The World Turned Inside Out

by James Livingston

  So the university had become the site of significant struggle by the late twentieth century as an incident in the emergence of a postindustrial society. Again, by the 1970s, everyone, from Left to Right, agreed that it was the social and intellectual terrain on which the promise of American life would be decided, for better or worse. But if the rambunctious social scientists harbored by the university were still part of the loyal opposition as late as 1975, if they were still “critics within the system” long after the spirit of the 1960s had expired, what was all the fuss about “tenured radicals” in the 1980s and 1990s? What were they doing that was so outrageous? What, in other words, was the real difference between the combatants in the culture wars, aside from the obvious fact that one side (the Left) controlled the commanding heights of the higher learning, and the other (the Right) wanted a foothold there, at the level of intellectual authority now determined by the university, the cultural pivot of postindustrial society?

  From Left to Right, What Is to Be Done?

  The New Left that flourished in the 1960s later told its own story as an unfolding tragedy that began in 1968, when “years of hope” gave way to “days of rage,” when left-wing activists, having given up on the American electorate, either tried terrorism—the Weather Underground of Students for a Democratic Society, the Progressive Labor Party, the Symbionese Liberation Army, and so on—or retreated to the ivory tower of academe. The New Right that meanwhile emerged in the 1960s and 1970s similarly told its own story as an unfolding tragedy that began in 1968, when left-wing activists, having been defeated by the American electorate, either tried terrorism or took over the ivory tower of academe. Both tellers of the tale were correct, of course, because they told pretty much the same story. But what was the moral of the story they told?

  The Left’s complaints about America as newly framed by academic locutions were familiar to anyone who had merely watched the network news in the 1960s and 1970s. The United States was built on a foundation of racism. Slavery was the origin, of course, but racial oppression did not end when the “peculiar institution” did, in 1865. In fact, the enforcement of white supremacy got more ugly, more violent, and more effective in the early twentieth century. The civil rights movement and its successor, Black Power, had tried to redeem the promise of the Declaration (“all men are created equal”), but inequality was still the rule. The United States was also built on a foundation of sexism. Females had been systematically excluded from the public sphere since the seventeenth century, and no amount of voting would change the assumption that women were better off at home with the kids than at work. Women’s Liberation in the late 1960s had questioned this common sense, of course, but here, too, inequality was still the rule as late as 1980.

  What then was to be done? The question was not yet political. As rephrased by the academic Left, it went something like this: Why does inequality persist in a society committed, at least on paper, to its eradication? Why can’t we live up to our own beliefs, our own promises? Or is our notion of equality flawed? Is it too formal, too contractual? Why does it seem to allow for, perhaps even require, racial difference, sexual difference? In view of this accommodation of racial and sexual difference, why can’t it acknowledge the role of ethnicity in shaping American politics? What powers hold us in their thrall, and what is power, anyway? If the state is not its only source, where does it come from, how is it expressed, who are its agents? Speaking of power, did old-fashioned imperialism drive America’s bloody “intervention” in Vietnam? Or was this grisly war an accident, a deviation from the principles of U.S. foreign policy?

  The form of the answers was in many ways more important than their content. That form was urgent, angry, categorical, above all cultural—a hard-line, Marxist emphasis on “structural” (read: economic) causes of American idiocy was already quaint in the 1970s. And before long, this form became the content of critique as such, in keeping with the collapse of distinctions between appearance and reality, or surface and depth, or known and knower: the medium and then the messenger became the message. And so cultural politics was born. Its key words were race, gender, and class (read: identities), and, as methodological matters, pragmatism, feminism, multiculturalism, postmodernism, deconstruction, relativism, and revisionism.

  The Right’s complaints about America were less familiar to those who had merely watched the network news in the 1960s and 1970s, for two reasons. First, the mass media had depicted movements for racial equality as consistent with the best hopes and oldest promises of the nation. It was not until the early 1970s that Black Power began to look dangerous, or at least divisive, and even here most journalists were residually sympathetic to the cause because they knew that the FBI was funding a flamboyantly violent counteroffensive against the Black Panthers. Second, as more and more females entered the workforce out of necessity as well as choice, the palpable obstacles to equal pay, the sexual politics of the workplace, and the epic inertia of the family—when was the housework going to get done?—became pressing issues for most women, even those uninterested in a feminist critique of patriarchy. This rapidly increasing labor force participation may well account for the easy passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (it outlawed discrimination by employers on the basis of sex) by both houses of Congress in 1972 and its ratification by thirty states within a year. But no matter how conservative you were in 1973, it was hard to argue with the claims of both black folk and working women on the promise of the Declaration.

