A More Conservative Place: Intellectual Culture in the Bush Era

By Paul A. Bové

Identifying the historical antecedents of President George W. Bush’s imperial ambitions and the sources of the reactionary thought and politics that underlie them, Paul A. Bové shows how neoconservatism represents a singular danger to democracy. At the same time, he criticizes the equally disheartening inability of the academic Left to oppose neoconservatives and its tendency to mirror their views instead. Divorced from historical knowledge and intellectual rigor, the neocon mindset reflects a cultural and historical amnesia that feeds on ignorance and conformity. Exposing the threats to national survival inherent in the alliance of right-wing politics and academic tribalism, Bové emphasizes the need to reconnect with the powers of imagination and the complexity of human historical experience. With urgency and passion, Bové shows how the neocons have succeeded in cowing or coopting academic intellectuals and how language has been used and abused for the maintenance and extension of an undemocratic regime.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dartmouth College Press
• Release date: Dec 8, 2012
• ISBN: 9781611683707

Book preview

RE-MAPPING THE TRANSNATIONAL

A Dartmouth Series in American Studies

Series Editor

Donald E. Pease

Avalon Foundation Chair of Humanities

Founding Director of the Futures of American Studies Institute Dartmouth College

The emergence of Transnational American Studies in the wake of the Cold War marks the most significant reconfiguration of American Studies since its inception. The shock waves generated by a newly globalized world order demanded an understanding of America’s embeddedness within global and local processes rather than scholarly reaffirmations of its splendid isolation. The series Re-Mapping the Transnational seeks to foster the cross-national dialogues needed to sustain the vitality of this emergent field. To advance a truly comparativist understanding of this scholarly endeavor, Dartmouth College Press welcomes monographs from scholars both inside and outside the United States.

For a complete list of books available in this series, see www.upne.com.

Paul A. Bové, A More Conservative Place: Intellectual Culture in the Bush Era

John Muthyala, Dwelling in American: Dissent, Empire, and Globalization

Winfried Fluck, Donald E. Pease, and John Carlos Rowe, editors, Re-Framing the Transnational Turn in American Studies

Lene M. Johannessen, Horizons of Enchantment: Essays in the American Imaginary

John Carlos Rowe, Afterlives of Modernism: Liberalism, Transnationalism, and Political Critique

Anthony Bogues, Empire of Liberty: Power, Desire, and Freedom

Bernd Herzogenrath, An American Body | Politic: A Deleuzian Approach

Johannes Voelz, Transcendental Resistance: The New Americanists and Emerson’s Challenge

Paul A. Bové

A MORE CONSERVATIVE PLACE

Intellectual

Culture in

the Bush Era

» Dartmouth College Press Hanover, New Hampshire

Dartmouth College Press

An imprint of University Press of New England

www.upne.com

© 2013 Trustees of Dartmouth College

All rights reserved

Chapter 5, Can American Studies Be ‘Area Studies’? originally appeared in Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies, edited by Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 206–30.

Chapter 8, Can We Judge the Humanities by Their Future as a Course of Study? originally appeared in Globalization and the Humanities: Field Imaginaries, Virtual Worlds, and Emergent Sensibilities, edited by David Leiwei Li (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2003), 273–84.

Chapter 10, Rights Discourse in the Age of US-China Trade, Copyright © 2002 by New Literary History, University of Virginia, first appeared as an article in New Literary History 33, no. 1 (2002): 171–87, and is reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Chapter 13, The Intellectual as a Contemporary Phenomenon, was originally published in the online journal Surfaces, as part of the proceedings of Rethinking Culture, a conference held April 3–5, 1992, at the University of Montreal.

Chapter 14, The End of Thinking: Intellectual Failure in the New World Order, was originally presented as a paper, Intellectual Failure in the New World Order, at the conference The Political Status of Theory: The Place of Critical Reflection in the End of the Millennium, held at Menéndez y Pelayo International University, Valencia, Spain, July 15, 1994, and was published in EUTOPÍAS, 2a Época—Documentos de trabajo (Working Papers) 61 (1994).

