I. Background

    A metanarrative is a story that would give universal meaning to history.  There have been many metanarratives, and two of the most common are Christianity and Marxism, though there are many others.  The Christian and Marxist metanarratives can also be called eschatologies, this word comes from the Greek for “last” (eschatos) and “study of” (-ology), and an eschatology is a story that is concerned with the ultimate destiny and meaning of the world, and of life.  Both of these ways of thinking see history as a plane of unhappiness and alienation.  The Christian eschatology culminates with a transcendent agency annihilating history for the sake of a higher realm, while the Marxist narrative ends with people within history bringing it to a close by ending alienation and exploitation through political and economic action. So, we can see that both of these eschatologies include much discussion of history, but culminate in something other than history.  As a sort of midpoint between these two, we have the meta-narrative of Enlightenment modernity; according to this narrative, history is the story of the bold fight of an enlightened elite struggling to protect accumulated scientific knowledge and principle of the application of Reason to public institutions from superstition and authority; protecting the idea that public life should be based on freedom and equal rights and the idea that through change and action we can make life better.    

   According to Lyotard, people are increasingly skeptical toward this type of story. Something seems to have changed in the relation between the people and certain metanarratives. It seems that the once liberatory narrative of Enlightenment and modernity has lost its street credibility in the wake of a number of developments in the world including the betrayal of the revolution by Stalin, the abandonment of the revolution of ’68, capitalist incorporation of trade unions and workers’ parties, and so on.  It has become increasingly apparent that the metanarratives of opposition and liberation, in order to remain metanarratives, needed to be complicit with the very power structures they would liberate people from. It can also be thought of as the autocannibalism of Reason, which neglected to neglect itself in the work of demystification.    

II. Lyotard, Nietzsche, Heidegger

      How does Lyotard’s postmodern condition look when we bring it into relation with Nietzsche’s “Death of God”?   In the wake of this death, any transcendent value system, any beyond, becomes unbelievable; this includes knowledge, truth, reason, good, evil, and the other members of the secular pantheon. The rug is pulled out from under all symbolic values, especially those that propped themselves up against religion. In order to explain modernity and the transition from modernity to whatever follows, we should refer to two quotes from Nietzsche, first his statement that “God is dead; but given the ways of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown.[1]”and second “The event itself is far too great, too distant, too remote from the multitude’s capacity for comprehension even for the tidings of it to be thought of as having arrived as yet.[2]” 

     Thus, we can understand ‘modernity’ as a bubble that opened up, wherein God had died or was dying, yet the residue of theology was left behind and adapted to ‘worldly ends.’ It seems that Lyotard is heralding the arrival of that death on a scale larger than was to be seen in Nietzsche’s day. However, this death is a process underway since long before the postmodern era; looking to Nietzsche, we see it underway in the late nineteenth century. Nietzsche’s thought on the matter of nihilism had a disciple of sorts in Martin Heidegger.  Heidegger’s essay, “On the Question of Technology” is highly relevant for understanding the arrival of the death of God in contemporary society, and the technological nihilism that comes with it.  First, we see the prevalence of one-dimensional technological rationality on an unprecedented scale. With this, we also face the increasing identification of being as a standing reserve, this includes knowing and thinking.  Second, and inseparable from the first, we can see the revival of the Platonic doctrine of the noble lie by the neo-conservative movement; we can call this irony or cynicism, depending on our point of view, but it is a gesture of bold and daring nihilism.  Between these two thinkers, we can see the ‘postmodern’ theorized under another name, namely nihilism, and it is my interpretation that Lyotard is recognizing a moment in the history of nihilism when he speaks of the postmodern. It seems that Lyotard attributed to the postmodern an unwarranted singularity as if some kind of rupture had occurred, when it is best viewed as a moment in the history of technihilism

