Kontextmaschine

11th March 2013

Post with 28 notes

"Cultural Marxism" and American Studies

So the “Cultural Marxism” meme.

Which, for those of you that have the misfortune to follow this tumblr because you know me personally or like happy hardcore, is an idea lately growing in prominence though still largely confined to the rightist alt-media. It’s the idea that “political correctness”, the collapse of self-assured WASP cultural supremacy, the destabilization of gender roles, and so on and so on are actually continuous with the Marxist project of world revolution in general and the destruction of America in particular.

And that this is all traceable to a group of German Jewish refugee academics known as the Frankfurt School, who in the shadow of WWII took Marxism (which traditionally viewed itself as the science of history, and was most likely to be classified by outsiders as economics or political philosophy), married it to Freudian psychology and literary criticism, and birthed of that unholy union a revolutionary monster. (Actually more recently I see Frank Boas and cultural anthropology getting tossed in, though he’s a generation earlier - but still German Marxist Jewish.)

I see people wonder Where This All Came From All Of A Sudden, and there’s a simple answer, and it’s American Studies.

Andrew Brietbart, who did more than anyone to get the idea circulating, was American Studies at Tulane. William S. Lind, who basically originated the meme in the ‘90s at the Free Congress Foundation, was History - specifically American - at Dartmouth and then Princeton, but then I don’t think they give American Studies degrees at the corresponding levels. (I know when I was doing American Studies at Cornell, most of my classes were cross-listed history.)

And the thing about American Studies is - well, university departments are fiefdoms more than anything else. I’m not sure how it works in the STEM fields, but in the social sciences and humanities, just like nations are languages with an army, departments are canons with tenure lines. When you think about it that way all the departmental politics make more sense. The canonical example of stakes so low, but the thing is even in miniature, they’re still full-blown feudal succession crises, with usurpations and splits and takeovers attendant.

Boasians pretty much stole anthropology from the skull-measurers, economics departments are split into freshwater and saltwater, philosophy’s got continental/analytic (in America, mostly analytic). Sociology claims to be the study of society, and you’d think that would be covered by history, or anthropology, or hell maybe philosophy, but none of those disciplines worshipped statistics like they did in Chicago so.

Women’s Studies departments were formed to give feminist canon a home, then Gender Studies for queer theory canon, and recently there were a bunch of mergers between the two that got really hostile because even if they’d seem to cover the same topics THEY’RE DIFFERENT CANONS with different theoretical bases and policy biases and that’s what counts.

English departments in America were always struggling to put together a native canon, after WWII they kind of settled on Thoreau and Melville through to Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and the theoretical approach of close reading. (That’s where secondary education last dipped into the well, which is why high school still has you sniffing out symbolism in an American literary tradition that ends in the '30s, plus maybe Amy Tan and Toni Morrison and The Crucible.)

Then the Canon Wars of the '70s blew that all away, and in the aftermath you ended up with English taking in refugees from canons too unhegemonic to get recognized as their own discipline. “Theory” was big for a while, and it was largely continental philosophy’s outpost in America, though I hear it’s been pushed back to redoubts in Cornell and Irvine. Elsewhere you’ve got visual studies and film studies and material culture and post-colonialism and I hear evo-psych’s preparing to storm a few.

But I digress. The thing is that the Frankfurt School is the canon that American Studies coalesced around, and so it’s unsurprising that people who came up in that tradition would hold them up as The Key To Understanding America, because in that tradition that’s exactly what they are. The right-blogosphere take on them isn’t even a mirror image of the American Studies view, it’s the very same view. Tenured academics would be much more positive (and jaded) about the long march through the institutions - obv - and the Scheming Jew subtext gets played as Cultured European instead, but the idea that the Frankfurt School represents a successful attempt to destabilize and revolutionize America’s understanding of itself, and successive cultural developments can be laid at their feet fundamentally IS the American Studies idea.

Tagged: cultural marxismamerican studiesfrankfurt school