Reaganism in Literary Theory: Negative Moralism and Hermeneutic Suspicion

By Jeremiah Bowen

Reaganism is a discourse of devotion and disqualification, combining a neoliberal negative theology of the market with a neoconservative demonization of opponents. By representing the market as a moralistic standard of perfection, a representation of goodness and freedom, Reagan’s personality cult organizes a social fantasy that shelters from inquiry the aggressivity of the market as a war of all against all. In literary theory and criticism, a homologous valuative system centered itself on the canon, which covers for exclusionary social systems by representing them as devoted agents of culture, defined as the Arnoldian study of perfection. Paul de Man argued for the displacement of this positive moralism, critiquing its referential structure for its failure to account for the arbitrariness of signification. But de Man’s proposals ultimately replace the system of culture and canon with a negative moralism, centered on literariness defined as a negative referent, a representation of the impossibility of desire to achieve its aims. 

De Man’s premises have been perpetuated in subsequent theory by persistent misrecognitions of dialectic as suspicious hermeneutics, of materialism as reference to materiality, and of demands for democratic equity as identity politics. The book traces this motivated reasoning through misreadings of Eve Sedgwick’s critique of conspiracy theory and Edward Said’s “secular criticism,” we are led back to the unexamined premises of Paul de Man’s negative moralism and the opportunistic competition of academic careerism. Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus cite Sedgwick to propose “surface reading” as an alternative or supplement to the hermeneutics of suspicion. But in failing to acknowledge that Ricoeur’s definition of a method common to Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud in terms of suspicion is a form of “defining the opposition,” which constructs the other as a negative image of the self. Their theoretical blind spots are thus linked to political or historical blind spots, and their willingness to accept bad faith objectifications of opponents is linked to the interpretive structure of privilege, in which narcissism organizes and sanctions aggressivity.

Like Sedgwick, Edward Said interrogates the homologies among interpretive, political, and historical patterns of behaviour, discerning the implication of literary studies in the rise of Reaganism. His secular criticism proposes an alternative to Reagan’s devotion to markets as well as the humanities’ devotion to canon, but it is attacked by J. Hillis Miller and Stanley Fish as a form of referential moralism. This line of attack is predicated on de Man’s arguments for the impossibility of reference, read as an alibi for competition and opportunism. A new explanation for the connections between de Man’s literary theory and his opportunist collaboration with Belgium’s Nazi occupiers is suggested by his use of arbitrary signification to obviate solidarity and cooperation in many forms—whether it be truth as intersubjective verifiability, justice as coincidence of interests, or aesthetic harmony as the compatibility of diverse preferences. His arguments to replace logic with aesthetics as the primary criterion of judgment are homologous with the replacement of the rule of law with personal rule, an unprincipled opportunism demonstrated by both supremacist politics and market competition.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Jul 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781785272806

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Reaganism in Literary Theory

Reaganism in Literary Theory

Negative Moralism and Hermeneutic Suspicion

Jeremiah Bowen

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2020

by ANTHEM PRESS

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Copyright © Jeremiah Bowen 2020

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

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ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-278-3 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-278-0 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Essay One Interpretive Politics: Reading Systemic Oppressions with Eve Sedgwick, Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus

1. Reading the Lines

Obsolete Suspicions

Bad Faith

2. Paranoid Projects

Conspiracy Theory

Superman Cape

Narcissistic Rebellion

3. Defining the Opposition

Bad Religion

Noninterference and Neoliberalism

Privilege and Self-Censorship

Essay Two Devotional Scholarship: Reading Academic Reaganism with Edward Said, Stanley Fish and Walter Jackson Bate

1. Neoliberalism and Religious Intellectualism Neoliberalism and Religious Intellectualism

Culture and Legacy

Emulation Pedagogy

2. Neoconservatism as Negative Devotion

Bate’s Trivial Titles

Indifferent Opponents

3. Professional Privilege

Mirrored Positions

Essay Three Negative Moralism: Reading Literariness, Materiality and Revolution with Paul de Man and J. Hillis Miller

1. The Disqualification of de Man

Singular Circumstances

2. Reference to Nothingness

Discrepancies of Desire

Negative Moralism

3. Misreading Materialism

Culture and Soil

Overturning and Displacement

Progress and Determination

Index

Acknowledgments

For all my teachers, whether I encountered them as allies or as opponents.

