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Rethinking History: The Journal

of Theory and Practice
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On intellecticide or university
driven politics of history
a
Sande Cohen
a
Emeritus, School of Critical Studies, California
Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA, USA
Published online: 25 Aug 2013.

To cite this article: Sande Cohen (2013) On intellecticide or university driven politics
of history, Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, 17:4, 528-547, DOI:
10.1080/13642529.2013.825082

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 Rethinking History, 2013
Vol. 17, No. 4, 528–547, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2013.825082

Invitation to historians
On intellecticide or university driven politics of history
Sande Cohen*

Emeritus, School of Critical Studies, California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA, USA
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‘What does all will to truth mean?’

Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality

For Rethinking History’s ‘invitation’, I consider some inseparable actions

linking academic and artistic institutions with historical representation and
its politics. This involves discussion of how publication and institutional
conditions are historicized. To historicize is the key linkage: academic/
intellectual labor and writing often ‘plays for’ the future, in which such
endeavors require sanitizing a past-present so as to select and rank –
‘history’ serves, and services, present-future institutions and subjects.
Institutions are historical because they historicize. Continuity of institutions
and roles incorporates breaks and breakdowns. I make a critique of the
historicization performed by the institutions where I have worked and
published: the University of California and The California Institute of the
Arts and Academic Presses. In this, I link to historicize with capitalization
and some politics of university-driven knowledge.
Keywords: historicize; narrative; university; politics; critique

To prepare this essay, I read each of the previous invitations; perhaps making a
thread of continuity, a gesture of conservatism? My engagement with these texts
uses a sense of reading understood as a concept, practice and politics since
(at least) Roland Barthes, Paul de Man and Umberto Eco, among many, argued
for the validity of a skeptical reader, who read for, and to, generative processes of
interpretation and was not a target or stand-in for a text’s authorities and
authorizations. Eco was one of many writers who drew reading into analytic
engagement with a text’s codes: ‘ideological structure oppositions can be
translated into truth assignments (True vs. False) – and vice versa, as logicians
hardly suspect. There are ideological structures also in logical fabulae’
(Eco 1979, 39). Foucault put it that there are ‘rules of formation’ of discourse, a
precise ‘uniform anonymity’ area by area (Foucault 1972, 63). De Man’s
activation of ancient arguments about the power of discourse to impose itself in
the very act which makes ‘truth’ appear – the redundancy of words that ‘sound

*Email: sande.cohen@hotmail.com

q 2013 Taylor & Francis

 Rethinking History 529
right’ – turns out to have been not only a plea for skepticism, but an argument
against the intellectual who, in Martin Malia’s terms, is prone to ‘cupidity,
spinelessness, vanity, fascination with power [ . . . ] fervor’ (Malia 1999, 20). For
the skeptical (or critical) reader, a text is not some ‘undetectable mental event’
(Eco 1979, 197), but rather an opening to how the discursive and the social,
notions of process and subject at once, are put together. Among other outcomes,
close reading is sometimes an immobilization of a text’s order-words, that
Deleuze and Guattari construct which tied discourse to power. Thus, powers of
reading variously emerged, belonging to intellectual critique or an intellectual
activism which used reading to make a critique.
In any case, I am awed by the exceptional scholarship of the previous
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invitations, but especially by the thoughtfulness of the writing. Considered as a

stream of writing, the previous contributions more than extend the implications of
‘doing history’, which perforce involves ‘bringing into effect of a sense or the
realization of a value [ . . . ] not truth and falsity but the noble and the base, the
high and the low, depending on the nature of the forces that take hold of thought
itself’ (Deleuze 1983, 104). Noble and base and high and low are intensely
engaged by the previous invitations: they reflect on the moral dimension as
positively mixed with epistemology, as many of the contributions explicitly
affirm a critical knowledge of past injustices to groups; collectively, the writings
consider specific institutional involvements; they use syntaxes, from poetic
evaluations of great peoples destroyed to ruminations on method, and just about
all the invitations cross back to that abyss question, or that peculiar repetition
Jenkins notices, the question ‘what is history for?’, a (perhaps) malevolent form
of the future anterior (Jenkins 1999a, 8).
The writings extend or perform engagement; not with ‘history’ but with what
the authors think of the forces that helped to generate the content of their writing,
the how of sense making. The thoughtfulness has to do not with professional
ideals of writing history, always illusory, but rather with processes evoked by the
materials; Greg Dening’s piece gives a concise expression to this thought/
process: ‘The past has its own silences that never will be voiced’ (1998, 145).
From the perspective of past ‘underdogs’ who struggled in rigged systems of all
kinds, Dening ennobles the past and more. How to conceive the force of silence
and its actions with other forces? Peter Munz’s affirmation that his historical
analysis was a ‘reinterpretation’ of twelfth-century self-understanding grants
paradox a force in historical thought: ‘An objective story does not seem true to us
moderns; and a story which seems true to people in modern times is a subjective
story’ (Munz 2004, 477). Munz’s paradox remains. In a different register, Robert
Rosenstone notes that when he consulted the ‘leading historian of the American
left’ about writing on the Lincoln Brigades, he received a ‘nasty letter suggesting
the topic was not worth doing’, and so a completely different force, from out of
the bureaucracy of writing, was made conceivable: ‘The radicalism of the past
brought me into touch with the forces of history in the present as the FBI, the
Soviet government (probably the KGB), and Richard Nixon all poked fingers into
 530 S. Cohen
my research’ (Rosenstone 2004, 155). Patrick Joyce carefully draws attention to
his reading of Paul Ricoeur, after which critical history of the past involves ‘an
ethical matter of obligation to real people in the past’, which brought his writing
into conflict with the ‘managerial ethos that now dominates academic life’ (Joyce
2001, 368, 374). Elizabeth Ermarth’s invitation indexes her ‘lack of academic
mentoring’ and issues with Princeton University Press: ‘often Amateur Night and
where conventionality reigns’ (Ermarth 2001, 198). Most of the invitations I tried
to engage with also supposed something like Ankersmit’s insistence that there is
a dreadful ‘lack of a sense of urgency’ to historical thought; as ever, Ankersmit
refers to a conjunction of writing and knowing, where in the very act of taking a
position on the past there is partially an act of prejudice and disciplines are very
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effective in rationalizing some prejudices while excluding others (Ankersmit

