From
producer to consumer, arts and entertainment corporations are the
ever-present intermediaries for successful production and realization
of cultural commodities. Their goal is profit and not artistic merit.
Similarly,
the humanities have been marginalized through the marketization of
higher education. The ever present mantra of “running everything
like a business” has deeply infected the process of learning, thus
sending philosophy, political studies, literature, history and other
humanities to the dustbin. That which cannot pay its way deserves no
place in the university, say administrators wedded to best business
practices. Consequently, the appreciation for and vibrant generation
of the humanities is stunted by the dominance of the “practicality”
of the sciences and business. Higher learning becomes learning for a
purpose, namely, getting ahead.
But
the arts and independent thought are threatened by other factors as
well. While even those friendly to capitalism will give a reluctant
acknowledgment of the economic factors that diminish culture and
humanistic pursuits, few accept the significant role of politics in
stunting culture and learning. Of course many will readily agree that
right wing zealots chip away politically at the liberal values that
are believed to be the foundation for cultural and intellectual
enrichment. They will eagerly concede that pornography police and
music censors retard the free flow of ideas. But they, nonetheless,
celebrate the US democratic spirit that continues to nourish the
spring of cultural production and intellectual innovation.
Accordingly, they forget, or purposely overlook, the insidious role of Cold War repression that befell intellectual and cultural life in the US from the late 1940s through the early 1960s, with loud echoes today. For nearly a decade and a half, intellectual conformity on class, race, and Communism was rigorously enforced through punishment or fear, especially in the sensitive areas of culture and ideas (the battle of ideas is not merely in academia or among the men and women of letters but in the unions and mass organizations, where a vibrant incubation of radical ideas was replaced with a tepid, mediocre, and intolerant uniformity). Thousands of cultural and intellectual workers lost their jobs, were shunned, or blacklisted. Tens of thousands were frozen with fear and determined to assiduously avoid anything controversial.
Artists
and intellectuals grew timid: ironically, some of the best popular
cinema of the otherwise mediocre era was offered by ex-Communists who
had made their mea culpas and thus earned the right to tackle
edgy themes (for example, A Face in the Crowd (Kazan), Sweet
Smell of Success, and The Big Knife (Odets). The
best of television, a then-new medium seemingly happy to wallow in
mediocrity, came from deeply covert writers who had been expelled
from Hollywood. When vibrant African American music in the form of a
subversive Rhythm and Blues stood to crack the cultural barriers, US
entertainment corporations co-opted and whitened the music while
transforming it into mildly titillating Rock and Roll (RCA and Elvis
Presley), a safer alternative.
The
false radicalism of Abstract Expressionism was promoted by a deeply
conservative coterie of wealthy art impresarios intent upon
overshadowing any subversive messages borne by representational art
(see How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, Guilbaut). And
mildly mocking satire of upper-middle-class and suburban mores a
la New Yorker magazine became the gold standard of popular
literature.
Youth
rebellion, thought to be a biological imperative, found expression in
the middle-class angst of the “beat” generation or through
revisiting frontier toughness through the cult of the motorcycle.
“Alienation” replaced “exploitation” as the theme of
critiques of industrial society.
Moral
and political philosophy shunned social criticism for the fetish of
linguistic analysis while the social sciences fell under the sway of
the paradigm of the self-interested, rational individual.
But
it was not simply fear and intimidation that drove the vapidity of
culture and thought in the high season of anti-Communism. The best
and brightest of Cold War liberals readily collaborated with the US
government's security forces and propaganda offensives. As Frances
Stoner Saunders thoroughly documents (The Cultural Cold War),
the CIA's front organization, The Congress for Cultural Freedom,
purchased or captured in its net some of the most illustrious
intellectuals in the US and the world. Recruitment and manipulation
of writers, editors, journalists, academics exerted a strong
influence on the direction of intellectual and cultural life for
decades. It would be naïve not to believe-- and contrary to what has
been uncovered-- that these same government tentacles had not reached
into the US labor movement and numerous NGOs.
It
is a pity that no one has taken on the daunting task of assembling
all of the glimpses, hints, testaments, and documents that have
allowed us to peek behind the curtain of secrecy and deception
shielding the vast apparatus of thought control employed by US
rulers. What we know about the co-option of a student organization
like NSA, a labor front like AIFLD, a publishing house like Praeger,
or public intellectuals like Isaiah Berlin, Mary McCarthy, Clement
Greenberg, or Arthur Schlesinger Jr. suggests that the instruments of
influence stretch far and wide and ensure limits to discussion,
debate, and artistic expression.
