The Year's Work in Nerds, Wonks, and Neocons 0253026822, 9780253026828

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THE YEAR'S WORK IN

NERDS, WONKS, AND NEOCONS

The Year’s Wor k: Studies in Fan Cultur e and Cultur al Theory Edward P. Comentale and Aaron Jaffe, editors

THE YEAR'S WORK IN

NERDS, WONKS, AND NEOCONS EDITED BY JONATHAN P. EBURNE & BENJAMIN SCHREIER

i n di a n a u n i versity press

This book is a publication of Indi a na Uni ver sit y Pr ess Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA iupress.indiana.edu © 2017 by Indiana University Press All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, A NSI Z39.48–1992.

Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Comentale, Edward P., editor. | Jaffe, Aaron, editor. Title: The year’s work in nerds, wonks, and necons / Edward P. Comentale and Aaron Jaffe, editors. Description: Bloomington, Indiana : Indiana University Press, [2017] | Series: The year’s work: studies in fan culture and cultural theory | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016040462 (print) | LCCN 2017000858 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253026187 (cl : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253026828 (pb : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253026873 (eb) Subjects: LCSH: United States—Intellectual life—21st century. | Intellectuals—United States—21st century. | Popular culture—United States—21st century. | Stereotypes (Social psychology)—United States—21st century. Classification: LCC E169.12 .Y33 2017 (print) | LCC E169.12 (ebook) | DDC 306.0973/0905—dc23 LC record available at https:// lccn.loc.gov/2016040462 1 2 3 4 5

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“So this is it,” said Arthur, “we are going to die.” “Yes,” said Ford, “except . . . no! Wait a minute!” He suddenly lunged across the chamber at something behind Arthur’s line of vision. “What’s this switch?” he cried. “What? Where?” cried Arthur, twisting round. “No, I was only fooling,” said Ford, “we are going to die after all.” He slumped against the wall again and carried on the tune from where he had left off. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams © 1979. Reprinted by kind permission of the Estate of Douglas Adams.

CONTENTS

· Acknowledgments · ix · Introduction: Working in and on Nerds, Wonks, and Neocons, This Year and to Come Jonathan P. Ebur ne & Benjamin Schr eier · 1 · Part I: Through Glasses, Dor kily 1 Wonk Masculinity Dennis Allen · 29 2 Surface Worship, Super-Public Intellectuals, and the Suspiciously Common Reader William J. Ma xwell · 56 3 Stratigraphic Form: Science Fictions of the Present War r en Liu · 70 4 Obsession, Pathology, and Justice: Nerds, Bodies, Winsor McCay, and the 1893 Chicago Fair Nathan L. Gr ant · 93 5 The Neoconservative Imagination Jennifer Glaser · 119

6 Conservative and Internationalist: George S. Schuyler’s Pulp Fiction and the Imperialism of the Oppressed Sar a Marzioli · 145 7 The Turing Test and Other Love Songs Br ian Glavey · 172 · Part II: Natur e, Nurtur e, Ner d: Ways of Being 8 Sex and the Single Nerd: The Schizo Saga of Genes, Genius, and Finally Getting Some Judith Roof · 195 9 Nerds in Capes: Courtly Love and the Erotics of Medievalism Jamie Taylor · 223 10 Comic Book Kid Scott T. Smith · 249 11 Walking Simulators, #GamerGate, and the Gender of Wandering Melissa K agen · 275 12 The Fan as Public Intellectual in “RaceFail ’09” Siobhan Car roll · 301 13 Autism, Nerds, and Insecurity Chloe Silver man · 326 · Afterwor d: Professors without Chairs A aron S. Lecklider · 350 · Index · 357

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Years ago, like when he was first hired as a junior faculty member at Penn State, Ben had an idea for a conference- or seminar-type affair about the New York intellectuals and what they mean today—that is, framed otherwise than by the more or less standard, and reflexive, oscillation between relatively leftist and relatively rightist nostalgic yearnings. Then Jonathan had the idea—and the pluck—to adapt and expand this idea into something like the kernel of what you now see before you. In turn, Jonathan had the energy to keep at it, and Ben had the wisdom to follow his suggestions. So, first and foremost, we acknowledge, and thank, each other. A few moments ago, Jonathan decided that an epigraph from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy might make an appropriate opening statement for the contents of this volume. He is currently reading this novel with his ten-year-old daughter, Adelaide, having never done so previously; it is no less a rite of passage for traditional nerds than reciting dialogues from Monty Python—its author, Douglas Adams, was in fact friendly with the Python group and collaborated on a number of radio plays with them. And so the world turns. Until of course, it ceases to do so: one of the premises of The Hitchhiker’s Guide is that the earth has, in fact, been obliterated, owing less to the relentless human exhaustion of the ecosphere than to a bit of interplanetary bureaucracy. The premise is, needless to say, a resonant one. To compile a volume of essays about Nerds, Wonks, and Neocons in an era when we are facing the nonfictional possibilities of global collapse might seem no less ix

alien—or maddeningly flip—of a gesture than Ford Prefect’s joke in the face of imminent doom. Only fooling! Such jokes are inveterately nerdy: inappropriate, untimely, and curiously unsentimental. It is in the spirit of such inappropriateness, untimeliness, and curious unsentimentality that we offer this series of reflections on unpopular intellectuals: these may not be the intellectuals you’re looking for. The solutions they offer may or may not claim to solve the world’s most pressing problems, or to find the secret, hidden switch to reverse all our woe. But who knows? Maybe they will. Either way, why not keep on humming a tune in the meantime? And why not keep on reading? We thus wish to thank you, dear reader, for at least getting this far. Before the contents of this volume became a book, they took the form of a day-long symposium, held on April 29, 2013, in State College, Pennsylvania, sponsored by the Penn State English Department’s Center for American Literary Studies. Thanks to CALS and its intrepid director, Sean Goudie, for making that symposium such a success. And thanks, too, of course, to the twelve symposiasts, most of whom are represented here in this book: Siobhan Carroll, Ed Comentale, Brian Glavey, Jennifer Glaser, Nathan Grant, Aaron Jaffe, Warren Liu, Bill Maxwell, J. Paul Narkunas, James Braxton Peterson, Judith Roof, and Jamie Taylor. We would also like to thank Cheryl Mohr for her support in organizing the symposium, as well as the students and faculty who attended the event. We would also like to thank the “Year’s Work” series editors, Ed Comentale and Aaron Jaffe, for their enthusiasm toward the project—as well as for their own participation in the original symposium. We are grateful, too, for the support of Indiana University Press, particularly Janice Frisch, in seeing this volume through production, as well as Caren Irr, who offered important feedback, and David Shumway, who reviewed the manuscript.

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Acknowledgments

THE YEAR'S WORK IN

NERDS, WONKS, AND NEOCONS

INTRODUCTION: WORKING IN AND ON NERDS, WONKS, AND NEOCONS, THIS YEAR AND TO COME

jonathan p. eburne & benjamin schreier It says a lot about your intellectual life if you remember being pushed around for wearing glasses and reading books as a kid—or if you remember pushing around kids who wore glasses and read books. Such persecutions may have faded to a distant memory or persist as a lingering ordeal. But what was the appeal—or the pathology—of glasses and books in the first place? Perhaps you were a Young Republican and flourished on the debating club; perhaps you were the manager for the varsity sports team, more comfortable with a clipboard than a sports bra or jockstrap. Were these expressions of social belonging (or nonbelonging), or were they active interests, ruling passions that comprised the very lifeblood of intellectual existence? Band and theater geeks, lab rats, wallflowers, bookworms, math nerds, goths, sci-fi fanatics, RPG players: the typology of adolescent outcasts reveals a variety of intellectual subclasses that form part of the basic landscape of school-age flora and fauna, a cross-fertilization of patterns of socialization and patterns of intellectualism. But what can it tell us about intellectual life more broadly? What happens to such ruling passions, for instance, when the kids grow up, go to college, and find work? The Year’s Work in Nerds, Wonks, and Neocons takes seriously the kinds of thinkers—and ruling passions—often marginalized or considered simply too weird, too annoying, or too divisive to be considered as “real” public forms of intellectualism. Nerds, wonks, and neoconservatives have much to tell us 1

about subcultures of adults and kids who pursue the life of the mind in ways that may not fully register among the traditional ranks of public intellectuals, whether pundits or professors. Such subcultures are the subject of this book. The history of modern American intellectuals has been told, in many ways and by many people, as a history of marginalization. In his Pulitzer Prize–winning study Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963) Richard Hofstadter charts the development and enforcement of a “wide and unhealthy gap between American intellectuals and the people,” as Arthur Schlesinger put it.1 Hofstadter addresses the Cold War–era images and public discourses that increasingly cast the intellectual as an outsider or oddity, fatally out of step with the governing forces of business and political decision making. The intellectual no longer stood for “us,” We the People, but instead designated “a wordy and pretentious man [sic],” subject to a “ruling passion” incompatible with the norms of production, decisive action, and the accumulation of capital.2 The nerd, we might say, became a figure for this outcast (though presumably elite) intellectual, whereas the wonk became the sanctioned number cruncher whose intellectualism was put to work in the service of other ruling passions. The neoconservative emerged, by contrast, as something of a reaction formation: a thinking person no longer bound to the ideal communities of knowledge to which intellectualism might otherwise dedicate itself, but instead a strategist of the free market.3 Intellectualism persists, these roles suggest, but in oddly countercultural forms. The academy has long embraced—or at least acknowledged—the simmering, rebellious leftist or the European philosophercritic as available figures for such a counterculture; Lionel Trilling’s indictment of the “adversary culture” of US intellectuals became one of the key prooftexts of the neoconservatives, after all. All the same, most American college professors and students have long since abandoned 2

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their berets and black turtlenecks. The communard and the gallant philosopher-king still resonate as asymptotic ideals in many undergraduate literary theory courses, but their sublime alienation is already an acquired taste. Far more available is the experience of alienation itself, an alienation not simply of the intellectual but also from the collective experience of intellectual life. A passionate interest in ideas tends to be marked by an alternative set of social and sartorial codes: corrective lenses; social awkwardness in the face of a prevailing climate of sexual, athletic, and corporate precocity; ethnic and sexual difference; or private, even secret coteries of shared interest. Intellectual passion has, we might say, gone underground. Or rather, it inhabits the oddball margins of popular culture itself as the result of a “stubborn paradox in American society,” as Aaron Lecklider puts it, by which popular culture encourages brainpower while “deflating the pretensions of those who [are] labeled as overly intelligent.”4 Nerds—along with wonks and neocons—are figures of persistence, cultivating their idiosyncratic gardens of ideas. All the same, the anti-intellectual stigmas and prejudices attached to such figures are no less persistent. In Nerds: How Dorks, Dweebs, Techies, and Trekkies Can Save America and Why They Might Be Our Last Hope (2007), the child psychiatrist David Anderegg reminds us that the term “nerd” still bears a major stigma in spite of its ironic adoption as a marketing category and marker of social affiliation; he likewise interrogates the tendency merely to recast a derogatory name for maladjusted youths as a moniker for unorthodox intellectuals. Hipsters in their twenties might find it empowering to sport giant glasses and dress in carefully curated unfashionable clothing, pursuing their counterhegemonic passions in small intentional communities. But the same cannot be said of most middle-school children, for instance, who still view the “nerd” as a maladjusted outsider, manifesting a “queerness” defined less in terms Introduction

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of sexual preference than in terms of phantasmatic notions of scholastic normality. Nerds may be everywhere, finding economic and social prestige later in life, but as children and adolescents they often remain painfully invisible, or, for that matter, hypervisible as archetypal outcasts, rejects, nobodies. The antisocial and counternormative behaviors attributed to adolescent and preadolescent forms of intellectual passion have, Anderegg argues, done much to police against the very formation and acknowledgement of intellectual interests. Wonks and neocons might designate adult career decisions, but the specter of nerdiness still casts a long shadow over the intellectual development of children and adults alike—and thus to the very development and institutionalization of social behavior. This doesn’t mean, however, that nerds, or wonks, or neocons are exempt from bad behavior. The terrain of nerdiness and intellectual passion is rife with turf wars and clashes, as both Siobhan Carroll and Melissa Kagen discuss in their contributions to this volume. The recent Ghostbusters reboot (2016) is a case in point: even before the film’s release, scores of “ghostbros” bum-rushed Twitter and online review sites such as Rotten Tomatoes with scathing reviews of the film, on account of its largely female cast. The original Ghostbusters (1984) was such a cherished classic of supernatural humor, apparently, that a woman-centered reboot presented a sacrilege to nerddom and fandom alike. “This film has already killed everything good about the franchise,” writes one blogger, noting that “back in early May [i.e., before the film was released] I wrote about how terrible this film was likely to be.”5 Such categorical judgments confirm how deeply antisocial nerdy behavior can be. Yet they also register the ugly side of “intellectual passion,” the extent to which the interests of unpopular intellectuals can lead to hatred, violence, and white supremacy as much as to solace or solidarity. What happens when nerds and wonks write for Breitbart? 4

Jonathan P. Eburne & Benjamin Schreier

Nerds, wonks, and neocons may thus be unpopular for a reason. What remains significant even in the ugliest cases of antisocial behavior—whether at #GamerGate or against Ghostbusters, whether as political policy or as political posturing—are the intense intellectual interests that fuel them. The chapters in this volume examine such oddly resilient desires and consider the forms and practices through which they continue to manifest themselves in the contemporary United States. Far from seeking merely to popularize marginalized social types, this book explores what unpopular intellectuals can teach us about the possibilities and passions of maintaining a life of the mind. Unpopular Intellectuals It’s easy these days to use the word “intellectual,” and a key reason for this is that the term does so much work so effortlessly. The term and its cognates and compounds—among the more popular of which we can count such academic and journalistic workhorses as intellectual culture, intellectualism, intellectual work, and public intellectual—are powerful levers in our current fascination with the seductive, productive intersections between information and power. We admit that in using such an overdetermined pronoun as “our” to describe those whom intellectualism serves today, we do so in order to indicate a collectivity, a group, a shared enterprise or space of labor. There may not actually be any such “we,” any such de jure collectivity, in spite of the fact that many people in many professional and institutional contexts still appeal to it, or maybe just expect to rely on it. But this is precisely the point: intellectual remains a functional concept because it is so often assumed to be constitutive and representational above all else. Insofar as naming them has the strange effect of calling us into being, we assume that the pronouns us and we offer up for Introduction

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consideration a social or political formation that is nonetheless real in one way or another: they invoke the promise of a sociopolitical formation whose existence we already expect and whose effects we already desire to discover. Philosophers and intellectual historians differ on the question of how such figures may come to speak for and comprehend the public who call them into being—whether their wisdom stands proleptically in the vanguard of human understanding, for instance, or whether it gives form to the fissures and complexities of that understanding. Either way, we love—or resist—the idea of the intellectual because it instantiates a fundamentally affirmative expectation about social knowledge, implying concrete relays between abstractions such as agency, knowledge, and society. Public intellectuals in the current political and sociological imagination seem almost always to be our representatives, at least ideally so; they are the legislators we wish to acknowledge as the agents of “our” interests, standing in for models of social action. But who are we? And what kinds of voluntary or involuntary exclusions might any such constitution entail? Russell Jacoby is probably the most visible critic to champion this positive, representationalist image of the intellectual, a figure who speaks out for truth in opposition to repressive social forces. For Jacoby, the model for speaking out against alienation and oppression in the interest of enlightened integration is the group of mid-twentiethcentury cultural critics known as the New York intellectuals: the last broadly significant group of critics in US history, who claimed to speak about culture in its widest, most general, and most political modalities—though also in the name of a liberal, assimilationist, and (hetero-) normative model of inclusivity.6 Jacoby’s view of the intellectual—coordinated by a liberal enlightenment constellation of ideas about power, truth, nation, and agency—can be traced back to Émile Zola, whose 1898 newspaper editorial “J’Accuse . . . !” is often considered the 6

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principal manifesto of the modern intellectual as a public figure. For Zola, the act of entering into the public fray voluntarily—at the risk of libel—constituted a “revolutionary measure to hasten the explosion of truth and justice.” Zola’s fiery condemnation of the anti-Semitic persecution of Albert Dreyfus for treason was a writerly act carried out in the name of truth, in opposition to the repressive function of the state and popular opinion. The task of the intellectual was to dare to tell the truth, and thus, as Zola writes, “I will tell it, because I have promised to tell it, since the regular channels of justice have not adequately done so. My duty is to speak up; I do not want to be an accomplice.” In closing his litany of counteraccusations against the military leaders and legal experts who condemned Dreyfus, Zola articulates the very stakes of intellectualism, as Jacoby and other liberal thinkers view it: “I have but one passion,” he writes: “that of enlightenment, in the name of humanity which has suffered so much and is entitled to happiness. My fiery protest is nothing other than the cry of my very soul.”7 The intellectual is “our” conscience, our corrective agent; her soul cries out to enlighten the rest of us, in the name of humanity. Heroic, humanity-enlightening intellectuals continue to air their singular passions in the public arena, in spite of persistent efforts to drum them out. From Julien Benda’s 1927 screed against the trahison des clercs, on account of their insouciant meddling in political affairs, to the Culture Wars of the 1980s and 1990s, the very premise of intellectual agency has become increasingly contested, slighted, and even rendered suspect. Our aim here is hardly to join the chorus of anti-intellectualism and philistinism that rings out all too clearly in the contemporary media. We seek instead to interrogate presumptions about who an intellectual can be, how she can be an intellectual, and on whose behalf her “passion” might speak. The Year’s Work in Nerds, Wonks, and Neocons thus extends from contemporary thinking about the particularities and Introduction

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parochialisms of intellectual engagement that takes issue with the universalist image of the public intellectual described by Jacoby and Zola. Such thinking takes its lead from Antonio Gramsci’s ideas about the “organic” (as opposed to the “traditional”) intellectual, who speaks in the interest of a specific social class to which she belongs, as well as from Michel Foucault’s notion of the “specific” (as opposed to the “universal”) intellectual, who forges solidarities with others in local struggles for institutional and discursive power.8 For a large number of such thinkers, Zola’s “but one passion” hardly seems to be the appropriate fuel for political change; and the task of enlightening a suffering, presumably ignorant public suggests a presumptuousness well out of step with the corporate structures and risk management protocols to which so much contemporary life adheres. Must those on whose behalf an intellectual speaks be so woefully in the dark? We might take heed here of Frantz Fanon’s ruthless dismantling of the cosmopolitan “native intellectual” for his tendency to assimilate to, rather than resist, the dominant culture—precisely in claiming to speak on behalf of the unenlightened.9 Must intellectual activity be so restricted in its guiding passions—and does writing newspaper editorials constitute the only legitimate means for exercising this passion? In the face of the many barriers that restrict public access—or that restrict the public to be accessed—the passions and truth-claims of intellectuals have been not so much exhausted as overdetermined. The Year’s Work in Nerds, Wonks, and Neocons asks what happens when we interrogate the affirmative, representational expectations about intellectual labor to which even such contemporary models adhere. Beyond mourning, decrying, or simply denying the marginalization of intellectuals in contemporary US culture, the chapters in this volume pinpoint alternative forms and models of intellectual passion, even from within the alleged margins themselves. Beyond simply 8

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updating the models we invoke to represent our interests—is there an Émile Zola for the millennial generation?—this volume asks whether we may have spent too long in front of magic mirrors, ignoring the growing disparity between the ideal figures we seek and the living complexities of our contemporary world. It’s not so much a question of whether Noam Chomsky and Angela Davis, or Cornell West, Slavoj Žižek, and Howard Zinn—or, for that matter, Irving or Bill Kristol—still lay claim to representing “us.” Rather, it is a question of whether “representing” is the best rubric under which to think about the relationship of such figures to the manifold possible ways of thinking about “us.” Instead of seeking a reflection or recognition of our ruling passions, we find a proliferation of passionate scholars and proto-scholars whose interests, and whose features, may or may not resemble our own. Whereas the New Deal “Brain Trust” may now be taken for granted as the very model of how intellectuals can act assertively on behalf of and in the interest of a public, we can also admit that the rise of the neocons in the 1950s and 1960s, in the form of folks like Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and Gertrude and Milton Himmelfarb, exerts surprisingly dynamic pressure on any pat representational concepts of “constituency” or liberal inclusivity one might wish to imagine. The mindless media pundits we see on television may be “taking over” from the measured, thoughtful, careful, and well-intentioned intellectual class of yore. This phenomenon points, on the one hand, to the unregulated commodification of “the public,” whereby access to media networks is increasingly dominated by large-scale corporations whose commercial and often ideological interests explicitly shape program content; all other media channels—from book, magazine, and newspaper publishing to universities, television, cinema, and the internet—are rendered obsolete or downmarket backwaters. On the other hand, the neocon attack on the premise of liberal inclusivity has since become Introduction

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an ironic point of agreement between the political left and the political right: how dare they represent us? Under such conditions, do we simply need a new, fresher crop of intellectuals, or is it time we reconsidered the very function of the intellectual altogether? Such questions open up to a further set of queries in turn: what if the possibilities we presume intellectuals to represent run counter to or even contest the models of representability we hold dear? In place of—or at least alongside—the public intellectual, we propose that the unpopular intellectual is no less deserving of attention, and presents a more variegated image of American intellectual life, warts and all. The chapters in this volume explore some of the alternative channels that intellectual activity has followed in the contemporary United States, not all of which are heroic or even popular. In American culture, intellectuals are nowhere and everywhere at once: the eggheads of America may no longer represent a consistent, mandarin caste of European-style intellos; rather, they have scattered and diversified, as have their practices and predilections. Some of the eggs may have cracked, perhaps, but others have simply become harder to find, or harder to recognize. Nerds, wonks, and neocons designate realms and spheres of intellectual passion and pursuit that extend from the local Starbucks to the extemporized laboratory in a suburban garage; from the tech support department to the English department, and from the Junior High Mathletes team to the think tanks and nonprofit institutes of the Washington Beltway. The chapters in this volume explore what, in short, we can learn about the nature—and the future—of American culture by thinking about antisocial intellectuals, or intellectuals who elude or even flout normalized social possibilities. Nerds, wonks, and neocons are, of course, provisional and often derogatory terms for such ersatz public intellectuals. As we have already 10

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begun to suggest, wonkiness names a model of knowledge production that doesn’t align with accepted social protocols, insofar as the wonk is precisely she or he who has a nonnormative interest in particular sets of facts or fields of information. The nerd is by popular definition more comfortable sequestered in the laboratory, in the dragon’s lair, or on Vulcan than she or he is in the company of the neighborhood kids on the Little League team. And the neocon points to a specific group of Cold War figures who, on behalf of a newly invigorated libertarian individualism, famously contested New Deal presumptions about civil society in terms that have hardened into public self-evidence in a remarkably speedy generation or two. All three designations have become commonplace stylistic markers in contemporary US popular culture, with “neocon” applying as much to art critics such as Hilton Kramer and Terry Teachout or tradition-minded jazz musicians such Wynton Marsalis, as to any explicit ideology.10 “Wonk” has become, in turn, a generalized way of describing an abnormally asocial qualitative relationship to quantitative knowledge, such as when it names the failed folksiness of a policy geek such as Al Gore, whose earth tones and public kisses could never fully displace his relentless, antisocial passion for facts and data. And perhaps most visibly, “nerd” has come to describe new sartorial trends that seek to redeploy the very fashions that had hitherto amounted to a kiss of social death: bulky corrective glasses, too-short pants, and argyle socks. Beyond, or perhaps on account of, their increasing vernacular usage, all three terms have become sites of significant transvaluation as well. Once the derogatory name for a socially maladjusted enthusiast of arcane or otherwise difficult knowledge, “nerd” is now increasingly embraced in an effort to recognize laboratories, reading circles, and dragons’ lairs as productive sites of youthful interest and attention; “wonk” designates an entire caste of government policy workers, as Introduction

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well as the increasingly in-demand fellowship of number crunchers and statisticians contracted as invaluable outsiders in business, sports, and industry. And nerds now seem to be everywhere, with the term recast and seemingly rehabilitated as a badge of intellectual empowerment. As Stephen H. Segal puts it in the introduction to his Geek Wisdom, the once-derogatory terms “nerd” and “geek” now offer tongue-in-cheek handles for “passionate fans of stuff,” “and particularly of stuff that lies somewhere along one of two cultural axes: math and myth.”11 Nerds and geeks are, in this light, intellectual amateurs, in the literal sense: those who love passionately. Yet unlike Zola’s “one passion,” theirs are often content to remain in the dark, in basements, labs, and online networks, rather than directed explicitly toward the enlightenment of others. With such resurgent roles in mind, the questions about intellectuals and intellectual activity posed in The Year’s Work in Nerds, Wonks, and Neocons compel us to think about such difficult-to-imagine possibilities as antisocial communities of knowledge; or a concept of intellectual labor mediated by concerns other than a “public,” or with goals other than power. In addition to thinking about how and where such communities and forms of labor occur, The Year’s Work in Nerds, Wonks, and Neocons is attentive to who such alternative intellectuals are, and according to what social, cognitive, sexual, or elective criteria they come to occupy such roles. Thus we could also imagine this inquiry as a series of questions about the styles, as well as the media, of intellectual activity: What would the critique of intellectuality look like were we to concentrate on how and in what contexts intellectuals, intellectual labor, and intellectuality emerge? For that matter, what if we paid as much attention to Zola’s beard—linking him to slouchy-beanie-capped hipster Brooklyn pickle mavens and pakol-capped US military commandoes alike—as we do to the liberal traditions of humanist naturalism and bourgeois 12

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protest his writings engage?12 What if intellectuals don’t represent us, or our fully formed political concepts, so much as they represent often importantly surface-level, dare we say even superficial, patterns of knowledge, power, and information through which we recognize and model ourselves as we circulate through them? This book expands our understanding of what intellectual means—as both noun and adjective—through an analysis of how its unpopular, queer, and antiheroic forms bear on its status as a conduit for social agency, for communities of knowledge and affinity. How might we imagine a field of inquiry into intellectual activity that does not orbit around the self-evidence of concepts of the popular or liberalism? Nerd, wonk, and neocon name potentially non- or even extraliberal modes of intellectualism within which style is as conspicuous—and as significant—as substance, in which style is substance. As such, our interest in these terms aims to expand the universe of, by contesting the normalized patterns and traditions of, our analysis of the modes, fulcra, fields of operation, and interchanges of the figures of intellectuality that remain alive and dynamic. With its eye on the awkward, the covert, the single-minded, and the unpopular, The Year’s Work in Nerds, Wonks, and Neocons explores and complicates the history of intellectual life in the contemporary United States. It looks beyond the scholarly tendency to idealize intellectual activity as the resistant work of Zolaesque figures heroically wielding their pens in the face of corruption and intolerance in order to explore instead other models and practices of learnedness, reflection, knowledge production, and opinion in the contemporary world. In an age marked by dramatic shifts in the media and institutions of knowledge, it has become increasingly important to take stock of the kinds of intellectualism, and the kinds of intellectuals, that persist. As teachers, researchers, and university scholars continue to struggle for mainstream visibility (as well as for funding and employment possibilities), we aim Introduction

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to consider what other forms of attention, excitement, and expertise have emerged alongside them, or as their de facto replacements. If the Zolaesque intellectual inhabits the progressive historical narrative of heroism, enlightenment, and justice, what other narratives and ideological structures frame the way we think and engage with our “passion for stuff”? Everywhere and Nowhere For all the nerd’s idiosyncrasy within traditions of liberal sociality, nerds seem now, more than ever, to be everywhere. Is the modern world run by nerds? Bill Gates is a nerd; Warren Buffet is a nerd; Taylor Swift claims she’s a nerd (well, at least she used to make this claim). Nathan Glazer and Paul Krugman are nerds; Rachel Maddow probably is a nerd. Peter Orszag’s double BlackBerry holsters confirm that he’s a nerd, at least according to the New York Times Magazine, as Dennis Allen discusses in his contribution to this volume. Washington may be swarming with glad-handing political animals, and Hollywood and Wall Street may be teeming with outsized egos, but their ranks are peopled with number crunchers, statisticians, legal analysts, and policy wonks. The great irony of David Fincher’s film The Social Network (2010) is its attention to the antisocial tics and habits of its central figure, Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook. Not only is the great inventor of social media a nerd himself, but his own intense, involuted ways of dealing with people have since become the very means through which millions of people now communicate and socialize as well. And in turn Facebook has pioneered the wonky examination—and big-time monetization— of big data. “Therefore be nice to your fellow nerds,” advises one online fan site, concluding that “you never know, you may be working for them one day.”13 14

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Wonks and nerds may always have been with us, but these days we seem to be witnessing an explosion. Nerds are no longer just awkward bookish or science-loving boys, either, but powerful and eccentric girls and women: the popularity of fictional characters such as Hermione Granger and Willow Rosenberg has much to do with the prominence of writers such as Tina Fey, J. K. Rowling, Sarah Vowell, and Amy Sedaris. The agonistic nerd of popular culture used to struggle against the jock, in the hope of proving that nerds could accede to normal social roles. But these days nerds create new social roles that are themselves rapidly accepted and normalized; it’s time for nerds to “come out of the closet,” as the Black Girl Nerds website puts it, “and tell the world that they are PROUD to be who they are—no matter what anyone says, does, or thinks.”14 This is one of the basic plot points and a key dramatic axis, we might say, of the recent remake of 21 Jump Street (albeit less so of its inevitable sequel, 22 Jump Street). The real revenge of the nerd is not simply that the “nerd gets the girl” (a narrative Judith Roof upends in her chapter here) but that the nerd is what everyone now wants to become. Even the archetypal jock has diversified, opening up into the money-balling number cruncher, the econometrics-minded sports analyst, the statistician: she has become a nerd in fact. The path from geeky MIT and Cal Tech to high-powered Goldman Sachs and K Street is now a cliché. From day traders to home brewers to armchair political bloggers to iPhone technophiles to Pinterest scrapbookers, nerds are everywhere. Nerds are not just other people, as Jean-Paul Sartre may or may not have said; they are, in fact, already us. Rather than offering a socially restricted counterpoint to the American fantasy of libertarian rugged individualism—or, for that matter, just another derogatory word for white male power—the nerd has regularly reemerged over the decades as a kind of stumbling block in the idealization of an American self-image. While not necessarily Introduction

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following a simple populist itinerary, the nerd reappears throughout modern American culture as a point of cultural transfer, marking—but also spanning—the lines of demarcation between rarified practices of knowing and more recognizably practical patterns of agency and intelligence. Whereas the “egghead” of the 1950s marked an intellectual caste whose whiteness and maleness “served to further remove him from ‘the people,’ or from mass culture” in a decade when whiteness had come “to signify blandness and an unquestioning acceptance of the status quo,” such figurations also helped ensure that “intelligence would be inextricably associated with contests over race in relation to American identity, and tied in with representations of social change.”15 True to its Cold War coinage as a marker of the bookish introvert, the nerd designates a category for demarcating intellectualism—as much as a deliberately unfashionable self-styling—that has as much to do today with the intense concentration of interest characteristic of hipsters, locavores, musicians, and diligent introverts, as with the professional investiture of laboratory scientists and other “eggheads.” Yet it also marks the intellectual passions of gifted thinkers weaned on public libraries and secondhand computers and clothes, for instance: nerds can also be bootstrappers who exercise their dedication to ideas in spite of economic disadvantages, limited school resources, or dysfunctional families. Nerdiness can mark the idiosyncratic cultural idioms of recent or second-generation immigrants, as much as the explicitly antisocial tendencies of shyness, closeted sexuality, or even autism (as Chloe Silverman discusses in this volume). What can such figures—in their powerful and public guises as well as in their more modest and particular incarnations—tell us about the past and future of intellectualism in the United States, as well as throughout the world? What might it mean to consider such unlikely figures as nerds, policy wonks, neoconservatives, and techies, but also the aficionados of comics, sci-fi, 16

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RPGs and MMORPGs, bearded Mason jar–bound fermenters and skinny-jeaned fixed-gear bikers, and other fixations as intellectuals, in an age in which bookishness and scholarly commitment already seem unpopular and irrelevant? The Year’s Work in Nerds, Wonks, and Neocons addresses the increasing fan interest—as well as the increasing political significance—of “unpopular” activities and intellectuals in US popular culture. Beyond merely attending to the way nerds and wonks are depicted in pop culture, the chapters in this volume address the forms of intellectual endeavor such figures come to represent, as well as the institutions and media that broadcast and shape what it means to be a nerd, a wonk, or a neoconservative. The public university plays a major role in the rise of nerds, wonks, and neocons in US popular culture, especially during the long decades of the Cold War, when the university fully emerged as a US State apparatus. All the same, the university is an overdetermined site for the circulation of such “unpopular” intellectualism. Universities may function as an important pillar of what used to be called the military industrial complex, but they also house errant intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky, and have produced generations of hippies, draft dodgers, protesters, and introverts alike. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the struggle over universities as privileged sites of intellectual culture reached its peak during the very period when such institutions provided the greatest access to secondary education for an American public. Even so, universities are hardly the only site for intellectualism in the United States, whether “popular” or “unpopular.” Whether the liberalism of New York intellectuals after WWII; the implicit or explicit radicalism of communists, worker movements, black or Chican@ radicals, and other political movements; or the rightism of neoconservatives who dominated the afterlife of the New York intellectual group, our classic understanding of “public intellectuals” has always tended to exist in a relation to university curricula Introduction

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that can at best be described as oblique. The same is true for nerds and wonks, and increasingly so. Far from fixing static definitions of entities such as “university,” “state functionary,” “public intellectual,” “activist,” or “expert,” our goal in this collection is instead to analyze how such institutions contribute to the complex and multivalent processes of knowledge production, circulation, and utilization. Nerds, wonks, and neocons have much to teach us about how such processes work. About This Book This volume features new essays on topics ranging from comic-book fanboys to cape-wearing college women; from autistic children to artificial intelligence; and from the FBI’s employment of ghostreaders to spy on African American writers to the science fiction of black neoconservative author George Schuyler. These essays aim both to chart a thematic anatomy of twenty-first-century intellectualism and to establish a set of critical keywords for an analysis of contemporary intellectual cultures. By turns traditional and profane, the essays in this book approach the question of popular and unpopular intellectuals in the postwar United States with creativity and humor—but without losing sight of the topic’s exigency. The Year’s Work in Nerds, Wonks, and Neocons is bifocal in structure. The collection opens with a series of chapters that explore the means through which less-than-popular intellectualism has been exercised, whether as a practice of social exclusion or as a more recuperative method of interpretation and cultural analysis. Working across the spectrum of US politics, from left wing to right wing, from the center to the margins, this first series of chapters, “Through Glasses, Dorkily,” investigate specific patterns of creative thought, writing, and interpretation demarcated by terms such as “nerd,” “geek,” and “spaz”—as well as 18

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by their governmental counterparts such as “wonk,” “wonkette,” “pundit,” or “neocon.” The seven chapters in this section offer much to teach us about ways we can look “through glasses, dorkily,” to understand new ways of reading in the contemporary world. The volume’s first half opens with Dennis Allen’s “Wonk Masculinity,” which addresses the struggle between vita activa and vita contemplativa in the image-marketing campaigns of two contemporary male policy wonks, the one-time presidential hopeful Paul Ryan and the former Obama White House budget director Peter Orszag. Allen’s chapter examines how ideas and anxieties about the nature of (white) masculinity emerge into visibility in the concept of the wonk. Allen’s analysis of the stakes of image making both above and beneath the Washington Beltway is followed by William J. Maxwell’s discussion of more clandestine government acts during the Cold War in chapter 2. In “Surface Worship, Super-public Intellectuals, and the Suspiciously Common Reader,” Maxwell investigates the contemporary “decline” of public intellectualism and the rise of “surface reading” in terms of the modes of suspicion typified and exerted by the FBI in its surveillance of African American intellectuals. Countering “suspicious” and “surface” reading alike with a practice of “reading nerdily,” Warren Liu investigates a deep, obsessional form of reading that draws from both science fiction and geology. Chapter 3, “Stratigraphic Form: Science Fictions of the Present,” offers for consideration a devotional approach to reading, and to knowledge, that contests the hyperspecialization and professionalization of the contemporary scholarly world, without losing sight of its own passions and priorities. In chapter 4, Nathan L. Grant offers a parallel history of “reading nerdily,” albeit a more ambivalent one. In “Obsession, Pathology, and Justice: Nerds, Bodies, Winsor McCay, and the 1893 Chicago Fair,” Grant studies Winsor McCay’s massively popular turn-of-the-century Introduction

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comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland as a model for nerdy fascination that approached the hegemonic consumer capitalism of white America as an enchanting spectacle. Rather than considering the nerd as a figure for intellectual resistance, Grant’s proto-nerd Nemo offers a model for both the counterculture and the hypercapitalism of entrepreneurial pop-culture icons such as Walt Disney and Will Eisner. Such suspicion toward the public sphere is the subject of chapter 5, Jennifer Glaser’s “The Neoconservative Imagination,” which discusses how the neocon rejection of democratic liberalism persists within contemporary literature. In chapter 6, Sara Marzioli offers a parallel genealogy of African American neoconservativism in her discussion of George Schuyler’s speculative fiction and newspaper editorials; in “Conservative and Internationalist: George S. Schuyler’s Pulp Fiction and the Imperialism of the Oppressed,” Marzioli argues for the contemporary significance of Schuyler’s hostility toward black internationalism as a spur for independent thinking. The very possibility of “independent thinking” lies at the heart of Brian Glavey’s “The Turing Test and Other Love Songs.” In this final chapter in the volume’s first section, Glavey addresses the recent popularity of Alan Turing’s work in artificial intelligence, which complicates the relationship between knowledge—or information—and the human. Glavey examines popular speculations about the question of whether machines can think and of whether humans can be replaced by machines, and in doing so demonstrates the extent to which rule-bound and algorithmic “thought”—thinking not only like a computer, but also like a nerd—is not necessarily an impediment to thinking about sex or even love, and in fact relates deeply to modern techniques in lyric poetry. The second half of the volume, “Nature, Nurture, Nerd: Ways of Being,” features six chapters that explore the vicissitudes of living as a nerd or recognizable practitioner of otherwise less-than-popular intellectual 20

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activities, whether through self-identification or genetic accident. From communities of sci-fi fans, gamers, and medievalists to the diagnostic spectrum of autism, this section offers a poignant and playful examination of popular reimaginations of contemporary intellectualism as a cultural style. Chapter 8, Judith Roof’s “Sex and the Single Nerd: The Schizo Saga of Genes, Genius, and Finally Getting Some,” studies the hidden recesses of masculine sexuality attributed to nerds throughout contemporary popular culture. Rather than presuming that nerds are asexual or flatly unattractive, Roof studies how the so-called revenge of nerds draws directly from the traditional assignation of masculine sexual prowess to geniuses. Roof thus criticizes popular representations of nerds according to which self-proclaimed geniuses can vicariously live out delusions of masculine empowerment instead of working to surpass the limitations of both brawn and brains. An important counterpoint to Roof’s assessment of male nerds in popular culture is Jamie Taylor’s “Nerds in Capes: Courtly Love and the Erotics of Medievalism,” which offers a case study of self-styled nerdy subcultures at the all-women’s Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. The cape-wearing college-age fans of medieval culture present themselves as “elusive and strange outsiders who are extraordinarily dedicated to their obscure hobbies” without sacrificing their social and sexual interests. For Taylor, the Capies form a nerd community that self-consciously embraces and enables the possibility for women who pursue intellectual and erotic pleasures simultaneously. In chapter 10, Scott T. Smith, himself a scholar of medieval literature, offers an autobiographically driven analysis of how it becomes possible to pursue both scholarship and comic-book fandom: to be, in other words, both a professional academic and a nerd. Whereas the rise in academic credibility of graphic novels has shifted the lines of demarcation Introduction

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between acceptable and unacceptable objects of scholarly study, the passions with which comics fans approach the topic remain problematic, if not alien, within the university. In “Comic Book Kid,” Smith thus seeks to interrogate the cultural formation and status of different modes of intellectual work and expertise that comic books demand. In chapter 11, Melissa Kagen studies the sociological shifts in the gamer community that arise as video games become increasingly mainstream, rather than the province of nerdy fan subcultures. Kagan’s “Walking Simulators, #GamerGate, and the Gender of Wandering” examines the online debates about the role—and especially the gender— of so-called hardcore gamers in the increasingly culturally diverse world of video game fandom. The chapter focuses on #GamerGate, a hotly contested Internet debate about walking simulator games, whose digressive, wandering, and often nonviolent nature many hardcore gamers considered to be “feminine” and purposeless; for Kagen, #GamerGate thus offers a significant moment of contestation about the nature, and especially the gender, of intellectual “passion” in the gaming world. Siobhan Carroll’s “The Fan as Public Intellectual in ‘RaceFail ’09’” discusses a similarly polemical set of online debates that erupted throughout the blogosphere in 2009 about how to portray racially diverse characters in science fiction writing. In tracing how bloggers, fans, and writers of online science fiction addressed the question of whether science fiction writers were racist in their attempts to portray characters of color, Carroll demonstrates how “RaceFail ’09” offers an important example of contemporary intellectual debate, precisely insofar as it insisted on the demarcations between university-affiliated writers and critics and “common readers” and fans. Finally, shifting from online debates to cultural clichés about those who engage in them, Chloe Silverman’s “Autism, Nerds, and Insecurity” begins with the cases of a Scottish systems analyst cum computer hacker named Gary McKinnon 22

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and Darius McCollum, a New Yorker fascinated with the MTA, who have both been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. Silverman analyzes the consequences following from the ways popular culture elides “the distinction between the diagnostic label of autism and the cultural label of nerdiness” in the interest of shedding light on social expectations about, and normalizing patterns of recognizing, achievement, ability, and competence. Given the uncertain present conditions of public education throughout the world, and especially in the United States—from the eclipse of print media and the fiscal crises faced by major intellectual institutions such as universities, libraries, schools, museums—we hope that this volume will contribute to broader conversations about the history and future of intellectual endeavor. It has become a truism to claim that the public intellectual is in eclipse. Without either confirming or debating this claim, The Year’s Work in Nerds, Wonks, and Neocons instead considers where else and how else we might look for intellectual labor—that is, for the networks of intellectual production, reception, and intensification of expertise that we might call intellectuality. Given the tangled history of American intellectualism and the fraught present of global knowledge production, what are the contemporary stakes of the lines of demarcation between rarefied knowledge and quotidian behavior, between the esoteric and the practical, between the nerd and us? Notes 1. Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, 3. 2. Ibid., 5. 3. Academic books analyzing intellectuals, their practices, and their traditions of course have a long history, to which we can only begin to allude, were we actually all that interested in so alluding, here. Books such as Aaron Lecklider’s Inventing the Introduction

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Egghead: The Battle over Brainpower in American Culture, Bruce Robbins’s Perpetual War: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Violence, Andrew Ross’s No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture, and Marjorie Garber and Rebecca Walkowitz’s Secret Agents: The Rosenberg Case, McCarthyism and Fifties America build on an established tradition of books on US intellectual history to look at the activities and popular image of intellectuals from wider and more multivalent perspectives. Susan Jacoby’s recent examination of the longstanding effects of American antiintellectualism, The Age of American Unreason, proposes that the marginalization of intellectual activity not only permeates the political culture and popular media of the contemporary United States, but even extends to its institutions of knowledge: the pulpit, the field of scientific inquiry, and the university. But there is also an emerging body of scholarly work that investigates the intellectual currents in popular culture with a methodological approach and tone born of equal parts academic rigor and, for lack of a better word, fun. Twenty years ago, Steven Shaviro’s Doom Patrols looked to figures from late twentieth-century popular and mass cultures for the patterns of intellectual activity they practiced, reproduced, made available, and otherwise represented. Recent trends in commercial publishing likewise attest to a fun, sometimes even parodic, popular interest in intellectuality; indeed, the popular marketplace is already well stocked with the innumerable parodic how-to-guides—such as Alex Langley’s The Geek Handbook: Practical Skills and Advice for the Likeable Modern Geek (2012) and Garth Sundem’s The Geek’s Guide to World Domination (2009), or Stephen Segal’s Geek Wisdom: The Sacred Teachings of Nerd Culture (2011)—and humorous memoirs—such as Simon Pegg’s Nerd Do Well (2012) or Benjamin Nugent’s American Nerd: The Story of My People (2008)—which offer a nerd’s-eye view of the world. 4. Lecklider, Inventing the Egghead, 4. 5. Yiannopoulos, “Teenage Boys with Tits.” 6. R. Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals, 77. 7. Zola, “J’Accuse . . . !” Translation by the editors. 8. See Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, esp. 5–10; Foucault, “Truth and Power,” 109–33. 9. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 178–79. 10. See Prestianni, “What Wynton Doesn’t Hear.” The article responds to Marsalis’s essay on “The Music of Democracy,” which, according to the Prestianni, “blows off the last three decades in the evolution of jazz,” representative of an “ideological chasm” that has economic as well as artistic repercussions based on the “dearth of possibilities for players whose vision extends beyond bop.” 11. Segal, Geek Wisdom, 11.

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12. Were it not for Susan Weeber, we would not have been able to light upon the term “slouchy beanie.” 13. “About BGN.” 14. Ibid. 15. Lecklider, Inventing the Egghead, 201–2.

Bibliography “About BGN.” Black Girl Nerds. Accessed September 18, 2016. http://blackgirlnerds .com/about-bgn/. Anderegg, David. Nerds: How Dorks, Dweebs, Techies, and Trekkies Can Save America and Why They Might Be Our Last Hope. New York: Penguin, 2007. Fanon, Frantz. Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press, 1963. Foucault, Michel. “Truth and Power” (interviewed by Alessandro Fontana and Pasquale Pasquino). In Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, edited by Colin Gordon, 109–33. New York: Pantheon, 1980. Garber, Marjorie, and Rebecca Walkowitz. Secret Agents: The Rosenberg Case, McCarthyism and Fifties America. London: Routledge, 1995. Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers, 1971. Hofstadter, Richard. Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. New York: Vintage, 1966. Jacoby, Russell. The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe. New York: Basic Books, 1987. Jacoby, Susan. The Age of American Unreason. New York: Pantheon, 2008. Langley, Alex. The Geek Handbook: Practical Skills and Advice for the Likeable Modern Geek. Iaola, WI: Krause, 2012. Lecklider, Aaron. Inventing the Egghead: The Battle over Brainpower in American Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011, 2013. Nugent, Benjamin. American Nerd: The Story of My People. New York: Scribner, 2008. Pegg, Simon. Nerd Do Well: A Small Boy’s Journey to Becoming a Big Kid. New York: Gotham Books, 2012. Prestianni, Sam. “What Wynton Doesn’t Hear: Lester Bowie Explains.” SFWeekly, September 11, 1996. Accessed September 18, 2016. http://archives.sfweekly.com /sanfrancisco/what-wynton-doesnt-hear/Content?oid=2133416.

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Robbins, Bruce. Perpetual War: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Violence. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. Ross, Andrew. No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture. London: Routledge, 1989. Segal, Stephen H., ed. Geek Wisdom: The Sacred Teachings of Nerd Culture. Philadelphia: Quirk Books, 2011. Shaviro, Stven. Doom Patrols. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1997. Sundem, Garth. The Geek’s Guide to World Domination. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2009. Yiannopoulos, Milo. “Teenage Boys with Tits: Here’s My Problem with Ghostbusters.” July 18, 2016. http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/07/18/milo-reviews -ghostbusters/. Zola, Émile. “J’Accuse . . . !” (Letter to M. Félix Faure, President of the Republic). L’Aurore, January 13, 1898.

Jonathan P. Eburne is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Penn State. He is the author of Surrealism and the Art of Crime, editor, with Judith Roof, of The Year’s Work in the Oddball Archive (IUP, 2016), and coeditor of ASAP/Journal, the scholarly journal of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present. Benjamin Schreier is Associate Professor of English and Jewish studies and Lea P. and Malvin E. Bank Early Career Professor of Jewish Studies at Penn State University. He is author of The Impossible Jew: Identity and the Reconstruction of Jewish American Literary History and The Power of Negative Thinking: Cynicism and the History of Modern American Literature, and he is also editor of the journal Studies in American Jewish Literature.

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part i through glasses, dorkily

WONK MASCULINITY

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dennis allen

Sometime during the summer of 2013, Rick Perry, then governor of Texas, began wearing glasses. Now, these were not just any glasses but a pair of very big, very obvious, black-framed spectacles reminiscent of Clark Kent, which the media, with some consistency, referred to as “nerd glasses.” Since Perry’s general self-presentation had up until then run toward an extremely traditional “man’s man” image, this change prompted considerable speculation in the press. Ultimately, the pundits’ consensus was that after a disastrous performance in the 2011 Republican primary campaign, including a debate in which he forgot one of his main talking points and was unable to name the third of three government agencies he would close down, Perry was trying to rebrand himself as an intellectual, or, at the very least, as reasonably intelligent. As Scott Greer succinctly put it in the Daily Caller, the glasses are “clearly an attempt to transform himself from a swaggering bro to a knowledgeable policy wonk.”1 Thus, the glasses represent a new Rick Perry, who, as his wife Anita has remarked, now reads constantly and who has spent the last couple of years meeting with various experts to get up to speed on economic policy.2 The effect on his political fortunes aside, Perry’s attempt at self-fashioning raises a number of questions, including one of the major questions that this chapter will address. If a wonk is something like a nerd, and if popular culture has traditionally told us that it’s bad to be a nerd, is being a nerd now a good thing? Or, 29

to put that question in a more academic way, does the wonk signal a reconfiguration of our conceptions of the value of various types of contemporary masculinity? This question actually derives some of its momentum from the almost universal assumption in the press that, as was the case with Clark Kent himself, Rick Perry’s glasses are something like a disguise, a gestural appropriation of an undervalued secondary form of masculinity, a nerdish bookishness, that is not only not “real” masculinity but that is probably not who Perry actually is. After all, one of Perry’s recent photo ops showed him reverting to a form of masculinity that was both more traditional and more typical of him. With aviator sunglasses replacing his “nerd glasses,” carrying a gun and wearing a flak jacket, he and Sean Hannity patrolled the Texas/Mexico border looking for encroaching hordes of illegal immigrants. Yet, even if—actually, especially if—we conclude that Perry’s new image is inauthentic, merely a superficial attempt to rebrand himself, the very fact that Perry would want to be seen as a wonk suggests that it might be as valuable, and possibly even as masculine, to read a book as to wander through the sagebrush with a gun. Being a wonk must be a good thing, right? Well, maybe. In a rather strange piece about Rick Perry’s transformation in the Economist, Will Wilkinson begins to answer that last question. Arguing that Perry’s disastrous debate performance was not a reflection of his innate intellectual abilities but could instead be attributed to the fact that Perry was medicated because of pain from spinal fusion surgery, the explanation given by Perry’s campaign itself, Wilkinson suggests that the glasses may indeed be part of a “subtle repositioning in Rick Perry’s performance of masculinity.” As Wilkinson sees it, the glasses are both a concession to age and part of a related attempt to soften Perry’s abrasive alpha male persona by displaying a certain vulnerability. According to Wilkinson, this vulnerability is intended not only to produce empathy in voters but to suggest that, as a result of 30

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his travails, Perry himself might have learned to be empathetic to their concerns. All of this is plausible enough, but Wilkinson’s underlying conceptions about the relative value of these various types of masculinity become evident in the conclusion of the essay in a formulation that is bizarre even if we take into account that it is almost certainly tongue-in-cheek: “He’s your handsome Texas grandpa. He could still strangle you to death with his bare hands, but his back hurts a little, and he cares. It’s not a message a truly dim-witted candidate would try to send.”3 Now, leaving aside the question of whether it might not, after all, be dimwitted to suggest that an aspirant to the job of commander in chief is in chronic pain, we can focus instead on how Perry’s masculinity is implicitly framed here. Although Wilkinson acknowledges that masculinity is a performance, at least in public self-presentations in the political realm, the essay nonetheless takes Perry’s machismo to be, if not innate, the most natural pose for him. If Perry is thus a “tough guy,” as Wilkinson would have it, the glasses become a sign of a certain diminution of masculinity, whether that is attributed to the depredations of age or to a calculated image of empathetic vulnerability or both. Even more crucially, rather than seeing the glasses as Perry’s adoption of an alternative but positive form of masculinity, a stance as the intelligent, informed wonk, Wilkinson can only view them negatively, as if anything other than being the “tough guy” were cause for sympathy. If “real” masculinity is alpha male machismo, then this is indeed its inevitable tragedy. At some point you’ll get old enough that you can no longer bench press a small Fiat or are too tired to strangle someone with your bare hands, and then you’re no longer a man. Fortunately, as gender studies has insistently pointed out, masculinity is not a unitary or singular quality and hence not an either/or, a successful or failed performance of that one way of being, the assumption underlying Wilkinson’s piece. At any given historical moment, there are multiple types of Wonk Masculinity

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acceptable masculinity.4 The central project of this chapter will be to examine the emergence of the wonk as a significant moment in an ongoing reconfiguration of the landscape of twenty-first-century masculinities. I will suggest that the wonk is a site of identity that lies somewhere between the jock and the nerd, to use only one formulation of a familiar binary understanding of contemporary types of men. As such, the wonk signals a shift from a conception of masculinity based on physical or psychological dominance to a masculinity whose value is derived from expertise and rationality. Yet, as we will see, precisely because of this liminal status, the wonk is also the site where some of the tensions and incoherencies inherent in our ideas of masculinity emerge. It is in this sense that Rick Perry may, after all, be emblematic, not simply because his public persona wavers between “gun-toting cowboy guarding the border” and “economics expert nerdishly boring the voters in New Hampshire,” and not even because this wavering raises questions about who, what sort of man, he really is.5 Finally, Rick Perry the Wonk is significant because that identity produces an evaluative aporia about wonk masculinity itself: Do those glasses represent the laudable knowledge of the expert or the sad vulnerability of the aging jock? Definitions So what, then, actually is a wonk? “An expert on intricate policies,” we learn from Hatchet Jobs and Hardball: The Oxford Dictionary of Political Slang, with the added notation that, more generally, the term can mean “a studious or hardworking person.”6 Particularly since the latter definition is fairly expansive, it might be best to start by narrowing down our field of inquiry. This chapter will focus on the wonk as a political identity category, as a type of politician or political figure, if only because that is still the sense in which the term is most commonly used (e.g., “a 32

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policy wonk”) while expertise in other highly specialized fields is usually designated by “nerd” or “geek” (as in “computer geek”), identities with which, as we’ll see, the wonk nonetheless shares some affinities. Even more specifically, I’d like to focus on male wonks, not simply because most policy wonks are still male, but also because I would like to investigate the ways in which the category of the wonk is, precisely, constructed as a particular type of masculinity, how it is, by default, assimilated to maleness, if you will.7 Finally, this chapter will not concern itself with matters of policy themselves, with the details, say, of various budget proposals, but rather with how the individual proposing them is gendered and, as an inevitable corollary of that, with how that individual is sexualized, although, as we will see, it is finally not possible to completely separate the gender of the politician from the gender of his politics. In order to define the wonk, then, it would first seem to be necessary to distinguish that identity from the nerd and the geek. In Nerds, psychologist David Anderegg parses out some of the differences between a wonk and a nerd. The stereotypical nerd, he argues, is defined by five qualities. A nerd is not sexy, is interested in technology, is not interested in personal appearance, is enthusiastic about things that bore everyone else, and, finally, is persecuted by the jock, an equally stereotypical category.8 Above all, Anderegg adds, the nerd is distinguished by a lack of self-consciousness reminiscent of preadolescence. Interestingly, for our purposes, while Anderegg devotes some attention to articulating the differences between a nerd and a geek (the former term, he argues, tends to denote an unappealing appearance while the latter indicates a grasp of arcane knowledge), he spends very little time discussing the wonk.9 In fact, his treatment of the wonk implicitly suggests that that figure actually falls in a liminal space within the nerd/jock duality. At times, Anderegg uses “wonk” as synonymous with “geek” or “nerd,” Wonk Masculinity

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primarily in cases of someone who, like Bill Gates, is famous for his technological expertise. Yet, finally, Anderegg suggests that the wonk may be a separate, and clearly separable, identity category. Discussing the 2000 election as a classic confrontation between a nerd (Al Gore) and a jock (George W. Bush), Anderegg is careful to point out that this view of that electoral contest is a construction that artificially fits the candidates to the stereotypes since, after all, Gore is not physically awkward or unattractive just as George Bush is not really all that athletic. What doomed Gore to the nerd category, Anderegg continues, is that he seemed smug about his knowledge, and in this respect he differed from Bill Clinton, who was also knowledgeable but rarely seemed selfsatisfied about his expertise. As such, Clinton represents an entirely different sort of political figure: “He was the ur-wonk, the man who made the term ‘wonk’ what it is today, because we all needed a term to describe someone as brainy as Clinton was who was, at the same time, so manifestly unnerdy.”10 Unfortunately, this looks like a far more precise definition than it actually is. Nor is that problem solely due to the vagueness of the description “brainy but unnerdy.” Crucially, the imprecision here arises because the definition is primarily comparative. A wonk is a smart “nonnerd,” and this process of definition by juxtaposition, rather than by the recounting of definitive qualities, fits with Anderegg’s larger point about the 2000 election in particular and about nerds in general, which is that the terms “nerd” and “jock” ultimately derive their meanings from each other. A nerd is, basically, a non-jock just as a jock is a non-nerd. Now, clearly, the two positions are associated with particular qualities that are both seen as opposites and subject to a cultural valuation, a point to which I’ll return. For the moment, though, it seems important to stress that the crucial structure here is this binary difference itself, or, as Anderegg suggests, the real stereotype is not the identities of the jock 34

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and the nerd but the struggle between them.11 Thus, as with the Gore versus Bush election, the candidates are assimilated to preset roles that do not fit them very well. Although Anderegg does not devote much attention to the point, what the wonk thus does is to disrupt this binary in Anderegg’s taxonomy, and I would like to suggest that it does so in ways that may mark a shift in contemporary ideas of masculinity. To understand that, however, we need to look at some actual wonks and see, specifically, what kind of men they are. The Wonk as Jock I’d like to turn now to two contemporary policy wonks, Paul Ryan and Peter Orszag, both budget experts, to see exactly how their public personas can help us further articulate a definition of the wonk and, in the case of two relatively famous photos of them, how those media depictions simultaneously complicate that definition. We can begin with Ryan, who may very well be the contemporary politician whose name is most frequently associated with the label. Writing during the run-up to the 2012 election, Alec MacGillis did a profile piece on Ryan in the New Republic that both confirms and elaborates on Anderegg’s definition of the wonk as smart but not really nerdy. Noting that Ryan worked as a personal trainer while studying up on policy during his early years in Washington, MacGillis makes clear that part of Ryan’s success comes not only from his knowledge of domestic economic matters but from qualities, such as athleticism and a certain charisma, that have traditionally been associated with the jock. One of MacGillis’s main points is that fewer people in Washington today understand the inner workings, the details, of government than was formerly the case, so that Ryan’s knowledge stands out, but he goes on to note that “it also didn’t hurt that he carried his geeky authority with decidedly un-geeklike personal Wonk Masculinity

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charm, not to mention a trim physique.”12 MacGillis then quotes Ronald Reagan’s secretary of education, William Bennett, one of Ryan’s friends, who has something like a dream vision when he articulates Ryan’s particular blend of the intellectual and the physical: “Ryan and Bennett have gone on several long hikes in the Colorado Rockies together on which they’ve had free-ranging policy discussions, and Bennett raves of the congressman’s mix of smarts and physicality: ‘Paul’s an all-American guy. He’s the fisherman, the hunter sitting alone in the tree. . . . He’s hunting something with a bow.’”13 I’ll return to the ideological underpinnings that animate the quote from Bennett. For the moment, I’ll simply note that the phantasmatic nature of Bennett’s view of Ryan that emerges here is evident precisely from the way that the depiction elaborates itself as it goes along, moving from present tense to present progressive. Thus, Ryan’s masculine physicality is increasingly stressed, first in the shift from fishing to hunting and then from hunting to bow hunting. Actually, it’s probably fortunate that the vision of Ryan ends where it does since, given its rising curve of machismo and Bennett’s political predilections, the next sentence would almost have to be something like: “He’s hunting something with a bow. He’s hunting . . . Hillary Clinton.” Given Paul Ryan’s Bennett-approved blend of the mind and the body, the concept behind Gregg Segal’s famous photo shoot of Ryan for Time magazine, Ryan working out, seems like a natural one. The photos, taken in 2011 when Ryan was in contention for Time’s Person of the Year award, were finally published a year later on the eve of the vice presidential debate during the 2012 election campaign. The shoot consists of a number of contenders for the Most Awkward Photo of a Politician award, but perhaps the most conceptually rich one is shown in figure 1.1. 36

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1.1. Paul Ryan in 2011. Photography by Gregg Segal. Image courtesy of the artist. Wonk Masculinity

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Ostensibly used to demonstrate Ryan’s devotion to the P90X workout regimen and hence to confirm his athleticism and reinforce his mens nerd in corpore jock image, the photo sets Ryan adrift in a sea of conflicting signifiers of various types of masculinity; or to put it another way, the disparate masculine qualities that Ryan is supposed to unify begin to pull apart. To begin with, while the image of Ryan is clearly meant to be read as “jock,” the addition of the earbuds, the backward snapback, and his direct (and rather smug) look into the camera slide him toward the younger end of that demographic, toward “frat boy,” a subject position that he is a bit too old to pull off. Perhaps because of the dissonance produced by this unsuccessful “bro impersonation,” the photo’s representation of Ryan’s masculinity simultaneously flips into what Revenge of the Nerds assured us was the polar opposite of the frat boy jock. Ryan’s ectomorphic build and the goofiness of his expression read not simply as “nerd,” but as that far more pernicious identity category, “the nerd pretending to be cool.” It’s not then surprising that Joe Scarborough, presumably thinking of Screech, said that the photo “looks like a 1980’s sitcom. Like Saved by the Bell or something.”14 The vague sense of imposture or dissimulation here would have been reinforced for contemporary viewers by the fact that, just prior to this, Ryan had “misremembered” his marathon time, giving himself a significant, and purely discursive, performance boost. It also doesn’t help that, probably for the benefit of the camera, he is holding the dumbbell at the wrong angle to do the exercise he’s supposed to be doing. We can take that last point as something of a synecdoche for the general effect created by the picture. Because the photo presents us with multiple, conflicting signifiers of various types of masculinity, one obvious way to resolve the conflict is to read it along a true/false axis, precisely according to a logic of authenticity and imposture. So, the effect is that Ryan is trying to look younger than he is or that Ryan is a nerd 38

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pretending to be a jock. And this itself carries a deeper implication. In a sense, because the photo presents but does not reconcile the signifiers of both the nerd and jock aspects of Ryan’s persona, the traditional conflict between those two figures is played out here within Ryan himself, or, perhaps more accurately, across the surface of the image of him. Thus, the photo implicitly solicits the traditional reification of the nerd/ jock binary as a binary, which causes us to read it according to a logic of either/or rather than both/and. Instead of making us see Ryan as a complex blend of qualities, as a nerdy jock or a jocky nerd, viewing the wonk as a figure somewhere between the poles of that binary, the photo, because of its semiotic dissonance, pushes us toward a more traditional and far more familiar reading based not only on that binary but on the cultural stereotypes of the hierarchical relation between them: Paul Ryan is simply a nerd who wants to be a jock. The Wonk as Nerd In order to understand why this photo of Paul Ryan is so confusing, we can compare it to an equally famous photo of another wonk. Published in early 2009 in the New York Times Magazine as one of Nadav Kander’s series of fifty-two portraits of the members of the incoming Obama administration, the picture of Peter Orszag, the budget director for the Obama White House, functions in the exact opposite direction of the photo of Ryan. Widely circulated in both print and digital forms, the image is available on the New York Times website, as well as elsewhere on the Internet.15 Unlike Ryan’s gesture toward athleticism, the photo of Orszag embraces the image of the geek. Thus, there are the glasses, the rather unfortunate haircut, the crooked tie, and the closed, awkward stance, not to mention the twin BlackBerry holsters for which Orszag was famous. Wonk Masculinity

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Rather than trying to blend the jock and nerd aspects of the wonk, this image focuses exclusively on the nerd side and celebrates it. In fact, although the entire series of portraits was intended to be informal and the sitters were encouraged to express their individuality, the image of Orszag that’s created here is as studied as the photo of Ryan, although it’s not entirely clear how much of this comes from the photographer and how much from Orszag himself. In addition to the pose, which seems expressly designed to make him look awkward, one of the most striking things about the photograph is the way in which the notebook in the shirt pocket and the pens clipped to the front of it clearly recall that ultimate nerd symbol, the pocket protector. In fact, once one compares the portrait to the hundreds of press photos of Orszag from the same era, it becomes clear that this photo is as calculated to present a certain image of the wonk as the one of Ryan. In actuality, Orszag is usually fairly dapper for an American politician, rarely appearing in public without a suit jacket, and while it’s possible to find a few other shots of that notebook and those pens, those vanish from the media record fairly early on during Orszag’s tenure in the White House. Moreover, aside from the BlackBerry holsters, his main stylistic affectation at the time was to wear cowboy boots with a suit, a sartorial statement that, if it doesn’t exactly say “jock,” clearly reads more as “macho” than as “nerd,” so that it makes sense that the photo is cropped to exclude them. Unlike the photo of Paul Ryan in which the signifiers clash, making the semiotic manipulation of the shot clear, in the picture of Orszag all the signifiers align without contradiction, concealing the artifice. We are clearly looking at a picture of a nerd. If the portrait of Orszag thus gives us a clear way of understanding the wonk as nerd, the other side of Orszag’s iteration of the wonk, his more “jock-y” elements, and the resulting tensions between those two aspects of Orszag’s wonk identity were played out in a more general 40

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arena, in the overall presentation of Orszag by the White House publicity machine during his time there. On the one hand, the White House took great care to insist repeatedly that Orszag was indeed a nerd. Yet, the twist is that Orszag was also considered something of a heartthrob so that, as Rahm Emmanuel was quoted as saying in the New York Times, Orszag “has made nerdy sexy.”16 Thus, unlike the stereotypical nerd, Orszag also has a more charismatic, sexually attractive side that aligns him with some of the traditional attributes of the jock. So, for example, there was a website during this era entitled Orszagasm, a fan blog devoted to Orszag’s charms that is now, sadly, defunct. This image of Orszag reached a peak at the end of 2009 and the beginning of 2010, when there was extensive press coverage after Orszag, who had divorced his first wife in 2006, left his current girlfriend, Greek heiress and venture capitalist Claire Milonas, who had just given birth to his child, and became engaged to ABC correspondent Bianna Golodryga, which led the New York Times to refer to him as “Casanova with a calculator.”17 Perhaps the best summary of Orszag’s overall image during his White House years, the way in which he stood between more familiar nerd and jock stereotypes, however, is Alec MacGillis’s characterization of the media representations of him as “the stud with a spreadsheet.”18 Thinkers and Deciders Yet, the point is not simply that the wonk lies somewhat uneasily between the twin poles of the stud and the spreadsheet, the jock and the nerd, albeit trending, perhaps, a bit toward the latter. To fully understand these two portraits, we need to look more closely at that binary itself, seeing wonk masculinity in the context of a larger and more detailed framework, if only in order to understand why the Obama administration would consistently stress the nerd side of their budget wonk. Wonk Masculinity

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If nerdiness is, by definition, always the negative counterpart of whatever the jock represents, why would the White House emphasize it? We can get a bit of help here from sociologist R. W. Connell, who argues that the rise of a technological infrastructure during the second half of the twentieth century and the corresponding growth of professional and technical work, combined with the expansion of higher education and of a “new middle class” of intellectually trained workers, led to the emergence of a type of masculinity that provides an alternative to the traditional form of masculinity that Connell calls “dominance masculinity.” If the older form is based on a model of physical or psychological domination exemplified by the command structure of the military and traditional forms of corporate management, the new masculinity, which we can call “expertise masculinity,” is based on technical or technological knowledge and the use of reason, qualities that are traditionally understood, Connell is careful to note, to be primarily associated with men.19 If the former derives its authority from physical strength or social rank or wealth or corporate power, the latter finds its justification in expertise. The contrast between these two competing definitions of masculinity provides at least one possible explanation for the official framing of Peter Orszag as a nerd. In fact, it can also explain the particular series of projections that animate William Bennett’s view of Paul Ryan. As sociologist Michael Kimmel points out, one way different conceptions of masculinity play out in contemporary life is in the political arena, where they not only animate the public images of different administrations but are encoded into policy, although this encoding is often reflected less in the actual details of any given political position itself than in the hierarchical (and often agonistic) relation it establishes between the politician and other entities (other individuals, other branches of government, other nations).20 For example, it seems safe to 42

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say that one of the hallmarks of the George W. Bush White House was its devotion to dominance masculinity. From Bush’s declaration that he was “The Decider” to the generally bellicose nature of the administration, the Bush administration, as personified not only by Bush but by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, emphasized force, a structure of command, and the assertion, explicit or implicit, of power. The clearest articulations of these principles were the administration’s attempts to expand the power of the executive branch, particularly after 9/11, and the Bush Doctrine, which, in at least one of its iterations, asserted that America had the right to attack countries that we perceived to be potentially threatening even if they posed no imminent danger, dominance masculinity elevated to the level of foreign policy.21 Perhaps the perfect synecdochic illustration of the Bush administration’s version of masculinity, however, is not the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq or even the continual stream of signing statements from the president asserting that he was not bound by particular provisions of legislation passed by Congress but a minor historical footnote, the incident in 2006 when Cheney accidentally shot Texas attorney Harry Whittington while the two were quail hunting. Although this caused Whittington to have a collapsed lung and atrial fibrillation, it was Whittington and not Cheney who apologized, noting that “my family and I are deeply sorry for everything Vice President Cheney and his family have had to deal with.”22 Apparently, being the alpha male means never having to say you’re sorry. Given the disastrous consequences of the militarized masculinity of the Bush White House, most notably the aftermath of the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions, it makes sense that the Obama administration might have wanted to project a different image, stressing a measured approach based on expert knowledge of any given situation, in other words a White House governed by expertise masculinity. Thus the Wonk Masculinity

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emphasis in foreign affairs shifts from the use of military force to negotiation, most notably in the case of Iran, and Barack Obama’s own public persona seems generally designed to present him as eminently measured, reasonable, and thoughtful, qualities for which David Cameron, for one, has praised him.23 In this context, it makes perfect sense that the New York Times portrait of Peter Orszag would stress his nerd credentials, his intellectuality, since that extended the administration’s insistence on expertise into the realm of economics and budget policy, a particularly important emphasis given the financial collapse of 2007. As it happens, the best example of the public relations value of the wonk as nerd actually comes from Orszag’s career after leaving the White House in 2010, when he was hired as a vice chairman of Citigroup. As Gabriel Sherman notes in New York magazine, Citi, which had been one of the prime architects of the housing bubble, was on the verge of bankruptcy in 2007, requiring a government bailout precisely because of its heedless and aggressive pursuit of profits, the economic version of dominance masculinity. According to Sherman, Orszag was thus hired to give Citi an air of intellectual respectability, his expertise helping to transform Citi’s image from a “profiteering bank” to “a significant American institution.”24 Yet, these emphases on differing types of masculinity are not confined to the Bush and Obama administrations but reflect larger trends. As Michael Kimmel makes clear, the right and left wings of the political spectrum diverge in their conceptions of what masculinity is or should be. Kimmel’s example is drawn from the 2004 election, during which, he argues, the choice was between two different “visions of paternal masculinity,” with Bush Jr. figuring as the forceful, if unreflective, “stern father” and John Kerry as the “nurturing parent” who, at least in the eyes of the right, exhibited a “feminine” indecisiveness precisely because he 44

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did spend time thinking about policy matters and sometimes changed his mind.25 Even if the distinction is not absolute or universal, if political conservatives tend to favor an older dominance definition of masculinity while liberals incline toward the newer ideal of expertise masculinity, then it becomes clear that much of the indeterminacy in defining wonk masculinity comes from the spectrum of perspectives in which the wonk is situated, the unstated assumptions with which political commentators and pundits approach that figure. Thus, one way to understand Rahm Emmanuel’s assertion that Peter Orszag has made nerdiness attractive is that it fits with a contemporary trope, itself a reflection of the ideological assumptions of expertise masculinity, that “smart is sexy,” so Orszag is a stud because of his spreadsheet rather than in spite of it. Similarly, we can now better understand some of the intellectual gymnastics that Will Wilkinson undertakes in his piece on Rick Perry. While Wilkinson clearly wants Perry not just to look smart but to actually be intelligent, his sense of Perry’s masculine identity finally comes down to Perry’s physicality, the implicit ideological ground of the ideal of dominance masculinity on which the article is based. Since bookishness or intellectuality traditionally represents a diminution of that identity, the logic of Wilkinson’s essay is thus forced to tie itself in knots so that Perry can simultaneously read books and be a “real man.” Even more interesting, however, is Alec MacGillis’s further elaboration of Bill Bennett’s phantasmatic view of Paul Ryan, which begins from the same premises as Wilkinson but takes an entirely different tack: “In Ryan’s world, policy is macho. He’s the kind of guy, Bill Bennett says, who likes to get together at night with Budget Committee actuaries, just to ‘get a few beers and talk numbers.’”26 Here, the threat to dominance masculinity represented by intellectual interests is reconfigured so that intellectuality now becomes an attribute of the traditional “man’s man.” Wonk Masculinity

