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Camp Sites
Sex, Politics, and Academic Style in Postwar America
By Michael Trask Stanford University Press
Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-8441-2
Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Schooling of America
A Consensus of Make-Believe
In the late 1940s, the federal government established a commission to puzzle through a dilemma that preoccupied the crafters of the national security state in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: the tendency of the atomic threat to induce either paralysis or panic. Presuming that the trauma inflicted by the idea of the bomb would prove no less disabling than the force from a detonation, Project East River (as the commission was named) encouraged citizen-survivors to maintain an open-minded skepticism with regard to the otherwise self-evident specter of annihilation. To use the phrase coined by Irving Janis in Air War and Emotional Stress (1951), civil defense depended on "emotional inoculation," and the best way to inject this psychological booster shot was through drills that served as dress rehearsals of the postnuclear apocalypse. "As in combat training," the Project East River report argued, "every approach toward realism in the training situations will be a gain inasmuch as it guarantees greater transfer of the learned responses to the situation of real danger."
By this logic, undergoing mock-ups of catastrophe would so inure persons to the real thing that in the event of a bona fide thermonuclear exchange, "learned response" would take over the panic reflex and "return" "the individual to rationality." In emphasizing potential scenarios and in habituating citizens to a condition of make-believe, the report gives to "realism" some novel connotations. This is the realism of the behaviorist, for example, who imagines that reality is flexible enough to be reconditioned as the controlling agent sees fit. Alternatively it suggests the realism of the stage actor who, through sheer force of will, subdues his own personality in the effort to suspend disbelief in a script on which his very survival is now understood to depend. Finally, it suggests the "simulation aesthetic," to use Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi's term, that would come to dominate the RAND Corporation in the 1950s. That fledgling think tank made its mark on postwar policy making by aggressively promoting "realism" on what Bruce Kuklick calls a "nonempirical basis."
In the writing of the history of post-1945 America, few things have invited as much finger wagging as the effort to make the nuclear arsenal appear continuous with conventional technologies of warfare. My point in revisiting this particular folly is to draw attention to the oblique but crucial role played in the postwar regime of emotion management by the school system here represented by the professors who constituted Project East River—or, as its chartered body was otherwise known, Associated Universities, Inc. Under the aegis of civil defense, the architects of the national security state enlisted academics to import into the body politic the counterintuitive "detachment" increasingly characteristic of postwar school culture. What the nation's educators were imagined to contribute to the public good was a social style rooted in the sort of make-believe that Project East River encouraged. The potential of this social style to effect alternative visions by inverting the terms of naive empiricism emerged as one of the chief dividends of the postwar college campus. It was also an enduring one, judging by Don DeLillo's choice to make a series of "simulated" disaster scenarios, orchestrated by the SIMUVAC lackeys who roam the streets of College-on-the-Hill, an integral subplot of White Noise (1985). Long before DeLillo satirized the college as a breeding ground for imaginary crisis management, postwar thinkers seized upon school culture's penchant for improvisational reality.
To say that the Cold War university collaborated in the project of emotion management by way of its openness to conditionals is to run the risk of hollowness that attaches to any general claim about that institution. As Theodore Caplow and Reece McGee wrote in The Academic Marketplace (1958), "It is easy to agree that the purpose of a factory is production" but "not at all easy ... to determine the fundamental purposes of a university" Yet as Caplow and McGee's book itself demonstrates, the resistance to specifying what the university did was accompanied throughout the postwar decade by a massive escalation in the industry dedicated to worrying that very purpose. Academics' discovery of the problematic status of the university occasioned a discursive watershed in the 1950s, and the torrent of publications on this hitherto uncontroversial subject routinely marshaled a self-distancing skepticism akin to the structure of disbelief in the Project East River report. Accustomed to a steady flow of monographs that take as their subject the university in crisis, we may scarcely realize that it was not ever thus. Self-criticism was not quite a novelty in school culture before 1950, but neither had it been the habitual distraction it would become during the Eisenhower era. One task in this chapter is to pursue the implications of this autocritical gesture.
