dialectical framework” and the “Marxist framework” that will allow the journal to raise and discuss political and theoretical questions in a properly historical light. The word sits uneasily alongside the “Prospectus” ’s simultaneous embrace of “new modes of critical and utopian thought,” “new emancipatory impulses and new forms of struggle,” precisely because “frameworks” are what such new modes, impulses, and forms of struggle usually direct their energies against. Indeed, Brenkman renounces Marxism because he thinks of it as a framework, a schematic

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tendency to see “patterns of human behavior in groups,” and he opts for liberalism because he thinks it is more attuned to action and potentiality: “liberalism postulates individuals in their capacity of action.” Perhaps it is a sign of the distance separating Social Text 1 from Social Text 100 that thinking of Marxism as a framework, and liberalism as anything but a fantasy, seems out of tune to me. Thanks in part to the kind of thinking Social Text helped to put in motion between issue 1 and issue 100, some of us learned Marxism not as a framework but rather as a way to think outside the frame. “Frame work” originally referred to the product (or “work”) of a machine (or “frame”) composed of parts fitted together, like a loom for weaving or a mold for casting. Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopædia; or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (1738) explains that the word “frame is more particularly used for a sort of loom, whereon artizans stretch their linens, silks, stuffs &c. to be embroidered, quilted or the like. See EMBROIDERY, TAPESTRY work &c.”1 The 11 May 1812 issue of The Examiner; a Sunday paper, on politics, domestic economy, and theatricals asserts that “Frames . . . indisputably lessen the number of workmen,” and G. P. R. James’s The Woodman; A Romance of the Times of Richard III (1849) describes “two young girls who sat near with tall frames before them, running the industrious needle in and out.”2 So in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, at least, “frame work” named the interface between commodities and the artisans, workmen, and young girls who made them under conditions of automation, structural unemployment, and child labor that echo into this crisis-ridden, twenty-first-century global economy. Rather than thinking of Marxism as a framework, then, we could treat framework as a term forged in and through capitalist discursive practice, like primitive accumulation or use-value. The “so-called” (sogenannte) in the title “So-called Primitive Accumulation” of part 8, volume 1, of Marx’s Capital reminds us of how Marx liked to interpret such terms when they appeared in the familiar plots of the classical political economists. The following passage from “So-called Primitive Accumulation” exemplifies what we might call the analytic of the so-called, which is more traditionally known by Marxists as the critique of the form of appearance: This primitive accumulation plays approximately the same role in political economy as original sin does in theology. Adam bit the apple, and thereupon sin fell on the human race. Its origin is supposed to be explained when it is told as an anecdote about the past. Long, long ago there were two sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent and above all frugal élite; the other, lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living. The legend of theological original sin tells us certainly how man came to be condemned to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow; but the history of economic original sin reveals to us that there are people to whom this is by no means essential. 16 0

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Never mind! Thus it came to pass that the former sort accumulated wealth, and the latter sort finally had nothing to sell except their own skins. And from this original sin dates the poverty of the great majority who, despite all their labour, have up to now nothing to sell but themselves, and the wealth of the few that increases constantly, although they have long ceased to work. 3

In the face of pervasive, over-familiar terms that one cannot not utter, terms that utter us as much as we utter them, Marx had a method: inhabit in order to know, perform in order to critique, and parody in order to revolutionize. What happens when we turn this analytic of the so-called on framework itself? Frameworks are said to help us know and act by bringing everything together more efficiently, more neatly. For instance, the “Prospectus” says that “the Marxist framework seeks to restore . . . history and historical perspective” to the theory of its day, as if the task of thinking were to put everything back in its proper place, as if that proper place were knowable, as if “history” tells us exactly where to look. However, as the 11 May 1812 issue of the Examiner points out, frames also automate the work of thinking, “lessening the number of workmen.” From the perspective of the frame in James’s The Woodman, it is the needle that is industrious, not the young girls, as if the needle works the girls themselves. So what about the workmen who are “lessened,” pushed outside the frame — how and what do they think? And what are the girls up to while they sit alongside those industrious needles? The so-called of the framework points us toward what happens in and through, but also alongside and outside, the frame. Grace Lee Boggs, in her 1999/2000 interview with L. Todd Duncan and Katheryne V. Lindberg published in Social Text 67 (2001), talks at length about working in an industrial plant during World War II. Of the social and political action that went on among the workers, she says: “There was a tremendous camaraderie. While our hands were busy wiring and soldering, our mouths were yapping away.” Boggs continues: “In Capital, Marx contrasts the stage of attraction, when the workforce is expanding, and that of repulsion, when it is shrinking. World War II was a period of tremendous expansion. Blacks, women, intellectuals were coming together in the plant for the first time in great numbers. They would exchange books, go bowling together after work, hold discussions. It was a very lively place.” Inside, alongside, and in apposition to the order and efficiency of the plant’s so-called frame work, wiring and soldering, Boggs and her coworkers kept their mouths from being lessened, automated. They yapped away and went bowling, had discussions and exchanged books — “lazy rascals.” They questioned what Stanley Aronowitz reminded us to question in Social Text 24 (1990): “the crucial bourgeois ideology — work as an ethical form of life.” In turn, they raise for us what Aronowitz called the Social Text 100

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“most subversive slogan since the ninetheenth century,” a frame-busting question if there ever was one: “why work?” The plot of Marx’s “anecdote about the past” from “So-called Primitive Accumulation” is familiar, with its misguided origins, its featured individuals, its heroes and villains. It is old, it is new, and it is an ordeal, this plot, but apparently someone has to tell it, or else we’ll all start asking what we’re working for, and why we can’t take a break, refuse to work, live riotously. And if we do ask, just like always, we’ll be called “illiberal,” which according to the Oxford English Dictionary means “ill-bred, ungentlemanly, unrefined, base, mean, vulgar, rude, sordid” — lazy rascals, yapping away. This plot still tells itself today, as if automated, a frame work, running the industrious keyboard on our computers with confidence and ease, calling us all. So-calling us all. Malcolm X knew something about this plot, and he also knew something about the analytic of the so-called: “This so-called democracy has failed the Negro. And all these white liberals have definitely failed the Negro. So, where do we go from here? First, we need some friends. We need some new allies. The entire civil-rights struggle needs a new interpretation, a broader interpretation. We need to look at this civil-rights thing from another angle — from the inside as well as from the outside.”4 This democracy, this liberalism, this civil-rights thing — Malcolm insisted that we could inhabit them and find a way out of them, too. To where? There’s no framework for that. A young Marx had a similar thought, in 1843: “Therefore not one of the so-called rights of man goes beyond egoistic man, man as a member of civil society, namely an individual withdrawn into himself, his private interest and his private desires and separated from the community”; 5 this “political emancipation is certainly a big step forward. It may not be the last form of general human emancipation.”6 It may not be. But who knows? That’s the social part of this text of Marxism. Here’s one way to start, though: take a big step backward to Social Text 1, where, a few pages after the “Prospectus,” Sylvia Wynter’s essay “Sambos and Minstrels” breaks out of the frame that Marx’s own critique of so-called primitive accumulation left in place: the frame of the socalled primitive. Drawing “attention to that implicit cultural blanchitude which has been central to the social machine of the world system,” Wynter reflected on how slave cultures of the Americas expose “the contradictions of the egalitarian creed.” She thus took “another angle” on the richly theoretical internationalism that fed into Social Text at its start: “In constituting another self, another collective identity whose coding and signification moved outside the framework of the dominant ideology, the slaves were involved in a long and sustained counterstruggle.” In a sense, Wynter inaugurates what would become a long Social Text counterplot to a certain liberalism’s egalitarian creed and its inevitable imperial articula16 2

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tions, as well as to a certain Marxism’s (anti)primitivism and its inevitable imperial articulations, a counterplot told in Social Text from the third world, from postcolonial critiques of the third world, from critiques of the postcolonial. Get in and get out, Malcolm and Marx said. Grace Lee Boggs and Sylvia Wynter, too. Both at once. But don’t forget how to get out. There’s riotous work to perform. Illiberal living to be lived. Friendships and alliances to create. Yapping to do. Outside of the so-called framework. Notes 1. Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopædia; or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, vol. 1, 2nd ed. (London, 1738), 296. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Gale. 2. G. P. R. James, The Woodman; A Romance of the Times of Richard III (London: T. C. Newby, 1849), 13; The Examiner; a Sunday paper, on politics, domestic economy, and theatricals (London), 11 May 1812. 3. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1977), 873. 4. Malcolm X, “The Ballot or the Bullet,” in Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements, ed. George Breitman (New York: Merit, 1965), 31. 5. Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (New York: Vintage, 1975), 230. 6. Ibid., 221.

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National Allegory



Brian Larkin

In January 2009, Amitabh Bachchan, the lion of Indian cinema, reacted on his blog to the increasing success of the film Slumdog Millionaire with a caution. Tapping into an anxiety about how India is represented abroad, he asserted, “If SM projects India as Third World dirty underbelly developing nation and causes pain and disgust among nationalists and patriots, let it be known that a murky under belly exists and thrives even in the most developed nations.”1 Bachchan intensified a furious controversy both inside India and abroad over whether the film was a form of “poverty porn,”2 whether it was Indian or not, and whether its representations showed real problems in India or a stereotype of poverty served up for foreign audiences. Slumdog Millionaire is, perhaps, an ill fit for Fredric Jameson’s argument in ST 15 (1986), in “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” that third-world texts operate as national allegories. Based on an Indian novel (Q&A by Vikas Swarup), adapted by a British screenwriter (Simon Beaufoy) and British director (Danny Boyle), codirected by an Indian (Loveleen Tandan), financed from Europe, set in India and starring Indians — the film has origins complex enough for many Indians to claim it as desi while others disavow it as foreign. It is also not an allegory in Jameson’s sense of private individual stories representing public political events. Yet the controversy itself is deeply Indian as it replays previous conflicts over the circulation of Indian cinema and what constitutes proper representations of India. What these controversies do is sharpen the focus on a dynamic central to the debate between Jameson and Aijaz Ahmad, but relatively neglected in scholarly discussion (see Ahmad, “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory,’ ” ST 17, 1987). Allegory is not always a feature immanent to a text but is something

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texts have placed upon them through the act of circulation across cultural difference. Bachchan’s reaction to Slumdog as a story of a “dirty underbelly developing nation” rather than of the hard life of two children is an example of this. His reading of the film as a national allegory derives not from his experience of the film but from his reaction to its success in the West, and it is only after this movement that the film comes to stand for the nation (and thus become an object of critique). Allegory, in this mode, is not tied to the imagination of writer or director but is derived externally from the movement of the text in and out of different publics. This is particularly the case for successful films and novels such as Slumdog whose popularity heightens a dynamic inherent to the process of circulation itself. In his article on third-world literature, Jameson attempts to lay out theoretical grounds for analyzing non-Western literature and through that to expand the literary canon. The publicity brought by the debate with Ahmad means this aim has been probably more successful than Jameson could have imagined (if not in the way he expected). His argument, famously, is that third-world intellectuals and the texts they produce exhibit an “obsessive return to the national situation” that comes from their position as structurally marginal to the centers of power in the contemporary world. He insists on a sharp cleavage between West and nonWest. “Nothing is to be gained,” he argues, “by passing over in silence the radical difference of non-canonical texts.” This difference emerges from the experience of imperial domination and living in the dark shadow of American hegemony that together lead to the formation of a different, more politicized non-Western intellectual. It is the experience of this marginality, Jameson argues, that accounts for the “obsessive” concern with allegory. Novels that purport to be about private, intimate stories “necessarily project a political dimension in the forms of national allegory: the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third world culture and society.” Ahmad, of course, rejects the claim of difference and the argument that third-world texts are wholly concerned with national allegories (indeed he rejects the entire category of third-world literature as a theoretical unity). In most societies, he argues, there is a vast diversity of literature in which thematic concerns about the nation-state are either minor or wholly absent. Using the example of nineteenth-century Urdu literature, he argues this body of work betrays a preoccupation with the place of women and the rise of a petite bourgeoisie rather than any sustained discussion of the national question. It is only because Jameson has little access to vernacular literatures and relies on translated works, Ahmad argues, that he comes to conceive of third-world literature solely in terms of its marginality and opposition to “global American postmodernist culture.” While Ahmad makes some compelling points, he is curiously unconcerned with the basic Social Text 100

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question Jameson raises: what is the relation between cultural forms and nationalism? One can reject Jameson’s totalizing summation (“all Third World texts”) while still interrogating the close imbrication of nationalism, literature, and film. As the controversy over Slumdog reveals, the allegorical capacity of texts to stand for the nation stems not just from authorial intention but from the movement that looses them from original contexts of production and reception and opens them up to different publics that do not share the same contexts of understanding. While Jameson does not focus on this dynamic, it is central to his theoretical argument about the Western critical reception of non-Western texts. For Jameson, third-world texts come to the Western reader as estranged: “Western readers whose tastes . . . have been formed by our own modernisms” cannot read in the same way as the public for which the text is originally intended. For readers like himself, Jameson argues, the text appears as “already-read.” The Westerner recognizes an “Other reader” standing between her and the text, at the same time realizing a “noncoincidence with that Other reader.” His argument here rests on a radical form of alterity that is reflexive in that the haunting presence of this second reader is ultimately the recognition of cultural, religious, political, and social difference. Jameson’s analysis is grounded in the difficulty of translation across difference, and it is in that precise encounter that the force of national allegory is released. To return to Slumdog, it is as these images circulate outside of India through film festivals and awards events, and as they assume popularity in these arenas, that they come to take on the increasing burden of representing the nation and so intensify the controversy that surrounds the film. In the case of India, this controversy replays earlier ones that frame how Slumdog is understood. The most important of these was the fierce reaction to the international success of Satyajit Ray’s film Pather Panchali (1955). Pather Panchali was the first Indian film recognized within the realm of European art cinema and achieved the feat of making cinema acceptable to an Indian intelligentsia notoriously condescending toward Hindi film and of projecting India’s artistic achievement to a worldwide critical audience. In her later years as a member of the Indian parliament, Nargis, one of the few Hindi film stars whose reputation matches that of Amitabh Bachchan, accused Ray of exporting Indian backwardness for foreign audiences. Her fear, and that of many nationalists, was that the film would merely confirm Western stereotypes of Indian poverty and deny the possibility of India representing herself as a modern nation, and she argued that Ray was only successful because he catered to the Western desire to see Indian poverty. Indian films should present images of a modern India that, for her, was defined by dams and development (itself a reference to

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the dam-building sequence in her most famous film, Mother India [1957; dir. Mehboob Khan]). 3 Accusations that Pather Panchali exported poverty had dogged the film from its release, long before Nargis’s comments. Even though the film was selected to represent India at Cannes (where it won an award), attacks on the film led the Indian government to pass regulations directing that, in the future, “before any State Government sends films . . . abroad for exhibition, the State Government should ascertain the film’s suitability from the point of view of external publicity.”4 The art historian Kajri Jain argues that these nationalist attempts to control representations of India are a secular equivalent to ideas of religious desecration. They exemplify “what filmmakers in particular recognize as the ‘proper light’ syndrome referring to the way in which certain images . . . are rejected . . . by representatives of the state because they ‘do not show India in a proper light.’ ”5 In 1959 the Central Board of Film Censors reacted to the success of Ray’s film abroad by extending its list of censorable images to include scenes representing “abject, disgusting poverty”6 — a clear reference to Pather Panchali and one that confirms its peculiar status as a film that brought tremendous prestige to India while, at the same time, destabilizing and threatening that prestige. The assertion of government control over this process reveals an awareness that any film shown abroad might come to speak for the nation irrespective of its content or aesthetic form. When Satyajit Ray made Pather Panchali according to the aesthetic norms of European art cinema at the time, it may be the case that he represented the sort of political intellectual Jameson wrote of, one for whom private stories were at the same time public narratives about the state of the nation. But the controversy that surrounded the film and more recently Slumdog Millionaire derives from Indian response to the critical success of these films as they traverse the festivals and cinemas of the West. Allegory, in these instances, is something external to the films. A cultural text is not a container of a meaning that lies inside of it waiting for the critic to release it but is already mediated by the process of circulation itself and accrues meaning by virtue of that traffic across difference. The Jameson-Ahmad debate has been mostly discussed in relation to its role in the analysis of postcolonial literature, but it has much to say about the difficulty in analyzing the traffic of cultural forms across national boundaries (see special issues ST 31/32, 1992, “Third World and Post-Colonial Issues,” and ST 78, 2004, “Postcolonial Traces”). At stake is how we understand the specificity and forms of difference that gives rise to different intellectual publics for writers and critics and the dynamics of translation this involves.

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Notes 1. Amitabh Bachchan, “Day 265,” BigBlog, 13 January 2009, bigb.bigadda .com/2009/01/page/12/. 2. See, for instance, Alice Miles, “Shocked by Slumdog’s Poverty Porn,” (London) Times, 14 January 2009, www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/ alice_miles/article5511650.ece. 3. D. A. Windsor, “Nargis, Rushdie, and the Real,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 21 (1998): 229 – 42. 4. Cited in Erik Barnouw and S. Krishnaswamy, Indian Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), 223. 5. Kajri Jain, Gods in the Bazaar: The Commercial Sacred and Libidinal Economies of Indian Calendar Art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 297. 6. Cited in Barnouw and Krishnaswamy, Indian Film, 224.

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Peer Review

Stanley Aronowitz : We didn’t want a peer-reviewed journal. It would be

peer review only in the sense that the collective would review it. But we were not going to send it out to people for blind reviews or any of that kind of stuff. At least at the beginning, we decided that the basic style of the journal would not be submissions: instead, we would go out and commission. And the reason for that was we wanted to have a certain bite, and a certain character. It turned out that that helped us because I think that made the journal have a profile. We’d have a manuscript — sometimes commissioned ones, or sometimes someone would submit because he knew somebody on the collective. We’d then have three readers who would read the manuscript and write critiques of it, with the recommendation to reject, revise, or accept with revisions. And then we would offer to let other people on the collective read it. Some of the manuscripts we used as the basis of our Sunday discussions. Randy Martin : Probably the overwhelming cultural phenomenon was the

performativity of the collective meeting: the sense it involved some kind of conversation that was ephemeral on the one hand but also a moment of evaluation. People were so strong in their capacities; the conversation could have this incredible dynamism but also this real punch to it, in terms of what was being implied and what was being invoked. What does it say that we’re publishing this? What did it mean to be able to pass before that range of difference? I think it’s also interesting that the meetings brought to the surface a lot of what was still unstated in collective work: evaluation and judgment and questions of responsibility around that. How do you recognize the expertise of collective labor if it doesn’t take the forms of peerage, specifically of autonomy, neutrality, value distinction, a fit between disciplinary means and ends, the natural

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partitioning of expertise — all of those things that make for the Kantian universal. Sohnya Sayres : I think we did a really great job working that way, being

at the ground level and helping people really come through. And then supporting them through the process. But for the authors the process was probably one of the most miserable — I didn’t realize how miserable it was, just to have to satisfy so many perspectives at once. Toby Miller: A friend of mine in a far-off place once received a rejection letter from the journal that apologized for taking a long time to come to a decision, explaining that the manuscript had been lost when it fell from the back of someone’s motorbike and this was ultimately assumed to be some kind of sign. He loved this letter. It was his favorite rejection of any kind, from anywhere. We became a bit more organized, which was probably a good thing.