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It’s a particularly nice touch: in the process, not only does expertise masculinity disappear completely as an alternative form of maleness, but the act of conceptual colonization that takes place here, in which thinking becomes just another act of machismo, is itself also an illustration of the aggrandizing way in which dominance masculinity tends to work. Making Mr. Right I’m not convinced that policy is macho, but that’s actually the point. We can now see that the instability in wonk masculinity, its uncertain location between the jock and the nerd, is not really an aporia inherent in the concept of the wonk. Instead, the difficulty in pinning down the nature of wonk masculinity is a reflection of a larger problem with contemporary masculinity itself. As Bill Bennett’s view of policy suggests, this problem is not simply that there are two competing conceptions of masculinity but rather that how we understand, and more importantly evaluate, any particular “masculine” attribute itself depends on the implicit understanding of masculinity, the mobile and shifting set of assumptions and preconceptions, with which we begin. Thus, to finally answer the question with which we started—is it a good thing to be a wonk?—the answer actually depends on whom you ask. If, for Rahm Emmanuel, the nerd can be sexy and if, for William Bennett, talking to accountants can be macho, then there would no longer seem to be any clear roadmap to the territory of the masculine and no universal answer to that question. Yet, this indeterminacy itself may be the most valuable thing that the wonk can finally teach us about masculinity. One of the main themes of Michael Kimmel’s work is what he calls the “contemporary crisis in 46

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masculinity,” by which he means precisely the way in which that roadmap has been lost. Kimmel’s taxonomy of types of men differs slightly from Connell’s, with Kimmel stressing the Self-Made Man as the dominant conception of American masculinity in the twentieth century, in contrast to the older ideals of the aristocrat and the artisan-laborer.27 As a taxonomic category, the Self-Made Man would include both Connell’s dominance and expertise masculinities, the police officer and the aeronautical engineer, since it is predicated, finally, on an ethic of individual achievement, self-control, and the role of breadwinner. According to Kimmel, in an era of outsourcing and globalization, of deindustrialization in America and rising income inequality, not to mention increasing gender and racial equality, the economic and cultural foundations of this masculine ideal have substantially eroded in recent years, sparking a rising curve of anxiety and, more recently, anger among men.28 What I would like to suggest is that the anxieties about the status of masculinity—actually, anxieties about the nature of masculinity—that come into play here emerge into visibility in the concept of the wonk and are indirectly inscribed into the two portraits we have been discussing, which can now be seen as fairly anxious documents. Perhaps not surprisingly, this is clearest in the less anxious of these: the portrait of Orszag. The best way to explain this anxiety is to uncover something that has only been implicit in our discussion up until now. However the relation between them may have been reconfigured by the rise of high technology enterprises, the contrast between dominance masculinity and expertise masculinity really harkens back to a much older distinction in types of men: the Man of Action versus the Man of Contemplation. In this variant of the mind/body split, dominance masculinity, the masculinity of the Man of Action, is always ideologically grounded on the male body, on physical power and force, even if these are sublimated Wonk Masculinity

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into command structures or psychological control. By the same token, the Man of Contemplation, as the illustration of thought, and more specifically of reason, is, on an ideological level, inherently disembodied. The resultant anxieties can be clearly seen in the photo of Orszag. As I’ve already suggested, the signifiers in the portrait of Orszag align perfectly, providing an overdetermined message: this is expertise masculinity, the wonk as nerd. Yet, it’s the elaboration of paraphernalia here that signals a problem. Precisely because knowledge or intelligence or expertise can’t be seen, they have to be visually encoded in the picture through a sort of nerd iconography, evident in the Blackberries and the pens and the glasses. And this very proliferation of apparati suggests that wonk masculinity requires a certain prosthetic supplementation. The glasses are the most obvious symbol of this, the sign of a literal defect or weakness that must be corrected, but the Blackberries and the pens and the notepad follow the same logic of the supplement, which suggests that the thing itself, whether we think of that thing as the wonk or as wonk masculinity, is incomplete or insufficient. Actually, in a literal sense there is some truth in this. If you’re a wonk, where are you without your smartphone or your calculator or your PowerPoint slides of charts and graphs? And if, on one level, the notepad and the Blackberries suggest what any academic knows is true, that no matter how smart you are and how much you know, you can’t keep it all in your head, that intelligence or expertise requires tools and props, on a deeper level the proliferation of such tools implies a more metaphorical lack. If the expertise that is the basis for expertise masculinity needs prosthetic enhancement then the obvious implication is that the masculinity part of that identity may be wanting too, particularly when compared to dominance masculinity, which, based on the body, should, at least in theory, be self-evident, sufficient unto itself.29 48

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Yet, I would argue, even dominance masculinity is subject to the logic of the supplement and hence to anxieties about its insufficiency. In part, this is because, as we’ve seen, dominance masculinity is already abstracted away from the corporeal through sublimation, but even a masculinity directly based on the male body requires a certain supplementation. If Rick Perry is going to guard the border with Sean Hannity, then his masculinity still requires props—the gun and the flak jacket and the aviator glasses—just as, if nothing else, Paul Ryan’s photoshoot requires the workout gear and the weights. Now, granted, part of that photoshoot’s attempts to articulate Ryan’s masculinity, the wonk as jock in this case, is through Ryan’s toned and defined body itself, but, as Michael Kimmel points out, the emphasis on masculine fitness, particularly weightlifting, that began in the 1980s is itself a symptom of the crisis in masculinity precisely because the muscular body created by exercise has no utility, because it is ornamental rather than useful.30 Yet, the problem with the P90X body isn’t really that it’s not used to buck the bales from the south forty but simply to look good. Far more importantly, the worked-out body is transmuted into a sign of physical power rather than being simply physicality in itself. Thus the muscular body, redoubled as a sign, becomes its own supplement. The latter point is particularly salient given that, if we believe Kimmel, the body as a sign of the physical strength associated with traditional masculinity is compensatory, simultaneously also a sign of the anxiety resulting from the erosion of the social and cultural grounds of dominance masculinity. Kimmel argues that, for many men, one of the primary responses to this anxiety is not to question our conceptions of masculinity but to fall back with renewed vigor on the ideals—“physical strength, selfcontrol, power”—that constitute “traditional masculinity,” in other words, to insist on what we’ve been calling dominance masculinity. Wonk Masculinity

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In fact, this anxious retrenchment may also be the site where gender itself becomes an object of public policy, specifically in the conservative focus on legislative control of the corporeal, the reproductive, and the sexual (in its positions on, for example, stem cells, abortion, and same-sex marriage). As should be suggested by the fact that a number of these positions, taken collectively, have been popularly referred to as “the Republican War on Women,” one way to see conservative efforts to constrain reproductive freedom or to insist on traditional definitions of marriage is as an attempt to police both gender and sexuality, restricting particular behaviors or actions as a way of indirectly containing and stabilizing the increasing complexity of concepts such as “men,” “women,” and “marriage.” However, as Kimmel goes on to add, precisely because the changes that have produced the “crisis in masculinity” are global economic and cultural shifts, this strategy of insisting on traditional definitions of gender does not work particularly well on the individual level.31 Arguably, it is also not particularly successful in the realm of public policy. Yet if wonk masculinity is a site where the anxieties produced by shifting conceptions of the nature of masculinity can be clearly seen, it might also be a site where a possible solution to the crisis emerges, if only as a locus from which an interrogation of our ideas of masculinity can begin. In fact, the key to this interrogation may actually come from the very symptoms that signal this anxiety. If masculinity is decorporealized, abstracted into signs, then one way to understand that process is to reimagine it. Instead of seeing the signifiers of masculinity as supplements that attempt to mask a lack in, or insufficiency of, masculinity, we can instead see them as being the basis for masculinity itself insofar as masculinity might best be understood as a conceptual abstraction. In other words, we can regard masculinity not as a transcendental or universal “thing” that is signified but as, instead, a mobile and shifting 50

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set of significations, of conceptions of what a man is. This runs directly counter, of course, to an idea of masculinity that is grounded on the apparent facticity of the male body, but it meshes nicely with the basic premise underlying expertise masculinity, which stresses precisely the process of abstraction and signification that is thought, and it is from this angle that the wonk, or at least the nerdier aspects of the wonk, can begin to suggest a different approach to masculinity. To put the point as abstrusely as possible, the existence of the wonk suggests that the basis for the conceptual abstraction that is masculinity is not the body but the mind, conceptual abstraction itself. R. W. Connell articulates the practical implications of this point in far clearer terms. While Connell notes that expertise masculinity has been used to support an occupational or institutional culture—think engineering—that bolsters male authority through “a masculinized definition of expertise,” he argues that the very premises of expertise, logic and instrumental rationality, are in conflict with a doctrine of male authority, with dominance masculinity.32 Connell’s focus is the rationality of the marketplace, in which one wants to hire the best worker regardless of gender, but his larger point, that expertise or knowledge are not the sole province of men and that, even more importantly, they need not be linked to a gendered conception of authority, does indeed have, as he puts it, the “power to disrupt gender” as we currently understand it.33 Sadly, I’m not quite sure we’ve currently reached the point where “expertise” can be completely detached from “masculinity,” if only because, if nothing else, there is still plenty of “mansplaining” going on. Yet the very emergence of the idea that this is possible suggests the start of a critique that would allow us to imagine different, more expansive definitions of gender. Perhaps the wonk, who, as we’ve seen, is not supposed to be smug about his knowledge, can help us begin to draw a new roadmap for masculinity. Wonk Masculinity

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Notes 1. Greer, “Have the Glasses Changed Rick Perry’s Stance on Amnesty?” 2. W. W., “In Defence of Rick Perry’s Eyeglasses.” See also Woodruff, “Rick Perry Read a Book on Economics.” 3. W. W., “In Defence of Rick Perry’s Eyeglasses.” 4. See, for example, Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 1–43, and Berger, Wallis, and Watson’s “Introduction” to Constructing Masculinity, 1–7. 5. Woodruff, “Rick Perry Read a Book on Economics,” notes the boredom in New Hampshire. 6. Barrett, Hatchet Jobs and Hardball, 296. 7. The apparent counterexample that comes immediately to mind, the website Wonkette, actually demonstrates this point. Founded by Gawker Media in 2004 with Ana Marie Cox as its first editor, the site’s use of the feminine diminutive for its name implies that the wonk is, by definition, male. 8. Anderegg, Nerds, 13. 9. Ultimately, Anderegg concludes that making a clear distinction between the nerd and the geek is not really possible (ibid., 24). 10. Ibid., 216. 11. Ibid., 27, 219, 226. 12. MacGillis, “How Paul Ryan Convinced Washington of His Genius.” 13. Ibid. 14. Scarry, “Time Publishes Year-Old Unflattering ‘Outtake’ Photos.” 15. See photos by Nadav Kander at http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2013/01/20/magazine/obamaspeople-38.html and http://www.flowersgallery. com/works/view/14276-peter-r-orszag-office-of-management-and-budget-director. 16. Kantor, “Obama’s Man on the Budget.” 17. Leibovich, “If Peter Orszag Is So Smart.” 18. MacGillis, “How Paul Ryan Convinced Washington of His Genius.” 19. Connell, Masculinities, 164–65. Connell illustrates the gendering of expertise, the association of technical knowledge and rationality with men, by presenting a number of sociological case studies. As we will see, and as he himself notes, considering expertise solely as the province of men is not, itself, entirely rational. 20. Kimmel, Manhood in America, 248. 21. For expanded executive power, see Michiko Kakutani’s review of Frederick A. O. Schwarz Jr. and Aziz Huq’s Unchecked and Unbalanced: Presidential Power in a Time of Terror; for an anatomization of the various versions of the Bush Doctrine, see Froomkin, “What Is the Bush Doctrine, Anyway?” 52

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22. Whittington, “Harry Whittington’s Hospital Statement.” As of 2010, Cheney still had not apologized to Whittington. See Fahri, “Since Dick Cheney Shot Him.” 23. Fuller, “David Cameron on Obama.” Obama’s calmness and rationality are so clearly established as part of his persona that they form the basis for a series of comedy sketches on Key & Peele in which Obama is provided with Luther, an “anger translator,” who restates the president’s points with considerable emotion. 24. Sherman, “Revolver.” 25. Kimmel, Manhood in America, 251–52. 26. MacGillis, “How Paul Ryan Convinced Washington of His Genius.” 27. Kimmel, Manhood in America, 16. 28. Ibid., 217. 29. If we’re discussing masculinity and we’re talking about an apparent insufficiency in that masculinity, the classic Freudian articulation of that would be to understand it as castration. From this standpoint, one way to read all those supplements— the Blackberries and the notebook and the pens—is as fetishistic substitutions for the missing phallus. From this perspective, the most salient fetish object in the photo would probably be Orszag’s tie. 30. Kimmel, Manhood in America, 222. 31. Ibid., 218. It is worth noting that the “Republican War on Women” is not waged solely by men. As studies done over the past thirty years have repeatedly shown, the majority of Right to Life activists are women. See, for example, Maxwell, Pro-Life Activists in America. 32. Connell, Masculinities, 171, 174. 33. Ibid., 178.

Bibliography Anderegg, David. Nerds: How Dorks, Dweebs, Techies, and Trekkies Can Save America and Why They Might Be Our Last Hope. New York: Penguin, 2007. Barrett, Grant, ed. Hatchet Jobs and Hardball: The Oxford Dictionary of Political Slang. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Berger, Maurice, Brian Wallis, and Simon Watson, eds. Constructing Masculinity. New York: Routledge, 1995. Connell, R. W. Masculinities. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Fahri, Paul. “Since Dick Cheney Shot Him, Harry Whittington’s Aim Has Been to Move On.” Washington Post, October 14, 2010. http://www.washingtonpost.com /wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/13/AR2010101307173.html?sid=ST2010101307297. Wonk Masculinity

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Froomkin, Dan. “What Is the Bush Doctrine, Anyway?” Washington Post, September 12, 2008. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2008/09/12 /BL2008091201471.html. Fuller, Jaime. “David Cameron on Obama: ‘I admire his leadership and his reasonable approach.’” Washington Post, January 18, 2015. http://www.washingtonpost.com /blogs/post-politics/wp/2015/01/18/david-cameron-on-obama-i-admire-his -leadership-and-his-reasonable-approach/. Greer, Scott. “Have the Glasses Changed Rick Perry’s Stance on Amnesty?” Daily Caller. June 4, 2015. http://dailycaller.com/2015/06/04/have-the-glasses-changed -rick-perrys-stance-on-amnesty/. Halberstam, Judith. Female Masculinity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. Kakutani, Michiko. “Unchecked and Unbalanced.” Review of Unchecked and Unbalanced: Presidential Power in a Time of Terror, by Frederick A. O. Schwarz Jr. and Aziz Huq. New York Times., July 6, 2007. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/06 /books/06book.html?pagewanted&_r=1&. Kantor, Jodi. “Obama’s Man on the Budget: Just 40 and Going Like 60.” New York Times, March 27, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/28/us/politics/28orszag .html?pagewanted=all. Kimmel, Michael. Manhood in America: A Cultural History. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Leibovich, Mark. “If Peter Orszag Is So Smart, What Will He Do Now?” New York Times, January 8, 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/fashion/10orszag.html ?_r=0. MacGillis, Alec. “How Paul Ryan Convinced Washington of His Genius.” New Republic. September 14, 2012. http://www.newrepublic.com/article/politics /magazine/107242/how-paul-ryan-convinced-washington-his-genius. Maxwell, Carol C. J. Pro-Life Activists in America. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Scarry, Eddie. “Time Publishes Year-Old Unflattering ‘Outtake’ Photos of Paul Ryan Working Out.” TheBlaze. October 11, 2012. http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2012 /10/11/paul-ryan-time-p90x-photos/. Sherman, Gabriel. “Revolver.” New York Magazine. April 10, 2011. http://nymag.com /news/business/wallstreet/peter-orszag-2011–4/. W. W. (Wilkinson, Will). “In Defence of Rick Perry’s Eyeglasses.” Economist, June 5, 2015. http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2015/06/republican -field.

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Whittington, Harry. “Harry Whittington’s Hospital Statement.” NBCNews.com. http://www.nbcnews.com/id/11409731/ns/politics/t/harry-whittingtons-hospital -statement/#.VYnflHnbJ-Y. Woodruff, Betsy. “Rick Perry Read a Book on Economics and Won’t Shut Up about It.” Daily Beast. April 17, 2015. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/04/17 /rick-perry-read-a-book-on-economic-and-won-t-shut-up-about-it.html.

Dennis Allen is Professor of English at West Virginia University and author of Sexuality in Victorian Fiction in addition to articles on narrative theory, sexuality studies, gender theory, and LGBT pedagogy in a variety of edited collections and such journals as SEL, Genders, and Narrative.

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2

SURFACE WORSHIP, SUPER-PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS, AND THE SUSPICIOUSLY COMMON READER

william j. maxwell Young nerds may rule at last, as the title of this book implies, but their public intellectual moms and dads have never felt less regal. By this I don’t mean, Richard A. Posner–style, that it’s all been downhill for such intellectuals practically since Wilhelm von Humboldt forced seminars, laboratories, and departments on the learned gentlemen of Prussia. At the start of his millennial plaint Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline (2001), Posner defines his subject as “academics’ writing outside their field,” and attributes the regular failures of professors courting a general readership to the successes of academic freedom and academic specialization in the modern research university.1 “The depth of knowledge that specialization enables is purchased at the expense of breadth,” he judges, “while the working conditions of the modern university, in particular the principle of academic freedom backed by the tenure contract, make the intellectual’s career a safe, comfortable one, which can breed aloofness and complacency.”2 It would be a better world, it strikes me, if more intellectuals still had a fighting chance to grow aloof and complacent: tenure and the academic freedom it underwrites are rare baubles in the latest model of the modern American university, a fact that Posner would be more likely to recognize if he were an overspecialized, underemployed adjunct expert in Tang dynasty painting, say, rather than a distinguished jurist, economist, University of Chicago law professor, and dizzyingly eclectic author of books from Sex and Reason 56

(1992) to The Crisis of Capitalist Democracy (2010). But my disagreement with Posner has more to do with his dating of decline than with his uncharacteristically myopic survey of university conditions. As I see it, the waning reach and romance of the public intellectual, narrowly understood as the lefty humanities professor writing big books on large topics for a greater-than-academic audience, is a more recent affair than Posner’s past-facing 2001 analysis can suggest. To judge from ample selfcommentary by ex- and still-would-be public intellectuals, the big ’90s ideal of the tenured radical-turned-popular sage—peaking, perhaps, with the 1995 publication of trend pieces in the New Yorker (“Public Academy”) and the Atlantic Monthly (“The New Intellectuals”)3—has suffered slings and arrows over the past fifteen years in particular. What has happened since the turn of the millennium to dent the ideal among even the most public-minded academics? Googling the leading phrase “Wither the public intellectual?” in August 2015, I discovered dozens of inside takes on the type’s twentyfirst-century decline. In the most rigorously depressing example of the genre, Henry Giroux, the holder of the Global TV Network chair at McMaster University in Canada, ties the diminishment of the public intellectual to the disappearance of the public sphere in which she once intellectualized. As Giroux sees it in “Cultural Studies in Dark Times” (2005), the hypermilitarized neoliberalism enforced by the George W. Bush administration targeted public dialogue and the public interest above all. “There is no public politics” in this refanged neoliberalism, Giroux observes, “only the private domain of market identities, values, and practices” and the proof this domain provides that the “discourses fashioned in the academy of the 1980s and 1990s [are] hopelessly disconnected, if not irrelevant, in the current moment.”4 The journalists and Bard College professors Roger Berkowitz and Walter Russell Mead note the electronically obvious—“We live in the age of the blog,” they Surface Worship, Intellectuals, the Common Reader

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declare—and speculate that a flexibly employed, just-in-time public intellectual has dispatched the 1990s vintage amid “short news cycles, short attention spans, new economic models and a flood of competing commentary and information.” The “rise of blogs may be dangerous,” they caution, “insofar as blogs attract like-minded people who will only hear one side, but they are extremely powerful as well, insofar as they allow for people to become highly educated about the world by following a few top bloggers.”5 In “Blogging and the New Public Intellectual,” an ongoing interview series at Bard’s Hannah Arendt Center, Berkowitz and Mead invite representatives of the dangerous and powerful new breed to expand on the sound of one blog clapping. Neil Davenport, an advanced politics teacher in London, proposes a more literal-minded theory: the public intellectual proper died along with Tony Judt, who died along with the dream of social democracy in August 2010. In “Tony Judt: The Last Public Intellectual?,” an otherwise complimentary review of Judt’s posthumous Thinking the Twentieth Century (2012), Davenport takes the New York–based European historian to task for not recognizing the grounds of his own obsolescence, a postdemocratic era in which “the state, as a conduit for managerial instrumentalism,” fills the gap in which “language, beliefs and ideas to engage the masses” were once formulated. The departed Judt finally serves as a brilliant chronicler of generational loss, the representative intellectual of “the babyboomer generation’s . . . dashed dreams” of popular yet world-remaking thought.6 A sped-up, up-armored neoliberalism with no use for the public sphere, or make that a genuinely public anything. A shift of public intellectual work from books to blogs, not to mention tweets, posts, and profiles (an online migration rampant enough to usher in “the time of the semipublic intellectual,” according to the public-repelling pages of PMLA).7 The passing, premature and otherwise, of the ambition of 58

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some baby-boom humanists to break the state’s hold on the language, ideas, and beliefs of its subjects. All of these happenings have surely contributed to the wilting of the 1990s-model public intellectual in the new millennium. In this chapter, however, I’d like to reflect on another, less structural cause of this intellectual’s dimming star: namely, the fading of the wish-fulfillment once invested in the public intellectual into the fantasy that literature professors can vanish into the popular practice of everyday reading. Over the last decade, in some of the most prestigious quarters of the American English department, the longing to go public has been rebooted as a longing to become the reading public. Usurping the hope that tenured readers will teach common readers the stringent joys of ideological suspicion is the hope that tenured readers will relearn the common pleasures of scratching the surface. As a result, critical interpretation, once seen as the public intellectual’s special, must-have gift to her popular audience, is reimagined as the preexisting lingua franca of town-gown unity. If you can’t outread the public, reckons the logic of the postpublic intellectual era, you might still join it. Appropriately enough, the most influential call to postpublic intellectual reading takes the form of a bold but self-effacing manifesto. Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus’s 2009 essay “Surface Reading: An Introduction” does more prediction than description of its title subject, but has achieved an academic fame that reflects an already settled structure of academic feeling. Framing a special issue of Representations, once the stronghold of the surface-doubting New Historicism, Best and Marcus express dissatisfaction with what they term “symptomatic reading,” a close analogue of what Paul Ricoeur thirty years earlier dubbed the hermeneutics of suspicion.8 For Best and Marcus, like Ricoeur before them, the hermeneutics of symptom/suspicion are characterized by an unpayable debt to the interpretive metalanguages of Marx and Freud, and by the root assumption that “a text’s truest meaning lies in what Surface Worship, Intellectuals, the Common Reader

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it does not say”—in other words, the assumption that every text has a controlling political and/or psychological unconscious, brimming with meanings “hidden, repressed, deep, and in need of detection and disclosure” by a rigorously trained interpreter.9 Surface reading, Best and Marcus’s alternative mode of reading beyond symptoms and suspicions, answers their boredom and disappointment with depth analysis—their own habitual method as younger scholars—with a variety of interpretive activities that trace the topography of literary surfaces and allow texts to speak their conscious minds by faithfully depicting “the truth to which [they bear] witness.”10 Respecting the known surface of the text does not mean succumbing to inarticulate superficiality, Best and Marcus stipulate. “We take surface to mean what is evident, perceptible, apprehensible in texts; what is neither hidden not hiding; what, in the geometrical sense, has length and breadth but no thickness, and therefore covers no depth.” Length and breadth can be extensive, of course, and difficult to communicate. Understanding that “[a] surface is what insists on being looked at rather than what we must train ourselves to see through” does not make the job of describing all surfaces a cakewalk.11 Best and Marcus, extremely intelligent critics, are up to something shrewder than anti-intellectual surrender. This much of Best and Marcus’s argument lies on the surface of their essay, but I’d like to note, for my purposes, the less obvious mixed constituency in whose interest their argument is cleverly bent. Best and Marcus begin by speaking for an overeducated, multigenerational “we” composed of “scholars who received doctoral degrees in either English or comparative literature after 1983.”12 As they typify it, this is a gaggle of literature PhDs less dulled by specialization than Richard Posner could imagine, a cohort “formed in the era of interdisciplinary history,” conversant with “paradigms drawn from anthropology, history, and political theory,” and happy to read nonliterary objects as well as 60

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noncanonical texts.13 Best and Marcus proceed to assume that readers of their essay have more-than-shallow knowledge of the stages of post1983 (inter)disciplinary history, from Foucauldian New Historicism to computer-enabled Distant Reading. But they also take up the cudgels for common readers when setting surface reading against the suspicious/symptomatic critics who luxuriate in the supposed distance between their “critical freedom and the limits placed on others.”14 Surface reading’s neutrality toward the ideological constraints inevitably represented in literary texts, Best and Marcus maintain, is not “neutrality about the constraints themselves, which we may find ourselves moved to deplore, but neutrality about the existences”—the non-criticallyreading existences, for most part—“entwined with them, which we would like to recognize without judging.”15 Their attack on the pseudotranscendence of the false consciousness-busting, more-progressivethan-thou literary academic is thus also a kind of one-upping populism, an emulative defense of the reading and being rights of the average folk whose existence is consciously shaped by limitation. Best and Marcus “are interested in how to register the ways that constraints structure existence” in literary texts in no small part because they are interested in registering, more finely than the loudly radical critical generation before them, the value of common lives constrained beyond the page.16 Learning to read in sympathy and in tandem with nonacademic folk, flatteringly and condescendingly defined through their cheerful negotiation with social restrictions, is indeed a typical aim of the postcritical theory that plowed the way to Best and Marcus’s essay. Eve Sedgwick’s trailblazing 1997 distinction between “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading” seeks to dethrone suspicion as the baseline affect of queer theory, yet pursues this change in academic emotion in defense of the commoners who thumb through novels in search of “pleasure and amelioration.” The “exclusiveness” of paranoid reading’s Surface Worship, Intellectuals, the Common Reader

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“faith in demystifying exposure,” Sedgwick passionately contends, is a “cruel and contemptuous assumption that the one thing lacking for global revolution, explosion of gender roles, or whatever” is the people’s (“that is, other people’s”) habit of making gratifying, nonrevolutionary meaning amid “oppression, poverty, and deludedness.”17 What reparative reading aims to uncover, in distinction, are “the many ways in which selves and communities extract sustenance from the objects of a culture”—sustenance extracted even when, specifies Sedgwick, the stated goal of that culture “has often been not to sustain them.”18 In the style of Best and Marcus noting their distaste for “the constraints themselves,” Sedgwick thus takes care to separate her admiration for the pragmatic resource extraction done by common readers from a blessing of the materials and conditions under which it occurs. Like later surface readers, her interpretive egalitarianism anticipates and parries charges of political detachment. For its part, Rita Felski’s bracing 2008 “un-manifesto,” Uses of Literature, even more explicitly connects the call for a postparanoid, truly pro-public intellectual to the wisdom of the nonacademics who read “voluntarily and for pleasure.”19 University-paid literary critics have been far too eager to act as little Dantes, distinguishing “categorically between the damned and saved, banishing to the outer darkness all the riffraff or renegades oblivious to our own preferred hermeneutic,” Felski alleges.20 “Rather than pitting literary theory against common knowledge” and common people, she declares, “I hope to build better bridges between them.” “This is not,” Felski clarifies, in her own version of the generic disavowal of political neutrality, “because I endorse every opinion expressed in the name of common sense—quite the contrary—but because theoretical reflection is powered by, and indeed indebted to, many of the same motives and structures that shape everyday thinking, 62

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so that any disavowal of such thinking must reek of bad faith.” In the good-faith end, then, “there is no compelling reason why the practice of theory requires us to go behind the backs of ordinary persons in order to expose their beliefs as deluded or delinquent.”21 The business of literary theory and interpretation can and should be done frontally, in full daylight, and with open respect for the truth claims of nonuniversity customers. Best and Marcus defend surface reading against the inevitable accusation of quietism by deploring social constraints (though not, again, those persons made ordinary by these constraints) and by redefining “attentiveness to the artwork as itself a kind of freedom,” however attenuated.22 With a nod to Felski and Sedgwick, they might also defend this reading with reference to its democratic embrace of the nonacademic classes able to enjoy books before the political second coming. In place of the uneven, strife-filled, but semi-utopian alliance public intellectuals sought with the general public, the surface readers and their relatives project a balanced coupling of lay and professional booklovers, mutually drawn to the satisfactions of literary reflection in imperfect times. Like the Russian Narodniki of the late nineteenth century, these readers are guilty cosmopolitans who insist on going “back to the people,” but with more interest in collective interpretation than collective farms. All strained historical jokes aside, they are anti-elite elitists whose assumptions and principles outpopularize the old school of literary public intellectuals. Their loosely enforced allegiance to textual surfaces, despite its echo of effete aestheticism, actually expresses one of the purest populisms in literary-critical history. In it, the people are not to be mass-educated in formal analysis, or selectively tapped for linguistic inventions, or glorified in one or another social realism, or liberated by deft revelation of internalized traumas and chains. They are Surface Worship, Intellectuals, the Common Reader

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not to be read to, but read with—a superpopulism forced in part by the thwarted public outreach of earlier, less methodologically democratic public intellectuals. Pleasure, trust the surface readers, a surprisingly pragmatic bunch, is where you find it, and where you find it most, they suggest, is among those who read outside the interlocking buzzkills of the syllabus, the semester, and the routinely subversive literature department. But do non-“U” common readers really read for enjoyment alone? Is voluntary reading synonymous with pleasure reading? Are the basics of the hermeneutics of suspicion as foreign to the common-reading population as the finer distinctions between a Freudian unconscious and a Fredric Jamesonian one? With apologies for brevity and partiality, I submit in what remains of this chapter that suspicion is in fact a historically common affect among sociologically common American readers. Suffering with paranoia and imagining demystifying exposure as its cure, I think the record shows, joins many such readers to many literature professors. The superpopulism of surface reading, I’ll thus suggest, will need to face the broader reading public’s documented habit of distrusting as well as relishing literary recreation—a habit that most ’90s-style public intellectuals acknowledged even when least successful. Over the past ten years, I’ve spent too much time reading—both pleasurably and symptomatically—scores of FBI files on twentiethcentury African American authors, about 14,000 pages in all. As I show in the raw materials deposited in the F.B. Eyes Digital Archive23 and in my interpretive book F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature,24 these files overflow with oncesecret proof that the ghostreaders of the US security apparatus schemed to determine black aesthetic value. But the files—many newly released with help from the US Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)—also contain something weirder still: copies of dozens of letters from everyday, 64

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nonacademic readers beseeching the FBI with literary opinions and pleas for critical enlightenment. Some of these letters cast J. Edgar Hoover, the Bureau’s legendary director and impassive public face from 1924 to 1972, as a kind of national reference librarian. For instance, one confused Houston citizen wrote Hoover in 1970 with this elementary question about the history of African American drama: “I seem to remember that [A Raisin in the Sun] was a highly controversial production written by a Leroi Jones and that Jones is something of a professional trouble maker and rabble rouser. If you cannot furnish information pertaining to this play and its author please advise where I might obtain such details.”25 A Raisin in the Sun (1959) was no unforgiving Dutchman (1964), and Jones/Amiri Baraka did not look much like Hansberry, but the Houstonite rightly supposed that Hoover’s FBI knew what it took to learn differently. Many more citizen readers, however, wrote Hoover assuming he was a patriotic critic-in-chief qualified to verify complex suspicions about recent literary prose. In 1945, for example, a self-identified colored person from Los Angeles urged Hoover to sift Richard Wright’s books Black Boy (1945) and Native Son (1940) for coded signs of fascist sympathy. The latter text was damaging enough to the national will, the Californian warns, but “if people in Germany should get a hold of Black boy I’m awfull afraid Uncle Sam’s face is going to be red for you cant rule a German you cant rule America [sic].”26 A second disgusted reader of Black Boy, likely a nonblack citizen of Dallas, informed Hoover in the same year that he has “looked over the book . . . supposedly written by a negro [sic] named Richard Wright,” and found it to be uncomfortably “racially inflammatory.”27 “It is my opinion,” this citizen-critic announces, “that all the publicity given the book is being financed—either by some person or organization—for propaganda purposes: to fan the flames of dissension and seditious discontent. How Hitler (if he is yet alive) must laugh, and Surface Worship, Intellectuals, the Common Reader

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laugh.”28 Wright’s now canonical autobiography is once again suspected to be an objective ally of Nazi Germany—on the evidence of his selfcritical essay “How Bigger Was Born” (1940), a paranoid reading Wright himself had expected years before. Twenty years later, the reluctance of citizen readers to skate pleasantly along the surface of African American literature remains, but has discovered new objects of distrust. In 1965, a troubled member of a Baptist church wrote the FBI to implore Hoover to read and ban James Baldwin’s Another Country (1962), a novel containing “every filthy word, compound word and phrasing that could be used to portray . . . Drug addiction and Sex perversion at its vilest. Unless or/and until one has read this Book of degradation, any attempt the writer makes to describe the contents will fall short of the degenerate nature of the Book [sic].”29 The churchgoer confesses inadequacy to the tasks of plot summary, but expects the Bureau to purchase and analyze copies of its own: “Many Book stores and Drug [stores] in Fort Worth . . . have it in stock, with a price of 76 cents for paper bind.”30 Direct acquaintance with Baldwin’s froth of filthy and compound words will overpower First Amendment scruples, the writer believes: “Mr. Hoover, is there any Federal [law] which would prohibit the publication or the sale of this degrading Book? [sic].”31 With her notes on stock prices, paper binds, and conditions of sale, the common reader from Fort Worth seems to approximate the nuts and bolts of materialist book history, one of the modes of literary scholarship Best and Marcus seek to assimilate into surface reading. Just as significant in the present context, however, is the fact that her worried challenge to Hoover is also a challenge to Best and Marcus’s populist underside. This far-from-academic reader believes that Another Country’s provocative surface signals an unconscious truth worth asking the most famous policeman in America to investigate. Her pleasure in 66

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Baldwin’s text, confessed through the familiar rhetoric of the turned-on censor, is hopelessly entangled with her suspicion of its perversion. And this suspicion is not an isolating and sexless affect: communicating this affect to Hoover, she reaches out to touch the state, the governmental power that may favor compulsion over fraternity, but that still profits like the nation from the imaginative love of its citizens. The testimony of the Fort Worth reader has grown old, of course, and belongs to a Cold War moment that Best and Marcus might separate from the era after Abu Ghraib and Hurricane Katrina, a plain-speaking present in which detecting crimes of domination may no longer require the “demystifying protocols” of the hermeneutics of suspicion.32 But I would bet my academic salary that the suspiciously common reader remains with us in an age of mainstream conservative conspiracy theory and the proliferation of fictions of mass apocalypse and cult survival. The health of surface reading’s intensified academic populism—its corrective variation on the theme of public intellectualism—may thus rest on distinguishing the common from the credulous. Notes 1. Posner, Public Intellectuals, 1. 2. Ibid., 4. 3. Bérubé, “Public Academy”; Boynton, “The New Intellectuals.” 4. Giroux, “Cultural Studies in Dark Times,” 5 and 2. 5. Berkowitz and Mead, “Blogging and the New Public Intellectual,” 1. 6. Davenport, “Tony Judt,” 4. 7. Loofbourow and Maciak, “Introduction: The Time of the Semipublic Intellectual,” 439. 8. Best and Marcus, “Surface Reading,” 1. 9. Ibid., emphasis in original. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., 9, emphasis in original. Surface Worship, Intellectuals, the Common Reader

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12. Ibid., 1. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid., 18. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., 8. 17. Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” 22, emphasis in original. 18. Ibid., 35. 19. Felski, Uses of Literature, 12. 20. Ibid., 135. 21. Ibid., 13. 22. Best, “Surface Reading,” 16. 23. F.B. Eyes Digital Archive. 24. Maxwell, F.B. Eyes. 25. US Federal Bureau of Investigation, Richard Wright file (8 July 1970). 26. US Federal Bureau of Investigation, Richard Wright file (18 July 1945). 27. US Federal Bureau of Investigation, Richard Wright file (27 Sept. 1945). 28. Ibid. 29. US Federal Bureau of Investigation, James Baldwin file (22 Jan. 1965). 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Best, “Surface Reading,” 2.

Bibliography Berkowitz, Roger, and Walter Russell Mead. “Blogging and the New Public Intellectual.” Hannah Arendt Center Blog. Accessed August 26, 2015. http://hac.bard .edu/bnpi/. Bérubé, Michael. “Public Academy.” New Yorker, January 9, 1995, 73–80. Best, Stephen, and Sharon Marcus. “Surface Reading: An Introduction.” Representations 108, no. 1 (Fall 2009): 1–21. Boynton, Robert S. “The New Intellectuals.” Atlantic Monthly 275, no. 3 (March 1995): 53–70. Davenport, Neil. “Tony Judt: The Last Public Intellectual?” Spiked. May 25, 2012. www.spiked-online.com/review_of_books/article/12486. The F.B. Eyes Digital Archive. Digital Humanities Workshop, Washington University in St. Louis. Accessed September 3, 2015. http://digital.wustl.edu/fbeyes/. 68

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Felski, Rita. Uses of Literature. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008. Giroux, Henry A. “Cultural Studies in Dark Times: Public Pedagogy and the Challenge of Neoliberalism.” Fast Capitalism 1, no. 2 (2005): 1–6. http://www .fastcapitalism.com/. Loofbourow, Lili, and Phillip Maciak. “Introduction: The Time of the Semipublic Intellectual.” PMLA 130, no. 2 (2015): 439–445. Maxwell, William J. F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015. Posner, Richard A. Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction Is about You.” In Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, 1–37. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997. US Federal Bureau of Investigation. James Baldwin file obtained under provisions of the Freedom of Information Act. Assorted documents dated [?] Oct. 1958 to 20 Feb. 1974. Internal case file no. 62–108763. ——. Richard Wright file obtained under provisions of the Freedom of Information Act. Assorted documents dated 9 Dec. 1942 to 9 May 1963. Internal case file no. 100–157464.

William J. Maxwell is Professor of English and African and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. He is author of F.B. Eyes and New Negro, Old Left, and editor of Claude McKay’s Complete Poems and the forthcoming James Baldwin: The FBI File.

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3

STRATIGRAPHIC FORM: SCIENCE FICTIONS OF THE PRESENT

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On Nerds and Reading Nerdily In the spirit of the other chapters in this volume, I’m interested in exploring what it might mean to read “nerdily,” and to think about the possibly productive results that might result from such reading. The object of my attention, John McPhee’s Annals of the Former World, could certainly be described as an exemplary work of nerd-like obsession, one painstakingly pieced together over the course of twenty years and incorporating four separate volumes.1 But I am less interested in qualifying McPhee as a nerd than I am in articulating how my encounter with McPhee’s text has provided unexpectedly insightful new ways to rethink and reframe my own nerdy obsessions, namely, science fiction, geology, and time travel. In other words, while this chapter charts two levels of obsession—McPhee’s attention to the history of geology, and my attention to McPhee’s resultant text—I want to decouple them and concentrate almost exclusively on what the former yields to the latter, particularly in terms of how this encounter requires or even produces new reading practices. In short, in this chapter I’m going to perform a nerd reading of John McPhee’s Annals as a science fictional text about geology as time travel—three somewhat nerdy topics—and in so doing, propose that the text is also very much about race, and thus might be of serious interest to critics interested in Asian American literature. 70

Before getting to the McPhee, though, a somewhat lengthy detour is necessary. Insofar as I’ve just proposed an activity called reading nerdily, I should at least first frame more thoroughly why the figure of the nerd might prove useful for clarifying both the stakes of this project specifically and the broader goals of contemporary intellectual inquiry in academic practice. Central to this discussion is my belief that despite the commonplace representation of academics as a boringly familiar type of nerd, academics are at once too nerdy and not nerdy enough. Paradoxically, illustrating this point requires wielding the nerdiest of weapons in the academic’s arsenal of hoary rhetorical gestures. I refer, of course, to the strategy of referencing the Oxford English Dictionary to define an argument’s key term, namely, as the OED reminds us, a “nerd” is “an insignificant, foolish, or socially inept person; a person who is boringly conventional or studious. Now also: spec. a person who pursues an unfashionable or highly technical interest with obsessive or exclusive dedication.”2 Most salient here is how the first definition pertains to persons, the second to actions (“a person who pursues”); the first qualifies what a nerd is, the second, what a nerd does. Note, too, how the second definition does not enlist the first’s qualifying adjectives: what is “unfashionable” in this case is not the person, but the interest, which incidentally might explain why these days it’s so fashionable to be unfashionable. If, as the phrase “now also” implies, the full definition provides a link between past and present identifications of the nerd, that link is troubled by the present’s recasting of those identifications in positive rather than negative terms. Indeed, the definition seems to mirror structurally the historic sociocultural transformation through which the second denotation comes to overwrite, rather than supplement, the first. Most simply put, it appears that in our contemporary moment the label “nerd” leads not to ostracism but to reward, a point I am neither Stratigraphic Form

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the first nor the only one to make. Less apparent but of equal import is the fact that the term now primarily characterizes an act, rather than a subject: nerds are nerds because of what they do, not because of who they are. The new nerd, in other words, is a specialist par excellence, and rewarded for being so. To study something obsessively was, at some point in the recent past, to open oneself to charges of an unproductive and even antisocial myopia. To do so today is to risk little and potentially gain plenty, precisely because this very same mode of technical, obsessive inquiry has become the primary vehicle through which professional knowledge production itself takes form and becomes visible. It’s because of this shift, I think, that the terms of social disapprobation in the earliest definition of nerd all but drop away in the later. But also displaced in this transformation are the kinds of intellectual investment with which nerds were once associated, and more importantly, the risks one took in their pursuit. If nerds are indeed the newly ascendant sociocultural class, what does one risk in joining the tide? Why would one not want to be a nerd? The important question to ask, in my view, is not how nerds leapt from a place of social ineptitude to a position of social power, but what new forms of sociality arise when obsessive and even myopic specialization comes to characterize aptitude instead of ineptitude. In a sense, we are all specialists now; at issue is not if you’re a nerd, but what kind of nerd you are, and the forms of affiliation resulting thereof. It’s for this reason that I earlier asserted that academics are both too nerdy and not nerdy enough, a point to which I can now finally return. Since I obviously cannot speak for all of academia, let me illustrate the first idea, that academics are too nerdy, with a simple but hopefully illustrative personal example: I work on American literature, with an emphasis on Asian American fiction and poetry. With this statement, I note my particular area of expertise. Less obviously, I also invoke an entire social 72

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and material network through which this expertise becomes affirmed and rewarded. This network determines, to a remarkable degree, the field of my intellectual investment and the subjects and objects that populate it; the types of people I both want to know and, at times, need to know, and the conditions under which these two categories overlap or fail to; the cities I’m able to visit, in the form of conferences and conventions, and the kinds of things I do once I’m there; and so on. In other words, what I do adheres perfectly to what defines nerdiness in our contemporary moment. It is not antisocial, but supremely sociable: I risk more by not attending highly specialized conference proceedings, mingling with experts, and reading very selectively the books written by those experts as well as the books selectively read by those experts. This suggests that sociality in the profession produces something like an organizational and spatial distribution of disciplinary territories, defined ostensibly by subject but in fact representing coalescent expertise. One way to characterize the academic profession would thus be to describe it as a constellation populated with clusters of separate experts, where the parameters of separation define the first conditions of sociality. I would go even further by proposing that this distribution is increasingly hyperspecific, and partitions disciplines into ever more granular accretions of sub- and sub-sub-specialties, that is, Asian American literature, aesthetic form, techno- culture, science fiction, temporality, and more. This sociality is regulative, reinvigorating the structure of disciplinarity by reproducing modes of belonging at both the macro and micro levels of the profession. While the stereotypical tweediness of academics has perhaps remained unchanged, what is distinctive now is the terrain of sociality in relation to the risks and rewards involved in the dedicated pursuit of “merely” academic interests. For academics to be more nerdy, in this context, is to reactivate the sense of peril or risk that animated earlier incarnations of nerdhood, Stratigraphic Form

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even if, in the larger scheme of things, the peril appears minimal or trifling. It is to acknowledge that there is something productive about the asocial, the unprofessional, and the undisciplined, and to assert that the frames of sociality that shape the profession might be worth interrogating and occasionally disordering. I am not advocating for a lazy intellectual dilettantism or an uncritical antidisciplinarity, nor is this a paean to the oft-romanticized image of academics past as bookishly inquisitive generalists with no worldly ambition. If the academic profession these days is indeed a network of distributed expertise, there are clearly positive elements to this selective myopia, one of which is the establishment of hitherto unrepresented subdisciplines, such as Asian American literary criticism. But I do want to spend some time investigating how, given the intense hyperspecialization characterizing a great deal of contemporary academic life, there may be something liberating in sidestepping orthodox disciplinary sociality and ignoring, if only momentarily, those sociable, associative frames that can become stifling, even as they are often professionally rewarded. It is in this spirit that I want to read John McPhee nerdily, and to illustrate, in performing this reading, how the introduction of an asocial object into the field of Asian American literary criticism leads to a unexpected widening of its myopic scope, even if only by a few degrees. As I suggested earlier, the goal here is less to establish why or how John McPhee is a nerd, and more to articulate how McPhee’s text maps onto a larger set of questions I’ve long held regarding form, temporality, Asian futures, and Asian pasts. As such, consider this chapter an attempt to enact Colleen Lye’s recent call for a “historical formalism” that could “put form to work in theorizing what is and has been Asian American literature.” As Lye argues: “Investigating the historicity of the Asian American subject will require, as a first step, disaggregating the Asian 74

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American subject from any one of the customary textual categories from which it is so often adduced: author narrator, character, thematic subject matter, and less often, reception and interpretive community. We might conceive of the Asian American subject as the product of the articulation of the links between two or more of these textual categories.”3 John McPhee’s work, I suggest, is about as disaggregated and disarticulated as one can get from the Asian American subject even at its most loosely defined. And while my yoking together of McPhee and Asian American literature began as an experiment in unruly aggregation, the end result recasts the act of aggregation itself as an integral component of an aesthetic form that couples discussions of geology to productions of race; in what follows, the first two sections will focus primarily on the former, while the final will concentrate on the latter. On Rocks and Time Travel It may surprise you to hear, but John McPhee’s Annals is a book not much discussed by critics of science fiction. I myself only stumbled upon it because I was working on an essay about William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine and wanted to learn a little something about the history of geology.4 McPhee’s tome, it turned out, provided more than a little something: what I discovered, in a moment of felicitous synapsis, is that when John McPhee writes about geology, he’s also writing science fiction. In other words, the book is as much about time travel as it is about rocks. Thus, while Annals of the Former World’s general subject is the plate-tectonics revolution and the ripple effect it had on the larger field of geology, the text’s primary discursive task, I suggest, is to give form to an abstract phenomenon: to imagine, as keenly as possible, the materialization of time as a four-dimensional Stratigraphic Form

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object. If you will forgive the pun, here is a particularly concrete example, in which McPhee is describing Interstate 80 as it descends westward into Pennsylvania’s Nittany Valley: To the immediate west . . . we would be going down in time and predictably would descend in space to a Cambro-Ordovician carbonate valley, which is what happened, as the road fell away bending left and down into Nittany Valley. . . . Its strata dipped deeply west. The rock had bent again, and again we were moving upward through history. In a dozen miles of ever younger rock, we climbed through the Paleozoic era almost from beginning to end. We went up through time at least three hundred million years and up through the country more than a thousand vertical feet. (244)

McPhee is clearly not suggesting that one can physically climb up and down through time, despite the wonderful certainty of the phrase “which is what happened.” But neither does the text refrain from imaginatively, even obsessively, staging and restaging this type of movement (McPhee’s reliance on the conditional “would” in the passage cited above recurs with noticeable frequency throughout the text).5 What most interests me here is the way that McPhee’s language so perfectly adheres figuratively to the contours of the material at hand, with its reliance on tropes of layering, accretion, and traversal. For example, note how the verbs conflate physical with imaginative movement: “moving” through “history,” “we climbed through the Paleozoic era almost from beginning to end.” Note, too, how the passage’s concluding parallelism literally embeds time in the physical earth: “up through time” becoming the equivalent of “up through the country.” Of course, one does not move “up” or “down” through time even if one does so through space; one does not enter into, traverse, or bridge times, even if one is an excellent reader of rocks. What’s most striking 76

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about McPhee’s language here is precisely its seeming “naturalness,” and how the figurative imagery seems to magically transform into literal description. By this, I mean to suggest that the figuration is both imaginary, since no one can travel through time, and oddly actual, insofar as the earth’s strata present a visual record of layers of time in time. But which, one wonders, comes first? Is McPhee merely describing, in highly imaginative terms, that which simply exists? Or does McPhee’s language materialize and give form to that which is largely discursive? Does the earth speak, or do we speak for it? I am admittedly ill-equipped to conduct a debate about the nature and/or reality of time. But I do think it’s reasonable to point out that one of the remarkable effects of McPhee’s impeccably precise diction is the way it proposes, confirms, and enacts qualities about time that are not at all easily quantified. For instance, the passage imagines that time can be mapped onto discrete, identifiable layers, and that long durations of time represent a material accretion of those layers. In fact, to go one step further, the passage actually conflates layers of time with layers of earth, such that it produces temporality as a surprisingly durable matter. Enlivening the passage’s figurative language, then, is the underlying formal unity of those figurations, which might appropriately be termed “stratigraphic.” Indeed, most striking about McPhee’s geologic time travel is how it deploys an aesthetic form that both dramatizes and renders “natural” the process wherein time “appears” as material. It’s worth emphasizing that this is a pretty science fictional conceit indeed. It would be akin to saying, for instance, that when one looks at a book printed in 1962 bookended by two others printed in 2003 and 1974, one is not looking at three objects in the present moment that have existed for differing lengths of time but three slices of time itself: 2003, 1962, 1974, each of which can be picked up and moved around. It’s as if, in McPhee’s science fiction, you don’t have to travel through time Stratigraphic Form

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because time travels to you, a concept subtly reiterated in the following passage: Suppose you were to find in a spacious loft a whale-oil lamp of pressed lead glass. What would you think, know, guess, and wonder about the origin and travels of that lamp? And suppose you were to find near it a Joseph Meeks laminated-rosewood chair, and an English silver porringer and stand, and an eight-lobed dish with birds in a flowering thicket. It is possible that you would not immediately think 1850, 1833, 1662, and 1620. . . . Stratigraphically, they are out of order. How did that happen? . . . Sort that out. . . . Tell each story backward through shifting space to differing points in time. . . . Naturally, you can’t do that—not in a single reconnaissance.6

There are several things worth noting here. The first is that stratigraphic form need not describe strata to achieve its effects. Indeed, despite the obvious confusion of objects upon which the passage’s central figuration depends—by which I mean not only that the objects are confused and disordered, but that suddenly human-made objects are enlisted as stand-ins for rocks—the formal effects are similar: time, here, is rendered materially durable, even graspable. Second, imagining time as a materially durable object renders the present a disordered and chaotic temporality, a time “out of order,” into which other objects of time intrude and interrupt. Thus, while one of the central effects of stratigraphic form is the materialization of time, the crucial function of the form’s deployment is to reorder time into an appropriately aggregated temporality. Indeed, it is this function that enables the detachment of stratigraphy as content from stratigraphic form, and accounts for the form’s untethered mobility. One might wonder, too, about McPhee’s interesting choice of the word “naturally” to close the passage’s argument: if this can’t be done 78

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naturally, how can it be done? I’ll take up the question of “natural” temporal ordering in more detail in the sections that follow. For now, let me highlight the very minor-key note of indeterminacy underwriting the phrases “each story,” “shifting space,” and “differing points in time.” It is through this uncertainty that a second science-fictional element appears, despite McPhee’s overall confidence that a comprehensive ordering is ultimately possible: the existence of alternate histories and possible futures. Indeed, reflected in the sentence’s semiconcession that “you can’t do that—not in a single reconnaissance” is an unspoken anxiety about the ultimate certitude of any act of temporal ordering. Insofar as stratigraphy is a science that attempts to visualize what is not, in fact, materially possible to see—the totality of all time, in a nutshell—it does so only through a kind of speculative imagination.7 It’s not science fiction, quite, but it’s certainly science fictional. To revise the example I used earlier, it would be as if one were asked to order in temporal sequence not just three books but every single book ever published, anytime, anywhere, despite the unhappy truth that a vast number of them are inaccessible. That the task is impossible is less significant here than the fact that, given its impossibility, the end-goal becomes an argument over the probable, not the provable. Indeed, insofar as the speculative is an integral component of the science, the particular form deployed in this science fictional imagination is necessarily ideological, representing an intense contestation over how to appropriately synchronize the ever-shifting present with its multiple potential pasts. On Time and/as Order For fans of science fiction, and particularly those narratives that feature some form of time travel, that last claim above might seem familiar, as it evokes a trope nearly impossible to avoid in such narratives: “Who Stratigraphic Form

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controls the timeline controls the world.” I want to suggest here that this adage is quite literally true if we take it to describe the discursive function of what I’ve been calling stratigraphic form. Here, it’s important to reemphasize that this function is embedded in the form, and need not rely on any particular content. In other words, what stratigraphic form describes is a process that produces, rather than “represents,” temporal frames: it enables a proposition about time and how to order it. We might roughly describe the process like this: given any two points of space-time describing a limited four-dimensional space, how one plots a path from start-point to end-point recursively reframes the entirety of the space into a hitherto unrecognized new temporality. It is thus to propose that 1815 and 2015 represent not a unidirectional span of 200 years, but a spatial-temporal grid in which any number of alternate layered aggregations of space-time could potentially connect 1815 to 2015, each resulting in a different version of the framing grid itself. And as science fictional as this may sound, it is precisely the deployment of stratigraphic form in this manner that connects McPhee’s Annals to numerous other critical works of philosophy, criticism, and history, all of which, it’s worth noting, are generally treated as nonfictions, rather than science fictions. In this regard, McPhee’s text resonates with recent critical work on queer temporalities, alternate or emergent modernities, and alternative histories, in ways both surprising and uncanny. To illustrate this, I suggest, requires placing these texts in stratigraphic relation to one another, positioning McPhee’s work as an object in a four-dimensional stratigraphic field organized not by subject or discipline, but by the spatial-temporal duration of stratigraphic form itself. Reading stratigraphic form stratigraphically, so to speak, produces an unexpected alternate temporality that positions Annals as just one point on a timeline conjoining a seemingly disparate set of texts, none of which are 80

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actually about geology, but all of which rely on stratigraphic form. This widespread recurrence of stratigraphic form across multiple disciplines, representing multiple methodologies, suggests then that what’s being adopted is less the original science that initially gave rise to the form and more the form’s enablement of an imaginative proliferation of competing temporalities. Indeed, central to this argument is the fact that the enlistment of stratigraphic form paradoxically requires neither any special knowledge of or even explicit reference to stratigraphy or geology, yet nonetheless relies heavily on that science’s presumed “natural” facticity. For the sake of economy, let me quickly cite a few examples without much commentary. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari model their influential and oft-cited concept of de- and reterritorialization not on geographic territory, but on geologic movement: “The strata are continually being shaken by phenomena of cracking and rupture . . . everywhere there arise simultaneous accelerations and blockages, comparative speeds, differences in deterritorialization creating relative fields of reterritorialization.”8 Likewise, while Manual De Landa suggests that one of the central tasks in his A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History is to “allow physics to infiltrate human history,” what goes by the name “physics” very much resembles geology: “From the point of view of energetic and catalytic flows, human societies are very much like lava flows; and human-made structures (mineralized cities and institutions) are very much like mountains and rocks: accumulations of materials hardened and shaped by historical processes.”9 Wai Chee Dimock proposes a theory of the “deep time” of American literature, the term providing “a set of longitudinal frames, at once projective and recessional, with input going both ways, and binding continents and millennia into many loops of relations, a densely interactive fabric” in which “American literature emerges with a much longer Stratigraphic Form

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history than one might think.”10 Elizabeth Freeman theorizes a similar projective recession for apparently outdated feminisms in terms of a resistant “temporal drag” against the strictures of “chrononormativity”: “not the time of childhood but geologic time, the time of feminism and other dinosaurs, of fossilized icons and sedimented layers of meaning.”11 Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus have recently argued for what they call “surface reading,” in which critics attend more carefully to the “surface” of a text, what is “evident, perceptible, apprehensible . . . what is neither hidden nor hiding; what, in the geometrical sense, has length and breadth but no thickness, and therefore covers no depth.”12 This focus, in their view, “assumes that texts can reveal their own truths because texts meditate themselves; what we think theory brings to texts (form, structure, meaning) is already present in them.”13 How something with “no thickness” or “depth” can have anything “in” it is a question Best and Marcus leave unanswered—but one to which I will return momentarily. First let me provide one last example from an adjacent but not overlapping field. David Christian equates what he calls “big history” with modern creation myths, arguing that they “offer answers to universal questions at many different scales,” an illustrative image of which is “the Ptolemaic vision of the universe, with its many concentric shells. At the center are those trying to understand. At the outer edge is a totality of some kind . . . in between are entities that exist at differential chronological, spatial, and mythic scales.”14 I don’t think it a stretch to suggest that what Christian is imagining here is a closely aligned with the metaphor of surface and depth that animates the work of Best and Marcus. What is distinct about each approach seems to me less interesting than what unites them. Indeed, while Christian’s “big history” appears to undertake precisely the opposite kind of reading for which Best and Marcus advocate, the stratigraphic form that gives shape to the method is in fact quite apposite. 82

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Despite obvious differences in focus and target, these disparate critical works are united in their enlistment of stratigraphic form as a way to visualize different and distinct temporal frames. The fact that the science of geology need be neither interrogated nor historicized is, I suggest, not corollary to this act, but central to it. In this sense, uniting these critical approaches is not only the obvious deployment of stratigraphic form—the accumulations of materials, the longitudinal frames, the sedimented layers of meaning, the many concentric shells—but also the less obvious fact that each such deployment presumes the stability of a form needing little or no supporting content. More simply put, each of the critics mentioned here evokes stratigraphy as figure, without needing reference to geology as fact. Dimock’s deep time would look to a geologist remarkably shallow; Best and Marcus discuss, at length, the dialectic of surface versus depth, but do not much explore why or how the notion of depth becomes naturally associated with both physical and metaphysical interiority. The point here isn’t that these critics misunderstand or misrepresent what stratigraphy “really is.” Nor do I mean to rather simplistically imply that these texts are all better read as speculative fictions. Instead, most salient here is how the discursive portability of stratigraphic form presumes a facticity that attributes to it an artificial “emptiness.” Paradoxically, then, it is the strange evacuated facticity of stratigraphy from stratigraphic form that authorizes its utility as a flexibly portable figuration, even as it is the imaginative figuration of time (geologists “seeing” what cannot be seen) that discursively underwrites the form’s consistent reproducibility. In this sense, regardless of how it’s “filled,” stratigraphic form is a necessarily contradictory sign, always signifying something else and itself: it is at once a highly fluid and extremely rigid form. While it can flexibly “contain” a multitude of distinct strata, from American literary texts and their surfaces to molar and molecular de- or Stratigraphic Form

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reterritorializations to outdated feminisms, it does so only through a reproduction of the formal strictures that those various strata are mobilized to disrupt. Indeed, if, in essence, the deployment of stratigraphic form signals an attempt to disorder temporality by reordering it anew, it does so only by overlooking the totalizing power of the form itself. What good does it do to control the timeline, if the ideological function of form as a “naturally” occurring reproductive ordering remains unchallenged? On Projective and/or Protective Futures In this concluding section I’d like to delineate more clearly one specific link between ideology and form that served as the previous section’s exclamatory interrogative finale. Briefly put: if stratigraphic form underwrites the imaginative act of temporal (re)ordering, it more problematically does so with the imaginative act of racial (re)ordering as well. The most efficient way to dramatize this is to mentally replace, in any of the examples of stratigraphic form thus far discussed, the nonhuman objects with racial subjects, and to envision those racial subjects as representing discrete layers of time. Far from an absurd proposition, this exercise should bring into sharp focus how predictable and familiar this method is for both envisioning and maintaining hierarchies of racial difference. But it is precisely the familiar repetitiveness of this racial-temporal linkage that bears further investigation: why, and for what purpose, is racial difference so often mapped onto temporal scales? One possible answer, I suggest, is that race, like time, is “stratigraphically” produced as a durable materiality. Moreover, the adoption of stratigraphic form to characterize race reveals a critical function of the form not fully articulated but implicit in each of the examples described above: in speculatively reordering the temporal axes of multiple pasts to 84

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multiple presents, stratigraphic form also aligns those multiple presents with an array of possible and possibly threatening futures, from which the present must be either projected into or protected from. Let me refine the first point, that race is stratigraphically produced, by amending a statement I made earlier: when John McPhee writes about race, he’s also writing science fiction. In other words, Annals is a book as much about race as it is about rocks. More specifically, the text consistently racializes Native Americans as subjects irrevocably “past,” even as it identifies that past as originary proof of the inevitability of the present. Here’s one such example, in which McPhee quite literally fossilizes Native Americans: Absorbing the valley scene . . . the newly plowed fields where arrowheads appear in the spring, I remarked that we had entered the dominion of the Minsi, the northernmost band of the Lenape. They came into the region toward the dawn of Holocene time and lost claim to it in the beginnings of the Age of Washington. Like index fossils, they now represent this distinct historical stratum. . . . The Minisink [valley] is a world of corn shocks and islands and valley mists, of trout streams and bears, today. Especially in New Jersey, it has not been mistreated, and, with respect to the epoch of the Minsi, geologically it is the same. (188)

Setting aside the grave historical omission encapsulated in the assertion that the Lenape “lost claim to” the Minisink Valley, as well as the moral evasiveness of the claim that the valley “has not been mistreated” (but the Lenape have?), most intriguing about this passage is its contrapuntal oscillation between past/present times and past/present races. This occurs at the level of both diction and imagery. In terms of diction, note how the passage starts in the present (“absorbing,” “appear”), shifts to the past (“they came”), and then emphatically concludes in the present (“is today,” “is the same”). But notice too how, despite this shift to Stratigraphic Form

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present tense, the imagery collapses these poles into a single stratum, refuting the semantic division of past and present. Arrowheads, index fossils, and even the valley itself emerge as emblems of a racial past that problematically disrupts the Edenic present, a tension perfectly captured by the passage’s conclusion: “with respect to the epoch of the Minsi, geologically it is the same.” McPhee, typically so attentive to the effects of style, seems here ironically oblivious to the irony of the double entendre activated by the phrase “with respect to”: what is worthy of respect here is, bluntly speaking, geology without people. And therein, I think, lies the problem: in order to support stratigraphy’s ultimate aim of mapping the totality of deep time, stratigraphic form must be necessarily scalar, reproducible on both micro- and macrocosmic scales. But on the scale of deep time it is only the microcosmic present to which we have access and, moreover, to which such access matters. I invoke this term deliberately, to indicate how, in the example above, the material signs of racial difference do more than conflate racial and spatial-temporal orders: they register an anxiety about how those orders might be discursively maintained when what is supposedly past has a rightful but unfulfilled material claim on the present. While the Lenape may have “lost claim” to the Minisink Valley, current members of the Lenape tribe might be surprised to find that they’ve been written out of the present entirely—nowhere in this long paragraph, which goes on for much longer than I’ve quoted here, does McPhee acknowledge their existence. But what can be buried can be suddenly unearthed. As the arrowheads and index fossils uncannily evoke, the “anachronistic” emergence of a past material claim on the present threateningly derails the ideological investment in the specific timeline of modernity and progress that the passage discursively affirms. 86

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A similar disorder threatens to erupt in McPhee’s later discussion of the California Gold Rush and its effects on the geology of that region. This disorder occurs across two key passages united in their liberal use of the second-person pronoun “you”; read together, they present another compelling example of how race is produced stratigraphically. Put in the context of the excerpt above, though, these passages also indicate more squarely how stratigraphic form is protective and what, precisely, the present needs protection from. I will elaborate on this idea momentarily. The passages are as follows: the first describes how a geologist might see the Sierra Nevada mountains; the second, how a gold miner might see the other gold miners around him: Climbing the steep east face of the mountains, you see granite and more granite and andesite capping the granite. So far so comprehensible. But before you have crossed the range you have seen rock of such varied type, age, and provenance that time itself becomes nervous—Pliocene, Miocene, Eocene non-marine, Jurassic here, Triassic there. . . . You cannot be expected, just by looking at it, to fit it all together in mobile space and sequential time. (442) You wear a flannel shirt. . . . You wear wool trousers, heavy leather boots, and a soft hat. . . . You carry a pistol. Not everyone resembles you. There are miners in top hats, miners in panama hats, miners in sombreros, and French miners in berets. . . . There are miners in fringed buckskin, miners in brocaded vests, miners working claims in dress pumps. . . . There are numerous Indians, who are essentially naked. There are many black miners, all of them free. (465–466)

There’s much to say about these passages, but I will centralize my discussion on just two phrases, “time itself becomes nervous” and “you carry a pistol,” to highlight how they represent parallel yet distinct anxieties Stratigraphic Form

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about stratigraphic/racial order. These anxieties can be traced in the curious inverted equivalence that occurs across the passages: time becomes nervous in the first passage because the strata in view cannot be ordered, while in the second you become nervous—“you carry a pistol”—because of the presence of racial difference. But notice how, in this inversion, race is also spatial-temporal, materialized as asynchronous modes of fashion signifying discontiguous places of origin: top hats, panamas hats, sombreros and fringed buckskin, brocaded vests and dress pumps, nakedness. Of crucial importance, then, is how the second passage, unlike the first, positions the reader in the seat of national whiteness: “you” are obviously not black, or Indian, or even French. Uniting all three of the passages cited above then is an anxiety about how a past racial disorder might represent a potential future threat to the maintenance of present-day racialized spatial-temporal orders. It is this threat that marks stratigraphic form as an ideologically protective enterprise, one that simultaneously projects the future perfection of the present and protects the present from future disorder. It speculatively confirms the continuous centrality of the “you” around which other times and races are ordered; it buries the material inequalities that support the “natural” visibility of a selectively limited stratigraphic ordering; it validates the racist ideologies upon which narratives of national progress and racial-temporal modernity rely, narratives for which “you” stand as synecdoche. Despite the disorder and nervousness of the passages above, Annals consistently, if anxiously, reconfirms that what is now provisional will be, in the future, absolute. To recall a quote from earlier: “Naturally, you can’t do that— not in a single reconnaissance” (443), or, if not now, then soon. But will soon be soon enough? Not if the Chinese have any say in the matter. An unusual place to conclude, I concede, but of unusual relevance as well to the entire 88

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discussion thus far. In order to explain why this is so requires a bit of time travel, looping us back to this chapter’s opening set of claims, for it is here that reading McPhee nerdily proves unexpectedly useful for critics of Asian American literature. For common to both John McPhee and Asian American literary criticism is a shared investment in the trope of Asians as a menacing horde as one of the essential strategies deployed in the racialization of Asians in America. And while this investment seeks, for McPhee and Asian Americanists, quite different returns, what Annals helps to clarify is how this trope, too, relies on stratigraphic form. Indeed, somewhat comically, in McPhee the Chinese appear as a horde of geologists literally knocking at door: Better to be a loser in the United States, [Anita Harris, a prominent American geologist] thought, than to be a geological peasant in China. There are four hundred thousand people in the Chinese Geological Survey. . . . “If they want to see exposed rock, they don’t depend on streambanks and roadcuts, as we do. If an important Chinese geologist wants to see a section of rock the peasants dig out a mountainside.” (175) Oil companies have continued to beat the path to [Anita’s] door, as have oil geologists from every continent but Antarctica, including large delegations from the Chinese Geological Survey. (181)

As with the evocation of the Lenape, the Chinese here are purely symbolic subjects, appearing only a handful of times in McPhee’s nearly 700-page tome. But how they appear is stratigraphically distinct: if the Native Americans symbolize a potentially irruptive past, the Chinese signal a potentially irruptive future. It’s the phrase “geological peasant,” evasively attributed to Anita Harris’s “thought,” that most effectively captures the anxiety expressed here. For if those “four hundred thousand” Chinese geologists are, for now, an anonymous mass, they Stratigraphic Form

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also represent an inappropriately deordered modernity in which the geological peasant can do en masse what only nature (“streambanks”) and machines (“roadcuts”) can do in America: reshape the earth and remap earth’s time at will. Evoked here, then, is an unsettling future modernity in which the Chinese, no longer strata at the outer edges of a racialized spatial-temporal order, become central to and determinative of it: a modernity that de- and restratifies the Anita Harrises of the present as the geological peasants of the future. Admittedly, one need not read John McPhee to see this trope in action: it underwrites numerous contemporary and historical representations of China, and more generally Asia, across a multitude of cultural productions. But to see it in McPhee’s Annals is to open up several intriguing possibilities. First, it suggests as a stratigraphic form, race is at once fluidly portable and structurally rigid, capacious enough to “contain” multiple strata but also always signifying as form. Race, in this sense, is necessarily a relational grid that posits multiple subjects in spatial-temporal order. Second, it implies that stratigraphic forms are discursively deployed to reproduce race even or especially in texts that are not apparently about race at all, for example, books on the science of geology, “apparently” being the operative word here. Indeed, as in the McPhee, it is precisely the apparent superficiality of its engagements with race that so well masks the consistently problematic and equivocating position it takes on the not inconsequential material effects of American racism. And third, it proposes that in order to mount any serious challenge to these resultant material effects it is not enough to simply adopt stratigraphic form—one must learn how to read the form against itself, as I’ve tried to do with the McPhee. One must read, in other words, both more nerdily, with an obsessive attention to a form that inheres in objects well outside the purview of disciplinary conventions, and less nerdily, with an intentional if momentary disregard for 90

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how those conventions might, or more importantly might not, incorporate these asocial objects.

Notes 1. Annals of the Former World collects together four books initially published separately: Basin and Range, In Suspect Terrain, Rising from the Plains, Assembling California, adding a fifth, Crossing the Craton. McPhee, Annals of the Former World, 6. All further references will use the abbreviation Annals and will cite page numbers in parentheses. 2. Oxford English Dictionary, online ed., s.v. “nerd,” accessed June 27, 2016, http:// www.oed.com.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/view/Entry/126165?redirectedFrom=nerd&. 3. Lye, “Racial Form,” 95–96. 4. Gibson and Sterling, The Difference Engine. For the resultant essay see Liu, “Queer Excavations,” 64–75. 5. McPhee, The Difference Engine, 28–30, 92–95, 171, 190–91, 199–200, 283–84. 6. Ibid., 433. 7. A theme that runs throughout McPhee’s text, in fact: “Geologists, in their all but close conversation, inhabit scenes that no one ever saw” (64); “a space so great that you can still stand on a hilltop and see not only what Jim Bridger saw but also— through dimming tracts of time—what no one saw” (404); “Like the early cartographers piecing together the face of the globe, geologists and geophysicists are now trying to map places that no human being will ever see” (503). 8. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 55. 9. De Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, 15, 55, emphasis added. 10. Dimock, Through Other Continents, 3–4, emphasis added. 11. Freeman, Time Binds, 3, 85; emphasis added. 12. Best and Marcus, “Surface Reading,” 9. 13. Ibid., 11, emphasis added. 14. Christian, Maps of Time, 6, emphasis added.

Bibliography Best, Stephen, and Sharon Marcus. “Surface Reading: An Introduction.” Representations 108, no. 1 (2009): 1–21. Stratigraphic Form

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Christian, David. Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. De Landa, Manuel. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. New York: Zone Books, 1997. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Dimock, Wai Chee. Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Gibson, William, and Bruce Sterling. The Difference Engine. New York: Bantam Books, 1991. Liu, Warren. “Queer Excavations: Technology, Temporality, Race.” In TechnoOrientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media, edited by David S. Roh, Betsy Huang, and Greta A. Niu, 64–75. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015. Lye, Colleen. “Racial Form.” Representations 104, no. 1 (2008): 95–6. McPhee, John. Annals of the Former World. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.

Warren Liu is Associate Professor of English at Scripps College, where he teaches courses in American literature and creative writing.

