W illiam s Panos “The Center Will Not Hold”: The Widening Gyre of the New, New Americanist Studies It is no exaggeration to say that liberation as an intellectual mission, born in the resistance and opposition to the confinements and ravages of imperialism, has shifted from the settled, established, and domesticated dynamics of culture to its unhoused, decentered and exilic energies, energies whose incarnation today is the migrant, and whose consciousness is the intellectual and artist in exile, the political figure between domains, between forms, between homes, and between languages. Edward W� Said, Culture and Imperialism So, floating on the margin of the ensuing scene, in full sight of it, when the halfspent suction of the sunk ship reached me, I was then, but slowly, drawn towards the closing vortex� When I reached it, it had subsided to a creamy pool� Round and round, then, and ever contracting towards the button-like black bubble at the axis of that slowly wheeling circle, like another Ixion I did revolve� Till, gaining that vital center, the black bubble upward burst; and now, liberated by reason of its cunning spring, and, owing to its great buoyancy, rising with great force, the coffin life-buoy shot lengthwise from the sea, fell over. And floated by my side. Buoyed up by that coffin, for almost one whole day and night, I floated on a soft and dirge-like main� The unharming sharks, they glided by as if with padlocks on their mouths; the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed beaks� On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last� It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan� Herman Melville, Moby-Dick 1. In the summer of 2000, shortly before the epochal bombing of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon by al Qaeda on 9/ 11/ 01 and President George W� Bush’s spectacular annunciation of the U� S�’s “War on Terror,” I delivered a paper entitled “American Studies in ‘the Age of the World Picture’: Thinking the Question of Language,” at the Humanities Institute at Dartmouth College (published after 9/ 11 in 2002) in Donald E� Pease and Robin Wiegman’s inaugural volume, The Futures of American Studies� 1 In that contribution to the New Americanist project, I criticized the promising counter-mnemonic initiative of the “New Americanists” for remaining too local in an age that had irreversibly become global� It was my view then that these New Americanists remained vestigially bound to the American exceptionalist ethos in a global 1 Donald E� Pease and Robin Wiegman, The Futures of American Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002)� 14 W illiam s Panos age, dominated by the United States, that has brought the spatializing logic of Western metaphysical thinking (thinking meta ta physika: from after or above things-as-they-are) to its fulfillment (and theoretical demise) by way of the final reduction of temporality to a “World Picture” (and the disclosure of the nothing [das Nichts] it cannot finally contain). More specifically, I argued that, for all their interrogation of the celebratory discourse of American exceptionalism (the American Adam of the Myth and Symbol School that inaugurated American studies in the World War II period), these New Americanists, with a few exceptions, were not global enough� By this I meant that they had not yet achieved the inside-outside (de-centered or exilic) perspective that would have 1) enabled them to perceive exceptionalist America from the eyes of its victimized “others”; and 2) that, in thus remaining vestigially inside the metaphysical ontology of “American exceptionalism,” they were unwittingly compelled to fulfill the prophetic dictates of Francis Fukuyama’s (de Tocquevillean/ Hegelian) annunciation of the “End of History” in the wake of the ”triumph” of American democracy over Soviet communism - and the absolute vindication of the “Truth” of the American exceptionalist ethos: What is emerging victorious is not so much liberal practice, as the liberal idea� That is to say for a very large part of the world, there is now no ideology with pretension to universality that is in a position to challenge liberal democracy, and no universal principle of legitimacy other than the sovereignty of the people� Even non-democrats will have to speak the language of democracy in order to justify their deviation from the single universal standard� 2 Commenting on this prophetic American exceptionalist annunciation of the End of History, I wrote: The universalist-instrumentalist discourse that frames the triumphalist American vision of the brave new post-Cold War world rings hollow in the wake of its selfdestruction during the Vietnam War and of the postmodern thinking that has tacitly theorized the violence inherent in its saying� Nevertheless, New Americanists continue unthinkingly to use this language even when it opposes the violence of its practices, thus becoming unwitting accomplices of the very regime of truth it would delegitimate� This complicity, for example, is manifest, as Paul Bové has decisively shown, in [Sacvan] Bercovitch’s “reformist” mode of dealing with problems confronting the Americanist seeking for alternatives to the consensusproducing imperatives of the American jeremiadic discourse, specifically, his disabling delimitation of critical options to those made available by that discourse: “the option [for American critics] is not multiplicity or consensus� It is whether to make use of the categories of the culture or to be used by them�” 3 2 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992), p� 45; my emphasis� 3 William V� Spanos, “ American Studies in the ‘Age of the World Picture,’” p� 390� The quotation from Bercovitch is from the afterword to Ideology and Classic American Literature, ed� Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p� 438� The quote from Paul Bové is from “Notes toward a Politics of ‘American’ Criticism,” in In the Wake of Theory (Middletown, Ct: Wesleyan University Press, 1992) pp� 52-60� The Widening Gyre of the New, New Americanist Studies 15 My frame of reference at that time was not simply the Vietnam War - the selfdestruction, at this liminal point, of the long forwarding historical itinerary of the America’s “errand in [the world’s] wilderness,” of the American exceptionalist ethos by way of the American war machine’s unerring destruction of Vietnam in the name of “saving” it for democracy� As this obscene paradox suggests, it was also the disclosure of the banality of the evil that the American exceptionalist language wrought on that “new frontier” with the leaking of the Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsworth� Michael Herr, it will be recalled, put this dreadful reality in an unforgettable synecdochical way in his account of the Tet Offensive: Our worst dread of yellow peril became realized; we now saw them dying by the thousands all over the country, yet they didn’t seem depleted, let alone exhausted, as the Mission was claiming by the fourth day� We took space back quickly, expensively, with total panic and close to maximum brutality� Our machine was devastating� And versatile� It could do everything but stop� As one Americana major said, in a successful attempt of attaining history, “We has to destroy Ben Tre in order to save it�” That’s how most of the country came back under what we called control, and how it remained essentially occupied by the Viet Cong and the North until the day years later when there were none of us left there� 4 The national forgetting of the apocalyptic violence inherent in the redemptive logic of American exceptionalism disclosed by the United States’ brutal conduct of the war in Vietnam became the paranoid purpose of the American political class (Republican and Democrat) and the culture industry in the aftermath of that catastrophic war� It took the form of representing the protest movement in the United States against the war as a national paranoia - “the Vietnam Syndrome�” And this sustained, massive ideological initiative of forgetting, aided and abetted by Saddam Hussein, a former client of the U�S� in the Middle East, was successfully accomplished during the first George Bush’s administration with what was then represented by the American government and the media as the spectacular “surgical” victory of the American army in the first Gulf War (August 2, 1990-February 28, 1991), an accomplishment epitomized by the president’s exclamation to a reporter, “Thank God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome at last�” 5 What the finality of this exclamation of relief meant ideologically was that the “healing” of the Vietnam syndrome was the healing of the wounded American exceptionalist ethos - and, as the euphoria of the political class and the media made spectacularly clear, the redemption of America’s exceptionalist) errand in the world’s wilderness. It established, before 9/ 11, the ideological justification for the second Bush administration’s “War on Terror” in the name of America’s redemptive global mission� It is this recuperative initiative - this rejuvenation of the 4 Michael Herr, Dispatches (New York: Vintage 1991), p 71; originally published by Alfred A. Knopf, 1977. For an amplified account of the self-destruction of the American exceptionalist ethos during the Vietnam War (and its recuperation in the aftermath), see William V� Spanos, American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization: The Specter of Vietnam (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007)� 5 George Bush, to a group of state legislators, reported in Newsweek 117, March 11, 1991� 16 W illiam s Panos American exceptionalist ethos and the realization of the myth - that, I will suggest, the new, post- 9/ 11 generation of New Americanist have not adequately registered in their effort to transcend the limitations of their predecessors by way of the “transnationalization” of American studies� 2. Since the Al Qaeda attacks on American soil on September 11, 2001 and the United States’ annunciation, under the aegis of the George W� Bush administration, of the United States’ interminable global “War on Terror,” the blindnesses of the New Americanist studies to the global context I pointed to in the summer of 2000 have been overcome� In the decade or so following 9/ 11, a remarkably large archive of New Americanist scholarship and criticism addressing American studies according to the urgent imperatives of the waning of the nation-state system and the globalization of the planet has been produced� Edited volumes such as Wai Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell’s Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature (2007); Janice Radway, Kevin Gaines, Barry Shank, and Penny Von Eschen’s American Studies: An Anthology (2009); Russ Castronovo and Susan s Gilman’s States of Emergency: The Object of American Studies (2009); Brian T� Edwards and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar’s Globalizing American Studies (2010); and Donald Pease, Winfried Fluck, and John Carlos Rowe’s Re-Framing the Transnational Turn in American Studies (2011), among others, which include the essays of a wide range of prestigious and neophyte New Americanist scholars, and books such a Paul Giles’ Virtual America: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary (2002) and The Global Remapping of American Literature (2011); Donald Pease’s The New American Exceptionalism (2009); and Paul Jay’s Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies (2010), among others, bear witness to this radical transformation of the American studies� 6 Despite the great diversity of perspectives, most leave behind the founding Puritan school of Americanist studies associated with Perry Miller and Sacvan Bercovitch and the nation-oriented Myth and Symbol field imaginary associated with Henry Nash Smith (The Virgin Land), Leo Marx (The Machine in the Garden); R�W�B� Lewis (The American Adam), among others� Instead, as a number of the subtitles attest, this new generation of New