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Performance Tavia Nyong’o

Social Text has been an important forum for the development of performance studies, and a productive space for debates around performativity as well. That is probably primarily due to the journal’s hospitability to the development of trans and queer studies (see “Queer and Disorderly” in this issue). Indeed, while some in the field of performance studies proper might gnash their teeth at the thought, it is likely the case that, to a broader intellectual world, performativity and queer performativity are almost synonymous, no doubt in part due to the work of Social Text. (The other area to which Social Text has contributed important strands of performance theorization — contemporary popular culture, especially although not exclusively black popular culture — is hardly likely to placate some purists.) If “performance” as a concept exists in a permanent and productive tension with “performativity,” one in which neither term can fully extricate itself from or, alternatively, subsume, the other, Social Text has been among the few intellectual venues to consistently foreground, rather than anxiously resolve, that tension. Why is this the case? Performance theorist Erving Goffman observed that social performances seem most noticeable, and consequently most theoretically productive, when it is the socially stigmatized or marginalized who are performing.1 Conversely, the social lives of professional performers such as dancers and actors can give off a queer aura, such that the association of performance with marginality, stigma, or oddity seems as noteworthy a phenomenon as the more common assertion, oft attributed to performance studies, that “everything” is a performance. Work on performance and performativity in the journal has been further distinguished, as might be expected, by a politicized orientation toward the topic. Social Text has highlighted performances of minor-

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ity resistance and alternative world making. While it has not yet chosen to interrogate either “performance” or “performativity” at special-issue length, its approach to the field has permitted what work has emerged on performativity and performance in its pages to percolate broadly, bringing margin to center not only through the above-mentioned trans, queer, and popular-culture studies, but also in performance analyses of community, antiglobalization, anticolonialism, mass media, and secularism and religiosity, to name a few. Social Text has never placed performance in a silo, therein to stew in internecine polemics over what does or doesn’t count “as” performance (a fine tradition from which this essay, sadly, risks departing). Performance has been deployed, as we so often say in the field, “to do things with words,” a phrase that, at its finest, operates as a kind of manifesto for an experimental, militant, and worldly scholarship of engagement. This ongoing theorization of performativity and performance as interventionist praxis must, however, perpetually reposition itself in relation to academic disciplinary imperatives that anxiously insist on locating some proper and stable objects of performance analysis. A particularly sophisticated version of this insistence on exactitude can be found, appropriately enough, in Susan Manning’s entry on “Performance” in the recent Keywords for American Cultural Studies.2 Manning defines the proper object of performance studies and assays the historical development of the field in such a way as to enable the conclusion that “performance” as a concept was mistakenly and arbitrarily redefined and set askew by Judith Butler’s influential account of gender “performativity,” and, by implication, the broader tradition of speech-act theory.3 After offering some well-rehearsed critiques of Butler — including the (quite correct) observation that her reading of house ball culture in the essay “Gender Is Burning” was insufficient and the (to me, dubious, but popular) claim that her theory of performativity “implies an unimpeded agency” — Manning ends her entry by attributing the rise of theories of performativity such as those of Butler and Goffman to a waning of the live in a world characterized by everintensified mediatization. Only with the gradual loss of live performance, her entry suggests, could performance and ultimately performativity rise as distancing, theoretical tropes. Manning’s intellectual history is indeed suggestive. It offers a potentially compelling historicist alternative to my claim, via Goffman, that performances have been interesting because they are socially marginal or stigmatized. But shifting the emphasis, from marginal performance to an alleged waning of the live, risks reifying performance in the process of accounting for its historical emergence as a problematic. Consider that Manning’s model for a good performance analysis is Lawrence Levine’s Highbrow/Lowbrow, an indeed exemplary work of social and cultural history.4 Levine’s work, however, makes no claims to theorize performance 17 2

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as such, much less performativity, nor does it employ a performance methodology. Like histories of the emotions (or of sexuality, race — the list could go on), it employs the method of social and cultural history to narrate the historical transformation of an idea or practice, the actual definition of which it gives over to some other discipline to properly define. Such studies are necessary for the field. The perhaps unintentional, but I fear unavoidable, effect of presenting them to the broader profession as the model for performance studies (with Butler as the cautionary example) is that performance will be subsumed into the history of performance. The definition of performance is clarified, permitting it to “change over time,” but at the cost of rendering it a more static concept. Ultimately, this also makes it a less usefully political one. My interest here is not to refuse but, if anything, extend the engagement between performance and historicism. Manning’s fascinating account of how performativity emerged out of the decline of performance begs a larger question: what did performance emerge out of? At least one take on this longer historical view claims that it emerged out of performativity. In her article “What Was Performance?” Mary Crane argues that the verb to perform, in its early modern meaning, “already incorporates a concept of performativity, in that it involves turning something immaterial (a duty, a promise, a contract, the pattern of a ceremony) into a material thing.”5 And, just as J. L. Austin famously attempted to exclude theatrical speech from his account of the performative speech-act (and indeed for much the same reason, since both Austin and early modern critics feared that theater was merely “a deceitful show,” as Crane puts it), such early modern performances were set in tension with the demarcated, set-apart world of what we today think of as performances. To put the point even more strongly, due to this emphasis on performance as a doing, as opposed to mere showing (connotations Manning’s definition concatenates), Crane suggests that critics of the theater did not refer to it as “performance” until the early eighteenth century. While the performative speech-act may indeed have emerged in twentieth-century philosophy and literary theory, as Manning shows, it is not for this reason reducible to its historical “origin.” Furthermore, it is not somehow dependent, due to an alleged proximity of birth, upon the concurrent rise of mass media or technological reproducibility. In an effort to preserve live performance as a proper object of analysis, Manning’s historical account flirts with technological determinism. It’s worth recalling here Guy Debord’s insistence that the spectacle isn’t “a collection of images” but a “social relationship between people that is mediated by images.”6 To narrate a historical succession wherein the live is technologically displaced by the mediated, in the process exfoliating a derivative but misleading theory of performativity, just defers a fuller accounting of Social Text 100

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the various lines of historical descent, emergence, and articulation that constitute performance’s relation to the archive. I would say in particular that it defers an accounting of the social struggles that are enacted in and through technology (not simply media technologies, but, also, for instance, the biomedical technologies that enable certain trans performativities) but are not for that reason determined by those technologies. Historical reductionism, technological determinism, and definitional exactitude combine to exclude from sufficient consideration the very social flux out of which performance at/as the margins becomes political. Hence my surprise at Manning’s imputation of a “seeming irony of our preoccupation with performance at precisely the cultural moment when encounters with live bodies bound in time and framed in space have become increasingly rare occurrences.” Unless by “time” Manning means the duration of an evening’s performance and by “space” she means a proscenium, white cube, or socially acceptable substitute, I have no idea to what social reality this claim could possibly refer. We are preoccupied with performance, I would posit to the contrary, because our spatiotemporal encounters with other bodies are in such an intensifying flux, rendering the boundary work that performance within modernity formerly secured increasingly blurred. That flux is nowhere clearer, and with no clearer a stake, than in the arenas of “the ‘performance’ of race, gender, class, and so on” that Manning attributes to the undue influence of Butler, before curtly dismissing.7 Here the political stakes of the disciplinary drive toward proper objects reveals itself. Manning intends to dispel the “everything is performance” claim oft attributed to the field, and I share her apparent irritation with it. But, as I’ve tried to argue, any formal anxiety over disciplinary “mission creep” needs always to be thought of in dialectical relation to its underside, the political anxiety over the bordering work needed to keep racial, gendered, and classed others (for example) at the margins of concern. Because social performances so effectively show this bordering work, and thereby potentially expose it, performance studies can transform them into a single or stable object of analysis only at perilous cost. Might the messiness of definitions be preferable to the security of borders? The early modern ethical and dialectical tensions between showing and doing seem a more capacious point of emergence (or line of descent) than the early-twenty-first-century nostalgia for the live, a nostalgia that itself seems to be, of late, already usurped by an imminent nostalgia for the mediated (as the various imminent deaths of print media, the recording industry, Hollywood cinema, and network television are bandied about). What historical memory of live performance we do want to wield against the amnesiac euphoria of the present, which Manning’s definition so convincingly insists upon our noticing, might seek to go further, and include

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within its remembrance an acknowledgment of the spectacularization of performance as a philosophical problematic as old as modernity itself. 8 Notes 1. I am thinking of his work as a whole, but, in particular, Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959; Woodstock: Overlook Press, 1973). 2. Susan Manning, “Performance,” in Keywords for American Cultural Studies, ed. Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 177 – 80. 3. See Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits Of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993). 4. Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). 5. Mary Thomas Crane, “What Was Performance?” Criticism 43 (2001): 173. 6. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Ken Knabb (London: Rebel, 2005), 12. 7. Manning, “Performance,” 179. 8. In addition to Debord, this sentence depends crucially upon André Lepecki, Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement (New York: Routledge, 2006).

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Literature

John Brenkman : I think in my imaginary Social Text was always going to

be a hybrid between a political review or journal and a literary magazine. It’d have that kind of literary quality to it. We had a lot of discussions about that: trying to pitch the language of the journal to not a purely academic kind of thing. Stanley Aronowitz : Literature is a form of social knowledge, and it’s a dif-

ferent kind of social knowledge than what the historian does. Sohnya Sayres : A long, stretched-out theoretical piece sometimes really can be just a powerful poem. And those two things are both vital voices in the world. I’d never thought of them as separate, really. John Brenkman : I feel it was a mistake that we didn’t do more with litera-

ture in a consistent way. There’s this funny paradox of the fact that most of the people contributing to the journal come out of literary studies but it’s the last thing anyone wants to do. Sohnya Sayres : How to edit the little magazine format was an over-

whelming problem. We just couldn’t build up the momentum. There was a critical snobbery that was hard to beat down: the notion that criticism has become so much more interesting than creative work — that criticism is the real creative work of the hour. Andrew Ross : With creative writing, there was always a debate about

whether the writing had to have a line. Some kind of concrete political perspective. How do you judge that? There were people who argued that creative expression was a zone of exemption and wasn’t subject to any of the usual political criteria for evaluating manuscripts. And there were others who argued that there’s long history of debates on the Left about tendency in literature, and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t treat the literary submissions as an extension of what we do with the manuscripts. Social Text 100 • Vol. 27, No. 3 • Fall 2009 176

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Poetry Brent Hayes Edwards

Literature has been part of the purview of Social Text since the journal’s inception, although the literary has never been presumed to be its paradigmatic or primary object of study. The “Prospectus” in the first issue frames “avant-garde literature or art” in terms of its “dialectical relation to mass audience culture,” rejecting the “stale dichotomies between ‘popular’ and ‘high’ art.” But the essays included in the issue make it impossible to consider art as an autonomous sphere of activity that would somehow be — to use the phrase that nearly two decades later would be the linchpin of an important exchange in ST 52/53 (1997) between Judith Butler and Nancy Fraser — “merely cultural.” Already in the first issue of the journal, the reader is forced to move from Edward Said’s essay on the material effects of Zionism “from the standpoint of its victims,” with its insistence that ideas do not “exist only in the realm of ideas” but are “mixed in with historical circumstances,” to Bruce Boone’s essay contending that Frank O’Hara’s poetry can be read for the way it registers the traces of the “oppositional language practice of the gay community.” The juxtaposition itself is an argument that literature must be considered as a “form of social knowledge,” as Stanley Aronowitz phrases it. Any close reader of the first decade of Social Text will recognize, though, that there is another layer to this argument. From issue 4 (1981) through issue 39 (1994), the journal not only published scholarship on literature, but also sporadically published poetry and fiction. This was never a consistent feature of the journal: not every issue included poems or short stories, and there was a great deal of stylistic diversity among the literary contributions that did appear over the years. It is difficult to make any generalizations about the small roster of poets (Robert Glück, Roque Dalton, Tenney Nathanson, Rafaela Chacón Nardi, Georgina Herrera,

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Dulce María Loynaz, Nancy Morejón, Carilda Oliver Labra, Reina María Rodríguez, Mira Yañez, Jo-Ann Mort, Paul Violi, Finvola Drury, Brian Swann, Joseph Donahue, Joel Lewis, Marc Kaminsky) and fiction writers (Lynne Tillman, Alix Kates Shulman, Robert Roth, Tama Janowitz, Phillip A. Eprile, Miguel Barnet, Fred Pfeil, Sol Yurick) who have appeared in Social Text. In ST 4, there appears a group of poems by Robert Glück, a friend and collaborator of Bruce Boone in San Francisco. The first is the blunt, journalistic “Learning to Write/The Chronicle,” a numbered series of stanzas at once recounting a historical event (the disruption by protestors of an ostentatious party thrown by Charlotte Smith Mailliard Swig Shultz, an heiress and socialite in San Francisco) and reflecting on what one might term the politics of any “chronicle” of such an event. It opens with a simple sentence: A swank luncheon thrown in Union Square by San Francisco society’s premiere hostess broke up yesterday with apple cores and curses & police drawing guns.

The distribution of the sentence in verse draws attention to the peculiarities of its form — to the ways that even the flat reporting of the most superficial “news” betrays a whole range of assumptions about normalcy, agency (we are not informed of the provenance of the “apples cores and / curses”), and the relation between forms of social violence (what is the difference between “and,” the conjunction that links the forms of interruption, and “&,” the conjunction that links the disturbance to the response it provokes from the forces of order?). Given that “The Chronicle” is not only a historiographic mode but also the name of the daily paper in San Francisco, the title of the poem implies that journalism is not simply a medium of information delivery but a discursive practice that is ideological and “learned.” The interruptions in subsequent sections of the poem underline this point, with stanzas subtitled with phrases such as “Personal Reflection” that analyze and comment on the motivation of various actors in the episode (Mailliard herself refused to be perturbed — according to the poem, her only remark about the intruders was “They were / the entertainment” — whereas a doctor who attempts to calm the situation is described as a “mediating / ideologue” who “belongs to the echelon that works / for its betters by creating imaginary resolutions / of real contradictions”). To consider the role of literature in Social Text, however, it is necessary not only to consider the internal dynamics of an individual poem (or the way it suggests a critical posture in relation to an external mode of

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knowledge production such as newspaper journalism), but also to read a poem in relation to a given issue as a whole. How does one read “Learning to Write/The Chronicle,” then, in relation to the essay that follows Glück’s work in ST 4, Jean Franco’s “The Utopia of a Tired Man”? Franco’s piece on the writing and growing international reputation of Jorge Luis Borges is concerned, among other things, with the ways that Borges’s metafictions influenced French poststructuralist theorists in the 1960s, who “had begun to challenge the procedures of discourse and the assumption on which traditional narrative, history, metaphysics, science, and anthropology based their authority. The fictions opportunely became the exemplary texts. The laughter provoked by reading Borges’s imaginary Chinese taxonomy shattered, according to Foucault, ‘all the familiar landmarks of my thought, our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography.’ ” What resonates from Glück to Franco is thus an emphasis on the dynamics of power at stake in any mode of writing, and the ways that reading across modes can provide angles of critique and insight — ways to “open up the whole bag of tricks,” as Franco puts it. In ST 5 (1982), John Beverley’s long and statistically rich introduction to the history and politics of El Salvador is followed by a selection of work in translation by one of the country’s great communist poets, Roque Dalton. The point is not that there is a line of filiation from Glück to Dalton, but instead that in the literature as well as the criticism, part of the task of the journal has been to move across national and linguistic contexts, attending to the circulation of cultural forms and political discourse. This is equally the case in issue 15 (1986), where the “Special Section on Cuba” includes not only translations of criticism by Roberto Fernández Retamar and Gerardo Mosquera but also of poems by contemporary women poets (Nardi, Herrera, Loynaz, Morejón, Labra, Rodríguez, and Yañez). In ST 5, the selection of Dalton’s verse translated by Edward Baker opens with a prose poem titled simply “357” from his 1969 collection Taberna y otros lugares, which reads in its entirety: The guards are divided into several groups. The ones who stone the rabbits as they race across the garden with daisies in their mouths, for example. The ones who hop up and down in front of my cell, yelling words of my country and staring at the rain’s froth on their wristwatches. And the ones who, early in the morning, urinate at the same time they wake me up (their flashlights licking at my face) and, downcast, tell me that it’s even colder today than yesterday. 357 doesn’t belong to any of these groups; he used to be a shepherd and a musician and now, due to a mysterious act of revenge, he’s a policeman who (357, that is) they’re going to fire at the end of the month. Just because he slipped away and slept with his wife until nine in the morning, thumbing his nose at the rules. A few days ago, 357 gave me a cigarette. Yesterday, as he watched me chew a big anise leaf (that I managed to pull Social Text 100

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near the bars with a homemade hook), he asked me about Cuba. And today he suggested that perhaps I could write him a poem — about the mountains of Chalatenango — so he could keep it as a souvenir after they killed me.

If Glück’s poem engages the presuppositions of journalism, Dalton’s seems an equally ambiguous investigation of the parameters of prison literature, portraiture, and testimonial. The poem offers a contrast between interpersonal nuance — the revelation of complexity, idiosyncrasy, and even minor rebellion in the guards — and the inexorable fact of power: there is an unexpected intimacy between prisoner and guard, and yet the guard is still referred to as a number, not a name. What is this poem, one wonders, if poetry here can be requested almost facetiously as a “souvenir,” without that exchange having any effect on the immutability of the death sentence (which goes unexplained, as unavoidable as tomorrow’s weather)? In a short essay in the Minnesota Review in 1977, Fredric Jameson suggests that a revived Marxist criticism would need to be “reflexive and self-conscious, as well as hermeneutic, because part of the point to be made by such writing is precisely our own conscious or unconscious resistance to it.” Interestingly, he goes on to argue that there is a “parallel” between the task of theory in this sense and the task of poetry, in that their attempts to overcome reification — in the understanding of social relations on the one hand, and in everyday language on the other — require a self-reflexive approach to formal innovation in writing. “What is striking is not the vast gap between theoretical jargon and poetic speech,” Jameson continues, “but rather the similarity of the situations they face and the dilemmas they have to overcome.” The failure to recognize the “mutual interests” between theory and poetry is due to “one of the more advanced ruses of reification,” an artificial segregation of modes of writing into “specialized compartments.”1 In this sense, Social Text can be described as one of a small group of journals that emerged in the 1970s (including the Minnesota Review and boundary 2) that were expressly designed to explode such segregation among modes of writerly practice. Perhaps the most powerful argument for the necessity of this cross-fertilization between criticism and poetry in Social Text itself is Charles Bernstein’s essay “Living Tissue/Dead Ideas” in issue 16 (1986), an extended demolition of the pretense of “ideational mimesis” in criticism (the notion “that ideas are static objects that can be accurately portrayed” without attending to scholarship’s “material base as writing composition”) and a reminder that poetry, precisely because it has so often been “institutionally broken-off from the dominant discursive practices of the political thought of the time,” can provide “a necessary corrective to the crudely rationalistic drifts of much social radicalism and its theory.” 18 0

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From one perspective, the literature in Social Text can be read as an attempt — at best fitful, and at worst failed — to position the journal within the tradition of the little magazine: that is, as a periodical defined by its commitment to the interpenetration of “creative” and “critical” modes of writing. From another perspective, the inclusion of fiction and poetry must raise questions about the scope and definition of the term theory (as in the first sentence of the “Prospectus” announcing the founding of a journal devoted to “problems in theory”). “Theory” is not only a matter of conceptual precision and rhetorical force, in other words, but also inherently a matter of writerly practice. And if poetry and fiction — not to mention the unique and sundry short pieces that the journal would publish under the rubric “Unequal Developments” — could all be subsumed under the rubric, then perhaps one should not presuppose that theory composes a genre onto itself, with its own standards of evidence, protocols of reception, and formal predilections. In this respect, then, the question of poetry in Social Text cannot be divorced from the question of literature more broadly. In the early years of the journal, there is a relation between the self-reflexive poetics of Glück and Dalton, the involuted metafiction of Sol Yurick, Fred Pfeil, and Lynne Tillman, and the short theoretical interventions in the “Unequal Developments” section of the journal. While the journal was unable to sustain its full ambitions in the little magazine format, the reintroduction in Social Text 94 of a section of experimental criticism and Denkbilder is an attempt to return to the productive friction among writerly modes that is one of the animating impulses of the journal. Note 1. Fredric Jameson, “On Jargon,” Minnesota Review, n.s., 9 (Fall 1977): 30, 31. This essay was a response to a questionnaire on Marxism and the arts circulated by the editors of the journal to a variety of writers and scholars.

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Policy and Planning



Fred Moten and Stefano Harney

Let’s get together, get some land Raise our food, like the man Save our money like the mob Put up the factory on the job  — James Brown, “Funky President”

The hope that Cornel West wrote about in 1984 in ST 11 was not destined to become policy in 2008. The ones who practiced it, within and against the grain of every imposed contingency, always had a plan. In and out of the depths of Reaganism, against the backdrop and by way of a resuscitory irruption into politics that Jesse Jackson could be said to have both symbolized and quelled, something West indexes as black radicalism, which “hopes against hope . . . in order to survive in the deplorable present,” asserts a metapolitical surrealism that sees and sees through the evidence of mass incapacity, cutting the despair it breeds. Exuberantly metacritical hope has always exceeded every immediate circumstance in its incalculably varied everyday enactments of the fugitive art of the impossible. This art is practiced on and over the edge of politics, beneath its ground, in animative and improvisatory decomposition of its inert body. It emerges as an ensemblic stand, a kinetic set of positions, but also takes the form of embodied notation, study, score. Its encoded noise is hidden in plain sight from the ones who refuse to see and hear—even while placing under constant surveillance—the thing whose repressive imitation they call for and are. Now, a quarter century after West’s analysis, and after an intervening iteration that had the nerve to call hope home while serially disavowing it and helping to extend and prepare its almost total eclipse, the remains of American politics exudes hope once again. Having seemingly lost its redoubled edge while settling in and for the

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carceral techniques of the possible, having thereby unwittingly become the privileged mode of expression of a kind of despair, hope appears now simply to be a matter of policy. Policy, on the other hand, now comes into view as no simple matter. By policy, we mean not a particular policy, as in company policy or public policy, but rather policy as something in contradistinction to planning. By policy, we mean a resistance to the commons from above, arrayed in the exclusive and exclusionary uniform/ity of imposed consensus, that both denies and at the very same time seeks to destroy the ongoing plans, the fugitive initiations, the black operations of the multitude. As a resistance from above, policy is a class phenomenon because it is the means to advantage in the post-Fordist economy, a means that takes on the character of politics in an economy dominated structurally by immaterial labor. This economy is powered by the constant insistence on a radical contingency producing a steady risk for all organic and nonorganic forms, a risk that allows work against risk to be harvested indefinitely. Policy is the form that opportunism takes in this environment. It is a demonstration of willingness to be made contingent and to make contingent all around you by demonstrating an embrace of the radically extraeconomic, political character of command today.1 It is a demonstration designed to separate you from others, in the interest of a universality reduced to private property that is not yours, for your own survival, for your own advantage in this environment. Opportunism sees no other way, has no alternative, but separates itself by its own vision, its ability to see the future of its own survival in this turmoil against those who cannot imagine surviving in this turmoil (even if they must all the time) and are thus said by policy to lack vision, and in the most extreme cases to be without interests, on the one hand, and incapable of disinterestedness, on the other. Every utterance of policy, no matter its intention or content, is first and foremost a demonstration of one’s ability to be close to the top in the hierarchy of the post-Fordist economy. (Thus every utterance of policy on the radical Left is immediately contradiction.) As an operation from above designed to make the multitude productive for capital, policy must first deal with the fact that the multitude is already productive for itself. This productive imagination is its genius, its impossible, and nevertheless material, collective head. And this is a problem because plans are afoot, black operations are in effect, and, in the undercommons, all the organizing is done. The multitude uses every quiet moment, every peace, every security, every front porch and sundown to plan, to launch, to improvise an operation. It is difficult for policy to deny these plans directly, to ignore these operations, to pretend that those already in motion need to stop and get a vision, to contend that base communities for escape need to believe in escape. And, if this is Social Text 100