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OBSESSION, PATHOLOGY, AND JUSTICE: NERDS, BODIES, WINSOR MCCAY, AND THE 1893 CHICAGO FAIR

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nathan l. grant Shortly before 1900, the growing ability of the weekly newspaper comic strip to bend the imagery of the everyday soon made it a staple of modern American life, as was the case with film. Beginning in 1895, Richard Outcault’s Sunday strip The Yellow Kid, depicting a bald, barefoot boy who, through the solecisms printed on his shirt, eventually helped to sell the idea of war with Spain to Americans, appeared in both William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, becoming wildly popular toward the end of the century. With his class-bound abuses of English grammar and spelling, the Yellow Kid was like so many cartoon characters before him, an Everyboy scrapping and subsisting along the lowest rungs of American society. Outcault’s Hogan’s Alley, appearing the same year, again depicted New York’s poorer children, and another strip featuring his picaresque black character Poor Lil’ Mose appeared in 1901 with marginal success, but his substitution of Mose with white, middle-class, and mostly dandyish Buster Brown in 1902 was hugely successful and remained so even late into the twentieth century, particularly through its use as a means of selling children’s shoes and apparel.1 In this measure, the young, fey male type not only became a liminal representation for white male development of American fortune, but also fulfilled the promise of such liminality through its enduring effectiveness as a symbol of American capitalism. As there was little movement away from the picaresque 93

following Outcault’s Buster Brown, it became apparent that this dandyesque hero of the Sunday comics would more consistently depict the white American male as the bold scion of his class and follow his development into their adulthood; the eternal child would mature through the aspirations of his followers. By far, however, it was the innovative illustrator Winsor McCay whose work would capture the spectacular allure of capitalism for white American readers and usher in an enduring dreamscape of popular and intellectual enchantment alike. In 1905 McCay began the series Little Nemo in Slumberland in James Gordon Bennett Jr.’s New York Herald, a strip that quickly became so immensely popular that Hearst, as he had done with Outcault a few years before, contracted McCay exclusively for the Journal. McCay’s style, use of color, sense of proportion, and corresponding risk of perspective was a tremendous influence on later cartoonists, from George Herriman to Will Eisner, from Art Spiegelman to Robert Crumb, from Walt Disney to Maurice Sendak. In many of these later instances one can find both countercultural critics of American consumer capitalism and the very scions of the capitalist imagination; in either case, though, the massive popularity and influence of McCay’s Little Nemo prefigures such cultural positionings in its phantasmagoric, oneiric vision of the American cultural imaginary approached from what might be considered a nerd’s-eye view. The term “nerd” was coined only much later to demarcate a social, socioeconomic, and even political obsessive who, in his self-protectiveness, clings tenaciously to his peculiar sense of science and mind. Yet in McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland we find a significant forebear for such tenaciousness, whose obsessions are marked by wonder and fascination toward the grandeur of American cultural majesty. In the nerd’s blossoming through the widely distributed medium of the newspaper comic strip, Little Nemo is critically important in this dimension because its alienation from the 94

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emerging “mainstream” of US consumer capitalism is marked by enchantment rather than awkwardness, flânerie rather than isolation. McKay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland proffered a model and a narrative for a new cultural vantage point from which the everyday reader could witness the spectacle of America’s modernizing capitalist landscape as a spectacle. The comic strip uses for many of its backgrounds the interiors of the buildings of the White City, the grandest pavilion of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.2 This fair, considered then and now the greatest of all, although mostly resembling American fairs before it, and since—Philadelphia in 1876, Buffalo in 1901, St. Louis in 1904, and several others in the West, South, and Southwest later in the twentieth century—promised the path to a fulfilling American destiny by engaging in the making of the modern through its commoditization. Earlier nineteenth-century European fairs similarly promised this path for Europe, and the American fairs thus owe their every expression of modernity and its structures to these. The Paris arcades of the 1820s had the earliest struggles with the modern, relying ineluctably upon blends with fragments of the past; for Walter Benjamin, the images of these fairs were “wish images,” especially in a Freudian sense. “In them,” Benjamin writes, “the collective seeks both to overcome and to transfigure the immaturity of the social product and the inadequacies of the social organization of production.” The arcade as theater of collective entertainment was the means of galvanizing wish fulfillment, of imagining the classless society and its world free of inadequacies, but the indissolubility of the past always thwarted this imagining. Even in his critique of the archeologist Karl Bötticher, who preferred a formal Hellenism in new expressions of architecture, Benjamin understood the difficulty of achieving the formal break between the hierarchies of the previous era and the imagined social and mechanistic perfection of an eternal cleanliness. “Empire,” Benjamin wrote in Obsession, Pathology, and Justice

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his stinging assessment of Bötticher, “is the style of revolutionary terrorism, for which the state is an end in itself.”3 For Benjamin, the insistence of a durable empire as a feature of the arcades, and later also of the larger, more encompassing fairs, ensured that the gleaming new world of the future would be fundamentally indistinguishable from the old. This became fertile ground for the obsessive as he became the aesthete of his age. His will to mastery, nurtured by the depths of his solitude and frustrated by the persistence of his melancholy (Trübsinn) directs his urge to power, but his desire toward such control often returns him only to an embrace of its already realized forms. The retention of empire as a means of envisioning utopia ensured for the nerd not a clean break with the past but rather a firm disquietude with the future. Although these were not felt realities for most fairgoers, we may now see them as having been the most poignant of the 1893 Chicago fair, and they were even more so than in the first American fair—the Centennial Exposition of 1876 in Philadelphia, during which the theme of ethnicity was designed to display a level of civil and national sophistication. Here, national hierarchies were more benignly determined through a classification scheme devised by eminent leaders in the sciences, as Robert Rydell writes, although not without due attention to American hegemony. Such hierarchies, in the collective interests of politics, science, and business, managed “the development and presentation of an ideology of progress that linked ideas about race to national and industrial growth.”4 The difference of the 1893 fair, however, lay in its fantastic preoccupation with the West’s discursive control of race, ethnicity, and gender, and was driven principally by the quintessentially American belief in its own exceptionalism. While nonwhites, including Africans, Native Americans, Indo-Chinese, and African Americans, were denigrated with the most gratuitously demeaning stereotypes along the fair’s Midway Plaisance—the long promenade that featured on each 96

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side the booths that housed and described the world’s subordinated groups—the end of the Midway featured the gleaming pavilions of the White City and its focal point, the Court of Honor, which housed the unmistakable physical and anthropological symbols of vigorous, masculine, Western, and particularly American, progress.5 The visual contrasts between the Midway exhibits and the White City were so stark as to aid any viewer in distinguishing the intended venue of reflected power and influence. While some fairgoers may have been skeptical of the accuracy of some of the Midway exhibits, the fair’s vitality depended on the white middle-class American male’s belief that he was the standard-bearer of the century’s new ethos. Frederic Ward Putnam, head of Harvard’s Peabody Museum of American Anthropology and Ethnology and director of the department orchestrating the exhibits, admonished the skeptics by emphasizing the exhibits’ significant anthropological value. Revealingly, writes Rydell, the fair’s Rand McNally guidebook “suggested that people visit the Midway and view the exhibits . . . only after having seen the edifices of modern civilization in the White City. There was a lesson to be learned from the apparent contrast.”6 In Letters of an Altrurian Traveller (1893–94), for all his erudition as well as for his unique perspective borne of his being not only foreign but also extraterrestrial, William Dean Howells’s thoughtful and courtly observer Aristides Homos, visiting the Chicago fair from the egalitarian planet Altruria, can do no more than look reproachfully at his earthly companion the banker’s insistence that Homos must prefer the White City to the Plaisance.7 The idea generated among designers and imbibed by fairgoers that in 1893 the Chicago fair was the American focus of modernism and the gravitational center of a technocracy being brought to bear on all things—society, race, sexuality, politics, power—both dominated the era and also became the field of possibility for the nerd in his nascent Obsession, Pathology, and Justice

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state. In this concentrated American space, there was the ineffable social tension with its own risk of self-caricature that the nerd seized in testing this new, and only presumably democratized, domain, this virtual center of a modernist universe: as Alexander Saxton remarks, despite Frederick Jackson Turner’s pronouncement of America’s having reached the farthest end of its continental expansion by 1890, “it was, after all, the 1893 Chicago fair that Howells’s interplanetary guest came to visit, not the vanishing frontier in the West.”8 Ironically too, it was Putnam’s assistant, a young Franz Boas not yet known as the famous opponent to scientific racism, who curated several of the numerous exhibits.9 “Hailed as a ‘great object lesson’ in anthropology by leading anthropologists,” Rydell recounts, “the Midway provided visitors with ethnological, scientific sanction for the American view of the nonwhite world as barbaric and childlike and gave a scientific basis to the racial blueprint for building a utopia.”10 But in this mapping of utopia, as William McFeely remarks, “the Chicago fair was a world gone sour.”11 Little Nemo’s oneiric background of the Chicago fair is at once the nerd’s field of play and arena of desire, but his most salient purchase is for power in the early twentieth century, where phantasms of utopia beckon but are nevertheless checked by an inglorious past. The strip’s typical story line involves young Nemo’s dreamy trips to the nether world Slumberland, where he attempts to meet the Princess. Many of Slumberland’s fairylike emissaries are charged with the task of overcoming Nemo’s little-boy reluctance and bringing this union about, which is a comedy that ostensibly suggests decorum in Sunday family fare, but on a deeper level also betrays Nemo’s lack of force in the world to which he is the presumptive heir. Nemo, appearing both dandyesque and boyish, coheres with what Gail Bederman describes as a frustrated and frustrating urge toward a new American manliness at the turn of the century. In the era of the American Centennial, from 1873 to 1896—which includes 98

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the year of the Columbian Exposition—several rounds of economic depression threatened independent entrepreneurship and thus self-sufficiency in the man with middle-class aspirations. What followed soon thereafter was a growth in consumer culture and the fostering of an identity in leisure. “Codes of manliness” demanded, however, that these men “must work hard and become economically independent”; the consumer culture’s ethos of pleasure and frivolity clashed with ideals of manly self-restraint, further undermining the potency of middle-class manliness. Such restraint was the element that separated the civilized man from the savage.12 Along this tension, this man of self-restraint was likely first an innocent boy who also possessed, perhaps as a limning of his masculine drive, a touch of boyhood mischief. The dandyish Nemo’s adventures in Slumberland—the vast landscape of his dreams—nearly always ended with a parent having to soothe him from his nightmare (such soothing taking place always within the interior of the home, but only after Nemo’s excursion through the deeper interior of the psyche) while admonishing him against continuing to eat the rich desserts just before bedtime that cause the nightmares in the first place. That dandyism, or rather its descriptive effects of softness, leisure, and insouciance, also corresponds to the idea of the nerd, the Narcissus at the crest of the American modernist wave. Nemo’s “exterior” world, already vast in the everyday life of the energetic child reader, is never seen by his audience. His rich interior life, however, is collected, arranged by his psyche as he struggles to control an environment that acts just beyond his efforts. He is the entertaining, split modern subject whose adventures possess all of the wonder of oneiric distortion. Racial and social others, already subdued, are generally smaller by comparison to Nemo himself, but large animals, the beasts yet to be conquered as they appear frame by frame in many dreams, can become progressively larger. Unlike the heroes of earlier comics, however—and despite the Obsession, Pathology, and Justice

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fact that Nemo is for many of his adventures in the baggy, cumbersome sleepwear of the period—he is not at all like Outcault’s barefoot and unkempt Yellow Kid, or the urchins of Hogan’s Alley. He is much more like their well-scrubbed counterpart, Buster Brown, who is often nattily appointed, but nevertheless retains his baby fat. In fact, it was McCay’s young son Robert—whose father, often living beyond his means, indulged his own tastes for fashionable clothing, good food, and fine wine—born and raised in relative ease, who became the inspiration for Nemo.13 In later developments of the strip, Nemo’s body, consonant with that of many of Slumberland’s male emissaries, can be seen to reflect health and vitality in its youth in ways consistent with the masculine ideal of the era, and driven by early physical culturists such as Bernarr MacFadden and Eugen Sandow. While made for children, but with wide appeal for adults of all ages, not only do Little Nemo’s settings serve as something of a Baedeker for Sigmund Freud’s 1900 opus The Interpretation of Dreams, but also, similarly, for Pierre Bourdieu, Nemo’s body and its evolving differentiation from femaleness is a function rooted not only in class, but more profoundly also in histories of masculinity and modernity. This feature of Nemo’s bodily development, to the extent that it represents the work necessary to become one’s own agent in the dominance of capital, is itself, via the physical culture of the period, “a historical unconscious, linked not to a biological or psychological nature, like the difference between the sexes according to psychoanalysis, but to a specifically historical labor of construction— like the labor which aims to produce the separation of the boy from the female universe—and one which can consequently be modified by a transformation of its historical conditions of production.”14 Yet the sexual differentiation that is psychoanalytic also obtains in the wish fulfillment and other psychical acts15 that compose the strip’s episodes. At the same time, the era in which Little Nemo appears 100

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encourages the interdependency of the psychical, social, and historical formations of the masculine body, and with these, valuations of racial and socioeconomic difference that helped raise the self-consciousness of the white American middle class. As John Canemaker notes, while each episodically self-contained strip of an earlier but only moderately successful series by McCay, Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend,16 dealt with “paranoid behavior, delusions of persecution, hallucinations, irrationality, and insanity,” the canvas of Little Nemo, whose narrative ran through many series of strips, exhibited the mind’s more quotidian states: it “explore[d] the fragile state of consciousness, and the instability of reality, the fine mental membrane separating the inner from the outer worlds.”17 McCay’s uses of these elements, as well as his attention to a richness of color entirely unusual in strips of the time, take McCay’s Nemo beyond the simpler uses of the daily comic entertainment to a status that itself represents a milestone in graphic art. Frame by Frame In Benjamin’s remarks on the work of Eugène Atget, who began taking photographs of Paris streets at about the same time that McCay’s work became noteworthy in the United States, and whose keen eye had significant consequences for the making of another new and vibrant art, the implications for the broadening of the modern horizon become evident. Because photographs had become “standard evidence for historical occurrences,” they possessed a “hidden political significance,” Benjamin writes; viewers are challenged in ways they had not been previously by art that could not so quickly be called both into being and to consciousness. The use of the caption as a means of focusing the political aims of the photographer was even more of moment for the maker of then-silent film, whose message would alter image after image, Obsession, Pathology, and Justice

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frame after frame.18 This condition is also present in McCay’s early use of captions in his processes of creation as his works, rich with detail but composed with preternatural quickness, also had their sharpest impact on early film.19 But McCay also had a work ethic entirely descriptive of mania. Often working for as many as sixteen to twenty hours daily, he prepared tens of thousands of different though scarcely varied drawings of the adventures in Little Nemo for the flipbooks whose effects would constitute early animation. McCay’s contribution to the public perception of class inheritance and uplift via both the newspaper and the film thus marks him not only as a powerful force in the proliferation of the material culture of his time, but also as a significant figure in the development of the habits of mind that portray the obsessive, wonkish consciousness comprised by both solitude and passion—the consciousness of the nerd. The myriad tensions with which the universe of Little Nemo in Slumberland was created—the psychical and historical elements of a bodily masculinity in the era of its composition, the gnawing desire for the middle-class share of American economic power, and the often violent collisions between the worlds of social and literary modernisms—are all situated on McCay’s broad and often forbidding canvas. As Nemo’s narrative extends through time, the heaviest bodily distortions are reserved for the boy’s two sidekicks. Flip, a white, portly, picaresque character, is usually dressed as a clown masked with greasepaint, has chin stubble, and is often smoking a cigar (see figure 4.1). Flip’s declaration in one frame on Sunday, July 8, 1906, “I got as much right here as [Nemo] has. I am not as purty as he is but I can fight,”20 is an announcement indicating the lower social position he occupies in the world of the strip due to his comparative unattractiveness and his general refusal to mediate difficult situations. The presumably better-bred middle-class man must do this, but Flip rather prefers to embrace discord. As M. Thomas Inge describes Flip’s plaintiveness, it is “a 102

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4.1. Little Nemo in Slumberland. September 2, 1906, pane no. 5. Courtesy: Peter Maresca. Obsession, Pathology, and Justice

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courageous plea from an underdog not blessed with the handsomeness and natural advantages of Nemo from the bourgeois world of reality,” that is, from Nemo’s reality, or state of wakefulness. “Flip is a ‘Yellow Kid’ from Hogan’s Alley dropped into a Buster Brown land of good behavior and exemplary conduct,” though he tends to deny either that life has treated him roughly or that he deserves consideration beyond his state. He also provides a bedrock, practical realism that is the antithesis to Nemo’s (and Slumberland’s) romanticism and sentimentality, and while he is usually unwelcome in the scenes in which he appears, Nemo is solicitous to him and has even saved his life on three occasions.21 But it may be difficult to know how Flip’s friendship with Nemo is truly characterized, as there is no linear progression of it. For a narrative, this information would seem critical (though for an oneiric narrative, perhaps not). Slumberland’s ordinary setting, however—the pavilions of the Chicago fair—should not be forgotten, particularly as that setting symbolized middle-class American progress, and correspondingly cast its gaze upon lower-class status: Nemo’s behavior toward Flip readily suggests the simple and durable condescension of noblesse oblige. At this ground, Nemo needs Flip’s reduced social state to assume his own sense of the romantic and the beautiful in the Slumberland of the Sunday papers, the realm of self-realization for the American bourgeoisie. Nemo’s other foil, Impy, the “little brown cannibal” who at one point in the series was captured by Flip for the purpose of forced servitude but who ultimately exhibited his independence,22 is an otherwise physically distorted Africanesque character with wild hair, a grass skirt, and the usual flat nose and protruding lips. Impy’s eye-masking suggests an apelike nature while it also resembles Flip’s greasepaint, thus conflating the simian and the clownish as significations of low status for both blacks and working-class and poorer whites; their bodies are also similarly distorted by an unhealthiness featured as comic, which relegates 104

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4.2. Little Nemo in Slumberland. September 29, 1907, pane no. 3. Courtesy: Peter Maresca. Obsession, Pathology, and Justice

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both their bodily and facial depictions to the proscriptive margins of middle-class physical culture. Other than race, Impy’s chief distinction from Nemo, and one that not only ensures the fixed distance between the two but also determines a place below even that of Flip, is language, as Impy utters only an undecipherable string of sounds (see figure 4.2). Impy may be said, in the most reduced Du Boisian sense, to have “no true self-consciousness”—he is thus never the observer of human nature, and is sensibly only part of the landscape. The idea of Impy was first conceived when in 1898 McCay drew a series of cartoons for the Cincinnati Enquirer, entitled A Tale of the Jungle Imps. Nothing had changed since then—neither Impy’s characterization, as all of the imps in the Enquirer version are exact replicas of one another, nor even really his name. His provenance in unpredictability may possibly be traced to an Edgar Allan Poe story, “The Imp of the Perverse” (1845), in which a perfectly protected secret is revealed through the knower’s irrationality. While most of its characters appear for the first time in its frames, or are composites from previous strips, Impy, different neither in name nor in form from the earlier A Tale of the Jungle Imps, remains the static repository of disdain in the white American imagination.23 In Hearst’s Journal, Impy moved incongruously through the gleaming background of McCay’s strip, and was for its readers the means to their insouciant, sometimes unconscious dominance, as they took their places in a burgeoning American midlevel elect. With his indistinctness, and without an identifiable language, Impy has no provenance—at least one not worth recalling by the West. It is precisely this voicelessness and indistinguishability that obtains as the last moving part in Little Nemo’s racialized engine. As there can be little empathy without the presumption of a common or even recognizable language, this ultimate element of an aggregation of abject foreignness throws Impy fantastically beyond a recognizable humanity. David Roediger, 106

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in quoting Mikhail Bahktin, argues that “meaning is . . . always multifaceted and socially contested, but it is neither absent nor unconnected with social relations.”24 Thus, where there is no language and no meaning, there are for the unintelligible or nonspeaking subject no avenues to these relations. When Subalterns Speak During the Chicago fair itself, and little more than a decade before the debut of Little Nemo, the pamphlet developed by Ida B. Wells and Frederick Douglass, The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition, became the most enduring counterstatement against the fair. While the Exposition supported new theories of race via the instabilities created by the new biological and social sciences, the interrogation by Wells and Douglass of this species of modernism returned to evidence that descendants of Africa in America had been variously disfranchised and de-formed through and even after slavery through violence, custom, and law. The pamphlet’s additional title, The Afro-American’s Contribution to Columbian Literature, commands recognition of the linked importance of black literacy and everyday American demand, and also indicates the importance of the literary and its utility in combating the aberrations in the social sciences—including those which led, potentially, to racialized terror. In Susan Mizruchi’s The Science of Sacrifice, what the social sciences as developed toward the end of the nineteenth century lacked in articulating the rituals of the actual world were demonstrated anew by literature: “Call it . . . the disciplinary hypothesis,” Mizruchi writes, “the self-evident truth that a work of sociology, or anthropology is designed to fulfill the expectations of a given disciplinary system of explanation. Whereas literature, if not antidisciplinary, might best be understood as supradisciplinary.”25 In Obsession, Pathology, and Justice

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this measure literature is for social science a means of augmenting its reason. Literature stages sociology, Mizruchi argues; the literary urge gives the new science a means of articulation, a bold conduit for example. What literature and imagery lend to theoretical and scientific discourse are a series of ideational horizons that themselves lend to discourse a suprarationality; in this case, certainly a suprarationality such as the nerd can imbibe. Often contained in this idea, however, was the dangerous silence regarding some of the worst aspects of cultural life. For Jacqueline Goldsby, the secret history of lynching as an American cultural practice, even in Northern cities, becomes legible when read out of literature rather than in it—when read against the background of “the growing hegemony of secularized science and technology over the domains of public and private life . . . in short, America’s emergence into modernity at the start of the twentieth century.”26 Additional social, economic, and scientistic forces, such as the continuation of forced segregation, unfree labor, and eugenics, are at once attendant upon the nerd’s already obsessive isolation and the drivers of negative interdependencies with respect to race, class, and masculinity that reveal themselves in McCay’s comic renderings. As Flip is “marked” by the fact that he is not “purty” but can fight, he is announced as being the feckless, unattractive street brawler, the walking, breathing cautionary tale for young men who must make their claim in the higher yet perilous economic and social milieus of the early-twentieth-century United States. But as we might appreciate that representations of debt peonage and lynching would not be considered suitable fare in the Sunday comics section, Impy’s caricaturing in Nemo’s dream depicts not only his social death but also his entombment: his diminished human worth partly through his outlandish appearance and partly through his unintelligibility makes him a cipher as it recalls—and horrifically magnifies—W. E. B. Du Bois’s explanation of double consciousness. 108

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If Impy has no “second sight” in the world, no true self-consciousness, we cannot know even if the consciousness he may have is bestowed upon him by an enigmatic white gaze, because he cannot convey it. It is this very use of techné, this expression of craft that names the fear of its practitioner through the means of desire, that relinquishes its meaning for art and becomes, especially for the nerd, a new kind of politics. As Petrine Archer-Straw describes the thinking toward a nomenclature of otherness in the Parisian artistic vanguard of the 1920s, “Whether the term ‘primitive’ has any descriptive validity at all with regard to other cultures is questionable. It was a label conferred by nineteenth-century Europeans in an act of self-definition. The ‘Primitive’ was created to be oppositional to or to complement the Western rational ‘I.’”27 And as Burton Benedict suggests, Impy’s interiority was already irretrievably lost at the Chicago fair, even as it was only that void that returned again and again in fairs held throughout the last third of the twentieth century: “There are important differences between exhibiting objects and exhibiting people. Objects don’t talk back. In many exhibits people were treated as objects and not given the opportunity to talk back. They may not have been put in glass cases, but they were often placed at some distance from their audiences, roped off. They often spoke languages unintelligible to their audiences and this helped maintain social distance. Where the exhibited people gave performances, theatrical conventions operated to keep performers and spectators apart.”28 As Carol Breckinridge writes, the purveyors of the fairs, including the Chicago fair, saw them as “a unitary, though not uniform, landscape of discourse and practice, that situated metropole and colony within a single analytic field, precisely through such technologies as the international exhibition” that was not at all unlike Benedict Anderson’s description of the broad effect of print media and its efficacy in creating imagined communities that underlay the nation-state.29 “To see is to Obsession, Pathology, and Justice

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know,” writes Rydell not only of the exhibits at the fair, but also of the attitudes of Frederic Ward Putnam and the other curators whose task it was to persuade, as with the Rand McNally guidebooks, of the global discourse of the colonizer while also demonstrating a far more limited compass for the cultural other. Any discourse that announced itself as a counterstatement would have to employ a wonkishness of a different order, and for this, Wells and Douglass’s pamphlet The Reason Why became the most enduring counterstatement against the Chicago fair. While the Exposition itself supported new theories of race via the instabilities created by the new biological and social sciences, the interrogation by Wells and Douglass of this species of modernism returned to evidence that descendants of Africa in America had been variously disfranchised and de-formed through and even after slavery through violence, custom, and law. The pamphlet’s additional title, The Afro-American’s Contribution to Columbian Literature, commands recognition of the linked importance of black literacy and everyday American demand, and also indicates the importance of the literary and its utility in combating the aberrations in the new social sciences—including those which led, potentially, to racialized terror. This was indeed the rebuttal to the kind of wonkishness developed by Putnam and others, and continued by McCay a decade later through even broader means. Intriguing also is the fact that Wells and Douglass originally sought to publish the pamphlet with prefaces by Wells not only in English, but also in French and German—which translations, through their ready accessibility to more attendees, suggest one of the earliest representations of “viral” distribution that today constitutes the imagined community across continents and oceans. Obsession is a durable entity also for writers such as Wells and Douglass; although dissimilar in its end, their obsession seeks its assault 110

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against much of the same symbology as both McCay and the purveyors of nonwhite denigration who preceded him. Taken out of their architectural and historical contexts as seen by Benjamin, the commoditization of the White City and what for a contemporary audience is its supportive class- and race-bound representations through nerdiness might be seen as pure spectacle, its spectacularization a function of the nerd’s elasticity, but nevertheless a rooted and personal apprehension of the real, a hypostasis. McCay and his audience would likely appreciate his illustrations as such, making author and audience ineluctable consumers of their era with respect to such images as they both mark and imbibe an immediate and derivative pleasure. But as Benjamin suggests in his great essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” through a critique that is all of a piece in his scorn of architecture in the Hellenic style in the Arcades Project, there is no human investiture in artifacts that resists the text of its history, written in the blood of the vanquished. “There is no document of civilization,” he writes, “which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another.”30 Drawing upon Benjamin and others, Fredric Jameson’s idea in this vein that these texts and images necessarily have been contested by various publics over time argues for history’s persistence and indissolubility even and especially unto the images’ ability to render pleasure, as there is neither respite nor refuge from their historicity.31 Wells’s and Douglass’s “obsession” in this regard—their implicit knowledge of these concepts—enables their assault on such imagery even before it appears in McCay’s illustrations in the new century. Wells’s research on lynching, ever-present in her writing and thinking in these years, reaches beyond the degraded depictions at the Chicago Obsession, Pathology, and Justice

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fair of the Dahomeyan Fon, or of the generalized African in McCay’s other strips. In this measure, the imagery of the lynched black body in The Reason Why is crucial, for any image of the destroyed body both precedes and is immanent in its comic counterpart. Not only is there a photograph of a lynching in the pamphlet (as well as a written warning to other blacks as crafted by one of the perpetrators, perhaps the photographer himself, on the obverse side), but there is also a drawing of another. At stake in Wells’s choices of imagery in The Reason Why is, as Goldsby writes, “her keen appreciation for late nineteenth-century journalism’s expanded hegemony as a curator of public knowledge.”32 The fact that different styles of nineteenth-century journalistic writing could describe any lynching either as a tragic failure of humanity or with the arid simulacrum of everyday news was the principal issue in Wells’s effort to continuously re-form an imagined community around such crimes. For his part, Douglass, one of the great voices of the nineteenth century, invokes a black masculine imperative that must also confront a new economic modernity: “What the Negro has to do then, is to cultivate a courageous and cheerful spirit, use philosophy and exercise patience. He must embrace every avenue open to him for the acquisition of wealth. He must educate his children and build up a character for industry, economy, intelligence and virtue. Next to victory is the glory and happiness of manfully contending for it. Therefore, contend! contend!”33 While it is obvious that Douglass urges black men to stand and fight for equity, he perhaps is in another sense also aware that an approach to a new economy demands a new kind of man. In the latter chapters of The Reason Why, readers of the pamphlet would have observed the two drawings in Irving Garland Penn’s chapter on African Americans since emancipation that suggest the progress necessary for any realization of 112

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Douglass’s formula, though these buildings are facts in evidence. Both drawings are of buildings on Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee campus: Phelps Hall, for Bible study, and Provident Hospital and Training School. What is striking about these drawings, however, is that the buildings are modest, and the poignancy of their story is in their unassuming nature; they bear none of the features of a static Hellenism, obdurate and imposing edifices in the theater of the modern. The buildings’ very difference from a reflected power seemed to make its own statement on the exercise of black participation, its unease with personal witness, and a different kind of obsessive focus, as if quiet study often necessitated that retreat into the safety of one’s lodgings and spoke instead of the tremendous task of securing equality through the great and hopefully communitarian effort that lay ahead. But the bicentennial edition of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Historical Register of the Centennial Exposition, 1876 (1974) not only haunts via the ghosts of the century preceding but also casts its shadow beyond its milestone anniversary, just as the original did in its time, and precisely as Benjamin and Burton Benedict have suggested. The penultimate paragraph of the introduction to the new edition seems at pains to offer a more sanguine perspective of its present. Yet it cannot overcome its own awareness of the wound that remains both fresh and suppurating. Although the United States feels its renewal through the passing of another century, it nevertheless also faces its vexing haggardness in the mirror: “As the United States celebrates its Bicentennial we can derive much inspiration and enthusiasm from the great Philadelphia Exposition of one hundred years ago. America is again seeking to bind the wounds of a decisive war [Vietnam]. Our political problems have again raised fundamental questions about the validity of our institutions. The positions of the Black, the Indian, and the American woman are in the Obsession, Pathology, and Justice

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4.3. Little Nemo in Slumberland. December 17, 1905, pane no. 10. Courtesy: Peter Maresca.

forefront of our national attention. Beyond our borders competitive nations like the Japanese continue, as they did in 1876, to provide significant challenges for the American economy.”34 This is the introduction to a new American century, as McCay’s racialized representations and those that have followed since have yellowed and faded at the urging of a new advance guard, though the work of that vanguard bears so striking a resemblance to that of its predecessors. This is inevitable, as images for a new generation of obsessives decorate the imagination, soothe the fears of competition and competence, and seduce at leisure.35 The nerd’s efforts to embrace these images are resistless, and they constitute their own testament to dominance and its relentlessness. They are the denizens of the old architecture that continue to walk the wide avenues between sleep and wakefulness. 114

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Notes 1. As Stromberg writes in Black Images, the Yellow Kid later gained a black adversary called the New Bully. “A razor-swinging buck stereotype, Bully briefly starred in a spin-off strip, The Huckleberry Volunteers, but it was not successful” (53). Also, although Poor Lil’ Mose did headline a 1901 collection, it was the advent of Buster Brown that significantly changed Outcault’s fortunes. 2. Canemaker, Winsor McCay, 100. 3. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 4. 4. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 22. 5. For the many nodes of convergence between progress and race dominance at world’s fairs, see ibid. See also Nasaw, Going Out. 6. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 61–62. 7. Howells, Letters of an Altrurian Traveller, 28. 8. Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic, 353. 9. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 55. 10. Ibid., 40. 11. McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 362. 12. See Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 12–13. Such lack of restraint and its results can also be seen in both the rise and fall of George Hurstwood in Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900). 13. Canemaker, Winsor McCay, 8. 14. Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, 54. 15. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, 588–89. 16. McCay, Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend. 17. Canemaker, Winsor McCay, 56. 18. Benjamin, Illuminations, 226. 19. Inge, Comics as Culture, 37. 20. Ibid., 33. 21. Ibid., 34. 22. Ibid., 35. 23. For David Roediger, in The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, the stakes are of a different order with respect to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century making of white American independent labor and the functional necessity it constructed to keep any ideations of blackness and slavery from its sphere:

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All labor republicans existed in a society that offered the opportunity for white workers to measure their situations not only against the dream of a republic of small producers but also against the nightmare of chattel slavery. If early languages of class have already been located by historians within the context of republican thought and accelerating working class formation, they need also to be located within a slaveholding republic in which the constant, even increasing, presence of slavery was, as the Black abolitionist H. Ford Douglass remarked, “completely interwoven into the passions of the . . . people.” (44, original emphasis) 24. Roediger quotes Mikhail Bakhtin from The Dialogic Imagination (271–72): “At any given moment . . . language is stratified not only into linguistic dialects . . . but also—and for us this is the essential point—into languages which are social-ideological” (Wages of Whiteness, 15). 25. Mizruchi, The Science of Sacrifice, 12–13. 26. Goldsby, A Spectacular Secret, 4–5. 27. Archer-Straw, Negrophilia, 11, original emphasis. 28. Benedict, “International Exhibitions and National Identity,” 8. 29. Breckinridge, “Aesthetics and Politics,” 195–216; Anderson, Imagined Communities. 30. Benjamin, Illuminations, 256. 31. In The Political Unconscious, Fredric Jameson remarks that the long-held idea that there are social and political cultural texts just as there are those that are neither becomes something worse than an error: namely, a symptom and a reinforcement of the reification and privatization of contemporary life. Such a distinction reconfirms that structural, experiential, and conceptual gap between the public and the private, between the social and the psychological, or the political and the poetic, between history or society and the “individual,” which—the tendential law of social life under capitalism—maims our existence as individual subjects and paralyzes our thinking about time and change just as surely as it alienates us from our speech itself. To imagine that, sheltered from the omnipresence of history and the implacable influence of the social, there already exists a realm of freedom—whether it be that of the microscopic experience or the ecstasies and intensities of the various private religions—is only to strengthen the grip of Necessity over all such blind zones in which the individual subject seeks refuge, in pursuit of a purely individual, a merely psychological, project of salvation (20).

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See also 84–89 for Jameson’s discussion on the contestation between groups for symbols to secure their “power positions.” 32. Goldsby, A Spectacular Secret, 58. 33. Wells, The Reason Why the Colored American, 60. 34. Kenin, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Historical Register, n.p., emphasis added. 35. Though there are many commentators here, this point is made trenchantly by Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism.

Bibliography Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991. Archer-Straw, Petrine. Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2000. Bederman, Gail. Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Benedict, Burton. “International Exhibitions and National Identity.” Anthropology Today 7, no. 3 (1991): 5–9. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard, 1999. ——. Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zohn; edited and introduction by Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1988. Bourdieu, Pierre. Masculine Domination. Translated by Richard Nice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. Breckinridge, Carol. “The Aesthetics and Politics of Colonial Collecting: India at World’s Fairs.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 31, no. 2 (April 1989): 195–216. Canemaker, John. Winsor McCay: His Life and Art. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2005. Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Translated by James Strachey. 1900; New York: Basic Books, 1965. Goldsby, Jacqueline. A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Howells, William Dean. 1893—94. Facsimile reproduction with introduction by Clara M. Kirk and Rudolf Kirk. Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1961. Inge, M. Thomas. Comics as Culture. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990.

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Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981. Kenin, Richard, introd. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Historical Register of the Centennial Exposition, 1876. New York: Paddington Press, 1974. Maresca, Peter, ed. Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland. Los Angeles: Sunday Press, 2005. McCay, Winsor. Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend. 1905. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1973. McFeely, William. Frederick Douglass. New York: Norton, 1991. Mizruchi, Susan. The Science of Sacrifice: American Literature and Modern Social Theory. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. Nasaw, David. Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements. New York: BasicBooks, 1993. Roediger, David. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. New York: Verso, 1991. Rydell, Robert. All the World’s a Fair. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Saxton, Alexander. The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Verso, 1990. Stromberg, Fredrik. Black Images in the Comics: A Visual History. Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics Books, 2012. Wells, Ida B., and Frederick Douglass. The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition: The Afro-American’s Contribution to Columbian Literature. In Selected Works of Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Compiled and introduction by Trudier Harris. Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Williams, Raymond. The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (London: Verso, 2007).

Nathan L. Gr ant is Associate Professor of English at Saint Louis University. He is the author of Masculinist Impulses: Toomer, Hurston, Black Writing and Modernity, and he is also editor of the journal African American Review.

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THE NEOCONSERVATIVE IMAGINATION

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jennifer glaser

Reading Neoconservatism, Reading Race As I struggled to finish a monograph on Jews, race, and writing, I couldn’t help but feel that I was futilely circling the point. Yes, Jewish writers were preoccupied with questions of race and racialization after the rise of civil rights in America. Yes, many of these same writers (and the intellectuals who influenced them) grappled with their anxiety by speaking in the cadences of more marginalized and racially marked others. But these arguments never felt like they fully encompassed the sometimes messy politics of race at the heart of postwar Jewish life. My project, like those of the Jewish writers whom I followed, was haunted. The specter tailing my work was a monster I’d rather leave in the basement, the pointy-headed cousin I, along with many of my similarly progressive brethren, would prefer to disavow: the neocon. Often Jewish, proudly polemical, formerly (anticommunist) liberals, these neoconservative public intellectuals, including Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and Paul Wolfowitz, embodied a subterranean current in twentieth-century Jewish and American thought that profoundly influenced many of the authors and thinkers I was studying. Neoconservatism, as an ideology and a practice, has often been defined by what it is not. First and foremost, it is defined in contrast to traditional, or what has come to be called “paleo-,” conservatism. 119

Paleoconservatives support small government and national insularity, arguing against both military intervention and the porousness of national borders (they frown on illegal and sometimes even legal immigration) while propagating the importance of American civic and cultural values. Neocons sometimes share this jingoistic appreciation for everything American, but they depart from the tenets of traditional conservatism in their investment in geopolitics. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s preoccupation with military intervention as a strategy for the circulation of American ideology and economic gain is a primary example of neoconservative policy at the national level. Pat Buchanan’s criticism of the Iraq War, although surprising to many, was a prototypical paleoconservative response to perceived interventionism. Neocons also depart from typical conservatives in their profound investment in cultural debates—from the politics of the university to the decline of the nuclear family. For this reason, as much as it has been defined by geopolitical positions or public policy, neoconservatism has emerged in acts of reading. Neoconservative intellectuals, particularly those aligned with magazines such as Commentary, have often developed and clarified their positions in response to twentieth-century literary texts and authors. Their approach to reading has often been transparently ideological, as well as, in some cases, didactic; neocon literary interpretations act to buttress or explicate beliefs in the decline of American values and a viable commons in the wake of the rise of identity politics and the New Left. At the same time, I will argue that this profound commitment to textuality—writing an “autobiography,” to paraphrase Irving Kristol, of neoconservatism through the texts that comprise it—manifests an ambivalence about questions of identity, and particularly racial identity, that lies at the very heart of the neoconservative project. 120

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In his appraisal of the political implications of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral (1997), Anthony Hutchison points to Norman Podhoretz’s 1998 reading and reevaluation of the career of Roth in the pages of Commentary as just such an example of neoconservative reading practices. Hutchison writes of Podhoretz’s “The Adventures of Philip Roth”: “The assessments that follow generally tell the reader at least as much about the phenomenon of neoconservatism and Podhoretz’s own political journey as they do about the merits or otherwise of Philip Roth’s fiction.”1 In the iconic Commentary essay, Podhoretz moves from detailing his “discovery” of Roth during the 1950s to his disillusionment with the author’s increasing leftism and purportedly anti-Jewish sentiment during the late 1960s and 1970s. For Podhoretz, the publication of American Pastoral in 1997, however, marked a profound change in Roth’s work and occasioned the question: “Had Philip Roth turned into a neoconservative?” Although he doesn’t fully explain just what about the novel marks Roth as a “born-again” neocon, “whose entire outlook on the world has been inverted,” he is no doubt responding, as many critics did, to American Pastoral’s searing criticism of the politically radical daughter of the novel’s protagonist, as well as its pessimistic meditations on race and its role in the decline of Newark.2 Throughout the piece, Podhoretz rests his appraisal of Roth on an evaluation of the author’s representation of Jewishness and his willingness to stand with “the middle-class Jews who had once offered such fat targets for his poisoned arrows” against “the counterculture and its academic apologists with whom in his younger days (admittedly never with a completely full heart) he had once identified and to whom he had directed his authorial winks of complicity.”3 Pitting middle-class Jews against the counterculture (which, not incidentally, is often identified as Jewish by mainstream American culture) is central to Podhoretz’s embattled sense of self, as well as to his belief The Neoconservative Imagination

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that the limits of liberalism were reached precisely around questions of identity and (Jewish) difference. Ironically, late-career Roth and his newfound respect for Jewish experience were noted not only by avowed neocons such as Podhoretz, but also by those in search of a language for critiquing the role of identity in the ideological formations (both neoliberalism and neoconservatism) that arose in the wake of liberalism. In search of a text to exemplify the turn toward identity politics and the language of race by Jewish writers, Walter Benn Michaels (to whom I will return in more detail below) looks to Philip Roth’s The Plot against America. The Plot against America, a speculative history that details the dystopian results of a Charles Lindbergh presidency, was published in 2004 to much fanfare. The novel, despite its focus on the rise of Nazism during the interwar period, was decidedly postwar in many of its preoccupations—most strikingly in its investment in recovering a racialized Jewish difference. In The Trouble with Diversity, Michaels reads Roth as moving inexorably to the right via his attempt to write Jewishness as race in The Plot. By importing antiSemitism to American shores and portraying the Roth family of the novel as subject to Jim Crow–style segregation (in a pivotal scene, the Roths are refused entry to a hotel due to their “race”), Michaels argues that Roth co-opts black experience and rewrites anti-Semitism as a primarily American phenomenon in order to participate in the high-stakes game of multiculturalism. These vignettes from reading Roth function as an example of the powerful role of literature in defining the neoconservative imagination, as well as the role of Jewish American writing as the site through which the many competitions over meaning and value that define it take place. Equally useful for understanding what neoconservatism is and why figurations of Jewish identity have played such a prominent role within it is Howard Winant’s description of neoconservatism as a white racial 122

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project.4 Winant, the author, along with longtime collaborator Michael Omi, of the pivotal Racial Formation in the United States, argues that “neoconservative discourse seeks to preserve white advantages through denial of racial difference. For neoconservatism, racial difference is something to be overcome, a blight on the core United States values— both politically and culturally speaking—of universalism and individualism.”5 As Winant points out, neoconservative intellectuals often rely on a discourse of color blindness that overtly borrows from (even as it perverts) the rhetoric of civil rights leaders bent on getting beyond race so as to get beyond racial inequality. This insistence on the transcendence of race is not, of course, as utopian as neoconservatives would have it. The ideology of color blindness so central to neoconservative thought has had profound repercussions in American life—from increasing challenges to affirmative action to the mass incarceration and disenfranchisement of black men that critical legal scholar Michelle Alexander has dubbed “the new Jim Crow.” Neoconservative thought has also had a wider impact on how we talk about identity in the United States, marking a shift from the language of race to that of ethnicity in a manner that favors the recognition of white ethnics as bearers of difference and powerful political actors (the “politicization of whiteness” that Winant evokes in his analysis of the neoconservative racial project). It has also, as we will discuss later, been used to buttress attacks on the university during the era of the Culture Wars.6 I would argue, alongside Winant, that race is a covert foundational element in the neoconservative project that exposes the dark logic undergirding its fantasy of American uniqueness. However, I would extend Winant’s reading of the neoconservative racial project by looking at just why and how prominent neoconservatives have been so intent on disavowing race and its role in structural inequality (as well as in the The Neoconservative Imagination

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history of neoconservatism itself). Exploring the neoconservatives’ disavowal of their origins leads me back to thinking about my own. Why do I manifest such a kneejerk rejection to the neoconservative strand of literary and cultural narratives I had hoped to write? Does my disavowal of the Jewish neocons mirror in some way their refusal to acknowledge the central role of race in their own thinking? Might both projects—if to varying degrees and with different aims—begin in anxiety about the question of Jewish difference? Moreover, is it possible to assess neoconservatism and its offshoots in the literary and cultural sphere through the lens of Jewishness without resorting to essentialism? As Benjamin Schreier has noted, the tendency to reduce to their Jewishness both the necons and the celebrated midcentury New York Intellectuals from whom they were purported to evolve originates from a weak historicist reading practice that assumes a total identity between reality and representation, “populations” and the texts they produce and by which they are produced. He argues instead that an analysis of these oft-analyzed intellectuals must begin from an acknowledgment of “the unstable problem that identity presents to literary history.”7 Like Schreier, I am interested here less in exploring the lived “Jewishness” of the neoconservative writer or intellectual than in the power of the Jewish neoconservative as a trope and its continuing reverberation in American literary culture. What do we talk about when we talk about the identity of the neoconservative? In contrast to the supposedly transparent Jewishness of the New York Intellectuals, which is assumed despite the discomfort many of these midcentury figures had with Jewish identification, the Jewishness of the neocon is itself shadowy and contested—often associated, for those who would note it, with anti-Semitism. The March/April 2004 issue of the left-leaning magazine Adbusters tackles this subject, featuring an article entitled “Why Won’t Anyone Say They’re Jewish?” Above a list 124

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of “the 50 most influential neocons,” one of Adbusters’ editors speculates about the surfeit of Jewish members of the neoconservative elite.8 The unnamed editor (later identified as Kalle Lasn, a pivotal figure in the Occupy movement) was primarily concerned with the unacknowledged ways in which Jewish neocons might affect America’s policy toward Israel and the Middle East—a particularly potent anxiety in 2004, the year after the Iraq War began. However, implicit in Adbusters’ critique was the related question: why were so many prominent neocons Jewish in the first place when America’s Jewish population “overwhelmingly vote Democrat and many disagree strongly with Ariel Sharon’s policies and Bush’s aggression in Iraq”?9 One year after America’s declaration of war, some of the most visible hawks in geopolitics were Jews intent on redefining conservatism and America’s role in the world. Although this period might have witnessed the zenith of neoconservative power in America, it was only the tail end of a lengthy process that began with the rightward turn of many on the anticommunist left around questions of race, culture, and the new, postwar face of American imperialism. My chapter is not an attempt to answer the question of “why won’t they say they’re Jewish.” It is, however, the very start of an attempt to chart some of the ways in which Jewish neoconservatives have influenced literary culture and vice versa. In the process of recovering the figure of the neocon for literary history, my own and American literary history more generally, I am interested in how neocons mobilized the rhetoric of ethnic or racial difference at the same time that they actively disavowed the existence of race. Moreover, I am interested in how the neoconservative approach to identity intersects with, and ultimately departs from, the neoliberal conception of identity. While neoliberalism (or the idea of neoliberalism) has assumed a sort of hegemony in the public sphere, as well as in contemporary literary criticism, neoconservatism has remained a largely neglected area of inquiry despite its The Neoconservative Imagination

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continuing influence on American figurations of racial difference and inequality, as well as Jewish literary self-fashioning. In order to provide a grounding point for these wide-ranging and somewhat fragmentary speculations, I’ll also look at the ways in which two contemporary novels, David Bezmogis’s The Betrayers and Dara Horn’s A Guide for the Perplexed, follow in the footsteps of Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet to rewrite and respond to the figure of the Jewish neoconservative. While these writers might not themselves identify as neoconservative in an overtly political way, I will argue that their work participates in the reproduction and extension of the neoconservative imagination. The idea of the neoconservative imagination I cheekily borrow from Lionel Trilling, the author of The Liberal Imagination and the writer who is often viewed as the paterfamilias for both the New York Intellectuals and the neocons. Like Trilling, although much less thoroughly, I hope to suggest the powerful nexus of influence between the public realm and the supposedly sacrosanct world of the (literary) imagination. With this idea in mind, I’ll close by pointing toward possible future methodologies for studying the neocon as a public literary figure that transcends the narrow conception of the literary that often holds sway in contemporary literary study. Neoconservative writers and intellectuals require new methodologies for “doing” literary history—namely, they emphasize the imperative to move beyond the novel into looking at other archives of the self. Neoliberal, Neocon In the Winter 2013 issue of Dissent, Jeffrey J. Williams lamented the rise of the neoliberal novel and “the plutocratic imagination,” distant kin to Lionel Trilling’s “liberal imagination,” of which it was a product. He opens his elegiac piece with the following extended statement: 126

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If we still take the novel as a register of politics and culture, it is not a good time for social democracy. Since around 1990, a new wave of American fiction has emerged that focuses on the dominance of finance, the political power of the super-rich, and the decline of the middle class. This new wave marks a turn in the political novel: the fiction of the 1970s and 1980s tended to expose conspiracies under the surface of formal government, whereas this new wave tends to see government as subsidiary, with the main societal choices occurring within the economic sphere. The novels animate the turn to neoliberalism, and thus we might aptly categorize them as “the neoliberal novel.”10

Williams goes on to theorize this budding form, using texts such as Jonathan Franzen’s celebrated follow-up to The Corrections (2001), Freedom (2010), Allegra Goodman’s The Cookbook Collector (2010), which narrates, among other plotlines, the romance between two CEOs, and Joshua Ferris’s second-person plural ode to the office, Then We Came to the End (2007). These books, however seemingly disparate in content or style, illustrate the “neoliberal creed: [that] government is cumbersome and inefficient, social problems can be more effectively handled through private means than public ones, the super-rich are not only entitled to political power but also make the best political choices, their interest serves the public interest, and those not rich are naturally supplicants to those that are.”11 All of the works Williams treats exalt the corporation and its interests at the expense of an idea of the public or social good. Not incidentally, many of the neoliberal fictions Williams notes depict the dominance and ubiquity of digital industry and culture in the twenty-first century. This choice would not necessarily be a “neoliberal” one if the novels did not also replicate the industry’s utopian fantasy of itself as an egalitarian and color-blind space. Moreover, as Williams makes clear by including works such as Freedom and Then We Came to the End on his list of neoliberal fiction, novels need not intentionally The Neoconservative Imagination

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spout free-market credos to support the ethos of neoliberalism and the idea that the corporation is our sole recourse for social agency and change.12 Williams is not the only critic to theorize the neoliberal novel—or to associate it with a downturn in contemporary culture. In developing his ideas about fiction and the state, Williams contrasts himself to Walter Benn Michaels. Particularly, he takes issue with Michaels’s definition of neoliberal literature in The Trouble with Diversity and elsewhere. In contrast to Williams, whose definition is primarily economic, Michaels associates neoliberalism with novels of identity and sees multiculturalism as the mask worn by neoliberalism to draw the reader’s gaze away from class issues to those of race. Michaels reads the neoliberal novel as a form in which “cultural difference” substitutes for “economic difference.”13 This substitution, he suggests, distracts us from the real roots of inequality. In neoliberal novels, according to Michaels, the sacralization of blood becomes just another means of worshipping the individual as the central unit of neoliberal ideology. As Michaels puts it in his typically acerbic manner: “What the neoliberal novel likes about cultural difference is that it sentimentalizes social conflict, imagining that what people really want is respect for their otherness rather than money for their mortgages.”14 Related to this type of novel of difference, under which Michaels provocatively places Toni Morrison’s Beloved, among other works, is the popular memoir. He argues that neoliberalism—associated, for him, with Margaret Thatcher’s infamous statement that “there is no such thing as society . . . there are individual men and women, and there are families”—has contributed to our contemporary valorization of the genre of the memoir, which places the individual’s daily agonies and ecstasies over and above the larger institutional structures that have 128

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created them.15 Williams’s and Michaels’s taxonomies diverge precisely around the importance of identity to neoliberalism. To Michaels, neoliberalism is defined by its pernicious embrace of identity and identity politics, while Williams sees more of a potential for identitarian interests to combine with class interests in a critique of neoliberal politics. I would argue that Michaels’s account, in particular, would benefit from recognizing some of the shared precepts of neoconservatism and neoliberalism that remain unacknowledged in his narrative. Despite neoliberalism’s embrace of the discourse of multiculturalism, it remains deeply invested in the ideals of color blindness that exist at the very heart of neoconservatism. Although Winant, for instance, acknowledges the very real differences between neoconservative and neoliberal ideologies and policies, he rightly points out that both movements seek to mask the importance of racial difference to inequality. Michaels’s wholesale disavowal of identity and the politicization of identity risks reproducing some of the very discourses it seeks to critique. Obviously, neoliberalism and neoconservatism are somewhat different beasts. To use Wendy Brown’s formulation, we might think of neoconservatism as a “fierce moral-political rationality—and neoliberalism—[as] a market-political rationality that exceeds its peculiarly American instantiation and that does not align exclusively with any political persuasion.”16 In recent years, however, Brown points out that the two have functioned symbiotically to undermine democratic institutions and propound a globalizing corporate interest as fundamental to the American way. As Anne Norton has noted, neoconservatives “combine populist rhetoric with a corporate strategy,” touting small businesses and the individual, even as they worship at the altar of the corporation and espouse the total power of the state.17 With Michaels’s definition of neoliberalism in mind, as well as the idea that The Neoconservative Imagination

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neoliberalism and neoconservatism have increasingly converged in American culture, is it possible to develop neoconservatism as an ideological formation—related to neoliberalism—that produced particular strains of the contemporary novel and memoir. Is there a neoconservative imagination—kin to Williams and Michaels’s neoliberal one? Does one need to be avowedly neoconservative in one’s political commitments to reproduce it? The Origins of Literary Neoconservatism In 1970, Saul Bellow published Mr. Sammler’s Planet, a socially panoramic novel that opens a portal into the chaos of 1960s New York City. Artur Sammler, the novel’s protagonist and all-seeing eye, is a Holocaust survivor and an amateur ethnographer, his last name an ironic Yiddish joke on his penchant for collecting and cataloguing the disparate social types he sees around him. He is also, as critics from Stanley Crouch to Kenneth Feldman have noted, preoccupied with questions of race in postwar and post–civil rights America. Sammler navigates a New York City purportedly taken over by a racially inflected barbarism, the telos of a move away from Enlightenment values that began for him in Nazi-occupied Krakow. For Sammler, racial and sexual degeneracy go hand in hand. He watches as “the reprobates converted into children of joy, the sexual ways of the seraglio and of the Congo bush adopted by the emancipated masses of New York, Amsterdam, and London.”18 He goes on to narrate how the dangers of the postwar cosmopolis can be written in black and white; “the mental masses, inheriting everything in a debased state, had formed an idea of the corrupting disease of being white and the healing power of black.”19 The adoption of the supposedly wanton 130

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characteristics of blackness by the “masses” heralds a potential death knell for civilization, according to Sammler, who had “seen the world collapse once” and found that “liberal beliefs did not seem capable of self-defense and you could smell the decay.”20 In the novel’s most striking and controversial scene, Bellow further marries race, sexuality, and social decay in uncomfortable ways. After witnessing an African American pickpocket steal from another rider on a local bus, Sammler is followed home by the thief. The unnamed pickpocket, “who no more spoke than a puma would,” intimidates the old man by pulling out his penis, described alternately as a “snake” and “an elephant’s trunk.”21 This moment of encounter with what he believes to be the animal in human form, and not his grievous experience as a Holocaust survivor, marks the nadir of civilization for Sammler. He speculates sentences later as to whether it might be time for him to leave Earth. Although a number of critics have sought to rescue Bellow from being labeled a racist due to his depiction of African American identity in Mr. Sammler’s Planet, the novel clearly participates in a long history of dehumanizing and criminalizing African American subjects at the same time that it displaces the distinctly American ills of slavery by focusing on the European Holocaust and the postwar role of the United States as a haven for Europe’s most hated minority. Throughout the novel, Bellow marries pessimistic thoughts about the death of (American) civilization with thoughts about racial and sexual degeneracy. This racialist thinking would not be so disturbing if Bellow did not, first, marry it to the larger theme of the Holocaust and, later, suture it to thoughts about Israel and the rise of America as a geopolitical power, themes at the center of neoconservative ideology. Halfway through the novel, he transports the aged and ailing Sammler to Israel to report on the Six Day War—a ridiculous plotline that mirrors The Neoconservative Imagination

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Bellow’s own choice to report on the conflict for Newsday in 1967, the inspiration for his tortured travelogue, To Jerusalem and Back. Although Bellow’s writing for Newsday and in his nonfiction work is relatively even-handed, it, along with his work in Mr. Sammler’s Planet, indexes a move rightward by Bellow. It also marks the moment when Bellow, like many American Jews, became allied with Israel around the Six Day War. Israel’s masterful use of the rhetoric of extinction prior to and after the conflict reoriented many Jews, already worried about the extinction of their own racialized otherness in America, toward the Jewish nation. At the same time, Israel’s military triumph and violently anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian position further antagonized many black activists and intellectuals intent on forming international, “third world” alliances with people of color around the world during the same time period. Mr. Sammler’s Planet illuminates the moment when the Holocaust, the Six Day War, and anxiety about white ethnic (here, Jewish) identity converges. Bellow, later famous both for writing the foreword to friend Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind and for his own controversial statements about race and canonicity, writes the neoconservative novel par excellence in Mr. Sammler’s Planet.22 Here, anxiety about the waning role for cultured Jewish identity in the dangerous, polyglot culture of 1960s America joins with fears about the role of the “liberal” public intellectual in the new discursive sphere created by the New Left.23 Mr. Sammler’s Planet can be read as part and parcel of the larger neoconservative project that centered on a newly theorized white ethnicity during the 1960s. This movement, which reached from Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer’s Beyond the Melting Pot and the Ocean Hill–Brownsville Teacher’s Strike of 1968 to the sort of white “roots” celebrations, such as the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, that began during the same time period, found its literary counterpart in Sammler and Bellow’s paranoid racial imaginary.24 132

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Contemporary Novelists and the Neoconservative Imagination It would be easy to see Bellow as having simultaneously written the neoconservative novel’s apex and obituary with Mr. Sammler’s Planet. After all, few respected literary authors would willingly be associated with the architects of Reagan- or Bush-era foreign policy after him. However, I would argue that the backdrop of neoconservatism and the neoconservative intellectuals who espouse its ideology continue to influence a number of contemporary writers, particularly those who claim Jewish identity. These novelists, like those who compose the works Williams labels “neoliberal,” are not as overt in their political allegiances as Bellow was. Many would not be likely to vote for avowed neocons for public office. However, a number of young writers continue to situate their novels in a pessimistic landscape, much like that inhabited by characters in popular television shows Homeland and 24, where neoconservative geopolitical allegiances and an ideology of ethnic chauvinism are deemed unavoidable. This is the landscape of the neoconservative imagination, warped grandchild of Trilling’s purportedly liberal one. In The Betrayers, Canadian Jewish writer David Bezmogis writes the third in a trilogy of works about Russian Jewish literature and culture.25 This novel, set in Israel and the Crimea, introduces us to Baruch Kotler, a thinly fictionalized version of Soviet dissident and Israeli politician, Natan Sharansky. Like Sharansky, Kotler is a former refusenik who lived for years as a prisoner in the Soviet Gulag. Like Sharansky, Kotler was sent to the Gulag due to the betrayal of another Jewish man, an undercover KGB agent who infiltrated his refusenik circle and accused him of working for the CIA. Kotler, also like Sharansky, eventually immigrated to Israel with the help of his long-suffering wife, and became a popular Israeli politician. Most importantly for the sake of our argument about the neoconservative imagination, both men moved The Neoconservative Imagination

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inexorably toward the right when Israel attempted to remove Jewish settlers from disputed territory. Sharansky, a voluble member of the Likud party, eventually left the Knesset in order to help form the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies, a think tank funded by neoconservative billionaire Sheldon Adelson.26 What makes The Betrayers most complicit in the neoconservative imagination is the contrast it draws between Kotler (aka Sharansky) and its other central character, Tankilevich, a figure loosely based on Sanya Lipavsky, the man who turned Sharansky in to the CIA. The Betrayers finds Kotler escaping to the Crimea after a scandal and coming upon his former accuser, now a broken man and pariah to the Jewish community he once betrayed. In interviews, Bezmogis asserts that it is precisely this relationship between good and evil as embodied in the two men that motivated his novel. The novel revolves around “the moral and constitutional difference between a man like Lipavsky and one like Sharansky.”27 Bezmogis suggests that “the question at the heart of the book is a moral one: Why is one person able to sacrifice everything for the sake of his or her principles while another is not? In other words, the central idea behind the book is one of virtue or goodness. The question is as old as philosophy. What does it mean to lead a virtuous life?”28 Although Kotler’s virtue is questioned in terms of his affair with a younger woman, his personal and political integrity are considered unassailable in the book. After all, his affair with the younger woman is exposed only because he refuses to back down in his support of the settlers, despite the embarrassment it causes the Israeli prime minister. This sort of hero worship of Sharansky via Kotler continues throughout The Betrayers. One cannot help but see in Bezmogis’s contrasting of Tankilevich in Crimea with Kotler something of the age-old stereotype of the weak, duplicitous shtetl Jew, living in a perpetual condition of feminized galut (or exile). Like the black subjects of Bellow’s novel, there is something 134

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deemed pathological about the other in Bezmogis’s novel. In this case, however, the other is the diasporic Jew who doesn’t find strength, virtue, and health in Israel. Kotler shares much in common with Artur Sammler, as well as Natan Sharansky. Bezmogis’s protagonist mirrors Bellow’s aging hero in a number of ways; both are men wizened by past experience and violent encounter with totalitarian regimes. Both see themselves as retaining a sophisticated and cynical distance from the world around them. Finally, each man is defined, and eventually undermined, by his stubborn fealty to what are portrayed as admirable—if somewhat outmoded—ideals. Sammler adheres to ideas of enlightenment and civility, while Kotler remains loyal to ideas of Jewishness and the Jewish state that he cannot and will not betray. What makes The Betrayers align with the neoconservative landscape it depicts is its lack of distance from its Sharansky-esque protagonist. The protagonist is imperfect, but protected from criticism by his purportedly ironclad integrity and refusal to betray the Jews as his own betrayer has. Kotler’s worldview, like Sammler’s, is embraced as comprehensible in a world gone mad. The perspectives of Kotler’s wife and son, both aligned with the Orthodox in Israel’s religious right, too, are shown to be reasonable responses to a cycle of endless violence and mutual mistrust between Arabs and Israelis. Bezmogis depicts a moment when Jewish and American identity have been radically reoriented—in part by Russian Jews, such as Kotler and his family—around questions of Israel and religious observance. Despite the fact that most of the action of The Betrayers happens in the Crimea, where early Zionists once imagined a home for Jews, he makes it clear that the future for Jews lies not in the Eastern European past but in an (uncertain) Israeli future. As Bezmogis puts it, the novel allowed him to “combine three of my main preoccupations: morality, Soviet Jews, and Zionism.”29 These The Neoconservative Imagination

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preoccupations, in turn, form the bedrock of the contemporary neoconservative imagination. The novelist Dara Horn explores similar questions in A Guide for the Perplexed (2013). Horn’s most recent novel, like her genre-bending earlier works, combines a number of storylines and traverses multiple historical periods. The frame narrative concerns the tale of Josie Ashkenazi, a computer programmer and entrepreneurial wunderkind, who creates a software called Genizah, which records and maintains an archive of every moment of its users’ lives. At the behest of her hated sister, Judith, she travels to a post–Arab Spring Egypt to help create a digital archive of the Library of Alexandria. Horn interweaves this story with two related narratives, one about nineteenth-century biblical scholar Solomon Schechter and his discovery of the Cairo Genizah and the other about Maimonides’s composition of A Guide for the Perplexed in the twelfth century. A Guide for the Perplexed is complex and metafictional, exploring heady topics such as memory, faith, and the effect of past trauma on the present. For our purposes, however, the novel is interesting, in part, because it is situated at the crossroads of the neoconservative and neoliberal imaginations, the marriage of ideas about racial (here, Jewish) difference and economic triumphalism. Horn, a former Fellow of the conservative Tikkun Institute and a student and protégé of the scholar Ruth Wisse, marries the narratives of the heroic corporation helmed by Ashkenazi with the geopolitical paranoia of America’s neoconservative elite. Josie Ashkenazi is portrayed as a sort of female Mark Zuckerberg, universally admired for her business acumen and preternatural success. She is so internationally important that when she ventures to Egypt she is kidnapped, tortured, and held for ransom by Islamic fundamentalists. In many ways, Josie comes to stand in for America in the text; she exists less as a developed character than as a figure through which Horn 136

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might draw a contrast to the Middle East. Her global business sense and ease at intervening in international affairs are taken for granted, much as is that of the United States. America’s privileged relationship with Israel is emblematized by Josie’s marriage to an Israeli man, Itamar Mizrachi, who helps run her company. Although little of the novel takes place in Israel proper, the Jewish nation hangs over the text. When Josie is captured in Egypt, she is questioned about why she doesn’t sell her software in the Arab world, but only in Israel and Europe. Her belief that the reason should be self-evident is just one of the ways that Muslim identity and culture is othered in the book and that Ashkenazi’s worldview seems to parallel and replicate a neoconservative one. Like The Betrayers, A Guide for the Perplexed is a novel that hinges on doubling and the representation of doubles. Josie and her sister Judith function as doubles of sorts, as do, most obviously, the twin sisters who help Solomon Schechter find the Cairo Genizah. However, Horn also meditates on more subtle forms of doubleness in her depiction of Jewish identity and its paradoxes. It is not by accident that Horn dubs the husband and wife at the center of her novel Ashkenazi and Mizrachi respectively; in the contrast she creates between them, she gets at the deep division between Sephardic and European-identified Jewish cultures, as well as their volatile mixture in Israel. Solomon Schechter, too, has a double who gets at the schisms in Jewish culture. His twin brother, left behind in Romania when Schechter left for the scholarly life in England, lives as a Zionist in Palestine. The tale of Maimonides, and his trials skirting the divide between Islamic and Jewish cultures, also forms the backdrop of Jewish doubleness in Horn’s book. This doubleness reverberates with the anxieties about defining and stabilizing Jewish identity at the heart of the neoconservative project. Horn is very successful at rendering the complexity of these types of divisions and their effects on identity—that is, until she moves to The Neoconservative Imagination

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represent the contemporary Middle East. Written in the immediate aftermath of the Arab Spring, A Guide for the Perplexed sees no room for optimism about the area. In its portrayal, Egyptian culture is withering. When Josie Ashkenazi gets to Egypt, she is greeted by totalizing misogyny and misplaced patriotism. Horn relates: “During the first few days her hosts try to awe her with the country’s past . . . the splendor of the pharaohs now only served to make the contemporary country seem pitiable by comparison.”30 When the city is overtaken by parades, “one of the mustached men explained to her that it was a national holiday, celebrating Egypt’s victory over Israel in the war of 1973. The fact that Egypt had not actually won the 1973 war seemed in no way to dampen the festivities.”31 Later, Josie Ashkenazi meets her Egyptian guide, Nasreen, who functions as a native informant and friend to Josie before eventually betraying her. When Josie is kidnapped, A Guide for the Perplexed moves from the genre of literary fiction into the form of the popular captivity narrative—with the Muslim man as the evil other who taints American femininity. It takes the intervention of American and Israeli interests to save Josie. Horn’s marriage of Jewish identity with American geopolitics forms the heart of the novel’s neoconservative imagination. The Future of the Neocon in Literary History However, much as I am interested in writing the history of the neoconservative novel, I also wonder whether we can ever simply talk about the novel as a form when attempting to probe at the (neoconservative) literary and cultural landscape. Instead, in order to think about the relationship between writing and a certain idea of the state that lies at the center of the neoconservative project, we must imagine not just the neoconservative novel, but the neoconservative archive, a collection of texts and textual ephemera that encompasses not only conventional literary 138

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novels but also popular fiction, memoirs, legal documents, various magazine editorials and Commentary jeremiads, political briefs and memos about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Reagan era policies of Soviet containment, as well as covert documents and records of surveillance. There are a number of reasons why, I would argue, approaching this neoconservative archive is important. First and foremost, the neocons—besides being the architects of the Cold War and post–Cold War imperial politics of the Reagan and Bush administrations—are also central figures in the writing of a new kind of literary history that necessitates the melding of public intellectuals, literary authors, and popular fiction writers together with the kinds of new archives and methodologies that increasingly govern literary study. In looking at the neocon, we must ask: How do the neocons complicate the figure of the public intellectual? How distinct can and should ideological histories remain from literary histories? Looking at the neoconservative archive also allows us to think beyond neoliberalism as both Williams and Michaels define it by focusing on institutions rather than simply individuals. For instance, might thinking about Cornell University as an institution that was deeply invested in the production and dissemination of Cold War ideology at the same time that it produced Paul Wolfowitz and Thomas Pynchon, not to mention Harold and Allan Bloom (in different ways), allow us to write a local history that joins literary and political figures, public and private intellectuals, as well as conventional understandings of neoconservatism and postmodernism? Does this kind of institutional history allow us to do the sort of distant reading that Mark McGurl advocates in his assessment of postwar literature in The Program Era? Moreover, how might using neoconservatism as a rubric help us to reread transnational literary commitments through a less utopian lens, for instance Khaled Hosseini’s best-selling novel, The Kite Runner, or Azar Nafisi’s Reading The Neoconservative Imagination

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Lolita in Tehran, as John Carlos Rowe does in “Reading Reading Lolita in Tehran in Idaho”? Perhaps most importantly, though, thinking about the neoconservative, rather than the neoliberal, also allows us to get beyond the “either/or” binary that Michaels creates in assessing neoliberalism via novels of identity.32 After all, race and ethnicity, as well as class, not to mention the maligned genre of the memoir, are at the very heart of the neoconservative project. The neoconservative memoir, popularized by Norman Podhoretz, continues to hold strong, with endless new entries by the children of the former anticommunist left. Irving Kristol has even written “an autobiography” of neoconservatism itself. Like the memoir, the discourses of race and ethnicity so central to the neoconservative (and, arguably, the neoliberal) project are engines for the production of subjects. I would also argue that thinking about neoconservatism is another way to approach the postwar genealogy of Jewish American literature. We might say that this genealogy extends from Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny, which Joel Brodkin identifies as the proto-neoconservative novel, to the early history of Commentary magazine to Leon Uris’s articulation of Zionism in Exodus and his suturing together of Jewish and American Cold War interests in his work on Russian Jewish émigrés, from Lionel Trilling’s novel The Middle of the Journey, to Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet, to Norman Podhoretz’s memoir Making It, which Norman Mailer reviewed as a “dwindled novel,”33 to Cynthia Ozick’s large output of essays about politics and Jewish identity (which began, perhaps, in her own reading of Malamud’s dystopian race wars novel, The Tenants) to the writing of pundits such as Kristol and Horowitz to Seymour Martin Lipset’s writing about American exceptionalism to Glazer and Moynihan’s Beyond the Melting Pot to the many reviews written in the wake of Philip Roth’s publication of American Pastoral that sought to claim it as a neoconservative novel. 140

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This archive is a particularly apt one to interrogate, I would argue, when engaging with the omnipresent debates about just what comprises Jewish American literature. The question of definitions is the question asked of all scholars who focus on Jewish writers, particularly Jewish writers who write in languages that are not dubbed immutably “Jewish” or who do not foreground religious or quasi-racial Jewish identification in their work. In the neoconservative imagination, we can find the paradox of postwar Jewish identity—its simultaneous reliance on discourses of identity and rejection of this discourse in order to claim the privileges of whiteness. If, as Walter Benn Michaels suggests, the Jewish novel was the precursor of the type of identity fiction he associates with neoliberalism, an appraisal of Jewish American literature through the lens of neoconservatism sheds light not only on the preoccupation with race and ethnicity at the heart of the neocon project, however heterogeneous, but also on how we might use Jewish American literature to think about the relationship between ethnic identity formation, literature, and the state. Notes 1. Hutchison, Writing the Republic, 112. 2. Podhoretz, “The Adventures of Philip Roth,” n.p. 3. Ibid. 4. Omi and Winant write that “a racial project is simultaneously an interpretation, representation, or explanation of racial dynamics, and an effort to reorganize and redistribute resources along particular racial lines. Racial projects connect what race means in a particular discursive practice and the ways in which both social structures and everyday experiences are racially organized, based upon that meaning” (Racial Formation in the United States, 56). 5. Winant, “Behind Blue Eyes,” 7. 6. Here, we might look to Alan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind as an example of neoconservatism in the service of defenses of the canon. The Neoconservative Imagination

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7. Schreier, The Impossible Jew, 100. 8. Lasn, “Why Won’t Anyone Say They Are Jewish?,” 96. 9. Ibid. 10. Williams, “The Plutocratic Imagination.” 11. To Williams’s list of neoliberal novels, I would add Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore (2012), the recent novel by Robin Sloan that takes the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision literally, making Google one of its protagonists and heroes. 12. The same holds true, I will argue, for those novels I label neoconservative. 13. Michaels, The Trouble with Diversity, 201. 14. Michaels, “Going Boom,” n.p. 15. Ibid. 16. Brown, “American Nightmare,” 691. 17. Norton, Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire, 179. 18. Bellow, Mr. Sammler’s Planet, 32. 19. Ibid., 33. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., 49. 22. This novel might be paired in provocative ways with his later light fictionalization of Bloom’s life in Ravelstein. 23. As Dean Franco notes in Race, Rights, and Recognition: Jewish American Literature since 1969, it is not by accident that Bellow’s novel features Sammler being shouted down by New Left Jews when he attempts to give a talk at Columbia. 24. Matthew Frye Jacobson writes about the formation of white ethnicity in his Roots Too. 25. Bezmogis, The Betrayers. 26. I refer to Adelson as neoconservative here due to his preoccupation with international intervention and his investment in American cultural politics. 27. Bezmogis, interview by Donald Weber. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid. 30. Horn, A Guide for the Perplexed, 49–50. 31. Ibid., 50. 32. Williams, “The Plutocratic Imagination,” n.p. 33. Mailer, “Up the Family Tree,” 247.