     Based on this context, there is much to be commended in Lyotard’s reading of the postmodern, but it seems that he was blind to the continuity involved.  His summary definition of postmodernism can be assimilated to a preexisting explanation as put forward by Nietzsche and Heidegger.  One can even be so bold as to claim that the era of technihilism began definitively with the industrial revolution.  It is during this so-called revolution that God was displaced by economics, by economy or efficiency in the more precise formulation.  At the time they occurred, one could easily have defined the enlightenment or romanticism as an increased credulity toward metanarratives, the metanarratives of Christianity and Reason specifically.  However, the watershed event was the displacement of the meaning of the term primum mobile from God to the engine.  Lyotard was somewhat correct because technology has become more powerful, technihilism more triumphant in recent history, but it was a quantitative change, not a qualitative one. We are still living in the age when nothing is true and everything is permitted. The age feared and touched only in nightmares by all previous civilizations.  We are still tinkering with the same bourgeois values of science, efficiency in production and so on that inaugurated the bourgeois epoch. We are now feeling the implications of discoveries and changes made in the past, the present will only catch up to us in the future.     

     A proper theorization of postmodernism, if it is to be asserted that we live in such a time right now,  would be content to accept the death of God and the rise of technological nihilism as background.  It is a very good basis, a good context into which to place a theorization of the postmodern, as we have seen that postmodernity is a moment in the history of nihilism.  What a good theory of the postmodern needs to do is to find the particularity of the postmodern as it stands over against the other moments in the history of technological nihilism.  Lyotard’s formulation can only leave us hungry in that respect as it draws attention to the nihilism and the technologism without looking for the concrete instantiations the details of how that is playing out in the current day.  If we place such a theory as I think it should be placed, different things, different features of the current time become salient to the investigator, become theoretically interesting.  Lyotard, thoughtful though he is, may not prepare us for what we are dealing with today; his theorization does not provide us with tools for handling the change in the means of relating to metanarrativity which I feel characterizes the current era, the shift from modernist perspectives that deal in necessity to perspectives that embody a consciousness of radical contingency. 

III. Strauss, Detournement, Populism

     There are a few metanarratives that are flourishing right now.  One of them, and the most farcical of all, is the neo-conservative oligarcho-imperialist populism metanarrative. As Thomas Frank once said, neoconservative propaganda in the United States is a recycled version of the socialist/populist rhetoric of the 1930’s shorn of its economic content [3].  This makes sense considering where the neoconservative movement comes from; many of the first members of this movement were disaffected liberals and socialists  who turned to the right during the Nixon administration. Thus, a conservative politician will tell us how the little man needs to be protected from excessive taxation of big business. This sort of farcical adaptation is closer to the heart of the postmodern than public skepticism regarding metanarratives; the public is eager for the populist narrative, in the face of the absurdity of the narrative one is almost led to posit an overcredulity rather than an incredulity.  This operates in conjunction with a second metanarrative; the metanarrative of market-driven globalization which one can say, without much hyperbole, is the apotheosis of technological reason.  Another flourishing metanarrative is the war on terror/west vs. the rest metanarrative, the one that currently motivates the practice of many of the nations of Western Europe and the United States of America. Finally, we have the triumphalist “we beat the Russians” metanarrative; which has been discredited in part (‘the end of history’) but retains the power to overwhelm any contestation regarding the truth of justice, in a way similar to the war against the Persians worked to justify the Athenian empire during the Peloponnesian war.

     If we want to understand what we are living, we need to revisit Lyotard’s formulation and contextualize it within contemporary political events. While we can say that Karl Marx was the most influential political philosopher for most of the twentieth century, we may have to concede that thus far in the twenty first it has been Leo Strauss, the contemporary of Heidegger, and the patron philosopher of the neo-conservative movement. The Rudolph Giulianis, neo-conservatives, the Nixonians, the Reganites, the Thatcherites, these are postmoderns, these and the broader movement they are a part of are emblems of the era in which we are living; an era that has more in common with a Christian Fundamentalist punk band than it does with The Velvet Underground. We are now living in the age of the conservative revolution, the bizarre and monstrous inversion of the traditional distribution of ideas. We must recognize that the conservative revolution and all that comes with it are as essentially postmodern as the drive to local struggles in progressive politics.  It is the other face of postmodernism that Lyotard’s theorization may shift our attention away from. 