Essay One

INTERPRETIVE POLITICS: READING SYSTEMIC OPPRESSIONS WITH EVE SEDGWICK, STEPHEN BEST AND SHARON MARCUS

We can say of the eighties what Orwell could say of the forties: In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’

W. J. T. Mitchell, The Politics of Interpretation (1982)

The current era of political polarization and culture war in the United States is often measured against a fantasy, an imaginary era of nonpartisan harmony in the wake of a war that established The American Century.¹ And yet this depoliticized image signifies the same age Orwell describes as inescapably political, in an essay written to span the ocean between allies.² Like the forties, the eighties is now often mythologized as a time of American triumph, when good struggled against an Evil Empire, and freedom overcame tyranny. This mythological narrative of holy war is presaged by Ronald Reagan’s depoliticized image of the 1962 election in A Time for Choosing: There is no left or right [...] only an up or down—up to man’s age-old dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order, or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism.³ Reagan is apparently undeterred by the manifest contradiction between his disavowal of partisanship and the ostentatiously partisan occasion of his speech, televised in support of Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. That disavowal itself also depends on Reagan’s image of the Democratic Party as drifting toward a Stalinist authoritarian version of socialism. The bad faith of his trope is undeniable, especially when one recognizes that Reagan ostensibly refuses partisanship only to immediately define his own party as agents of man’s age-old dream of freedom, and dehumanize the other party as a mindless colony of insects bent on dystopian oppression. We will see homologous rhetorical gestures repeated throughout this book, as various characters deny or conflate the differences of left and right, claiming for themselves universality and agency, while objectifying others as mere negations of universal value, truth and right.

Reagan’s frame and premises—defining the struggle between left and right in the United States in terms of individualism, freedom or liberty, the same terms used to define the reasons for US opposition to the USSR—have essentially been accepted as the default explanation for the national turn away from the progressivism of Roosevelt’s New Deal. Within this frame, US democracy is defined as consistent or even coterminous with private property, both subsumed by the signifier liberty, and this is placed in opposition to Stalinist authoritarianism, the signifier under which the socialism of the USSR is identified with any system of communal ownership or wealth redistribution. Never mind that none of these identifications are rigorously defensible, let alone self-evident, as they ignore contradictions internal to each society. In both the US and the USSR, a professed adherence to principles of equal distribution of power is belied by traditions of terrorist governance that have maintained disproportionate power for elites. While the United States touted its principles of political equality, its unequal distribution of wealth and privilege guaranteed inequities in political and legal representation and enforcement. And while the USSR boasted of its principles of economic equality, its inequitable distribution of political and legal enforcement and representation guaranteed inequalities of wealth and privilege. In both cases, mutually reinforcing inequalities and inequities ensured that, for most citizens, their nations were neither a pure heaven of freedom and opportunity, nor a pure hell of oppression.

Reagan calls analytic attention to one such contradiction internal to US democracy in this period by means of the caveat he places on freedom, specifying that it should be consistent with law and order. In a speech given in support of Barry Goldwater, famously an opponent of the Civil Rights Act, this caveat carries significant semantic weight—just as it would for Richard Nixon in elections to come. The record of the Nixon and Reagan administrations demonstrates that freedom consistent with law and order meant freedom inconsistently distributed and defended along lines of race, sex, class and religion. His record marks Reagan as a counterrevolutionary figure in the trajectory of US democracy, in which the rejection of aristocratic rule has progressed incompletely and unevenly toward broader inclusion. And yet his inconsistent support for individual freedoms places him in the mainstream of US history, as the rhetoric of liberty has always been partly inconsistent with structural inequities in production, law and policy.