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Bibliography Bellow, Saul. Mr. Sammler’s Planet. New York: Viking Press, 1970. Bezmogis, David. The Betrayers. New York: Little, Brown, 2014. ——. Interview by Donald Weber. “The ProsenPeople.” Jewish Book Council. September 29, 2014. http://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/_blog/The_ProsenPeople /post/interview-david-bezmozgis/. Brown, Wendy. “American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and DeDemocratization.” Political Theory 34, no. 6 (December 2006): 690–714. Franco, Dean. Race, Rights, and Recognition: Jewish American Literature after 1969. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012. Glazer, Nathan, and Daniel Moynihan. Beyond the Melting Pot. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970. Horn, Dara. A Guide for the Perplexed. New York: Norton, 2013. Hosseini, Khaled. The Kite Runner. New York: Riverhead, 2004. Hutchison, Anthony. Writing the Republic: Liberalism in Morality in American Political Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Roots Too. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. Lasn, Kalle. “Why Won’t Anyone Say They Are Jewish?” Adbusters. March/April 2004. Mailer, Norman. “Up The Family Tree.” Partisan Review 35, no. 2 (Spring 1968): 234– 52. http://hgar-srv3.bu.edu/collections/partisan-review/search/detail?id=326080. McGurl, Mark. The Program Era. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Michaels, Walter Benn. “Going Boom.” Bookforum. February–March 2009. http:// www.bookforum.com/inprint/015_05/3274. ——. The Trouble with Diversity. New York: Macmillan, 2007. Nafisi, Azar. Reading Lolita in Tehran. New York: Random House, 2003. Norton, Anne. Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005. Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the United States: 1960s to 1990s. New York: Psychology Press, 1994. Podhoretz, Norman. “The Adventures of Philip Roth.” Commentary. October 1, 1998. https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-adventures-of-philip-roth/. ——. Making It. New York: Harpercollins, 1980. Roth, Philip. American Pastoral. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. ——. The Plot against America. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004. Rowe, John Carlos. “Reading Reading Lolita in Tehran in Idaho.” American Quarterly 59, no. 2 (June 2007): 253–275. Project Muse. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/217549. The Neoconservative Imagination

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Schreier, Benjamin. The Impossible Jew: Identity and the Reconstruction of Jewish American Literary History. New York: New York University Press, 2015. Trilling, Lionel. The Liberal Imagination. New York: NYRB Classics, 2008. ——. The Middle of the Journey. New York: NYRB Classics, 2002. Uris, Leon. Exodus. New York: Bantam, 1983. Williams, Jeffrey J. “The Plutocratic Imagination.” Dissent (Winter 2013): n.p. https:// www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-plutocratic-imagination. Winant, Howard. “Behind Blue Eyes.” In Off White: Readings on Power, Race, and Resistance. London: Routledge, 2012. Wouk, Herman. The Caine Mutiny. Boston: Back Bay, 1992.

Jennifer Glaser is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Cincinnati. She is sauthor of Borrowed Voices: Writing and Racial Ventriloquism in the Jewish American Literary Imagination.

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CONSERVATIVE AND INTERNATIONALIST: GEORGE S. SCHUYLER’S PULP FICTION AND THE IMPERIALISM OF THE OPPRESSED

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sara marzioli There is something at once ludicrous and dramatic about the clamor of afroamericans to do or die for dear old Ethiopia. George Schuyler, “Views and Reviews”

On the eve of the Italian invasion of the Kingdom of Ethiopia in 1935, the journalist and novelist George Schuyler poked fun at the tendency for African Americans to become passionately concerned with the fate of the last independent African nation. In his weekly “Views and Reviews” column for the Pittsburgh Courier, he depicts this passion for a faraway land as both ridiculous and unbelievable, its motives both striking and performative—a gesture of disdain that epitomizes Schuyler’s own complex relationship to black internationalism and anticolonialism. Schuyler was, in fact, one of the most famous black conservative intellectuals of his time, as well as the author of a widely read work of serial fiction about the liberation of Africa from the grip of white imperialism, entitled Black Empire, which would appear in the very pages of the Courier beginning the following year; far from dismissing the investment of African Americans in the fate of African nations, the novel imagines a liberation movement carried out by a black international organization led by a group of African Americans.1 Yet the novel, published under a pseudonym, was also a satire of this very possibility: African liberation 145

was, for Schuyler, a speculative fiction at best, and at worst, a con. Together with his weekly articles, Schuyler’s fiction forms a heterogeneous compilation of ideas, often in contradiction with each other, and resolutely at odds with contemporary political trends. A staunch anticommunist in the 1930s, he later became a critic of the protest movement that led to the Civil Rights Acts of the mid-1960s. This contrarian attitude animates his serial fiction of the 1930s, particularly Black Empire. A sci-fi rendition of a political impossibility, Schuyler’s speculative fiction about the black takeover of the world amounted to a sustained critique of radicalism, racialism, and the ideological force of mass movements. As a result, Schuyler’s political conservatism has overshadowed the complexity of his critique of the imperialistic strain he saw in the African American commitment to black internationalism, and has likewise muted his emphasis on the affective potential of black internationalism for black American empowerment. His work questions the equation between liberal politics and the support of internationalism, and in doing so problematizes an understanding of internationalism as solely a political struggle. As a conservative public intellectual he thus offers a productive alternative to a liberal or communist intellectualism grounded in the preestablished and self-evident correlation between one’s cultural work and one’s political stance: for Schuyler, the imaginative and the political were necessarily at odds with one another, a site of necessary judgment and decision. Reading his work today reveals a conservative and deeply suspicious approach to the possibilities of black internationalism and PanAfricanism as viable strategies for achieving political sovereignty.2 His satirical investment in the topic nonetheless discloses a sustained intellectual engagement with the ideologies and practices of activism that undergirded black internationalism, albeit from a doggedly right-wing perspective. Consistent with his sarcastic, at times cynical, and always 146

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debunking polemical style, Schuyler’s writing exposes the idiosyncrasies of black America’s ideological investment in and practical alliances with anticolonial movements in Africa and throughout the world. Decentering race as the ground on which a common political consciousness can be developed, his criticism was equally directed at the black nationalism of Marcus Garvey’s Back-to-Africa movement and the leftist framework of W. E. B. Du Bois’s anticolonial activism.3 His conservative political stance during a historical period when African Americans were increasingly embracing both communism and liberalism has muted the logic for this skepticism. As Christopher Bracey asks of Schuyler’s particular brand of skeptical (neo)conservativism, “why would anyone (any Black person) choose to become one?”4 Beyond relegating Schuyler to a historical anomaly or race traitor, the contemporary discomfort for Schuyler’s work is telling. What are the risks of muting his critique of imperialism—even black imperialism—and silencing a dissonant voice that, for over forty years, informed and challenged American audiences in their thinking about the network of relations between Africa and black America? In looking squarely at Schuyler’s uncomfortable place in literary and intellectual history, we necessarily confront the intellectual demands of his work: as Yogita Goyal has noted, “his work forces us to grapple with the fact that transnationalism can contain both imperial and anti-imperial urges and platforms, hence making the task of distinguishing between them crucial.”5 Seeking to relinquish the communist and liberal hold on the narrative of black internationalism, Schuyler’s writing voices an important and unsurprisingly unpopular critique of the exceptional role of African America within it. In what follows, I will focus on the two serial fictions published in the Pittsburgh Courier from 1936 to 1938, “The Black Internationale” and “Black Empire,” later published in book form in 1991 under the title of Black Empire. Schuyler’s fictional account of the recolonization of Africa Conservative and Internationalist

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by black Americans, when coupled with the destructive and futuristic means employed to achieve the plan, presents a powerful criticism of black nationalism that takes particular aim at its violent means and teleological ends. The astonishing level of violence and annihilation in Schuyler’s speculative fiction both solicits and frustrates the reader’s easy identification with an internationalist revolution based on racial affiliation and military prowess, as carried out by the “liberating” forces of Dr. Belsidus’s organization; Black Empire thus exposes the illiberal politics entailed in Ethiopianism as it comes to fruition. At the same time, the serials capitalize on the empowerment promised by the rise of anticolonial insurgencies in the 1930s, deliberately confronting African American readers with their own investments in such movements. The terms of Schuyler’s “conservative” suspicion of black internationalism are consistent with the historical work of self-fashioning as an American intellectual, which he pursued by challenging accepted beliefs and political practices of both white and black communities. Nowhere is this more evident than in his critique of the imperialistic attitude that underlined African Americans’ engagements with black international activism, especially the belief that black Americans could help the African continent on the path toward modernization and progress. That he took his role very seriously is confirmed by his own later remembrance of the publication of his famous essay “The Rise of the Black Internationale,” which he considered as much a celebration of the worldwide anticolonial upheavals to come as a testament to his own knowledge of world history. In “The Rise of the Black Internationale,” published in the Crisis in 1938, Schuyler speaks of the psychological power that international events exercised on black Americans. The essay is a tour de force that distills 500 years of global history in a few pages, connecting the slave trade to contemporary lynching in the United States and uprisings in 148

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China. It celebrates the “New Negro” who “sees and welcome a community of interest of all colored peoples. No longer ignorant, terrorized or lacking confidence, he waits, and schemes and plans.”6 Here Schuyler does not define any concrete political formations, but instead registers the political awakening of people of color worldwide, whose unspecified and secretive activism sounds like a threat to the white-ruled world. Such threatening intimation echoes the destructive plans of Dr. Belsidus’s Black Internationale, signaling the mixture of history and fiction that characterizes the essay. It is worth reproducing Schuyler’s own description of this piece in his autobiography, Black and Conservative (1966). He calls it “the most significant article I wrote in this entire period,” since “it predicted much that has happened in the developing color conflict, including the world wide liberation of the colored peoples from white rule, which I referred to as the White Internationale. This was exactly one month before the Nazi invasion of Poland. It was a factual summary and analysis, which led logically to the inevitability of World War II and the awakening of the nonwhite people everywhere.”7 It is indicative of Schuyler’s unorthodox internationalism that he would mention and celebrate this essay in the autobiography that has the unequivocal goal of fashioning himself as a conservative. To refer to this piece in 1966, two years after Schuyler ran for office on the Republican Party ticket in New York, speaks to his belief that internationalism is a valuable source of empowerment for black Americans, without entailing a radical outlook on domestic social change or the possibility of a return to Africa.8 Schuyler identifies the power of internationalism with knowledge, the consciousness of a partially shared past and present of oppression, while acknowledging that both oppression and the struggle against it take site-specific forms. In line with his consistent negotiation between, on the one hand, his rejection of mass movements and radical politics, and, on the other hand, his cultural and affective investment Conservative and Internationalist

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in black internationalism, Schuyler’s trajectory as a public intellectual provides an alternative to the overdetermined correspondence between political affiliation and cultural work that became commonplace during the era of social realism. Journalism and Imperial Fantasies George Samuel Schuyler (1875–1977) was one of the most prominent American journalists and essayists of the last century, whose long career spanned the Harlem Renaissance, two World Wars, and the emergence of the Black Power movement. He is most often mentioned for the article “Negro Art Hokum” (1926), in which he critiques the emphasis on the Africanist origins of black American culture at the core of the Harlem Renaissance, and for the satirical novel Black No More (1931), which suggests solving the racial problem through a chemical discovery that literally turns black skin white. H. L. Mencken’s mentorship at the American Mercury launched Schuyler’s career, whose mark was a seemingly inexhaustible critique of the human penchant for herd instinct and race-based politics. He authored the column “Shafts and Darts” (subtitled “A Page of Calumny and Satire”) for the socialist Messenger, contributed to the N.A.A.C.P.’s official organ, the Crisis, and for the New York Evening Post in 1931 penned a reportage on Liberia, which eventually became the book Slaves Today (1931). Schuyler’s most consistent and fruitful affiliation was with the Pittsburgh Courier, for which he authored the weekly column “Views & Reviews,” anonymous editorials, and multiple serial fictions under the pseudonyms Samuel Brooks and Rachel Call. This long collaboration ended in 1965, when the newspaper dismissed him for his untenable criticism of Martin Luther King Jr.’s leadership of the civil rights movement and of the Civil Right Acts of 1964 and 1965.9 At this point of his intellectual trajectory he had moved 150

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beyond his long-standing anticommunism to side with far-right conservatism in a phase that saw the African American constituency aligning itself with the Democratic Party. His consistent criticism of any public policy and activism motivated by racial repression contributed to his marginalization from both the white and black liberal intellectual establishments. Scholars have long been debating how he could denounce the short end given to African Americans by the New Deal yet criticize the civil rights movement for trying to subvert racism through legal redress.10 Whether he was a contrarian or an opportunist, his columns in the Pittsburgh Courier were “read by friends and enemies alike,” and they stirred heated debates on major domestic and international issues for three decades,11 on a wide spectrum of topics that ranged from race relations in the United States and Latin America to black economic self-reliance and cooperativism, European imperialism, and American culture.12 In light of contemporary debates on the, to say the least, problematic situation of racial relations in the United States, as well as the development of a transnational approach to American culture, the publication of Black Empire in 1991 (followed by Ethiopian Stories in 1995) has opened the door to a renewed scholarly interest in Schuyler’s work. The centrality of the category of race in the historical construction of the African diaspora has become a contested idea, as it has supported an ideal of unity across cultures and historical experiences, which erases ethnic and historical differences. Black Empire and Ethiopian Stories were published in weekly installments in the Courier from 1934 to 1938, during the Italian invasion of Ethiopia; thus the stories capitalized on the resurgent internationalist activities in the African American community sparked by a long religious tradition that identified Ethiopia as the black nation that would deliver black people to freedom.13 In so doing, Schuyler brought the unfolding of world history into the everyday life of the readers of the Conservative and Internationalist

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Courier. In his fiction and essays, the adventures of the fictional characters set the debates on US race relations in the context of anticolonial activism in the Atlantic world. The publication of the serial alongside the reporter Joel Rogers’s dispatches from Ethiopia consolidated its success.14 The complicity of the League of Nations, which allowed Great Britain and the Soviet Union to indirectly support Mussolini’s effort, heightened African Americans’ outrage for the colonial assault of the last independent black nation, thus boosting the sales of the Pittsburgh Courier to a quarter of a million copies in November 1936. In Black Empire Schuyler portrays an extreme dystopia revolving around Dr. Belsidus, a cynical and ruthless mastermind who liberates Africa from European rule by way of espionage, murder, and incredible technology. This technology renders possible, in the narrative world, the “sheer improbability” of the events narrated, to use Schuyler’s words on his work. Only a not yet existent technology, in the hands of an oppressed group, could succeed at doing what political diplomacy had failed to realize, that is, maintain Ethiopia’s independence. By way of entertainment offered by a combination of sci-fi, international espionage, and romance, the serial functioned as a racial revenge, but its weekly installments, which appeared for over two years, were a consistent presence in the readers’ lives, thus promoting the discussion of global political events in the spaces of everyday life. Families, friends, and coworkers would share the reading of the weekly installments, as the newspapers circulated in homes, barbershops, and other communal spaces of daily life. At once mocking and feeding the indignation of the African American community for the fate of Ethiopia, and by extension, for racial oppression in the United States, made worse by the economic hardships of the Great Depression, the dystopic fantasy of Black Empire reveals Schuyler’s tension between the critique of structural racism and global imperialism and his skepticism toward state-sanctioned policy 152

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and collective political action. Dr. Belsidus epitomizes the conservative credo in individualism: he is a prominent medical doctor in Upper Manhattan and single-handedly creates the Black Internationale. Yet his revenge plan is morally unacceptable. His dystopic success speaks to Schuyler’s skepticism about organized politics as benefiting the leaders rather than the people. The repression and exploitation of people of color worldwide can be overthrown only in the narrative world of the sci-fi text, without this diminishing the critical and pedagogical function still performed by the text in educating global citizens and promoting debates on the ways in which such events affect US domestic racial relations.15 The brand of internationalism Schuyler explores through Black Empire is consistent with his journalism and his novel Slaves Today (1931), both of which denounce the outcome of the Back-to-Africa movement as a colonial practice and critique the claim of black Americans’ leading role in the African diaspora.16 Schuyler advocates for interracial collaborations to counter the rampant militarism and authoritarianism of the 1930s, which were flaunted as signs of the greatness of Western civilization and a triumph of the technocratic order.17 Consistent with his belief in education to change the mind of white people, he founded the Association for Tolerance in America, whose goal was to deconstruct racial stereotypes through science, offering a counterpropaganda based on facts. As a man of his time, he knew and appreciated the possibilities offered by technological and scientific developments, but he was aware that the equation between scientific advancement and cultural and social progress was a wrong one.18 In Slaves Today, written after living four months in Liberia, he renders in a positive light the social organization of the tribes, women’s role within it, and their religious practices, which he takes very seriously, in contrast to his mockery of the church in Black Empire. The satire directed at Dr. Belsidus’s excessive and exorbitant Conservative and Internationalist

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destructive plans, and his recolonization of Africa, problematize the premise upon which black internationalist activism should lead Africa out of its ahistorical or backward place in world history. Schuyler’s belief that black American culture is first and foremost American, rather than African, is clear in his best-known essay, “Negro Art Hokum” (1926) and is reiterated much later in “The Caucasian Problem” (1944). Predicated upon a combination of pragmatism and conservatism, in his defense of the potential for African Americans’ emancipation within American institutions, however assimilationist and gradualist in the face of immense daily suffering, this statement belies his anti-imperialism and at the same time exposes narratives of black internationalism based on the dominance of the Western, African American visions and goals for Africa. The value of Schuyler’s critique of black internationalism is often shadowed by his unrelenting debunking of race as possessing implicit political and cultural attributes, to the point that he often sounded like the white racists whose mind he wanted to change. As Jeffrey Tucker argues, Schuyler wrongly uses the idea that race is a cultural construct to criticize both white suprematism and the black civil rights movement.19 Dr. Belsidus’s Internationalism as a Critique of Authoritarianism Black Empire, as well as his earlier satirical novel Black No More (1930), depicts an illiberal fantasy in which science and technology replace interracial dialogue and social progress. In Black No More (1930) Schuyler suggests the consequences of doing away altogether with black people through a chemical process that turns black bodies white. The satire is directed toward black race leaders who make a career and a fortune, says Schuyler, by capitalizing on black people’s frustration with segregation and daily repression. In Black Empire Dr. Belsidus ends white supremacy on both sides of the Atlantic and eliminates white people 154

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altogether. He drafts the smartest black scientists, engineers, and aviators worldwide, and recruits the necessary manpower by proselytizing black people through the Temple of Love—a satirical rendition of a black church—which is the only ramification of the Black Internationale operating in the open in both the United States and Africa. Rather than hinting at a drastic subversion of the social and economic order, Dr. Belsidus’s methods leverage on capitalism and militarism. More than a revolution, Belsidus’s plan replaces white people, as the beneficiaries of the existing world order, with black people, thus leaving intact the rules that govern the world. In his study of Schuyler’s intellectual and political trajectory toward far-right conservatism, Oscar Williams reports Schuyler’s claims that “the masses of Negroes do not want to overthrow the government; they want to participate in it,” and that “they do not want to despoil the rich; they want to become rich themselves.”20 We can understand these statements in the context of the history of leftist movements in the United States. Schuyler’s intellectual and political formation was rooted in the experience of the 1920s and 1930s. He was briefly affiliated with the Socialist Party, mostly because it represented the most intellectually lively circle in 1920s New York. He soon left, though, similarly to more engaged US black socialists, such as A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, editors of the Messenger. The radicalization of black Americans was accompanied by a growing racism within both the Socialist Party and the American Communist Party. Michael Dawson takes Randolph’s and Owen’s experience as paradigmatic of the gradual disaffection of black Americans for the Communist Party, when he argues that “A. Philip Randolph and his colleague Chandler Owen’s brief and ultimately ineffective sojourn in the Socialist Party represents the tragic failure of the organized social democratic wing of the left to recruit and retain African Americans.”21 On an international level, the disappointment produced by the Stalin-Molotov Pact and the Conservative and Internationalist

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Communist Internationale’s abandonment of black liberation struggles in favor of a focus on antifascism engendered black Americans’ disillusionment with the Communist Party.22 Thus, by the early 1940s, Schuyler’s anticommunism was not an exception. In 1934 when Angelo Herndon, a young member of the CPUSA, who had been arrested two years earlier for alleged subversive activity, was released, Schuyler harshly criticized the party for sacrificing the lives of black young people. He maintained that their energy could be used in more constructive ways, and, in response to the criticism leveled at him by the American Workers Party, he boldly declared his opposition to any party membership: “I decided some time ago not to be a member of any of the numerous political parties, conservative, liberal or radical. . . . Your present contemplated action convinces me that you have taken over the methods of the Communist Party and of course I refuse to accept the regimentation of thought, which that so-called party imposes.”23 Yet, Schuyler’s anticommunism does not entail the abandonment of internationalism.24 Consistently with his intellectual investment in internationalism and anticolonialism, Schuyler writes, “As an old soldier, I would certainly like to participate in such an adventure and press a machine-gun trigger on the Italian hordes as they toiled over the Ethiopian terrain.”25 Thus, he was very much in tune with the rising interest in the fate of colonized African countries, especially of Ethiopia, now in the grip of a minor European colonial power.26 The traditional historiography of black internationalism is so deeply steeped in the leftist and Communist-inspired activism that the idea of anticolonialism from a conservative perspective is not fathomable, at the loss of discordant voices and possible insights into the homogeneous cultural and political narrative of African diasporic solidarity.27 But the dystopic Pan-Africanist revolution Schuyler narrates in Black Empire and his vitriolic articles aimed at debunking the mythical aura surrounding 156

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racial alliances alert his audience not to forgo their critical thinking in a sea of promises, dreams, and media frenzy manipulation. The reader’s subjective involvement in the narrative of Belsidus’s plans and Slater’s questioning of the organization’s means of struggle promotes individual critical engagement at a time of rising authoritarianism. Whether Communist Russia or Fascist Germany, Italy, and soon Spain, or even the more democratic means of the New Deal in the United States, the 1930s saw the growth of state control over the subject. In this climate, Carl Slater’s questioning of Belsidus’s methods and goals is a statement against ideological conformity, in the name of either race or nation. The near future of the sci-fi setting provides enough distance from the reality of the readers’ life, while being still anchored in it, therefore remaining recognizable. The incredible technological advancements, from hydroponic agriculture to solar panels, laser weapons, and underground hangars, are important features not only for the narrative development of the text, but for the connection they make possible between contemporary forms of political authoritarianism and atavism. Schuyler’s critique of the conflation of scientific with cultural advancement, a conflation also used to justify colonialism as a civilizing mission, is part of his debunking of racialist understanding of identity and his critiques of an internationalism that leads to a recolonization of Africa by black Americans. The juxtaposition of such seemingly opposed realms as technology and traditional cultures makes of Schuyler an early critic of modernity. The two planes work together through the very characteristic of near-future science fiction. The narrative’s proximity to contemporary historical events works by what Peter Stockwell calls “extrapolation,” through which “science fiction has often taken the historical dimension to extrapolate from current realities into the future. Here the base is recognizable, and so the text-world is, if not literally yet possible, at least a potential that cannot be discounted in advance. The realism Conservative and Internationalist

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of many represented science-fictional text-worlds is the tactic by which this potential is presented to the reader as a possibility.”28 The possibility is strengthened by the first deed of the Black Internationale: the bombing of the town of Intercourse, Mississippi, in retaliation for the lynching of a young black man.29 From a narrative perspective, this early episode establishes the connection between internationalist sentiments and the US racial struggle, while presenting Dr. Belsidus in a more favorable light, since his lack of scruples and extremely violent methods could easily alienate the reader. Even the narrator, Carl Slater, needs to be consistently reassured that if the means are not fair, the goal is just, especially after Dr. Belsidus’s own introduction: “I and my comrades shall destroy them or make them destroy themselves. We have brains, the best brains in the Negro race. We have science of which the white man has not dreamed in our possession. We have courage. And we are absolutely ruthless.”30 Only a few pages later Belsidus has to remind Slater of the need “to get used to bloodshed. . . . We must be unrelenting, neither giving nor asking quarter, until either we or the white race, is definitely subjugated, or even exterminated. There is no other way. Softness is weakness. Compromise is disastrous. Tolerance is fatal.”31 Such determination does not leave space for human consideration or inclusive decision making. In this plan of large-scale destruction the African continent is merely an empty space, whose peoples are subjected to Belsidus’s plan, and whose cultures and histories are completely absent from the text. Thus the text critiques the common understanding of internationalism, which celebrated Africa as the only motherland for black people in the diaspora, yet dismisses the contemporary reality of the continent. Internationalism is a product of the world system it tries to undo, as it is born of the ideological underpinning of a capitalistic and technocratic world order, within which imperialistic projects are not the prerogative of nation-states only.32 158

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The last of Belsidus’s acts is to warn the African leaders against engaging in slavery, as the white man had done. At this point of the narrative Schuyler seems to lose control of the narrative: not only is the sudden moral concern of Dr. Belsidus not reinforced by other textual elements, but he is also the only speaker at the congress, and no dissenting voice is heard. Through the end, the text is the realization of an African American fantasy, one in which Africa plays the role of stage. This conclusive act reveals the contradiction between the ideals of brotherhood and cooperation inherent to black internationalism and Dr. Belsidus’s concretization of them. The narrator’s comments and reflections redress this disconnection, by engaging the reader in thinking about the idiosyncrasies of such a practice of internationalism. That the readers devoured the serials does not preclude their active engagement with the text and reflection on the topic addressed. If Schuyler’s aim is to inform and educate his audience about the forms and, most of all, the deformations of black internationalism, then science fiction, by way of entertainment, is especially functional to this purpose. Serial Fiction: Internationalism and Local Communities The function of the narrator, Carl Slater, is to mediate between the readers and the text, as the seemingly distant textual reality of a sci-fi revenge against white suprematism echoes with the news of the riots in Detroit and New York and of the rising tension between black and Italian American communities following the Italian invasion of Addis Ababa in 1935. The “sheer improbability” of Belsidus’s plans is pitched against the hard reality of the Great Depression, that is, the context in which the stories were avidly consumed. According to Michael Lund, one of the characteristic features of serial fiction is its entanglement with the Conservative and Internationalist

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reader’s life. Lund argues that “one of the most basic appeals of serial literature is the way in which continuing stories got bound up in the audience’s everyday consciousness, becoming landmarks in their progression through life.”33 Fictional events linger in the reader’s life in the time unfolding between the weekly installments, during which the reader would continue accumulating personal experiences, while processing the fictional events and anticipating the developments of the following installment. Moreover, reading serial fiction was often a shared practice as newspapers circulated in public spaces like cafes and barbershops, as well as homes, thus becoming part of everyday conversations and contributing to a sense of community.34 Because of the stories’ publication next to the news articles on the actual events unfolding in Ethiopia, the boundaries between reality and fiction are blurred to the extent that one reader wrote to the Courier asking, “I want to understand about this Dr. Henri Belsidus. Is his conquest going on now, at the present time, in Africa?”35 The reader’s concern for the existence of Dr. Belsidus’s Black Internationale is a symptom of what Schuyler was most critical of, that is, the exploitation of popular anxieties by political leaders and the media, the Courier included. It also proves the success of his fiction and of the depth of the reader’s response, secured by the love story between Carl Slater and Patricia Givens, the head of aviation of the Black Internationale. Thus, Black Empire both participates in and criticizes the outrage caused by the colonization of the last black independent nation in Africa, by bringing it into the everyday life and concerns of the readers. Schuyler’s well-known scornful judgment of his work reads more as a gesture defensive of his literary reputation than a condemnation of the text itself. The author’s own commentary on the popularity of the text reveals his cynical idea of humankind, but also his desire to be respected as a writer, a hard goal to achieve by writing pulp fiction at the time. Thus, Schuyler describes his reaction to the success of the 160

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serial: “I have been greatly amused by the public enthusiasm for ‘The Black Internationale,’ which is hokum and hack work of the purest vein. I deliberately set out to crowd as much race chauvinism and sheer improbability into it as my fertile imagination could conjure. The result vindicated my low opinion of the human race.”36 In voicing his cynicism to a colleague at the Courier in 1937, Schuyler dismisses his work on the account of its extreme racial views and improbability. The serial alerted the readers of the dangers of projecting the full enfranchisement of black Americans onto a distant temporal and spatial plane. Such projection is dangerous not only for black Americans themselves, but also for Africa, transformed into an aseptic and orderly space, the ultimate dream of technocratic modernization. This dystopic dream is still presented as an act of good faith to ameliorate living conditions in developing countries, while its realization is predicated on the dismissal of traditional ways of life and cultures.37 Carl Slater: Technical Progress and the Silencing of Doubt Carl Slater’s consistent doubting of Belsidus’s plans and methods warns the reader of the importance of questioning calls to arms and buzzwords. Not even after witnessing the success of Belsidus’s plan is Slater a full-fledged supporter of the leader’s goals and means. At the beginning of the very last installment, he says, “I was torn between two desires. I wanted to stay behind with Pat and I wanted to go along and see this last decisive battle for the Dark Continent. Dr. Belsidus decided the question for me. Shortly after the planes left the stratosphere with their infernal cargo, my telephone rang. It was the Chief.”38 Slater’s doubts resonate with the Courier’s audience’s investment in the Italo-Ethiopian Army, in a moment when many were asking to enlist in the Ethiopian Resistance to the Italian aggression.39 Belsidus’s uncompromising Conservative and Internationalist

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determination produces a mix of fear and awe in Slater. During their first encounter the journalist accidentally witnesses Belsidus’s murder of a young white woman. After arriving at the headquarters of the organization, Slater witnesses the murder in cold blood of a supposed spy who had infiltrated the movement. Immediately Slater understands that Belsidus’s ruthlessness will not be stopped, and he reminds himself of the long history of black oppression to appease his conscience, although he questions the methods of the organization until the very end of the serial. When he sees the incredible technological developments that the Black Internationale applies to every aspect of life in Africa, his skepticism about Belsidus dwindles, although he is alarmed by the practice of eugenics to rid the continent of diseases.40 The imposed improvement of living conditions in the African continent, coupled with the powerful intelligence and military resources, silences Slater in a conditional acceptance of the “greater good” as the ultimate outcome of so much destruction and regimentation of life. This section is a reminder of the common argument of the civilizing mission of European colonization of Africa, thus inviting the readers to question their own allegiances and motives for taking part in the various forms of pro-Ethiopian activism. Within these broad geopolitical dynamics, Carl Slater, along with the reader, has little agency beyond silencing his moral discomfort with the thought of the long history of white exploitation and repression of black peoples. Slater’s free will is further cramped as Belsidus withholds from him the possibility of returning to his private life, that is, to live his romance with Pat. After his arrival in Liberia, from where the offensive throughout Africa will be launched, he muses, “We have to become conditioned to our changed environment almost overnight, historically speaking. Physically we live in the twentieth century; psychologically, we live many thousands of years ago. .  .  . Life has been made too complex, 162

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and man was intended to live a life of simplicity.”41 Here Slater reflects on the changed role of women in modern society. More specifically, he laments the fact that Pat Givens’s choice to become an aviator and serve the cause of world black emancipation limits the possibility of living their love. Through Slater’s reflection, Schuyler sheds light on how collective revolutions are sustained by the individual’s sacrifice to the cause. Besides warning his readers, who were trying to enlist in the Ethiopian Resistance, he hints at the possibility of political change as an individual act, very much in line with his belief in individualism. But in Belsidus’s world romance obeys the demands of real politics. Slater’s individual feelings and desires are stifled for the sake of the greater good, as he remains a mere executor of Belsidus’s orders. It is through Slater’s thought process that the reader is invited to see for herself what the grand plan of turning historical reality upside down through coercion and cunning looks like. Belsidus’s plans are not viable without the support of the mediatic grip on the masses, but Slater’s meditation on his own reactions, and the excesses of the text, alert the readers to disbelief, despite the contemporary hysteria about Ethiopia.42 The “near future” sci-fi and the impossibility of a black takeover of the world do not discount the power of the serials to engage the readers, and thus to educate while entertaining. The text of Black Empire functions as a fictional extension of the biting satirical columns “Views and Reviews.” By way of entertainment, it engages its readership in political and philosophical debates, while asking the readers not to take at face value the calls to arms in the name of “dear old Ethiopia.” Conclusion The political dynamics following WWII resulted in increasing difficulty for African American intellectuals to speak of civil rights in an Conservative and Internationalist

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international, anticolonial context, since being critical of the United States was equal to political subversion.43 Schuyler, already an outspoken anticommunist, would find himself drifting increasingly toward the far right. After participating in the Berlin conference in 1950, he abandoned the American Committee for Cultural Freedom for its critical stance toward Senator Joseph McCarthy. By the mid-1960s, when the failures of the liberal civil rights movement were made clear by the rise of the New Left and radical protest groups, such as the Black Power movement and the Nation of Islam, Schuyler completes his trajectory towards the ultraconservative wing of American politics.44 In the attempt to explain his seemingly blind allegiance to an extreme orthodoxy after a life spent defending and practicing independent intellectual work, scholars mention tragic personal events, such as the death of his daughter in an airplane crash and the suicide of his wife, as well as an upbringing informed by middle-class values, and the desire to be included in the mainstream intellectual life of the country. Ultimately, he was unable to envision a concrete alternative to more radical means of social change for black Americans, an alternative that would not involve the near-future technology and annihilating violence of Black Empire. Yet he kept practicing his intellectual work, addressing the broader public, even if to express unpopular perspectives, and therein lies the most valuable aspect of this puzzling figure. His interest in the political and cultural developments of Africa is kept alive in the commentary on political events and reviews of scholarship about Africa, which are the recurring topics of many of his “Views and Reviews” column, alongside his anticommunist tirades. Schuyler’s essays and serial fiction, written for the Courier over thirty years, shed light on an unconventional career that coupled black conservatism and anticolonialism. Schuyler’s internationalism had little to do with revolutionary politics already before his turn to extreme 164

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conservatism. Consistent with his conservatism, he spoke for the full participation of African Americans in the existing social and economic order in the United States and the world, rather than for its subversion, which he maintained was a dangerous path for a minority group that had little legal recourse and social support. Yet his conservative views on black enfranchisement are never disjointed from the interest in black internationalism, which framed blacks’ interests at home. The dystopic internationalism Schuyler narrates in Black Empire shows that, as sheer fantasy, internationalism is easily co-opted as a distant ground on which discontentment is channeled and defused in a teleological project that allows for the deferment of racial uplift onto some distant time and space. Despite its grim outlook on mass movements, Black Empire responds to the highest function of intellectual work for Schuyler, namely, to inform and educate the public, contributing a dissenting voice that puts pressure on the homogeneity of the Ethiopianist, and more broadly the internationalist, narrative as the ultimate solution to racial oppression in the United States and worldwide. As an alternative, Schuyler offered skepticism and doubt, channeled through excess, improbability, and a fascistic fantasy of an Africa turned into a laboratory experiment by black Americans. The publication of the sci-fi serials next to news items and journalistic reports from Ethiopia blurred the boundaries between fiction and reality, but not enough to prevent the readers from understanding that if such fantasy were to be realized, the outcome would not be a new world order, but the continuation of authoritarian regimes of racial oppression and economic exploitation, however couched in a positive rhetoric of liberation and progress. Despite his conservatism and his untenable responses to civil rights activism in the United States, Schuyler’s work is an important addition to our understanding of black internationalism as the unique ground for leftist politics. In having the Black Internationale led by an African American and the African Conservative and Internationalist

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continent as a clean slate for colonization, Schuyler voices a powerful critique of the civilizing mission of colonialism and imperialism, beyond racial identifications and progressive visions of human history. Notes 1. In Saviors or Sellouts, Christopher Bracey acknowledges Schuyler as the link between nineteenth-century black conservatism and the neoconservatism of the 1970s and 1980s (65). 2. Michael West defines black internationalism as “struggle” shaped according to geography yet understood through a perspective that transcends the nation-state (West, Martin, and Wilkins, From Toussaint to Tupac, xi). 3. This is one of the main ideas explored by Yogita Goyal in her article “Black Nationalist Hokum.” 4. Bracey enumerates the basic tenets of black conservatism as the “respect for the culture and institutions of American society . . . and Western civilization, and the abiding belief that Blacks can thrive within American society through their own effort” (Saviors or Sellouts, xx). 5. Goyal, “Black Nationalist Hokum,” 23. 6. Schuyler, Black Empire, appendix A, 336. 7. Ibid., 348. 8. In “Colored Empires in the 1930s,” Etsuko Taketani argues that Schuyler capitalizes on “the affective geopolitics of the 1930s” (129). The article provides a detailed account of how by 1935 the news of a possible marriage between the royal families of Japan and Ethiopia had been circulating already for over one year, raising hopes in the materialization of an empire of people of color that would overthrow European imperialism in Africa. 9. Schuyler expresses his harshest criticism of M. L. King’s strategy in “The Case against the Civil Rights Bill,” a speech given at the SUNY Rockland Community College in Suffern, New York and reproduced in Leak, Rac(e)Ing to The Right, 97–103. From 1964, Schuyler will write for ultraconservative outlets, such as American Opinion, published by the John Birch Society (ibid., 104). 10. Williams, George S. Schuyler, 130, 135–36. W. E. B. Du Bois also warned African Americans that legal rights in the United States had to go hand in hand with a global racial struggle and economic measures; see Redding, Turncoats, Traitors, and Fellow Travelers, 63. Discussing Schuyler’s seemingly contradictory views, John Cullen 166

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Gruesser disagrees with Henry L. Gates Jr.’s definition of Schuyler as “schizophrenic” (“A Fragmented Man”), claiming that Schuyler created a variety of personae in response to the ideological conformity required of black Americans (Black on Black, 107). 11. Robert Hill in his detailed afterword to Black Empire stresses the value of Schuyler’s work in stirring consciences and animating debates (262). 12. Jeffrey B. Ferguson, in his The Sage of Sugar Hill, thus describes Schuyler’s attitude as a public intellectual: “From his controversial column ‘Shafts and Darts’ to his interracial marriage to the archconservatism of his later years, Schuyler fashioned himself as a useful irritant. . . . He flung himself into the cultural fray, always attempting to inspire the reexamination of important beliefs” (28). 13. The main biblical reference is in the Psalms 68:31: “Princes shall come of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God.” The website BlackPast.org (http://www.blackpast.org/gah/ethiopianism) has an exhaustive page on the religious and political movements inspired by Ethiopianism. 14. On J. A. Rogers’s publication of a pamphlet titled The Real Facts about Ethiopia, 1935, see Hill and Rasmussen, Afterword, 277. For a detailed account of African Americans’ responses to the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, see William R. Scott, The Sons of Sheba’s Race. 15. Alexander Bain, in “Shocks Americana!,” concludes his analysis of Black Empire with the acknowledgement that there is little of a revolutionary utopia in the serial and that the described alliance with people of color across the globe foresees American foreign policy as the post-WWII worldwide harbinger of freedom and democracy. Thus Bain argues that internationalism, rather than leading the US government to promote civil rights legislation, was “the product of an unwholesome dissent on national identity” (968). 16. See John Cullen Gruesser’s Black on Black for an extensive treatment of the historical and spiritual value of Africa in African American culture. 17. On Schuyler’s critique of fascism see Patterson, “Fascist Parody and Wish Fulfillment.” 18. See Schuyler, Black and Conservative, 196. 19. Tucker, “Can Science Succeed?” 141. 20. Schuyler expresses these opinions in the article “The Negro and Communism,” Interracial Review, April 1964, 54. Quoted in Williams, George S. Schuyler, 124. 21. Michael C. Dawson, Blacks in and out of the Left, 31. 22. The most notable casualties being the Trinidadian George Padmore and the Senegalese Kuyate, who abandoned the Communist Internationale, see West, Martin, and Wilkins, From Toussaint to Tupac, xxx. Conservative and Internationalist

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23. From the unpublished correspondence of George Schuyler with Anne Shane and Larry Cohen, 1934. Cited in Williams, George S. Schuyler, 95. 24. Bain, “Shocks Americana!,” 948. 25. Quoted in Williams, George S. Schuyler, 97. 26. Robin Kelley explains “the radicalization of a section of the African American community in the mid-thirties” as a result of “the impact of the Scottsboro case; the lynching of Claude Neal in Florida, New Deal legislation leave millions of blacks jobless and landless; . . . groups like the Klan, the American Nazi Party, the White Legion, and the Black Shirts beat, rape, and humiliate their people.” As a result, concludes Kelley, “when Mussolini invaded the only black independent African nation in 1935, their simmering anger turned to outrage” (Black Rebels, 128). 27. The Communist Internationale sponsored by the Soviet Union was by far the largest organization worldwide to uphold racial struggle and anticolonialism. 28. Stockwell, Impossibility Fiction, 5. 29. Schuyler, Black Empire, 66–70. 30. Ibid., 11. 31. Ibid., 14. 32. Isaiah Lavender III makes this argument in his study, Race in Science Fiction, 111. Also, the trope of the black empire has a long history in African American literature. See Stephens, Black Empire, 67. For a discussion of the celebration of the technocratic world in Schuyler’s serials, see Bain, “Shocks Americana!,” 945. 33. Lund, America’s Continuing Story, 41. 34. Ibid., 77. 35. Quoted in Hill and Rasmussen, Afterword, 268. 36. Ibid., 276. 37. Singh, Black Is a Country, is a good example for his focus on the interpretation of Martin Luther King’s ideas and achievements with the purpose of fitting the liberal capitalistic social order, most notably the discount of King’s call for an alliance across racial lines and on the basis of class. 38. Schuyler, Black Empire, 245. 39. For an extended analysis of the African American response to the ItaloEthiopian War, see Gruesser, Black on Black. 40. Schuyler, Black Empire, 151. 41. Ibid., 94. 42. Tal, “That Just Kills Me,” 80. 43. Penny Von Eschen explains that “with the onset of the Cold War, direct criticism of American foreign policy or the terms of government or corporate involvement

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was beyond the bounds of legitimate debate” (Race against Empire, 119). In Black Is a Country, Nikhil Pal Singh maintains that “the specter of Communism” was used to support civil rights as exemplified by the Supreme Court’s deliberation to desegregate schools in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). In tracing the overlapping history of the African American struggle for political enfranchisement with anticolonialism, Singh notes that the battle for political enfranchisement never ceased, despite the obstacles posed by the Cold War. “Indeed,” he explains, “the problem of empire had not been forgotten, even if it had been rendered more obscure and remote within US public discussion” (172). 44. On the trajectory of the New York Intellectuals from the radicalism of the 1930s to the anticommunist liberalism of the ’40s and ’50s and the neoconservative turn of the 1960s, see Alan Wald, The New York Intellectuals. Eric Sundquist’s Strangers in the Land details the developments of the relations between Jewish and African American intellectuals and their communities.

Bibliography Bain, Alexander M. “Shocks Americana!”: George Schuyler Serializes Black Internationalism.” American Literary History 19, no. 4 (2007): 937–63. doi: 10.1093 /alh/ajm034. Bracey, Christopher A. Saviors or Sellouts: The Promise and Peril of Black Conservatism, from Booker T. Washington to Condoleezza Rice. Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 2008. Dawson, Michael C. Blacks in and out of the Left. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Ferguson, Jeffrey B. The Sage of Sugar Hill: George S. Schuyler and the Harlem Renaissance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005. Gates, Henry Louis Jr. “A Fragmented Man: George S. Schuyler and the Claims of Race.” New York Times Book Review, September 20, 1992, 42–43. Goyal, Yogita. “Black Nationalist Hokum: George S. Schuyler’s Transnational Critique.” African American Review 47, no. 1 (2014): 21–36. doi: 10.1353/afa.2014 .0022. Gruesser, John Cullen. Black on Black: Twentieth-Century African American Writing about Africa. Lexington: Kentucky University Press, 2000. Hill, Robert A., and R. Kent Rasmussen. Afterword. In George S. Schuyler, Black Empire, edited by Robert A. Hill and R. Kent Rasmussen, 259–336. Ann Harbor, MI: Northeastern University Press, 1991.

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Kamen, Scott C. “The Demise of the Congress for Cultural Freedom: Transatlantic Intellectual Consensus and ‘Vital Center’ Liberalism, 1950–1967.” MA thesis, University of Maryland, 2011. Kelley, Robin D. G. Black Rebels. Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class. New York: Macmillan, 1994. Lavender, Isaiah, III. Race in American Science Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. Leak, Jeffrey B. Rac(e)Ing to the Right: Selected Essays by George S. Schuyler. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2011. Littlewood, Derek, and Peter Stockwell, eds. Impossibility Fiction: AlternativityExtrapolation-Interpolation. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi B.V. Editions, 1996. Lund, Michael. America’s Continuing Story: An Introduction to Serial Fiction, 1850– 1900. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992. Patterson, Martha A. “Fascist Parody and Wish Fulfillment: George S. Schuyler’s Periodical Fiction of the 1930s.” Journal of Periodical Studies 4, no. 1 (2013): 76–99. doi: 10.5325/jmodeperistud.4.1.0076. Redding, Arthur. Turncoats, Traitors, and Fellow Travelers. Culture and Politics of the Early Cold War. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2012. Schuyler, George S. Black and Conservative: The Autobiography of George S. Schuyler. New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1966. ——. [as Samuel I. Brooks]. Black Empire. Edited by Robert Hill and R. Kent Rasmussen. 1935–38. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1991. ——. “The Black Internationale: Story of Black Genius against the World.” In Black Empire, 1–142. ——. Black No More: Being an Account of the Strange and Wonderful Workings of Science in the Land of the Free, a.d. 1933–1940. 1931. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1989. ——. Ethiopian Stories. Edited by Robert Hill. 1935–37. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1994. ——. Slaves Today: A Story of Liberia. New York: Brewer, Warren and Putnam, 1931. Scott, William R. The Sons of Sheba’s Race: African Americans and the Italo-American War 1935–1941. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Singh, Nikhil Pal. Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004. Skorupsky, John. “The Conservative Critique of Liberalism.” In The Cambridge Companion to Liberalism, edited by Steven Wall, 401–22. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

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Stephens, Michelle A. Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914–1962. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008. Stockwell, Peter. Introduction. In Impossibility Fiction: Alternativity-ExtrapolationInterpolation, edited by Derek Littlewood and Peter Stockwell, 3–10. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi B.V. Editions, 1996. Sundquist, Eric J. Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005. Taketani, Etsuku. “Colored Empires in the 1930s: Black Internationalism, the US Black Press, and George Samuel Schuyler.” American Literature 82 no. 1 (2010): 121–49. Accessed April 18, 2011. http://americanliterature.dukejournals.org.ezprox .bard.edu/content/82/1/121.full.pdf+html. Tal, Kalì. “That Just Kills Me: Black Militant Near-Future Fiction.” Social Text 71, no. 2 (2002): 65–91. Accessed November 4, 2014. http://socialtext.dukejournals.org .ezprox.bard.edu/content/20/2_71/65.full.pdf+html. Tucker, Jeoffrey. “Can Science Succeed Where the Civil War Has Failed? George S. Schuyler and Race.” In Race Consciousness: Reinterpretations for the New Century, edited byJudith Fossett, 136–52. New York: New York University Press, 1997. Von Eschen, Penny M. Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997. Wald, Alan. The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987. West, Michael O., William G. Martin, and Fanon Che Wilkins, eds. From Toussaint to Tupac: The Black International since the Age of Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Williams, Oscar. George S. Schuyler: Portrait of A Black Conservative. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007.

Sar a Marzioli is a visiting assistant professor of Italian at Bard College. Currently, she is at work on a book manuscript titled The Color of the Archive: AfroModernism between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean.

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7

THE TURING TEST AND OTHER LOVE SONGS

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In the introduction to The Most Human Human: What Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us about Being Alive, Brian Christian relates an embarrassing anecdote about being alive and intelligent. Looking for love in all the wrong places, a psychologist and author named Robert Epstein finds himself entangled in a long-distance relationship with a woman he met through an online dating service. Ivana lived thousands of miles away and her English was spotty, but the two spark a connection and begin an extended correspondence nonetheless. It is only after several months of evasive and oddball answers to his requests to meet in person, however, that a realization begins to dawn on Epstein: Ivana is a chatbot, a computer program. “Poor guy,” Christian writes, “it wasn’t enough that web-ruffians spam his email box every day, now they have to spam his heart?”1 In an age in which over half of all Internet traffic is estimated to be nonhuman, such encounters are likely not that uncommon, but what is interesting about Epstein’s spammed heart is that by all accounts his head should have known better. Along with Hugh Loebner, a discodance-floor millionaire and sex-worker activist, Epstein had founded the annual Loebner Prize competition in 1991, an event dedicated to enacting the Turing Test, the procedure proposed by Alan Turing in his influential 1950 essay “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” Turing famously offers a game as a means of considering the question “Can machines think?” by reframing it to read something like “Can machines 172

imitate thinking so convincingly that we cannot tell the difference?”2 Until very recently machines have fared poorly in official versions of the test, but in Epstein’s CAPTCHA courtship Ivana seems to have passed with flying colors. Underscoring the irony, Epstein was at the time working on an edited collection entitled Parsing the Turing Test: Philosophical and Methodological Issues in the Quest for Computer Thinking.3 The trope of the lovelorn scientist beguiled by zeroes and ones is powerful and persistent. The Pygmalion fantasies it raises are never far away, it seems, from the specter of artificial intelligence. As the title of Christian’s book suggests, the immediate legibility of the scenario raises questions about the way that humanness gets conceptualized and how such humanness relates to conceptualization in general. Turing’s paper and much of the philosophical literature it has engendered embodies an ideological faith that David Golumbia labels computationalism, the assumption that human thinking is more or less equivalent to computation, to the manipulation of symbols.4 The story of an expert so easily fooled by the promise of love suggests that there must be much more to intelligence than the computational model, more to the way we use language than the exchange of inputs and outputs. Indeed, we might read this story as a cautionary tale about expertise itself: perhaps the people most invested in parsing the Turing Test might not be the best equipped to tell human from machine. Computer programmers, philosophers, and other assorted academics bring a particular set of skills and expertise to the consideration of intelligence, but the sort of abstract formalizing useful for contemplating methodological and philosophical issues might obscure other considerations of human behavior in all of its social complexity and emotional messiness. We might be better off if someone better at chitchat were in charge of the chatbots. Brian Christian is a poet, and his book on the Loebner Prize zeroes in on the Epstein story as its jumping-off point for obvious reasons. The The Turing Test and Other Love Songs

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computational philosophy of language that appears to be at the heart of the Turing Test seems to reduce semantics to syntax, rendering content as an epiphenomenal side effect of form. It does not leave much room for poetry, in either a literal or a figurative sense. Indeed, Turing offers skirting poetry as an example of how a machine might deceive a human interlocutor: Q: Please write me a sonnet on the subject of the Fourth Bridge. A: Count me out on this one. I could never write poetry.5

Poetry—or at least a specific and historically contingent conception of the lyric—is often imagined to stand in a privileged position to conceptions of humanness, love, creativity, and the like, but at the same time poetry might be seen as being as rule-bound as computer programming, a matter of measure, of tallied dactyls and anapests. Of course, the formalism of the sonnet is a different matter than the formalism of formal logic, even if the latter, as Vikram Chandra highlights in the Geek Sublime, affords its own aesthetic pleasures.6 But poetry, like another other linguistic practice, is always among other things a formal exercise. From this perspective, the lesson to be learned from scenarios like the one Christian relates might question not the possibility of machine intelligence, but whether love itself might be just a matter of formulaic repetition. The poet Cecilia Corrigan explores this insight in Titanic, a book-length text loosely organized around a fictionalized Turing’s love for his computer. At one point in the poem, the Turing character asks “computer-you to write a perfect Italian style sonnet for me which communicates pure unimpeachable love.” Turing is not pleased with the result: “Also, for your next demonstration could you write me something other than a poem? That last thing you made was pretty but so maudlin, and I say this with love! Your poems are a bit of a boner killer 174

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tbh. I mean, I’m as sentimental as can be, so maybe it’s just a problem with poetry in general: so corny! I guess I’m just sick of poetry. Aren’t you? It’s like, ‘get over it!’ Right?”7 Corrigan’s poetic language—culled from the diction of sexting and computer programing—brings Turing’s meditations into the era of Ivana the chatbot, an era in which Turing’s legacy has transformed not only poetry but the way that people relate to one another in fundamental ways. At this point, she suggests, the question that stands at the dividing line between human and machine is no longer whether a computer can seem intelligent. Instead, the question is whether a computer can seem as cheesy, as formulaic, as maudlin as a human. Pantoums and programs don’t stand, in other words, on opposite sides of a divide separating human beings and machines, nor do love and math. The popular iconography of the Turing Test belies the fact that the forms of thinking associated with the image of the awkward, number-crunching nerd cannot be so neatly separated from the forms of expression we imagine to be linked with affect and sociability. Parsing the Turing Test, in other words, involves a broad set of questions about the ways that forms of intellectualism are embodied in particular social worlds. Even computational accounts of intelligence cannot be abstracted out of the specific context of the lives, histories, and bodies of which they are a part. In this chapter I will argue that the problem of whether machines can write poems like humans and the problem of whether humans can write poems like machines both highlight the entanglement of what we might think of as two different ways of reading like a nerd: the first a kind of formalism that seeks to filter out nuance and noise in favor of algorithmic certainty, and the second a kind of formalism that, if anything feels too much, gets excessively invested in distinctions and differences that might not seem to matter to the The Turing Test and Other Love Songs

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uninitiated. After all, an overeager love of form can be a kind of wonkery, but it can also be a form of love. Such concerns might seem secondary, but they are in fact central to Turing’s reception. This has been especially evident recently in the discussion surrounding Morten Tyldum’s filmic adaption of Turing’s life, The Imitation Game (2014).8 Tyldum’s film centers on Turing’s work developing the bombe, a cryptanalysis machine used to decipher the German ENIGMA code and, arguably, to hasten the end of World War  II. Turing’s work on this project was classified and his heroism was unknown during his lifetime, a fact made all the more poignant by the cruelty with which the nation he secretly served conspired to humiliate him because of his homosexuality. Convicted for gross indecency in 1952, Turing was forced to choose between imprisonment and government-mandated hormone therapy and in 1954 appears to have committed suicide by biting into a cyanide-laced apple. Tyldum’s film is only tangentially concerned with Turing’s “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” essay; its invocation of the Turing Test is thus a metaphorical framing device, suggesting in part that the sorts of imitation at the center of the imitation game—trying to act in ways that will seem normatively human—can be mapped onto the contours of the closet that Turing was forced to live within. But even more than Turing’s sexuality, the film suggests that Turing’s attachment to imitation might be attributed to what appears to be something like a form of autism. Awkward and antisocial, mistaking jokes with an austere literalness and incapable of reading basic interpersonal cues, Turing as portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch appears to long for the discrete states of the digital as an antidote to his incomprehension of the analog world of human relationships. Such an account implicitly suggests that certain forms of cognition are less human than others. As Chloe Silverman has argued, the recent popularity of the image of the brilliant computer geek as an 176

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exemplar of Asperger’s syndrome tends to obscure the precarious realities of life with autism. And, of course, this depiction appears to be an exaggeration if not an outright invention; Turing’s biographies attest to the warmth of his friendships and his sense of humor. The logic of the film, however, wants to argue that Turing thinks that machines can think because he thinks like a machine. The relation between Turing’s personal life and his theories is a confounding one, made more complicated by the fact that gender itself plays a confusing and contradictory role in his “Computing Machinery” essay. Biographer David Leavitt, for instance, traces “a subtle but distinct strain of anxiety concerning gender, sexual imitation, and even homosexual procreation” within “Turing’s ‘official’ argument about machine intelligence.”9 Most significantly, the test itself as Turing initially introduces it takes the ability to tell the difference between men and women to be something like the control of the experiment. His first account of the imitation game stipulates: “It is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C), who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart from the other two. The object of the game is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman.”10 It is only once this version of the game is understood that Turing then asserts, “We now ask the question ‘What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game?’ Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman? These questions replace our original, ‘Can machines think?’”11 There is much debate about how important this initial introduction of gender is to Turing’s argument, indeed, about how the imitation game is literally to be construed based on these instructions. However one glosses this question, however, it seems worth noting in and of itself that Turing’s argument, in contrast to the popular image of him as an abstruse and The Turing Test and Other Love Songs

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literal-minded savant, is an ambiguous and enigmatic mess, not at all the model of analytic rigor that one might expect. Indeed, this messiness is arguably what makes Turing’s essay such an important document. Bruno Latour, for instance, proposes that “what is so interesting for students of information is that Alan Turing, the Ur-programmer, the icon of the computer age, the enigma of Enigma, inaugurates the problem of the thinking machine with the most bizarre, kitschy, baroque text ever submitted to a scholarly journal.”12 The simplified version of the Turing Test that has entered the philosophical literature, and even into the popular imagination, could hardly be more different from the strange thought experiments that populate Turing’s actual essay, which devotes its energies to contemplating everything from theology to ESP. Critics have almost all been mistaken in believing Turing’s point to be a celebration of formalism. Instead, Latour argues, Turing is engaged in something rather different: a profoundly nonformalist account of formalism. Turing’s work, in other words, demonstrates that thinking like a nerd—being rulebound and algorithmic—is not necessarily an impediment to thinking about sex or even love. Indeed, the queerness of Turing’s writing rests in the way that it refuses to assume in advance what we mean by love, by thinking, or by machine. For Latour, the strangeness of Turing’s muchthought-about but seldom-read essay has to do with the fact that what he was writing poetry. Turing’s essay occupies a seminal position at the beginning of the historical moment Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank label “the cybernetic fold,” a moment when the idea and allure of computation outpaced what machines could actually accomplish at the time.13 The resulting disconnect between imagination and reality was generative in many surprising ways. This was a moment when thinkers were hard at work prompting machines to imitate humans. But it was also a moment 178

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in which humans were learning to imitate machines. As a case in point consider Jackson Mac Low’s procedural poem “Pattern Recognition by Machine,” which begins: Perceive. As Letters. Think? Think? Elusive, relations, now met most of the classic criteria of intelligence that skeptics have proposed. Relations, elusive, can outperform their designer. Relations, elusive, can outperform their designers: original: group from the Carnegie Institute of Technology and the Rand Corporations (now met most of the classic criteria of intelligence that skeptics have proposed). In Principia Mathematica, think? In Principia Mathematica, original: now met most of the classic criteria of intelligence that skeptic have proposed.14

Composed in 1960, “Pattern Recognition by Machine” reads like a response to Turing’s essay, concurring that the skeptics have already been proven wrong. It is not only a poem about machine intelligence, however; it is also an instance of it. An example of the “diastic” compositional procedure that Mac Low would rely on to produce countless texts over the course of his career, this text is a result of an abstract algorithm (a sort of Turing machine) applied to a source text. According to this procedure, Mac Low would start with a particular phrase (often the title of the poem) and then, for each letter in the phrase, turn to the page in a specific book correlating to the letter’s position in the alphabet. He would then read until he came to the first word beginning with that letter and copy it down. In following stanzas, he would continue with the same procedure, this time looking for the second, the third word starting with that letter, and so on. The basic idea behind such a practice could be varied in any number of ways. “Pattern Recognition by Machine” applies the diastic procedure (with the variation that it sometimes will incorporate not only individual words but phrases of varying The Turing Test and Other Love Songs

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lengths) to an article drawn from August 1960 Scientific American: “Pattern Recognition by Machine” by artificial intelligence pioneers Oliver G. Selfridge and Ulric Neisser. Though it does not invoke Turing, the article opens with a gesture clearly inspired by his essay, arguing that the question of machine intelligence was already satisfactorily dispatched: “Can a machine think? The answer to this old chestnut is certainly yes: Computers have been made to play chess and checkers, to prove theorems, to solve intricate problems of strategy. Yet the intelligence implied by such activities has an elusive, unnatural quality.”15 Mac Low’s poem is literally made from these words, but in the process of running them through his algorithmic imagination, the sorts of transformational surprises that Latour finds in Turing’s essay are revealed. For one thing, Mac Low’s translation of Selfridge and Neisser’s certainty invokes an alternative context. His poem’s querying invocation of machine intelligence (“Think? Think?”) and of elusive relationships resonates within a specifically poetic tradition as well, echoing for instance the middle of the “A Game of Chess” section of T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land, in which two people are incapable of accessing one another’s mind: “What are you thinking of? What thinking? What? / I never know what you are thinking. Think.”16 Mac Low, a poetry wonk if ever there was one, is thus engaged in the sort of formalism at the heart of Turing’s account of intelligence, but his work is also animated by the formalism embodied in the lyric tradition. Indeed, his work is an excellent test case for thinking about the relation between the two. Marjorie Perloff relates an anecdote about confessing her bewilderment in the face of Jackson Mac Low’s work: “Once,” she explains, “when I was talking to John Cage, I mentioned that I didn’t know how to approach the procedural texts of Jackson Mac Low, that I didn’t quite get their point. ‘Oh,’ Cage laughed. ‘Forget about their quality. Think of their quantity!’”17 All poetry, at least in theory, asks its 180

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readers to think in quantitative as well as qualitative terms, to consider the relation between meter and meaning, form and feeling. There are few other poets, however, whose work seems to privilege quanta to the extent one finds in Mac Low. Inspired by Cage’s own chance-based aesthetic, Mac Low developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s a procedural poetics that Cage himself would arguably only catch up to sometime later. Over the course of his long career Mac Low developed countless programmatic systems for the generation of texts, systems apparently divorced from authorial intention. He also meticulously documented his method as though he were making notes in a laboratory log, and kept carefully filed copies of all his experiments. As Charles Bernstein explains, Mac Low’s attitude toward poetry is that of a scientist: it would not make sense to criticize the uneven, prodigious scope of his textual production any more than it would make sense to criticize a natural historian “for gathering too many specimens.”18 The quantity is indeed key, a fact signaled by the title of the first extensive collection of Mac Low’s work: Representative Works: 1938–1985.19 Unlike a Selected or Collected Poems, Mac Low’s title indicates that the value of each work has more to do with the class of other works it exemplifies than with any specific qualitative features of the text itself. And indeed, the poems are often accompanied by detailed explanations, often considerably longer than the poems themselves, of the arcane procedures employed to produce them. Mac Low’s procedural works are analog precursors of digital poems. Many of them could have been written by machines, and indeed, Mac Low was a pioneer in thinking about the use of computation in the composition of poetry.20 But Mac Low’s poems have their qualitative charms as well. As if to counteract the titular scientism of Representative Works, a posthumous overview of Mac Low’s work edited by his second wife, Anne Tardos, bears the title Thing of Beauty, a potentially surprising choice not only The Turing Test and Other Love Songs

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because his work appears on the surface to resist lyric conceptions of beauty, but also because of its emphasis on the artifactual.21 There may be no ideas but in things, but Mac Low would appear to be the kind of poet for whom ideas matter. The abstract character of his work explains its powerful influence on subsequent generations of language-based poets and conceptual writers, but it doesn’t necessarily explain why readers should care about such experiments. It doesn’t, in other words, offer much guidance in linking the quantity with its qualities. These questions come into particular intriguing focus in relation to Mac Low’s Stanzas for Iris Lezak, a collection of poems originally handwritten in a series of composition notebooks over the course of six months in 1960 but not published until 1972.22 At 424 pages, the book is itself a quantitative oddity, dwarfing the rest of Mac Low’s published writings at the time and defying the slender lyric expectations suggested by its invocation of the stanza. If anything, the book resembles the barbaric heft of Leaves of Grass, or perhaps Gertrude Stein’s gargantuan The Making of Americans. The book’s title poem indeed reads like Steinian prose poetry: Sweeping eastern capture testimony as sweeping sweeping as sweeping into notoriety. Temperature each sufficiently, A Bonus. Nor culminate existing languor of relapse existing implement guard harangue tenure harangue yearn existing and relapse guard relapse and detriment existing is non-toxic secretion extremely contains that assassin-bug secretion secretion secretion23

Continuing for several paragraphs, “Stanzas for Iris Lezak” evokes something akin to the sense of unreadable tedium Sianne Ngai labels stuplimity.24 But in its insistent secretion, the text gestures toward its secret: it is indeed easier (and perhaps more interesting) to read the text as representative of a procedure rather than to see it in its own terms, in 182

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part because its own terms have already been appropriated and recycled from elsewhere. Tyrus Miller explains that “the poem ‘Stanzas for Iris Lezak’ is not the title poem of the book Stanzas for Iris Lezak, but rather an example of a poems from that book, one among the hundreds of samples of the property ‘Stanzas for Iris Lezak-ness.’”25 The first poem in the collection, “The Blue and Brown Books” follows this reading through procedure throughout a specific copy of the transcribed lectures notes published as Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Preliminary Studies for the “Philosophical Investigations”: The “how” explanation Bewilderment: Let us explanation A number does Bewilderment: reply of What number Bewilderment: of of know something.

It is appropriate this bewildering book should begin with bewilderment and books. “The Blue and Brown Book” functions as an invocation for the poems that follow, underlining in Wittgensteinian fashion that all of Mac Low’s productions are specific kinds of language games that may or not operate according to our expected rules. In their specific rule-governed constraint, the texts come to resemble something like a Turing machine. Anyone operating with the same source text and the same seed phrase would ostensibly create the same procedure. One benefit of such a procedure, apart from its disruption of the author’s ego, is its portability. Requiring only a book, a notebook, and a pen, Mac Low could construct his poems on his commute from the Bronx to Manhattan and back again in the same manner one might chisel away at a crossword puzzle. Part of the point of poetry generated in this fashion is of course the fact that the process could be replicated again and again with different The Turing Test and Other Love Songs

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texts to produce an infinite series of new texts: quantity, not quality. “Like the scientific method,” Brian Reed explains, Mac Low’s method “can be applied to whatever problem/whatever texts come one’s way.”26 To the extent that one can speak of an “author function” present in a book like Stanzas, he is in large part defined by his bookshelf. It is notable that Mac Low’s is an eclectic and international bookshelf (not to mention one tied to a very specific public library on Southern Blvd. in the Bronx) containing everything from the I Ching to Emerson, from Sri Ramana Maharshi to Robert Louis Stevenson. The titles of the poems are similarly linked to a specific sensibility, reflecting his philosophical and spiritual interests, not only in the nod to Wittgenstein but in the frequent invocation of Buddhist and other conceptions of selflessness: “Lectures on Zen Buddhism.” Other titles invoke their moment and milieu in other ways: for instance, “Cuba as I See It” and the prescient “Hipsters Are Not Happy People.” But even more significant than these trace elements of the subjective is the fact that all of these stanzas are, after all, for Iris Lezak: written for and, in a certain oblique sense, about a specific person identified with her full name. As Ellen Zweig points out, “When we enter the Stanzas we enter a life, not just a book of poems. We meet a man who loved a woman, Iris Lezak, and dedicated poem after poem to her name.”27 What do these dedications tell us about the poems? The complexity and sophistication of the generative procedures that stand behind Mac Low’s output have encouraged critics to emphasize where the texts come from rather than where they are directed. This tendency obscures the social character of the processes Mac Low employs, the degree to which they are, as Zweig suggests, tightly woven into a specific life and a specific set of relations. The significance of this shift is hinted at in the first of the notebooks containing the manuscripts for the Stanzas. “6 Gitanjali for Iris” appears two hundred pages into the published version 184

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because it was originally written at the back of a notebook accidentally bound upside down. From the very beginning, Mac Low’s readingthrough procedures are thus linked not only with the sorts of chance associated with the I Ching, but with more personal and quotidian accidents as well: a poorly made notebook opened backward on a bus. But tellingly, Mac Low’s title places emphasis not on its procedural generation but on his particular muse. The poem appears to have originally been labeled “An Acrostic from Gitanjali,” but on the top of the page on which it is written, Mac Low crossed out “an acrostic from” and offered a new title instead: “6 Gitanjali for Iris.”28 This revision redirects our attention from the from-ness of the poem and toward its for-ness. The transitivity of the text is reflected throughout the entire collection, not only in its title but in many of the poems throughout. Several explicitly name Lezak, as in “I Love Iris” (“Inhibit / Lāma or vividly extending / Inhibit red inhibit size”), “Iris Is Lovely” (“In Rosary. In succession, / In Succession, / Lines of variations ‘ELEGANT’ line yet”), and the even more emphatic “Iris,” which chants her first name over and over for twenty-four lines: If, return into sage in religion it saying is robbery, ignorant spiritual interests religious indispensable sequence29

A less obviously lyrical example is “Plant Poem for Iris Lezak Whom I Love,” a text intended for performance and introduced by three pages of detailed instructions: “All words should be pronounced correctly in English. The Scientific Latin words should be given their accepted English pronunciation, not read as if they were Classical Latin or Church Latin. However, readers who are not used to pronouncing Scientific Latin words as in English (though they may be used to them as The Turing Test and Other Love Songs

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pronounced in their native languages) may pronounce them according to accepted usage in their native tongues.”30 Following the stage direction “Moderately loud, fast,” the poem itself begins: “Phleùm praténse Leek (Garden) Állium pórrum Narcíssus tazétta Tillándsia űsneöìdes.”31 In a certain sense, the “Plant Poem” takes its place within a perfectly recognizable tradition of love poetry, underscoring the amorous associations of the botanical world. At the same time, it rewrites this roses are red eroticism with a botanist’s scientific precision. What would it mean to read “Polysiphònia Laver Albùgo Nidulàira Tillètia” as a line of love poetry? In part it would be to see that procedural formalism—even in its most algorithmic instantiations—is often embedded in specific social and often erotic contexts, and to recognize that this embeddedness remains an integral rather than accidental feature of the texts themselves. The way Mac Low’s abstract stanzas are tied to specific biographical and emotional territories is perhaps easiest to grasp in the “Gitanjali” poem. Here is the second of six gitanjali: Midnight, your Gifts is river, light, Sing Thy humble every Gifts river, every and thy every sing thy Flute unbreakable captive keep is not Thy of whom not (10 seconds of silence) Is Light, of voice every Thy of Flute unbreakable captive keep Midnight, your Gifts is river, light32 186

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If “6 Gitanjali” feels more lyric than most of its companion poems, this no doubt has much to do with the way that something of the amorous quality of Tagore’s original remains in Mac Low’s transformation. Applied to Tagore’s romantic vocabulary, Mac Low’s procedures highlight a visionary union between the first and second person: “My You” begins the first section, “Me You” the third, “My Your” the fourth, and so on. Because the diastic schema governing the construction of these verses is organized around initial letters, the poem holds to preordained sonic patterns of alliteration that lend the piece a musical quality. But the most personal aspect of this poem’s composition is the fact that it takes as its seed phrase a particularly revealing bit of oversharing, a phrase Mac Low later described as “exultant sentences”: “My girl’s the greatest fuck in town. I love to fuck my girl.”33 Mac Low had long made a practice of dedicating poems to friends and lovers, but the practice seems to have been of particular importance during the period in which he composed the poems that make up the Stanzas. Mac Low had just extricated himself from a romantic relationship that had become a great strain and was indeed exultant after Iris Lezak moved into his apartment. The elation surrounding his relation with Lezak had much to do with the fact that the generation of poetry was incorporated much more harmoniously into their love life. Prior to developing his diastic strategies, Mac Low composed poems generated directly from time spent with these lovers using other deterministic methods: “Night Walk” and “Subway Ride.” The notebooks in which he composed his poems in these months are full not only of experimental texts, but of straightforwardly smitten love poems as well. A series of haiku- and tanka-inspired poems, for instance, analyze his feelings for the various friends and lovers coming in and out of his life, each poem annotated with the initials of the particular person it considers. One haiku dated March 10, 1960, reads, “My sterling note book / Full The Turing Test and Other Love Songs

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of words by love and chance / Property of ? School ?” Another: “I’m a creature full Of sentimentality:—/ Break it up with chance.” Another poem from the same period is even more explicit: “Now the truth is out: I’m a romantic cornball: / Since we’ve been closer / I’ve not been able to stop / Writing poems about it.”34 A series of “Friendship Poems” written during this period and published in David Antin and Jerome Rothenberg’s Some/Thing asserts, “I have started again to write poems that say things to people,” explaining that chance has transformed not only his poetics but also his personal relationships: “And chance—what else can I call it?—has opened my life now again.”35 For Mac Low, in other words, the commitment to formalized algorithms and procedures is a part of, rather than apart from, the erotic and social character of his work. Mac Low’s poems for his friends and lovers remain songs of both love and chance. The fact that the poem that helped inaugurate Mac Low’s career as a procedural poet is generated from such a bit of potentially awkward masculinist exultation has caused Chris Funkhouser to label Mac Low a “shadow beatnik,” suggesting that the Romantic ethos of the Beats and the austere conceptualism of someone like Mac Low might not be so far removed from one another.36 This link is in fact crucial to understanding Mac Low’s accomplishment. But if this aspect of his work is underacknowledged, it is not necessarily in the shadows. The exultantly erotic and personal character of the poem is not, after, concealed: it is advertised not only in the endnotes but in the title of the entire book. Tyrus Miller notes that Mac Low was concerned about the poem’s dedications, explaining in a letter to Cage that he prefers to dedicate his works to people who are not well known and that he makes a point of immediately sending the poems to their dedicatee.37 But, given his concern that the dedications be seen as a form of name-dropping, it is interesting to note that he does not seem to consider avoiding them altogether in his procedural works. 188

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On the contrary, giving the poem to the person who inspired it is in fact a crucial part of the procedure itself. The question that these dedications pose might be what to make of the relationship between the syntactic on the one hand and the semantic on the other, the intellectual and the affective, the lover and the wonk. Where does one draw the boundaries around a poem’s procedure? In a certain sense performance is a necessary part of the process, as is a poem’s dedication. We might ask, then, whether the subway ride or late-night walk that occasioned it are to be considered as well. And how about the sex? Counting letters as one moves from page to page of the source text counts as part of the process, but does selecting the text in the first place? Does borrowing it from the library or picking it off the shelf at a bookstore? This is not a problem limited to Mac Low’s case, but a question at the heart of literary and philosophical concepts of form in general. Indeed, the problem resonates most broadly in relation to the specific tradition of postwar American poetry, which, like other art of the period, often emphasizes process over product in a fashion that would seem to short-circuit forms of connoisseurship or pedantry. Oren Izenberg has argued, for instance, that one of the distinguishing characteristics of much of the most interesting poetry of the twentieth century is its relative lack of interest in poems.38 A wide range of twentieth-century poets create work that, in foregrounding its own production, rejects the New Critical concept of the poem as hermetically sealed art object. But this apparent rejection leaves open the question of how readers might value specific texts, how we might calibrate the ways in which a poem might be at once representative of an abstract process and yet still itself a beautiful thing. Revealing that algorithmic imitations are no more or less human than other sorts of language use, Mac Low and Turing offer extreme examples of this aesthetic and affective investment in process The Turing Test and Other Love Songs

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and form, and in so doing, they suggest that there may be no other way to read than to read like a nerd. Notes 1. Christian, The Most Human Human, 9. 2. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” 433. 3. Epstein, Roberts, and Beber, Parsing the Turing Test. 4. See Golumbia, The Cultural Logic of Computation, and “Computation, Gender, and Human Thinking,” 27–48. 5. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” 435. 6. Chandra, The Geek Sublime. 7. Corrigan, Titanic, 57, 61. 8. The Imitation Game, directed by Morten Tyldum. 9. Leavitt, The Man Who Knew Too Much, 247. 10. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” 433. 11. Ibid. 12. Latour, “Powers of the Facsimile.” 13. See Sedgwick and Frank, “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold.” 14. Mac Low, Stanzas for Iris Lezak, 116. 15. Selfridge and Neisser, “Pattern Recognition by Machine,” 60. 16. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Poems, 33. 17. Perloff, “The Aura of Modernism.” 18. Bernstein, “Jackson at Home,” 254–55. 19. Mac Low, Representative Works. 20. See Funkhouser, Prehistoric Digital Poetry. 21. Mac Low, A Thing of Beauty. 22. Mac Low, Stanzas for Iris Lezak. 23. Ibid., x. 24. Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 248–97. 25. Miller, Singular Examples, 62–63. 26. Reed, “Twentieth-Century Poetry and the New York Art World,” 129. 27. Zweig, “Jackson Mac Low,” 83. 28. Mac Low Papers, Box 61, Folder 72. 29. Mac Low, Stanzas for Iris Lezak 99. 30. Ibid., 182. 31. Ibid., 185. 190

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32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

Ibid., 204. Ibid., 400. Mac Low Papers, Box 1, Folder 9. Mac Low, “Friendship Poems,” 58. Funkhouser, “On Jackson Mac Low, ‘Stanzas for Iris Lezak.’” Miller, Singular Examples, 50. Izenberg, Being Numerous.