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difficult for policy, then so, too, is the next and crucial step, teaching the value of radical contingency, teaching how to participate in change from above. Of course, some plans can be dismissed — plans hatched darker than blue, on the criminal side, out of love. But most will instead require another approach. So what is left for those who want to dwell in policy? Obviously, the most salient and consistent aspect of policy — help and correction. Policy will help. Policy will help with the plan, and even more policy will correct the planners. Policy will discover what is not yet theorized, what is not yet fully contingent, and most important what is not yet legible. Policy is correction. Policy distinguishes itself from planning by distinguishing those who dwell in policy and fix things, from those who dwell in planning and must be fixed. This is the first rule of policy. It fixes others. In an extension of Michel Foucault, we might say of this first rule that it remains concerned with how to be governed just right, how to fix others in a position of equilibrium, even if this today requires constant recalibration. But the objects of this constant adjustment provoke this attention because they just don’t want to govern at all. And because such policy emerges materially from post-Fordist opportunism, policy must optimally, for each policy maker, fix others as others, as those who have not just made an error in planning (or indeed an error by planning) but who are themselves in error. And from the perspective of policy, of this post-Fordist opportunism, there is indeed something wrong with the multitude. They are out of joint — instead of constantly positing their position in contingency, they seek solidity, a place from which to plan, some ground on which to imagine, some love on which to count. Nor is this just a political problem from the point of view of policy, but an ontological one. Seeking fixity, finding a steady place from which to launch a plan, hatch an escape, signals a problem of essentialism, of beings who think and act like they are something in particular, like they are somebody, although at the same time that something is, from the perspective of policy, whatever you say I am. To get these planners out of this problem of essentialism, this fixity and repose, this security and base, they have to come to imagine they can be more, they can do more, they can change, they can be changed. Because right now, there is something wrong with them. We know there is something wrong with them because they keep making plans. And plans fail. Plans fail because that is policy. Plans must fail because planners must fail. Planners are static, essential, just surviving. They do not see clearly. They hear things. They lack perspective. They fail to see the complexity. Planners have no vision, no real hope for the future, just a plan here and now, an actually existing plan. They need hope. They need vision. They need to have their sights 18 4

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lifted above the furtive plans and night launches of their despairing lives. Vision. Because from the perspective of policy, it is too dark in there to see, in the black heart of the multitude. You can hear something, you can feel something, feel people going about their own business in there, feel them present at their own making. But hope can lift them above ground into the light, out of the shadows, away from these dark senses. Whether the hope is Fanonian redemption or Arendtian revaluation, policy will fix these humans. Whether they lack consciousness or politics, utopianism or common sense, hope has arrived. With new vision, planners will become participants. And participants will be taught to reject essence for contingency, as if planning and improvisation, flexibility and fixity, and complexity and simplicity were opposed within an imposed composition there is no choice but to inhabit, as some exilic home. All that could not be seen in the dark heart of the multitude will be supposed absent, as policy checks its own imagination. But most of all they will participate. Policy is a mass effort. Left intellectuals will write articles in the newspapers. Philosophers will hold conferences on new utopias. Bloggers will debate. Politicians will surf. Change is the only constant here, the only constant of policy. Participating in change is the second rule of policy. Now hope is an orientation toward this participation in change, this participation as change. This is the hope policy gives to the multitude, a chance to stop digging and start circulating. Policy not only offers this hope, but enacts it. Those who dwell in policy do so not just by invoking contingency but riding it, by, in a sense, proving it. Those who dwell in policy are prepared. They are legible to change, liable to change, lendable to change. Policy is not so much a position as a disposition, a disposition toward display. This is why policy’s chief manifestation is governance. Governance should not be confused with government or governmentality. Governance is the new form of expropriation. It is the provocation of a certain kind of display, a display of interests as disinterestedness, a display of convertibility, a display of legibility. Governance offers a forum for policy, for bidding oneself, auctioning oneself, to post-Fordist production. Governance is harvesting of immaterial labor, but a willing harvest, a death drive of labor. As capital cannot know directly affect, thought, sociality, imagination, it must instead prospect for these in order to extract and abstract them as labor. This is the real bioprospecting. Governance, the voluntary but dissociative offering up of interests, willing participation in the general privacy and privation, grants capital this knowledge, this wealth-making capacity. Who is more keen on governance than the dweller in policy? On the new governance of universities, hospitals, corporations, governments, and prisoners, on the governance of NGOs, of Africa, of peace processes? Policy offers to help by offering its own interests, and if it really seeks to be valuable, provoking others to offer up their own interests, too. Social Text 100

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But governance despite its own hopes to universality is for the initiated, for those who know how to articulate interests disinterestedly, who know why they vote (not because someone is black or female but because he or she is smart), who have opinions and want to be taken seriously by serious people. In the meantime, policy also orders the quotidian sphere of aborted plans. Policy posits curriculum against study, child development against play, careers against jobs. It posits voice against voices, and gregariousness against friendship. Policy posits the public sphere, and the counterpublic sphere, and the black public sphere, against the illegal occupation of the illegitimately privatized. Policy is not the one against the many, the cynical against the romantic, or the pragmatic against the principled. It is simply baseless vision. It is against all conservation, all rest, all gathering, cooking, drinking, and smoking, if they lead to marronage. Policy’s vision is to break it up, move along, get ambition, and give it to your children. Policy’s hope is that there will be more policy, more participation, more change. However, there is also a danger in all this participation, a danger of crisis. When the multitude participates in policy without first being fixed, this leads to crisis: participation without fully entering the enlightenment, without fully functioning families, without financial responsibility, without respect for the rule of law, without distance and irony; participation that is too loud, too fat, too loving, too full, too flowing, too dread. This leads to crisis. People are in crisis. Economies are in crisis. We are facing an unprecedented crisis, a crisis of participation, a crisis of faith. Is there any hope? Yes, there is, if we can pull together, if we can share a vision of change. For policy, any crisis in the productivity of radical contingency is a crisis in participation, which is to say, a crisis provoked by the wrong participation of the multitude. This is the third rule of policy. The crisis of the credit crunch caused by subprime debtors, the crisis of race in the U.S. elections produced by Reverend Wright and Bernie Mac, the crisis in the Middle East produced by peace movements, the crisis of obesity produced by unhealthy eaters, the crisis of the environment produced by Chinese and Indians, are all instances of uncorrected, unmanaged participation. If the multitude is to stop its sneaky plans only to participate in this way, crisis is inevitable. But policy diagnoses the problem: participation must be hopeful, it must have vision, it must embrace change. Participants must be fashioned who are hopeful, visionary change agents. Those who dwell in policy will lead the way, toward concrete changes in the face of the crisis. Be smart. Believe in change. This is what we have been waiting for. It’s time for the Left to offer solutions. Now’s the time, before it’s night again, and you start hearing D.O.C. They got a secret plan of their own and they won’t be corrected. Before you get stopped by KRS-One and 186

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asked for your plan, before Storm says “holla if you understand my plan ladies.” Before you start singing another half-illiterate fantasy. Before you are in the ongoing amplification at the dark heart of the multitude, the operations in its soft center. Before someone says let’s get together and get some land where we’ll still plan to be communist about communism, still plan to be unreconstructed about reconstruction, and still plan to be absolute about abolition. Policy can’t see it, policy can’t read it, but it’s intelligible if you got a plan. Note 1. For discussion of command as a term of economy, see Antonio Negri and Matteo Mandarini, Time for Revolution, trans. Matteo Mandarini (New York: Continuum, 2005), 62, and see Paolo Virno on opportunism in A Grammar of the Multitude (Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e), 2006), 86.

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Postcolonialism



Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel

If postcolonial theory has ended, what exactly ended, and what was its task?  — Simon Gikandi Our dialogue . . . reminds me of why postcolonial studies has been significant for me. This field opened my mind. . . . But our dialogue has also reminded me of why I have found postcolonial studies frustrating.  — Fernando Coronil

In 2007, the PMLA published an editor’s column titled “The End of Postcolonial Theory?” that hosted a conversation with Sunil Agnani, Fernando Coronil, Gaurav Desai, Mamadou Diouf, Simon Gikandi, Susie Tharu, and Jennifer Wenzel.1 For the epigraphs above, I have chosen two moments of this dialogue that illustrate the ambivalent intellectual positionings provoked by postcolonial theory. The column repeats a wellknown scene in most of the scholarship that adopts postcolonialism as its theoretical paradigm: the moment of etymological crisis in which the authors feel compelled to explain how the postcolonial is still a productive approach to pose questions about sixteenth-century Latin America, nineteenth-century Africa, or the twentieth-century Caribbean. In each case, to use Coronil’s wording, postcolonialism opens the mind and frustrates specific modes of understanding. Social Text has also published its share of key essays on the advantages and pitfalls of postcolonialism. For example, Anne McClintock focused her criticism on the implicit binary opposition between the colonial and the postcolonial moments, arguing against the temporal and linear implication of these terms. One of the crucial consequences of this temporal episteme is that it “actively obscures the continuities and discontinuities of U.S. power around the globe” (ST 31/32, 1992). Ella Shohat, on the Social Text 100 • Vol. 27, No. 3 • Fall 2009 18 8

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other hand, explored how the postcolonial displaced the category of the third world and erased the history of oppositional movements that emerged in this geopolitical zone. As a result, Shohat conceives postcolonialism as a “politically correct” term that promotes the partial containment of people of color (ST 31/32). The post of postcolonialism functions simultaneously as a disciplinary prefix that aligns it with other notions, such as “poststructuralism” and “postdeconstructionism,” and as a chronological marker that signals to a time period after the end of colonialism. Finally, Gyan Prakash interrogated the link between globalization and differentiation and proposed postcolonialism as a strategy to study other forms of domination, resistance, and complicity with new forms of power (ST 49, 1996). Prakash’s pronouncement, however, did not resolve the contradiction posed by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin’s classical definition of postcolonialism that neutralizes the temporal echoes of the term: “ ‘Post-colonial’ as we define it does not mean ‘post-independence,’ or ‘after colonialism,’ for this would be to falsely ascribe an end to the colonial process. Post-colonialism, rather, begins from the very first moment of colonial contact. It is the discourse of oppositionality which colonialism brings into being.”2 What sort of new strategies can be mobilized when postcolonialism attempts to explain a wide diversity of experiences that encompasses from the end of the fifteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth-first century? This uncomfortable dialogue with postcolonialism is still prevalent in recent scholarship. Silvio Torres-Saillant, for example, questions the novelty behind postcolonial theory and conceives this theoretical framework as a new Anglocentric paradigm that replaces and displaces other regional conceptualizations on marginality and colonialism, specifically debates about négritude, créolité, and mestizaje developed since the 1930s in the French and Hispanic Caribbean.3 Torres-Saillant’s work shares similar reservations about the limits of the universalizing impulse of postcolonialism already formulated by Stuart Hall, 4 as well as Patrick Williams’s concerns about the erasure of the Caribbean origins of foundational figures such as Frantz Fanon.5 Vicente L. Rafael, on the other hand, questions the effectiveness of a term like postcolonialism to understand regions that experienced more than one form of imperial domination or in nonsovereign regions that have lived extended periods of colonial subordination.6 Finally, in 2008, Duke University Press published a 628-page anthology titled Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate that revisits the problematic relationship between Latin American cultural studies and postcolonial theory from an interdisciplinary perspective.7 It turns out that postcolonialism has become that theoretical paradigm that many scholars have learned to love and hate in the process of rethinking the immediate and less-evident effects of epistemic, political, and economic subordinaSocial Text 100

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tion in the production of non-Western identities. This process of debating and revisiting the complex relationship with the legacies of colonialism has also diversified our disciplinary lexicon. A partial list of relevant keywords to think about postcolonialism are: internal colonialism, colonialism, neocolonialism, decolonization, coloniality of power, decolonial move, and even postcolonialities. If the founding moment for postcolonial theory is 1978, with the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism, 8 and the “Holy Trinity of postcolonialism” is the combined body of work produced by Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Homi Bhabha,9 the end of post­ colonialism looks like a constant autocritical reexamination of the theoretical endeavors made possible by this disciplinary paradigm.10 I enter the debate of postcolonialism from a very problematical perspective. On the one hand, I was born and raised in Puerto Rico, one of the most traditional colonies still existing at the heart of the American empire. At the same time, Puerto Rico is part of the insular Caribbean, where nationalism is more an exception than the rule. This region includes states that became independent between 1804 and 1983, colonies, incorporated territories, a few British and American “commonwealths,” associated states, departments of France, and other overseas territories. Therefore, in the Caribbean, colonialism, neocolonialism, and postcoloniality coexist side by side. On the other hand, I was trained as a specialist in colonial Latin American literature, which means that I study what is classically defined as the colonial subjectivity and discourse produced in Latin America before the formation of the national states that took place in 1804 for Haiti, between the 1810s and 1820s for most of the countries of Spanish America, and during the second half of the twentieth century for many of the Caribbean countries. In Latin America alone, colonialist rule spans from 1492 until today, and the legacies of colonialism manifest in many different ways. Finally, Latin American scholars have received with their share of anxiety, resistance, and celebration the emergence of postcolonial theory. In that context, it is fair to ask: How can I interact with a theoretical framework that presupposes the end of colonialism to produce some of its central questions? How can postcolonial theory illuminate the works produced during the early colonial periods (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) in Latin America? How can the present inform our critical interventions in a past that could not imagine the possibility of a postcolonial context or that imagined itself as an extension of a single empire? How can I be a postcolonial critic if most of my intellectual training has been devoted to understanding the specificity of forms of identity that cannot imagine modernity or nationalism as the only logical outcomes? Some of the disadvantages of using the postcolonial paradigm have already been mentioned, but I would like to summarize them here. Postcolonialism emerged in a particular historical context, to analyze a series 19 0

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of Western countries and zones in Africa and Asia that had become independent after World War II. As such, this theoretical paradigm focused originally on a very specific experience and traced the formation of nationstates during the twentieth century. The inclusion of earlier modes of imperial expansion and colonial domination allowed postcolonial theory to become more global and encompassing, but at the same time created some issues on the specificity of certain experiences in which a postcolonial (i.e., national, sovereign, or independent) state was never actually reached and, in some cases, was not even actually desired. Some critics were also concerned with the discursive and psychological analysis that was prevalent in many postcolonial approaches, because these two paradigms displaced the historically grounded analysis of power relations and their effect in social and political structures. Finally, as a result of its institutional emergence and modes of circulation, postcolonialism became a keyword that did not “make sense to literary and cultural scholars outside English.”11 Gradually, however, the resistance to postcolonial theory waned, and this theoretical framework was adopted — not without intense debates — in Francophone, Latin American, and Pacific studies. This process of adoption of post­ colonial theory also promoted the exploration of “vernacular” debates and academic traditions, to recover the local notions and the regional lexicon that inform the multiple inflections of the postcolonial in different time periods and geopolitical zones.12 There are, however, advantages to the “universalization” of the postcolonial. On the one hand, the colonial subjectivity and context have become a central area of concern for many scholars in the humanities and the social sciences. As a result, the specificity of a “colonial condition” — not necessarily modern, sovereign, or national — has become imaginable, and even desirable, in our postnational, hybrid, and globalized academic and social world. This has promoted a questioning of the national paradigm that informed the formation of many literature departments, and even area studies programs and professional organizations and associations. It is now easier to empathize or understand identities that are forged in nonnational and nonsovereign contexts. Literature departments are more open to the reconfiguration of new cultural imaginaries, to incorporate racial diversity, linguistic multiplicity, and epistemological variance as part of their areas of interest. Eurocentric and Anglocentric epistemologies are questioned and deconstructed as a legacy of imperial modes of knowledge, and the power differential informing the configuration of some of our institutional academic structures has become a source of intense scrutiny. Diasporic subjects, narratives in more than one language, and new modes of conceiving knowledge become integral in our modes of reading and understanding the cultures and subjects we study. Feminism, gender, sexuality, race, studies of social class, and other forms of identity explore more often than Social Text 100

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before the colonial dimensions of multiple modes of marginality, alterity, and subalternity. I cannot deny that the colonialist scholar in me is more than happy with this unexpected side effect of postcoloniality. In closing, I would like to suggest that postcolonialism is a concept that is still deeply significant. To illustrate my point, I will mention two disparate examples. The first one is the demonization of area and postcolonial studies after 9/11. In the United States, area studies programs were created in 1958 under the National Defense Education Act, so the purpose of these programs was to supply the Department of Defense with enough experts in the language and history of countries deemed important for the national security. In 2003 there was a heated debate around the reauthorization of project HR 3077, which provides funding through Title VI to area studies programs, and some proposed the constitution of an International Advisory Board that would monitor and evaluate the activities supported under Title VI. Postcolonial theory, and particularly Edward Said’s work, was at the center of this controversy, under the pretext that it has produced a “critical field of academic study . . . which mixes scholarly activism . . . with a strong dose of historical revisionism.”13 This political debate generated a series of intense arguments about the state of academic freedom, some of which were addressed in a special issue of Social Text, “The Perils of Academic Freedom” (ST 90, 2007). My second example is more mundane, but it is also very telling. Postcolonialism is included in The Intellectual Devotional: Revive Your Mind, Complete Your Education, and Roam Confidently with the Cultured Class in the short list of terms that someone should know in order to be conversant with university professors, college students, and other sorts of intellectuals.14 These two very different examples illustrate how postcolonialism is both a source of fear and admiration, a form of danger and validation, that has not yet reached its point of exhaustion. Notes 1. Patricia Yaeger, “Editor’s Column: The End of Postcolonial Theory?” PMLA 122 (2007): 633 – 51. 2. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, introduction to “Postmodernism and Post-colonialism,” in The Postcolonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (New York: Routledge, 1995), 117. 3. Silvio Torres-Saillant, An Intellectual History of the Caribbean (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 40 – 44. 4. Stuart Hall, “When Was the Postcolonial? Thinking at the Limit,” in The Postcolonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons, ed. Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti (New York: Routledge, 1996), 242 – 60. 5. Patrick Williams, “Frantz Fanon: The Routes of Writing,” in An Introduction to Caribbean Francophone Writing: Guadeloupe and Martinique, ed. Sam Haigh (New York: Berg, 1999), 51 – 68.

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6. Vicente Rafael, Contracting Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), ix – xvi. 7. Mabel Moraña, Enrique Dussel, and Carlos Jáuregui, eds., Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). 8. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978). 9. Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (New York: Routledge, 1995), 163, applies this phrase to the trio Said, Spivak, and Bhabha. 10. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); Robert Young, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 11. Yaeger, “Editor’s Column,” 635. 12. Moraña, Dussel, and Jáuregui, Coloniality at Large, 15. 13. T. O’Connor, “Terrorism as Postcolonialism,” MegaLinks in Criminal Justice, www.apsu.edu/oconnort/3420/3420lect02b.htm (accessed 22 December 2008). 14. David S. Kidder and Noah D. Oppenheimer, The Intellectual Devotional: Revive Your Mind, Complete Your Education, and Roam Confidently with the Cultured Class (New York: Rodale, 2006), 156.

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“Sugar Cane Press (North Amazon River Basin, Peru),” Jorge Alberto Perez, 2009. Digital Photo. Courtesy of the artist.



The Means of Production

Anders Stephanson : There was unwieldiness about the operation that

gave rise to unwieldiness of stuff that went into it. So there was a sort of amateurishness, I mean planned amateurishness that was good in that sense: there was not a rigid kind of theoretical project attached. Bruce Robbins : I remember carrying things. A great deal of carrying

things. You know, coughing the dust. . . . It was physical labor. Andrew Ross : It was a whole day because it was a social outlet. Often you

arranged to meet people for lunch before and invariably you went to a bar after the meeting. So there were always little groupings before and after in addition to spending the morning reading manuscripts, which people did. And if you could put aside your Sunday for that, that’s a bulk of the Sunday. Anders Stephanson : I don’t know how many times every Sunday we’d

spend the entire bloody afternoon discussing manuscripts and everything in extraordinarily cumbersome procedures. You have to remember that in the early years, you don’t have e-mail, you don’t have computers. You have typewritten things that have to be revised and typeset and copyread. And once or twice or thrice. And the whole thing has to be produced and then the whole thing has to be sent out. We did all of that ourselves. Randy Martin : I remember we would sit on the floor outside of Stanley’s office and lick envelopes and put stamps on things and sit together in pairs and do copyediting. It was a fairly rudimentary production process, cottage industry type. Anders Stephanson : Almost everybody licked envelopes. Loren Shumway

taught me how you in one single movement fold an 8.5 x 11 sheet so that it will fit in an envelope.

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Sohnya Sayres : Nancy Anderson and I would go to our mailbox and

sometimes it was like Santa Claus: we’d come out dragging these boxes with all these manuscripts, unsolicited manuscripts. We’d lug them down the street together. So how do you handle that flow with integrity? Andrew Ross : It was a big commitment. It was because it was an artisanal

operation: we did mailing sessions where everyone — not everyone, but the more dedicated core — showed up and stuffed envelopes with the issues. Anders Stephanson : To me, it’s always an organizational effort. I did not

think, “What can I get out of this intellectually? Do I find this useful or not?” That, too, of course. But, to me, it was primarily: Are we going to get this fucking journal out? How are we going to get this into envelopes?

