Manifesto of a Tenured Radical. Cary Nelson
kind of liberalism at work during the great purge of the Left in the 1950s and we know something of the monolithic right-wing culture to which it too readily capitulates. It is in fact not multiculturalism at all, but rather a monoculture in varied dress.
Such confident solutions are not available to a multiculturalism that wishes to maintain both more full historical knowledge and a greater frankness about present tensions. Reading a multicultural anthology compiled with such aims can involve powerful moments of epiphanic identification across cultural differences; it can also produce moments when difference is treasured for the sense of partially irreducible variety that is one of its pleasures. A more fully multicultural anthology will also provoke moments of self-interrogation and historical anguish. Yet such multicultural anthologies give us more still than recovered pain and ecstasy within inviolable cultural boundaries. They give us workbooks of discourses for rearticulation, texts for comparison, contrast, and realignment. They give us a discursive space in which to compare histories and test possible filiations and alliances. Properly assembled, multicultural anthologies mix Utopian longings with a historical review of the fate such longings have often met in the past. They indicate some of the bases for strategic alliances across different cultures in the future, while giving voice to the forces that will resist and undermine those same alliances. They thus promote realism and vision in the context of historical reflection, empowering progressive work without simply reinforcing readers’ self-images.
There is no way of assuring that readers will put anthologies to use in that fashion, just as there is no way of suturing a multicultural society in advance of its emergence. Much like individual texts, anthologies acquire different meanings in different contexts. Competing constituencies will construe their intertextual implications in diverse and contradictory ways. This is, to borrow a phrase Stuart Hall has put to good use, a multiculturalism “without guarantees.”5 That is the most we can ask for now, and it is better than the alternatives—misery, mayhem, and Republican right-wing extremism.
In moving from anthologies to political reflection on multiculturalism we need to accept the fact that there can be no secure social text to hold in view, let alone any renegotiated social space whose character can be guaranteed in advance. Despite what the Right wants to believe, the future cannot be guaranteed; all we can do is to educate ourselves about our diverse cultural traditions and try to maximize good will, while recognizing that even those ground rules will not be universally valued. What can be guaranteed, however, is that multicultural negotiations carried on in ignorance of one another’s history and traditions will be permeated with bad faith. It is also probably inevitable that the social forms that can structure such negotiations will themselves change under pressure from competing and distinctive cultural traditions. While the Right has willfully conflated culture and society, maliciously implying thereby that cultural diversity necessarily threatens the existence of any consensually maintained social institutions, there is reason to assume that cultural differences will prompt changes that cut broadly across social life. Indeed, there is sound basis to conclude that has always been the case. There is no part of social life which can be wholly protected from cultural pressures. It may not be necessary, however, that the center hold, nor even that the spaces of recognized social articulation be conceived of as exclusively central, nor even that everyone suddenly be miraculously invested in caring about our intercultural exchanges. There has not been universal, continuous engagement in public life in the past, and there is no reason to suppose we can expect it in the future. Our “common” culture, moreover, has never been common in the sense of meaning the same thing to every constituency and subculture. Nor have its elements penetrated every area of cultural life nor penetrated it to the same degree. It may be sufficient to agree that there need to be such spaces, including institutions in which power is shared, contracts and meanings are negotiated, contact is maintained, and common enterprises are agreed upon. Such spaces include our public schools and our legislatures. Those are among the places capable of producing some level of multicultural exchange; we do not need to be identical with one another and we do not need to forget our history for those institutions to function. They may even function better if we refuse to repress the past.
3 RELATIVISM, POLITICS, AND ETHICS
WRITING LITERARY HISTORY IN THE SHADOW OF POSTSTRUCTURALISM
How else could we entide that word “history,” now, except in speechmarks, under the sign of vocative instability, outside any assumed consensus? As perhaps the most over-employed item in the vocabulary of literary-critical and cultural analysis, “history” may well also be the least decisive. We return to history, work toward history, and espouse a historical method, but few of us can say exactly what we mean by history, except in the most gestural way. Those of us who worry about it at all find ourselves necessarily mired in complex theoretical retractions and modifications, bewildering enough to sponsor some fairly radical insecurities. Others, sensing a probable dead end street, run for the cover of the kind of “new historicism” that looks to history as to a safe and approved harbor, a place where one may sleep peacefully, lulled by anecdotal stories, after tossing on the stormy seas of deconstructive and theoretical Marxist uncertainty.
—David Simpson, “Raymond Williams”
The entire development of contemporary epistemology has established that there is no fact that allows its meaning to be read transparently.
—Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe,
“Post-Marxism without Guarantees”
In the current critical climate one may easily find proclamations of a “return to history” sharing disciplinary contemporaneity with declarations that objective historical knowledge is impossible. Given the far-reaching and apparently opposite nature of these claims, it is not surprising that many see them not only as irreconcilable but also as competing moral, epistemological, professional, and cultural agendas. They represent, or so we are often urged to conclude, radically different ways of thinking about both historiography and the world itself. I would not want to argue that it is possible to synthesize certainty and doubt as they are embodied in these positions, but rather, as I will argue, that there is reason to take up their relationship as a problematic.
Among the recent developments in literary studies to be most welcomed, I believe, are some that make such a negotiation possible, especially the increasingly close relationships between the discourses of theory and the discourses of minority scholarship and canonical critique. Through the 1960s and 1970s theory, or what was widely recognized as theory, largely stayed away from these projects of cultural recovery and critique. As I suggested in the opening chapter, what has in some quarters in recent years been variously hailed or mourned as the death of theory in fact represents theory’s productive engagement with and rearticulation to these material social projects. It may be, then, that theory conceived as an abstract, transhistorical metadiscourse has died. If so, I am not persuaded that its death is necessarily to be regretted. Theory that cannot be pursued with an Olympian disdain for its social contexts and effects is in many ways theory that can do more, rather than less, productive work both in academic disciplines and in the public sphere. That this is not obvious to English professors says more about the discipline than it says about the nature of theory.
I am interested in addressing one particular terrain within this general phenomenon—the mutual articulation of theory and the efforts to open up the canon in literary studies. My focus will be on one of my own contributions to this project, Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910–1945 (1989). The effects research for this and subsequent books and essays had on my teaching will be the subject of my fifth chapter, “Progressive Pedagogy without Apologies.” Here I want instead to focus on the book’s general cultural aims, but I want to begin not so much by reflecting on what I did and did not accomplish in that book but rather by laying out some of the intersecting theoretical and practical forces that made the book possible. I also hope thereby to disentangle some of the competing aims in the book, the countervailing pressures that shaped numerous tactical decisions made in the process of composition. Finally, by making those tactical decisions more explicit here than I did in the book itself, I may be able to make both my writing strategies and