Details useful to the state: Writers & the shaping of US empire, 1945 to the present
"Are you going to ask where I am? I'll tell you--giving only details useful to the State..."
Pablo Neruda, "Letter to Miguel Otero Silva,” 1948
Hannah Arendt quoting Kafka in Men in Dark Times: “It is difficult to speak the truth, for although there is only one truth, it is alive and therefore has a live and changing face.”
What might it mean for a writer to be useful to a state? How have states used writers, witting and unwitting, in projects aimed at influence and hegemony? How might a state make use of language as a weapon? What might it mean for a writer to attempt to avoid being useful to a state? How might a state inflect and influence the intimacy between a writer & what we may write?
In this class we'll discuss an array of choices writers have made in relation to state power, focusing particularly on the United States from just after World War 2 until the present. You'll be asking to read four books: Joel Whitney's Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World's Best Writers; Frances Stonor Saunders' The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters; Eric Bennett's Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing during the Cold War; & Peter Dale Scott's long poem Coming to Jakarta. This is not a history or a literature class: our lens will be that of a writer, using deep study and playful practice to figure out the dilemmas and best practices of the present.
Although this is a lecture class, with a limit of 30 students, you'll be asked to participate, improvise, and do some class reading & writing work with a partner, as well as participate in one group conference a week. At the end of the class, you'll be asked to lecture yourself, in teams, addressing some of our questions and your responses to them.
The only prerequisite is the courage to think out loud with other people, aka the courage required to learn.
PLEASE SAVE THIS SYLLABUS!
Here's what you'll be asked to do over the course of the semester:
Show up. Attendance will be taken at both class & group conference sessions. If you miss more than four meetings (either class or conference) per semester, this will affect your grade.
Post responses to readings & lectures. These should be one page long, focused on whatever aspect of the week's adventures interests you most, posted on the MySLC Discussion Board by noon the day before class. As with all pages you send to us or to me: Please put your name and the date at the top of the page, and include your name as part of any attached document. Aim for what you might aim for in any academic prose : something both analytical and alive. (Questions I ask myself re this challenge: Am I doing more than summarizing? Am I getting under the surface? Is it boring? Does it sound like me?) It doesn't have to be formal. Think of writing us all a letter about how what you learned made you think. No late posts will be accepted. Three missed posts will count as an absence.
--which of course implies: Read. Our focus will be on thinking below the surfaces, exploring the place your minds and the assigned texts meet. Eventually you'll be reading & responding to each other's responses as well.
Work in pairs. Toward the beginning of the semester, we'll use some chance procedure to make sure each class member has a partner. You'll discuss work-in-progress with this person, occasionally meet in your pair with other pairs, write letters back & forth, & introduce your partner's work at midterm & at the final reading. Details TBA.
Do writing exercises. We'll spend part of most class sessions on various writing exercises. For each class, I'll send a link to a Google document, to which we can contribute collectively during class, and which we can keep once each class is done. In-class writing exercises will be done here. It's a nice way to offer what you're thinking while someone else is talking, which isn't possible in person.
Beyond spectatorhood. In our world of screens it can be easy to think of an education as something you watch vs. something you do. This was true before the plague, and is even more true now.
To try to avoid this, the second class hour of our lecture will be focused on discussion, based on the readings responses you submit & whatever may come up in group conference discussions. Group conferences will be as far from the lecture format as possible, & may include you & your partner making a presentation, facilitating a discussion, or workshopping works in progress
Those of you familiar with the conventions of Black church may be familiar with a kind of real-time community response that is one of spectatorhood's best antidotes. When someone talks, people talk back. That way the speaker knows they're not alone. Not sure how this may work in a lecture, but let's try. (Finger-snapping when you agree with something is one nice place to start.)
Participate in mid-term and final readings. These will be discussions and celebrations of your own work and others', details TBA. A great chance to see what collaborations might be possible, once you know in detail what your classmates are working on.
Write a final letter to your partner. Details TBA.
M a t t e r s o f C o u r t e s y
Courtesy. If you blow off class or conference without notice, show up late or unprepared, go off on distracted tangents in discussions, make excuses for unmet responsibilities vs. amends, don't ask for help if you're struggling, or consider it someone else's responsibility to carry the conversation ball, this creates the impression that you don't care. Not just for this class but in general: Care. Pay attention to whoever is speaking. Make contributions to discussions, even if bewildered. Take responsibility for your own actions. Do your homework. Come on time. Go to the bathroom before class begins. Call or text ahead if you have to miss something--at worst, call or text after. Ask for help when you need it. Sleep & move & eat your greens. (This is courtesy to yourself.) You're all college students at a time of deep challenges. Let's help each other meet them together.