      In this era the political ground has shifted under our feet revealing a radical contingency, we come to see that there is no necessary connection between forms (artistic or social) and positions within the class struggle, that all of these correlations come about through contingent historical articulation. We are living in a time characterized by a bizarre detournement in which conservative cultural revolution has become a serious force in political life. An excellent example of this is Bob Roberts; a film written and directed in 1992 by the American actor Tim Robbins.  In this film, Roberts, a conservative folk singer and businessman, runs for a seat in the senate, all the while recording albums that contort the music of Woodie Guthrie and Bob Dylan into the shape of the resurgent right. It is very much as Marx said in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Naploeon, “ Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.[4] ”       

     As any person who knows a young republican/born again Christian/or jihadist can tell you, in this period there is no shortage of zealots of every kind; true believers swarm us from every direction, parties, religions, cults and so on have no shortage of followers. If we stick with a definition of the postmodern condition as skepticism, we render ourselves blind to the culture of farcical detournement, as well as the fact that our world is characterized by an almost medieval zealotry for metanarrative; it is best to view Lyotard’s pronouncement as an aspect of a moment in the development of nihilism, not as a new epoch in human history.  If we must advance a definition of postmodernity our focus must be on radical contingency and reversal not on skepticism, it must be on appropriation not on contemplation.

[1] Friedrich Nietzsche. The Gay Science,  Tr. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1974, pg. 167, #108.

[2] Ibid, pg. 279, #343.

[3] Something like this claim can be found in his What's Wrong with Kansas? Though I paraphrase from memory.

[4] Karl Marx. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon.  http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm

( Poetic Function and Thought )

We should study the means by which languages and institutions are produced and sustained: this involves attention to the influence exerted on language by social change, on social change by language, and the influence of language in maintenance of the status quo.  This could also be called a focus on the performative-pragmatic aspects of discourse.  Shelley’s thoughts on the different types of societies lead us to think of a comparative linguistic study of the variations language undergoes under different political conditions, but his thought here should inspire us to read the Paradiso along with the Inferno and to study the moments when the creative force of the poetic function is operating at its most potent.     

( Conclusions )</div>

      While reading Shelley in preparation for the stylistic analysis I undertook in this paper, it occurred to me that there was more to his work than a stylistic analysis based on the current standard model of language could capture.  This led me to wonder what type of stylistics, what type of thinking about language could be more adequate to his work.  Then, it occurred to me that he had written on the philosophy of language, and it could be profitable for this paper, and also in a broader sense for students of language generally, to inquire into the idea of language that Shelley had.

      Thus, this paper is split into two sections: the first deals with two of Shelley’s poems, “Ozymandias” and “England in 1819,” and the second deals with his thinking about language.  I argue that his thinking is consistent with what Jean Jacques Lecercle calls the “Post-Galilean Paradigm” in linguistics and philosophy of language.  After analyzing the way he uses language in his poetry, I move on to develop his philosophical insights into the outline of a model of language, and suggestions for further research. In order to develop this model into a type of linguistics, it seems that further thinking about the implications of Shelley’s insights is necessary. However, given the constraints imposed by this paper, preliminary reflections will have to suffice until next time.    

     Again, Shelley chooses a complex perspective: this time, he shifts from a third person description in the first thirteen lines of the poem to a first person perspective in the final line. This shift is indicated by the presence of the first person plural pronoun in the final line. He starts by offering us a polemical description of the social order at that time; it is not a positive evaluation.  However, in the last lines, we are treated to the possibility of something better emerging from this situation. This may mirror Shelley’s own ratio of feeling about his country’s politics: two parts hope twelve parts anger and indignation. Also, the poem seems to be making a statement about identity: the narrator is not a part of England as it is enumerated in the first twelve lines, but he associates himself only with the hope of better things to come.    

