Volume 1 / Athens 1999 "Whatever happened to Sande Cohen?" Or "Telling the Truth About History" by Robert Batchelor Review of Sande Cohen, Academia and the Luster of Capital, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993 In January of 1997, Hayden White stunned an audience at the New York meeting of the American Historical Association by announcing that he still believed in Marxism as the primary framework for historical analysis. What White meant in terms of a particular method remains obscure, but his remarks bring to mind not only Jacques Derrida's 1993 gesture towards Marx but also the work of a lesser-known author, Sande Cohen. [1] The promising protégé of Hayden White, Cohen received his dissertation from the University of California, Los Angeles. His 1986 book Historical Culture: On the Recoding of an Academic Discipline, while often conflated with White's Metahistory, actually critiqued White's attempt to recuperate history through the device of metaphor and an almost transcendental poetics governed by the criteria of academic aesthetic judgment. [2] Cohen's second book Academia and the Luster of Capital (1993) received less attention, but it raises the most interesting questions with regard to Hayden White's seemingly incongruous return to Marxism. [3] Most of Cohen's book stakes out a series of intellectual positions largely defined by the last of the post-World War II French "neo-Marxists," namely Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard and Gilles Deleuze. For these theorists, the totalising and energetic character of capitalism ("constant revolutionising of production") made it impossible to ground epistemology on anything solid. ("All that is solid melts into air") As Baudrillard wrote, It becomes impossible to distinguish (Lyotard) the libidinal economy from the system's economy (that of value). It becomes impossible to distinguish (Deleuze) the capitalist schizzes from the revolutionary schizzes. Because the system is the master: like God, it can bind and unbind energies... In truth, there is nothing left to ground ourselves on. All that is left is theoretical violence. [4] Cohen works out of this position, through Nietzsche, and begins his own enterprise of theoretical violence, targeting the discipline of history. At one level, Luster offers a personal illumination of the purging of Cohen and more broadly 'deconstructive' theory from the academic discipline of history. Chapter Two, "The Academic Thing," is most interesting and most problematic of the book. Unlike the other chapters, which offer relatively conventional theoretical critiques of various historiographic positions, this chapter presents three scenarios taken from Cohen's experience in academia. The University of Minnesota Press chose to delete both individual and institutional names from the manuscript. The resulting text reads oddly like an eighteenth-century satire with blanks replacing the names of aristocrats. Cohen's first example stems from his own experience in 1976-1978 as a prospective candidate for a position at _______ University, which turned him down in favor of an affirmative action hiring. Not only does he argue that public and private research universities used affirmative action in the 1970s to expand the inflow of grant money from foundations like the Mellon into the humanities, but he also contends that the accompanying bureaucratisation of the hiring process allowed administrators to both mystify and dictate decisions formerly governed by departments. (31) The second example Cohen offers involves the use of bureaucratic and legalistic procedures to enable a politically-based non-renewal of a colleague's position at [California Institute for the Arts?] in 1985-1986. [5] The final example comes from 1987 when Cohen was a lecturer at [UCLA?], and the university pulled funds out of the lecturer program in order to support a number of "star" senior faculty tracks. As he argues in this last case, "It takes no theoretical insight to figure out this power play, which all the political factors -including internationally famous left historians- played to the hilt." (59) In fact, one might wonder why Cohen needs any theory, aside from something like Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of knowledge, to explain what seem to be rather straightforward exertions of economic interest and bureaucratic/corporate power against casual labor (lecturers and post-doctorates). [6] At a basic level, Cohen's arguments seem symptomatic of the California academic job market since the 1970s. As state universities in California tried to compete with the eastern establishment of the Ivy League, administrations emphasised modes of distinction such as star academics, multicultural programs, and fashionable theoreticians in order to highlight their humanities programs. At one level, this opened up domains and opportunities to a certain number of previously excluded perspectives. At another level, the "politically correct" nature of the hirings disguised the economic and prestige motivations behind these appointments and the strains placed on teaching by the shift in resources. Cohen, using a classic California trope, characterises the process as a series of "power plays masking as utopian projections." (47) But, the implications of Luster go beyond the particular California "academic thing." In particular, Cohen's book suggests how the historian's status as tenured, tenure-track or lecturer determines the limits of "academic freedom." According to Cohen, the academic writing of the tenured faculty member has an absolutely guaranteed future, even if the audience for such writing equals itself. (36) Such an economy of academic production leads Cohen to the conclusion that, "The 'research' model is undoubtedly a colossal piece of narcissism." (62) Conversely, without the mark of tenure, Cohen's own textual production illegitimately questions the unity/community of the profession. In 1988, the historian Peter Novick in his own critique of the historical profession ambiguously used Cohen as both a critic of the "objectivity" myth and as a whipping boy to help explain "the decline in the [historical] profession's sense of wholeness." [7] "Stars" like Peter Novick or the medieval historian Norman Cantor can name names, and their vaguely naughty behavior receives praise from other prominent historians. [8] Academic freedom works as a function of corporate seniority, a freedom held by an elite carefully selected through the tenure process that confirms and perpetuates the viewpoint of the academy. Rather than a guarantee of free thought, tenure becomes a mode of policing. This interpretation might seem too extreme, for there remains the possibility of an appeal to the 'public' through the variety of academic presses. Yet, the encounter between Luster as manuscript and the University of Minnesota Press also framed the possibilities of critical articulation. Editorial policies are in part responsible for the reductive feeling of the argument, much of which apparently ended up on the cutting room floor. As Cohen explains at an abstract level, "Institutions, including those of the criticism market, require that one learn to pay attention to lengths (time codes), repetitions (structures) and processes (directions), since these forms are directly creative of labor and cultural socialites." (83) Cohen's critique raises the question of "the implications of symbolic 'indifference' toward every type of official culture, institutionalised in the forms of university presses, curatorial texts, the reviewing processes, grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and so on." (145) Even in the case of a supposedly "avant-garde" theory press like Minnesota, edges get blunted, texts get bowdlerized, names get dropped (erased or commodified as the case may be) and theory becomes normalised for academic consumption. The press serves up "spicy" food para los gringos. An even broader frame than tenure or academic presses is the relation of the university to a broader system of capitalist reproduction of society and ideas. [9] The sacred space of the university ("academic freedom") is made possible by a fortress of capital (endowments, government and business grants, production of students, network of alumni, even landed property). Cohen's current employer, Cal Arts, is well known as a feeder institution for the Disney corporation, a long-standing relationship dating from Walt Disney's involvement in the founding of the school. [10] In part, the establishment of the capitalist fortress (the "ivory tower") returns to the issue of tenure. As Cohen explains, "because of this built-in self-perpetuation of professional production, it is hard to see how the university would generate ideas that might interfere with its own privileges." (24) Moreover, the permeation of the university by capitalism makes the commodification of knowledge an important component of the general production of professional commodity-selves ("stars"), an academic "self-fashioning" explicitly modeled upon the Renaissance courtier (cf. Galileo). As Cohen explains in a more recent article, "Today's historians are skilled as surviving in one of the great laboratories of Capital, which is precisely what 'profession' means in a managerial world: the most contentious realities can be written, extraordinary global changes can be processes in modes of intellect and institution which are themselves unchangeable." [11] Cohen faces the problem of somewhat willingly being pulled back into the capitalist academy with its own peculiar brand of knowledge production and its replication of the "cultural 'logic' of management." (101) Despite his use of personal anecdotes (anekdota: that which is unpublished), it remains unclear how Cohen's project challenges the general process of academic commodity-self production. Cohen establishes his own "distinction" (in Bourdieu's sense of the