Literature and Security: CIA Engagement in the Arts. What Philosophers of Education Need to Know and Why

Abstract

These are broad and expansive themes and so what we wish to do is to provide a perhaps dramatic case study example of state engagement with the arts for political and security purposes. Our critical case is that of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) engagement with the arts during the Cold War and newly uncovered archival evidence of the CIA involvement with the writers’ organisation which is still thriving today, International PEN. Our argument is that the state security engagement with the arts and literature is an important exemplar of what we term the influence of public education by often covert means, which may derogatively be referred to as propaganda, or what Jameson called the ‘political unconscious’. From the archival evidence arising from CIA engagement with the arts we derive three principles of intellectual framing for analysis of the critical aesthetic of philosophy of education: (1) the political aesthetic of security and literature; (2) cultural citizenship as security; (3) the educational ecosystem of literature as securitisation. In sum, we suggest philosophers of education sharpen their treatments of literature in education with more realistic and informed assessments of the aesthetic in political and security contexts. Methodologically, by implication, we think we also make the case for philosophers of education to make greater and more frequent use of primary documentation, particularly archival sources in order to be able to substantiate such sharpened treatments.

The demise of the American hegemony in international business research has been greatly exaggerated

“…In the intellectual fields, the American government did its bit by infiltrating the arts and literature (Gearon & Wyne‐Davies, 2018), and by founding the growth abroad of American‐led business schools. This is how the American‐sponsored Alliance for Progress initiative supported many of the new business schools in Latin America (Batiz‐Lazo, 2008; Wanderley & Barros, 2020) and how the Ford Foundation did the same in India, at a time the help of the American government would not have been as welcome (Kumar, 2019).…”

Eslovenia y la Guerra Fría cultural

“…Miller acabó por aceptar el reto, pero no sin haber experimentado cierto recelo: «Tenía la sospecha de que me estaban utilizando y me pregunté de repente si el Departamento de Estado o la CIA, o su equivalente británico eran los que removían aquel estofado en particular» (Miller, 1988). Gearon acentúa que el secretario general y su asistente apostaron por Miller, conscientes de que las dos bazas principales en la lucha de Occidente contra Oriente eran la financiación por un lado y la presidencia por el otro: «El primer paso fue, por lo tanto, reclutar a un presidente de PEN estadounidense que pudiera ser manipulado en la guerra fría cultural contra Rusia» (Gearon, 2019).…”

Securitisation theory and the securitised university: Europe and the nascent colonisation of global intellectual capital

“…Risso's (2014) study of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Information Service (NATIS), for instance, demonstrates the extent of interest of intelligence services in cultural matters far distant from battlefield engagement or the nuclear arms race preoccupations of the time. Operationally and epistemologically, the extension of interest was to types of knowledge and types of people beyond the military to include the cultural, as is also demonstrated by studies of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) engagement with the arts (Gearon & Davies 2019;Stonor Saunders 2013).…”