     “England in 1819” uses ten verbs, six of which are intransitive (flow, neither see, nor feel, nor know, cling, drop, tempt and slay, may burst).  Three verbs are transitive (makes, wield, illumine) and there is also one instance of the very ‘to be.’ The preponderance of intransitive verbs underscores the focus on the malignancy of the subject of the descriptive sentences. The reason for this can be clarified by considering the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs: the former need to take an object, whereas the latter are complete without one.  Thus, intransitives can direct the focus of the reader toward the subject of the action. The use of the verb ‘to be’ signals the poems dominant metaphor and the reversal of meaning that comes at the end.  In addition Shelley employs a modal in line thirteen seemingly to show that in contrast to the rest of the poem what is to be hoped for is not as certain as the existing evils.   

     Teachers have always been gatekeepers in some sense--whether we begin with the Sophists in Greece, exposing the political class to their techniques of linguistic manipulation, or with the various priestly castes and their initiations and catechisms--throughout history, we see education making the most powerful discourses available to some people, and simultaneously closing active discursive power to others.  Today, with the advent of compulsory public education, it could be argued that educators are no longer in this position; even acknowledging this expansion as progress, it should also be noted that full education is not compulsory: there are chambers in the house of education into which the majority of people are not expected to penetrate, and there are different levels of quality within the primary and secondary education that all are guaranteed under the law.   There is still inequality.  Teachers still have to think about their relationship to this inequality.  

       The work of scholars like James Paul Gee and List Delpit has been a starting point for many educators who are looking to fit their classroom practices into this larger historical and sociological framework.  Though these scholars agree on a number of fundamentals, they come to significantly different positions on several issues that affect the classroom teacher.   In this paper, I will compare Gee’s article “What is Literacy?” and Delpit’s “The Politics of Teaching Literate Discourse” with an eye to classroom practice.   Delpit’s article is a critical engagement with Gee’s work, and thus I will begin by explaining Gee’s ideas, after which I will explain her critique, and evaluate the validity of their positions.  In closing, I will draw a few conclusions regarding the salutary influence that exposure to linguistic concepts can have on the everyday practice of the classroom teacher, especially concerning the challenges attendant upon teaching today’s linguistically diverse student body.

A society’s most potent taboos are shadows of its highest values. 

Consider prostitution in relation to the historical institution of marriage; both involve an intimate exchange: the former producing money, the latter producing capital. Taboos are ontologically necessary preconditions of the “sacred.”  In order for the scared to be, it needs to enjoy something we can call a ‘semiotic monopoly:’ its signs must remain pure; irony is to be avoided at all costs.  In other words, the sacred gestures and ritual attitudes must not be appropriated without warrant: there must be strict and pitiless felicity conditions imposed.  Violations of these conditions of felicity are called taboos, and they carry strong punishments, not the least of which is the imputation of insanity, being declared mad.      

      These taboos are thus revealed as political.  Punishment without written law is one form of political struggle, even if it does not appear to us as a very just one.   The taboo can be said to be the first institution, pre-dating even marriage which Vico refers to as the first “human institution.” Following Vico, it seems to me that “solemn nuptials” would not be possible without a strong set of preexisting taboos, which he would refer to as “divine institutions.  As he puts it in his New Science:

10        On the altar near the lituus may be seen the water and fire, the former contained in a jar. For with a view to divination sacrifices arose among the gentiles from that common custom of theirs which the Latins called procurare auspicia, i.e. to sacrifice in order to understand the auguries well so that the divine warnings or commands of Jove might be properly carried out. These are the divine things among the gentiles, from which came later all their human things.

11        The first of these [human things] was marriage, symbolized by the torch lit from the fire on the altar and leaning against the jar. For marriage, as all statesmen agree, is the seed-plot of the family, as the family is the seed-plot of the commonwealth. To denote this, the torch, although it is the hieroglyph of a human thing, is placed on the altar along with the water and the fire, which are hieroglyphs of divine ceremonies; just as the ancient Romans celebrated nuptials aqua et igni, because it was understood that by divine counsel these two common things (and, before fire even, perennial water as a thing more necessary to life) had led men to live in society. (7-8)

      Thus, we can see a significant overlap between human and divine institutions, the divine or heroic institutions enable the human institutions.  In other words, secular ‘modern’ institutions rely on something formulated in a different mode, unintelligible to modernity.  Secular, democratic political discourse relies on a set of never-fully explicit axioms—we can call them endoxa­-­­which serve as a horizon of intelligibility for arguments.  Modernity does not know how to call these institutions political because the processes associated with these institutions fabricate the terms from which modernity operates. Through them a different type of power is wielded, or a different but complementary phenomenon of power takes place.