Americanists take their point of departure in the transnational turn compelled by the rapid globalization of the planet in the wake of World War II, which is to say, the self-destruction of the Western imperial project, the rise of the postcolonial consciousness - and the neo-liberal globalization of the “free market�” The consequence of this transnational turn, as virtually all these post-9/ 11 New American texts testify, has been the supersession 6 Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010; Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2011; Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009; Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010� Of the critical studies, I single out Donald Pease’s The New American Exceptionalism as in some degree an exception to the rule� See footnote 7� The Widening Gyre of the New, New Americanist Studies 17 of the emphasis of study on the national by the “post-national” or “transnational,” or, to anticipate, the overdetermination of the global over the local� 7 I am, of course, in some significant degree in solidarity with this turn in New Americanist studies, not least, because 1) it has enabled the silenced peoples of the world - the multitudes who have hitherto been spoken for by the West - to speak for themselves or, in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s resonant terms, to “provincialize Europe,” that is, to avow the violence against them that the hegemonic (exceptionalist) Western interpretation of history has always disavowed, 8 and 2), in so doing, this perspectival turn reveals the unexceptionalist essence of American exceptionalism� But, I submit, in overdetermining the “transnational”- in collapsing borders and boundaries, the trinity of “state, nation, territory” that underlies the modern nation-state system 9 in favor of the “global” or the postnational, this promising “new” Americanist initiative has gone too far in the direction I was calling for in 2000 in “American Studies in the ‘Age of the World Picture�’” That is, as richly diverse as the transnationalizing of American studies seems to be, the one aspect that this diversity has surprisingly - unfortunately - in common is its marginalization of the hegemonic American exceptionalist ethos in the name of its “anti-exceptionalism�” Despite its remarkable resurrection after 9/ 11 (now overtly, as the prolific use of the literal term by the American political class testifies) and the government of the United States’ declaration of its exceptionalist “War on Terror” and on the “rogue states” that harbor them, the new, New Americanist transnational initiative views the manifestations of post-9/ 11 American exceptionalism, when it addresses them at all, as merely one of many, often unrelated, global projects - weather, gender, race, education, information, migration, the Americas, domestic politics, ecology, neo-liberal capitalism, etc� - rather than, as global history from the Vietnam War to the War on Terror patently bears witness, the locus that determines the structural feature of all these others� 7 The work of Donald E. Pease constitutes a significant exception to this tendency to overdetermine the global, as his magisterial The New American Exceptionalism testifies. See also “Re-Mapping the Transnational Turn,” his introduction to Re-Framing American Studies� Though ostensibly a summary of the various itineraries of this transnational turn, it is evident from his insistence on the fundamental centrality of the George W� Bush administration’s “War on Terror,” the exceptionalism of which has normalized the state of exception, that Pease discriminates qualitatively between those post-9/ 11 New Americanists who focus on the critique of American exceptionalism and those who do not”: “In calling for a wholesale dismantling of American exceptionalism, transnational Americanists have failed to see that transnational American studies produced the version of American exceptionalism without exceptionalists that the transnational state of exception required� Transnational Americanists’ generalized disavowal of the state of exception became especially discernible in their anti-exceptionalist explanations of the transition from Cold War American studies to transnational American studies�” (p� 23)� 8 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000� 9 This trinity defining the essence of the nation-state system was first posited by Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitianaism, vol� 2 , and later appropriated by Giorgio Agamben in Means Without End. 18 W illiam s Panos Let me amplify on what I mean by this paradigm shift from the local to the global enacted by these new New Americanists in the last decade by way of invoking the spatial metaphor that has informed not only the history of the West’s representation of being (metaphysics), as Jacques Derrida has shown, 10 but also its political logic of belonging (the concept of the nationstate), and its comportment toward its Others (imperialism)� I am referring to the centered circle, or, more precisely, the exceptionalist Center/ Origin and the ever-expanding circumference or periphery that is intrinsic to the imperial logic (the ”will to power’ over difference) of thinking meta ta physika (from after or above or beyond things-as-theyare�) The Achilles heel of the sovereign logic of this exceptionaist/ imperial metaphor lies in its inexorable imperative to expand its circumference, to incorporate and tether everything in space and every event in time to its commanding center� This is because the farther away from the center the circumference recedes, the weaker the tether that binds it to the sovereign center becomes� At a certain point in the centrifugal process the periphery eventually disintegrates, which is to say, annuls the (power) of the exceptionalist center� To quote W� B� Yeats’s “Second Coming” (without adhering to his conservative nostalgic judgment): Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity� 11 Taking my directives from this centrifugal temporal dynamics of the center/ periphery, I am suggesting that the new New Americanists to whom I am referring all too prematurely assume that the globalization of the planet and the demise of the nation-state (the emergence of the global and the annulment of the local) has been historically accomplished� Though they take their theoretical point of departure from the de-centering of the metaphysicai center, it 10 Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” Writing and difference, trans Alan Bass, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978): “[I] t has always been thought that the center, which is by definition unique, constituted the very thing within structure while governing structure, escapes structurality� This is why classical thought concerning structure could say that the center is, paradoxically, within the structure and outside it� The center is at the center of the totality, and yet, since the center does not belong to the totality (is not part of the totality), the totality has its center elsewhere� The center is not the center� The concept of centered structure - although it represents coherence itself, the condition of the epistémé as philosophy or science - is contradictorily coherent� And, as always, coherence in contradiction expresses the force of a desire� The concept of centered structure is in fact the concept of play based on a fundamental ground, a play constituted on the basis of a fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude, which itself is beyond the reach of free play� And on the basis of this certitude anxiety can be mastered�” p� 279� 11 W� B� Yeats, “The Second Coming,” The Collected Poems of W. B Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1956), p� 183� The Widening Gyre of the New, New Americanist Studies 19 is, paradoxically, the panoptic perspective enabled by the “center elsewhere” that, like that of the traditional Americanists they oppose, determines their representation of the contemporary historical occasion� In thus positioning themselves outside of - and in opposition to - the local, not incidentally, they, tacitly circumscribe the “exilic consciousness” - the in-between, the outside-inside condition that Edward Said posited as the most efficacious agency of resistance to contemporary power relations� For all their insistence on attending to history, they seem blinded by the oversight of their global problematic 12 to its local historical actualities� Indeed, this New Americanist oversight for all practical purpose annuls the local of the local-global dyad, or, more specifically, the role that the nation-state, particularly the United States, continues to play in the world at large� Despite the continuing identification of their scholarly discipline with America, they, like the exponents of “World Literature” (Weltliteratur) - Pascale Casanova, David Damrosch, Franco Morretti, and John Pizer, among many others, 13 and the exponents of cosmopolitanism (Martha Nussbaum and Bruce Robins, among others), who have clearly influenced their global vision, their historical perspective is so broad that it effaces the culturally and politically fraught post- 9/ 11 occasion and the urgent need to resist the form of globalism it is taking by way of the harnessing the American state to the dynamics of the global free market� 14 To put it generally, what this panoptic global perspective overlooks in its all too easy, sometimes euphoric, representation of the contemporary historical occasion as “deterritorialized” (Giles) 15 is that global humanity, in fact, lives in an interregnum, in between the local (or national) and the global, a world-system (the nation-state) that is dying (but is not in fact dead) and a de-centered world struggling to be born� It is true that, on the one hand, the American exceptionalist myth self-destructed theoretically during the course of the Vietnam War (“We had to destroy Ben Tre in order to save it�”) and then again, even more decisively, with George W� Bush’s declaration of the United States’ unending global “War on Terror” and the “rogue states,” like Iraq and Afghanistan, that harbored terrorists in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, and, on the other, the proliferation of contrapuntal postcolonial voices that have challenged the American 12 Althusser explains the operations of the problematic in “From Capital to Marx’s Philosophy” in Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital (London: Verso, 1979), pp� 24-30� For my analysis of the problematic, see “Althusser’s ‘Problematic’: Vision and the Vietnam War,” in American Exceptionalism in the Age of Gobalization: The Specter of Vietnam (Albany: SUNY Press, 2008), pp� 35-57� 13 Titles, respectively: The World Republic of Letters; What Is World Literature? ; Modern Epic; The Idea of World Literature� 14 For a persuasive early critique of the general tendency of recent transnationalist scholars to overdetermine the global, see Timothy Brennan, “Cosmo-Theory,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 100: 3 (Summer 2001), pp� 659-691� 15 Paul Giles, “The Deterritorialization of American Literature,” in Dimock and Buell, ed� Shades of the Planet, pp� 39-61� This essay is reprinted with some revisions from Giles’ The Global Re-Mapping of American Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011)� Further citations of the latter will be abbreviated to GR, and incorporated in the text in parentheses� 20 W illiam s Panos version of the exceptionalist Western narrative of modern global history� But this theoretical self-de-struction has not manifested itself in the destruction of American exceptionalist praxis� Despite its theoretical disintegration, the American exceptionalist ethos continues, after the fall of the Bush administration to remain intact as a hegemonic “truth�” The tentative speech-bereaving spectacle of American high tech war-making, the “domino theory,” the creation of puppet regimes, and the establishment of torture camps