Literature Lost

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 Yale University Press New Haven & London

Literature
Lost Social Agendas
and the
Corruption of
the Humanities

John M. Ellis
 Published with assistance from the Charles A. Coffin Fund. Copyright
© 1997 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be
reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form
(beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S.
Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without
written permission from the publishers.
Designed by Nancy Ovedovitz and set in Adobe Garamond type by
Keystone Typesetting, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ellis, John M. (John Martin), 1936-
Literature lost : social agendas and the corruption of the
humanities / John M. Ellis,
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN : 978-0-300-07579-3 (pbk.)

i. Humanities—Study and teaching (Higher)—United States-

Evaluation. i.Humanities—Political aspects—United States. 3. Political
correctness—United States. 4. Humanities—United States—History.
I. Tide.
AZi83.U5E45 1997
001.3'071'173—dc2i 96-37680
CIP
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and
durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity
of the Council on Library Resources.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4
Contents

Acknowledgments, vii

Introduction, i

/ The Origins of Political Correctness, 12

2 The Diversity of Literature, 33

3 Gender, Politics, and Criticism, 60

4 The Academic Politics of Race, 89

5 Class and Perfect Egalitarianism, 115

 Contents

6 Activism and Knowledge, 140

7 Power, Objectivity, and PC Logic, 160

8 Is Theory to Blame? 181

9 How Did It All Happen—and What Comes Next? 204

Conclusion, 228

Notes, 231

Index, 257

vi
 Acknowledgments

I am indebted to many friends and colleagues for their helpful sugges-

tions on all or part of the manuscript, including the comments I re-
ceived following presentation of parts of the book at various con-
ferences and universities. I wish to thank especially Stephen Balch, Paul
Cantor, Peter Collier, Barbara Ellis, Richard Ellis, Norman Fruman,
John Hollander, Siegfried Puknat, Peter Shaw, Christina Sommers, and
Fred Sommers. Gary Saul Morson gave the entire manuscript a par-
ticularly thorough reading; his suggestions improved it considerably.
I am proud and grateful to have had this work generously supported
by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Carthage Founda-
tion, the John M. Olin Foundation, and the Smith Richardson Foun-
dation.

vii
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 Introduction

This book is about the great changes that have taken place—and are
still proceeding—in humanistic education and learning throughout the
English-speaking world, though they are most advanced in America.
This is a matter of great social importance. From elementary school
through university, literature and history are two of the most signifi-
cant aspects of the education of young people. The effect of a pro-
found change in the way these subjects are taught and in what teachers
are trying to achieve in teaching them is therefore far from trivial—
especially when part of the purpose of this change is to transform
students' attitudes toward the society in which they live.
Although I am concerned with what is happening to humanistic
education and learning in general, I focus mainly on one area of the

/
 Introduction

humanities: literature. There are good reasons to do so. First, literature

has been affected more than any other field; and, second, insofar as
these same changes have occurred in other fields, they have done so in
large part through the influence of literary studies, for that is where the
most influential advocates of the new approach are concentrated. Para-
doxically, however, even this narrowing of focus will take us well be-
yond literature itself, because the new approach to literature is heavily
involved in political and historical matters.
These changes have already provoked much discussion, both on the
college and university campuses where they originated and among the
wider public. Interestingly, the questioning has been reasonably open
and direct in the public sphere, whereas on campuses it has been much
more inhibited. At first, much of the argument was about whether the
changes were being exaggerated by those who objected to them. De-
fenders insisted that accounts of political correctness in classrooms, and
of a transformation in curricula to accommodate race, gender, and class
perspectives, were nothing more than a few unrepresentative anec-
dotes. By now, however, it is clear from the sheer persistence of these
reports that such is not the case. Nor was it ever a plausible contention
in view of a strange discrepancy that was apparent from the beginning:
the same people who reassured the public with the explanation of
unrepresentative anecdotes told a different story on campus.1 There
they claimed that the changes were revolutionary and that they had
already experienced considerable success in implementing them.2 I
have no doubt that the story told on campus was the correct one.
My concern in this book, however, is not to establish what is hap-
pening—others have done this well enough already3—but, rather, to
examine the forces behind these changes and the arguments that are
made to persuade others to accept them. My aim, in other words, is to
interpret the situation. In the process, I hope to give my reader an

2
Introduction

analysis of the coherence of the arguments that are used to justify the
installation of race, gender, and class perspectives at the center of the
college curriculum, so that he or she will be in a better position to
decide whether they are sound and, if they are not, to understand what
is wrong with them.
The present is so compelling that it soon crowds out thoughts of
how things were even a short time ago; so completely do present prob-
lems command our attention that even when a rapid and startling
change takes place, we soon adjust to it, as the situation that preceded
the change begins to fade away. Already it requires some effort to recall
what the typical attitudes toward the study of the humanities were just
a short while ago. It is worth making that effort. Looking back has
nothing to do with a nostalgia for the way things were or a conservative
resistance to change. The point is that to grasp the character of what is
happening now we must contrast it with what it has replaced.
Just a few years ago, we were accustomed to a standard set of argu-
ments about the place of the humanities in an education. People with a
utilitarian cast of mind were typically lukewarm to the humanities:
they were wary of letting too much time be taken up by subjects that
had no relevance to a career and a future livelihood. Law, politics,
economics, science, and technology were all practical things to study,
and although some literature, history, or philosophy might make life a
bit more interesting, too much would be an indulgence. The standard
defense of the humanities, on the other hand, was that humanistic
education provided all kinds of rewards, but the least important was the
enrichment of our leisure through great literature and the arts. The
most weighty arguments were that the humanities enabled us to see
ourselves in perspective, to become more enlightened citizens, and to
think more deeply about important issues in our lives. A society of
people educated not just for a vocation but for full and intelligent

3
 Introduction

participation in a modern democracy would be a far better and happier

society—so ran the argument—and this overriding social usefulness of
humanistic education compensated for its not leading directly to a
means of earning ones living.
These two opposing viewpoints could be heard over and over again,
and while all kinds of people mightvoice one or the other, a stereotypi-
cal distribution of them was also part of our common experience.
People in the world of business were more likely to voice the first,
whereas teachers of the humanities were—naturally enough—advocates
of the second. And so we heard people who taught difficult but unique
books for a living—books like Dante s Inferno, Goethe s Faust» or Ho-
mer s ///W—arguing passionately for the power of Dantes or Goethes
or Homer s understanding of human existence and the profundity of
the questions they raised. If there was unquestionably a self-serving
edge to these arguments, this logic nonetheless proved sufficient to
convince even most businessmen that the humanities should be part of
their children's education. These were, after all, writers of such qual-
ity that, by common consent, they towered above their fellows; their
thought was so arresting that few who were exposed to them resisted
their spell.
Some now seriously misrepresent this attitude toward the great writ-
ers and thinkers by referring to it contemptuously as a passive, uncriti-
cal swallowing of "eternal verities."4 Nothing could be further from the
truth: these writers were more apt to present eternal dilemmas and
challenges than dogmas, and insofar as there could be said to be doc-
trines or lessons in Shakespeare or Dante, Plato or Hume, the develop-
ment of thought and the unfolding of different sides of issues and
problems was always far more visible than this caricature allowed. The
body of enduring literary and philosophical books of the Western tradi-
tion is not a collection of ideas demanding to be believed but a remark-

4
Introduction

able set of fascinating struggles with problems and issues. Always prom-
inent is the conflict and competition between the ideas and vision of
one writer and those of others, and there is often a high degree of self-
criticism.
If we could use a time machine to go back to the scene of this classic
set of arguments for and against the humanities in education, we would
likely not find a single person willing to believe that within a few years
the participants in these arguments would have changed sides: those
who had formerly made the case for Dante, Goethe, and Homer and
against narrowly utilitarian attitudes would now be making the case for
those same attitudes and against the great writers, whereas those who
had formerly been skeptical would constitute the most vocal lobby for
them. Yet this is indeed what has happened: professors of literature now
argue against the Western tradition in thought and literature, and in
this new-found role they go even further than their predecessors. They
argue not that studying Shakespeare and Plato is a superfluous diver-
sion from more serious pursuits but that such study can be positively
harmful. High culture is full of pernicious ideas and influences—even
Shakespeares plays reflect reactionary attitudes: jingoistic imperialism,
racism, sexism, homophobia. And because high culture embodies these
attitudes, the argument goes, it plays a leading role in reinforcing them
in the general public and is therefore a means by which the socially,
racially, and sexually privileged maintain their power. High culture is
part of the ruling elites apparatus for social control. And for that reason
we were mistaken—according to this newer view—to think that study
of the great books of the West opened our minds and trained us to
think critically. It is just the reverse: these books close our minds, get us
to believe unquestioningly in a reactionary ideology, and make us con-
form to the ideas of a privileged class of white upper-class European
males. Consequently, the former teachers and defenders of the great

5
 Introduction

works of Western thought and literature now scorn them, leaving the
defense of these works to those who do not teach them.
This strange reversal has been accompanied by another. People out-
side the university, impatient with academias independence, used to
urge that higher education preach the values of our society so as to
further, in a direct way, its cohesion and internal strength. The threat of
communism was most frequently the spur for this kind of pressure.
Universities, it was said, should teach the virtues of our way of life and
not employ Marxists to present the case for our bitter ideological en-
emies. In response to this pressure, professors would argue that univer-
sities served society in a nonpartisan way; the outside world could call
on them for expert knowledge and advanced teaching, but to make this
possible colleges had to remain politically neutral. Direct involvement
in everyday life was to be avoided so that professors and students could
reflect on it, analyze it, and see it in broader perspective from a distance.
Requiring them to preach would destroy this inquiring spirit. Aca-
demics reasoned that it was dangerous to know but one side of an
argument; those who understood the case for communism as well as its
own partisans were really best equipped to oppose it, not those who
knew nothing of it.
Although some inside the academy spoke as if this attempt to politi-
cize the universities was an imminent danger, the argument for inde-
pendence made by the overwhelming majority of professors easily pre-
vailed, because it seemed obvious to nearly everyone that this was the
one reason for the success of our universities. The alternative of the
politically and ideologically correct universities of totalitarian regimes,
both Marxist and fascist, had resulted in such absurdities as Lysenko-
ism, the genetic doctrine of Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko which held
that acquired characteristics could be inherited. Because of the direct

6
Introduction

political interference of Stalin, Lysenko was allowed to corrupt Soviet

biological research with his ideas for several decades. Stalin had good
political reasons for liking the idea that the blacksmith could pass on to
his children not just the fine physique that had made blacksmithing a
good choice of occupation but also the enlarged muscles that had
resulted from that work. If that were so, then the new Soviet man and
woman might pass on to their children the characteristics that Stalin
had instilled in them during their lifetime. If Lysenko was right, then
Stalin could control the next generation as well as this one. An even
more important point was that the realities of biology could not im-
pede social change. The lesson of episodes like this seemed clear: once
political considerations, rather than a disinterested search for truth,
were allowed to dictate the course of university research, any crackpot
theory that a country's rulers found useful could dominate a whole
field.
Again, twenty years ago no one would have believed it possible that
professors, of all people, would one day argue that the universities
should have an overtly political function, work directly for social and
political change, and inculcate a particular political viewpoint in their
students.5 It seemed obvious that a nonpolitical stance was their only
protection against governmental interference with their academic free-
dom. Everyone knew that once professors took on the role of instilling
correct political thinking, it would not be long before a newly elected
government of a different political persuasion used its mandate to fire
them all and appoint its own partisans. (And only the more fastidious
governments would even require an election to justify their actions.)
Yet once more, the same bizarre reversal has occurred. Now it is the
professors who say that they should be political. In fact, a quite dif-
ferent conception of academic life has gained ground recently, one that

7
 Introduction

is not content with merely reflecting and analyzing but instead wants
the academy to get into the day-to-day jostling of the real world and
pursue direct political action to transform it.
Now when we see a demand that politics be given a more important
place in the academy, it would be natural to assume that professors and
students of politics were behind it, perhaps intent on maximizing the
importance of their field of study. And yet—even more strangely—they
are not the source of this demand. It is humanists, but especially teach-
ers of literature, who press for this new centrality of politics to every-
thing, not those who are the academic specialists in that field. How, one
might wonder, can literature professors claim to know more about the
scope of politics than specialists in political science do? But professors
of literature are now experts on everything. They write authoritatively
on sociological topics like racism and race relations; political and his-
torical topics like imperialism and socialism; psychological topics such
as sex, both straight and gay; and topics in criminology such as rape,
pornography, and pedophilia. Some even express themselves tren-
chantly on economics. And it is plain that in all these cases, far from
feeling insecure about their lack of professional training and breadth of
knowledge, they believe they have the edge by virtue of a superior
conceptual framework that they bring to these tasks.
Given these changes, it is not surprising that there have been changes
in the way literature is taught. These changes are, in fact, the most
visible sign of the overall change in the climate of university life. In a
comparatively short time, academic literary criticism has been trans-
formed. Many now regard social activism as the major purpose of
literary criticism, and social activism of a very specific kind: the pri-
mary issue in all literary texts is the question of oppression by virtue of
race, gender, and class. They view the very idea of a canon of great

8
Introduction

works as an elitist notion and even question whether there should be

a distinction between literature and other kinds of writing; that, too,
is elitism.
Their new view of human motivation must also astonish anyone
who remembers the way humanists used to talk: for them power is now
the most basic factor in human motivation. In this grim view of hu-
manity, one central factor displaces and undermines the multiplicity of
other motivations that we used to think so important: love, loyalty,
fulfillment, ambition, achievement, friendship, intellectual curiosity,
and so on.
Humanists used to be rather cheerfully disorganized people whose
immersion in very particular, one-of-a-kind human situations—like
those in Hamlet or Crime and Punishment— made them, on the whole,
dislike abstract generalizations. Yet now, for the first time, a majority
seem to accept the fact that a definite theory should be the one indis-
pensable tool of a critic. But what kind of theory? In the period before
this new mood overtook literary studies, a minority of critics—of which
I was one6—tried to persuade others that critics ought to think about
the general theory of their field, that is, to reflect in general terms about
what made for good criticism. The more recent success of theory,
however, is not in the same spirit. Instead, what has triumphed is not
greater openness to general reflection but a narrowing of perspective to
a rigid prescription for criticism that insists it be of a certain character
and have a specific content and concern. This represents not an open-
ing up but a shutting down of theoretical reflection.
Another departure from the past can be seen in the quality of writing
in present-day literary criticism. As was fitting for people whose profes-
sional lives were devoted to studying outstanding examples of language
use, critics (and more generally, humanists) prided themselves on using

9
 Introduction

their language well. Here, too, the new wave has produced a startling
change: people who write about literature now write in a prose thick
with impenetrable jargon.
These new attitudes and ideas gained ground so quickly that no full-
scale discussion and analysis of them took place before they were al-
ready widely accepted; there seems never to have been an intervening
stage in which to test their intellectual force in the marketplace of ideas.
They became accepted dogma quite suddenly, and quite unusual pres-
sures have built up to make dissent from them seem perilous. This is
not just a matter of the rapid conversion of the leaders of the profession
or of control of bodies such as the Modern Language Association of
America, now squarely behind the new orthodoxy. What is especially
intimidating to dissenters—especially young people who are trying to
get their first job at a difficult time—is an odd but highly effective blend
of two currents, each of which supports the other and neutralizes what
would otherwise be serious weaknesses.
One ingredient is a moral appeal: the concern with race, gender, and
class makes this new mode seem a just cause, one that no decent person
would want to oppose. The second is an arcane language derived in
large measure from sophisticated Parisian intellectuals. To understand
why this is a uniquely effective combination we need only look at the
weaknesses of each factor by itself. Moral sermons easily seem priggish
and unsophisticated, which is one reason the literary intelligentsia have
usually despised the prevailing morality of their times. On the other
hand, when the pursuits of intellectuals become too rarefied, they easily
seem out of touch with the real world. Combining race, gender, and
class criticism with the language of deconstruction takes care of both
problems at once. Politicized criticism gives deconstruction an appar-
ent seriousness of purpose, and in return deconstruction makes a rig-
idly moralistic position seem avant-garde and sophisticated.

10
Introduction

The result is an institutionally entrenched orthodoxy armed with

intimidating twin defenses and enforced by what has become known as
political correctness, or PC; dissenters can expect to be not only crit-
icized, as dissenters always are, but denounced as both moral outcasts
and unsophisticated simpletons. Yet this is done on the basis of a
viewpoint that coalesced far too quickly for it to have been properly
thought through, one that seemed to advance not by its intellectual
force but instead by a kind of tidal action that suddenly surged over
everyone. It is time to retrace our steps, to do what should have been
done initially: we must take a hard look at what this position really
amounts to and see whether it is sound enough to deserve the com-
manding position it now has. The aim of this book is to give this new
orthodoxy the systematic scrutiny it did not get on its way to the top.
Chapter i sets political correctness in wider perspective, showing
that it represents a recurring impulse of Western society—one with a
discouraging history. Chapter 2 examines the current orthodoxy about
literature and criticism and argues that it has everything upside down
in discussions of the canon and diversity. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 focus on
how the issues of gender, race, and class function in this controversy.
Chapter 6 considers the arguments advanced for social activism in
scholarship. Chapter 7 looks at the typical thought process that results
in race-gender-class criticism. Chapter 8 measures the contributions of
race-gender-class critics to theory against those of prior critics. Finally,
chapter 9 considers where we are now, what factors have produced this
result, and what we ought to do about it.

//
1 The Origins
of Political
Correctness

What we now call "political correctness" may seem to be nothing more

than a modern fad, and one that will pass, but to see it only this way is
to misunderstand it.1 Its particular shape may be specific to our time,
but its basic impulse is one that recurs regularly in the history of
Western society. Herein lies a deep irony. Those in the grip of this
impulse are critical of the Western tradition and define themselves by
their opposition to it, yet the impulse itself is so much a part of the
Western tradition that the attitudes it generates can be said to be
quintessentially Western. One reason for studying the Western tradi-
tion is to learn some important lessons about this recurring phenome-
non and so avoid mistakes that have been made many times before. In
this chapter I shall look at some prior episodes to show more clearly

12
The Origins of Political Correctness

what kind of thing this impulse is, what produces it, and what its
dangers are. Rather than carp at the absurdities of the current scene, we
can understand them more fully as part of the history of Western
civilization.
Those who study German culture, as I do, usually get their first
account of the early Germanic peoples from the Roman historian Tac-
itus, who wrote a short treatise entitled Germania in the first century
A.D.2 By the standards of civilized Rome, the Germans were barbarians,
which is what Tacitus calls them; in modern terminology, they were
part of the Third World of their day. But in Tacitus' eyes they were
quite remarkable people. They seemed to be instinctively democratic;
all major affairs were discussed by the entire community, and only
minor matters were delegated to chieftains. Even the views of a king
were heeded, Tacitus tells us, "more because his advice carries weight
than because he has the power to command." Similarly, in war, com-
manders relied on example rather than on the authority of their rank.
These natural egalitarians were apparently not bothered by questions of
social standing and power. And if they seemed to have the sin of pride
well under control, the sin of greed seemed to give them no problems
either: Tacitus notes that "the employment of capital in order to in-
crease it by usury is unknown in Germany."
Nor was sexism one of their vices, for they had a high regard for the
opinions of women and treated them with the utmost respect: "They
do not scorn to ask their advice, or lightly disregard their replies." In
fact, these Germanic tribes, though primitive, exhibited high moral
character, a point Tacitus stresses repeatedly, with remarks such as
"They live uncorrupted by the temptations of public shows or the
excitements of banquets" or "No one in Germany finds vice amusing,
or calls it 'up to date' to seduce and be seduced" or "Clandestine love
letters are unknown to men and women alike. Adultery is extremely

13
 The Origins of Political Correctness

rare." Tacitus' Germans were also brave, honest . . . and just about
anything else one could wish.
Tacitus sums up his idyllic picture by saying that "good morality is
more effective in Germany than good laws are elsewhere." That is, of
course, because the Germans were a naturally good people who did not
need laws to keep their behavior in check. If Tacitus had been speaking
about a tribe that had vanished without a trace, we might simply regret
that we had never encountered such a splendid and admirable people.
Unfortunately, we actually know a great deal more about those Ger-
mans than Tacitus did, and they do not seem so admirable in other
recorded accounts. Moreover, Tacitus never actually traveled among
them. What is going on here?
That vague word elsewhere m Tacitus' summary, suggesting as it does
an unspecified place where people must be governed by laws to keep
their depravity in check, gives the game away. It refers, of course, to
Tacitus' own society, to the first world of the time: imperial Rome.
What Tacitus really has on his mind is less the virtue of Germans than
the corruptness of civilized Rome-—its sexual depravity, greed, and
obsession with rank and conquest.
We are surely familiar with this situation in our own time. A sophis-
ticated man of letters, disillusioned and even embittered by the flaws,
inconsistencies, and retrogressions of a great civilization, deludes him-
self that a world of primitive innocence and natural goodness exists in
peoples who are untouched by the advances of that civilization. So
intense are his hostile feelings toward his own society that he is unable
to see the one he compares it to with any degree of realism: whatever its
actual qualities, it is endowed with all of the human values that he
misses in his own. Consequently, he sees his own culture not as an
improvement on brutish natural human behavior but as a departure
from a state of natural goodness. This recurring Western fantasy runs