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Production Andrew Ross

I joined the Social Text collective in 1985, when it had become a predominantly New York – based outfit (the New Haven and Madison collectives had dissolved) and I cycled off sixteen years later. For about half of that time, the journal was self-published in what was basically a homegrown operation. We not only copyedited and proofread articles but also physically sent out subscribers’ copies in communal mailing sessions. For several years, we used PageMaker software to typeset and lay out the pages. Changes in the design of the cover were hotly debated. Problems with distribution or with final copy had to be dealt with, as did correspondence with subscribers and readers. Paying the bills, fundraising, and promotion were all hands-on tasks, and a host of other activities, both social and political, directly supported the production of the journal. In other words, the collective had full control, as we used to say, of “the means of production,” and most of us attached a clear political value to this laborintensive relationship to the journal. Other collectively produced journals shared that ethos, and it may be worth reflecting on some of the reasons that it was so relevant then, and why it no longer is today. There were some collective members who saw Social Text in the tradition of the “little magazine” of the U.S. Left, whose most auspicious exponent had been the Partisan Review. I had a more shortsighted view of the journal’s pedigree. I believed I was joining an offshoot of a branch of the New Left, and understood that collectives were a favored response to the New Left’s zeal for participatory forms of politics. Since members learned the art and practice of cooperation through their participation, collectives were often more about the process than the product — an adventure in mutuality that was far removed from any mode of production governed by efficiency. Social Text also felt to me like a safe haven for intellectual activ-

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ists who had a theoretical bent, and part of the appeal was certainly that it had no institutional home. Membership of the collective included nonacademics — artists, writers, critics — and we hosted speakers on political affairs at events that drew a small but stable New York City crowd. Sunday afternoon meetings of the collective, hosted in Sohnya Sayres and George Yudice’s downtown loft and then later in mine, were divided between a limited period allocated to discussion of journal submissions and then a longer session set aside for debate among ourselves on a predetermined topic. Cornel West would join us after attending religious services, Michael Denning would come down from New Haven, and Stanley Aronowitz, in his prime, held forth. It was always understood that the collective had a political raison d’être, though by no means a set of rigidly held positions. To honor that understanding, every so often, a discussion would arise about whether the collective had a political line on a particular matter, and it would usually end in some affirmation of the differences of opinion held by those in attendance. Of course, consensus was necessary on some questions, but it was often built around a small majority of votes. Despite, or perhaps because of, the nonsectarian character of the group, there was no end of insider humor about internal purges, and about the increasing force of “democratic centralism” in decision making — the task of executive editing was eventually assigned to coeditors, responsible for making the trains run on time. For sure, we shared this kind of esprit de corps with other radical journal – centered collectives that had 1970s origins, such as the Socialist Review, Telos, Feminist Review, and Signs (or those founded in the 1980s, such as Rethinking Marxism and Socialism and Democracy), each of which had arisen from the dispersed energies and tendencies of the late New Left period. Sharing our 1970s vintage were collectively produced journals like Boundary 2, Camera Obscura, October, Radical Philosophy, Radical History Review, Insurgent Sociologist, Antipode, each of which was founded as a radical alternative to established journals in their respective disciplinary field. While all of these collectives were stacked with people who were taking “the long march through the institutions,” none of the journals, at that time, had a solid institutional home or an academic publisher. No doubt, this reflected, in part, the limited academic clout of their members, either younger members of the profession or folks who were marginalized in their disciplines because of their radical politics. But the independent standing was a preferred position, intended to convey (and to sustain) opposition to “business as usual” within the academic industry. It went hand in hand with the collective means of production. As a result, deliberations about whether to transfer Social Text to a university press in the early 1990s were quite fraught. Those on the collective who were opposed to the move saw it 200

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as a fatal concession to institutionalization, a betrayal of the independent’s birthright. Though in retrospect I’m not sure they feel the same way, their arguments rested on a powerful political premise. But there were too many factors pulling the other way. All of our other cognate publications mentioned above were either taking the same path or would do so over the next few years. The journal was already receiving a good deal of institutional support for its editorial office at Rutgers, for which we were immensely grateful, and, as long as we were still assured of editorial independence, the move to a press (Duke was the preferred choice — we had a book series at Minnesota, and wanted to keep these separate) seemed to be a fiscally responsible decision. The one benefit we lost as a result of the press’s more rigid publication schedule was the capacity to insert, up until the last moment, an analysis of some late-breaking political event. As for the university presses, they were publishing more and more of the kind of content that had appeared in the journal’s pages. Whereas once they may have served as part of a gatekeeping apparatus for the academic disciplines, increasingly press editors were to be viewed as allies, even fellow travelers of progressive writing. Minnesota and Duke were already in that category, and more would follow. Lastly, the proliferation of new journals (under the broad penumbra of cultural studies) meant that there was now a spectrum of publishing outlets and conferences for Social Text – style content that did not exist five or ten years before. The fact is that in the 1970s and 1980s, Social Text was one of a relatively small group of Anglophone journals that hosted serious left publishing on the culture/politics connection. By the mid-1990s, that was no longer the case. It was possible to publish and opinionate in this mode in a multitude of publications and forums, and there were fewer barriers within the academy to the advancement of those who did so. The impact of this development on the journal was plain to see. The submission rate fell, and it was rare that articles submitted cold made it through review into the company of those that had been directly solicited. While the collective had always done special issues on occasion, increasingly now the journal’s publication schedule was filled out by special issues, and we put out general issues less and less frequently. Some saw this as evidence of the (pernicious) impact of professional specialization. But there was another interpretation. The silver lining in this new publishing environment was that the collective could make more pointed interventions into new, or emergent, areas of thought and action. In its own way, the special issue was as a form of activism, responding to specific needs in a timely fashion. The collective had always been open to publishing new contributions to certain debates. For example, we published a steady stream of ongoing responses to postcolonialism, a pattern set in the first issue of the journal, Social Text 100

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which featured Edward Said’s seminal “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims” (ST 1, 1979), and which culminated in a double issue on the topic in 1992 (ST 31/32, “Third World and Post-Colonial Issues”). The “Fear of a Queer Planet” issue in 1991 (ST 29) proved to be a prescient foundation for queer studies/activism. So, too, the double issue on intellectual politics in China (ST 55, “Intellectual Politics in Post-Tiananmen China”) was the first airing in English in 1998 of writings of the Chinese New Left. Because of that capacity to commit to a cause, we were able to respond to the emergence of the academic labor movement with an issue on the Yale strike in 1996 (“The Yale Strike Dossier,” ST 49), and two follow-up issues on university organizing (“Academic Labor,” ST 51, 1997; “Turning Pro: Professional Qualifications and the Global University,” ST 79, 2004). The “Out at Work” issue in 1999 (ST 61), an effort to analyze and help build a gay-labor alliance, was perhaps the best example. It featured a policy piece by John Sweeney, AFL-CIO president, on the importance of acknowledging sexual orientation in the workplace. It was the first such published statement by a national labor leader. In some ways, Social Text, because of its commitment to link old with new political traditions, was the only journal that could have solicited and published such a declaration. Today, of course, we operate within an entirely different information landscape. The politics of networking on the Web has outpaced, though not vanquished, the inky mode of production. In many ways, the online self-publishing world has been a godsend for the independent voice, though the struggle to be noticed or heard, amid the now massive churn of virtual traffic, is much more of a challenge than it was in the era that I have been recalling here. The activist’s temporality — everything has to be done now — is now firmly hitched to e-networking, but any movement of action needs a movement of thought, and the latter often demands a much slower germination of ideas that is not well served by the bustle of Internet time. New media slides over old media, it does not push print aside, and there may be some voices and contexts that are still best serviced by the older politics of production.

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The First Issue

John Brenkman : One of the great things about the beginning of a jour-

nal is that you have a certain kind of conception, but you can’t write the articles yourself. I mean, you can write some of them but you can’t write all of them. The journal takes shape out of what you happen to get. There’s a great back-and-forth that goes on between the journal’s idea of what it wants and the things that come in that eventually begin to feel right in some way. And I think probably the most exciting part of it was feeling like we’re doing a journal unlike anything that existed then, and at the same time, once you put the articles in, issue after issue, they look like they belong together somehow. That’s the great function of journals, to improvise that kind of relationship and to see where it goes. Stanley Aronowitz : In late 1977 or early 1978, we started to plan the

first issue. And we decided that Fred and I should write pieces; and Fred had his friend Edward Said, who was writing a book which became The Question of Palestine, give us a chapter. Then we had Bruce Boone’s essay on the poet Frank O’Hara, and Fred’s “Reification and Utopia,” and my own “Film: The Art Form of Late Capitalism,” which was a controversial piece. The first issue came out I think in the fall of 1979, and it was a very strong first issue; it made a lot of waves and circulated fairly widely. John Brenkman : Part of this expansive use of the term culture was to try

to say that the reflection on mass culture was as important as reflection on literature and art for a socially critical kind of theory and thinking. What we wanted to do with that first issue was first of all to do this very dramatic thing with the Said article — something extremely political and volatile — and then also to put forward an idea through the selection of the essays themselves as to how mass culture would be an important part of the project of the journal.

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Anders Stephanson : I can’t exaggerate actually how excited I was about the

first issue. To me it was very obviously what I was interested in myself —  this and that and the other — with a certain theoretical and political seriousness attached to it. The thing about the first issue was the quality of the articles in terms of theoretical sophistication, and the mix of stuff that it dealt with. Also the literature — having things that were not predictable —  that I think was part of the persuasiveness of the journal at that stage. It was just a fantastic issue.

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Prospectus John Brenkman

When the editors of Social Text suggested I look back at the “Prospectus” that Stanley Aronowitz, Fredric Jameson, and I wrote for the journal’s inaugural issue (ST 1, 1979), I gulped. I hadn’t reread it since I left the journal in 1983. My anxieties over revisiting the text were garden-variety. Would it be unrecognizable? Or would its every pronouncement and question anticipate, indeed even predict, everything I’ve thought, taught, and written since? Would thirty years seem like an instant or an eternity? Would our project’s boldness reawaken pride? Or would its datedness embarrass? Was my break with the journal a mistake? Or a liberation? Would the prospectus seem visionary? Or would it feel outworn? The answer to all of these questions turned out, of course, to be yes. Unrecognizable and prescient. Lost and lasting. Tumescent and detumescent. Erroneous and freeing. Prophetic and exhausted. Once my anxieties were thus at once fulfilled and thwarted, I had to reread the “Prospectus” and then reread it again, and then once more, until there emerged the questions that sloughed off the merely personal and touched on our present intellectual and political predicament. Two questions stood out: Why at the moment that Social Text was founded did Marx seem so relevant and liberalism so bankrupt, whereas today — a scant thirty years later — Marxism might reasonably be thought to be dead, while the fundamental elements of liberalism are in need of vigorous defense? Where do things stand today regarding the conflict between systematic and pluralizing ways of understanding the topics on which the “Prospectus” called for “substantive interventions”? Namely: Everyday Life and Revolutionary Practice, the Proliferation of Theories, Symbolic Investments of the Political, The Texts of History, Ideology and Narrative, Mass Culture and the Avant-Garde, Marxism and the State, “Consumer Society” and the World System. Social Text 100 • Vol. 27, No. 3 • Fall 2009 DOI 10.1215/01642472-2009-040  © 2009 Duke University Press

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As I have argued elsewhere, the predominant attitude of Western Marxism at the time, on the one hand, took democracy for granted and considered repressive anticommunism, from 1950s McCarthyism to the German Autumn of 1977, to be the decisive brake on greater equality and social justice in Western societies, and, on the other hand, rejected the totalitarianism of Soviet and Chinese communism and expected revolts like those in Czechoslovakia and Poland to eventually democratize state socialism. “The two prongs complemented one another, as mutual alibis, so to speak: anti-anticommunism presupposed democracy while rejecting capitalism; antitotalitarianism presupposed socialism while rejecting bureaucracy and one-party rule. The rejection of capitalism, bureaucracy, and one-party rule seemed then to confirm the presupposition that socialism and democracy belong together. Meanwhile, the standoff of the Cold War itself deferred the crucial unanswered question: by what path could liberal democracy become socialist or state socialism democratic?”1 The Soviet system’s collapse exposed the hard truth that state socialism was incapable of reform, and the transformation of China into a confection of state socialism and state capitalism under shamelessly undemocratic one-party rule further confounded the old equations. The rhetorical remnants of Marxism have been able to persist in part thanks to the gross simplifications of neoliberal ideology. Neoliberalism extols as real a nonexistent system — since everywhere free markets are created, sustained, managed, and guided by means of the state — and so continues to give life to a mirror-image leftist ideology that denounces capitalism per se as the ruthless creator of poverty, injustice, and ecological disaster. The supposed antagonism between the so-called global North and global South — a latter-day version of Mao’s “principal contradiction” — replaces and revives the image of class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat that Marx theorized and whose ripening he fruitlessly awaited. In those first years of Social Text we neglected the criticism of totalitarianism, in part because of the misguided priority given to anti-anticommunism in the American context and in part because of a misreading of the nouveaux philosophes in France, who were rediscovering the liberal tenets we had grown used to belittling precisely because we could so comfortably take them for granted. That oppressed peoples in the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic, and throughout the third world had a real need for liberal institutions and liberal freedoms was a blind spot that damaged our project from the beginning. We were all too happy to leave the antitotalitarian discussion to our friends at New German Critique and Telos, thus failing to make what could have been an original contribution of our own to the vexed question of democracy and socialism, and especially the role of liberalism and illiberalism in various visions of liberation, egalitarianism, and social justice. 206

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A remarkable aspect of the “Prospectus” is that no sooner did we declare that “the journal’s mission is to develop and keep open a distinctively Marxist problematic” than we proceeded to reject or question the way Marxism had hitherto framed the question or oriented the politics in nearly every area we intended to explore. A sign of our bravura to be sure, pioneers who saw that the most basic concepts needed “to be worked out afresh and reinvented in terms of today’s situation.” Behind the rhetoric, though, was the unique intellectual situation of the late 1970s. Marxism had not played a vital role in American intellectual life except in fairly orthodox Old Left circles whose influence had died out; the sixties saw posters and T-shirts of Che, Lenin, and Trotsky, and Mao jackets and caps, more than a serious reading of Marx. It was only as the pseudorevolutionary mood of the sixties came to an end that we began to discover the intellectual richness of European Marxism and its Frankfurt School offshoot. Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness did not appear from MIT in Rodney Livingston’s translation until 1972 when I was in the middle of graduate school. While we of course knew Herbert Marcuse’s work, Theodor W. Adorno and Ernst Bloch had scarcely been heard of. Illuminations with Hannah Arendt’s introduction, published in 1968, was the only Walter Benjamin available in English. Jean-Paul Sartre was known primarily as an existentialist not a Marxist. All this began to change in no small part due to Fredric Jameson’s Marxism and Form (1971), which boldly presented the work, precisely, of Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse, Bloch, Lukács, and Sartre, replete with long citations he himself translated from the German and French. I encountered this extraordinary book when it appeared in paperback in 1974; I met Jameson the next year; we first discussed the idea of a new journal shortly after he had met Stanley Aronowitz. Aronowitz undoubtedly had in mind the Partisan Review, Jameson Les Temps modernes, and I Tel Quel. It is Marxism and Form, though, that truly inspired the project. Most of the young scholars who got involved in Social Text at its early stages, including me, came from literary studies. We had long ignored Marxist criticism that tracked characters’ social background, documented class struggle, or laid claim to sociologizing literature. Here in Jameson was something else: a new consideration of literary form in relation to a heteroclite group of thinkers who drew from Marxism the imperative to understand cultural creations in light of a spiritedly critical view of society as a whole and of history in its broadest scope. The aspiration was breathtaking, the readings were challenging, the sense of worldly relevance palpable. Jameson is one of the most imaginative and prolific critics of the past fifty years. His aesthetic taste, nay, his aesthetic appetite is vast, varied, and contradictory. Like the other aesthetes in the tradition — Lukács, Bertolt Brecht, Benjamin, Adorno — he finds in Marxism a frame, and Social Text 100

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a conceptual toolbox, with which to grab hold of his aesthetic responses and twist them into a coherent, politically relevant commentary on society. Arguably, all literary criticism is social criticism, but the imperative — or irrational need — to transform polymorphous aesthetic perversity into monolithic social vision is unique to Marxist aesthetes from Lukács to Jameson. The Social Text “Prospectus,” it seems to me in retrospect, took its vibrant, unsettled, double-voiced aspiration to plurality and totality from Jameson’s sensibility. The thrashing out of the drafts and final version was the product of the three editors’ quite distinct inclinations and preoccupations. Jameson’s confidence that Marxism’s frame and tools would always ultimately win out inflected our exuberance for such wildly different thinkers as Bloch, Georges Bataille, Mikhail Bakhtin, Michel Foucault, Jürgen Habermas, Jacques Derrida, Fernand Braudel, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Louis Althusser, all of whose names are evoked in the “Prospectus,” plus those alluded to, such as Guy Debord, Adorno, and Julia Kristeva. Aronowitz and I gave different inflections to this plurality. Aronowitz tended to see Marxism as one among many voicings of the working class’s aspirations rather than an ultimate theory. A musical prodigy as a child, a labor organizer from the age of nineteen, an autodidact in philosophy and theory, Aronowitz adhered to the twofold dream of an emancipated and cultivated working class — a dream reinforced by chance during his sojourn in the France of May ’68 where there flashed before his eyes the image of a revolutionary coalition of students and workers, intellectual and manual labor, learning and industry. Aronowitz’s gift as a writer and speaker lay in his ability to take up some specific political situation or struggle — from the teaching assistants’ strike at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that preoccupied me as a young faculty member in 1980 to the election later that year of Ronald Reagan — and weave an account of the dynamics of capitalism and the direction of social struggles worldwide that made the concrete event in question seem like the inevitable excrescence of world history! Aronowitz’s totality was a narrative art, the knack of bringing the big picture to bear on the present and immediate. At the same time, I think he believed Marxism was dead even as he was starting a new Marxist journal; his thought in this period closely resembled that of André Gorz, author of Farewell to the Working Class. Being Jameson’s and Aronowitz’s junior by some thirteen or so years, I had not yet distilled my convictions, inclinations, prejudices, into a body of work or habit of mind. Perhaps as a result I embodied the journal’s sense of adventure and uncertainty. In any case, my reflections today are more retrospection than memory. The intellectual currents I was trying to mesh at the moment of Social Text’s founding were poststructuralism, the Frankfurt School, and Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. By instinct — as 208

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I would not realize until later — I eschewed synthesis. I was drawn to plurality and distrusted totality. Eventually Paul Ricoeur’s idea of the “conflict of interpretations,” with its sense that reality can only be grasped through incommensurate interpretive frameworks, clarified my own view. The Madison group had lively, sometimes ferocious debates over the idea of totality during the drafting of the “Prospectus.” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari were often cited to contest the aim of totalization, but of course they were an ambiguous reference point. For despite the tropes of rhizome, network, and so on, what was more totalizing than their Anti-Oedipus? I defended totality, too fearful of confronting Jameson, but in turn fought for the language of plurality, playing on his fear of appearing retrograde. Plurality versus totality is a philosophical dispute over the aims of theory. The political question, which does not necessarily match up term-for-term with the philosophical one, touches on Arendt’s concept of human plurality, that is, the infinite individuality that is the principle of democratic citizenship; Isaiah Berlin’s concept of negative liberty, as the space of individual initiative free from the intrusion of the state or of one’s neighbors; and Max Weber’s concept of the polytheism, which results from the fact that modern society imposes on every individual the freedom, and the burdensome responsibility, to posit his or her own supreme values. Social Text at the moment of its founding, like the Left in general in the decades since then, largely neglected the import of Arendt, Berlin, and Weber and their conflicting commitments to liberalism. We also shied away from Habermas and Pierre Bourdieu. At the outset we envisioned the journal as fostering a new kind of commingling of the humanities and the social sciences, but in the end we found hardly any social science contributors, except of course Aronowitz. We missed the chance to explore the tensions between sociology and political theory, a conflict of incommensurate interpretations of human association; sociology, like Marxism, looks to patterns of human behavior in groups, while political theory, like liberalism, postulates individuals in their capacity of action rather than behavior. The common thread of all our missed encounters was our unreflected antipathy to liberalism. And the Left still faces this fundamental challenge: to fight its inclination to illiberalism and embrace the ordeal of liberalism. Note 1. John Brenkman, The Cultural Contradictions of Democracy: Political Thought since September 11 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 65 – 66.

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Queer and Disorderly



Gustavus Stadler

In 1991, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick published “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay: The War on Effeminate Boys” in the “Fear of a Queer Planet” issue of Social Text (ST 29). The immediate prompt for Sedgwick’s essay was the first Bush administration’s repudiation of its own Department of Health and Human Services’s 1989 report drawing attention to the exceptionally high rate of suicides among gay and lesbian youth. Interested in what a depressed queer teenager or child might encounter if seeking, or being forced to seek, help from psychological clinicians, Sedgwick discovered that while homosexuality had been withdrawn (with much self-congratulation) from the official catalog of pathologies, psychiatrists’ approach to gender was now guided, at least officially, by something called Gender Identity Disorder (GID). “Help” was synonymous with steering kids toward acclimation to the supposed order of “traditional” gender roles. Sedgwick asked “how it happens that the depathologization of an atypical sexual object-choice can be yoked to the new pathologization of an atypical gender identification.” In a series of bracing readings of major work in the field, some of which claimed to affirm “healthy” (read: normatively gendered) forms of homosexuality, she made clear the compatibility of this diagnosis with a broad structure of thinking and feeling designed to eliminate queerness in its initial stages, before it had a chance to live beyond early childhood. Her powerful polemic labeled this work “a train of squalid lies. The overarching lie is the lie that they are predicated on anything but the therapists’ disavowed desire for a non-gay outcome.” Here and throughout the essay, Sedgwick’s writing reflects the energy of a time in which the possibility of disappearance was very much the driving force of queer activism — a movement both ravaged and galvanized by

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the AIDS epidemic. Now it would seem that, at least according to a powerful sector of that activism’s inheritors, gays and lesbians are beyond that, fighting what the Advocate called in the subheadline to its 16 December 2008 issue “The Last Great Civil Rights Battle,” the struggle to legalize same-sex marriage. (The presumptive whiteness of that sector is made clear in the main headline’s awesomely insidious, newsstand-friendly declaration that “Gay Is the New Black.”) Yet the GID diagnosis remains on the books, one of the many sore points that threaten the coherence of such one-more-river-to-cross rhetoric. Thus, in the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), psychiatrists are advised to watch children for certain patterns of behavior: They may have a preference for dressing in girls’ or women’s clothes or may improvise such items from available materials. . . . They particularly enjoy playing house, drawing pictures of beautiful girls and princesses, and watching television or videos of their favorite female characters. Stereotypical female-type dolls, such as Barbie, are often their favorite toys. . . . They avoid rough-and-tumble play and competitive sports and have little interest in cars and trucks. . . . They may insist on sitting to urinate and pretend not to have a penis by pushing it in between their legs. Their fantasy heroes are most often powerful male figures. . . . [They] prefer boys as playmates, with whom they share interests in contact sports, rough-and-tumble play, and traditional boyhood games. They show little interest in dolls or any form of feminine dress-up or role-play activity. A girl with this disorder may occasionally refuse to urinate in a sitting position.