A
Swamp of Gullibility: The Case of Paul De Man
It
was in the context of reflecting upon the Cold War clamp-down on US
culture and intellectual life that I approached Evelyn Barish's new
book, The Double Life of Paul De Man. From the mid-sixties
until his death in 1983, De Man acquired a scholarly, intellectual
reputation that secured him a position as one of the most influential
intellectuals in the Western world. His students and colleagues in
the intellectual school popularly known as “deconstructionism”
held prestigious positions at many academic centers, influenced most
of the humanities, and succeeded in penetrating into popular culture.
Deconstruction-- as an intellectual current-- has the curious
distinction of being nearly incomprehensible to the uninitiated, yet
purporting to be a devastating critique sweeping away all that comes
before it.
Not
long after de Man's death, an admiring student of his discovered
evidence that de Man collaborated with the Nazi occupiers in his
native Belgium, contributing pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic articles to
Belgium's leading newspaper. This revelation rocked the academic
community and beyond, raising questions about de Man's integrity and
fitness to retain his celestial place in the liberal arts heavens. De
Man loyalists sought to cast the collaboration as an aberration and,
perhaps with some merit, as irrelevant to the value of his work. As
with other fascists or collaborators-- Martin Heidegger, Herbert von
Karajan, Werner von Braun, etc.-- it may be possible to separate
their life's work from their work with the devil (possible, but
difficult).
Critics
like David Lehman in his 1991 book, Signs of the Times:
Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man, offered no such life
line to de Man and deconstruction. He argues forcefully that
deconstruction is as tainted by hum-buggery as de Man is flawed as a
human being.
But
like the Western debate over Heidegger's past, sides were drawn, but
no minds were changed.
Now
comes Ms. Barish's book which shows that Paul de Man was thoroughly a
cad, a thief, and, with few exceptions, cavalier with the truth.
While Barish indulges in annoying flights of psychological
speculation, while she gets some minutiae wrong, she marshals a most
convincing case that de Man neglected a wife and children, falsified
official documents, stole from investors, lied about academic
credentials (even about his own paternity), failed to pay debts-- the
list of crimes and misdemeanors goes on and on... Those curious of
the myriad, lurid details should buy the book; they will find it more
bizarre than fiction.
Predictably,
the Barish book drew many responses. At one extreme, de Man friend
and Sterling Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Yale
(succeeding de Man as Sterling professor) and Andrew W. Mellon
Scholar at Princeton, Peter Brooks, brought his scholarship to bear
on the book in a review published in The New York Review of Books.
Notable for its prickliness, the review challenges Barish's
“scholarship” but fails to engage or correct any of the
substantive claims at play. Nor do Brooks’ scholarly sensitivities
note that the NYRB published several de Man articles
previously, perhaps a fact that might be seen as tainting the
editors' objectivity.
Robert
Alter, writing in The New Republic, saw the Barish book as
demonstrating that de Man was simply a “total fraud,” a
conclusion with which those of us less concerned with scholarly
niceties might concur. Carlin Romano, writing in the Chronicle of
Higher Education, similarly recoils from de Man's demonstrated
moral corruption.
Harvard
Professor Susan Rubin Sulieman, writing in the New York Times
concedes that de Man is a “con man,” but cannot resist the
academic urge to cast a long shadow by scolding Barish over her
scholarly standards. Her sense of moral proportion seems to be
overshadowed by her outrage over professional standards.
Writing
in The New Yorker, Louis Menand details de Man's sins with a
school-boy relish, while attempting to separate his turpitude from
the intellectual views associated with his work. Menand writes, in
defense of deconstructionism:
We could say that
deconstruction is an attempt to go through the looking glass, to get
beyond or behind language, but a deconstructionist would have to
begin by explaining that the concepts “beyond” and “behind”
are themselves effects of language. Deconstruction is all about
interrogating apparently unproblematic terms. It’s like digging a
hole in the middle of the ocean with a shovel made of water.
“...
go through the looking glass...”? “...digging a hole in the
middle of the ocean with a shovel made of water...”? Is this
nonsense or an example of the elevated, urbane wit so long associated
with The New Yorker?
Chickens
Coming Home to Roost
While
writers milk the de Man affair for its full entertainment value, and
academics debate the damage to the deconstructionist program,
critical questions are quietly passed over: How did de Man, the con
man, slip through the filters of some of the world's most prestigious
universities? How did Bard, Harvard, Cornell, and Yale allow this man
who never completed a baccalaureate snooker the gatekeepers on his
journey to claiming one of the most prestigious academic chairs in
the US? More broadly, how were the celebrated New York intellectuals,
especially Mary McCarthy and Dwight McDonald, seduced into sponsoring
de Man into the highest intellectual circles?
In
her fashion, Barish speculates on the personalities and psyches of
those taken in by de Man in order to supply an explanation. But such
an explanation would reduce the rise of Paul de Man to an
unprecedented, finally inexplicable historic accident.