    The monetary signifier is one of semblance, which rests on social conventions. The financial universe is an architecture made of fictions and its keystone is what Lacan called a “subject supposed to know”, to know why and how. Who plays this part? The concert of authorities, from where sometimes a voice is detached, Alan Greenspan, for example, in his time. The financial players base their behavior on this. The fictional and hyper-reflexive unit holds by the “belief” in the authorities, i.e. through the transference to the subject supposed to know. If this subject falters, there is a crisis, a falling apart of the foundations, which of course involves effects of panic.

Jacques-Alain Miller ’The Financial Crisis’

         We now realize something which has been true for some time: capitalism is self-destructing in the face of its chance to establish a global monopoly.  The U.S.S.R fell, and capitalism appeared to be the only option.  With the united states as the world’s sole superpower, it seemed that there would be a pax venalici with the market taking the day, and abolishing history all at once.  How close we all came to believing that it was natural for a person to live or die based on their ability to get a job.  Free-Market Capitalism has had the power to put its vision into practice on as radical a scale as Lenin, or Mao.

      People knew that this system was not capable of triumph.  That it would either destroy itself in the process of transformation into something better, or just destroy itself.  The results seem to be in.  History will continue.  Politics will be resumed.   Perhaps it is worthwhile to narrate a certain portion of the story of capitalism in finer detail.   This will help to bring out the absurdity and delirium embodied in the capitalist vision.

       Capital tends toward monopoly.  The pursuit of profit, of expansion for its own sake, is the logic of capital, and the conclusion toward which this logic drives is monopoly.  However, under capitalism, what we have is a large mass of discreet, atomized forces driving toward a monopoly which they cannot reach: total market saturation is not possible, as free-market social theory tells us: there is no society; they are only individuals.  Monopoly is the object of capital’s desire; it is as intoxicating as absolute power.

       Monopoly is the point of qualitative change which is the limit of the horizon of capitalism.  This fantasy of capital is the image of a point of qualitative change as it is visible to capital, the moment at which a new logic would be necessary.  Capitalism cannot achieve a social monopoly such as the one it seemed to be heir to after the cold war because it needs competition and division in order to operate.  If the social monopoly were achieved we would need a logic of struggle together instead of the capitalist logic of struggle against.    

            Deleuze and Guattari’s Treatise on Nomadology is a good point of departure for us.  Georges Dumezil has demonstrated that domination is bipolar.  D&G ruminate on this and begin with the following set of oppositions.  There are a number of important principles at work here.  First, these terms are in a relation of simultaneous opposition and complementarity. Domination needs both of these aspects, and it needs them to be/appear separate.  Second, though violence is associated with one of the terms, this violence is not warfare; it is the civil violence of law enforcement.  In order for the state to have soldiers, it must attract a war machine which D&G claim is outside the sovereignty of the state and prior to its law.  They even claim that it is “another species.”  However, D&G stress the fact that war is not necessarily the nature of the war machine, what we know today as the military is the result of the state attempting to appropriate and contain the war machine.  If the state does not succeed in containing such machines, it will be seriously threatened.  D&G claim that the war machine, “unties the bond just as [it] betrays the pact (352)” yet it is the only means by which anything can pass between the poles of the state.     
  

         In other words, there is always a group with attitudes contrary to those of proponents of the state, if the state can put this energy of transgression to military use, it can expel it from the system.  Dumezil was discussing Indo-European culture when he made this argument.  This argument has in its scope social arrangements where there were nomads living nearby.  The people that the state claimed to rule would learn fighting techniques from the nomads, and appropriate their technological innovations, altering them to bring them in line with a certain model of organization.   However, we must also think of the nomads living within.  These are the people who transgress the state’s claim that it rules them.  The state exists in a sea of possible hostility which it must disperse and channel in order to survive.

