Xref: murdoch uva.engl.amstdsma:101 Newsgroups: uva.engl.amstdsma Path: murdoch!darwin.clas.Virginia.EDU!jab3w From: jab3w@darwin.clas.Virginia.EDU (John A. Blackburn) Subject: Decker Reading, Much Improved Message-ID: Sender: usenet@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU Organization: uva Date: Mon, 19 Sep 1994 14:34:15 GMT Dis-Assembling the Machine in the Garden: Antihumanism and the Critique of American Studies Jeffrey Louis Decker Since its beginning, the American Studies community has been remarkably uneasy about the role and meaning theoretical thinking about its premises and objectives should have in its work. --Guenter H.Lenz, "American Studies--Beyond the Crisis?" NINETEEN SIXTY-NINE was a significant year for New Literary History because it marked the journal's beginning. For those of us in American Studies, NLH's inaugural issue also signaled a watershed in the debate around our (inter)discipline's methodology. In this issue, Leo Marx published something akin to a manifesto for traditional American Studies scholarship entitled "American Studies--A Defense of an Unscientific Method." As the title of this essay suggests, and as the essay itself demonstrates, American Studies (according to Marx) conceived of itself as an antiempirical practice. The rhetoric of "defense," however, implied a disciplinary crisis in American Studies concerning its thinking about theory and methodology. Not surprisingly, Marx's powerful antiscientific defense was soon attacked by a new breed of social-science-oriented American Studies practitioners. The latter's tendency, most notably found in the work of Bruce Kuklick, was to posit an explicit empiricist critique against older forms of American Studies scholarship. Yet, since the early 1970s, the debate around theory and methodology in American Studies has been somewhat stifled and certainly less forceful and engaging. A theoretical impasse seems to have been reached since the empirical criticisms of the antiscientific scholars. By the late seventies and into the eighties, American Studies practitioners have bemoaned the discipline's "uneasy" relationship to theory. What has produced the so-called "crisis" in American Studies methodology over the past twenty years? Although there is no simple answer to this inquiry, it is my contention that the crisis in the methodology of American Studies is, to a large extent, a product of its untheorized and unproblematized relationship to its long-standing humanist presuppositions. An example: looking through the pages of the most recent issue of a scholarly journal, I come across an advertisement for American Quarterly, the primary institutional "voice" of the American Studies Association. It reads: "As the official publication of the American Studies Association, the American Quarterly serves as a guide to the culture of the United States. The journal promotes a broad humanistic understanding of American culture, encourages scholars from diverse disciplines to exchange ideas on America, and examines the ways American life relates to world society." At first glance, this seems an innocent public statement concerning the "humanistic" principles that have guided American Studies since its beginnings. But what kind of assumptions concerning the practice of American Studies are operating in this advertisement? What presuppositions are suggested by the claim that Americanists practice--ant the American Quarterly "promotes"--"a broad humanistic understanding of American culture"? Has humanism, in one form or another, been the dominant philosophical presupposition in American Studies to date? It is my contention that, to date, humanism--often articulated as such, but sometimes assumed as well--has been the primary theoretical presupposition in American Studies. In this manner, American Studies's humanist presuppositions largely have come to mark the limits of its condition of possibility. As a result the antihumanist discourses of poststructuralism, which offer theories of the "subject" that disrupt humanist notions of the "individual," are largely ex- cluded from the practice of American Studies. My project will be to THEORIZE rather than THINK WITHIN the problematic of a humanist American Studies in order to unmask the tensions and contradictions that are internal to its determinate structure, but which are "naturalized" by its universalist constructions. In other words, my project will be (1) to disassemble the critical machine within the Americanist's garden in order to denaturalize the uncritical promotion of a "humanistic understanding of American culture," and (2) to produce one alternative antihumanist critical practice5--an interpretive strategy that draws from both Marxism and poststructuralism--for American Studies. Louis Althusser (particularly in his reading of Karl Marx's Capital;) produces a number of critical concepts that will inform my own antihumanist reading of the humanist problematic of American Studies, concepts which challenge practices ranging from the un-scientific method of the myth-symbol school to empiricism. According to Althusser, a "problematic" is a historically determinate structure that "can only pose problems on the terrain and within the horizon of a definite theoretical structure . . . which constitutes its absolute and definite condition of possibility, and hence the absolute determination of the forms in which all problems must be posed." In this sense, the "answers" enabled by a particular problematic are determined by already structured lines of inquiry and objects of knowledge. In order to interpret a specific problematic, Althusser relies on and revises the metaphor of sight to produce a "symptomatic reading." He does not merely suggest that the project of interpretation is to reveal what is missing from the structure of a particular problematic as an oversight--that is, an omission that simply lies outside the structure. Instead Althusser produces a second level of interpretation--or a symptomatic reading--which discloses the relationship between the visible and the invisible within the determinate structural problematic. In American Studies to date, humanism has generated the historical limits of the discipline. Humanism's political unconscious or symptomatic contradictions determine the invisible within its ideological formulation: "The invisible is defined by the visible as its invisible, its forbidden vision: the invisible is not therefore simply what is outside the visible (to return to the spatial metaphor), the outer darkness of exclusion--but the INNER DARK DARKNESS OF EXCLUSION, inside the visible itself because defined by its structure". This essay maps the historical trajectory of American Studies scholarship into three sections. Each part contains both immanent readings and poststructuralist critiques (as well as brief introductions to the latter) of particular American Studies scholarship from a specifically Marxist antihumanist perspective. The three sections correspond to an account of the historical transformation of humanism within American Studies institutionalized practices. The first section, while it briefly contextualizes the radical humanist tradition in American Studies scholarship between 1945 and 1965, contains a more extended critique of what continues to be one of the most highly regarded pieces of scholarship in American Studies, Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden (1964). In section II I move to one of the primary methodological debates in American Studies to date (which occurred in the early 1970s, and to which I briefly referred in the opening of this paper), between the self-proclaimed humanists of the myth-symbol school and the empiricists of the social sciences. I will conclude by briefly discussing some of the more recent attempts by Americanists to come to terms with various antihumanist poststructuralisms, of which the latter are not only the primary concern of this paper but also have rapidly gained currency in the academy during the past ten to twenty years. I. Criticism in the Americanist Garden "We may speak without exaggeration of this occasion as historic, since we have come here to enact anew the chief function of culture and humanism, to bring man again into communication with man." --F. O. Matthiessen, opening remarks of the first (1947) Salzburg Seminar in American Studies "They got all this machinery, but that ain't everything; we the machines inside the machine." --Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man In his recent