Bibliography Bernstein, Charles. “Jackson at Home.” In Content’s Dream: Essays 1975–1984. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1986. Chandra, Vikram. The Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty. New York: Greywolf Press, 2014. Christian, Brian. The Most Human Human: What Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us about Being Alive. New York: Anchor Books, 2011. Corrigan, Cecilia. Titanic. Lake Forest, IL: Lake Forest College Press, 2014. Eliot, T. S. The Waste Land and Other Poems. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1958. Epstein, Robert, Gary Roberts, and Grace Beber, eds. Parsing the Turing Test: Philosophical and Methodological Issues in the Quest for Computer Thinking. New York: Springer, 2008. Funkhouser, Chris. “On Jackson Mac Low, ‘Stanzas for Iris Lezak’: Mac Low as Shadow Beatnik.” Jacket 2. Poetry in 1960: A Symposium, April 27, 2011. https:// jacket2.org/article/jackson-mac-low-stanzas-iris-lezak. ——. Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archaeology of Forms. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007. Golumbia, David. “Computation, Gender, and Human Thinking.” Differences 14 (Summer 2003): 27–48. ——. The Cultural Logic of Computing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. The Imitation Game. Directed by Morten Tyldum. 2014. Beverly Hills, CA: Anchor Bay Entertainment, 2015. DVD. Izenberg, Oren. Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of Social Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Latour, Bruno. “Powers of the Facsimile: A Turing Test on Science and Literature.” In Intersections: Essays on Richard Powers, edited by Stephen J. Burn and Peter Dempsey, 263–92. Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2008. The Turing Test and Other Love Songs

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Leavitt, David. The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer. New York: Norton, 2008. Mac Low, Jackson. “Friendship Poems.” Some/Thing 2 (1965): 58. ——. Jackson Mac Low Papers. MSS 0180. University of California San Diego. Mandeville Special Collections Library. ——. Representative Works: 1938–1985. New York: Roof, 1985. ——. Stanzas for Iris Lezak. Millerton, NY: Something Else Press, 1972. ——. A Thing of Beauty: New and Selected Works. Edited by Anne Tardos. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. Miller, Tyrus. Singular Examples: Artistic Politics and the Neo-Avant-Garde. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2009. Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Perloff, Marjorie. “The Aura of Modernism. Modernist Cultures 1 (2005): 1–14. Reed, Brian M. “Twentieth-Century Poetry and the Art World.” In A Concise Companion to Twentieth-Century American Poetry, edited by Stephen Fredman. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, and Adam Frank. “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Sylvan Tomkins.” Critical Inquiry 21 (Winter 1995): 496–522. Selfridge, Oliver G., and Ulric Neisser. “Pattern Recognition by Machine.” Scientific American 203 (August 1960): 60–68. Turing, A. M. “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” Mind 59 (October 1950): 433–60. Zweig, Ellen. “Jackson Mac Low: The Limits of Formalism.” Poetics Today 3, no. 3 (1982): 79–86.

Br ian Glavey is Associate Professor of English at the University of South Carolina and author of The Wallflower Avant-Garde: Modernism, Sexuality, and Queer Ekphrasis.

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part ii nature, nurture, nerd: ways of being

SEX AND THE SINGLE NERD: THE SCHIZO SAGA OF GENES, GENIUS, AND FINALLY GETTING SOME

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judith roof SHELDON: (surprised) . . . and a third person! I must say, Leonard, ever since you started having regular intercourse, your mind has lost its keen edge. You should reflect on that. LEONARD: Excuse me, but Einstein had a pretty busy sex life. SHELDON: Yes, and he never unified gravity with the other forces! If he hadn’t been such a hound dog, we’d all have time machines! The Big Bang Theory, season 4, episode 22 (aired May 5, 2011)

Genius, Genetics, and Sublimated Libidos In the latter half of the nineteenth century, Sir Francis Galton, halfcousin of Charles Darwin and most remembered for his advocacy of eugenics (he coined the term), worked to define scientifically the phenomenon of genius. Using surveys and developing statistical methods as the basis for his anthropometric studies, Galton published Hereditary Genius in 1869. In a 1874 lecture, “On Men in Science, Their Nature and Their Nurture,” Galton queried, “What then are the conditions of nature, and the various circumstances and conditions of life,—which I include under the general name of nurture,—which have selected that one and left the remainder?”1 “That one” is the nerd. In the late nineteenth century, this nerdy “genius” is imagined to be a figure who, 195

having repressed or sublimated his more quotidian side, exists as a layered being whose hidden “emotional” side is only a hypothesis.2 Although the repressed sides of geniuses occasionally did emerge in some nineteenth-century fiction, and although twentieth-century atomic scientists appeared to have unsublimated their libidos, by the middle of the twentieth century the nerds’ nether sides lay fully exposed, providing the drama (and excitement) for a series of films focused on the ways the nerds’ manly portion is just as exceptional as their brains. The male genius, who had been a genius because he chose his mind over his genitals, becomes the all-around man, the hearty consumer whose nerdy inability to manage both brains and sexual prowess is, by the twentyfirst century, displaced onto third-world figures and women. It is now acceptable to be a genius as long as you participate enthusiastically in a fully blown nerd commodity culture and don’t use your brain to unsettle a corporate status quo. The contemporary lack of enthusiasm for the cerebral was not in style in the latter half of the nineteenth century when Galton was trying to figure out how to breed more brainy specimens. Galton surveyed what he defined as “qualities which the returns specify as most conspicuous in scientific men” as discerned from the autobiographical accounts of his subjects in the order of their importance. The first quality Galton describes is “energy, both of body and of mind.” Commenting on smart guys’ stamina and work hours, Galton also notes paradoxically that “energy appears to be correlated with smallness of head.” The second quality is “the excellence of health in the men in my list.” “Steady perseverance is a third quality,” and “some prevalence of practical business habits” a fourth. In addition to these general qualities Galton adds a list of more “special qualities”: “independence of character,” “strong innate sense for science or for some special branch of it,” and finally “the 196

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very general prevalence of mechanical tastes.” Adding these up, Galton concludes, “all of this tends to show that the scientific mind is directed to facts and abstract theories, and not to persons or human interests. The man of science is deficient in the purely emotional element, and in the desire to influence the beliefs of others.” He also adds that “in many respects their character is strongly anti-feminine”—and presumably also antisexual, the libidos of such men torquing toward their intellect.3 Although Galton was unable to discern which of the geniuses’ qualities derived from nature and which from nurture (he also coined the phrase “nature versus nurture”), his observations focused on his subjects’ self-reported experiences of nurture and disposition. What is clear is that Galton already recognized the type that later becomes the “nerd” as a definable phenomenon in the 1870s. Although Galton’s subjects are successful “men of science,” their single-minded energetic perseverance and independence, their interest in facts and ideas instead of people, and their lack of interest in women become the trademarks of the nerd figures who reemerge in 1950s film culture not as uninterested in women or sex, but as singularly incompetent in that regard. Galton’s method was the statistical processing of culled autobiographical material. Defining the phenomenon he was trying to explain was a means of acknowledging the value of intelligent men. But Galton’s “sample” included only men, suggesting that from the start Galton unthinkingly perceived genius as a quality enjoyed only by males, as did Freud in his theory of sublimation from his Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). Theorists’ persistent association of mental capacity and sex in the context of northern Europe predicts that women of extraordinary intelligence would most likely be perceived as masculine or that their intelligence would neither be perceived nor cultivated, educated nor deployed. Genius was male and white. As Kelly Oliver observes: Sex and the Single Nerd

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We have admired the genius of great (white) men who changed the way that we look at the world, men like Newton, Darwin, Freud, and Einstein. But there are few, if any, women or racialized others whom we idolize as geniuses who have changed our experience of the world. As Christine Battersby so persuasively documents in Gender and Genius (1989), not only are all of our geniuses men but also throughout history (men’s) theories of genius reserve genius for men; many theories of genius, like Freud’s theory of creative sublimation, maintain that genius is the result of some kind of control over male virility. Many of these theories, like Freud’s, also propose that women (and racialized others) are closer to nature, more intuitive and emotional, and therefor less civilized and incapable of the sublimation necessary for great genius.4

With mind separated from body and sexual libido relegated to the “weaker” sex, there is not much chance for intercourse beyond the cerebral. The strivings of geniuses do not include sexual conquest. Freud indeed distributed civilization’s intellectual wealth to males and its sexual and emotional functions to women in Civilization and Its Discontents. Progress, new discoveries, and achievement beyond the norm, in fact, occur when males overcome the deadening effects of the feminine and the domestic: The next discord is caused by women, who soon become antithetical to cultural trends and spread around them their conservative influence—the women who at the beginning laid the foundations of culture by the appeal of their love. Women represent the interests of the family and sexual life; the work of civilization has become more and more men’s business; it confronts them with ever harder tasks, compels them to sublimations of instinct which women are not easily able to achieve. Since man has not an unlimited amount of mental energy at his disposal, he must accomplish his tasks by distributing his libido to the best advantage.5 198

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Realizing the genius’s intellectual capacity requires that geniuses sublimate their instincts and overcome any inclinations toward sexual commerce in favor of more abstract intellectual and artistic endeavors. As Freud suggests, “sublimation of instinct is an especially conspicuous feature of cultural evolution; this it is that makes it possible for the higher mental operations, scientific, artistic, ideological activities, to play such an important part in civilized life.”6 Sublimation both produces and thrives in a rarified unisex culture; as Freud sees the process, “what he employs for cultural purposes he withdraws to a great extent from women and his sexual life; his constant association with men and his dependence on his relations with them even estrange him from his duties as husband and father. Woman finds herself thus forced into the background by the claims of culture, and she adopts an inimical attitude towards it.”7 Males benefit; males render women, who are already not a part of culture, even more utilitarian. Women begin to resent what males accomplish, becoming countercultural—an “antithetical” drag on achievement. In short, male sublimation of sexual “instincts”—of the bad, domestic, feminine—is the only way cultures can progress, genius can thrive, and art and ideas emerge. Libido, energy, inclination, capacity can go in only one direction if one is to display or enable genius. Or geniuses have libidos that can participate only in the cerebral. In either case, during this earlier stage of genius conception, being a genius required that a man be an asexual, socially incompetent, absent-minded nerd. The Sex of Geniuses Albert Einstein was, nonetheless, a notorious womanizer. “Albert Einstein had half a dozen girlfriends,” NBC News reported, “and told his wife they showered him with ‘unwanted’ affection, according to letters Sex and the Single Nerd

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released on Monday that shed light on his extramarital affairs.” “In the new volume of letters released on Monday by Hebrew University in Jerusalem,” the NBC report continues, “Einstein described about six women with whom he spent time and from whom he received gifts while being married to Elsa.” One wonders what progress might have occurred had Einstein sublimated a bit more.8 But Einstein was not the only Lothario among the geniuses. Physicist Richard Feynman, after faithfully attending his tubercular wife until she died, became a playboy. In Surely You Are Joking, Mr. Feynman, Feynman recounts some of his bar exploits, including sketching nudes and pretending to be an undergraduate (while he taught at Cornell) to pick up undergraduate women. Although it would seem that Feynman was somewhat fascinated with himself as a public figure, a figure whose “curiousness” (in both senses of the word) he cultivated in these essay collections, like Einstein he was also a serious scientist—a genius in Galton’s terms. And like Einstein, Feynman seems to have ignored Freud’s observation that geniuses tend to ignore women. Both Einstein and Feynman became themselves objects of cultural interest as characters—as types. What are geniuses like? Wait, they will tell you. Unlike many “geniuses,” Feynman was not reluctant to recount his own exploits and produce his own reputation as a slightly offbeat thinker who could see past normative assumptions. There are few twentieth-century physicists (except perhaps Albert Einstein) who can boast more texts recounting his life.9 Both Einstein and Feynman published popular texts explaining their various theories as well as their opinions on cultural events (e.g., Einstein’s Einstein on Cosmic Religion and Other Opinions and Aphorisms, with “an appreciation” penned by George Bernard Shaw), but although Einstein published autobiographical commentary (The World as I See It, for example, or Ideas and Opinions), Feynman had him beat when it came to collections of observations, 200

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experience, interviews, and other collections with catchy titles: Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman (Adventures of a Curious Character); The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard Feynman; “What Do You Care What Other People Think?”: Further Adventures of a Curious Character; and The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist; Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track. In a Scientific American Blog posting on Feynman as a character, Ashutosh Jogalekar offers an extended (and controversial) commentary on Feynman’s selfconfessed womanizing: What started bothering me more the deeper I dug into Feynman’s life was something quite different: his casual sexism. The latest insight into this comes from Lawrence Krauss’s book “Quantum Man” which does a great job explaining the one thing about Feynman that should matter the most—his science. But Krauss also does not ignore the warts. What startled me the most was the fact that when he was a young, boyish looking professor at Cornell, Feynman used to pretend to be a student so he could ask undergraduate women out. I suspect that this kind of behavior on the part of a contemporary professor would almost certainly lead to harsh disciplinary action, as it should. The behavior was clearly, egregiously wrong and when I read about it my view of Feynman definitely went down a notch, and a large notch at that. Feynman’s apparent sexism was also the subject of a 2009 post with a sensationalist title; the post pointed out one chapter in “Surely. . .” in which Feynman documented various strategies he adopted for trying to get women in bars to sleep with him. Neither were Feynman’s escapades limited to bars; more than one of his biographies have documented affairs with two married women, at least one of which caused him considerable problems.10

Eschewing neither women nor personality, these geniuses represent a shift from Galton’s nineteenth-century men of science. Sex and the Single Nerd

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Twentieth-century men of science are both geniuses and, unexpectedly, lady-killers. They are the all-around men. Or are they? Not on the surface. On the one hand they are indeed geniuses, thinking in unprecedented ways about unprecedented phenomena. On the other, they are successful studs. But they are studs whose studly character seems more a hidden than an overt capacity, their charisma an effect not of conventional manliness but of something else—perhaps the charm of finding a libido cached within a brain. These guys are such geniuses that they can be geniuses without sublimating their “sexual instinct.” Instead, for these geniuses sexual instinct lurks within, both spur and reward for genius achievement. What Freud hypothesized had been sublimated is now fully visible; and the sexist assumptions upon which Freud’s theories rest manifest themselves, at least in Feynman’s case, as joyous sexist behavior. It appears, thus, as if Galton and Freud underestimated the genius’s libidinal reserves. Geniuses Having Sex There was never any doubt in either Galton’s or Freud’s mind that genius was male. But the mid-twentieth century discovers something else: a gender (a regime that operates among the various dynamics desiring positions might occupy) characterized by the more openly layered coexistence of contradictory attributes.11 For the mid-century moment, these figures are all still, as they were in the nineteenth century, male, but they are a special category of males characterized by a brainy, unstylish, nonathletic, uncool veneer that now cloaks an ardent, seductive lover. These gents formerly identifiable as geniuses have become the gender “nerd,” a bifurcated halfway being who is unmanly genius on the outside and suave testosteronic Lothario underneath. These nerds’ genius forebears really had been Lotharios all along, but the earlier 202

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versions had to sacrifice love for intellectual achievement. The new “genius” gets to have it both ways. The extent to which these smart guys are Lotharios predicts the measure of their genius (and vice versa). Galton’s and Freud’s contrary investments turn out to have been aligned all along. Smart guys don’t have to choose between genius and sex, but can enjoy a genius impelled by a sexiness that, though perhaps not immediately evident, is not sublimated into the service of the mind at all, as Freud suggests. Instead the mind is pressed into the project of bringing this other side out, of finding means to unrepress and express the playboy within. Evidence that the genius’s intellect/sex duality already existed, itself to be sublimated by Galton and Freud, is a novella by Galton’s contemporary, Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). The respectable Dr. Henry Jekyll, proud of his serious demeanor but chafing against the need always to be restrained, develops a chemical solution that enables his uninhibited, gleefully depraved side to emerge. Morphing to a cramped physique and dastardly appearance that match what turns out to be this alter ego’s unmitigated monstrosity, Dr. Jekyll becomes increasingly unable to control the emergence of this untamed other, whom he dubs “Edward Hyde.” Although Stevenson’s novella coyly avoids direct mention of any of Hyde’s sexual aberrations, Jekyll, who admits that he enjoys Hyde’s forays “vicariously,” recalls Hyde: “This familiar that I called out of my own soul, and sent forth alone to do his good pleasure, was a being inherently malign and villainous; his every act and thought centred on self; drinking pleasure with bestial avidity from any degree of torture to another; relentless like a man of stone.”12 Sadist instead of overt sexual predator, Mr. Hyde finally gets himself into trouble by running over a child on a deserted street in the dead of night. A few months later, Hyde murders a respected M.P. No longer Sex and the Single Nerd

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able to appear openly as Mr. Hyde—and experiencing an increasing lack of control over when Hyde will take him over—Jekyll resolves to eliminate Hyde and return to his life of virtuous restraint. This turns out to be impossible. Hyde has grabbed onto too much of Jekyll’s unleashed libido. No longer able to acquire the “salts” that dissipate Hyde, Jekyll gives himself over to a Hyde who he hopes will do the right thing and kill himself. Although not exactly the narrative of a genius sublimating his sexual instincts, as Freud might characterize the possibilities of scientific achievement, Jekyll is a scientist who successfully unrepresses a hidden malign energy he has perceived as a trapped and chafing part of himself. Instead of seeing the good man as benefiting from the sublimation of his “bestial avidity,” Jekyll understands the other side as equally himself, its “current of disordered sensual images” a part longing to be free.13 The genius in this tale is a man who mistakenly unleashes this other side, losing control as a result, wallowing in evil, murder, and finally suicide. Often read as a study of doubles, the tale does paint the genius as a man who undoubtedly does harbor another side, already intrinsic to his character.14 Despite Galton’s characterizations of genius and Freud’s theory of genius as necessarily sublimating the sexual instinct, Stevenson’s rendition offers another hypothesis: the genius is Janus-faced, hiding an ambivalence, just as easily an accomplished criminal or playboy as he might be an Einstein. There is as yet no sense that the genius is a genius because he can also be a playboy, nor any idea that such geniuses can control their two-sidedness. They can neither voluntarily evoke it nor keep it in place once it has appeared. In addition to Mr. Hyde’s diminutive stature and uncannily evil demeanor (enough to literally scare Jekyll’s longtime friend, Dr. Lanyon, 204

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to death), Hyde’s voice also differs from Jekyll’s, making it possible to discern changes in the unseen figure from outside locked doors. That the voice becomes a primary signifier of the emergence of a genius’s “other” side also occurs, but in reverse fashion, in the 1963 Jerry Lewis film comedy, The Nutty Professor. Lewis plays a university chemistry teacher, Professor Kelp, whose croaky, high-pitched voice, gawky pigeon-toed stride, clumsy mannerisms, near-sightedness, and buck teeth make him about as unsexy a genius as might be possible. Although Kelp is modest, humble, and kind, his attraction to a student, Stella Purdy (Stella Stevens), as well as several bouts of being bullied (a football player picks him up and stashes him on a shelf) motivate Professor Kelp to improve his mating potential. He first tries bodybuilding, which offers the opportunity for several comic stunts. When that doesn’t work (the genius’s body remains the signifier of his lack of manliness), Kelp begins to formulate an elixir that will turn his dweeby-ness into charismatic masculinity. Kelp’s late-night foray into bettering life through chemistry proceeds in much the same way as Dr. Jekyll’s first foray with his transformative salts. Horrific changes in the body turn it hairy, deformed, and monstrous. Kelp nearly destroys his laboratory in the throes of his transformation. But when the alteration is complete, Kelp turns admiring heads in the street, and grabs the attention of everyone in the college crowd as he makes a stop at the “Purple Pit,” the students’ late-night bar and jazz club. As it turns out, this remade Kelp is the coolest, suavest, and perhaps most conceited “cat” in the place. He is a talented pianist and crooner who captivates the entire club, including his own romantic target, Stella. Getting her to drive him to a make-out spot, Kelp, who calls himself “Buddy Love,” begins to gather the payoff for his chemical adventure, only to discover (as did Dr. Jekyll) that his formula is Sex and the Single Nerd

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unreliable, wearing off as he puckers for his first kiss. Noticing that his voice is changing back into Kelp’s dorky, high-pitched whine, Buddy legs it, jumping out of the car and running away into the darkness. Although Dr. Jekyll’s salts produce an evil monster, Professor Kelp’s transformation into Buddy Love, a manifestation of the same phenomenon as Hyde, seem to produce a new candidate for Sinatra’s ’60s Rat Pack. Wondering mid-film why the formula transformed him into such a sexy, but rudely conceited, man, Professor Kelp contemplates the degree to which heredity and the experiences of his childhood conditioned the outcome. The film flashes back to a scene of childhood domestic infelicity, as his ball-breaking mother dominates his timid, dweebish father. Seeing the effects of his experiment, thus, as bringing out something that was already present in both his makeup and his history, Professor Kelp, like Dr. Jekyll, hypothesizes that the formula sponsors the emergence of a persona who already inhabits the genius. Instead of a maleficent evildoer, Professor Kelp’s suppressed ego is a macho sex symbol who quickly becomes the students’ social “leader.” Like Dr. Jekyll increasingly unable to control when the formula will wear off, Buddy Love agrees to headline the entertainment at the senior prom. But as he takes the stage to perform “That Old Black Magic” backed by Les Brown and His Band of Renown, his voice betrays him yet again. The students witness his visible transformation back into the familiar Professor Kelp. Finally, shamed, Kelp flees offstage, where Stella discovers him. The film ends happily with Kelp and Stella together as she seems not to care about his outward appearance. His father takes over the formula (and the dominant position in his household) as the film ends with Professor Kelp and Stella heading off to a life as newlyweds.

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The Genius Gendertype In the mid-1980s nerds have become sexually proficient, their entire manly secret the fact that they neither look nor act like studs. The mind/ sex duality persists, but a cultural imperative to remasculinize the smart guys so that guys can be smart without risk plays out in films whose valorization of the nerd figures parallels the growing centrality of software engineers. Revenge of the Nerds (1984), for example, pits a nerdy conglomerate of dorky computer geeks, hyperbolically nearsighted violin players, prepubescents, black gay athletes, and Japanese engineering students against the macho, occasionally handsome, alpha boys of the Adams College football team. Characterized by hiked-up pants, pocket protectors, buck teeth, totally goofy laughs, and glasses, the nerds, headed by Lewis (Robert Carradine) and Gilbert (Anthony Edwards), have been forced out of their dorm so that the school can accommodate the football team fraternity members of Alpha Beta, who burned down their frat house. The displaced nerds find their own house and form a new fraternity. To qualify as an acknowledged part of the Greek system, the nerds must find a national sponsor. A traditionally black fraternity, Lambda Lambda Lambda (suggesting the odd yet felicitous coalition of bullied minorities), gives them a shot (mostly because the nerds forgot to send the Lambdas their group photograph). The nerds convince the national fraternity heads that they are worthy through a series of smart maneuvers—providing “Wonder Pot” at their first party; aligning themselves with the sorority Omega Mu (whose name says it all) of Gilbert’s new girlfriend, accordion-playing Judy (Michelle Meyrink); gaining revenge on the Alpha Beta’s paired sorority, the Pis, by sneaking into the house and planting remote-controlled surveillance cameras;

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and getting revenge on the Alpha Betas themselves by pouring hot sauce on their athletic supporters. Because the Greek Council headed by the Alpha Betas and the Pis has control over all Greek matters, the nerds realize that to avoid further harassment, they must win the Homecoming Carnival and thus take over control of the Greek Council. Nerdy Lewis has a crush on head Alpha Beta Stan Gable’s (Ted McGinley) girlfriend, Betty Childs (Julie Montgomery), and during the carnival’s various events, Lewis, dressed as Darth Vader, approaches Betty in the Fun House and has sex with her. Betty, who thinks her fondler is her boyfriend Stan, is impressed with his new technique, only to find out that her skillful swain is Lewis when he unmasks himself.15 The nerd is the stud! Lambda Lambda Lambda wins the carnival through a combination of scientific knowledge (using an alcohol antidote to win the beer/tricycle event), clever marketing (selling “pies” in plates with nude pictures of the “Pis” on the bottom—get it? a homonym), skill at belching, and an electronic musical number that makes the other contestants’ acts look like, well, high school. The nerds outstud the studs; brains beat brawn. The truly sexy are those who don’t advertise, who hide their prowess behind pocket protectors and in hiked-up pants. By a year later in the 1985 Real Genius, there is no question that the genius California Polytechnic students are also the studs. Still encountering bullying, though this time from a corrupt professor, Jerry Hathaway (William Atherton), who uses his students to build a secret high-powered space laser for the defense department, alpha genius studs Chris Knight (Val Kilmer), precocious freshman Mitch Tayler (Gabe Jarret), and brainy legend Lazlo Hollyfeld (Jonathan Gries) manage both to invent the laser to be used in the weapon and to thwart the laser’s secret test, re-aiming it from space to destroy the professor’s own house. But not all of the film’s nerds are studs; some, like Kent (Robert 208

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Prescott) are still one-sided nerds who are unable to adjust to the new sexily holistic Geekdom. How we know that the star nerds are studs is that the secretary, Sherry Nugil (Patti D’Arbanville), of Darlington Electric, the main source of postgraduate jobs, has rated the ten best minds in the country by screwing them all, ending up with Lazlo as the best. And high schooler Mitch finds himself a girlfriend in the hyperactive nerd genius girl, played, perhaps predictably, by Michelle Meyrink. The bullies end up with no one—or rather Jerry ends up with a neighbor’s annoying boxer dog. What has happened from the era of Galton and Freud to the age of the nerd is the redirection, or perhaps redistribution, of genius libido to “persons and human interests”—the unrepression, or unsublimation, of Freud’s “sexual instinct” without any loss of genius at all. It appears as if the implicit contradiction between body (sexuality, lusts, human interests) and mind has dissolved. But has it? Can brainy nerds have it all? The mind/body dualism represented by the “either sex/or genius” has become the open secret of the nerdy genius. While culturally the choice between brains and brawn is still posed as an individual alternative in a range of typologies, the ambivalent striations of culture, as Galton already hypothesized it, are even more openly the layerings of contemporary nerd personality and capability. Sublimation has turned to masquerade. Nerds are studs insofar as their unmasculine nerdiness layers atop and obscures their hidden potency. This layering produces a chimera, one who neither is as he seems to be nor seems to succeed at being normative in any way, one whose mental talents may be subtended by sexual capability but whose sexiness cannot be immediately apparent. Nerds can be studs, but they still have a lot more trouble getting the girl. The nerd figure’s ambivalence points to not only uneasiness about intelligence, but uneasiness about status of intelligence in Sex and the Single Nerd

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a culture that can no longer decide whether being smart is a very good thing. The nerd figure is a compromise formation that responds to some cultural ambivalence, some unsettled battle of values around maleness itself. Although the nerd figure is not, according to nerd historians, a recent phenomenon, the formation does inhabit a highly symptomatic intersection between intelligence and stupidity, liberal values and misogyny, narcissism and generosity, and the shaky status of masculinity in general since the Second World War. That the nerd is a postwar phenomenon is ratified by Dr. Seuss’s invention of the term in his 1952 If I Ran the Zoo (although this is contested by alternative etymologies fronted by spellings beginning with a “k”—not to knock these, of course).16 The nerd type, which had appeared previously in the form of awkward, comic, often tragically expendable white male secondary characters in Hollywood cinema, shifts to the shunned intelligent misfit Plato of Rebel without a Cause or the brainy loser figures played by Tony Randall and Gig Young in Doris Day films.17 From the 1963 The Nutty Professor on, nerds persist in generational waves in which the nerds’ sexiness becomes increasingly visible and the version of the nerd as merely awkward and socially incompetent gradually fades. For example, the difference between ’80s nerds’ hidden machismo as repeatedly revealed in Revenge of the Nerds and Real Genius manifests in Revenge of the Nerds’ generation of three sequels that extend to 1994, becoming increasingly focused on the paradox of nerd sexiness. A third nerd generation arrives in 2007 with The Big Bang Theory, whose promotion of the nerd protagonist offers a broader anatomy of nerd characteristics that includes strains of narcissism, misogyny, obsessive compulsive behaviors, and perhaps notably, the nerd’s lack of developmental synchronization. If popular culture is symptomatic of larger cultural trends, then the increasing visibility of nerd figures in post–World War II films and 210

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television links the nerd to related arenas of cultural ambivalence. First, the nerd figure negotiates the perpetual need to bolster masculinity even by means of its self-cannibalization. Compared to nerds, “real” men enact the paradox of seeming to be even more masculine but at the same time ineffectual pretenders. The revelation of pretense is a necessary part of the mechanism by which masculinity is secured as that which always governs itself and produces within itself its own Hegelian binary. Second, the rise of scientific and technical culture occurs contemporaneously with the emergence of rabid anti-intellectualism in the United States. Although the latter has hovered at least since Henry Ford expostulated against the deleterious effects of education, only recently have we taken overt steps to eliminate thought and actively discredit thinkers and knowledge itself.18 As the synecdoche of a useless and annoying intellectual capacity, the nerd figure signifies the emasculating dangers of questioning massive corporate-engendered ignorance with such things as facts, logic, and a sense of history. Third, at the same time, the American discourse of the underdog locates the nerd as the unlikely winner of contests against brawny boys, suggesting again that the most effective way to secure American masculinity is to have it attack itself, while at the same time, the best way to castigate intellectual ambition is to figure it as unmanly. The unmanly nerds win, not because they are smart but because they are sexy, while the brawny boys lose to the spindly brains. Although nerd figures tend to disappear back into the secondary character positions such characters had previously occupied—Screech, Urkel19—they continue to provide contrast to characters defined as normatively masculine, taking on their nerdly selves such unsexy characteristics as intellect, clumsiness, homeliness, spastic lack of control, and social awkwardness so that the manly male protagonists can appear to be free from those pesky flaws. Instead of being split into the more Sex and the Single Nerd

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traditional halves representing brainy and sexy, genius males constitute one of two male groups on television sitcoms: the brainy nerds and the sexy normal guys. In this way, American culture can have it both ways: the genius intelligence that is necessary for progress (but that should be relatively unrewarded) and the macho-guy-ness to do the real brawny social business of profit and reproduction. Finally, misogyny arising anew as the apparent payoff of feminism’s excesses thrives in the environment of the nerd insofar as the nerd indulges openly in misogyny in the way only a sexually unsuccessful male can demean what he cannot acquire; and nerdish females are often, though not always, figured as clunky, oddly maternal, and/or unattractive. One cannot be intellectually engaged and a female, and/ or one cannot be intellectually engaged and have sex. Sound familiar? Only now the impossibility of versatility is located on the female side of things—well, now that we might admit that women have brains. The nerd figure, thus, encapsulates ambivalence about sexual difference, the value of intelligence, the roles of masculinity, and the value of thought for its own sake during the current emergence of corporate feudalism. Hound Dogs Leonard, Howard, Raj, and Sheldon are the nerdy science-minded genius boys who populate the 2007 CBS sitcom hit, The Big Bang Theory. Back again from their ’80s ventures as two-sided alpha males after two decades’ vacation, the nerdy boys, who have it all but never look like it, return as sitcom heroes. Although Revenge of the Nerds manfully spawned Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise in 1987, the television movies Revenge of the Nerds III: The Next Generation (1992) and Revenge of the Nerds IV: Nerds in Love (1994), as well as a host of eponymously 212

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titled television episodes on various sitcoms, in 2007 the Big Bang Theory’s nerdy boys reemerge full tilt as primarily intelligent (as opposed to simply nerdy) characters whose lives are openly intellectual. They have academic jobs and enjoy mental (as opposed to physical) pursuits, recreational activities, and jokes. Instead of being mere sidekicks, they are protagonists whose pursuits update the nerd culture represented in ’80s nerd films. The show became a CBS hit: by its fourth season it was the highest-rated comedy on television, winning awards for Best Comedy and Emmys for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series (Jim Parsons as the geekiest of all, Sheldon). Reaffirming Galton’s notion that geniuses tend not to care about “persons or human interests,” these four buddies, interested as three of them may be in sex, begin as neophytes who make robot girlfriends, get dates with international spies because they are working on government projects, or attempt to woo girls by letting them drive the Mars Rover. Markedly idiosyncratic, each has an intelligence that manifests in personal and sartorial quirks that make evident their difference from the norm. Central character Leonard (Johnny Galecki) is an experimental physicist who wears hoodies, is lactose intolerant, has asthma, initially has no idea how to act around women, and puts up with his roommate Sheldon’s OCD and narcissistic behaviors. Leonard clearly has a sexual libido; many of the show’s first three seasons focus on his awkward dating difficulties. Leonard’s roommate, Sheldon Cooper (Jim Parsons), is an “M” (string) theorist and self-proclaimed genius whose personal tics and predilections constitute the social challenge of the comedy. A precocious genius with two doctorates, Sheldon is a legalistic, obsessivecompulsive, narcissistic germophobe who constructs voluminous roommate agreements and routinized social and bathroom schedules, Sex and the Single Nerd

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and who contrives brain teasers as the basis for social interactions. Sheldon understands neither humor nor sarcasm; he is deaf to anything but direct statement and scientific application. Loudly opposed to sexual relations, Sheldon embodies a parody version of the genius of Galton and Freud’s time as the focused, one-sided, asexual, misogynist, socially uninterested male devoted to science. The roommates’ two friends, Howard (Simon Helberg) and Raj (Kunal Nayyar), are brainy as well, though Sheldon disputes their real intellect, as he constantly points out that Howard, an engineer, has only a master’s degree (from MIT). Howard is the most openly skeevy of the four as he brazenly offers sleazy pickup lines to new neighbor Penny, manufactures robot sex partners with six breasts, frequents a prostitute or two, but at the same time lives with his mother. A nice Jewish boy, Howard wears dickies and oddly color-coordinated outfits reminiscent of Garanimals while sporting a Beatles haircut. His best friend, Raj Koothrappali, a New Delhi astrophysicist, cannot talk to women unless he has ingested alcohol, and his behaviors and interests are closer to what he calls “the metrosexual” than to any sort of macho creature. In Raj’s case, this metrosexuality is the signifier of his apparent lack of masculinity—which also and predictably locates itself in the thirdworld other. Raj himself often draws attention to “racist” projection. The four together constitute a version of the Galton/Freud genius, with the attributes distributed among them. Sheldon is the singleminded, energetic genius; Leonard is a more macho but still intelligent social connector; Howard is the dorky-looking sexual predator (reminiscent of Revenge of the Nerds’ Lewis); and Raj is the ethnic other onto whom anxieties about homosexuality and insufficient masculinity might be displaced. In this way, the show appears to valorize genius while undermining it. A catalyst in the form of a new neighbor, Penny 214

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(Kaley Cuoco), an attractive struggling actress-waitress from Nebraska, instigates a running commentary on the masculine inadequacies of smart guys, while at the same time inviting identification with them as just guys like anyone else (well, except Sheldon). The Big Bang Theory persistently plays out cultural ambivalence about two issues: (1) the value of intelligence and (2) the value of women. Its title is even a pun referring either to a theory about the beginning of the universe or to a great moment of sexual intercourse. The comedy extols intelligence even as it displays its intelligent characters as narrow-minded, snobbish, naive, childish, socially inadequate or completely socially incompetent, and decidedly homocentric. The cost of brilliance is apparently having the social life and activities of an emotionally stalled fourteen-year-old. The characters seem to have a work ethic (although we rarely see them really at work), seem to know a lot of scattered facts, talk in full sentences, have good vocabularies, and can be witty in a brainy sort of way. But at the same time, the show seems to favor the characters precisely because of their juvenile weaknesses, which make smart people human like everyone else—in fact, maybe developmentally behind most normal guys. But just as the show humanizes the smart guys, it also suggests that their intelligence is no more useful nor valuable than that of neighbor Penny’s social, interpersonal, and street smarts that enable her to succeed where the brainy guys persistently fail. We like geniuses, but then, well, they aren’t really that useful. Smart’s good, but nothing special. There is really no practical difference between the four smart guys and neighbor Penny, which sets up the show’s other subtle ambivalence in its alternate displays of adulation of women and misogyny. It gets to have it both ways. On the one hand, some of the geniuses are openly misogynist, especially Sheldon, who constantly makes remarks dismissive Sex and the Single Nerd

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of women as “clucking hens” who discuss their menstrual cycles, unicorns, and rainbows, or other subjects he understands as somehow in the realm of the female. For years he refuses to acknowledge that friend Amy Farrah Fowler (Mayim Bialik), is his “girlfriend,” and he won’t hold hands, kiss, or engage in any other courtship behavior. Howard is a completely (and pathetically) sleazy sexist in the show’s first year. On the other hand, Penny is clearly the geniuses’ equal and also evidently physically superior in her ability to do what they cannot: kill spiders in the bathroom and effectively physically assault men. The show’s other female characters—the bossy Brooklyn offstage voice of Howard’s mother (Carol Ann Susi), Sheldon’s East Texas fundamentalist mom (Laurie Metcalf), and Leonard’s hyperintellectual, insensitive, and nonnourishing psychiatrist mother (Christine Baranski)—represent women as bossy or ignorant (depending on how one feels about fundamentalism). They also hint at psychological bases for their sons’ social retardation, suggesting that perhaps geniuses are unmanly because their mothers dominated them (and remember Professor Kelp). This is not the case with Sheldon, whose mother is a highly sympathetic, caring character, who had Sheldon “tested” to see if he was crazy. Sheldon seems to have been born that way. Genius Superheroes Curiously, however, the show never suggests that there is value in intelligence for its own sake. The genius subject of Galton’s researches and Freud’s interest is a mere (if idiosyncratic) consumer like everyone else. The Big Bang Theory’s ambivalence about the value of genius operates to delimit that genius to a mere consumer slot, itself consumed by those who are interested in watching geniuses consume. The profile of these geniuses is a market profile: they devour superhero comics (one of the 216

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four major sets on the show is a comic book store), watch superhero movies and sci-fi adventure sagas, purchase Dungeons and Dragons paraphernalia, and play Jenga. The idea is that these nerds admire superheroes both because they do not themselves have much in the way of macho physical qualities and also because insofar as superheroes also have super brains, they combine, yet again ambivalently, aspects of the two sides of masculinity posited culturally as alternatives to one another: brawn or brains. Although part of this admiration of superheroes contributes to the geniuses’ characterization as nerds, part of their being nerds comes from their participation in the identifiably “geek” portion of the consumer market.20 This market, particularly the computer game portion, itself designed by computer whizzes, is precisely aimed at computer whizzes and operates to distract such geniuses from their energetic pursuit of knowledge and instead to use their talent in meaningless games and narratives that offer them imaginary powers (and imaginary masculinity) in place of the real powers they might exercise. What had, in the nineteenth century, been the repression or sublimation of an attention to the mundane or to sexual urges turns into another kind of split existence: a life half-subsumed in substanceless junk, where genius goes to die. No longer beings focused on the energetic, single-minded pursuit of knowledge, contemporary geniuses (at least as represented on television) divert their talents toward empty ends—ends that are themselves the meaningless products of the (now wasted) mental energies of other geniuses. Genius has turned into itself, spiraling inwardly toward the useless production of commodity fantasies by which geniuses can vicariously live out delusions of masculine empowerment instead of work toward a culture that might surpass the limitations of both brawn and brains. Sex and the Single Nerd

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Notes 1. Galton, Hereditary Genius, 227. 2. Ibid., 232. 3. Ibid., 228–32. 4. Oliver, The Colonization of Psychic Space, 158–59. 5. Ibid., 21. 6. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 16. 7. Ibid., 21. 8. “New Letters Shed Light on Einstein’s Love Life.” See also Tsutsumi, “Albert Einstein Love Letters.” 9. For example, Walter Isaacson’s Einstein: His Life and Universe from 2008, James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, 1993, and Lawrence Krauss, Quantum Man: Richard Feynman’s Life in Science, 2012. There are at least ten biographies of each man—not including their own writings. 10. Jogalekar, “Richard Feynman, Sexism and Changing Perceptions of a Scientific Icon.” 11. For a fuller account of this concept of genders, see my What Gender Is, What Gender Does, 2016. 12. Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 91. 13. Ibid., 86. 14. In “Silent Homosexuality in Oscar Wilde’s Teleny and The Picture of Dorian Gray and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,” Antonio Sanna reads the tale as a comment upon prescriptive heteronormativity. Patricia Ferrer-Medina reads the tale as playing out the opposition between culture and nature in “Wild Humans: The Culture/Nature Duality in Marie Darrieussecq’s Pig Tales and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” Martin Danahay reads it as contemplating issues of masculinity and class in “Dr. Jekyll’s Two Bodies”; and, of course, as a double, e.g., Jules Law’s “There’s Something about Hyde.” 15. Lewis, alas, may cross the line of permissible sexual activity in the sense that dressed as Betty’s boyfriend, Lewis knows that he is gaining permission for sexual activity through ruse. He is saved from a rape accusation only because what he does outshines the capacities of her boyfriend. This unfortunately figures nerd libido as a fantasy of power over the feminine in relation to which the nerd has always been defined. 16. The Wikipedia entry on “nerd” lists several origins for the term, from Dr. Seuss to Newsweek to Philip K. Dick and even to “drunk” spelled backward. 17. Hollywood comedies from the 1940s and 1950s often included a nerdish male as 218

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a secondary character, either as a romantic competitor or as the male lead’s sidekick. See, for example, Hildy Johnson’s (Rosalind Russell) nerdy boyfriend, Bruce Baldwin (Ralph Bellamy) who is easily beaten out by ex-husband Walter Burns (Cary Grant) in His Girl Friday, or the easily outstripped Jonathan Forbes (Tony Randall) in the 1959 Pillow Talk or even the roles played by nerd character actor Alvy Moore in the 1954 Susan Slept Here and as character Hank Kimball in television’s Green Acres. 18. The history of American anti-intellectualism is probably much longer. See Pierce, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free. 19. Screech, played by Dustin Diamond on the television series Saved by the Bell (1989–93) and Steve Urkel, played by Jaleel White on Family Matters (1989–98) typify this geek of the transitional years. Urkel, like Professor Kelp but even more like Eddie Murphy’s Professor Sherman Klump, who transforms his DNA in the 1996 remake of The Nutty Professor, developed a “Cool Juice” formula to repress the nerdy part of his DNA and let the “cool” part emerge, so that he becomes “Stefan Urquelle.” Not only does this reflect a continued notion of the nerd as a layered being with a repressed (and equally) studly other half, it deliberately links the African American Urkel to a tradition of mostly white geniuses. Diamond, however, has turned out to be more Mr. Hyde, as he was recently sentenced to serve four months in prison for stabbing a man in a bar fight. 20. See for example, studies of geeks as “cultural intermediaries” in economic contexts as in Benjamin Woo’s “Alpha Nerds: Cultural Intermediaries in a Subcultural Scene,” the symptomatic function of the market in Arthur Chu’s “Nerd Is the New Normal,” or Lori Kendall’s reading of nerd subcultures’ intersection with music culture and their mediation of fears of computing in “‘White and Nerdy’: Computers, Race, and the Nerd Stereotype.”

Bibliography Battersby, Christine. Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. The Big Bang Theory. 2007–. Created by Chuck Lorre and Bill Prady. Los Angeles: Stage 25 Warner Brothers. TV show. Chu, Arthur. “Nerd Is the New Normal.” Guardian, November 11, 2014. http://www .theguardian.com/commentsisfree/2014/nov/11/nerd-is-the-new-normal. Danahay, Martin, “Dr. Jekyll’s Two Bodies.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 35, no. 1 (February 2013): 23–40. Dr. Seuss [Theodore Geisel]. If I Ran the Zoo. New York: Random, 1950. Sex and the Single Nerd

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Einstein, Albert. Einstein on Cosmic Religion and Other Opinions and Aphorisms. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2009. ——. Ideas and Opinions. Portland, OR: Broadway Books, 1995. ——. The World as I See It. New York: Citadel, 2006 Family Matters. 1989–98. Los Angeles: Bickley-Warren Productions. TV show. Ferrer-Medina, Patricia, “Wild Humans: The Culture/Nature Duality in Marie Darrieussecq’s Pig Tales and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” Comparatist: Journal of the Southern Comparative Literature Association 31 (May 2007): 67–87. Feynman, Richard. The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist. New York: Basic Books, 2005. ——. Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track. New York: Basic Books, 2006. ——. The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman. New York: Basic Books, 2005. ——. Surely You Are Joking, Mr. Feynman (Adventures of a Curious Character). New York: Norton, 1997. ——. “What Do You Care What Other People Think?”: Further Adventures of a Curious Character. New York: Norton, 2001. Francis, Matthew. “The Problem of Richard Feynman.” Galileo’s Pendulum (blog). July 13, 2014. https://galileospendulum.org/2014/07/13/the-problem-of-richard -feynman/. Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. Aylesbury, England: Chrysoma, 2000. Galton, Francis. Hereditary Genius. London: Macmillan, 1869. ——. “On Men in Science, Their Nature and Their Nurture.” Proceedings of the Royal Institution of Great Britain 7 (February 27, 1874): 227–36. https://books.google.com /books?id=_uE-bpGo2N4C&pg=PA227#v=onepage&q&f=false. Gleick, James. Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman. New York: Vintage, 1993. Green Acres. 1965–1971. Directed by Jay Sommers. Los Angeles: Filmways. TV show. His Girl Friday. 1940. Directed by Howard Hawks. Los Angeles: Columbia. Film. Isaacson, Walter. Einstein: His Life and Universe. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2008. Jogalekar, Ashutosh. “Richard Feynman, Sexism and Changing Perceptions of a Scientific Icon.” July 11, 2014. Accessed July 12, 2016. http://blogs.scientificamerican .com/the-curious-wavefunction/richard-feynman-sexism-and-changing-perceptions -of-a-scientific-icon/.

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Kendall, Lori. “‘White and Nerdy’: Computers, Race, and the Nerd Stereotype.” Journal of Popular Culture 44, no. 3 (2011): 505–24. Krauss, Lawrence. Quantum Man: Richard Feynman’s Life in Science. New York: Norton, 2012. Law, Jules, “There’s Something about Hyde.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 42, no. 3 (Fall 2009): 504–10. “Nerd.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nerd. Accessed June 27, 2015. “New Letters Shed Light on Einstein’s Love Life.” NBCNews.com. Updated July 10, 2006. http://www.nbcnews.com/id/13804030/ns/technology_and_science-science /t/new-letters-shed-light-einsteins-love-life/#.VWxnJSlH3cI. Accessed June 25, 2015 and removed June 27, 2015. The Nutty Professor. 1963. Directed by Jerry Lewis. Los Angeles: Paramount. Film. The Nutty Professor. 1996. Directed by Tom Shadyac. Los Angeles: Imagine. Film. Oliver, Kelly. The Colonization of Psychic Space: A Psychoanalytic Social Theory of Oppression. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Pierce, Charles. Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free. New York: Anchor, 2010. Pillow Talk. 1959. Directed by Michael Gordon. Los Angeles: Universal. Film. Rebel without a Cause. 1955. Directed by Nicholas Ray. Los Angeles: Warner Brothers. Film. Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise. 1987. Directed by Joe Roth. Los Angeles: Twentieth Century Fox. Film. Revenge of the Nerds III: The Next Generation. 1992. Directed by Roland Mesa. Los Angeles: Zacharias-Buhai Productions. TV movie. Revenge of the Nerds IV: Nerds in Love. 1994. Directed by Steve Zacharias. Los Angeles: Fox West Pictures. TV movie. Roof, Judith. What Gender Is, What Gender Does. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. Sanna, Antonio. “Silent Homosexuality in Oscar Wilde’s Teleny and The Picture of Dorian Gray and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.” Law and Literature 24, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 21–39. Saved by the Bell. 1989–1993. Created by Sam Bobrick. Los Angeles: NBC. TV show. Stevenson, Robert Louis. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. 1886. Project Gutenberg. http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/42/pg42.html. Susan Slept Here. 1954. Directed by Frank Tashlin. Los Angeles: RKO Radio Pictures. Film. Tsutsumi, Kengo. “Albert Einstein Love Letters: Famed Physicist’s Theory of Relationships.” International Business Times. December 8, 2014. http://www.ibtimes Sex and the Single Nerd

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.com/pulse/albert-einstein-love-letters-famed-physicists-theory-relationships -1742804. Woo, Benjamin. “Alpha Nerds: Cultural Intermediaries in a Subcultural Scene.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 15, no. 5 (October 2012): 659–76.

Judith Roof is William Shakespeare Chair in English at Rice University, author, most recently, of What Gender Is, What Gender Does, and editor (with Jonathan P. Eburne) of The Year’s Work in the Oddball Archive (Indiana University Press, 2016) and the journal Genders.

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NERDS IN CAPES: COURTLY LOVE AND THE EROTICS OF MEDIEVALISM

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jamie taylor

At any moment at Bryn Mawr College, a women’s liberal arts college just outside of Philadelphia, one might encounter undergraduates involved in a game of Quidditch, overhear a group speaking like pirates, or see a few students wearing long capes. These students are known as “Capies,” and they constitute a small but visible subculture on campus, listed on Unigo (an online guide to American colleges and universities) as one of Bryn Mawr’s top-ten curiosities.1 Even fellow Bryn Mawr students see them as oddities—as elusive and strange outsiders who are extraordinarily dedicated to their obscure hobbies, as a community that coalesces around traditionally nerdy interests, including science fiction, comic books, and fantasy literature. Perhaps not surprisingly, Capies are also often enthusiastic medievalists, filling Bryn Mawr’s courses in medieval literature, history, art history, and classics. This chapter maps the interrelationship between nerd culture and medievalism at Bryn Mawr College to describe the particular ways and reasons women express nerdiness. These Bryn Mawr nerds not only draw on medieval history, vocabulary, and tropes as communal interests and enthusiasms; they also turn to the Middle Ages to explore their complex subject positions as nerdy women shifting from adolescence to adulthood. Hard to define but easy to identify, nerds are typically thought to have technological know-how, mathematical talent, and a penchant for fantasy literature, comic books, and science fiction. They are also 223

implicitly assumed to be white, middle to upper class, and male.2 In studies of the social organizations of US high schools, “nerds” occupy a social category different from “jocks” or “burnouts,” defining themselves in contradistinction to masculine codes of “coolness” and rejecting traditional models of male subject formation such as dating, participation in sports, or, in the case of “burnouts,” deliberately underachieving in academics. Mary Bucholtz notes that those classified as nerds in high school tend to “consciously choose and display their identities through language and other social resources,” demonstrating expertise in the world of books and academic knowledge.3 Likewise, nerds tend to dismiss unwritten “rules” of dress or friendship choices that shape those in other social categories. They are thus marked sartorially, socially, and intellectually as outcasts who excel in school. Such a dismissal of the “rules” of mainstream social interaction and appearance marks nerds as perpetually immature, particularly in terms of sexual development; moreover, nerd culture elevates scholarly ability over and against sexual prowess. For example, “nerdity tests,” online lists of 500 questions designed to determine one’s level of nerdiness, offer a response to popular online “purity tests,” which use a series of 500 questions about sexual experience and drug use to establish one’s level of “purity.”4 “Nerdity tests” suggest that nerd culture establishes its own set of standards distinct from any normative focus on sexual experience and experimentation. Accordingly, nerds embody a “liminal masculinity,” insofar as they reject the kind of “rugged physicality” and sexual confidence celebrated in American culture in favor of technological and academic expertise.5 What about nerdy girls? Recently, traditionally nerdy (and traditionally male) venues like Comic-Con have started to recognize women as enthusiastic participants in nerdy activities and interests. Likewise, video game manufacturers and science fiction writers have begun to 224

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envision women as a part of their target audience.6 Nerd culture provides studious girls an opportunity to engage in their interests and to resist the pressures to be demure, provocative, or flirtatious. Accordingly, nerdy girls can forge an identity centered on intellectual capability and performance. As Bucholtz puts it: “For girls, nerd identity also offers an alternative to the pressures of hegemonic femininity—an ideological construct that is at best incompatible with, and at worst hostile to, female intellectual ability. Nerd girls’ conscious opposition to this ideology is evident in every aspect of their lives, from language to hexis to other aspects of self-presentation. Where cool girls aim for either cuteness or sophistication in their personal style, nerd girls aim for silliness. . . . Cool girls read fashion magazines; nerd girls read novels.”7 Nerdiness offers girls the opportunity to extract themselves from the pressure to construct their identity around conventional attractiveness and dating. For female nerds, nerdiness provides an alternative to the heteronormative demands of femininity. And yet, as Bucholtz here suggests, nerd culture also arrests girls in a prolonged adolescence in which “silliness” trumps sophistication and intellectual interests trump sexual desires. Whereas male nerds turn their attention to technological expertise and away from sexual aggression, female nerds turn their attention toward scholarly interests and away from sexual objectification. However, Bryn Mawr nerds express and experiment with sexual objectification even as they announce their “silly,” nerdy interests and expertise, and they do so specifically through medievalism. We can track these nerds’ medievalism across several decades through a unique archive known as the Backsmoker Diaries, which are notebooks that have been maintained and housed in Bryn Mawr’s dorms since at least 1976, kept in common rooms that were once smoking lounges (hence the term “Backsmoker”). In these diaries, students anonymously or pseudonymously write notes to one another, voice complaints and Nerds in Capes

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questions, and cite quotations from books or movies they like. Some Backsmoker Diaries have ongoing stories that have been added to by various people over the years; others feature drawings and sketches. At their most superficial, they offer evidence of just how pedantically nerdy some Bryn Mawr students can be. For example, one student wrote in September 1978 a rather poetic lament: “O thou Mawrters, how can I calm my weary brain. Blasphemy against the Great Old, hostility among our ranks, and even one daring to suspect he (let that name not be evermore mentioned upon this earth-amen) was in any fashion right, it is all more than I can manage. Is this not a dark hour in the pursuit of truth?” The response just below this lament corrects the lamenter’s grammar, without offering empathy or advice: “Thou is singular. You should say, ‘O ye Mawrters.’”8 Significantly, the Diaries often feature medieval words or tropes to express a wide range of excitements, laments, and responses. Such medievalisms (employing quasi-medieval vocatives, for example, or describing knightly costuming) use an ersatz Middle Ages to construct a common vocabulary among a community of nerdy girls and, as I analyze below, to deposit the writers’ anxieties into a distant time and space. Indeed, turning to the Middle Ages to excise anxieties, voice ideologies, or formulate communities is not unique to Bryn Mawr nerds. Medievalism emerged almost before the Middle Ages themselves were over. Despite Petrarch’s 1330 sneering dismissal of the “dark ages” as a way to herald a literary and cultural “renaissance,” the Middle Ages thrived in the early modern period and beyond. To offer just a few examples, the Middle Ages functioned as a lively setting for Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Shepheardes Calender, for Shakespeare’s Hamlet, King Lear, and Romeo and Juliet, for Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, and for Scott’s Ivanhoe. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed newfound interests in collecting medieval manuscripts and objects, prompted both 226

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by antiquarian curiosity and by the desire to formulate the present as a “modern” society distinct from the “simple” or “barbaric” systems of its past. In contrast, the nineteenth-century historians and archivists produced numerous treatises on the Middle Ages that promoted revolution by depicting idealized medieval governments.9 Current versions of the Middle Ages often take on a more “popular,” entertaining focus, in the form of movies, television shows, Renaissance Faires, and Medieval Times restaurant franchises. Such “medieval kitsch,” to use David W. Marshall’s phrase, foregrounds the silly enjoyment that more “serious” forms of medievalism cast aside in favor of scholarly rigor or ideological agenda.10 The pleasures of “popular” medievalism are worth considering in terms of women’s particular reclamation of the medieval in the service of articulating desire, intellectual engagement, and community. In its widely various forms, medievalism is driven by competing forces: on the one hand, to connect to and revivify the traditions, languages, and customs of one’s cultural heritage; on the other hand, to erect boundaries around that past, to separate it from the inexorable move toward modern institutions, systems of government, and social practices. Simultaneously past- and future-oriented, any form of medievalism—whether Shakespeare’s stagings, lofty neo-Gothic architecture, or contemporary American Renaissance Faires—is motivated by the desire to “capture” the distant past and reinvent it on behalf of the present. The multiple kinds of medievalisms archived in the Backsmoker Diaries reveal an attempt to establish a community of like-minded, knowledgeable women who could banter through historical facts and quotations. Indeed, many of the medievalisms in the Diaries depict a population that was very well-informed about the Middle Ages, offering citations from medieval texts or accurate historical information, rather than bowdlerized versions of the Middle Ages. These citations function as a call to others Nerds in Capes

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who might have the same enthusiasm for or knowledge about them. For example, one student quizzes her peers: “‘ATTENTION: Here is a riddle that a famous philosopher, I forget who, died from frustration trying to solve: What we caught we threw away; what we could not catch we kept. Hint: Remember this riddle was written in the Middle Ages.’ Another student solves the riddle (‘ANSWER: fleas’) in the margin.”11 In addition, the Middle Ages offer a way for these students to animate their own moment. When on October 14, 1980, a diarist notes the anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, for example, she does so both to perform her own historical knowledge for other readers who might be interested and to connect the present day to events in the past. Here, knowledge of medieval history serves as a kind of linking tool between the diarists, a signal to others who might use medieval facts as conversational fodder; and thus it functions as a mode of community formation among those who live in the same dorm. Some citations of actual events and texts from the Middle Ages link those medieval moments to the present even more overtly: “Today is the Feast Day of St. George, who did in centuries past gloriously defeat a vile Worm, or Dragon. He himself was also killed, but was restored again to life. Let us then follow his example, and, no great time hence, go forth valourously [sic] to struggle with our exams, remembering that though they be the death of us, yet there is life after exam week, and we shall be restored to life, and our proper health and happiness.”12 This diarist uses the Feast Day of St. George to buoy her fellow students during exam week, a strategy of linking the past and present to commiserate with fellow dormmates. Likewise, diarists turned to medieval forms of representation to symbolize their common experiences in the dorms across time. In the early 1980s, for example, one dorm sought to revive forms of heraldry to brand itself and foster a sense of territorial loyalty: 228

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9.1. Backsmoker Diary, Denbigh, vol. 2. Image courtesy of Bryn Mawr College Special Collections. Nerds in Capes

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Dear Folks, Would one or more of you try to locate a pictorial (or simply verbal) representation of either the coat of arms for the Earl of Denbigh and or the emblem? We would like to recreate it for dorm use.13

The “Earl of Denbigh” is a fictionalized character for Denbigh Dorm; here, the diarist suggests an ersatz history to authorize a “revival” of a dorm tradition. The Backsmoker Diaries thus exhibit several kinds of medievalisms, from direct quotations of medieval riddles to citations of historical dates to “medieval” heraldic imagery. All of these modes draw together a community of female students who envision the Middle Ages as a site of common intellectual expertise and interest. Notably, the Diaries use the term “nerd” for the first time in 1994, in an ironic “confession” written with artificial medieval spelling and diction: “Confession: The undersigned doth confess with open and willing heart, a heart heavy with shame, that shee is to be publickly castigated as the most abjecte of NERDS.” The marginal response reads, “Oooh, a real live NERD. Are you accepting disciples at this time?”14 The initial comment sardonically admits to the purported shame that attends nerdiness, inviting public mockery and punishment for it. But the response upends this performance of shame, expressing excitement at finding a fellow nerd. Here, “nerd” operates as shorthand for women who feel isolated, ashamed, or marginalized, and in turn, for the possibilities of intimacy and friendship that can emerge from that marginalization. More specifically, nerdiness here and elsewhere dovetails with medievalism, constructing a community of outcasts marked by medieval signifiers and vocabulary. As one student writes in 1999: “Welcome Prospectives! There are too many normal people here. If you’re wierd [sic] please come join us. We may be insane but we have lots of fun. Cloaks and swords 230

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and castles and capes.”15 These “weird” students—these nerds—potentially find each other through medievalism, whether via the “medieval” confessions left in the Backsmoker Diaries or via cloaks, swords, and capes. Indeed, the medievalisms in the Backsmoker Diaries repeatedly express yearning for a community of weird, nerdy girls, demonstrating a desire for a community, rather than the ongoing existence of one. When the above diarist says that “there are too many normal people here,” or when the nerdy confessor requests public castigation for her nerdiness, both reach out to be recognized and to have her nerdiness witnessed. (Notably, the nickname Bryn Mawr students use for one another, “Mawrtyrs,” gestures to the etymological link between martyrs and witnesses.) As Kelly Oliver has argued, “To conceive of oneself as a subject is to have the ability to address oneself to another, real or imaginary, actual or potential. Subjectivity is the result of, and depends on, the process of witnessing—address-ability and response-ability.”16 For the Backsmoker nerds, medievalism attempts the kind of witnessing that supports subject formation, insofar as these students use medieval tropes to imagine like-minded women, addressing one another and asking for responses.17 Medievalisms in the Backsmoker Diaries thus represent the desires of these students to formulate for themselves a subject position with a name—nerds—that authorizes and even celebrates them as “weird.” Thomas Prendergast and Stephanie Trigg remind us that medievalism is always an exercise in desire of one kind or another: “Among these desires,” they list, “are the desire to recover, the desire to revive, the desire to play or recreate, or to reform, the desire to know, and most problematically, erotic desire.”18 I will return to the specific operations of erotic desire in the Backsmoker medievalisms later in this chapter, but for now I want to stress that the coagulating feature of these various desires for the Middle Ages might be described as nostalgia, an affective Nerds in Capes

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yearning for an object that was never really there. If nostalgia “paradoxically affirms the past (and very often a fictional past at that) by reconstituting the story of its passing,” it always, like medievalism, imagines a past in the service of the present.19 Nostalgia registers a never-to-befulfilled desire, and it is experienced as the ongoing, melancholic pleasure of loss or absence. Indeed, nostalgia requires that longing remain unsatisfied, so desire is nurtured, sustained, and enjoyed. As Svetlana Boym succinctly explains, “Nostalgia (from nostos—return home, and algia—longing) is a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed. Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy.”20 Renée Trilling has recently argued that the proliferation of popular escapes to an artificial, enjoymentbased Middle Ages rely specifically upon the nostalgic desires of communities like the Bryn Mawr Capies. “For modern readers, viewers, and visitors,” she writes, “the tropes of nostalgic medievalism are classically longed-for but always-already lost, and the sites that offer them for consumption—cultural heritage, popular media—exploit this disjunction, holding them up for view, but at arm’s length.”21 Renaissance Faires, Medieval Times restaurants, and the like all gesture to the possibility that a distant past might be not only understood but experienced, even as they also demonstrate the impossibility of actually living the Middle Ages. Thus, they instantiate an “ongoing cycle of desire, fulfillment and lack that can only be addressed by the production and consumption of still more medievalist/fantasy artifacts.”22 If the Backsmoker medievalisms reveal a persistent reach toward an imagined community of female nerds, they also express a nostalgic longing for a lost past, perhaps an earlier time when these women did have a ready community of nerdy friends with whom they could share their silly, “unsophisticated” interests. The Middle Ages offers an appropriate venue through which these students might try to return to a childhood 232

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in which they knew themselves as nerds with fellow nerdy friends, to an “innocent” time before the challenges of heteronormative femininity emerged as a crucial mode of subjectivity for women. The Middle Ages themselves have been repeatedly conceptualized as youthful, innocent, and naïve, in contrast to the sophistication of modern politics, economics, and social structures. (Mark Twain’s medievalist masterpiece, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, exploits this conceptualization to tragicomic effect.) And the Middle Ages has long been fodder for children’s and young adult literature, both in retellings of medieval narratives (such as Howard Pyle’s 1883 Merry Adventures of Robin Hood) and in fantastical constructions of “medieval” worlds (such as J. R. R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings series).23 The Backsmoker diarists draw upon medieval tropes and language both to forge new communities of nerds as well as to glance toward lost childhoods; as college students, they find themselves at the brink of adulthood, poised between their adolescent selves and new, undefined adult subjects. Nerdiness, as Bucholtz points out, extends adolescence by inoculating girls against the sexual politics in which they are expected to participate. So, it seems, does medievalism, in that it provides the opportunity to imagine a nerd culture that finds pleasure in pedantic historical expertise or in silly uses of “ye olde” language, rather than in sexual exploits or more “adult” modes of social interaction. In the Backsmoker Diaries, then, the cycle of desire and lack through which medievalism emerges is the desire for a lost adolescent “innocence” in which these nerdy girls might continue to formulate friendships around intellectual or academic interests rather than heteronormative standards of attractiveness or sexual competition. But the Backsmoker Diaries demonstrate that erotic pleasures might also be an important part of these nerds’ medievalism. As Prendergast and Trigg suggest, the most powerful and problematic desire of medievalism is erotic desire. “To uncover the Middle Ages,” they write, “is to Nerds in Capes

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fulfill desire even as desire is abjured—a vacillation between discovery and reinvestment that is expressed in that vexed word ‘recovery.’”24 The Middle Ages is figured as time and place marginal to “modernity,” a temporal outcast whose differences from the present moment are enticing, even seductive. Those who invest their academic or hobbyist interests in the Middle Ages participate in a twofold structure: on one hand, they seek to “reveal” the Middle Ages, to cite historical facts, to use “medieval” vocabularies, to dress in period costumes. On the other hand, they seek to keep the Middle Ages “weird,” alien to the present moment, and connected to the outcast culture of nerds. The pleasures of this double structure are in the balance between revelation and concealment; nerds nurture those pleasures by animating the Middle Ages while insisting that they remain fundamentally inaccessible or “weird.” Prendergast and Trigg argue for “a subterranean discourse of eros that corporealizes the Middle Ages,” insofar as medievalism is based on an ongoing coverand-reveal construction of a Middle Ages that is seductively close but out of reach. It is thus not so surprising that many of the medievalisms in the Backsmoker Diaries express specifically erotic or romantic desire, often sighing about troubled or nonexistent love lives. Indeed, the nerdy diarists do not, as Bucholtz has suggested, turn away from romantic or erotic pleasures in favor of intellectual ones. Rather, they persistently depict their experimentation with erotic fantasies through the medieval tropes of courtly romance. For example, in October 1977, one student wrote, “A knight in shining armour slew the dragons outside the castle gates—but will he be able to reach my secluded bower?” Likewise, that same month, yet another student complained, “A gallant tried to scale the walls to reach me, but slipped, fell, cursed, and walked away sigh A good man is hard to find.”25 Courtly love tropes are both appropriate and odd resources for Bryn Mawr students to express their erotic or romantic fantasies. Courtly 234

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romance offers a structured system of unfulfilled erotic desire, in which a besotted knight performs feats of strength on behalf of his absent beloved. It even comes with a rule book—Andreas Capellanus’s twelfthcentury De amore offers specific codes of conduct to regulate the processes of seduction and romance—so it appeals to those who want to express erotic longing via nerdy expertise or pedantry. But courtly love tropes emphasize the activity of male, knightly lovers, and when cited in the Backsmoker Diaries, they position the diarists as passive ladies subject to the successes or failures of men. Both Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek have rightly argued that the Lady of courtly love is “a feminine object emptied of all real substance,” such that she becomes “a cold, distanced, inhuman partner.”26 The gendered passivity of courtly love is at odds with the active pursuit of a female nerd community in other, less erotically charged medievalisms. Thus, these entries offer a specific form of medievalism that seems to contradict the work performed by other entries. In other words, the entries that use courtly love tropes to articulate romantic desire, erotic yearning, and unfulfilled fantasies of love seem to differ from those that draw upon other kinds of medievalisms—mentions of feast days, citations of Old English riddles, descriptions of heraldic coats-of-arms—in that they depict a lone woman glumly and passively waiting for a man, rather than a community of women actively pursuing similar intellectual passions. Yet these entries exceed the gendered constrictions they express. When the diarist above wonders if her knight will make it into her bower, for example, she locates herself in a private space designated specifically for women, in contradistinction to the public, masculine space of the castle. As Elizabeth Fay explains, “The bower invokes a medieval setting, a lady’s space of privacy and beauty less regulated than the interiors of the castle. . . . The medieval bower was external to or closeted from the male-defined and male regulated court.”27 The bower Nerds in Capes

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in this entry both isolates the diarist and uniquely permits her to reach out to other women; it is where she awaits the dragon-slaying knight, but it is also where she asserts her writing as intended exclusively for women. By detaching herself from the masculine space of the castle and attaching herself to the feminine space of the bower, she establishes this diary entry specifically as an utterance from a woman, addressed toward other women. Moreover, bowers were often conceptualized as spaces of sexual experimentation, unabashed pleasure, and female power. As Spenser describes his famous Bower of Blisse in the Faerie Queene (itself a call to medieval courtly romance): Goodly it was enclosed round about, Aswell their entred guests to keep within, As those unruly beasts to hold without; Yet was the fence thereof but weake and thin; Nought feard their force, that fortilage to win, But wisedomes powre, and temperaunces might, By which the mightiest things efforced bin: And eke the gate was wrought of substaunce light, Rather for pleasure, then for battery or fight.28

