Discourse and Culture

The Creation of America, 1870-1920

Alun Munslow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136035586
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Written history is literary artifact: taking this as its starting point, Discourse and Culture argues that the Foucauldian concept of the shifting scale of linguistic and historic values must be the central focus for a new interpretation of American culture and ideology. Six major American historical figures are evaluated as products of the conflict between subordinate and dominant influences in American society: steelmaster Andrew Carnegie; labour leader Terence V. Powderly; historian of the West Frederick J. Turner; social reconstructionist Jane Addams; race leader Booker T. Washington; and black nationalist W.E.B. du Bois. Discourse and Culture re-assesses the relationship between ideology and cultural formation by asking if cultural change can be explained as a function of discourse. The book draws upon the ideas of Althusser, Gramsci and Hayden to address this issue, which lies at the very heart of contemporary debate on the character of cultural history.

Chapter 1
Discourse and culture

The process of cultural formation in America, 1870–1920

The purpose of this book is to examine the role of discourse in the formation of American culture between 1870 and 1920. With reference to six significant historical figures the object is to characterise the deep structure of the American republican social and political imagination through a model derived from our knowledge of narrative structures. As an exercise in the new cultural history it is written at a time when historians are beginning to acknowledge that their enterprise is structured as much by its written form as by its content.¹ The reconstruction of the past is about the interpretation of evidence, but it is presented in a narrative form constructed from metaphor, plot and arguments that carry ideological implications. Written history is representational, an analogue of what happened in the past, and offered to the reader packaged predominantly as romance, tragedy, farce or satire.² While the traditional empirical method assumes language to be a non-arbitrary mode of communication the new cultural history has prompted the deconstruction of the referent or content of meaning (the ‘Signified’) emphasising instead the actual language (the ‘signifier’) in historical discourse.³ As a consequence a new understanding of the historical imagination is being gained.

This new cultural history acknowledges that cultural change may be explained in part as a function of discourse. The explanations for American cultural formation in the late nineteenth-century are to be derived not only from the examination of the evidence of factory life and urban living conditions, but also from the analysis of the discourse of dominant and subordinate groups represented in the voices of class, race and gender.⁴ For the critic of history Hayden White this latter question suggests that the historical imagination must itself exist intertextually within, and act as a constituent part of the social and political imagination. Along with the model of cultural formation provided by the French structuralist critic of history Michel Foucault and Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, White’s formalist theories of narrative offer a morphology for the study of America’s republican social and political imagination as it developed in the post helium era.⁵

That language and its figurative character is a material force that shapes lived experience has long been recognised. In American historiography Herbert Gutman’s studies of black slaves and industrial workers have, for example, revealed how their widely different worlds were constituted by their sermons, speeches, songs and pamphlets. Meaning or significance in any given culture is not, therefore, a simple reflection of its economic foundation, but is, rather, a linguistic mediation.⁶ Literary critics have also ‘strayed’ into the domain of the historian by exploring the relationship between image, symbol and metaphor in reconstructing the American past.⁷ American cultural history has borrowed from the disciplines of philosophy and literary theory modes of analyses that illuminate the social and political imagination of the past.⁸ Recent work in literary theory on the way texts or discourses are produced can be usefully employed by historians not only in reassessing the nature of their discipline, but also in the task of reconstructing how cultures develop a collective imagination, explicable as narrative forms.

The basis for a narrative model of cultural formation is provided by the American formalist critic of history Hayden White as suggested by Foucault’s notion of the episteme. Because cultural formation involves conflict between competing social groups French cultural critic Michel Foucault also suggests the meaning of that struggle is constituted through and in language. In Foucault’s view each age possesses its own episteme, or manner of acquiring and using knowledge based upon the structure of figuration, which is the process of noting similarities and differences between objects. What Foucault suggests is the existence of domains of knowledge that legitimise the different modes of discourse within which the human sciences (discourses) can be elaborated. In Foucault’s history each epoch represents the colonisation of events, people and things by different linguistic protocols each of which constitute a different episteme as mediated in its many constituent discourses. In his exegesis of Foucault, Hayden White maintains ‘each of the epochs in Western cultural history, then, appears to be locked within a specific mode of discourse, which at once provides its access to “reality” and delimits the horizon of what can possibly appear as real’.⁹ The end result is the notion of a tropically shaped social and political imagination.

