Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right (review)

Timothy Brennan may well be the Ishmael of critical theory: his hand is against every man's, and every man's hand will be against his–at least some of the time. In the nine essays that comprise Wars of Position, he offers bracing and often brilliant critiques of the new Italian neo-Schmittian left, the use and misuse of Gramsci in postcolonial theory, most varieties of cosmopolitanism, Hardt and Negri's Empire and Multitude, and the academic left's aversion to politics of state, which has left it without an "organizational imaginary." Brennan's critique of the anarcho-Foucauldian left also leads him to spend a chapter arguing that Edward Said wasn't really all that into Foucault after all, and while I admire the effort, the chapter reads like a strained insistence that Gayatri Spivak never devoted very much time to Derrida.

But when Brennan turns his attention to actual politics, his work is markedly less successful. He writes, for example, that "affirmative action has always been relatively weak and decentralized" because it was "neither federal law nor executive order" (31). Actually, affirmative action has its origins in a series of executive orders, most notably LBJ's epochal executive order 11246, which dictated that "the contractor will take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin." Later on, Brennan tries to take Lani Guinier down a notch, calling her "a paradigm of Clinton liberalism" and attempting rather ludicrously to associate her with the siege at Waco on the grounds that she is "an uncritical fan of Janet Reno" (167). In reality, far from being a paradigm of Clinton liberalism, Guinier was thrown under the bus by Clinton liberalism at the first sign of complaint from The New Republic, even before she had a chance to take her candidacy to the Senate.

Most striking, however, are Brennan's remarks about the Balkans, a subject about which Brennan is simply incoherent. Brennan starts by claiming that "embedded in the term 'East/West' is sedimentary evidence of a longstanding tendency in the West to associate the racial with the socialist other" (42) and that this tendency explains why the West demonized the Serbs. This offers "one way of looking, certainly, at the bombing of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, whose unruly Slavic actors (from the mainstream U.S. point of view) stand in quite readily for the Soviets in ways that go beyond their defiance of the U.S. government or their supposedly criminal actions. They are like the Soviets, they look like them to U.S. eyes, they speak a language 'like' Russian, they have the same religion, they are not quite European in the same way as are our NATO allies, they are from the same peripheral region to the east of the Europe that counts" (44). I do not imagine that the reference to the Serbs' "supposedly criminal actions" will go over well with survivors of the siege of Sarajevo or relatives of the thousands massacred at Srebenica. But quite apart from that nastiness, this account of the Balkans doesn't even make sense in Brennan's own terms, since Wars of Position also argues that the West has mapped Marxism onto Islam: "The slippage from anti-red to anti-Muslim sentiments takes place to most observers, left and right, as though it were a wholly natural phenomenon" (xii). If indeed Western imperialism has transferred anti-Communist sentiment to the cause of Islamophobia, there is no plausible way to claim that the U.S. belatedly came to the aid of Bosnian and Albanian Muslims in the Balkans because the Serbs were too much like the Russians. In the dramatic difference between Brennan's scorching theoretical arguments and muddled political positions, Wars of Position demonstrates, both by (deliberate) argument and (unwitting) example, the gap between the politics of theory and the practice of politics.