fantasy of Reagan to eclipse her concern with the historical reality, Giller becomes a figure for academics whose devotion to aristocratic values exercises a censorship over our attention to the implication of our discipline in historical struggles, and its implications for those struggles.
This kind of discussion is bound to provoke anxiety among academics because, in part, our reticence to engage with historical and political interpretation follows from an understandable desire to maintain an image of nonpartisanship. In this, we have much in common with journalists who, despite having long been targeted by the right, wish to maintain credibility as nonpartisan actors. Reagan’s taped call received a lot of attention from journalists for the same reason that Giller feels emboldened to implicitly deny the manifest evidence: Without the calls, supporters of Reagan could still disavow his racism by insisting on referential proof of a phenomenon that was already inferentially discernible, as patterns of practice in Reagan’s policies and rhetoric. Whether or not a recording emerged that included racist slurs and stereotypes, the consequences of Reagan’s rhetoric and policies would have remained the same, and they would have been just as clearly rooted in racist and imperialist beliefs about white superiority and the agenda of white supremacy. But without that recording, the clear pattern could always be rhetorically dismissed as merely reading into Reagan’s record, primarily because we continue to value referential over inferential evidence.
Reagan’s savvy in disavowing his solidarity with racists is evident from his first public appearance as the 1980 Republican nominee, when he demonstrated his intention to continue Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” appealing to Wallace voters by signaling approval and support for institutional racism. At the Neshoba County Fair, where famously three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964, Reagan announced to a white audience, “I believe in states’ rights.”35 President Carter responded to the obvious implications of Reagan’s speech the next month at Ebenezer Baptist Church, denouncing “the stirrings of hate and the rebirth of code words like ‘states’ rights.’”36 The press responded by questioning Carter’s accusations, rather than Reagan’s rhetoric. A reporter asked Carter: “Do you think that Reagan is running a campaign of hatred and racism, and how do you answer allegations that you are running a mean campaign?” In what is by now a familiar pattern of false equivalencies, the reporter’s question balances one presidential candidate’s message of dehumanizing hate and institutional terror against concerns that it might be “mean” for his opponent to point out that hate. True to form, Carter demurred from mean-spirited accusations and equivocated on his own previous statements in assuring the room, “I do not think that my opponent is a racist in any degree.”
But as a Hollywood showman and corporate spokesman, Reagan knew when to press an advantage. He called Carter’s speech “shameful,” scolding him that “we ought to be trying to pull the country together.” After sending a message to the white South that he would protect the system that encoded the Confederacy and Jim Crow as issues of “states’ rights,” Reagan also claimed the role of messenger of unity to the whole nation. In our time, we would call this “gaslighting,” recognizing this tactic as one long used by abusers to silence their victims. And yet these kinds of tactics seem to have only contributed to Reagan’s aura of power and Carter’s image of weakness in the media narrative. By accusing Carter of divisiveness after appealing to racist support for segregation, Reagan is demonstrating a form of projection, in the psychoanalytic sense of assigning to another some disliked aspect of oneself, in order to preserve a flawless image of self.37 This is a component of the splitting of the ego, in which narcissistic overvaluation requires splitting off a wholly good self-image from a wholly bad image of the other. Splitting in this way serves as a mechanism of defense against confronting the split or contradiction internal to any unity—which if acknowledged would pose problems and motivate change.
The avoidance of politics and history is necessarily an avoidance of internal splits and contradictions, avoidance of change and self-criticism. One of the key obstacles to social engagement in literary studies is a notion we will examine later in writings by Reagan’s Education Secretary William Bennett and Harvard humanist Walter Jackson Bate, that interpretive attention is only appropriate or worthwhile when applied to texts that incarnate perfection and universality—an assumption that can be read as a survival from the era in which the primary object of hermeneutics was scripture. This is a devotional entailment of metaphysical or mystified interpretations, like those that sustain faith in the Reagan myth. By constructing Reagan as a god-like figure of aspirational identification and his opponents as demonized figures of threatening difference, the political imagination of Reaganism is organized in homology with this splitting of the ego, marking the intersection of narcissistic identification, religious mythology and supremacist politics. Any interpretation that reduces systemic conditions to a personalized or aestheticized melodrama of struggle to the death—between forces of good and evil, being and nonbeing, or reason and unreason—participates in this mythologized pattern of interpretation, which can trace its roots to the interpretive process in which the self-image is formed. In an essay cited by Best and Marcus as providing a foundation for their criticisms of symptomatic reading, Eve Sedgwick describes precisely these interrelations, in which paranoia, conspiracy theory and narcissism indicate the politics of interpretation in literary studies and their connections to the interpretation of politics.
When Mick Mulvaney accuses Chris Wallace of “spending way too much time reading between the lines,” he is exploiting ambiguities in the way we speak of conspiracy theory and interpretation as such, as well as a culturally enforced aversion toward intellectualism and self-criticism. Eve Sedgwick’s account of “paranoid reading” directly addresses this “sore spot” in literary theory, marked by our shame about participating in what Paul Ricoeur calls the “hermeneutics of suspicion.” Best and Marcus indicate their debt to Sedgwick’s definition of this hegemonic style in literary theory and criticism, and to the challenge she poses to its universality by enumerating its defining features “as one kind of cognitive/ affective theoretical practice among other, alternative kinds.”38 In line with this objective, Sedgwick distances herself from “the use of ‘paranoid’ as a pathologizing diagnosis,”39 not aiming to refute or disqualify this mode of reading, but only to particularize and denaturalize it.
One defining feature of this paranoid style that Sedgwick emphasizes is “its faith in exposure.” As an example, Sedgwick describes in Foucauldian terms the purpose and method of D. A. Miller’s The Novel and the Police, an exposure of “modern discipline” as “a problem in its own right.”40 By seeking to expose political violence by means of literary criticism, this project stakes its value on an implicit claim of historical pertinence and social utility. But that claim is undermined when Sedgwick shows that the book’s problematic is more a response to theoretical predecessors like Foucault than to the social and political context in which it was produced. This autonomous response to a disciplinary intellectual history, posing as a response to a broader social and political history, risks wasting its sophisticated powers of interpretation on irrelevant or anachronistic problems.41
Sedgwick cites Miller’s book, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and works associated with New Historicism as examples of the broad range of influential texts that rely on paranoid reading. But she warns against confusing conventional ubiquity with necessary, universal or eternal relevance, observing that “with the passage of time […] it’s becoming easier to see the ways that such a paranoid project of exposure may be more historically specific than it seems.” The tendency to mistake hegemonic methods for necessary or definitive ones has encouraged the pursuit of anachronistic objectives in the work of Sedgwick’s students, who seem to be responding to their professors and readings more than to their own life circumstances:
I daily encounter graduate students who are dab hands at unveiling the hidden historical violences that underlie a secular, universalist liberal humanism. Yet these students’ sentient years, unlike the formative