This inequitable recognition of citizens’ equal right to liberty is the condition for a function of Reagan’s rhetoric of depoliticization that is not so much persuasive as it is permissive, and which remained durably effective even in his post-presidency and after his death. This permissive gesture is also occasioned by the unpopularity of Goldwater, whose extreme views would win over only the five states of the Deep South and his home state of Arizona, earning him the smallest share of the popular vote ever received by a major-party candidate for US President. By positioning himself as voice of the unassailable center and standard, and by presenting his views as an expression of universal values, not partisan agendas, Reagan invites supporters of the far-right candidate he endorses to shelter under the strength and confidence of his rhetorical persona. It is a protective and permissive rhetorical posture, a claim to universality that guards against the disapproval of others, in which his audience is invited to share. That rhetorical posture would persist throughout his presidency, helping to normalize the polarizing policies that would constitute his administration’s putative ascension toward freedom—which included support for dictators,⁴ paramilitary death squads⁵ and apartheid regimes at home and abroad,⁶ as well as agitation against women’s reproductive rights,⁷ and the neglect of tens of thousands of queer citizens dying of an unchecked epidemic.⁸

In one sense, this relational pattern of assimilation or destruction of every difference, this aggressivity toward outgroups, is a function of what Slavoj Žižek calls the totalitarian Master, whose calls for discipline and renunciation provide cover for an invitation to transgress ordinary moral prohibitions.⁹ One follows such a figure so that one may unleash one’s own aggression on those who are designated as enemies, outsiders or subalterns, surrendering the rights and responsibilities of self-determination to the Master in exchange for permission to violate the rights of those beneath or outside the hierarchical order. While Žižek opposes this totalitarian Master to Theodor Adorno’s authoritarian personality, these explanations are not precisely at odds, as both define the consistency of an excessive deference toward those above one in a social hierarchy with demeaning violence toward those below.¹⁰ This relational structure behaves in accord with Jacques Lacan’s definition of madness, which is not exemplified best by a commoner who believes himself to be a reigning king, but by a reigning king who believes himself to truly be a king. In other words, the belief that one’s position truly expresses a substantial distinction is a signal error of madness. This faith in necessary referentiality is also a signal condition of unexamined privilege.

While Adorno’s model interprets this relational structure of deference and aggressivity in terms of a personality type, Žižek treats it as a social fantasy, a shared structure of enjoyment into which one is initiated by the rhetoric of a central figure, around which a group organizes the rules and values of its relations. This helps to explain why followers of authoritarian figures or personality cults sometimes seem indifferent to the harms they suffer as a result of their leader’s policies or actions. Harms caused by Reagan’s neoliberal policies were not confined to minority communities, but also hit the white working-class communities who were a key part of Reagan’s successful electoral strategies. Those communities were deeply impacted by union busting, shifts in the tax burden toward those with less wealth and income, weakening regulatory protections, and encouragement of domestic deindustrialization and offshoring. These policies contributed to a period of wage stagnation that began in 1980 and still continues, even as wealth and productivity has increased exponentially.¹¹ But if Žižek’s Master offers a compensatory exchange of social benefits for psychic benefits, this is not proffered or accepted as a conscious bargain. The mechanisms by which such contracts are foreclosed from attention, disavowed or denied—not to mention the generically fascist character of this arrangement—have only become topics of greater interest during the Trump administration. These mechanisms are important to the study of interpretation, and especially to theoretical reflection on the social construction or production of meaning.

Such foreclosures and disavowals are part of the social technics of knowledge production, information distribution and meaning making. If the negative consequences of Reagan’s policies and priorities cited above are not what first come to mind when one encounters his name, this is explained in part by the partisan politicization of education, media and interpretation. Already in 1982 Mitchell was defining the New Right in terms of this partisan attack: The emergence of Reaganism has brought the pressure of economic and political reality directly to bear on the practice of criticism and scholarship. The intellectual and academic community, that part of society which lives by and on interpretation, finds itself threatened with loss of power, jobs, and prestige.¹² In literary studies, these losses persisted in every decade since Mitchell’s caution, despite repeated promises of a boom just around the corner. There is no way to predict whether this trend will dramatically alter its trajectory, or simply continue until graduate education in literary study collapses entirely. But it is clear that the efforts Mitchell describes to undermine the prestige and security of workers in the academic humanities comports with other efforts to politicize interpretation: Alongside the delegitimization of nonpartisan journalism and the invention of a fair and balanced news network by Republican political strategist Roger Ailes, the threat to literary studies Mitchell cites is implicated in a decades-long pattern of practice, with obvious strategic value for anyone who might wish to manipulate definitions of the mainstream in US politics and culture. The damage done to Nixon’s agendas by student activism and investigative reporting has apparently not gone unanswered, as his party has sought to maintain its title to values and principles of democracy that are often contradicted by its deeds. By redefining his opponents as evil antagonists in an eternal struggle between ascension and decline, Reagan set the tone for the next 50 years of partisan struggle.