  What then was to be done? The question was already quite political, in part because the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade also came in 1973, at the moment of the liberal legal ascendancy—the low point, by all accounts, of American conservatism. As rephrased by the intellectual cadres of the New Right, which were consigned to the outer darkness of extra-

  academic think tanks and journals, that question went something like this: How can anyone talk about persistent racial or sexual inequality after the Civil Rights Act of 1965 and Title IX of the Educational Amendments Act of 1972? Who says we haven’t lived up to our founding beliefs? Haven’t we provided genuine equality of opportunity (not outcomes), in keeping with our commitment to the free markets afforded by capitalism? And shouldn’t we affirm sexual difference—aren’t men and women fundamentally different? But why should we acknowledge ethnic identities in political deliberations? Isn’t that a way of renouncing the “color-blindness” of the Constitution? What powers hold us in their thrall, and why are they concentrated in the universities and in the mass media—movies, radio, music, TV—that congregate on our coasts? And how can anyone say that imperialism was America’s motive or purpose in Vietnam or in the world? Aren’t we the country that rebuilt Japan and Germany after routing them in World War II? We have massive military power, to be sure, but has it not always been deployed for the common global good?

  Here again the form of the answers was in many ways more important than their content. Here again that form was urgent, angry, categorical, and above all cultural. Here again the messenger became the message, and so seemingly private, personal attributes became public, political issues; in short, the personal got political. The key words of this intellectual program were the same as those of the Left, but, as we shall see, the Right did tend to treat certain cultural categories—particularly family, Western civilization, nation, modernity, canon, and reason—as given facts, and thus as self-

  evident premises of its countercritique.

  Race, Class, and Gender

  Let us have a look at the contested meanings of these key words, then, but as we do so, let us bear in mind that the populations and purposes of the Left and the Right were changing quickly in the 1970s, 1980s, and thereafter, to the point where conventional political geographies were becoming moot. Many late-twentieth-century conservatives, for example, were “old liberals” who understood themselves as defenders of truths forgotten in the political stampede that would turn the world inside out—the stampede that would destroy the di
stinction between what is private and what is public by insisting, along with the feminists who were rethinking the family, that “the personal is political.” Irving Kristol, the father of neoconservatism whom we met in chapter 1, explained this confusion of spheres in 1978: “To begin with, the institutions which conservatives wish to preserve are, and for two centuries were called, liberal institutions, i.e., institutions which maximize personal liberty vis-à-vis a state, a church, or an official ideology. On the other hand, the severest critics of these institutions—those who wish to enlarge the scope of governmental authority indefinitely, so as to achieve ever greater equality at the expense of liberty—are today commonly called ‘liberals.’ It would certainly help to clarify matters if they were called, with greater propriety and accuracy, ‘socialists’ or ‘neo-socialists.’”

  From the standpoint of the academic Left, an awareness of race, gender, and/or class in reading any text, whether the U.S. Constitution or a canonical novel from the nineteenth century, was merely a way of deciphering its social origins and cultural effects. It was not a way of avoiding the intrinsic rigor of such texts or of introducing politics into the classroom. Politics had always been there, in the institutional assumptions that required the reading of this text—say, R. W. Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” (1841)—as opposed to that text—say, Sara Grimke’s “Letters on the Equality of the Sexes” (1838) or Henry Highland Garnet’s “Address to the Slaves of the United States” (1843). It was simply another reading strategy. It was not even a new strategy. Charles Beard’s 1913 book on the Constitution, which showed that “the people” invoked at the founding were already profuse and plural, already a contested political category, was probably the first scholarly entry in the genre. But this reading strategy did violate the idea of the artist or the author as “a uniquely talented, individual sensibility”—it did treat her as a condensation of her social origins—to the point where old-school defenders of the humanities like Roger Kimball claimed that it caused “the eclipse of the self.” The same reading strategy also violated the notion of a literary canon that, on the one hand, appears to us as naturally national—it is supposed to be the self-evident expression of a people—and that, on the other hand, becomes appreciable as such only through the critical efforts of those few educated individuals who can explain what knowledge of the canon does for a people.

  Notice the range of violations performed by the mere insertion of race, gender, and/or class into the act of undergraduate reading: artist/author/individual and canon/nation/people are immediately put at risk, or at least in question, according to both sides in the debate. And notice the dependent relation between the singular and the collective categories at issue here: it seems that the artist, the author, or the individual has no stable meaning or function in the absence of the canon, the nation, or the people, and vice versa—again, according to both sides in the debate. No wonder the “assault on the canon,” as Kimball defined the relatively minor curricular reforms of the 1980s, looked like an attack on the nation itself. “For what is at stake in these difficult questions is more than an academic squabble over book lists and pedagogy,” he declared in a best-selling book called Tenured Radicals (1990). “What is at stake is nothing less than the traditional liberal understanding of democratic society and the place of education and high culture within it.”