2003, 418, 433 – 34).
However one wishes to conceive, there are internal and external forces these
invitations refer to, what Foucault called ‘caesurae breaking the instant and
dispersing the subject in a multiplicity of possible positions and functions’,
likened to ‘slender wedge[s]’ or instances of discontinuity meant to jar the
misleading continuities of subject and time (Foucault 1972, 231). In sum, and in
relation to historiography, critical reading pressures the famous from-to
supercode of every historicism. In semiotic terms, each of the ‘invitations’
evinces different sensitizations and moralizations, cohesions and dispersions
pushing and pulling intellectual knowing to different zones of sense and thought
(Greimas and Fontanille 1993, 109 – 10).
An invitation to publish is different from the usual submission process, and so
carries a different obligation. What I have stolen from the previous invitations, as
one submits a response to an invitation, is that one can affirm paradox –
invitation/submission – without descent into irony. Many paradoxes are
available on reading the previous contributions, but not one of them affirms irony
as an uncontested condition of present existence. Irony is one of the key
privileges of any bureaucracy of representation; a kind of power to set-time, as in
the common two –six years it now takes to put up a ‘high-impact’ museum show,
irrelevant in advance except as ‘career making’, and it is power without much
responsibility. I am thinking here of the economist Paul Krugman, who
ceaselessly calls for ‘debt relief’ to sustain spending while mostly silent about the
actual multiple run-ups (inflation) in prices that took place over 30 years; putting
ordinary savers together with ‘rentiers’ ironizes a radical difference. The UC
Berkeley economist Meister has shown that increases in UC tuition actually pay
interest on California bonds, which support pensions; imagine students were
shown how their tuitions were used (Bond-Graham 2012). Is the institutionaliza­
tion of irony always reactionary? In what follows then, I take the lead from the
previous contributions around the following topics: the various senses of
belonging to a discipline called history; publication experiences, as many refer to
this; and political-intellectual contradictions, which laps with disciplinary issues
via contested notions of academic politics, institutional expediencies, among
 Rethinking History 531
other things. If at times the writing passes into what is taken for disrespect toward
professors/academe, nothing is invented, and the transformations discussed
below suggest not so much subjective experience as collective processes badly
politicized (capitalized). After all, if a scholar with the status of Mark Taylor can
call for an end to graduate training in the arts and humanities (Taylor 2009), what
is said below is only more intense in its conceptions.
I am not an historian, only a historiographer. The closest I came to writing
narrative history was two versions of a long essay on mainland Chinese
and American political obedience to the insistent story of ‘One China’.
A historiography story, the very phrase ‘One China’ names and forces silence
over discontinuities between the names (forces) China and Taiwan.
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Paradoxically, as a narrative, ‘One China’ is anti-discursive because it silences

discontinuity and so it is anti-intellectual, a real academic and social ‘whopper’.
The ‘public world’ as a whole is full of such story-whoppers. In fact, using
narratives to take sides seems to rely, at times, on a certain incoherence. A recent
narrative of the failure of ‘heroic’ conservative memorials to the Cold War insists
that the public has forgotten them; but forgetting is poorly defined as ‘public
indifference, skepticism, and apparent resistance to [ . . . ] triumphalism’ (Weiner
2012, 2). Making sense of history takes place in that huge vacuum today called
‘public life’: endless re-orientations to the powers that be, evocations if not
installations of continuity, including fears and threats of discontinuity. Just
consider the two parties in the US now blaming the other by invoking little more
than self-serving rationalizations (and omissions) of the recent/contemporary
past, with discourses that define just about nothing. As a non-historian then, I am
also non-competitive with historians who can certainly retreat to their redoubt,
their departments of ‘doing history’, the recoding of history, a negative continuity
because a continuity that uses the negative for political and cultural functions.
Deleuze, after Nietzsche, thought the very form of historical consciousness was
an education in learning how to die (Deleuze 1983, 155ff). What is that form?
Narrative catechisms, which are an expanded mode of repetition of Barthes’
notorious statement that ‘language is fascist’. Such catechisms are issued as
illusions of direction, goal, telos, subject and more, each with their own
privileged domination of means, techniques, procedures, and mechanisms of
validation. Levi-Strauss put historical meaning as a regressive one: ‘It suffices
therefore for history to move away from us in time or for us to move away from it
in thought, for it to cease to be internalizable and to lose its intelligibility, a
spurious intelligibility attaching to a temporary internality’ (Levi-Strauss 1966,
255). Thus historical representation is always a recoding of catechism by
catechism – instructions for accommodation to history – a line-up of sides or the
acceptable forms at any given moment, epistemic irresponsibility, as such forms
of consensus mix aesthetics and politics in a witches’ brew of integration of belief
and behavioral accommodation. The code of before-after or from-to allows for
story coherence, but change a date and every story can go haywire.
 532 S. Cohen
My methods of criticism have been philosophical and linguistic, written out
of a resistance to the dominance of law or the transmission of authority,
especially those ‘half-written’ prescriptions and prohibitions which have run
through, and still manage, the modern/postmodern human sciences. Tatiana
Flessas has posed this as a question concerning not only ‘history’ but all cultural
discourses and their artifacts: ‘If the object does not guarantee truth, then why
protect it?’ (Flessas 2005, 117). To historicize is to promise (after Nietzsche).
We can impose truth on the past in the name of intellectual property, or collective
memory, or social necessities so that ‘history’ provides ‘connection and
correspondence’ between knowledge and value (among other couples); but this
‘history’ generates its own discursive situation, conditioned by, in Flessas’s
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terms, life driven by a strange sense of ‘preservation-loss’, narratives that claim

