Andrew N. Rubin is assistant professor of English at Georgetown University. He is the coeditor of Adorno: A Critical Reader and The Edward Said Reader.

Archives of Authority

Empire, Culture, and the Cold WarBy Andrew N. Rubin

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2012 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-15415-2

Contents

Acknowledgments………………………………………………………ixIntroduction…………………………………………………………1Chapter 1 Archives of Authority……………………………………….11The Archive and the Juridical………………………………………….12States of Exception…………………………………………………..13States of Criticism…………………………………………………..17Chapter 2 Orwell and the Globalization of Literature…………………….24Communist Crypts……………………………………………………..28The “Communist Menace”………………………………………………..34The Translation of Authority…………………………………………..37Translation and Modes of Domination…………………………………….44Chapter 3 Transnational Literary Spaces at War………………………….47The Sun Never Sets on the British Writer………………………………..47The Time of Translation……………………………………………….58London Calling……………………………………………………….60Literary Diplomacy……………………………………………………65Chapter 4 Archives of Critical Theory………………………………….74Accommodations……………………………………………………….80Chapter 5 Humanism, Territory, and Techniques of Trouble…………………87Terrain of Philology………………………………………………….90Notes……………………………………………………………….109Bibliography…………………………………………………………141Index……………………………………………………………….167

Chapter One

Archives of Authority

I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get mixed up and lost in the course of night. —Jorge Luis Borges

In May 2000, I wrote what was to be the first of several letters to the Central Intelligence Agency and requested, under the Freedom of Information Act, that it release all available information in its possession about the English poet Stephen Spender (1909–95). While I had no hard evidence proving that Spender was an intelligence agent, I was confident that he had played a direct role in the various institutions that emerged in the early years of the Cold War. From 1953 to 1967, Spender had served as the coeditor of Encounter magazine—the flagship journal published by the Congress for Cultural Freedom. One of the most significant institutions in the Cold War, the CCF was funded by the Central Intelligence Agency to essentially administer, control, and manage the various discourses of the Cold War.

When I submitted the request, I did so on the basis of an emerging body of scholarship that examines the relationship between American postwar ascendancy and “cultural diplomacy” in the early years of the Cold War and decolonization. While much of the existing research focuses on how the U.S. government, through the CCF, funded symphonies, performances, musical competitions, literary prizes, exhibitions, festivals, and many scholars and writers, few studies have considered how its underwriting reshaped and refashioned the global literary landscape, altered the relationships between writers and their publics, and rendered those whom it supported more recognizable figures than others. While many of these endeavors arose in the absence of a defined cultural strategy to legitimize American postwar ascendancy, these practices were nevertheless conceived as part of an orchestrated imperial effort to occupy a global public space that by 1948 had been largely dominated by the socialist rhetoric of the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform).

In 1948, a National Security Directive (NSC-10) authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to develop a cultural strategy to undermine the Soviet Union’s “peace offensive,” and shortly thereafter, the CCF became one of the most important projects and institutions in the imperial rivalry between the two superpowers. Through any number of its journals—Cuadernos (published in Paris but distributed in Latin America from 1956 to 1965), Cadernos Brasileiros (published in Rio de Janeiro from 1959 to 1970), Encounter (published in London from 1953 to 1974), Forum (published in Vienna from 1954 to 1965), Der Monat (published in Munich from 1949 to 1971), Preuves (published in Paris from 1951 to 1975), Quadrant (published in Sidney from 1956 to 1967), Quest (published in Mumbai from 1955 to 1976), Tempo Presente (published in Rome from 1956 to 1967), and Transition (published in Kampala from 1961 to 1967)—the CCF had a significant impact on the changing conditions of humanistic practice from 1950 until 1967, when the New York Times and Ramparts magazine reported that the Central Intelligence Agency had been secretly funding the CCF, along with its exhibitions, performances, poets, novelists, theater companies, dancing troupes, and student associations. All these energies and resources, it was revealed, were enlisted to legitimize and culturally sustain the transfer of imperial power from Europe to the United States in the aftermath of the Second World War and refashion and reinvent the idea of world literature.