Spenser’s bower is a place of pleasure, rather than violence or might. It protects its female inhabitants from “unruly beasts,” but the enclosure is permeable. Indeed, as Spenser continues, when one of the maidens who lives in the bower notices a male knight watching her, she turns to him and “her two lilly paps aloft displayd, / And all, that might his melting hart entise / To her delights, she vnto him bewrayd.”29 The women who live in Spenser’s bower manipulate the passive desire of the male knight, establishing themselves as the empowered inhabitants of this semiprivate space. By positioning herself in the bower, then, this diarist extracts herself a bit from the “ladylike” passivity that subtends these 236

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chivalric tropes. Although she is waiting for her lover to arrive, she does so in a distinctly female private space, one suggestive of unashamed erotic pleasure in which women can take over the role of love object. More broadly, the courtly love tropes the diarist deploys are transformed when inserted into a communal, interactive text like the Backsmoker Diaries. By writing these tropes to other women as a call to those who would recognize the citations, she disturbs the roles of active (male) lover and passive (female) object. These entries function both as an exploration of the kind of erotic desire that might retreat into stale, heteronormative tropes and as a mode of intellectual sorority that revises the role of the absent lady into a more active participant. Courtly love thus operates in the Backsmoker Diaries in multiple, contradictory ways, expressing passive longing to be a beloved as well as harnessing the power of erotic fantasy on behalf of a community of women. The medievalisms of the Backsmoker Diaries accommodate erotic pleasures even if they do not wholly embrace them, depicting conflicted, contradictory shifts from adolescent to adult for female nerds. Indeed, the diarists sometimes reveal an embarrassed self-awareness that their expressive modes might be understood as silly, clichéd, or antifeminist. For example, the student who complained about the gallant who slipped and walked away when scaling the walls to reach her wrote a sad poem a month later. “My white knight / Not a Lancelot / Or an angel with wings,” she writes, “Just someone who will love me / Who is not ashamed of a few fine things.” But a fellow student hastens to add a caveat: “I must correct the above statement—at least enough to make sure that the future historians who study this document will not think that I conceived and wrote down the above statement—even though I do not like it—it just isn’t my style.”30 The “correction” tries to offer a counternarrative to romantic medievalisms by assuring future archivists that not all Bryn Mawr students use such modes of expression. Nerds in Capes

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Yet it is unclear precisely what embarrasses the editor, whether the use of medievalism for affective expression or the expression of romantic desire itself. It is possible that this caveat polices the boundaries of the dorm’s nerd community to remind the medieval enthusiasts that medievalism ought to express intellectual pleasures, not erotic ones. Nonetheless, any split between intellectual and erotic pleasures is not only impossible to maintain for the Backsmoker diarists, it is decidedly unmedieval. The drive to knowledge begins, according to medieval theologians, with curiosity, or curiositas, and theologians worried about curiosity as dangerously “promiscuous,” insofar as it might promote indiscriminate pursuit of and pleasure in knowledge. Medieval writers like Peter Damian and Bernard of Clairvaux argued that only those who are able to pursue their curiosity in a structured, responsible way—that is, academics—could manage to avoid overstepping their intellectual bounds. For non-philosophers and non-theologians, curiosity was an ill-advised attempt to figure out the divine secrets they had no business or ability to know. Significantly, patristic writers stridently worried that curiosity might lead to sensual practices of pleasure. For example, Augustine warned that inquisitiveness is just as dangerous as bodily sin: “For in addition to the fleshly appetite which strives for the gratification of all senses and pleasures . . . there is also a certain vain and curious longing in the soul, rooted in the same bodily senses, which is cloaked under the name of knowledge and learning; not having pleasure in the flesh, but striving for new experiences through the flesh.”31 The problem is that curiosity produces a desire for knowledge for its own sake, and the pleasures of that knowledge dwell, as Augustine says, only in the thrill of knowing. This language—of desire, lust, thrill, craving—recurs for centuries, in the writings of John Cassian, Thomas Aquinas, and even Geoffrey Chaucer, among others.32 Throughout the Middle Ages, 238

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intellectual and erotic desire was difficult to disentangle. So too in the Backsmoker Diaries. The link between intellectual and erotic desire is more overt in the 1990s, when the Backsmoker Diaries’ medievalisms become more creative and deliberate interventions in the gendered structures of courtly romance, reframing courtly love tropes to accommodate “modern,” feminist versions of romance heroines. In 1999, for example, an original poem called “The Lay of the Lass and the Minstrel” constructs a young woman (perhaps a Bryn Mawr freshman) as resistant to the chivalrous pursuits of a knight: Atop a mountain near old Caernaervon Stood a great grey tower of stone, And dwelling therein for thirty-nine moons, A lass of seventeen (blissfully alone). From far Aberystwyth a valiant knight came With thirty-five men atop glorious steeds, And servants and grooms and guardsmen aplenty, As well as a minstrel (which he did not need). Through trials unnumbered and dangers untold The knight persevered in his chivalrous quest To rescue the lass and have for his own The key to her heart (which lay in her chest). Climbing man atop man, a ladder to form, None heeded the warning the fair lass was voicing. The knight’s sweet ascent was halted a-sudden When the lass felled the ladder (greatly rejoicing). The knight and his men made hasty retreat But the minstrel remained, suppressing his laughter. From an old wooden chest, the lass fetched a key, Which she dropped to the minstrel. (They lived happily ever after.)33

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This poem clearly knows the characters and plot points exhibited in medieval romance: the powerful knight, the observant minstrel, and the quest for a key to a nameless woman’s heart. But here, the knight’s quest is depicted as comical, and the structures of desire that animate his quest are rejected in favor of the lass’s fun; the “lass” topples the ladder of knights and “greatly rejoices” when she drops the ladder as her minstrel laughs. Likewise, the medieval symbols of dorm government take on a new, more revisionary bent. In 2000, for example, the new Head of High Table in Denbigh Dorm appoints a female “knight”: “Officially I am now head of High Table. The twenty-second, actually. I got the sword, the medallion, and the god-damned basket. Oh, yeah . . . another important event occurred—Lady Gwyn became the First Knight of the Order of the Owl (’cause she’s so awesome).”34 By the late nineties, just after the term “nerd” is used for the first time in the Backsmoker Diaries, medievalism is seen as a revisionist opportunity to express female pleasure and power rather than passive erotic longing. No longer particularly nostalgic, this medievalism looks to corral the medieval past to announce Bryn Mawr’s current feminist ideologies. Unlike the male nerds who express a “liminal masculinity” or the female nerds who retreat to a childish asexuality (as described by Bucholtz), these Bryn Mawr nerds draw on medieval tropes and symbols to assert a more adult form of female nerdiness, one that accommodates the erotic desires and political role of women. Significantly, some responses to these reconceptualizations mocked the culture from the outside, focusing particularly on the gendered nerdiness of the Backsmoker diarists. For example, two unidentified men write an entry that snidely expresses concern over the same-sex environment at Bryn Mawr, asking, “So, what’s the deal w/the girls here? Are they penis-envyers [sic] or penis crazy? Love guys or hate them? . . . 240

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What do you gain by acting weird-like? Do these cults truly believe? Or is it to be as different as possible. . . . Please don’t cast a spell on me with your wand (I here [sic] you carry them). I just call it as I see it, on a normal every day basis. Do you all consider yourselves moral? This place seems like an alternative universe.”35 This strange rant imagines the same-sex campus as a cult that nurtures witchcraft and black magic, an “alternative universe” in which it is impossible for an outsider to tell if the Capies “truly believe” or are merely costuming themselves. The writers seem particularly anxious that these nerds have not established clear erotic relationships with men: Do they love or hate guys? Envy or reject penises? The hidden “wands” these nerds ostensibly carry—their cloaked, artificial penises, used to put hexes on unsuspecting men— threaten the social order the writers claim to be “normal.” Written just a few months before a diarist’s call to other “weird” girls to dress in cloaks and capes, this entry uses the terms “normal” and “weird” to register the ways these nerds resist the need to construct themselves via penis envy or love. Moreover, their revisionary courtly romances provide the evidence to determine that these women are “weird-like.” In other words, whereas these “weird” girls seek sororal community through a shared and revised “medieval” vocabulary, men on the outside of the community read that vocabulary as endangering their own importance in the formation of female subjectivity. The Backsmoker Diaries’ most extensive revisionist courtly narrative is the Diary of Elsinore, begun in 1984 (see figure 9.2). The Diary of Elsinore differs from the Backsmoker Diaries in that it features an ongoing story relating the quasi-medieval romance adventures of Lady K and a sorceress, Rose, who describes Elsinore as a “strange yet restful place” that always has female rulers. The Diary of Elsinore begins with a “Royal Decree” that implores all entries be written in ink, encourages diarists to illustrate their entries, and asks that the book not be removed Nerds in Capes

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9.2. Diary of Elsinore, vol. 1. Image courtesy of Bryn Mawr Special Collections. 242

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9.3. Image courtesy of Bryn Mawr Special Collections Nerds in Capes

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from the Backsmoker (see figure 9.3). Moreover, it constructs this writers’ collective in medieval terms, as its first rule is that “all are Welcome in the kingdom that do abide by the rule of chivalry, and that do obey the laws of the Queen.” Lavishly illustrated and often written in calligraphy, the multivolume Diary of Elsinore is a manuscript designed to mimic a large, expensive text from the Middle Ages, perhaps the kind of volume Bryn Mawr students likely imagined well-to-do medieval women possessing. In fact, the writers of the Diary of Elsinore imitate medieval systems of intellectual and cultural networking among women. As Amy N. Vines has shown, romances were a key site in which women established and asserted financial, intellectual, and spiritual networks among other women, insofar as romances were where “the female reader encounters an explicit demonstration of how a woman’s intellectual and financial resources can be used to impact cultural and literary productions.”36 In other words, like the Diary of Elsinore, medieval romances often featured examples of powerful women modeling various forms of cultural or intellectual influence and were themselves owned and read by influential networks of women. Similarly, Roberta Krueger has persuasively argued that while medieval romances offer portraits of women as mere objects of male desire, they also offer portraits of women as readers and spectators who challenge the gendered courtly conventions that romance ostensibly supports.37 The plot of the multivolume Diary of Elsinore meanders, but for the most part, it reads like an inverted courtly romance, beginning with a quest: “I am a fair princess of the realm with no upper body strength. I am being held prisoner in the dungeon of the Castle Erdman. Art there no fine young men who wouldst rescue me? ’Tis passing cold and my stockings commenceth to run.—Princess Nought (Tammy Campbell).”38 Although this “fair princess” asks for a “fine young man” to 244

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rescue her, the quest is taken up by both a male and a female knight, Sir Scorpión and Dame Ranji. Meanwhile, Lady K searches for her beloved prince in a gendered role reversal of medieval courtly literature. The final volume, written in 1993, imparts words of wisdom to “Future Royal Knights,” including one final, emphatic suggestion: “HAVE FUN!!! RELAX!!! Elsinore is for fun—never let yourself, or any writers, lose sight of that. The moment it’s a chore, a source of contention between friends, a substitute for real life, pull back. Elsinore cannot endure forever; it would be a crime to preserve her for tradition’s sake after the life has gone out of her. (That’s what memories are for). As long as the writers are enjoying themselves, the magic will continue.”39 This final proclamation articulates the value of the Diary of Elsinore as a tool of enjoyment used by women on behalf of other women. Its rejection of the Diary as a relic of tradition or as a substitute for real life seems to distance it from the purposes of the medievalisms in other Backsmoker Diaries. Rather than suggest that the Diary ought not be understood as a form of medievalism, however, this proclamation encourages us to see the Diary of Elsinore as well as the Backsmoker Diaries’ recycled romance tropes as continuations of medieval women’s reading practices. Although medieval romance typically depicts chivalric codes that may seem to position women as mere objects for male desire, medieval romances also offer opportunities for women to be active, engaged readers—nerds—and to construct networks of other like-minded women who were intellectually and culturally influential rather than mere objects of male desire. For Bryn Mawr students and medieval women alike, intellectual and erotic pleasures need not cancel one another out. Indeed, for female nerds, scholarly, hobbyist, and erotic enjoyment are bound together, approached with equal enthusiasm and expertise. Nerds in Capes

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Notes 1. Fortgang, “Top 10 Bryn Mawr Curiosities.” 2. Eglash, “Race, Sex, and Nerds,” 49. 3. Bucholtz, “‘Why Be Normal?,’” 213. 4. See, for example, Bauer, “The Nerdity Test”; Bennett, “Nerdity Test.” For a discussion of the “nerdity test,” see Kendall, “Nerd Nation,” 262–63. 5. Kendall, “Nerd Nation,” 265. 6. See, for example, Derr, “Comic-Con 2013.” 7. Bucholtz, “‘Why Be Normal?,’” 213. 8. Backsmoker Diaries, vol. 2, 1978–79. 9. Ortenberg, In Search of the Holy Grail, 237. 10. Marshall, “Introduction: The Medievalism of Popular Culture,” 1–12. 11. Backsmoker Diaries, vol. 2, 1978–79. 12. Backsmoker Diaries, vol. 3, 1979–80. 13. Ibid. 14. Backsmoker Diaries, 1994–95. 15. Backsmoker Diaries, 1998–2006. 16. Oliver, Witnessing, 17. 17. For a discussion of medieval forms of witnessing and witnessing as a mode of community construction, see my Fictions of Evidence. 18. Prendergast and Trigg, “The Negative Erotics of Medievalism,” 120. 19. Trilling, The Aesthetics of Nostalgia, 4. See also Jameson, Postmodernism, 279–96. 20. Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, xiii. 21. Trilling, “Medievalism and Its Discontents,” 218. 22. Ibid., 217. 23. Pugh and Weisl, “‘Medieval’ Literature for Children and Young Adults,” 47–63. 24. Prendergast and Trigg, “The Negative Erotics of Medievalism,” 120. 25. Backsmoker Diaries, vol. 1, 1977–78. 26. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, 149; Žižek, “Courtly Love, or Woman as Thing,” 151. 27. Fay, Romantic Medievalism, 29. 28. Spenser, The Faerie Queene, II.xii.43. 29. Ibid., II.xii.66. 30. Backsmoker Diaries, vol. 1, 1977–78. 31. Augustine, Confessions, X.35.

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32. For a more in-depth discussion of medieval debates around curiosity, see my “Curiositas, Desire, and the Book of Margery Kempe,” 106–22. 33. Backsmoker Diaries, 1998–2006. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 36. Vines, Women’s Power in Late Medieval Romance, 4. 37. Krueger, Women Readers and the Ideology of Gender. 38. See Brundige, The Chronicles of Elsinore. 39. Ibid., “Appendix,” 77.

Bibliography Augustine. Confessions. Translated by R. S. Pine-Coffin. New York: Penguin Press, 1961. Backsmoker Diaries. Denbigh Hall. Record Group 9R. Special Collections Department. Bryn Mawr College Library. Bauer, Michael J. “The Nerdity Test.” December 5, 1993. http://www.mit.edu/people /mjbauer/Purity/nerdity-test.html. Bennett, Jeff. “Nerdity Test.” Accessed May 15, 2015. https://www.netjeff.com/humor /item.cgi?file=NerdityTest. Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Brundige, Ellen Nicholson. The Chronicles of Elsinore: An Index and Concordance. Accessed June 2, 2015. http://sepdet.istad.org/misc/ElsinoreChronicles.doc. Bucholtz, Mary. “‘Why Be Normal?’: Language and Identity Practices in a Community of Nerd Girls.” Language in Society 28, no. 2 (1999): 203–23. Derr, Holly L. “Comic-Con 2013: The Women’s Geekiverse.” Ms.blog. July 26, 2013. http://msmagazine.com/blog/2013/07/26/comic-con-2013-the-womens-geekiverse/. Eglash, Ron. “Race, Sex, and Nerds: From Black Geeks to Asian American Hipsters.” Social Text 20, no. 2 (2002): 49–62. Fay, Elizabeth. Romantic Medievalism: History and the Romantic Literary Ideal. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Fortgang, Megan. “Top 10 Bryn Mawr Curiosities.” March 4, 2015. https://www.unigo .com/articles/top_10_bryn_mawr_curiosities. Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Kendall, Lori. “Nerd Nation: Images of Nerds in US Popular Culture.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 2, no. 2 (1999): 260–83. Nerds in Capes

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Krueger, Roberta L. Women Readers and the Ideology of Gender in Old French Verse Romance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book 7. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992. Marshall, David W. “Introduction: The Medievalism of Popular Culture.” In Mass Market Medieval: Essays on the Middle Ages in Popular Culture, edited by David W. Marshall, 1–12. Jefferson, NC: McFarland Press, 2007. Oliver, Kelly. Witnessing: Beyond Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2001. Ortenberg, Veronica. In Search of the Holy Grail: The Quest for the Middle Ages. London: Hambledon Continuum, 2006. Prendergast, Thomas, and Stephanie Trigg. “The Negative Erotics of Medievalism.” In The Post-Historical Middle Ages, edited by Elizabeth Scala and Sylvia Federico, 117–37. New York: Palgrave, 2009. Pugh, Tison, and Angela Jane Weisl. “‘Medieval’ Literature for Children and Young Adults: Fantasies of Innocence.” In Medievalisms: Making the Past in the Present, 47–63. London and New York: Routledge, 2013. Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. Edited by A. C. Hamilton. London and New York: Longman, 1977. Taylor, Jamie. “Curiositas, Desire, and the Book of Margery Kempe.” Mediaevalia 31, no. 1 (2010): 106–22. ——. Fictions of Evidence: Witnessing, Literature, and Community in the Late Middle Ages. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013. Trilling, Renee. The Aesthetics of Nostalgia: Historical Representation in Old English Verse. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. ——. “Medievalism and its Discontents,” Postmedieval 2, no. 2 (2011): 216–24. Vines, Amy N. Women’s Power in Late Medieval Romance. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2011. Žižek, Slavoj. “Courtly Love, or Woman as Thing.” In The Žižek Reader. Edited by Elizabeth Wright and Edmond Wright, 148–73. Oxford: Blackwell Press, 1999.

Jamie Taylor is Associate Professor of English at Bryn Mawr College and author of Fictions of Evidence: Literature, Witnessing, and Community in the Late Middle Ages.

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COMIC BOOK KID 10

scott t. smith

You don’t need to know anything, apart from that shared knowledge we all possess about contemporary everyday life, to interpret comics. David Carrier, The Aesthetics of Comics

Like life-changing poetry of yore, graphic novels are a young person’s art, demanding and rewarding mental flexibility and nervous stamina. Consuming them—toggling for hours between the incommensurable functions of reading and looking—is taxing. Peter Schjeldahl, “Words and Pictures”

I don’t know. It’s all comics, and it’s all good to me. Jaime Hernandez, The “Love and Rockets” Companion

In a recent conversation about comics, a friend asked me how I was able to keep separate the different identities of scholar and fan. The question troubled me. I am a medievalist by training, but I also regularly teach undergraduate courses on comics. Was the implication that my academic work was professional (scholar), while my interest in comics was more casual (fan)? Must scholar and fan be exclusive categories—and 249

do they describe “identities” at all? The alignment between comics and fan in my friend’s question certainly implied a value judgment, as well as a distinction between different kinds of intellectual investment and identification. The word “fan,” which first entered the English language as an abbreviation for “fanatic,” carries a complex set of connotations, many of them negative. Is the fan—and likewise, comics—lesser, limited, obsessive? What does the categorical distinction between scholar and fan tell us about the ways in which knowledge and opinion about comics have been shaped, circulated, and contested in the United States, among both academic and popular audiences? In many ways I believe the distinction to be artificial, especially insofar as it imagines separate ways of knowing and valuing the cultural production that has been and is comics. What scholar is not somewhat fanatical about his or her research? What fan does not aspire to a deep knowledge of his or her chosen object? The recent formation of comics studies as a recognized academic field prompts us to question how and to what end the divide between fan and scholar has been constructed and maintained within this particular domain, and to interrogate more generally the disciplinary formation and status of different modes of intellectual work and expertise. I began to think of myself as an academic during my twenties. Long before that, though, at least from the age of four, I was a comics fan. Comics were the first texts I experienced intensely as a reader. My elementary school library had a coveted hardcover collection of Batman comics ranging from the character’s 1939 debut through the 1960s. I was shaken by the early stories with grotesque villains like the early Joker and Clayface (a washed-up film star who murders rival actors) and then baffled by the surreal slapstick of the stories of the late 1950s, especially those featuring the diminutive trickster Bat-Mite. Reading (and then rereading) those stories, I was fascinated by how such a range of styles and 250

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characters, no matter how dissonant, could accumulate around a single constant figure over decades. That half-remembered Batman book taught me at an early age that comics comprise an archive with a long history, informed by intersecting creative and commercial genealogies. Over time, I put comics aside as I gradually internalized the idea that comics were adolescent entertainments. A few of my college friends read comics—someone might lend me a Sandman trade paperback, for example, or a stack of Bloom County anthologies—but comics generally were not valued or even present in that environment. It was better to keep some things private, I learned. I was sadly unaware of innovations going on in independent comics at the time—the one local comics store carried mainstream titles only and I didn’t even know that The Comics Journal existed. For me, this meant little access to the exchange of new knowledge and no community for the circulation and testing of expansive criticism. When I went to graduate school, comics became even more distant. I could talk with my peers about Michel Foucault or Jane Austen (in no small part due to shared discourses of scholarship), but serious discussions about Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s The Fantastic Four, or Steve Gerber’s Howard the Duck? Such things were beyond the pale. These two ways of being—literature scholar and comics fan—remained exclusive. As I became increasingly professionalized within academia, comics became increasingly inappropriate within that ordered context, to be relearned as mere entertainments and diversions, always lesser than. Happily for me, things changed. The 2000s proved to be at a time when the availability and reputation of the medium began to improve due to the convergence of a number of transformative trends in comics. As Marc Sobel puts it in a recent retrospective, the decade was a time of “vast expansion, unprecedented in the medium’s history, both in terms of creative innovation and cultural relevance.”1 Some of these trends Comic Book Kid

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include the increased publication of trade paperbacks and comics in book form (marketed with the shiny phrase “graphic novel”), with a corresponding growth in the bookstore market for comics; the increased availability of international comics in the United States; more reprints and archival collections of classic comics and newspaper strips; a growing presence online for creators (web comics) and critics (the comics blogosphere); a rush of publication from popular and academic presses, with a large number of introductions and guides to the comics medium; and a new presence for comics in university classrooms and archival projects. At the same time comics provided raw material and inspiration for more visible and broadly esteemed creative mediums, especially literary fiction and film.2 Suddenly, it was okay (sort of) to read comics. Yet those gains also came with a cost, I would argue. There was a tendency during the 2000s, intentional or not, to homogenize comics, and paradoxically, to partition and prioritize certain forms and genres, especially within academia. This drive to classify comics as a particular field of knowledge, a process that was most often achieved through active inclusion and exclusion, became aggressively prescriptive and territorial. Consequently, insular groups emerged, imagining different enemies around them, whether they be naysayers, philistines, fans, snobs, interlopers, or some other encroaching threat. As a result, the budding field of comics studies has become contested by its own advocates. What does it mean to be learned about comics, especially now that many academics have embraced comics? Who is qualified to talk about comics, and how do they claim the authority or expertise to do so? What kinds of comics count in those discussions? Where and how do comics matter, and to whom? In the United States, the comics medium is still emerging from the miasma of cultural suspicion and misperception that has obscured and slowed its recognition as an art form. As a result, comics advocates, who may remain quite sensitive of such prejudices, often feel 252

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moved to defend or celebrate the medium in terms that can malign or marginalize particular comics traditions, genres, forms, or communities. As a result, the cultural field of comics has been redefined through an ongoing process that selectively delineates and finally reduces the medium to a manageable, knowable object. Before comics could become respectable, it seems, they had to be disciplined. Recent academic writing on comics has often taken pains to justify its interest in a medium that received opinion had long dismissed as adolescent, deviant, or disposable. As a result, some scholarship has assumed a defensive stance. Aaron Meskin has suggested that “those interested in comics suffer from a sort of aesthetic insecurity” that prompts them “to provide an apology for their interest.”3 While this is clearly a generalization, one need not venture far before stumbling across apologetic rhetoric in academic writing on comics. Other moves born from this residual insecurity involve renaming the medium as something other than comics (such as graphic narrative or sequential art), framing comics as literature, relating comics to other more established media and creative traditions, or privileging those genres within comics most likely to be familiar or acceptable to an academic audience.4 Unfortunately, these efforts to redeem comics from a low cultural status have often repeated and redirected many of the same moves that marginalized comics in the first place. One especially popular way to champion the medium has been to chide the dreck of the mainstream (and its obsessive fans) in order to assert legitimacy for certain comics and/ or creators through a form of negative classification. This shortsighted move badly misrepresents the long life of comics as a popular medium. It also invites antagonism and competition between different communities, with significant consequences for the ways in which comics get discussed and valued in the public domain. Moreover, this elevation of comics, even as it aspires to rescue the medium from unruly fandom, Comic Book Kid

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often repeats, with little self-reflection, some of the uglier tactics associated with that very domain, such as the habitual circulation of received opinion and a collaborative suppression or shaming of undesirable elements. An alternative to this limiting practice, I propose, would be an intellectual position that collapses, or at the very least critiques, the distinction between scholar and fan and its implicit hierarchies of value. This alternate mode would demand an impassioned accumulation of knowledge that is both exhaustive and discerning, deeply attached to its objects but still wary of favoritism, however it may be predicated. Moreover, this way of knowing would promote a criticism that is radically inclusive, open to the many traditions and forms (high and low) that comprise the deep archive of comics. The tactic of distinguishing some comics through the diminishment of others was especially visible during the 2000s, the same decade that produced a new swell of interest, production, and visibility for comics in the United States. Many writers seemed burdened by inherited notions about comics, leading them to produce vexed assessments that were laced with suspicion and hostility. The examples are legion, but I offer only a few here. In July 2004, the New York Times Magazine published Charles McGrath’s “Not Funnies,” which presented several cartoonists as avatars of a new wave of literary comics.5 The article aspires to be an introduction of sorts but despite its (perhaps) good intentions it casts a pernicious pall over both the medium and its makers. The “next new thing,” McGrath writes in his opening sentence, “might be comic books. Seriously. Comic books are what novels used to be—an accessible, vernacular form with mass appeal—and if the highbrows are right, they’re a form perfectly suited to our dumbed-down culture and collective attention deficit.”6 This is not a promising start.7 The tone is snide, even incredulous that comics could be considered an emergent art form. 254

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McGrath later airs unexamined notions of accessibility and ease as he circulates the reductive idea that anyone can read comics, even going so far as to suggest that our culture of laziness has finally gotten what it deserves. Comics are on the rise, he contends, in part due to “a new generation of readers, perhaps, who have grown up staring at cartoon images on their computer screens and in their video games, not to mention the savvy librarians and teachers who now cater to their interests and short attention spans.”8 In this equation, comics are a lesser artistic cousin to poetry and fiction, a substitute medium for the degraded cognition of a generation of distracted sometime-readers that must be managed by the custodians of culture. At other points McGrath imagines comics as a kind of creative pathology. He describes comics as “an almost primitive medium,” the laborious making of which “demands a certain obsessional personality and sometimes results in obsessional storytelling.”9 The curious reader might wonder what “obsessional storytelling” looks like, or ask whether such storytelling is limited to comics. Rather than elucidate or justify his generalizations about comics, however, McGrath turns to the creators who make them. He presents cartoonists (and all those featured in the article are men) as a band of dysfunctional oddballs, all of whom fit a rather pathetic general profile: For those that stick with it, the career of the graphic novelist can seem less a choice than a compulsion. . . . In high school, where this artist, a nerd, most likely, and an outcast, is unrecognized for the talent he is, cartooning becomes a refuge, a way to work out revenge fantasies and occasionally even a modest claim to fame. . . . [Cartooning later becomes] an obsession, a visual diary in which the artist records every detail of his personal life, with a special emphasis on his sexual fantasies and his usually excessive masturbation, and then at some point, if

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he is lucky, he figures out how to turn all this rage and depression and thwarted energy, all those pages and pages of sketches and drawings, into storytelling, into a portrait of the artist as a young man.10

This invented caricature, McGrath admits, is based on the highly mediated depiction of R. Crumb in Terry Zwigoff’s 1994 documentary Crumb, but McGrath still forces nearly every creator he highlights into this singular category. Daniel Clowes, we learn, “fits the classic profile (broken home, comics obsession, friendless, dateless adolescence).”11 Neil Gaiman, however, receives only passing mention because he does not fit the profile, whereas McGrath dedicates several paragraphs to Alan Moore, who we learn “dabbles in the occult” and “is working on a pornographic graphic novel.”12 Moreover, if a creator defeats the generalization, they are deemed an anomaly, rather than the generalization itself. Joe Sacco, McGrath observes with some surprise, is a handsome man with “excellent social skills,” even though he “wallowed in plenty of comics” as a boy.13 In the end, McGrath damns comics with condescending and conflicted praise: “In fact, the genre’s greatest strength and weakness is that no matter how far the graphic novel verges toward realism, its basic idiom is always a little, well, cartoonish. Sacco’s example notwithstanding, this is a medium probably not well suited to lyricism or strong emotion, and (again, Sacco excepted) the very best graphic novels don’t take themselves entirely seriously.”14 Another conclusion might be that Charles McGrath was probably not well suited, or even qualified, to write about comics in an informed or insightful way. “Not Funnies” offers a disheartening index of the cultural ambivalence toward (and ignorance about) comics that endured well into the 2000s. McGrath may see some value in the artists he features, but in the end his mean-spirited 256

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blend of skepticism and derision frames comics as a bizarre amusement. More importantly perhaps, McGrath shows little in the way of substantial knowledge or appreciation of comics in his essay, choosing instead to cultivate and reify sensationalist opinion. The critic-as-tastemaker becomes not an ally but an adversary of the material, building a protective distance between himself and the object of his attention, with a reluctance to acquire or acknowledge knowledge of comics. This pose of bemused detachment bears negative consequences, not least in its replacement of expertise and passion with passing acquaintance and abiding suspicion. The New Yorker published a piece of similar tenor one year later in Peter Schjeldahl’s “Words and Pictures: Graphic Novels Come of Age.”15 Here, we have another article in an influential venue written by a curmudgeonly critic who seems somewhat baffled by comics (although “graphic novel” is his preferred term). Like McGrath, Schjeldahl is generally condescending toward and perplexed by his subject matter; unlike McGrath, he repeatedly calls attention to how his age distances him from graphic novels, which he sees as a playground for the young.16 As he surveys the strange world of graphic novels, Schjeldahl delivers a number of reductive rankings and assessments to help his readers navigate this new terrain. “The best first-person graphic novel to date,” for example, is Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and the second best is her Persepolis 2. Check. You should also read Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, Schjeldahl suggests, as it is “the first formal masterpiece of a medium that he [Ware] has proved to be unexpectedly complex and fertile.” Check. But wait. There is no need to venture further, it seems. According to Schjeldahl, Ware has already hit his peak with Jimmy Corrigan, as his more recent work “bespeaks a style on cruise control.” (Ware’s Building Stories, published in 2012, obliterated Comic Book Kid

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this blinkered prediction.) “Read X and Y and then you can be done,” seems to be the take-home message. What a time saver! This judgmental temperament, so prominently on display in the mid-2000s, was especially pernicious for its assumption that one need read only a handful of works and creators—and it was always the same ones—in order to know the medium well. Even as it offered ostensible introductions to comics, the mainstream press most often flattened the medium’s diversity under the reductive catch-all of graphic novels. More significantly, it disseminated a restrictive view of comics that relied upon and promoted a very narrow knowledge of the medium. Readers received easy prescriptions of taste, shuttled through crib sheets and manageable checklists, rather than informed introductions to the diversity and depth of a popular medium. At the same time, comics were attracting more attention among academics. This is not to say that scholarship on comics first appeared during the 2000s, which is certainly not the case, only that the decade witnessed an unprecedented flurry of academic publication on comics in a relatively short period of time.17 One of the more visible and representative examples of this new wave of academic writing on comics was Hillary Chute’s 2008 PMLA article, “Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative.”18 One immediately notices the question mark in the title, with its tentative equation of the low and the high. How, and when, do comics count as literature? In order to claim comics as literature—and thus as a sustainable academic subject—Chute privileges nonfiction narratives, which she terms “graphic narrative” rather than “comics,” including works by Art Spiegelman and Joe Sacco, both of whom had also been featured earlier by McGrath. The difference is that these cartoonists now appear as eminent literary figures, not as compulsive creators weighed down by lingering adolescent anxieties 258

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and fixations. Chute clearly respects the creators and their work. Unlike McGrath and Schjeldahl, Chute takes comics seriously, writing with a determined air of intellectual earnestness. At the same time, Chute opens on a self-conscious note: “Comics—a form once considered pure junk—is sparking interest in literary studies. I’m as amazed as anybody else by the comics boom.”19 This statement anticipates suspicion from the academic readers of PMLA even as it allies the author with the likely skeptics among that readership. Chute accordingly packages comics in a familiar academic discourse, with all of its comforting tropes and appeals to registered cultural authorities: Chute assures us that the mass-produced newspaper comics of the early twentieth century were “influenced by avant-garde practices, especially those of Dada and surrealism,” for example, and she incorporates weighty citations throughout, with references to Edward Said and James Joyce (whom Chute quotes in her final sentence).20 Moreover, Chute’s essay assumes a general ignorance of comics among its readers, offering a capsule history that intentionally passes over “the development of the commercial comic book industry, which is dominated by two superhero-focused publishers, Marvel and DC.”21 She instead highlights the underground comics of the 1960s as the foundation for “today’s most enduring graphic narratives . . . [those] serious, imaginative works that explored social and political realities by stretching the boundaries of a historically mass medium.”22 Not surprisingly, this neat survey of maturation and innovation ends with Art Spiegelman’s Maus, endorsed by its Pulitzer Prize, as the “touchstone text” that “introduced the sophistication of comics to the academy.”23 This strategic narrative elides the rich history and diversity of mainstream comics, thereby making the medium acceptable to a select audience through selective exclusion.24 Professionalization is achieved through a circumscribed survey of the field, with the Comic Book Kid

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acceptance (and implicit endorsement) of a partial knowledge of that field. Comics may now count as literature, but only some comics qualify for that transformative honorific. Chute’s particular attention to nonfiction texts is not in and of itself a problem. The problem instead arises in the aggregate, when many writers across both the popular and the academic press, both in print and online, continue to cite and discuss the same small group of texts and creators, thereby producing a rather narrow and repetitive canon. Several creators and titles have appeared again and again: Art Spiegelman (Maus), Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis), Alison Bechdel (Fun Home), Joe Sacco, Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes, and so on. This formation of a comics canon has been accelerated through the publication of a plethora of titles dedicated to surveying the field for various audiences and uses. We can clearly see the result of this habit in the essay collection Teaching the Graphic Novel (2009), published in the Options for Teaching series from the Modern Language Association of America.25 In her review of the book, Ann Miller calls attention to how its preferred terminology and content imagine a rather circumscribed field of study and interest: “The indicator of recognition is highly welcome, even if the choice of term used in the title, more restrictive than ‘comics’ or ‘comic art’, could be taken to imply a disavowal of some of the lesser respectable manifestations of the medium; and it is undoubtedly the case that the choice of artists, in which Spiegelman, Sacco and Ware loom large, has a certain canon-forming effect. This may very well be helpful, and is probably inevitable, when an art form is still establishing its academic credentials.”26 Miller raises a number of important points. First, the term “graphic novel,” despite its present currency, remains problematic as an inclusive term for the medium, as it makes a number of limiting assumptions about length, production, publishing format, history, genre, and audience.27 Second, the book’s collective suggestion of what can be 260

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taught (and how to teach it) has significant normative potential, especially when we consider the professional endorsement of the MLA. And third, Miller’s description of comics as a medium “still establishing its academic credentials” speaks to the prolonged nascency of comics studies as a cross-disciplinary field that remains preoccupied with defining its mission and worth.28 In part, this is because the old biases that have dogged comics in the United States for so long—still very much on display in McGrath and Schjeldahl—continue to inflect the conversations about comics within academia. In order to protect itself from the stigma of low culture, comics scholarship often distances itself from the medium’s past as mass culture. At the current moment, two genres accordingly dominate academic discussions of comics, especially among scholars of literature: (1) memoir; and (2) those comics whose content and concerns most resemble those of literary fiction (such as Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth or David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp). In other words, the comics that academics seem to value most are realistic and serious. Chute observes, for example, “Some of the most riveting books out there—the ones waking up literary critics—represent often vicious historical realities,” citing the work of Art Spiegelman, Joe Sacco, and Marjane Satrapi as examples.29 It should come as no surprise that these are the same creators who appeared most frequently in the more influential forums of the popular press during the 2000s. Cultural critics and gatekeepers—many of whom did not seem to know the medium all that well—quickly assembled a comics pantheon that could defy the endemic associations of frivolity and adolescence that had stubbornly clung to American comics. This scramble for respectability often shortchanged the comics medium by denying its popular, and often decidedly nonserious, past. As someone who considers himself both an academic and a fan, it seems to me that critics and scholars have too Comic Book Kid

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quickly settled on a selective and very limited canon of creators, texts, and touchstones.30 The fallout from this short-list mentality is still very much with us, aggravated by the lingering imperative to justify some comics as serious fare at the expense of others. Moreover, this mode of approval has not been limited to academic writing. An especially pronounced case of such hierarchical management appeared in a piece from the Wall Street Journal, published online in May 2012.31 This article presents itself as a review of Leaping Tall Buildings: The Origins of American Comics, a book that contains wide-ranging profiles of comics writers and artists.32 The author, Tim Marchman, however, says very little about the book under review, taking the opportunity instead to deliver a screed against mainstream superhero comics, corporate greed, and creative atrophy.33 In his conclusion, Marchman observes: But by far the most charming and enjoyable parts of the book are those that present substantive artists like Mr. Ware, Jaime Hernandez (Love and Rockets) and Jeffrey Brown (Unlikely). By a quirk of the comics industry, artists like these, who deal with the stuff of real life and whose work is treasured by people who read books that have spines, are tagged as “alternative” or “underground.” It’s amusing to see how, in Leaping Tall Buildings, such artists come off as normal, thoughtful people, while contemporary superhero creators tend to come off as pretentious autodidacts or failed cult leaders. If anything is “underground,” it’s their insular, indecipherable comics.

Here the voice of the critic mocks the most visible component of the mainstream in order to beg easy credibility for its hipster view of the current state (and future) of comics as a creative medium. Those cartoonists who deal “with the stuff of real life,” the very same creators who had been cast as oddballs and loners by McGrath back in 2004, now 262

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appear as “substantive artists,” while the position of creepy fetishist has shifted to superhero creators and their genre hackwork (which is, interestingly enough, also presented as unknowable). Opinion has shifted, perhaps, yet the deficiency still resides not in the critic-consumer, but always in the scrutinized object and its maker(s). The broader field of comics continues to provoke anxiety over status and knowledge. We might dismiss Marchman as a clickbait provocateur, but his snarky commentary notably repeats many of the same moves and recirculates many of the same assumptions that we have seen in other writing on comics: certain genres matter more than others; mainstream comics are the dregs of the medium; and, because of a vestigial embarrassment that still adheres to comics, the serious voice must validate itself by rejecting some less desirable component of the medium. Ignorance and dismissal become not only acceptable but necessary as the critic marks out what we can (or must) safely ignore. Such efforts to elevate (some) comics through exclusion, it must be recognized, mimic the same kind of cultural bullying that marginalized comics generally in the United States. Part of this process of knowledge formation and valuation, as we have seen, has been the push to categorize comics as literature, or to prefer terms like “graphic novel” or “graphic narrative” over “comics.” Such sleights of nomenclature may recast the medium in more prestigious terms, but they also run the risk of misrepresenting the culture of comics, and by that term I mean not only comics texts, but also their various modes of production, forms, reception, and use. By valuing comics primarily as literature, and by writing about them primarily in those terms, many academics have taken up a discourse that, although familiar to them, may not be best suited to thinking about comics as a medium with its own history and conventions. The narrow view of comics-as-literature most notably shuts out the mainstream of comics, Comic Book Kid

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with its long history of influential creators and visual vocabularies. Scottish cartoonist Eddie Campbell called attention to the problem in his essay “The Literaries,” written for the Comics Journal in early 2013. In the wake of the comics medium’s forty-year hike to serious acceptance, the chances are that now a person won’t get laughed out [of] the room for putting them on a par with Literature. The flipside of the medium having gained this kind of recognition is that it has also acquired a new species of critic who demands that comics be held to the standards of LITERATURE. Since the invasion of these literaries, I have been observing a tendency to ask the question: if this weren’t a comic would it stand up? Would the story be any good if it were prose and in competition with the rest of the world’s prose? If we take away all these damn pictures, would the stuff that is left be worth a hoot?34

Campbell was writing in response to a specific debate over the aesthetic merit of classic comics from the 1950s (particularly those from the EC line), but his broader argument deals with the problem of “applying irrelevant criteria” to the evaluation of comics, mainstream or otherwise.35 Rather than judging a comic by its complexity of plot or freedom from conventionality, he argues, we should attend to that “particular species of narrative drawing that belong entirely and exclusively to comics.” This visual element—the sequence and layout of panels, the quality and expression of the line, the iconography of images, the economy of movement, and so on—“tends to elude conventional literary analysis,” which can overvalue the word at the expense of image. For Campbell, narrative and meaning in comics is driven primarily by image, not by words. Campbell’s criticism is incisive in several ways. Academic writing on comics often struggles on two important points, especially within literary studies: first, the function and significance of visual style; second, 264

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the meaning of genre work that works with (and against) tradition and reader expectation. The visual element of comics has been difficult in part because a critical vocabulary for such matters has yet to be fully realized, and in part due to financial restrictions of using multiple images from comics in academic books and journals. Furthermore, as Bart Beaty has observed, “One of the significant consequences of the literary turn in the study of comics has been a tendency to drive attention away from comics as a form of visual culture.”36 In part due to their formal blend of word and image, comics do not fit comfortably within the current disciplinary parameters of current academia. The mainstream element in turn has been challenging because of both its sheer mass and its conventional nature. Mainstream comics also present an array of challenging factors in terms of creative and publishing processes: the collaboration of multiple creators, not all of whom are always acknowledged; the extent of editorial direction and influence; the environment of original serialization, including contexts of advertisements and other titles in a company’s publishing line; and so on. How important is all (or some) of this information to know? Does it matter when much of this context is occluded as comics are repackaged and reprinted in book collections and anthologies (that is, as graphic novels)? To access and assess such a multiplicity of information would require a deep, even obsessional, knowledge of context and tradition, but such knowledge could inform the critical appreciation and analysis of comics texts in powerful ways. At the same time, Campbell’s interrogation of comics-as-literature, insightful as it is, suggests something of a resistance to the contribution of new discourses to established ways of knowing and valuing comics. The recent disciplining of comics, with its tactics and professionalization and reclassification, has clearly created hostility between different groups. On one side, those interested in qualifying comics as an Comic Book Kid

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object of intellectual study have often created a field of knowledge that seems unduly limited or partitioned; on the other side, that generally of creators and fans, we see a distrust of academic discourse and its practitioners, along with a reluctance to theorize comics and comics culture in ways that might challenge or complicate established conventions and cherished tastes. The tension between these often opposed communities, and their respective modes of knowing and valuation, distinguishes the field of comics from many other modes of cultural production. Indeed, Charles Hatfield has pointedly argued that “the rise of comic studies represents a fortunate crisis in knowledge production, and, methodologically, we will need to more nimble and inclusive to face that challenge.”37 How might the unpopular intellectual engage this crisis in productive ways? One way forward would be an unapologetic union of deep knowledge with flexible criticism, a way of knowing in which one reads and writes as both a fan and a scholar. In order to occupy this middle position, set somewhere between fannish attachment and scholarly disinterest, one must enter the archive and wallow in the beautiful accumulative sprawl of comics. To hold a substantial knowledge and critical awareness of comics, of both their history and their formal qualities, one most read widely and openly. Such reading would importantly include comics that are routinely, even relentlessly, conventional, those ephemeral pamphlets that aspired in the main only to entertainment delivered in monthly doses. Moreover, this intellectual mode would resist the commodification of select comics as masterworks that somehow stand apart from comics as mass culture, safely free of nerdish precedent. Indeed, many of today’s esteemed cartoonists value and work from the popular past of comics. Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, the creators of the lauded Love and Rockets series, have long drawn inspiration from the popular idioms of American comics, including the genres of humor, children’s 266

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comics, Archie comics, and superheroes.38 During a book tour for his Marble Season (2013), Gilbert Hernandez spoke about the influential comics from his youth, including those by such mainstream icons as Jack Kirby (the prolific superhero artist and creator) and Owen Fitzgerald (who drew humor books featuring Bob Hope and Dennis the Menace, among others). Charles Burns’s recent books, X’ed Out (2010) and The Hive (2012), play heavily on tropes and images drawn from Tintin, horror, and romance comics.39 Alison Bechdel’s cartooning influences include MAD magazine, Edward Gorey, Charles Addams, R. Crumb, and Hergé.40 Each of these contemporary creators is celebrated in literary circles, yet each has been shaped deeply by popular traditions that value the play of visual style and genre convention. Knowledge and appreciation of such traditions and visual systems is born from long exposure and reading and rereading, from accumulation that often precedes analysis. We might call this process fan reading, or even nerdily reading, due to its openly obsessive and sustained nature. This way of knowing can reclaim those same qualities most often designated as profane—the obsessional, the cartoonish, the indecipherable—and grant them a value that sets aside anxieties over useless or unfashionable knowledge. In this sense, the field of comics is especially apropos for the unpopular intellectual, as comics have thus far evaded easy containment within conventional academic disciplines and discourses. Comics give us the opportunity to think about culture in ways that trouble supposedly imploded but still resilient dichotomies like high/low, image/text, hip/nerdy, and so on. Comics deserve a form of intellectualism that values the full history of the medium, in all its manic and commercial range, one that resists the residual instinct to identify and ennoble those “best” texts that have been designated as a culmination or imagined to have somehow transcended a less accomplished popular past. The comics intellectual can be both nerdish Comic Book Kid

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scholar and discerning fan, aspiring to expansive and inclusive critical inquiry that is informed by deep both knowledge and abiding love for the object of his or her attention. Notes 1. Sobel, “The Decade in Comics,” 499. 2. For literary fiction, see Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay; Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude; and Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Díaz’s This Is How You Lose Her (2012) was republished in a deluxe edition in 2013 with illustrations by Jaime Hernandez of Love and Rockets fame. Chabon also wrote several comics featuring the Escapist for Dark Horse Comics; Lethem wrote the miniseries Omega the Unknown (Marvel Comics, 2007–8), a reimagining of Steve Gerber’s classic series from the 1970s, with Karl Rusnak and Farel Dalrymple. Díaz has not yet written any comics, but he has provided blurbs for several comics publications. 3. Meskin, “Defining Comics?,” 374. 4. Hillary Chute, for example, has suggested that “the most fruitful analogy to comics might be poetry” in “Secret Labor: Sketching the Connection between Poetry and Comics.” Such associations are clearly a shortcut to credibility through association. For a rejoinder, see Berlatsky, “The Promise—and the Danger—of Comparing Comics to Poetry.” Berlatsky observes, rightly in my opinion, that Chute’s selective claims are mainly concerned with the status of comics rather than comics themselves. 5. McGrath, “Not Funnies.” 6. Ibid., 24. 7. McGrath’s credibility deteriorates further when he misspells Scott McCloud as “Scott McLoud” (ibid., 26). 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid., 30. 10. Ibid. McGrath offers several bizarre and half-formed links between comics and pornography. In his short discussion of the graphic novel as a contested term, for example, McGrath observes, “The center of this dispute—the comic book with a brain—is a somewhat arbitrary and subjective place, not unlike pornography in Justice Stewart’s famous formulation (you recognize it when you see it).” Other references to pornography appear at 26, 30, and 55. 11. Ibid., 33. 12. Ibid., 55. 268

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13. Ibid., 46. 14. Ibid., 56. McGrath flubs the important distinction between genre and medium here, a surprisingly common imprecision in academic writing on comics. To be clear, comics is a creative medium that accommodates a wide variety of genres. 15. Schjeldahl, “Words and Pictures.” 16. Schjeldahl echoes McGrath with phrases like “compulsive cartooning” and claims like “Graphic novels induce an enveloping kind of emotional identification that makes them only too congenial to adolescent narcissism.” For these two writers, comics seem to constitute something of a disorder for both its creators and readers. 17. Notable academic books published before the 2000s include Barker, A Haunt of Fears; Witek, Comic Books as History; Inge, Comics as Culture; Dorfman and Mattleart, How to Read Donald Duck; Pearson and Uricchio, The Many Lives of the Batman; Harvey, The Art of the Funnies; Harvey, The Art of the Comic Book; and Pustz, Comic Book Culture. To this list should be added two influential books by comics creators, both of which are frequently cited: Eisner, Comics and Sequential Art; New York: Norton, 2008); and McCloud, Understanding Comics. 18. Chute, “Comics as Literature?,” 452–65. 19. Ibid., 452. 20. Ibid., 455, 459, and 462. 21. Ibid., 455. 22. Ibid. Several key words and phrases should be noted: “most enduring,” “graphic narratives” (not comics), “serious,” “realities” (not fictions), and “stretching the boundaries” (not conventional). 23. Ibid., 456. Chute describes Maus as “a touchstone text” at 457. For a discussion of the many factors that facilitated the success of Maus, see Beaty, Comics versus Art, 117–128. 24. For more full and nuanced overviews of the history of comics in the United States, see Sabin, Adult Comics; Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men; and Gardner, Projections. See also the important work of art historian David Kunzle, including The Early Comic Strip and The History of the Comic Strip. 25. Tabachnick, Teaching the Graphic Novel. 26. Miller, review of Teaching the Graphic Novel, 223. 27. See also Sabin, Adult Comics, 235–48; Kuskin, “The Comics Page,” 3–4; and Labio, “What’s in a Name?,” 123–26. As Kuskin points out, many celebrated graphic novels “originated as serialized comics of one sort or another. Given this, perhaps too much has been made of categorical labels” (3). 28. See Smith, “Who Gets to Speak?,” 21–40. 29. Chute, “Comics as Literature?,” 457. Comic Book Kid

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30. This is not to say that comic studies has disregarded the mainstream. Superhero comics in particular seem to be in little danger of neglect. See Alaniz, Death, Disability, and the Superhero; Bukatman, Matters of Gravity; Costello, Secret Identity Crisis; Fawaz, The New Mutants; Hatfield, Hand of Fire; Hatfield, Heer, and Worcester, The Superhero Reader; Ndalianis, The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero; Rosenberg and Coogan, What Is a Superhero?; Saunders, Do the Gods Wear Capes?; and Singer, Grant Morrison. In the popular press, see Morrison, Supergods; and the many titles published by Sequart Research and Literacy (http://www.sequart.org/books/). 31. Marchman, “Worst Comic Book Ever!” 32. Irving and Kushner, Leaping Tall Buildings. 33. Marchman seems especially irritated by the steady stream of superhero films that began with Bryan Singer’s X-Men film in 2000. For a similar complaint, see Dargis and Scott, “Super-Dreams of an Alternate World Order.” The two critics condemn superhero films as banal and regressive, another sign that corporate power is smothering creative fire in film. Dargis and Scott do acknowledge the criticism that comics have received as a corrupting form of popular culture, especially during the 1940s and 50s, but Scott then takes an interesting turn: “But the kind of condescending dismissal practiced by [Edmund] Wilson and the cultural panic expressed by [Frederic] Wertham exist nowadays almost entirely as straw men. A critic who voices skepticism about a comic book movie—or any other expensive, large-scale, boy-targeted entertainment—is likely to be called out for snobbery or priggishness, to be accused of clinging to snobbish, irrelevant standards and trying to spoil everyone else’s fun.” The old antagonism between high and low culture emerges once again with comics at its flash point. Indeed, as we have seen, “condescending dismissal” of comics was still quite easy to find in the opening decade of the new century. Scott later observes, “But comic book fans need to feel perpetually beleaguered and disenfranchised, marginalized by phantom elites who want to confiscate their hard-won pleasures. And this resentment—which I have a feeling I’m provoking more of here—finds its way into the stories themselves, expressed either as glowering self-pity or bullying machismo.” This faux analysis captures the sense of ease with which an ensconced critic can deliver an antagonistic claim about comics (and their stunted readers) that turns entirely on generalized caricature and reductive dichotomy. 34. Campbell, “The Literaries.” 35. The debate began in response to Ng Suat Tong, “EC Comics and the Chimera of Memory,” in the Comics Journal, which was later posted at The Hooded Utilitarian online. In his conclusion, Tong wonders whether we will ever reach “a point at which one can look back at these comics of our youth and say with honesty that they were mediocre, even as children’s comics” (Campbell, “The Literaries,” 122). See also Beaty, 270

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Comics versus Art, 101–28, on the “relationship between the celebratory exegeses of fandom and academic writing on comics, which, according to the demands of that field, aspires to disinterestedness” (104). 36. Beaty, Comics versus Art, 18. 37. Hatfield, “How to Read a . . . ,” 147. 38. See the series of interviews collected in Sobel and Valenti, The “Love and Rockets” Companion. 39. See “Charles Burns,” interview by Darcy Sullivan, and “Charles Burns,” interview by Hillary Chute. 40. “Life Drawing: An Interview with Alison Bechdel Conducted by Lynn Emmert,” 50.

Bibliography Alaniz, José. Death, Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014. Barker, Martin. A Haunt of Fears: The Strange History of the British Horror Comics Campaign. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992 (first published 1984 by Pluto Press). Beaty, Bart. Comics versus Art. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. Bechdel, Alison. “Life Drawing: An Interview with Alison Bechdel Conducted by Lynn Emmert.” Comics Journal 282 (2007): 34–52. Berlatsky, Noah. “The Promise—and the Danger—of Comparing Comics to Poetry.” Atlantic, August 7, 2013. http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013 /08/the-promise-and-the-danger-of-comparing-comic-books-to-poetry/278430/. Bukatman, Scott. Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Burns, Charles. Interview by Darcy Sullivan. Comics Journal 148 (1992): 52–88. ——. Interview by Hillary Chute. Believer 6.1 (January 2008): 47–64. Campbell, Eddie. “The Literaries.” Comics Journal, February 6, 2013. http://www.tcj .com/the-literaries/. Carrier, David. The Aesthetics of Comics. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000. Chabon, Michael. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. New York: Random House, 2000. Chute, Hillary. “Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative.” PMLA 123 (2008): 452–65. Comic Book Kid

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——. “Secret Labor: Sketching the Connection between Poetry and Comics.” Poetry Magazine, July/August 2013. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine /article/246090. Costello, Matthew J. Secret Identity Crisis: Comic Books and the Unmasking of Cold War America. London: Continuum, 2009. Dargis, Manohla, and A. O. Scott. “Super-Dreams of an Alternate World Order: The Amazing Spider-Man and the Modern Comic Book Movie.” New York Times, June 27, 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/01/movies/the-amazing-spider-man-and -the-modern-comic-book-movie.html. Díaz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. New York: Riverhead Books, 2007. ——. This Is How You Lose Her. Deluxe ed. Illustrations by Jaime Hernandez. New York: Riverhead Books, 2013. Dorfman, Ariel, and Armand Mattleart. How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic. Translated by David Kunzle. New York: International General, 1984. Eisner, Will. Comics and Sequential Art: Principles and Practice of the World’s Most Popular Art Form. Rev. ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008 (first published 1985 by Poorhouse Press). Fawaz, Ramzi. The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics. New York: New York University Press, 2016. Gabilliet, Jean-Paul. Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books. Translated by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010. Gardner, Jared. Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012. Harvey, Robert C. The Art of the Comic Book: An Aesthetic History. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996. ——. The Art of the Funnies: An Aesthetic History. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. Hatfield, Charles. Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012. ——. “How to Read a . . .” English Language Notes 46, no. 2 (2008): 129–49. Hatfield, Charles, Jeet Heer, and Kent Worcester, eds. The Superhero Reader. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013. Hernandez, Jaime. Interview by Marc Sobel. In The “Love and Rockets” Companion, edited by Marc Sobel and Kristy Valenti, 121–59 at 159. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2013.

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Inge, M. Thomas. Comics as Culture. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990. Irving, Christopher, and Seth Kushner. Leaping Tall Buildings: The Origins of American Comics. Brooklyn, NY: powerHouse Books, 2012. Kunzle, David. The Early Comic Strip: Narrative Strips and Picture Stories in the European Broadsheet from c.1450 to 1825. History of the Comics Strip 1. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973. ——. The History of the Comic Strip: The Nineteenth Century. History of the Comic Strip 2. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Kuskin, William. “The Comics Page.” In Graphia: Comics, Graphic Novels and the Humanities on the Front Range, Exhibition Catalogue, 3–4. Boulder, CO: English Language Notes, 2009. Labio, Catherine. “What’s in a Name? The Academic Study of Comics and the ‘Graphic Novel.’” Cinema Journal 50 (2011): 123–26. Lethem, Jonathan. The Fortress of Solitude. New York: Vintage Books, 2003. Lethem, Jonathan, Karl Rusnak, and Farel Dalrymple. Omega the Unknown. New York: Marvel Comics, 2007–8. Marchman, Tim. “Worst Comic Book Ever!” Wall Street Journal, May 25, 2012. http:// www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303610504577418120266945742. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: HarperPerennial, 1993. McGrath, Charles. “Not Funnies.” New York Times Magazine, July 11, 2004, 24–36, 55–56. Meskin, Aaron. “Defining Comics?” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65 (2007): 369–79. Miller, Ann. Review of Teaching the Graphic Novel, edited by Stephen E. Tabachnick. European Comic Art 3 (2010): 223–28. Morrison, Grant. Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us about Being Human. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2011. Ndalianis, Angela, ed. The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero. New York: Routledge, 2009. Pearson, Roberta E., and William Uricchio, eds. The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and His Media. New York: Routledge, 1991. Pustz, Matthew. Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999. Rosenberg, Robin S., and Peter Coogan, eds. What Is a Superhero? Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

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Sabin, Roger. Adult Comics: An Introduction. New York: Routledge, 1993. Saunders, Ben. Do the Gods Wear Capes? Spirituality, Fantasy, and Superheroes. London: Continuum, 2011. Schjeldahl, Peter. “Words and Pictures: Graphic Novels Come of Age.” New Yorker, October 17, 2005. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/10/17/words-and -pictures. Singer, Marc. Grant Morrison: Combining the Worlds of Contemporary Comics. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012. Smith, Scott T. “Who Gets to Speak? The Making of Comics Scholarship.” In Graphic Medicine Manifesto, 21–40. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015. Sobel, Marc. “The Decade in Comics.” Comics Journal 301 (2011): 479–99. Sobel, Marc, and Kristy Valenti, eds. The “Love and Rockets” Companion. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2013. Tabachnick, Stephen E., ed. Teaching the Graphic Novel. Options for Teaching. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2009. Tong, Ng Suat. “EC Comics and the Chimera of Memory.” Comics Journal 250 (2003): 115–22. Reprint http://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/2012/09/ec-comics-and-the -chimera-of-memory-part-1-of-2/ (September 12, 2012). Witek, Joseph. Comic Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989.

Scott T. Smith is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Pennsylvania State University. He is author of Land and Book: Literature and Land Tenure in Anglo-Saxon England, and he is part of the editorial collective for the Graphic Medicine series at Penn State University Press.

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WALKING SIMULATORS, #GAMERGATE, AND THE GENDER OF WANDERING

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This chapter examines a new kind of video game, the walking simulator, and how it stages a conflict between old “hardcore gamer” culture and a newer perception of gaming as fundamentally mainstream, artistic, and diverse. This conflict is exemplified by the #GamerGate controversy, which exploded in the gamer community in August 2014, either in response to a lack of journalistic ethics or because of an undercurrent of vicious misogyny in gaming, depending on whom you ask. Among other things, it was an attempt to police the borders of gamer identity in the face of changing demographics and complementary erosions of white, male, nerd culture, of which the classic “hardcore gamer” is stereotypically a key member (although, obviously, plenty of women and people of color enjoy games and consider themselves hardcore gamers). While the people who play walking simulators are not necessarily “hardcore gamers,” nor are they necessarily casual gamers who occasionally play, but rather a combination of players: indie, casual, hardcore, and mainstream. These categories (hardcore, casual, indie) break down into meaninglessness in the face of developing trends in the way people play. As Adrienne Shaw points out, there is “nothing casual about playing Farmville on Facebook for hours on end, just as there is nothing inherently hardcore about playing an hour of Halo with friends at a gaming party.”1

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The dissolution of the “hardcore gamer” as an identity was presaged by Reggie Fils-Aimé, the president and chief operations officer of Nintendo of America, who asked rhetorically in 2006, “Do you know anyone who’s never watched TV, never seen a movie, never read a book? Of course not. . . . Do you know someone, maybe even in your own family, who’s never played a video game? I bet you do. How can this be? If we want to consider ourselves a true mass medium, if we want to grow as an industry, this has to change.”2 As gaming grows increasingly mainstream, the previously stable identity of “hardcore gamer” (read: male and nerdy) finds itself attacked from all sides. Feeling besieged, the “hardcore gamer” (represented by many in the pro-#GamerGate faction) rejects certain games as not real games and derides them as politically correct nonsense. For the “hardcore gamer,” it does not sit well that critics rave about strange, disconcerting anti-games like walking sims, while disparaging gamer favorites like Grand Theft Auto and Mortal Kombat for their überviolence and misogyny. At the same time, many in the gaming community (hardcore and otherwise) welcome the influx of new titles, since, except for the increased marginalization of the “hardcore gamer” identity, little is lost and much gained by greater diversity in games and players. To explore this conflict, we first need a working definition of “walking sims” and their superset, “anti-games.” Anti-games are works that subvert, expand, or otherwise comment on traditional video game tropes, using game conventions to make metacommentaries, offer an alternative way to play, and explore the artistry inherent in gaming. The difference between games and anti-games, Erik Fredner explains, is that “traditional games give you goals and achievements and ways to win. Anti-games suggest, they afford opportunities, but they never demand. You can’t fail an anti-game, but you can fail yourself in it.”3 In 2011, Michaël Samyn’s Notgames initiative promised to “explore the potential of 276

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videogames as a creative medium, beyond the confines of conventional game design.”4 Jenova Chen’s studio, thatgamecompany, has created beloved games like Flow, Flower, and Journey, which focus more on experiences, atmosphere, and emotion than the kinds of fun accessible in most games (although these are less anti-games than art games). In The Stanley Parable, released by Davey Wreden in 2011, players interact with the narrative voiceover to make a series of choices, each of which leads to a different ending. It plays around with narrative structure and the deterministic conclusions coded into play, despite the appearance of free choice given to the player. In Mountain, developed by David O’Reilly in 2014, you can “FULFILL YOUR DREAMS OF BEING A MOUNTAIN,” as you experience the evolution of a procedurally generated mountain while it slowly spins against a beautifully changing sky.5 On its website, Mountain claims to be in the genre “Mountain Simulator, Relax em’ up, Art Horror,” all plays on established genres (simulators, shoot ’em ups, and horror).6 Whether jesting send-ups or serious artistic endeavors that test the limits of what gaming can be, the genre has gained a foothold on the market and received critical acclaim. One subgenre of anti-game focuses on walking. Gameplay is largely spent wandering around a surreal landscape, exploring and collecting items, and having an aesthetic experience without achieving goals or racking up points. Nicknamed “walking simulators” derogatorily by some hardcore gamers and complimentarily by others, these games, including critically acclaimed gems like Dear Esther, Gone Home, Proteus, and Ether One, shed light on what games are and can be—and what gamer culture currently is. This chapter will put walking sims in context—of literary scholarship, gamer trends, and historical concepts— and examine a few of the games themselves in detail. We begin with wandering texts and digressive literature, the literary forerunners of walking simulators. By foregrounding the discussion Walking Simulators, #GamerGate, and Gender

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with this genre, we can observe how the rise of walking sims is part of a long tradition of gendered wandering, of coding certain kinds of exploration as manly and others as (unacceptably) feminine. This leads into an examination of the #GamerGate controversy as a dramatic reaction to the rise of the walking sim. During the debacle, walking sims are painted as particularly feminine. By comparing this rhetoric with historical conceptions of female walkers, we can see how a gendered value distinction between passivity and activity has been imported to walking sim reception. We’ll look closely at several games and consider how the slur of feminization affects boredom, art, and the nerd culture surrounding gaming, the borders of which have grown increasingly porous. As nerdiness itself goes mainstream, games and gamer identity get pulled in that direction as well. This chapter explores the ramifications of that shift. Walking Sims and Digression Video game characters spend a lot of time walking. In open world games, avatars travel across vast landscapes to complete quests, achieve goals, and explore environments, discovering intermediate goals along the way. Because quantitative achievements can often be earned only by exploring, some open world designs demand that characters walk around randomly in an effort to find the storyline. Walking is thus ostensibly pointless but made productive and useful, since exploration and aimlessness are written into gameplay. Still, traditionally, walking is not the main activity involved in playing a game (as, for example, fighting or solving puzzles would be). Walking is the means to an end, a way to render character movement unobtrusive and get from one place to another. 278

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Game studies scholars have noted the ubiquity of walking in video games, most clearly in Ian Bogost’s Unit Operations.7 Elsewhere, Bogost explains how “in-videogame transit recreates a world in which reality had not yet been dissolved into bits but had to be traversed deliberately.”8 In games that exploit this deliberate relationship between the character and the landscape, transit makes the player more conscious of her steps and how they connect her to this digital world. By responding to open-ended, nonlinear gameplay, Bogost writes, “the player develops an intuitive and continuous relationship with the [gameworld’s] landscape.”9 Focusing the player’s attention on a background activity affords an alternative experience.10 Walking sims take this to an extreme, focusing the majority of time and effort on a character’s experience walking around. In literary studies, the analogue to walking sims is digressive literature: texts that wander, to the point where the digressions themselves become the text (Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy is the premier example). In Loiterature, a seminal examination of digressive lit, Ross Chambers highlights the three-way crossing as a metaphor for digressive texts; the choice is not whether to digress or not, but only which way to swerve.11 In such a text, the question is not what the plot might be, but how to grapple with a work so utterly unconcerned with having a plot at all. Claudia Albes differentiates literature that is narratively about walking from literature that uses walking as a storytelling model: texts like Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years follows wandering characters and the difficulties of travel, but is written with a conventional emphasis on plot, character development, and style. The text does not wander; the characters do. Conversely, texts like Montaigne’s Essais wander stylistically, but don’t focus on wandering as a theme.12 More recently, scholars such as Samuel Frederick, Rhian Atkin, Alexis Grohmann, and Caragh Walking Simulators, #GamerGate, and Gender

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Wells have explored narrative digression as an alternate storytelling method.13 Like digressive literature, ergodic literature (which requires active effort to traverse) presents the text as a kind of space the reader must cross; the difference is that this traversal is metaphorical for a digressive text and nonmetaphorical for an ergodic one. Unlike the powerless reader of a traditional narrative, who can do nothing but voyeuristically observe, a piece of ergodic literature “raises the stakes of interpretation to those of intervention. Trying to know a cybertext is an investment of personal improvisation that can result in either intimacy or failure.”14 In video games, most of which are ergodic texts, a player must make active choices with unknown consequences in order to cocreate his experience. This is built into most definitions of games, although defining what a game must contain and exclude remains a dicey proposition.15 Walking sims are often designed to retard activity and promote meandering, in a similar way that a wandering text works against quick reading. If the text of Tristram Shandy is digressive, the reader is still guided through it, one line after another. But if a game is made entirely of digressions (if there is no plot to return to), something more complicated is at play. The game remains ergodic (if, in some instances, barely), not something one can passively follow, turning the pages, letting the words flow by. To play a game is to be active, engaged, participating. So the player of a wandering game must actively loiter, must press the right sequence of buttons to propel an avatar along a digression to nowhere. While almost all computer games are ergodic texts in Espen Aarseth’s sense (the player must do something), walking simulators are pushing back toward something that might be called barely ergodic gaming, games that become a practice, a spiritual exploration, a piece of interactive fiction, but perhaps not, as has been asserted with increasing levels of aggressiveness, a game; a “real game” requires nontrivial effort to play 280

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à la Aarseth. Some players in massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) like World of Warcraft, for example, spend an enormous amount of time gaining skills, earning money, and making alliances with other players. A game that can be enjoyed by a novice lacks the challenge that these players see as definitional. Despite these complaints, the walking sim is gaining steam. Although progenitors abound, contemporary walking sims grew popular with the release of Dear Esther in 2012. Since then, a diverse set of games has attracted the label (often amid heated debate).16 Wander, a “collaborative, non-combat, non-competitive MMO,” released in June 2015, and the main activities in the game are exploring a massive fantasy environment and transforming between avatars such as a walking tree, a human, a fish, and a flying griffin. As the website promises, Wander “is focused on narrative, exploration and joy,” rather than doing anything in particular, an experimental MMO without combat, chats, or quests.17 The early reviews of Wander are overwhelmingly negative (partly because of bugs) and highlight the crucial difficulty of walking sims: they provoke anxiety because there’s nothing obvious to do. Without tasks to accomplish, plot to follow, fights to win, or skills to acquire, the activity of playing can seem a little too much like regular life. One Wander critic complains, “Do not play this game unless you think you have TOO MUCH TIME in the real world and want to waste some in this one.”18 In other words, the fundamental problem that gamers have with walking sims is that they’re boring. As one online commenter fumes, “Trip-Wire-Narrative Walking Simulators are not games. There is no storytelling, no plot, nada. Just pretty environments (if you get even that) and some schlepy schmutzy shit about feels.”19 Although walking sims may fail to entertain, the mistake could be in assuming that games are supposed to entertain at all. Boredom has long been coded as generative, and gendered. In Victorian novels, boredom is feminine Walking Simulators, #GamerGate, and Gender

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and beautiful, becoming “sometimes the sole avenue for female characters to experience freedom, creativity, profound productivity, selfknowledge, and power,” because it allows the mental space for creative productivity.20 Patricia Spacks, quoting Nietzsche, asserts that thinkers “actually require a lot of boredom if their work is to succeed. . . . All ‘cultural advance’ derives from the need to withstand boredom.”21 Most provocatively, Spacks claims the certainty of feminine boredom as an impetus for narrative to begin at all.22 For Spacks, boredom provides the perpetual deferral that J. J. Long identifies as one of two central narrative impulses: “the one oriented towards the end [and] the other oriented towards a retardation of the end.”23 Digression (and boredom as a particular kind of digression) extends the pleasurable suspense of reading and thought, becoming itself the object, rather than a diversion away from the driving force of a narrative teleology. In walking sims, the boredom is the point. Wandering is not wandering “away” from the plot of the game; wandering is the game. This mindful boredom, provoked by the experience of playing the game, introduces a similar sort of embodiment to that invoked by Jesper Juul, who points out that all narrative games exist in a half-real space, in which the narrative is fictional and the action is only half-fictional.24 The player is actually completing actions (like pressing buttons), but their representation within the action of the narrative is fictional. If I press a key and an avatar walks one step forward, have I walked? Is button-pressing a kind of wandering, just because it represents wandering? Alice O’Connor, in November 2014, lamented on Rock, Paper, Shotgun how “walking in a game is nothing like walking on your own feet. We don’t feel the weight and restraint of clothing, the thud reverberating from our ankle up through our leg, or rolling our toes to push off.”25 For that kind of consideration, we turn to “Walking Simulators,” games in which the mechanics of walking are taken apart and then 282

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reconfigured to be humorously difficult, simulating walking if you were an alien who had no idea how to walk. The best known of these is QWOP, a browser game in which the player must manipulate Q and W keys to control a runner’s thighs and O and P to control his calves, to humorously impossible effect. Octodad: Dadliest Catch features you as an octopus trying to hide your true nature from your human family. The multiple controls of Octodad, the Steam site promises, “can be remapped to any configuration a player may want,” presumably to facilitate walking in a way organic to the player.26 “Walking Sims,” however, are very much not walking sims, the wandering texts I’ve been describing: the former are easily recognizable as games, if jokey in conception, with rules, challenges, and metrics for success. The latter are doing something different, presenting a version of embodiment that highlights the mind as part of the body. Pressing W over and over can bring a player to a Zen-like state of simplicity and awareness, making her more attuned to the physical act of walking by watching an avatar perform it, precisely because she lacks another distracting focus. For example, Dear Esther. Arguably the most famous walking sim, Dear Esther was released in 2012 as a mod for Half-Life 2, itself an important and award-winning dystopian shooter from 2004. Dear Esther describes itself as “a poetic ghost story told using game technologies.”27 You press a single button to negotiate your way around a stunningly beautiful island, interrupted every so often by blocks of text read in a voiceover by a grieving narrator. As you go, you learn the vague outlines of the tragedy he endured, but are never given specifics. Each chunk of text is a piece of a letter he’s written, and the experience is like engaging with an interactive epistolary novel, contemplative and sad. At the end, we climb to the top of a lighthouse and jump, but we never hit the water. Instead, the camera swoops safely upward just as we’re about to crash, and the shadow of a bird is visible on the waves beneath us. The Walking Simulators, #GamerGate, and Gender