to preserve the truth of the past while protecting a present from loss of whatever
cultural values are propagated by particular, dominant, narratives (Flessas 2005,
117). It is dominant that academics are employed to create and transmit the very
continuity of such scholarship, but what if this is only half-true, surrounded by
other relations not so sunny and synthetic? Many years ago, Mieke Bal asked if
professorial trashing was in fact incidental to academic ‘business’. In the cultural
wars of the 1980s (which have not ended), amply documented, it was in fact
progressives who ensured that deconstruction would stay in literary and cultural
studies, well away from history departments. Be that as it may, in a society where
people had affirmative desires and relations, without the baggage of narrative bad
conscience, where narratives were understood only as process-simulations,
would they not laugh at much of what historians write, particularly those
narratives that rely on notions of ‘normal’ subjectivity and experience? I was
struck by Robert Rosenstone’s full comment on his ‘professional’ training:
The leading historian of the American Left answered my request for leads with a
nasty letter suggesting the topic was not worth doing because the Lincolns [Brigade]
were no more than a bunch of Communists and liars. (This is the open mind of the
great historian? I wondered then. And still.) (Rosenstone 2004, 153)
Today, throughout the West, we have an unrelenting monumentalization,
narrations, of the smallest things: the New York Times now has an ongoing series
called ‘anxiety’, in which they document anxiety’s current twists and turns, its
narrative outcomes. They give ‘anxiety’ historical value. Foucault blasted this
monumentalization of culture, calling for the dismantling of history in favor of
genealogy; as he put it, the monumental is ‘a history given to reestablishing the
high points of historical development and their maintenance in a perpetual
presence, given to the recovery of works, actions, and creations through the
monogram of their personal essence’ (Foucault 1972, 94). But distinguished
historians tell us that Picasso’s Guernica is ‘unsurpassable’, a confounding
reactionary judgment from someone on the left (Clark 2010; http://www.
kunstkritikk.no/artikler/moderniteten-som-katastrofe-%E2%80%93-et-intervju­
med-t-j-clark/). In the literature of the 1930s and after, Herodotus was often
 Rethinking History 533
connected to ‘father of lies’, whereas, today, most historians are oblivious to the
history of history, the most obvious topic in the world. History has a history,
made by and ruined by the historians, those upper and lower case historians Keith
Jenkins and Hayden White and Michel Foucault and Michel de Certeau and
hundreds of others have written about. Yet, today, university historians leverage
insider-traded protected territories with other institutions, like museums, each
with their add-ons, with curators who dwell on history: are progressives the new
reactionaries? Authors such as Davies who argue that historicization is a process
of social smothering are completely on point: ‘historicized culture thus proves
inimical to enlightenment and autonomy: museums are just another coercive
public agency which (as Kant remarked) “does our thinking for us”’ (Davies
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2010, 27).
I was born in San Francisco in 1946, in the panhandle section of the Haight-
Ashbury, when San Francisco was still variously slummy. The suburbs went into
their ‘desertification’. Marin County, north across Golden Gate Bridge, was
paradise. I saw a wild turkey stampede there in 1954, which left a lasting sense of
nature amok. I roamed San Francisco at will – it was simply called ‘The City’ –
with the exception of the black area, Hunter’s Point. We were raised to be afraid
of ‘others’. My father had a small business, near Golden Gate Park. He had been a
linoleum layer. His family did bootlegging in Denver, Colorado. A Denver uncle
married an Indian, horrifying the Denver Jews. An Indian? I filed that away,
along with images of actresses as Indians, especially this one: Debra Paget in
Broken Arrow (1950).
Through my father’s business contacts, we ate at every great Italian and
Japanese restaurant in San Francisco. Some summers, we drove through the
deserts of Utah and the valleys of Wyoming to Denver, to visit old family. The
Salt Lakes were overwhelming and Colorado a dreamy zone. Jeremy Popkins’
invitation on growing up in academic and Jewish environs was not my experience
(Popkin 2010). We were petite-bourgeois so-so observant Jews and I dropped out
of Judaism as soon as I could. I went to public schools. Our grammar teachers
were pitiless. In addition to the transcendent Debra Paget, Tyrone Power films
made an acute pathway, in particular Captain from Castile (1947), which I saw on
TV in the mid-1950s. This was real blasphemy: in that film, Power’s family is
mayhemed by the Inquisition and, during his escape, gets the super-villain
Inquisitor on his knees, has him renounce Jesus, and then kills him; so he thinks.
Later in the film, in Vera Cruz on the way to topple the Aztecs, the Inquisitor pops
up to cleanse the troops, and is killed by an Indian the Power character freed, in
Spain, at the beginning of the film (see Figure 2).
Many years later, while teaching at CalArts, Herzog gave a talk in which he
announced he wanted to make a film on the conquest of Mexico, and asked if
anyone knew Captain; he was sure no one did. There was a good laugh at my
‘confession’ (see Figure 2). In 1963, I entered the Marine Reserves for six months
(the first hour of Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987) is very good on this), and
then went to City College, high school with ashtrays, but with a few enthusiastic
 534 S. Cohen
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Figure 1. Broken Arrow (1950). http://www.themoviescene.co.uk/reviews/broken­

arrow-1950/broken-arrow-1950.html.

instructors. I transferred to San Francisco State in 1967. By then San Francisco

was famous for its counter-culture, especially via music: Country Joe and the
Fish’s ‘Who Am I?’ resonated, with its savage critique of the counter-culture, at
the betrayals which were felt and thought to be taking place at the time. When did
Americans not cash-in at and on trouble? Without any hesitation, the brutality of
the Vietnam War defined my using school to drop-in to what was then a
legitimate alienation; pretty close to the opposite of today, where school is the
road to social integration, such as it is. An arts and humanities routine consisted
of reading one book per class per week, which meant only reading plus . . . When