Of course, such observations about patterns of behavior, systemic consistencies and strategic incentives can be mistaken for conspiracy theory, as we will discuss in connection with Eve Sedgwick’s reflections on the AIDS epidemic in the United States. This ambiguity between conspiracy and what she calls systemic oppressions has often been used to the right’s advantage: Whether it be Zionist protocols, global communist plots, jihadist terror, or immigrant invasions, the right’s grand narratives inevitably define the outgroup against which aggression is permitted as an inexplicably powerful cabal drawn from the marginalized or disempowered side of an asymmetrical struggle. Like the self-aggrandizing, self-universalizing fantasy of a silent majority living in a city on a hill, melodramas of victimization in which powerful and wealthy white men are beset by demonized and demeaned minority subalterns completely ignores systemic inequities. So while this dimension of narrative, poetics and interpretation is incomparably important to the reproduction of power, it is an often underestimated and overlooked aspect of US politics and history. The period of US history in which minority rule, information bubbles and fake news have blossomed as primary drivers of public policy has been the same period in which the academic centers of expertise in narrative, poetics and interpretation have been systematically defunded and disempowered. This need not be misread as a conspiracy in order to be acknowledged as a systemic consistency that accords with the right’s strategic incentives.

As Mitchell observes of the eighties and Orwell of the forties, we still live in an age in which there is no escaping politics—and in politics, there is no escaping interpretation. Just now, in an interview with the New York Times Book Review, a Yale professor in his seventies is defending the aristocratic spirit of the university against the egalitarian and democratic values of US political culture.¹³ While he assures us he does not object to these values in our political life, Anthony Kronman speaks of the dangers of importing such values into academic life. As if the university were a walled sovereignty upon which students were imposing their foreign democratic culture, or else an apolitical realm in which questions of power were suspended, he accuses students of engaging in the politicization of academic life.¹⁴ Seemingly unaware that his aristocratic values are as political as democratic ones, Kronman’s argument illustrates the self-aggrandizing fantasies of victimization that are so often voiced by the most privileged wealthy white men, fantasies we will see recur throughout this book. Kronman calls the attempt to democratize higher education an assault on American excellence, and by defining his own values as universal, he remains etymologically true to the aristos of his preferred spirit. He warns against an invasion, already underway, of the demos into Yale’s rarified halls, bringing with them Orwellian attempts at purification and restriction of speech on campus.

It is easy to forget that the term aristocracy—even in the analogical sense of spiritual aristocracy that Kronman invokes here—is already partisan in its valorizing redefinition of oligarchy, or minority rule, as rule by the best. The distinction best presumes a universalized standard of value, a central referent which would guarantee that the excellence Kronman celebrates is not merely relative or contingent, but is universal and necessary, defined by those distinguished not in this or that particular endeavor [...] but in the all-inclusive work of being human. His use of a vocabulary of inclusion to define an exclusionary ethos is an echo of William Bennett and Walter Jackson Bate, whose rhetoric of crisis in the humanities was provoked by challenges to the aristocratic, white, heteronormative, masculinist canon that for so long centered humanistic study. Kronman’s reaction to this destabilization of an exclusionary standard of value is indicated by the anecdote that begins his book, concerning one residential unit adviser at Yale who decided to abandon the traditional title of master, because he understood why black students in particular might be sensitive to the use of the term.¹⁵

Immediately after recounting this facially reasonable decision, Kronman mocks it as a clear demonstration of the inferior intelligence of both the would-be master and the black students about whom he articulated concern:

I found it hard to believe he was serious. In an academic setting, the word master carries none of the connotations the complaining students found offensive. Instead of mindlessly deferring to their feelings, the master of Pierson should have told them what is obvious—that in this setting the word has an altogether different meaning.¹⁶

This is the implicit interpretive theory of privilege in action. Connotations, in Kronman’s view, should apparently be erased and reset at every institutional threshold, to be defined solely by those with the preponderance of institutional power. In that view, meanings are not carried over from a more familiar to a less familiar usage or rhetorical situation. Instead, words mean what those in power say they mean. Kronman treats as obvious the presumption that Yale tradition decides what words mean for all those who tread on its campus, and insists no other connotations are valid, no matter how the language or its population of users might change over time. The decision to alter one’s vocabulary in response to altered conditions or audiences is here depicted as ridiculous, unserious or mindless, as laughably irrelevant as a student’s feelings. But any thinking that disavows feelings thereby ignores key aspects of its own occasion, frame and motor, just as much as any inquiry that disavows its historical and social implication.