For permission to reproduce any of the material in this book, contact Permissions, University Press of New England, One Court Street, Suite 250, Lebanon NH 03766; or visit www.upne.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bové, Paul A., 1949–

A more conservative place: intellectual culture in the Bush era / Paul A. Bové.

   p. cm.—(Re-mapping the transnational: a

Dartmouth series in American studies)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-61168-342-4 (cloth: alk. paper)—

ISBN 978-1-61168-369-1 (pbk.: alk. paper)—

ISBN 978-1-61168-370-7 (ebook)

1. United States—Intellectual life—21st century. 2. United States—Study and teaching—Political aspects. 3. Bush, George W. (George Walker), 1946– —Influence. I. Title.

E169.12.B685 2013

973.931—dc23

012020969

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments

1  A Retrospective Introduction

2  American Universalism and Its Democracy

3  Area Studies Revisited

4  The American State Allegorizes the Ruins: Henry Adams and Counterstrategy

5  Can American Studies Be Area Studies?

6  Critical Poetics: American Resources for Theorizing America

7  Curiosity in The Education of Henry Adams

8  Can We Judge the Humanities by Their Future as a Course of Study?

9  Humanities and the Changing Role of Worldly Engagement

10  Rights Discourse in the Age of U.S.-China Trade

11  Historical Humanist, American Style

12  The Ineluctability of American Empire

13  The Intellectual as a Contemporary Phenomenon

14  The End of Thinking: Intellectual Failure in the New World Order

15  Why the Neocons Hate Henry Adams

Notes

Index

PREFACE

I believe in democracy. I accept it. I will faithfully serve and defend it. . . . I grant it is an experiment, but it is the only direction society can take that is worth taking; the only conception of its duty large enough to satisfy its instinct; the only result that is worth an effort or a risk.

—Henry Adams, Democracy

» For fifteen years I have read and written about Henry Adams, trying to bring his peculiar modes of historical critical thought back into fashion especially but not only in the study of the United States. While completing a book on Adams, I have written a series of essays and lectures that explore his practice and attempt to use what I know of his work as a lens for analyzing and describing intellectual and political impulses and tendencies. A More Conservative Place is a collection of these essays and lectures. Inevitably, I developed various theories and criticisms predicated on my study that allowed me to address some specific issues that matter to American studies and other fields interested in U.S. history and the global presence of U.S. power. Moreover, since I contend that Adams belongs to a line of thought too much disregarded by the academic Left and savagely attacked by the political Right, I had to clear the ground of obstacles to a critical historical scholarship and writing based on radical democratic ideals undergirding suspicions of normativity and intellectual conformity. The pressures of the Bush era, specifically the implementation of ideas without intellectual or historical support as policy legitimating horrendous abuses of power, forced me to critique. Above all, I drew academic intellectuals’ attention to the coalescence between some or much of their work — especially certain dominant beliefs and figures of speech — and those of their often avowed political enemies on the right and in state power. I had been long interested not only in the role of American intellectuals in the legitimation of U.S. power abroad but also more specifically in the parallels between the languages and implicit beliefs of the foreign policy intelligentsia and their allies and those of academics who believed themselves the critics of that intelligentsia, believed themselves to uphold and instantiate alternatives.

American literary and humanistic intellectuals have played varying complex roles in the transformations of the United States and in its rise (and perhaps decline) in global power and status. The chapters in this book attempt to extend a genealogical awareness of the workings of language and the power of discourse throughout a study of its two objects — that is, certain influential ways of speaking in foreign policy and academic humanistic practice. Particularly, historical and ideological insistence that especially academic leftist discourse differentiates itself by contestation from the discourse of the American empire ignores the pressure of the past and the power of language and thought solidified in discourse and its repetitions. As much as human will and agency matter in intellectual creation and political action, no one should believe any agent could operate with impunity on a conceptual terrain or within a discursive structure. The often-voiced claim among academics that we can and should contest the use of particular figures of speech, ideas, modes of thinking, and discourse while admirably heroic also confidently ignores much that literary critics in particular learned during the theory moment.¹ To put it in a phrase, the burden of the past deposited in language allows no such impunity — except as fantasy.² These chapters investigate the shared genealogies of intellectual and political antagonists and press on the limits that create the difference between these not to show family resemblance but to dissolve the boundary differences by which academic intellectuals assert their identity.