Conjuring, in a quasi – cold-war tone, little spectral armies of Barbieaverse biological girls and princess-obsessed biological boys, these passages sound almost satirical, as though lifted from an episode of the television series Mad Men. But in their purported goal of rescuing children from the pain of growing up different, they reflect shockingly impoverished attitudes toward not only gender, but also play and fantasy, not to mention children and parents themselves. And, as of early 2009, they appear destined to remain the official word of the American Psychiatric Association (APA). The DSM is revised every fifteen to twenty years; work has already begun on the fifth edition, slated for publication in 2012. In May 2008, the APA named Dr. Kenneth Zucker to head the DSM-V work group on gender and sexuality. Zucker and another member assigned to the group, Ray Blanchard, are among the most prominent of a number of vocal, wellpublished clinicians whose work arises from, and is dedicated to maintaining, the belief that the behaviors comprising GID are indeed pathological and ought to be submitted to corrective treatment. Zucker considers gender variance, or what he calls “gender dysphoria,” a symptom of some root Social Text 100

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problem in a child’s development — absent fathers and overbearing mothers heavily populate this diagnostic landscape. According to a November 2008 article in the Atlantic, his chosen modes of treatment have included advising a family to turn their household “into a 1950s kitchen sink drama, intended to inculcate respect for patriarchy, in the crudest and simplest terms.” As one element of this cure he advised the parents to tell the GIDdiagnosed child, “Daddy is smarter than Mommy.” In another publication, Zucker approvingly quotes work describing a mother who “inadvertantly induced a gender identity disorder in her four-year-old son by allowing him to overhear her anti-male speeches to her feminist discussion group.” Is there really any connection between the current marriage-centric state of lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender politics and the DSM issue? The latter is certainly a more oblique, less visible fight, played out not in the courts and electoral politics but in largely Internet-based awareness raising and appeals to the APA to open the details of its revision process to the public. Yet the high visibility of the marriage issue in the media, like the (to some) easy translation into a triumphalist narrative modeled on a superficial understanding of the black civil rights movement, threatens to obscure every aspect of queer politics that is messy, conflicted, or unsuited to the mainstream media’s terms and representational strategies. More important, those working for marriage need to be careful to recognize their cause’s susceptibility to a shorthand of family values rhetoric, however appealing it may seem to employ at certain junctures. Appeals to Adam and Steve’s ability to raise a stable family just like Adam and Eve (oh, sorry, bad example) may hold a good deal of currency within the grand tradition of sentimentalism in the U.S. cultural-political sphere, but for a lot of straight people, “stable” means boys raised as boys and girls raised as girls. Sociologist Mary Bernstein, for instance, examining efforts by lesbian and gay couples to change family law, has described a tendency to “circumvent rather than embrace the challenge to heteronormativity, thus leaving dominant norms in tact.” My main question is this: just what will the marriage fight do to the struggle to develop and live what Judith Butler calls “a new legitimating lexicon for the gender complexity we have always been living”? The answer may not be clear yet, but the contemporaneousness of the same-sex marriage issue and the DSM issue illustrates a developing shift, if not fracture, in the relationship of transgender people to gay and lesbian politics as articulated by the Advocate or a group like the Human Rights Campaign. Many trans activists feel the focus on marriage both discourages challenges to gender normativity and pulls energy away from their major concerns: violence (and inclusion in hate-crimes legislation), employment discrimination (the status of transgender people’s inclusion in the Employment Non-Discrimination Act currently under debate in Congress is, as I write, 212

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uncertain), and fair and decent treatment by the medical institution: doctors, psychiatrists, and health insurance companies. The climactic, endof-days rhetoric of the “Last Civil Rights Battle” is particularly alienating as trans people continue to be consigned, in many quarters of society, to nonexistence.

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The Queer Social Text José Esteban Muñoz

The table of contents for the 1979 premier issue of Social Text included a list of well-known left scholars. A name that stuck out on the list was poetry critic Bruce Boone. Boone was the only author in that list who dealt with questions of sexuality. His essay “Gay Language as Political Praxis: The Poetry of Frank O’Hara” considered the reception and growing acceptance of O’Hara’s work. Boone discussed an important early essay by Helen Vendler that put O’Hara on the map for legitimate poetry criticism. He discussed Vendler’s contention that O’Hara did not provide an “intellectual syntax,” which, for her, was a good thing since in her mind it “refused maleness and ideology.” Vendler had also remarked that the sex poems were not very good. She ultimately celebrated the poet for his descriptive force, his ability to capture everyday life.1 This, as Boone showed, was better than the previous dismissal of O’Hara’s language as mere gossip or triviality. Boone went on to explain that before O’Hara was rescued by Vendler there was another discussion of the poet’s work in relation to white gay male circles of belonging. Boone’s point is that this language was one that spoke to a growing and emerging queer collectivity. “Gay Language as Political Praxis” made its final critical move through a consideration of Walter Benjamin’s “The Storyteller.” Boone connected Benjamin’s thesis that the storyteller’s work was always a larger social intervention with an explication of the performative nature of O’Hara’s writing. Boone posited that O’Hara’s work did not simply describe a universalized notion of the quotidian, but it enacted queer bonds and modes of belonging through a giving of voice, functioning as a protoqueer praxis in its own right. It is instructive to note Vendler’s effort to unyoke O’Hara from sexuality on behalf of a larger universal agenda. It is not my own particular research interest in queer cultural production during O’Hara’s

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era that brings me to reflect on that particular essay. Instead it is a different investment in articulating multiple genealogies of what we call queer theory. I am interested in sketching the trajectory of queer theorizing in Social Text and, more broadly, discussing the enduring relevance of thinking through the actual or potential force of queerness as a relational mode and based in a notion of social critique. The usage of the concept queer deployed here is distinct from the exclusively identity-based concerns of lesbian and gay studies. The thread I am tracing here is the elaboration and engagement with the production of a queer social text. Boone’s essay identified O’Hara’s writing as praxis. Much of the work that we can now identify as queer that has followed Boone’s in the pages of Social Text shares similar interests with linking sexuality with a broader critique of the social. Social Text has certainly been nothing like consistent in publishing relevant queer social theory. An examination of the journal’s table of contents over the last hundred issues certainly reveals some significant dry patches for queer content. The journal has nonetheless published some significant articles and, more important, key special issues that have contributed to queer social theory. Douglas Crimp’s 1992 article “Right On, Girlfriend!” (ST 33) signals a unique moment where queer theory and praxis were uniquely intertwined. His essay began with a moving meditation on the memorial service for famed gay activist and film critic Vito Russo and concluded with a consideration of the political force of converging and multiple identifications of the term queer. Crimp’s now historical reflection on the movement is fueled through a lens informed by critical theory. Crimp described the AIDS crisis as bringing us face-to-face with “the consequences of both our separatism and our liberalism.” For Crimp that critique occurred at a political conjuncture where the “word queer has been reclaimed to designate new political identities.” The failures of white gay male separatism and liberalism would become a topic for Social Text’s critically queer agenda that would come in and out of focus for the next fifteen years. Another important intervention located between the history of AIDS activism and the sex wars was published two years before Crimp’s article. Activist Scott Tucker wrote the extraordinary “Gender, Fucking, and Utopia: An Essay in Response to John Stoltenberg’s Refusing to Be a Man” (ST 27, 1990), a manifesto-like essay that called for “a hedonism with a conscience,” which would essentially be “a practical prefiguration of utopia.” This hedonism accounted for multiple sexual formations between people of all sexualities and spoke of gender and race as necessary coordinates for an understanding of sexuality as a relational continuum. Both Tucker and Crimp actively desired a queer theory – infused activist politics. In 1994 Lisa Duggan wondered about the gap between queer activism 216

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and theory. Duggan explained that we need to “close the language gap in queer studies and queer politics” (ST 39, 1994). Today we can glimpse this formulation as the other side of Boone’s linkage between praxis and language. Duggan’s essay anticipated future critiques of what by 2006 was being referred to as “queer liberalism.” Duggan’s analysis called for “dissent” as a politics in relation to the liberal state. It is useful to read Duggan’s appraisal of the liberal state and its failures around sexuality with another essay from a few years later. In the nineties (and arguably today) queer theory was too focused on North America and a critique of liberal politics. One important exception to that trend was Ricardo L. Ortiz’s “Revolution’s Other Histories: The Sexual, Cultural, and Critical Legacies of Roberto Fernández Retamar’s ‘Caliban’ ” (ST 58, 1999). Ortiz’s essay considered Fernández Retamar’s cornerstone essay on revolutionary masculinity, “Caliban,” by outlining the heterosexist rhetoric that informed this treatise on the new revolutionary man. Ortiz’s essay represented a swerve away from exclusively North America – based topics and more importantly operated as a critique of the Left from the Left under the sign of queer theory. This sampling from the 1990s represents a cross section of the ways in which that decade was a formatively queer one for the journal. In all these articles the relationship of queer thought to queer politics organized an official critical flight plan for queer social critique. “Special Issues” punctuate particular moments throughout the trajectory of queer critique. Guest editor Michael Warner’s “Fear of a Queer Planet” (ST 29, 1991) intervened in what he felt was emerging queer studies that privileged literary theory, film criticism, and cultural history. Warner also critiqued social theory’s seeming inability to speak to questions of sexuality. Phillip Brian Harper, Anne McClintock, Trish Rosen, and I coedited “Queer Transexions of Race, Nation, and Gender” (ST 52/53, 1997). Among other things that project attempted to continue the work of “Queer Planet” by being more planetary on the level of inclusion. That issue is now notable for its inclusion of transgender studies, performance theory, and queer of color critique. That volume included a much-cited debate between philosophers Nancy Fraser and Judith Butler. Butler responded to work by Fraser that categorized sexuality as an essential cultural matter while race and sexuality were essentially issues of political economy. Fraser did not retreat from her position in response to Butler. In that particular debate we can better locate the queer stakes of Boone and other authors published afterward in Social Text who attempted to describe sexuality as not only being “merely cultural” but also intrinsically nondislocatable from other modes of particularity such as race and gender. The work I started with those coeditors was continued in “What’s Queer about Queer Theory Now?” (ST 84/85, 2005), which I edited with David L. Eng and Judith Halberstam. That issue included more work Social Text 100

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that considered the lived reality of queers of color in North America and other lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender (LGBT) folks in an international context. An important question in that issue was the further articulation of the critique of liberalism that was explicitly announced by Duggan over twelve years earlier and can arguably be understood as always having been a tenet of the queer social text. We cannot anticipate what comes next. The project of theorizing the queer social text is, by its very nature, unfinished. What we have come to identify as queer social texts are always changing along with the larger political cosmology they belong to. In the end, we return to Boone’s insistence on O’Hara’s relevance as theory and praxis. Looking back, we can view the moment in which Boone took on Vendler, challenging her efforts to generalize O’Hara’s queer text, as a moment that signaled the centrality of queer thinking to the journal’s mission and made the queerness of the social text integral to its ongoing commitment to rethinking foundational categories in progressive intellectual work. Note 1. Helen Vendler, “The Virtues of the Alterable,” Parnassus: Poetry in Review 1 (Fall – Winter 1972): 20.

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Racial Politics (in the United States) Roopali Mukherjee

In the spring of 1995, Social Text published a symposium on “Race and Racism” in which notable scholars in the field were invited to assess the state of critical work on abiding but ever-mutating forms of race and racism and to theorize new and uneven modes of racial address and response that were emerging within the “much heralded postnational phase of race talk” (ST 42). Symposium editors Trisha Rose and Andrew Ross invited their guests to deliberate on why despite extensive intermingling of cultural groups in the United States, dominant discourses of race remained fixed on public images of an America divided into two nations — one black, the other white — separate, hostile, and unequal. How, the editors asked, had multiculturalist appeals to difference and diversity launched a new, more flexible, and resilient career for racism? What price had masculinist heterosexisms exacted from the emancipatory promise of black political leadership and popular culture? And given that race and racism seemed to be “perpetual constituents of public opinion,” how might we imagine a “society in which race does not matter” (emphasis in original)? Fourteen years later, I am struck by the constancy we find both in the editors’ questions and the essayists’ claims in response. In the first instance, the politico-cultural terrain of race in the United States at the present moment is marked and fissured by constitutive inheritances of the post – civil rights era — urban deindustrialization, structural neglect, hypercommoditization of blackness, and so on — dynamics that cut ever deeper racial and gendered economic divisions. Here, forces of neoliberal multiculturalism and a withering liberal state collude with structures of racial privilege shaping the contours of new modes of racial injustice and power — neoracism, epistemic racism, race as governmentality.

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Likewise, emerging disarticulations within cultural categories of enraced subjects — buppies, b-boys, baps, and bohos, wankstas, wiggers, and wannabes — and the contingent promise of what Paul Gilroy calls heteroethnic resistances in the era of globalization reflect an unruly field of political, cultural, and aesthetic transformations marked by postmodern incoherences at the interstices of “black” and “white,” across marginalities and alterities, between citizens and civil society.1 Familiar tensions abound in a constant wavering about how much race does and should count in public matters, about the primacy and persistence of blackness in constituting race and racial difference in the United States, and claims about the end of politics with the arrival of a postracial moment in U.S. racial history. Beyond its service to neoliberal hegemonies that animate cultural vernaculars about those who “fail” as having done so as a consequence of their own deficiencies (“dangerous individuals” who deserve renewed discipline and rigorous rehabilitation so as to produce properly “post-racial” subjects), the idea of the “end of race” deserves a careful regard, for within its whorls lurks a whole host of contradictions and contingencies that offer the means to theorize the dappled significance of race and racism within the current moment. Indeed, the task ahead, much as the essayists in the 1995 symposium charged, is not to decipher if race matters anymore but rather to illuminate how race matters differently within the cultural valences of this moment. Within a universe of analytic uncertainty, 2008 stands out in certainty as a “historic moment,” the year Americans elected the first African American to the White House. Against abiding concerns about the abilities of marginalized groups who for generations were forced to the outskirts of civil and political society, who, as Michael Hanchard argued in ST 48 (1996), were limited to vantage points ill-suited to direct political engagement, the election of Barack Obama to the presidency compels reformulations of the coordinates at which racial presence and state power meet. As popular media and news reports alike write Barack Obama into history as a messianic figure at the postracial turn, a rich metonym for generational transformations within the racial order, enduring archetypes of race and difference distill and signify within the cultural imaginary. Here, the figure of the tragic mulatto, deviant and difficult within biological matrices of race and racism, shape-shifts its way into an uneasy cultural truce that frames fetishized inclusion as proof of civility and rationality, an unblinking answer to the savagery and barbarism of other times and places. The ebony saint reappears as well, a triumph of American multiculturalism, a fully assimilable apparatus of neoliberal discipline who provides what Kimberle Crenshaw has termed a “racially-correct voiceover” for retrenchments of political subjectivity. 2 And the magic negro, endowed with miraculous talents and mythical counterknowledges, takes form once 220

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again to nurse whiteness out of psychic despair and the nation from its ideological and material predicaments. Like the events of September 11, which reoriented racial matrices of national standing, allowing some African Americans to “feel more American than ever,” or those of Hurricane Katrina, which enabled the converse, the election of Barack Obama traces a furrowed terrain of uneven inheritances, internal insecurities, and discursive paradoxes. Tethered to history and biology, it parses the spectral significance of racial triumph and vexation, of political elation as well as mourning, of cooptation and compromise. Thus we witnessed spontaneous multiracial throngs chanting “Yes We Did!” on the streets of Harlem on election night, which like the unprecedented multitudes who gathered on the National Mall on inauguration day, bespoke giddy celebrations, not simply of the end of the most unpopular presidential administration in recent history, but as well, of the culmination, at long last, of decades of black struggle for racial equality. Such expressions of racial triumph and elation jostle in the public imaginary with critical commentaries that appeared over the course of the 2008 election season, which drew attention to the ways that Obama’s victory adds momentum to the rightward slide into racial silence, shrinking public space for race talk, cauterizing the racial present from the past, eviscerating old agendas and solidarities, and fanning an uncritical exuberance that sedates social action toward antiracist accountability. 3 Given the ways that these tensions revisit strains of critical scholarship published across many volumes of this journal on the challenges of repoliticizing post – civil rights political subjectivities and the relevance of public intellectuals within the revolutionary promise of black politics, it may well be time for another Social Text symposium on race and racism, this time geared to illuminating ruptures as well as continuities that constitute the “post” in “postracial.” Notes 1. See Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). 2. Kimberle Crenshaw, “Color Blindness, History, and the Law,” in The House That Race Built, ed. Wahneema Lubiano (New York: Vintage, 1997), 280 – 88. 3. The critical voices have included Judith Butler, “Uncritical Exuberance,” Indybay, 5 November 2008, www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/11/05/18549195.php; Bill Fletcher Jr., “President-Elect Obama: History, Challenges, and Possibilities; The African World,” Black Commentator, 6 November 2008, www.BlackCommentator .com/298/298_aw_obama_history_possibilities.html; Salim Muwakkil, “The Squandering of Obama,” In These Times, 26 July 2007, www.inthesetimes.com/ article/3268/the_squandering_of_obama; Adolph Reed Jr., “Obama No,” Progressive, May 2008, www.progressive.org/mag_reed0508; Reed, “Where Obamaism Social Text 100

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Seems to Be Going,” Black Agenda Report, 16 July 2008, www.blackagendareport .com/?q=node/10697; Jonathan Tilove, “For Scholars of Race, an Obama Dilemma,” Seattle Times, 13 August 2008; and “Roundtable: From King to Obama: Race in America,” Social Science Research Council, 4 April 2008, www.ssrc.org/racein america; as well as two recent books: David R. Roediger, How Race Survived U.S. History: From Settlement and Slavery to the Obama Phenomenon (New York: Verso, 2008), and Paul Street, Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2008).

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Revolution María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo and David Sartorius

To be a communist is a beautiful thing, although it causes many headaches. And the problem with communist headaches is, as we all know, historical; they don’t yield to aspirin, only to the realization of Paradise on Earth. So it goes. Under capitalism, if our head aches it gets chopped off. In the struggle for the Revolution the head is a time bomb. In the period of socialist construction we plan headaches, which does not make them go away, quite the contrary Communism will be, among other things, an aspirin the size of the sun.  — Roque Dalton, “On Headaches”

Roque Dalton’s poem reflects our jubilant encounter with the Social Text articles on revolution. The poem appeared early the journal’s publication history (ST 5, 1982), reminding us that the founders of the journal considered the dissemination of revolutionary aesthetics to be a key part of the journal’s praxis. Articles on revolution from the first decade took seriously the possibility of its coming in various quarters of the globe, planning for its arrival with a sense of expectation, and reflecting the collective’s envisioned engagement with a politics of the present. This revolutionary optimism extended to matters of race and sex. Manning

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Marable, for example, discussed the utopian project of black revolution, weighing the contradictions between socialist revolution and black liberation, prognosticating with great detail on the possibilities of this joint process, and predicting that the coming socialist revolution “would set the historical stage for the final assault against white racism” (ST 4, 1981). Ellen Willis, meanwhile, chided the feminist movement for a certain prudishness in matters sexual. She theorized the utopic possibilities of sexual satisfaction: “From a radical standpoint, then, sexual liberation involves not only the abolition of restrictions but the positive presence of social and psychological conditions that foster satisfying sexual relations” (ST 6, 1982). Revolution will be an orgasm the size of the sun. If there was a holistic approach to what counted as the grounds for revolution in the journal, there was also a profound recognition of the interrelatedness of the global struggle for change. Third-world anticolonial struggles shaped a putatively Western consciousness of revolution after World War II, as authors such as Belden Fields emphasized (“French Maoism,” ST 9/10, 1984). Indeed, the vast majority of the articles on revolution in the journal focused on Latin America. This struck us as odd, at first, given the global scope of revolutionary consciousness in the 1960s and 1970s. Upon reflection, though, we realized that this was due less to any parochialism on the part of Social Text contributors than to the historical contingency of the moment of the journal’s founding in 1979, which coincided with the twentieth anniversary of the “triumph” of the Cuban Revolution and with the birth of the Nicaraguan Revolution. The Nicaraguan Revolution, in particular, not only lit up Central America and Mexico with the possibility of social justice achieved through armed struggle, but also clearly lit up the scholars who wrote for Social Text. We realized how paradigmatic the Latin American revolutionary process was for the journal (and the world). Roberto Fernández Retamar underscores this by citing José Martí: “What is the history of Cuba if not the history of Latin America? And what is the history of Latin America if not the history of Asia, Africa and Oceania? And what is the history of all these peoples if not the history of the cruelest and most pitiless exploitation dealt by imperialism throughout the world?” (ST 15, 1986). The journal’s sustained engagement with unfolding Central American revolutionary processes produced significant revisions in Marxist theory among contributors. The role of religion and cultural policies in the revolutionary processes was the predominant focus of these critical efforts. In 1983, Michael Fleet offered correctives to the secularist consensus about Marxism in light of the central role of the Catholic Church in facilitating popular mobilization and class struggle. Giulio Girardi moved beyond Fleet’s empirical findings in his revision of the relationship between religion and revolutionary socialism: 224

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Traditionally considered the main enemy of faith in the modern world, Marxism is adopted by believers as a means to deepen their faith. . . . On one side, Christians discover the need to translate their ethical-religious choice in a political commitment. From identification with the poor they move towards identification with the popular social bloc. On their side Marxists overcome the objectivism of some of their formulations, thereby becoming aware of the importance, for a political commitment, of moral motivations, in particular of the love for others, for the poor, for one’s own country.