study of the "radical tradition" in American Studies scholarship which ran from approximately 1945 to 1965, Guenter Lenz remarks on the context in which the early American Studies scholars, from F. O. Matthiessen to Leo Marx, labored: the failure of the old American left, the crisis of the "liberal tradition," McCarthyism, the Cold War, Stalinism, and the Communist takeover in Eastern Europe.' During this period and beyond, American Studies operated in many ways as what Michael Denning has appropriately called a "substitute for Marxism." At first glance, this seems somewhat ironic, given, say, Matthiessen's tentative Christian socialism and, more specific to this paper, Marx's commitment to socialist humanism. Yet, upon second look, the humanist specificity of Leo Marx's socialism is precisely the issue with which this paper is concerned. What follows in this section is an attempt, first, to briefly place Marx's socialist humanism in its appropriate historical context, and, second, to connect Marx's political concerns to the humanist presuppositions of his celebrated book, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal. First, a historical note on the origins of humanism in Western thought. From at least the time of the Renaissance, humanism has been characterized by its adherence to Western notions of"man" as an autonomous, coherent, "individual" with a wholly private consciousness. Humanism has its roots, in part, in the philosophy of Rene Descartes. In Part IV of his Discourse on Method, Descartes, while "search[ing] after Truth," utters his famous dictum "I think, therefore I am" (cogito ergo sum). The pronoun "I" in Descartes's dictum denotes not only the fully self-conscious individual; it also provides the ground for stable origins. Cartesian truth is unmediated by social or unconscious forces. Paradoxically, although an individual might be imposed upon by a higher being (such as God), this is not perceived as a threat to his freedom; rather, it is regarded as the means for attaining transcendent conditions such as the Divine or the Beautiful. A historical explication of Leo Marx's own brand of humanism--socialist humanism, to be specific--can be found in his 1959 Monthly Review essay entitled "Notes On the Culture of the New Capitalism." The issues that Marx, as a socialist, sees before him during the late 1950s are not only that capitalism has not failed, but that a "new" capitalism has emerged since World War II that has "greatly diminished" the "direct pressure of economic need upon our daily lives." That the "problem of productivity in America is apparently solved," coupled with the "discrediting of the USSR as a model of socialist achievement" since the revelations concerning Stalin's dictatorship, makes socialism in America seem to many "quite irrelevant." Marx's project, in this essay, is to suggest the appropriate direction for American socialism. The direction that Marx chooses, not surprisingly given the Cold War context from which he writes, is toward a socialism with a humanist face-- one which is concerned less with economics and social determination and more with culture and individual consciousness. As opposed to Karl Marx's notion that "[men's] social being determines their consciousness," with its "tacit depreciation of the significance of consciousness," Leo Marx writes in favor of a socialist humanism that is attentive not only to mass culture, but also to "the truth value of thought and language" (located for Leo Marx, albeit not unproblematically, in the church and schools) and "the most important of all natural resources: human consciousness itself." Leaving aside the issue of specificity in terms of both the implied constituency of the "our" in Marx's above usage ("our daily lives") as well as the implications of what Marx calls, with some qualification the "hopeful view of the 'new' capitalism" (these issues will be addressed below in my critique of The Machine in the Garden), I want to suggest that it is the humanism in Marx's socialism that allows him to make the critique of what he perceives as an irretrievable economic determinism in traditional Marxism. Leo Marx was not alone in his advocacy of socialist humanism. For example, across the Atlantic Jean Paul Sartre, perhaps the leading intellectual on the left in France in the late 1950's, was promoting a form of Marxist humanism (in his 1960 Critique of Dialectical Reason) largely in response to the revelations of the Twentieth Party Congress. However, Sartre's Marxist humanist project largely collapsed under the weight of devastating critiques by structuralisms ranging from Louis Althusser's For Marx and Reading Capital (1965) to the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss's The Savage Mind (1962). After Althusser and Levi-Strauss, Marxist humanism in France no longer constituted an effective critique of late capitalism. There were certainly vast cultural differences between Sartre's France and Marx's United States during the late 1950s: the leftist intellectual in America, for instance, was coping with the effects of McCarthyism more than with the atrocities of Stalinism. Yet what is analogous about Sartre's and Marx's situations concerns their distaste for what appeared to be, and often were, outmoded forms of Marxist interpretations and teleologies, as well as their appeal to humanism as the appropriate Marxist method for critiquing postindustrial capitalism. What is significantly different, however, about the American context is that no structuralist (or poststructuralist) critique of the humanism in Marx's socialism was ever made. The primary burden of my paper is to engage the humanist problematic in American Studies over the last few decades. This first section will focus on a portion of Leo Marx's influential work which was produced during the so-called "Golden Years" of American Studies myth-symbol school scholarship. In 1964 Leo Marx published The Machine in the Garden, one of the most influential, widely read, and learned of the myth-symbol texts. Its central thesis is stated simply by Marx as follows: "The contrast between the machine and the pastoral ideal dramatizes the great issue of our [American] culture.'' This dialectical drama between machine and garden, industrial technology and pastoral ideal, is the structuring metaphor for the entire book. Yet before Marx plays out this dialectical scenario, he calls up another drama-- Shakespeare's The Tempest--to undergird, anticipate, and legitimate his entire thesis. It is my contention that Marx's analysis of The Tempest IS crucial to propping up his humanist project. Although Marx titles this early chapter "Shakespeare's American Fable," it is, in fact, Leo Marx's American(ist) Fable--a narrative operating in Marx's text with an unspoken but powerful humanist moral. What follows is a symptomatic reading of the role that The Tempest plays in Marx's American(ist) Fable. I will produce this critical reading of The Machine in the Garden in order to dramatize the manner in which the category of "nature" functions as an alibi in humanism for its universalizing impulse and for the violent social contradictions and power relationships that are necessarily excluded from or rendered invisible within the structure of its problematic. Specifically, my project is to disclose the construction of racial "Othering" in Marx's text. More generally, I will suggest the manner in which an antihumanist practice can be utilized both to theorize American Studies practices and to produce alternative critical reading strategies. In his chapter on The Tempest, Marx's primary interest concerns the way in which Shakespeare's "universal theme" of culture versus nature is paradigmatic of the "American experience" itself. Marx is less concerned with the historical evidence that suggests Shakespeare's composition of the play relied, in part, on Elizabethan travel accounts of the discovery of the New World, than he is with "the action of The Tempest": "an unspoiled landscape suddenly invaded by advance parties of a dynamic, literate, and purposeful civilization". Here we are immediately confronted with the violence of the letter. The humanist analogy that Marx produces is as follows: nature (unspoiled landscape) is to culture (literate civilization) as not-writing is to writing. These binarisms insist on a categorical fullness that attempts to locate a stable origin while simultaneously repressing what the binarisms cannot say. Thus while Marx concludes that "The Tempest may be read as a prologue