References and Notes
- Fish, S. (1994). There’s no such thing as free speech. New York: Oxford University Press; See also his Doing What Comes Naturally (1989). Durham, NC: Duke University Press; Is There a Text in This Class? (1980). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, where his ideas of “interpretive communities” are elaborated.
- Goodman, N. (1985). Ways of worldmaking (Chap. VI). Indianapolis, IN; (1984). Of mind and other matters (Chap. II). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; For a comprehensive discussion the communal roots of reasoning, see Habermas, see (1987). The philosophical discourse of modernity (translated by Frederick Lawrence). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; Rarty, R. (1989). Contingency irony and solidarity. New York: Cambridge Press.
- The ethnomethodoiogists of three decades ago made this general case empirically and ana1ytically. See Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall; A less bizarre, more conventionally written analysis of the ceremonial ritualized happenings of the ordinary activities of everyday life may be found in Goffman, E. (1971). Relations in public: Microstudies of the public order. New York: Basic Books; “Originary” accounts are the stuff of imaginative speculations as in Rousseau, The social contract, Hobbes, The leviathan, Stevenson~ Robinson Crusoe, Freud, The ego and the id, Levi-Strauss. The savage mind, and not least, The Book of Genesis; Though it may now be dissolving or transforming itself, the outlaw culture of the underworld is crowded with rules of conduct whose violations are dealt with mercilessly. Regarding the stipulative rules of conduct operative in the underworld, see Kelly, R. J. (1989). Succession by murder: Reflections on Paul Castellano’s funeral and the rise of John Gotti. Criminal Organizations, 4(5), 19–28.
- Georg Simmel pioneered the study of conflict and its dynamical processes. See Simmel, G. (1955). Conflict and the web of group-affiliations (translated by Kurt H. Wolff and R. Bendix). Glencoe, IL: The Free Press; Simmel may be the “Freud” of the study of society: his analyses are strikingly similar to what Freud did for the psyche and human personality. Contemporary perspectives on the study of conflict and group behavior may be found in Coser, L. (1965). The functions of social conflict. New York: Free Press, and the research in the theory of action that emerged out of the work of Talcott Parsons; See Parsons, T., Bales, R. F., & Shils, E. A. (1953). Working papers in the theory of action. Glencoe. IL: The Free Press.
- A useful discussion on “the canonn may be found in a series of essays in Scholes, R., Hirsch, E. D., Fox-Genovese, E., Perloff, M., Sisk, J. P., & Mitchell Morse, J. (1986). Salmagundi, No. 72 (Fall); More recently, the peevish volume by Bloom, H. (1994). The Western Canon: The book and schools of the ages. New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., exemplifies the established view. He snipes at some Third World literature and previously excluded African-American, Latino and Asian writers whose work in his opinion is too marginal and too parochial to warrant inclusion in the corpus of sacred texts of mainly Western European males that make up the modern literary heritage.
- An early but still rewarding effort concerning American attitudes toward intellectuals is Hofstadter, R. (1965). The paranoid style in American politics. New York: Vintage Books; an assessment of the critical posture of Third World, postcolonial intellectuals is in Said, E. (1994). Culture and imperialism. New York: Vintage Books.
- But not always: philosopher, Martha Nussbaum, offers a brilliant reading of Plato where her hermeneutical apparatus is a model of interpretive clarity. See Nussbaum, M. (1994). Feminists and philosophy. The New York Review, XLI(17) (October 20).
- Some linguistic subductions mayor may not succeed in revamping the broad collective social understanding of discredited individualst their social statuses, or life chances. These processes are explored in two papers: Kelly, R. J. (1993). The Rhetorical and Analytical Inventions of Self and Identity: Transformative Language and Stylistics in Feminist Ideology. Unpublished paper presented at the Fifth Biannual Conference of the International Society for Theoretical Psychology, Bierville France; Kelly, J. (1991). Aids and the societal reaction. In Kelly, R.14 & MacNamara, D. E. J., Perspectives on deviance: Dominance, degradation and denigration. Cincinnati, OH: Anderson Publishing Co., Goffman (1963). Stigma: Notes on the management of spoiled identity is a major statement on these social identity dynamics.