The broad-based nature of the revolutionary movements in Latin America made it evident that identification with revolutionary processes regularly exceeded the class position of their adherents. Indeed, the fact that these revolutions were often occurring in countries where the forces of production were considered “underdeveloped” and not sufficiently capitalist shook Marxist theorists in the “first world” precisely because the agents of these revolutionary processes were not exclusively, or even primarily, “proletarian.” Sociologist James Petras described how this reality flummoxes Marxism: “The experience of class formation and the growth of revolutionary movements in conditions in which capitalist development was not accompanied simultaneously by the growth of wage labor relations call into question aspects of the global-historical universality of Marx’s original conception” (ST 8, 1983 – 84). Calls Marxism into question, indeed. Experiences in Latin America (and third-world revolutionary movements more generally) permanently debunked the developmentalism of Euro-American Marxist theory that privileged a model of revolutionary agency stubbornly identified with urban, industrial labor. The close of this post – World War II revolutionary effervescence in 1990, with the defeat of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua’s national election that year and the collapse of the Soviet bloc that would have devastating consequences for Cuba, necessarily changed the tenor of the writing on revolution for the editors and contributors to Social Text. Like the rest of the global Left, the contributors reflect a defeatism in the face of these changes. In the short span of ten years, ST writings on revolution came full circle. “The prospects for socialism do appear dim,” Stanley Aronowitz prosnosticated in 1990. Popular movements might continue, but in different form. Citing the examples of Brazil and Chile, Aronowitz concluded: “Where once these movements were clearly under Marxist hegemony, and attracted to Cuban and Chinese models of revolutionary combat . . . now they have adopted parliamentary democratic perspectives . . . socialists and many former communists openly proclaim the priority of the struggle for democracy over the struggle for socialism and frame redistributive demands in Left-social democratic frameworks.” The repressive nature of so many revolutionary governments all over the world, and the extra­ Social Text 100

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ordinary economic failure of Eastern Europe, made revolutionary socialism untenable in his view. Nineteen years later, though, it would be a bummer for our reflection on revolution to end in such a predictable place as the “death of revolution and the triumph of (literal) democracy.” Instead, with Dalton, we recall that “to be a communist is a beautiful thing, although it causes many headaches” and turn to culture and sexuality, two revolutionary migraines that offer a more generative interpretation than repression and death. Many articles in Social Text that foregrounded the cultural politics of revolution avoided foreclosing the radical possibilities that Aronowitz mourned. Consonant with its prospectus, articles in Social Text dealt often with the production and circulation of texts and images in revolutionary societies and their political functions within state-building projects. Cuban writers Ambrosio Fornet and Roberto Fernández Retamar invited Fredric Jameson to hold the 1985 Institute for Culture and Society in Havana in acknowledgment that North American culture has, “for better and for worse, been a part of our historical process” (ST 15, 1986). Importantly, though, contributors to the ST 15 dossier on Cuba that emerged from the encounter generally understood the exchange in less integrative terms, using the occasion to observe “cultural revolution” through an us-versusthem optic calibrated to cold-war polemic. Celebrating the Cuban “cultural intellectual who is also a political militant, the intellectual who produces both poetry and praxis,” Jameson reflected that “we have allowed ourselves, as first-world cultural intellectuals, to restrict our consciousness of our life’s work to the narrowest professional or bureaucratic terms.” Similarly, Laura Kipnis bemoaned the limitations of a marketplace cultural politics of the United States in comparison to the freedom (requirement?) of political expression in the unmediated cultural politics in Cuba. The Cuban artists themselves who figured in the dossier hardly saw the intersection of culture and revolutionary politics in such stark terms. Y. Espinola admitted that “for those of us who went to Cuba seeking to corroborate whatever notions of liberatory potential we had attached to epic genres like testimonial and revolutionary poster art, it came as a surprise to hear our hosts . . . reject these forms as outdated and lacking in artistic qualities.” Coco Fusco’s interview with performance artist Consuelo Castañeda evinced ambivalence about the revolutionary ends of state-authorized art: The generation of artists — e.g., Nelson Domínguez and Chocolate — that emerged after the triumph of the revolution developed a completely representational aesthetic. Besides, their work was totally political, pamphleteering, if you will. It got to the point that if someone died for the revolution 100 prints of paintings were turned out. It was embarrassing. It was opportunis-

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tic, there can be no other explanation. . . . The day I need to make politically committed art I’ll do it for my own reasons, not out of opportunism. (ST 15, 1986)

On one hand, Cuban artists suggested that forms such as testimonio, the urtext of subalternity, were outdated and evacuated of political saliency. On the other hand, Castañeda’s remarks remind us that the political content of any art form necessarily shifts historically, particularly within the dynamic temporality of revolution, and that the interpretation of such content may not be exhausted by Jameson’s model of cultural revolution, which “turns on the phenomenon of what [Antonio] Gramsci called ‘subalternity,’ namely the feelings of mental inferiority and habits of subservience and obedience which necessarily and structurally develop in situations of domination — most dramatically in the experience of colonized peoples.” In identifying the primacy of national allegory in “third-world literature,” Jameson delegated the work of confronting subalternity to the third (and second) world, even as he deplored the comparative passivity of “first-world cultural intellectuals.” For Latin American revolutionaries ostensibly left to complete the work that Jameson laid out — especially those who endured the violence of counterrevolutionary reaction — the problem of subalternity mapped awkwardly onto the complicated grids of political and personal relationships. While Roque Dalton does not necessarily negate Jameson’s definition of subalternity, he certainly complicates it in “357,” a poem about his experience as a political prisoner under the Salvadoran dictatorship: The guards are divided into several groups. The ones who stone the rabbits as they race across the garden with daisies in their mouths, for example. The ones who hop up and down in front of my cell, yelling words of my country and staring at the rain’s froth on their wristwatches. And the ones who, early in the morning, urinate at the same time they wake me up (their flashlights licking at my face) and, downcast, tell me that it’s even colder today than yesterday. 357 doesn’t belong to any of these groups; he used to be a shepherd and a musician and now, due to a mysterious act of revenge, he’s a policeman who (357, that is) they’re going to fire at the end of the month. Just because he slipped away and slept with his wife until nine in the morning, thumbing his nose at the rules. A few days ago, 357 gave me a cigarette. Yesterday, as he watched me chew a big anise leaf (that I managed to pull near the bars with a homemade hook), he asked me about Cuba. And today he suggested that perhaps I could write him a poem — about the mountains of Chalatenango — so he could keep it as a souvenir after they killed me. (ST 5, 1982)

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tionaries and counterrevolutionaries in “situations of domination” and challenged their observers to better account for questions of agency and representation. If the discussions of revolutionary culture often adhered to the polemics of their day — the cold war, the incorporation of third-world culture into modernity (or its resistance to it) — so, too, did the authors who grappled with the issue of sexuality in revolutionary societies. In “South of Your Border,” Jean Franco described a moment in the late 1960s when “you were either for the revolution or against it, when it was impossible to be against a revolution that meant . . . socialism in Latin America. . . . equally, it was impossible to be for certain aspects of the revolution, particularly the machismo, the persecution of homosexuals, the system of personal rule, the rigid cultural policy” (ST 9/10, 1984). The failure of Latin American revolutionary projects to confront rigid gender norms limited their transformative potential, and Franco and other Social Text authors advanced this critique with great care. In Cuba, institutionalized homophobia in the early years of the revolution took root in the soil of “New Man” ideology, described by Ricardo Ortiz as walking “that very fine line between overt homosexual behavior and the kind of generalized homosocial but desperately antisexual male bonding dependent on the intense repression of that overt behavior” (ST 58, 1999). Artists and writers figured prominently among the gay men targeted by the government as lacking the strength and discipline necessary to build a revolutionary society. The experiences of men and women who found themselves harassed by police and bureaucrats can be glimpsed in Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel and Frances NegrónMuntaner’s interview with Ana Veltfort, an exiled German-Cuban friend of Cuban-American writer Lourdes Casal (ST 92, 2007). In deploring the reduction of sexual pleasure within Cuban revolutionary politics to an orthodoxy of political correctness, contributors amplified, rather than muted, analogous limitations in liberal democracies that were all the more eligible for radical critique. Ellen Willis, after all, identified a general “dismissal of sexual freedom as a valid political issue” that operated across political systems and ideologies (ST 6, 1982). While the Cuban example dominates the discussion of sexuality and revolution in Social Text, the contours of the experiences cited bend to the early years of the revolution, rather than acknowledging the changes that accompanied the loosening of public strictures in the 1980s, the national conversation about the film Fresa y Chocolate (1994), and recent rights extended to transgendered Cubans. In doing so, there is little recognition of changes in Latin America’s revolutionary movements in their attitudes toward sexuality. No Social Text article, for example, reflected on the sexual politics of the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua, which never embraced the rigid policies developed in 1960s Cuba and treated sexuality with a 228

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degree of ambivalence. Despite the presence of openly gay comandantes and Sandinista party members, the party invoked the threat of counterrevolution when it prohibited members from forming explicitly gay/lesbian auxiliary organizations. Nevertheless, the Sandinista-led National Assembly promulgated a constitution that recognized a family as any group of people living in solidarity under one roof. This acknowledged both the prevalence of female-headed households and alternative kinship structures. Ironically, the journal’s assessments of revolutionary societies, when it came to sexual politics, made little room for the potential for radical change. The wider meanings of radical change, as Social Text’s discussions of revolution make clear, should not be buried underneath blunt assessments today that revolution is either dead or alive. In reflecting on Roque Dalton’s assassination, John Beverley argued that “even in his death — a stupid and tragic death — Dalton was ‘useful,’ as he would have wanted” (ST 5, 1982). Drawing inspiration from thirty years of productive thinking about revolution in Social Text and beyond, we respond to obituaries for revolution dating from the 1990s with Beverley’s — and Dalton’s — resolve: to continue to make revolution a useful political and aesthetic concept for the future. Revolution will be an aspirin the size of the sun.

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“Social Text”

John Brenkman : I am pretty sure that Fred came up with the title Social Text. He may have already had it in mind. We had one of your typical debates about whether it was going to be The Social Text or Social Text. I’m sure I had a strong opinion but I don’t remember which it was. Stanley Aronowitz : You know where it comes from, right? It’s a section

of the Critique of Everyday Life. For both Fred and me, Lefebvre is very important. It was Fred’s idea that we call it Social Text. Yeah, it was his idea, and I readily agreed. Fredric Jameson : No, no, no. We didn’t know Lefebvre at the time, I don’t think. Stanley may have known it, but I didn’t back then. My contacts with Lefebvre are later on, in the 1980s. No, no, it was just something that occurred to me, that’s all. In French stuff, “text” was all over the place in those days in structuralism and poststructuralism. In a lot of poststructuralism, it was considered that society was a text — and a text that one “reads,” with de Certeau and so forth — so it just seemed to me, trying to think of something catchy, that the phrase “social text” might combine our two sides: our sociological side and our cultural side. And send a signal that we were textual — that is to say, it was important to us how literature and culture and even philosophy were central — but that we were also social — that is to say, we would look at these things politically and not in just some aesthetic or purely contemplative or academic way. The title tried to communicate all that. It seemed to click all of a sudden — it just popped into my head.

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Social Text Brent Hayes Edwards

Despite the divergence between the accounts given by Stanley Aronowitz and Fredric Jameson of the origins of the name Social Text, it is worth exploring the use of the phrase in the work of Henri Lefebvre. Even if it is ultimately a false cognate, the chapter titled “The Social Text” in the second volume of his Critique of Everyday Life (published in French in 1961) is an intriguing intertext for the journal, especially given the importance of the category of the “everyday” in its early issues.1 In Social Text 1 (1979), the first thematic area announced in the “Prospectus” is “Everyday Life and Revolutionary Praxis”: “One of the most important new concepts in radical thinking is that of ‘everyday life’ as an area of theory and praxis distinct from the familiar ones of knowledge, political action, economic formation, social institutions, and the like.” Whether or not the founding editors were then familiar with Lefebvre, they were clearly attuned to the energetic dialogue emerging around this rubric in French theory (in a field very much shaped by Lefebvre’s work). 2 If the journal’s name can be taken to be not only a declaration of its collective editorial orientation but also something of a “prospectus” of its potential horizon of inquiry, then one might suggest that part of its project has been to theorize social text through collective critical practice, through the concatenation of applications and recalibrations of the phrase. The monumental three volumes of Lefebvre’s Critique are first of all a radical rejection of the orthodoxy and quantitative bias of “proletarian science” in postwar Marxist sociology through the theorization of a new object of study too slippery to be grasped with a methodology of surveys, questionnaires, and rigid classifications. Lefebvre defines the everyday as “on the one hand an empirical modality for the organization of human life, and on the other a mass of representations which disguise this organization,

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its contingency and its risks” (138). One of the key questions for Lefebvre has to do with the degree to which any method of sociological analysis can apprehend the totality of society. For him, “totality never appears to be other than fragmentary, contradictory, and composed of levels, of contradictions on differing levels, and of partial totalities.” The only way to reach totality, then, is through these partial totalities that “cross-refer to each other”; the fragments of social life, he writes, “presuppose a whole and . . . necessitate the concept of a whole of which they are the evidence and the elements, but not the entirety” (237). For Lefebvre, the “semantic field” is only part of the full total field of social life, which cannot be reduced to the production of meaning. And the varieties of human language use (langage) are only one component of the semantic field. The “social text” is defined as an “aspect of the semantic field”: “it is how we each perceive the semantic field in everyday life, in a non-conceptual or preconceptual (affective and perceptive) manner” (306). For Lefebvre, in other words, the “social text” is not simply a linguistic form, but more broadly the multilayered and discontinuous field that one navigates continuously at the most basic perceptual level of daily life without the need to formulate concepts. It is what one “moves through” (parcourt) and “reads,” although not from some exterior or privileged perspective: “the social text encompasses us,” and so “we read it from inside, and never completely from outside” (307). It is for this reason that the city and above all the street become for Lefebvre the paradigmatic examples of the “social text,” in a manner that seems clearly in dialogue with work by theorists including Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin on the centrality of the urban experience to modernity (309 – 10). Starting with the definite article, Lefebvre’s definition of the “social text” seems narrower and more deliberately circumscribed than the connotations of the phrase in the work published in the journal. The occasional invocation of the title phrase in Social Text articles over the years might be described as heuristic rather than categorical: an ongoing, dialogic effort to limn an arena of investigation rather than the attempt to define once and for all an aspect of a broader social field. There is something programmatic, certainly, in the way social text seems to function as an almost ludicrously blunt reminder of the imperative to push against the “strategic containment or delimitation” of academic disciplines, as it is described in the “Prospectus.” But the phrase does not settle into a restricted range of application. Even if the title might be said to sacrifice subtlety in the name of provocation, it must not be read as an attempt to reduce the social to nothing more than “a” text — or worse, to propagate literary analysis as the exemplary method of social critique. Such a reduction comes to serve as a means of self-positioning in some of the journals that emerged in 232

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the late 1980s as they strove to distinguish themselves from predecessors such as Social Text. Writing in Public Culture, for instance, Dilip Gaonkar and Elizabeth Povinelli have described what they term “the ‘social texts’ tradition in cultural studies” as a “formal demand” that “cultural forms appear in a textualized form and from some sedimented archive.”3 (By “textualized form,” Gaonkar and Povinelli explain that they ultimately mean “the humanistic tradition of the book.”) To any reader even slightly familiar with the extended conversations in Social Text around rubrics including everyday life, the public sphere, performance, and sexuality, such a mischaracterization is, if not hallucinatory, malicious. Without rejecting literature as an object of study or literary analysis as an approach, work in Social Text has always been deeply engaged with the complexities of theorizing what in ST 3 Michel de Certeau calls “non- or pre-verbal domains in which there are only practices without any accompanying discourse.” The title phrase is also a provocation directed at literary studies, in other words, as is evident in Edward Said’s caustic observation in the first issue that literary criticism “has become radically ahistorical, jargonistically technical, and wholly marginal in its relationship to the world.” As John Brenkman argues in one of the short essays in the “Unequal Developments” section of the same issue, “literary practice actively responds to the entire set of discourses, symbolic formations, and systems of representation that define a particular society’s cultural and political life.” To “read” the “social text,” he contends, demands something entirely different from what literary criticism does: it requires “shifts in register,” because “a shift from literary discourse to, say, the economic codes and the mode of production or to political representation and the collective exercise of power requires different forms of hermeneutical subversion, other types of interpretive violence.” Brenkman’s essay is titled “Deconstruction and the Social Text,” and he is at pains to correct another misunderstanding regarding social text: that it is derived from Derridean deconstruction (and thus an approximate equivalent of what Jacques Derrida calls the “general text”). There is not enough space here to take up this point; to do so, one would first of all have to consider the way the journal’s commitment to “the Marxist framework” is framed as a commitment to a dialectical conception of history — to theorize, in other words, means always to historicize. Another approach to the title phrase — to theorize its implications precisely by historicizing its uses — would be to consider the ways that social text has been taken up beyond the journal. To take only a single instance, when Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak writes in her classic 1988 essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” of “semioses of the social text,” she means a particular kind of engaged historical analysis — a way of making meaning out of a fabric that both contains and exceeds that meaning — that she associates most directly with the work of Ranajit Guha, in which “the historian, Social Text 100

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transforming ‘insurgency’ into ‘text for knowledge,’ is only one ‘receiver’ of any collectively intended social act.”4 That is, as the phrase is appropriated (with surprising frequency) in Spivak’s work, the “social text” comes to point to the ways any interpretive endeavor confronts its own contingency.5 Or as Lefebvre puts it in his discussion of totality, “You imagine you have a fragment of it in your hands, you hold it tight, you cherish it, and suddenly it assumes all reality and truth. You have the audacity to claim that what you are grasping is totality itself. Then immediately it breaks into pieces again, and all that remains in your hands is but a tiny fragment” (273 – 74). This is not to imply that Spivak’s use of the phrase is somehow representative, much less authoritative. But charting the ways the title has reverberated beyond the journal would be one way to track the afterlives and futures of Social Text. Notes 1. Henri Lefebvre, “The Social Text,” in Critique of Everyday Life, vol. 2: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday, trans. John Moore (London: Verso, 2002), 306 – 11. Subsequent citations will be indicated parenthetically. The French original is Critique de la vie quotidienne II: Fondements d’une sociologie de la quotidienneté (Paris: L’Arche Editeur, 1961). 2. Social Text 3 (1980) features a long translation of Michel de Certeau’s “On the Oppositional Practices of Everyday Life” by Jameson and Carl Lovitt. 3. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar and Elizabeth A. Povinelli, “Technologies of Public Forms: Circulation, Transfiguration, Recognition,” Public Culture 15 (2003): 388. 4. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 287. 5. It is in this sense that Spivak writes of “the social text as vanishing present” in her more recent book A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 337.

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Social Text Alondra Nelson

On the level of the politics of what-is-said and on the level of the politics of how-it-is-said there are indications of a systematic reflection on the management of contradiction . . . contained within the utopian program of the New Right. The procedures of this containment not only indicate the range of the New Right’s politics, but the scene upon which must intervene a new oppositional practice.  — Madison Social Text Group, “The New Right and Media,” ST 1 (1979)

In the foundational first issue of Social Text, the editorial collective “propose[d] a fresh exploration of those cultural ‘texts’ . . . which constitute fundamental vehicles for ideological programming and legitimation in American society” through the application of new modes of critique to an expansive range of social objects and practices. Traversing and dialectically articulating disciplines and genres, the rejuvenation of Marxist cultural analysis inaugurated in ST 1 (1979) also attended to its mediation, in a fashion related to yet also categorically distinct from how mass culture had been previously treated by Left theorists. For example, by both design and prescience, this issue’s “Prospectus” notably set the pace for inquiry into postwar technoculture. Since this time, the journal’s editorial trajectory has reflected a commitment to a distinctive and comprehensive analytics of politics and media that, taking inspiration from an article in the inaugural issue exemplifying it, might be termed social textronics. In “The New Right and Media” (ST 1), an examination of the backlash hastened by the advances of progressive social movements The Madison Social Text Group (MSTG) limned the emergence in the late 1960s of a national conservative network comprising “various single-issue

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campaigns” — including the anti – welfare state referendum Proposition 13 in California and numerous “anti-abortion, anti-gay rights, anti-ERA and affirmative action” initiatives — and unified in their mobilization of both an imagined halcyon past and “media politics.” (Combining contributions from individual and paired authors into a single-essay format, this piece reflected the editorial collective’s commitment to cooperative praxis and, in this way, also served as a template of sorts for ST 100.) By 1979 this network had evolved into a reactionary technocultural line of attack that would yield a Reagan presidential victory and decades later would usher Karl Rove, a leading proponent of this strategy, from Texas machine politics to the brain trust of the George W. Bush White House. This conservative countermovement media blitz, the MSTG argued, included “computerized,” mass direct mailing for the solicitation of money (a tactic conceived by right-wing ideologue Richard Viguerie, called the “funder of conservatism,” and later adopted by Rove); “the creation of an electronic network of groups and individuals”; “the appropriation of mass cultural programs and devices,” such as the now ubiquitous conservative talk radio circuit; and the use of “corporate advertising in defense of business ideologies,” among other tactics. As one form of rejoinder, in a section of “The New Right and Media” that ran under the heading “Textronics,” the MSTG excavated political messages intertwined in the content (“what-is-said”) and form (“how-itis said”) of conservative media and exposed how these narratives functioned as ideological facade. Textronics referenced how advertisements for office equipment, electronics, and aeronautics sold by the Textron Corporation were ideological devices through which the merchandise was encysted within a sentimental representation of an idealized past in an effort to reconcile and manage the contradictions inherent to the conditions of its production under advanced capitalism. More generally, textronics also referred to the broader terrain of Right cultural politics and underscored the “symbiotic” relationship of these with “the technology of new media.” In response to the Right’s broadening bandwidth, the MSTG suggested a social-textronics analysis of the Left. A critical approach that began in the journal as theory and now extends to the editorial collective’s own media praxis as well, social textronics reflects an appreciation for technoculture’s bilateralism—its potential both to embody conservative ideologies and to advance progressive politics. From this perspective, technologies are not only tools of production and domination and ideological vectors (longstanding preoccupations of the Left), but are also heuristics—via “information and systems theory”—and

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can be vehicles for socio-political affiliation and, potentially, ideological resistance. Following “The New Right and Media,” subsequent articles in Social Text similarly toggled between appraisals of the political vices and virtues of technoculture, analog and digital. On the more pessimistic end of the spectrum, Tizziana Terranova in ST 80 (2000) observes that, in the age of information, workers contribute to their very own subjugation, as wage labor is transformed into “free labor” or “forms of labor we do not immediately recognize as such.” Moreover, Terranova cautions that Internet culture, abetted by ideological discourses of freedom that are a dominant narrative frame of new media advertising campaigns (not unlike the Textron ads) as well as allegedly libratory practices such as the open source movement, masks exploitation as pleasure and idle consumption as production and renders consumers’ continuous, unpaid toil as agency. Yet, other works in the journal have suggested agentive possibilities. In conversation with Constance Penley and Andrew Ross in ST 24/25 (1990), social theorist Donna Haraway proposed that Left positions on technoculture need not be solely condemning. As she remarked, “We can’t afford the versions of the ‘one-dimensional-man’ critique of technological rationality, which is to say, we can’t turn scientific discourses into the Other, and make them into the enemy.” Haraway’s influential “Cyborg Manifesto” is a locus classicus of how technology embodies both social reality and “social fiction,” of how it can bring the what is of material domination into starkest relief and concomitantly pose the “radically liberating,” socialist-feminist utopian questions What if ? and What could be? The progression of social textronics in the journal is also evoked by Rosalind Morris’s recent incisive examination in ST 91 (2007) of the gruesome digital photographs of blithely executed torture at the U.S. Abu Ghraib camp. Her analysis partly extends Jean Baudrillard’s observations about how bellicose imperialism is abstracted through video-game aesthetics (e.g., single-shooter perspective, radar, virtual reality). On the other hand, the “mediatization” of images of this abuse, their circulation on the Internet and in the news media, Morris asserts, served in some measure to “circumvent the processes of concealment and dissimulation by which (anachronistic) state powers try to maintain their hold on knowledge.” This Left media politics, the social textronics, highlighted in ST by Haraway, Terranova, Morris, and others is more an ideological lockstep operation than a system override, to borrow computing language. Nevertheless, interrupting the techniques of consensus manufacture, gumming

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the machine works, and fashioning alternative circuitry continue to be vital “oppositional practices” of the Left and important themes in Social Text. Indeed, the technolocultural work of the editorial collective itself now includes a Web site (http://socialtextonline.org/) and a wiki on which drafts of this hundredth issue were circulated.

