The Practices of Hope

Literary Criticism in Disenchanted Times

Christopher Castiglia

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781479822263
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Offers a positive approach to literary criticism At a moment when the “hermeneutics of suspicion” is under fire in literary studies, The Practices of Hope encourages an alternative approach that, rather than abandoning critique altogether, relinquishes its commitment to disenchantment. As an alternative, Castiglia offers hopeful reading, a combination of idealism and imagination that retains its analytic edge yet moves beyond nay-saying to articulate the values that shape our scholarship and creates the possible worlds that animate genuine social critique. Drawing on a variety of critics from the Great Depression to the Vietnam War, from Granville Hicks and Constance Rourke to Lewis Mumford, C.L.R. James, Charles Feidelson, and Richard Poirier, Castiglia demonstrates that their criticism simultaneously denounced the social conditions of the Cold War United States and proposed ideal worlds as more democratic alternatives. Organized around a series of terms that have become anathema to critics—nation, liberalism, humanism, symbolism— The Practices of Hope shows how they were employed in criticism’s “usable past” to generate an alternative critique, a practice of hope.

1

Nation

I Like America

I begin this chapter with two counterintuitive propositions. First, we are only now, nearly three decades after the nominal end of the Cold War, beginning to move past its influence on literary criticism, a belatedness that may be in large part responsible for our apparent uselessness in the contemporary world. And second, the influence of the Cold War is most strongly felt, paradoxically, when our critiques are aimed at the ideologies, particularly national exceptionalism, endorsed by the Cold War state. To put the case more sharply: we are reproducing Cold War state epistemologies even (especially) when Cold War ideology is our nominal object of critique. In making these claims, I do not mean to minimize or assign cynical motives to the sustained and incisive critique of Cold War ideologies undertaken by critics of literature and culture in the past three decades. My aim here is not to argue for abandoning ideology critique but rather to strengthen it, although not in its current form. My contention is that we need alternatives to our currently ubiquitous methodologies for critique because their dispositions—if not their explicit content—draw unintentionally upon Cold War epistemologies that, in a post–Cold War world, are no longer effective for countering the social inequalities we most typically oppose. More important, we need alternative methodologies for sustaining the ideals central to criticism’s social engagement.

Throughout the Cold War, the self-contained and superior national image was haunted by a persistent insecurity, the most obvious symptom of which was the hysteria personified by Joseph McCarthy, whose insistence that communists and homosexuals lurked everywhere, poised to subvert “our way of life” from within, suggests fears about the permeability of America and the instability of a way of life ready to collapse from internal fissures. The response to that anxiety was the cultivation of suspicion, the capacity to detect dangerous ideologies lurking beneath surfaces that appeared innocent, even pleasurable. Suspicion as a Cold War prophylactic had several destructive consequences. For one, it required endlessly renewed anxiety. Suspicion could never be resolved but took on an ever-shifting variety of objects, making everything a potential source of ideological treachery. For another, it attempted to forestall self-criticism, thwarting inquiry into whether threats to American democracy might not be coming from the U.S. government itself, especially in its perpetuation of suspicions. Finally, the conservative impulse of preservation (“keeping safe”) encouraged citizens to hold dear a good-enough democracy, preventing them from imagining and instituting better versions of everyday life, much less governmental structure. Whether the “way of life” lived by most citizens was worth preserving, in other words, was a question forestalled by the imperative protectivism generated by supposedly imminent threat. Suspicion encouraged citizens to believe that there is no need for any activity except to suspect and expose. Certainly the state epistemology of suspicion implied there was no need for—indeed, there were a great number of incentives against—imagining better versions of America.

