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America's Shadow: An Anatomy of Empire

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Books like this have been a long time coming. This one says things that are fundamentally important. Lack of this kind of political and historical insight during the Vietnam decade was probably one of the main factors that caused the radical movements and people of that time to lose their way in a fairly short time, so that the radical high-tide of the late 1960s was ebbing away by the early- to mid-1970s and never appeared again, except occasionally. If the Vietnam era served as the crucible from which books such as this eventually came, then those years are still generating a compelling and important legacy.

If readers of this book draw only one general conclusion from it, it probably should be an awareness of how vital an adequate political-historical perspective is for the successful framing and prosecution of any radical, revolutionary or 'counter-establishment' political agenda.

The great virtue of this book is to remind people how long-established and deeply entrenched in Western societies is a logic of imperialism and domination with its accompanying rationalisations and 'justifications', and that a new stage or level of that logic has been achieved recently with the end-of-cold-war 'victory' achieved by the West.

It's also a bit unfortunate that only one response to this book has appeared here in more than a year. Potential readers should know that this book really is worth reading and commenting on.

To be more specific than in the previous piece, it could be noted that anyone dedicated to a `counter-hegemonic' project should be aware at the outset how slippery and slithery the discourse of the American political `establishment' has been since it was systematically crystallised and formalised in the latter part of the eighteenth century (most notably with the Declaration of Independence). This discourse relies almost entirely on a series of airy generalities such as life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, opportunity, freedom, democracy, human rights etc etc.

The extent to which this kind of discourse and rhetoric dominates both the public domain and the inner workings of the mind of the American people themselves is fundamentally important for the maintenance of control by a `power elite'. Such a generalised, slippery discourse makes it quite difficult for people to come to grips with the causes, consequences and nature of specific events and policies. For example, if the prevailing, largely automatic popular assumption is that the American political system is at all times dedicated to `life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness' etc, it follows automatically that any repressive or authoritarian policies or legislation can't really be repressive or authoritarian at all; they become necessary expedients to resist or overcome the influence of the enemies of life, liberty etc. In effect, the American political class wrote itself a blank cheque with the expansive, high-minded rhetoric they wrote into the Declaration of Independence, a cheque which they are still able to draw against.

The American people got at least two early warnings about how limited and constrained their rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness could be, at least when times were difficult. One was the Constitution agreed to at Philadelphia in 1787. This caused such popular discontent that ten amendments had to be added shortly after (the `Bill of Rights'), to calm things down. Then in 1798 the Alien and Sedition Acts were passed. 1798 happened to be a fairly radical year (the Irish uprising, Napoleon in Egypt). Reading the language of the Sedition Act, it is impossible not to notice how English it sounds. These acts were politically similar to the English `Orders-in-Council' of 1792, by means of which the domestic area was made subject to tight discipline for the forthcoming assault on revolutionary France. The politics of the Alien and Sedition Acts confirmed the new American nation as essentially English. The War of Independence therefore can't be thought of as a revolution. What it was was a means to reverse positions with England; instead of England being dominant and America subordinate, the colonies enabled themselves to become the dominant power at a later time. More than a century later as it turned out - around the time of what Christopher Hitchens called `the hinge year' of 1898. Around this time it became clear to the English political class that they would have to resign themselves to playing `second fiddle' to the rising power of the USA. When that stage was reached, each felt free to engage in gratuitous, aggressive wars i.e. wars for which there was absolutely no military necessity (the Spanish-American War and the Boer War). From then on, World War I probably became inevitable.

This perhaps helps to flesh out some of the nineteenth century history which is perhaps not explicitly dealt with in Spanos' book, but which serves as the background which makes Spanos' outline urgent and compelling; the background which, as Spanos explains, Herman Melville was trying to explicate for the American people.

This is an excellent exploration and critique (in the real sense of that word) of the epistemology and discourse of empire. Persuasively argues for the "family resemblance" b/w romanesque notions and practice of empire/imperialism, the war on Vietnam, and current mantras about democracy and freedom. Compares very favorably to the much ballyhoo'd hardt-negri tome on "Empire". Not an easy read, of course, but the complexity of the problem Spanos addresses warrants it.

Anyone inclined to doubt the urgency or force of Spanos' critique could usefully be referred to another recent book, Vincent J. Cheng's Joyce, Race and Empire. In this case the focus of the book, as Joyce's was, is on English rather than American imperial power, but if it's understood that from the end of the nineteenth century the two were for the most part engaged in a common enterprise, the difference is inconsequential. It's the underlying logic that matters.

"(Joyce's)...writings...were most frequently attempts to resist and defy the authorized centrality of canons, empires (especially England), and totalizing structures" (p.3). This is precisely the project that Spanos has attempted, with an argument derived in large part from Heidegger. The arguments of Spanos and Cheng should strongly re-inforce each other, with Spanos helping to provide historical background , depth and theoretical rigor to Cheng's work on Joyce. Readers and admirers of Joyce who understand or suspect the heavily obscured political nature of his project could be well advised to read Spanos to help them understand the background to his work. Readers of Spanos will also learn a great deal from the strong, incisive commentary of Cheng.

According to Cheng the true significance of Joyce's work has been denied and buried in a manner very similar to that which Spanos relates for Herman Melville. The two recent books may help to retrieve both from the oblivion to which they have been consigned.

What Wlliam Spanos offers here, with relentless clarity, energy, wry wit, and range of intellectual and social-political insights, is an ontological critque of Empire. Thes crowing study is devastating and elegant, worthy of Melville and those prior US cultural workers who had opposed (and failed to disrupt) the US historical and geographical project of sublimated imperialism. Spanos, to me, is a Charles Olson in his range of visions and caustic style, and I just wish his work would gather the readers it deserves. To me, this book is a "vade mecum" for the era of US globalization, as is the Negri/ Hardt book "Empire," and Ridley Scott's imperial sublime spectacle, "Gladiator." Take and read, as Saint Augustine said to the fallen City of God.

An "ontological account of Empire" is based on a theoretical paradigm that is bankrupt in terms of its potential for political insight. What must we believe about the theory-praxis relation before we can follow Spanos in reading the history of Western imperialism through the lense of Heidegger's ontological difference? We must believe that political history unfolds as a series of discrete "ontic structures" that owe their existence (and their imperialistic drive) to the "forgetting" of an original indebtedness to some unfathomable power of Being, whatever that may be. The only source of critical insight vis-a-vis such broad categories as "liberal humanism" is the Heidegger-patented flight into obscurity, the forfeiting of all empirical and theoretical analysis (easily dismissed as "humanist" and relegated to the wastebins of "ontotheology") in deference to the ontological "dispensation" of Being (Habermas's phrase). The implicit assumption, of course, is that ALL political programs are equally guilty of the humanist sin and are therefore equally deserving of smoke-and-mirrors "de-structuration." Spanos sees Heidegger's de-structive hermeneutics as the only hope for political salvation, and as a consequence he flattens out the socio-political (ontic) side of the ontological difference under the assumption that "structure" is an intrinsically bad thing, or, more to the point, that "structure" can only be understood in the kind of dualistic model that underwrites Heideggerian "critique." The question for Spanos would be, what kind of politics suggests itself after we have uncritically assumed this Heideggerian framework? There's nothing to be said here--this should make us skeptical.