A related task is to articulate some of the less overt or official features of the academic style that nurtured it, features that rarely earn much attention in cultural studies of the academy even as they could be said to shape the experience of the numerous people recruited to the professoriat as well as the experience of the countless students who pass through the academic fold. By style, I mean the extracurricular manifestations of conduct and attitude that make up the university intellectuals' legacy across disciplinary and historical divides. Another name for what I have in mind is what Pierre Bourdieu calls habitus, the "durable, transposable dispositions," from gestures to norms of interaction, that a social group both forcefully and unknowingly reproduces across generations. The essence of the academic habitus in Bourdieu's view is what he calls the "posture of the scholar feeling free to withdraw from the game in order to conceptualize it" As outlined in an ethnographic project that extends from Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture (1970, coauthored with Jean-Claude Passeron) through Homo Academicus (1984) to Pascalian Meditations (1997), Bourdieu's goal was to reattach this free-ranging "posture" to "the social foundations of the propensity to theorize."
Much as my thinking is indebted to Bourdieu, I also take issue with one of his central premises: The "academic field," to use the properly Bourdieuian term, "occupies a homologous place to that of the Church" insofar as it "reproduces continually the distinction between consecrated and illegitimate works" Bourdieu's focus on the school's sacral mission proves inadequate to a consideration of the American university at midcentury. For the postwar college repeatedly demonstrates its lack of interest in "consecration" or, to be precise, repeatedly subjects that task itself to critique. This is not to deny that postwar school culture sanctifies subject matter or legitimizes tradition but only to say that such curatorial labor is pursued under a nonconformist and frequently deconsecrating banner. In postwar America, the "cultural capital" to which the school "regulates access," as John Guillory puts it, is not merely the prestige associated with canonical forms of knowledge but also the prestige associated with a fundamental suspicion of such forms. Along with the New Critical canon and its fetish for form, this era rallied around the hermeneutics of suspicion and its equally powerful fetish for demystification.
A better way to reconcile these seemingly opposed points in Bourdieu's work—the professoriat imagines itself detached from institutional mediation; the school functions to secure knowledge as doxa—is to note that among the objects of legitimation to which the postwar faculty consistently turns its attention is the academic discipline itself. If literary critics, for example, have been prone to imagine the boundaries of their discipline as either too porous to contain its members in a tidy unity or too soft to stand against the solid front presented by their rivals in the sciences, the reason is that they have long been in the position of never quite believing in the discipline of which they are (or at least used to be) lifetime members. I do not mean that they have broken faith with their discipline's ideals, as the conservative canard would have it. I mean that they proceed as if the discipline were a figment of someone's imagination. Yet this disinclination to take the profession as given finds its formative antecedents among diverse Cold War disciplines well beyond the English department.
The literature professor's makeshift sense of belonging fits into the array of ironizing strategies brought to bear in Project East River's specifically academic exercise in making Herman Kahn's "thinking about the unthinkable" into public policy. The postwar university does not reject belief but brackets it, turns it into a pliable faculty, a target of opportunity subject to all manner of infilling. "The question of belief or disbelief never arises when we are reading well," Cleanth Brooks claims in The Well-Wrought Urn (1947), because "we are willing to allow our various interests as human beings to become subordinate to the total experience." The goal in reading a poem for Brooks is not to derive "propositions" but to absorb its "complexity of attitude" That "attitude" shares generously in the "strategic make-believe" that Andrew Grossman sees as the bulwark of Truman-era civil defense. Nor was this eminently Cold War epistemology abandoned with the end of the Cold War. It survives in Gayatri Spivak's call for "the strategic use of positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest," the expedient of pretending as if essences ground identities even while conceding essentialism's fictitiousness. This proposal has occasioned more notoriety than it might have were critics to take a longer view of the academic habitus that includes Spivak as its end point. That Spivak's "political interest" is opposed to the global hegemony ratified by Cold War intellectuals should not eclipse the fact that, however nontrivial the distinction between her politics and Herman Kahn's, the goal in both cases entails a commitment to the political value of suspended disbelief.
In view of the received idea of Cold War quietism, the triumph of the research university appears to involve a paradox: a society that demanded conformism of its citizens invested massive reserves of human and economic capital in an institution that requires innovation and vigorous competition for its survival. This paradox is somewhat mitigated by the observation that the university's ascent in the 1950s included a valorization of the academic world as a structure of private self-organization. In this account, the university could be unrestrained and expansive just because it was homeostatic: a system tailored, like the ideal polity, for an optimum balance of tensions and oppositions. Then, too, the Fifties academic style turned out to be surprisingly well matched to that decade's less savory traits: its paranoia, its vigilance against threats international and domestic, and its jingoistic vision of American life as fundamentally open. The postwar American vogue for mistrust coincided almost too neatly with the hermeneutics of suspicion that emerged as the default in the university at midcentury.