inaugurated by the United States in the name of in the America’s exceptionalist errand on the “New [Southeast Asian] Frontier” were brought to their liminal (and revelatory) point of development by the George W� Bush administration after 9/ 11 when it identified the United States as a Homeland Security State: The security environment confronting the United States today is radically different from what we have faced before. Yet the first duty of the United States Government remains what it always has been: to protect the Americana people and American interests� It is an enduring American principle that this duty obligates the government to anticipate and counter threats, using all elements of national power, before the threats can do grave damage� The greater the threat, the greater the risk of inaction - and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack� There are few greater threats than a terrorist attack with WMD [Weapons of Mass Destruction]� To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, If necessary, act preemptively in exercising our inherent right of self-defense� The United States will not resort to force in all cases to preempt emerging threats� Our preference is that nonmilitary actions succeed� And no country should ever use preemption as a pretext for aggression� 16 I am referring specifically to the Bush administration’s illegal doctrine of “preemptive war” (the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq); the “shock and awe” military tactics that were intended to strike these Third World peoples dumb; the systematic institutionalization of concentration camps (Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo); the practice of detention and torture without legal recourse obscenely called “extraordinary rendition” by its apologists; the tethering (however contradictorily) of the American state to the neoliberal global free market, indeed, as Robert Marzec has forcefully shown, the militarization of the global ecos in the name of national security; 17 and, not least, the declaration of a global state of emergency in the name of “homeland security” (The Homeland Security Act), all enacted in the name of the redemptive American 16 “The National Security Strategy of the United States of America” [see Google]� Though the second paragraph of this quotation disclaims the Bush administration’s willful resort to military force to achieve its preemptive “defense,” the truth is that the Bush administration justified its preemptive war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq by falsely representing it as manufacturing weapons of mass destruction� 17 Robert Marzec, “Introduction to Environmentality: MEDEA, the SAGE’s of the Earth and the Environmental Politics of Adaptation,” in Environmentality, forthcoming, University of Minnesota Press� The Widening Gyre of the New, New Americanist Studies 21 exceptionalist ethos and the Pax Americana� 18 In short, what was tentatively inaugurated in the period of the Vietnam War in the name of the “exceptionalist American state” became under the aegis of the sovereign Bush administration the global normalization of the state of exception: the biopoliticization of human life, which is to say, with Giorgio Agamben’s identification of modern democratic (particularly American) political practice and Nazi biopolitics in mind, the reduction of bios to zoé, bare life (nuda vida), life that can be killed without the killing being called homicide: The wish to lend a sacrificial aura to the extermination of Jews by means of the term “Holocaust” was … an irresponsible historiographical blindness� The Jew living under Nazism is the privileged negative referent of the new biopolitical sovereignty and is, as such, a flagrant case of homo sacer in the sense of a life that may be killed but not sacrificed. His killing therefore constitutes … neither capital punishment nor a sacrifice, but simply the actualization of a mere “capacity to be killed inherent in the condition of the Jew as such� The truth - which is difficult for the victims to face, but which we must have the courage not to cover with sacrificial veils - is that the Jews were exterminated not in a mad and giant holocaust but exactly as Hitler had announced, “as lice”� Which is to say, as bare life� The dimension in which these extermination took place is neither religion nor law, but biopolitics� If it is true that the figure proposed by our age is that of unsacrificeable life that has nevertheless become capable of being killed to an unprecedented degree, then the bare life of homo sacer concerns us in a special way� Sacredness is a line of flight still present in contemporary politics. A line that is as such moving into zones increasingly vast and dark, to the point of ultimately coinciding with the biological life itself of citizens. If today there is no longer any one clear figure of the sacred man, it is perhaps because we are all virtually homines sacri. 19 3. Nothing substantial has changed since the fall of the Bush administration and the election of Barack Obama� To be sure, the cultural rhetoric of this Democratic administration, playing as it does to both political constituencies, has become less strident and aggressively exceptionalist than that of the Bush administration� But it continues to represent itself and the Americana people fundamentally in terms of the American exceptionalist ethos and its redemptive global mission� More important, its domestic and global practice remains basically the same as that of the Bush administration� The Bush doctrines of preemptive war and regime change; its tactics of staging the spectacle; and its harnessing of the power of the state to the global free market have not been explicitly renounced; the war on terror continues; Guantánamo and 18 See “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategies, Forces, and Resources For a New Century,” the white paper of the influential neoconservative group called “Project for New American Century” (PNAC) that became the ideological blue print for the George W� Bush administration’s foreign policy� 19 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans� Daniel Heller- Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp� 114-115� 22 W illiam s Panos the lawless detention camps in political indeterminate zones remain open and operative; the torture of Arabs suspected of terrorism (euphemistically called “enhanced form of interrogation”) and the targeting of terrorist suspects by CIA hits squads (now drones) goes on� In sum, the Bush administration’s establishment of the Homeland Security State in the wake of the Al Qaeda bombing of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and enacted by Congress as The Homeland Security Act of 2002) 20 - the sovereign executive decision that rendered the state of exception the global rule - remains the determining “law” of the American domestic and global practice� 21 Equally important, it is the American exceptionalist ethos - the perennial belief that History has ordained America as the redeemer nation - that continues to informs this law� That this national condition remains the case in the wake of the election of a Democratic president is borne witness to by the sudden adoption and massive take off of the celebratory use of the term “American exceptionalism” by the American political class (Republican and Democrat) and the culture industry in the aftermath of 9/ 11 as a jeremiadic strategy for covenantal rejuvenation� As the sociologist Jerome Karabel has observed about the remarkable popularization of the term since its emergence during the Reagan administration’s Cold War against the Soviet Union: “According to a Gallup poll from December 2010, 80 percent of Americans agree that ‘because of the United States’ history and the Constitution - the United States has a unique character that makes it the greatest country in the world�’ Support for this proposition varied somewhat along party lines, but not by much: 91 percent of Republicans agreed, but so, too, did 73 percent of Democrats�” 22 Indeed, these telling statistics were dramatically corroborated during the national presidential election conventions of 2012, during which the Democratic Party speakers in behalf of Obama (including Obama himself) vied with the Republican speakers in behalf of Mitt Romney over which candidate (and party) was more faithful in its practice to the redemptive Imperatives of the American exceptionalist ethos� Elsewhere, I have analyzed in some detail a number of these speeches by the American political class to show the continuing hegemonic power of the term. Here, for the specific purpose of this essay, I will restrict my commentary to a brief rehearsal of the spectacular use (in the Debordian sense) to which Senator John Kerry (now Secretary of State in the Obama administration) put the term in behalf of persuading the American public, against earlier and persistent jeremiadic accusations of betrayal by Republican spokespersons, that President Obama’s administration 20 Enacted by the Congress following the directives of the Bush administration’s post- 9/ 11 declaration of policy entitled “The National Security Strategy of the United State of America�” 21 The recent exposures by Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden of the disturbing degree to which the state operates according to the imperatives of the state of exception bear witness to this� 22 Jerome Karabel, “‘American Exceptionalism’ and the Battle for the Presidency�” Huffington Post. http: / / www.huffingtonpost.com/ jerome-karabel/ american-exceptionalism-obama-gingrich_b_1161800�html The Widening Gyre of the New, New Americanist Studies 23 was continuing America’s perennial exceptionalist errand in the world’s wilderness� 23 I am referring to his staging (for effect) of his encomium to the president’s American exceptionalism by way of his triumphant (but equivocal) climactic assertion that Obama’s “promise” to fulfill the redemptive (symbolic) goal of America’s global mission in the wake of 9/ 11 culminated in what the previous Republican administration had not achieved: the spectacular - “surgically executed” - assassination of Osama bin Laden, the living symbol of the threat posed by Jihadist Islam to the security of the American people: And President Obama kept his promise� He promised to end the war in Iraq - and he has - and our heroes have come home� He promised to end the war in Afghanistan responsibly - and he is - and our heroes there are coming home� He promised to focus like a laser on al-Qaeda - and he has - our forces have eliminated more of its leadership in the last three years than in all the eight years that came before� And after more than ten years without justice for thousand of Americans murdered on 9/ 11, after Mitt Romney said it would be “naïve” to go into Pakistan to pursue the terrorist, it took President Obama, against the advice of many to give that order to finally rid this earth of Osama bin Laden. Ask Osama bin Laden if he is better off now than he was four years ago� [inordinate applause] 24 In thus identifying American exceptionalism as the determining agent of the spectacular assassination of Osama bin Laden, Senator Kerry not only brought to fulfillment the conservative Republican George W. Bush’s Texan inflected Ahabism: his exceptionaiist and monomaniac promise to hunt down Osama bin Laden� In so doing, he also brought to its liminal point the essential - massively destructive (and finally self-defeating) - exceptional (onto)logic, or, rather, the (onto)logic of exceptionalism - of the American exceptional ethos: the objectification of the complexities of history (produced in large part by Western and American colonialism) to render them, as Melville proleptically observed of Captain Ahab’s monomaniacal exceptionalism, “practically assailable�” 25 Despite the growing counter-mnemonic scholarship of the New Americanists pointing to a quite different evaluation of American exceptionaiism, what seems to be astonishing about this discourse of the contemporary post-9/ 11 American political class is its obliviousness to its findings. 