Courtesy appendix re screens. I am not the law or your mama; you're grown & responsible for figuring out your own behavior with the potentially addictive substance of laptop or cellphone screens. Just a reminder that reading text messages in class & engaging fully with your expensive education at the same time is impossible. We may experiment with a few screenless days, to see if that helps or hinders our work together, to hold class without laptops or phones.
While I may not devote class time & energy to verifying whether you're taking notes or texting or shopping, my attention tends toward the sharp--so it's possible that your evaluation when we're finished may include, "If Fran had spent less time with their phone & more with class discussions, things might have gone differently." Avoid this. Turn off your phone during class & conference. (Not muted. Off.) Turn off any laptop notifications. (A good idea anyway.) Don't keep an email tab open. Show up all the way.
Making up work. If you miss a class, it's your responsibility to make up what you missed. Use your phone & email lists; if you know in advance that you'll miss a class, call or text or email & ask someone to take notes & report back to you. If you don't know in advance, contact someone to find out what happened; make sure you're prepared for your next class &/or conference time.
Asking questions. If you have a question in class that pertains to everyone, please ask it. If you have a question that pertains only to you, please ask it before class begins or after it ends.
Miscellaneous difficulties. If you're having difficulty with any aspect of the class, or with life in general, please let me know. Speaking up means things have a chance to change.
Required texts
• Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World's Best Writers, Joel Whitney
• The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, Frances Stonor Saunders [the British title: Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War]
• Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing during the Cold War, Eric Bennett
• Coming to Jakarta, Peter Dale Scott
Here is a C a l e n d a r , ever subject to revision:
September 7 / Introduction / Details useful to the state
Read: 3 articles from 1977 New York Times series by John M Crewdson & Joseph B Treaster : "CIA: Secret Shaper of Public Opinion":
1 December 25, 1977: "The CIA's 3-Decade Effort To Mold The World's Views"
2 December 26, 1977: "Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the CIA"
3 December 27, 1977: "CIA Established Many Links to Journalists in US and Abroad"
Supplements:
Patrick Iber, "Literary Magazines for Socialists Funded by the CIA, Ranked," The Awl, 2015
Video clip of former CIA officer John Stockwell : "...we were planting stories in the Washington Post," from 60 Minutes, 1978
group conference 1
"Just then, people needed interior possessions that would keep standing, as it were, even as the rubble of the outer world kept falling around them. What they required was work that addressed itself to the place of ultimate suffering and decision in each and every one of us."
Seamus Heaney, Emory commencement 2003
September 14 / The death of Pablo Neruda & the phone in Roger Straus's desk drawer
Read: Saunders, Introduction & chapter 21, "Caesar of Argentina"
Whitney, chapter 11, "Tools rush in: Pablo Neruda, Mundo Nuevo, and Keith Botsford"
group conference 2
September 21 / Communism, communications & counterrevolution
"The Cultural Cold War asks to what degree intellectuals became embroiled in these counterfeits and, more controversially, enlarged them." Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War
Read: Saunders, Chapter 1, "Exquisite Corpse," chapter 2, "Destiny's Elect," & one other chapter of your choice--be prepared to discuss
group conference 3
September 28 / Operation Bewilderment & the Psychological Strategy Board
"It is impossible to discuss here in detail the political 'Operation Bewilderment' of the postwar period, which defined Communism & National Socialism for us as two not even very different manifestations of one & the same thing."
Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits
"only a fact could be so dreamlike"
Adrienne Rich, "Like This Together"
Read: Bennett, Introduction & chapter 3, "The Rockefeller Foundation and Postwar Internationalism," Conclusion, Epilogue, & one other chapter of your choice--be prepared to discuss
"On the communication engineering plane, it had already become clear to Mr. Bigelow and myself that the problems of control engineering and of communication engineering were inseparable, and that they centered not around the technique of electrical engineering but around the much more fundamental notion of the message, whether this should be transmitted by electrical, mechanical, or nervous means."