14
The Origins of Political Correctness

from Tacitus' idealized Germans all the way to such twentieth-century

versions as Margaret Mead s sentimentalized Samoans and ultimately
to one of the most far-reaching outbreaks of this illusion—the political
correctness of our own day.3
Anyone reasonably knowledgeable about the history of Western cul-
ture knows that some of these episodes were major factors in the his-
torical development of Europe. Both Jean-Jacques Rousseau s adulation
of the Noble Savage and the nineteenth-century German Romantics'
glorification of the German Volk had serious repercussions. Karl Marx
was perhaps in a similar frame of mind when he imagined the end
point of his transformation of society to be the withering away of the
state. He must have fantasized, just as Tacitus did, that morality could
substitute for good laws.
John Searle recently defended Western thought against the criticisms
of the politically correct by pointing out that it is uniquely self-critical.4
But an even stronger point can be made: political correctness itself is a
thoroughly Western phenomenon. From earliest times, Western so-
ciety has been prone to recurring fits of this self-doubt. Those who are
seized by this mood may imagine that they are taking an anti-Western
stance, but that is all part of the same pattern of self-delusion.
Tacitus was using these imagined noble Germans as a standard
against which to judge the Romans, but that was as far as he went; his
concern was simply with the particular historical situation he was in.
Rousseau went further, however. Instead of being content to think that
eighteenth-century French society and its institutions were corrupt and
corrupting, and to imagine another people that was morally superior
because their natural goodness had remained intact, Rousseau gener-
alized: man in his natural state was naturally good, and all corruptness
sprang from society and its institutions.5 His Noble Savage was not
just a particular group of Germanic tribesmen but simply man in his

*5
 The Origins of Political Correctness

naturally good state before the degradation brought by the institutions

of society—any society.
Rousseau had gone beyond Tacitus' local irritation to formulate a
general theory of society and human nature, one heavily pessimistic
about the former and blithely optimistic about the latter. Tacitus' quar-
rel was with Roman society, but Rousseau's was with civilization itself,
which, he said, had ruined the human race. For Rousseau, the first
person who enclosed a piece of land and said "this is mine" started civil
society; and, he tells us, if only someone had objected to that first step,
"what crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors" he would have
saved the human race.6
Whether because of the direct influence of Rousseau or through the
spontaneous eruption of the politically correct impulse, this dark view
of civilization has been revisited often since Rousseau wrote. Yet history
has been most unkind to these illusions. Tacitus wanted to see in the
Germans the answer to everything that bothered him about his own
society, just as the campus radicals of our own time are tempted to see
in the contemporary Third World an absence of rank consciousness
and hierarchy, of capitalism and greed, of the strong coercing the weak,
and of men lording it over women and treating them as playthings.
Alas, Tacitus did not live to see his noble Germans run amok in the
centuries that followed. One tribe, the Vandals, instituted a legend-
ary reign of terror that gave us the word vandalism. We can be sure
their victims did not see the sweetness and natural goodness Tacitus
attributed to them. The Goths and the Vikings, too, committed more
than their share of rape and plunder, and we can be confident that
when the Visigoths sacked Rome in A.D. 410, the female inhabitants
of the city did not experience the respect for women that Tacitus
had described.
Had the Germanic tribes changed in the intervening years? They had

16
The Origins of Political Correctness

not. Tacitus recorded a curious detail in his account of one tribe that
might have revealed the truth of the situation, if only he had been
receptive to the bad news it contained. He tells us of a tribe called the
Suiones, who lived beyond the mainland and built ships in a peculiar
way: "The shape of their ships differs from the normal in having a prow
at each end, so that they are always facing the right way to put in to
shore. The rowlocks . . . can be reversed, as circumstances require, for
rowing in either direction."7 The word Suionesis, of course, our modern
word Swedes, and those ships were already recognizable as Viking raid-
ing ships. There was nothing peculiar about them if one understood the
purpose of their design. They were built for what Gwyn Jones calls the
"quick-in quick-out Viking raids."8 In remarking that they always face
the right way to put in to shore Tacitus misses the point, which is that
they always face the right way for putting out to sea. Just as a bank
robber will leave a car idling outside the bank, the Vikings had a ship
waiting that did not have to be turned around to get under way. This
Germanic tribe was already not what Tacitus imagined it to be.
History has treated Rousseau's theories just as roughly. The French
Revolution was Rousseauist in nature: the old institutions were swept
away and what was left was simply citizens—an apparently egalitarian
society without institutions that would corrupt them. But contrary to
Rousseau, the very worst in human nature was about to be unleashed:
cruelty, bloodlust, vengefulness, envy, greed. What the institutions of
monarchic France had done to its citizens was nothing compared to
what they now did to themselves.9 The atmosphere of fear in Paris is
what has most captured the historical imagination, but the loss of life in
provincial areas was far worse.10 (The same pattern was repeated in the
Russian Revolution.) The vacuum left by the recently destroyed social
institutions was filled not by the resplendent goodness of human beings
but, quite the reverse, by the cruel tyrant Robespierre and his minions.

/7
 The Origins of Political Correctness

The period is now known to historians as "the Terror." And Stalin's

"Great Terror," though on a much larger scale, is a close parallel.11
Rousseau died just before the Revolution and so escaped seeing what
natural human qualities emerged during the Terror and having to face
the fact that society's institutions are there precisely to restrain those
qualities. Marx, too, never had to experience the consequences of his
views: he was buried long before his romanticized future society turned
out to be one in which proletarian leaders proved yet again to be all
too human—greedy, corruptible, cruel, and much too fond of the
state apparatuses they controlled to let them wither away. A system of
thought that never envisaged the need for any check on natural human
qualities proved powerless to check the savagery of a Stalin or a Pol Pot.
There is more than a broadbrush similarity between todays political
correctness and these recurring fantasies of the primitive innocence to
be found outside a corrupt Western society. Many of the views that are
currently cherished as the sophisticated products of modern theory are
in fact neither modern nor derived from theory; they are instead a
replay of earlier episodes in the history of Western culture. Take, for
example, the view that the Western canon of great books reflects ruling
class values and that when deconstructed it reveals hidden power rela-
tions that have the repressive function of social control of the lower
classes. This sounds like the very latest thought of those among us who
have absorbed the teachings of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and
Antonio Gramsci. But now look at the same point, made in a more
felicitous style over two hundred years ago: "Princes always view with
pleasure the spread among their subjects of a taste for the arts The
sciences, letters and arts . . . cover with garlands of flowers the iron
chains that bind them, stifle in them the feeling ofthat original liberty
for which they seemed to have been born, make them love their slavery,
and turn them into what is called civilized people."12

18
The Origins of Political Correctness

This is again Rousseau, and here he presents all the essential ele-
ments of the avant-garde thought of our daring modern theorists: both
the literary canon and scientific inquiry are really about social control
and serve the interests of rulers by brainwashing the lower classes. Terry
Eagleton is evidently much too intent on the iconoclasm of what he
imagines to be bold new thought to understand that he is merely
parroting Rousseau when he tells us that literature in England was
designed to inculcate in the masses the viewpoint of their masters and
"impress upon them a reverence for middle-class achievements, and...
curb in them any disruptive tendency to collective political action."13
There is not a single reference to Rousseau in the entire book from
which this citation is taken.
In looking back at Rousseau's version of his thought we have one
great advantage: we know what happened next—and we know that
Rousseau could not have been more wrong. Nothing proved more
dangerous to the rulers of his time than the free expression of ideas by
the creative writers and philosophers of the Enlightenment. Unlike
Rousseau, those princes correctly saw writers as dangerous subversives,
censored them, and generally had strained relations with them. Rous-
seaus idea turned out to be foolish in his time, and there is no reason to
believe that it is any less so in ours. The behavior of modern princes,
whether they rule in Baghdad or Havana, tells us that they have no such
illusions.
Rousseau obviously did not need modern literary theory to reach his
view; to use the jargon of our day, he did not have to deconstruct the
canon to reveal a "repressed politics" or to "bring political, psychologi-
cal and institutional contexts into interpretive practices," as an advo-
cate of this view puts it.14 He simply fell victim to a crude and unrealis-
tic conspiracy theory—for that is what it is, whether as formulated by
Rousseau or in its chic modern formulation.

19
 The Origins of Political Correctness

All the major elements of modern political correctness can be found

in the Western tradition, and in every case we can learn something
from the way they have played out. One worth a careful look is the
currently fashionable theory of cultural relativism.
In the modern context, what has become known as political correct-
ness has two distinct strands. The first consists of people who are rather
like Tacitus—intellectuals who are alienated from their own society and
who in their disgust with its imperfections imagine a primitive society
full of sweetness and light. The second reaches the same conclusion as
the first but by a different route. We might call the two groups the
alienated insiders and the resentful outsiders. The outsider denigrates
the dominant culture not because of his disgust with its imperfections
but because he does not feel part of it. Resentment is the reason for his
adulation of primitive cultures. The alienated insider is motivated by
self-disgust, the outsider by self-defense; and that defensiveness takes
the form of cultural relativism.
Faced with a large disparity between the cultural influence and tech-
nological development of the West and Third World, the outsider tries
to equalize matters with the notion that all cultures are unique—which
in some sense must be true—and that consequently no one culture is
better than any other. But the conclusion does not follow from the
premise, and it is clearly false. Yet even this is not really enough to
satisfy the animus against the dominant culture, and so the outsider
still rails against it with an inconsistency that betrays irrationality. Be-
cause Western high culture is snobbish and elitist, for example, more
popular or primitive cultures are preferable, and so some cultures are
better than others after all. The end result is that the alienated insider
and the envious outsider can agree: both are hostile to the stronger and
more developed society and both idealize primitive cultures. Yet this
synthesis of the two different strands is also not uniquely of our time.

20
The Origins of Political Correctness

The convergence of these mutually supportive views is well attested in

the Western tradition.
If Rousseau gives us an example of the alienated insider, the German
Romantics serve as the example of the envious outsiders. By the middle
of the eighteenth century, a number of European cultures were well
advanced. The situation will have a familiar ring if we say that the
dominance (the correct word today is hegemony) of countries like
France was much resented in countries like Germany, whose renais-
sance, for various historical reasons, occurred quite late. Compared to
the leading European nations of the day, Germany was culturally un-
developed.
The French often spoke disparagingly of the Germans, a fact that
Germans perceived as cultural arrogance. Some German intellectuals
began to question the right of French cultural imperialists to regard
Germany as culturally primitive based on French standards. Johann
Gottfried Herder, the major ideologist of the German Sturm und
Drang movement, now invented multicultural theory—or rather cul-
tural relativism, according to which cultures can be judged only by
their own standards. No one culture can be said to be better than
another—they are just different. And as might be said today, we should
celebrate the difference.
Herder used another equally familiar argument to bolster Germany's
case: he disparaged high culture as artificial and praised low culture (the
culture of the common German Volk) as genuine, thereby breaking the
cultural truce that relativism was supposed to offer. Here, too, modern
multiculturalists unwittingly follow Herder to the letter, first by asking
us to celebrate difference, then by denouncing Western culture as elitist.
Again, the advantage of locating a particular aspect of modern politi-
cal correctness in its historical birthplace is that we can see how it fared.
The fate of Germany s cultural relativism was partly amusing and partly

21
 The Origins of Political Correctness

tragic. The amusing part was that almost immediately German culture
began to produce in quick succession a dazzling series of artists and
philosophers: Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Kant, Hegel,
Schopenhauer, Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Hölderlin, the Grimms, and a
host of others. Suddenly it was the Germans who dominated European
culture. Not surprisingly, cultural relativism began to seem less attrac-
tive to them.
Now for the tragedy: the European Enlightenment had had a gen-
eral, humanitarian focus. It espoused the rights of mankind rather than
the special rights or virtues of particular nations. But thinkers like
Herder would have none of that. What mattered for him was not a
general European culture of the Enlightenment but the specifically
German character of German culture and thought. He might well have
said, consistent with his general position but in the language of todays
multiculturalists, that the generalized notion of mankind prevalent
among the French was a cover for Frenchmen foisting their values onto
everyone else.
This turn away from the Enlightenment s emphasis on a common
humanity was a fateful step, however, as was Herder s advocacy of the
primitive culture of the German people. His celebration of the special
character of the Volk as a more important value than European notions
of mankind sowed the seeds of a virulent and persistent German na-
tionalism, one based on blood and soil that echoes throughout the
nineteenth century and eventually becomes an unmistakable ingre-
dient in Nazi ideology. Germany was to fight many bitter wars with
France in the century and a half after Herder wrote, and one must
wonder how much his influence contributed to those wars.
There is a lesson to be learned from this sad sequence of events, and
it is one that can be discerned in many comparable situations through-

22
The Origins of Political Correctness

out the world, both before and since, the latest examples being Sri
Lanka and the former Yugoslavia. Anyone who thinks that cultural
relativism and the celebration of ethnicity will ensure democracy and
egalitarianism is sadly mistaken: history has shown us, to the contrary,
that these attitudes are more likely to unleash the dangerous forces of
tribal chauvinism and resentment. Encouraging people to think of
themselves first and foremost as members of a tribe is a perilous under-
taking. If Serbs and Sinhalese could have thought of themselves as
human beings first and Serbs or Sinhalese second—the Enlighten-
ments way—much bloodshed might have been avoided.
When some scholars argue that we should pay less attention to the
history of the Western tradition and more to both our own age and
Third World peoples, we should be aware that this is a very Western
thing to say. The Third World cultures so favored by these scholars are
generally far more insistent on their own traditions that we are.
As to the other element in Herders theory—the disparagement of
high culture and praise for the culture of the common people—here,
too, there is a lesson for us in what followed. Herder had extolled the
natural eloquence of illiterate German country folk (especially women)
who were unspoiled by books and philosophizing. The brothers Jacob
and Wilhelm Grimm liked the idea and set out to show the richness of
German popular culture by collecting folktales and fairy tales. The
result was their famous Grimms' Fairy Tales. Although the brothers
insisted in the first edition that they had faithfully represented their
peasant sources, we now know that they gathered their material almost
exclusively from their literate middle-class friends or simply from other
books—even French books—and that whatever the source, they re-
wrote everything extensively. The folksy tone and style of the collection
is their own creation. When their sentimental preconceptions clashed

23
 The Origins of Political Correctness

with the reality of what real peasants said, the brothers chose to lie
rather than to admit that their theory had turned out to be wishful
thinking.
The trouble was that Herder and the Grimms believed they would
find among simple peasants the modern equivalent of the oral tradi-
tions that resulted in Homer, not understanding that there was a world
of difference between the uneducated, illiterate members of a modern
literate society and the elite among the storytellers of a preliterate age.
The real equivalent of the elite ofthat earlier time was to be found in
people like the Grimms themselves, a fact that their (unacknowledged)
authorship of the Tales demonstrates.
This episode shows that two theoretical advocates of the eloquence
of low culture understood only too well that the only way to make low
culture competitive with high culture was to have two high-cultural
writers intervene to make the result appear authentically folklike. And
they succeeded: such was their skill that they were able to create a
carefully crafted and deceptively simple language that could not have
been achieved through any other means. And so this enduring monu-
ment of low culture is actually a fraud created by two upper middle
class scholars.15
At this point we ought to entertain a plea of mitigation for Tacitus
and some of his successors. We must remember that, by our modern
standards, they had a very limited experience of the world, whereas we
have that world brought to us on CNN, in newspapers, through travel,
and in countless other ways. Given his limited experience of the world,
we ought not criticize Tacitus too severely for a lack of perspective on
his Roman society, nor should we fault him for failing to foresee the
brutal exploits of the Vandals and Goths. Neither can we blame Rous-
seau for not foreseeing Robespierre, or Herder and the Grimms for
failing to see where celebrating the ethnicity of the German Volk would

24
The Origins of Political Correctness

lead. But we surely can ask that literate people of the modern age who
want to take us through all of this yet again first consider the lessons of
history that show how disastrous these ideas have proved to be.
Because of modern communications, there is no longer any excuse
for ignorance of the violent racial clashes and tribal conflicts of the
Third World or for sentimentalizing the often appalling treatment of
women there. The list of horrors visited upon women is extraordinary:
in India, suttee (the ritual suicide expected of widows and often forced
on them if they demur) and bride burning; in China, not too long ago,
foot binding; in Africa, to this day, severe genital mutilation; in Islamic
countries, the veil (chador), draconian restrictions on employment, and
a prohibition on driving; and in many parts of the world, widespread
killing of female infants. In a recent newspaper article entitled "Stark
Data on Women: 100 Million Are Missing," Nicholas D. Kristof re-
ported that census data from Asian countries indicate that "at least 60
million females in Asia are missing and feared dead," based on evidence
such as "the number of boy births and the ratio that should exist
between them."16 Worldwide, Kristof guesses that "the number of
missing females may top 100 million."
Equally absurd is the idea that where racial harmony or freedom
from imperialism is concerned, the Third World is to be admired more
than the West. Indeed, in these matters the Third World is politically
incorrect to a shocking degree. Ethnic clashes abound, frequently esca-
lating to the level of genocide. During the recent history of Nigeria, for
example, tribal warfare resulted in genocidal massacre. Ethnic major-
ities routinely persecute minorities, and wars of the stronger against the
weaker are constrained not by moral considerations alone but rather
by military feasibility.17 Only intellectuals blinded by alienation from
their own society could fail to see these clear differences or similarly
striking examples of the extent to which state power is commonly

25
 The Origins of Political Correctness

abused; for example, the routine use of torture by police is common

only outside the West. And the historical record leaves us in no doubt
that this behavior predated the arrival of Western colonialism and
imperialism—it could not have been learned from the West.
Given our knowledge of the world through modern communica-
tions, it takes an extraordinary act of self-deception not to see that it is
the developed countries that are slowly leading the world away from
racism and male dominance. To demand an end to racism and sexism is
not to reject Western society but, on the contrary, to ally oneself with
certain Western values. "Enlightened" attitudes toward the relations
between men and women; social justice; torture, rape,18 and other
forms of physical brutality; tribalism; and even imperialism have slowly
coalesced in Western societies. Only someone who reads history blind-
fold could think that the absence of these evils is a normal state of
humankind from which the West deviates. In denouncing any devia-
tion from their own value system as "oppression," race-gender-class
scholars by implication denounce non-Western cultures and measure
them rigidly by Western standards, the reverse of what they think they
are doing.
What does it mean when not simply individuals but whole groups of
people maintain a view that is contradicted by facts too obvious to be
ignored? This question takes us to the heart of the politically correct
impulse and what it means. Of the two groups—the alienated insiders
and the envious outsiders—the motivation of the second is straightfor-
ward enough. Their natural insecurity as outsiders, reinforced as it is by
encouragement from the alienated insiders, produces a result that is not
difficult to understand. The behavior of the first group, however, is less
simple. Self-interest helps the outsider to his conclusion, but all that
stands in the way of the alienated insider s seeing what is obvious to

26
The Origins of Political Correctness

everyone else is his own determination to see the opposite. Where does
this determination come from?
Some degree of dissatisfaction with ones society, or more specifically
with ones place in it, is normal and rational. We all think that the
society in which we live has room for improvement; a high school
teacher, for example, might easily reach the conclusion that he or she
was underpaid given the social importance of the work teachers do.
Even so, such criticism need not interfere with an ability to form
realistic judgments about how this society compares to others in terms
of its overall fairness, racial tolerance, standard of living, protection of
individuals from governmental abuse, and so on. Experience shows,
however, that when these feelings reach a certain level of intensity, all
perspective is lost. Antagonism toward one s own society then becomes
so great that nothing can be conceded to it. Its imperfections can no
longer be compared to those of other societies, yet it is the imperfect
implementation of its own values that has caused the anger. The alien-
ated insider is so much a creature of his own society that the values that
are the basis of his criticism are uniquely /'ft values.
The reasons for this intense alienation probably vary. Intellectuals
often develop feelings of isolation, and some groups—for example,
homosexuals—may have a good reason to feel left out of the main-
stream. In the case of Foucault, the most influential figure among race-
gender-class scholars, we know that this was a factor in his feelings of
alienation. There is, however, more variety in the causes than in the
result, which is not a general loss of the ability to think cogently but a
disposition to think along specific lines.
When most of us reflect on the shortcomings of our society, we
are likely to remember that the frailty of human nature is always the
biggest problem. There is no institution, whether it be the Chrysler

27
 The Origins of Political Correctness

Corporation, the local high school, the Red Cross, or the U.S. Con-
gress, that is immune from the problems of poor leadership, compla-
cency, intellectual laziness, or zealotry—all permanent features of the
human condition. Alienated intellectuals are unable to entertain such a
thought, however, for that would be to let the society around them off
the hook. They must therefore attribute all blame to society and none
to humanity.
It is this critical step that determines the nature of politically correct
thinking, because from this beginning it must follow that people are
not responsible for, since they are inherently better than, what the
alienated insider complains about. They are dragged down by this
society, and their current state of degradation need not have happened.
The politically correct impulse thus leads inexorably to thoughts of a
place where people are simply allowed to be what they can be. And this,
in turn, leads to the idea of a primitive harmony and Rousseau's idyllic
state of nature.
Primitive harmony is therefore not simply a daydream that arises
through fantasy but a result that follows with ironclad logic from the
premises of the initial impulse. That is why so many different people
reach this same point regardless of how many times it has led to ruin.
For some, the disparagement of Western culture has had the effect of
impoverishing their education so that they have been protected from
any knowledge of Rousseau s thought and of the disasters that it has
helped bring about. But even for those whose education was not defi-
cient in this respect, the force of the impulse is still strong enough to
make them dream of the elusive primitive harmony that allows them to
denounce their own society. It is there in the idyllic life of the American
Indians, according to Annette Kolodny, before the white man raped the
country;19 or it was there in the Americas before Columbus brought the
evils of European society;20 or it was there throughout the world, before