We can hear the echoes of these state strategies in contemporary critical methodologies if we turn to the account of critique offered by one of its fiercest challengers. In 2004, Bruno Latour asked if we are not exhausted by the predictability and belatedness of critiques that, going too far with too little self-analysis, have become unduly suspicious.1 In the process of “trying to detect the real prejudices hidden behind the appearance of objective statements,” critique produces “an excessive distrust of good matters of fact disguised as bad ideological biases!”2 Latour here echoes Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s skepticism about the “binarized, highly moralistic allegories of the subversive versus the hegemonic, resistance versus power” that characterize contemporary practices of critique.3 Becoming its own version of conspiracy theory, critique, claims Latour, has made itself “suspicious of everything people say because of course we all know that they live in the thralls of a complete illusio of their real motives.”4 Critique thus enacts what Sedgwick calls the “moralistic hygiene by which any reader of today is unchallengeably entitled to condescend to the thought of any moment in the past (maybe especially the recent past),” an entitlement that “is globally available to anyone who masters the application of two or three discrediting questions.”5 Unmaking the naive fetishes of a desperate and docile populace, critique, as Latour mockingly contends, leaves only “the courageous critic, who alone remains aware and attentive, who never sleeps, and turns those false objects into fetishes that are supposed to be nothing but mere empty white screens on which is projected the power of society, domination, whatever.”6 One of Latour’s key insights is that scholars criticizing networks of power often re-create them in ways that uncannily resemble conspiracy theories. Readers of disguised subtexts and draconian schemes, Latour claims, make “the same appeal to powerful agents hidden in the dark acting always consistently, continuously, relentlessly.”7 Academics differ from conspiracy theorists only in the former’s use of more abstract and metaphoric agents: “society, discourse, knowledge-slash-power, fields of forces, empires, capitalism.”8 Those abstract “appeals to powerful agents hidden in the dark” unmask everyone except academic critics themselves, who remain “intimately certain that the things really close to our hearts” are—and should be—immune to conspiratorial examination.9

As is clear, Latour believes such explanatory suspicion has outlived its usefulness and “deteriorated to the point of now feeding the most gullible sort of critique.”10 Unlike “military experts” who “constantly revise their strategic doctrines, their contingency plans, the size, direction, and technology of their projectiles, their smart bombs, their missiles,” critics, Latour maintains, have resisted the need “to prepare ourselves for new threats, new dangers, new tasks, new target,” leading him to query, would it really be surprising “if intellectuals were also one war late, one critique late?”11 It is not that such critiques are invalid, Latour acknowledges, “but simply that history changes quickly and that there is no greater intellectual crime than to address with the equipment of an older period the challenges of the present one.”12 Outmoded critical artillery keeps buffeting equally obsolete enemies, which Latour describes as the “big totalities” that “like the Soviet empire . . . have feet of clay.”13 The challenge becomes discerning and devising what resources are needed for the struggle at hand. “The practical problem we face,” Latour asserts, “if we try to go that new route, is to associate the word criticism with a whole set of new positive metaphors, gestures, attitudes, knee-jerk reactions, habits of thoughts.”14 Today, critiques take for granted that nefarious ideologies lurk beneath a text’s seemingly innocuous surface and must be unmasked by an unimplicated critic who assumes no responsibility but to unmask. It is hard to miss the echoes, in this description, of life during the Cold War, especially when Latour invokes the abstract agencies attributed to the Soviet empire.15

That such echoes should arise from methodologies forged by scholars who came of age in the Cold War is hardly surprising. What is surprising is the decades-long shelf life of those methodologies after the Cold War’s end, the belatedness observed by Latour. The intellectual popularization of ideological critique began, after all, not during the Cold War but at its end, with the rise of New Historicism in the mid-1980s and, in American literary studies particularly, with reassessments such as The American Renaissance Reconsidered, Reconstructing American Literary History, Ideology and Classic American Literature, Sensational Designs, and Beneath the American Renaissance, the first published in 1985, the next three in 1986, and the last in 1988, the exact span of the Reagan-Gorbachev negotiations that ended in the Malta Summit and the Cold War’s nominal end.16 Of course, the social and literary reevaluations associated with New Historicism owe a great deal to the political commitments of the civil rights, antiwar, and feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, which have their own complicated relationships to Cold War politics. I have no wish to undervalue those movements or to diminish the importance of the scholarly work they generated. What I do want to point out is a significant tension between the socially engaged intentions of that work and its methodological assumptions and consequent practices. While the former brought to light and productively analyzed structures of cultural and political power, the latter, despite those intentions, worked at cross-purposes by reproducing the state-sponsored epistemological strategies that made critical resistance necessary in the first place. Taking the Cold War state to be the origin of diffused suspicion, abstract ideological enemies, and totalizing explanations, we can see how the kinds of critique disparaged by Latour register not only opposition to but also identification with the Cold War state, the unquestioned and totalizing explanatory powers of which began to diminish exactly as ideology critique took hold in the academy. Faced with the loss at the end of the Cold War of the state’s compelling explanatory power, critics both repudiated and replicated those explanatory strategies. The perseverance of a Cold War-inflected methodology enacted the ambivalent introjections central to what Freud called melancholy, and to what, in this particular cultural context, I am calling Cold War melancholy.

