``In the United States, appropriating Derrida led to apolitical scholarship, but it seems that studying Derrida can help us answer an important question: what is it about the American intellectual zeal against totalizing theories that leads to political apathy?'' Asad Haider
-------------
I think the above is the wrong impression. The US academy in my day (1961-69) prior to Derrida et al. was studiously apolitical to a fault. The whole system was devoted to produce a completely apolitical product, with mid-line liberalism as its only political dimension.
The continental philosophies were just being introduced, but I really had to scour the course catalog to find them. So then appropriating some of the French theory crowd was something of a vague political move.
The Michaels dust up lead me to start to follow Michaels and try to figure out his politics and literary criticism. It turns out that Michaels is a pretty good study in what I consider an apolitical scholarship.
Below is a link to a long interview where Michaels talks about his career, writing, influences, and his literary criticism projects. I recommend it to both side of the Michaels debate:
http://www.theminnesotareview.org/journal/ns55/michaels.htm
This is from his grad student days:
``So I was staying at Santa Barbara and didn't know what to do. Herb Schneidau, who was also a Poundian and had been at SUNY-Buffalo, was a lifesaver for me in the sense that he knew what was going on in the academic world. He showed up in 1970 or 1971 and he had a hardcover book called "The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man," which was later retitled The Structuralist Controversy. He had been blown away by Derrida's piece in the book ["Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences"]. Herb didn't speak French and hired me as his research assistant to read this book, De la grammatologie, and to write up a synopsis of the argument. I spoke French and had made a living off doing translations from French. Well, writing a synopsis of the argument of Grammatology is not that easy. It took me a long time, and I really got into it. '' (WBM)
This interview is also a study in the problem of integrating Derrida and de Man into a US literary criticism, which is what Michaels did. In another part of the interview:
``Michaels: I actually was not thinking of Raymond Williams, but I take your point. My interest in Marxism has never been in Marxist literary criticism or theory. I do have a strong interest in certain Marxist ideas about class, about the irrelevance of identity categories like race, and about the ways in which class is not really an identity category. And I definitely am interested in deploying Marxist arguments against so-called post-Marxism and its interest in cultural identities.''
Doug thinks I enjoy pissing on Michaels. I did at first. But I've changed my mind. I may even buy Our America. It's about changes in US fiction in (I think) high modernism. Since I've read a lot of that work, and about the period, I have my own take on it.
>From the bits and pieces I've read of Our America, Michaels is mounting
a critique _within_ the changes in fiction. He mentions various
political changes during 20s-30s but he doesn't quite connect the dots,
and see that the social forces issuing from big changes in the political
economy, as well as changes in mass media like radio, phonograph
records, film, art reproductions, etc. that are moving the whole
cultural system and its strata.
Michaels focuses on the writers and their texts. This focus comes from two sources. The first is the emphasis that New Criticism or a formalist school puts on close reading, analysis of style, composition, techniques, devices, and so forth---all independent from author intention, meaning, and socio-political context. The second source is the ultra-close reading and its moves to deconstruct the text that Derrida and de Man do which is again independent of intent, context, and meaning. New Criticism was still dominant when I left school. It was Michaels generation who moved away from that kind of formalism to what I think of as just another kinds of formalism.
The consequence of adopting Derrida and de Man is that a social history view is lost. The effect, I think erases a more concrete Marxist view of cultural productions. In the interview Michaels says he doesn't know how to write a social-historical analysis:
``...if you were doing a micro-history, it would be interesting to explain how you got from A to B, but that kind of history, which is the causal account, I have no idea how to write. I've always been more interested in figuring out how things at a certain moment fit together.''
My answer is that you get to understand how to link A to B, through reading a writer's work, a biography or two, and then surround him or her with their world and its historical developments and then figure it out. What I discovered was understanding an identity and getting to know a sensibility within its period and social-class strata was critical to understanding. I wanted to know why Arendt and Strauss were so politically different. I found my answer in Strauss's relationship to his minority religious background and standing, and how it fit with the political movements of his time in Weimar.
CG