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    Archives of Authority: Empire, Culture, and the Cold War
    Archives of Authority: Empire, Culture, and the Cold War
    Archives of Authority: Empire, Culture, and the Cold War
    Ebook353 pages11 hours

    Archives of Authority: Empire, Culture, and the Cold War

    By Andrew N. Rubin

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    Combining literary, cultural, and political history, and based on extensive archival research, including previously unseen FBI and CIA documents, Archives of Authority argues that cultural politics--specifically America's often covert patronage of the arts--played a highly important role in the transfer of imperial authority from Britain to the United States during a critical period after World War II. Andrew Rubin argues that this transfer reshaped the postwar literary space and he shows how, during this time, new and efficient modes of cultural transmission, replication, and travel--such as radio and rapidly and globally circulated journals--completely transformed the position occupied by the postwar writer and the role of world literature.


    Rubin demonstrates that the nearly instantaneous translation of texts by George Orwell, Thomas Mann, W. H. Auden, Richard Wright, Mary McCarthy, and Albert Camus, among others, into interrelated journals that were sponsored by organizations such as the CIA's Congress for Cultural Freedom and circulated around the world effectively reshaped writers, critics, and intellectuals into easily recognizable, transnational figures. Their work formed a new canon of world literature that was celebrated in the United States and supposedly represented the best of contemporary thought, while less politically attractive authors were ignored or even demonized. This championing and demonizing of writers occurred in the name of anti-Communism--the new, transatlantic "civilizing mission" through which postwar cultural and literary authority emerged.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateAug 16, 2012
    ISBN9781400842179
    Archives of Authority: Empire, Culture, and the Cold War
    Author

    Andrew N. Rubin

    Andrew N. Rubin is assistant professor of English at Georgetown University. He is the coeditor of Adorno: A Critical Reader and The Edward Said Reader.

    Read more from Andrew N. Rubin

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      Book preview

      Archives of Authority - Andrew N. Rubin

      A list of titles in the series appears at the back of the book.

      Archives of Authority

      EMPIRE, CULTURE, AND

      THE COLD WAR

      Andrew N. Rubin

      PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

      PRINCETON AND OXFORD

      Copyright © 2012 by Princeton University Press

      Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

      In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

      press.princeton.edu

      Jacket illustration: Jenny Holzer, Xenon for Bregenz, 2004, photo by Attilio Maranzano, courtesy Jenny Holzer/Art Resource, NY, © 2012 Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

      All Rights Reserved

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Rubin, Andrew.

         Archives of authority : empire, culture, and the Cold War / Andrew N. Rubin.

            p. cm.—(Translation/transnation)

         Includes bibliographical references and index.

         ISBN 978-0-691-15415-2 (hardback : acid-free paper)  1. Criticism—History—20th century.  2. Cold War in literature.  I. Title.

         PN94.R83 2012

         801'.950904—dc23          2011049576

      British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

      This book has been composed in Verdigris MVB Pro

      Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

      Printed in the United States of America

      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

      In memory of Edward W. Said

      Contents

      Acknowledgments

      INTRODUCTION

      CHAPTER 1

      Archives of Authority

      The Archive and the Juridical

      States of Exception

      States of Criticism

      CHAPTER 2

      Orwell and the Globalization of Literature

      Communist Crypts

      The Communist Menace

      The Translation of Authority

      Translation and Modes of Domination

      CHAPTER 3

      Transnational Literary Spaces at War

      The Sun Never Sets on the British Writer

      The Time of Translation

      London Calling

      Literary Diplomacy

      CHAPTER 4

      Archives of Critical Theory

      Accommodations

      CHAPTER 5

      Humanism, Territory, and Techniques of Trouble

      Terrain of Philology

      Notes

      Bibliography

      Index

      Acknowledgments

      THE IDEA OF WRITING A BOOK on the subject of the U.S. and British government's support and promotion of various writers, poets, and intellectuals abroad during the Cold War owes its origins to the encouragement of Edward W. Said. For their intellectual generosity and constructive criticism, I am grateful to George O'Brien, Mark McMorris, Carolyn Forché, Jonathan Arac, Ammiel Alcalay, Emily Apter, Norman Birnbaum, Eric Foner, Jean Franco, Andreas Huyssen, and Bruce Robbins. I owe special thanks to my editor, Hanne Winarsky, whose patient understanding made this book possible in many ways. I am also grateful to Emily Apter, whose support and criticism were entirely indispensable over the years. I also wish to thank Kelly Malloy for her thorough assistance, vigilance, and enthusiasm for the project. I am particularly grateful to Penn Szittya, Jason Rosenblatt, and Kathryn Temple for their support, encouragement, and understanding throughout my years at Georgetown. In the final stages, the manuscript benefited enormously from the meticulous attention of Mary Taveras, Elizabeth Gibbens, Amy Margolin, Brenda Werth, and especially Cathy Slovensky.