Let me offer two influential examples that helped establish the tone and strategies of what became the New Americanism, a branch of ideology critique inflected by New Historicism and directed again the Cold War American state.17 I choose these essays not because they are particularly egregious in their Cold War melancholy but because their Cold War roots are closer to the surface than in most other examples of critical suspicion and therefore acknowledge to some degree the Cold War source of the methodologies they helped make academic doxa. The first, Donald E. Pease’s “Moby Dick and the Cold War” (1985), shows how the U.S.-Soviet antagonism absorbed “everyday life into a ‘battlefield’ arena” in which “the complications, doubts, and conflicts of modern existence get a single opposition that then clears up the whole mess and puts everybody back to work.”18 Given the will to get “back to work” without any work to do, Americans during the Cold War fell prey not to Soviet attack but to what Pease calls boredom. We required someone else’s decisive action to relieve our boredom, yet the destructive consequences of action on the Cold War battlefield made inaction seem like adequate opposition to catastrophe, a heroism without heroics. Supporting this thesis through Moby-Dick, Pease reminds us that Ishmael’s boredom, which sets the novel in motion, is cured by the epic conflict between Ahab and Leviathan that absorbs all other doubts and conflicts. Ishmael not only finds in Ahab relief for his boredom but also creates Ahab to rationalize his inactivity, which becomes heroic simply by not replicating Ahab’s murderous acts. Indecision thereby becomes an opposition without any need to oppose.

In this brilliant analysis Pease, critiquing the Cold War state, constructs the critic as that state, even as he frames his essay as a corrective to the ideologically implicated misinterpretations put forward by what he names as the composite “Cold War critics,” for whom Ishmael, the model American, heroically opposes the totalitarian (Soviet) Ahab. For Pease, however, there are no heroes, only fatal action and bored inaction. Melville alone comes out well, having unmasked modernity’s ideological stratagems, in which he presumably is not implicated. But this is not Melville’s drama. Setting out to contest the axioms of Cold War critics, Pease renders himself as Ishmael opposing the tyrannical power of an absolute Other, whose dangerous acts of misinterpretation rationalize what can be understood as Pease’s boredom. In this battle of Pease versus Cold War critics, in other words, the terms are reversed (Pease now represents antiexceptionalism while Cold War critics represent American hegemony), but the structure of the reading he critiques—heroic individual versus an ideologically tyrannical state “other”—remains intact, replicating what Pease identifies as the mythological rationale for the Cold War state consensus. By Pease’s own interpretation, furthermore, just as Ishmael creates Ahab, so Pease creates the category “Cold War critics” to rationalize the brave posture of his critical boredom: by unmasking ideologically suspect misreadings, Pease makes unmisreading a triumphant, if (because) inactive, opposition, while our boredom, our interpretive inactivity in the face of Pease’s spectacularly tight and comprehensive reading, seemingly disappears on the battlefield where New Americanists, armed with bored suspicion, confront Cold War critics, armed only with a weak exceptionalism. Replicating the oppositional inactivity he criticizes as the Cold War ideological structure, the New Americanist becomes an exemplary Cold War citizen.

The ways the Cold War inflects methodologies in ways at odds with critical intentions are clear if we compare “Moby Dick and the Cold War” with the introductory chapter of Pease’s Visionary Compacts (1987). In that chapter, Pease writes that nineteenth-century Romantic authors should be studied not in order to critique, through them, the nation and its founding ideologies but because those writers kept the unfinished promise of the Revolution alive despite their discouraging ideological contexts:

None of these writers disclaimed the founding principles as merely ideological. Each of them envisioned the founding principles as well as the covenant of relations as unfulfilled promises in need of the renewal that visionary compact could effect. In fulfilling these promises, they developed new faculties, like self-reliance and the collective memory, capable of converting founding principles into motivating forces rather than past ideals. Instead of opposing the nation’s principles, in an age of political compromise, these writers found those principles to be vital moral and political energies.19

For Pease, fictions by Hawthorne and Melville express “an as yet unrealized vision” and draw attention to the past’s “ongoing power to renegotiate the terms of the covenant binding Americans to one another.”20 Pease states, “A nation can lose its soul the same way an individual can, by compromising on its principles,” so writers must “establish an enabling context for overcoming the divisions of cultural life at work in our own time.”21

These are stirring statements, striking in their explicit articulation of the idealism I attribute to practices of hope, and Pease is singular among New Americanists for demonstrating the mutually constituting relationship of visionary ideals and incisive critique. But Pease’s statement of these ideals came at the beginning of the period marked by Cold War melancholy, before its full influence took hold. Whe...