      The state as the protector of privilege deserves the contempt of every honest person. We should keep in mind that the state is inextricably linked with privilege, so linked that we can even ask why war is the health of privilege.  In order to see how the state performs its sleight of hand, let us examine the present state of war which America has become.  America is a conflicted state of war; we should examine this heterogeneity in some detail in order to understand how war is the health of the state and of privilege.  From these conflicts, we should be able to come up with ways of destroying privilege, and its necessary correlate domination.  It seems that America is in the reactionary imperial stage of development analogous to the Roman Empire, which while passing through a similar phase was involved in constant military action in defense of established privileged ruling classes.  This also has its root in the multinational nature of today’s capital, in order for capital to convince people to give their natural resources to foreigners capital is required to back a privileged class and aide it in exploiting its helots.  Today America seems to be the global representative of privilege; smug, arrogant, violent and scared, paranoid lest anyone find out about the crime on which privilege is founded.

America’s Lineage To WWI

     America as we know it today, The United States of America as a nation-state began with its founding patriarch Abraham Lincoln.  The first and second republics were founded under the articles of confederation and the constitution.  The first republic was a decentralized federation, whereas the second was a more centralized federalism.  What the federalists argued for was not a federation but something much more centralized, they argued for a national government above and beyond the rights of the individual states, a central power which could make laws that transcended the states.  In the years following the civil war, the third government was founded.  This was the government of America as a nation state.  Lincoln forged the American nation with blood and steel.  This government was founded on the idea that The United States was a singular noun.  Though this sort of thing was implicit in the second republic, it could never have happened by peaceful means.  Under the constitution, states were permitted to secede from the union; under the nation state of America, the third government, this had changed.  The relation between the individual states and the federal government under the constitution was asymmetrical in favor of the states, there was no federal army there was no income tax there was no FBI for domestic surveillance and terror operations.  Under the nation founded by Lincoln, the union was to be put before all else, in other words the central power in Washington now enjoyed an asymmetrical relation with the states.  This autonomy made America into a nation state.

      Before Lincoln’s time, there had been several important wars in American history. First, the war of decolonization or the revolution fought against Britain.  Second, the war of 1812 in which the White House was burned by the British. Third, the Mexican War of 1846 which US Grant points to as the chief cause of the civil war.  We cannot forget the war of expansion which Americans had been fighting against the indigenous people of the continent.  Lincoln’s war, the civil war was the greatest killer of Americans in history.  It marked a new era in the history of warfare, the technologies used and the tactics employed were the first announcement of the age of total war.  However, the Mexican War also marked its own type of milestone in history.  It was America’s first imperialist adventure.  It had been very unpopular, but it was fought anyway; what America did was it smashed Mexico and grabbed half of its land.  This was the beginning of the end of the republic of the constitution.  Under that republic, it was tolerated when people held slaves and when people took land from the indigenous peoples, but imperialist adventures in which the national army attacked another country for no compelling reason would not have been tolerated.  Though I jokingly refer to Lincoln as our national patriarch, much of the work was done after his assassination and behind his back.  We might even say that the new nation was in assembly until 1898, when the United States declared war against Spain for spurious reasons, defeated them and gained a worldwide reputation as well as several overseas territories. 

     The influence of the people who survived when Lincoln died led to the ascendancy of the modern corporation.  At the same time as Roosevelt was studying the effect of naval power on history, the trust was coming into its own as a serious power.  Under the third government, America entered its imperial phase, at the same time that the corporation and the bank became more powerful than they had ever been before in American Life.  This was powered by two things: first, the expansion of the state, which is necessary for the conversion of currency and capital; and second, the influx of immigrants from Europe who provided their labor to the capitalists, or rather who were forced to provide their labor under exploitative conditions for criminally low wages.  Although slavery had been formally ended by the Emancipation proclamation, it was still alive and well; these workers were provided with material conditions on par with what the bondsman had to endure, they were forced to work without any say in the process of production or any right to negotiate their pay.  Their pay was barely enough to pay for what the master provided for his slaves, shelter and food.  The shift from rural plantation-style slavery reminiscent of serfdom to industrial slavery also occasioned a shift in terminology.  These people were no longer called slaves, after all, the north had fought to end slavery, they were now called employees.  The underlying reality of nearly absolute exploitation remained the same for all who would see it.    