  The largely left-wing academics who were reforming the college curriculum in the 1980s and 1990s had a similarly excitable view of their purpose in house, but they didn’t believe that changes in required courses and readings would have huge effects off campus. They, too, were wrong. They started the skirmishes that became the culture wars of the 1990s. But we should acknowledge that their emphasis on race, class, and gender in reconsidering the canon was a good-faith effort to open the thing up at both ends, at

  the point of production—the intellectual scene of artistic authority—and at the moment of consumption—the cultural scene of reader reception. What was an author, they asked, and how did one get anointed as such? What was the experience, then the effect, of reading, and how did critical opinion shape them? Was the “authenticity” of slave narratives a problem because their authorial “origin” was a question? Why were women writers and readers—

  they were the creators and the constituency of modern popular fiction, after all—marginal in the making and the maintenance of “the” canon?

  And speaking of slaves and women, didn’t they have their own histories? Could it be that they made their own histories? Could it be that the received tradition among American historians—the nonfictional canon, as it were—needed revision from the standpoint of those who had been hitherto excluded from the history book indexes? For example, could you follow the lead of W. E. B. DuBois, a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, who claimed in a 1935 book called Black Reconstruction that the general strike of the slaves after 1860 was the key to Northern victory in the Civil War? Could you say, in other words, that black folk were political actors and agents in their own right, even under the most oppressive circumstances, even under slavery? Could you rewrite nineteenth-

  century American history by inserting women into your grand narratives, by asking how they shaped political deliberations without voting, how they determined economic development without owning property? Could it be, then, that “local people,” everyday people, were the proper objects of a specifically political history that preceded but somehow resembled the civil rights movement in all its mundane glory? Could it be that the conspicuous individuals who wrote the constitutions and gave the speeches, then as now, were only a small part of a sprawling, sloppy social history that needed telling in terms of identities derived from race, class, and gender? But now that you mention it, aren’t identities performed rather than derived from obvious antecedents? And how does sexuality—a dimension, clearly, of gender—figure in such performances, or is it, too, unknown until enacted?

  These were the questions that revolutionized the pilot disciplines in the humanities and social sciences—in English, comparative literature, history, political science, sociology, and even economics and philosophy—in the 1970s. They led, in the 1980s and 1990s, toward the invention of new, cross-disciplinary programs like black studies, women’s studies, ethnic studies, Jewish studies, and of course cultural studies, where matters of race, class, and gender became central to the curriculum. These questions also opened up whole new scholarly fields within established disciplines, for example, queer theory in English and family/gender/sexuality in both history and political science. Meanwhile they forced every academic to take a stand, to address and accommodate the new questions or be left behind.

  Disuniting America?

  The “disuniting of America,” as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. put it, would seem to be the agenda, if not the result, of such questions and their new institutional apparatus within the universities. For, as he asked, how can anyone speak of the people and for the people across the divisions of race, class, and gender? But we should remember that the late-twentieth-century academic interest in these acquired identities—in groups rather than individuals as the proximate causes of history, politics, even literature—began at least a hundred years earlier. We should also remember that this academic interest is in many ways more inclusive, more conciliatory, than its intellectual alternatives. Even its earnest and clumsy and infuriating sponsorship of political correctness broadened the sociological bandwidth of undergraduate life, making us all more aware of where we didn’t come from.

  The problem of group identities as discovered and engaged a hundred years ago was the problem of political pluralism. It emerged when the “self-made man,” the small producer, the energetic entrepreneur who underwrote the American Dream—he was his own boss, and thus he was an independent, omnicompetent citizen—became an endangered species. That was when the large corporations consolidated their control of productive property and goods production, turning almost everybody into a worker who
was dependent on another (on his boss), rather than a proprietor who was dependent only on himself. That was when “the eclipse of the self”—the demise of the self-mastering small producer who was his own man—was first glimpsed by American writers, artists, philosophers, academics, and, yes, politicians. That was when the pioneer individualism of the nineteenth century gave way to cultural pluralism, and group identities became legitimate objects of intellectual scrutiny and political mobilization.

  In the early corporate age, these new identities were called social selves, interest groups, sex classes, and ethnic enclaves. Whatever the labels, the point of naming them as such was to understand that the atomic particles of American politics were no longer individuals. They were instead groups, and they were already turning on the axes of race (e.g., the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), class (e.g., the American Federation of Labor, the Industrial Workers of the World), and gender (e.g., the National Women’s Party, the Women’s Trade Union League). So the big difference between the early- and late-twentieth-century interest in group identities is not the erosion of academic attention to individualism—“the eclipse of the self” and, accordingly, “the death of the author,” were accomplished long before tenured radicals stormed the ivory tower. The big difference is the relatively greater emphasis on ethnicity in the later corporate age, in our own time. The remarkable continuity between these twentieth-century moments resides in the acknowledgment of the simple fact that individuals as the nineteenth century conceived them don’t count for much in a culture created and dominated by large corporations, professional associations, and international organizations.