In honor of Banned Books week, I offered the following to some of my students and colleagues. Enjoy.
One of the more astonishing revelations of this presidential campaign season is that a vice-presidential nominee once floated the suggestion that a librarian remove books from a local library in order to respond to citizen complaints about the book’s content. Whether anyone who has ever contemplated banning a book is remotely or conceivably fit for high office, or any office other than the one around the corner from the bathroom with the broken fluorescent lights, is a question on which I have some opinions but will not attempt to answer in what follows.
[Please note that some quotes appear here unattributed. They are from one of two sources: Todd Gitlin's article on the rise of anti-intellectualism in theChronicle of Higher Education or the very fine article on Giorgio Agamben in the Internet Encyclopedia by Catherine Mills. I will clean up the quotes if I submit this somewhere. I wrote this in a hurry...]
In this talk I will pursue another question raised by the Palin episode, one about anti-intellectualism and the ban. There are obvious links between anti-intellectualism and book banning, and not just because one would have to be anti-intellectual to want to ban many of the books that appear on the annual list of banned books. And not just because banning books has the direct and probably measurable result of making people less intelligent. The Palin episode is far worse than we might have imagined. It’s not just a case of right-thinking moral rectitude run amok, as the Vatican’s centuries long experiment with censorship was. And it’s not just anti-intellectualism for its own sake. The anti-intellectualism exhibited by Palin is intrinsically linked to book banning, not because on Palin’s view we need fewer books in our libraries. Books are just the sacrificial lamb in the Palin book-banning story, and in this case the sacrifice is, like Isaac’s, averted: the lamb is still bleating. The anti-intellectualism exhibited by Palin is intrinsically linked to the power to ban: the power to ban a book, a thought, a community, a body, a person, a soldier, a protestor, a journalist, a thinker, a poet, or a scientist. The power to ban a book is indistinct from other sorts of powers, and these powers are linked to and depend on anti-intellectualism. Therefore, resistance to book banning—that which we celebrate and enact this week--is not just a matter of loving books. It’s not reducible to the mewing of a few sad humanists nostalgic for Twain’s elegant phrasing or the transcendent sensitivities of Holden Caufield. Resistance to book banning is a resistance to a form of power that expels and banishes, that abandons possibilities and ways of life, resistance to a form of power that finds the full measure of human decency and breadth and variety expressed in the narrowest and most desiccated "interests." Resistence to book banning is resistance to something more insidious even than fascism, though the obvious and well-documented homologies between Palin’s and Bush’s leadership style make fascism a real concern. Resistance to book banning is the assertion of democracy, and the power to ban is anti-democratic, pure and simple.
In case the details are still unclear, here is how the story was reported by the Anchorage Daily News. In 1996, Sarah Palin asked the city librarian if she would be all right with censoring library books should she be asked to do so. The librarian replied that she was not at all "all right" with the idea of banning books. According to the Daily News, a few months later, the librarian was fired by Palin. She had been city librarian for seven years and was well liked, and a fter a wave of public support for her, Palin relented and let the librarian keep her job. When questioned, Palin called her inquiries rhetorical and simply part of a policy discussion with a department head "about understanding and following administration agendas."
These facts have been distorted and misrepresented in the press and in the blogosphere. For example, it was widely reported that Palin wanted to ban Harry Potter and other books on a long list. This is untrue, as some of the Harry Potter volumes she was accused of banning were not written during her tenure as mayor. Indeed, nobody seems to know which books were in question. While this fact has been understood by the conservative media and even the mainstream press as exculpatory, it is anything but. In essence, as I’ve said, what Palin sought was not the ban of this or that book, and it was not the loyalty of a particular librarian, as the conservatives argue in Palin’s defense. They see this as merely a test of the conservative bona fides of any political appointee, akin to asking a district attorney if she would support the death penalty. Even if this were all there was to it, the preposterousness of Palin’s explanation is boundless and alarming: one does not test the loyalty of department heads by asking them whether they would do something unwise should the administration agenda call for it. Asking a librarian whether she would ban a book is like asking a basketball coach if she would break her player’s kneecaps with a tire-iron. It may be a test of loyalty, but it’s preposterous, and I think it was quite a bit worse than that. What Palin sought was not the ban of this or that book, but she actively sought to consolidate a power that by all accounts she simply assumed was in a mayoral portfolio, a form of power that is not the mere expression of anti-intellectualism, but the power that reshapes democracy in an anti-intellectual image. So let’s turn briefly to this power, claimed here and there by authoritarian states and the Vatican, school boards and townships. Let’s ask what it is and what it does, and how it amounts to a reshaping of democracy in an anti-intellectual image, and then we can discuss whether democracy can survive the anti-intellectualism that book-banning sustains.
