Pain-in-the-ass Democracy

Jeffrey T. Nealon

Department of English
Pennsylvania State University
jxn8@psu.edu

 

Review of: John McGowan, Democracy’s Children: Intellectuals and the Rise of Cultural Politics.Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2002.

 

Are we so confident in our current formulations that we would not value the person who comes along to challenge them? More likely than not, that person is a pain in the ass.(McGowan 224)

 

 

In Democracy’s Children, John McGowan goes out of his way to be a pain in the ass–as long as we understand that term in the very circumscribed manner he outlines in our epigraph: a person who ceaselessly examines, challenges, and unsettles many of our longstanding beliefs and assumptions. McGowan’s project, he admits, is “to provoke as much as convince” (95), and there is much both convincing and provocative to recommend Democracy’s Children.

 

Like McGowan’s earlier books, Postmodernism and Its Critics and Hannah Arendt: An Introduction, Democracy’s Children is an exceedingly smart and deft surgical strike to the heart of contemporary debates about intellectuals and politics. Among the dozens of books published on this topic, I know of none that will so quickly and persuasively orient the reader within these crucial debates. McGowan cuts decisively to the crux of critical arguments, and more importantly, he offers a series of paths away from the stale platitudes that too often adhere to cultural criticism. “I am an intellectual,” McGowan insists, “not a scholar” (1)–and in a personal style that quickly gains the reader’s attention and trust, he takes us on a guided critical tour of the fraught relations among contemporary intellectual production, academic work, and politics.

 

McGowan’s most sustained engagement here is with critical in-fighting among academic intellectuals themselves, the tendency of many intellectual debates to become intramural wars of position, rather than useful critical interventions. “What I am trying to combat,” he writes in the book’s introduction, “is the narcissism of intellectuals, their tendency to find their own ambiguous position in modern societies endlessly fascinating. ‘This is not about us,’ I want to scream” (5). Later he expands on this claim, in another of the book’s many spot-on, “pain in the ass” critical moments: “manifestos with footnotes capture the laughable plight of today’s would-be intellectual, a careerist in the university who believes himself to be a threat to the status quo. Luckily, he has Roger Kimball to bolster his self-esteem” (79). Not the sort of thing academic intellectuals like to hear, but increasingly the sort of problem that intellectuals need to confront. What might “resistance” or “critique” mean in a climate where the dominant mode of power shares intellectuals’ suspicion of something called “the status quo”? And how might intellectual work be rethought or reoriented to give it some traction in public debates? These are the questions that fuel McGowan’s inquiry into intellectual work.

 

Democracy’s Children also constitutes a thoroughgoing interrogation of the roots of contemporary cultural studies in North America: “the very enterprise of cultural studies,” McGowan argues, “marks our Victorianism” (141). As he expands on this claim, McGowan insists that “loyalty to culture is almost always reactionary in every sense of that term. Such loyalty tends to be negative, to exist as a defensive resistance to change, without any positive plan of action” (182). Culture, then, is the abstract, oddly contentless Victorian moniker for all those things that might have saved Victorians from complete adherence to instrumental rationality, the market, and the commonplace.

 

But culture is our code word for such hopes, as well–the hopes of a critical practice that would subvert or overturn the economic leveling effects of late capitalism. On McGowan’s view, such faith in culture is either hopelessly abstract, or much too particularist. “With dreams of revolution lost,” he writes, “local resistance to capitalism often seems the best hope available” (182). At the vanguard of the contemporary fight against capitalism, McGowan argues, the enemy to be overcome is both “their” vision of the future and “our” nostalgia for the subversive past, when the realm of culture challenged the repressive forces of capitalism. We, the other Arnoldians: contemporary radicals fighting from tenured pulpits, just as the conservative Victorians did from their drawing rooms, both trying to keep some privileged and supposedly resistant forms of “culture” from disappearing into the maw of uncultured, lunkheaded businessmen.

 

And McGowan takes head-on left intellectuals’ near-universal denunciation of corporate or market economics, and their concomitant celebration of cultural alternatives: “as a pluralist, I am not in favor of letting the market determine all human relations or all human desires. But I want to encourage suspicion about the culturalist alternative, which looks equally anti-pluralist to me” (121). Indeed, McGowan provocatively suggests that “cultural studies needs an ethnography of business to match its sophisticated ethnographies of consumers. Then we would stand a chance of getting past the fatuous opinions of commerce that now pass unchallenged” (125). In short, McGowan insistently shows that “culture” continues to mark our fear of massification and our fear of the other, 100 years after the Victorians.

 

Against any emphasis on studying something narrowly called “culture,” the central concept that McGowan both builds and performs throughout the book is “pragmatic pluralism,” a thoroughgoing pluralism that maintains a healthy skepticism about its own claims, abilities, and limitations. Subtly, McGowan’s “pragmatic pluralism” continues his critique of the cultural intellectual as the subject presumed to know. His notion of pragmatism, in other words, is not territorialized on subjects and their supposedly plural abilities to subvert dominant norms and expectations. “Significance,” he insists, “is not solely the provenance of selves but the product of a multitude of signifying acts” (194). In other words, pluralism is pragmatic precisely because it’s not primarily subjective, but is rather beholden to process, “the non-subjective creation of meaning” (194).