- Marcus, S. (1993). Soft totalitarianism. Partisan Review, 60(4) (Fall).
- Genovese quoted in Goldstein, R. (1991). The politics of political correctness. Village Voice p. 40 (June 18).
- Dilthey, W. (1989). Introduction to the human science (translated and edited by R. A. Makreel and F. Rocti). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; Ironically some historians who fear “revitalization” and intellectually expansionist movements appear to forget that all histories are invented in that they are not simply discovered but assembled under the pressures of some present urgency. The inundation of drugs, mass homelessness, the poisoning of our children with media violence, pornography, perversion; the radical corporate transfonnations of the political economy of the United States and its fallout on millions and millions of working people constitute in our opinion a present urgency that cannot but find expression in- works of art, history, and science no matter how socially antiseptic they may appear.
- Martin, J. L. (1993). The post modern argument considered. Partisan Review, 60(4) (Fall).
- Centina, K. K., & Meelky, M. (Eds.) (1983). Science observed. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications; Harding, S. (1986). The science question in feminism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press; Longino, H. (1990). Science as social knowledge. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; Kelly, R. J. (1989). Private data and public knowledge: Intellectual property rights in science. Legal Studies, 13(4), 265–381.
- Kuhn, T. (1969). The strocture of scientific revolutions (2nd ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Hobbes, Boyle and the experimental life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; Simians, D. H. (1991). Cyborgs and women. New York: Routledge Kegan Paul; Russett, C. E. (1989). Sexual science. Cambridge: Harvard University Press; Latour, B. (1987). Science in action. Cambridge: Harvard University Press; Fleck, L. (1976). Genesis of a scientific fact. In T. Kuhn and R. Martin (ed.), The sociology of science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Pickering, A. (1984). Constructing quarks: A social history ofparticle physics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Aronowitz, S. (1988). Science as power: Discourse and ideology in modem society. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; Shapiro, S., & Schaeffer, S. (1985). Leviathan and air..pumps.
- Derrida, J. (1972). Structure, sign and play in the discourse of the human sciences. In R. Macksey and E. Donato (eds.), The structuralist controversy.
- Bernstein, R. (1994). Dictatorship of virtue: Multiculturalism and the battle for America’s future. New York: Alfred Knopf.
- Aronowitz, S. (1993). Roll over Beethoven: The return of culture strife (p. 23). Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press.
- Derrida, J., op. cit. The languages of criticism and the sciences of man. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press.
- Derrida’s account of the concept of the “structural center” is complex in its ideas and comprehensive in the time span it treats-reaching back into the inaugural phases of Milesian Greek philosophy. He is one of those imprecise oddities, a legendary giant in some corners of literary criticism and antianalytic philosophy whose writings do not transpose easily to folklore like the lapidary essays of Bertrand Russell. Derrida has been undernoticed outside a relatively small circle of intellectuals in the humanities. His work crosses the boundaries of literary criticism and traditional philosophy and that often bewilders his critics and admirers as he himself acknowledges. On this last issue of misunderstanding and misinterpretation see, his “Dialanguages” in Derrida, J. (1995). Points...intelViews 1974·1994 (pp. 132–155) (edited by E. Weber). Stanford, CA: Stamford University Press.
- An excellent exposition of Paul De Man’s formulation of intellectual “blindness” (an admittedly melodramatic depiction of ethnocentrism) is Jameson, F. (1992). PostModemism: Or, the cu/turallogic of late capitalism (pp. 219–259). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Though it may seem digressive, the opening chapter of Levi-Strauss (1967). The savage mind “The Science of the Concrete” raises similar questions about the roles of discourse and syntax in the scientific understanding of abstract thought.
- Heath, S. B. (1981). English in Our Language Heritage. In C. Ferguson and S. Brice Heath (Eds.), Language in the United States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Aronowitz, (p. 7). Supra Note (18).