23 Senator John Kerry used the term “exceptionalism” nine times in his speech� 24 John Kerry, Speech to the 2012 DNC� Charlotte, North Carolina� September 6, 2012� http: / / goo�gl/ Ooj33h 25 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or The Whole, ed� Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G� Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago” Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1988), p� 184; my emphasis� The unintended ironic parallel between the spectacular high tech (“shock and awe”) metaphor Senator Kerry uses to characterize Obama’s assault on Osama bin Laden (“like a laser”) and the spectacular high tech metaphor Melville uses to characterize Ahab’s assault on the white whale (“and then , as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it�”) should not be overlooked� 24 W illiam s Panos My purpose in thus retrieving this recent American history is, in sum, to underscore two affiliated urgent points, which, despite their patent visibility, have been strangely marginalized if not entirely overlooked by the new, New Americanist globalized discourses. The first is that the American exceptionalist ethos continues at the present historical conjuncture to determine America’s mission in the world� Despite its theoretical self-destruction (the disclosure of the violence it always disavows during the Vietnam War and again during the global “War on Terror”), it has not, as yet, become, in the Gramscian sense of the word, a (conscious and articulate) ideology; it remains, that is, a hegemonic discourse (what I have been calling, after Jacques Rancière, an “ethos”): a polyvalent ideology that is taken by the American political class and the vast majority of the interpellated (“called”) American public to be reality: “common sense,” “the way things are�” At the risk of rehearsing the obvious, I quote at length Raymond Williams’ precise and resonant rendition of Antonio Gramsci’s enabling and indispensable, yet curiously marginalized, distinction between “ideology” and “hegemony,” which, in determining the difference between - and the sameness of - modern totalitarian and democratic/ capitalist societies, remarkably epitomizes the American exceptionalsit ethos: The concept of hegemony often, in practice, resembles the definitions [of “ideology” as a consciously held world view of both the dominant and subordinate classes], but it is distinct in its refusal to equate consciousness with the articulate formal system which can be and ordinarily is abstracted as “ideology”� It of course does not exclude the articulate and formal meanings, values and beliefs which a dominant class develops and propagates� But it does not equate these with consciousness, or rather it does not reduce consciousness to them� Instead it sees the relations of domination and subordination, in the forms as practical consciousness, as in effect as a saturation of the whole process of living - not only of political and economic activity, nor only of manifest social activity, but of the whole substance of lived identities and relationships, to such a depth that the pressures and limits of what can ultimately be seen as a specific economic, political, and cultural system seem to most of us the pressures and limits of simple experience and common sense� Hegemony is then not only the articulate upper level of ‘ideology’, nor are its forms of control only those ordinarily seen as ‘manipulation’ or ‘indoctrination’� It is a whole body of practices and expectations, over the whole of living: our senses and assignments of energy, our shaping perceptions of ourselves and our world� It is a lived system of meanings and values - constitutive and constituting - which as they are experienced as practices appear as reciprocally confirming. It thus constitutes a sense of reality for most people in the society, a sense of absolute because experienced reality beyond which it is very difficult for most members of society to move, in most areas of their lives. It is, that is to say, in the strongest sense a ‘culture’, but a culture which has also to be seen as the lived dominance and subordination of particular classes� 26 26 Raymond Williams� Marxism and Literature (London: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp� 109-110� The Widening Gyre of the New, New Americanist Studies 25 4. The second point I want to underscore in thus recalling the dominant role that American exceptionalism continues to play in the contemporary world, despite the volatile dynamic of globalization, is that our contemporary occasion is not the end of an era, whether of History or the “American Century�” It is rather the occasion of the interregnum� By this term I not only mean the “now time” between a centered world (the nation-state and its intrinsic exceptionalism) that is dying but, in the form of the U.S., is willfully, desperately, and dangerously trying to remain alive, and a de-centered world struggling to be born� I also mean “the now time” of the exilic consciousness, that damaged but thus estranging and illuminating local/ global perspective of, in Edward Said’s still compelling words, “the intellectual and artist in exile, the political figure between domains, between forms, between homes, and between languages,” who is the consciousness of the ubiquitous deracinated “migrant,” that incarnation of the “unhoused, decentered, and exilic energies” that, “today, ” in the wake of the implosion of the Western Imperial project and the replacement of “the settled, established and domesticated dynamics of culture,” has become the new agent of liberation from Western colonial oppression� (CI, 332) 27 That is to say, to return to the metaphor of the centered circle (the local and the global), the interregnum compels the authentic intellectual to be both inside and outside the “world,” at home and not at home, at once (apart)� From this estranged and estranging perspective - this profane alienating time of the now - as Said empoweringly observes, “all things are indeed counter, original, spare , strange”: potential as such� 28 To put this imperative of the profane time of the now of the interregnum in Giorgio Agamben’s alternative terms, in the interregnum the exilic intellectual’s vocation becomes the “revocation of all vocations” 29 - the rendering inoperative of the interpellating ethos - in this case, American exceptionaism - that renders the individual human being a subjected subject, the willing servant of a Higher (transcendental) Cause, which is to say, the liberation of humanity from the bondage of a logic of belonging that serves the mystified few to a logic that returns the commons to the common� From the exilic perspective of this in-between time, too, one is enabled to envision a coming polis of the 27 See also Hannah Arendt “We Refugees” in The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age, ed� Ron H� Feldman (New York: Grove Press, 1978); and Giorgio Agamben “ Beyond Human Rights,” in Means without End, trans� Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp� 15-28� I amplify on the liberating potential of the figure of the contemporary figure of the refugee in Exile in the City: Hannah Arendt and Edward W. Said in Counterpoint (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013) , pp� 165-174� 28 This, not incidentally is, consciously or not, an echo of Martin Heidegger‘s phenomenological analysis of the de-structive by which the “ordinary” becomes “extraordinary�” 29 See Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains: A Commentary of the Letter to the Romans, trans� Patricia Daily (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), p� 23� 26 W illiam s Panos commons untethered to the sovereign and totalitarian center elsewhere, or, in Said’s paradoxical and resonantly heuristic phrase, “’the complete consort dancing together’ contrapuntally�” Given the continuing, if contested, authority of the polyvalent American exceptionalist ethos in the discourse and practice of the American political class throughout the post-9/ 11 era, it comes as a surprise to find that, in “remapping” American studies, the great majority of New Americanist texts published in the last decade either marginalize “America” (interrogate the validity of the term “American studies”), minimize America’s exceptionalism, or virtually erase it in the process of overdetermining the site of the global or, rather, the plural aspects of the global� Of course, the tacit purpose of this overdetermination of the global (when it is not simply a matter of academic fashion) is, more or less, in keeping with the dictates of the global perspective, to diminish the imperial authority of the United States, and, more generally, the concept of the nation-state� But the result of this outside Archimedean perspective, as I have been arguing, has been to distort the historical reality of the post-9/ 11 occasion. This distortion is evident in some significant degree in all the New American texts I have referred to above� A remarkable example of this effacement of the visible local can be found in Wei Chee Dimock’s “Planet America: Set and Subset,” the introduction surveying the influential volume of New Americanist essays she edited with Lawrence Buell entitled Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature (2007), which makes no significant reference to the primary role the perennial American exceptionalist ethos has played on a global scale since the Bush administration’s declaration of America’s “War on Terror�” It is true that Dimock refers in passing to 9/ 11 as a turning point in the history of Americana studies: After the World Trade Center, and after Katrina, few of us are under the illusion that the Unites States is sovereign in any absolute sense� The nation seems to have come literally “unbundled” before our eyes, its fabric of life torn apart by extremist militant groups, and, by physical forces of even greater scope, wrought by climate change and the intensification of hurricane cycles. Territorial sovereignty, we suddenly realize, is no more than a legal fiction, a man-made fiction.” 30 But, it is not, in fact, America’s unending exceptionalist war on terror and the massive “collateral damage” it is inflicting that she overdetermines in introducing the topic of the globalizing of American literary studies and the essays that follow� 31 Indeed, the war on terror and the “redemptive” exceptionalism of its origins are marginalized in the sequel (and in the following essays)� It is, rather, as the emphasis in the above passage anticipates, 30 Wei Chee Dimock, “Introduction: “Planet and America, Set and Subset,” in Shades of the Planet: American Literature and World Literature, ed� Dimock and Lawrence Buell (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), “Plant and America,” p� 1; further references will be abbreviated to PA and incorporated in the text in parentheses� 31 The dearth of reference to American exceptionalism in this volume of thirteen is evidenced in the Index� Under the heading “American studies, and exceptionalism,” the Index lists, 6 single page entries; under the heading “exceptionalism: American,” it lists 5 single page entries� The Widening Gyre of the New, New Americanist Studies 27 “Katrina,” the ecological disaster that befell New Orleans as a result of the United States’ indifference to global warming that, she claims, has precipitated the planetization of American studies: What Katrina dramatizes … is a form of “globalization” different from either scenarios [the emergence of a “global civil society” in the wake of the decline of the nation-state envisioned by such theorists as Jürgen Habermas and Michael Walzer, on the one hand; and the global free market under the aegis of the United States warned against by theorists such as Fredric Jameson]� Not benign, it is at the same time not predicated on the primacy of any nation� Long accustomed to seeing itself as the de facto