Anti-intellectualism is old. In ancient and early modern philosophy, anti-intellectualism is a claim about the relationship between knowledge and the good. Anti-intellectualism in this sense denies that knowledge is sufficient for virtue. But this philosophical anti-intellectualism, though connected by many dotted lines to it, dotted lines that terminate in Puritanism, is not the kind of anti-intellectualism that concerns me here. My concern is what Hofstadter called "anti-intellectualism" in his 1963 book "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life." "The common strain that binds together [anti-intellectual] attitudes and ideas...is a resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it; and a disposition constantly to minimize the value of that life." According to Hofstadter, this anti-intellectualism has three pillars -- evangelical religion, practical-minded business, and the populist political style. "Religion was suspicious of modern relativism, business of regulatory expertise, populism of claims that specialized knowledge had its privileges."
Of course, nobody is suspicious of intelligence, understood as practical know-how, professional expertise. We like intelligence that actually does something, that makes, cures, or enhances wealth and comes up with innovative business plans. Gitlin: "The rise of big science during World War II, and its normalization during the cold war, along with the Sputnik panic of 1957, made "brains" more reputable among respectable citizens who had their own ideas about the force of common sense but had to acknowledge that expertise delivered material goods. Then as now, the "brains" that became admirable were brains kept in their place. To the extent that brains were admirable, it was because they were instrumental -- they prevented polio, invented computers, launched satellites." What is suspect are "pointy-headed intellectuals," "nattering nabobs of negativism," professorial types, elites, and finally, in the end, broad-based liberal-arts educations, now understood to be the equivalent of anti-foundationalist theoretical navel-gazing that bores students and confuses traditionalists. The left in the united states, of course, shares some of the blame for the rise of this particular strain of anti-intellectualism because of the left’s peculiar autophagia and its repetition of the suspicion of elitism that the right had already successfully co-opted by the end of the seventies. Populist lefties mistrust elites just as much as corporate conservatives claim (over martini lunches) to mistrust elites, which is why you can find downtrodden tattooed punk-rock loving cowboy hat wearing hipsters haunting the shrimp bowl at Republican meet ups. They are confused, but their confusion is understandable. As Gitlin concludes, "In the Bushes, pere et fils, we see another turn in the history of the American aversion to intellect." He continues, "Hofstadter rightly noted the 19th-century aristocratic disdain for practical intellectuals, the business types and experts whose rising power displaced their own. But the Bushes are men of social credentials who went to the right schools and passed through them without any detectable mark. They represent aristocracy with a populist gloss, borrowing what they can from the evangelical revival, siding with business and its distaste for time-wasting mind work, holding intellectual talent in contempt from both above and below." It might also bear pointing out at this point that Sarah Palin went to five universities before being awarded a degree from the University of Iowa, and each seems to have left even less of a mark on her, a fact of which she and her supporters are manifestly proud (because to be marked by education, deepened by it, and to govern as if the world is as complex as higher education makes it out to be, is intolerably elitist and not something that is done in the Republican party’s new utopia, "small towns"). Indeed, we might also note that Sarah Palin is the first candidate to have graduated from college—as I did, in the late 80’s—in the midst of growing (albeit cyclical) uncertainty and distrust of the liberal arts in many public universities.
Palin’s book banning was not about books, but was about the consolidation of a form of power that seeks to reshape democracy in an anti-intellectual image. What is this power, and can democracy survive it? If we take it as given that anti-intellectualism has been on the rise since the post-war period, and that a peculiar strain of anti-intellectualism has taken hold since the late eighties and the Reagan years (when Palin and I graduated from college), we can provisionally ask, given that the history of the last thirty years has been largely about the resurgence of not only conservatism but a form of rule represented by the current president Bush that is by all appearances radically authoritarian and hostile to not only "intellectualism," but hostile to the rule of law, constitutional principles, and to the values that underlie good governance in a pluralistic society. These hostilities are not separable in my view: the anti-intellectual motivations behind book banning (and creationism in schools, and anti-scientific resistance to various claims about climate change, environmental damage, etc.) are intrinsically linked to a more general approach to power, to the function and scope of law, and finally to the future of true democracy.