- Menand (1994). Culture wars. The New York Review (October 6), 16–21.
- Kelly, R. J., Francis, K., & Bell, M. J. (1994). Language diversity in the university: Aspects of remediation, open admissions and multiculturalism. Education, 114(4) (Summer), 13–28.
- For useful discussions on social and cultural “imprinting” of spatial environments see Jameson, F. (1992). (Chap. 4); Schama, S. (1995). Landscape and memory. New York: Alfred Knopf; Levi..Strauss, C. (1980). The naked man: Introduction to a science of mythology: (Vol. 4). New York: Harper Torchbooks.
- With deeper multicultural type probings into- American history new social and cultural realities “histories from below,” are being found that had been traditionally silent that were previously submerged by abstract, clearly biased theorizing now reveal themselves in narratives. Consequently, the saga of the frontier can never be the same as it was for our grandparents. The idea that the frontier was a vast, virgin uninhabited free land with bands of nomadic Indians following the migratory herds and the seasons was promulgated persuasively by the American historian Frederick Jackson Turner and his students. It was, as Hughes points out, bad history: “This was in direct contradiction to earlier (Puritan-based) historians who wrote as though everything in America, .Hemanated from New England. But for more than two decades now, Turner's scheme, which is essentially that of Manifest Destiny...with whites advancing into an unowned “wilderness”) has been criticized, modified and outright rejected by newer Western historians. Any effect to discover the historical realities of the West, historians now acknowledge, must begin with multiculturalism: that is, above all, by recognizing that the West was not a terra nullius (“no man’s land”) into which the whites marched; that it was a highly charged arena in which various cultures, the invading Anglo-American and the already resident Indian and Spanish, impacted on one another, never with simple results (1993, pp. 123–124, emphasis in the original). Hughes, R. (1993). Culture of complaint: The fraying of America. New York: Oxford University Press.
- The subtitle comes from an essay by Sarchett, B. W. (1994). Russell Jacoby, anti-professionalism and the politics of cultural nostalgia. In J. Williams (ed.), p.e. wars: Politics and theory in the academy. London: Routledge, Kegan Paul.
- Fox-Genovese, E. (1986). Gender, race, class, canon. Salmagundi, No. 76 (Fall).
- Bernstein, R. (1994). Dictatorship of virtue: Multiculturalism and the battle for America’s future. New York: Knopf.
- Menand, L. (1994). op. cit. (p. 18).
- Bernstein, R., op. cit. Bernstein crystallizes a body of criticism developed over the past decade by Bennett, Cheney, DeSousa, Alan Bloom, and more recently Harold Bloom, among many others.
- Schlesinger’s book, The disuniting ofAmerica, has been hailed as a major contribution to the multicultural debate and has been widely cited as the definitive response to the critics of the Western, Eurocentric canon. We regard it as a sad episode in current intellectual life. Arthur Schlinger, former Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Graduate School of the City University of New York, has had a spectacular career in government as a presidential advisor and as an important historian of American presidential politics, but he is persuaded by arguments that most specialists in the fields of cultural history and ethnic studies have rejected as xenophobic and nativist. The fact that his views are out of fashion apparently counts for little in Schlesinger’s view. The mistakes and misreadings in Schlesinger’s account of American ethnic experience cannot be described in detail in the space available. In rough outline though, the structure of his argument is as follows: basic to American society is a cluster of durable core cultural beliefs that has sustained our political and social system for more than two centuries. So successful has the American experiment been that it has become a powerful influence in the post-Cold War revolutions occurring globally; most importantly, the American pluralist democracy was the catalytic agent in the forces precipitating the collapse of communist ideology. From this, Schlesinger, concludes (with some reasonableness) that any threat to the coherence of the cultural infrastructure upon which political democracy rests will undermine the entire enterprise. But there is not and never was a “core culture.” The United States cannot be described as a “melting pot”: that formulation is much too simple. However, in the beautifully written (if not always convincing) strictly historical sections of his book, he makes the case that no single metaphor can do justice to the complexity of cultural crossings and perfusions in America. The United States has always been a heterogeneous country and