Figure 2. Captain from Castile (1947). http://www.emovieposter.com/images/

moviestars/AA130627/200/lc_captain_from_castile_7_KS00381_L.jpg.
 Rethinking History 535
I left CalArts in 2009, we could not ask students to read more than 20 pages per
critical studies course. I met the now famous Vartan Gregorian at San Francisco
State. His lectures were stunning: ‘According to Pascal, the heart has reasons that
reason hardly knows’. I was hooked on intellectual history. Gregorian gave me
dozens of books to read on the disputes between Marxists and Anarchists, my first
intensive reading in any kind of history. The life of Bakunin, via E.H. Carr’s
biography, made Marx read as a sorcerer, with the exception of the labor theory
of value. After reading these disputes, it was not difficult to think of politics as the
ever-always legitimation of mayhem, the giving of illusory historical reason.
John Diggins had us read von Treitschke, whose writings could make one’s skin
crawl; the historian as con-artist. Elizabeth Gleason had us read von Gierke’s
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Natural Law and Society (1957), filled with translated passages from primary
sources, many of which are now obscure, but a text that had legal and moral
fictional ‘persons’ and groups running around trying to establish Mr. and Mrs.
Humanity in Reason and Law. I read French history with Arthur Meija, whose
sister was killed by the Manson Family.
For my MA, I read Husserl, Sartre and Heidegger for Donald Lowe, trying to
get a grip on phenomenology. I first read Collingwood and Danto in a
historiography course he offered, the former’s humanism inviting, the latter’s
analytics more dangerous. Lowe had us read Foucault as well, and it was startling
to compare, at the time, Foucault and Hobsbawm, the latter with his snappy put-
downs of counter-culture and the former with an austere rhetoric that encouraged
transgression; if some Marxist writing melded a bit with Formalism – Barthes’
first writings – it was clear that progressive thought in general was in delusion as
to its scientificity; and I didn’t see any disjunction between smoking a joint and
reading. I finished at San Francisco State taking a written MA exam while the
campus was in riot over the Kent State shootings; it was take the exam or wait a
year for the degree. Historicize yourself or watch time (opportunity?) disappear?
Gregorian was persistent that I should do a PhD in intellectual history with
Hayden White. So I did. When I got to UCLA, White wasn’t there; he left a letter
for me, suggesting which courses I might take. He was writing Metahistory at
Wesleyan (White 1973). I took a course on Medieval symbolism with the noble
Gerhardt Ladner, a refugee from Nazism. That class was acute in showing links
between symbol and social process. I took classes with a Reformation historian,
Classen, who made us write close book reviews of everything we read. I did a
review of three volumes of Luther’s Table Talk, and came to the conclusion
Protestantism was nuts – like Judaism, but historical: Protestantism was modern
– the subject as subject of inner wretchedness fully formed. I had inched to
Nietzsche. I studied French revolutionary history and after with Temma Kaplan,
a great teacher. I took classes in the history of science with John Burke, who, for
doctoral exams, had me read 50 books in the field, including the four volumes of
Mertz’s Opus (1965). These people were excellent educators. UCLA’s history
department, at its best, was tilted to a critical history of the intellectual traditions,
or so I thought. But I stayed away from most of the European historians, whose
 536 S. Cohen
work was often an avoidance of ideation. Students of White had some glimpses –
table talk – of the anti-intellectualism, indeed the dread many historians felt
about Metahistory and White’s relations to existential-formalism, which by far
exceeded White’s leftism. All of the interested candidates for inclusion in the arts
and humanities had emerged: feminism, socialism, Marxism, psychoanalysis,
literary theory, culturalism; group after group – identities – tied to theory but
subservient to progressive politics. Barthes was coming up while Lukacs ruled,
before Althusser was widely read (or located in anthologies); in the early 1970s,
Lukacs and Habermas gave the deadly shot to anything ‘vulgar’ with the Marxist
turn to subjectivity, as it was called then. There are many turns in historiography,
but that one – as it merged with Lacanian notions of ‘lack’ and negativity –
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generated serious confinements of theory and hence critique. One of the most
brilliant books of that era, Wilden’s System and Structure, which introduced
Lacan but also much else in modern thought, especially some formal aspects of
communication, information-theory, inter alia, seems to have been ‘disappeared’
by many contemporary writers on these matters.
White returned to UCLA in 1971. He was a generous teacher. We started to
meet once a week, structured by a reading that he and I then discussed. He did not
push his own specialization. So we read Hegel and Kant and Nietzsche on and on
for a year. Primary sources were paired with what he thought was the best
commentary literature. I read dozens and more obscure books, which were
brilliant in their domain of thought. He taught a seminar that attracted students
from across the graduate programs. He brought the student papers to the seminar
one night, threw them across the room, and said ‘none of these papers are
publishable. I’ve done factory work, and scholarship is harder’. At which point I
took doctoral exams. I did not know what a doctoral thesis in history looked like,
but soon found out. I started a thesis on Bachelard, but dropped it. I started a
thesis on Cassirer, and then dropped it. I finally decided to write in the history of
philosophy. I borrowed Pepper’s notions of philosophy – from White’s work –
and came to the intellectual history conclusion that Wittgenstein closed the
history of Idealism, or so I thought. In trying to figure out how Wittgenstein
linked said/shown and language games, I found Feyerabend’s writings – another
intense critic – important. After completion of the PhD, 1975 –76, I applied for a
post at a prison in Monterey County, but they told me I would be made a prisoner
because of my small height. Temma Kaplan, unbeknownst to me, put me in for a
post-doc at Brown, in a field of 112 candidates, and, after a good interview, I took
off for Providence, Rhode Island.
I wrote about Brown in Academia and the Luster of Capital (Cohen 1993).
It was a position under legal scrutiny because of Brown’s history of discrimina­
tion against women. No one informed me. I survived a search for a tenure-track
post, whose outcome was cancelled by the over-riding legal issue of past
discrimination. In this first post, I directly saw the historian’s fear of thought;
I supervised a thesis that used Lacan to understand Dostoevsky and the Russian
historian, Gleason, recoiled: ‘I don’t see Dostoevsky through Lacan’. I served on
 Rethinking History 537
a search committee with Gordon Wood and the smartest dissertations, so
I thought, were tossed out; ‘too complex’ was the refrain.
I went back to UCLA. They offered me part-time work to teach
historiography. In 1980 I was asked by a Century City law firm to read the
depositions given by the Beatles in their lawsuit to have a film stopped. I read the
depositions, gave an ‘opinion’ that the Beatles’ music was public property, and
could never again hear Lennon singing his lullabies (‘imagine’), given his
documented testimony and its Mr. Scrooge attitude. I gave a workshop at CalArts
on the new theories of the arts and humanities, especially Structuralism, and they
offered me part-time work. From 1980 –88, I alternated between UCLA and
CalArts. If I taught a lot, I made decent money for the times. I worked on my first
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book while teaching four summer school classes in 1984. At CalArts, the director
of Sweet Smell of Success (1957), Alexander McKendrick, asked me if my first
class, on perception and art, was really going to show the students the being of
perception. I didn’t know anything about perception apart from phenomenology.
But I certainly learned my first lesson about art schools: be careful. I’ll pick up
this thread below.
In 1984, I submitted Historical Culture (Cohen 1986) to an editor, Stan
Holwitz, at University California Press. He put the manuscript out for review;
both came back very positive and Michael Rogin, on the board at UC Press, asked
for some changes, which I gladly made. I didn’t know any of the reviewers, other
than through their reports. One of the later critiques of Historical Culture’s
alleged ‘difficulty’ is that said difficulty was ‘on purpose’, and it was: I wanted to
integrate the discursive and the cognitive – to make an epistemological critique
carried out in and as semiotics – and show, not say, how a text generated a certain
kind of reader, a reader/society’s ‘fascination’ with temporal processes and
outcomes. I chose to write at the level of those authors I respected. I came to the
conclusion that the academic narratives I analyzed distributed an anti-intellectual
effect: concepts turned into judgments, and judgments used to give false
necessity to a present. It is just anti-intellectual to say a process is settled when it
is not clear that the process(es) named and narrated are relevant to critique
instead of institutional-political validation. I objected to the very form of
narrative history, the idea of ‘taking sides’ in relation to pre-digested narrative
modes of sense and telos struck me as high-brow obfuscation. Historical Culture
is a hard-core critique because of the recalcitrance and aggression of its object:
the historical ‘profession’ as realized in its typical material presences, its
functions, its writings. The afterlife of Historical Culture is somewhat strange.
Early reviews by LaCapra and others said it was an intelligent critique but
leftist’s called it unreadable. I read the great E.P. Thompson too closely, and a
former colleague at Brown told me I ‘lacked’ a utopian dimension, necessary for