       America, some claim, was founded on the humanistic principles of the enlightenment.  The trouble with humanism is that in order to see oneself as human one must dehumanize another.  Americans had done this to the natives and to the Africans for generations.  Now there came an influx of desperate Europeans, America would have no shame about doing the same to them.  The humanist’s definition of freedom is a negative individualist definition in which freedom is derived from the institution of private property.  The autonomy of the free and enlightened humanist is dependent on liberation from toil, in other words the humanist human is a master a member of a ruling class.  Thus, his very humanity depends on his ability to exploit the labor of another group of people.  Lincoln once said that he did not desire to be a slave therefore he did not desire to be a master, and that was his idea of democracy; America after Lincoln wanted to be the master of free people.  This contradiction gives the lie to all of the current rhetoric about ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ as an export product. This contradiction lies at the heart of all attempts at bourgeois good conscience; the French and American revolutions proclaimed their ideals of liberty and equality but one is only free insofar as a mobile and flexible slave is required in this new epoch, insofar as the responsibility which comes with ownership is seen as an encumbrance on the masters. In other words, America had made the transition from a mixed regime of Feudal and Capitalist economic conditions to a much more capitalist regime. Under the mixed regime, serfdom prevailed in the south and capitalism in the north; under the new regime, plantation-slavery had been abolished, and the new form of waged slavery was not recognized as a form of slavery at all.  Humanistic ideas of government ‘of the people, for the people, and by the people’ of a ‘free press’ and  ‘liberty of conscience’ were harshly subordinated to the demands of an ascendant imperialist oligarchy in this period. We can see this in T.Roosevelt’s suppression of Anarchism, where he made it illegal for anarchist literature to pass through the mail.  His rationale may have invoked a need to defend our institutions against the anarcho-terrorist menace, but his actions were in direct contradiction with the principles on which those institutions claim to be founded, and in terms of which they were justified. The pressure of worldwide anti-capitalist revolution was coming to bear on America at this time, as exemplified in the work of Eugene V. Debs, Emma Goldman, the Chicago Anarchists, the Mexican Zapatistas and many more.  In that era of monopolistic exploitation of disenfranchised immigrant labor the ‘european’ ideas of revolution were gaining wide currency among Americans, and being harshly opposed by the American ruling class as well as the American state. The most shameful part of this is that these ‘outside agitators’ were basing their revolutionary aspirations on the principles of liberty and equality which America claimed to champion.

A doorslams,  

the night is cold,

 man is stranded in the city ,

     and has no money;

  your head so gently upon my shoulder,

            us fascinated with oneanother,

the hours pass minutes and days

  there is nowhere to sleep, nothing to eat,

                                                empty space,

the night has turned her back

  my hand touches                            your face,

  we  see each other,

a rose grown on a battlefield,

   in the ticking clocks tenderest rhythms smother,   

        do not sound over the tv  noise

          Proletarian culture has had a difficult time in the United States.  The same forces that attempted to stifle its development during the period mentioned in Foley’s title have been largely responsible for writing its history.  Perhaps I should be more accurate and say writing it out of literary history.  This entire body of work, and the philosophical ideas regarding literature associated with it, have been airbrushed out of American literary history like Trotsky in the notorious photo archive purge. In this study, Foley attempts to excavate in American history to recover this manifestation of working class life, and she succeeds. 

          Foley’s book is divided into two parts: part one deals with the historical and political context in which proletarian literature operated during the depression, and part two deals with the strengths and limitations of particular literary forms as vehicles for the expression of revolutionary ideas.  In part one, Foley discusses the anti-communist movement’s influence on literary history, the major influences on American literary radicalism, and debates within the movement regarding the definition of proletarian literature, partisanship in literature, race and gender. All of these discussions are based on extensive archival research and close reading of proletarian literature.  In part two, Foley critically examines the fictional autobiography, the bildungsroman, the social novel, and the collective novel as possible vehicles for revolutionary expression using the tools of narratology as developed by Gerard Genette. Again, this section is richly documented from the pages of proletarian novels, and analyzed with an eye to the present.            