The Archive and the Juridical

When I submitted my Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in the spring of 2000, I expected that the response to the inquiry would supply a complete account of the process of selection, inclusion, and exclusion that governed the congress’s cultural strategy, particularly as it related to Encounter magazine, of which Spender was the more influential and older coeditor (above Irving Kristol). I had hoped that such information, if released, would provide a more comprehensive understanding of the intertwining of culture and power in the early years of the Cold War and decolonization. The full disclosure of the relationship between the CCF and the U.S. government would not only explain how new techniques and modes of articulation had radically redefined the position of public writers in postwar culture but would also reveal which writers were selected for marginalization, how they were chosen, and why. We know very little, for example, of the CCF’s efforts to discredit and delegitimize writers such as Pablo Neruda, John Berger, Frantz Fanon, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Did this absence of a positive cultural strategy extend to other writers? The endeavor also addressed a larger shift in global alignments and accommodations: the cultural strategies that were part of the transfer of imperial authority from Britain and France to the United States in the aftermath of World War II, the history of which has been largely overlooked. Mapping the whole network of relationships, assemblages, and organizations that constituted the CCF’s endeavors would establish the conditions for the development of new forms of nondominative knowledge, just as it would document the historical conditions through which Weltliteratur‘s silences are deposited. Because Stephen Spender was an editor of Encounter, and quite an itinerant one at that, my request thus focused on him as much as it aimed to acquire knowledge about what one might call the concealed institutional and disciplinary mechanisms of dominant culture, the better to be able to grasp the historical determinants of its archive.

Several months after I made the inquiry, the agency requested that I provide evidence that Stephen Spender was, in fact, no longer alive. Shortly after submitting his obituary from the New York Times, I received a brief letter from the agency indicating that it would “neither confirm nor deny” the “existence or nonexistence” of any available information on Stephen Spender for reasons of “national security.” The decision did not come as a complete surprise, but it seemed alarming that the cultural policies carried out shortly after the Second World War could conceivably remain classified half a century later. The Berlin Wall had fallen in November 1989, the Soviet Union no longer existed, and a whole new way of thinking had replaced the episteme of the Cold War. The intricacies of the CIA’s involvement in international and domestic cultural politics and the origins of the CCF had been made public by Ramparts magazine in 1966 and then by the New York Times in 1967. Intelligence officials such as Tom Braden had already written and spoken openly about the CIA’s administration of the CCF. In a strident, unapologetic defense, whose underlying irony seemed to escape him, Braden wrote:

I remember the enormous joy I got when the Boston Symphony Orchestra won more acclaim for the U.S. in Paris than John Foster Dulles or Dwight D. Eisenhower could have bought with a hundred speeches. And then there was Encounter, the magazine published in England and dedicated to the proposition that cultural achievement and political freedom were interdependent. Money for both the orchestra’s tour and the magazine’s publication came from the CIA, and few outside the CIA knew about it. We had placed one agent in a Europe-based organization of intellectuals called the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Another agent became an editor of Encounter.

States of Exception

The CIA based its refusal to comply with my request upon its interpretation of the National Security Act of 1947, which had established the Central Intelligence Agency. The act held that the CIA was not required to confirm the existence of any material that could possibly reveal its “sources and methods” of collecting intelligence. The act stipulated that the CIA, unlike other government agencies, such as the Security Exchange Commission or the Department of Labor, was exempt from releasing any material that could be “reasonably” construed “to result in damage to national security”:

The Central Intelligence Agency can neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence of any Central Intelligence Agency records responsive to your request. The fact of the existence or nonexistence of records containing such information—unless it has been officially acknowledged—would be classified for reasons of national security under Sections 1.5 (c) [intelligence sources and methods] and 1.5 (d) [foreign relations] of Executive Order 12958. Further, the Director of the Central Intelligence has the responsibility and authority to protect such information from unauthorized disclosure in accordance with Subsection 103 (c) (6) of the National Security Act of 1947 and Section 6 of the CIA Act of 1949…. By this action, we are neither confirming nor denying the existence or nonexistence of such records.

In a challenge to the government’s decision in the spring of 2001, I filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York, claiming that the agency had improperly withheld information about Spender in violation of the Freedom of Information Act. Given the historical nature and the obscurity of the query, I thought I stood a relatively strong chance of persuading the court of the importance of the request. Why, after all, should a scholar of English literature have to enjoin the government to release historical texts about a deceased British poet? The casuistry of the government’s position seemed, to me at least, extraordinarily transparent, and I assumed that any reasonable judge would concur that the government had withheld information from the public in violation of the Freedom of Information Act.

The Freedom of Information Act was codified as a federal law in 1966. Later amended in the 1970s shortly before the Church Committee hearings disclosed the scope and ruthlessness of the CIA’s various operations abroad (the then secret overthrow of governments in Guatemala, Iran, Chile, and the Congo; the attempted assassinations of Jawaharlal Nehru and Fidel Castro; the failed ouster of Sukarno in Indonesia; and the fixing of Italy’s elections of 1948, among other activities), the Freedom of Information Act provides access to U.S. government records, documents, cables, texts, decisions, and memoranda. Yet, as a statute that regulates the release or suppression of official forms of knowledge, the law contains nine provisions through which the government is exempt from upholding the general spirit of the law. In my case in particular, the agency contended that the law could be suspended in the interest of upholding national security.