In Madness and Civilisation Foucault describes how ways of relating to deviancy reflected this deeper linguistic structure for ordering all things in society, through a shift from resemblance to difference. In the sixteenth-century the dominant mode of discourse was metaphoric given the general desire to find resemblance in different things – so the human sciences were dominated by similitude, analogy and agreement. This search for similarity eventually revealed the extent of the differences between objects and things, leading to the abandonment of discourse founded as Foucault says on the paradigm of resemblance. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the dominant mode of discourse was represented through categories of serial arrangement and order, and of contiguity cast in the trope of metonymy as the comprehension of discontinuity. Hence the treatment of the insane as dangerous opposites of a presumed normalcy. Foucault has attempted to demonstrate how the reform of their treatment in the nineteenth-century was influenced by a third mode of categorising the relationship between similarity and variance, that of a stress on alterations within a norm rather than as oppositions to a norm, cast in the trope of synecdoche.

White maintains that because written history is a literary artefact, historians like other writers of realist literature share and use the same narrative structures and sense of difference in interpreting their world. Historians construct stories (narratives) to effect explanations then use the three basic strategies of explanation by emplotment, explanation by formal argument and explanation by ideological implication. These strategies of explanation are the surface characteristics of the narrative, with White suggesting a deep structure of consciousness which determines how the writer/historian elects to explain the data through their narrative. It is White’s position that language is found in neither the economic base nor the social superstructure but is prior to both. This primacy of language is cast in terms of the four major tropes of figurative language: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony.¹⁰

Through his reading of Foucault White has married his theory of tropes to the idea of the episteme arguing it is feasible to describe the cultural practices of any historical period with reference to its dominant tropic prefiguration.¹¹ Given that the tropes constitute the deep structures of human thought in the Saussurian sense of creating meaning through binary opposition – the idea of otherness, or difference in any historical era – is at the core of its social and political imagination. White has demonstrated that the theory of tropes is a way of characterising the dominant modes of the historical imagination specifically in nineteenth-century Europe, and by extension to the level of cultural paradigm, his model allows the characterisation of the deep and surface structures of the social and political imagination.¹²

Fundamental to this narrative model of cultural formation is White’s assumption that ideology is determined by the primal text, rather than the material world.¹³ The analysis offered here, however, modifies White’s textual absolutism with Gramsci’s argument that ideology is as much a product of the material as the linguistic world. In the case of post helium America the emergent business culture served its material interests through its own intellectual leadership and the co-optation of the leadership and language of subordinate Populist-producer, female and race groups. Its dominance was established not only through economic power, but also by the colonisation by its intellectuals of public discourse, and the attempt to create a unified rather than a class divided culture. The result was a new structure of power and a new definition of American republicanism.

While study of the lived experience of the anonymous American labouring classes reveals much about how a new republican cultural climate was created, it does not preclude an examination of the prominent in understanding the processes of cultural formation.¹⁴ Never a thinker to forget the masses, Gramsci argues that society and ideology are not best explored through enjoining battle with the ‘auxiliaries and the minor hangers-on’, rather it is necessary to tackle ‘the most eminent’.¹⁵ The role of the intellectual then in cultural formation is central. The definition of an intellectual has often been restricted to those members of the ‘high culture’ who played their parts in historical change as statesmen, members of the propertied aristocracy and those significant figures among the academic or cultured classes who wrote and thought for the intellectual and educated elite. But in the sense that all thinking people create and use language we are all, according to Gramsci, intellectuals.

Consequently this study examines five language terrains or discourses which were integral to the creation of American culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They are the languages of capital accumulation and enterprise, the producer tradition that was largely destroyed by economic change, the nationalist discourse of written history, the language of social reconstruction and the constitution of gender, and finally the language of race. Each discourse is assessed through the role of a key intellectual chosen for his or her significance in the process of cultural representation and ideological formation.¹⁶ Although for each figure another hundred might be offered as alternatives, because the objective is to explore the creation of the new republican social and political imagination, each figure chosen had to possess a truly national profile beyond the confines of their particular discourse. Assuming a culture to be the product of the interaction of the material base of a society and its superstructure of ideas then the connecting threads are the discourses of the intellectuals. The intellectual is the centre from which ideas irradiate and are disseminated ‘in the … form of current reality’. While the term intellectual includes everyone, for practical purposes Gramsci privileges those members of a social strata who undertake to organise their fellows.¹⁷ In this fashion every fundamental social group creates within itself its intellectual agents or deputies – its NCOs and junior officers.¹⁸