anyone on the Left/Progressive axis. Here, it gets a little sticky. Ermarth’s
invitation refers to some difficulties with Princeton University Press concerning
her book and the ‘world of academic publishing [ . . . ] a particular problem that
I am not the first to mention in print. Name names, I say’ (Ermarth 2001, 198,
 538 S. Cohen
although, strangely, she does not name). My contractual situation with UCLA’s
history department was such that with publication of the book, I was asked to
apply for what in those days was an SOE contract, an ongoing three-year
appointment. Publication of Historical Culture had precluded repetition of one-
year contracts. The request was denied by the administrative side on the grounds
that the history department did not persuasively argue for a position in
historiography.
In fact, the department was getting rid of historiography as a field, and the
Provost’s office could easily find ‘ladder [permanent] faculty in the department
qualified to teach the course [ . . . ] it is hard to believe that in a distinguished
faculty of nearly 70 historians, only one [Cohen] is qualified to teach a beginning
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course in historiography at the upper division level’ (Orbach 1988). There were
letters from history faculty declaring the importance of my teaching and the value
of the just published Historical Culture, but it was a done deal: positions for
‘scientifically’ or politically imperative recognized fields of history were funded,
while the analytics of historiography were thought to be ‘common knowledge’.
What I am describing is threaded to the process of knowledge-control. As I
argued in Historical Culture, historical everything – culture, discourse,
epistemology, social implications et al. – is disturbed all the way through and
controlled by university departments; as the kind of historiography I did was tied
to criticism, it was out of synch with the politics of a discipline of history. Alice
Kessler-Harris’ invitation (Kessler-Harris 2001) takes note of many labor
problems, both in society and with the writing of history, including ‘emotional
patterns’ which make up conditions of existence: by the later 1980s, research
units in the arts and humanities were businesses as much as intellectual-
knowledge exchanges, well controlled.
In the years since, I could only teach historiography in an art school context. It
was slightly jarring that Historical Culture was written about quite severely by
UCLA faculty and their students. Joyce Appleby at UCLA, along with Hunt and
Jacob, called Historical Culture ‘an extreme form of postmodernist critique’, and
managed to turn Foucault into someone who ‘attributed all identity to historical
processes’, rather than accepting Foucault’s designation of subjective identity as
the result of a genealogic process, quite different (Appleby, Hunt, & Jacob 1994,
233). A student of Appleby, Kerwin Klein, chastised my use of semiotic
criticism, writing that Historical Culture made ‘the reader as prisoner, never
dreaming that outside her storybook dungeon the heroic semiologist romps free’
(Klein 1996). Klein was hired by a search committee headed by Martin Jay at
Berkeley, and is the only writer to twice review my work (a slightly more positive
review in Clio, Klein 2000), and both essays were used by him in his tenure-run at
Berkeley, which I find politically par for the course: my critical ‘excesses’
(Klein’s word) added to the conventional career of a neo-liberal ironist. What
would historians have done without a Baudrillard or Derrida to negate so as to
sustain their standards of reasonableness for historical representation, but where
the reasonable at times is gross distortion?1 Jenkins’ discussion of the book, more
 Rethinking History 539
than 10 years after publication, gave a ‘recognition’ to it that acknowledged
Historical Culture’s force of criticism (Jenkins 1999b, 154).
I stayed at CalArts from 1988 until I resigned and took early retirement in
2009. I returned to UCLA in 2008 and 2009 to teach French thought/criticism in
the Design program. From 1988 or so until 1991, I worked on a book, Academia
and the Luster of Capital (1993), and it too had mixed outcomes but an even more
grotesque process of publication. It was great that Lingua Franca called it one of
a hundred notable critical theory books of the 1990s. But once again I had serious
professional conflict with the University of California system, or rather UC’s
trashing of professionalism. Upon completion of Academia, I called my previous
editor to deliver the manuscript. UC Press has had a lot of trouble in the past 20
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years or so, receiving a blistering rebuke from Arthur Danto for cutting
philosophy out of its list. We met and he turned me over to the new editor, a
graduate student in history at Berkeley. Complimented by this editor on
Historical Culture, the manuscript went out – I assumed with editorial approval
– to two readers, who both highly recommended publication. I was then informed
a third report would be requested, another ‘high’, as in extremely political and
professionally manipulative (reader’s reports are supposed to be one of the few
sacred academic verification processes). That report came in, recommending
publication but with doubts, and I was called to the office of UC and informed
that the manuscript would not be recommended to the editorial board. In front of
witnesses, this graduate student/editor (now a professor at UC) stated ‘I don’t
want to end up in court’, which meant that his own political agenda didn’t
coincide with peer review, that astoundingly squishy concept/function. I could
not help but notice that this graduate student/editor’s own edited book was
published shortly later by UC Press, and it seemed pretty obvious that university
publication was now fraught with all sorts of constraints and acts of ‘soft’
censorship. I came to the earned conclusion that peer-review was a political and
institutional mess, often using an ethical mask to disguise politics (Giri 2000,
186 – 87). I contacted the readers and they recommended I talk to University of
Minnesota Press. I did, and the editor there asked me to forward the manuscript
with reports. A month later, the book was submitted to the Press, provisionally
approved but halted by the objections of a Marxist member of the review board,
and the manuscript was sent again for review. That report came back and urged
publication. I was sent the most generous reader’s report imaginable: a 32-page
line-by-line critique. Be that as it may, scholarship depended on what
Bourdieu summed it up as; claims to disinterestedness and objectivity by high-
end professors act as discursive and institutional techniques to ‘reproduce the
gaps’ (i.e. make new professors) and so keep barbarism at bay: ‘It is barbarism to
ask what culture is for; to allow the hypothesis that culture might be devoid of
intrinsic interest, and that interest in culture is not a natural property’ (Bourdieu
1989, 250).
In sum, Historical Culture and Academia and the Luster of Capital are certainly
critical texts because they linked close reading to the various intellecticides of
 540 S. Cohen
narrative writing and institutional contexts; I wrote against intellectual capture,
continuous with groups such as the College of Sociology (1937– 39), which Denis
Hollier notes came to see the Western intellectual traditions as a void and abyss
(Hollier 1989, xixff). That’s what my education in intellectual history came to:
another escape from history’s discourse, its culture of an all smothering irony and
indifference – taking sides in redundancies – but also a kind of ‘audit’ of academic
politics at the thresholds of professorial writing, where, as Marilyn Strathern
studied, there is always a ‘purification’ process to ensure the continuance of
institutions (Strathern 2000, 5). I simply made an interpretation of modern
historiography and intellectual history, the force of which is amply expressed in
Levi-Strauss’ remark that ‘superstructures are faulty acts which have “made it”’
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socially (Levi-Strauss 1966, 254), that the ‘richest’ interpretations, the ones we find
aesthetically satisfying, are not at all the ‘truest’ interpretations.
For the remainder of this essay, I wish to weave publication issues with
institutional topics and historiography, making a ‘case’ for their connections in
what is today’s hyper-politics of university-intellectual life. Paraphrasing from
my History Out of Joint (Cohen 2006), the ‘use and abuse’ of history is the war-
deployment of selection, review, evaluation, ranking, inclusion, exclusion,
historical selection and selection ‘for history’, for social cohesion, for
overcoming lacunae and gaps in knowledge, but mostly for deciding what has
a future. If there is a from-to relation applicable to historiography, it is that much
historical knowledge today is not about the past at all; it invokes the past, but is
used in a present to establish continuity with the future. Historical representation
inside capitalism is quite political and intellectually violent, and has little to do
with articulated ideologies.
In 1992, as Academia and the Luster of Capital went to press, my unit at
CalArts hired Dick Hebdige as its Dean. Hebdige brought cultural studies into a
badly divided unit and a deeply contradictory institution. But cultural studies was
firmly attached to the larger process of historicization, and, discussed below,
political correctness was a return of the repressed. But such returns were threaded
to the relentless competition between New York and Los Angeles over standing
as the ‘art capital’ of the USA. From the early 1980s on out, institutions in Los
Angeles pursued ‘world-class’ status (aka ‘too big to fail’?). My commitment to
close readings of writers such as Baudrillard, Lyotard and Deleuze (among
others) was set against the neo or re-historicization of narrative history and art.
Why? Because neo and re- in Los Angeles meant that institutions such as the
Museum of Contemporary Art became ego-ideals for aesthetic significance: the