      I have benefited from the kindness and generosity of many institutions. I especially wish to express my gratitude to the Lannan Foundation for their generous support, which gave me the time and space to write large portions of the manuscript. In particular, I would like to thank Patrick Lannan, Jo Chapman, Chris Abani, Dinaw Mengetsu, and Martha Jessup for their kindness and spirited interest in the project. I owe a special thanks to Georgetown University Graduate School for its generous assistance. Georgetown's Department of English provided me with invaluable time to research and write much of this book, and I am thankful for the several occasions when they did so. The librarians at Butler Library at Columbia University were of critical assistance in helping me with the Trilling Papers. The staff at the Joseph Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago assisted me with the Congress for Cultural Freedom Papers. Without the support of the Stern Fellowship, much of the research on Orwell at the University College of London would not have been possible.

      I must gratefully acknowledge the critical interest of colleagues, friends, and students whose questions and discussion sharpened the text to a considerable degree. George O'Brien and Mark McMorris played an enormous role in helping me reshape the manuscript as a whole. They were remarkable interlocutors, and I cannot fully express my debt to them for their tireless interest and investment in the realization of this book. I also wish to especially thank Bruce Robbins, Jonathan Arac, Eric Foner, Rob Nixon, Akeel Bilgrami, Jonathan Cole, Gayatri Spivak, and Mariam Said, who provided a great deal of encouragement in Edward's absence. I also must acknowledge the tireless work of my research assistants, Julia Lovett and Kathryn Lewis, who were indispensable in many ways. For her commitment to this book, I wish to express my gratitude and appreciation to Christina Frohock, who generously agreed to represent me pro bono in my efforts to procure much of the material I discuss in chapter 1.

      For their incredible friendship and understanding, I am extremely grateful to Zaia Alexander, Alex Forman, Lecia Rosenthal, and Matthew Specter, who helped to refine many of the book's main arguments. The project was sustained in great measure by the encouragement and friendship of Phyllis Bennis, Jacqueline Loss, Brenda Werth, Louis Bernard, Sabina Zeffler, Katy Bohinc, and Aiyah Saihati. My parents, Harriet and Allen Rubin, in addition to Leslie Rubin, Joseph Viroslav, Norman Birnbaum, Jacqueline Loss, Lecia Rosenthal, and, most of all, my grandfather, the late Charles Shifrin, were a constant source of encouragement after a catastrophic injury interrupted the writing of this book.

      Though he did not live to see the completion of the project, Edward W. Said was the inspiration for this book. My memory of his encouragement, commitment, and example gave this project the momentum that helped to bring the book into the world. His intellectual generosity, enthusiasm, and excitement for the discovery of new knowledge, and his humor, intellect, and friendship, are what bind these pages together. My greatest regret is that he never had the chance to read the completed book in its entirety. I wrote many of these pages, especially the final chapter, in his memory in my hopes that in my own way I might help to keep his ideas alive.

      Washington, D.C.

      August 2011

      Introduction

      On the fantail of a boat to Europe, T. S. Eliot was reclining with several passengers in deck seats, blue cloudy sky behind, iron floor below us. And yourself, I said, what do you think of the domination of poetics by the CIA? After all, wasn't [James] Angleton your friend? Didn't he tell you his plans to revitalize the intellectual structure of the West against so-to-speak Stalinists? Eliot listened attentively—I was surprised he wasn't distracted. Well, there are all sorts of chaps competing for dominance, political and literary…your Gurus for instance, and the Theosophists, and the table rappers and dialecticians and tea-leaf-readers and ideologues. I suppose I was one such, in my middle years. But I did, yes, know of Angleton's literary conspiracies, I thought they were petty—well meant but of no importance to literature. I thought they were of some importance, I said, "since it secretly nourished the careers of too many square intellectuals, provided sustenance to thinkers in the Academy who influenced the intellectual tone of the West…After all,…the government through foundations was supporting a whole field of ‘Scholars of War’…the subsidization of magazines like Encounter which held Eliotic style as a touchstone of sophistication and competence…failed to create an alternative free vital decentralized individualistic culture."