word) with a series of theoretical trump cards (Nietzsche, Lyotard, Baudrillard) not very different from those consistently used by avant-gardists of the twentieth century, arguments which seem to have done little to mobilise a politics either inside or outside of the teaching machine let alone to shake the foundations of Capital. Cohen's most recent published work, aside from his forthcoming book , is a sort-of exchange with Kerwin Klein in the journal CLIO. [12] Klein comes close to what he calls the "banal irony" of classifying Cohen's work as a reflection of the capitalist culture of the modern academy, "an interest group politics in which one set of white collar professionals (theorists) legitimates itself by attacking another group of white collar professionals (historians)." Cohen responds by accusing Klein (along with a large group of University of California historians) of "professional border-patrolling" and verging "on the hysterical." Is the only politics possible after the collision of theory and academic bureaucracy a form of localized struggle between junior academics over their relations of legitimacy with (Capital "A") Academia? Academia can be understood solely as a bureaucratic and capitalist structure, reduced to its economic frame as a symptom of omnipresent and omnipotent Capital, yet in such a situation, any politics emerging from academia could only re-institute or negatively mirror a form of bureaucratic capitalism. In such a system, according to Cohen, "The idea of 'history' [has] served as a cultural measure in what was the political control of economic practices." (152) This seems to get at what Cohen means when he talks about "thought systems that hyper-politicise or reduce life," but Cohen resists any coherent social, political or economic formulation. (155) To a certain extent, all critical or political theory written from within the university loops back into this system of academic social reproduction. Revisionism in history and cultural studies, which questions the old objectivist and historicist model of "recreating the real," nevertheless "continues the passage of culture onto the control of bureaucracies of meaning-schools, galleries, museums and so on-whose luxurious reactivity stands out against 'general society' and its skidding toward 'infotainment' and worse." (85) The increasing role of university administrations in controlling departmental hiring since World War II and the growing interference of the state in hiring practices at public universities suggest that the current "downsizing" of the academy is part of a long-term process of corporate bureaucratization of American universities. [13] This process is not well documented because the production of socio-economic knowledge in the United States largely remains within the academy. The American university may indeed offer no other options outside of a capitalist reduction of political ideas to professional commodities, an "official becoming" that ceaselessly reduces "life to the reproduction of domestic politics with its precise local power games." (95) As a strategy or form of resistance, Cohen calls somewhat vaguely for the "debureaucratisation of one's thought-signs." (97) At some points, Cohen seems to suggest a form of madness as strategy that parallels the "theoretical violence" of Baudrillard. "Historicist discourse is something to be feared," writes Cohen, "something to practice a creative paranoia against" [as opposed to Klein's creative "hysteria"?]. (86) In his more recent work, Cohen talks about historians who "wish to remove historical writing from politics, using political rhetoric." [14] In other words, his earlier suspicion of politics seems to derive from the uses to which political rhetoric is currently being put by historians rather than a fundamental and categorical dismissal. Yet, with the collapse of Marxism as a framework of analysis and the lack of an organized international proletarian labor movement what kind of new politics could be imagined, either within or outside of the academy? The present weighs heavily upon any attempt to develop such a theory of practice. This is evidenced by the difficulty in establishing what frame determines Cohen's own argument-ranging from California universities to global capitalism. Cohen has to contend with the fragmentation and diversity of American academia as opposed to the more centralised French system analysed by Bourdieu. Beyond this, however, the fragmentation of contemporary transnational capitalism makes conceptualisation and critique increasingly difficult, unlike the relatively centralised system of nineteenth-century capitalism organised around a few metropoles in Europe analysed by Marx. Capitalism in the late twentieth century has revolutionised and erased the remnants of its older manifestations. How would one even begin to think about politics from a position within the "teaching machine" that itself has trouble imagining capitalism as something