its cohesion, whatever cohesion it has, can only be based upon a collective psychology, a sentimental posture of mutual respect. To see the United States, to inscribe it as a society in which everyone looks the same more or less, speaks the same language, worships the same gods and believes in the same things is to misrepresent it. Even before Europeans arrived, American Indians were constantly at war with one another. In this sense America, often embattled from within, is in Benedict Anderson’s apt conceptualization, an “imagined community,” Imagined Communities (1983) a construction of mind, not a race, inherited class or ancestral territory. American mutuality, a theory of collective sentiments that defines a society of reciprocal social linkages with tightly woven political economic membranes holding it together, really has no choice but to live in recognition of difference. And these rather fragile usually unspoken subcultural pacts and covenants can unravel easily or be destroyed quickly when differences are no longer respected or celebrated but raised into cultural barricades. The dismembered corpse of Yugoslavia, the dissolution of the Hapsburg empire, the PalestinianlIndia religious separatism, the ghastly American Civil War-all of these archaic racial, religious, and ethnic lunacies of recent and historical moment evoke the frightening metaphor of “Balkanization” back into memory. One is coaxed into visions of a society split and fractured into sects, cults, groups, little nodes of dissolute power inhabiting a Hobbesian world of relentless warring and conflict, paralyzing bloodfeuds, and theologically inspired hatreds that would threaten and undermine the mild and milky multiculturalism of the United States. The United States is a nation of a quarter billion people, but this does not mean that they are an the same kind of people with the same mores, customs, and beliefs. America is difficult to characterize sociologically, linguistically (notwithstanding the lingua franca of English) economically, and politically. Class divisions that transcend racial and ethnic identities are nervously discussed in open forums: and polarizations and rivalries over basic values between the secular and the pentecostal fundamentalists dot the landscape. Regrettably, the United States seems increasingly divided between these two battlefields of mutually uncomprehending universes of the secular and saintly; their points of view on family life, sex, abortion, homosexuality, prayer in the schools, medical practice, the schools and their curricula, childrearing, crime and punishment are expressed in idioms that constitute different languages, one rooted in Faith and the other in Reason. Surely Schlesinger knows all of this and knows better than us that America is a collective work of imagination and narration whose making, inventing, reconstructing, and telling is endless. Once that dynamic becomes inert, the country could begin to unravel. Contrary to Schlesinger’s sentimental seeing, the social richness and solidarity of America is dependent on its genius for consensus, for a consolidated vision living by and through its ethnic and now racial eclecticism. And when previously the diverse groups, including regional “tribes,” elevated their differences above the general consensus and behaved intolerantly, impassable barriers were erected that could only be removed by war and blood. On this last point, see Barrington Moore’s ingenious account of the multiple causes of the American Civil War in Moore, B. (1976). Social origins of dictatorship and democracy (Chap. III). Boston: Beacon Press.
- Said, E. W. (1994). Culture and imperialism (p. 336). New York: Vintage Books.
- See Stanley Aronowitz’s brilliant discussions along these lines and on the origins of “cultural studies” a curriculum strategy in which multicultural analyses are integral. Aronowitz, op. cit.
- Crews, F. (1989). The sins of the fathers: Hawthorne’s psychological themes. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Bennett, W. J. (1984). To reclaim a legacy: Reports of the humanities in higher education. Washington, D.C.: National Endowment of the Humanities; Bloom, A. (1987). The closing of the American mind. New York: Simon & Schuster; Kimmball, R. (1990). Tenured radicals: How politics has corrnpted higher educatioTL New York: Harper; Bloom, H. (1994). The western canon: The books and school of the ages. New York: Harcourt Brace & Co. For a lively and informative debate on the “canon,” see “On cultural literacy: Canon, class and curriculum.” Salmagundi, No. 72 (Fall 1986) (Edited by Robert Boyers); and the brilliantly iconoclastic essays of Crews, F. (1992). The critics bear it away: American fiction and the academy. New York: Random House; Fish, S. (1994). There's no such thing as free speech...and its a good thing too. New York: Oxford University Press.