We may distinguish two types of bourgeois intellectuals – organic and traditional. The first group comprise the bureaucrats, lawyers, managers, entrepreneurs, civil servants, and technicians that the new bourgeois class ‘creates alongside itself’.¹⁹ The second group comprises the clergy, writers, teachers, academics, philosophers – those intellectuals who appear to be classless and not associated organically with any single fundamental social group, as Gramsci describes them ‘categories of intellectuals already in existence and which seemed indeed to represent an historical continuity’.²⁰ Historically in America it has not been as straightforward as this categorisation makes it seem. The six intellectuals examined here clearly emerged from the dominant bourgeois class to legitimise its dogma and cultural power in the absence of a substantive group of traditional intellectuals who, while losing their feudal economic power, maintained their ideological authority.²¹ Taken as a group then these six organic intellectuals articulated and translated emerging bourgeois values into popular language and belief.²²

The question arises why not choose individuals who ventilated radical views? While important as they were as contributors to the American social and political imagination, insurgent intellectuals by definition were not in the cultural mainstream, their social and political views often discredited and de-legitimised. The six finally chosen were included because their criticisms of both the residual republican order and the new business civilisation quickly became an integral part of that new order. Cast in a jeremiadic tone their opinions contained, deflected, and defused opposition. The six are Andrew Carnegie with his defence of popular capitalism, Terence V. Powderly in trades unionism and producerism, Frederick Jackson Turner and the creation of a national history, Jane Addams and the social reconstructionist New Woman, and the black cultural leaders Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois. Each in their own way warned against the pitfalls of America coming to terms with what the historian Alan Trachtenberg has called its ‘incorporation’.²³ By that is meant the growth of an industrialised, capitalist state in which the rise of the factory and city, the massive influx of immigrants and northern movement of black Americans combined to create new structures of power, authority, hierarchy, space, dissent and consent.

Initially, however, the incorporation of America cannot be understood without grasping the importance of the primary discourse of popular capitalism. This is undertaken by a close textual analysis of Andrew Carnegie’s major written works. Carnegie is chosen rather than any other major entrepreneurial figure, like Henry Saltonstall the cotton manufacturer, or Leland Stanford in railroading, or Frank Sprague in electronic traction, or any other single businessman, because he was most influential in directing public thinking about the relationship between equality, natural rights, poverty, free labour, Social Darwinism, and their relationship to a new image of the individual and economic exchange. As the leading figure of the emergent business civilisation he played a formidable role in creating the rationale for the post Civil War republican order among his own social strata, and among those producer groups he addressed.

The important question of whether residual producer groups were willing accessories in maintaining their own economic and political inequality is also addressed by examining the vision of America possessed by the Knights of Labor leader Terence V. Powderly. Much recent labour history scholarship has built on E.P. Thompson’s interpretation of working-class autonomy and workplace opposition to the dominance of the industrial bourgeoisie.²⁴ It has been argued that the conflicts which peppered so much of late-nineteenth-century American social history reveals the existence of a vibrant and oppositional American working class. However, the role of the producer intellectual opens up the question of a labouring class confederacy in their own exploitation. The reason for selecting Powderly rather than a socialist like Eugene Debs, say, lies in Powderly’s attachment to a new and revised republican heritage that produced a labour leader who actively rejected the idea of class dominance and subordinance. Powderly’s assimilation into the emergent-dominant bourgeois culture was not so much the result of an American consensus which rejected class as a legitimate category of social analysis, but rather demonstrates his acceptance of inter-class coherence and identity of interests.

Identity of class interest implies national unity, and the writing of American history was central to the confirmation of a national culture in the late nineteenth-century. The ideological colonisation of the past in the shape of the appropriation of certain myths and symbols remains a necessity for those wishing to reconstruct the present. Consequently the historical imagination of the historian of the frontier, Frederick Jackson Tu...