These chapters consistently interrogate the emergence and dominance of imperial ideas from Mahan to Wolfowitz. They note how the neoconservatives repeat the 1890s imperialists’ strategic and intellectual commitment to war as the proper cultural and policy norm of America as a great power. They also note the increasingly nondemocratic, indeed antidemocratic cynicism of movement conservatism. I investigate the coalescence of neoconservative motives with the misrecognitions of American history and politics essential to the various apocalyptic, messianic, and utopian commitments of antisecular fundamentalism.

Several of these chapters, particularly those that deal with the question of American studies as an area studies, develop lines of thought that emerge from my study of Adams. They propose careful analyses of the entanglements consequent upon academic work’s involvement with the state and its purposes. By studying the intersection of academic knowledge production and the state, A More Conservative Place understands America and its state system in a way that others have not produced. At times, these chapters contain cautions for the American studies scholars. In The American State Allegorizes the Ruins, for example, I analyze the widespread ideological and technical habit of writing critical allegories about America and its history. Drawing on related work into the theory and history of allegorization and its modern institutional normalization, I suggest that allegoresis cannot produce responsible critique or analysis.

Throughout this book, I suggest to American studies scholars in general that normal practice, such as allegoresis, produces in vast quantity knowledge easily anticipated and rarely original in kind, critically sharp, or transformative. More than once, these chapters propose that a simple way to surpass the identity-constructing habits of American studies would be to adopt the techniques of historical humanism, techniques necessarily comparatist and philological. I suggest in several chapters that the melancholy and self-doubt of cultural and literary studies (especially of the United States) today results from academics’ sense of melancholy and ineffectiveness. Of course, there are various historical accounts of this tendency and many scholars who would deny the existence of such melancholic doubt — pointing all the while to their various accomplishments and productions.³ The great historical humanists were always comparatists, reading regions and nations against each other, and placing eras and periods next to each other so that the limits of each might dissolve into their persistent potential.

Underlying these various motifs and sustaining their coherence as critical vision is the idea of critical poetics, a term of wide-ranging reference. In my earlier book, Poetry against Torture,⁴ I drew together the complex and varying figures of John Stuart Mill, Giambattista Vico, Erich Auerbach, and William Empson to derive an account of how poesis is a historicizing process, the proper way in which the species makes and sustains its humanity. The American tradition offers resources for a similar understanding of poesis, resources that impel the sustained perfection of the human as such.⁵ These chapters suggest that the neopragmatist turn in American studies and literary studies in general occludes some of those resources. Typically, Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club underweighted Adams, a gesture that rests on Adams’s dislike for the pragmatist turn.⁶ If Menand represents a liberal position in the U.S. academy, given his position at Harvard and in the monthly magazines, a normative position, it coalesces with that of his political opposite, Irving Kristol.