28
The Origins of Political Correctness

Western civilization destroyed the reign of the "Goddess," a benign

deity who presided over human life just before recorded history be-
gan;21 or it was there in Africa before colonization by Europeans
brought misery with it;22 or it was there before capitalism.23 In each
case we are told of lives of great beauty and simplicity, without exploita-
tion of people or abuse of the environment; in short, these were ecolog-
ical and human paradises. But they all appear to have existed before we
could actually witness them and, in most cases, before recorded history
began. In such settings, imaginative fantasy and wishful thinking en-
counter fewer obstacles.
It would be an understatement to say that arguments can be
mounted against all these imagined conditions and more to the point
to say that it is embarrassingly easy to show that none really existed.
Our knowledge of pre-Columbian society, of North American Indians,
or of precolonial Africa establishes that all the Western vices that race-
gender-class scholars complain of were there, and more: human sacri-
fice, cannibalism, slavery, ethnic hatreds, rigidly hierarchical societies,
and even a taste for cruelty and torture that would have put medieval
Europe to shame.24
By now, the notion of a primitivç harmony has been ridiculed as
wishful thinking so often that race-gender-class scholars seem on occa-
sion embarrassed and defensive about their continued belief in it; yet
they cling to it still. Annette Kolodny paints her picture of the idyllic life
of the North American Indians—"a harmonious society governed by
seasonal change and unburdened either by toil or material wealth"—but
at the same time enters a caveat that this is not an invocation of the
"noble savage."25 Yet that is exactly what it is. Fredric Jameson, no less in
the grip of the fantasy of primitive harmony both in the contemporary
Third World and more generally in the world before capitalism undid
it, also mocks unreal "Western Third-Worldism," as if to suggest that

29
 The Origins of Political Correctness

there are indeed people who romanticize the Third World but that he is
not one of them.26 But of course he is. The trouble is that Kolodny,
Jameson, and others like them have no real choice: the fantasy of
original harmony is what they must inevitably reach for when their
resentment against their own society reaches an uncontrollable level.
There is another consequence of the belief of these alienated intellec-
tuals that their society's corruption is the source of its problems. They
are unable to grasp the fundamental truth that Robert Edgerton sets
out in his book Sick Societies, namely, that all sociocultural systems
must attempt to restrain weaknesses in human nature—traits like
greed, envy, cowardice, dishonesty, selfishness—but that none has had
complete success in doing so. "Nowhere," says Edgerton, "have adults
found it necessary to teach their children to be selfish, greedy, angry,
stubborn, envious, or disobedient; instead they search everywhere for
means to limit or eliminate these characteristics in their children."27
Although societies try to do this in different ways, their common
task is to find a way to keep human nastiness in check, not to avoid
interfering with the natural occurrence of human sweetness. One
judges societies by many criteria, but one of the most important is:
How well does a society protect its members from one another? This
thought is not accessible to the mind-set we have been discussing, for it
has things the other way around—it attributes nastiness to society, not
to human nature.
Because the problems of society cannot be attributed in any serious
degree to the human nature that it imperfecdy restrains, it follows that
some faction or force within the society must be to blame. Race-
gender-class scholars are therefore predisposed to conspiracy thinking.
The conspiracy will usually be run by a group that they can identify and
resent: the rich, the patriarchy or, more generally, an "establishment."
The chosen group will be imagined as uniquely successful in getting

30
The Origins of Political Correctness

things arranged the way it wants. That our society is what we imperfect
human beings collectively make it will not do as an explanation. But
the most fateful part of this mind-set is its urge to destroy in order to
rebuild. If our society is corrupt, it must be remade from the ground
up. To reach the desired state of harmony, we must start again. And that
would sweep away all the progress that we have made so far.
Most would agree that Western society, though far from perfect, has
made very real progress: compared with the rest of the world, its system
of laws keeps cruelty and torture in check, its people live longer and are
healthier than those in other societies, it feeds its people comparatively
well, it manages to change governments without civil war or bloody
coups, and so on. But to say this simply angers alienated intellectuals,
who know that the core of Western society is rotten, however rosy its
surface appearance. Starting again will not return us to natural good-
ness, however, but only to a natural chaos where all kinds of natural
human nastiness flourish; that would mean both undoing the progress
made by the Enlightenment and abandoning much practical experi-
ence about the calamity of naive Utopian political thought.
The cruel paradox of the politically correct impulse is that it is
impatient with imperfection and wants something better, but its actual
results are always destructive. As Marxism is to the economic sphere, so
cultural political correctness is to the cultural sphere. Marxism prom-
ised a Utopian economic abundance to be shared equally by all—if only
we would dismantle the existing bad economic structure. But only the
dismantling was ever realized, with the result that the formerly socialist
countries must now suffer severe hardships during the long process of
rebuilding their economies. In just the same way, cultural political
correctness now promises cultural abundance for everyone in a new
egalitarian culture if only we are willing to reject our elitist Western
culture. The result is just as predictable: we shall all be culturally poorer

31
 The Origins of Political Correctness

as, once again, the destruction succeeds but the promised state of cul-
tural utopia that is to replace it never materializes. Our Western cul-
tural inheritance is not perfect, but it has succeeded in raising us from
the barbarism of a state of nature. It has managed to abolish many
forms of human cruelty, has given us forms of democratic government
that actually work, and has a record of human thought in literature and
philosophy that offers extraordinary range, depth, and complexity. Far
from debasing human beings, it has enhanced their dignity in a thou-
sand different ways. We can build on it, extend it, modify it; but if we
allow the politically correct to pull it down with their characteristic
Utopian promises about what they can replace it with, we have only
ourselves to blame. We can be sure that if we allow their destructive
resentment to destroy yet again so that they can create perfection, we
shall witness the destruction but never see the benefits promised. We
shall soon be faced with cultural ruin and a painful period of rebuild-
ing—a cultural disaster analogous to the economic disaster that has
befallen eastern Europe.

32
2 Thp Diversity
of Literature

The most striking thing about the new prescription for the study of
literature is how very specific it is. Traditionally, literature has been
considered to have an educative social function, though one conceived
in general terms: it has been thought to help develop a richer under-
standing of human life and to train the mind. But critics who have
determined views about what is wrong with our society—namely, its
oppressiveness with regard to race, gender, and class—believe that read-
ers should be concerned with those three aspects of society above all
others. They are convinced that their triad of issues is fundamental and
that anything else is superficial. What is true for criticism must also be
true for literature, which is therefore also about problems of race,
gender, and class.

33
 The Diversity of Literature

Two questions arise immediately: first, how can one know what a
book is about before reading it? And second, why must all literature be
about the same thing? What reason could be found for reducing the
content of seemingly different works to one issue? How could this
severe narrowing of content be justified? Ordinarily, when we pick up a
book we have not read, we assume we are about to become familiar
with its content. Race-gender-class critics, however, seem to know in
advance. And if criticism is to be reduced to results that are largely
predictable before we even begin, what is the point of it?
It follows from the race-gender-class program that criticism should
not be concerned primarily with the content of a literary work—its
unique stamp, the individual meaning that makes it unlike any other
work, the specific qualities that make readers return to it again and
again. But it is puzzling to think that any valid form of literary criticism
would not be centrally concerned with such things. What, then, can
the point of race-gender-class criticism be?
Peter Washingtons answer to this question is that race-gender-class
criticism essentially puts works of literature on ideological trial; they are
measured against "correct" attitudes toward race, gender, and class and
found wanting or not.1 An example will show how this works: a race-
gender-class critic looked at gender roles in Grimms' Fairy Tales and
found that the boys and girls reflect the sexual stereotypes of the time—
which are of course bad.2 What has been achieved by doing this?
Certainly, nothing very surprising; if the Grimms' Tales reflect the
sexual stereotypes of their age, then presumably one could find those
same stereotypes just about anywhere. That is what stereotypical
means. What the critic has done here surely fails the test of significance,
because it amounts to saying nothing more than that the Grimms
wrote in the early nineteenth century. Because the critic has said noth-
ing that could not have been said about virtually everything else written

34
The Diversity of Literature

at the time, nothing has been said specifically about the stories. It is as if
we were asked to say something about Einstein and responded: "He has
two legs." True enough, but obviously not worth saying. To be signifi-
cant, a statement about a man or a poem needs to say something that
focuses on the particular qualities of each: it is not enough that the
statement be true.
Race-gender-class critics are by no means the first to have made the
mistake of thinking that if a statement about a literary work is true, it
must, by the same token, also be relevant and useful.3 One can easily
show that this assumption cannot be so. We might use a play, for
example, as part of the evidence for a study of the history of handwrit-
ing or of printing or of the English language. We might just as easily use
it for what it tells us about clothing fashions in the eighteenth century
or for information about any number of other historical develop-
ments—attitudes toward smoking, dueling, traveling, eating, making
love, Christianity, marriage, sodomy, hunting, and so on.
Suppose that we find a scholar going through one medieval poem
after another to find out all he or she can about hunting in the Middle
Ages. As he reads each poem he has a preconceived idea of the content
he is looking for—any reference to hunting—and pays no attention to
anything else. If such a person told us he was doing literary criticism,
we would be surprised: it would be obvious that he had no interest in
the poems as literature. If he could find the evidence that he wanted set
out systematically somewhere else, he would clearly use the more con-
venient source. We can make sense of what he is doing if we call him a
social historian, but if we call him a student or critic of literature, what
he is doing in that framework is absurd: he would have decided in
advance of seeing each poem that the most important aspect of its
content will be hunting, regardless of how important or trivial hunting
turns out to be to the meaning of the particular poem. The same would

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be true for someone whose concern was, say, marriage: a social historian
can legitimately use literature for his evidence, but a critic who decided
that the emphasis of every work of literature must be on marriage
would be regarded as strange. Literary critics must take the emphasis
of each text where they find it, one text at a time, or they cease be-
ing critics.
It is worth remembering that there have always been critics who
judged the content of each piece of literature in advance: in effect, they
had a favorite idea and were determined to make it the favorite idea of
every author they read, whether or not it was so. That is the essence of
bad reading, but it has been the way of Freudians, Marxists, and some
religious critics, and it was just as much the sin of that subset of the
New Critics that looked primarily for (and found) ambiguity in every
literary text. But for critics with rigid attitudes of this kind, the sheer
diversity of literary texts has always been an insuperable problem.
Given such diversity, to decide in advance what is going to be the
emphasis of every text can only be reductive and distorting. It is not
necessary to refute Marx or Freud to reach this conclusion; all that is
needed is to remember the obvious fact that literary texts are all dif-
ferent. Once we accept that fact, the determination of race-gender-class
critics to see race, gender, and class as the central issues in every work
must be regarded as a serious mistake.
If we simply set aside these restrictive theories that tell us all litera-
ture is about this or that and look instead at literature itself, we find an
enormous variety of theme, content, and outlook. What we call litera-
ture is a collection of very different texts written by all kinds of people
of differing temperaments and viewpoints. These texts represent a great
range of opinion on social and political questions, as well as on every
other kind of question. They are written at different times, in different
places, about different issues, and in different moods. People write, and

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read, for many, fundamentally dissimilar reasons. This is the diversity

of life itself. How ironic that diversity has become a buzzword of race-
gender-class criticism when that criticism is committed to ignoring the
true diversity of literature.
It is not enough to say that these critics are right some but not all of
the time. If we are determined to take from literature only the attitudes
that we bring to it, it ceases to have any point. Why, after all, do we read
literature? A large part of the answer to this question is surely that
although in the course of a life one encounters only a limited number of
the people, situations, and problems that exist, literature expands those
limits dramatically. The result is both a broadening and a deepening of
experience. The new situations and people we are exposed to are not
simply those that we might have known had we more than one life to
lead; rather, they are created by writers who give us a distillation of real
life and an interpretation of it that often takes us beyond anything that
everyday life offers.
No other writer has quite the ability of Charles Dickens to create a
world full of unique characters, but the remarkable thing is that al-
though we had never met Uriah Heep or Mr. Micawber before reading
David Copperfield, or Scrooge before reading A Christmas Carol, we
seem to recognize them instantly. For all their unforgettable individu-
ality, they are distilled from more fragmentary versions found in the
real world. We never see anyone quite like them, though we see many
who are similar, and we understand these individuals better because
Dickens was able to discern the fundamental shape of certain human
traits so clearly that he could show them in heightened form. Once we
have seen that heightened profile, we are able to recognize and under-
stand more easily the paler versions around us.
Almost everyone knows someone who paints, for example, but the
painter of Robert Brownings poem "Andrea del Sarto" gives us much to

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think about. This is a man known as a faultless painter, a perfect

technician who can execute any idea flawlessly but who lacks one
crucial thing—a compelling style or vision of his own. Browning fo-
cuses the issue for us with the much quoted

Ah, but a mans reach should exceed his grasp,

Or what s a Heaven for?

Browning s painter raises in a peculiarly sharp way an issue that every-

one struggles with sooner or later: the need to have goals that will
stretch but not overwhelm us.4 Unlike the painter, whose reach is his
grasp, we need to grasp for something not quite within our reach to
give our lives a challenge and a meaning. If the goal is so beyond reach
that we have no chance of attaining it, we end up disillusioned and
bitter; if it is so close that it is easily reached, it will have no meaning.
Browning uses his painter as a means of examining a central principle
in human life. Once we encounter his poem, it becomes a permanent
part of the way we think about ambition. No philosopher could have
captured the principle so vividly, because abstract formulae will not do
the job. What is needed is a concrete expression, and that is why the
great poets are more often quoted to illuminate human situations than
are philosophers.
It is no accident that quotations from Shakespeare have become part
of everyday life. If someone seems paralyzed by indecision, we say that
he is "thinking too precisely on the event"; if there is an argument as to
what to call something, we are likely to hear "a rose by any other name";
and someone who finds that a dear friend has sided with adversaries
will likely think of Julius Caesar: "Et tu Brute." Yet this happens not
because Shakespeare had a unique ability to turn a pretty phrase but
because he comments on central issues in human life with such devas-

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taring accuracy, giving us in the process a unique way of grasping and

understanding them.
It is the precision of his thought, the sharpness of his observation,
and his power to abstract the essence of events that keeps Shakespeares
language so influential hundreds of years after his death. When we
begin to worry about the way a commitment to a particular goal makes
us simplify issues and so distort them, Hamlet s thinking too precisely
on the event enables us to understand this recurring dilemma. Even
Macbeths phony alibi for killing the servants who are to be the scape-
goats for Duncans murder becomes a concise principle that we may
recall and use many times over as we wrestle with the same issue
ourselves:

Who can be wise, amazed, temperate and furious,

Loyal and neutral in a moment? No man.

Hamlet would have found that one useful.

The great writers to whom we return again and again are a limitless
source of inspired commentary on the endless puzzles of human exis-
tence, and even when two of them look at the same problem, each has a
unique interpretation of it. Goethe's Faust, like Browning's "Andrea del
Sarto," also deals with the struggle to achieve yet dwells on a quite
different aspect of it. Goethe examines how creating and destroying are
so closely related that the ambition to know and experience more
becomes a pact with the devil. Everyday German is as full of quotations
from Faust as English is from Hamlet, and for the same reason; both
plays are the work of writers who had the gift of making us see things as
we had not seen them before.
Writers whose works are compelling enough to survive after their
death and be read and reread by future generations have seen the

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essence of human situations so clearly that even profound changes in

human life cannot obscure their meaning. Take, for example, the ques-
tion of what it means to be exceptionally talented or to be in the
company of those who are. We usually think that great talent is a
blessing—something that should enable one to lead a successful life.
But three great writers from different epochs saw much more in the
situation. The heroic figures in Homers The Iliad, in the German
medieval Nibelungenlied, or in Tolstoy s War and Peace show us that
exceptional talent does not make a successful life. Andrei Bolkonsky is a
glittering figure for whom there is, surprisingly, no real place in the
world: it is his more ordinary friend, Pierre, who survives and lives out a
contented and useful life. Siegfried s extraordinary natural ability and
strength allow him to get by without ever having to develop an under-
standing of the people round him; he is therefore surprised when those
for whom he has done so much do not admire him (as he thinks they
should) but instead plot to kill him at the first opportunity, using fair
means or foul. In The Iliad the link between brilliance and unfitness for
life is strongest of all, so strong that Achilles is already aware of the
prophesy that one so gifted will have a short life. The three cases differ
in so many ways that one can never be substituted for another, yet on
occasion one illuminates the others. Coming from the Nibelungenlied
to The Iliad, for example, we see immediately that the prophesy of
Achilles' early death is not simply an arbitrary act of cruel gods; rather,
the prophesy is about the distortion that exceptional talent inevitably
brings with it.
In works of literature that have been able to grip the human imagi-
nation continually for nearly three thousand years, issues must have
been abstracted, focused, sharpened, heightened; no one quite like its
larger-than-life figures is seen every day. Still, when the remarkable
swimmer Mark Spitz won a record seven Olympic gold medals and

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then proceeded to destroy his enormous popularity through boorish

behavior, no one who had reflected upon The Iliad or the Nibelungen-
liedcould have been surprised. The shadow of Achilles and Siegfried
was again visible, and even if Spitz was only a pale shadow of them, he
was recognizably part of the human behavior that had inspired their
creation.
The literature of remote times and places frequently offers thought
and commentary on human life that surprise us with its continuing
relevance. There is a German poem that gives powerful expression to a
mood we all know well. The poet sees a world in which every value
seems to be slipping away from him: taste and style are deteriorating,
integrity is a forgotten virtue, modern music is a cacophony, people no
longer know how to dress properly, good manners are a thing of the
past, and standards in all things no longer exist. It is as if he has slept for
a long time and awakened to an alien world.
Most people have felt that their world was disintegrating at one time
or other, and so one might ask: What does this poem really do for us? It
is certainly the most magnificent and sonorous expression of this la-
ment that one could imagine, and that is the result of the focusing and
heightening of experience found only in the best writers. But beyond
this, the really interesting thing about this poem is that although it
seems as if it could have been written yesterday, it dates from the high
Middle Ages, around the year 1200. The author is Walther von der
Vogelweide.5 It is a sobering thought that people have been expressing
the same kind of lament about their own generations integrity and its
betrayal by the next for a very long time, though, to be sure, without
Walther s eloquence. If the world really is disintegrating, it is taking a
very long time to do it. And so Walthers poem offers us a wonderful
chance to indulge this mood grandly and at the same time a perspective
on it that will never allow us to experience it in quite the same way again.

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More examples would emphasize further, but not change, the essen-
tial point that the body of writings we call literature is enormously
varied and that it broadens our experience and deepens our under-
standing of issues, events, and people by helping us grasp their essential
shape and meaning. Literature can be thought of as a kind of forum in
which the members of a society reflect together and brood upon the
many issues that arise in their lives. Inevitably, the thoughts of those
who offer the most insight into the most interesting and most enduring
issues—that is, those with an unusual gift for doing so, the great writ-
ers—float to the top and get the most attention. How could it be
otherwise? But the collective judgment as to what is most important is
the only limit on the scope of the forum, which means that the diversity
of theme, content, and viewpoint found in literature is of the essence:
only that diversity fulfills the function of literature.
If we look at race-gender-class criticism with such thoughts in mind,
it is clear that this one-note criticism is far too restrictive to deal with
the great diversity of content in literature.6 To say only this, however,
still does not get to the heart of the problem. Criticism that restricts
itself to one issue might seem to have some use within this restriction,
but when we look at what is typical of single-issue critics, a more
fundamental problem comes to light. The examples I gave earlier of
single-issue users of literature were scholars interested in the history of
handwriting, printing, or hunting. Most of them would freely admit
that they are not really concerned with literature, because they are
involved in another kind of study. There is, after all, only one possible
reason to restrict literatures content to a single issue, and that reason
must lie in a purpose that has nothing specifically to do with literature.
What this means is that race-gender-class criticism belongs firmly in
the category of activities that may involve literature but that center
around something else. To put the matter simply, when you reduce

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literature to a single issue, your reasons for doing so must have nothing
to do with literature, and consequently neither will your results.
Race-gender-class critics try to avoid the issue of diminishing the
content of literature by claiming that they are setting literature in a
wider context, hoping to make it seem that they see more, not less.7 But
their wider context is merely a different context, wider, to be sure, in
the sense that it encompasses more phenomena than literature, but also
narrower, in that it addresses nothing but a single strand that runs
intermittently through that widened body of phenomena. In the rele-
vant sense, then, the context is narrower, not wider.8 The question
remains as to whether these critics' treatment of even that one issue is
coherent and intelligent. In the next two chapters I shall show that
their politics is just as dubious as their criticism.
Some race-gender-class critics may sense that they are vulnerable on
the question of their misuse of literature, because many of them deny
that there is any such thing. This paradoxical claim evidently does not
mean that Hamlet is something we imagined but that the category
"literature" is not a coherent one—its boundaries are not clear enough
to prevent it from merging with all other uses of language. The purpose
of this claim can be seen in the next step in the argument, which asserts
that because "literature is an illusion" (as Eagleton puts it),9 treating
literature as if it existed results in the "dislocation of 'literature' from
other cultural and social practices."10 Literature is therefore a bogus,
elitist category, and there is no real difference between literary texts and
other texts. This argument is now commonly used to justify what is
known as "cultural studies"—virtually another name for race-gender-
class studies—as the proper framework for studying literature.
Because Eagleton's is the most influential version of this argument,
it is worthwhile to see how he reaches his conclusion. As we shall see,
he begins by citing and building upon someone else's analysis of how

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literature should be defined, citing it with evident approval, but he

misunderstands that analysis and its conclusions. What he then erects
upon this foundation shows that he has not grasped the nature of the
issues that arise in a definition. I make this judgment with some con-
fidence, for the analysis Eagleton makes the basis of his argument was
my own.
The question What is literature? has been a perennial concern of
theory. What is it that differentiates literature from other uses of lan-
guage?11 Early attempts to define literature focused on the features
common to all members of the category; possession of those features
then became the diagnostic basis for deciding whether a given text was
or was not literature. This approach breaks down, however, because no
aspect of either form or content is common to all literary texts and only
to them. Political speeches can be subtly composed, newspaper articles
can be stylish, and real-life stories have plots, dialogue, beginnings,
endings, and turning points. Attempts to diagnose a specifically literary
form of organization as the diagnostic feature have sometimes seemed
plausible, but only at the cost of being too vague to permit a clear test.
In The Theory of Literary Criticism I suggested that this problem can
be solved by recognizing that definitions do not require common prop-
erties; the basis of categorization is as often a matter of common pur-
poses as of common properties.12 A common pattern of use is in fact
the basis of many everyday categories, for example, clothes, food, poi-
son, weeds. One food, or poison, may have nothing structurally in
common with another; what matters is that they are put to the same use
or have a similar result. I suggested that literature was a similar case. It is
a functional category, one whose members have a common function.
The ordinary use of language is directly related to its immediate context
and is governed by the purposes ofthat context. When it has achieved
its purely local purpose, a piece of language is rarely recalled except

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when that context is studied in retrospect. By contrast, the pattern of

use characteristic of literary texts consists in recurrent attention, with-
out any interest in the context of their origin per se, and therefore in a
more general kind of concern with their content. In this view, the
category "English literature" is the group of texts that are continually
looked at in this way.
My approach had been to show how a better understanding of the
logic of definition could solve the problem of defining literature, be-
cause what had made this question such a puzzle was simply a logically
inadequate notion of what a definition is. This was the analysis that
Eagleton took as his starting point, glossing it with a remark that
completely misrepresented my point: " 'Literature' in this sense is a
purely formal, empty sort of definition."13 It is nothing of the kind. All
kinds of perfectly ordinary, coherent categories are based on function
rather than on defining physical properties, and many more have fuzzy
edges, for example, book, shirt, and tree: at what point is a book no
longer a pamphlet, a shirt not a tunic, or a tree not a bush? Eagleton
seizes on the idea that literature is not a category based strictly on
physical similarity in order to dissolve literature as a real category, but
that argument would dissolve most of the other categories that we live
by. So wedded was he to the idea that a real definition required com-
mon properties that he went on to conclude that a definition without
them amounted to no category at all. This elementary mistake of logic
has now become the basis of race-gender-class theory on the question
of literature as a category.
Eagleton s logical misunderstanding was highly congenial to all those
critics who treated literature in the same way they treated any other his-
torical document and for whom any categorical difference between
them was an embarrassment. And yet a theory requiring that no dis-
tinction be made between Shakespeare and an Elizabethan cookbook

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should not have been persuasive. Moreover, no amount of theorizing

about the concept can ever abolish the fact that people who speak En-
glish have no difficulty understanding what the word literature means.
Those people also know that many different kinds of writing about very
different issues fall within its scope and that when race-gender-class
critics show themselves to be interested only in exploitation and oppres-
sion, that narrow focus is their limitation, not literature's.
Because they have decided in advance what any particular text will
have to say to them, race-gender-class critics cannot receive anything
from literature: what they go away with is no more than what they
brought to it. No insight can be gained from writers and thinkers
whose work has stood the test of time, because these critics are deter-
mined to stick to their own thoughts and measure literature against
them. For generations, literature has opened minds and propelled them
beyond their previous limits, but race-gender-class critics in principle
exclude any such experience of literature. Instead of letting the broader
perspective of different situations and conditions work to open up new
thoughts about their own time, race-gender-class critics project only
their own obsessions (which are already narrow enough even as they
relate to their own time) onto the literature of past ages.
What, then, does it take to be a good critic? For many years, Frank
Kermode has been one of the most respected critics of English litera-
ture. A fellow critic, attempting to define what made Kermode the
great critic he is, recently said that it was "his acute responsiveness to a
great variety of texts."14 Receptiveness is indeed the key: in effect, a
good critic has to be a good listener. To be able to deal appropriately
with a great body of diverse texts, one must be, like Kermode, acutely
responsive to the particular agenda and emphasis of each one. If, how-
ever, critics have a fixed agenda and a predetermined set of concerns,
they will never be able to do justice to the diversity that confronts them.