      —"T. S. Eliot Entered My Dreams," Allen Ginsberg¹

      ARCHIVES OF AUTHORITY investigates a historically decisive period in the literary and cultural interstices of the Cold War and decolonization. Contributing to a growing body of scholarship that places a renewed emphasis on transnational literary history by analyzing the particular historical and cultural determinants that structure the emergence of dominant literary formations, Archives engages recent efforts to develop new paradigms for comparative literary historiography that have aimed to reconceive the ideal of Weltliteratur. A concept first articulated by Johann Wolfgang Goethe in 1827 in a conversation with his secretary Johann Peter Eckermann, Goethe's term did not refer to world literature as a collection of world masterpieces; rather, it pointed to the emergence of the multiple modes of articulation through which nations communicated the particular experiences and peculiarities they embodied. When Goethe first used the expression, he was making the observation that Weltliteratur was merely in the process of formation.² The widening circulation of journals, such as the Edinburgh Review, Eco, the Foreign Review, Mme de Staël's De l'Allemagne, and Le Globe were gradually establishing the basis for different modes of recognition, understanding, and tolerance between the nations of Europe. Together these journals reconstituted the general contours as well as the limitations of a historically specific form of restrictive and Eurocentric cosmopolitanism. Le Globe, for example, had risen to Goethe's defense against the vicious and hypernationalist attacks of the writer Wolfgang Menzel. These journals were not simply a way for Goethe to develop new and multiple perspectives of his own work but a way of becoming familiar with the works of other writers in English, French, and Italian as well.

      Even if Weltliteratur could have persisted as a mode that was not disrupted by the corrosive forces of totalitarianism, nationalism, provincialism, racism, and imperialism, Goethe's notion of Weltliteratur was never meant to suggest the full and complete realization of a universal literature, since if such a mode of understanding were to one day be achieved, Weltliteratur, as Goethe understood it, would be abolished. At the very most, Weltliteratur, as a mode of mutual understanding and coexistence between nations, was a distant potential. Goethe saw the development of these modes and the awareness that they generated as belonging to a gradual process. He spoke about Weltliteratur tentatively; he said that there was talk of it. He ventured to announce it. He saw hope of it emerging. It was in the process of formation.³ As the not-yet present that pointed to the future, Weltliteratur was, after all, a historically specific mode of cultural transmission articulated within and bounded by the specific project of German Romanticism. Geographically limited to Europe, Weltliteratur designated a process of translation and dissemination that at once depended on the particularities of national difference as much as it enabled an enlarged awareness of the shared, but discrepant experiences between nations.

      Yet in spite of the historical impediments and challenges that Weltliteratur has encountered over the past two centuries, it has nevertheless often remained uncritically central to the aspirations of comparative literature.⁴ While its geographical limitations have been widely rejected, it has retained its strength as a concept to justify a practice of incorporation and appropriation that has threatened to undermine the historical and cultural contributions and achievements of postcolonial studies. Many of its most ambitious accounts have appropriated and intertextually juxtaposed texts across vast expanses of time and geography, apparently in an effort to align themselves with an imaginary cosmopolitan avant-garde while overlooking the historical determinants of the concept as Goethe had used it. Advancing the illusion of a cosmopolitanism that is unaware of its own historically situated displacement, many of these works fail to question the false unity implied by the world it claims to represent.⁵ They manage to do little else but reinscribe neoliberal assumptions that maintain the illusion that world literature is real, which permits Weltliteratur to harmonically accompany the rhythms of globalization to which it is dutifully attuned.⁶ No discernible interest in the historical conditions and situation of the writers, the frameworks that structure their attitudes, the historical modes that shape their circulation, the cultural forces that determine their translation, or the social and political realities that structure the constitution of the reading publics, is evident in these accounts.⁷

      Yet if we are to comprehend so-called world literature as a mode of circulation, we are often left to wonder, what are the precise modes to which Weltliteratur might refer to today?⁸ How do these modes intersect, overlap, and interact? How have these modes become the means through which forms of understanding and knowledge are expressed? Or have these modes of Weltliteratur been replaced by modes of Weltkultur? What are the conditions through which texts are transmitted and not transmitted via these modes? How do we take into account the multiplicity of these sites? What are the actual limits to linguistic exchange, and where are they located?⁹ What silences do they help to conceal? On the face of it, the nation and market appear to interact along the neoliberal rhythms of the global economy to produce recognizable international literary figures. Writers such as J. M. Coetzee, Gabriel García Márquez, Ahdaf Soueif, Nadine Gordimer, Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Ondaatje, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, and Wole Soyinka, among others, appear to belong to the field of so-called world literature. Yet the notion that Orhan Pamuk represents the Turkish Writer more fully than any other Turkish writer entails the marginalization of yet untranslated writers such as Hasan Ali Toptaş.¹⁰ A great many writers are rendered invisible by the seemingly totalizing circuitry of world literature, and upon closer scrutiny it becomes evident that their absences are the very conditions of possibility of world literature.

