Reaganism in Literary Theory. Jeremiah Bowen
of power over our lives and the primary enemy for any liberative project. But this is not the government we encounter inferentially in the relevant data, even if it is the government we encounter as referent for so much political rhetoric.
Indeed, while the positive impacts of Foucault’s US influence are marked in both Said and Sedgwick, his concept of state power, formed in a political context quite different than that of the United States, can easily lend itself to conclusions compatible with neoliberal and neoconservative attitudes toward “state control.” In part, then, Sedgwick’s students overlook the problems of their own time and place because they emulate models provided by professors and influential theorists, whose work responds to other times and places. The students are working on the problems posed by an anachronistic or culturally misplaced conception of governance, rather than responding to problems posed by their experience of the society in which they live. This problem of anachronism combines with the valorization of the hegemonic class culture, especially in environments organized centripetally (to aim at concentration rather than distribution of power) and narcissistically (to focus participants’ efforts on aggrandizing a central figure of emulative identification). Where students are taught to emulate elders, rather than explain their experience, where students are encouraged to universalize a particular cultural tradition and eternalize the explanations of specific historical moments, the problem Sedgwick observes in D. A. Miller’s work will be a necessary consequence, indicating a larger systemic problem of self-universalization characteristic of privilege.
It should not be surprising that academic disciplines disproportionately comprised of a privileged minority of wealthy white people—thus as insulated as possible from the precarity and caprice of markets and power, and conditioned by every prejudice in our society to see themselves as superior to others—have not broadly registered political or cultural shifts with more alacrity than Sedgwick suggests. Writing 15 years before my complaint, Sedgwick is already dismayed by the delay in responding to Reagan, citing an example from 15 years prior:
Writing in 1988—that is, after two full terms of Reaganism in the United States—D. A. Miller proposes to follow Foucault in demystifying “the intensive and continuous ‘pastoral’ care that liberal society proposes to take of each and every one of its charges.” As if! I’m a lot less worried about being pathologized by my therapist than about my vanishing mental health coverage.43
I am deeply grateful for Sedgwick’s confident scoff, which highlights the dramatic irony of Miller’s evocation of a universal welfare state never implemented in the United States. While those reared in the top income quintile of US households might have lived their lives with ample access to medical care, the remaining 80 percent of households have too often had only intermittent or precarious access to it. Writing in George W. Bush’s first term, Sedgwick observes that “since the beginning of the tax revolt, the government of the United States […] has been positively rushing to divest itself of answerability for care to its charges, with no other institutions proposing to fill the gap.”44 With dramatic increases in the discipline’s reliance on poorly compensated casual labor, it now seems certain that far fewer among English faculties have stable and reliable mental health coverage than did at the time of Sedgwick’s writing, though it is also likely that far more of us find ourselves in need of it.
Thirty years of neoliberal national policy since D. A. Miller’s rhetorical emulation of Foucault—a period in which such policies have driven the spread of precarity from manufacturing jobs to professional careers, as illustrated by the changes in English—demonstrates the victory of the counter-revolution Said warned against while Reagan was still in his first term. In the red-state, fundamentalist Christian, white working class subculture in which I was reared, far away from the demographics most likely to produce humanities professors, the words “secular, universalist liberal humanism” are not merely marginalized, as Sedgwick rightly suggests, and not even merely subject to the silence that might attend a taboo, but actively and energetically demonized. In my own experience, these terms seem to be among the more familiar names for what is perceived in such communities as a grand internal threat to the “real America”—one that matches the external threats of the Communist “Evil Empire,” “radical Islamic terror” or the once-always-approaching “migrant caravan.” “Secular humanism” and “liberalism” are titles given to an insidious, “globalist” anti-Christian plot as reviled as any of the racial, sexual and religious slurs with which these terms are routinely connected. Growing up inside (though, in many ways, on the wrong side of) that Real America, making and studying literature seemed like an alternative. Of course, this liberal secular world in which I sought refuge from reactionary moralism is not as diametrically opposed to fundamentalist conservatism as it is often supposed to be.
The examples Sedgwick cites therefore serve, in part, to remind us of the principle that undermines all privilege, the truth that must be obfuscated for privilege to persist: No particular view can also be a universal view. This negative principle implies a positive correlative: Every singularity of experience indicates a universal principle. For example, because the experience of state neglect is applicable to a far larger portion of humanity than Miller’s articulation of “pastoral care,” that paternalistic relation to the state, even if it was his experience, is not definitive of the state as such. But this does not mean that Miller’s experience is not worthy of articulation or indicative of pertinent truths about the state. The political contrariety we are now tasked with overcoming, if we hope to deliver democratic governance to future generations, is a forced choice between the violence of state neglect disguised as liberty, and the violence of state manipulation disguised as care. While I welcome Sedgwick’s “as if!” for the space it makes for my experience in the conversation, the experiences of paternalism that Miller articulates are also necessary to illuminate the ways in which state care can be corruptly manipulative, abusive and controlling. Rejecting both paternalistic liberalism and “tough love” conservatism would require a recognition of both as rationalizations for exploitative violence by appeal to misrepresentations of fidelitous love (philos).
These correlative principles— that every singularity is a path to universality, but no particularity can own or identify itself with the universal as such—entail that diversity is necessary to knowledge production. Not as a matter of public relations or normative moralism, but because universalizing any particular position or life experience inevitably leads to omissions that must be continuously suppressed if that claim to universality is to be maintained. The resulting misrecognitions and misapplications impoverish any attempt to solve problems, mobilizing the resources of the ego to impede, rather than shepherd, the transformative work of learning.
This insight is tangible in Sedgwick’s treatment of “paranoid reading,” not as the essence or definitional principle of theory or criticism “as such,” but as a particular critical “position”—using the Kleinian sense of this latter term: “the characteristic posture that the ego takes up with respect to its objects.”45 In questioning paranoid reading’s project of exposure, Sedgwick seeks to expand the range of positions available to theorists beyond that of paranoia, rather than to disqualify any position. She is not questioning the utility of that project for some ends, but only the wisdom of universalizing any particular approach: “The force of any interpretive project of unveiling hidden violence would seem to depend on a cultural context, like the one assumed in Foucault’s early works, in which violence would be deprecated and hence hidden in the first place.”46 As Sedgwick observes, this context differs from the era of Reaganism, what she calls the Reagan–Bush–Clinton–Bush America in which, “while there is plenty of hidden violence that requires exposure,” the dominant culture is conditioned by “an ethos where forms of violence that are hypervisible from the start may be offered as an exemplary spectacle.” From the Evil Empire’s nukes to Saddam’s WMD’s, from the shirtless suspects on Cops to Willie Horton, from “welfare queens” to casualties of AIDS, little effort is put into articulating pious concern for the victims blamed by a US government increasingly driven by neoliberal and neoconservative imperatives.
Of course, the neoliberal agenda of that period is well served by a phallic image of the state, as necessarily defined by domination or manipulative paternalism. And the inverse of the premise of phallic potency is the image of democratic