Politically Conscious: Towards a Redefinition of (Global) Literary Studies

Why are there two towers at New York’s World Trade Center? The two WTC towers, perfect parallelepipeds a 1/4 mile high on a square base, perfectly balanced and blind communicating vessels. The fact that there are two of them signifies the end of all competition, the end of all original reference. …For the sign to be pure, it has to duplicate itself: it is the duplication of the sign which destroys its meaning. …The very definition of the real becomes: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction.

Jean Baudrillard

Finally, it must be clear that it is our business not to supply reality but to invent allusions to the conceivable which cannot be presented. … We have paid a high enough price for the nostalgia of the whole and the one, for the recognition of the concept and the sensible, of the transparent and communicable experience. Under the general demand for slackening and appeasement, we can hear the mutterings of the desire for a return to terror, for the realization of the fantasy to seize reality. The answer is: Let us wage a war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable; let us activate the differences and save the honor of the name.

Jean-Francois Lyotard

Perhaps after the events of September 11, 2001 it will be impossible to read utopian postmodernist rhetoric such as that quoted above with the same blend of cynicism and naivete with which, until recently, it was so gleefully consumed by academics and cultural critics alike. For the terrorist attacks against the WTC towers demonstrated that for many, far from the end of competition and the end of all original reference, these buildings symbolized oppression and inequity and provided a focal point for outrage and hatred. The innocent victims who perished during their fall tragically repudiated the postmodern fantasy of indeterminacy and the endless play of signification. Their "real," far from being an "equivalent reproduction" a la Armageddon and other Hollywood disaster films, was the thing itself. Or, in Lyotard’s terminology, it signified a "return to terror," a "realization of the fantasy" within "reality."

The United States’ subsequent increased globalization of its national interests underscores the Academy’s need—and, for the purposes of this paper, the need of literary studies and English programs in particular—to re-engage with the politics not only of the "imaginary world" of literature (Lyotard’s "allusions to the conceivable"), but with those of a globalized late capitalist socioeconomic world as well—or that which Lyotard and Baudrillard reductively refer to as "reality." More importantly, perhaps, the terrorists’ acts, together with our government’s responses, both civil and military, re-emphasize our need to question many assumptions made by academics and politicians alike concerning globalization—most pertinently that this process somehow marks the end of history and ideology. Thus, we must attempt to deconstruct the cultural experience of globalization if we wish not only to comprehend the forces that made possible the events of September 11, but also to comprehend more fully our continuing role (as a Western power serving as the primary conduit of national and multinational capital within the global market) in the shaping of such events.

To this end, the Academy must resist the growing ideological pressure imposed upon it by right-wing organizations such as the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA). Its recent pamphlet, "Defending Civilization: How Our Universities are Failing America and What Can be Done about It," ostensibly calls for colleges to design "strong core curricula" and to incorporate "rigorous, broad-based courses on the great works of Western civilization as well as courses on American history" that do not mandate a "particular ideology." This demand for a pedagogy beyond politics is as spurious as it is cynical. For ACTA’s challenge to alumni and donors that they cease to support institutions failing to address "America’s continuing struggle to extend and defend the principles on which it was founded" is blatant coercion: an attempt to re-emphasize and re-impose an ethnocentric and nationalistic curriculum driven by hegemonic "Western" constructions of history and culture.

At this moment of social and ideological crisis, as vested national interests manifest ever more explicitly their global origins and influences, the academy must continue to recognize and disseminate multiple histories—be they "factual" or the "invented allusions to the conceivable" of literature. Only by resisting the borders that shape hegemonic constructions of American globalizing culture can the academy effectively "build bridges and relationships, not simply bombs and walls." Today, this must continue as academe’s most vital mission: the ability not to tell only the story of the powerful, the aggressive, the confrontational, and the competitive, but to tell as well that of the disempowered, the oppressed, the silenced, and the forgotten. Indeed, such are the stories that literary studies in particular has gradually come to address, explore, and (in some institutions) embrace. As Paul Jay explains, the rise of the modern university in the West "is linked to the development and needs of the nation-state" to which the "globalizing of literary studies portends a remarkable reversal"—a reversal which to many, particularly organizations such as ACTA, poses a tangible institutional threat.

Viewed from a nationalistic perspective, this threat is indeed well founded: "The emergence of what we have come to call global culture, characterized by the rapid circulation of cultural commodities such as books, films, works in electronic media, clothing, and food…has come at the expense of the nation-state’s ability to control the formation of national subjectivities and ideologies." In turn, encouraged by the advent of Marxist, feminist, and, more recently, postcolonial theories, the "transparently nationalist" structures of conventional literary study have been exposed as ideologically grounded in a "limited set of texts unified around certain themes and values"—the very themes and values reiterated by groups such as ACTA.