      Many of the recent and rather original and elegant models that have provided the broadest and often most theoretically sophisticated accounts of literary history have hardly uncovered or excavated any of the silences produced by what Michel-Rolph Trouillot has described as the North Atlantic universal.¹¹ Lost in the muddle of abstract theories and models borrowed from historians of the Annales School, such as Marc Bloch and later Fernand Braudel and others whose theories and methods traveled only to become diluted into a set of rules and laws, the texts of an untold number of writers are concealed, overlooked, or buried by concepts such as the longue durée, which vastly expands the scope of historical analysis to segments of time that can span centuries.¹² As part of a general attempt to provide a theory that offers a unified account of the evolution of literary forms, these ambitious studies are driven by a yearning for totality, a desire to provide a total history, une histoire tout court.¹³ Not since Lukács's Theory of the Novel has there been a theoretical attempt to provide an account of a new literary universality.¹⁴ Yet even Lukács acknowledged that the historical and philosophical realities that the literary forms had confronted were not sufficient to provide the synthesis to which his theory of totality and historical development of literary forms aspired.¹⁵ Nevertheless, abstract assertions about the actual existence of a world literary space—a parallel territory of literary space that has a time of its own—are made in so sweepingly transhistorical movements that it would be hard to discern that the literature of this realm has anything to do with secular human history or even the specificities of experience and realities of human beings.¹⁶ As a result, the relationship between the overlapping aspects and the intermingling of cultures—those mutually shared and discrepant experiences that are the basis for the production of new modes of mutual understanding and coexistence—are undermined.¹⁷ A significant amount of theoretical work that developed in the wake of Said's Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism is essentially dismissed, marginalized, ignored, or forgotten.¹⁸ What remains, however, is a disavowal of the way culture is entangled with power, even though many of these methods use metaphors of domination and marginalization. The interpretation of other cultures is seen to operate within the realm of an ahistorical vacuum—one that is pliable enough to permit interpretation to stand for a universalism devoid of any real social attachment. Said's notion of contrapuntal criticism—so central to an awareness that metropolitan history is narrated against those histories upon which the dominating discourse acts—faces the renewed challenge that a theoretical vantage point exists that is extricated from its own engagements and entanglements with the world.¹⁹ We must be reminded that "we are, so to speak, of connections, not outside or beyond them" (emphasis in the original).²⁰

      The ongoing activity of providing an inventory of the interpellation of culture by empire has been contested most directly by Pascale Casanova. In her effort to develop a theory that relates the particularity of the literary text to the concept of literature as a world, Casanova wants us to understand that to restore the lost bond between literature, history, and the world, we must abandon textually based criticism (which institutes a break between the text and the world) and, at the same time, reject the idea that literature and history are identical. The limitations posed by postcolonialism, she asserts, is that it posits a direct link between literature and history, one that is exclusively political. Textually based criticism, she says, is internal; it is too narrowly focused on the text to see that it is part of the world. Postcolonial criticism is external; it broadly conflates literature with history. A question that initially appears to be posed in terms of a relationship between the particular text and the general concept of the whole world suddenly finds itself confronted with a different set of categories: an irreconcilable opposition between the internal and the external. Why these two practices of criticism cannot operate together as an ensemble Casanova does not say.²¹

      The compulsive drive to detach oneself from the circumstances of the present and its connection to the past has diminished Weltliteratur into an instrumental mode of Weltkultur that has, in exceptional instances, played a defining role in establishing the zones of warfare and translation. Beginning in 2005, the U.S. Defense Department began embedding teams of cultural anthropologists within military units to function as cultural analysts of those subjects under military occupation. Described as the Human Terrain System (HTS; now referred to as the HTS Project), the operation recruited and mobilized teams of social scientists to produce an archive of knowledge about the Afghan, and later the Iraqi, populations and culture to supply the military command with more effective strategies to administer, manage, and control its subjects. The impetus behind the Defense Department's initiative came from a small body of pseudoscholarship that claimed that the acquisition of cultural knowledge about the adversary would make military engagements a more effective and efficient means to subjugate a restless and resistant population.²² In 2008 the Joint Force Quarterly published an essay entitled, The Military Understanding of an Adversary Culture, which asserted that