- According to Fish: “It is the neoconservative forces on and off campus (...more often off than on) that operate an efficient network of semistudent organizations, nonofficial semistudent newspapers, and nonlocal faculty action groups. It is the neoconservatives who intrude themselves into other people’s classes and demand the removal of courses and programs put in place by regular university procedures; it is the neoconservatives who generalize a few tired incidents into an assertion of wholesale crisis and then feed the public’s appetite for crisis with the help of a cadre of well-placed and largely ignorant journalists. And. above all, it is the neoconservatives who are enabled in these activities by massive infusions of outside funding from a familiar list of far-right foundations, think tanks, and individuals” (1994, pp. 54–55, emphasis in the original).
- D’Souza, D. (1992). Illiberal education: The politics ofrace and sex on campus. New York: Random House.
- Lind., M. (1995). The next American nation: The new nationalism and the fourth American revolution. New York: Free Press. The rhetoric of polarization is indeed overheated, sharp, and often vengeful among some self-sanctifying segments of the warring elites, even though ethnic and racial diversity and divisiveness is far less than in previous decades. Is it that the surrounding clamor of the debate and discussion is a function not of increasing divisiveness but of cultural meldings, coalescence and assimilation which are scarcely smooth but more complicated and messy processes than imagined because there are so many voices attempting to create a common ground and because, as Tocqueville shrewdly observed, the real revolution is one of rising expectations where previous thresholds of acceptability and accommodation are relative to changing frames of relative deprivations? Menand has it right again when he says that the confrontations between multiculturalists and their opponents are very talky with the palaver only encouraging greater stridency. uAmerican life is not, contrary to muIticulturalist boilerplate, more diverse today than ever,” according to Menand: “From a bird’s eye view, it is far more integrated and homogeneous than ever. Thirty years ago, men and women, Black and White Americans, homosexual and heterosexual people, and members of many ethnic groups tended to lead, culturally and socially, largely segregated lives. Today they do so, for the most part, only as a matter of choice. Down on the ground, though, there is a lot of friction, since people who have never worked side by side before are finding themselves in situations of professional intimacy unimaginable (or only imaginable) a generation ago” (1994, p. 21). Menand (1994). supra #23. Empirical sociological studies tend to support Menand’s claims. O’Neill (1992) found that African-Americans made dramatic gains in both rights and income from 1940 to 1980. Improved schooling-meaning by and large, desegregated schooling-and declining discrimination-meaning the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the enforcement of its housing and job provisions-were the major reasons for the big gains. See O’Neill, J. (1992). The changing economic status of Black Americans. The American enterprise, (September/October), 71–79.
- Assuming Lind is correct-and there is some evidence that he may be right in his projections about the structure and composition of the United States in the 21st century-then the class system may divide laterally rather than vertically with a pyramid of wealth, privilege, skill, and well-educated talent sharply apexed with descending class layers bulging with racially and ethnically mixed peoples. And like Brazil, or Sicily, the wealthy elites, enabled by a friendly, corrupted government, win manage to construct a society within the society insulated from their ostensible fellow citizens by their own schools, resorts, neighborhoods, banks, police, security systems, and politicians to do their bidding legislatively. The projected plutocracy of the near future exists in one substantial form or another in such dystopian crime empires as Colombia, Sicily, Hong Kong, Russia, and the former republics of the Soviet Union where political oligarchies behave in much the same manner (with alarmingly similar tastes) as legendary mafia chiefs in Sicily.
- In 1965, the revisions in the immigration statutes opened the county to those previously excluded. Prior to that, in the Euro-American period, what held the United States together as a nation with a coherent political culture was its rapacious need for labor as it grew economically by leaps and bounds.