to American literature", the only manner in which he can account for the figure of the Other--Caliban--is through an unacknowledged metaphysics of presence. As we will see below, this locks Caliban into the prisonhouse of "nature," where humanist surveillance insures his unmediated presence. Shakespeare's use of the pastoral mode is the most apparent motive behind Marx's extensive use of this text. Although this use, in part, can be attributed to the Renaissance artist's interest in the nature/culture distinction, for Marx "the play . . . prefigures the design of the classic American fables, and especially the idea of a redemptive journey away from society in the direction of nature". Constructing The Tempest as a prefigurative American pastoral allegory allows Marx, in part, to establish a "myth of origins" for classic American literature. This, in turn, helps to legitimate Marx's claims within the academy. Marx anticipates his discussion of nineteenth-century American literature and culture in general by assigning the primary characters in Shakespeare's play symbolic roles in relation to the pastoral ideal. Take, for example, the play's hero, Prospero. He symbolizes and "affirms an intellectual and humanistic ideal of high civilization". Thus while his name is derived etymologically from the Latin prosperare, to succeed, "his behavior [is] prophetic of the deliberate and sometimes utopian manipulation of social forms that would tempt Europeans in a virgin land"). Caliban, on the other hand, whose name is probably derived from the word cannibal, "embodies the untrammeled wildness or cannibalism at the heart of nature". Furthermore, Caliban "keeps us in mind of the unremitting vigilance and the repression of instinct necessary to the felicity Prospero and Miranda enjoy". Marx compliments Prospero later in the chapter for his "recognition of inherent and perhaps irre- mediable aggressiveness in man" (as symbolized by Caliban whom Prospero puts to work) which "saves Prospero's utopian bent from sentimentality", and which marks the failure of Gonzalo's sentimental pastoralism. In relation to the theme of American pastoralism, Marx reads Prospero and Caliban as archetypal symbols for culture and nature, respectively. As a result, the social construction of the nature/culture conflict (which was certainly a crucial issue during the Renaissance) is concealed and naturalized in Marx's account. Because the nature/ culture confrontation is essentialized in Marx's book, he is unable to take into account the dynamics of particular social relationships. If, according to Marx, within this dualism Caliban is merely a symbol of hostile nature, then only Prospero has the status of a human(ist) being. The consequence is that Caliban's subjectivity must be subjected to what Althusser calls (in another context) "the inner darkness of exclusion". This darkness is inside the visible itself insofar as it is defined by the humanist structure. Caliban is not excluded from the structure of the humanist problematic; rather, he is relegated to the space of the (invisible) political unconscious within the structure of the humanist text itself. As George Lamming suggests, Caliban is the condition of possibility for Prospero's humanist narrative: "Caliban is never accorded the power to see.... He is seen as an occasion, a state of existence which can be appropriated and exploited for the purposes of another's own development." Caliban acts as a necessary (although unacknowledged) support for Western humanism. Stated differently, Marx's analytical machine in his Americanist garden does unrecognized but symptomatic violence to social relationships because it must necessarily produce an oversight within its own theoretical structure in order to repress its contradictions and thus sustain the interpretive power of humanism. Marx concludes that "finally it is Prospero himself who most clearly defines the nature of nature, and man's relation to it". Although he has produced a correct answer by revealing Prospero's coercive power, as Althusser says, "it is the correct answer to a question that has just one failing: it was never posed". The question that Leo Marx's humanism cannot pose in this example is, How is the formulation or definition of "the nature of nature" socially constructed? It is Prospero, the carrier of the "humanistic ideal" of civilization (or what Marx refers to more specifically in relation to his thesis as "complex pastoralism") who, by "defin[ing] the nature of nature" subjects Caliban to an essential(ized) category: the natural. Caliban plays the part of a naturalized nature that functions as the support for Marx's interpretation of Prospero as a humanist par excellence. With Caliban apolitically positioned as the symbol of the "dark, hostile forces" of nature, the possibility for challenging oppressive racial constructions of the Other is erased from Marx's humanist theoretical horizon. This occurs not because the category of racism is external or outside the determinate structure of the humanist problematic; rather, racial Othering is of necessity internally invisible to the humanist project itself. It is, in this instance, its forbidden vision. An early remark in the chapter on The Tempest is symptomatic of Marx's inability to interrogate the historical specificity of the moment in which Shakespeare wrote. After acknowledging that the play probably takes place in the Mediterranean off the coast of Africa, Marx adds that "[f]or the dramatist's purpose it might be anywhere. Nevertheless, it is almost certain that Shakespeare had in mind the reports of a recent voyage to the New World". In this way, Marx is able to situate Prospero as something of a New World Adam with Old World sophistication, a man who wages the universal "conflict between art and nature." "Prospero's situation is in many ways the typical situation of voyagers in newly discovered lands. I am thinking of the remote setting, the strong sense of place and its hold on the mind, the hero's struggle with raw nature on the one hand and the corruption within his own civilization on the other, and, finally, his impulse to effect a general reconciliation between the forces of civilization and nature". The ethnocentrism in this passage is perhaps by now predictable. Prospero, Marx's New World "hero," aside from being in exile from "his own civilization" is analyzed as "struggling with raw nature." Although it is right before his eyes, Marx is unable to see that Prospero's struggle with raw nature is simultaneously a class and a colonialist struggle which concerns a violent and historical civilizing mission imposed on the so-called New World by Europe. Instead, Marx apologizes for Prospero's abuse of his power when he states that Prospero is representative of a Renaissance notion of progress--a progressivism that Marx supports: "Prospero's behavior . . . suggests that half-- formed, indistinct idea of history as a record of human improvement, or progress". But "progress" at what social cost? More directly, what counts as "raw nature" in this passage is, as we observed earlier, the figure of Caliban. Thus it is Caliban who struggles under specific historical circumstances against the colonial powers of Prospero's civilization. It is no coincidence that Shakespeare's The Tempest, written at the beginning of the second decade of the seventeenth century, was first performed in the initial period of English colonial expansion into the "Orient" and the "New World." In this respect, the play dramatizes the historical moment of the colonial conquest. Although Marx can only see colonialism--through humanist lenses--as progressive, upon a second, antihumanist look Shakespeare's text can be reread as an instance within the politics of colonization. We need to read the figure of Caliban. The issue of domination and resistance in relation to colonial power everywhere concerns his character: from Prospero's usurpation of the island from Caliban (the latter's deceased mother, Sycorax, who is of North African descent, had also ruled the island) to Caliban's failed insurrection (along with Trinculo and Stephano) aimed at reclaiming the island from Prospero. The first instance of colonial domination predates the play itself by twelve years. Of this moment of violent usurpation, Prospero merely states that "Here in this island we arriv'd." This claim echoes the innocence with which Leo Marx suggests, without critique, that the New World voyagers came upon a "[virgin] land untouched by history". In this manner, Prospero