center of the world - a military superpower, the largest economy, and the moral arbiter to boot - the United States suddenly finds itself downgraded to something considerably less� “It’s like being in a Third World country,” Mitch Handler, a manager in Louisiana’s biggest public hospital, said to the Associated Press about the plight of hurricane victims� The Third-Worlding of a superpower came with a shock not only to Louisiana and Mississippi but to unbelieving eyes everywhere� Not the actor but the acted upon, the United States is simply the spot where catastrophe hits, the place on the map where largescale forces, unleashed elsewhere, come home to roost� What does it mean for the United States to be on the receiving end of things? … Scale enlargement has stripped from this nation any dream of unchallenged primacy� If Europe has already been “provincialized” - has been revealed to be a smaller player in world history than previously imagined, as Dipesh Chakrabarty argues - the United States seems poised to follow� … In this context, it seems important to rethink the adequacy of a nation-based paradigm [of American literary studies]� Is “American” an adjective that can stand on its own, uninflected, unentangled, and unconstrained? Can an autonomous field be built on its chronology and geography, equal to the task of phenomenal description and causal explanation? Janice Radway, in her presidential address to the American Studies Association of 1998, answers with a resounding “no,” and proposes a name change for the association for just that reasons� (PA, 2) Dimock is, of course, justified in calling into question the sovereignty of the nation-state, “America,” and the exceptionalism it implies. But her identification of the ground of this identification with Katrina as such - without pointing to the negative effects on the domestic site (in this case the ecologically vulnerable city New Orleans and its black population) of the United States’ “War on Terror” - not only flies in the face of contemporary history. In deflecting attention from the unending, massively destructive global War on Terror being perpetrated by the United States in the name of its assumed redemptive global errand, it defuses the urgency of naming this unerring exceptionalist justification as the normalization of the state of exception on both the local and global scale - a normalization, not incidentally, that includes the United States’ right to militarize the ecos in the name of national security 32 - and, thus, of resisting not only its drive to reduce human life to life that can be killed with impunity, but also, in the end, to destroy the planet� 32 See Robert Marzec, “Environmenality : The War Machine and the Struggle for Inhabitancy in the Age of Climate Change,“ in Environmentality, forthcoming, University of Minnesota Press, 2015� 28 W illiam s Panos The deflection of critical attention from exceptionalist America endemic to this overdetermined global perspective of Wei Chee Dimock (and the majority of essays in the volume) is also plainly evident in various degrees in the other recent anthologies of New Americanist Studies� But its disabling effect is most visible in the introduction to (and contents of) the volume entitled The Globalization of American Studies edited by Brian T� Edwards and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, a compilation of the best essays presented at the ongoing conferences of the “Global American Studies” project (GLAS) at Northwestern University� And this is because, unlike the editors of the other anthologies, who overdetermine the global at the expense of the local, these take the point of departure of their global perspective (and their summary of the essays In the volume) by invoking the myth of American exceptionalism (which, following Henry Luce, they refer to as “the American Century”) only to dismiss it, along with the United State’s exceptionalist post-9/ 11 “War on Terror” and it rendering of the state of exception the rule, as having run it historical course� That is to say, they begin from the vantage point of the “historical” coming-to-itsend of the myth of American exceptionalism, the dissolution, as it were, of the center intrinsic to the widening gyre� Thus, their introduction begins with an extended (and rather labored) commentary on the essay inaugurating the volume, Donald Pease’s “American Studies after American Exceptionalism? : Toward a Comparative Analysis of Imperial State Exceptionalism,” the purpose of which is to challenge its thesis concerning the viability of American exceptionalism in the era of globalization: The question is whether American exceptionalism has always already been implicated in some sort of imperial formation, as Pease argues, with the American century serving as the most recent incarnation of that imperial strand� This historical question, which Pease argues with considerable precision and force, need not, however, be the starting point for this introduction� If American exceptionalism was always implicated in American imperialism, so long as American imperialism does not come to an end, neither will some versions of American exceptionalism invoked to sustain that imperialism come to an end� In this we agree with Pease, but the question we ask is the following: What happens to American studies when the American Century - which can be variously described, including as an imperial formation, but which always refers to a particular logic of the circulation of capital, signs, texts, and (cultural) goods - comes to an end or enters its longue durée? If the American Century in the Lucean sense is coming or has come to an end, then we expect that the particular link between American exeptionalism and American studies is bound to change, if it has not already changed� 33 Edwards and Gaonkar thus modify, if they do not entirely reject Pease’s thesis about the continuing existence of American exceptionalism by way of assuming, against historical reality, that the American century has for all practical purposes come to its end� Admittedly they express ambiguousness about this end: 33 Brian T� Edwards and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, “Introduction: Globalizing American Studies,” in Edwards and Gaonkar, ed� Globalzing American Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), pp� 4-5� Further references will be abbreviated to GAS and incorporated in the text in parentheses� The Widening Gyre of the New, New Americanist Studies 29 The American Century cannot be critiqued out of existence, even if it renews itself In the guise of a decentered empire, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri would have us believe� Instead, it can only come to an end� We need to come to that time when American exceptionalism has to stand alone, in the multilateral world of the global� indeed, we believe that we have come to that time, or nearly so� Therefore we suggest that the closing of the so-called American Century, less as unit of time than a decided shift in global conditions, signals the weakening of the long-and-enduring myth of American exceptionalism� American studies, as a result, must yield to a context within which such a formation - of America’s special place and role in the world - requires the bracketing of fictions that can no longer be sustained� (GAS, 50; my emphasis) This qualification is a telling one, but, as the content of the essay testifies, it has no importance to the editors’ argument (and to those of most of the essays in the volume) about the ”closing of the American Century�” 34 Indeed, the ambiguity strikes one as a specter of the historical reality of the interregnum - the exceptionalism that continues to inform America’s global practice - that haunts Edwards’ and Gaonkar’s overdetermined global thesis� Like the other texts to which I have referred thus far, Edwards’ and Goankar’s bears unintended spectral witness to the new New Americanist betrayal of the critical imperatives of the interregnum� 5. The small anthology edited by Russ Castronovo and Susan Gilman entitled States of Emergency: The Object of American Studies is, in this respect, more adequate than the Dimock and Buell volume, because, as the title suggests, it identifies the issue at stake for New Americanists as the rendering of the state of exception (emergency) the global rule� In their ”Introduction: The Study of the American Problems,” however, the editors’ global (as opposed to local) orientation renders their analysis finally inadequate to the critical imperatives of the Interregnum, in which local and global belong together� Symptomatic of this inadequacy is the labored way the editors attempt to relate the global issues referred to in the essays - weather, slavery, neo-liberal capital, homosexuality, torture, etc� Their overdeterminaton of the global perspective, that is, blinds them to the fact that it is the (local) American exceptionalist state, understood at its liminal point, as in the case of the Vietnam War and, especially the post-9/ 11 War on Terror, that has precipitated the ominous normalization of the state of exception and thus constitutes the hidden paradigm that informs all the global topics to which the essay refers� 34 The editors refer twice more to “the closing of the American Century as if it were a fait accompli. A page later, for example, they write, “We briefly defer the question of what sort of American studies emerges after the American Century by asking what sort of disciplinary anxiety our time - the end of the ‘American Century’ - present�” p� 6� See also pp� 30 and 39� 30 W illiam s Panos Two essays in this volume constitute exceptions to this general marginalization of the destructive role the United States continues to play on the global scene: Anne McClintock’s “Paranoid Empire: Specters from Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib” and Ian Baucom’s “Cicero’s Ghost: The Atlantic, the Enemy, and the Laws of War. ” The first distinguishes itself by way of its brilliantly corrosive analysis of the notorious Abu Ghraib photographs depicting American soldiers torturing Arabs suspected of being terrorists, which, against the official representation that identifies the agents as exceptions to America’s redemptive global mission (“bad apples”), demonstrates decisively that they were manifestations of an official paranoia which was the result of an imperial society’s coherence around “contradictory cultural narratives, self-mythologies, practices and identities that oscillate between delusions of inherent superiority and omnipotence and phantasms of threat and engulfment�” 35 The second essay distinguishes itself, by way of its illuminating genealogy of the West’s concept of the “unjust enemy” which has enabled the its perennial colonizing project� McClintock’s focus on the “superior” (exceptionalist) imperial society’s need for a perpetual enemy constitutes a major contribution to the understanding of both the strength and weakness of the Western imperial project� But in universalizing the paranoia informing the practice of torture at Abu Ghraib, it diverts attention from the specifically American version of this paranoia and its long history� Thus, for example, in introducing the theme of what she calls “the enemy deficit” that is intrinsic to imperial power, McClintock invokes the famous last lines of the modern Greek poet, Constantine Cavafy’s “Waiting for the Barbarians: ” “And now what shall become of us [the Romans] without any barbarians? / Those people were a kind of solution�” Commenting on these lines, she writes: C� P� Cavafy wrote “Waiting for the Barbarians” in 1927� But the poem haunts the aftermath of 9/ 11 with the force of an uncanny and prescient déjà vu� To what dilemma are the “barbarians a kind of solution”? Every modern empire faces an abiding crisis of legitimacy in that it flings its power over territories and peoples who have not consented to that power� Cavafy’s insight is that an imperial state claims legitimacy only by evoking the threat of the