I note throughout these chapters how important it is that Adams, whom academic leftists normally criticize for his cultural and social conservatism, so bothers the neoconservatives.⁷ I treat this as a revealing symptom of how easily Adams serves to dedifferentiate these seeming antagonists — in this case, the enemy of my enemy is also my enemy. Neither of these antagonists continues nor exploits the life-enhancing American tradition of comparative historical humanism. Burkeans value the social and cultural achievements of past societies and hesitate to lose the functional value that inheres in human achievement. Burkeans do not see all of history as ruin. In such pieces as The American State Allegorizes the Ruins, I caution that American studies’ commitment to allegoresis literalizes a tradition of early twentieth-century European crisis thinking in searching for messianic transformation of a kind that renounces the slow processes of human creative life,⁸ as that was the study of comparative historical humanism. This last loses its rightful place in the development of American ideas for the exercise and understanding of power and intellectual responsibility. Moreover, these chapters claim a strong family resemblance between the academic understandings of history as ruin in need of redemption and movement conservatism’s counterrevolutionary, antidemocratic, tyrannical ambitions to control to one end only the activities of human imagination and will.⁹ I try to clarify this last point in the Retrospective Introduction. While I do not directly discuss the irony of the academic Left, influenced by the desires inherent in allegoresis and deploying tactics and ideologies deriving from European modernity, I do develop an account of how the secular intellectuals of movement conservatism derive most of their own political understanding from reactionary European intellectuals of European modernity, especially Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss. In Critical Poetics, a lecture originally prepared for the Cultural Analysis Colloquium Series at the University of California at Santa Barbara, I followed Shadia Drury’s hint — as I wrote then — that a U.S.-German intersection . . . accounts in part for the ease with which Strauss’s influence spread among U.S. conservatives. To some extent, especially following on the American transcendental tradition, the American ground readily accepted antidemocratic reactionary thought from a modern European antimodernist. While American tradition contains a strain of comparative historical humanism — on the democratic and antidemocratic side of U.S. politics — it also contains an antihistorical trend. Scholars and academics should work to clarify the lines that differentiate these trends while also clarifying how they exist as dedifferentiated concepts. Critical Poetics typifies my suggestion that this antihistorical trend, extended even now by the influence of esoteric antihistoricist theories often imported without context from Europe, solidifies the ahistorical and antihumanistic, antidemocratic trends of an antisecular and cynical electoral politics.¹⁰ Implicitly, too, I claim that for all the criticism of American exceptionalism, the absence of developed comparative work as the basis of American studies weakens both the methods of analysis and the needed self-criticism of intellectual theories and practices.

Adams’s Mont Saint Michel and Chartres embodies the critical mind, as we need it and as the American tradition best presents it. In general, intellectuals need to map the flows of creativity and knowledge differently than do the reactionaries, but also differently than do those progressives who choose to contest their antagonists on their terms. Adams, for example, as I suggest below, traced the movements of language, culture, politics, and trade across sea and land routes in ways that meaningfully superseded Mahan’s account of sea power. A counter-Mahan might well have contested the admiral account of the sea as a mechanism of war. Indeed, the best historian of the Atlantic, Marcus Rediker, has done just this.¹¹ As I suggested earlier, however, theory’s lessons about the burdens of the past, about the independent agency of language and thought, teach us that the iterability of established tropes inhibits their reversal unless more subtle writing displaces and redefines or differentiates them. I argue strongly within that such contestation or negotiation, as the new historicists call it, cannot escape the worst consequences of the iterability it willingly embraces as the needed basis for its own work. Against this self-enabling professionalism, A More Conservative Place insists that historical, creative affection is the best alternative. Therefore, the best alternative, as it were, to the imperial story of American greatness told in Mahan on sea power is not an alternative account of the sea that inverts a given hierarchy. Rather, the best alternative is a creative act, not a project of creative destruction apotheosized by European crisis intellectuals who mistook creativity for the ideology of a single failed culture and class.

In the chapters that follow on the humanities, humanism, and education, I propose that American culture and American intellectual responsibility demand a reembrace of the critical act that carefully differentiates to trace the achievements of humanity in self-making from the ever-present, equally human, if barbaric, acts of cruelty and destruction. In essence, then, these chapters express a worldview in the form of critical and political analysis of a certain era in U.S. history. They find the Bush era to be the perfect and unavoidable foil for serious intellectual engagement. They represent the Bush era as the object lesson of what happens when intellectuals, culture, and thinking turn from the lessons of historical humanism to its explicit alternative — nihilistic movement conservatism — or its subtle shadow, intellectual carelessness in mistaking the enemy of its enemy for its own enemy.

The Schmittian politics of left and right, I suggest, abrogate the suspicion that development of the human species must include all tribalisms, all primitive notions of enemies and friends. Interestingly, Edward Said, Rosa Menocal, and Henry Adams could discover similar instances of social worlds, intellectual and human relations that represent the paradigm for political love and affection. Importantly, these prove that the Schmittian theories of politics, which right and left so willingly contest and develop, have neither necessity nor truth on their side. We would do well to remember, as these chapters suggest, the historical origin of Schmitt and Strauss whose wisdom and/or usefulness often allows their hateful and violent politics to pass uncriticized. The Left makes use of Schmitt for his critique of liberalism — as does the Right, for his critique of secular democracy. Where are those who embrace the complex historical vision of Adams or the grand fictional imagination of Thomas Pynchon?