embodies the figure of the humanist "hero" for Marx. Yet, if we listen to Caliban, as Marx cannot, we hear a different story. Caliban counters Prospero's one-line description of his arrival by stating: "This island's mine by Sycorax my mother, / Which thou tak'st from me" (1.2.331-32), and, "Which first was mine own King; and here you sty me / In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me / The rest o' th' island" (1.2.34234). "Criticism within the jungle" or "criticism in the wilderness" (as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Elaine Showalter, respectively, have called it in other contexts) must listen with an ear sensitive to the muffled cries of the Other. In The Tempest one can hear the voice of protest in Caliban's speech: "You taught me language, and my profit on't / Is, to know how to curse. The red-plague rid you / For learning me your language!" (1.2.362-64). Although Caliban is, in a sense, turning the oppressor's "language" against itself and thus rupturing the smooth operation of the colonial narrative, it should be remembered that it is Prospero's language which Caliban speaks--and which places the latter in suffering and in pain. Finally, we must not lose sight of Caliban's struggle in the form of a "conspiracy" (4.2.139) near the close of the drama. This scene disrupts not only Prospero's celebratory masque, but the flow of the larger play's humanist/colonial narrative. Caliban's conspiracy is crucial to an antihumanist/decolonial interpretation of the play because it discloses that not even the dominant discourse (of Prospero) can completely suppress resistance from that which it subordinates (that is, Caliban). Caliban's enslavement constitutes his performance at the site of physical labor. Yet Marx's text works symptomatically to misrecognize the issue of labor-power. In fact, Marx again gives us a correct answer to a question he cannot pose because it is invisible to him within the humanist problematic. In the same manner that Marx (as discussed above) is incapable of interrogating the silences in his own claim that "finally it is Prospero himself who most clearly defines the nature of nature," the political unconscious in Marx's humanist text is at work again in his seeming revelation: "We are not in Eden; Caliban must be made to work". Without further commenting on either the issue of Caliban's forced labor or the making of his subjectivity, Marx instead immediately discusses the manner in which Caliban is the antithetical symbol "to the felicity Prospero and Miranda enjoy." Yet Prospero makes clear that he and his daughter are dependent on Caliban's labor-power when he states: "We cannot miss him. He does make our fire, / Fetch in our wood, and serves in offices / That profit us" (1.2.311-13). Profit indeed! It is the labor of Caliban that sustains Prospero's Western physical and metaphysical economy of force. It is important that we comprehend the limits of humanism in Marx's text as a part of dominant American Studies scholarship in general. It must be remembered that Marx's humanism, however influential, is not the "essential" or the only form that this problematic can take in American Studies scholarship. The next section will disclose the manner in which the humanist machine runs the engines of a wide range of critical practices in American Studies--from myth-symbol school scholarship to empirical analyses. It is the task of the antihumanist critic, while admitting the limits of his or her own reading practice (and thus if not completely avoiding, then acknowledging and negotiating the potential pitfalls of either an arrogant universalism or a naive pluralism) to interrogate the dominant assumption in American Studies today. That presupposition appears, at first glance, to be rather innocent; but we can challenge it by theorizing its unspoken exclusions as a humanist machine in an American(ist) garden. II. The Humanist Machine "We must completely reorganize the idea we have of knowledge, we must abandon the mirror myths of immediate vision and reading and conceive knowledge as production." Louis Althusser, Reading Capital As I stated at the opening of this paper, Marx's proclamations, in "American Studies--A Defense of an Unscientific Method," acted as a touchstone for traditional American Studies thinking about its intellectual premises and project. The implication of Marx's antiempirical position is that if American Studies utilizes an unscientific method, then it has no methodology at all. This denial of methodology--in the guise of "humanism"--is, paradoxically, a thinly veiled method in itself. Otherwise Marx would have nothing (or no reason) to "defend." But Marx does defend. And he does so by "contrast[ing]" his own unscientific humanist approach to the empirical method. He reasons that while empirical analysis focuses on "content analysis" and "quantifiable results," humanists take "an interdisciplinary approach to the culture as a whole". Their object of analysis also differs, according to Marx. While empiricists "rely on an arbitrary or random sampling procedure" to discuss "public opinion," the humanists, although they "study the culture as a whole," privilege the category of canonized "imaginative literature". Marx's faith in "the established canon . . . based on the collective wisdom" of scholars is reasoned as follows: "Because the canon supposedly embodies the highest development of literary consciousness, it is a major source for the humanist in his continuing effort to recover the usable past". In an illuminating footnote, Marx further justifies his choice of object by claiming that the "concept of literary 'power' here refers to the inherent capacity of a work to generate the emotional and intellectual response of its readers". Moby-Dick, Marx's own example of canonized imaginative literature, finds its "intrinsic merit" or "usefulness" in "its satisfying power, its capacity to provide a coherent organization of thought and feeling, or in a word, . . . its compelling truth value". Thus the humanist "assumes that the significant relationships cannot be reduced to quantifiable terms". Rather, Marx concludes his essay by stating that the "significance" of the novel "cannot be located in any objective realm, uncompromised by human judgment. It derives from choices made by human beings, hence they are the ultimate basis for the method we would call humanistic". Within three years of Leo Marx's defense, Bruce Kuklick, in the pages of American Quarterly, offered an important empiricist critique of myth-symbol school humanism. In an article entitled "Myth and Symbol in American Studies," Kuklick attacks the myth-symbol school practitioners (Marx especially, but also writers ranging from Henry Nash Smith to Alan Trachtenberg) on two philosophical grounds: "a crude Cartesian view of mind" and "presentism." Crude Car- tesianism, according to Kuklick, suggests two (problematic) methodological possibilities: either "a strict dichotomy between consciousness and the world . . . [between] myths and symbols . . . [and] empirical fact," or a conflation of "facts and images" into a state of "consciousness". The former, dualistic, crude Cartesianism is criticized by Kuklick as rendering impossible any "meaningful relation" between a mental image and the referent in the external world. Alternatively, Kuklick deems the second possibility, that which conflates empirical fact with mental images, "a form of idealism". The second half of Kuklick's article challenges what he calls the "presentism" inherent in the myth-symbol school's humanist approach, particularly as it pertains to the latter's predisposition to valorize high art over popular culture. There is a problem with presentism, according to Kuklick: "Historians are liable to read their interest back into the past, and misconstrue an individual's thought so that it is relevant for the present: the result will be that historians extract from an author what is significant for us, but lose the author's intentions". Although Kuklick admits that his criticism of presentism begs the question, he insists that the rampant Platonism of the myth-symbol school's humanism "prevents an understanding of the peculiar intentions of a given thinker". What alternative does Kuklick offer to replace the myth-symbol school's unscientific methodology? Although he concludes his essay by apologizing for a mainly "negative" critique of the dominant American Studies method, and although a number of recent commentators concur with this assessment