 

McGowan’s principled stand of pragmatic pluralism commits him to ceaselessly interrogating notions of politics and the intellectual, rather than settling for platitudinous solutions to complex problems. So when McGowan writes, for example, that “the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ have lost their usefulness” (157), he argues this provocation and its consequences not according to some neo-liberal consensus model–we’re beyond such ideological conflicts here at the end of history or the rebirth of Empire, etc.–but through a principled commitment to pragmatic pluralism. The terminology of left and right has to be abandoned not because of its anachronistic or polemical nature, but precisely because it smoothes out a whole complex world of differences, non-subjective differences of performative labeling that we precisely do not get to choose or remake. Pragmatically, we have to negotiate among plural stances of naming, and we are as subject to the chain of plural meanings as we are in control of it.

 

McGowan builds his notion of pragmatic pluralism on the scaffolding afforded by an odd but finally effective linking of performative theory and narratology, an approach that allows him to treat “pragmatist themes [he] want[s] to take up against prevailing Derridean models of the performative” (187). Rather than seeing performatives as essentially semantic entities, tied up with meaning and its ostensible subversion, McGowan wants to emphasize the forceful, open-ended, and future-oriented qualities of performativity. And he sees a robust, narrative, non-truth-oriented pragmatism as the key factor in helping him do so:

 

pragmatism sees the emphasis on process as a way of freeing us from the dead hand of the past. Because meaning is always in process, our primary concern should not be in delineating the meaning of this situation or the causes that bring us to this moment, but instead on the possible ways to go from here. Process means that acts of naming are always transformative, always supplements to the already-named. (195)

 

 

Rather than emphasize the originary absences so crucial to Derridean notions of the performative (where the conditions of meaning’s possibility are always and simultaneously the conditions of its impossibility), McGowan highlights the positive upshot of meaning’s plurality: the constant (and necessarily non-subjective, non-originary) experimental deployment of response that makes up the public sphere of “culture.”

 

Rather than understanding culture primarily as a negative site of subjective subversion (the culturalist undermining of a totalized caricature of capitalism, meaning, identity, or whatever), McGowan asks us to reconceptualize cultural politics as a positive performative process, “a succession of namings in a perpetual call and response that establishes the ongoing relations among self, world, and others, relations that individual performatives strive to shape, to change for the better, but which no action can permanently arrest” (198). So for McGowan the “performative” political is precisely not the site of meaning’s constant failure, from which we learn over and over again negative lessons concerning our inabilities to communicate or effect change. Rather, “the political refers to the processes that produce a public sphere and the activities that are enabled by the existence of that public sphere” (178). This is a subtle but important change of focus from the performative political theories of, say, Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, or Jean-Luc Nancy (all of whom, in different ways, emphasize the negative moment of meaning’s failure in cultural politics). Without relying on some notion of privatized subjective creativity, McGowan wants to emphasize the positive, productive, enabling powers of performativity, what he calls performativity’s social “creativity and its plural effects” (214).

 

In short, McGowan tries to build a notion of the performative public sphere, where debates are treated less as wars of position among ossified cultural commonplaces (left/right, liberal/conservative, intellectuals/mass culture) than they are as open-ended situations, always “stressing the rhetorical component of democracy,” its “dialogic give-and-take” (8). Importantly, though, McGowan’s notion of “rhetoric” is less concerned with any kind of correctness or speaking of “the truth” than it is with transformation and intervention: “we don’t begin from nowhere,” he writes, “since just as situations come to us already label-laden, so each agent begins from a set of commitments, loyalties, other agents to whom he or she feels answerable, and habitual strategies of relation to various realities. But selves and situations are transformed through their interaction in the on-going process of meaning-creation” (195).

 

As an alternative to the public discourses of right and wrong or true and false, McGowan offers us an Arendt-inflected notion of “story-telling and judgment,” a kind of rhetorical public work that is less dedicated to ideology critique (unmasking the illusions we live by) than it is interested in creating performative narratives that allow us to go somewhere else, to escape dead-end debates. This, I think, is the most important provocation performed in this most important book: McGowan challenges intellectuals to take up a critical, pragmatic pluralism that gives up the pretense of unmasking the sinister truth hiding behind the cultural glitz and noise. As he asks, “does critical reflection, lucidity about the social and intellectual processes by which habits are formed, gain us anything? The watchword of critique has always been that the truth will set you free […]. The arrogance of this position is among the least reasons it has come under increasing attack” (77).

 

McGowan’s Democracy’s Children, at some level, finishes off the attack on the intellectual and his or her position as the subject presumed to know. But, more importantly, he gives intellectual work another place to go, another more crucial series of interventions to perform. In the end, McGowan suggests that intellectuals–as “democracy’s children”–have affinities with children everywhere, a kind of ingrained commitment to dialogic, pain-in-the-ass questions: “where are we going? Why? How do we get there?” And in the end, maybe intellectuals can learn their most important lessons about democracy from children, who know intuitively that getting somewhere beats knowing something any day of the week.