It is received wisdom that the expansion of the American university occurred in response to the needs of a culture preoccupied with the uses to which science could be put for military ends. Yet by focusing on the university as the training ground for the new technocracy, this narrative slights the multiple ways the university as a whole (rather than its science departments) inserted itself into the foreground of the American national style. Nor does it seem accurate to argue, with Richard Ohmann, that "when the lines of the Cold War were firmed up, English was a pastoral retreat within the university." All departments were essentially retreats in the institutional imaginary of postwar school culture, which encouraged a high level of differentiation and territoriality among the disciplines. It is not difficult to see how such a division of labor provided the blueprint for the pluralistic ideal endorsed by the architects of the Cold War consensus. In the model of the disciplines set forth in the postwar college, as in the version of liberalism set forth in opposition to fanaticism, one need not comprehend another's practices or beliefs in order to respect them. "To convert concrete issues into ideological problems, to invest them with moral color," Daniel Bell argued in defense of this agnostic tolerance, "is to invite conflicts which can only damage a society."
Bell was typical of humanists and social scientists who considered it their task to lead by example in modeling the skepticism of the academic style for the nation's citizens. "Our crucial problem now and for the next decade," Howard Mumford Jones wrote in the March 1949 issue of PMLA, "is to master a style through which we may communicate to a reasonably intelligent general public whatever it is we have to offer." "Equipped to interpret the ideals of man as recorded in his languages and literatures," Modern Language Association (MLA) president Hayward Keniston told that convention's members in 1952, "humanists" constitute "the only group that can provide us with illumined leadership in a war of ideas." Consider Stanford German professor Bayard Morgan's address at the same convention, portentously titled "Unrecognized Disarmament." Language study serves the interests of national security, according to Morgan, because democracy's foes resort to subterfuges that only those skilled in critical interpretation can combat:
One of the principal weapons of that enemy, in the Cold War now being hotly waged, is the word as the concealment of meaning, the lie as a substitute for truth, fiction offered as reality. To ... act as if we could afford to ignore what our enemies, actual and potential, are thinking and saying and planning, simply to go on chewing the cud of our own inbred notions, is to perform the ostrich act and to invite the launching of an attack as unsuspected, and as unprepared for, as the one which took place on a December day that will not soon be forgotten.
The most striking thing about this passage is Morgan's insistence on the literary scholar's "relevance," to borrow a term from our own disciplinary moment. It would be difficult to find a contemporary critic who rivals Morgan in foregrounding the humanist's sensibility in the advancement of the open society or endowing her credentials with the superheroic powers Morgan imagines for them. "It is not a mere figure of speech," Morgan writes, summoning precisely a figure of speech, "to say that each master of a modern foreign language supplies the state with an extra pair of mental eyes, capable of looking into an enemy's mind.... This kind of clairvoyance knows of no substitute whatever."
Less confused about the ontology of metaphors than Morgan, but no less confident in his political acumen, Leslie Fiedler makes up for his lack of "expert knowledge in political matters" with a "sensibility trained by the newer critical methods." "It is a close reading of recent events that I should like to think that I have achieved," he writes in An End to Innocence (1955), "a reading that does not scant ambiguity or paradox, but tries to give to the testimony of a witness before a Senate committee or the letters of the Rosenbergs the same careful scrutiny we have learned to practice on the shorter poems of Donne." Fiedler's title paid tribute to an intellectual mode popularized at the start of the 1950s with the publication of Reinhold Niebuhr's The Irony of American History (1952). Foremost among the many ironies of that history, according to Niebuhr, was the discrepancy between the American's self-image as an "innocent" and his actual conduct on the world stage. "We know ourselves," he argues, "to be less innocent than our theories assume." Opposing it not to guilt but to knowingness, Niebuhr views innocence as perilous because it causes the American to yield to the "pretensions" of "consistency" against his own better judgment. Arguing for "an interpretation of life which emphasizes the dire consequences of vain pretensions and sees them ironically refuted by actual experience," Niebuhr announces: "Consciousness of an ironic situation tends to dissolve it" (168). Irony for Niebuhr is both an attribute of historical process and, more important, an awareness of that history, the viewpoint occasioned by the "ambiguity" (170) and "incongruities" (153) central to the American condition. "The final wisdom of life requires," therefore, "not the annulment of incongruity but the achievement of serenity within and above it" (63).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Camp Sites by Michael Trask. Copyright © 2013 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press.
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