of Kuklick's essay,30 it seems to me that Kuklick does attempt to offer an alternative to--and even replace--the myth-symbol school's self-proclaimed "hu- manist" approach. Kuklick's negative critique of "crude Cartesianism" and "presentism" is not merely an attack on the concept of an essential mind/body split and an apparent ahistoricism (respectively) in work of myth-symbol school practitioners. It is more importantly an empiricist critique of the myth-symbolists, which is situated as an alternative American Studies approach. This results not only in Kuklick's relentless recourse to the importance of uncovering authorial intention in avoiding the pitfalls of presentlsm. More significantly, it is symptomatic of his perslstent attempt to explain "American behavior" through an empirical concept of reality: "The simple point is that the imputation of collective beliefs is an extraordinarily complex empirical procedure". In other words, to "decide the truth or falsity of humanist claims," popular culture or "lower-level [empirical] explanations" must be utilized to test the myth-symbol school's analysis of "the great work of art". The "essential truths about American culture" are reduced, for Kuklick, to "complex empirical questions." Empiricism does supply an alternative to the myth-symbol school's unscientific methodology, but it is not the radical departure that empiricists believe it to be. This is because empiricism provides the Americanist with an alternative analytical strategy that, instead of being the opposite of the myth-symbol school's humanism, is closer to the latter's inverse--and thus is within the horizon of the humanist problematic. In fact, the apparent idealism/empiricism, subjective/ objective split in American Studies method is an instance of what Georg Luk‡cs identified in his History and Class Consciousness as "the antinomies of bourgeois thought." Empiricism, not unlike the unscientific method of the myth-symbol school, is structured by the humanist problematic. This much is suggested in an analysis of the presuppositions that support Kuklick's empirical criticisms of traditional American Studies techniques. Phil- osophically, empiricism is the "science of experience," which is based on the doctrine that all knowledge is derived from sense experience. Empiricism has its roots in a tradition that assumes (and in its most naive forms continues to assume) a notion of praxis unmediated by theory and untouched by the play of language and representation. Thus, although Kuklick is correct in locating the "idealism" involved in the "crude Cartesianism" of the myth-symbol school, where images "reflect" the external world he is incapable of perceiving the limits of the humanist horizon within his own empirical object of knowledge. According to Althusser, the empiricist project is based on an uninterrogated concept of a "real" abstraction: "To know [empirically] is to abstract from the real object its essence.... Knowledge is an abstraction, in the strict sense, i.e., an extraction of the essence from the real which contains it, a separation of the essence from the real which contains it and keeps it in hiding". The operation of empiricist knowledge depends on the separation of the essential from the inessential, which results in the privileging of the former and a discarding of the latter. As opposed to, say, the myth-symbol school's reliance on immediate transparency, "The empiricist concept may be thought of as a variant of [this] conception of vision, with the mere difference that transparency is not given from the beginning, but is separated from itself precisely by the veil, the dross of impurities, of the inessential which steal the essence from us, and which abstraction, by its techniques of separation and scouring, sets aside, in order to give us the real presence of the pure naked essence, knowledge of which is then merely sight". At first glance, the "real" seems to be what is at stake in empiricist discourse. Yet because the "real" contains both the essence and nonessence, the object of knowledge or the essence "is not identical to the real object." Empiricism's use of the "real" to mask its object of knowledge is a "play on words" that, according to Althusser, "plays on a difference it kills: at the same time it spirits away the corpse.... It is not the word 'real' that needs to be interrogated in connexion with the murder, but the word 'object', the difference of the concept of object must be produced to deliver it from the fraudulent unity of the word 'object'". Marxist theoreticians ranging from Luk‡cs to Althusser allow us to recognize that empiricism is not the myth-symbol school's opposite, but rather its inverse. Empiricism, not unlike myth-symbol school presuppositions, is constituted by the humanist problematic whose object of knowledge marks the limits of its theoretical possibility. My point here is that the relationship between a text and external reality is complex; in this sense, I am in full agreement with Kuklick's critique of the myth-symbol school. In other words, I am not suggesting that we abandon the empiricist project altogether; mine is not a counterclaim against empiricism which contends that the "real" world does not exist. Rather, we need to keep in mind that reference functions less as a given and more as a problem. Kuklick's essay is an important contribution to moving American Studies methods in this direction. When Kuklick rejects what he calls the "crude Cartesianism" of the myth-symbol school, however, we find him coming dangerously close to operating unproblematically within perhaps the fundamental presupposition of the empiricist project--the immediacy of vision. Kuklick doesn't problematize the empirical underpinnings of his argument; he merely calls for a "complex" empiricism. Although this might exempt Kuklick from a crude form of empiricism, it does nothing to interrogate the presumed immediacy with which empiricism has traditionally claimed to know its object. Furthermore, the empirical concept of knowledge is dependent on an alliance between truth and experience. Ironically, and symptomatically in terms of empiricism's debt to the humanist problematic, the category of the transcendental Cartesian subject is central to Kuklick's em- piricist formulation that language can function unproblematically to reproduce "truth" or "reality." This accounts, I believe, for Kuklick's constant recourse to the importance of studying "American behavior." One instance in which Kuklick's empiricist formulation breaks down is in its reliance on a humanist notion of the Cartesian subject--a configuration that does not take into account a theory of the unconscious. Empiricism's recourse to the stable subject--particularly the manner in which this is formulated by Anglo-American "behavioral" psychologists-- is a primary motive behind Jacques Lacan's (post)structuralist return to Freud. As opposed to the normative psychology of the behavioralists, Lacan theorizes a subject that is always already radically decentered due to the workings of the unconscious. Thus, in an antihumanist gesture, Lacan reformulates Descartes's dictum "I think, therefore I am" as "I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think." For Lacan, the unconscious is what ruptures the subject's ability to know the world empirically. The ego is not, as the behaviorists would have us believe, the mechanism of unproblematic subjective coherence; rather, the ego is organized to suture the disjuncture between the subject and its world. If, as in the case of the behaviorists, the ego is not understood as a mechanism for misrecognition, then psychology is in the business of maintaining the naturalized "identity" of the bourgeois subject through social controls. And this leads to a conservative politics in which humanism is universalized and not recognized as a historical and dominative construction. A specific presupposition of Kuklick's empiricism--which poststructuralism effectively critiques--is his faith in a humanist concept of authorship. Recourse to authorial intention allows Kuklick to criticize the other major target of his empiricist attack on mythsymbol practitioners: "presentism." Although authorial intention is also crucial to some myth-symbol school practitioners (as we will observe below in the case of Richard Slotkin's recent book The Fatal Environment), it should be noted that Kuklick is concerned in his essay with how it might be uncovered most effectively. Yet as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault have suggested in different ways, the very question of an author's intention is a historical one which is constituted, in part, by the rise of empiricism and bourgeois humanism. This particular humanist concept of authorship depends, at the very least, on stable and centered notions of the subject, language, and meaning--concepts that are antithetical to theories of poststructuralism. The direct and uncritical line that many humanists assume from author to meaning of an author's work is constituted by the theological belief in a transparency of language that depends on immediate vision or presence (what Derrida refers to as logocentrism). This particular humanist concept of authorship cannot account for the inevitable slippage of language that occurs between the author and the reader of a text. We would do better, I think, to utilize Foucault's antihumanist notion of the "author function," which, while it problematizes the naive equation of author and work, does not simultaneously replace the transcendental author with the transcendental reader. According to Foucault, a (poststructuralist) theory of authorship needs to be sustained for historical and political purposes: "It should be reconsidered, not to restore the [humanist] theme of an originating subject, but to seize its functions, its intervention in discourse, and its system of dependencies." Stated differently, authorial intention is one (among many) effects of the text, and not its cause. In this sense, we need to focus less on meaning and more on the historicaldiscursive apparatuses that establish social relations. In sum, Kuklick's empirical method is unable to interrogate the concept of "truth value" found in Leo Marx's essay in "defense" of an unscientific method. In fact, while Marx defends imaginative literature such as Moby-Dick for its "compelling truth value", Kuklick's response is concerned only with "what grounds we have for asserting the truths the novel is supposed to express". And, almost a decade later, we find Marx, in an attempt to rethink the myth-symbol school's methods, merely reiterating the humanist notion of myth as being involved, for the American Studies scholar, in a seemingly transparent relationship with "actual" empirical reality. "To expose the masking effect of myth, the historian must finally identify the actualities it masks." Marx suggests that a "masking" relationship exists--but it is one which is wholly legible. More recently, Alan Trachtenberg, in an essay entitled "Myth and Symbol," cites this and other remarks by Leo Marx in an attempt to perform a necessary self-criticism for myth-symbol practitioners. However, as I have attempted to demonstrate, bringing the mythsymbol school's practices more closely in line with the traditional empirical project of separating the essential "actualities" from the inessential "mask" will not significantly alter American Studies methods. "We must," as Althusser states, "completely reorganize the idea we have of knowledge, we must abandon the mirror myths of immediate vision and reading and conceive knowledge as production". Because antihumanist practices attempt to theorize about rather than think within the horizon of humanism, they are capable of reconceptualizing the methodology of American Studies. III. Out of the Garden ?: Recent Americanist Excursions Into Antihumanism "But as there is no such thing as an innocent reading, we must say what reading we are guilty of." --Louis Althusser, Reading Capital In 1984, Alan Trachtenberg, one of the leading proponents of the myth-symbol school early in his career (and one of its most sophisticated practitioners), wrote: "In the past fifteen years or so the category of methodology has had a particular resonance, a charge of significance, registered by an outpouring of words addressed to the question of the 'identity' of American Studies as a professional academic enterprise." During the 1970's the "crisis" over methodology was characterized to a large extent (although not exclusively) by the debate between the self-proclaimed humanists of the mythsymbol school and the empiricists of the social sciences. The result, as the recent advertisement for American Quarterly cited at the opening of this essay stated, is that the humanist problematic remains the "identity" of American Studies to date. During the 1980s theoretical debate within American Studies has been more uneven, and, in relation to poststructuralism, nearly absent. This conspicuous absence is what this essay attempts to address and, hopefully, begins to correct. While the first two sections of this essay utilized, to a large extent, Althusser's theory of symptomatic reading to critique the force of humanism in American Studies scholarship, what follows is a brief account of two recent attempts by Americanists to engage the primary concern of this paper: the usefulness of various poststructuralisms for American Studies critical practices. The work of T. J. Jackson Lears on Antonio Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony is a rare instance of theorizing a new method for Americanists. In his "The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities" (1985), Lears argues persuasively for a consideration of Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony in the study of the complex relationship between consent and force in society. Yet, when Lears makes his way into various poststructuralisms at the conclusion of his essay, he quickly (on one, final page!) rejects their "antisubjectivism"--a category of analysis contained within what 1 am referring to as antihumanism--on largely uninformed grounds. First, rhetorically: Lears states that poststructuralism is "a fashionable ideology." The intellectual rigor of this claim as evidence against poststructuralism obviously does not deserve a response (although one does wonder about the politics of institutional legitimation when this argument is used to delegitimize any scholarly practice). Second, Lears states that antisubjectivism "fails to account for resistance." This sweeping condemnation of all poststructuralisms on the issue of resistance is simply inaccurate when one considers those discourses which deal, for example, with sexual and racial Others. In fact, to make his claim Lears must ignore the influence of feminist, Marxist, anticolonial, and African-American theorists within the constitution of poststructuralist practices. Lears's resistance to poststructuralism also takes the form of an argument against an antisubjectivist concept of language, which he believes is as mechanistic and reductionistic as economic determinism. This reading is guilty of either the previous problem of ignoring theories of resistance in antihumanist discursive practices or of gross simplification of the meaning of discourse and textuality in poststructuralism. My own reading of the racial Othering in Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden provides one possibility of countering Lears's charge. Lears also suggests that antisubjectivism cannot account for "transformation in 'discursive practice.'" To answer this charge we might turn our attention to one of Lears's primary targets: Michel Foucault, the philosopher of history most responsible for the concept of discursive practice. While it is true that Foucault did not conceptualize history within a traditional model of linear, progressive "transformations," he did spend his entire career tracing what he referred to (at different moments in his career) as "epistemic" and "gene- alogical" breaks, especially those shifts between the classical age and the nineteenth century. In his final defense of humanism, Lears has recourse to "human experience" when assessing poststructuralism's "denial of the subject" In history. Here, I will let Foucault speak for himself: "My objective, mstead, has been to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects.... it is not power but the subject which is the general theme of my research." The object of Foucault's analysis is the subject in history. Not unlike other antihumanist theoreticians, Foucault writes against a Western, metaphysical, universalized, centered, or fixed concept of the subject. In its place, he proposes a more complex notion of the subject in history: specifically, that there is not one manner in which the subject is constructed historically, but many; and, that the subject is not at the center of history--which has no center. Finally, there has been a return of the repressed, of sorts, in the 1980's debate