A
better answer is found by returning to the historical context of Paul
de Man's journey. De Man arrived and maneuvered his way into a
position to launch his career at the peak of the Cold War repression
in the US. Academics and intellectuals were not expanding horizons
nor inviting fresh currents. Rather, they were circling the wagons
and banning controversial ideas. This was, of course, fertile soil
for opportunists, people who could read the signs and conform.
It
is important to remember that de Man's chosen field of literature and
literary criticism underwent a radical transformation coincident with
the rise of anti-Communist hysteria in the US. Formerly, critics
sought to understand literature in broadly open ways, groping for
social, cultural, historical, and personal factors that would inform
the meaning of texts. A prominent exponent and acknowledged leader of
this school was V. L. Parrington. While not a Marxist, Parrington's
“...progressive interpretation of American history was highly influential in the 1920s and 1930s and helped define modern liberalism in the United States..." (Wikipedia)
Parrington's Pulitzer Prize winning book “... dominated literary
and cultural criticism from 1927 through the early 1950s...,”
according to a source cited in the same article. At that time a
Marxist, Granville Hicks, wrote a critical appreciation of
Parrington's work for Science and Society in 1938 (The
Critical Principles of V L Parrington), concluding that “...if
he were alive, Parrington would be fighting for democracy. Certainly
his work is a powerful weapon on that side.” Apparently, too
powerful for the malignant 1950s.
Moderately
progressive views such as Parrington's were squelched in this time of
toadyism:
Trilling was one of the most important "hard-liners" in the CIA's Congress for Cultural Freedom.
Today,
Parrington is largely forgotten, thanks to Cold Warriors and academic
opportunists. And in his place, the “New Critics” arose in the
late 1940s to rescue literary texts from a fulsome, rich
interpretation, especially an interpretation that might even remotely
suggest Marxism. From that time on, everything was text and only
text. Like the shift from representational art to Abstract
Expressionism, the movement to “new criticism” was a Cold War
gambit masquerading as a new, daring approach to culture, a safe
officially sanctioned rebellion that barred the door from seditious
art and interpretation.
Arriving
in New York in 1948, Paul de Man's brand of charm, salon wit, and
shameless opportunism fit perfectly into the intellectual milieu of
the emerging Cold War. A European, without the baggage of Communism
or leftism, but emitting vague hints of participating in the
Resistance, proved attractive to Cold War liberals. But when he
packed up and left Bard College for Harvard ahead of bill collectors
and scandal, his fortunes took another even more significant turn.
Harvard's heralded Humanities Six class gave de Man a taste of the
flavors enjoyed at the US's elite universities. The gift of the New
Critics' method of “close reading” became the foundation for his
meteoric career. Add European exoticism, a profound rejection of
inter-subjective meaning, and convey this package in a dense,
impenetrable language, and you have a ticket to stardom for an
incorrigible con man. Paul de Man punched the ticket.
Intellectual
life in the US was irreparably damaged by the stifling, suffocating
atmosphere imposed by Cold War hysteria. Cultural and intellectual
watchdogs collaborated with administrators to master promoting the
illusion of a free and open society while blocking any potential
challenges to the bourgeois canon. Central to that task was the
project of creating and shaping ersatz rebellion, of channeling the
natural skepticism and contrariness of young minds towards benign
expressions of revolt. Paul de Man became a willing participant in
that game, molding deconstruction into an instrument for thumbing
one's nose at an ambiguous, amorphous establishment. A difficult,
frustratingly opaque language coupled to a defiant rejection of the
most basic category of understanding-- meaning-- seduced initiates
into the world of deconstruction. While it challenged no center of
real power, deconstruction tasted, smelled, and looked like
rebellion. Thus, it joined a long list of carefully constructed
cultural and intellectual manifestations that absorb the
rebelliousness of youth while producing a harmless release of
energies.
Many
believe that with the loosening of the repressive noose popularly
called McCarthyism, the US returned to openness and freedom of
expression. However, that is a misleading perspective. Openness and
freedom of expression mean nothing when intellectual and cultural
ideas were purged and remain forgotten or uncritically scorned.
Openness and freedom of expression mean nothing when intellectual and
cultural workers have had their spines surgically removed to the
point that they cannot muster the courage to call out frauds and
poseurs.
Though
hardly revolutionary, V.L. Parrington's ideas and those of many
similarly purged, remain lost to a new generation, while the ideas of
the discredited Paul de Man and those of other intellectual
opportunists and charlatans continue to circulate through the
universities and in prestigious journals. The same could be said in
the arts and many other intellectual pursuits where the limits of
debate are not stated, but inherited. This is the legacy and cost of
hysterical, unrestrained anti-Communism.
Zoltan
Zigedy