Kronman’s characterization of such incidents as posing Orwellian dangers to campus life at Yale illustrates that, just as Reagan and his eighties are too often reduced to stock characters of popular myth, so too are Orwell and his forties. It should not be surprising that even the briefest review of Orwell’s warnings against politicizing speech, in Politics and the English Language, reveals an argument that contradicts Kronman’s reference. But it would be a dire mistake to avoid discussing such simplistic instrumentalizations of historical and literary figures and events: first, because they are so often carried out by the privileged and powerful, like this former Dean of Yale Law School. Silence on the overly familiarized tropes of mythologization or hagiography actually helps to reproduce them, as their alternative and antidote is not demonization or dismissal, but careful attention. To become familiar, after all, is to recede from attention, and figures like Reagan or Orwell are misremembered because they are referenced but not recalled. The most certain way to humanize and contextualize mythological figures is to attend closely to their words and deeds, drawing conclusions from the patterns discerned there, rather than from reputation, expectations or received wisdom.

Writing just a few months after World War II ended, Orwell reminds us of the tenor of the time when he epitomizes its political speech in some familiar phrases: "bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world."¹⁷ Orwell mocks these as hackneyed figures, robotically repeated, in conformity with the general rule that orthodoxy […] seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. But his point is not primarily stylistic. Nor is he proposing an aesthetic program—even though, like Williams’s insistence on no ideas but in things, Orwell’s advice emphasizes the importance in writing of calling up mental pictures. His primary concern is the political force of such images, which the political speech he cites is designed to neutralize. The familiar phrases are designed to repulse their readers’ attention, by means of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. By drawing attention to them, Orwell’s defense of the English language presents an alternative to the defense of the indefensible accomplished through obfuscation and distraction. He reminds readers that defeating Hitler did not defeat indefensible acts as such, and to that end recalls that the USSR purged dissidents and Jews, the US killed civilians with atomic weapons and the UK massacred its imperial subjects. The implication is that these Allied powers should not be allowed to mythologize themselves as purely noble and virtuous figures by contrast with their Axis enemies. The political oratory Orwell decries is meant to depoliticize the atrocities of one’s own country, subtracting their horror to leave only the empty formalism of terms like "pacification, transfer of population, rectification of frontiers. These terms allow their audience to forget or ignore the horrors that might be evoked by mental pictures, smoothing them over with technical jargon. Contrary to Kronman’s allusion, Orwell here argues against the depoliticization of language, and for its repoliticization. Clearly, Kronman’s desire to erase the historical connotations of master" exemplifies the political language Orwell condemns more than the evocative writing he prefers.

In Mitchell’s gloss, Orwell’s argument is that the pervasiveness of politics was very bad for language, that it tended to replace discussion with ‘a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia.¹⁸ While this could be taken to mean that Orwell argues for the depoliticization of discussion or debate, such an interpretation would not be consistent with his account of political speech. When Orwell claims that political writing is bad writing, he is not objecting to the intrusion of political concerns into discussions that would be better organized around universal values. Instead, he is objecting to the elision of specific, concrete content in discussions of public policy. Mitchell’s reading is not wrong, per se, but it is potentially misleading. In part, this is because he is repurposing Orwell’s argument as an occasion for his own rhetorical task as editor of Critical Inquiry, arguing for the pertinence of the issue’s theme, The Politics of Interpretation. Mitchell makes room for opposing arguments in the journal by acknowledging that Orwell’s authority might be pressed into service by more than one side of current debates—having observed that politics is inescapable, but also that it can be very bad for language. Mitchell’s gloss is expedient in establishing the valid and pertinent point that politics has always elicited both interest and opposition among producers and critics of literature, and in that he is certainly not wrong. But his summary would likely mislead those who have not read Orwell’s famous essay, have not read it lately, or have only read about it.

