Reaganism in Literary Theory. Jeremiah Bowen
novelty of surface reading is thus presented as arising from a new political and cultural climate—as we have noted, in response to Bush’s blundering indifference to the values proper to a democratic republic. Best and Marcus imply that past political obfuscation looks sophisticated by comparison with the transparent lies and abuses of the Bush administration, which have rendered obsolete the sophisticated interpretive methods to which past generations turned in order to reveal political violence and oppression. The examples they cite are revealing enough to be worth quoting at length:
Those of us who cut our intellectual teeth on deconstruction, ideology critique, and the hermeneutics of suspicion have often found those demystifying protocols superfluous in an era when images of torture at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere were immediately circulated on the internet; the real-time coverage of Hurricane Katrina showed in ways that required little explication the state’s abandonment of its African American citizens; and many people instantly recognized as lies political statements such as “mission accomplished.”25
On first reading, their principal claim seems inarguable, in part because it is a description of their own experience: They report finding their training in “demystifying protocols” unnecessary for the purpose of decoding the administration’s blatant cruelty, incompetence and deceit. But this observation about their own experience and judgments is then immediately generalized into a normative program for the discipline, producing a claim that is complexly problematic and even self-contradictory—indeed, one might say it is “symptomatic.”
Their argument can be read as symptomatic because its aporias indicate a procedure of self-universalization characteristic of privilege, which can also be discerned as a systemic pattern in the disciplines of literary studies. And because all asymmetrical binaries of privilege and disempowerment or centrality and marginalization are intersectional, this pattern implicates even those of us for whom some salient vectors of marginalization or oppression are definitive. In other words, because few if any of us are defined by the disempowered or marginalized terms of every conceivable binary, most if not all of us are conditioned by some vector of privilege. Unacknowledged and unaddressed issues of privilege have continued to undermine literary studies’ social significance since the canon and theory wars of the eighties. Symptomatic indication can therefore be read as a trope for the homology between systemic disciplinary difficulties and the four difficulties specific to this argument: First, Best and Marcus misrepresent the novelty of the Bush administration in claiming its policies as their occasion. Second, the ambiguous relation of their methodological arguments to their experience of the Bush years is consonant with their ambiguous views on interpretation’s relation to politics. Third, this ambiguity regarding the relation between interpretive act and political implication opens the way for an immediate universalization of their own privileged position. And fourth, confusion about the politics of interpretation manifests in inconsistent representations of their intellectual lineage.
While it would be easy to dismiss their response to the Bush administration as a rhetorical device, merely an occasion for their argument with no more than decorative significance, it is rather the primary premise offered in support of their conclusion that symptomatic reading is obsolete or outmoded. Without the political frame, readers might be tempted to view their call for a new methodological consensus as arising purely from their own personal preferences or goals. While nothing in principle prevents them from framing their arguments in that way, they do not, and instead they cite a shared experience of the Bush administration as a turning point in the interpretation of politics. Demystification, they imply, was necessary at some time in the past, but the events they cite have made it “superfluous” for scholarship and teaching—because information about state violence has been made widely available (e.g., images from Abu Ghraib), inequitable state neglect has been prominently featured in news media (e.g., coverage of Katrina), and the president has made claims that “many people” know to be deceptive (e.g., “mission accomplished”). But if we attend carefully to these claims, we find that none of these events mark the epochal shift their argument presumes. None of these names a novel development of the Bush era, and so it is difficult to understand how these events can be supposed to have convinced Best and Marcus that we were entering upon a newly unmystified, unveiled era in politics.
Despite their characterization, the images from Abu Ghraib were not in fact “immediately circulated.” While it is technically true that those images were available on the Internet earlier than most Americans became aware of them, it took approximately 10 months for those abuses to garner widespread media attention. By way of comparison, this is only a few months less than it took the media to give national attention to the Mỹ Lai Massacre decades earlier, and information about that event was also available before the media thematized it as a national issue.26 Abuses at Abu Ghraib did not therefore represent an effectively new experience of immediate exposure. Similarly, what Best and Marcus characterize as “real-time coverage” of the state neglect of African Americans after Hurricane Katrina can be compared to page one of the New York Times on May 4, 1963, which prominently features the previous day’s events under the headline “Dogs and Hoses Repulse Negroes at Birmingham.”27 There does not seem to be anything new, therefore, about real-time attention to such racist state abuses.28 And after “mission accomplished,” the lies of the Iraq War do not appear to have been “instantly recognized” as such by most Americans— at least not in any way that effectively undermined Bush’s majority of the popular vote in 2004, which improved upon his failure to secure a majority in 2000. Perhaps as they were writing in 2009, amidst historically low approval ratings for Bush and in the wake of Obama’s victory, Best and Marcus forgot that the 2004 election records popular approval for Bush after two of the three events they cite.
If the same kind of immediacy and transparency that Best and Marcus impute to the Bush years could also reasonably be imputed to earlier periods, then we cannot conclude that their views were formed in response to changing conditions. This is evidence that the Bush administration functions not as a provocation for their call to reject “demystifying protocols” but as a post hoc rationalization. There is nothing new about Bush’s disregard for international law, civil rights, equitable treatment or transparently responsive governance—all of which are consistent with Republican Party rhetoric and policy under the Nixon, Reagan and Trump administrations. In the same way, the skepticism professed by Best and Marcus regarding political engagement in literary studies is not new. Hostility toward democratic governance is consistent with skepticism about the efficacy or desirability of political engagement, and both are perennial tendencies in a long-running war of position. They are especially characteristic of the neoliberal consistency that has gained in power and influence in the US during the last 50 years.
This leads us to the second difficulty, which arises when we consider the nature of this ostensible occasion for their argument: The obviousness of Bush’s abuses of power is cited in order to obviate political engagement in literary scholarship, as “the disasters and triumphs of the last decade have shown that literary criticism alone is not sufficient to effect change.” Here they admit literary scholarship’s implication in politics, by offering its lessons as germane to disciplinary objectives, but deny that such scholarship in turn has implications for politics. Literary studies is thus subordinated to determination by political events, while they deny its capacity to share in the determination of those events. So, while they disapprove of Bush’s actions, they also argue against scholars’ efforts to respond, dismissing them as pointless attempts to make literary criticism into “political activism by another name.” But if demystifying protocols cannot “explain our oppression” or “effect change,” as they claim, then why would it also be necessary to argue that its effects are obviated by the obviousness of Bush’s acts? The former implies that demystification is insufficient to the task, while the latter implies that it would be sufficient, but it is not necessary, since those abuses and lies are apparent even without sophisticated interpretive techniques. If criticism is incapable of explanation, then why insist that its explanations are unnecessary because “many people” recognize “immediately” or “instantly” the deceptions and abuses that are taking place?
Like their attribution of novelty to aspects of the Bush administration with ample precedent in US history, their argument in the alternative suggests that Bush is used as a rationalization for their