barbarians� It is only the threat of the barbarians that constitutes the silhouette of the empire’s borders in the first place� On the other hand, the hallucination of the barbarians disturbs the empire with perpetual nightmares of impending attack� The enemy is the abject of empire: the rejected from which we cannot part� And without the barbarians the legitimacy of empire vanishes like a disappearing phantom� These people were a kind of solution� (PE, 92) McClintock then goes on to illustrate Cavafy’s thesis by recalling, first, the dominant American culture’s deep anxiety - she quotes General Peter Schoonmaker, head of the U�S Army; Dick Cheney; Colin Powell; George W� 35 Anne McClintock, “Paranoid Empire: Specters from Guantánamo an Abu Ghraib,” in Castronovo and Gilman, ed� Strategies of Emergency: : The Object of American Studies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009) p� 91; further references will be abbreviated to PE and incorporated in the text in parentheses� The Widening Gyre of the New, New Americanist Studies 31 Bush; and the neocons of the Project for New Americana Century - over the loss of such an enemy with the end of the Cold War with the Soviet Union and, then, in Cavafy’s language, their relief, if not euphoria, in the wake of al Qaeda’s bombing of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon: The 9/ 11 attacks came as a dazzling solution to both the enemy deficit and the problem of legitimacy� General Schoonmaker saw the attacks as an immense boon: “There is a huge silver lining in this cloud� … War is a tremendous focus� Now we have this focusing opportunity, and we have the fact that (terrorists) have actually attacked our homeland, which gives it some oomph�” After the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, Powell noted, “America will have a continuing interest and presence in Central Asia of a kind we could not have dreamed of before�” Charles Krauthammer called for a declaration of total war� “We no long have to search for a name for the post-Cold War era,” he declared, “It will henceforth be known as the age of terrorism�” (PE, 93) McClintocks’s Cavafian focus on the anxiety-provoking “enemy deficit” constitutes a significant contribution to our understanding of the paranoid dynamics of the imperial imagination� But her overdetermined universalizing global perspective blinds her to the more immediate origins of the American version of the paranoid imperial syndrome� That is to say, her recurrent reference to the American political class’s vacillation between “delirium of grandeur” and “nightmare of perpetual threat” and thus of the paranoid need for a perpetual rejuvenating enemy can be more accurately - and, from the point of view of resistance, productively - understood as having its genealogical origins in the American jeremiad� I mean that long and abiding ritualized (hegemonized) American cultural tradition, coeval with the origins of American exceptionalism, that, as I have shown elsewhere, had its origins, according to Sacvan Bercovitch, in the American Puritans’ effort to combat recidivism - the very cultural backsliding that its errand in the New World wilderness was intended to transcend - by way of the instigation of anxiety - the threat of a perpetual enemy on the other side of a perpetual frontier� I quote at length from Bercovitch’s American Jeremiad not only to suggest the remarkable parallel with McClintoch’s Cavafy but also to underscore the difference of this same between the process-oriented New World and the static Old World vocations and the hegemonic nature of the American jeremiad: the perennial national ritual that has ensured the rejuvenation (through violence) of the American covenantal people 36 : The American Puritan jeremiad was the ritual of culture on an errand - which is to say, a culture based on a faith in process� Substituting teleology for hierarchy, it discarded the Old World ideals of stasis for a New World vision of the future� Its function was to create a climate of anxiety that helped release the restless “progressive” energies required for the success of the venture� The European jeremiads also thrived on anxiety, of course� Like all traditional forms of ritual, it used fear and trembling to teach acceptance of fixed social norms. But the American Puritan jeremiad went much further. It made anxiety its end as well as its means. Crisis 36 See Richard Slotkin, Rejuvenation Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1973)� 32 W illiam s Panos was the social norm it sought to inculcate. The very concept of errand, after all, implied a state of unfulfillment. The future, though divinely assured, was never quite there, and New England’s Jeremiahs set out to provide the sense of insecurity that would ensure the outcome. Denouncing or affirming , their vision fed on the distance between promise and fact� 37 Similarly, Ian Baucom, in “Cicero’s Ghost: The Atlantic, the Enemy, the Laws of War,” locates the genealogical origins of the Bush administration’s representation of the terrorist suspects incarcerated and tortured in indeterminate juridical zones such as Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo as “unlawful combatants” back to European origins: the discourse and practice of modern Western nation-states, which identified the “unjust [nomadic] enemy” as one that was not organized into a national polity, thus violating “the law of nature” and justifying its destruction by sovereign (sedentary and civilized) 38 states with impunity� The difference between the two is a matter of degree of historical specificity. Whereas McClintock, via Cavafy’s poem, locates the origins of contemporary America’s “unjust enemy” - the barbarian Arab that can be tortured without the torture being subject to punishment - in the general imperial Roman distinction between civilization and barbarism, Baucom locates it in the early modern tradition of European jurisprudential discourse on war and the commonwealth instigated by the question of Black Atlantic slavery and going back from Immanuel Kant (The Metaphysics of Morals) to Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan), Hugo Grotius (The Rights of War and Peace), and Alberto Gentili (De Jure Belli Libri), who, in turn, find their source in Cicero’s Philippics (against “’the bandit,’” Mark Antony, and his “’villainous band of brigands�’” 39 Taking his point of departure from the commen- 37 Sacvan Bercovicth, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), p� 23; my emphasis� For an extended account of the relationship between the Puritan understanding of the enemy and the later American understanding of the frontier, see William V� Spanos “American Exceptionalism, the Jeremiad, and the Frontier before and after 9/ 11: From the Puritans to the Neo-Con Men,” in American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization: The Specter of Vietnam (Albany: SUNT Press, 2008), pp� 187-242� 38 I put “nomadic” and “sedentary” in parentheses to suggest that Baucom could have extended his genealogy beyond Cicero’s argument against Mark Antony to include the fundamental distinction, extending throughout the history of Western colonialism to the present day, that justified Rome’s conquest and occupation of the terra incognita beyond the terra orbis: that between a sedentary (agricultural and thus “civilized”) people and a nomadic people (and thus “barbarian”) people� Had Baucom included this aspect of Rome’s justification of war against an “unjust enemy,” it would have enabled him to be more historically accurate about the genealogy of post-9/ 11 America’s version of the unjust” or “inimical” enemy� For this distinction was absolutely central in the establishment of the American exceptionalism ethos, which in the period of westward expansion was expressed in the vernacular as the opposition between the Americans’ “betterment” or “settlement” of the land the natives’ merely “roaming on” the land� 39 Ian Baucom, “Cicero’s Ghost: The Atlantic, the Enemy, and the Laws of War,” in Russ Castranovo and Susan Gilman, ed�, States of Emergency: The Object of Americana Studies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), p� 131; further references will be abbreviated to CG and incorporated in the text in parentheses� The Widening Gyre of the New, New Americanist Studies 33 tary justifying America’s war against Iraq (“The Pentagon’s New Map”) of American of policy expert Thomas P�M� Barnett, former director of “the New Rules Set Project, a collaborative project sponsored by the Naval War College and the investment consulting firm Cantor Fitzgerald,” Baucom succinctly summarizes his globalized version of this genealogical history of America’s version of the unjust enemy as follows: The key argument central to the mid-seventeenth-century law of war (and central again, in overtly Hobbesian terms, to Kant’s own theory of international and cosmopolitan right) thus returns as key to Barnett’s new map of capital law, and war� In response to the appearance of a “predatory” people living in a putatively real state of nature on the boundaries and beyond the outposts of stable nation states and the circulating flow of capital-people living in that “lawless condition in which man is a wolf to man (homo homini lupus” [Hobbes]), the condition of human life one of a perpetual war of all against all, and the pursuit of commerce impossible in the absence of an overawing law-and-contract-securing power-sovereign power can again extend itself as a law-constituting power of violence and, in so extending law and violence extend the flow of capital. And it is not at all an accident that at precisely the moment in which this Hobbesian-Kantian map of war should re-emerge, or that at the very frontier of its Gulf War testing ground, so too should the figure of the inimicus return to the law-suspending center of the law of war: now in the form of the “unlawful enemy combatant” identified in President Bush’s October 2001 order of War and subsequently written into U�S� law by the Military Commissions Act of 20006 - a figure, once again, distinguishable from the “lawful enemies” of the imperial state by the failure to “belong to a State party”: a figure, once again. Inimical, rightless, legally exceptional, and languishing indefinitely, but by law, within yet another of the Atlantic’s legally free and empty zones; a melancholy successor figure in the long line of “Capman,” “Hottentots,” “brigands,” “inimici,”and “unjust enemies,” against whom the imperial state has held its own “rights” to be ”unlimited�” (CG, 138) As in the case of McClintock genealogical focus on America’s perennial “enemy deficit,” Baucom’s remarkably similar, but more historically specific, genealogical focus on its perennial reliance on “the unjust enemy” sheds new and welcomed light not only on the United States’ justification of its “war on terror” and its use of torture against “terrorist suspects” at Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, and other indefinite zone of detention, but also on the United States’ post-9/ 11 American imaginary� This is especially true of Baucom’s resonant implication, by way of his identification of America’s understanding of the “unlawful combatant” with that of the Western tradition at large - the “unjust enemy,” the inimicus,” “the homo homini lupus” - that the pervasive American discourse and practice pertaining to an always threatening enemy (or frontier) is ultimately, no different, in reality, from “the unjust enemy” of all the other Old World imperial nations-states from which it distinguishes itself� (Tellingly, however, Baucom, like McClintock, does not overtly articulate this parallel�) As in the case of McClintock’s genealogy, however, Baucom overdetermines the global perspective at the expense of the local� And, in thus violating the imperatives of the historical interregnum, he marginalizes, if he does not entirely efface, the particular - and, crucially, the historically differentiating - origins of America’s perennial representation of “the