over the appropriate American Studies theoretical framework: the myth-symbol school persists in its efforts to revitalize its methods, especially by attempting to incorporate a concept of "ideology" into its notion of myth. An example of this is the ambitious and important work of Richard Slotkin. If we look at the opening chapter of his recent book entitled The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800--1890, we witness Slotkin reformulating his earlier static, archetypal concept of myth into what he now refers to as the "myth/ideology system." The advantage of utilizing the category of ideology alongside myth is that it allows Slotkin to begin to articulate more persuasively the systemic impact of capitalism and racism on American cultural history. Yet, upon a second look, Slotkin's use of a concept of ideology is less a reconceptualization of the myth-symbol school's humanist problematic in terms of either structuralism or poststructuralism than an unsatisfactory appendage to it. Although, for example, Slotkin relies heavily on Roland Barthes's structuralist definition of myth, a humanist notion of authorial intention insists on returning to the former's discourse with a vengeance. Quoting Slotkin on Barthes: "'Myth is constituted by the loss of the historical quality of things,' Barthes has said. The most important consequence of this is the concealment of human authorship and intention in the creation of ideas and values and the shaping of material conditions . . . the premise of human authorship is the very thing that myth is organized to deny." Yet Barthes's discussion of the interpellative effects of myth on the historical subject is in direct contrast to Slotkin's claim that authorial intention is what myth hides, if one knows where to look. This leads to Slotkin's humanist preoccupation with origins and authorship, which is glossed in his question "Whose Myth Is It?" Instead, Slotkin might have asked the question differently (with an ear for Barthes's structuralist concerns): "How Do Myths Function Historically to Construct Subjects?" This (post) structuralist question, however, once again lies outside the limits of American Studies methodology. In fact, Barthes prefaces the 1970 edition of Mythologies by stating that his project is "to go further than the pious show of unmasking [sign-systems] and account in detail for the mystification which transforms petit-bourgeois culture into a universal nature". In a lengthy final essay entitled "Myth Today," Barthes reinforces this claim when he suggests that the contemporary function of myths is to "naturalize" a socially constructed history and subjectivity. The humanist concept of authorial intention is nowhere to be found in Barthes's Mythologies, which anticipates Barthes's later radically antihumanist, poststructuralist work such as "The Death of the Author." But Slotkin never addresses these issues; instead he forces Barthes's theory of myths into a humanist framework. I am not suggesting that the myth-symbol school is an anachronism of American Studies. Rather, its persistence lies partly in the fact that it has been the only theory of American Studies to articulate its fundamental presupposition: humanism. And humanism--whether uncritically articulated (as in the case of the myth-symbol school) or simply unrecognized (as in the case of the empiricists)--is the problematic of American Studies to date. I am not naively suggesting that we can, even if we wanted to, completely abandon the project of humanism that has been so important to American Studies. However, it is the dogged persistence of humanism in American Studies which has worked to constrain the possibility of utilizing the broad range of poststructuralist reading strategies for our discipline's practice. Yet, perhaps the terrain of American Studies scholarship is finally shifting. Michael Denning's recent Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America (1987) is a notable exception to the more entrenched humanist practices of American Studies scholarship. Denning's project, which draws substantially from a Marxist antihumanist tradition (through the work of Marx, Antonio Gramsci V. N. Volosinov, Fredric Jameson, Stuart Hall, and the Frankfurt school), is to read the dime novel as the contested arena of ideological struggle: "Thus the ideological signs mobilized in dime novels--the characters, particular words and figures, narrative patterns-- are not established and univocal. Their ambiguity comes not only from their rhetorical character, their use of metaphor and other figurative devices, but from the different class accents with which they are inflected. These class accents can sometimes be detected in their production, in the way the writer understands the material, but they are equally active in their reception, in the way readers accent their readings. This can be difficult to detect; thus it is essential to begin with an assumption of contradiction, of the multiaccentuality of all ideological signs." For Denning, the "rhetoric of class" is the figurative space of multiaccentual struggle over representations of competing realities. The dime novel can thus be understood as a part of an emerging culture industry where there exists class struggle at the level of consumption as well as production. Overall, however, the general unwillingness to engage in increasingly influential antihumanist methods has, I believe, not only weakened American Studies institutionally. It also discloses the current limits of American Studies' commitment to interdisciplinary practices. It was this latter commitment that made American Studies effective and innovative at its inception; we must return to this same commitment today, but without the constraints of an American(ist) innocence of humanist proportions. Reply to Jeffrey Decker T. J. Jackson Lears JEFFREY DECKER has put his finger on the weak point of my argument in "The Concept of Cultural Hegemony"'--the concluding rhetorical peroration. I indulged in this bit of naive humanism to sugarcoat my theoretical discussion for an audience of historians who have trouble swallowing any overt reference to theory. No doubt my dismissal of "antisubjectivist" tendencies in poststructuralist thought was inadequately informed. Now I am persuaded, by Decker and others, that cultural historians risk a crippling ethnocentrism unless they acknowledge the problematicity of the unified, originating human subject. But acknowledging problematicity is not the same thing as proclaiming "the death of the author." The effect of much poststructuralist thought, if not its intention, is to wipe out familiar notions of human agency and personal responsibility. Maybe they deserve to be wiped out, but at this point I'm still not convinced. People still do things to each other. For example, advertisers (as well as academics) create fictions of the self that impinge on people's lives: the advertisers and their audience are still actual people, if not coherent selves. The extract from Denning concerns the ways "people figure social cleavages." Are these people subjects? Somehow they are unified and coherent enough to manipulate "words, metaphors, and narratives"--this sounds like a kind of authorship to me. Granted the notion of "the author" is a cultural construction, the fact remains that if Melville had not taken pen in hand we would not have Moby Dick. The proclamation of "the death of the author" is too often an excuse for the critic to turn the text into a trampoline where he can perform daring tricks with words. (The caperings of Barthes are the clearest case in point.) Nevertheless I applaud Decker's antihumanist project. As I said in "The Concept of Cultural Hegemony," more crimes than anyone can count have been committed in the name of humanism. An antihumanist movement is long overdue and, if we take seriously its largest implications, crucial to the survival of the earth and its inhabitants. The irony is that the success of that movement may require the participation of some knowing, committed subjects--or at least some people who believe in the convenient fictions of personal responsibility and unified selfhood. RUTGERS UNIVERSITY NOTES T. J. Jackson Lears, "The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities," American Historical Review, 90 (1985), 567-9.3 Reply to Decker Bruce Kuklick MUCH OF WHAT Professor Decker says I do not understand, although he seems to make more out of "Myth and Symbol in American Studies" than is justified. Part of the problem has to do with