art work (and artists) shown there was directly moved into CalArts and other
institutions as teachable. The art world (Danto) was in fact closing down as
places of showing proliferated. Institutions ‘for’ the public were made over into
places for the ‘anti-expert’s expert, the individualist whose status arose from the
way he could point to the folly of the “so-called” experts in charge’ (Moran
2011). Political Correctness, whatever else it meant, was a way that artists and
intellectuals could claim the status of resistance to rigid identities, the status quo,
 Rethinking History 541
high culture, inter alia, as such ‘resistance’ was immediately institutionalized.
Instead of experimentation, one ‘received’ theory as liberation, not as a challenge
to judgment(s) all the way through (Lyotard). We brought Zizek in for a lecture at
CalArts, who verbally machine-gunned the audience as he insisted Hegel and
Lacan belonged to the tradition of the dialectic, which could not be challenged.
I remember asking him if the dialectic, after Deleuze, was anything more than a
word to rationalize the ‘success of failure’, i.e. the reactive life idealized.
(Deleuze 1983, 159). Many verbal bullets ensued. Historiographically, I can
summarize this by saying that where the President of CalArts, Steven Lavine,
became obsessed with ensuring the historical importance of CalArts, such
importance was predicated on making sure the Institute was opposed to
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discourses that would connect CalArts to any intimation that its own past (and
present) was contestable. Or that its faculty was anything less than correct, in the
name of ideals. Tuition soared. To historicize can mean to capitalize. In 1995 or
1996, Lavine withdrew the funds for the Institute’s bookstore, some USD30,000,
and thereafter students ordered books from bookstores. By the early 2000s, book
orders from Borders were dropped due to insufficient sales; as visibility ‘did
itself’, reading plunged. It was stunning when the accreditation board came to
CalArts in 1999, concerned about the absence of peer-review criteria, and no
faculty member could meet with them outside/apart from CalArts administrators.
Historicization went hand in hand with promotion, marketing, institutional
protection. As I argued in History Out of Joint, art schools in Los Angeles were
radically promoted by venues such as the Los Angeles Times, and became
historical because hyper-political, even though notable artists such as John
Baldessari had earlier insisted ‘historical’ meant fast marketing of European
trends in art (Hertz 2003, 55, 60). Art product trumped any understanding of art
process.2
In sum, where UCLA gave the ‘boot’ to historiography in order to specialize
(historicize) in national competition, I had managed to go from the often dodged
professionalism of university to the bare knuckles of an art world in which
competition was ruthless, under cover of art as that which is the ‘highest’ calling
of subjective expression, such expressions (things) now historicized. The Dean of
the Art School at CalArts, who later became Dean at UC Irvine, could write
positively of an artist’s work that ‘reclaimed the inventory of bottom-feeder
white male fantasies’, pure targeting, but also politically sending ‘bad things’ into
the past (Lord 1998).
During this time, someone showed me Bruno Latour’s (1993) We Have Never
Been Modern, and I went a little crazy trying to figure out this sophisticated put-
down of French Theory: I wrote an essay on it and sent it to another journal pretty
far outside my ‘discipline’, whatever that was. I read Latour as political-
intellectual history of the present, making a critique of his neo-liberal salvation
for the arts and humanities, the idealizing of ‘tinkering, reshuffling, crossbreeding
and sorting’ (Latour 1993, 126). Latour’s work was part of the backlash to
deconstruction. I wrote an essay on historiographic schizophrenia, and spent a
 542 S. Cohen
long time trying to read Ginzburg’s work, published in an Italian historiography
journal. I worked on close readings of specific historiographic issues, focusing on
how progressives could mythologize politics and take anti-intellectual steps to
misrepresent deconstruction. While things were on and off calm-stormy at
CalArts, I put together essays published as Passive Nihilism (Cohen 1998), some
of it written in Xiamen, China, where I had a four month post in 1997. I don’t
have space here to go into it, but the job at Xiamen was to teach French theory.
One of the Chinese faculty members had an MA from Harvard, and was
constantly distressed at Foucault, Deleuze and Co ( pace Cusset), and kept
insisting Chinese history was simply a matter of crowd control, nothing else.
Pace Ermarth’s invitation, I sent the manuscript to two publishers at the same
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time. I withdrew from the academic press when I learned, through that huge
‘network’ of hearing what one is not supposed to hear, that the reviewer would be a
close friend; but I also wanted to see what would happen with a more commercial
press. Passive Nihilism focuses on what I thought were illusions of contemporary
progressive criticism: sections on Zizek and Butler made a critique of the function
of ‘lack’ in contemporary theory; my objection to ‘lack’ and related notions
(negation, dialectic) was that such notions spun theory into a speculative dogma
of subjectivity, from which critique could not emerge. I thought then and still do
that power as such loves the psychologization of experience, the idea that
scholars should be talking about subjective this and that instead of the obviousness
of institutional and political nihilisms. Concepts of lack struck me as poor
structuralism, but complementary with historicist notions of telos: the means and
techniques of a society to secure a future were linked to make a present
lack something, hence to overcome: it is not difficult to secure the future if the
present lacks something. To historicize often means to capture the future, a
politics that has no other means than to dominate a present and select for an
imaginary time.
By the mid-1990s I was working with Sylvere Lotringer on two conferences
in New York, published as French Theory in America (2001). I was very happy to
engage with those projects, but, as ever, the politics took over.3 French Theory in
America is a good piece of work, I think, and I was particularly pleased with its
range, its spanning of disciplines. For instance, Elizabeth Roudinesco’s astute,
calm, and devastating critique of Lacan’s ‘erasure of history’ was a real eye-
opener. Elie During’s essay on the Sokol ‘affair’ was likewise a sharp and pithy
analysis of the politics of French Theory. My essays in the volume took up why
two eminent journals, October and Critical Inquiry, turned so completely back
toward history and away from theory and why research historians had to mis­
signify deconstruction. My essays in French Theory argued how completely the
notions of an aesthetic avant-garde and ‘advanced’ scholarship were not only
politicized (relying on impact, image value, timing and placing of reviews inter
alia), but meant that sectors of progressive-academic culture operated as its own
‘right wing’: brilliantly put by Bourdieu in Distinction as ‘these struggles over the
legitimate definition of culture and the legitimate way of evaluating it are only
 Rethinking History 543
one dimension of the endless struggles which divide every dominant class.
Behind the virtues of the accomplished man the legitimate titles to the exercise of
domination are at stake’ (Bourdieu 1984, 93). By 2007 or so, I came to the
conclusion that the ‘best and brightest’ running the scholarly presses had agendas
that had less to do with scholarship than with institutional survival.4
I began work on History Out of Joint in 2002 and submitted it to Johns Hopkins,
which published it in January 2006. The editor was entirely professional, and the
board at Hopkins voted unanimously a contract. The subtitle to the book – ‘use and
abuse of history’ – is of course taken from Nietzsche, the most consistent ‘source’
for all of my work. Why Nietzsche? Because his critical notions of history,
language, debt, exchange, psychology and much more were themselves resistant to
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political and ideological rationalization, and linked up quite closely with a critique
of narrativity, the transformation of reality/actuality into misleadingly coherent
stories, superbly rendered by Hayden White where:
reality wears the mask of a meaning, the completeness and fullness of which we can
only imagine, never experience. Insofar as historical stories can be completed, can
be giving narrative closure, can be shown to have had a plot all along, they give to
reality the odor of an ideal. This is why the plot of a historical narrative is always an
embarrassment and has to be presented as ‘found’ in the events rather than put there
by narrative techniques (White 1980, 24)
The continuity from Historical Culture to History Out of Joint is that reality is at once
intelligible and mythified through ‘history’. But most often its intelligibility is that of an
acceptance of reality against a will to difference. When ‘history’ takes the place of
thinking, passivity dominates. To think means to make risky definitions,
interpretations, evaluations and use concepts that are not fixed but allow one to
discover and invent (Deleuze 1983, 100–1). To think within the reactive life (like
academic disciplines) is precisely not to think, but to recode. History Out of Joint had
a pretty good reception, all things considered. I was a little surprised when History
and Theory, which never reviewed any of my work, published in 2012 a review of it,
six years after publication, by a reviewer who seems to think that I should have
emphasized Saussure and not Nietzsche/de Man (Ermarth 2012). Johns Hopkins
sent a copy to Keith Jenkins, who contacted me. Do I have to say – may I say –
Rethinking History became a place where editors and I actually discuss problems
instead of immediately taking sides over useless political filiations?