unjust 34 W illiam s Panos enemy” and the violence it has inflicted on their minds and bodies. In short, his distance from the center, like McClintock’s, blinds him to the the fundamental role that the American jeremiad has played in the formation of the American national identity as an exceptionalist and redemptive identity from America’s Puritan origins, through the era of the removal of the native Americans to reservations (camps) and their eventual extermination (including the reduction of Africans to slaves, which is Baucom’s primary example of the continuity between President Bush’s “unlawful combatant” and the Old World’s “unjust enemy”) to the present 9/ 11 occasion� I mean, to repeat, the instigation of anxiety in the covenantal people by way of identifying the alien Other beyond the frontier between civilization and wilderness as a threatening enemy in behalf of always already rejuvenating (by violence) its communal energies in the face of the backsliding that is endemic to the very civilizing process of its errand� Had McClintock and Baucom been more attentive to American history in tracing the genealogy of official America’s post- 9/ 11 representation of its global itinerary, epitomized by Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, they, no doubt, would have been directed by their focus on “the unjust enemy” to the prestigious neoconservative Samuel P. Huntington’s very visible justificatory defense of George W� Bush’s War on Terror in the face of what he refers to as “the deconstruction of America�” I am referring to Who Are We: The Challenges to America’s NationaI Identity (2004), 40 which traces the American national identity (the “Protestant core culture”) that the Bush administration would secure against “militant Islam” back to the Puritan “errand in the wilderness” - The settling of America was, of course, a result of economic and other motives, as well as religious ones� Yet religion still was central� … Religious intensity was undoubtedly greatest among the Puritans, especially in Massachusetts� They took the lead in defining their settlement based on “a Covenant with God” to create “a city on a hill” as a model for all the world, and people of the Protestant faiths soon also came to see themselves and America in a similar way� In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Americans defined their mission in the New World in biblical terms� They were a “chosen people,” on an ”errand in the wilderness,” creating a ”the new Israel,” or the “new Jerusalem” in what was clearly “the promised land�” America was the site of a “new Heaven and a new earth, the home of justice,” God’s country� The settlement of American was vested, as Sacvan Bercovitch put it, “with all the emotional, spiritual, and intellectual appeal of a religious quest�” This sense of holy mission was easily expanded into millenarian themes of America as ”the redeemer nation” and “the visionary republic�” (WAW, 64) and, as the title itself and Huntington’s (misleading) appropriation of Sacvan Bercovitch make patently clear, is consciously written in American jeremiadic vein� 40 Samuel P� Huntington, Who Are We? : The Challenges to America’s National Identity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004); further citations will be abbreviated to WAW and incorporated in the text in parentheses� Baucom refers to Huntington in his essay (p� 137), but it is the Huntington who is identified with the ”clash of civilizations” thesis of his earlier book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996)� The Widening Gyre of the New, New Americanist Studies 35 Huntington’s jeremiadic ideological itinerary, in fact, culminates in a disquisition on America’s perennial need for an enemy that is remarkably similar, though ideologically antithetical to Anne McClintock’s characterization of what she calls the Bush administration’s’ paranoid “enemy deficit.” Unlike his neoconservative predecessor, Francis Fukuyama, who represented the end of America’s Cold War against Soviet communism euphorically as the triumph of American democracy and “End of History,” 41 Huntington, in this culminating chapter tellingly entitled “In Search of an Enemy,” dwells, paradoxically it would seem to most, on the negative consequence of this triumphant “end�” Like the previous American Jeremiahs - John Winthrop, Jonathan Edwards, Francis Parkman, Daniel Webster, Frederick Jackson Turner, Mark Twain, and William Lederer and Eugene Burdick , among many others - he overdetermines America’s loss of the anxiety-provoking enemy: At the end of the century, Democracy was left without a significant secular ideological rival, and the United States was left without a peer competitor� Among American foreign policy elites, the result were euphoric, pride, arrogance - and uncertainty� The absence of an ideological threat produced an absence of purpose� “Nations need enemies,” Charles Krauthammer commented as the Cold War ends. “Take away one, and they find another.” The ideal enemy for America would be ideologically hostile, racially and culturally different, and militantly strong enough to pose a credible threat to American security� The foreign policy debates of the 1990s were already over who Might be such an enemy� (WAW, 262) It is at this point in Huntington’s jeremiad, as I have observed elsewhere, that “the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9/ 11 come from the margins, where they have been lying in wait from the beginning, to center stage�” 42 In a rhetoric worthy of Mark Twain’s signature American exceptionalist technique of staging for effect - or more to the point, of Guy Debord’s corrosive analysis of Western modernity’s use of the spectacle to bereave its human objects of speech, i�e� a polity), Huntington goes on calculatively to orchestrate a spectacular end of his narrative of exceptionalist America’s anxious ”search for an enemy�” Beginning with a rapid but suspense-inducing survey of the possible candidates for the status of America’s post-Cold war enemy - Serbia, China, Iran Iraq , Pakistan - he concludes with a resonant - and, to invoke McClintock language, paranoid finality: The cultural gap between Islam and America’s Christianity and Anglo- Protestantism reinforces Islam’s enemy qualifications. And on September 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden ended America’s search� The attacks on New York and Washington followed by the wars with Afghanistan and Iraq and the more diffuse “war on terrorism” make militant Islam America’s first enemy of the twentyfirst century. (WAW, 264-265) 41 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992)� 42 William V� Spanos, “American Exceptionalism and the State of Exception after 9/ 11: Melville’s Proleptic Witness,” in The State of Exception and the Exceptionalist State: Herman Melvile’s Billy Budd, Sailor (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), p� 157� 36 W illiam s Panos 6. I conclude this essay with a brief critical commentary on Paul Giles’s influential The Re-Mapping of Americana Literature (2011), 43 which, it seems to me, epitomizes what is most problematic, if not entirely disabling, about this New Americanist tendency to overdetermine the global at the expense of the local, the American exceptionalism that has informed America’s national identity and its practice from the Puritans’ genocidal war against the Pequots to the George W� Bush administration’s post-9/ 11 “War on [Islamic] Terror�” Giles’s revisionary “re-mapping” of American literature brings numerous “subversive” texts hitherto marginalized by the exceptionalist tradition to visibility� Furthermore, in reading canonical American texts against the nationalist grain, it sheds productive counter-light on the American literary tradition� That is, his intervention complicates the narrative of American literature canonized by the celebratory Myth and Symbol school of Americanist studies and is thus welcomed� But the spectacle of his erudite invocation of forgotten American texts and his disorienting globalized readings of canonical national texts should not awe us into acquiescing to his questionable revisionary thesis� In fact, they distract attention from its otherwise patent vulnerability� In what follows I will identify this hidden vulnerability by way of making four brief but indissolubly related points pertaining to Giles’s global “remapping” model to suggest what is troubling - and perhaps even disabling - about his revisionary thesis on American literature� My first point has to do with the presiding metaphor of mapping (or remapping) itself, since it has become increasingly prominent in New Americanist studies� Giles’s inaugural and determining invocation of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “de-territorializing” to characterize the history of American literature “hidden” by the thesis that posits American exceptionalism as the founding and abiding origin of the Americana national identity is confusing if not contradictory� The concept of cartography he uses to articulate this deterritorialization derives from Mercator’s map-making , which is to say, the very spatializing concept that, in replacing the ancient existential and temporal-oriented “periplus” by the projection of parallel and longitude coordinates, enabled a panoptic view of the “unknown” from within� I mean, more specifically, that version of the spatialized “tableaux vivant,” born in the period of the Enlightenment, as Foucault has shown, that, in privileging the distanced panoptic eye, enables the observer to spatialize and domesticate the mysterious terra incognita, thus becoming the primary apparatus of the of the exploration and colonization of the “New World,” the “territorialization of its ”wilderness�” Giles, of course, uses the metaphor of cartography against itself� But in thus privileging the panoptic eye and its distancing/ spatializing perspective, his project becomes an apparatus of capture complicitous with the mapping intrinsic to the territorializing imperatives of imperialism� Ironically, critique of this panoptic modern cartography in the name of experiencing the phenomena of being immediately, i�e� existentially, was made by 43 Further citations will be abbreviated to GR and incorporated in the text in parentheses� The Widening Gyre of the New, New Americanist Studies 37 two recent American poets, Ezra Pound and Charles Olson, who were critical of the imperialism inherent in the cartographic mentality of American modernity� Thus Pound’s recurrent appeal to the Phoenician sailor Hanno’s periplus: “not as land seen on a map / but sea bord seen by men sailing�” 44 Thus also Charles Olson’s similar appeal to Juan de la Cosa, Columbus’s shipboard mapmaker: Behaim - and nothing Insular Azores to Cipangu (Candyn) Somewhere also there where spices And yes, in the Atlantic, one floating island: de Sant Brand an�… But before La Cosa, nobody could have a mappemunde 45 My second point is that Giles’s overdetermined (panoptic) global perspective compels him to minimize, if not entirely erase, the Puritan thesis, inaugurated by Perry Miller and especially Sacvan Bercovitch about the origins of the American national identity� This is especially evident in his misrepresentation of Bercovitch’s scholarship, particularly by way of not directly addressing American Jeremiad, most evident in his “heretical” reading of Cotton Mather’s Magnaiia Christi Americana: There is a certain heretical quality to such an approach [reconsidering Cotton Mather’s major work “along a geographic axis” and reading “it within a transatlantic context, as an example of Restoration style being creatively reconfigured within an American context] not only because it goes against the Bercovitch line of New England as a protected space bound into an apocalyptic rhetoric of “New England promise” but also because it cuts across the premise that the organizing principle of the Magnalia is ”generational [Puritan Origins,75, 130) with Mather seeking to bind New England in a diachronic continuum across