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Both monotony and irrelevance will be the result of looking for and
finding just one issue—one kind of political content construed and
judged in a predetermined way—regardless of the text. Critics who
become obsessed with a single factor cannot do the job because they
cannot be listening to what the text says. And that makes it doubtful
whether critics should declare a specific theme for their work. The term
"feminist critic," for example, is hard to square with the fact that the
critics job is to deal with the subject of a given text, not to impose
her own.15
Race-gender-class critics often try to evade the issue of receptivity to
a text, but never with any real success. Reading the classics with an
interest in what they have to say to us (rather than diagnosing their
race-gender-class attitudes) is described scornfully by Gerald Graff as
an uncritical search for "a repository of uncomplicated truths" or "uni-
versal values that stand above controversy."16 (Another popular catch-
phrase used for this purpose is "eternal verities.") Graff also complains
of an attempt at "protecting [the classics] from disrespect."17 But his
argument is transparently an attempt to avoid the issue. What Graff
needs to explain is why alert reading and receptivity to the emphases of
the text are not preferable to a critical agenda that is set even before the
text is read; he evades that problem, however, by caricaturing receptive
reading as a search for "uncomplicated truths." In doing so, Graff also
misrepresents literature and its appeal. Western literature can claim
universality—that is, it is interesting to anyone who wishes to read and
think—precisely because the diversity of attitudes contained within it is
so great. Because the values of one classic writer frequently clash with
those of another, the great writers present more questions than they do
answers; one can contemplate Hamletor King Lear* long time without
finding any uncomplicated truths. Students of German literature will
smile grimly at the notion that Goethes Faust gives easy answers. And

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one will not find in Dickens' London "values that stand above contro-
versy." Many of the classics are remarkable precisely for provoking
long-lasting controversy and taking no clearcut stand between compet-
ing values.
It would be more true to say that we get eternal questioning, not
eternal verity, from Shakespeare, which is something we do not get
from race-gender-class critics. To the contrary, they give us a set of
simple and eternal verities, namely, their extraordinarily rigid ideas
about race, gender, and class. They choose books for their course read-
ing lists because those books contain viewpoints they see as eternal
truths. They grant to the "truths" of Foucault, for example, an extraor-
dinary degree of credence, even reverence. The same point holds for
philosophical works in the Western tradition: few of the university
teachers who urge us to read Plato believe that he found the truth about
anything. Instead, they generally want us to read Plato because he asked
some excellent questions that we should all think about. And so here,
too, the talk of eternal verities only diverts attention from the logical
problems of race-gender-class scholarship.
An older moralizing tradition that measured literature and philoso-
phy against the conventional pieties of its time also required resistance
rather than receptivity to what the classic authors had to say to us. That
tradition was always mocked as the work of dull, pious middle-class
folk who had no ear for what transcended their narrow understanding
of the Bible—but now their essential spirit is with us again. As they, too,
now respond to Shakespeare s subtlety and complexity with simple and
rigid moral judgments, race-gender-class critics seem not to understand
their kinship with the dullards and philistines of yesterday.
Gerald Graff is charmingly frank in admitting that "being alone with
the texts only left me feeling bored and helpless." Just imagine: being
alone with Dickens or Shakespeare made this professor of literature

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bored. And so, race-gender-class ideology can help to relieve the bore-
dom: "The classics, I suggest, have less to fear from newfangled ideo-
logical hostility than from old-fashioned indifference."18 The notion
that we need to enliven bored readers of Shakespeare or Dickens by
monitoring the correctness of their politics makes no sense except in
the context of the particular fact that Graff was bored. But one can only
wonder: Why did one so deaf to literature want to study and teach it in
the first place?
The sad fact is that politically inspired criticism never speaks of the
enjoyment or intellectual excitement of literature, and certainly not of
the love of it. A visitor from another planet who read this kind of
criticism might well wonder what sort of institution literature is: Why,
he might think, do people buy those books? The question would baffle
him. Race-gender-class critics think of themselves as having more se-
rious things on their minds than enjoyment. The word aesthetic is not
valued in their vocabulary. It conjures up an image of someone turned
inward on himself and his own pleasure while others deal with a grim
reality. Aesthetic enjoyment is thus for irresponsible people with no
social conscience. And yet for centuries the institution of literature has
been based only on people s liking books so much that they choose to
read them repeatedly, not on their having a duty to read what is morally
or politically correct.
Race-gender-class critics have profoundly misunderstood the mean-
ing of aesthetic pleasure, which does not involve a self-absorbed with-
drawal from serious matters. It is, rather, one example among many of
the way human nature supports activities that are useful through the
pleasure experienced in performing them. We need to eat to survive,
and nature ensures that we do so by having us enjoy food; we need
clothing and shelter to protect us, and so find clothes and houses
attractive; we need to procreate, and here nature made special efforts to

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ensure that we should like to do so; our children need to be protected,

and we are fascinated by them; we need to maintain our physical
capacities, and so find exercise exhilarating. But we also need to exercise
our imagination, our capacity to think and feel, and hence we enjoy
literature.
If we did not enjoy this exercise of the imagination, we would soon
deteriorate intellectually, just as we would starve if we stopped eating
and our species would die out if we no longer enjoyed making love. The
pleasure we take in any of these activities can be heightened without
necessarily being divorced from the essential benefit the activity pro-
vides. We therefore have gourmet food, attractive architecture, well-
designed clothes. In just the same way, literature makes a heightened
appeal to our imagination, and works of literature that have what we
call an aesthetic appeal do so in an exceptionally powerful way. That is
why they survive generation after generation.
We can be sure that the kind of victim-centered literature being
written today to illustrate politically correct precepts will soon die for
lack of an ability to excite or inspire: group grievances will not hold
peoples interest for long. Take the case of Alice Walker's "Am I Blue?"
a short story that the California State Board of Education recendy
adopted for use in public school achievement tests.19 This short text (of
about two thousand words) boils down to little more than a series of
complaints. In it, whites are mean to blacks, whites are mean to In-
dians, white men are mean to Asian women, boys are mean to girls, and
people are mean to animals. (There may be hope for the son of the
narrators "partner," who learns to piece quilts.) For all its attempt at
seizing moral high ground, this series of remarkably narrow and mean-
spirited racial stereotypes reads like a race-gender-class parody. Who
could ever learn to love reading if this recitation of grievances were all
there was to literature?

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The aesthetic sense is not divorced from real issues, then, but is the
same kind of force that draws us into many activities that are important
in our lives. The recognition of this close connection between the
functional importance of literature and its aesthetic impact has a long
history in criticism. In classical and neoclassical poetics it was said that
poetry delighted and instructed. This has been a durable view, and if its
two key terms are formulated somewhat more broadly, it is still viable;20
we can extend the word delight to include other nuances of a strong and
immediate response: to involve, to intrigue, to move, to fascinate. Sim-
ilarly, we can broaden the scope of instruct to include such ideas as "give
cause to reflect" or "develop understanding." It is worth noting, how-
ever, that the classical formula avoided any restriction of content: both
instruction and delight could be about anything. By contrast, the chief
difficulty of race-gender-class criticism lies in its departure from this
level of generality and in the lack of any justification for its extreme
narrowing of focus.
Race-gender-class critics often try to justify this narrowing with the
claim that it is not of their making, because (they argue) Western lit-
erature is itself monolithic and dominated by a restricted set of ideas;
and since these ideas are harmful, they must be exposed. In this view,
the canon of Western literature is the record and the instrument of
the sexism, racism, and class oppression of Western civilization, and it
both embodies and perpetuates the anti-egalitarian values of politically
dominant groups, mainly upper-class white males. Writing in this vein,
Eagleton states that "departments of literature in higher education are
part of the ideological apparatus of the modern capitalist state."21 But
this idea is supported only by its constant repetition; to anyone willing
to look at the factual record it is simply wrong.
All the unreal tidiness of conspiracy thinking is present in the sug-
gestion that a single, tightly knit, well-disciplined, highly effective

51
 The Diversity of Literature

social group with a clear idea of its interests pursues those interests with
a well-executed plan. Reality is quite different: the literary canon is the
result of the activities of all kinds of writers, many of them loners and
oddballs who irritated their ruling classes. Far from being willing pro-
pagandists for the social order, they were often viewed in their own
times as dangerous subversives.
The canon is also the result of the actions of all kinds of readers;
when we use this word, we are employing a kind of shorthand that
sums up the present state of our collective reading and theatergoing.
There is nothing oppressive about it: it simply summarizes what we do.
Race-gender-class critics charge that the canon is elitist, because cultur-
ally dominant figures impose their choices on others. But far too many
people are involved to make this kind of control possible in anything
but the short run. Professors whose reading lists consist of books that
students find uninteresting or directors who put on plays the public
won t pay to see soon find their cultural influence declining sharply, if
they ever had any. The real difference between the Western canon and
the politically correct books chosen by race-gender-class critics is that
the latter are ideological choices imposed on unwilling readers by a
cultural elite and only the former are backed by a long history of appre-
ciation and interest on the part of a genuinely diverse reading public.
Although the historical record is full of attempts to make literature
monolithic and to force it to reflect the values of the ruling class, such
attempts generally failed. The most prominent examples recendy are
the attempts of Marxist regimes like Stalins and Maos to control their
subjects' reading, though dictators of the right are (almost) as likely to
do the same. The outcome of such governmental repression is instruc-
tive, for the light it sheds on the process of canon formation. Usually, a
coterie of compliant writers gathers around the dictatorial regime and
enjoys success, whereas more courageous writers are either censored or

52
The Diversity of Literature

executed. When the regime falls, however, those who conformed to its
values are discredited, and they run for cover. (The East German writer
Christa Wolf is an excellent example.) The works of courageous indi-
viduals who spoke their minds and offended the regime either survive
as underground classics or are rediscovered, and many make their way
into the canon—as is happening in Russia today.
What this shows is that, once again, the race-gender-class attack on
the canon has things the wrong way round: canonical status goes not to
the mediocrities who do as the ruling classes tell them but to individ-
uals who write as their consciences dictate. Oddly enough, the race-
gender-class critics who want to reshape the canon according to their
political beliefs (instead of allowing it to be shaped by the diverse forces
of the citizenry at large) share Joseph Stalins view of the uses of litera-
ture. These critics think of themselves as liberators, but they follow in
the footsteps of dictators.
The idea that literature ¡s a means of social control is again the
reverse of the truth. By broadening our horizons and giving us access to
a wider range of thoughts and attitudes, literature has always been
likely to shake the conventional pieties: it is liberating and subversive,
not repressive. That is why dictators, fearing that literature will subvert
the status quo, try to restrict access to books. The former monarchs of
many European countries were generally suspicious of poets and think-
ers, and their eventual fate proved that they had good reason to be.
The claims that race-gender-class critics make about the objection-
able ideas spread by the canon are once more not just wrong but the
exact opposite of the truth. The charge that the Western literary canon
embodies and promotes sexist attitudes, for example, is repeated end-
lessly, but if this is so, then one must wonder why it has not been more
effective than it is, for the position of women is certainly better in
Western than in non-Western cultures. The truth, of course, is that the

53
 The Diversity of Literature

Western canon has helped to produce that result, and one can easily see
how. Take the example of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the quintessen-
tial rationalist writer of the German Enlightenment. Just the kind of
white male that race-gender-class critics talk about, one might think.
Yet in his most important play, Minna von Barnhelm, the voice of
reason and insight is given not to a male but to the plays title charac-
ter—a woman. Compared to her, the male characters are weak, irra-
tional, and confused. Another still-popular play by Lessing— Nathan
the Wise— is an eighteenth-century attack on racial prejudice.
The French playwright Molière is a similar case. Molière loved to
satirize all kinds of human follies, from hypocrisy and pretentiousness
to hypochondria, but when he wanted a voice of common sense and
decency in his plays, he usually gave it not to an upper-class male
character but to a servant girl who commented on events with devastat-
ing clarity and intelligence.
The examples I have pointed to are neither atypical nor minor—
Lessing is the most prominent literary figure of the German Enlighten-
ment, and Molière one of the three great dramatists of the classical age
of French literature. They point to a truth that utterly confounds the
race-gender-class case: Western poets and writers have generally been
leading, not lagging, in humanitarian movements. To be sure, the
canon has its share of works that extol male bravery and heroism, but its
greatest figures are rarely wholly admirable: Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth,
Achilles, Faust, all have their faults. Strong women, however, are every-
where: Portia, Lady Macbeth, Cordelia. Still, the really important point
is that the Western canon is far too large and diverse to permit the
simple generalizations of the race-gender-class critic.
Contrary to feminist dogma, women have often had a marked influ-
ence on the production of literature. In the French classical age, the
literary salons had great authority in matters of literary taste, and those

54
The Diversity of Literature

salons were controlled by women. And in the eighteenth century the

cult of sensibility in the novels of the time owed much to the fact that
an enlarged audience for books had been formed by the rising middle
class, especially the daughters and wives, who now had both the educa-
tion and the leisure time to make reading possible. In Goethes play
Torquato Tasso it is said that the realm of taste and the arts is that
of women.
What is true for women is just as true for egalitarian developments in
society generally, including the struggle for racial equality. Egalitarian
sentiments are far more common in Western than in non-Western
cultures, and this, too, is the achievement of the Enlightenment, in
which educated people (that is, those despised elite groups) played a
leading role. The free expression of ideas by the creative writers and
philosophers of that period led the way and those ideas have been
spreading since the eighteenth century: many inhabitants of the Third
World would be delighted to see them arrive more quickly. Far from
being a repository of repressive ideas, then, Western literature is a
record of our progress toward the kind of society that race-gender-class
critics want. Political correctness itself is a legacy of dead white males
like Tacitus and Rousseau. Remember, however, that all this is part of
the great diversity of Western literature and thought, which contains
voices raised against Rousseau as well.
Those who want social justice in matters of race, gender, and class
should be the loudest voices raised for the Western canon—the source
of, and the support for, their egalitarian ideals. But radicals always
demand perfection, and that perfection alienates them even from the
roots of their own ideals; it is on this basis that they criticize the
Enlightenment for its incompleteness (here read simply as hypocrisy),
as if the work of that group of writers could have been completed
overnight. They fail to see that the Enlightenment initiated a process

55
 The Diversity of Literature

whereby conditions within its sphere of influence began to depart

radically from those that remained outside.
Even the most vocal of the insurgent groups among race-gender-
class critics—homosexuals—seem not to understand their enormous
prominence and influence in Western culture. The list of remarkable
figures in this group includes possibly the greatest philosopher of
this century (Ludwig Wittgenstein); Russia's greatest composer (Tchai-
kovsky); the most influential economist of this century (John May-
nard Keynes); Germany's greatest twentieth-century novelist (Thomas
Mann) and most important political figure (Frederick the Great); many
great English writers (W. Somerset Maugham, E. M. Forster, Oscar
Wilde) and actors; the greatest military figure of the ancient world
(Alexander the Great); many great figures in the world of dance; and
the list goes on.
The objection to the Western canon is sometimes framed as an
objection to the rigidity of its defenders, who are allegedly resistant to
the natural process of change and want it to be immutable and beyond
revision. But although resistance to change is a notion that is valid in
many human contexts, it does not fit well with the specific situation we
are dealing with, for few have ever thought the canon immutable. The
greatest figures stay in it year after year, to be sure, but new names are
being added all the time, and all but a very few regularly rise and fall in
stature. The annual bibliography of critical books and articles pub-
lished by the Modern Language Association (MLA) can be used to
follow these changes. The bibliography shows, for example, that in
German literature E. T. A. Hoffmann's standing has improved during
the past forty years, as has that of Kleist, whereas Schiller's and Hebbel's
have declined during this period. The rise of twentieth-century au-
thors such as Kafka and Grass has evidently had the effect of sharply
reducing interest in other early twentieth-century authors, for example,

56
 The Diversity of Literature

Remarque. All of this happens not because of a conspiracy to control us

but simply because patterns of reading change over time. People make
their own reading decisions, and the present canon is the result; future
changes in that canon will also be the result of such decisions.
1
Although race-gender-class critics often say that pronouncing one
book better than another is oppressive, the act of choosing to read this
work rather than that is unavoidable in a modern world where no one
could begin to read what is printed in a year. The basis of evaluation is
the need to decide how to spend limited time. The resistance to the
race-gender-class critic s agenda is not a matter of resistance to change
in the canon, then, but of resistance to a particular way of changing it;
the objection is both to changes brought about by fiat, rather than
naturally through readers' decisions, and to narrow, politically correct
criteria that are rigidly applied.
Because literature as a body of texts is essentially and necessarily
diverse, it cannot have a specific agenda, but critics who do not under-
stand this are always tempted to impose one of their own. But now a
paradox arises: What makes this move so tempting is the promise of
grand results from an all-encompassing critical system, yet the results
trivialize literature. It is simply parochial to read Shakespeare or Chau-
cer primarily in the context of twentieth-century political obsessions
(the dreamed-of egalitarian transformation of human society or the
destruction of the patriarchy).
One can see just how the impulse to find an agenda for literature
leads to totalitarian criticism when an advocate of politicized criticism
argues against Frank Kermode's criticism. Peter Parrinder makes his
case with disarming candor: "Whenever [Kermode] outlines the pur-
pose and function of criticism he tacitly redefines criticism as inter-
pretation."22 This means in turn that his "attachment is not to any
particular interpretative system but to the notions of the canon ... and

57
 The Diversity of Literature

of the professional practice of interpretation." Because Kermode has no

system, his is "permissive and pluralist" criticism, and it is complicit in
the academy s "obsessive and monotonous return to a core of texts
which might seem scarcely in need of further elucidation." All this
removes criticism from the sphere of cultural politics, and because, for
Parrinder, "what qualifies criticism as criticism is [that], . . it assails
what it takes to be false values in the name of true values," it follows
that Kermode s criticism is barely criticism at all: he is guilty of "neu-
tralizing and perhaps neutering the critical act." According to Par-
rinder, we need a "clear message to convey to the people outside," for
"if criticism prefers to reduce itself to interpretation and to stop asking
what is taught and why it is taught.. . somebody else, perhaps some-
body far more sinister," does it instead.23
For Parrinder, there exists one set of true values, these values control
everything, and critics must know and apply them—no room for diver-
sity here. Critics must also decide what people will read and what they
are to think. Who will decide all of this? We are not told, but he or she
will certainly be a social engineer with grand ambitions.
The health of our social system in general, and of particular institu-
tions within it (such as the one we call literature), can be attributed to
the fact that a large number of people are constantly making decisions
for themselves. Literary commissars have no place there. Many will try
to shape taste to their liking, but they must compete with others who
want to do the same. The public will have the last word, however, as to
whom they will listen to, and for how long. Professors of literature have
more influence than most, but their opinions are as varied as they are.
In this situation, there can never be a single, decisive choice, nor can a
single criterion ever be enthroned. That kind of centralization could
happen only in the police state that Parrinder conjures up with his
sinister "people outside," blissfully unaware that this phrase is more

5*
The Diversity of Literature

likely to alert readers to the dangers of his own politics rather than to
those he offers to protect us from.
Parrinder had accused Kermode of being narrowly professional and
of serving only the internal needs of the university world, but in a
stinging reply Kermode said that Parrinder had everything backward:
"The entire operation of high-powered academic literary criticism"
ultimately depends on the preservation of a reading public, without
which literature cannot exist; and "university teachers of literature . . .
can read what they like and deconstruct or neo-historicize what they
like, but in the classroom they should be on their honour to make
people know books well enough to understand what it is to love them.
If they fail in that, either because they despise the humbleness of the
task or because they don't themselves love literature, they are failures
and frauds."24 When a man as noted for his tact and tolerance of other
viewpoints as Frank Kermode speaks so trenchantly, we would do well
to listen. Kermode rightly insists that it is the race-gender-class critics,
not he, who have a narrowly professional outlook and that it is they
who have lost touch with the wider world of readers. This situation
exists because these critics have no real interest in what literature might
have to say, only an interest in what they can use it for. They do not love
books, so they cannot inspire love for them. Yet unless they do, they
have no business teaching literature.