Near the end of this book, I caution against adopting a visionary or prophetic imaginative stance or rhetoric as if it were a sufficient basis for criticism or creativity. The prophetic imagination rests on a pragmatist base that I try to show underlies both the self-enabling professionalism of those who hold that culture is a site of negotiation and the right-wing liberal nationalism (Richard Rorty appears at this point) of the Clinton era. Each of these — prophecy and pragmatism — claims a progressive mantle that properly understands and resists capital formations and its statist agents. I try to show the inevitable limits of such claims are consequent upon their own ahistoricality and their naive use of such tropes as hope, faith, and truth — certainly heavily loaded terms with complex genealogies that limit much more than they enable.

In sum, A More Conservative Place develops from one insight formed while struggling with the circumstances of the Bush era. I project this insight in the character of Henry Adams, borrowed of course, from the eponymous book, The Education of Henry Adams. There are other figures, too, contributing to this insight as well as circumstances that seem to compel it. As I write toward the end of the book, its task has been to reveal the necessity for judgment of human historical action from within the full historicality of subjectivity capable of particularized, nonesoteric, historicist judgments.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

» Several of these chapters appeared in earlier form as essays in journals and edited volumes. I thank the editors and publishers for their invitations to contribute and their permissions to reprint.

Several other chapters existed before now only as lectures given at several institutions in the United States and abroad. I want to thank my hosts and all my interlocutors for extremely useful responses and advice. I want also to acknowledge the careful and patient help of Jonathan Gotsick in preparing and editing this manuscript; he has been essential to its appearance.

As always, most of my thanks must go to my cohort of boundary 2 colleagues without whose remarkable camaraderie I would not know as much or as little as I do and who give me context in which I dare to think nonconformist ideas. In particular, I must thank Don Pease who invited me to make a coherent book of the varied pieces I had written over the last few years. I thank him for seeing the unified project that underlay and emerged within these talks, essays, and debates.

Of course, we produce nothing without the motive to write and create for the proper reader. The necessary reader is always inside the text and its condition.

1

A RETROSPECTIVE INTRODUCTION

I urge everyone to join in and not leave the field of values, definitions, and cultures uncontested. They are certainly not the property of a few Washington officials, any more than they are the responsibility of a few Middle Eastern rulers. There is a common field of human undertaking being created and recreated, and no amount of imperial bluster can ever conceal or negate that fact.

— Edward W. Said, Al Ahram, August 30, 2003

» The essays and papers collected here either emerge from and engage with some of the forces that made possible George W. Bush’s regime in the United States during the first decade of this century or take up particular cultural and intellectual challenges posed by the regime to understand better their implications for life and thought in the United States and abroad. The events of September 11, 2001, did not themselves change everything for me or for most academic humanists I know. For many, and certainly for me, the Bush regime’s reaction to those events changed everything. For some, the Bush era demanded strong critical engagement, the attempt to analyze, understand, and resist — often by providing alternatives to the imaginative death that regime desired and embodied. For others, the era offered the chance to challenge the still fragile if seemingly orthodox truths associated with multiculturalism, human rights movements, and the academic fields that studied, advanced, and responded to these movements.¹ Many academic leaders polemically stood up for the values, persons, and cultural efforts the right-wing politics of the Bush coalition threatened and deposed.² Yet others — and perhaps this was the norm — encouraged by the corporatism of university governance, politically motivated economic restrictions, and the needs of professional survival and advancement, immersed themselves in often apolitical, bounded research in traditional and modernized subfields or committed themselves to teaching and service in ever more proletarianizing institutions.³