beyond a commodity for use in academic debates? To a large extent, this problem stems not only from the nature of American academic culture but late-twentieth-century capitalism generally. What Cohen shows is how French theory, dependent on the ghosts of an old Marxism that posited a unified field of production, crashes J. G. Ballard-style into the bureaucracy of an increasingly corporatist culture of the American academy. His work raises several important questions, two of which seem central to all contemporary academic practice. What radical possibilities does intellectual labor offer in the late twentieth century? Has the development of capital erased all radical potential from the categories of history and politics? Perhaps some of these questions will be answered in Cohen's forthcoming book. The importance of Luster is not that Cohen answers such questions but that he in theory raises issues that ultimately cannot be completely incorporated into the academy. The reader is left with the possibility of mapping the wound patterns on the body of theory resulting from the crash with academic bureaucracy in the hope of finding a new realm, analogous to that once called the political, for the twenty-first century. Footnotes 1. Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx, (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1993). Also published in 1993 was Gayatri Spivak's Outside in the Teaching Machine, (London: Routledge, 1993), a collection of essays that promised to forefront a theory-based Marxist institutional critique of writing in the American academy. Spivak claims in her "Foreword" that "as the margin or 'outside' enters an institution or teaching machine, what kind of teaching machine it enters will determine its contours." [p. ix] 2. Sande Cohen, Historical Culture: On the Recoding of an Academic Discipline, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986) p. 48-57; see also p. 80-5 and passim. 3. Cohen has also completed a third book, titled Politics, Idealism and Scholarship: Readings in a Nietzschean Key, to be published in 1997. 4. Jean Baudrillard, "Symbolic Exchange and Death," Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988) p. 124. 5. Cohen still teaches at Cal Arts in the Critical Studies program. 6. For the approach of Pierre Bourdieu to similar problems see especially the expanded American version of Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, The Inheritors: French Students and their Relation to Culture, trans. Richard Nice, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), which was originally published in a shorter version as Les Heritiers, (Paris : Editions de Minuit, 1964). Bourdieu's Homo Academicus, (Paris : Editions de Minuit, 1984) and La Distinction, (Paris : Editions de Minuit, 1979) provide the larger framework. 7. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) p. 589. 8. William McNeill wrote one of the blurbs for Novick's Noble Dream, calling the book "Irreverent but not nastily irreverent," while Gordon Craig is quoted on the back of Norman Cantor's Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century, (New York: William Morrow, 1991). 9. For a recent account see Lawrence Soley, "Phi Beta Capitalism: Universities in Service to Business," Covert Action Quarterly, (Spring 1997); and Leasing the Ivory Tower: The Corporate Takeover of Academia, (South End Press, 1995). The Marxist Literary Group was scheduled to host a panel relating to these issues at the Modern Language Association meeting in Toronto in December of 1997. 10. Christopher Finch, The Art of Walt Disney: From Mickey Mouse to the Magic Kingdoms, (New York: Harry Abrams, 1995) p. 268. 11. Sande Cohen, "Reading the Historians' Resistance to Reading: An Essay on Historiographic Schizophrenia," CLIO, vol. 26, no. 1, (Fall 1996) p. 3. 12. Kerwin Lee Klein, "Anti-History: The Meaning of 'Historical Culture,' (Sande Cohen)," CLIO, v. 25, no. 2, (Winter 1996) p. 125-144; Sande Cohen, "Reading the Historians' Resistance to Reading: An Essay on Historiographic Schizophrenia," CLIO, vol. 26, no. 1, (Fall 1996) p. 1-28. 13. A recent case study is Rebecca S. Lowen, Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). For a classic account of this see, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life, (New York: Basic Books, 1977) esp. p. 201-223. For a compelling alternative to the "Cold War" thesis that takes into account the struggle between corporatist Fascists and Communists in the 1930s in relation to American academia see the unpublished dissertation of Clare Spark, The "Melville" Revival, 1919-1953: An unclosed case study in conservative enlightenment. (UCLA PhD dissertation, 1993). Spark's work also comes out of her own experiences at Pacifica Radio and UCLA in the "Culture Wars" of the 1980s. 14. Sande Cohen, "Reading the Historians' Resistance to Reading: An Essay on Historiographic Schizophrenia," CLIO, vol. 26, no. 1, (Fall 1996) p. 24. Return to Top