        This study comes in the context of two other movements in literary studies against which it should be laid out in order to comprehend its true power.  These movements are the so-called new criticism, and the cultural studies movement.  As different as these movements may appear, this book offers a serious challenge to both of them.  If we view the new criticism as a high-culture formalist movement which focuses on the aesthetic autonomy of literature, and cultural studies as an (unthinking) affirmation of “popular culture” in the light of a rejection of the work of critics of mass culture like Adorno and Marcuse, we can imagine the type of contempt with which practitioners of these hegemonic schools of American reading would approach the proletarian literature that Foley studies.  We can imagine the simultaneous cries of ‘elitism’ and ‘propaganda’ that these dominant strands of American literary education would offer as arguments against it.  

         It seems that with the end of the cold war the “claims” of the new critics and cold-war liberals have lost something.  It is becoming increasingly evident that the principle of their claims’ coherence was not strictly rational.  With the end of the cold war, it is possible to answer these claims with fact, to displace the ideological taboo placed on these novels and these aesthetic values with reasoned historical and aesthetic argumentation.  In this study, Foley returns to the documentary history of the proletarian literary movement and uses the evidence of the archives to refute the slogans and myths propagated by the movements’ critics over the years.  Her arguments attack the central dogmas of the new criticism, as well as its defined ‘heresies,’ but they also indirectly destabilize the legitimacy of cultural studies insofar as it relies on certain inherited valuations of radical culture.  In particular, the existence of an aesthetically legitimate autonomous proletarian culture destabilizes the notion of market-driven cultural democracy that underlies cultural studies’ affirmation of what it calls “popular culture.”  As Thomas Frank puts it, summarizing the work of Herbert Gans, a representative articulation of the worldview of the cultural studies movement:

Gans began the book by rejecting the idea “that popular culture is simply imposed on the audience from above,” that a malign culture industry is able to tell us what to think. In fact, he argues, audiences have the power to demand and receive, through the medium of the market, the culture of their choosing from the entertainment industry. Then, in what would eventually become the trademark gesture of academic cultural studies, Gans hammered the critics of the entertainment industry as the real villains, as “elitist” nabobs who are “unhappy with [recent] tendencies toward cultural democracy” and who obnoxiously assume they know what is best for the world. (New Consensus for Old: Cultural Studies from Left to Right, pg. 2)

          If the proletarian literary movement is unbound, if this repressed element is set free, it makes this notion of market-driven cultural democracy laughable.  As long as the correct portion of the history of twentieth century American literature is suppressed, the cultural studies practitioners can pose as literary radicals who affirm the underdog and defend the working person against the incursions of the elites.  After reading Foley’s work, it becomes impossible to respect the authenticity of “popular culture,” and more importantly, it becomes possible to make rigorous historical arguments against those who would defend this most objectionable tenet of the cultural studies worldview.  She gives us a point of departure; she restores the rest of the historical record: working class people have produced culture that was not sold to them by an entertainment industry, but was an integrated part of their political aspirations and everyday experience.

        As important as this work is to theoretical practitioners in the modern literary critical environment, it is equally important to aspiring left-wing artists, novelists, dramatists and poets.  Many people socialized in neo-liberal culture who feel revolutionary stirrings in their guts do not know where to turn in order to gain from a history of experimentation by like-minded forebears. Foley consciously seeks to remedy this problem in her study.  She does not approach this history in a memorializing way that would enshrine the literary radicals of the 1930’s as saints or demi-gods beyond which the modern aspirant has no appeal, but she approaches it critically, astutely noting room for improvement, impasses and failures.   She shows us some of what has been done, and points us to the sources where we can investigate this much-neglected history for ourselves.   

         
                                        
                                                 Works Cited

Foley, Barbara. Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929-1941. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.

Frank, Thomas. New Consensus for Old Cultural Studies from Left to Right. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2002.