When the Bush regime began, I had several research projects on my desk, the chief of which was a study of Henry Adams. Hoping to build on earlier work on intellectuals, I had contracted for not only a book on Adams but also a book on Edmund Wilson and another on Richard Palmer Blackmur. I wanted to write accounts of American intellectual life in the literary humanities, hoping that these diverse figures would allow me to recall intellectual potentials represented by these figures. I had started out trying to answer Edward Said’s question following the publication of my Intellectuals in Power ⁴ — why don’t you talk about American intellectuals? — within the larger context of U.S. transformation into an imperial and hegemonic power. What role did literary, humanistic intellectuals play in the process, and what critical potential, what capacity for alternative social political norms, might we find in these writers if we hoped to reimagine U.S. life and power?

Jimmy Carter’s deregulation of the American transportation sector is an early mark of emerging neoliberalism. Movement conservatism and the intensified Cold War of the Reagan years followed rapidly.⁵ To grasp some of this required reading a wide variety of tendencies in various forms of knowledge production, language, academic practice, and finance to understand above all the roles played by intelligence and imagination in the transformation of the world into a world system. Generous offers to lecture and teach in Geneva, Vienna, and Spain had already started me reading across these fields, hoping to identify and somewhat clarify their constellations in the developments from Reaganism to Clintonism. Ironically, I gathered the research notes, talks, and papers emerging from this synthetizing effort under the working title The End of Thinking.⁶ Simultaneously, I agreed to write a small polemical book on the culture of theory, a study meant to clarify the transformations within the academic human sciences — especially in literature departments — consequent upon both the emergence and repudiation of the theory movement of the 1970s and beyond. I published some preliminary results of this research, including a piece that linked the academic antitheory movement to various projects within the Reagan coalition. Certain congruencies between U.S. policy and academic practice required exposition.

The papers and essays collected here all carry the traces of research done for these projects, many of which continue. The actions of the Bush regime, especially as they attempted to transform if not end many institutions of liberal society, struck so hard that they demanded attention. The situation offered a chance to align oneself with the regime’s efforts — and a number of well-recorded prominent intellectuals surprised their allies and colleagues by joining in its efforts. It also offered a chance for the clerks’ treason, for a retreat into the apolitical professionalism of indifferent careerism or marketplace necessities. Finally, it offered a chance to attend to its movements, its ideas, its practices, and a vast number of academic humanists engaged in a struggle against its politics and worldview, against the power — domestic and international — of its coalition. The Bush regime forced almost all intellectuals and academics onto a terrain shaped by its power and willingness to use it.

Even semipopular books of current events, of contemporary history and analysis, note the Right’s ability to set the agenda. Among the elites, [the Right] has been making the intellectual weather for most of the past two decades; it is remarkable how far the best liberal thinkers have been reduced to reacting to conservative arguments. ⁷ Several public intellectuals joined the Right, especially on war and empire.⁸ Prominent academic intellectuals, some serving public positions, provided conceptual and political support, especially for the Iraq War.⁹ My point is that the Bush regime profoundly inflected intellectual work during the first decade of this century. It forced a way to its own success in denying alternative visions of the world very much chance to emerge; in fact, the Bush administration aimed to obstruct and delegitimize all other views of the world — all other ranges of human experience that might tend to different visions of the future and human life.¹⁰

As a scholar of especially academic intellectual theory and practice, I worried that American academic scholars in the human sciences too much aligned our work with the interests of the Right that had drawn my attention and others’ away from the projects they had in hand before 2002. Of course, Bush’s election did not suddenly turn on this alignment. The materials gathered under the dreadful heading The End of Thinking in chapter 14 suggest that trends and fashions in the academic humanities were already either aligning themselves — consider the paeans to globalism and its opposite, localism — or stepping aside, posing no serious alternatives to the emerging coalitions. I have not had the chance to write a careful study of how the rise of the political Right in America has effected changes among academic intellectuals. Such a systematic historical study would be hard but I believe would exceed the now well-established accounts of university corporatism.¹¹ Often, those accounts, properly focused on political economic forces and agencies that make universities subservient to extramural demands, ignore the ideological and intellectual component that the work faculties, especially humanistic faculties, produce. Since the National Defense Education Act (1958) forcefully and obviously made the universities an element in state policy, in the raison d’état of the state, American academics have had to accept their dependence upon various funding sources with their own priorities and their own antagonisms to independent thought and critical imagination. During the culture wars, newspapers and magazines — mainstream and right wing — pilloried the humanities for their distance from the citizenry, from tradition, and from relevance. These attacks had their effects. Not only did they buck up the old boys, but also they encouraged the young sometimes in directions not so open to hostile caricature. It facilitated the seeming return to what is in fact a new emphasis on apolitical hyperspecialization in the research universities.¹² It also encouraged thinking that safely passed the tests of right-wing and media hostility. Compare, for example, the New York Times’ favorable reporting on digital trends in the humanities with its not so long ago series of articles annually mocking the Modern Language Association (MLA) convention for the titles of its special sessions.¹³

