Shortly after the 2016 presidential election, we editors had a conversation about the shock and awe exhibited by the left at Donald Trump’s ascendance to the presidency. As humanities scholars, having studied the work of theorists like Michel Foucault, Karl Marx, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno, we found the election results somewhat predictable. Actually shocking to us, however, was that more people did not. Part of the work of this collection is to use “critical theory” (we mean the term broadly, encompassing work in literary theory, philosophy, and political science) and the work of the humanities to explain and make sense of the current moment. What unites the following chapters is the assertion that with critical theory we can understand, contextualize, and even predict phenomena like the current moment. This is just one of many ways in which the humanities prove their value and importance.
The humanities have been under attack for decades now. In his 2015 essay, “Posthumanism in the Age of Globalization: Rethinking The End of Education,” William V. Spanos revisits his 1993 book, this time from the post-9/11 perspective, to reconsider the role of humanities studies and the “post-human” that he defined in his concluding chapter. Spanos suggests that the “United States’ globalization of the free market in the post-Cold War period and, after the bombings of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon by al Qaeda on 9/11…enabled an invasion of the University by neoliberal capitalism intended not only to recuperate but to aggrandize the control over knowledge production it lost during the turbulent Vietnam decade.”1 More specifically, Spanos writes, he is referring to the “obliteration of both the residual traditional function of the humanities (the production of good ‘nationalist’ citizens of the nation-state)” and “the function of the humanities inaugurated by the protest movement in the 1960s and 1970s that would supersede the former”.2 In his meditation on the post-human and the post-structural decentering of man, Spanos concludes that we must not only “forcefully resist the neo-liberal capitalist version of globalization and its dehumanizing instrumentalist—and neo—imperial—imperatives” but that humanities teachers and scholars in particular must “establish a dialogic relation…between the departments of the humanities” in order to “inaugur[ate] an authentic intellectual polity of the common that would become the model of the coming community.”3 In this collection, we seek to bring together various departments of the humanities to answer such a call to action.
Particularly concomitant with Trump’s rise and that of the Alt-Right globally is further decimation of the already-massacred humanities disciplines—and this is discussed at length in Chaps. 6 and 11 of this book. Justin Stover’s March 4, 2018 essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “There is No Case for the Humanities: And deep down we know our justifications for it are hollow,” began with the claim that “the humanities are not just dying – they are almost dead.”4 The essay goes on to discuss how the disciplines are “squeezed on both sides” because defenders on the left and the right do not make adequate defenses and the call to make the case for the humanities is “fraught with ambiguities.”5 One of the more troubling assertions of the piece is the claim that “left defenders of the humanities have defended their value in the face of an increasingly corporate and crudely economic world, and yet they have also worked to gut some of the core areas of humanistic inquiry – “Western civ and all that” – as indelibly tainted by patriarchy, racism, and colonialism.”6 If uncovering silenced histories and working from a New Historicist framework is troubling to Stover, perhaps he ought to consider the role his own ideological agenda plays in his argument. Further, Aaron Hanlon’s December 14, 2018 essay in The Chronicle Review effectively pushes back on such a claim. In “Lies About the Humanities – and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them,” he discusses the often-unacknowledged lack of distinction between the humanities and the social sciences, and “the charge that all too often ideology, not truth or rigor, guides humanistic research.”7 “Many of the most important questions we face as a species aren’t falsifiable,” he writes.8 Hanlon posits questions like, “Can there be just warfare? Is the death penalty moral?” and asks, “What empirical scientific test would definitely answer these questions?”9
This collection seeks to use critical theory to understand the rise of the Alt-Right and the election of Donald Trump— and, in doing so, to assert the necessity and value of the humanities. While neoliberal mainstream culture has expressed shock at the seemingly expeditious rise of the Alt-Right movement and the outcome of the 2016 election, a rich tradition of theory may not only explain this “phenomenon” but also chart an alternative understanding of the movement, revealing the persistence of right-wing populism through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Though the humanities have seen themselves undervalued and under attack in recent years, the historical and cultural contextualization of the current moment via theory is a means of reaffirming the value of the humanities and the ever-important and multifaceted skill of critical literacy. The underlying focus of this work is reestablishing and reaffirming the humanities, particularly the study of literature, theory, and philosophy through questions like how the humanities can help us understand the here and now. The overarching argument is that critical theory provides a richer understanding and analysis of the present moment and an opportunity to make connections to various disciplines within the humanities. In the wake of the current historical moment, anti-intellectualism has become the modus operandi for our predominant governing bodies. This book seeks to examine, challenge, and develop thoughtful alternatives to these dangerously limiting ideologies, arguing for the necessity of deliberate and concentrated theoretical analysis as a form of individual and collective agency.
Chapter 2, “‘For Every Two Steps Forward, It Often Feels Like We Take One Step Back’: Foucauldian Historiography and the Current Political Moment,” uses several of Michel Foucault’s texts to rethink linear conceptions of historical progress. In November 2017, former president Obama wrote a letter to supporters, encouraging them not to lose hope: “Our country’s progress has never followed a straight line – for every two steps forward, it often feels like we take one step back,” he wrote.10 But does such a statement put forth a problematic, linear, and somewhat oversimplified conception of history? In The Order of Things, Foucault presents an overarching question that may be of use here: “But what if empirical knowledge, at a given time and in a given culture, did possess a well-defined regularity? If the very possibility of recording facts, of allowing oneself to be convinced by them, of distorting them in traditions of making purely speculative use of them, if even this was not at the mercy of chance?”11
This chapter begins by tracing Foucault’s historiography from The Order of Things (1966), to The Archeology of Knowledge (1969), to finally Discipline and Punish (1975). The Order of Things initiates Foucault’s archeological method, the notion that knowledge and systems of thought are governed by rules that people subconsciously adhere to and that such rules define conceptual possibilities that create the limits of thought in a given period and place. Foucault extends such a method in his next work, The Archeology of Knowledge, in which the value of this method becomes clearer: it allows Foucault to compare various discursive formations in different periods while displacing the primacy of the individual subject crucial to traditional historiography. In the last text addressed here, Discipline and Punish, Foucault employs genealogy to account for the transition from one way of thinking or one system of thought to another—something that the archeological method could not do, he says. Foucault’s genealogy—an extension of Nietzsche’s genealogy of morals—negates a grand scheme of linear, progressive history. Foucault argues instead in Discipline and Punish that genealogical analysis reveals that systems of thought are actually the result of unforeseen, unpredictable historical turns, and not the consequence of destined or fixed trends.
This chapter uses Foucauldian historiography, as defined and refined through these three primary texts, to destabilize popular conceptions of cohesive historical narratives of linear progression and liberal advancement. From Obama’s letter to myriad celebrity commentaries to political talk shows and editorials, narrative has acted as a salve over the last year, and popular rhetoric has conceptualized of the 2016 election as derailment from a progressive path, which presupposes the existence of an inaccurate historical trajectory refuted by Foucault in his work. Put simply, this chapter proposes a critical framework for rethinking the connections between the current political moment and those that came before it, as well as a means for reconceptualizing and unpacking the notion of History.
In Chap. 3, Andrew Woods begins with the premise that an analysis of the Alt-Right from the perspective of critical theory necessitates an understanding of what the Alt-Right says about critical theory. He argues that a conspiracy theory that identifies the Frankfurt School as the origin of cultural Marxis...