time� There is clearly a filiopietist strand to the Magnalia, with Mather paying homage to his father Increase, to John Winthrop , and many others as he seeks to canonize New England history and to institutionalize its legacy� But if the content of the text is filiopietistic, the form, I would argue, is primarily Augustan, owing less to Increase Mather than to John Dryden, the arch enemy of the Puritans� (GR, 46 ) 44 Ezra Pound, “Canto LIX in The Cantos (New York: New Directions, 1970, p� 324� 45 Charles Olson, “On ‘first Looking Out through Juan de la Cosa Eyes,” in The Maximus Poems , ed� George Butterick (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), pp� 81- 84� For Pound and Olson the periplus is an immediate expression of being-there, in the midst� As such they are more true to the reality of the world than the earlier maps of sedentary academics such as the map of the world of Martin Behaim (1492), which shows no land between Europe and Cipangu (Japan), but also earlier maps of the world based on Mercator’s projections� For an expanded commentary on this issue of cartography see, William V� Spanos, “The Ontological Origins of Occidental Imperialism: Thinking the Meta of Metaphysics,” in America’s Shadow: An Anatomy of Empire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp� 39-52� 38 W illiam s Panos In representing the “Bercovitch line” as identifying Puritan “New England as a protected space,” Giles travesties both the concepts of history and language that inform American Jeremiad. In focusing on the Puritans’ figural (or typological) mode of interpreting historical events and their related need for a perpetual rejuvenating enemy, Bercovitch demonstrates that the Puritan errand in the New World was not only intrinsically “global” and trans-temporal in its perspective but also imperial in practice� Thus, contrary to the implications of Giles’s representation, he can be seen as a precursor of the New Americanist counter-memory� All this is borne witness to by Bercovitch’s brief but decisive commentary on Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana, which, as he decisively notes earlier in his text, epitomizes the historical itinerary of America “from visible saint to American patriot, sacred errand to “manifest destiny,” colony to republic to imperial power (AJ, 92): Mather’s millenarianism at this time is worth special emphasis because the Magnalia has often been read as cry of despair. … The significance of those deliverances are [sic] indicated by the title of the last section of the last book, “Arma Virosque Cano,” a title that recalls the Virgilian invocation with which Mather opens the History (as well as the numerous echoes of Virgil thereafter), and so suggest the epic proportions of his narrative� For Mather, of course, New England’s story not only parallels but supersedes that of the founding of Rome [by a saving remnant], as his literary “assistance” from Christ excels the inspiration of Virgil’s muse, as the “exemplary heroes” he celebrates resemble but outshine the men of Aeneas’ band - not only as Christians but as seafarers and conquerors of hostile pagan tribes� Undoubtedly the proper title for Mather’s work is the exultant one he gave it: Magnalia Christi Americana, The Great Acts of Christ in America� (AJ ,87) My third point, related to the second, is that, Giles’s marginalization of the Puritan thesis about the origins of the American national identity in favor of his overdetermined global thesis also tacitly marginalizes the patent continuity between the American jeremiad - the Puritan need for a perpetual rejuvenating enemy - and the frontier thesis inaugurated by Frederick Jackson Turner at the time of the official closing of the American frontier and incorporated by the Myth and Symbol school of Americanists in behalf of America’s Cold War against the Soviet communism� 46 My fourth point focuses on the linguistic aspect of the Puritan providential concept of history� In identifying Mather’s literary style (in the above passage) with the “Augustan” style of the Old World English poet, John Dryden, Giles, in keeping with his minimization of the Puritan/ frontier thesis, obscures the difference between Mather’s Puritan figural poesis and Dryden’s “allegorical” style: One of the dominant strains in the Magnalia is the tension between history and allegory, the stress involved in the struggle to bring temporal events into alignment with a providential pattern� This precisely links Mather again with Dryden, whose historical satires, “Absalom and Achitophel,” and other works play both the analogies and the disjunctions between contemporary monarchs and and mythological 46 See William V� Spanos, “American Exceptionalism, the Jeremiad ,and the Frontier, before and after 9/ 11 : From the Puritans to the Neo-Con Mend,” in American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization, pp� 167-242� The Widening Gyre of the New, New Americanist Studies 39 or biblical archetypes. The whole Idea of parallelism is highly significant tropologically for Mather in the Magnalia, something evident at both a microcosmic level … and also a macrocosmic level� … Throughout the Magnalia, indeed, the search for parallels becomes self-conscious, even compulsive� … (GR, 48) In thus identifying Mather’s with Dryden’s style, Giles collapses the very essential distinction, implicit in Bercovitch but explicit in Eric Auerbach, between the figural interpretation of the Puritans, which understands the “parallels” it draws between disparate particular images as fundamentally historical, and the allegorical interpretation of those “Augustans,” like Dryden, who view the parallel images as imaginative and ahistorical abstractions: Figural interpretation establishes a connection between two events or persons, the first of which signifies not only itself but also the second, while the second encompasses or fulfills the first. The two poles of the figure are separated in time, but both being real events or figures, are within time, within the stream of historical life. Only the understanding of the two persons or events is a spiritual act, but this spiritual act deals with concrete events whether past, present, or future and not with concepts or abstractions; these are not secondary, since promise and fulfillment are real historical events, which have either happened in the incarnation of the Word, or will happen with the second coming. … Since in figural interpretation one thing stands for another, since one thing represents and signifies the other, figural interpretation is “allegorical” in the widest sense� But it differs from most of the allegorical forms known to us by the historicity both of the sign and what it signifies. 47 Of course, as Giles points out, Mather “is always pondering self-critically the question of how far parallels of any kind might be legitimately be pursued�” (GR, 48) But this self-critical pondering is not the result of questioning Puritan providential history and the figural method of historical exegesis. It is rather the natural consequence of the human problem of trying to incorporate every detail in space and every moment in historical time (the “fall of a sparrow” or Virgil’s Aeneid, for example) into a total design� In the conclusion of his commentary on the Magnalia, Giles, defining Mather’s literary accomplishment as the making of “an American Augustan style,” writes, “Drawing deliberately upon classical myth and Virgil’s conception of epic, Mather crosses [the “baroque” elements that other revisionary commentators on the text have identified with writers like Melville, Borges, and Faulkner] with Christian piety and scientific rationalism to create a work whose tortuous energy derives from its manifold rhetoric of self-contradiction�” (GR, 54) If, however, the structure and rhetorical style of the Magnalia is seen in the light of this crucial distinction between Puritan figural exegesis and allegory, it then can also be seen that its “tortuous energy” - and, I would add, its engaging power in behalf the Puritan redemptive mission - resides, not in its Drydenesque “Augustan” (Old World) style, but in it Puritan’s New World vocation� My last, but not least, point is that, in thus effacing the Puritan thesis about the origins of the Americana national identity, which, as I have observed, tacitly effaces the frontier thesis extending from Turner and the Myth 47 Eric Auerbach, “Figura,” in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature: Six Essays (New York: Meridian Books 1959), p� 53-54� 40 W illiam s Panos and Symbol school of Americanists, through the intellectual deputies of the presidencies of the Vietnam War era to George W� Bush administration’s post-9/ 11 “War on Terror,” Giles’s overdetermined “deterritorialing” global perspective minimizes the historical reality of American exceptionalism and the violence it has always disavowed, not least, of its perpetual exceptionalist appeal to the state of emergency that justifies the establishment of the state of exception (the homeland security state) as the norm� In so doing, he suggests, if he does not literally state, like so many of the new New Americanists, that America, in keeping with its self-representation as a “New World,” has always been plural, multicultural, hybrid, transnational, global� It is, of course, true that American exceptionaiism is a myth� But, to recall Gramsci, it is also true that this myth has produced reality, as the history of Indian removal in the nineteenth century, the Vietnam War, and, most recently, the unending “War on Terror” bear stark witness� It should not be forgotten - it is the decisive lesson bequeathed to us by post-structuralist theory from Nietzsche to Althusser - that when a fiction (ideology) becomes hegemonic, “a representation of the imagined relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence,” it also becomes history� In short, we might say, adapting a vernacular commonplace to Yeats’s lines about the widening gyre from “The Second Coming” quoted in my title, that Giles’s “heretical” readings of American literature, particularly those early texts such Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana and Timothy Dwight’s “The Conquest of Cäanan” that were hitherto Identified as founding works of the American exceptionalist tradition, are “far out�” What I have said in this essay about the new New Americanist studies is not intended to disparage its globalizing or transnationalizing initiative� As I have observed, globalizing the national contributes to the disclosure of the dark side of the nation-state, and, in so doing, facilitates thinking an alternative - de-centered and non-identitarian - communal polis� As such, it is a welcomed initiative� Furthermore, as I have noted, its implied collapsing of the distinction between American exceptionalism and the exceptionalism of the Old War nation-states - the disclosure that there is no ultimate difference between the exceptionalism that defines their national identities - contributes significantly to the task of resisting America’s errand in the global “wilderness�” My intention, undertaken in the spirit of dialogue, is, rather, to show that this new New Americanist countermnemonic initiative’s overdetermination of the global perspective - its perception of the world from the vantage point of the expanding gyre, where the center no longer holds - obliterates the actual history of our contemporary post-9/ 11 occasion, which is bearing witness to an uneven struggle between a reactionary United States, armed by its exceptionalist ethos and the most powerful-and spectacular-weapons of mass destruction in the world, and a multitude of deracinated people, unhomed by the depredations of exceptionalist nation-state imperialism, who are symptomatically clamoring for a new, alternative global polity� As “New Americanists,” therefore, it is from this interregnumthis in-between, estranged world, that we must take our critical-counter-mnemonic-directives in addressing our globalizing occasion