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mechanic of the game is such that we have to direct the avatar (it’s first person, so we never see him) to jump off the lighthouse, at which point the cutscene takes over. As the bird rises, we see it fly over the many letters to Esther, folded into paper boats, drifting out to sea. The sense of embodiment evoked by Dear Esther is that of a penitent treading a church labyrinth; walking is so simple in Dear Esther that pressing the button realistically mirrors the simplicity of walking, the two activities functioning as alternate but effective ways to find grace. The final, fantastical transformation into a bird is beyond our control; the practice of walking is the only activity we’re allowed, and yet it’s enough. A hardcore game sees embodiment as a way to try on different modes and roles, a practice ground for physical fantasies.28 But walking sims are too close to life to afford that kind of imaginative exercise. In some ways, the growth of walking sims is a long-overdue gesture toward a different kind of game and gamer. In 2005, Chris Bateman and Richard Boon in their book 21st Century Game Design analyzed four types of game players, associated with Meyers–Briggs personality categories. Their third category, the Wanderer, corresponded to those with “Feeling and Perceiving Preferences.” This is a player “in search of Easy-fun (associated with the emotions of wonder, awe, and mystery). . . . Whereas a Type 1–oriented player enjoys mastering a complex control mechanism . . . a Type 3–oriented player generally wants to press a single button and have something pleasing happen.”29 Atmosphere, setting, and story are very important to this type of players, a group once called “casual” that now has simply become one of many strands of mainstream gaming. Bateman and Boon noted that traditional games cater more to gamers in the other categories and the third-category “Wanderer” players, though numerous, were poorly served by the current offerings. The development of walking sims could be seen as a reaction. The following section will examine the #GamerGate controversy 284

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as a reaction to that reaction: an over-the-top response by old-school “hardcore gamers” who found their identity as ostracized nerds being overtaken by the mainstream. #GamerGate: Misogynistic Troglodytes or Cruelly Bullied Nerds? In August 2014, a cultural battle called #GamerGate exploded online. The spark was a blog post by Eron Gjoni, detailing his relationship with his ex-girlfriend Zoë Quinn, an indie game developer. Gjoni claims that Quinn cheated on him multiple times, including with Nathan Grayson, a game journalist who writes for the gaming websites Kotaku and Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Gjoni’s “ZoePost” immediately provoked a huge outpouring of vitriol online alleging a breach of journalistic ethics. Over the next several days, accusations escalated, particularly on Reddit and 4chan; one YouTuber uploaded a video alleging that Quinn slept with five men in the video game industry in return for better reviews and wider influence, and claimed that she was now “portraying herself as a victim to receive donations and support.”30 Kotaku editor in chief Stephen Totilo responded on August 20th, assuring readers that Grayson had never even reviewed Quinn’s game Depression Quest, much less given it a good review under ethically questionable circumstances.31 Nonetheless, #GamerGate took off, with both sides claiming the status of righteous victims. Pro-GamerGaters asserted that the incestuous tangle of game developers and game reviewers polluted the nature of reviews on sites like Polygon, Gamasutra, Kotaku, and Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Anti-GamerGaters furiously responded that the whole controversy was an antifeminist attack by gamers who didn’t want to share game culture with anyone else. This opinion was buttressed by the vicious online abuse, harassment, and death and rape threats experienced by many women in the industry (particularly Zoë Quinn, Anita Walking Simulators, #GamerGate, and Gender

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Sarkeesian, and Brianna Wu) by anonymous online bullies. Leigh Alexander declared “gamer culture” over, patronizingly dismissing gamers as a cohort of embarrassing, socially inept losers, a move that further polarized the conflict and was seen by many as an unwarranted wholesale defamation.32 Many game journalists analyzed the conflict as highlighting a tension between traditional “gamer”/nerd culture and the increasing mainstream population now playing games. Mike Diver elegantly lays out this viewpoint in a December 22nd Vice essay titled “Merry Christmas GamerGate.”33 Although the rhetoric is nicer, Diver’s post echoes Alexander’s Gamasutra piece, as well as the New York Times article on the controversy in October.34 Gamers’ fears of being outgrown by their own cultural niche is backed up by demographic shifts that, conveniently, were widely publicized in August 2014. A Flurry poll published August 7th asserted that the audience for mobile games had changed and that women spend both more time and more money on mobile gaming than men. Flurry divvies up game categories and reports that, while women dominate nine categories as opposed to men’s six, men won strategy, sport, and action/RPG, among others; “that should give some hardcore game reviewers, irked by the overnight success of the Kardashian game, a sigh of relief,” the report asserted.35 The myth of the primarily male gamer was fundamentally eroded by an Entertainment Software Association report on August 21, 2014. They reported that women over 18 encompass a much larger percentage of players (36%) than boys under 18 (17%), who traditionally have been the core gamer demographic. Self-identified gamers have responded to these shifts by claiming that playing a mobile game like Candy Crush Saga (or a walking sim) doesn’t make you a gamer; it’s not a real game. But a Nielsen survey, also conducted in 2014, concluded that “women 286

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gamers in the US are most likely to play games on personal computers, mobile devices and Nintendo’s Wii console. In fact, US women are more likely than US men to play on the Nintendo Wii . . . while they are equally likely as men to play games on Apple devices.”36 When angry commenters claim that games played on Nintendo Wii aren’t real, or that the data were skewed by mothers buying consoles for their children, dismissal of female gaming starts to look suspiciously like policing the boundaries of gamer identity against the growing female demographic. So it’s unsurprising that Nick Wingfield attributes #GamerGate more to fears over demographic shifts than outrage at dishonest journalism.37 At the same time, the pro-GamerGate camp has disowned the misogynistic harassers as extremists and maintained that the conflict is about corruption and “the injection of politics into gaming. . . . [We] would like to see games evaluated for their merit as games—not for their politics.”38 This position presupposes that games aren’t inherently political, an opinion harder to maintain as the genre moves more mainstream and contends with contemporary awareness of subtle political messaging in media. With its battle lines drawn between irate, hardcore gaming nerds and a more mainstream gamer attuned (perhaps overly) to social justice issues, #GamerGate taps into the phenomenon of the male nerd blind to the privilege afforded him by his maleness. MIT professor Scott Aaronson touched off a related controversy in a December 2014 blog post. Aaronson details his struggle to be a feminist while society at large and women in particular made it clear that he and his sexuality were disgusting and unwanted.39 Online responses castigated him, accusing him of entitlement to female attention and a misunderstanding of intersectionality.40 Empathetic though several of them were, the “plight of the bitter nerd” divided people who’d suffered a nerdy male adolescence Walking Simulators, #GamerGate, and Gender

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from others who contended that there are far worse things to suffer. Despite these criticisms, Aaronson makes some compelling points and represents a sympathetic voice among bitter nerds. For the purposes of this chapter, #GamerGate is interesting for how it relates to the phenomenon of walking sims, a category of games that have been squarely placed in the anti-GamerGate camp. At the height of the conflict, a user posted a message on the #GamerGate thread on Encyclopedia Dramatica (a satirical wiki that mocks Internet cultural trends), responding to a tweet: “Why [are you concerned]? Because they’re not feminists? Because their game wasn’t a ‘zomg so progressive’ walking simulator?”41 Between its pleas to keep politics out of gaming and its association of feminist politics with walking sims, the #GamerGate faction tied together the fear that games were becoming unrecognizable to gamers with the fear that women were taking over nerdy male spaces. The idea that walking sims function as a feminist plot to destroy gaming came to a head with Gone Home, a critically acclaimed walking sim developed by Fullbright Company and released in August 2013. The main character is a young woman exploring her family’s deserted home and piecing together the clues of her sister’s homosexuality. Pervaded with Riot grrrl music, ’90s memorabilia, and horror game tropes that convince the player of an impending jump scare that never arrives, Gone Home raked in awards and was universally lauded by critics, earning a Metacritic score of 86 percent.42 The gamer community was far less enamored, and #GamerGate responded with some of its most fevered conspiracy theorizing by pointing out an extant friendship between the game’s developers and the Polygon reviewer who rated the game a perfect 10.43 The community’s hatred of Gone Home went far enough to redefine the definition of a “walking simulator” on Urban Dictionary. In April 2014, it was defined rather neutrally as “a genre of games where 288

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the walking is a big part of the experience,” originating with the zombie survival game Day Z, which has notoriously been in alpha testing mode for two years. By December 7, 2014, the definition had become more explicitly negative: A walking simulator is a type of video game which lacks many of the traditional aspects of a game (such as a goal, win/loss conditions, any kind of game system to interact with) despite taking the form of a video game. The phrase implies that there is basically nothing to do in the game other than walking around. A: I sent you a new game on Steam, check it out. B: Gone Home? That’s not even a game, it’s a walking simulator.44

A walking sim isn’t just a bad game; it’s a nongame and, worse, one that duplicitously pretends to be a game. For Gone Home’s proponents, the distinction is ridiculous because the mechanism of Gone Home is the same as that of any first person shooter (FPS), but “in the case of Gone Home ‘click’ doesn’t equal ‘gunshot.’”45 Since clicking on things to interact with them is a very well accepted convention in a FPS, the difference seems to be the content (which, let’s remember, is a story about a queer teenage girl and her sense of estrangement from her family). A humor site made a parody advertisement called Gun Home, where the player shoots at various interlopers in his family home, including Hitler in the attic, and features “15 weapons to tear your ennui a new one!”46 With a gun in the player’s hand and 8-bit Nazis to demolish, the parody implies, Gone Home would be a real game. In October 2014, Destructive Creations brilliantly capitalized on the #GamerGate furor (and some gamers’ dissatisfaction with the existence of artsy nongames) by announcing Hatred, an isometric shooter with a psychopathic main character whose only agenda is to slaughter as many helpless, pleading civilians as possible. The trailers feature bodies Walking Simulators, #GamerGate, and Gender

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twitching in a gruesomely realistic manner when they’re shot, a woman stuttering “please” as she’s shot in the head, and another woman shrieking as she’s set on fire in a kitchen. Anti-GamerGaters demanded the game be removed from Steam Greenlight, and Steam complied, only to reinstate it the next day with an apology from Steam cofounder Gabe Newell. Destructive Creations saw this as a victory against the runaway forces of political correctness, as they explain on their website: “These days, when a lot of games are heading to be polite, colorful, politically correct and trying to be some kind of higher art, rather than just an entertainment—we wanted to create something against trends. Something different, something that could give the player a pure, gaming pleasure.”47 By claiming to be a pure, apolitical game, Hatred sets itself in opposition to indie games that explicitly explore culturally touchy themes, or reviewers who find underlying meanings in games in general. The message is, stop calling us sexist because we want Lara Croft as scantily clad as possible; this isn’t politics, it’s just a game. Incredible violence in games isn’t nearly as new as they claim (See: Postal, or the Grand Theft Auto series), but the lack of a frame story or satirical wink to internally justify the violence (as in GTA) makes many game critics uncomfortable.48 Which is, of course, the point. Beyond its distaste for art games, Hatred obliquely takes on walking sims as well. Destructive Creations’ business developer Przemysław Szczepaniak explains the team’s motivation as a move away from wandering games: “We were tired of games that always lead you by the hand, where the game becomes so ridiculously simple that you are lacking the fun and participation in game action. . . . Nowadays, it is only about being a great graphical creation without the immersive and entertaining game elements.”49 Notice how well this type of game would suit the Wanderer gamer described by Bateman and Boon (“a player in search of easy-fun”). What Szczepaniak is assuming are universal game elements 290

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(i.e., immersion, entertainment, interactivity, skills that are difficult to master), Bateman and Boon would call Type-1 oriented play. There are three other types. And notice, too, how what gamers define implicitly as interactivity (immersion, participation, having an effect on one’s surroundings) is not a hard and fast definition. A blog post by Pat Ashe illustrates how constraining the idea of interactivity has become: We need to re-imagine what we mean when we say “interactive.” . . . Looking, listening, smelling and being are all interactions. . . . Come here, and see what happens when you walk around this space. See how the world reacts to you. This is the core that exists at most things that get the label of walking simulator because our idea of a game is one of conquest, of beating a system. Existing in and playing with the system is rarely considered a worthwhile goal for a videogame but surely the joy in games is in uncovering and playing with the systems at work.50

Just walking around, as Ashe suggests, is not antithetical to interacting with the world or having agency. However, the history of who gets to claim that agency, and how, shines an interesting light on the critiques of walking simulators today. Gendered Wandering Aimless wandering as cultural statement has a pedigree stretching back to the nineteenth century with Baudelaire and continues into modernism with Benjamin, but let’s pick up the story in the mid-twentieth century, when the Situationist International in the 1950s and ’60s (led by Guy Debord) defined a twentieth-century practice of flânerie. For Debord, the walker creates a certain space of his own by walking, counteracting the established landscape through which he moves. The switch between passive and active is important here: by enunciating an Walking Simulators, #GamerGate, and Gender

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individual path, counterwalking the established narrative of the city, the flâneur becomes a configurative agent, active in spite of his supposed distance and passivity. If we imagine the city as a procedurally generated text (like a piece of interactive fiction, or a game), the flâneur is the one who delineates the storyline.51 And by walking from one section to another, he’s also the one holding the story together. This central figure, however, is always male. Prostitution was coded as a female version of flânerie in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; restricted from many areas of public life, women walking in the city at unusual times or in unusual areas were not perceived as aimless dandies like their male counterparts, but as prostitutes at work.52 Subjected to a critical male gaze, female walkers did not have the luxury of observing and wandering aimlessly, but were always observed and ascribed some purpose. Deborah L. Parsons and other scholars have attempted to reclaim the female flâneur, however, as the very embodiment of digression.53 A female digressive voice, unlike Tristram Shandy’s, “is clearly gendered feminine.”54 This is arguably insulting, defining “female writing as conversational, epistolary and lacking in style, implicitly to be placed in opposition to male writing, the printed book, and rhetoric.” But digressivity, particularly when read today, creates a feminized space: “a sanctuary from the masculine tyranny of plot.”55 The female flâneur in writing is thus actively passive in the same way as Debord’s subversive psychogeographer: she counters the established narrative by digressing. We see an analogous struggle happening in The Path, a walking sim released in 2009, in which the player controls six avatars of Little Red Riding Hood and directs them on their eponymous path to grandmother’s house. The girls are aged 9–19, each named some version of red (Ruby, Scarlet, Rose), given a distinct personality, and instructed not to leave the path. But when the player obeys this rule and walks 292

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the girl straight to grandmother’s house, the game’s final screen chides the player (“Failure!”) for having neglected to collect any of the items available in the woods. The only way to win is to guide each girl away from the path and find her wolf somewhere in the forest. Each girl’s wolf manifests differently; the 9-year-old gets a growling storybook wolf, the 19-year-old a predatory piano instructor. The game’s mechanic requires the player to lead the girl directly to the wolf who eventually kills her (with sexual violence implied), thus forcing the player into a villainous role and challenging her to rethink the metaphors and tensions inherent in the original fairy tale. The forest is procedurally generated, so finding the wolf (and all the other hidden objects) can require a large amount of slow, sinister trekking. Grandmother’s house itself is a nightmare of angles and terrifying images, stringing together what you’ve found in the forest and killing your character gruesomely. Unless you haven’t found the wolf, in which case he just watches from the corner as you fall asleep in grandmother’s bed. The game is disturbing, powerful, and not particularly fun, in line with its status as trippy, postmodern fairy tale. With regard to Parsons’s argument that the female flâneur is coded as a prostitute, each girl in The Path is forced to digress directly into sexual victimization. Besides the vague anxiety of purposelessness common to playing walking sims, The Path goes a step further and evokes outright fear, guilt, and distaste as the player must manipulate her charge into danger again and again. The Path illustrates how old questions of agency, digressiveness, and the vulnerable female body can be recontextualized in light of new concerns, namely, inclusiveness in male spaces and the culture clash between the nerdy hardcore gamer and a newer mainstream gaming population. Walking sims situate this conflict within contemporary disputes like #GamerGate as well as literary and historical considerations of feminine digressiveness, purposelessness, and boredom, reclaiming Walking Simulators, #GamerGate, and Gender

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those traits (and the walking sims that display them) as expressions of an alternate but valid cultural artifact. Notes Thanks to Michael St. Clair, Bonnie Rubin, David Franke, Clara Lewis, and Kurt James Werner for helpful thoughts and conversations as this paper developed. Thanks also to Patrick Jagoda for organizing the MLA panel “Video Games and Literature” at the 2015 convention in Vancouver, where a version of this chapter was presented. 1. Shaw, “Do You Identify as a Gamer?,” 30. 2. Fils-Aimé, “Nintendo E3 2006 Press Conference.” 3. Fredner, “The Year in Anti-Games.” 4. Samyn, “Notgames Releases in 2012.” 5. Steam, “Mountain.” 6. O’Reilly, Mountain. 7. Bogost, Unit Operations. See ch. 6, “Encounters across Platforms.” 8. Bogost, How to Do Things with Videogames, 50–51. 9. Ibid., 49. 10. For more on how video game spaces contribute to a player’s construction of narrative, see Michael Nitsche, Video Game Spaces: Image, Play, and Structure in 3D Game Worlds (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). 11. Chambers, Loiterature. 12. Albes, Der Spaziergang als Erzählmodell, 17–18. 13. Atkin, Textual Wanderings; Frederick, Narratives Unsettled; Grohmann and Wells, Digressions in European Literature. 14. Aarseth, Cybertext. 15. Usually the definition involves some combination of rules, points, tasks, and end-conditions. For a survey of game definitions, see Salen and Zimmerman, The Rules of Play, and Sutton-Smith, “A Syntax for Play and Games.” 16. Progenitors include Myst, released in 1993, a popular puzzle game that provided some atmospheric inspiration for walking sims. The following have all been called walking sims: The Graveyard, The Path, Thirty Flights of Loving, Proteus, Bientôt l’été, Day Z, Kairo, Dream, Gone Home, Mirrormoon EP, Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, The Stanley Parable, 9.03m, Jazzpunk, Year Walk, Ether One, To the Moon, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, Another World, Among The Sleep, Lifeless Planet, Neverending Nightmares, Eidolon, Dream, Flower, NaissanceE, The Lost Valley, and Journey. List collected in part from lists on NeoGAF and Pat Ashe’s blog. 294

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17. Wander. 18. Ibid. 19. TheRalph, “GamerGate Cheers.” 20. Maynard, Beautiful Boredom, 3. 21. Spacks, Boredom, 2–3. 22. Ibid., 62: “The taken-for-granted probability of boredom in a woman’s life provides the starting point for narrative—and perhaps for female anger.” See also Toohey, Boredom. 23. Long, “‘Perfume from a Dress . . . ,’” 5. 24. Juul, Half-Real. 25. O’Connor, “Longing for Walking Simulators.” 26. “Octodad.” 27. “Dear Esther.” 28. Gee, “Video Games and Embodiment,” 3–4. 29. Bateman and Boon, 21st Century Game Design, 67. 30. “Quinnspiracy.” 31. Totilo, August 20, 2014, entry. 32. Alexander, “‘Gamers’ Don’t Have to Be Your Audience.” 33. Diver, “Merry Christmas, GamerGate.” “There’s fear behind a lot of GamerGate rhetoric—fear that the rise of a more varied array of gaming options will in some way marginalize the traditional shooters and sports simulations. But to deny these smaller, more niche productions space to exist beside the big boys is to promote inequality and everything that carries with it, from attitudes on feminism to political persuasions. Nobody that GamerGate has been seen to attack wants to steal away the big-budget blow-up-everything affairs—not even Feminist Frequency’s Anita Sarkeesian, who has repeatedly stated that games she identifies sexist shortcomings in can be enjoyed despite these factors—but everyone needs to be OK with a growing field of alternatives.” 34. Alexander’s language is openly insulting: “Traditional ‘gaming’ is sloughing off, culturally and economically, like the carapace of a bug. . . . This is hard for people who’ve drank the kool aid about how their identity depends on the aging cultural signposts of a rapidly-evolving, increasingly broad and complex medium. It’s hard for them to hear they don’t own anything, anymore, that they aren’t the world’s most special-est consumer demographic, that they have to share” (“‘Gamers’ Don’t Have to Be Your Audience”). See also Garrett Martin, “Why We Didn’t Want to Talk about ‘GamerGate,’” Paste Magazine, September 4, 2014, http://www.pastemagazine.com /articles/2014/09/why-we-didnt-want-to-talk-about-gamergate.html, and Chris Suellentrop, “Can Video Games Survive?,” New York Times, October 25, 2014, http://nyti.ms/1rB7eG2. For similar language about how gamers are “over” from the Walking Simulators, #GamerGate, and Gender

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Notgames perspective, see Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn, “Over Games,” presentation given at the Art History of Games symposium, Atlanta, Georgia, February 6, 2010, http://tale-of-tales.com/tales/OverGames.html. 35. Khalaf, “Mobile Gaming.” The Kim Kardashian: Hollywood mobile game, released June 25, 2014, earned $1.6 million on its first day. 36. Grundberg and Hansegard, “Women Now Make Up Almost Half of Gamers.” 37. Wingfield, “Feminist Critics of Video Games Facing Threats.” 38. Otton, “Understanding Pro and Anti-Gamergate.” 39. Aaronson, “Comment #171.” 40. Chu, “The Plight of the Bitter Nerd”; Marcotte, “MIT Professor Explains”; Penny, “On Nerd Entitlement.” 41. Arcticphoenix95, “The #GamerGate Thread.” 42. Metacritic, Review of Gone Home. 43. Kiltmanenator, “More Corruption at Polygon.” 44. Urban Dictionary, s.v. “Walking Simulator,” submitted by Ghost Tartar and 2CleverUsername, December 7, 2014, http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php ?term=walking+simulator. 45. HobbieK, title post: “Played Gone Home for the first time last week. And I for one am excited for our Anita Sarkeesian mandated gaming future consisting entirely of lesbian walking simulators. Because that game is actually really good.” See also comment by Baryonyx_walkeri: “You know what? #GamerGate is right. Gone Home is a walking simulator where you just click on stuff to interact with it. You know what else is like that? Every single FPS ever created. The only difference is that in the case of Gone Home ‘click’ doesn’t equal ‘gunshot.’” 46. “Gun Home.” 47. “Hatred.” 48. Grayson, “The Kind of Video Game Violence That Disturbs Me.” 49. Evans-Thirwell, “Face-Stabbing and Cop-Killing.” 50. Ashe, The Pat Ashe (blog). 51. Bogost, Unit Operations, 75: “The flâneur’s role is fundamentally a configurative one. His passage through the city constantly opens up new paths. . . . Because flânerie is fundamentally a passage through a space, it bears much similarity to the configurative structure of procedural texts.” 52. Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis. 53. See Anke Gleber, The Art of Taking a Walk: Flânerie, Literature, and Film in Weimar Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); Celeste Langan, Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); and Olivia Murphy, “Jane Austen’s ‘Excellent 296

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Walker’: Pride, Prejudice, and Pedestrianism,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 26, no. 1 (2013): 121–42. 54. McMorran, “‘I’ve Started So I’ll—,’” 71. 55. Ibid., 72.

Bibliography Aarseth, Espen J. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Aaronson, Scott. Comment #171. Shtetl-Optimized (blog). December 14, 2014. http:// www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2091#comment-326664. Albes, Claudia. Der Spaziergang als Erzählmodell: Studien zur Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adalbert Stifter, Robert Walser und Thomas Bernhard. Tübingen: Francke Verlag, 1999. Alexander, Leigh. “‘Gamers’ Don’t Have to Be Your Audience. ‘Gamers’ Are Over.” Gamasutra. August 28, 2014. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/224400 /Gamers_dont_have_to_be_your_audience_Gamers_are_over.php. Arcticphoenix95. “The #GamerGate Thread.” Encyclopedia Dramatic Forums. August 30, 2014. https://forum.encyclopediadramatica.se/threads/the-gamergate-thread .18342/page-59. Ashe, Pat. The Pat Ashe (blog). Accessed March 15, 2015. https://thepatashe.wordpress .com/2014/07/06/walking-simulator-simulator/ (owner’s permission is necessary to access site). Atkin, Rhian. Textual Wanderings: The Theory and Practice of Narrative Digression. London: Legenda, 2011. Bateman, Chris, and Richard Boon. 21st Century Game Design. (Game Development Series). Newton Center, MA: Charles River Media, 2005. Bogost, Ian. How to Do Things with Videogames. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. ——. Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. Chambers, Ross. Loiterature. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. Chu, Arthur. “The Plight of the Bitter Nerd: Why So Many Awkward, Shy Guys End Up Hating Feminism.” Salon, January 9, 2015. http://www.salon.com/2015/01/10 /the_plight_of_the_bitter_nerd_why_so_many_awkward_shy_guys_end_up _hating_feminism/. “Dear Esther.” The Chinese Room. Accessed June 16, 2015. http://dear-esther.com /?page_id=133. Walking Simulators, #GamerGate, and Gender

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Diver, Mike. “Merry Christmas, GamerGate.” Vice. December 22, 2014. http://www .vice.com/en_uk/read/merry-christmas-gamergate. Evans-Thirwell, Edwin. “Face-Stabbing and Cop-Killing: Inside 2015’s Most Controversial Video Game.” Vice. January 19, 2015. http://www.vice.com/read/an -interview-with-the-makers-of-hatred-2015s-most-controversial-game-783. Fils-Aimé, Reggie. “Nintendo E3 2006 Press Conference.” YouTube video, 10:29. Posted by CARSLOCK, June 28, 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v =EUDMg5b-n2w. Frederick, Samuel. Narratives Unsettled: Digression in Robert Walser, Thomas Bernhard, and Adalbert Stifter. Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2012. Fredner, Erik. “The Year in Anti-Games.” Kill Screen. December 18, 2014. http:// killscreendaily.com/articles/year-anti-games/. Gee, James Paul. “Video Games and Embodiment.” Games and Culture 3, no. 3–4 (2008): 253–63. doi: 10.1177/1555412008317309. Grayson, Nathan. “The Kind of Video Game Violence That Disturbs Me.” Kotaku (blog). October 18, 2014. http://kotaku.com/the-kind-of-video-game-violence-that -disturbs-me-1647874540. Grohmann, Alexis, and Caragh Wells. Digressions in European Literature: From Cervantes to Sebald. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Grundberg, Sven, and Jens Hansegard. “Women Now Make Up Almost Half of Gamers; Adult Women Gamers Now More Numerous Than Under-18 Boys.” Wall Street Journal, August 20, 2014. http://search.proquest.com/docview/1554421333 ?accountid=14026. “Gun Home: The Ultimate Gone Home DLC.” Dorkly. January 15, 2014. http://www .dorkly.com/video/58404/gun-home. Video. “Hatred.” Destructive Creations. Accessed June 26, 2015. http://www .destructivecreations.pl/. HobbieK. “Played Gone Home for the First Time Last Week.” Reddit: GamerGhazi. February 13, 2015. https://www.reddit.com/r/GamerGhazi/comments/2vtenv /played_gone_home_for_the_first_time_last_week/. Juul, Jesper. Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. Khalaf, Simon. “Mobile Gaming: Females Beat Males on Money, Time, and Loyalty.” Flurry. August 7, 2014. http://www.flurry.com/blog/flurry-insights/mobile-gaming -females-beat-males-money-time-and-loyalty#.VRCUZmYfk0L. Kiltmanenator. Comment on “More Corruption at Polygon: Gone Home Nepotism Worse Than We Thought.” Reddit: KokatuInAction. Accessed May 2015. http:// www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/2jy59e/more_corruption_at 298

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_polygon_gone_home_nepotism/ (the original post is no longer available, but the comments are). Long, J. J. “‘Perfume from a Dress . . .’: On Not Getting to the Point.” In Textual Wanderings: The Theory and Practice of Narrative Digression, edited by Rhian Atkin, 1–13. London: Modern Humanities Research Association and Maney Publishing, 2011. Marcotte, Amanda. “MIT Professor Explains: The Real Oppression Is Having to Learn to Talk to Women.” Pandagon (blog). December 30, 2014, Raw Story. http:// www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/12/mit-professor-explains-the-real-oppression-is-having -to-learn-to-talk-to-women/. Maynard, Lee Anna. Beautiful Boredom: Idleness and Feminine Self-realization in the Victorian Novel. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009. McMorran, Will. “‘I’ve Started So I’ll—‘: Marivaux’s La Vie de Marianne.” In Textual Wanderings: The Theory and Practice of Narrative Digression, edited by Rhian Atkin, 64–81. London: Modern Humanities Research Association and Maney Publishing, 2011. Metacritic. Review of Gone Home. Accessed June 17, 2015. http://www.metacritic.com /game/pc/gone-home. ——. Review of Journey. Accessed June 15, 2015. http://www.metacritic.com/game /playstation-3/journey. NeoGAF. Accessed June 15, 2015. http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php ?t=929530. O’Connor, Alice. “Longing for Walking Simulators Wot You Do Swimming In.” Rock, Paper, Shotgun. November 24, 2014. http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/11 /24/swimming-walking-simulators/. “Octodad.” Steam. Valve Corporation. Accessed June 16, 2015. http://store .steampowered.com/app/224480/. O’Reilly, David. Mountain. Accessed June 15, 2015. http://mountain-game.com/. Otton, Andrew. “Understanding Pro and Anti-Gamergate.” TechRaptor. October 19, 2014. http://techraptor.net/content/understanding-pro-anti-gamergate. “Quinnspiracy.” Know Your Meme. Accessed June 16, 2015. http://knowyourmeme.com /memes/events/quinnspiracy. Parsons, Deborah L. Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City and Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Penny, Laurie. “On Nerd Entitlement.” New Statesman, December 29, 2014. http:// www.newstatesman.com/laurie-penny/on-nerd-entitlement-rebel-alliance-empire. Salen, Katie, and Eric Zimmerman. The Rules of Play. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. Walking Simulators, #GamerGate, and Gender

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Samyn, Michaël. “Notgames releases in 2012.” Notgames blog. January 18, 2012. http:// notgames.org/blog/. Shaw, Adrienne. “Do You Identify as a Gamer? Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Gamer Identity.” New Media and Society 14, no. 1 (2011): 28–44. doi: 10.1177/1461444811410394. Spacks, Patricia Meyer. Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Steam. “Mountain.” Accessed June 15, 2015. http://store.steampowered.com/app /313340/. Sterling, Jim. Review of Journey. Destructoid. March 1, 2012. http://www.destructoid .com/review-journey-223030.phtml. Sutton-Smith, Brian. “A Syntax for Play and Games.” In Child’s Play, edited by R. E. Herron and Brian Sutton-Smith, 298–310. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1971. TheRalph. “GamerGate Cheers as Steam Restores Hatred to Greenlight (UPDATE from Gabe Newell).” The Ralph Retort. Updated December 17, 2014. http:// theralphretort.com/gamergate-cheers-hatred-steam-greenlight/. Toohey, Peter. Boredom: A Lively History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011. Totilo, Stephen. August 20, 2014, entry. Kotaku (blog). http://kotaku.com/in-recent -days-ive-been-asked-several-times-about-a-pos-1624707346. Wander. Accessed June 16, 2015. http://www.wanderthegame.com/p/wander-is-world -focused-on-exploration.html. Wingfield, Nick. “Feminist Critics of Video Games Facing Threats in ‘GamerGate’ Campaign.” New York Times, October 15, 2014. http://nyti.ms/1quzTvM.

Melissa K agen is a lecturer at Stanford University, where she teaches courses on writing, German literature, and video games. She is working on a book about wandering in German/Jewish opera in the early twentieth century.

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THE FAN AS PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL 12 IN “RACEFAIL ’09”

siobhan carroll

“All men are intellectuals,” Gramsci famously declared, “but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals.”1 For scholars writing in the wake of Edward Said’s influential Representations of the Intellectual, that function has mainly been to serve as a “critical commentator addressing a nonspecialist audience on matters of broad public concern.”2 While writers on public intellectualism acknowledge that university credentials are not a prerequisite for this kind of enterprise, for the most part their discussions describe a “person trained in a particular discipline . . . who is on the faculty of a college or university.”3 While such definitions have been useful to academics agitating for administrative support for politically engaged faculty, they are less useful in describing the intellectual roles available in twenty-first-century popular culture. As Noah Berlatsky observes, “the internet and social media have made it easier for people who are not traditional ‘public intellectuals’ to make their intellectual efforts public”—a boon to people and groups historically excluded from the “hierarchical . . . vision of the public intellectual” as university professor.4 This effect has been particularly pronounced in subject areas such as fan studies and science fiction studies, where, for decades, intellectual discussion of texts took place outside a university system unwilling to sully itself with “low” culture. In such areas, the line between fan and scholarly analyses has long been blurred, and scholars legitimized by 301

the academy often found themselves performing not so much as public intellectuals but as academic intellectuals, explaining to scholarly audiences phenomena of which sections of the general public were already aware. Fans meanwhile have long contributed to an amateur scholarly culture that includes “shadow academies” such as the Foundation Masterclass in Science Fiction Criticism and, as Alexis Lothian observes of media fandom, an “archive culture” in which amateur “writers, vidders, artists, and critics build their subcultural sphere by sharing and storing texts and interpretations.”5 In the science fiction and fantasy (“SF”) community, the empowered consumer or “fan” has historically already been able to occupy public intellectual roles, which in an era of social media and online commentary, are available to a broader and more diverse array of potential contributors.6 This gradual shift in SF communal intellectual discussion has not been without its contentions, particularly as fans and critics used to the hierarchies and protocols of offline discussion encounter those of the cyberspace era. “RaceFail ’09” was the name given by fans to one of the most notorious recent exchanges, an ongoing “conversation about race in the context of science fiction and fantasy that sprawled across the blogosphere” in 2009.7 What began as a set of blog posts by authors and fans about the representation of minority characters in fiction rapidly became, in Fanlore’s words, a “large and tangled snarl of racism, misunderstanding, culture clash, poor behavior, and hurt which consumed several interconnected corners of fandom in early 2009.”8 The controversy embroiled fans, writers, editors, and academics across the SF literary community in 2009 and proved a significant event in that community’s intellectual life.9 It generated notable responses such as fan writer deepad’s “I Didn’t Dream of Dragons,” a blog post on the ongoing impact of literary imperialism that was later nominated for the BSFA (British Science Fiction Association) nonfiction award; 302

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prompted academic conferences such as WisCon to make race their topic of themed conversation; and, in the eyes of SF authors such as N. K. Jemisin, appeared to be “the big thaw for the SFF field” that promised to dissolve the community’s icy resistance to discussions of race.10 As of 2015, it continues to be referenced as an important cultural event in academic scholarship and fandom alike, with scholars such as Henry Jenkins noting it as a significant entry in SF’s “debates over the genre’s representation of racial diversity”11 and fans such as Laura Mixon observing the controversy’s impact on fans and professionals “who entered [the SF community] around that time, and [had it shape] their entire perception of the field.”12 Yet despite the number of writings and discussions prompted by RaceFail ’09, there is, even in the academic discipline of fan studies, little published scholarship on the controversy itself.13 In part, I believe, this stems from the rhetorical difficultly of discussing, as an academic, an online debate that linked white and academic privileges and challenged the validity of scholarly discursive practices, such as those enacted in this volume.14 While admitting the rhetorical difficulties of my own position— as a white female academic and SF author, I occupy the identity categories whose privileges were challenged in this discussion—I wish in this chapter to revisit RaceFail ’09 for two reasons. The first stems from its significance to the SF community I belong to, which I believe is illserved by silence on race and color-blind racism. Given the importance of citation to scholarly argument, to not publish on RaceFail ’09 is to make it harder for others—particularly less established scholars—to do so, thus enabling the construction of a history of official silence that can be used to delegitimize future conversations on racial representation. The second reason regards the significance of RaceFail ’09 beyond the SF community as a potential case study in the perils and benefits of public intellectualism in cyberspace. As I will argue in this chapter, The Fan as Public Intellectual in “RaceFail ’09”

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part of what animated RaceFail ’09 exchanges was a struggle over what constituted public intellectual authority, or as Karen Healey noted, “who is permitted to criticize a text.”15 Although the most prominent participants in the RaceFail discussion were not academics, “academic” and “academia” became loaded terms in this online debate, deployed to authorize criticism and stratify intellectual discussion. Despite the omnipresence of appeals to academic authority, the economic pressures attending this discussion meant that self-identified fans were better positioned to contribute to an extended debate than were traditional “public intellectual” figures. The dynamics of RaceFail ’09 thus not only illustrate the rise of the fan as public intellectual, but also serve to recontextualize the oft-lamented decline of the academic public intellectual, highlighting the importance of economic security to the public intellectual role. The Origins of “RaceFail ’09” RaceFail ’09 is generally accepted to have originated with a January 2009 blog post by the science fiction author Elizabeth Bear on strategies for writing characters who hail from cultural and racial backgrounds not one’s own.16 In response to a post by SF author Jay Lake, Bear advised would-be writers to “stop thinking about this person you’re writing as The Other. Think of them as human,” and to conduct research that engaged both “primary sources” and interviews with “people whose lives were informed by similar experiences.”17 As Hannah Mueller observes, while “Bear’s original essay was very much a well-meaning take on ‘how to do better,’” SF fans responded to her perceived unreflective “ethnocentrism; as well as what they perceived as hypocrisy, since her own novel seemed to fall into the same trap she advised others to avoid.”18 LiveJournal (LJ) user deepad responded by writing of her experience 304

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growing up in a postcolonial India still dominated by the imperial privileging of English and English literature, while LJ user Avalon’s Willow responded with “An Open Letter to Elizabeth Bear,” in which she wrote that Bear herself had recently published a work featuring “a magical, negro [sic] who gets bridled by a white woman . . . becoming some sort of beast of burden/big buck protector. I couldn’t finish reading your book because I threw it across the room in disgust.”19 In a line that many writers read as taking issue with Bear’s “research” advice, Willow declared that Bear would never earn respect “if you keep checking in with me (metaphorical me, the larger culture and audience of PoC me) to see how you’re going . . . it looks like so much brownie points, so much patting yourself on the back, so much excuses and dissembling; so much pride.”20 A wave of response posts immediately followed, initiating the months-long conversation and argument documented in fan archives. While it may be true, as Joseph Michael Reagle has claimed, that the RaceFail ’09 conversation was more civilized than the average Usenet flame war, much of the discussion that followed essentially proved Avalon’s Willow’s point that, however well-intentioned Elizabeth Bear’s advice about presenting researched representations of ethnic minorities in fiction may have been, many in the SF community held opinions about race that were at best ill-informed, and at worst, racist in both the “colorblind” and, occasionally, the “Jim Crow” sense of the word.21 From its early stages, much of the friction generated in the RaceFail conversation was generated by overlapping communities of readership: “white” readers and “readers of color,” and “fans” and “professionals.” Different personal experiences, social assumptions, and perceptions of power balances colored individuals’ reading of each entry in the RaceFail discussion and, on the whole, generated certain predictable patterns of response. By and large, participants who self-identified as “people of color” (PoC) or as “fans” found Avalon’s Willow’s points a The Fan as Public Intellectual in “RaceFail ’09”

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persuasive critique of SF’s color-blind racism, while participants who self-identified as white SF “professionals”—and some fans—perceived her post as an unreasonable criticism not only of a writer but of a widely accepted professional protocol. One significant difference coloring fan and professional reading responses to the first wave of RaceFail posts involved differing perceptions of the power relations of participants. Fans perceived professional participants as wielding significant cultural power and were generally quick to dismiss the prospect that RaceFail could materially damage any of the author participants’ careers. The professional community, on the other hand, was alert to the potential economic and career damage entailed by a tarnished reputation: a drop in book sales of even a hundred copies could lead to a corporate chain dropping an author from future book orders, and this in turn could lead to the author being dropped from his or her publisher—a potentially career-ending outcome.22 Exacerbating professional responses to the RaceFail ’09 conversation was the fact that, a year earlier, Elizabeth Bear had been the poster child for this kind of economic vulnerability after a major American book distributor failed to properly enter the title of one of her books in its databases.23 In 2008, the professional community had rallied around Bear, holding up her case as a “scary” example of the vulnerability of an author to even an artificially created dip in sales figures.24 When, a mere year later, Bear and her endangered book series became a lightning rod in RaceFail ’09, and some fans began including her name on lists of “Authors to Avoid,” many professional participants and long-time readers of Bear’s blog received criticism of her post as grandstanding endeavors that could potentially end an author’s career. Avalon’s Willow’s post also touched a nerve with professional readers in that it seemed to directly challenge some of the SF writing community’s long-held practices. To SF editors and writers, Bear’s advice 306

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on representing “the other” was standard, a basic encapsulation of the advice dispensed in such SF teaching tools as Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward’s Writing the Other: A Practical Approach.25 Willow’s criticism of this post was thus seen by some respondents as an attack on one of the “best practices” of the field, and one that would reduce rather than encourage the representation of minority characters in fiction.26 Because the writing community relies heavily on the exchange of labor in the form of specialized and nonspecialized manuscript feedback, professional participants were also less inclined to perceive a request for informed readers as exploitative.27 Fan participants, on the other hand, were largely supportive of Willow’s critique of her interpolation as a source of “minority” feedback, her words resonating with participants who wanted to have their opinions on race registered by the community at large, not selectively sought out by white writers looking to enhance characterization in their (for-profit) fiction. As RaceFail ’09 continued, Willow’s resistance to being interpolated as a source of manuscript feedback also resonated with frustrations expressed by PoC (person/people of color) respondents over the “educative” roles frequently thrust on them in discussions of race. The lengthy discussion that spiraled out from this initial exchange was thus frequently exacerbated by differing communal perceptions of the issues at stake in the exchange. What Makes an Intellectual? Invocations of “Traditional” Public Intellectual Qualifications Literary “professionals” have traditionally been positioned within the SF community as intellectuals. From the first appearance of science fiction conventions in the late 1930s, fans and professionals have mixed in communal spaces and shared ideas about the development of the genre.28 However, as Farah Mendlesohn observed regarding her early The Fan as Public Intellectual in “RaceFail ’09”

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involvement with the Science Fiction Foundation, the lengthy route to intellectual and political prominence for fans was waived for writers: “It’s different if you are an sf writer; you go to a convention having published a book or a story and you are supposed to be the centre of attention . . . it’s right and proper that you should find yourself on panels . . . and generally just listened to.”29 Even in 2015, conference organizers are perceived as being more likely to put a self-designated professional on a panel than the average fan applicant, even if the professional knows little about the discussion topic at hand.30 The voices of professionals—particularly the voices of guests of honor—are thus structurally accorded more weight in this iconic space of science fiction fandom. The RaceFail ’09 conversation was thus notably more democratic, not only because the Internet gave more participants platforms from which to speak, but also because it enabled the intellectual participation of fans typically excluded from conventions because of the costs of travel—a group containing a disproportionate number of people of color.31 In positioning themselves as cultural critics, fan participants in RaceFail ’09 were thus implicitly challenging a type of professional privilege that strongly overlapped with white privilege. Offline fandom’s tradition of granting speaking positions on the basis of professional success may help explain why many of the participants who leapt in to challenge Avalon’s Willow characterized her response as a failure not of intellectualism, but of professionalism: by attacking her (perceived) failures in professional protocols they were rejecting her status as an intellectual in science fiction fandom. The first form of this critique characterized Avalon’s Willow’s “Open Letter” as a review of Elizabeth Bear’s Blood and Iron rather than as an essay responding to Bear’s writing advice.32 Latching on to Willow’s acknowledgment that she had stopped reading the book in its early chapters, respondents charged her with violating a reviewer’s professional obligation to read 308

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the entirety of a text being analyzed. Observed LJ user coffeeem (SF writer Emma Bull), “I can’t give a lot of weight to a critique of a book and its author that’s based on a shallow reading of the book, that doesn’t take into account all the text, but substitutes the reader’s own expected subtext for what’s actually there.”33 Similar comments on Avalon’s Willow’s abortive reading of Blood and Iron characterized her engagement in terms of academic reading protocols, provoking what Alexis Lothian described as “a great deal of discussion about the legitimate way to read a text, and whether discarding it for the painful issues it touched upon is a ‘valid’ reading.”34 LJ user vassilissa noted at the time that these critiques were holding Willow’s original post to the standards of a different genre than that to which it was intended to contribute, observing: “coffeeem . . . asserted that AW’s post was emotional, not rational (where actually she was supporting her arguments perfectly well, it was just a blog post, not a journal article, which doesn’t speak to her ability to use academic language, just her using proper language for the context) and lacking in proper literary theory training.”35 Willow’s critique, in other words, was being characterized as a violation of professional—and academic—reading protocols so that it, and its author, might be dismissed. Despite the charges leveled against Avalon’s Willow of a shallow reading and nonengagement with the text, few of the participants who sprang to Bear’s defense attempted to actually perform the close reading their rhetoric suggested was necessary, and their commentary thus appeared, at best, to be rhetorical posturing. As fan and academic Robin Anne Reid (LJ user ithiliana) noted in an online comment, the argument that Willow’s response wasn’t analytical enough because it didn’t bring “the ‘tools’ of literary analysis to bear” appeared to be a rhetorical device, a fresh form of the “you’re not interrogating the text from the right perspective” trope of white privilege argumentation.36 Following this exchange, Blogger Bossy Marmalade characterized the The Fan as Public Intellectual in “RaceFail ’09”

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RaceFail discussion in terms of academic privilege, summarizing the discussion as one in which the skill of “critically analyz[ing] literature in the proper university-trained manner”37 and the adoption or refusal to adopt a “coldly academic” tone were brought up as means of dismissing the arguments of people of color.38 Indeed, as RaceFail ’09 progressed, the word “academic,” more so than “professional,” thus became a loaded term in public discussion. Appeals to academic authority or conventions connoted a particular claim to authority as an (unofficial) literary critic and public intellectual and contributed to an atmosphere in which, as one fan commentator observed, “‘academia,’ especially online, has become, to me, something to avoid.”39 In an LJ comment reflecting on the critiques of Willow’s reading of Blood and Iron, acafan heyiya observed that “the distinction between academic and intellectual is maybe at the heart of this.” Willow’s initial post, she suggested, was an exercise in intellectualism meeting pushback from participants invested in intellectualism sanctioned by institutions. “Academia’s a profession and an institution based on a possessive investment in knowledge. In some contexts . . . it goes directly against what it means to be an intellectual.”40 Willow’s public intellectualism—her Foucauldian attempt to “disturb people’s mental habits”41—challenged the literary community’s investment in professional intellectual status in ways culturally structured by appeals to that traditional bastion of intellectualism, the university setting. That the rhetoric of academia was being deployed in order to establish a commentator’s plausibility as an intellectual is demonstrated by its use by participants who otherwise—sometimes in the very same post—positioned themselves as against “academia” and “academic” discussions. In a March 8, 2009, post on RaceFail, for example, J. F. Quackenbush trots out a belabored discussion of the origins of the term “Other” in the “Hegel’s Master-Slave Dialectic,” in order to establish 310

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his ethos as an academically informed intellectual commentator, before attacking PoCs’ deployment of the “more ugly and ridiculous elements of academic criticism” that “have been ensconced in a way that doesn’t work in the wider culture where more rational voices generally prevail.”42 “Academic criticism” is here positioned as irrational and inapplicable to wider society, as, presumably, are the minority voices that cite terms from academic discourse. The language of academia was also invoked by participants otherwise constructed as “academic outsiders” to establish hierarchies in discussions. Avalon’s Willow, in a later post to her journal, wrote that “the conversation in my journal is about where POC go next in the genre. It’s a doctorate level conversation. . . . People who need Anti-Racism 101 etc. . . . go there. I’m done talking to the freshman, sophomores, juniors and seniors. Come back when you’re ready to tackle a Masters and maybe I won’t find you quite so clueless.”43 Although Willow had been rhetorically presented as “outside” academic discourse, she and other participants used metaphors of university courses to indicate to readers the intellectual hierarchy they wanted established. The floating signifier of “academia” and “academic” was thus deployed by multiple online participants in RaceFail ’09 to indicate a structuring of online intellectual contribution. The Shadow of the Marketplace In discussing Edward Said’s description of the public intellectual, Alan Lightman notes, “According to Said, an intellectual’s mission in life is to advance human freedom and knowledge. This mission often means standing outside of society and its institutions and actively disturbing the status quo.”44 Not all of Said’s propositions seem intuitive, writes Lightman, for “How does the intellectual stand both outside society and inside society?”45 Lightman omits from his description of Saidian The Fan as Public Intellectual in “RaceFail ’09”

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intellectualism Said’s suggestion that “the intellectual today ought to be an amateur,” that is, a person whose intellectual engagement represents “activity that is fueled by care and affection rather than by profit and selfish, narrow specialization.”46 Said’s intellectual, in other words, stands inside and outside society by virtue of his partial detachment from the marketplace—in the case of academics, thanks to the insulating wall of tenure and a culture of academic free speech that allows the intellectual “to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma . . . to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corporations, and whose raison d’être is to represent all those peoples and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug.”47 Said’s description of public intellectualism thus accords more strongly with the position held by the fan—an individual by definition animated “by care and affection rather than by profit” in their engagement with their chosen topic area—than by those held by cultural producers or even, in today’s era of weakening tenure opportunities, the academic. The difference between fans’ and professionals’ relationship to the marketplace was a source of significant tension during RaceFail ’09. Many fan participants used preestablished online names unattached to their professional identities, whereas SF professionals, even if using pen names, were by definition using identities tied to their publishing careers. In online fan communities, as Hannah Mueller observes, “pseudonymity”—the ability to choose what elements of your identity present to your audience—is considered essential to the operation of a healthy public sphere, offering online participants “protection from harassment” and allowing people to “participate in online spaces with a lower risk of discrimination or dismissal.”48 Pseudonymity was thus perceived by fan participants to be a prerequisite of online intellectual engagement. When, in a particularly notorious RaceFail episode, a fan’s 312

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real identity was “outed” by two professional participants, the clash between fan and nonfan participants kicked into high gear. SF writer and media critic Tempest posted a pointed defense of the fan community’s convention of pseudonymity, observing that “I actually make an effort to keep [my work on the Angry Black Woman blog] from being attached too much to my legal name because, no matter how proud I am of that site and the work I’ve done with it, an employer may not look on it kindly.”49 Noting that professional participants did not enjoy the same separation of work and online discussion, LJ user spiralsheep responded to SF editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden by pointing out that this element of professional risk carried with it the benefit of a more privileged speaking position: “your choice to use your real names carries that burden, even as it also carries the reward of your Alpha / Big Name status which means some people will always agree with you even when you’re obviously wrong.”50 Spiralsheep’s comment indicates the potential significance of the online public sphere to the shaping of the SF fields, since it offered fans who might not normally have had the opportunity to speak in public setting to directly challenge the opinions of prominent editors and writers in the field. While the online setting of RaceFail ’09 brought voices that might otherwise have been marginalized to the center of the discussion, the potential economic consequences faced by online professionals also threatened to silence many voices. N. K. Jemisin, writing as LJ user nojojojo, articulated this point in a March 7, 2009, post, observing that, as a new writer whose first novel was making its debut in 2010, and as a black woman whose usual “day job” is in “academia,” where “reputation is the most important currency,” she felt herself to be particularly vulnerable. “I’ve spoken out against incidental racism in SF, and against the ongoing racism of exclusion and misappropriation that so few in this The Fan as Public Intellectual in “RaceFail ’09”

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field seem willing to acknowledge, let alone correct. . . . Lately I’ve come to realize that I cannot continue to do this without serious, possibly fatal, risk to my livelihood—writing career and day job too.”51 Anticipating fans’ assumption that a professional writer could easily shrug off a negative reputation generated online, Jemison explains that her professional success would be determined by “a number of factors that have nothing to do with my skill as a writer” including, perhaps most prominently, “how much people with power and influence in this field like me.”52 As Jemisin’s comments suggest, the professional consequences for a PoC writer were likely to be still higher than those experienced by a more established white professional. In a heated discussion of race, a white professional’s worst remarks were more likely to be excused or ignored by a mostly white professional community, whereas criticisms of that community made by a representative minority writer would be remembered. Then there’s the example offered by other established writers of color in this field. They’re very quiet; have you noticed that? They talk about this stuff too, but sparingly. They spend the bulk of their time doing what I’m trying to do—writing inclusively, doing it well, teaching, leading by example. But they don’t talk much in the blogosphere. I’m beginning to realize why not. I’m going to have to become quieter too. I am a coward for doing this, though; I’m very aware of that. By allowing myself to be silenced to any degree, I’m letting people down and probably losing some folks’ respect . . . But the way I see it, I’ve got two choices: hate myself a little but keep writing and publishing, or respect myself and torpedo my career.53

As one of the few black members of the SF writing community, Jemisin feels a stronger sense of obligation to speak up in support of PoC 314

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perspectives than her white colleagues, but faces professional risks in doing so. To step back for the sake of her career, Jemisin worries, is to be a “coward”; to step up as a public intellectual, she worries, may be professional suicide. Notably, one of the replies to Jemisin’s post promptly made a connection between her situation and that experienced by minority faculty members in academia: LJ user jamiam compares Jemisin’s situation to that of a female junior academic in a male-dominated arena and suggests that she stay “quiet” and focus on establishing herself in the community in order to achieve the equivalent of a “a bulletproof tenured position” from which to speak and initiate change. However, this statement highlights Jemisin’s dilemma rather than offering a real solution: the publishing industry does not have “tenure,” so Jemisin will never occupy a position of “bulletproof” economic security in the SF community. When, then, is she supposed to speak? The rarely articulated economic dilemmas of RaceFail ’09 complicate critical utopian views of cyberspace’s public sphere, reminding us that even when all participants have access to electronic platforms, cultural and economic factors that legitimate or restrict speech are still in play. These dilemmas lend support to Edward Said’s claim that the “intellectual today ought to be an amateur.”54 While participants who presented themselves as SF professionals were often characterized (at the time, and in subsequent fan histories of RaceFail) as having “louder” voices by virtues of their professional status, their status as insiders to the SF publishing industry, however minor or tenuous that status might actually be, also gave them something to lose. Fans unconnected with the industry, on the other hand, could speak without the same concern over economic penalty. If we frame RaceFail ’09 as an intellectual conversation about race in a public sphere, fans thus emerge as the most effective public intellectuals in this discussion. The Fan as Public Intellectual in “RaceFail ’09”

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Conclusions: RaceFail ’09 in 2015 On January 18, 2010, N. K. Jemisin published a blog post in honor of Martin Luther King Day, in which she reflected on the “coincidental approximate anniversary of RaceFail.”55 Despite the angst and anger generated during the controversy, the outcome of RaceFail ’09 had, Jemisin believed, been mostly positive: in addition to the creation of programs like Con or Bust, which funds the attendance of fans of color at SF conventions, the field was now, Jemisin believed, more attentive to racial issues and to the writing of authors of color.56 RaceFail ’09 also made visible not only the work but also, to some participants, the existence of a growing network of PoC fans critically engaged with the SF field.57 In the wider online fan community, RaceFail is represented by some as “the birth of modern fandom social justice and identity politics culture,”58 an episode that continues to shape online fandom whether fans recognize it or not. Most recently, RaceFail ’09 has been credited with marking the beginning of what the New Republic and Wall Street Journal have referred to as SF’s “culture wars,” the right-wing backlash against the diversifying of SF literature manifested in the successful conservative “gaming” of the 2014 Hugo Awards.59 In reflecting on the significance of RaceFail ’09 to the SF community, Jemisin observed that, prior to RaceFail, the SF community was far more resistant to discussions of race than the academic communities she was familiar with. Reflecting on RaceFail, N. K. Jemison writes that “it used to be very noticeable that I could at least broach the subject of race in every other aspect of my life—academia, the counseling psych field, political activism of course, literature/art in general—but not in SFF. The conversations would simply shut down, often thanks to respected personages/fans who would emphatically declare that there was no racism in the genre.”60 Although 316

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Jemison does not analyze RaceFail in these terms, her interpretation of RaceFail’s breaking past the resistance of “respected personages” suggests an ossified community’s belated catching-up to the discursive shifts of academia’s so-called Culture Wars. And as events like the conservative manipulation of the 2014 Hugo Awards indicate, SF’s Culture Wars are far from over. Fan studies has come a long way from the early 1990s, when scholars such as Henry Jenkins put pen to paper to argue that fans were not merely passive consumers. RaceFail ’09 demonstrates that fans not only can be engaged, activist consumers but can also function as public intellectuals, deriving their social authority not from disciplinary affiliation but from social capital developed via engaged consumption. This form of fan intellectualism has a dynamic relationship with academia, both borrowing elements of its codes and, occasionally, constituting itself against them. Fan public intellectualism has significance for academics as a matter not only of intellectual interest but of applied practice as well. While fan studies has, for the most part, hailed the emergence of activist fandom, when it comes to the academic workplace professors tend to be critical of students’ self-identification of themselves as empowered consumers, particularly when they are personally put in the position of the authority being challenged.61 Recent discussions of literature professors resisting student requests for “trigger warnings” on reading material, for example, represents a pushback against students’ demands that the university setting be governed by the same protocols as govern fan creative and critical engagement online.62 To fail to engage with fan intellectual culture and practices is thus not only to ignore a contemporary cultural phenomenon; it is also to ignore the practices that are having and will have a direct impact on academics’ own professional environment. The Fan as Public Intellectual in “RaceFail ’09”

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The rise of fans as public intellectuals has taken place in a cultural environment in which academic job security, particularly in the humanities, has been eroded.63 As the appeals to academic authority during the RaceFail ’09 discussion indicate, the modern university remains “the symbol and principal locus of the division of intellectual labor,” as Posner has argued.64 However, as allusions to fans’ and professionals’ differing risks of economic penalty indicate, professional and economic security plays a significant role in enabling individuals to serve as an effective public intellectual in their community. Posner’s belief that a so-called decline of public intellectualism will be exacerbated “as more and more public intellectuals opt for the safe and secure life of a university professor” seems questionable in an era where, for many otherwise qualified individuals, a university professor’s life is neither economically secure nor—given the contemporary job market in the humanities—even available.65 To enable the continuance of academic public intellectualism—an objective that seems valuable if only to maintain the diversity of public intellectual discussions—critics like Posner would do well to focus less on contemporary intellectual failings than on intellectualism’s material conditions. Meanwhile, academics interested in the development of public intellectualism would do well to take seriously the activities of critics unaffiliated with the university setting, particularly as demonstrated in the more widely accessible setting of cyberspace. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

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Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, 140. Posner, Public Intellectuals: A Study of a Decline, 5. Lightman, “The Role of the Public Intellectual.” Berlatsky, “Death to the ‘Public Intellectual.’”

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5. Lothian, “An Archive of One’s Own.” The Masterclass is a three-day workshop that provides training in critical analysis for individuals interested in SF reviewing and criticism. See “Tenth Science Fiction Foundation Masterclass in Science Fiction Criticism 2016,” The Science Fiction Foundation. Last modified February 2, 2015. http:// www.sf-foundation.org/masterclass2015. 6. I follow the convention of referring to the publishing genre of science fiction and fantasy, or sci-fi, as SF (speculative fiction). The abbreviation SFF is also commonly used in online discussions. 7. Jemisin, “Why I Think RaceFail.” 8. “RaceFail ’09.” 9. There are of course significant overlaps between these categories. In this essay I follow participants’ public self-identification during the RaceFail ’09 discussion and use the handles by which they were known online. In cases where a participant’s “real” or professional name was already publicly linked to their online handle, I have presented both when necessary for clarity. 10. Jemisin, “Why I Think RaceFail.” 11. Jenkins, “‘Cultural acupuncture.” Catherine Coker similarly cites RaceFail’s impact not only in fandom but also on her as a self-identified “acafan” (92). Coker, “THE ANGRY!TEXTUAL!POACHER! IS ANGRY!,” 81–96. 12. Mixon, “A Report On Damage Done.” 13. So far the most substantial published engagement with RaceFail is Robin Anne Reid’s “The Wild Unicorn Herd Check-In”: Reflexive Racialisation in Online Science Fiction Fandom.” In writing this essay I benefited from the generosity of Robin Anne Reid, Hannah Mueller, Helen Young, and Maria Velazquez, who shared as-yet unpublished presentations, papers, and dissertation chapters with me, and whose arguments have shaped my own. 14. See, for example, bossymarmelade’s comments on scholarship on race and the “iron-clad ingrained racism of the institution of higher education.” bossymarmelade, “No Subject.” 15. Healey, Jan 18, 2009, entry. 16. Bear, “whatever you’re doing.” 17. Ibid. 18. Mueller, “From Secretive Subculture to Alternative Public Sphere.” 19. Avalon’s Willow, “Open Letter.” 20. Ibid. For an example of a reply that interprets this remark as disabling writers, see tchernabyelo, January 14, 2009 (11:57 am), comment on Avalon’s Willow, “Open Letter.”

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21. Here I am borrowing the terminology of Eduardo Bonilla-Silva in Racism without Racists, 3, 5. 22. This effect is particularly pronounced in genre fiction sales, where margins are typically small. For online discussion of what is popularly known as the writer’s “death spiral,” see Rinzler, “What You Don’t Know about Book Scan Can Hurt You,” and Lisle, “How to Kill a Career in Three Easy Books.” 23. Reflecting on this development on July 19, 2008, Elizabeth Bear reflected that she and her publisher could “lose the series over what amounts to a data entry error. Yes, the life of a writer really is this perilous.” “Well, now, isn’t that interesting,” http://matociquala.livejournal.com/1410464.html. 24. Marie Brennan, writing as LJ user swan-tower, “How Scary is This Business?” 25. As Strange Horizons observes, in the SF community Writing the Other is considered “a pivotal text on how to write responsibly, respectably, and authentically about cultures, people, and religions with which an author has no inside experience”; see Vanderhooft, “An Interview with Nisi Shawl.” 26. For a response in this vein, see tchernabyelo, January 14, 2009 (11:57 am), comment on Avalon’s Willow, “Open Letter.” 27. Nisi Shawl, in an article that touches on the subject matter covered in Writing the Other, presents these requests as similar to those made for informed readers from a particular scientific background: “If you’re thinking of approaching someone who’s more an acquaintance than a friend, offer to buy them lunch, or dinner, and make the interaction a formal interview. This is what you’d do with anyone else. . . . Cultural background is data. If you want it, and you don’t have it, it’s valuable; treat it that way”; see “Transracial Writing for the Sincere.” 28. See Sam Moskowitz’s account of the development of conventions in The Immortal Storm. 29. Mendlesohn, “How I Discovered Fandom.” 30. This observation is based on my own experience of conventions in the eastern United States and the (private) complaints made by professional writers assigned to panel topics on which they are not qualified to speak. However, professional applicants—even well-known ones—are by no means guaranteed a place on a convention program. 31. See Reid, “Wild Unicorn Herd Check-In.” 32. This misrepresentation was repeated by some of Willow’s supporters. See, for example, LJ user mevennan’s comment that Bear should have followed writerly professional protocol in her response to Avalon’s Willow: “You can also thank the critic in question for taking the time to do the review in the first place”; see mevennan’s comment, March 6, 2009 (4:08 pm), Roz Kaveney, “Sometimes Things Become Very 320

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Clear,” LiveJournal: Silence Exile and Crumpets, http://rozk.livejournal.com/247442 .html. 33. Original comment since deleted. Quoted in Will Shetterly, “The Racefail 09 Flamewar, a Timeline.” Post deletion and journal locking posed a significant challenge to my research. I am very grateful to those RaceFail participants who have kept unflattering posts public for the sake of the fan archive and to those who reopened posts to the public in aid of this project. 34. Lothian, “Feminist SF, Alterity and Representation.” 35. vassilissa, comment on cereta, “Note to My Fellow Academics,” LiveJournal: But Not the Academics, January 19, 2009 (3:23 pm), http://cereta.livejournal.com /598103.html. 36. ithiliana, “Most Recent Racism Imbroglio.” 37. bossymarmalade, “No Subject.” 38. Ibid. 39. apetslife, comment on bossymarmalade, “No Subject,” January 18, 2009 (7:25 pm). 40. heyiya, comment on cereta, “Note,” January 19, 2009 (3:30 am). 41. Foucault, “The Concern for Truth,” 265. 42. Quackenbush, “Racefail and the SciFi Ghetto.” Wet Asphalt, March 18, 2009 43. Avalon’s Willow, “A Timeline.” 44. Lightman, “Role of the Public Intellectual.” 45. Ibid. 46. Said, Representations of the Intellectual, 83. 47. Ibid., 11. 48. Mueller, “Secretive Subculture,” 21. 49. Conventions regarding pseudonymity have shifted in the online era. As Anne Jamison notes of the contemporary fan fiction community, “Revealing someone’s ‘real life’ identity and location” is now understood as “as a sin of great magnitude, whereas in the days of zines, such information was commonly shared” (Fic.: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World, 112). Bradford, “I Don’t Have the Energy.” 50. spiralsheep, “In Which Teresa Neilsen Hayden Joins Her Husband in a Pantsless State.” 51. nojojojo, “operating in hostile territory.” 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid. 54. Said, Representations, 83. 55. Jemisin, “Why I Think RaceFail.” 56. Ibid. The Fan as Public Intellectual in “RaceFail ’09”

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57. As Reid observes, “the real work being done on critical race and intersectional issues in theory and praxis in SF communities is being done by people of color in a number of fandom communities, online and offline, some public and some closed to or invisible to white members of SF communities” (“The Wild Unicorn Callout,” 228). 58. Franklin, “Putting Fandom Back into the Hugos.” 59. See Heer, “Science Fiction’s White Boy’s Club Strikes Back,” and Rapoport, “The Culture Wars Invade Science Fiction.” 60. Jemisin, “Why I Think RaceFail.” 61. See McMillan and Cheney, “The Student as Consumer,” for an account of the “student as consumer” metaphor in education. 62. The phrase “trigger warning” as applied to literature was popularized in LJ fanfiction communities during the 2000s—the same communal space as shaped RaceFail ’09. For a popular history of the migration of the “trigger warning” phrase from psychological practice into daily usage, see Vingiano, “How the Trigger Warning Took Over the Internet.” For an example of academic resistance to trigger warnings, see Medina, “Warning.” 63. See Zuckerman and Ehrenberg, “Recent Trends in Funding for the Academic Humanities,” and Nelson, Will Teach for Food, for well-known academic discussions of these issues. 64. Posner, Public Intellectuals, 4. 65. Ibid., 388.

Bibliography Avalon’s Willow. “Open Letter: To Elizabeth Bear.” Seeking Avalon. January 13, 2009. http://seeking-avalon.blogspot.com/2009/01/open-letter-to-elizabeth-bear.html. ——. “A Timeline.” Seeking Avalon. January 29, 2009. http://seeking-avalon.blogspot .com/2009/01/timeline.html. Bear, Elizabeth. “Whatever You’re Doing, You’re Probably Wrong.” LiveJournal: Throw Another Bear in the Canoe. January 12, 2009. http://matociquala.livejournal.com /154411.html. Berlatsky, Noah. “Death to the ‘Public Intellectual.’” New Republic, February 17, 2015. http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121086/death-public-intellectual-what-mark -greif-essays-gets-wrong. Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States. 3rd ed. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010. 322

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bossymarmelade. “No Subject.” Dreamwidth. January 18, 2009. http:// bossymarmalade.dreamwidth.org/460123.html?thread=7887195. Bradford, K. Tempest. “I Don’t Have the Energy to Be Erudite So I’ll Just Rant Some More.” Between Boundaries. March 3, 2009. http://tempest.fluidartist.com/i-dont -have-the-energy-to-be-erudite-so-ill-just-rant-some-more/. Brennan, Marie. “How Scary Is This Business?” LiveJournal: Swan Tower. July 20, 2008. http://swan-tower.livejournal.com/182983.html. Coker, Catherine. “THE ANGRY!TEXTUAL!POACHER! IS ANGRY! Fanworks as Political Statements.” In Culture: Theory/Practice, edited by Katherine Larsen, 81–96. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2012. Foucault, Michel. Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977– 1984. Edited by Lawrence D. Kritzman. New York: Routledge, 1988. Franklin, Alis. “Putting Fandom Back into the Hugos.” Alis Franklin. April 9, 2015. https://alisfranklin.com/wyrd/putting-fandom-back-into-the-hugos/. Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. Edited and translated by Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. London: Elecbook, 1999. Healey, Karen. January 18, 2009, entry. LiveJournal. http://karenhealey.livejournal .com/741920.html (access restricted). Heer, Jeet. “Science Fiction’s White Boy’s Club Strikes Back.” New Republic, April 17, 2015. http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121554/2015-hugo-awards-and-history -science-fiction-culture-wars. ithiliana. “Most Recent Racism Imbroglio.” LiveJournal: The Heart of the Maze. January 15, 2009. http://ithiliana.livejournal.com/1000181.html. Jamison, Anne, ed. Fic.: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World. Dallas: BenBella Books, 2013. Jemisin, N. K. “Why I Think RaceFail Was the Bestest Thing Evar for SFF.” N. K. Jemisin. January 18, 2010. http://nkjemisin.com/2010/01/why-i-think-racefail-was -the-bestest-thing-evar-for-sff/. Jenkins, Henry. “‘Cultural Acupuncture’: Fan Activism and the Harry Potter Alliance.” In “Transformative Works and Fan Activism,” edited by Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova. Special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 10. (2012). doi:10.3983/twc.2012.0305. Lightman, Alan. “The Role of the Public Intellectual.” MIT Communications Forum. 2006. Accessed July 1, 2015. http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/papers/lightman .html. Lothian, Alexis. “An Archive of One’s Own: Subcultural Creativity and the Politics of Conservation.” Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 6 (2011): 2.3, 1.1. doi:10.3983 /twc.2011.0267. The Fan as Public Intellectual in “RaceFail ’09”

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——. “Feminist SF, Alterity and Representation.” Queer Geek Theory. January 15, 2009. https://queergeektheory.wordpress.com/2009/01/15/feminist-sf-alterity-and -representation/. Lisle, Holly. “How to Kill a Career in Three Easy Books.” Holly Lisle: Writer. Last updated December 14, 2006. http://hollylisle.com/selling-to-the-net-or/. McMillan, J. J., and G. Cheney, “The Student as Consumer: The Implications and Limitations of a Metaphor.” Communication Education 45, no. 1 (1996): 1–15. Medina, Jennifer. “Warning: The Literary Canon Could Make Students Squirm.” New York Times, May 17, 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/18/us/warning-the -literary-canon-could-make-students-squirm.html. Mendlesohn, Farah, “How I Discovered Fandom.” Iotacism. August 2006. http:// iotacism.com/farah/howidiscovered.htm. Mixon, Laura. “A Report on Damage Done by One Individual under Several Names.” Laura J. Mixon. November 6, 2014. http://laurajmixon.com/2014/11/a-report-on -damage-done-by-one-individual-under-several-names/. Moskowitz. Sam. The Immortal Storm: A History of Science Fiction Fandom. Westport, CT: Hyperion Press, 1974. Mueller, Hannah. “From Secretive Subculture to Alternative Public Sphere: JournalBased Fandom and Political Discourse.” Unpublished manuscript in possession of author, February 6, 2015. Nelson, Cary. Will Teach for Food: Academic Labor in Crisis. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. nojojojo [N. K. Jemisin]. “Operating in Hostile Territory.” March 7, 2009. LiveJournal.http://nojojojo.livejournal.com/169840.html. Posner, Richard A. Public Intellectuals: A Study of a Decline. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Quackenbush, J. F. “Racefail and the SciFi Ghetto: Why It’s Really All about High School,” Wet Asphalt. March 8, 2009. http://www.wetasphalt.com/content/racefail -and-scifi-ghetto-why-its-really-all-about-high-school. “RaceFail ’09.” Fanlore. Last modified February 22, 2013. http://fanlore.org/wiki /RaceFail_’09. Rapoport, Michael. “The Culture Wars Invade Science Fiction.” Wall Street Journal, May 15, 2015. http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-culture-wars-invade-science-fiction -1431707195. Reid, Robin Anne. “The Wild Unicorn Herd Check-In”: Reflexive Racialisation in Online Science Fiction Fandom.” In Black and Brown Planets: The Politics of Race in Science Fiction, edited by Isiah Lavender, 226–40. Oxford: University of Mississippi Press, 2014. 324

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Rinzler, Alan. “What You Don’t Know about Book Scan Can Hurt You.” Alan Rinzler Consulting Editor. Last updated May 14, 2009. http://www.alanrinzler.com/ blog/2009/05/14/author-alert-what-you-don%E2%80%99t-know-about-bookscan -can-hurt-you/. Said, Edward. Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures. New York: Pantheon Books, 1994. Shawl, Nisi. “Transracial Writing for the Sincere.” SFWA. December 4, 2009. http:// www.sfwa.org/2009/12/transracial-writing-for-the-sincere/. Shetterly, Will. “The Racefail 09 Flamewar, a Timeline.” Blogspot: It’s All One Thing. September 3, 2012. http://shetterly.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-racefail-09-flamewar -timeline.html. spiralsheep. “In Which Teresa Neilsen Hayden Joins Her Husband in a Pantsless State.” LiveJournal: I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue. January 26, 2009. http://spiralsheep .livejournal.com/276263.html. Vanderhooft, JoSelle. “An Interview with Nisi Shawl.” Strange Horizons, April 4, 2011. http://www.strangehorizons.com/2011/20110404/shawl-interview-a.shtml. Vingiano, Alison. “How the Trigger Warning Took Over the Internet.” Buzzfeed. May 5, 2014. http://www.buzzfeed.com/alisonvingiano/how-the-trigger-warning-took -over-the-internet#.xnzbbazyM. Zuckerman, Harriet, and Ronald G. Ehrenberg. “Recent Trends in Funding for the Academic Humanities and Their Implications.” Daedalus 138, no. 1 (2009): 124–26.