      The changing nature of warfare requires a deeper understanding of adversary culture. The more unconventional the adversary, and the further from Western norms, the more we need to understand the society and underlying cultural dynamics. To defeat non-Western opponents who are transnational in scope, nonhierarchical in structure, clandestine in approach, and who operate outside the context of nation-states, we need to improve our capacity to understand foreign cultures.²³

      The subjects became a terrain to be analyzed, examined, documented, and transmuted into the dehumanized objects of anthropological, sociological, and cultural knowledge. In the Counterinsurgency Guidance Source, issued in October 2008, General Odierno declared that the Iraqi people are the ‘decisive terrain’…The environment in which we operate is complex, he wrote, and it demands that we employ every weapon in our arsenal, both kinetic and non-kinetic. To fully utilize all approaches, we must understand the local culture and history.²⁴

      Not since Napoleon's conquest of Egypt had so many scientists and scholars been mobilized to record, analyze, and study the culture, geography, and history of a people who had not invited such scrutiny and invasion from abroad. In his project to dominate Egypt, Napoleon sent his army with teams of surgeons, archaeologists, linguists, chemists, and antiquarians as part of an enormous effort to incorporate Egypt's values and its connections to a tradition that included Homer, Lycurgus, Solon, Pythagoras, and Plato. The results of this scrutiny were recorded in the Description de l'Égypte, a twenty-three-volume tome written between 1808 and 1828. Napoleon's project was a disciplinary practice, a mode of knowing, and a mode of understanding that was inextricably connected to power, according to Edward Said:

      To institute new areas of specialization; to establish new disciplines; to divide, deploy, schematize, tabulate, index, and record everything in sight (and out of sight); to make out of every observable detail a generalization and out of every generalization an immutable law about Oriental nature, temperament, mentality, custom, or type; and, above all, to transmute a living reality into the stuff of texts, to possess (or think one possesses) actuality mainly because nothing in the Orient seems to resist one's powers: these are the features of Orientalist projection entirely realized in the Description de l'Égypte, itself enabled and reinforced by Napoleon's wholly Orientalist engulfment of Egypt by the instruments of Western knowledge and power.²⁵

      Yet there is an important distinction to be made between an Orientalism that is situated on the terrain of war and the textual Orientalism to which Said is referring. While both forms of knowledge about the Other are placed in the service of power, the Defense Department's HTS Project entails the militarization of knowledge and the refinement of the techniques of a specific kind of biopower—a discipline and power that regulates human life itself.²⁶ The terrain of operation becomes a dehumanized place, a topos that is replete with references, quotations, observations, and citations—essentially figurative constructions that are used to justify and legitimize the exercise of power in advance, to establish order, and to provide a logic that transforms the human subject into a terrain to be colonized, reworked, and occupied; yet at the same time, it becomes the very means through which violence is avowed or disavowed. According to a 2009 report from the American Anthropology Association, the advisors use

      a wide range of conventional ethnographic activities and techniques for data collection. Data collection, therefore, has been reported to include at least the following techniques: surveys, snowball sampling, semi-structured individual and group interviews with both ordinary Iraqis (or, presumably, Afghanis) and elites, the elicitation of oral-history narratives, kinship and genealogical analysis, as well as diverse assessments, all of which typically includes the use of interpreters as full research partners. Depending on the circumstances and objectives, these techniques are applied in different proportion and with different degrees of depth. Sometimes a given technique is simply impractical or impossible to use, as is true of field work everywhere.²⁷

      The strategy develops its own epistemological framework through which the terrain of insurgency is made into an entity over whose destiny the United States believes it has some sort of unquestioned entitlement to rule, control, and govern. The strategy of analyzing the cultural disposition of subjects who live under foreign rule exercises power so that each aspect of human behavior can be reduced and objectified into particular categories that can be administered, observed, controlled, and manipulated. These ethnologists and social scientists are agents of total observation, although what they produce are hardly anything but stereotypical figures who possess a certain mind-set that can be measured, recorded, archived, inventoried, and objectified to serve the ends of a power that transmutes the field of human social activities into a zone of military conquest. In this respect there can be no consistent, coherent, intelligible adversary without the discourse of counterinsurgency, through which the discipline of biopower not only eliminates life but also regulates it.

      In this crucial respect, it is not irrelevant that teams of embedded anthropologists that are mobilized by the HTS Project shape the very attitudes that indirectly inform the decisions in the chain of military command. These ethnographers

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