Conclusion
Process and product, time and history: trillions of words have been written on
these subjects, and no one can synthesize them without omissions, reductions,
idealizations, politicizations. Breton, who I quoted as an epigraph to Historical
Culture, is worth quoting again:
‘We want nothing whatever to do with those [ . . . ] who use their minds as they would a
savings bank [ . . . ] all proud partisans of leveling via the head.’ (Cohen 1986, x)
 544 S. Cohen
Rosenstone’s eloquent ‘invitation’ calls for better stories, ones that do not
‘level’, and I agree. But for some of us, the politics of the university are such that
critique is more important than disciplinary walls, narration and its
rationalizations of the present. Why? Because we professors almost always end
up validating product, and thus eliminating more disturbing works and pretending
our processes are continuous with ideals and truth. When I entered UCLA’s
history department, there were 45 professors and about 400 admitted graduate
students; in 2009, there were 95 professors and 37 admitted graduate students.
Which processes make sense of that: a capitalization of historical knowledge, the
failure of historical knowledge, the truth of historical knowledge in a consumer
society?5 If there is a narrative to what is discussed above, it is a narrative that
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puts the high-end zones of academic and aesthetic life in context: the all too
frequent anti-intellectualism of historians as well as the frightful dependence on
sanitized reputations in art. Under what conditions of existence is anti-
intellectualism required by academic life? Are the ‘best and brightest’ of faculty
in the arts and humanities, exceptions noted, really covered by an identity-
complex such that they are released from criticism, when in fact the ‘higher one
goes’ the more politicized one becomes, the more managerial functions
dominate? I wanted to make critique because I wanted to get at process; why
academics and artists became ‘nutcrackers of the soul’, why knowledge goes
hand in hand with the destruction of life: ‘we have to become daily more
deserving of being questioned, more deserving of asking questions, more
deserving – of living’ (Nietzsche 1997, 82). If there were processes at work that
gave the lie to the use and abuse of history, would that not change completely
conjunctions between present dominations/subjugations and history?