Following September 11, I would argue that far from retrenching literary studies as practiced in the United States within such nationalist paradigms it is all the more urgent for English programs to systemically address an increasingly anachronistic and destructive nationalistic ideology that too often still informs these programs. To do so, literature courses must re-examine the basic relationship that they construct between students and their objects of study, one which too frequently continues to naturalize or disavow the ideological underpinnings of such a relationship and, more importantly, of literature’s relationship to "reality." The alternative is to risk rendering English programs mere historical relics, wholly unable to prepare their students for "responsible citizenship in an increasingly globalized world." Such a citizenship is inherently—in today’s globalized economic environment—"always already" politicized, a fact that English programs can no longer afford to deny.

September’s events exposed an ideological "faultline" within our cultural imaginary, or what Alan Sinfield describes as the "conflict and contradiction that the social order inevitably produces within itself." The renewed recognition of this faultline underscores our need to reclaim a political historicity to our literary and cultural readings. As Epifiano San Juan has written, the "recognition of material power differences" must become "the prime desideratum of solidarity and practicable alliance" forged through our teaching and writing. For too long, postmodern theory has occluded these "material power differences" within the literature classroom, serving in its own way to insulate the literary from the realm of realpolitik as effectively as the New Criticism naturalized it as a tool of the dominant cultural ideology. Baudrillard’s fantasy of the "end of all original reference," enacted within the theater of the classroom, enabled the illusion of the "end of competition" while simultaneously allowing the academy to remain insulated from the ever-increasing effects of globalized competition within the world theater. As we are coming to realize, fantasy may indeed have "seized reality," but that fantasy is itself a product of material relations—and as literature instructors we can no longer indulge in our own fantasy that our teaching and texts are not (like our students and ourselves) always already politicized.

Simply put, I believe that Marxist criticism—literary, political, sociological, as well as economic—may serve as a direly needed corrective to the de-politicized and de-historicizing influence of various strands of postmodernist theory. For although postmodernist and postcolonial theory has helped to begin an "awareness of the complex ways in which English and American identities have been constructed historically through migration, displacement, colonialism, exile, gender relations, and cultural hybridity," too often the classroom practice of such theory compels students to view globalization (and all its accompanying "posts") as a "fundamentally contemporary event." In fact, globalization is decidedly not a postmodern phenomenon—nor is cultural hybridity nor ethnic or religious displacement and migration. The construction of fractured and hybrid subjectivity as a postmodern event is simply that—a construction. As Judith Butler has written, the maintenance of gender norms is always a performance, a continuing process "that can never be fully internalized," ultimately rendering gender norms themselves "phantasmatic, impossible to embody." Butler’s reading of gender is particularly compelling because it so effectively describes other such socially constructed norms—ethnicity, sexuality, race, nationalism. In fact, Butler underscores the inherently political nature of all identity by construing the performance of subjectivity as a constant negotiation of borders—a "constitutive antagonism" between what is "inside" and "outside" recognized socio-symbolic structures. For Butler, such a border is always potentially fluid—always itself a symbolic construction requiring "specific social and historical analysis" if we are to avoid conflating into " ‘one’ law [i.e. nationalism] the effect of a convergence of many."

As I shall argue, only by re-engaging the political nature of subjectivity as a historical performance, and thus concurrently recognizing the role of literature as both an indicator and progenitor of such a performance, can we begin to dismantle our continuing process of literary colonization, one which inevitably leads to the reading of global works as those of "the other." In this regard, Paul Jay’s commentary on the state of literary studies in America is sadly accurate: through its very structure and methods of articulation, the discipline of English continues to institutionalize what Epifiano San Juan calls the "structural legacy of colonialism" within the postcolonial state, a "mechanism" that simply replaces "direct by indirect ideological/economic domination." I believe that a Marxist reassessment of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of discourse—a theory too long appropriated by de-politicized postmodern theory—can provide an effective groundwork for reworking the approach to literary studies in America. Bakhtin’s ideas are essential towards constructing a performative method of analysis that allows literary studies to eschew its traditionally nationalist, ethnocentric perspective. For as Mikhail Bakhtin and P. N. Medvedev explained over half a century ago: "Human consciousness does not come into contact with existence directly, but through the medium of the surrounding ideological world. … In fact, the individual consciousness can only become a consciousness by being realized in the forms of the ideological environment proper to it: in language, in conventionalized gesture, in artistic image, in myth, and so on." In the second section of this essay I shall address several reasons why postmodern theory in general has failed to encourage politically conscious teachers and students, as well as why Marxism continues to be a compelling approach to achieving such awareness. In the final section I turn my attention specifically to a Marxist reading of Bakhtin and its employment within a literature course that perhaps most specifically encodes (and sometimes examines) the history and vicissitudes of capitalist culture: the British Novel. For only through a dialogic and historicized study of our own structural legacy and its global effects can we hope to facilitate a meaningful engagement between our students and their global environs.

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