59
3 ßender,
Politics, and
Criticism

In the previous chapter I argued that politicized critics ignore the

diversity of literature and treat all kinds of writing in the same way.
They attempt to justify this reduction in the content of literature by
insisting that some issues should take precedence over others. This
approach enables them to say that even if a variety of issues are present
in literature, we should turn our attention to those that are the most
important. And the most important are those with political content-
that is, their issues. These issues actually subsume others, for, as Fredric
Jameson puts it, "everything is 'in the last analysis' political."1
But this argument for a single factor taking precedence over all
others is more slippery than these critics think. When they tell us that
everything is political, they are assuming that to argue against them one

60
Gender, Politics, and Criticism

would have to deny that every action has a political dimension. And
because this cannot be denied, they think that they have made their
case. What matters here, however, is not whether it is true or false to say
that everything has a political dimension: of course its true. What
matters is what this truth implies, because once properly understood, it
does not support the radicals' case at all. Politically motivated critics
understand it to imply that politics is always the most important dimen-
sion of every action, but that is certainly not so: the political signifi-
cance of an action may be important in some cases but trivial in others.
Political analysis is indeed a general framework within which every-
thing ¡s potentially relevant. An analysis with this comprehensive reach
must be uniquely powerful, these critics think. But here they are mis-
taken, for all frameworks of analysis are equally general in their scope-
there are environmental, physical, chemical, ecological, economic, and
many other dimensions to everything, too. All actions have ecological
consequences, for example, and so, using the same logic, it could be
said that everything is ecological. Yet the ecological impact of a given
action may be enormous or negligible. If, like race-gender-class critics,
we confuse generality with priority—that is, if we think that the state-
ment "everything has a political dimension" implies "politics is the
deepest and most important consideration in any situation"—then we
shall reach the contradictory conclusion that a dozen or more factors
can all claim to be the most important aspect of an action.2 The in-
ference from the first statement to the second is true only if the first is
unique—and it is not.
For instance, scholars in various disciplines can look at crop failure
in the former Soviet Union from different perspectives: they may exam-
ine it as a factor in the political life of the country or study its effects on
global climate, world food production, the ecology of northern Europe,
or the world economy. A study is defined not by the facts it considers

61
 Gender» Politics, and Criticism

but by the kind of concern it has with those facts. If one wants to do a
political analysis, no fact or event is in principle irrelevant to that
analysis, but the same is just as true of many other kinds of analysis.
"Everything is political" is equivalent to "politics is the basis of every-
thing" only for those who do not understand this. That everything has
a political dimension has therefore nothing to do with the claim that
political analysis is the most fundamental type of analysis.
Race-gender-class critics use all manner of fallacious arguments in
their attempts to install politics as the central issue in literary criticism.
A typical case is that of Gerald Graff, who asks a rhetorical question
about literature and politics that is loaded for easy victory: "Is literature
a realm of universal experience that transcends politics, or is it inevita-
bly political?"3 Here the fallacy lies in Graffs attempt to force a choice
between two positions, one being patently foolish, the other being but
one of many possible alternatives. For who could doubt that politics is a
part of universal human experience? Graff thus uses an absurdity as a
lever to compel us to adopt his view—that politics must be central to all
literature—as the only possible alternative to it, which it is not. The
corrective to the view that literature has nothing to do with politics is
that it has something to do with politics, not that it has everything to do
with politics. The two crucial issues Graff avoids are: Must political
considerations take precedence over all others? and Is the particular
politics we are offered by literary radicals a viable politics?
Consistent with the principle that a political analysis can consider
any evidence it wishes to consider, there is no reason to exclude litera-
ture from its purview, as long as we understand that this is still political
analysis and that in many cases (though this will depend on the par-
ticular text) it will have little to do with literary criticism. Some literary
works are centrally concerned with politics, but most are not, and
criticism must give priority to the central, not the tangential, issues of

62
Gender, Politics, and Criticism

each work. Even with this substantial caveat, however, there are two
good reasons to question whether race-gender-class critics' writings are
useful even when politics is central to a particular work.
First, a political analysis grounded in the conviction that politics is
the basis of everything will not be ;of much use even as politics. A
meaningful politics must recognize other important values in human
life. Indeed, politics makes no sense when it stands by itself. If the
question who wields political power is not broadened to take account
of what that power is to be used for—that is, what human values it will
serve—then it reduces to a matter of who manages to subdue whom,
and that question, taken by itself, has no interest for us. It acquires
interest only to the extent that we care about the human values that will
be advanced as a result.
The second, more practical reason for skepticism about claims for a
politicized criticism is that whether or not political analysis takes prece-
dence over other kinds, it must be done in an informed and intelligent
way. Literary critics are not trained in political analysis, and as we shall
see from their attempts at it, they do it badly. As a result, political
scientists usually have a low opinion of the political thought of such
critics. What they do to politics is in fact analogous to what they do to
literature: just as they narrow the content of literature to politics, they
also reduce the content of politics to oppression and victimology. Thus
they not only reduce all of literature to one issue but handle even that
issue reductively. Instead of a realistic approach to politics as the art
of the possible, race-gender-class critics think in terms of a perfect
egalitarianism and want to denounce groups that, in their view, stand
in the way of our reaching it. In the real world, the formula for a
perfectly just society has proved elusive. Nonetheless, race-gender-class
critics speak as if we need only overcome the resistance of certain
malevolent groups —for example, the ruling class, or the middle class,

6}
 Gender, Politics, and Criticism

or males, or heterosexuals, or the imperial West—that conspire to pre-

vent this otherwise attainable goal.
In this chapter and the two that follow I shall look at the content of
political analysis offered by race-gender-class scholars, considering each
part of the triad separately. Race, gender, and class are, in reality, three
separate issues, and to allow the same concept (oppression) to govern
them adds yet another layer of distortion.
It is becoming increasingly clear that somewhere along the line femi-
nism has taken a wrong turn. The movement used to be identified with
eminently sensible goals that enjoyed broad support but seems now lost
in outlandish, wildly unrealistic ideas. Prominent feminists tell us that
men pursue a "war against women" and are bent on destroying, sub-
jugating, or mutilating them (Marilyn French) or that all heterosexual
sex is coercive and hence like rape because "for women it is difficult to
distinguish the two under conditions of male dominance" (Catharine
MacKinnon) or that the trouble with men is that they think vertically
whereas women think laterally—"vertical" denoting the (defective)
mode of thought that gives us modern science (Peggy Mclntosh).4
French seems to have lost sight of the enormous stake that men have
in the happiness of their mothers, wives, and daughters, MacKinnon
has sunk into such a bitter view of normal heterosexual relations that
she no longer has any grasp of what they mean to both men and
women, and Mclntosh repeats essentially the old antifemale slander
that women cannot think logically but believes she is doing women a
favor in giving new life to that view. These ideas seem to interest
campus feminists, whereas the wider public has no difficulty in recog-
nizing their absurdity. Similarly implausible ideas are so pervasive that
they can reasonably be said to characterize the present state of the
movement; this, in practice, is what feminism now is. When we are
told, for example, that Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., publisher of the New York

64
Gender, Politics, and Criticism

Times, considers himself a feminist and is "an ardent fan of the writer
Marilyn French," we are no longer surprised that an extremist is chosen
to illustrate a feminist viewpoint.5
What was formerly a defensible feminist agenda, at least in part, has
given way to destructive attacks on the allegedly exploitative character
of the traditional family and of male-female relationships; as a result,
feminism is losing support among men and women alike and is in
danger of isolating itself in angry campus enclaves, where its slide into
ever greater unreality can continue unchecked.
How did the women's movement degenerate to such an extent?
Although many factors are at work, the most important, in my view, is
a severely distorted view of the past, which in turn leads to an unrealis-
tic view of the present. Any movement for social change looks to a
better future but makes its case by arguing against the past: change
means that some existing condition needs to be altered. The case for
change becomes more compelling, therefore, if the past is made to seem
ugly. For this reason movements for social change are likely to take the
dimmest view of the past. But now a tension arises: concrete proposals
for change will work only if they are based on a realistic appraisal of the
existing state of affairs and of how it got that way. One must under-
stand well the nature of what one is trying to change to avoid doing
damage. So even though reformers are tempted to make the worst case
for the past to convince society that change is needed, successful re-
form requires that the past be viewed in a sober and accurate way.
The rhetorical temptations of the situation are at odds with the practi-
cal needs.
In the case of feminism, one of these two competing factors has
overwhelmed the other; the rhetorical urge has taken control to such an
extent that disparagement of the past has completely eclipsed a rational
understanding of it. The result is so unrealistic a view of how the

65
 Gender, Politics, and Criticism

present circumstances developed that it disables the movement. The

word that captures the essence of this view is patriarchy, shorthand for
the belief that what has obstructed political and social equality between
the sexes is a conspiracy by men to treat women unfairly. Some femi-
nists believe that patriarchy is a worldwide phenomenon, as well as one
that has endured throughout recorded human history; for example,
Marilyn French thinks that it "probably arose in Mesopotamia in the
fourth millennium BCE, and gradually spread across the world."6 Oth-
ers see it as the product of our Western society; in this vein, Sandra
Gilbert and Susan Gubar speak of "patriarchal Western culture."7 Lim-
iting criticism to a particular group of men, however, does not indicate
a more moderate attitude, because a narrow focus generally results in
greater hostility being concentrated on a smaller target. Yet the idea of
the West as the focal point of patriarchal oppression is so hard to square
with the documented plight of women in the rest of the world (for
example, the forced suicide of widows, genital mutilation, foot bind-
ing, the killing of female babies, and countless other horrors) that it can
surely be disregarded.8
If patriarchy were the source of the problem, then we would need to
get this malevolence on the part of men under control by taking appro-
priate steps to enforce equal outcomes for men and women. Histor-
ically, many situations seem to give plausibility to this way of thinking
—for example, differential rates of pay for men and women, the routine
promotion of men over women of comparable ability, the virtual ab-
sence of women in the professions, the exclusion of women from gov-
ernment, and the lack of suffrage for women.
These are certainly facts, but as feminists insist in all other contexts
but this one, facts need to be interpreted. Feminists have claimed that
the interpretation was obvious: men have systematically treated women
badly. But one can show that this interpretation is superficial and

66
Gender, Politics, and Criticism

misleading and that these injustices are, instead, partly a predictable

consequence of the conditions of life before the modern era and partly
an equally predictable result of progressive change itself. This difference
in interpreting the past is critical, for here lies the wrong turn that
feminism has taken, one that increasingly isolates it from the reality of
what is happening to women in the modern world.
One simple question is difficult to answer: If an enduring patriarchy
has indeed been the source of our troubles, why is it being challenged
now rather than at some earlier time? The usual answer—that women
will not'put up with it any more—only moves the question back a stage:
Why this recent assertiveness? Did women of earlier centuries lack the
spirit of todays women? Were they, too, to blame for the patriarchy?
The idea of an evil patriarchy commits feminists to a dim view of their
sisters of yesteryear, yet there is no reason to suppose that the tempera-
ment of those women was any different from their own. There is a
more plausible answer to the question of why now, but it does not
support the bitter feminist view of the past. Change is coming for
women not because they have at last woken up to the enormity of the
plot against them but because the conditions of human life have been
changing.
The way people live has changed significantly in recent times, and
some aspects of that change—for example, modern birth control-
affect women more than men. But the full impact of modern condi-
tions on the lives of women can be appreciated only if we examine how
several aspects of life before the modern era interacted to produce a
synergistic effect.
Consider first of all infant mortality. Not long ago the rate of infant
mortality was by modern standards appalling. The historian Fernand
Braudel, writing about the period from 1400 to 1800, calls it "terrify-
ing," for royals and paupers alike.9 Even in the late nineteenth century,

67
 Gender, Politics, and Criticism

stories like one I saw recently in a newspaper clipping from 1870 were
not unusual: all four children in one family died of diphtheria within a
period of a few weeks. Today the decision to raise, say, two children
usually involves no more than two births, but in former times a woman
might have to bear perhaps six or seven children to assure that two
would survive to maturity.
Seven pregnancies and infancies would be considerably more of an
obstacle to a woman's having a professional career or a role in govern-
ment than would two, but we cannot grasp the full force of this obstacle
unless we consider it with other factors, such as life expectancy. Life
expectancy for both men and women was formerly much shorter than
it is today, and because of the increased risk of death from frequent
childbirth before modern medicine, the life expectancy of women did
not exceed that of men by a decade or more, as it does today.10 So we are
not looking at a simple difference of two births versus six or seven;
instead we must compare time for two births and infancies taken out of
an expected lifespan of seventy or more years to time for seven births
taken out of perhaps forty years (the figure for mid-nineteenth-century
Europe as well as for modern-day Tanzania). The difference between
these two cases becomes even more lopsided if we compare only the
adult years, in which case the time for those seven births has to be taken
out of an average of perhaps twenty-five years.
But did this really have to affect all women? Might not some have
chosen to downplay the importance of children in their lives in order to
pursue professional careers? No, because here another factor comes into
play. Having children today can be a conscious quality-of-life decision,
in which a woman weighs career against family and makes the choice or
compromise that suits her. Remember, however, that Social Security is
a very recent phenomenon. In earlier times children were social se-

68
Gender, Politics, and Criticism

curity, and old age without them would have been a frightening pros-
pect. From this perspective, they were a virtual necessity.
Modern birth control is the one factor commonly mentioned as a
liberator of women, but it is much less important than the combined
effect of the three factors I have mentioned so far. Even if modern birth
control had been available in earlier times, it would not necessarily have
changed career opportunities for women while those other factors were
in place.
Feminists generally dismiss the idea that childbearing had much to
do with creating the unequal situation we inherit from the past, refer-
ring contemptuously to it as "biology is destiny" in order to insist that
human beings have freedom of choice. But here they are evidently
thinking of the freedom of choice their own era gives them: they know
that they are free not to have children if they so choose or to have just
one, or perhaps two, and return to their careers after a short time at
home. What they do not see is how unrealistic this attitude would have
been in a time of high infant mortality, shorter lifespans, no social
security, and no birth control. ;
Yet even these factors do not begin to give a realistic sense of how
unavoidably restricted most women s lives must have been by today s
standards. Imagine caring for several children when there was no re-
frigeration, when transportation was primitive and slow, and when
communications were virtually nonexistent. Again, feminists tend to
react with some impatience: Why should all this make any difference to
the relative position of men and women? Why would men not have
taken an equal part in caring for their children? But such arguments
would miss the point: the absence of refrigeration meant that the great
majority of women had to breast-feed, and for a longer time than is
usual today. This responsibility tied them to their children far more

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closely than it does modern women: there was no bottle of formula in

the refrigerator for someone else to give the baby while the mother was
at the office. This fact, together with the lack of motor vehicles and
telephones, would have made it difficult for a woman to work even five
miles away from home: unlike her modern counterparts, she could not
dash home in the car to feed the baby when the babysitter—or her
husband—telephoned to say that it was feeding time.
To be sure, wealthy women might have employed others to nurse
their children, but they would not have been exempted from the other
factors we have noted. Additionally, the pattern of life of the vast
majority was bound to have a spillover effect on the career expectations
of all, including women who were wealthy or unmarried.
There are countless other features of modern life that affect the way
women live their lives, and they go well beyond the obvious labor-
saving devices that enable both men and women to spend more time
doing what they like. For example, electricity has leveled much of what
was formerly a decidedly unlevel playing field for women. As a result,
very few jobs are left that require the greater upper-body strength of
men; that difference is trivial compared to the energy made available by
electricity. Men and women alike can now push buttons or pull levers
to operate heavy equipment, position a fire ladder, fly a plane, fire a
heavy gun, or even kill millions with nuclear weapons. And so today it
makes sense to ask why there should not be more women in the armed
forces and police and fire services—but it makes no sense to deplore the
fact that women have begun to enter these services only recently and to
blame sexism for the small number of women presently in senior ranks.
When upper-body strength was still a major factor in the use of weap-
ons and equipment, no one could have thought that women and men
should be equally represented in the military and the police.
Or consider the modern highway patrol: in former times even roads

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that connected major settlements were dangerous, especially for an

unaccompanied woman. This was yet another factor that made a career
in the professions almost impossible except in the relatively few places
with large population concentrations.
What most irks modern feminists is the image of the housewife,
stuck at home and thereby excluded from the stimulus of the outside
world and from access to power. But in the past the contrast between
the home and the outside world cannot have been what it is today. The
present-day world is large, diverse, and beckoning and is brought to us
by rapid travel, television, books, and the telephone. Today part of the
attraction of a career for both men and women is getting out of the
home into this enormously stimulating larger world. But when thirty
miles was a major journey, roads were dangerous, and most people
stayed within the few square miles of their home area from one year to
the next, the wider world must have been perceived as more dangerous
and less tempting.
These are just some of the recent changes that illustrate the lack of
historical perspective in blaming patriarchy for the unequal situation
we have inherited from the past. The differentiation of the roles of men
and women in past ages was due not to an enduring patriarchal con-
spiracy but rather to conditions of life that existed until quite recently.
Modern women have changed expectations not because of their sudden
awareness of past discrimination against them but because of profound
advances in science, technology, medicine, communications, travel,
and social legislation, advances that for the first time make the same
opportunities available to men and women—and what a wonderful
development in modern life this is.
But what about the openly unjust acts that men have sometimes
routinely and systematically committed against women in the past?
Dont they prove that patriarchal attitudes were a significant factor in

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 Gender, Politics, and Criticism

the unequal past? Yes and no—the no being the more important part of
the answer.
There are two parts to this question, but both relate to human rather
than specifically male failings. In answer to the first: there is no doubt
that the customs and legislation of former times could be grossly unfair
to women. Remember, however, that the conditions of human life in
those times all but excluded most women from a role in government.
The consequences of any interest group being unrepresented in govern-
ment are predictable: that group will not fare well. If we imagine a
situation in which women held virtually all governmental offices, we
might expect that over time legislation would slight men. In this case it
would be foolish to think that such self-interest was simply due to
prejudice against men rather than to other well-known limitations of
human nature: legislation is enacted under competing interests, and
the outcome always reflects that competition. When one group is ab-
sent from the process, the outcome will reflect that fact.
The second aspect of past injustices toward women—the once fierce
discrimination against them in the workplace—is essentially a tran-
sitional phenomenon, resulting from an all-too-human resistance to
change. As modern conditions began to allow women to entertain
thoughts of careers that had previously been inconceivable, many men
—and women—obstructed this drastic social change. Such resistance
made change much slower and more unpleasant than it might have
been, but we all know that human beings show signs of distress when
faced with disturbance of their settled ways. A natural preference for
what is familiar, a reluctance to give up privilege, and the persistence of
habits and attitudes formed in earlier times will always impede change.
There is no need to postulate a conspiratorial patriarchy or ingrained
male prejudice against women to explain this: it would be surprising if
major changes like these did not meet initial resistance. Two points

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clinch the argument for the interpretation of workplace prejudice as

resistance to change rather than male hostility to women. First, many, if
not most, women were as hostile to this kind of change as men were—
inexplicable according to the second explanation, but exactly what
would be expected according to the first. Second, much of this re-
sistance has now subsided, again exactly what we should expect accord-
ing to the first explanation. Given time, people adjust. But this is not
consistent with the patriarchal explanation, because these are still the
same men, only now acting differently.
How we see the past will inevitably shape the approach we take to
the present. If women see their present situation as one that has co-
alesced gradually over the past century and could never have existed
earlier, they will simply move to take advantage of their new oppor-
tunities. Determination is still needed to overcome some remaining
pockets of resistance, but it is also wise to approach a new situation
carefully. We can only guess how women will eventually take advantage
of it. Will they show the same pattern of career interests that men have
shown, and if not, where will the differences occur? Will the greater
bond with children that comes from carrying, bearing, and nursing
them necessarily keep the percentage of women in government and the
professions noticeably under fifty percent—say, thirty, or forty? We
shall find out in time.
Nonetheless, for feminists committed to the patriarchal theory, only
male oppression has prevented women from having professional ca-
reers, which means that past and present are essentially the same. Any-
thing less than a fifty-fifty split in numbers, power, and prestige in the
workplace is for them ipso facto evidence that oppression continues.
The caution that is appropriate to any new situation is therefore unnec-
essary, because the situation is not new; a wrong done to women by
men needs correcting now, just as it always has. We do not need to