Let me explain: The contemporary philosopher Giorgio Agamben argues that in contemporary politics the state of exception, the suspension of law by the sovereign, has become the rule. The exception that makes places like Guantanamo possible, the exception that permits the mistreatment and incarceration of immigrant populations and subjects non-citizens to extravagant humiliation, the exception that is thousands who live in grotesque poverty and yet who are not thought of as poor: these states of exception are now "the rule." The state of exception is thus a state of abandonment, a state in which the law is "in force but has no content or substantive meaning—it is "in force without significance." This is much like the structure of the "ban" (and we can hear the word "ban" in "abandonment") as identified by another contemporary philosopher, Jean-Luc Nancy, who argued that the "ban" in law—for instance, the way a person can be banished from a community, left to die—applies in no longer applying. That is, in the ban, the person is fully turned over to the law (his very being, belonging, survival, identity, and future is in the hands of the law) and simultaneously left bereft by it (in being expelled, banned, abandoned). "Homo Sacer, the figure that Agamben draws on to elaborate this condition, indicates one who can be killed but not sacrificed. The sacred man is "taken outside" both law as the exception to law and is thus abandoned by law. The fact that "the exception has become the norm or rule of contemporary politics means that it is not the case that only some subjects are abandoned by the law; rather, he states that in our age, "we are all virtually homines sacri."" Agamben argues in Homo Sacer and elsewhere that the concentration camp constitutes the state of exception par excellence and "reveals the ‘"nomos of the modern’" and the increasing convergence of democracy and totalitarianism." The camp is possible when the exception becomes the normal situation, as was the case in Germany in the period immediately before and throughout World War 2. In this space of the camp, law and life are indistinguishable: it is no longer the case that the rule of law bears upon or applies to the living body, but rather, the living body has become "the rule and criterion of its own application." Where the source of law's legitimacy is usually understood to be transcendent values, goods, or its independence, the body becomes the sole rule of the application of law, having no political significance as such. This is, as Mills points out, an exceedingly controversial claim, since "if the camps are in fact the "nomos" or "hidden matrix" of modern politics, then the normative crisis evident in them is not specifically limited to them, but is actually characteristic of our present condition, a condition that Agamben describes as one of "imperfect nihilism"": a nihilism that "nullifies the law but maintains ‘the Nothing [that is, the emptiness of the law] in a perpetual and infinitely deferred state of validity’." (http://www.borderlands.net.au/...)
Let’s look then at the banned book, for it too is in a state of exception: the book is fully turned over to law, subjected to ordinances of localities and school boards, policed by copyright and categorization, and the examination of the knowledge in them regulated and sometimes stifled by the unquestioned hegemony of academic disciplines. Indeed, the production of academic books is so much in a state of exception that we have taken to calling the conditions of our academic employment nothing less than "publish or perish." There is no better way to say Agamben’s state of exception in relation to books than that. At the same time, the book is abandoned, bereft of law: it can be burned, or less dramatically, it can be pulled from a local library, taken off a school’s reading list, hidden in a stock-room by a Barnes and Nobleman. It can be dismissed as the production of an overstressed junior academic who wrote under pressure for tenure and what-of-interest can come from that, right? Thousands of books when one would have sufficed, or so says Mark Buerlein in his recent attack on academic publishing in Academe. The banned book shines light on the nullity and emptiness of not only the laws that are supposed to protect speech and writing, but of the correlated freedoms to engage in a pluralistic democracy.
But my point here is not to defend the production of more and more books. Given the preponderance of online publishing, anyone complaining about junior scholars putting too much knowledge into the pipeline is worrying about a speck of dust in a sandstorm. My point is to remind everyone that Palin’s book ban was not a book ban at all. It was an instance of a broader, deeper, and more troubling phenomenon: the abandonment of law. She did not try to ban a book. She asked whether her reach, whether the reach of the law and of her sovereignty as mayor of a small town, extended as far as the library shelf. She asked whether the power to ban was hers, and that she never exercised it (instead firing the librarian who insisted that totalitarianism had limits and that the law stopped at some point) is not only not exculpatory, but thoroughly chilling. It takes us a step closer to the imperfect nihilism of the abandonment of law and leaves us there in smug satisfaction that she did her little job.
But she is only one among many who claim the power to ban a book, and books are only the test case. As I said earlier, the "sacrificial lamb." Note also that book-banning could end today, not another book could be successfully challenged anywhere on the planet, but as long as the anti-democratic power to ban is claimed and uncontested, totalitarianism and its consequences will be unavoidable. I wish Bush had tried to ban books as governor of texas. For some reason the book ban affects the popular conscience in a way his many executions did not, though I would argue that the claim of the power to ban the book is connected to the claim of the power to execute. Had we known that he had banned books, his emergence as the most dangerous threat to constitutional democracy the executive branch has ever known would have been predicted from the outset.