The American conservative movement has worked hard to establish that the American university system is elitist and liberal, a secular home to private interests that obstructs right-wing plans and damages U.S. culture and politics. Often, academic human scientists accept and encourage this account, and levelheaded studies explain that universities, especially most advanced research centers and liberal arts colleges, are bastions of liberal thought, values, and lifestyles. The contrast between movement conservatism and the liberal academy metonymically appears as the difference between Boulder, Colorado (home of the University of Colorado), and Colorado Springs (home of Focus on the Family and the Christianized Air Force Academy).¹⁴ Of course, the metonymy collapses and the fact that the university is a more conservative place than it likes to admit came into view with the Ward Churchill controversy.¹⁵

For the moment, I have avoided discussing the forces that led to Ward Churchill’s loss of tenure. Rather, I want to expose a potentially disturbing if complex truth perhaps best caught in an aphorism of Lichtenberg: A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is unlikely to look out.¹⁶ How far can the academics in the human sciences define themselves as outside the rightist regime they often oppose? How far do they belong to the same general project of political, cultural, and intellectual reaction? How should we criticize intellectual efforts that show no concern for or believe themselves safely immune to the enemy they think they see and oppose? How counter are these intellectuals and their efforts? What is the minimal sort of evaluative attention and self-regard required of humanistic intellectual work?

The academy and certain leading academics are far more conservative than they know or believe. I speak not of lifestyle or conscious intent but of the shape of work, the patterns of thought, and the forms of knowledge and discourse that take place on a terrain disconnected from serious tradition and struggling, ever so hard, to secure itself in a hostile world. Furthermore, and of course, my statements are polemical and do not apply to all. No doubt, others will propose important counterexamples to my claims. My point is that critical intellectuals should not allow this coalescence to occur as it does often in the work of those most identified with resistance and other such shibboleths.¹⁷ Social scientists have their ways of testing such hypotheses, but critics have their own devices that, sadly, might have less social authority but could still earn the tolerance of other critical readers.

Famously, Louis Althusser, perched at the École Normale Supérieure, taught critics to read symptomatically, to understand the markers of social, ideological, conceptual, and economic practices and structures.¹⁸ This technique, derived from a long history of psychoanalytic and critical practice — with its roots in Spinoza and his heirs — allows a reading of contextualized practices and statements that reveal more than a technological empiricism allows. I propose to adopt this Althusserian trope — for it is a figure as much as a method — in this book to suggest some of what troubles me about the mirrored relationship of important moments of academic practice and the Bush regime that so distracted me and many others from perhaps more creative projects.¹⁹ I hypothesize that the American humanistic academy not only rests in a derivative relationship to this right wing that it (mostly) opposes but also extends some of its basic desires, does some of its work, as it were. Of course, no such statement could be universally true, not right across the board, but symptoms suggest that academicians-assumed difference from movement conservatism is not always real, often not carefully examined, and most important not useful. The chapters contained in this volume hint at some family resemblances between certain humanistic academic modes and projects and the movement. I can do no more here than indicate a few of them and list a small number of others that indict us all.

I will stress that the postsecularism movement in the academy and, more broadly, the turn to and reliance upon the work of Carl Schmitt exemplify the unthought extension of right-wing