Misreadings, or even reversals of the meaning of a text, seem inevitable in the exchange of approximations and citations of arguments which, especially if they are not central to the rhetorical task, are often presented in the form of a compromise deemed least likely to raise objections from supporters or detractors. This dim bog of what everyone knows—where debunked myths and useful innovations blur in a haze of partial recall, expedience and impatience—seems to more or less constitute every middle ground. I do not dispute the inevitability of this middle ground, because certainly there are times when we must deal in compromise and sojourn in bogs to reach an objective. But this foggy place is a waypoint, not a destination. Much is lost when Orwell’s argument is so vaguely characterized, as if from a distance. When it is pulled a little closer, its words and their context comprehended firsthand, we are reminded that Orwell’s irritation with political speech is not articulated as a call for autonomously aesthetic writing cleansed of political and historical impurities. It is not aligned with an ahistorical image of close reading, or a depoliticized common sense. What the essay condemns is the euphemistic jargon that depoliticizes state terror and sanitizes the horrors consequent upon state neglect. Orwell pleads with writers to reject facile professional clichés, but his proposals do not primarily aim at restoring the beauty or even the truth of English writing. They aim instead to renew its utility to the moment, to produce writing shaped to its purpose. Orwell clearly hopes that a reinvigorated forthrightness will renew the shock of atrocity dampened by technical terminology, expose the lie of apolitical consensus hiding a status quo brutality, and unveil the exploitation at the foundation of every flawless professional façade.

In revisiting what seems familiar, we often encounter surprises. Without this seemingly inexhaustible novelty of the old, literary studies would have little warrant for its curricula. But just as we reconstruct each time the memories we seem to merely review, so we stand a chance of changing our cultures each time we reflect on we are supposed to know. The obscure power of this process informs our reflection on the politics of interpretation, a phrase that recurs throughout the issue of Critical Inquiry that Mitchell frames as a response to Reaganism. That phrase implicates a broad range of personal, professional and social technics of meaning-making. However we may subdivide those technics for the purposes of academic study, analytic examination remains incomplete without a synthetic account of how these various scales and spheres of meaning interact. And however we may compartmentalize these domains of meaning in our personal and professional lives, our apprehensions of particular objects are incomplete without the comprehension of reality that conditions the meaning we make of them, even as it is conditioned by them. To study interpretation is therefore to study how the subject is formed or produced by a social order, and how a social order can be transformed or reproduced by subjects—or in other words, how a self is constructed by others, and how others are constructed by a self.

1. Reading the Lines

But when we reconsider Mitchell’s citation, the question arises as to why one might wish to keep out of politics—a wish implied by Orwell’s pronouncement of its impossibility. Reagan’s sheltering, permissive persona reminds us that political efforts to support or encourage social changes can threaten unexamined attachments and enjoyments, which are foundational to one’s sense of significance and worth—just as a politics that supports or restores an exploitative asymmetry of power provokes subalterns to demand recognition that their lives matter. Any view that presumes a zero-sum distribution of worth will define politics as antagonism and loss, and this in turn motivates the search for a realm without struggle or death. In other words, the notion that politics is a fight to the death—one that inevitably ends in a master–slave relation—is correlated with the wish for a domain of eternal, universal excellence, truth and beauty. The fallen world implies a higher world above it. The negative reference of each of these worlds to the other—one inevitable but undesirable, the other impossible but irresistible—constructs a sense of stability, and at the same time produces a reality effect of incompleteness or inconsistency, of compensatory losses and gains. In some sense, any academic discipline that imagines itself in terms of Matthew Arnold’s study of perfection necessarily participates in this ambivalent structure of interdependent but irreconcilable worlds, in which the necessity of enduring quotidian struggle, strife and cruelty is compensated by an eternal realm of universal value which guarantees the superiority of social structures that shelter and defend it. This is the logic that frames devotional scholarship.

From within that frame, Orwell’s desire to unmask the atrocities of Western humanist and liberal democratic societies might appear to undermine the institutions that keep the inescapable antagonisms of a fallen world in some degree of containment. This fear of undermining institutional stability and authority informs traditionalists and conservatives, from T. S. Eliot’s attachment to the church and the main stream of the Western tradition to neoconservative views of culture and religion.¹⁹ But in the last decade or so, the exposure and unveiling for which Orwell advocates has been called into question from an