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explore new possibilities carefully, learning from experience as we go;

instead, we must simply set things straight.
If misrule by an oppressive patriarchy were a correct interpretation of
the past, the logical remedy would indeed be immediate corrective
measures such as hiring goals and timetables for reaching the parity
feminists believe should have existed all along. And so instead of letting
the situation take shape from the choices women make as they choose
among newly available careers, anger about the patriarchy leads femi-
nists to distort the situation by forcing it into what they consider the
correct shape. This distortion could be seen in the recent search for an
attorney general. Not content to remove barriers and then wait for
change, the Clinton administration decided to force change by limiting
the search to women. The result was a public relations disaster that
demeaned women (and the office) by implying that they needed to be
protected from competition with men.
This is by no means the only damage done by an obsession with
patriarchy. It also creates a "victim" culture within feminism that mis-
directs emotional energy into resentment and hostility. It poisons rela-
tions between the sexes, and it catapults into leadership roles in the
women's movement angry, alienated women who divert that move-
ment from the necessary task of exploring feasible changes. What is
most relevant to this book, however, is that this destructive attitude
corrupts the work of women who should be making contributions to
knowledge and scholarship. In one field after another, their work is
at best damaged and often rendered valueless by the unrealistic and
anachronistic victim-centered framework of their thought.
The most extensive examples of such corruption are found in the
field of literary scholarship. Typically, work by feminist critics is shaped
so completely by the notion of patriarchy that an intelligent contribu-
tion to the understanding of literature becomes almost impossible. The

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greatest problem is anachronism: when feminists use literature of the

past only to find evidence of patriarchal oppression, or of resistance
thereto, they are in effect taking the conditions of modern life as the
universal standard. The result is that their work becomes irrelevant to
literature produced by societies whose conditions they have fundamen-
tally misunderstood.
A preoccupation with slights to women has led one feminist critic
after another to miss an opportunity to make useful and distinctive
contributions. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar s The Madwoman in
the Attic y for example, could have been a ground-breaking study of the
great nineteenth-century women writers: Jane Austen, the Brontes,
George Eliot, Mary Shelley, and others. But from the outset Gilbert
and Gubar talk about how these women had to struggle against "pa-
triarchal poetry" and "patriarchal poetics," among other manifestations
of patriarchal mistreatment.11 Inevitably, their book says a great deal
about the alleged oppression of these writers by the patriarchy but little
about their remarkable literary imaginations.
When the feminist critic s attention is turned to female characters in
great books, the results are just as predictable. It is easy enough to use
the theory of a malevolent patriarchy as the basis for commentary on
how Ophelia or Desdemona12 or Cordelia is mistreated, or how The
Taming of the Shrew is full of misogynistic prejudice. But quite apart
from the fact that this approach applies a historically unrealistic theory
of relations between the sexes, it also applies indiscriminately a precon-
ceived idea as to what will be important. We are back to the central
critical sin discussed in the previous chapter—that of letting the critics
obsessions determine in advance what is going to be important for a
particular work.
A logical problem faces those who believe that the condition they
call patriarchy is present everywhere. If patriarchy is an evil, it must be

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regarded as an aberration; yet the universality of differentiated roles

suggests that they are deeply rooted in the human condition, which
would immediately throw doubt on the feminist analysis. Feminist
archaeologists have attempted to resolve this dilemma by making the
whole of recorded history the aberration. They discover in the era im-
mediately preceding recorded history the reign of a "Goddess," a be-
nign deity of prehistoric times who presided over an era of peace and
harmony before she and that harmony were swept aside by misogynis-
tic and violent Westerners with their patriarchal God. It was they who
introduced the patriarchal system to the rest of the world, and they who
ended the era of a nurturing, pacifist, egalitarian spirit. One conse-
quence of this theory congenial to race-gender-class ideology is that
even if the Third World is now a miserable place for women, respon-
sibility still lies with the West. The search for Rousseau's primitive
harmony finally succeeds, then, and the Noble Savage turns out to be
the child of the loving earth mother.
Skepticism is of course natural when something sought so fervendy
(and for so long) as the original harmony is eventually located after so
many disappointments at a time and place where evidence is both
scarce and ambiguous—that is, before recorded history begins. The
paucity of real evidence and the huge gaps in our knowledge allow
more latitude here for wishful thinking and leaps of the imagination. It
is scarcely surprising, therefore, that two careful recent critiques—by
Philip Davis and Mary Lefkowitz—both find that the feminist cult of
the Goddess rests on an overinterpretation of flimsy evidence.13
Davis s general conclusion is that "like other conspiracy theorists, the
Goddess* proponents twist evidence blatandy, when they do not simply
invent it." For example, Goddess theorists appeal to the archaeological
findings of James Mellaart to argue that a certain ancient Anatolian city
was a paradise whose people lived at peace with one another and in

7*
Gender, Politics, and Criticism

harmony with nature, though they neglect to mention that "Mellaart

reports evidence of a flourishing weapons industry. . . . Many of the
human skulls he found had sustained wounds."14 Lefkowitz shows that
even Marija Gimbutas, an academic archaeologist of considerable dis-
tinction, "must resort to speculation and imagination at almost every
stage of her discussion."15
The extent to which the theory of patriarchy dominates all areas of
feminist research can be seen in the recent, weighty compendium The
Knowledge Explosion: Generations of Feminist Scholarship.16 This volume
contains forty-four essays by different hands surveying feminist work in
a variety of disciplines (literature, physics, politics, sociology, and so
on). Although the editors clearly intended to display the considerable
achievements of recent feminist research, the impression they create is
quite different. What they really show is how an unreflective accep-
tance of the patriarchal theory constricts feminist work everywhere, for
though their title announces a concern with new knowledge, the indi-
vidual chapters give far more space to complaints about the victimiza-
tion of women. The chapter on political science, for example, takes as
its point of departure the statement that women have been margin-
alized; the one on engineering deals with womens threat to male con-
trol of the field; that on physics also talks about male domination of the
field and how men are trying to preserve it; that on law begins similarly
and goes on to consider how the law slights womens work; that on
economics soon focuses on the "outrageous abuses of women, in both
theory and practice, made in the name of economics"; that on sociol-
ogy begins with concern over the marginalized position of women in
the discipline and goes on to "basic tenets devaluing women";17 and so
on. Again and again, these essays recite a litany of insults to women.
Even the general chapter entitled "The Principles of Feminist Re-
search," which ought to be the intellectual showpiece of the volume,

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recommends research principles for feminism whose intellectual con-

tent is limited to victimization by patriarchy, for example, "doing re-
search with people rather than on them; having women do research;
doing research in ways that empower people; valuing experiential
knowledge; honoring female intelligence; and seeking the causes of
oppression."18 A more superficial and contentless set of research princi-
ples would be hard to imagine. How, for example, would such princi-
ples have helped in the search for the structure of DNA? Hopes are
raised by the inclusion of a chapter in which Chéris Kramarae promises
to look at problems that arise in defining the term patriarchy. But even
though she devotes much care to distinguishing "capitalist patriarchy"
from "racist patriarchy," Kramarae never even considers the possibility
that the analysis of human affairs implicit in the term might need
further thought.
Because of the broad scope of and the numerous contributors to The
Knowledge Explosion, the index of names cited gives a reasonable mea-
sure of a particular feminist scholar's influence.19 The results are star-
tling. Catharine MacKinnon is the most frequently cited, and Andrea
Dworkin places fourth. Both are associated with the extraordinary view
that normal heterosexual relations are tantamount to rape. Dworkin is
the blunter of the two: for her all sex is rape because women are
powerless, and therefore even their consent cannot be a free act.20 She
also believes that women's inequality originates in their having sexual
relations with men and that men retain their power through this means.
If feminism were less patriarchally obsessed, views such as these
would probably never be taken seriously. The dismal message of The
Knowledge Explosion is not only that these views get serious attention
from feminists but that they get more attention than any others. Many
observers imagine that Dworkins views consign her to the lunatic

78
Gender, Politics, and Criticism

fringe of feminism, but her writings are in fact a staple of Women's

Studies courses. Catharine MacKinnon, however, whose views are just
as extreme even though formulated less bluntly, is widely thought of
as a leader among feminist legal thinkers. She has been the subject
of innumerable puff pieces in the national press for her "innovative"
views, has been a visitor at the Harvard Law School, is published by
Harvard University Press, and has been called upon by NBC national
news to speak as an expert in feminist legal thought. She received
thirty-three votes from the Harvard Law faculty in favor of a tenured
position as professor of law there, a grim indicator of the intellec-
tual decline in major universities that race-gender-class thinking has
brought about.21 Her books are routinely reviewed in the nations most
prominent and intellectually ambitious journals, a treatment usually
accorded only the few most important books among the thousands
published each year; even reviewers who categorically reject her views
write analytically and at length about them (a case in point is Ronald
Dworkin, writing in the New York Review of Books), all of which sug-
gests that hers is a case to be reckoned with.22 But Richard Posner has
pointed bluntly to a consideration so obvious that it should have pre-
cluded this degree of public attention: MacKinnons argument has very
little in common with legal scholarship. She proceeds not by setting out
a thesis and then carefully scrutinizing all the arguments for and against
it but by engaging in careless and intemperate diatribe.23 Looking at
the MacKinnon phenomenon from the other side of the Atlantic,
Anthony Daniels, who refers to her as "one of the leading current
celebrities of American feminism," is just as clear: her latest book is
"not so much an argument leading from evidence to conclusion as a
prolonged howl of inchoate rage."24 By contrast, the prominent phi-
losopher Richard Rorty, in an advertisement for MacKinnons Only

79
 Gender, Politics, and Criticism

Words, says admiringly that "MacKinnon states her case in prose that is
as distinctive and trenchant as Orwells," a judgment certain to prove
embarrassing in the long run.
In its overwhelming concern with grievance rather than knowledge,
The Knowledge Explosion is typical. Other standard feminist antholo-
gies such as The New Feminist Criticism or Making a Difference: Femi-
nist Literary Criticism will disappoint in the same way; they too contain
a great deal about grievance and comparatively little about new femi-
nist knowledge of literature.25 When a large number of people lose
their way, usually more is involved than individual misjudgment. Sys-
temic factors are likely to be the problem, one of which is a contradic-
tion in the entire program of feminist "knowledge."
The starting point for feminists is a conviction that the lot of men
and women is unequal. And this judgment must be global, for if the
condition of men and women is unequal only in certain respects, then
one might be left with a series of apples and oranges that cannot be
compared. (Women have had to look after children, but men have been
drafted and killed in wars; women have been paid less, but men have
shorter lives; and so on.) For feminists, women have fared worse, pe-
riod. But now a problem arises. To reach this point, it was necessary to
assume that there are no serious differences in the capacities or interests
of men and women. For if the existence of such differences were con-
ceded, then it would also have to be conceded that they might be
relevant to and even explain some differences in the conditions of men
and women in the real world. And that might return us to the incom-
mensurability of the apples and oranges, which would steer us away
from grievance and complaint.
It is precisely this rejection of the possibility of serious differences
between men and women—whether expressed overtly and stated as
principle, as some feminists do, or covertly by adopting the framework

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of grievance—that makes the next step so difficult: How can feminists,

without contradiction, expect to find a contribution to knowledge that
is unique to women and characteristic of them? For that would require
a distinctive difference between men and women. As Catharine Stimp-
son admits, candidly enough, yet without seeing how this admission
must undermine feminisms ability to sustain its grievance posture,
"there is no reason to study women unless women represent something
else again."26 Stimpson does not understand that if a difference does
exist, then she and her sisters can no longer insist that only malt oppres-
sion accounts for the differentiated roles of the two sexes in the world.
At the very least, one other factor that leads to that differentiation
would now have to be considered, and it could not be a trivial one if it is
to be capable of generating a distinctive and important female contri-
bution to knowledge.
Two contradictory impulses are at work, therefore: the insistence
that there are no good reasons for the past differentiation of roles
pushes feminists in one direction, whereas the claim that there is a
distinctive female contribution to knowledge pushes them in the other.
The result is paralysis; a concern with new knowledge is often an-
nounced, but a recitation of grievances always follows, both because it
is easier and because that is the nature of the underlying drive. And the
more that grievance is stressed, the more difficult it becomes to arrive at
a female contribution to knowledge.
Some feminists break out of this paralysis by taking the next step—
that of diagnosing a distinctive female contribution to knowledge—but
only if they fail to see the underlying contradiction, and that is not a
hopeful sign of what is to come. The proof that progress beyond this
point is only possible for those who manage to forget how they got this
far can be found in a curious fact. The notion of a female way of
knowing is usually found in those hated stereotypes of female behavior,

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 Gender, Politics, and Criticism

which in all other contexts feminists denounce as demeaning to women

and as excuses for males to treat them as less than equals: to name a few,
women are less competitive and more nurturing, less logical and more
intuitive, more caring and less rational, less individualistic and more
social, less quantitative and more qualitative.27 The same qualities that
in one context were denounced as patriarchy's excuses for inequality are
embraced in another as valuable female traits.
Even more curious is the fact that some feminists go much further in
adopting these stereotypes of female behavior than society did in the
past. Peter Shaw has written that "in the past, surely, stereotypes of the
sexes were understood as tendencies, not absolutes. When men and
women were stigmatized, it was typically because of their occasional,
not their immutable, vulnerabilities."28 One might add that some ste-
reotypes did not stigmatize at all: the stereotype of men rather than
women as soldiers was understandable in a time of primitive weaponry,
and neither sex felt it embodied hostility or prejudice.
Peggy Mclntosh is among those who have revisited the old stereo-
types with great enthusiasm. Mclntosh is associate director of the
Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, arguably the most
influential of campus feminist groups. She believes that men and
women think differently—men "vertically" and women "laterally." The
formulation is new, but the idea is not; this is the old contrast of logical,
mathematical, individual, and competitive with intuitive, qualitative,
social, and nurturing. What Mclntosh contributes is a thoroughgoing
commitment to this line of thinking that does not balk at even its most
absurd consequences. Looking for the right answer in science, for ex-
ample, is competitive and hierarchic; quantitative thought is simply
bad. (Both are part of the patriarchy.) She would prefer that we develop
"a decent relationship with the invisible elements of the universe."29

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But if generations of scientists had not looked for the right answers,
Mclntosh would probably not be here to argue her point.
What matters to Mclntosh is that women are much nicer than men,
but in no other respects are her views1 flattering to women.30 For exam-
ple, she gives us an implicit answer to the question of why there are so
few women scientists: women dont think like scientists. One must
wonder why Mclntoshs radical feminist colleagues do not complain
about this slander. If I am correct, the answer to this is that the inherent
contradiction in looking for female ways of knowing makes finding
anything that will qualify so difficult that the seekers become desperate.
The idea that women are nicer people than men is often given
specificity by portraying them as antiwar, pro-environment, and so on.
For Sue Rosser, "most girls are more likely to understand and be inter-
ested in solving problems and learning techniques that do not involve
guns, violence, and war.... Many are uncomfortable with experiments
that appear to hurt animals for no reason at all."31 Or Ruth Bleier: "A
feminist approach to scientific knowledge . . . would aim to eliminate
research that leads to the exploitation and destruction of nature, the
destruction of the human race and other species, and that justifies the
oppression of people because of race, gender, class, sexuality or na-
tionality."32 For these feminists, womens ways of knowing seem indis-
tinguishable from strongly left-wing political beliefs.33 Here radical
campus feminists imagine their views to be those of women generally,
which they certainly are not. Helen Vendler has attempted to introduce
a note of realism into these attempts to sentimentalize women: "The
abuse of power by both sexes, and the deficient moral behavior of both
men and women to each other and to children, is the truth concealed
by feminism A de-idealizing of women is necessary for the womens
34
movement."

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 Gender» Politics, and Criticism

If women's ways of knowing are nice, men's are nasty. In fact, much
of feminist science is devoted to showing that males are mean to
Mother Nature, whom they try to dominate and control, even to vio-
late. She is oppressed by men, just as women are. The parallel is worked
through to its inevitable conclusion: scientists and engineers actually
rape nature. This commentary on science is represented by Sandra
Harding, for example, who refers to Newton's Principia as "Newton's
Rape Manual."35 To be sure, a doctor monitoring a fetal heart beat is
trying to control the situation—by preventing an infant's death—but
most women would view this as a unique blessing, not as a sinister plot.
Harding s extraordinary views are as much part and parcel of campus
feminism as are Mclntoshs.36 The judgment by Paul Gross and Nor-
man Levitt of feminist work in science seems apt: "The most widely
known attempts at feminist science ... are all undone intellectually by
the moral ferocity which motivates them in the first place."37
The most modest attempt to isolate a specific feminist contribution
to knowledge speaks not of a female mode of thinking, or of female
benignness in research, but of greater emphasis on research topics that
are in the interests of women. The most often cited example is research
on breast cancer: more women scientists, it is said, would mean more
such research. More women involved in funding decisions in science
would also, it is argued, mean more equitable funding for women's
health issues. But even this more modest position is hard to sustain.
Two questions must be asked: first, do the facts really bear out the claim
of skewed research emphasis and funding? And second, should we
expect women scientists to pursue women's issues?
Andrew Kadar convincingly answers the first question in his recent
article "The Sex-Bias Myth in Medicine."38 Kadar argues that the sta-
tistics quoted to show bias against women in the funding of medical
research are misinterpreted. For example, in 1987 funding at the Na-

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Gender, Politics, and Criticism

tional Institutes of Health for diseases unique to women was 13.5 per-
cent of its budget, which might seem low until one learns that 80
percent of the budget goes to diseases common to both sexes, and only
6.5 percent to diseases unique to men. He concludes: "Though it is
commonly believed that American health-care delivery and research
benefit men at the expense of women, the truth appears to be exactly
the opposite." Statistics on longevity underscore the point: before mod-
ern medicine, women had the same life expectancy as men, but now
they live many years longer.
In answer to the second question, scientists are motivated not by
gender issues but by their career interests. Science is a crowded and
competitive enterprise, and any aspiring scientist aware of an opening
in the field would seize the opportunity, regardless of whether it bene-
fited men, women, or both. Women scientists who chose to pursue
women's issues exclusively would hamper their careers by shutting
themselves off from most of the great issues in science. Serious women
scientists will want to be in the main arena, taking on projects of
concern to everyone; the alternative is automatic second-class status.
Here the unrealistic obsession with imagined past evils leads to a pro-
posal that would guarantee real future inequality.
The grandiose claims made for the new feminist knowledge only
draw attention to a sorry reality. The editors of The Knowledge Expío-
sion boast that "some areas of achievement . . . go beyond even the
wildest dreams of some of the early academic activists. . . . Women's
Studies explodes the traditional knowledge-making practices, and their
products." Yet the unbiased reader will note the discrepancy between
the great claims and the meager results.39 When Sandra Gilbert tells us
that "the intellectual excitement generated by feminist criticism" can
regenerate literary studies, she seems out of touch with the reaction of
the wider world beyond the charmed circle of campus feminists, where

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it is dismay, not excitement, that is generated.40 Peggy Mclntosh also

claims much with the title of an article: "Warning: The New Scholar-
ship on Women May Be Hazardous to Your Ego."41 But she gives not a
single example of intellectual achievement as she gloats about the insult
to men's consciousness of all this new knowledge. Meanwhile, falling
enrollments in the humanities carry a message that is not getting
through: students are voting with their feet against the direction that
the humanities have taken recently.
The sad truth is that once anger about patriarchal oppression starts,
it spins out of control and productive thought ceases. It is now not only
acceptable but expected that feminists will rehearse their rage publicly.
The Knowledge Explosion is full of such expressions, and one chapter is
even devoted expressly to rage: Susan Arpad s "The Personal Cost of the
Feminist Knowledge Explosion." Arpad recites a kind of ritual credo: "I
recognize that, as a woman, I am a marginal human being; I live in a
society where at any time I can be dismissed, trivialized, ignored, or
brutalized."42
In this climate, it is no accident that leadership among campus
feminists is now in the hands of people distinguished chiefly by the
degree of their alienation rather than by solid intellectual accomplish-
ment—women like Catharine MacKinnon, Annette Kolodny, Cathar-
ine Stimpson, and Peggy Mclntosh. Perhaps it is inevitable, too, that in
such a climate those who are most likely to be alienated from the
mainstream world of heterosexual relations—that is, lesbians—will ex-
ercise disproportionate influence. The severe intellectual deterioration
that has taken place has at last been challenged by several spirited
critiques from within the academy, for example, Christina Sommers'
Who Stole Feminism?**, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese's Feminism is NOT the
Story of My Life\ and the extraordinary whistle-blowing of two com-
mitted teachers in women's studies programs, Professing Feminism, by

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Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge, whose eloquent subtitle tells all:
Cautionary Tales from the Strange World of Womens Studies.43 These
books, however, have met with the bitter hostility of campus feminists.
Because of modern conditions, women now have unprecedented
access to all sectors of the job market. But even though their numbers
in colleges and universities have increased rapidly—55 percent of col-
lege students are now women44—feminism, as currently constituted, is
causing many of them to miss the opportunity to take their places
among the genuine intellectual leaders in their fields. New and damag-
ing female stereotypes are being created by the obsessive harping on
victim status that has become so obtrusive a part of public thought and
comment. The fact is that when women believe that a continuing
patriarchal conspiracy is the only reason for the differentiated roles of
the past, that belief becomes yet another barrier to their progress.
Sadly, this wrong turn occurred just as women had largely overcome
initial resistance to change in the workplace. That there will be further
significant change in the numbers of women in the professions and
government is no longer controversial. A short list of the most able
members of the last Republican administration, for example, would
have to include Lynne Martin, Carla Hills, Linda Chavez, Condoleezza
Rice, and Lynn Cheney. But the excesses of feminists are now under-
mining these gains, and the very word feminism has become so tainted
that more and more women shy away from it. The feminism typical of
campus women's studies departments has little credibility among the
general public.
The question of how to interpret the past is the heart of the matter,
because it determines the crucial question of how change should come.
We shall get the best from this new situation only if we see it more
positively and more realistically than the preoccupation with an imag-
ined patriarchal evil will allow. We need to be clear about the fact that

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the technological and medical advances of Western society, together

with the social changes they have brought about, now give women
opportunities that were unavailable in the past. These developments,
rightly understood, explain why feminism is a fairly recent and Western
phenomenon and why these changes are slowly spreading to the rest of
the world as it, too, is increasingly affected by the process of mod-
ernizing. Nonetheless, powerful emotional resistance prevents many
feminists (especially radical feminists) from accepting the fact that the
capitalist economies of the West have been the engine of change for
women. Rather than lament the entire past of humanity as one long
display of male oppression, they should focus on exploring the promis-
ing but uncharted future.