Acknowledgements
Thanks to Alun Munslow for his acute reading and to David E. James for the same.

Notes
1. Radically ‘cherry-picking’ quotes and statements from Structuralist and post-
Structuralists, P. Anderson, in In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (1984, 50 – 1),
bemoans the withering of causal/historical explanations. He imposes on Derrida the
notion that for the latter, writing is ‘implacable and undecidable’, a paradox, and in the
next sentence, calls it an antinomy. Foucault’s work is turned into a ‘panurgic will to
power’, which does away with analysis of power-holders and goals. Anderson’s
Mandarin Marxism keeps to the idealism of a ‘common end’ (1984, 106).
2. Interestingly, in 1977 Judith Adler described the Deans of CalArts as having regarded
their ‘schools as vehicles of self-expression’, even treating their working faculty as
‘signed pieces’, but who understood their own ‘professional reputation and integrity to
rest upon unambiguous freedom’ (Adler 1977).
3. Macfie’s invitation refers to ‘adulterated’ publication issues (Lyon Macfie 2011, 431).
Let me thicken this vexed subject. Once the manuscript was complete, itself arduous,
an assistant of William Germano, director of the press, called me with an addition, a
short paper by Lotringer’s wife, Chris Kraus. It was an incomprehensible mess of
 Rethinking History 545
words. I went along to ‘save’ the volume, and negotiated with Lotringer to send the
piece to Andrea Loselle at UCLA, who edited it.
4. I have already referred to Ermarth’s comments on publishers and Macfie’s
‘invitation’. Reiss’ contribution is more explicit about publishers and initial problems
in publishing sport history (Riess 2001, 32). In 2007 I sent a synopsis of a book on
CalArts, Los Angeles art institutions, and the politics of the avant-garde to Roger
Conover at MIT Press, who wrote back, in a day no less, insisting I send the
manuscript, which I did. He wanted a title change before seeing anything more than a
proposal with fairly detailed information. After months of hearing the proverbial
nothing, I wrote and got this reply, which is now in the acknowledgement section, for
whoever gets to publish this book:
Sande,
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I admire some qualities of this manuscript, others less so. It’s not going to work
for my list, but rather than just say no, I wanted to try to tell you why. I haven’t
found the time to do that. If you want to submit the ms. elsewhere, and I think you
should, you might try Ken Wissoker (Duke UP), Colin Robinson (New Press) and
someone at Verso. Despite my decision, I am glad that I had a chance to read this,
and if it’s ever published, I’ll be even more glad I’m not Dick Hebdige! (& you
might want to keep a pad in Thailand).
best, Roger Conover

He wants to tell me but doesn’t have the time? Conover sent me his stress-
schedule instead of a rational critique. When History Out of Joint appeared, the
President of CalArts publically rebuked me for publishing with Johns Hopkins; a
book too difficult for students, as he put it. That said a lot as to the transformation
of an academic institution. Failed in his own tenure run for lack of publication, this
was just ressentiment. By 2009 I literally had enough (income to retire included).
CalArts was monumentalizing its ‘history’, e.g. a recognized national artist who
taught for two weeks at the Institute 30 years earlier was put up on the web-site as
‘testimony’ to the importance of the Institute. The bait of history?
5. Let me note there is now almost one administrator for every faculty member in the UC
system, which means the institution is walling itself from society as it drives its own
definitions of labor, value, knowledge inter alia into society (Evans 2012).

Notes on contributor
Sande Cohen is the author of Historical Culture (1986) and History Out of Joint (2006),
among other works.

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