Siobhan Car roll is Associate Professor of English at the University of Delaware and author of An Empire of Air and Water: Uncolonizable Space in the British Imagination, 1750–1850. She is currently working on a book on the politics of global ecology in the long nineteenth century.

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13 AUTISM, NERDS, AND INSECURITY

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In December of 2012, the US government effectively lost what newspapers referred to as a “ten year battle” to extradite a Scottish systems analyst named Gary McKinnon so that he could face charges for committing, in the words of prosecution attorneys, “the biggest military computer hack of all time.”1 McKinnon maintained that he hacked into NASA and US military computers in order to locate suppressed evidence of UFOs, a special interest of his. He claimed that government agencies were concealing evidence of UFO crashes, effectively hiding knowledge of abundant, clean, alien energy sources of potential benefit to humanity. McKinnon has a form of autism called Asperger syndrome, which might explain some of his doggedness and his apparent obliviousness to the consequences of his actions. British judges blocked his extradition on human rights grounds, citing a psychiatrist’s testimony that he was likely to commit suicide if forcibly removed to the United States and away from his familiar environments and routines. This wasn’t the first time that the preoccupations of a man with Asperger’s syndrome made the news over the past few years. Police have arrested Darius McCollum, a New Yorker with a “deep fascination” with mass transit authority buses and subways, “around 30” times, most recently in 2010. His offenses included impersonating a transit officer and illegally driving subway trains and buses with passengers.2 The New York Daily News referred to him in somewhat lurid terms as the “Mass 326

Transit Menace” and “Train-Stealing Fanatic” but more sympathetic articles in places like Harpers have asked why the justice system refused until recently to recognize his criminal acts as both ultimately harmless (he did not cause any problems for passengers and in some cases was given access by MTA employees he had befriended) and stemming from a neurological disorder rather than a criminal interest in personal gain.3 The intersections between autism, especially the type of autism associated with typical measurable IQ and verbal abilities that was until recently called Asperger’s syndrome, and nerdiness are a cliché in popular culture and journalism. Both are, at least in some portrayals, characterized by social difficulties, behavioral rigidity, odd communication patterns, and a sometimes monomaniacal focus on what in autism circles are referred to as special interests. The New York Transit system, for one. Or UFOs. Although autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder and nerdiness is a social identity, the two categories seem superficially to have much in common. I hesitate to reference the cases of McKinnon and McCollum because they imply an association between autism and criminality— something altogether false. But these two men also serve as pretty good examples of why the analogy between autism and nerdiness is both interesting and flawed. Their heedless pursuit of special interests could be read as quintessentially nerdy. But their egregious security violations in the service of those interests also made authorities see them as public threats in ways that have put both men in jeopardy. According to the Guardian, McKinnon became suicidal under the stress of his legal troubles; without the help of his family it is doubtful that he would have survived. McCollum has spent “more than a third” of his life in prison, unlikely to be a place with significant accommodations or supports for those with neurological disorders. And neither man has been able to Autism, Nerds, and Insecurity

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work or support himself for years: McCollum has apparently not held a job at any time (and the MTA is not interested in hiring him); McKinnon was unable to work as a systems engineer following his arrest and until the case was resolved, though he is now successfully self-employed.4 So while a popular stereotype of nerdiness might depict a young man who is secure professionally but is socially awkward, the experience of these two men was decidedly different. Both experienced real and significant financial and bodily insecurity, if not directly as a result of their autism, then because of how features of their autism intersected with legal and social structures, affected their ability to deal with stress, and limited their opportunities to acquire and retain employment. But this matters far beyond these specific, tragic, and in many ways exceptional cases. Popular entertainment, experts, and public commentators readily elide the differences between the particular kinds of disability called autism and the social type called nerdiness. This practice is symptomatic of longstanding habits of medical and educational categorization that are probably harmful for both nerds and Aspies (a term of identity adopted by self-advocates with the condition), and for others as well. Put differently, the problem isn’t that there are no similarities between these two types or the real people that those types, the nerd and the Aspie, designate—the comparison isn’t an impossible or even improbable one. Nor is it the constructed nature of the two categories as groupings based on putative biological or neurological distinctiveness. The problem is that the terms of this particular set of comparisons help to hide huge inequalities in opportunity for these two different groups of people. The life chances of people in the social category of nerd and in the medical category of autism diverge when it comes to educational success, safe places to live, and stable employment. If being a nerd means, largely, that life improves after high school, the same cannot be said for young people with autism. 328

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Here I’ll spend some time discussing the popular parallels drawn between autism and nerdiness, or the notion of autism as extreme nerdiness (or nerdiness as near-autism). I’ll locate (following others) some of the inspiration for this move in theories from social psychology that emphasize continuities between neurotypical scientists and engineers and people on the autism spectrum, and the types of hopes and utopian visions that these theories and descriptive habits engender. I will then take the discussion in a slightly different direction to look at how giftedness and cognitive disability, and giftedness in the context of cognitive disabilities like autism, are labeled and addressed by a different set of professionals, educational researchers. I do this because educational performance and success is such a robust predictor of future economic security: if you get bad grades in high school, or worse yet, don’t graduate at all, you have a much lower chance of being able to provide for yourself later in life. While analogies between autism and nerdiness draw on a spectrum model associated with social psychological research on autism, a dominant model in gifted and special education is that of the twiceexceptional child. Both frameworks have the good intention of identifying the strengths often associated with autism, the ways that autism can be part of the cognitive profile of a person exceptionally skilled at certain tasks. But both frameworks have the unintended effect of largely ruling out the possibility of talents wrapped up in autism, capacities uniquely part of the disorder. My argument is that especially in the present moment, entrenched attitudes in the educational community mean that no matter how much autism is identified with neurotypical models of nerdy success, the reality is that students with autism face a very difficult adulthood. And part of the reason for that—but certainly not the entire cause—may lie in how autism and talents are commonly understood. Autism, Nerds, and Insecurity

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Autism as Nerdiness American Normal, a 2002 book on Asperger’s syndrome in American culture, devoted nearly an entire chapter to McCollum’s exploits. The author, Lawrence Osborne, suggests that the diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome involves, in essence, pathologizing nerdiness.5 It’s part of what the medical sociologist Peter Conrad calls “the medicalization of society.”6 What was once called social oddity, eccentricity, even genius, is now marked by the implication of neurological deficits; intellectual sharpness, focus, and obsession are seen by medical and psychological professionals as coming at the cost of empathy, social ability, and some basic types of self-care needed for living independently. In other words, the argument goes, in a world that places a premium on both treatable diagnoses and possession of social acumen, common nerdiness has been transformed into the diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome. Temple Grandin, a woman with autism known for her innovative livestock handling facility designs (a special interest of hers is animal behavior) worried in her review of Osborne’s book that “a diagnosis of Asperger’s may keep a talented child out of a gifted program at school,” implying that the problem is really one of labeling—where an inspired educator sees an eccentric genius, a pedantic diagnostician sees a person with Asperger’s syndrome, and, at least in the minds of educators, a diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome would preclude a diagnosis of giftedness.7 In keeping with this concern, David Anderegg, a psychologist and practicing psychotherapist, argues that removing associations between nerds and autism will be a necessary step in nerds’ claiming their social power. Nodding to the current inclusion of autism spectrum disorders in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association, or DSM, he writes that “the direction of material success as well as power is all on the side of nerds and geeks, 330

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and sooner or later they will rewrite the DSM as well. And when they do, they may just decide to write nerdity out of the book. Antinerd prejudices will not go away overnight, but then at least officially, they will go away.”8 So associations between nerdiness and autism, whether legitimate or not, are considered to be well established by writers like Anderegg. These associations, they argue, come at a social and economic cost to those given a label of Asperger’s syndrome or autism. If autism regularly shades into nerdy social awkwardness and intellectual preoccupations, the best way to support people with autism would be to find living and working environments where their strengths are valued and their behavioral and social differences are relatively invisible. This is the premise of a Dutch company, Specialisterne (“The Specialists”), profiled in the New York Times in 2012. The founder, Thorkil Sonne, began the company as a way to encourage others to hire as consultants talented people with autism like his son. They would be valuable workers because they excelled at repetitive tasks that required extreme—maybe excruciating—attention to detail, exactly the kind of work at which neurotypical employees (in autism parlance) tended to fail miserably. Sonne is moving to the United States because of the enormous interest in his business model here, prompted among other things by parents who despair at the lack of feasible options for their autistic children as they age out of the education system.9 A solution of this type, tapping the latent resources of talent for systematic thinking, categorization, and pattern recognition hidden among those with an autism diagnosis, seems like a magical one. And it seems especially so, perhaps, because of an enduring set of public associations that draw few distinctions among geeks, nerds, maleness, autism, and Asperger’s syndrome. Jordynn Jack has described the “stock character” of the Aspergerian computer whiz as it appears in popular articles about autism and lay “diagnoses” of entrepreneurs like Bill Gates Autism, Nerds, and Insecurity

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of Microsoft and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. Jack is particularly critical of how this dominant portrayal turns “attention away from females with ASD [Autism Spectrum Disorder] and away from features of ASD that do not conform to the geek profile.”10 Jack importantly locates the turn toward pathologizing the male computer whiz within the economic context of the rising service and technology economies, which putatively reward the combination of computer and engineering smarts that have been coded as male and social skills that have been coded as female. For Jack, “the character of the male autistic computer mogul stands in for this tension in the logics of cognitive capitalism” and serves as a focal point for cultural anxieties about male deskilling in the now not-so-new information economies.11 The analogy extends beyond journalism, popular culture, and public spokespeople for autism such as Temple Grandin. Simon Baron-Cohen, one of the world’s most prominent autism researchers, theorized that autism rates were higher in tech centers like Silicon Valley because computer programmers meet and have children there (a parent I interviewed once called this the “geeks get lucky” hypothesis). BaronCohen’s thesis is that everyone possesses abilities along a single axis of empathizing and systemizing, with men tending to place further toward the systemizing end of the spectrum. Following Hans Asperger’s 1944 claim, Baron-Cohen has suggested that autism represents an “extreme male brain,” that is, systemizing taken to pathological extremes.12 A questionnaire produced by his lab and available online produces Autism Spectrum Quotient figures for people without any likelihood of an autism diagnosis. The effect is to encourage people who dislike small talk, prefer routine, and are drawn to collecting “information about categories of things” to see themselves as on the border of the autism spectrum.13 332

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But the notion that many with autism are simply fish out of water, computer whiz kids who haven’t yet found a hospitable employer and a circle of kindred spirits, ignores much about the realities of autism. It’s important to note that Specialisterne, for example, doesn’t pretend to be an option for many people with autism. The New York Times noted that “over eight years of evaluating autistic adults, Sonne has discovered that only a small minority have the abilities Specialisterne is looking for and are able to navigate the unpredictable world of work well enough to get a job.” And this is the case despite the fact that each employee is paired with a neurotypical job coach and the Dutch government subsidizes the company so that the autistic consultants are paid full time for parttime work (something less likely to happen in the United States). The New York Times profile explains that this type of screening is necessary because Sonne wants to change how autistic people are perceived, and the best way to so do this is to “prove their value in the marketplace.” The economist Tyler Cowan, quoted in the same article, affirms that the marketplace is, indeed, becoming friendlier to the type of specialized intelligence that many autistics possess.14 This might be news to the over 50 percent of young adults with autism who have no work experience two years after graduating from high school, or to the ones who, though working, are at jobs poorly matched to their qualifications.15 Young adults with autism are subject to all manner of insecurity in their attempts to make lives for themselves: in their early twenties, over a third are “disconnected” from both employment and the educational system, and a majority continue to live with their parents. Perhaps not surprisingly, those who do succeed come from more privileged backgrounds.16 This is the problem with equating autism and run-of-the-mill nerdiness or even extreme nerdiness. Many people with Asperger’s syndrome or the related category Autism, Nerds, and Insecurity

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that until recently was called “high-functioning autism” need significant accommodations. They may experience anxiety, depression, and learning and behavioral differences that can make it hard to function in school despite their intelligence. It’s important to emphasize that this distinction isn’t necessarily a function of the “severity” of autistics’ impairments in the conventional language of rehabilitation and behavioral expertise; on the contrary, it is an index of how poorly educational systems and work environments conform to the differences associated with autism. The authors of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association, the gold standard for psychiatric (and some neurodevelopmental) diagnoses, emphasized unity across the autism spectrum in their most recent edition, the DSM-5, by eliminating the Asperger’s syndrome diagnosis altogether and creating a single catchall category for autism spectrum disorders.17 Although the choice and its rationale were heavily disputed, and “Asperger’s syndrome” remains in use in popular parlance, the published manual has institutionalized this change. The revision emphasizes continuities between people with good language abilities and people with more visible behavioral, communicative, and cognitive differences. Self-advocates with autism have been generally in favor of the revision because, as they have been reminding experts for years, categories of autism “severity” (like “low-“ or “high-“ functioning) often have little relationship to the quality of life of a person on the autism spectrum. Someone who is quite typical in their communicative abilities and behavior may have anxiety problems that prevent them from holding a job; someone who uses augmentative or alternative communication (like typing on an iPad to communicate) might be employed, live independently, and conform in most measurable respects more closely to what experts consider a “good outcome.” 334

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Returning to Jack’s argument about the assumptions implicit in the stock portrayal of the autistic as geeky computer whiz, it’s worth reiterating that such images are often gendered. It’s rare to hear of an autistic woman given a starring role in this hoped-for outcome. Perhaps women’s special interests are more difficult to monetize; perhaps this reflects the demographic fact that men have been disproportionately diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome (far above the 4:1 ratio for autism more generally), while women are more likely when diagnosed to have what has been referred to as “severe” autism symptoms, including a low measurable IQ. Whether better attention to women with less conventional autism symptoms and the removal of Asperger’s syndrome from DSM-5 will change these figures remains to be seen. What is clear is that even the apparent best outcome of employment in a supportive environment like that facilitated by Specialisterne depends on exclusions—the marginalization of people whose disabilities are not amenable to the type of support a company is willing to provide, and disregard for those without an interest in this particular kind of repetitive work. Once and Twice Exceptional I now turn briefly to a different set of discourses about ability, disability, and talent. Popular culture may elide the distinction between the diagnostic label of autism and the cultural label of nerdiness. However, within educational institutions (which arguably have a much greater effect on life prospects than more fickle popular representations) a bright line is drawn between the cognitive characteristics associated with autism and the talents associated with extreme academic promise—even when those traits occur in the same individual. Beginning in the 1980s, educators began using the term “twice exceptional” to refer to students with a combination of academic giftedness and disabilities; briefly, prior Autism, Nerds, and Insecurity

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to that time, the term had been “the gifted handicapped.”18 But whatever term was employed, educators began to focus on this group as one in need of special attention. Gifted students, specialists understood, had their own set of special needs. Force them to conform too strictly to set curricula and they could end up bored or alienated, “underachieving” rather than excelling. In other words, giftedness has long constituted a special need within academic literature on primary and secondary education.19 But here was an even more vulnerable group, those whose learning disabilities “masked” special abilities, as might be the case in a student whose dyslexia, for instance, so confounded their academic efforts that their mathematical or reasoning abilities were never noticed or fostered.20 The term “masking” is key here. Terminology of this type has been the source of considerable debate in the autism community, where a longstanding discourse, beginning perhaps with Bruno Bettelheim’s descriptions of autism as an “empty fortress,” represents autism as a barrier beyond which a typically functioning child awaited rescue.21 Self-advocates maintain that such descriptions are harmful to people with autism because they deny the specificity and coherence of autistic experience. Autism, they argue, informs experience and personality in ways essential to their being. Researchers likewise point out that autism is pervasive, involving entire bodies and minds, and built into the biology of an individual at a presumably genetic level. In articles on twice exceptionality, though, the mask metaphor is employed freely: for example, ADHD “masks” the innate creativity of children, argues one set of authors, who then, in seemingly contradictory fashion, document how the creativity of children with ADHD seems quite tightly bound up with their neurological deficits, or in their terms, “there was correlational evidence that poor working memory was associated with improved divergent thinking.”22 336

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Experts on twice-exceptional children, consequently, focus on the problem of identification: how to ensure that educators don’t mistake a gifted child with learning disabilities for one who is simply disabled.23 And conversely, how to make sure that the eccentricities of children labeled gifted are not dismissed as a product of their giftedness and are instead correctly labeled as Asperger’s syndrome, or ADHD, or other representative disabilities. What is interesting about the educational and psychological literature on twice exceptional children are the ways that authors so rigorously disaggregate disability and giftedness. The two identities do not combine in a single child. They are competing forces, fundamentally at odds, such that experts describe a single individual’s cognitive potential as promoted by one set of processes and stalled by another. The idea stands in contradiction to some research on autism that suggests that autistic intelligence can differ depending on the test used to measure it. The conventional wisdom has been that people with autism disproportionately have intellectual disabilities (what used to be called mental retardation)—at rates as high as 70 percent according to some studies— but the claim has little empirical basis, and has relied heavily on tests of adaptive functioning (ability to complete skills like writing checks and answering the phone) rather than intelligence tests. When intelligence tests were used, they usually failed to account for how autism can interfere with the requirements for taking intelligence tests in the first place: sitting still, interacting with a screener, and so on.24 But the problems run deeper: standard intelligence tests like the Wechsler may fail to measure those areas at which autistics excel, like pattern recognition. A test like Raven’s Progressive Matrices, designed to measure exactly that, shows people with autism on the whole to have considerably higher intelligence measures than revealed by other tests.25 Put differently, there is a least a strong possibility that something called “autistic intelligence” Autism, Nerds, and Insecurity

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exists as a distinct entity, unique to autism although with obvious parallels to the skill sets of neurotypical people. But it’s easy to imagine why, within an educational system with existing facilities and bureaucracies for gifted and disabled students, there could be something of a mania for sorting things out, and a tendency also to understand the two sets of needs as fundamentally distinct: remediation on the one hand, and challenges and enrichment on the other.26 Different sets of expertise pertain to gifted and disabled students, and different funding sources support their education. So while recognizing that many students with autism are also gifted is important, that recognition seems to often occur within the context of educational systems that treat the two cognitive characteristics as both distinct and at odds. Or as one article argues, “it is important to avoid the perception that impressive performance in individuals with ASD is a result of their abnormal neuroanatomical functions rather than genuine intellectual ability . . . which serves to pathologize rather than encourage and foster intellect and talent,” in other words, that their giftedness has anything to do with their autism. The article that the authors cite to support that point actually makes a considerably more nuanced claim, that autistic intelligence is indeed “genuine intellectual ability” but that it is also “atypical” and characterized by distinct cognitive patterns tied to autism.27 The differentiation between categories of gifted and disabled students in educational contexts probably owes something to the origins of gifted education. Though a comprehensive history of the field is hard to come by, internal accounts trace a line of descent from Francis Galton’s Hereditary Genius through Alfred Binet’s intelligence testing and Lewis Terman’s cohort studies of genius, and note that the field received a boost following the launch of the Soviet Sputnik satellite and attendant 338

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Cold War anxieties about fostering American talent in math and sciences.28 These histories don’t seem to find it important to note the significant role that all three men also played in the international eugenics movement or the ways that their projects of defining intelligence and linking it to heredity were part of broader scientific aspirations toward the improvement of human stock through selective breeding. A timeline on the website of the National Association for Gifted Children likewise highlights contributions from eugenicists like Goddard to the identification of the gifted without really locating that project within its broader ideological framework. The National Association for Gifted Children isn’t peripheral to the field, either: it publishes the Gifted Child Quarterly, the top-ranked journal in gifted education.29 The point here is not that gifted programs are mere legacies of a fundamentally discriminatory eugenics movement. It is that the basis of gifted education in the field of psychometric testing and eugenics might be one reason that the notion of talents bound up with disability, rather than talents despite disability, is difficult for educators in this area to grasp.30 Despite prevailing stereotypes, students identified as gifted aren’t all nerds, and doubtless not all nerds would be singled out as gifted. For the purposes of this argument though, what is important is that as far as educational experts are concerned, the prospects of a student with disabilities are very different from those of a gifted child. Furthermore, the educational project for gifted students with disabilities involves mitigating the masking effects of disabilities to reveal their hidden potential for giftedness, even when programs take the additional, and commendable, step of centering educational environments on students’ talents rather than their deficits.31 All of this suggests that as with employment, the educational trajectories for autistic children and nerds are likely to be very different. Autism, Nerds, and Insecurity

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Inequalities and Insecurity So what does this matter to the question of whether autism is simply the medicalization of a certain type of nerdiness, or whether the pop culture association between nerds and autism has practical effects? This imagined alignment allows us to ignore very real distinctions between the futures of nerds and the futures of young adults with autism. The worrisome thing about the nerd-autism nexus is that it’s a way of conflating groups that have access to wildly different sets of resources. We like to think of the revenge of the nerds, after all, at least partly in economic terms. It might be rough in high school, but then nerds get to run billion-dollar software companies. At the very least, they go to college and meet like-minded people, and end up economically and professionally secure. As we’ve already seen, that’s not a common outcome right now for students with autism. For people with more significant neurological, behavioral, and communicative differences, the transition to adulthood can entail a devastating withdrawal of educational and other supports, what parent and professional advocates sometimes call the “services cliff.”32 At least, that’s anecdotally true: vanishingly little research focuses explicitly on adults with autism, and what research there is fails to account for the vast differences in abilities among those adults.33 Yet adult outcomes are integral to a key way of defining disability among contemporary scholars and activists. That is, not in terms of measurable physical or cognitive impairments consistent across a diagnostically defined population (and defining those populations is often a messier project than medical researchers would prefer), but in terms of the economic, employment, and social barriers and exclusions entailed by any given set of differences. 340

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The people we call nerds may be disabled in the context of high school, but our economic and cultural systems are quite enabling to nerds once they navigate adolescence. That’s apparently not the case for autistics. And if autistics seem to do poorly on conventional measures of outcome, there is an additional problem: few studies on adult outcomes in autism ask those adults for input on what constitutes a good outcome. This is despite the fact that for a group defined at least partly by finding different things pleasurable and discomforting than other members of the population, a good outcome and a rewarding life might not, for example, involve managing symptoms enough to qualify for the entire range of possible jobs, using verbal communication (rather than alternative forms like typing), or having an active social life.34 Spectrum models of autism, which broaden the diagnostic category to include people with milder or less visible symptoms, have the laudatory effect of encouraging more members of the population to identify with stigmatized groups. They also enable researchers and activists alike to understand the diversity of behaviors and cognitive types labeled as autism as a single entity for the purposes of advocacy and research. But they can, as others have noted, have the additional effect of minimizing the true physiological, behavioral, and cognitive diversity among those with autism diagnoses. And they can encourage misrecognition of autism as “just” nerdiness, a mistake when there is such a vast need for further accommodation, acceptance, research, and understanding. Educational models describing those with autism as twice exceptional students have the benefit of emphasizing the need for accommodations in order to realize strengths and talents, but they make the possible mistake of disaggregating autism and giftedness. There’s another problem that I haven’t even mentioned. These ways of thinking about autism follow traditions in genetics and brain research Autism, Nerds, and Insecurity

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of defining autism as a disorder localized in, and confined to, the brain. There is a fair amount of research that contradicts that assumption, or at minimum, requires that we operate with a more capacious definition of brain than is standard. Autism can involve sensory processing differences (a feature undoubtedly cognitive in part, but not generally described in those terms) like an inability to tolerate certain textures, lights, smells, or sounds, as well as sleep disturbances. It can have significant physiological features including immune system dysregulation and gastrointestinal components. And all of these aspects of autism can impact, in ways that are difficult to predict, a person’s ability to maintain a job or live independently. What we do know is that finding secure futures for young adults with autism will require significant cultural experimentation and innovation. Fostering Strengths, Accommodating Difference Portraying autism as a kind of underappreciated nerdiness doesn’t pay enough attention to the relative abundance of work for nerds and those with nerdy traits. These categories may indeed be social and diagnostic constructions that draw distinctions where significant commonalities reside (obsessive preoccupations, awkwardness, sensitivity), but they are also categories that index persistent differences in life prospects. Erasing the distinction fails to acknowledge that many people with autism thrive in what Gil Eyal and his colleagues, borrowing from behavioral treatment strategies, call a “prosthetic environment,” a space organized on the premise that changing surroundings rather than trying to alter an individual is the best way to increase a person’s capabilities and independence. Thorkil Sonne, the Specialisterne founder, simply calls this a “comfort zone.”35 Valuing talents is one thing, but 342

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it’s not sufficient without reorganizing spaces to be hospitable to those with different sensory tolerances, variable communication abilities, and behaviors that significantly challenge social norms. And even those efforts will require a process of trial and error: a recent attempt to create a living community for adults on the spectrum succeeded beautifully on several counts: a gorgeous space, it is sensitive to sensory needs and includes accommodations for caregivers. But it’s not clear yet that the experiment in community living will work, and the cost of $39,000 per year is prohibitive for many families.36 So—is nerdiness in danger of being pathologized and labeled as autism, encouraging educators, and the world at large, to focus on social skills training and ignore obvious talents? That claim probably depends on ignoring a lot of what autism diagnoses, accurately understood, entail within existing systems of social supports, education, and medicine. The challenges—and pleasures—that autistic people and experts on autism describe as characterizing autism extend beyond those we typically associate with nerdiness. The claim that autism is medicalized nerdiness responds to some central truths and complaints about how autism medical practitioners and educators conventionally address autism—not as a collection of features that includes ones potentially of value to a person, or patient, but as a set of deficits in need of clinical attention. The problem with addressing the shortcomings of this deficit-centered approach to autism via analogies with nerdiness is that doing so ignores real and consequential differences in resource access and allocation. But that doesn’t mean that the interests of nerds and autistics are at odds—on the contrary, just because they come to it from very different angles, nerds and people with autism might unite under the sign of special interests. Nerds, precisely because of their presumptive Autism, Nerds, and Insecurity

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commonalities with autism, ought to make it a special interest of theirs to create better, more prevalent prosthetic environments, “seeking,” to quote Eyal et al. again, “not only to make the individual able to function in a given environment, but also to extend the perimeter of the prosthetic environment so it gradually comes to overlay more and more of the ‘normal’ everyday one.”37 Notes 1. BBC, “Hacker Gary McKinnon Will Not Face UK Charges.” 2. Yee, “Jailed Often Because of His Transit Obsession.” 3. Gregorian, “Mass Transit Menace Darius McCollum”; Donohue, Parascandola, and McShane, “Train-Stealing Fanatic Darius McCollum Arrested for 27th Time”; Tietz, “The Boy Who Loved Transit,” 43–51. 4. Yee, “Jailed Often Because of His Transit Obsession”; Edemariam, “Gary McKinnon’s Mother, Janis Sharp,” and BBC, “Hacker Gary MacKinnon Turns into a Search Expert.” 5. Osborne, American Normal. 6. Conrad, The Medicalization of Society. 7. Grandin, “The World Needs People with Asperger’s Syndrome.” 8. Anderegg, Nerds, 123. 9. Cook, “The Autism Advantage.” 10. Jack, “Presenting Gender,” 107. 11. Ibid., 111. 12. Baron-Cohen has published research articles on the hypothesis, but for a popular treatment see Baron-Cohen, The Essential Difference. Further discussion of BaronCohen’s theories about gender and autism can be found in Jack, Autism and Gender, 121–41, and Bumiller, “Quirky Citizens,” 967–90. 13. Baron-Cohen et al., “The Autism Spectrum Quotient” and Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ ) (Adult), https://www.autismresearchcentre.com/arc_tests. 14. Cook, “The Autism Advantage.” 15. Shattuck, Narendorf, et al., “Postsecondary Education and Employment,” 1047. 16. Roux et al., National Autism Indicators Report, 31 and 36. 17. American Psychiatric Association, “DSM 5 Autism Spectrum Disorder Fact Sheet.” 344

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18. McCallum et al., “A Model for Screening Twice-Exceptional,” 209. 19. In some instances, descriptions of the special needs of gifted students have seemed oddly parallel to those of students with autism: sensory sensitivities, introversion, and intense focus. This observation was made by an undergraduate I taught at Cornell, Jessica Fox, in her final paper for my class, “From ‘Cold Mothers’ to ‘Autistic Dads’: Autism in Twentieth Century America.” 20. On masking, see for example Foley-Nicpon, et al., “Empirical Investigation of Twice-Exceptionality,” 9 and 14. The authors note that further research is needed to confirm the phenomenon, which articles tend to refer to as either the “masking hypothesis” or the “masking effect.” 21. Waltz, “Metaphors of Autism,” 2. 22. Fugate, Zentall, and Gentry, “Creativity and Working Memory in Gifted Students,” 243. 23. See Doobay et al., “Cognitive, Adaptive, and Psychosocial Differences,” 2028: “These similarities have led to some challenge in differentiating behaviors simply associated with having high ability versus those associated with ASD in high ability students, which has subsequently led to problems of misdiagnosis and missed diagnosis.” 24. Edelson, “Are the Majority of Children with Autism Mentally Retarded?,” 66–83. 25. Dawson et al., “The Level and Nature of Autistic Intelligence,” 657–62. 26. I use the phrase “sorting things out” as a nod to Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star’s classic science studies work Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences. 27. Foley-Nicpon et al., 11, and Dawson et al., 661. 28. Jolly, “Foundations of the Field of Gifted Education,” 14–18 and 65; Stewart, “An American Century of Roots and Signposts,” 56–57; National Association for Gifted Children, “The History of Gifted and Talented Education.” Also see Levy and Palley, “Education, Needs, and a Feminist Ethics of Care,” 84–85, on the history of gifted education. 29. Journals on gifted education are placed in the category of special education by Thomson Reuters in their Journal Citation Reports®, one means of assessing the authority of a journal. Gifted Child Quarterly ranked 22/36 in Education, Special in the 2015 Thomson Reuters Journal Citation Report, but it is the top-ranked journal that, based on title, focuses exclusively on gifted education as opposed to education of children with disabilities. 30. An account of the foundations of gifted education noted in 2005 that “because the field of gifted education is currently occupied with investigating today’s pressing educational questions and researching best practices, very little attention is being Autism, Nerds, and Insecurity

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devoted to examining the roots and evolution of the field” (Jolly, “Foundations of the Field of Gifted Education,” 15. 31. For example, one study, which criticized a “deficit-based” model for educating twice exceptional students, noted that “talent development can be a worthwhile intervention,” a way of addressing students’ experiences of social exclusion and loss of confidence. Baum, Schader, and Hébert, “Through a Different Lens,” 323. 32. Roux et al., National Autism Indicators Report, 25. 33. Shattuck, Roux, et al., “Services for Adults with an Autism Spectrum Disorder,” 284–91. 34. As an example of a different approach, see Chamak et al. on revising diagnostic standards to take into account autistic’s own perceptions of symptom hierarchies, in this case based on accounts in autistic autobiographies (“What Can We Learn about Autism from Autistic Persons?,” 271–79). 35. Eyal and colleagues borrow and further develop this term from David L. Holmes, writing about Eden Autism Services (“Community-Based Services for Children and Adults with Autism”), in Gil Eyal, Brendan Hart, Emine Onculer, Neta Oren and Natasha Rossi, The Autism Matrix, and Robert D. Austin and Thorkil Sonne, “The Dandelion Principle: Redesigning Work for the Information Economy.” 36. Tortorello, “The Architecture of Autism.” 37. Eyal et al., The Autism Matrix, 36.

Bibliography American Psychiatric Association. “DSM 5 Autism Spectrum Disorder Fact Sheet.” American Psychiatric Publishing. 2013. http://www.dsm5.org/Documents/Autism %20Spectrum%20Disorder%20Fact%20Sheet.pdf. Anderegg, David. Nerds: How Dorks, Dweebs, Techies, and Trekkies Can Save America. New York: Penguin, 2007. Austin, Robert D., and Thorkil Sonne. “The Dandelion Principle: Redesigning Work for the Information Economy.” MIT Sloan Management Review. May 19, 2014. http://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/the-dandelion-principle-redesigning-work-for -the-innovation-economy/. Baron-Cohen, Simon. The Essential Difference: Male and Female Brains and the Truth about Autism. New York: Basic Books, 2004. Baron-Cohen, Simon, Sally Wheelwright, Richard Skinner, Joanne Martin, and Emma Clubley. “The Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ ): Evidence from Asperger Syndrome/High Functioning Autism, Males and Females, Scientists and 346

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Mathematicians.” Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 31, no. 1 (2001): 5–17. Baum, Susan M., Robin M. Schader, and Thomas P. Hébert. “Through a Different Lens: Reflecting on a Strengths-Based, Talent-Focused Approach for TwiceExceptional Learners.” Gifted Child Quarterly 58, no. 4 (2014): 311–27. BBC. “Hacker Gary McKinnon Turns into a Search Expert.” July 28, 2014. http:// www.bbc.com/news/technology-28524909. ——. “Hacker Gary McKinnon Will Not Face UK Charges.” December 15, 2012. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-20730627. Bowker, Geoffrey C., and Susan Leigh Star. Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Bumiller, Kristin. “Quirky Citizens: Autism, Gender, and Reimagining Disability.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 33, no. 4 (2008): 967–90. Chamak, Brigitte, Beatrice Bonniau, Emmanuel Jaunay, and David Cohen. “What Can We Learn about Autism from Autistic Persons?” Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics 77, no. 5 (2008): 271–79. Conrad, Peter. The Medicalization of Society: On the Transformation of Human Conditions into Treatable Disorders. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. Cook, Gareth. “The Autism Advantage.” New York Times Magazine, November 29, 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/magazine/the-autism-advantage.html. Dawson, Michelle, Isabelle Soulières, Morton Ann Gernsbacher, and Laurent Mottron. “The Level and Nature of Autistic Intelligence.” Psychological Science 18, no. 8 (2007): 657–62. Donohue, Pete, Rocco Parascandola, and Larry McShane. “Train-Stealing Fanatic Darius McCollum Arrested for 27th Time—and This Time, It’s a Bus.” New York Daily News, September 1, 2010. http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/train -stealing-fanatic-darius-mccollum-arrested-27th-time-time-bus-article-1.207505. Doobay, Alissa F., Megan Foley-Nicpon, Saba R. Ali, and Susan G. Assouline. “Cognitive, Adaptive, and Psychosocial Differences between High Ability Youth with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder.” Journal of Autism and Developmental Disabilities 44 (2014): 2026–40. Edelson, Meredyth Goldberg. “Are the Majority of Children with Autism Mentally Retarded? A Systematic Evaluation of the Data.” Focus on Autism and Other Developmental Disabilities 21, no. 2 (2006): 66–83. Edemariam, Aida. “Gary McKinnon’s Mother, Janis Sharp: When I’m in a Corner, I Fight.” Guardian, Oct 19, 2012. http://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2012/oct /19/interview-janis-sharp-gary-mckinnon. Autism, Nerds, and Insecurity

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Eyal, Gil, Brendan Hart, Emine Onculer, Neta Oren, and Natasha Rossi. The Autism Matrix. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010. Foley-Nicpon, Megan, Allison Allmon, Barbara Sieck, and Rebecca D. Stinson. “Empirical Investigation of Twice-Exceptionality: Where Have We Been and Where Are We Going?” Gifted Child Quarterly 55, no. 1 (2011): 3–17. Fox, Jessica. “From ‘Cold Mothers’ to ‘Autistic Dads’: Autism in Twentieth Century America.” Unpublished final paper. Biology and Society 425. Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 2004. Fugate, C. Matthew, Sydney S. Zentall, and Marcia Gentry. “Creativity and Working Memory in Gifted Students with and without Characteristics of Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder: Lifting the Mask.” Gifted Child Quarterly 57, no. 4 (2013): 234–46. Grandin, Temple. “The World Needs People with Asperger’s Syndrome: American Normal.” Cerebrum, October 1, 2002. http://www.dana.org/news/cerebrum/detail .aspx?id=2312. Gregorian, Darah. “Mass Transit Menace Darius McCollum, Who Once Stole an E Train, Pleads Guilty to Stealing a Bus.” New York Daily News, July 12, 2013. http:// www.nydailynews.com/new-york/mass-transit-menace-stole-e-train-pleads-guilty -stealing-bus-article-1.1387917. Holmes, David L. “Community-Based Services for Children and Adults with Autism: The Eden Family of Programs.” Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 20, no. 3 (1990): 339–51. Jack, Jordynn. “Presenting Gender: Computer Geeks.” In Autism and Gender: From Refrigerator Mothers to Computer Geeks, 105–53. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2014. Jolly, Jennifer L. “Foundations of the Field of Gifted Education.” Gifted Child Today 28, no. 2 (2005): 14–18, 65. Journal Citation Reports. Thomson Reuters. 2015. http://thomsonreuters.com/en /products-services/scholarly-scientific-research/research-management-and -evaluation/journal-citation-reports.html. Levy, Traci, and Elizabeth Palley. “Education, Needs, and a Feminist Ethics of Care: Lessons from Discomfort with Academic Giftedness.” Social Politics 17, no. 1 (2010): 80–109. McCallum, R. Steve, Sherry Mee Bell, Jeremy Thomas Coles, Kelli Caldwell Miller, Michael B. Hopkins, and Angela Hilton-Prillhart. “A Model for Screening TwiceExceptional Students (Gifted with Learning Disabilities) within a Response to Intervention Paradigm.” Gifted Child Quarterly 57, no. 4 (2013): 209–22.

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National Association for Gifted Children. “The History of Gifted and Talented Education: A Timeline of Key Dates in Gifted and Talented Education.” N.d. PowerPoint. Osborne, Lawrence. American Normal: Inside the Hidden World of Asperger Syndrome. New York: Copernicus Books, 2002. Roux, Anne M., Paul T. Shattuck, Jessica E. Rast, Julianna A. Rava, and Kristy A. Anderson. National Autism Indicators Report: Transition into Young Adulthood. Philadelphia, PA: Life Course Outcomes Research Program, A.J. Drexel Autism Institute, Drexel University, 2015. Shattuck, Paul T., Sarah Carter Narendorf, Benjamin Cooper, Paul R. Sterzing, Mary Wagnor, and Julie Lounds Taylor. “Postsecondary Education and Employment among Youths with an Autism Spectrum Disorder.” Pediatrics 129, no. 6 (2012): 1042–49. Shattuck, Paul T., Anne M. Roux, Laura E. Hudson, Julie Lounds Taylor, Matthew J Maenner, and Jean-Francois Trani. “Services for Adults with an Autism Spectrum Disorder.” Canadian Journal of Psychiatry 57, no. 5 (2012): 284–91. Stewart, Emily D. “An American Century of Roots and Signposts in Gifted and Talented Education.” Gifted Child Today Magazine 22, no. 6 (1999): 56–57. Tietz, Jeff. “The Boy Who Loved Transit: How the System Failed an Obsession.” Harpers Magazine, May 2002, 43–51. Tortorello, Michael. “The Architecture of Autism.” New York Times, October 9, 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/10/garden/the-architecture-of-autism.html. Waltz, Mitzi. “Metaphors of Autism, and Autism as a Metaphor: An Exploration of Representation.” Panel paper, Making Sense of: Health, Illness, and Disease. Mansfield College, Oxford, UK. 2003. https://www.inter-disciplinary.net/ptb/mso /hid/hid2/waltz%20paper.pdf. Yee, Vivian. “Jailed Often Because of His Transit Obsession, Man May Get Help.” New York Times, July 17, 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/18/nyregion/jailed -often-because-of-his-transit-obsession-man-may-get-help.html.

Chloe Silver man is Associate Professor in the Department of Politics and Center for Science, Technology & Society at Drexel University. She is author of Understanding Autism: Parents, Doctors, and the History of a Disorder. Autism, Nerds, and Insecurity

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AFTERWORD: PROFESSORS WITHOUT CHAIRS

aaron s. lecklider

The term “anti-intellectualism” emerged in the United States in the early decades of the twentieth century, appearing in 1911 in the wellknown (if now largely forgotten) radical John Spargo’s book, Sidelights on Contemporary Socialism. Spargo argued passionately that the revolution needed to be guided by the proletariat, not only by a bunch of blithely theorizing intellectuals who undeservedly claimed ownership of a socialist movement over which they had no rightful claim. Yet Spargo also acknowledged that the proletariat could not truly understand their condition without well-equipped intellectual guides. In contrast to those poseurs fomenting anti-intellectualism—the “lawyers without clients, authors without publishers, professors without chairs, ministers without pulpits, and so on”1—the true intellectuals knew their standing was best used to throw in their lot with the working class, and Spargo’s proletariat acknowledged their need to rely upon theoreticians to both facilitate and market their revolution. This was no laughing matter in the 1910s: as the Second International stood poised to take over a fairly sizable chunk of the globe in the name of the workers’ dictatorship, the question of who would be the heirs apparent to the new classless society—indeed, the very definition of the revolutionary vanguard—loomed heavily upon those who sought to overthrow the architects of the world’s current political malaise. Anti-intellectualism 350

in America represented a retrograde position that marked one as insufficiently sympathetic to the working class; it pitted workers against brainpower; it offered a poorly conceived position with immediate and devastating consequences. It is difficult to imagine that readers of Spargo’s furious text, let alone the fiery revolutionary himself, would recognize the term “anti-intellectualism” in its twenty-first-century usage. Consider, for example, a Charles M. Blow column from 2012, in which the stalwart New York Times columnist lambasts Republican senator Marco Rubio for his waffling on the question of whether dinosaurs and humans ever coexisted. “I’m not a scientist, man,” Rubio deflects. “This anti-intellectualism is antediluvian,” Blow concludes.2 In the new vernacular, Rubio’s refusal to affirm a basic claim of scientific knowledge marks him as anti-intellectual, a veritable Neanderthal clomping around the La Brea tar pits without even a cursory regard for scientific authority. Anti-intellectualism, once a marker of the counterrevolutionary consciousness and positioned in relation to the most radical class of Americans, becomes here a signifier of the Republican Party’s dogged refusal to give a whiff for the lofty claims of book learnin’. In contemporary American culture, anti-intellectualism represents a form of populism that is at best dangerous, at worst an indicator of Western civilization in its final death throes. Either way, it is not a good look. Whereas a mere century ago it was primarily revolutionaries aligned with the proletariat who decried anti-intellectualism, today it is largely intellectuals themselves who cry out against the cultural opprobrium cast upon those holding expensive degrees from institutions with massive endowments managed like hedge funds. It is just so hard to look down from our ivory towers at the stampeding masses discarding our scholarship like it is wanton opinion; discrediting our peer-reviewed Afterword

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scholarship as though it were drunken scrawls on bar napkins; spitting out the word “Professor” with the same vitriol one uses to snarl an especially vile slur. O, we cry out in the wilderness, the humanity! Over time, it has become impossible to imagine doing intellectual work without the backdrop of anti-intellectualism challenging our authority at every turn. Never mind that the definition of an “intellectual” shifts with the rapidity of an arctic ice floe, expanding and receding as the human race becomes increasingly imperiled by those who look increasingly to ill-informed politicians for the wisdom that was once jealously guarded by the professorial class. Sometimes the intellectual is one who aspires to the world of ideas, unmolested by the banal workaday concerns of those toiling in the muck and mire; other times we are guardians of elite knowledge eschewing the temptations of reality TV; here the intellectual is dedicated to big ideas; there they are simply those who recognize the imprimatur of science as a profound defense against the stupidity of those who put politics above knowledge. Yet the one thing that no one disputes, the one irreducible truth of intellectual culture, is that anti-intellectualism represents a grave threat—perhaps the gravest threat—to the continuing of life in a warming world overburdened with problems (global climate change; ISIS; neo-fascism) that cannot be solved without curating a penchant for big ideas. The humanities feel this most acutely. It is not only the threat of the STEM fields favoring practical knowledge and “implementation” that makes us cry out against the philistines who see intellectuals as archaic reminders of a millennia-old liberal arts education now under siege. It is also the very principle of ideas having value on their own merit, regardless of whether they can be assessed or turned into profits or draw fat grants into the neoliberal academy, that impels us to turn to the language of “crisis” to evaluate our position. Administrators rattle our cages, asking us to pursue “excellence” and accumulate majors like 352

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used-car salespeople, even as politicians and pundits question whether taxpayer dollars should be apportioned to departments more concerned with dismantling gender categories than assisting students in their quest to develop the next killer app. The contributors to this book acknowledge the significance of nerds, wonks, and geeks to the march of civilization. Some, such as the volume’s editors, labor over the question of what defines an intellectual, and what value society does, or should, place upon this rarified assemblage. Others consider the nerdy pursuits that place those whose passion is largely in their own heads in a position of moral authority. In either case, the peculiar moment in which we find ourselves, tortured by relentless assaults against the brainiacs in our midst, is defined through the persistence of intellectuals to carving new and unique spaces to push against the practical, the timely, the immediate. Intellectuals, that is to say, matter. And like all things with mass, we can be neither created nor destroyed. The language of anti-intellectualism has a strange power over those who believe in knowledge for its own sake. Anti-intellectualism cuts to the heart of our contemporary culture wars, jamming the work of those who seem most invested in pulling the nation out of its counterproductive malaise. Like Republican obstructionism, anti-intellectualism fails to consider ideas on their own merits, stubbornly declaring in advance that regardless of their individual value, intellectuals do not even deserve a fair hearing. Of course Richard Hofstadter remains that rare prophet whose prognostications half a century ago continue to hold remarkable staying power within an academy that tends to move on to the next big idea with the alacrity of New York’s fashion week. The term “anti-intellectual” has appeared in the New York Times over 650 times since 1870; more than 75 percent of those usages have occurred since 1964, the year Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life Afterword

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was published by Knopf. For nearly one hundred years, that is to say, individuals were rarely described as anti-intellectual in the United States, but for the subsequent fifty years, anti-intellectualism has become an indispensible interpretive lens through which to make sense of the contemporary world. We might find value in returning to John Spargo’s one-hundredyear-old book as we consider our place as intellectuals in this mixedup world. After all, the intellectuals Spargo defends were desperately seeking to connect with workers; they were indistinguishable from the uneducated masses save for the particular role they played in articulating its goals. The intellectuals were listening to the voices of a rising proletariat, and they were valuable in direct proportion to their alignment with the working-class women and men anxiously fighting against bureaucrats, billionaires, and bosses. As much as anti-intellectualism hurts, its chief impact is on those whose boots in the streets bring about radical social change, not the wounded feelings of those within the ivory tower who wish to do their work without exposure to the unsavory aroma of disrespect. If we are doing our job, we should be opening ourselves constantly to critique and frustration, because we are challenging those who sit comfortably in seats of power. Those of us who fancy ourselves intellectuals have a particular responsibility to make our work legible even as it exposes us to ever-expanding avenues of disrespect. If we occasionally find ourselves valorized in spite of being stubborn little nettles tearing insistently at the social fabric, so be it. But our position in society cannot be abdicated whenever we feel our work is not recognized as intrinsically connected to the common good. We will continue to do the work we believe matters, and eliciting irritation and fomenting frustration are the surest ways to guarantee that we, too, do not end up bemoaning our lot as professors without chairs and authors without publishers. 354

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Notes 1. Spargo, Sidelights on Contemporary Socialism, 74. 2. Blow, “Dinosaurs and Denial.”

Bibliography Blow, Charles M. “Dinosaurs and Denial.” New York Times, December 8, 2012, A21. Spargo, John. Sidelights on Contemporary Socialism. New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1911.

A aron S. Lecklider is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and author of Inventing the Egghead: The Battle over Brainpower in American Culture.

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INDEX

#GamerGate, 5, 22, 275–300 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition (Chicago), 95–98, 104, 107–11 21 Jump Street (2012 film), 15

Aquinas, Thomas, 238 Archer-Straw, Petrine, 109 artificial intelligence (AI), 18, 20, 172–75, 176, 177, 179, 180 ASD. See Autism Spectrum Disorder Ashe, Pat, 291 A Tale of the Jungle Imps (McCay), 106 Asian American literature, 70, 72, 73, Aaronson, Scott, 287–88 74–75, 89 Aarseth, Espen, 280–81 Asperger, Hans, 332 Adams, Douglas, ix Asperger’s Syndrome, 177, 326–27, 330–35, Addams, Charles, 267 337 Albes, Claudia, 279 Aspies. See Asperger’s Syndrome Alexander, Leigh, 286, 294n34 Atget, Eugène, 101 Alexander, Michelle, 123 algorithm, 20, 175, 178, 179, 180, 186, 188, 189 Augustine, 238 Austen, Jane, 251, 296n53 American Communist Party (CPUSA), autism, 16, 21, 22, 23, 176–77, 326–49 155–57 Autism Spectrum Disorder, 21, 23, 329, American Mercury (periodical), 150 330, 332, 334, 341 American Pastoral (Roth), 121, 140 Anderegg, David, 3–4, 33–35, 330–31 Backsmoker Diaries, 225–28, 229, 230–45 Anderson, Benedict, 109 Bahktin, Mikhail, 107 anti-games, 276–77 Baldwin, James, 66–67 anti-intellectualism, 2, 7, 60, 211, 219n18, Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones), 65 350–54 Baron-Cohen, Simon, 332, 334n12 Anti-Intellectualism in American Life Bateman, Chris, 284, 290–91 (Hofstadter), 2, 353 Batman (superhero), 250–51 anticolonialism, 145, 156, 164 357

Bear, Elizabeth, 304–306, 308–309, 320n23 Beaty, Bart, 265 Bechdel, Alison, 260, 267 Bederman, Gail, 98–99 Bellow, Saul, 126, 130–35, 140 Benda, Julien, 7 Benedict, Burton, 109, 113 Benjamin, Walter, 95–96, 101, 111, 113, 291 Bennett, James Gordon, Jr., 94 Bennett, William, 36, 42, 45–46 Berkowitz, Roger, 57–58 Bernstein, Charles, 181 Best, Stephen, 59–63, 66–67, 82–83 Betrayers, The (Bezmogi), 126, 133–35, 137 Bezmogis, David, 126, 133–35 Big Bang Theory, The (television show), 195, 210, 212–16 Binet, Alfred, 228 Black Empire (Schuyler), 145–48, 151–69 Black Girl Nerds (web site), 15 “Black Internationale, The” (Schuyler), 147, 148, 149, 153, 158, 161, 162, 165 Black Internationalism, 20, 145–50, 153– 54, 156–59, 164–69 Black No More (Schuyler), 150, 154 Blood and Iron (Bear), 308, 309, 310 Bloom, Allan, 132, 139, 141n6 Bloom, Harold, 139 Blow, Charles M., 351 Boas, Franz, 98 Bogost, Ian, 279, 296n51 Boon, Richard, 284, 290, 291 Bourdieu, Pierre, 100 boredom, 32, 60, 71, 278, 281–83, 290 358

Index

Bötticher, Karl, 95, 96 Boym, Svetlana, 232 Bracey, Christopher, 147, 166n1, 166n4 Breckinridge, Carol, 109 Brown, Wendy, 129 Bryn Mawr College, 21, 223, 225–26, 231, 232, 234, 237, 239, 240, 244, 245 Buchanan, Pat, 120 Bucholtz, Mary, 224–25, 233, 234, 240 Buddhism, 184 Buffet, Warren, 14 Bull, Emma, 309 bullying, 1, 115n1, 205, 207, 208, 209, 263, 270n33, 285–86 Burns, Charles, 267 Bush, George W., 34, 35, 43, 44, 57, 120, 125 Cage, John, 180, 181, 188 Cameron, David, 44 Campbell, Eddie, 264, 265 Canemaker, John, 101 Capellanus, Andreas, 235 Carradine, Robert, 207 Carrier, David, 249 Cassian, John, 238 Chambers, Ross, 279 Chandra, Vikram, 174 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 238 Chen, Jenova, 277 Cheney, Dick, 43, 120 Chinese Geological Survey, 89, 90 Chomsky, Noam, 9, 27 Christian, Brian, 172, 173, 174 Christian, David, 82 Chute, Hillary, 258–59, 260, 261, 268n4

Clairvaux, Bernard of, 238 Clinton, Bill, 34 Clinton, Hillary, 36 Clowes, Daniel, 256, 260 Cold War, 2, 11, 16, 17, 19, 67, 139, 140, 169n43, 339 Comic-Con, 224 comics, 16, 18, 21, 22, 93–118, 216, 223, 249–74 comics, as literature, 253, 258–61, 263–64, 265 comics, newspaper, 93, 94, 95, 102, 106, 108, 252, 259 comics, superhero, 216, 217, 259, 262–63, 267, 270n30, 270n33 Commentary (periodical), 120, 121, 139, 140 communism, 17, 146, 147, 155, 156, 157 computationalism, 173, 174, 175, 178, 181 Connell, R. W., 42, 47, 51, 52n19 Conrad, Peter, 330 conventions (fan), 224, 276, 307, 308, 316, 320n30 Corrigan, Cecilia, 174, 175 courtly love. See love, courtly Cowan, Tyler, 333 Cox, Ana Marie, 52n7 Crisis (periodical), 148, 150 Crouch, Stanley, 130 Crumb, Robert, 94, 256, 267 Culture Wars, 7, 123, 316, 317, 353 cyberspace, 302, 303, 315, 318 Damian, Peter, 238 dandy, 93, 94, 98, 99, 292 Darwin, Charles, 195, 198

Davenport, Neil, 58 Davis, Angela, 9 Dawson, Michael, 155 De Landa, Manuel, 81 Dear Esther (video game), 277, 281, 283–84 Debord, Guy, 291, 292 Deleuze, Gilles, 81 desire, 5, 96, 98, 102, 109, 161, 163, 164, 197, 225, 227, 231–40, 244, 245 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), 330–31, 334, 335 Diary of Elsinore, 241, 242, 243, 244–45 Dimock, Wai Chee, 81, 83 Disney, Walt, 20, 94 Diver, Mike, 286, 295n33 dominance masculinity. See masculinity, dominance Douglass, Frederick, 107, 110, 111, 112, 113 Dr. Seuss (Theodore Geisel), 210, 218n16 Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend (McCay), 101 Dreyfus, Albert, 7 DSM. See Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders Du Bois, W. E. B., 106, 108, 147, 166n10 Dungeons and Dragons (game), 217 egghead, 10, 16, 23n3 Einstein, Albert, 195, 198, 199–200, 204 Eisner, Will, 20, 94, 269n17 Eliot, T. S., 180 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 184 Emmanuel, Rahm, 41, 45, 46 Epstein, Robert, 172, 173 Index

359

Ethiopia, 145, 148, 151, 152, 156, 160, 161, 162, 163, 165 eugenics, 108, 162, 195, 339 expertise masculinity. See masculinity, expertise Eyal, Gil, 342, 344, 346n35 Facebook, 14, 275, 332 Faerie Queene (Spenser), 226, 236 fan (fanatic), 1, 4, 12, 17, 18, 21, 22, 41, 249–50, 251, 252, 253, 254, 261, 266–67, 268, 301–25, 327 Fanon, Frantz, 8 Fay, Elizabeth, 235 FBI. See Federal Bureau of Investigation Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 18, 19, 64, 65, 66 Feldman, Kenneth, 130 Felksi, Rita, 62, 63 Ferris, Joshua, 127 Fey, Tina, 15 Feynman, Richard, 200–201, 202 fiction, science. See science fiction fiction, serial. See serial fiction Fils-Aimé, Reggie, 276 Fincher, David, 14 Fitzgerald, Owen, 267 flâneur, 95, 291, 292, 293, 296n51 formalism, 74, 173, 174, 175, 178, 180, 186, 188 Foucault, Michel, 8, 251, 321n41 FPS (first person shooter), 289, 296n45 Frank, Adam, 178 Franzen, Jonathan, 127 Fredner, Erik, 276 360

Index

Freeman, Elizabeth, 82 Freud, Sigmund, 53n29, 59, 64, 95, 100, 197, 198, 199, 200, 202, 203, 204, 209, 214, 216 Funkhouser, Chris, 188 Galton, Sir Francis, 195, 196–97, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 209, 213, 214, 216, 338 Gamer, 21, 22, 275–300 Garvey, Marcus, 147 Gates, Bill, 14, 34, 331 geek, 1, 11, 12, 15, 18, 24n3, 33, 35, 39, 52n9, 174, 176, 207, 209, 213, 217, 219n19, 219n20, 330, 331, 332, 335, 353 gender, 22, 30-51, 52n7, 52n19, 62, 82, 96, 97, 99–102, 134, 177, 197, 198, 199, 202, 205, 207–12, 214, 215, 217, 218n15, 224, 225, 233, 235, 236, 239, 240, 244, 245, 278, 281, 291–94, 334, 344n12, 353 genius, 21, 52n12, 195–222, 330, 338 geology, as science fiction, 19, 70, 75, 85, 86 geology, as time travel, 70, 75, 80, 81, 83, 86, 87, 89–90 Ghostbusters (2016 film), 4, 5 Gibson, William, 75 giftedness, 16, 329, 330, 335, 336, 337, 338, 339, 341, 345n19, 345n30 Giroux, Henry, 57 Gjoni, Eron, 185 Glazer, Nathan, 14, 132, 140 Goldsby, Jacqueline, 108, 112 Golodryga, Bianna, 41 Golumbia, David, 173 Gone Home (video game), 277, 288, 289, 296n45

Goodman, Allegra, 127 Gore, Al, 11, 34, 35 Gorey, Edward, 267 Goyal, Yogita, 147, 166n3 Gramsci, Antonio, 8, 301 Grandin, Temple, 330, 332 graphic novels. See comics Greer, Scott, 19 Guattari, Félix, 81 Guide for the Perplexed, A (Horn), 126, 136–38 Hannity, Sean, 30, 49 Hansberry, Lorraine, 65 hardcore gamer. See gamer Hatfield, Charles, 266, 270n30 Hatred (video game), 289, 290 Hayden, Teresa Nielsen, 313 Healey, Karen, 304 Hearst, William Randolph, 93, 94, 106 Helberg, Simon, 214 Hereditary Genius (Galton), 195, 196–97, 338 Hergé, 267 Hernandez, Gilbert, 266, 267 Hernandez, Jaime, 249, 262, 266, 268n2 Herndon, Angelo, 156 Herriman, George, 94 Himmelfarb, Gertude, 9 Himmelfarb, Norman, 9 Historical formalism, 74–75 Hitler, Adolf, 65, 289 Hofstadter, Richard, 2, 353 Hogan’s Alley (Outcault), 93, 100, 104 Hoover, J. Edgar, 64, 65, 66, 67

Horn, Dara, 126, 136–38 Hosseini, Khaled, 139 Howells, William Dean, 97, 98 Hutchison, Anthony, 121 I Ching, 184, 185 Imitation Game, The (2014 film), 176 imperialism, 125, 139, 145, 146, 147, 148, 151, 152, 154, 158, 165–66, 302, 305 Inge, M. Thomas, 102–103 intellectual, public, 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 17, 18, 19, 22, 23, 56–69, 119, 132, 139, 146, 150, 167n12, 301–25 intellectualism, 1–3, 4, 5–9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 23n3, 29, 42, 44, 45, 71, 146, 164, 175, 198, 211, 212, 225, 227, 244, 250, 266, 267, 301, 303– 304, 308, 310–12, 315, 317, 350–54 Intellectuals, New York. See New York Intellectuals Italo-Ethiopian War, 151–52, 156, 160, 161, 163 Izenberg, Oren, 189 Jack, Jordynn, 331, 332, 335 Jacoby, Russell, 6, 7, 8 Jacoby, Susan, 24n3 Jameson, Frederic, 64, 111, 116n31, 246n19 Jemisin, N. K., 303, 313, 314–15, 316 Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (Ware), 257, 261 jock, 1, 15, 32–34, 35, 38–39, 40, 41, 42, 46, 49, 224 Jogalekar, Ashutosh, 201 Jones, LeRoi. See Baraka, Amiri Index

361

Joyce, James, 259 Judt, Tony, 58 Kander, Nadav, 39, 52n15 Kerry, John, 44 Kimmel, Michael, 42, 44, 46–47, 49–50 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 150, 166n9, 168n37, 316 Kirby, Jack, 251, 267 Kramer, Hilton, 11 Kristol, Irving, 9, 19, 120, 140 Kristol, William, 9 Krueger, Roberta, 244 Krugman, Paul, 14 Lacan, Jacques, 235 Lake, Jay, 304 Lasn, Kalle, 125 Latour, Bruno, 178, 180 Leavitt, David, 177 Lecklider, Aaron S., 3, 23n3, 350–55 Lee, Stan, 251 Lewis, Jerry, 205 Lezak, Iris, 182, 183, 184, 185, 187 Lightman, Alan, 311 Lipset, Seymour Martin, 140 Little Nemo in Slumberland (McCay) 19, 20, 94–95, 98–101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 114 Loebner, Hugh, 172, 173 Long, J. J., 282 Lord of the Rings (Tolkein), 233 Lothian, Alexis, 302, 309, 318n5

362

Index

love, 12, 20, 21, 63, 67, 155, 160, 163, 172–76, 178, 184, 185–189, 190, 202, 203, 234–36, 237, 239, 240, 241 love, courtly, 21, 234–37, 239, 245 Lund, Michael, 159, 160 Lye, Colleen, 74 Mac Low, Jackson, 179–91 MacFadden, Bernarr, 100 MacGillis, Alec, 35, 36, 41, 45 Maddow, Rachel, 14 Maharshi, Sri Ramana, 184 Malamud, Bernard, 140 Man, Self-Made. See Self-Made Man Marchman, Tim, 262, 263, 270n33 Marcus, Sharon, 59–61, 62, 63, 66, 67, 82–83 Marsalis, Wynton, 11, 24n10 Marshall, David W., 227 masculinity, 19, 21, 29–55, 97, 99, 100, 101, 102, 108, 112, 188, 197, 205, 207, 210, 211, 212, 214, 215, 217, 224, 235, 236, 240, 292; crisis in, 46–48, 49, 50, 210–12, 214; dominance, 32, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 51; expertise, 33, 34, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 51, 52n19 Mazzucchelli, David, 261 McCarthy, Joseph, 24n3, 164 McCay, Winsor, 19, 93, 94, 101, 102, 106, 108, 110, 111, 112, 114 McCollum, Darius, 22, 326 McFeely, William, 98 McGrath, Charles, 254, 255, 256, 257, 258, 259, 261, 262, 268n10, 269n14

McGurl, Mark, 139 McKinnon, Gary, 22, 326, 327, 328 McPhee, John, 70, 71, 74, 75–78, 80, 85, 86, 87, 89, 90 Mead, Walter Russell, 57, 58 medicalization, 330, 340, 343 medievalism, 21, 223–48, 249 Mencken, H. L., 150 Mendlesohn, Farah, 307 Meskin, Aaron, 253 Messenger (periodical), 150, 155 Michaels, Walter Benn, 122, 128, 129, 130, 139, 140, 141 Middle Ages, 223, 226–27, 228, 230, 231, 232, 233–34, 238, 244 Miller, Ann, 260, 261 Miller, Tyrus, 183, 188 Mixon, Laura, 303 Mizruchi, Susan, 107, 108 MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games), 16, 281 Montaigne, Michel de, 279 Monty Python, ix Moore, Alan, 256 Morrison, Toni, 128 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 132, 140 Mr. Sammler’s Planet (Bellow), 126, 130–32, 133, 140 Mueller, Hannah, 304, 312, 319n13 Nafisi, Azar, 139 Neisser, Ulric, 180 neocon. See neoconservatism neoconservatism, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 9, 10, 11, 13, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 119–44, 166n1, 169n44

neoliberalism, 57, 58, 122, 125, 126–30, 133, 136, 139, 140, 141, 142n11, 352 nerd, ix, x, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23, 29, 30, 32, 33–34, 35, 38, 39–41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 48, 52, 56, 70–72, 73, 74, 89, 90, 91n2, 94, 96, 97, 98, 99, 102, 108, 109, 111, 114, 175, 178, 190, 195, 196, 197, 199, 202, 207–12, 213, 217, 218n16, 223–25, 226, 230–31, 232, 233, 234, 235, 237, 238, 240, 241, 245, 255, 266, 267, 275, 276, 278, 285–88, 293, 327–29, 330–31, 333, 335, 339, 340, 341, 342, 343, 353 New Left, 120, 132, 142n23, 164 neurotypical, 329, 331, 333, 338 New York Intellectuals, ix, 6, 17, 124, 126, 169n44 Ngai, Sianne, 182 Norton, Anne, 129 nostalgia, 231–32, 240 Nutty Professor, The (1963 film), 205–206, 210 O’Connor, Alice, 282 O’Reilly, David, 277 Obama, Barack, 19, 39, 41, 43, 44, 53n23 Oliver, Kelly, 197, 231 Omi, Michael, 123, 141n4 Orszag, Peter, 14, 19, 35, 39–41, 42, 44, 45, 47, 48, 52n15, 53n29 Osborne, Lawrence, 330 Outcault, Richard, 93, 94, 100, 115n1 Owen, Chandler, 155 Ozick, Cynthia, 140

Index

363

paleoconservatism, 119, 120 Pan-Africanism, 146, 156 Parsons, Deborah L., 292, 293 Path, The (video game), 292–93 “Pattern Recognition by Machine” (Mac Low), 179–80 Perloff, Marjorie, 180 Perry, Rick, 29, 30, 31, 32, 45, 49 Persepolis (Satrapi), 257, 260 Pittsburgh Courier (newspaper), 145, 147, 150, 151, 152, 160, 161, 164 Podhoretz, Norman, 9, 119, 121, 122, 140 Poe, Edgar Allan, 106 poetry, 20, 72, 174–75, 178, 180–90, 249, 255, 268n4 political correctness, 290 Posner, Richard A., 56, 57, 60, 318 Prendergast, Thomas, 231, 233, 234 proceduralism, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 277, 292, 293, 296n51 professionalism, 16, 19, 21, 42, 72, 249, 251, 259, 265, 303, 305, 306, 307, 308, 309, 310, 312, 313, 314, 315, 317, 318, 328, 329, 340 pseudonymity, 312, 313, 321n49 public intellectual. See intellectual, public Pulitzer, Joseph, 93 Putnam, Frederic Ward, 97, 98, 110 Pyle, Howard, 233 Pynchon, Thomas, 139 Quidditch, 223 Quinn, Zoë, 285

364

Index

race, as stratigraphic form, 70, 75, 84–88, 90 RaceFail ’09, 22, 301–25 racism, 22, 88, 90, 98, 131, 151, 152, 154, 155, 214, 302, 303, 305, 306, 311, 313, 316, 319n14 Randall, Tony, 210, 219n17 Randolph, A. Philip, 155 reading nerdily, 19, 70–73, 74, 175, 176, 245, 267 reading, surface. See surface reading Reagle, Joseph Michael, 305 Real Genius (1985 film), 208, 210 Rebel without a Cause (1955 film), 210 Reed, Brian, 184 Reid, Robin Anne, 309, 39n13, 321n57 Representative Works: 1938–1985 (Mac Low), 181 Revenge of the Nerds (1984 film), 38, 207– 208, 210, 212, 214 Ricoeur, Paul, 59 Roediger, David, 106, 115n23, 116n24 Roth, Philip, 121–22, 140 Rowe, John Carlos, 140 Rowling, J. K., 15 RPGs (role-playing games), 1, 16, 281, 286 Rubio, Marco, 351 Rumsfeld, Donald, 43 Ryan, Paul, 19, 35–36, 37, 38–39, 40, 42, 45, 49 Rydell, Robert, 96, 97, 98, 110 Sacco, Joe, 256, 258, 260, 261 Said, Edward, 259, 301, 311, 312, 315

Samyn, Michaël, 276 Sandow, Eugen, 100 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 15 satire, 145, 146, 150, 153, 154, 155, 163, 288, 290 Satrapi, Marjane, 257, 260, 261 Saved by the Bell (television show), 38, 219n19 Saxton, Alexander, 98 Scarborough, Joe, 38 Schjeldahl, Peter, 249, 257, 258, 261, 269n16 Schlesinger, Arthur, 2 scholars, 9, 13, 17, 19, 21, 60, 66, 136, 137, 151, 164, 178, 224, 225, 227, 245, 249, 250, 251, 253, 254, 258, 261, 266, 268, 277, 279, 292, 301, 302, 303, 317, 340, 351, 352 Schuyler, George Samuel, 18, 20, 145–171 science fiction (SF), 1, 16, 18, 19, 22, 70, 73, 75, 77, 79, 80, 85, 146, 152, 153, 157, 158, 159, 163, 165, 217, 223, 224, 301–25 science fiction and geology. See geology, as science fiction Scientific American (periodical), 180, 201 Scott, Sir Walter, 226 Sedaris, Amy, 15 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 61, 62, 63, 178 Segal, Gregg, 36, 37 Segal, Stephen H., 12 Self-Made Man, 47 Selfridge, Oliver G., 180 Sendak, Maurice, 94 serial fiction, 145, 146, 147, 148, 150, 152, 159–61, 163, 164, 165, 265, 269n27

SF. See science fiction Shakespeare, William, 226, 227 Sharansky, Natan, 133, 134, 135 Shaw, Adrienne, 275 Shaw, George Bernard, 200 Shawl, Nisi, 307, 320n27 Sherman, Gabriel, 44 Sinatra, Frank, 206 Slaves Today (Schuyler), 150, 153 Sobel, Marc, 251 Sonne, Thorkil, 331, 333, 342 Spacks, Patricia, 282 Spargo, John, 350, 351, 354 Spenser, Edmund, 226, 236 Spiegelman, Art, 94, 258, 259, 260, 261 Stanzas for Iris Lezak (Mac Low), 182–87 Specialisterne (Dutch company), 331, 333, 335, 342 Stein, Gertrude, 182 Sterling, Bruce, 75 Sterne, Laurence, 179 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 184, 203, 204, 205, 206 Stockwell, Peter, 157 Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The (Stevenson), 203, 204, 205, 218n14 strata, 76, 77, 78, 81, 83, 84, 88, 90 stratigraphy, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90 superhero comics. See comics, superhero surface reading, 13, 19, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 66, 67, 82, 83 Swift, Taylor, 14 Szczepaniak, Przemyslaw, 290

Index

365

Tagore, Rabindranath, 187 Tardos, Anne, 181 Teachout, Terry, 11 temporal ordering, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 86, 88, 90, 161 Thatcher, Margaret, 128 The Yellow Kid (Outcault), 93, 100, 104, 115n1 time travel and geology. See geology, as time travel Tolkein, J. R. R., 233 Trigg, Stephanie, 231, 233, 234 trigger warnings, 317, 322n62 Trilling, Lionel, 2, 126, 133, 140 Trilling, Renée, 232 Tristram Shandy (Sterne), 279, 280, 292 Tucker, Jeffrey, 154 Turing Test, 20, 172–76, 177, 178, 183 Turing, Alan, 20, 172–78, 179, 180, 189 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 98 Twain, Mark (Samuel Clemens), 233 twice-exceptional, 329, 335–39, 341, 346n31 Tyldum, Morten, 176

walking sims (walking simulators), 22, 275–300 Walpole, Horace, 226 Ward, Cynthia, 307 Ware, Chris, 257, 260, 261, 262 Washington, Booker T., 113 Wells, Ida B., 107, 110, 111, 112 West, Cornell, 9 Whitman, Walt, 182 Whittington, Harry, 43, 54n22 Wilkinson, Will, 30, 31, 45 Williams, Jeffrey J., 126–27, 128, 129, 130, 133, 139 Williams, Oscar, 155 Winant, Howard, 122, 123, 129, 141n4 Wingfield, Nick, 287 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 183, 184 Wolfowitz, Paul, 119, 139 wonk, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 29–55, 102, 110, 176, 180, 189, 353 Wonkette (web site), 18, 52n7 Wouk, Herman, 140 Wreden, Davey, 277 Wright, Richard, 65, 66

UFOs, 326, 327 Uris, Leon, 140 US Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), 64

Zinn, Howard, 9 Žižek, Slavoj, 9, 235 Zola, Émile, 6, 7, 8, 9, 12, 13, 14 Zuckerberg, Mark, 14, 136, 332 Zweig, Ellen, 184 Zwigoff, Terry, 256

Vowell, Sarah, 15

366

Index