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4 The Academic
Politics
of Race

Race is another central ingredient of new-style campus studies in the

humanities. It enters into scholarship in literature and history in a
number of ways, but the common thread is an insistence on the white
European s mistreatment of other races. There is an intense focus on a
limited number of specific historical events: the enslavement of blacks
in North America; the disruption of the peaceful lives of the New
World Indians by Europeans who took their land; the imperial expan-
sion of Europe beginning in the Renaissance; and the colonial ad-
ministration of Third World countries. Moral indignation over these
episodes becomes not only the controlling framework for many race-
gender-class critics but often the entire content of their writing on
literature. They seek to uncover the racism that underlies even benign-

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 The Academic Politics of Race

looking texts by famous white American writers or the imperialist

arrogance and chauvinism beneath the surface of classic European writ-
ers. Even Shakespeare is found to be complicit in this meanness of
spirit, this white moral sickness. Historians of a similar mind-set stress
the cruelty and belligerence of the European explorers and the smug-
ness and racism of the colonial regimes.
Let us look at some representative examples of critical judgments in
this vein. Here is Edward Said on the novel: "Without empire... there
is no European novel as we know it The novel, as a cultural artefact
of bourgeois society, and imperialism are unthinkable without each
other. . . . Imperialism and the novel fortified each other to such a
degree that it is impossible, I would argue, to read one without in some
way dealing with the other."1 More generally, Said accuses Western
culture of "Orientalism," that is, of constructing a self-serving set of
stereotypes about the Orient to justify "European-Atlantic power over
the Orient," specifically colonialism: "To say simply that modern Ori-
entalism has been an aspect of both imperialism and colonialism is not
to say anything very disputable."2
Here is Stephen Greenblatt on Shakespeare: "Shakespeare became
the presiding genius of a popular, urban art form with the capacity to
foster psychic mobility in the service of Elizabethan power . . . [and]
approaches his culture, not, like Marlowe, as rebel and blasphemer, but
rather as dutiful servant." And on Spenser: "Spenser worships power
. . . [and] is our originating and preeminent poet of empire." The
complexities of his art "are not achieved in spite of what is for us a
repellent political ideology—the passionate worship of imperialism—
but are inseparably linked to that ideology." Greenblatt insists on the
"impossibility of sealing off the interests of the theater from the inter-
ests of power."3
I introduce these writers as representative examples, but they are

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more than that. Even a critic of Greenblatt s—Paul Cantor—says of him

that "if I were asked to name the most influential literary critic of this
generation, it would be Greenblatt."4 Said, University Professor at Co-
lumbia University, is also among the most prominent literary critics of
our day. Their followers are legion.
For some, these attitudes do not seem inconsistent with the continu-
ing study of works by white males—the European classics. (This posi-
tion is what makes it possible for race-gender-class critics to claim,
when on the defensive, that not much has changed—students still take
courses on Shakespeare and other European classics, just as they always
have.)5 Others, however, want to study texts by authors less blighted
in spirit. Yet the books that are new candidates for inclusion in lit-
erature curricula are obsessed with the same moral problems. They
express the same moral judgments, usually about the same historical
facts. (Alice Walker and Toni Morrison are good examples.)6 These
books in effect make politically correct criticism into literature; griev-
ance is their content.
Evidently, a great deal is now invested in this attitude toward race
and guilt, for it determines the content of much literary criticism and
even contemporary literature. Yet although this attitude has a factual
basis, it is seriously flawed. Everything depends on the context that is
assumed for the facts, and once that context is understood, the case for
this approach to literature and criticism collapses.
Before we look at specific cases, it will be helpful to formulate some
general principles. Take the following theoretical sequence of events: let
us say that General Motors announces a loss of half a billion dollars for
the preceding year. Yet despite this bad news, the price of the stock goes
up, not down. The market has apparently placed a positive, not a
negative, judgment on the news. The explanation for this initially
puzzling situation lies in a general context of facts and expectations.

9i
 The Academic Politics of Race

Suppose that during the same period auto manufacturers in the United
States had a terrible year because of foreign competition, that both Ford
and Chrysler had already reported losses of well over a billion each, and
that General Motors had been expected to report an even bigger loss.
Then the half billion loss is good news. The point here is that the loss
taken simply by itself meant nothing. Its meaning could be understood
only in light of the even greater losses of comparable companies, so that
GM performed well relative to what could have been expected at this
time and in this context.
The first general principle, then, is that facts do not carry their own
interpretation; they must be evaluated in relation to expectations with-
in a given context. Now for a second principle: imagine that a man is
walking toward me, and I am asked to say what I see. But what kind of
thing should I say? Just describe what he looks like, you reply. But there
must be more to it than that, for if I say that he has two legs, you will
react with impatience: everybody has two legs. You dont want just any
facts about him—you want significant facts, facts that will differentiate
him from other individuals, facts that are notable in the context. Once
more, facts are never just facts; some are commonplace and therefore
not worth mentioning, whereas others are distinctive and command
attention.
With the aid of these two principles, we shall see how race-gender-
class critics misinterpret the facts that obsess them—how they evaluate
facts without reference to a context of expectations and focus on the
commonplace rather than on the distinctive.
The most crucial aspect of the context of expectations in all the
historical events referred to lies in the great change ushered in by the
Enlightenment. When we accuse people of "racism"—that is, of acting
in a way that allows the inference that one group matters more than or
is superior to another in more than superficial ways—we are assuming a

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The Academic Politics of Race

sense of common humanity. But although that idea may have been
expressed by individuals throughout recorded history, it is relatively
modern in the sense that it did not achieve real power in human affairs
until the Enlightenment—the eighteenth-century current of political,
social, and philosophical thought that was largely the product of north-
western European thinkers and their North American cousins.
The idea of a common humanity was the Enlightenments precious
gift to succeeding ages. Up until that time, tribalism had been univer-
sal, as it still is in parts of the world where the Enlightenment s influ-
ence has not yet penetrated. (Calling a twentieth-century Yoruba bent
on annihilating the Ibo in the Nigerian civil war of the 1960$ a "racist,"
or accusing him of "genocide," would simply have puzzled him.) For-
merly, people identified with those that they saw as their own, and
when the interests ofthat group clashed with those of other groups, an
individuals loyalty to his or her people was never in doubt. One could
leave it to other groups to press their own claims.
In this context, clinging to one's own was not regarded as evil or as
insensitivity to others; it was a matter of seeking security in a hostile
world, because other groups were always seeking their own interests.
Tribalism provided collective security in a context where the dangers
faced by individuals were too great to allow concern for individuals
from other* tribes. Yet this attitude also entailed risks; the individ-
uals could rely on their own group, but if it was overrun by another,
annihilation could result. In the modern world, those risks have been
heightened by numerous factors—for example, weapons of war that are
many times as destructive as weapons of earlier times. For this reason,
tribalism has become counterproductive. The case of Bosnia, for exam-
ple, shows that it now results not in greater security for the individual
but in less. In the twentieth century, greater security is afforded by
the Enlightenment idea of belonging to a common humanity rather

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than to a tribe, for that idea widens the circle of those who might
protect the individual.
The central Enlightenment idea that all peoples share a common
humanity, and that their allegiance to that commonality transcends
any allegiance to their national or racial group, brings with it a set of
related ideas. Words like racism, genocide, and imperialism belong in
this new context but would be out of place in an environment not
imbued with Enlightenment attitudes. In fact, all these words signal
various ways the Enlightenments philosophy of a common humanity
is violated. If all human beings have equal value, regardless of tribe,
then it must be wrong for one tribe to exterminate another or to set
itself up over another. Torture now occurs for the most part only in
those areas of the globe where Enlightenment values have not yet fully
penetrated, and so its decline is also part of this same process. The
spread of Enlightenment values has led to the ending of many other
un-Enlightened customs, such as cannibalism, human sacrifice, head-
hunting—and slavery.
One can easily forget how much the Enlightenment has changed
(and is still changing) the world and how recently those changes began.
One way to grasp the magnitude of the movement is to visit the Tower
of London. Tourists are still shocked at the array of ingenious instru-
ments of torture in use just a few hundred years ago in England, the
same country that gave the world habeas corpus and the mother of
parliaments. Shakespeare seems very much part of us, yet the Tower
assaults our senses with evidence that his world was not ours: the
varieties of torture, the ugliness of methods of execution, and the mon-
arch's ability to subject anyone to them at whim, all attest to the low
value placed on life at that time. What is it that accounts for the
difference between a world full of such horrors and present-day En-
gland? The Enlightenment.

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The Academic Politics of Race

This spread of the idea of a common humanity has been a significant

aspect of modernization. There have been many milestones in the
history of the human race: the invention of the wheel, agriculture,
building, writing, democracy, and systematic knowledge itself. These
great innovations are the legacy of many different peoples from dif-
ferent eras. Northwestern Europe's contribution of the idea of a com-
mon humanity deserves to stand with that small number of other
fundamental changes in human life because of its role in ending the
horrors mentioned above. European pride in this achievement is justi-
fied, but it should be tempered by the thought that leadership in
human affairs regularly moves on from one group to another. It is a
sobering thought that the Germanic tribes whose descendants were so
prominent in the Enlightenment were largely illiterate peasants only a
few centuries before, the Mediterranean cultures having advanced far
ahead of them at that time.
The Enlightenment was the beginning of a worldwide cultural revo-
lution that is ongoing, and in this sense we might talk of a spreading
European cultural hegemony; but this is not a hegemony that race-
gender-class critics can pounce upon and vilify. For they are among its
agents: though professing cultural relativism and a solidarity with non-
Western cultures, they are in fact the most ruthless and uncompromis-
ing enforcers of the Enlightenments cultural revolution.7
The world is still in the process of coming to terms with Enlighten-
ment values. Take, for example, the notions of racism and genocide,
with all they imply about the need for respect for the humanity of tribes
and groups other than ones own. Third World ethnic strife and tribal
massacres in recent decades are clear evidence that the attitudes im-
plicit in those words are far from having been eradicated. In Nigeria,
whole populations of the Ibo have been annihilated by rival tribes.
Civil war in Ethiopia has produced horrendous numbers of dead. In

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 The Academic Politics of Race

Mozambique, the number who have died in the civil war that has been
going on since 1975 approaches one million.8 In Somalia, tribal war-
lords have been using mass starvation to improve their own tribes
position. In Rwanda, the war of extermination between the Hutu and
Tutsi tribes has claimed at least half a million lives. A ferocious racial
war has broken out in Sri Lanka between Tamils and Sinhalese, in
which "tens of thousands of people were massacred in the most grue-
some way."9 (This occurred after government-imposed racial prefer-
ences in employment and education to achieve racial equity had wors-
ened, not improved, race relations.)10 In Timor, up to two hundred
thousand East Timorese have been killed by Indonesians or starved to
death by famine since 1975." And this list is just a beginning. By post-
Enlightenment standards, these are incidents of racism and genocide,
but their sheer numbers show that they are not just lapses from those
standards and that the Enlightenment revolution has yet to reach many
areas of the world.
It is essential that we be clear that when we denounce racism in
absolute terms, we are measuring all cultures and all times by a standard
that is distinctly modern and Western. In this respect, race-gender-class
critics are not cultural relativists but cultural absolutists. In his recent
book Sick Societies, Robert Edgerton describes the variety of cultures on
earth with devastating realism and in the process demonstrates how
impossible it would be for race-gender-class scholars to retain their
professed relativism in the face of cultural situations that must pro-
foundly offend them. In some, life is often short and very unpleasant;
in others, relations between men and women are bitterly unhappy; in
still others, women are educationally and socially restricted and even
physically mutilated, and debilitating tribal warfare is a way of life.
Edgerton does not shrink from saying that some cultures are simply
dysfunctional—they do not offer their members satisfying lives. Given

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The Academic Politics of Race

a choice, nobody would be indifferent to whether they lived in a mod-

ern European society or in the wretched pre-Enlightenment situations
Edgerton describes. Michael Berliner puts the matter forcefully: "Some
cultures are better than others: A free society is better than slavery;
reason is better than brute force as a way to deal with other people."12
This, then, is the context within which the moral judgments that
concern race-gender-class scholars must be evaluated. It is easy to see
that, in this context, they violate both principles I set out above. They
make moral judgments without regard to the general morality of the
context, and in specifically criticizing Europeans, they focus on actions
that do not distinguish Europeans from others and ignore other things
that make them truly distinctive.
Let us begin with the most emotionally charged of all moral issues:
slavery. Just as General Motor s report of a substantial loss suggests a
negative judgment, so does white involvement in slavery. But what are
the standards of the context, and how do Europeans stand in relation to
those standards? Before the Enlightenment, slavery was widespread. In
general slavery was part of the universal habit of regarding the claims of
one's own group as more important than those of outsiders. The Arabs
were the first to run an organized slave trade in the late Middle Ages,
but it had been common to use captives as slaves regardless of race.13
Before the arrival of Europeans, Indians practiced slavery in North
America. It was also common in Africa, where Africans sold other
Africans to Europeans for transport to North America.
Relative to the context, then, how do Europeans (including their
North American branch) appear? The distinguished historian of Islam
Bernard Lewis puts the matter simply: "In having practiced sexism,
racism, and imperialism, the West was merely following the common
practice of mankind throughout the millennia of recorded history."14
Europeans seem no worse in this respect than non-Europeans, then,

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 The Academic Politics of Race

and perhaps somewhat better: they were at least ambivalent, as evi-

denced by the illegality of slavery in some states in North America.
Now to the second principle. To say that Europeans practiced slavery
is true, at least in North America, but this fact does not distinguish
them from other groups. A statement like this has the same force as
"this man has two legs," that is, very little. Is there anything with regard
to slavery that is distinctive by virtue of being true of them but not of
others? Clearly, there is. What sets Europeans apart from other groups
is their unique role in ending slavery, and the European Enlightenment
began the process. A standard account summarizes what happened:
"The slave system aroused little protest until the i8th century. Rational
thinkers of the Enlightenment then began to criticize it for its violation
of the rights of man.... By the late i8th century, moral disapproval of
slavery was widespread The trade to the British colonies was finally
abolished in 1807 In 1807 the United States also prohibited it." By
1865 slavery in North America had ceased to exist, and a worldwide
movement to end slavery was well under way. In 1919, "the principal
Allied Powers (Belgium, the British Empire, France, Italy, Japan, Portu-
gal, and the United States)" signed a convention to "secure the com-
plete suppression of slavery in all of its forms and of the slave trade by
land and sea."15
This sequence of events is extraordinary; in not much more than a
century, a practice that had existed all over the globe for thousands of
years was virtually ended. The heroes of this process were Europeans
who responded to the thinkers of the Enlightenment. One group from
among them deserves special mention—the North Americans who tore
their society apart to fight what proved to be the decisive batde in the
defeat of slavery, the American Civil War. And yet in the upside-down
world of race-gender-class scholars, this is precisely the group that is
blamed for slavery.

9»
The Academic Politics of Race

One aspect of the situation, however, predisposes all of us to see it in

a misleading way. The Civil War was the decisive moral struggle over
slavery, so in looking back at this great symbolic drama, it is natural to
admire the winners and despise the losers. For that reason, the losers in
this one battle tend to have all our indignation at the institution of
slavery heaped upon them and to be perceived as its representative. But
this is an illusion: the losers had that position only because their society
contained the vanguard of the abolitionist movement. In that respect
their society deserves credit for being unique, not opprobrium for
containing anti-abolitionists, for in that respect it was far from unique.
The point is reinforced if we look at the pockets of slavery that still
exist. They are found only where European influence—that is, Enlight-
enment influence—is weak. A recent article in Time magazine, head-
lined "Alas, Slavery Lives," reported that "tens of millions of people
around the globe, including children as young as six, are working in
bondage—in dangerous and degrading conditions that often involve
i8-hour days, beatings and sexual abuse. Many are the victims of op-
portunistic slave raiders."16 Another article reported not only that child
slavery exists in many countries throughout the world but that "tra-
ditional slavery persists in the Sudan."17 Still another headline pro-
claimed "Female Slavery a Get-Rich-Quick Scheme in China."18
What is true for slavery is just as true of the clashes between different
cultures that race-gender-class scholars denounce as imperialism. Once
again, if we ignore the mores of the context, we can easily say that
European imperialism and colonialism are morally unacceptable; they
violate the Enlightenment idea of a common humanity in which all
have equal value. But how should the Europeans be judged in context?
Again, in pre-Enlightenment times a tribe almost invariably pressed to
the limit its advantage against a neighboring tribe. As Dario Fernandez-
Morera said recently, the peoples that the Europeans conquered shared

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 The Academic Politics of Race

the values of their conquerors and would have done as much to them
had they had the power to do so.19
It must be remembered that what we now call genocide had earlier
been a temptingly permanent solution to competing claims. This was
the way of the Plains Indians, for example;20 the Pawnees were dras-
tically reduced in number through clashes with their neighbors. Their
persecutors, the Sioux, were also legendary for their love of torture.
Modern readers of the Greek classics are probably shocked by the
casual assumption in The Odyssey that when a town is captured, its men
will be killed and its women taken captive. But in pre-Enlightenment
times, wars between tribes were often fought to the finish, that is, until
one side had been exterminated, because the first priority of a group
was to secure its survival. In sixteenth-century Europe the best de-
fense was a good offense: if you were not growing stronger, your neigh-
bors were. A king s duty to his people was to secure their peace, and in
that dangerous world a strong state was a large one; the more powerful
the state, the fewer dangers it faced. What may sound like flagrant
national chauvinism in Elizabethan England was, for Elizabethans,
simply exultation in the knowledge that foreign powers could not
threaten them with devastation. If England had not contested Spanish
influence around the globe, it would eventually have had to face con-
quest by a stronger Spain.
All of us who live where the Enlightenment cultural revolution
is virtually complete can now condemn expansionism, but a pre-
Enlightenment state could not afford such an attitude. This point
cannot be emphasized enough: to reevaluate centuries-old situations in
terms of the most fastidious late twentieth-century rules is absurd.
As to the second of my two principles: if pressing their advantage over
that of other groups did not distinguish Europeans from other peoples,
was there anything in this area that did distinguish them? Again, the

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The Academic Politics of Race

answer lies in the fact that they led the world in moving away from this
pattern of behavior. The Enlightenment is the source of the still emerg-
ing consensus that aggression by one people against another is intoler-
able and that one people may not subjugate another. The Europeans
themselves turned against colonialism; if there is a parallel in world
history for the peaceful British withdrawal from India and its motiva-
tion in domestic anticolonial sentiment, I do not know of it.
Even the anticolonialism of the Third World owes much to the
spread of Western values. Mohandas Gandhi was an inspirational
leader in Indias fight for independence, but he was a Western-trained
lawyer as well. He, too, had absorbed the values of the Enlightenment.
The bloodless transition to self-rule in India was in no small part due to
Gandhis ability to speak to the British in terms they understood; he
used the Enlightenment language of a common humanity. Indeed the
very ideas of independence and self-determination were part of the
colonial legacy.
Although this distinctive European renunciation of expansionism
and aggression comes to full fruition only in this century, there are signs
of something new happening much earlier. J. H. Elliott aptly says of the
sixteenth-century Europeans that "greed, arrogance, dogma—all these
played their part. But there was a more generous spirit also alive in that
European civilization."21 If we look at the entire sweep of the colonial
era, from the Renaissance22 voyages through the nineteenth-century
empires and beyond to the process of decolonizing, the Europeans
typically shrink from the kind of thoroughgoing solution to the com-
peting claims of different peoples that was common elsewhere—that is,
genocida! rooting out of the rival culture. With rare local exceptions,
Europeans did not set out to annihilate populations that stood in their
way; they already felt the need to excuse what they were doing by
assuring themselves that they were ruling other populations for their

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own good. They were, of course, rationalizing, but their need to do so

indicates an ambivalence and the beginnings of a new set of values. For
here the legitimate claims of another group were being acknowledged,
even while they were being denied. The more permanent solution to
competing claims (slaughter) was no longer acceptable to a people who
had begun to have such thoughts. Seen in historical context, colonial-
ism is an intermediate stage between the unrestrained pressing of ones
claims without regard for those of others and the complete renuncia-
tion ofthat mode. A society that must convince itself that the occupa-
tion of another is for its own good is not too far away from accepting
that it should not do so at all.
Let us return to the trenchant judgments of Stephen Greenblatt and
Edward Said that I cited at the beginning of this chapter: Greenblatt s,
that Shakespeare and Spenser put their talents into the service of the
repulsive ideology of imperialism; and Said s, that the European novel
is implicated in imperialism and colonialism and that Europeans see
the Orient not as it is but through stereotypes designed to justify
colonialism. Evidently both violate my two principles.
Greenblatt ignores the prevailing morality of the context in order to
apply his own twentieth-century morality to Shakespeare and Spen-
ser—a flagrant anachronism. He speaks as if the Elizabethans had al-
ready experienced the Enlightenment. The devastating answer to his
charge that Elizabethan literature attempts to justify colonial adven-
tures is that at that time nobody felt the need to justify them. The
English did not have to be persuaded that England should extend its
influence and power—they simply thought it was a self-evidently good
thing to do. Other countries thought England s expansion of its empire
bad because they themselves would lose power and influence, but mo-
rality (Greenblatt s "repellent political ideology") had nothing to do
with it. Although the losers did not like losing, they would have been