his suspicion of intentionality. The suspicion has led him to ignore what I plainly said. Perhaps too, because he is dubious about the legitimacy of expressing one's intent, he is muddled in conveying what he has to say himself. Some disputed concerns, however, are not muddled. Decker desires to set me up as a bogeyman "empiricist." To do this he tells us what "naive" empiricists assert and puts forward Louis Althusser's critique of empiricism. He then attributes the supposed weaknesses of empiricism--even "complex empiricism"--to me. Yet, as Decker quotes me, my essay was "mainly negative." As he also states, readers have agreed that the essay was "mainly negative," and indeed I wrote that the essay was "mainly negative" so that they would come to that conclusion. I did not intend to defend empiricism or anything else; I intended, as I said, to offer a mainly negative critique. It is beyond me why Decker does not comprehend this. He tells us we must focus less on intentionality and more on "the historical-discursive apparatuses that establish social relationships." At the same time Decker cites Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and George Luk‡cs in addition to Althusser and repeatedly uses the clumsy construction "It is my contention" to signal us. Decker may want us to understand his own writing and theirs. Perhaps, however, he thinks we should concentrate instead on his ritualistic obeisance to these theoreticians or speculate about the self-serving needs of anyone who would take their work seriously. It is my contention that Decker wants us to know what his ideas and theirs are; that is, he wants us to get what he and others have aimed to say. It is irritating of Decker to deny what he constantly presupposes. I suggest he attend to the annoyance or chagrin he feels at reading what I have just written; he will then have a paradigm case of grasping an intention--my intention to anger him. "Myth and Symbol" did not embrace empiricism; nor did it "call for" a complex empiricism, as Decker says. The essay still of course had presuppositions of which I was not fully aware at the time. From the vantage-point of almost twenty years, I think these assumptions are fairly elementary. I believe--and still believe--that some answers to questions are better than others; that some methods of getting answers to these questions are better than others, and that complex empirical issues are involved in evaluating both the better answers and the better methods. To the question, Who killed the Polish officer corps in the Katyn forest in 1940? I think "the Russians" is a better answer than "the Germans." Decker says he agrees with my critique of the mythsymbol school. That is, he thinks it is a bad method, and he gestures toward the possibility of other, better methods. Research techniques, exploration of evidence, and puzzles about warranting explanations exemplify the sorts of empirical matters that plague us in appraising the better answers and the better methods. So far as I understand Decker's caveats about "empiricism," I do not object to them. Since the time of Kant--not to mention Protagoras--thinkers have worried about the role of human subjects in constituting knowledge and the way in which interests or relationships of power may (or even must) compromise belief. Decker's news is hardly new. C. I. Lewis, arguably the most influential American philosopher of this century, called himself a conceptual pragmatist. He contended that establishing claims to knowledge was akin to building an Empire State Building out of toothpicks "most of which we haven't got and cannot be given.''l I am very fond of Lewis as a thinker and share his only modest hope of what cautious and careful inquiry can obtain. Decker has these concerns too. Aside from the fatuous results of his worries about intentionality, I would not dispute him. What does disturb me greatly is the mumbo jumbo in which Decker cloaks his critique and the lack of thought that seems to go with the slovenly language. Whatever can be said, after all, can be said clearly. There is an irony in Decker's peculiar reading of my essay. When I wrote it, I was enamored of three Anglo-Saxon writers who, in a more linear fashion, espoused ideas akin to those of the nowfashionable Continental theorists Decker admires. "Myth and Symbol" noted Quentin Skinner's examination of intentionality. But what also fascinated me in Skinner's early writings was his skepticism about what intellectual historians had accomplished and his desire to place thought in its social context. These latter projects attracted me also in the work of Thomas Kuhn and Clifford Geertz.2 It still seems obvious to me that these pragmatist, historicist anti-empiricists were engaged in a social history of ideas that had more or less relativistic implications. If thought was so deeply connected to society, how could thought be objective? How could it correspond to reality? What intrigued me then and still does is the Cartesian problem that I said confused Leo Marx--the way in which, as I variously put it, consciousness is connected to the world, ideas to behavior, superstructure to structure. Embracing the agenda of people like Skinner, Geertz, and Kuhn, my own work tried to show how ideas coincided with constellations of interests or with certain organizational systems.3 My efforts did not, however, satisfy me. As the new historicism became popular in the 1970s, it appeared less and less adequate to me as a research strategy. Certainly inadequate was the trend-setting belief that theorizing alone could settle important substantive concerns. I became more and more committed to the view that scholarship is advanced only when theory arises from practice. My own practice, moreover, was less and less successful, I felt, in linking ideas to anything else.4 That is, over the years I have gained more respect for Leo Marx's Cartesianism, for his inability, as I saw it, to tell us about the way words and the world linked up. Indeed, in the last few years my writing has almost conceded that the connection of mind to existence is mysterious, that ideas supervene on reality, that consciousness may be transcendent.5 Thus, in some measure I believe that my attack on Marx was wrong insofar as I dismissed his recourse to Cartesianism as misguided. Speculative musings like mine in "Myth and Symbol" in and of themselves have little value.6 We best come to terms with issues of method by undertaking research, and one measure of good research is its ability to attract comment and criticism. So after some time, my hat is off to Leo Marx. His (implicit) theoretical framework has the virtue of being rooted in a major research endeavor. Whatever its philosophical failings, The Machine in the Garden continues to attract reflective readers who find much to conjure with in it; and perhaps its failings are not so surely failings after all. UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA NOTES 1.C. I. Lewis, An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation (Lasalle, 111., 1946), p. 264. 2. See Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientifie Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago, 1970); and Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Culture (New York, 1973). 3. See my The United States and the Division of Germany: The Clash with Russia over Reparations (Ithaca, N.Y., 1972), pp. 2-5, 237-41; and The Rise of Armerican Philosophy: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1860-1930 (New Haven, 1977), pp. xvii-xix. 4. See my Churchmen and Philosophers: From Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey (New Haven, 1985), pp. 301-2. 5. See my The Good Ruler: Herbert Hoover to Richard Nixon (New Brunswick, NJ., 1988), pp. 191-92; and To Every Thing A Season: Shibe Park and Urban Philadelphia, 1909-1976 (Princeton, 1991), notes to "Introduction" and "Epilogue: Common Ground," pp. 190-91, 225-26. 6. Even "Myth and Symbol" was not so entirely theoretical as more recent (and even more empty) attempts to set American Studies straight. My own theoretical writings did try to integrate empirical concerns. For example, see my "History as a Way of Learning," American Quarterly, 22 (1970), 609-28; "Studying the History of American Philosophy," Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 18 (1982), pp. 18--33; and "Does American Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?" in American Philosophy, ed. Marcus G. Singer (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 77-89.