Norbert Weiner, Cybernetics: or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine
"Philbrick’s essay 'Aiming Controls in Aerial Ordnance' was but one of a series in Division 7’s Summary Technical Report that synthesized the war’s experience into postwar technologies and engineering practice. Philbrick’s approach, together with his supersimulator, exemplified the emerging visions of computing and control: the importance of feedback, connections to human behavior, infinitely flexible machines to simulate the entire world."
David A Mindell, Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing Before Cybernetics
"In 1912-13 or so I considered that Norbert had the only mind in the Philosophical School of Harvard equal, and possibly superior, to my own. He has not altogether disappointed my expectations.” TS Eliot to Frank Morley, August 195
Read: Bennett, chapter 1, "The New Humanism," & chapter 2, "Liberalism & Literature After the War"
Listen to Jimi Hendrix, "The Star Spangled Banner
group conference 5
October 12 / The university & the mind of the stat
"But the question of what the campus battalion should communicate requires for its answer certain preliminary statements about the universities and colleges as a part of the mind of the state."
"This, we are told, is to be in an important way a war of communication."
Wilbur Schramm, "The Campus Battalion," 1942
"Communication is the process of making unique experience into common experience, and it is, above all, the claim to live."
Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution, 1961
Read: Saunders chapter 15, "Ransom's Boys"
Bennett chapter 4, "Paul Engle: The Creative Writing Cold Warrior"
group conference 6
October 19 / A wilderness of mirrors: James Angleton & Ezra Pound
"James Angleton graduated with a degree in English literature from Yale University, where he was the editor of the modernist journal Furioso. After university he joined what was to become the Central Intelligence Agency, where he was instrumental in coordinating efforts to ensure that the Italian Communist Party would not prevail in that country’s elections in 1948. Angleton often referred to Eliot when representing the Soviet Union in public. That country was, he said, quoting Eliot’s "Gerontion" on a television interview, 'a wilderness of mirrors.'”
Andrew N Rubin, Archives of Authority: Empire, Culture, and the Cold War
Read: Whitney, chapter 1, "Graduates"
October Study Days / No Conferences
October 26 / Midterm letter readings with partner introductions
group conference 7 / Midterm letter readings with partner introductions
November 2 / Shells: the National Student Association & Operation Mockingbird
"From 1950 to 1967, the Central Intelligence Agency ran a series of international covert operations through the U.S. National Student Association—most of whose members had no idea they were 'working' for the U.S. government."
Karen M Paget, Patriotic Betrayal: The Inside Story of the CIA's Secret Campaign to Enroll American Students in the Crusade Against Communism
Read: Whitney, chapter 12, "The Vital Center Cannot Hold"
Saunders, chapter 9, "The Consortium"
group conference 8
November 9 / Empire & the centrality of race
"I remember Cord Meyer chewing through a fillet steak (and my last dollars) at a Washington restaurant, pausing only to spit out a peevish remark about how the sole achievement of multiculturalism was to make it impossible to find a waiter who could speak proper English."
Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War
“The real frontal attack on Reconstruction, as interpreted by the leaders of national thought in 1870 and for some time thereafter, came from the universities, and particularly from Columbia and Johns Hopkins.
“The movement began with Columbia University and with the advent of John W Burgess of Tennessee and William A Dunning of New Jersey as professors of political science and history.”
WEB DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America
"Everywhere I go in the world the place is there and America is there with it." Claudia Rankine
November 16 / "A Gleam of Light in Asia": communications & counterinsurgency
"was secretary of the CIA's
Farfield Foundation
and his wife's cousin
Christopher Emmet a descendant
of John Jacob Astor
and President of the
American Friends of Vietnam
was the man whose Common Cause
accepted the tax-deductible
donations for the deliverers
of the Marseille waterfront
into the hands of friendly
socialists and behind them
the Corsican Guerinis
already smuggling the Saigon opium
through the Armenians in Beirut
to be sold on Harlem streetcorners"
Peter Dale Scott, Coming to Jakarta
Roger Straus's favorite toast: "Fuck the peasants."
Read: Scott, beginning through p. 45, & one other section of your choice–be prepared to discuss
Joshua Bennett's poem, "On Extinction"
group conference 10
November 23 / No Class – Thanksgiving / No conferences
November 30 / The internet & the Arab Spring
group conference 11
December 7 / Final letter readings with partner introductions
group conference 12 / Final letter readings with partner introductions
December 14 / Last class / Final letter readings with partner introductions
group conference 13 / final letter readings with partner introductions
"There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action. And because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium, and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business...to determine how good it is, nor how valuable, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly of the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open."