The agency invoked two exemptions, claiming the information remained classified for reasons of national security and that revealing that information would disclose procedures and sources of intelligence that the director of the CIA has the responsibility to protect under the National Security Act. The first exemption, based on an executive order issued by then president Bill Clinton, held that the information was classified because the very fact of its “existence or nonexistence” was itself classified. The agency was therefore permitted to “refuse to confirm or deny the existence or nonexistence of requested information whenever the fact of its existence or nonexistence is itself classified under Executive Order 12,958.” The second exemption was based on the principle that the disclosure of the information—whose “existence or nonexistence” it had already insisted would undermine “national security” under Clinton’s executive order—was the responsibility of the director of the CIA, who had a duty to “protect [such knowledge] from unauthorized disclosure.” In other words, the language of the act emphasized that the director is charged with the obligation to prevent any unauthorized acts of disclosure—an action that he and only he can authorize. If this reasoning suggested that the National Security Act required that the director has the duty to protect its records, it also implied that the very act of releasing them belongs to a class of unauthorized disclosures that have simply escaped the director’s attention.

The relationship between these two exemptions raises questions that are relevant to understanding the mechanics of power. To begin with, how can information that belongs to the realm of “nonexistence” be protected? What kind of power can claim authority over both the nonexistent and the existent? While there is a rationale to protecting sources and methods from unauthorized acts of disclosure, how can the director prevent the disclosure of nothing at all? What, if anything, is there to protect, if there is nothing but a void? What kind of authority organizes itself in this zone of indifference? Is the power to neither affirm nor negate what it may possess or may not possess a power that suggests that all forms of knowledge might possibly be under its control? Or instead of revealing the possible scope of this power, might it reveal something more about the nature of power upon which the state relies? Is the indeterminacy of the archive the absence or void upon which state power rests, since it is not simply a matter of the suspension of the law itself but the concealment of a zone of indifference that has become the very condition of possibility of authority in the first place? Much like Kafka’s character in “Before the Law” who wants to enter the law but cannot be assured for himself that there is a law behind the series of guarded doors to begin with, the only law visible to him is the demand to remain before it.

In November 2001, the Federal District Court in New York did not question the legitimacy of the exemption or the logic of the relationship between the two exemptions or its application. Deciding in favor of the agency’s motion to dismiss my case, the court maintained that the agency had compelling reasons to protect the “appearance of confidentiality,” which was “essential” to exercise United States authority abroad. The Federal District Court determined that the CIA had provided a “reasonably detailed explanation” as to why it refused to either confirm or deny “the fact of the existence or nonexistence” of records germane to the request. In spite of the fact that whatever activities Spender may have engaged in or been a part of happened half a century ago, the Federal District Court affirmed that the agency had complied with the dictates of the Freedom of Information Act. The court held that “the CIA has offered reasonable explanations for why the disclosure of such information could interfere with Agency efforts to collect human intelligence in the present day, including its ‘compelling interest’ in ‘protecting the appearance of confidentiality’ so essential to the effective operation of our foreign intelligence service.”

The Federal District Court based its decision on a series of precedents that reinterpreted the National Security Act of 1947, which maintains that the director of the Central Intelligence Agency is obliged to “protect intelligence sources and methods from unauthorized disclosure.” As the district judge observed in the decision, the Supreme Court in CIA v. Sims had radically extended and reinterpreted the scope of the National Security Act. In that case, the Supreme Court interpreted the National Security Act as giving the agency “very broad authority to protect all sources of intelligence information from disclosure.” If the National Security Act of 1947 originally gave the director of the CIA the responsibility to prevent “unauthorized disclosures,” in CIA v. Sims, the Supreme Court broadly expanded that authority to include the protection of “all sources of intelligence information from unauthorized disclosure” (my emphasis), regardless of the information’s level of classification, without defining precisely who or even what a “source” is.

Citing the precedent, the District Court concluded that the government met its responsibility to “protect” its sources and methods from “unauthorized disclosure,” claiming that its “sources” were further governed by a zone of indifference: “the existence or nonexistence” of the documents requested under the Freedom of Information Act. Not only is the Freedom of Information Act subject to a state of exception, but knowledge—which the state has the authority to “protect from disclosure”—does not even have to exist for the exception to be invoked and enforced. The metaphysics of national security therefore rests on an ambivalence: to identify an “intelligence source” would be to reveal the methods that are used to determine whether a source is a source or not—itself a violation of the authority vested in the director of Central Intelligence. We are thus far from enjoying the free, open, and democratic dissemination of information, but are close enough to be able to see the actual meaning of the authority of the state and the archives of its authority.

(Continues…)

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