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Social Text Tavia Nyong’o

A friend of mine with a far keener ear for the euphony of the English language cringes at the word blog. (He also objects to the word bromance, for I think a not unconnected reason). This gives me some pause as I hazard the claim that “a blog is a social text.” What forms of technohype do I thereby embrace, in urging upon the collective the use of a communication technology that, in any case, and without any additional urging on my part, will increasingly be imposed upon us by the cultural logic of advanced capitalism? The oft-trumpeted potential for a “creative commons” of the Internet may well prove to be neither creative nor common, if we take seriously the challenges Marx presents in “The Fragment on Machines”: “Not as with the instrument, which the worker animates and makes into his organ with his skill and strength, and whose handling therefore depends on his virtuosity. Rather, it is the machine which possesses skill and strength in place of the worker, is itself the virtuoso, with a soul of its own in the mechanical laws acting through it” (my emphasis).1 From the virtuosic instrument of the pen, which the writer makes into “his organ,” the means of intellectual production has moved within my lifetime onto the networked computer, which deskills the writer not only by imposing its own mechanical laws on writing, but through the overwhelming compositional force of its accumulated intelligence. In machinic virtuosity, which word processing, e-mailing, blogging, and Twittering extend and intensify, we confront not simply a transition but a transformation in prose. “In machinery,” Marx goes on to argue, “objectified labour confronts living labour within the labour process itself as the power which rules it; a power which, as the appropriation of living labour, is the form of capital” (639). The creative commons to which I contribute by blogging is not only a free endowment of my learning or knowledge to the world. It is

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also a capitalist subbotnik for Google, Facebook, News Corp., or any other transnational conglomerate whose capital stocks lie in the commodification of the immaterial and/or affective labors of computer programmers and professional Internet writers (excuse me, “suppliers of content”), not to mention those who assemble and maintain the machines themselves in industrial zones more continuous with William Blake’s “dark Satanic Mills” of the early-nineteenth-century industrialization than we would like to imagine. Admittedly, I write this critique from within an immanent frame: on Google Docs, Microsoft Word, and PBwiki softwares, using Apple Computer’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox Web browsers, with the MerriamWebster Online Dictionary quietly humming in another open window behind the front panel, and the collective intelligence of Wikipedia at my fingertips (however much my properly disciplined academic mind officially repels its untrustworthiness). Grammatical contractions like blog (from Web log) and portmanteau words like bromance (from brother and romance) index both the form and the content of these new regimes of affective labor, in which even the resistance to the usurpation of our social lives by technological mediation is easily commodifiable. (See “Commodity” in this issue.) As commodifiable, in fact, as the return to a natural kiss, which I saw advertised recently as “the original instant message,” preferably with fresh breath courtesy of Dentyne. Paolo Virno has suggested that a new virtuosity of the multitude is enabled by the “social brain” that Marx ascribed to machinic capital. 2 With his concept of a social brain, Marx speculated that that which dominates us under capitalism might, dialectically, free us to realize a new speciesbeing beyond it. We might employ feminist theory here to observe that, once the writer’s “organ” is transformed into the machinic virtuosity of the keyboard, new horizons of labor open up within a social brain that is no longer gendered male (if certainly not therefore “beyond” gender). Marx grounded his hopes upon the claim that “in so far as fixed capital is condemned to an existence within the confines of a specific use value” (694), the machinic objectification of labor into the form of capital as such is a limit upon capitalism. No matter how virtuosic, machinic objectification is subject to obsolescence to the very degree that it is specific, that is, “state of the art.” Only the social brain is never state of the art, holding a virtuosity that emerges out of what Virno calls the dissolution of the topoi idioi, the “ways of saying/thinking something which end up being appropriate at a local political party headquarters, or in church, or in a university classroom, or among sports fans of a certain team” (special places that, not coincidentally, seem conducive to the cultivation of both bromances and male idiolects of technological expertise). In the place of these literally idiotic ways of speaking and thinking, which are dependent 240

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upon and derivative of zombified aggregates of past labor and inventiveness, Virno champions the topoi koinoi, or common places, as a new ground of inventiveness unbounded by specific expertise. It is only the virtuosity of the social brain that possesses the inventiveness and flexibility to renew both itself and the dead and dying forces of capital. Indeed, its emancipation is premised on the sloughing off of the latter. I hardly need stress how difficult this sloughing off will be. In “circulating capital,” Marx explains, capitalism has long sought another type of emancipation: one from labor of even the objectified kind (labor congealed into machines of a specific use, force, and scale). This inner tension or torsion between fixed and circulating capital has returned to visibility since the financial crisis of 2008 brought down the latter like a house of cards. The central ruse of procorporate globalization rhetoric has been the rhetorical conflation of the machinic virtuosity of the multitude with the global circulation of capital. A false emancipation has been thereby proffered instead of the real one, and the topoi idioi have been anxiously camouflaged as topoi koinoi. And yet, the current crisis in capital accumulation on a global scale presents a rare and real chance of evading, for once, the vampire’s kiss. Notes 1. Karl Marx, “The Fragment on Machines,” in Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin, 1973), 692 – 93. Further page references in text. 2. Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life (Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e), 2003), 36.

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State



Heather Gautney

Theories of the state have undergone immense transformation since the founding of Social Text in 1979. While much of existing scholarship in political science and international relations remains restricted to the political sphere, contemporary critical theory has concerned itself with the state’s cultural and ideological manifestations and role in the development of a libratory politics. Some of the most important theoretical developments in this area, and debates over the state’s transformative potential, have appeared in the pages of this journal. Michael Hardt’s “The Withering of Civil Society” (ST 45, 1995), for example, weaves us through the history of modern state theory, from G. W. F. Hegel’s conception of the state as “ethical idea” to Michel Foucault’s “governmentality” and Gilles Deleuze’s “society of control.” The state, once elevated to the status of Truth and Transcendence in Hegelian thought, was reconceptualized by Antonio Gramsci in the early twentieth century in his quest to develop a revolutionary politics that did not actually involve violent revolution. Rather than imagine the state as the culmination of particular interests in the realm of the universal, Gramsci reversed the tide, conceiving civil society as a realm of particular interests that would be operative in the withering of the state. Strengthening civil society would cast power back in the hands of self-determined people, rather than consolidate it in a state of the ruling class. Instead of viewing the state as a mediator among citizens and institutions in a diverse society, Gramsci saw the institutions of civil society — the school, the union — as opening the state and destabilizing its authoritarian tendencies. Hardt further guides us to the latter part of the twentieth century, when Foucault theorized the collapse of political and civil society under the heading “government.” Governmentality is the art of government that prefigures individuals, orients their conduct, and produces disciplined, Social Text 100 • Vol. 27, No. 3 • Fall 2009 242

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normalized subjects by way of social institutions like schools and the family.1 Extending Foucault, Deleuze’s society of control represented a new plateau, or level of maximization, in which the state was both everywhere and nowhere. 2 Instead of disciplining subjects by way of institutional mediations, institutions such as the family, the church, and the trade union were, according to Deleuze, in crisis: they were no longer relevant as central devices of domination (or of resistance against domination). Rather, control involved a pervasive logic (of capitalist production) that extended beyond institutional mediations into the whole of social space. Deleuze’s control society was, in effect, the Matrix. 3 In Empire, one of the most widely read books on globalization and the state, Hardt and Antonio Negri apply Deleuze’s control society to discuss the new arrangements of sovereignty characteristic of the post–cold-war age of empire, arguing that institutional mediations had soured, civil society withered, and nation-states no longer operated as the uppermost apparatuses of power.4 Sovereignty — the power to impose order — rests in the hands of multinational corporations and supranational institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, which trump the sovereignty of nation-states. Opposition to empire is achieved via the “multitude,” a social multiplicity that acts in common, while maintaining the difference of its constituents, rather than a homogenous class formation or other false unity. “Multitude” involves an understanding of the expansive and ubiquitous nature of exploitation and control in contemporary societies that, paradoxically, offers innumerable opportunities for resistance, not bound to social class, identity politics, or national liberation. For Hardt and Negri, democratic socialist states like Venezuela may challenge U.S. policy and undermine IMF structural adjustment policies, but the Chávez state must still be understood as part of empire insofar as it remains a nationalist, bureaucratic, and only partially democratic apparatus that relies, at least in part, on coercion. Critics of Empire point to the Iraq War as evidence of a distinctly American version of hegemony in world affairs, but the authors of Empire maintain their view, asserting that while the entities that constitute empire may operate with different power differentials, they can never truly synthesize and represent the singularities that comprise the multitude. As Social Text advances toward its next one hundred issues, an important task for critical theory will involve shedding light on the role of multitudes and states in the contemporary social and political landscape and continuing to locate opportunities for change. In the world of anti-neoliberal resistance, recent movement activity suggests that institutions like political parties and trade unions, and even some states, may indeed play an important part in organizing multitudes, but are also being transformed by them, just as academic publishers and universities are enabling anticorporate, antidisciplinary journals like Social Text to transform the academy. Social Text 100

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Among contemporary movements, Empire has been criticized along such lines for failing to acknowledge the importance of political parties in alter-globalization movement building. Despite the bureaucratic nature of party organizations, democratic socialist leaders in Latin America have demonstrated that states can adopt egalitarian social agendas, and even orthodox Marxist parties have played an important part in organizing large numbers of people for antiwar protest campaigns around the world. European social democrats have focused on developing an independent public sphere to regulate multinational corporations and transform states into agents of social welfare. Activist networks like ATTAC (Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions for the Aid of Citizens) have derailed privatization efforts in various locales, especially in France, and helped prevent the development of a purely neoliberal European Union constitution. “New” anarchists and autonomous movements side more closely with Hardt and Negri, seeking to develop participatory democratic communities outside the realm of conventional politics. Some want to “smash the state,” as well as the corporation, school, and other agents of control, but most are interested in challenging illegitimate forms of authority that deflect power away from everyday people. They oppose state sovereignty because it defines life as an abstract, biological entity, whose protection or expropriation is decided by the powers of the state. These movements aim to discover new, radical forms of life, arguing that material life is an articulation of affective and sensuous attachments that ultimately exceed such abstractions and find grounding in struggles over collective life at the grassroots level. Despite these differences, much of contemporary social movement activity, in Latin America and beyond, has focused less on seizing or lobbying states, than on “disarticulating” them. The disarticulation of a state involves the reappropriation of elements of its machinery, in varying degrees, reclaiming privatized resources and industries from state management, and redefining them as commons that should be accessed and administered by everyday people.5 In countries like Venezuela, Argentina, and Uruguay, disarticulation has involved a surge in the prevalence of worker-run factories, also known as “recuperated” or reclaimed factories, in which workers self-organize production according to principles of wage equity and collective decision making. In Bolivia, it took the form of temporary assemblies following the Water Wars, in which neighborhood groups resisted privatization of the water supply and eventually gained representation in the agency responsible for administering the water utility (SEMAPA). In Italy, social centers have effectively reclaimed stretches of abandoned plants in industrial areas and provide housing and welfare services for illegal immigrants and other marginalized groups. A selection of the centers gained legal title to the squats by winning seats in municipal governments and occupying them with movement protagonists. 244

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In Brazil, the process of disarticulation involved the development of the participatory budget process, in which local budgets are decided by popular assembly. It has also surfaced in the expansion of AIDS treatment by coalitions of state actors with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), corporations, and grassroots activists. João Biehl writes in Social Text about the ways in which the demand for AIDS treatment in Brazil stimulated such mergers between state, corporate, and social forces in which the state acted less as an agent of social welfare than as what he calls an “activist state” (ST 80, 2004). In the midst of a growing epidemic that earned Brazil the number-two spot in the ranking of AIDS prevalence in the Americas, grassroots groups, NGOs, and medical practitioners formed a “new epistemic community within the state” that enabled broader dissemination of treatment resources and helped avert millions of new cases. The expansion of AIDS treatment hinged on the politicization of the disease itself and reidentification and representation of its outcast victims as “biomedical citizens” with medical rights to treatment and care. For Social Text, questions regarding the transformative potential of states and other institutions must remain central. As Tariq Jazeel points out so eloquently in his essay “Governmentality” (in this volume), governmentality not only operates in the domain of selves, workplaces, and schoolyards, but also through the activities of journal collectives, the knowledges they produce, and the spaces they inhabit. As Social Text navigates its future, one of the greatest challenges will involve testing its own transformative potential, despite its embeddedness in the academy, and remaining closely tied and true to the movements that inspire and ground its work. Notes 1. Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in Power, vol. 3 of Essential Works of Foucault, 1954 – 1984, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley et al. (New York: New Press, 2000), 201 – 22. 2. Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (1992): 3 – 7. 3. The Wachowski brothers’ The Matrix, released in 1999, tells the story of a computer programmer who learns that the world he lives in is really a facade in which a cyberintelligence is fueling its campaign of domination with the bare, biological life force of human beings. The Matrix is the lattice of this facade — it is the logic of control on which the simulacra of society is imposed. 4. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). 5. This concept is developed by Michael Menser in “Disarticulate the State! Maximizing Democracy in ‘New’ Autonomous Movements in the Americas,” in Democracy, States, and the Struggle for Global Justice, ed. Heather Gautney, Ashley Dawson, Omar Dahbour, and Neil Smith (New York: Routledge, 2009), 251 – 72.

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Theory Phillip Brian Harper

On the very day that I received my assignment from the Social Text editors to write on “Theory” for the one-hundredth issue of the journal, formal Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan appeared at a hearing of the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform to discuss the current world financial crisis. Pressing him to consider whether his strenuous advocacy of free-market principles during his eighteen-year tenure at the Fed had been misguided and had contributed to the financial meltdown, committee chair Henry Waxman (D-CA) asked Greenspan directly, “Do you feel that your ideology pushed you to make decisions that you wish you had not made?” Greenspan’s response was at once coy and pedagogical: “Well, remember that what an ideology is, is a conceptual framework [for] the way people deal with reality. Everyone has one. You have to — to exist, you need an ideology. The question is whether it is accurate or not.”1 Listening to this answer that evening on PBS’s NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, I could not help but hear echoes of a refrain common within academic literature departments during the early to mid-1980s, when I was in graduate school. Charged by opponents of the “high theory” that seemed to reign in the field at that point with displacing literature itself from its proper analytical centrality, those avowedly “doing” theory often countered by pointing out that every instance of critical analysis propounds some theory or other, even when it may appear to be only interpreting, say, a poem by Keats. The question, they would insist, to adapt Greenspan’s wording, was whether that theory was explicit or not. If this contention sounds downright quaint at this point, that is doubtless exactly why I experienced an undeniable degree of nostalgic pleasure in hearing it trumpeted again — that, and the somewhat disori-

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enting fact that it was being trumpeted by Alan Greenspan. For while it arguably goes without saying that Greenspan was not invoking ideology in the Althusserian sense, to refer to “a representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence,” neither was he accepting Waxman’s implied definition of ideology (evidently derived from Greenspan’s own prior use of the term) as, to quote from Raymond Williams, a “programmatic idea of how things should be.”2 Rather, as is clear from his reference to “a conceptual framework” for “deal[ing] with reality,” Greenspan was here conceiving ideology as a putatively neutral “scheme of ideas which explains practice” (to adduce Williams once more) — that is to say, as theory.3 Anyone with even the slightest familiarity with its history knows that Social Text has always been concerned with theory in this unexpectedly Greenspanian sense, just as it has always been concerned with ideology in the sense elaborated by Althusser — or, perhaps even better, by Stuart Hall. 4 After all, for each of its first twenty-six issues — published from 1979 to 1990 — the tripartite subtitle “Theory/Culture/Ideology” was emblazoned prominently on the journal’s cover, the slash marks leaving in typical tantalizing abeyance the exact character of the relationship between these various phenomena. That forbearance, I think, indicates that for all its interest in theory, Social Text has never had a theory of theory — except that, insofar as theory “explains” practice, it must necessarily derive from the latter. But if this elementary — and, I would imagine, unobjectionable —  materialist proposition itself seems to constitute a unitary theory of theory, it has in my experience consistently fallen short of functioning in that way at Social Text, chiefly because at no point has everyone involved been able to agree on what constitutes practice. This fact was made evident during my first Social Text collective meeting, sometime in 1994 or 1995. As I remember it, the event was preliminary to my being officially elected to membership in the group — one of a couple gatherings that, at that point, one was required to attend, on the invitation of a current member, before being considered for formal admission. We convened in the Greenwich Village apartment of another New York City – area academic intellectual on a weekend afternoon, making small talk over light refreshments before focusing our attention on (as I recall) the function of the journal in relation to the collective’s more general intellectual activism. During the prelude I struck up a conversation with a woman sitting next to me in the circular chair arrangement — someone I never again saw and whose name now escapes me — whom, in response to her query, I told I was a literary critic. Her expression immediately became stern and disapproving: “I don’t trust literature people,” she said. “They think that everything is text!” I could have allowed that, in my own estimation as well, some members of the field seemed to understand 248

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Jacques Derrida’s declaration that “il n’y a pas de hors-texte” in rather too restrictive a fashion, but what would that have amounted to other than my admitting that some of my colleagues did not seem so astute as one might have wished? 5 Alternatively, and more pointedly, I might have asked what she thought was signified by the word text in the phrase social text itself, and, given its appearance there in the first place, how she came to be involved in this group. As it happened, I was too taken aback to do either of these things, but, of course, the fact is that text, properly understood, itself comprises social practice, so that certain types of inquiry brought to bear on text can indeed generate theory of just the sort that has long been the purview of Social Text, the journal. I needn’t have worried too much over my inarticulacy in that instance, as both of the points I wanted to make had already been registered by John Brenkman in the very first issue of Social Text itself. Writing on “Deconstruction and the Social Text” in the issue’s “Unequal Developments” section (my favorite among the journal’s features, which has recently been reintroduced, sans the title), Brenkman mounted a critique of contemporary deconstructionist practice that also constituted a gloss on the journal’s title phrase. “The literary text,” Brenkman averred, “is a signifying act whose context includes, for example. . . , political discourse. . . , the symbolic formations of religion. . . , the entire collection of those kinds of statements traditionally called ideology. . . , even the codes that regulate material production and exchange.” Observing that “the general or, if you will, social text comprises all these discourses, each of which has a distinct history [and] entails its own signifying operations,” Brenkman accordingly concluded that “the deconstructive reading of literature, when satisfied with its limited conception of intertextuality” — that is, one restricted to recognizedly “literary” texts and to the tradition of “idealist philosophy since Plato” — actually “narrows the scope of reading, which it had promised to expand” (ST 1, 1979). The problem, in other words, was not that literary critics “think that everything is text,” but that they — and arguably those who charged them with this fault — entertained too limited an understanding of text. Admitting the urgency and import of an expansively conceived social text, Brenkman contended that “the task of literary analysis is to find the means of performing the shifts in register that the social text requires,” so as to address adequately such components of that text as “the economic codes and the mode of production,” or “political representation and the collective exercise of power” (ST 1, 1979). If the points at which those “shifts” are demanded are precisely the sites at which different discourses intertextually articulate with one another, then what I refer to above as practice comprises the particular means by which such articulation is effected. And if I say that never has everyone at Social Text been able to agree on what constitutes Social Text 100

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practice, I mean simply that those means of articulation are always contingent, contested, and open for debate — a situation that not only obtains far beyond the ambit of Social Text itself, but also should by no means be understood as a problem to be overcome, as it merely suggests that the production of theory is an unending project that we cannot forswear. By extension, I guess, that means that the work of Social Text, too, will never be finished, and I must confess to finding some comfort in that. I mean, if we must confront such certainties as death, taxes, ideology, is it not good to know that il n’y a pas de hors-théorie, either? Notes 1. Reported on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer (PBS), 23 October 2008, transcript available at www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/july-dec08/crisishearing _10 – 23.html. 2. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)” (1969), in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 127 – 87; 162 for the cited definition. Raymond Williams, “Theory,” in Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (1983; New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 316–18; 317 for the quoted passage. 3. Ibid., 316. 4. Stuart Hall, “The Toad in the Garden: Thatcherism among the Theorists,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 35 – 57; see esp. 42. 5. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (1967), trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 158.

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University Randy Martin

The thirty-year span in which Social Text has been published has seen its own great transformation in the university. Pursuing the injunction to be what Andrew Ross termed “a journal of tendency” invites consideration of how we might think of our editorial work in an activist and interventionist vein, and a persistent motif in the journal’s efforts has been a tracking of the politics of our work. Academic labor nestles in the three major organizational forms of the past hundred years: the professional association, the industrial union, and the political party. We can think organization immanently, as a revaluation of where our work takes us and to what effect. Organizational immanence is intersectional, multiple, polyvalent, precisely what we have come to know about identification and interpellation. Hence, organization is not simply an institutional body to join, but an imaginary or register invoked by the material implications of intellectual work. As the professoriate loses the autonomy that had marked education as an end in itself, the professional association is impelled to reconsider its disciplinary socialization from simple reproduction through replication of a grammar of specialization to the pressing epistemological outcomes borne by critical interdisciplinarity of the sort that the journal has abidingly sought to textualize. That this breakdown in epistemological self-regulation is a crisis of academic labor is amply exposed in Marc Bousquet’s work (ST 70, 2002) on the waste product of higher education — an internal excess that ends rather than being authorized by a credential. The remilling of professional associations to attend to their putative futures — whether the graduate student insurrection in the Modern Language Association, the reengineering of a public sociology, or the radicalization of the American Association of University Professors —  points to the internal transformation of the organizational forms that

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associate us and therefore the vitality of critique to the prospects of work. At stake in these movements is the shift from faculty governance, centered on the independence of departments to set their curricula, to university governance, where the matter of what knowledge gets made for provides a different axis from which to consider self-rule. As less of the university is centered on teaching, this question of sovereignty shifts from preservation of academic freedom to the mastery of administrative fiat. The tacit knowledge of how the institution works is a paradisciplinary competence that is beginning to be marshaled among professional bodies. The larger alliance, therefore, lies in moving across occupational positions and categories that compose the larger knowledge sector where universities now struggle to compete. Artists and engineers, media workers and data processors, biotechnologists and designers do not jettison their professional identities, but they do persistently renegotiate their own labor as work comes and goes. That the university’s enrollment in adult and continuous education programs is now, at 100 million per year, five times that of matriculated students points to an adjunct role of the university itself in the lateral mobility of a highly volatile knowledge sector. This ongoing formation and decomposition of a professional-managerial class sees its organizational resonance in the presence of industrial unions such as the United Auto Workers for graduate students and adjuncts, the leveraging and alliance of the travails of clerical and service workers, the advocacy of fair-labor practices (No Sweat, No Coke, divestment) led by undergraduates, and the convergence of knowledge-sector unions such as the Communications Workers of America. The industrialization of knowledge in which the university is now fully vested opens a Pandora’s box of affiliation, from mass intellectuality in a commons or undercommons (Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, ST 79, 2004), to the revaluing of the cultural discount that entwines artistic and academic labor in pointed unionization drives (Andrew Ross, ST 63, 2000). The calls for justice, for access, for an alignment of educational capacities with critical social ends cannot be decided simply within the occupational and class lineaments of academic labor (Ellen Willis, Micki McGee, both in ST 70, 2002). The older promises of higher education to meld professional competence with civic virtue had named a state function for the university that was the foundation of its national advance. To the extent that the university remains haunted by these civic claims, knowledge making becomes a matter not simply of professional training or industrial advance, but of the specter of participation, informed decision making, even just dispensation toward social wealth that underwrite material means of such conceptions of advancement. Knowledge that bears an address to issues of what a national interest might be, of who gets served and what is serviced, of what kind of public 252

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is being made good — these are matters of state. The desire to monopolize legitimate means of knowledge is made fragile and exposed in its particularity when scholars of the Middle East, or of science and technology, or of heteronormativity are attacked, as if what they know places at risk the silencing monologics of the state. The dissident voices that run from Edward Said (ST 1, 1979) to Eve Sedgwick (ST 29, 1991) to the explosive science wars issue (ST 46/47, 1996) index the activist intellectual’s resonance with the state and invocation of that organizational register that encompasses the exercise of state power in its myriad form — namely, the political party. At times, the violation of this code of silence is explicit, as when it touches upon the capacity to wage war against errant populations either directly or by proxy. Unsurprisingly, area knowledge borne of foreign-policy instrumentality has been treated as a pariah in this context. In other moments, the relation between critique and the state is refracted to epistemological and disciplinary turf, as seen in the cordon around big science, which goes to the heart of what should properly be funded as research on behalf of the public. However we think of ourselves, state responses suggest that the partyform is seen in us, that some knowledge is already attached to this kind of power. For many in academia, this connection between critique and the party-form is most elusive. Certainly, a corrective would begin with the recognition of how critical endeavors already insinuate organizational reach. That one of Social Text’s own founders, Stanley Aronowitz, has recognized this link in writing (in his book Left Turn) and in running (for New York state governor on the Green Party ticket) and was fond of proclaiming the collective as an inheritor of the theoretical wing of party work is worth recollecting on this occasion of backward and forward glancing. Surely, the university is not one. The gaps between what it demands on the job and what it suffers as work, between its excessive promises and the excess it cannot absorb, open prospects for another hundred issues and more.

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Eng-Beng Lim

The university’s “excessive promises and the excess it cannot absorb” point to yet another set of revalorizing knowledge streams that have not only “turned pro” (Randy Martin, ST 79, 2004), but also global. There is a long tradition of critique in Social Text about the university’s intellectual recidivism as a cognate of the neoliberal market ideal that claims to have “rendered obsolete political and cultural modes of thought and action” (Christopher Newfield, ST 44, 1995). In this U.S. context, the intensification and absorption of capital-centered agendas not only raise the stakes for what counts as academic labor, but also call for the elimination of nonmarket life, as well as alternative subjectivities and social formations. Such executive forms of modernity creeping into the administrative logic of U.S universities are turning them into educative empires with outposts all around the world. This begets the question: what happens when “America as the global model of civilization” is turned from a gambit for mobilizing progressive action through education (Aronowitz, ST 79, 2004) into a mantra for the global university? In recent years, U.S. universities have tightened the race to become the global university by using a celebratory rhetoric of internationalism, outreach, and exchange. Yale University, for instance, declares its ambition to “become a truly global university — educating leaders and advancing the frontiers of knowledge not simply for the United States, but for the entire world.”1 While once knowledge transfers involved forging links with peer institutions overseas, they have now become high-tech and highly priced tickets to the global marketplace. Many recent partnerships have rewarded U.S. universities with millions in gifts, research money, and administrative start-up funds as a kind of dowry for economic makeovers and marriages. In a way, the “global model of civilization” has been co-opted by the design

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of the global university as American Corporation Inc. University presidents and transoceanic elites often broker these institutional connections or transactions as a matter of innovation, but the simultaneous pursuit of status and revenue streams points to their neocolonial and corporate agendas. Significantly, professions of globality are now being concretized through the establishment of U.S. academic “outposts” or satellite campuses in Asia and the Middle East. Attaining an actual, global address has become the next chapter of the U.S. university’s rabid corporatization. The U.S. universities are, however, not alone in executing this expansionist and entrepreneurial plan. A dominant fraternity comprised of European and Australian universities is also part of the fray. These outposts of Western universities stage the return of the colonial metropole by reestablishing the latter’s geographic and political bifurcations: center/periphery, main/ outpost, West/rest. They also intensify the privatization and commodification of education by focusing on value over social equity, skill-sets over critique, brand over consciousness. Hence, professional training across the disciplines is purveyed at these “prestigious” outposts as the gold standard of the global university experience. At Doha, one can study engineering at Texas A&M University, journalism at Northwestern University, computer science and business at Carnegie Mellon University, and medicine at Cornell University. The only full-fledged liberal arts campus will be opened by New York University in Abu Dhabi in 2010, and it remains to be seen how it will operate as an outpost. The global institutional contours of the global U.S. university render the “local” struggles around academic labor issues such as graduate-student union activism, the canon wars, and disciplinary fights in new light. What counts as proper academic labor or valuable studies is now subject to neoliberal agendas that celebrate the possibilities of marketable innovation, exportable training, and worldwide tutelage-for-pay. As the production of global knowledge comes to be the “new” interdisciplinarity, advanced thinking is premised on technologies of innovation that take precedence over all other questions. Yet the epistemic stakes of intellectual innovation, political agency, and creative practices continue to hinge on the regulatory logics of the university’s corporatization. This is most evident in the division of academic labor in departments of the visual and performing arts where both institutional legibility and self-legibility are premised upon the bifurcation of artists and scholars, theory and practice, form and content. Meanwhile, Eurocentricism continues to haunt the instruction of ideas in these areas. Theater history classes, for instance, are still embroiled in configurations that pit Europe against the World. Fraught as this division is, it still marks an improvement over the previously dominant curriculum, which, since the sixties, had emphasized Western civilization. Social Text 100

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With these ongoing struggles on “home” turf, academics must ask what it would mean to export or engage in a network of interest and knowledge production that far exceeds the particularities of the U.S. social and cultural landscape. Would the appointment of ever more adjuncts at the satellite campuses and the valorization of labor and knowledge on the terms of the global university seal the fate of activism and progressive action and thought? The current global economic crisis, particularly with the depreciation of oil and national reserves at host countries, may put a dent in the global university’s unlimited expansion. Would the reality of reduced profits and monetary incentives deter the U.S. university’s global ambition to be the nuclei of world education? Would the form and flow of knowledge become more of an intercultural and intellectual exchange and less of a transaction? Note 1. Richard Levin, “The Global University,” speech delivered 7 May 2001, Peking University. See opa.yale.edu/president/message.aspx?id=45 (accessed 27 May 2009).

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War Allen Feldman

In his essay “Preliminary Thoughts on the Congo Crisis” (ST 17, 1999), Mahmood Mamdani proposed a postcolonial structure of flexible enfranchisement bifurcated between civic and ethnic membership as a disparate allocation of political subjecthood between the individuated citizen and diverse ethnic multitudes. Under the pressures of globalization and the subsequent hegemonic expansion of the war on terror, this model mutates into a distinction between the citizen as a fully present, frequently biopoliticized subject and the dangerous encrypted and collectivized body of the infiltrating minoritized sleeper or mole who infests the host body of the nation-state citizen, rendering it both mutable and a hostage. Mamdani posed a structuring enemy as an in situ yet disavowed parasitical core of state reproduction that legitimated the state’s own turn to terror. Almost a decade prior to this, Mick Taussig, in “Terror as Usual: Walter Benjamin’s Theory of History as a State of Siege” (ST 23, 1989), pointed out that the securocratic state, in contrast to the disciplinary state, conscripted terror for reconstituting power as “an opportunistic positionless position which recognizes that the terror in such disruption is no less than that of the order it is bent on eliminating.” Both Mamdani and Taussig approached political “terror” not as a political crime but as a formation guarding against the loss of the political in the violent countermeasures it enabled. Taussig describes this emerging political aesthesis as a “nervous system (facing) one way toward hysteria, the other way toward numbing and apparent acceptance, both ways flip-sides of terror, the political Art of the Arbitrary, as usual.” In the wake of the collapse of cold-war bipolar politics, Jacques Derrida in 1994 wrote:

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Losing the enemy would simply be the loss of the political itself. . . . The invention of the enemy is where the urgency and the anguish are; this invention is what would have to be brought off, in sum, to repoliticize, to put an end to depoliticization. Where the principal enemy, the “structuring” enemy, seems nowhere to be found, where it ceases to be identifiable and thus reliable — that is, where the same phobia projects a mobile multiplicity of potential, interchangeable, metonymic enemies.1

Derrida was commenting on the friend/enemy binary that Carl Schmitt theorized as the condition of possibility of all politics. For Schmitt, the loss of the polar enemy was not a political crime but a crime against the political itself insofar as the disappearing enemy marks the ends and borders of the political and defaces the threshold between the political and the nonpolitical. However, as a crime against the political, as that which threatens depoliticization as kenosis, the emptying of value equivalence and thus identity, the disappearance of a stable, fixed, and structuring enemy would not be the absence of war or the absence of structuration: “Losing the enemy would not necessarily be progress, reconciliation. . . . It would be . . . an unheard-of violence, the evil of a malice knowing neither measure nor ground. . . . The figure of the enemy would then be helpful — precisely as a figure — because of the features that will allow it to be identified as such, still identical to what has always been determined under this name.”2 The principal enemy is replaced and displaced by figures of the enemy, tropes and metaphors, emblematica and traces, apparitions and specters of the enemy. Derrida’s formulation evokes Lewis Carroll’s theorem in Through the Looking-Glass — the name of the name is not the name — and there can be no doubt that we are embroiled in wars of naming and unnaming, including what can be named or unnamed as war itself. For Derrida, the disappearing enemy would also be the departure of a reliable and calculable enemy; the end of systems of politicaldiscursive commensuration, measure, capitalization, and conservation that a calculable and prognosticated enemy enables and anchors. It would be the “unleashing of the incommensurable,” says Derrida, and of an alterity without end, requiring an isomorphic means without end that would save the political — the means that we now know as asymmetric war, as the unending war of and against terror, and of other emblematica of the immeasurable, such as shock and awe. However this is also a war of political effects and consequences deemed not worthy of measurement, such as collateral damage, the discounted Iraqi dead, and the unlimited detention of perpetual “terrorists” at various hidden black sites. What unfolds between a war without measure and a war that refuses measurement? The subjects of extraordinary rendition and “enhanced interrogation” regimes cannot be indicted, accused, or tried as this would not only render them calculable, to measure their offenses and non-offenses, but 258

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also render their very detention and torture measurable and recallable by ethics and law, which would be to calculate the limits and thresholds of the nonlaw that detains and warehouses these figures. Thus the ends of such interminable detention is to render the detainees virtual, virtually guilty, sentenced and judged, to render them as legal specters, and as containers, placeholders, and symbolic coordinates for a spectral terror that also persists beyond law. For all of these hidden sites of disappearance, rendition, collateral injury, death, and ethico-legal deferment, must, like their captives and victims, be detained and deferred in a transcendental realm of the incommensurate, the sublime emergency without end. This structuring enemy as binary alter or as an endlessly deferred subject, present or disappearing, measurable or not, remains the guarantee, witness and provocation, of national self-identity. In speaking of the incommensurability unleashed by the (de)structuring enemy Derrida tacitly disputes any sequence of before and after between the calculable and incalculable enemy. Derrida presents a dialectical law of the enemy (one without a reconciliation); the present and promised enemy contaminate and interpenetrate each other; the structuring enemy is an amalgam of enemies promised, manifest and receding, within and without, forthcoming and withheld. As Slavoj Žižek describes this, the enemy is the nebenmensch, the next man, the neighbor: “There is the Other qua Real, the impossible Thing, the inhuman partner, the Other with whom no symmetrical dialogue, mediated by the Symbolic Order is possible. . . . the neighbor as the Thing, means that beneath the neighbor as my semblant, my mirror image there always lurks the unfathomable abyss of radical otherness, of a monstrous thing that cannot be gentrified.”3 However, for Derrida, the disappearing enemy would take up a new abode in a terrain of disappearance, structural deniability, and disavowal among reciprocally disavowed objects and victims — among the dehistoricized, the demediatized, and the desubjectified. Thus it was a matter of pure necessity that the vanishing yet always structuring enemy be sought in endless alterity, delay, and deferment, in the terrain of the political trace: “The trace is not only the appearance of the origin. . . . it means that the origin did not even disappear, that it was never constituted except reciprocally by a non-origin, the trace which then becomes the origin of the origin.”4 The spectral weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), the theodical fantasy of an archaic Islamo-fascism, and first-responder bioterror rehearsals of the end-times are trace structures that solidify Ground Zero as the originating and magnetizing revenant of all other apparitions of the war on terror, what Derrida would have claimed as the hauntological ground, and Taussig “the nervous system” of the political. Due to all these revenants and ghost effects of WMDs, conspiratorial masterminds, and compulsory democracy-as-regime-change, there needed Social Text 100

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to be a complementary labor of conservation and anchorage: the evocative consignment of Osama bin Laden to his hashasheen-evoking cave and the confinement without trial of terrorists to dungeons or black sites, all of which stand in symmetrical relation to the nationalized dead entombed at Ground Zero. These locales of containment, storage, and anchorage are topological simulacra of a once reliable friend/enemy relation, a process that reaches its culmination in the commodification of the enemy as dissident Sunni and Shia militias were paid off to stop fighting the Americans and redirected to killing their respective splinter groups and whatever paramilitary units that could be made to pass for Al Qaeda. As the war in Iraq, the bad war, descends into a politics of bribery and American-engineered communalization, the Afghanization and Pakistanizaton of the political has been rapidly shoved into its place by Barack Obama as the “return of the new,” in order to secure our purchase on the disappearing enemy and thus to enforce our own precarious political identity — now even in greater need of securitization due to the crisis of global capitalism subverted by the virtualized terror-objects of toxic subprime credit and credibility. What this tapping into an inexhaustible third-world labor reserve of terror actually achieves is the continued conservation/sacralization of 9/11 as the origin of the political theologicalfundamentalist right to unilateral preemptive first strike and globalized outsourced torture. Thus Obama’s renewed war in Afghanistan and at the Pakistani border renews vigilance over, and shields the unbearable excess encrypted in, Ground Zero, whose possible kenosis would threaten American depoliticization. This Ground Zero conservation/preservation project is not limited to Obama’s militarism. Consider the degree to which the recent presidential campaign introjected the war on terror, transferring the latter’s axiomatic tropes from neocolonial borders to Obama, as a placeholder for the disappearing-reappearing terrorist: Obama, the mole; Obama, the sleeper harboring hidden associations and the excess of racial mixing, transcultural and imputed ideological promiscuity and with ghostly historical chickens coming home to roost; Obama, exemplar of Orlando Patterson’s characterization of the African American as the personification of “natal alienation”; Obama, the transient and transitive subject metonymically related to terrorists and covert migrancy (mysterious birth certificate, madrassa schooling, and an illegally resident aunt); Obama, the African American whose epidermal and natal difference precipitated calls for his branding with American flag pins — surrogates of the branding irons that once registered the enslaved in America. That this mythography did not prevail in the election does nothing to mitigate its presence, currency, necessary circulation, and malleability in American political culture; for it discloses that the unwinnable exteriorized war on terror can be recalled, amelio260

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rated, supplemented, and commemorated by an interiorized war of surplus securitization. These ceremonies of fidelity to the Ground Zero container expressed not just the panic of Republican and Democratic adversaries and the avarice of predatory media, but also a broader sociological reflex capable of as much flexible targeting as the war on terror itself. The global war on terror mobilized to defend the memory of democracy assaulted was redeployed to immunize that democracy from electorally assaulting itself — from falling into the exteriority and forgetfulness termed “Obamanation.” In this framework of bad names and returning revenants, it is no surprise that Obama, in turn, inoculated his candidacy with the Afghani/ Pakistani war as the good, winnable, and calculable war, thereby bending the arc of American exceptionality to the west Asian frontier, a passage that will betray his promise of military closure and homecoming. The disappearing enemy has its cognate in the disappearing state, or what Taussig termed the “nonpositioned” state, which is not the absence or simple negation of the state. I term this development the “becomingnonstate-of-the-state” — an apparatus of political virtualization invested in the production of vicarious power rather than the practice of law conserving violence, classification, or discipline. This counterfactual state is shaped by secrecy, programmatic indifference, and institutionally orchestrated inattention and misdirection, which can traverse anonymous disappearances, programmatically forgotten massacres, misplaced burial grounds of the executed, and the outsourced back-spaces and black sites of torture. The counterfactual state-become-nonstate is rule by voyeuristic power, as the state apparatus is retrofitted and swapped out in transplanted and exorbited organs of aggression that task everyday life with violence, intimidation, and terror. Today the exemplary corporate body without organs is the state-become-nonstate, with its detachable prosthetic tendrils of force and violence. The state-become-nonstate is a “deactualization” of the state that has nothing to do with a decrease in its pragmatic efficacy; quite the contrary. It coincides in part with what Michel Foucault anticipated as the capillary “de-institionalization” of panoptical power, which he identified as aspiring to continuous command and control of everyday life. However, the contemporary securocratic state no longer requires a continuous biography or legal continuity as a correlate to continuous panoptical power over a body subjected to compulsory visibility. Compulsory and contingently constructed zones of invisibility, alternating with optical saturations of shock and awe cutting out zones of sheer human exposability, are the order of the day. This is a politicized fort/da game by which the state manipulates and enacts its mastery over its own disappearance in the state of emergency. (The Freudian fort/da game foregrounds a certain object and also conceals the object that the mastering subject “causes” to appear and disappear, Social Text 100

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while simultaneously pointing to the sovereign subject’s own disappearance from the game, as an object in itself.) The becoming nonstate of the state is the self-sacrifice or selfsubjugation of the state to the nonstate. It entails the self-subjugation of law-conserving violence to law-transgressing violence; of formalized political policy to informalized and covert violence; of a declared state of war to undeclared, quotidian, low-intensity violence; of national mobilization to domination diffused and pursued through outsourced, privatized, and corporatized terror in ghettoized emergency zones. Political theory thus needs to develop an antisubjectivist and antiformalist theory of sovereignty to the degree that the existing model of sovereignty is predicated on inadequate theories of the political subject and split between nomothetic and anomic power. An antisubjectivist theory of sovereignty theorizes the state form as irreducibly manifold and heterogeneous. No longer denoting sovereignty as numerically one, as a synthetic unity identical with itself, the emergent anarchic securocratic state is incapable of instructing us about the legitimacy and illegitimacy of norms, particularly on what counts and does not count as the enemy beyond count. Notes 1. Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (New York: Verso, 2005), 84. 2. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 83. 3. Slavoj Žižek, “A Plea for Ethical Violence,” Bible and Critical Theory 1 (2004): 4. 4. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1974), 61 – 62.

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