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happy to have played the same game and won. Said also ignores the
context of expectations: who can doubt that expansionism and con-
quest in the Arab world was limited by feasibility rather than by moral-
ity? Here, too, the losers were unhappy about losing, not about the
rules of the game.
In criticizing Europeans for attitudes that were simply those of their
time, both Greenblatt and Said miss what was distinctive about them—
their ambivalence and the strong signs of their eventual renunciation of
those attitudes. And so Greenblatt and Said both preach historicism yet
judge ahistorically; they both preach Enlightenment values yet attack
the very group that originates and spreads those values.
Race-gender-class scholars sometimes acknowledge implicitly that
their critique assumes the very values of the West; in this mode, they
see the West s failing as the gap between its ideals and its performance,
in other words, as hypocrisy. A common example is criticism of the
discrepancy between the theoretical high-mindedness of eighteenth-
century talk of the rights of "man" and the sordid reality of slavery.
Similar discrepancies are found in colonial contexts.
This charge of hypocrisy is worth careful consideration, because it
does raise an interesting point about transitional periods. Once the
Enlightenment idea of a common humanity becomes widely accepted,
its consequences are clear: behavior that was once common comes to be
regarded as unacceptable barbarity. But this change requires a period of
transition. That transition is now well advanced. It has been going on
since the eighteenth century and is not yet over.
A period of transition is, of necessity, one of inconsistency, in which
parts of the old and the new exist side by side. Change will occur more
quickly in some regions than in others, but even in regions that lead,
there will be ambivalence. The form that this inconsistency takes
among Europeans is interesting but hardly surprising. The Enlighten-

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ment gives them a new view of humanity and also advances their
scientific and technological knowledge. They use their new knowledge
to advance their power, but their developing new morality begins to
undermine their confidence in what they are doing. For a while old
ambitions given new scope by new power are in conflict with their new
beliefs. This transition period is, however, relatively short; as it begins,
European nations still have relatively little doubt about empire, but by
the end they can no longer justify it to themselves.
During the transition there is much soul-searching and not a little
rationalizing of pre-Enlightenment practice by appeal to Enlighten-
ment values. The idea of the "white mans burden"—a wise colonial
regime prevents tribal warfare, brings medicine and literacy to Africa,
and so on—exemplifies this stage. The important question here is, Is it
possible to imagine the introduction of a wholly new set of values
without a transitional period full of double standards? This question
answers itself. It is possible to say that particular individuals were hypo-
critical, but to label a whole period and a whole people hypocritical
must imply that the Enlightenment revolution could have occurred
overnight, without a transition. Human affairs do not work that way.
Another interesting point about transitions is raised when the same
argument is made about the hypocrisy of the U.S. Constitution in the
matter of slavery. Here universal rights were enunciated in ringing
tones, yet they were not to apply to everyone. An instructive parallel is
the development of habeas corpus. Today we celebrate its introduction
in the Magna Carta of 1215 as a defining event in establishing limits to
the power of governments over individuals, yet its scope was also lim-
ited at first. Habeas corpus originated in a dispute between King John
and his barons, who were intent on limiting the kings power over
them—though such protections were not to be extended to the entire

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population. Should we worry about hypocrisy here too, because only

an elite was protected? History gives us the answer: what proved to be
supremely important was a principle, namely, that if the government
wants to deprive a person of his or her liberty, it must demonstrate the
reasonableness of its action to the satisfaction of a jury of his or her
peers—that is, to people who are like the accused—not to the satisfac-
tion of government agents. The idea that governments must behave in
a manner that ordinary people understand and condone was far too
profound to be disparaged simply because it was not fully implemented
at the time of its conception.
This principle was in fact so important that over time it gradually
spread not only through all classes of English society but beyond En-
gland, to one country after another. We need to be realistic about
situations such as these. If, when agréât moralprinciple is introduced, its
full cost must be paid immediately, progress will never occur. What matters
is that the principle be implemented, however imperfectly at first,
because its moral force will inevitably work to increase its scope.
Similarly, the great moral principles enunciated in the U.S. Consti-
tution could never have been implemented immediately; once they
were introduced, however, the progression to universal applicability
was irresistible. Resistance to change makes inconsistencies of this kind
unavoidable; to bemoan this is not to impugn Americans but to refuse
to accept human nature.
What is true of individual instances of this kind is just as true of
progress toward Enlightenment values in general. Europeans at first
stumble toward a new system of values that (it now appears) the world
will eventually adopt, but this stumbling can hardly be seen as morally
reprehensible when they are the authors of the standard being used to
judge them. Inconsistent situations are always open to the competing

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 The Academic Politics of Race

judgments that the glass is half full or half empty, but in these cases we
know that the glass had been empty, and that must be the standard
against which they are judged.
There is a considerable irony in the fact that race-gender-class schol-
ars consider all systems of belief "socially constructed" except their
own; yet nothing is more clearly an introduced and learned system than
the Enlightenment value system they adopt as their universal basis for
the denunciation of sexism and racism. It is the value system of what
V. S. Naipaul recently called "our universal civilization."23 We call its
values "civilized," and appropriately so.
There is still another kind of blindness here. Given their aggressive
and uncompromising insistence on value judgments (antisexism, anti-
racism, and the like) that are unmistakably part of the Enlightenments
legacy, it is odd that race-gender-class critics judge colonialism so
harshly. For colonialism was the means by which the Enlightenment
system of values they espouse was spread around the world. A small
thought experiment will prove the point: imagine a world in which
European expansion had never happened, one in which there had been
no influence of European ideas beyond Europe. What would the world
outside Europe be like today? Would the rigid caste system of India be
more, or less, in evidence? Would there be more, or fewer, genocidal
tribal clashes in the world? Would there be more, or less, brutaliza-
tion of women by suttee, foot binding, genital mutilation, exposure of
babies, forced segregation? Would there be more, or less, slavery in the
world? Would there be more, or less, human sacrifice, torture, can-
nibalism? Would life expectancy be higher or lower?
The answers to these questions are not in doubt. Without European
influence, the world would be much less to the liking of race-gender-
class scholars than it is today. The positive and negative effects ofthat
influence vary with particular areas, but in the case of Africa, for exam-

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pie, the noted Africanist L. H. Gann points to a host of beneficial

effects brought about by the colonial legacy.24 The other side of the
coin is presented by George Ayittey, who argues that in the immediate
postcolonial period "thirty years of independence have brought noth-
ing but economic misery, famine, senseless civil wars, wanton destruc-
tion, flagrant violations of human rights and brutal repression."25
Although it is sometimes argued that this postcolonial misery is itself
the legacy of colonial oppression, the very terms of this diagnosis—for
example, the "flagrant violations of human rights"—are clearly Western
in their formulation. Their use could not even be imagined outside the
sphere of influence of the European Enlightenment. Would anyone
even bother to accuse the nineteenth-century chief Shaka—the great,
and extraordinarily brutal, founder of the Zulu Empire—of "violating
human rights?" And can it be doubted that the genital mutilation of
females is a traditional African custom rather than one introduced by
the West through colonialism? The principle of the self-determination
of peoples must take precedence over the facts that Gann and Ayittey
present—it, too, is an inescapable legacy of the Enlightenment. But it is
worth remembering that throughout human history modernity and
progress were always spread by the influence of one culture on another,
including conquest.
In spite of the aggressive modernizing implicit in the values they
espouse, race-gender-class critics blame Western influence for destroy-
ing many a settled, established way of life. (Annette Kolodny s com-
plaint about the fate of North American Indian cultures is typical.)26
But this attitude is unrealistic in yet another way. All cultures change
and adapt, rise and fall; nothing is a given for very long. One of the very
same American Indian cultures discussed by Kolodny provides an in-
teresting example of this principle. Although the horse was supremely
important to the Comanche culture, it must have been a relatively

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recent introduction, because Comanche horses were descended from

those that the Spanish brought to the New World. Comanche culture
therefore illustrates the principle that a unique way of life often arises
from the contact, and even the clash, between different cultures.
In the Old World, Scotland illustrates the same point. Scottish cul-
ture, with its quaint folkways—kilts, bagpipes, and so forth—also has
an aura of antiquity, but it is really a relatively recent blending of many
cultures, including Irish, French, Viking, and Brittonic Celt, a blend-
ing that could not have occurred without clashes between those cul-
tures. Just as a favorite dish is a product of assimilated ingredients,
cultures too are unique syntheses of prior elements mixed together by
various historical accidents; they are always changing as new elements
are taken in. Changes in American Indian cultures through contact
with other cultures were therefore inevitable. To lament such change
is to be unrealistically sentimental; the spread of the wheel was no
less inevitable. Change occurs even without external stimulus; Robert
Edgerton shows that even undeveloped cultures are not harmonious
wholes without internal strain and that they also have dissenters who
occasionally manage to bring about change.27
At the bottom of this static view of cultures is a Romantic aestheti-
cism about folk traditions, a fascination with colorful and exotic cos-
tume, dances, and so on. When one considers the cost to a people of
not modernizing—for example, foregoing the benefits of modern med-
icine and having a life expectancy of only 25 to 30 years—a preference
for the aesthetic over the practical seems curious on the part of scholars
who in other contexts are only too ready to argue that the aesthetic
dimension of Western culture is a sugarcoating of unacceptable mate-
rial conditions.
If we are to make any statement about Westerners with regard to race
and racism, it is that Enlightenment values have led them to invent the

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term racism and to be severely troubled by it. Despite many accusations

that American society is racist, for example, careful empirical work by
Paul Sniderman and Thomas Piazza has demonstrated a remarkable
openness and flexibility in the attitudes of American whites toward
racial questions.28 Evidence of their hypersensitivity to any charge of
racism can also be seen in their vulnerability to racism baiting.
This hypersensitivity also makes it difficult for Americans to talk
honestly about race, but recently, during deliberations of a New York
State commission on the social studies curriculum in the public schools,
antiwhite racism baiting became so extreme that Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.,
a member of the commission, was provoked to an angry but truthful
reply. In The Disuniting of America, published shortly thereafter, Schle-
singer addressed assertions of the moral superiority of the African over
the Western tradition: Europe, he said, whatever its sins, was "the
source—the unique source—of those liberating ideas of individual lib-
erty, political democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and cultural
freedom that constitute our most precious legacy and to which most of
the world today aspires. These are European ideas, not Asian, nor
African. . . . There is surely no reason for Western civilization to have
guilt trips laid on it by champions of cultures based on despotism,
superstition, tribalism, and fanaticism.... The West needs no lectures
on the superior virtue of those 'sun people' who sustained slavery until
Western imperialism abolished i t . . . who still keep women in subjec-
tion and cut off their clitorises, who carry out racial persecutions not
only against Indians and other Asians but also against fellow Africans
from the wrong tribes . . . and who in their tyrannies and massacres,
their Idi Amins and Boukassas, have stamped with utmost brutality on
human rights. . . . Those many brave and humane Africans who are
struggling these days for decent societies are animated by Western, not
by African, ideals."29

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 The Academic Politics of Race

Two important points must be made about Schlesinger s outburst:

first, everything he says is so obvious that it can hardly be questioned;
and second, on college campuses today few dare to say as much. But
even Schlesinger suppresses a good part of the truth: he blames black
activists for this unrealistic denigration of the Western tradition, avoid-
ing the equally obvious fact that feminists and white liberals have done
far more to create the climate of opinion he objects to and to further
"multiculturalism" on college campuses than have those he singles out
for criticism.
Schlesinger's realism contrasts strangely with the unreality of prevail-
ing academic discussions. Johnnetta Cole, for example, is convinced
that * we live in a society where tolerance, not to mention respect for
differences, is particularly low" and believes that America is excep-
tionally racist: "Racism is dyed into the very cloth of the American
way."30 She does not understand that in making these charges she is
speaking a language that embodies the system of values—a Western
system—of those she is criticizing. Henry Louis Gates also complains
that the high canon of Western masterpieces "represents the return of
an order in which my people were the subjugated. . . . Who would
return us to that medieval never-never land?"31 But he, too, has things
upside down. It was Western thinkers who rescued us from a more
primitive moral order. It was they who moved us away from the sub-
jugation of one people by another.
Said's complaint that Europeans see and judge Arabs by Western,
not Arab, lights shows the same lack of realism. That Europeans see
other cultures through the eyes of Europeans is hardly surprising; all of
us bear the mark of the environment we grew up in. The crucial
question is whether the West is more, or less, open to and curious about
other cultures than are non-Western societies. That question is easily
answered. Stereotyped thinking about other races and cultures is ram-

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The Academic Politics of Race

pant outside the West. If Said could muster sufficient objectivity to

look at both sides of the relationship between Europeans and Arabs and
ask himself on which side one finds more expressions of hate and
prejudice, he could never have reached his unrealistic conclusions.32
Said's unrealistic view of Western, as opposed to non-Western cul-
tural openness is pursued in a whole new genre of scholarship that has
arisen recently—one concerned with travel writing. Before modern
technology made world travel a common experience, European trav-
elers sometimes published records of their surprising experiences in un-
familiar parts of the world for a readership that was understandably cu-
rious about those experiences. Race-gender-class scholars find in them a
convenient record of European chauvinism and prejudice toward other
races and cultures. Typical is Mary Louise Pratts stress on the "great
significance of travel writing as one of the ideological apparatuses of em-
pire" through which "metropolitan reading publics have been engaged
with expansionist enterprises whose material benefits accrued mainly to
the very few." She shows us "how travel books by Europeans about non-
European parts of the world went (and go) about creating the 'domestic
subject' of Euroimperialism."33 ("Creating the domestic subject" is
race-gender-class jargon for "forming public opinion.")
Again, a nearly total lack of realism prevails. Pratt does not see that
empire needed no justification in these contexts; that the impressions
recorded by the writers would not have differed from those the readers
would have formed; that travelers from these foreign lands would have
had equally culture-bound impressions themselves; that public opinion
could not have been formed by a few travelogues alone—indeed prior
public opinion probably had much to do with the tone of the trav-
elogues.34 Pratt prefers instead a conspiracy theory.
One can only hope that knowledgeable scholars will increasingly
shed their inhibitions and frankly insist that the Western tradition has

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 The Academic Politics of Race

been the unique source of opposition to racism and slavery, not the
reverse. The truth is the only thing that has any chance of setting us free
from the unhappy past in matters of race. Great damage has resulted
from our reluctance to speak plainly about the historical record.
The unrealistic attitudes toward race and racism that have been
preached on campuses across the country by race-gender-class scholars
have produced results that should alarm everyone. "For the first time in
forty years," a 1993 poll found, "young white adults are more biased
against blacks than are their older counterparts."35 There is now more
racial resentment among college-educated whites and blacks than
among those without a college education. This attitude is something
we might legitimately call socially constructed. In more familiar lan-
guage, it is the result of the present campus climate. Formerly, college-
educated people were more enlightened about race, hence less racist
than those without a college education. That was natural enough:
education should enlighten and broaden perspectives. The divisive,
unrealistic preachings of campus ideologues have reversed this pattern,
however, and have succeeded in dividing us. These ideologues have a
vested interest in the discord and chaos that will make their theories
self-fulfilling prophesies, but the rest of us ought to recognize that they
and their theories are leading us to disaster.
Race-gender-class orthodoxy on campus urges us to "celebrate eth-
nicity," but our Enlightenment heritage should have taught us to fear
anything that puts group membership ahead of common humanity,
thereby pushing us toward tribal thinking and tribal politics. Enlight-
enment thinkers realized that humane values can prevail only if we
identify ourselves as human beings first and foremost. The celebration
of ethnicity is what Herder prescribed for the German Volk and what
Hitler found it in his interest to revive. We have recendy ignored such
warnings from the past, with the result that race relations have deterio-

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rated. Arch Puddington recently noted that "the diversity agenda has
deepened racial, sexual, and ethnic tensions at universities all across the
country/* and it would be hard to challenge that judgment.36
If we vote, choose friends, take sides in a dispute, give credence to
one person over another—or do anything else—for reasons of ethnic
pride or solidarity, we are choosing not to give our first loyalty to
principle, integrity, truth, and honesty. That is why ethnic politics and
ethnic separatism must always be a threat to humane values. The good
intentions of affirmative-action programs are not in doubt, but their
results should by now have taught us that the principle of a common
humanity was too important—and too fragile—to be tampered with.
Anything that encourages people to see themselves primarily as mem-
bers of an ethnic group must also encourage tribal thinking, with all of
its destructiveness. In scholarship, the subordination of knowledge to
ethnic pride has led to Afrocentrism, that is, history that grasps at
flimsy or nonexistent evidence as a means of supporting claims of
African cultural achievement.37 Arthur Schlesinger is correct when he
observes that tribal separatism (on campus or anywhere else) must lead
to mutual suspicion and rancor, to self-ghettoizing and self-pity, and
that separatism in dormitories makes for worse, not better, race rela-
tions;38 but he cannot bring himself to mention the factor that has
done most to create the situation he deplores, because it encourages and
rewards tribal identification: affirmative action.
Race-gender-class scholars tell us that an emphasis on a common
humanity is a cover for white hegemony, but the proof that they are
wrong can be seen in the global improvement in the human condition
that the Enlightenment has brought about. The way to make a multi-
racial society work is neither by celebrating ethnicity nor by revisiting
primitive innocence but through continued progress toward a civilized
post-Enlightenment modernity. Multicultural orthodoxy interprets

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any deviation from perfect racial harmony as a sign of underlying evil

so that it can keep resentment and bad feeling alive, but the truth is that
when judged by any known standard, we already do well and would do
much better but for the damage that is caused by that orthodoxy itself.
It will be difficult to change the tenor of campus race discussions of
recent decades, but the effort must be made to introduce a more realis-
tic historical perspective into them.

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5 ,jJÍass and
Perfect
Egalitarianism

Human life is a complex and diverse phenomenon. The number of

factors and values at work in any human situation is always so large that
no single factor or concept is likely to give one an adequate understand-
ing of it. The conceptual framework that race-gender-class critics use
for their analysis of human situations is therefore discouraging because
of its narrowness. The basic analytical tool is the concept of oppression,
which is used equally for race, gender, and class. There is far more to
human life than oppression, and it is never clear why that is the only
issue we must address in discussing literature.
The practical effect of this exclusive focus on oppression is to make a
Utopian egalitarianism the reference point in analyses of race, gender,
and class; anything less than full equality counts as oppression and

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 Class and Perfect Egalitarianism

exploitation. In the two previous chapters we have seen how this frame-
work deflects attention from what should be the focal point of thought
about gender (the development of modern conditions that now allow
women to make choices that were seldom available to them in the past)
and race (the spread of the Enlightenment conception of a common
humanity). What of the specific issues raised by the notion of class?
Here the collapse of Marxism as a viable system of political thought
has left campus radicals in a state of disarray. Marxism had built its
case on the notion that capitalism was morally wrong and that a suc-
cessful economy could be built without competitiveness and the un-
equal outcomes that a free market presupposes. Bitter experience in
over twenty countries has removed any doubt that those ideas were
thoroughly mistaken. This historical development poses a problem for
race-gender-class critics in that their entire framework of thought and
vocabulary—particularly the concepts exploitation and oppression—
can hardly be disentangled from this now obsolete base of Marxist
economics. Previously, unequal outcomes could be considered evidence
of exploitation and oppression, but that automatic equation is no lon-
ger possible
Race-gender-class scholars seem to have noticed that a catastrophe
has befallen their conceptual framework, for certain changes in their
behavior are unmistakable. Many are less willing to use the words
Marxist and (to a lesser extent) capitalism, the former for obvious rea-
sons, the latter because it is so closely tied to the former. Some now
deny that their thinking is, or ever was, Marxist, whereas others adopt
the curious tactic of transferring the obsolescence of Marxism to the
criticism of Marxist thought—as though it was the questioner, not
Marxism, that had suddenly become outdated.1 There has been little
evidence, however, of what the situation really demands—namely, a

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Class and Perfect Egalitarianism

rethinking of the entire radical egalitarian framework of ideas, of which

oppression and exploitation are a part.
Let us look at some examples of the kind of rethinking presently
required. The idea of exploitation arises in Marx's thought directly
from his labor theory of value. Workers increase the value of the mate-
rials they handle and are then deprived of the difference between the
wages they are paid and the increased price that the capitalist receives
for the resultant goods (the surplus value), which, because workers
created it—so the argument goes—should belong to them. Yet accord-
ing to accounts of events that led to the downfall of the Soviet system,
stores were full of items nobody wanted but empty of food, while
vegetables rotted in the fields. The inadequacy of Marx s labor theory of
value was exposed: it had entirely failed to grasp the importance of
management, distribution, and buyers in creating value. This theory is
the bedrock of ideas like exploitation and oppression; take away the
labor theory of value and those ideas have no basis. Race-gender-class
critics have essentially continued to use ideas that are integral parts of
this defunct system of thought and appear to believe that all they need
do is to stop using the name Marxism.
Class remains a fundamental organizing principle for race-gender-
class scholars because it offers classifications for victim and victimizer,
but the fluid social structure of modern America looks very different
from the rigid nineteenth-century European class system that Marx
made the basis of his political theory. One economic group flows into
another, and movement up and down the social scale is constant. By
contrast, the true class systems of Europe differentiated people by dress,
speech, food, entertainment, and much more, but they have either
weakened or disappeared, England having perhaps the best preserved
of them. In America, a clearly defined "us" and "them" is much harder

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 Class and Perfect Egalitarianism

to discern. Generations of low-status immigrants have become affluent,

and access to higher education has never been greater. In these circum-
stances the notion of class, too, evidently needs rethinking.
Another difficulty for the Marxist proclivities of race-gender-class
critics is that America is a country whose prosperity, living conditions,
and individual political liberty are envied almost everywhere, the result
being a flood of people wanting to live there. If people vote for their
preferred form of society with their feet, then America wins that elec-
tion. Race-gender-class scholars find this an uncomfortable reality.
They are unwilling to abandon their denigration of bourgeois individ-
ualism and thus continue to criticize its concern with individual rights
as selfish; they would put the community first. Yet even before the
demise of Marxism, history had given us good reasons to be skeptical
about this idea.
Most race-gender-class critics would readily assent to the following
statement: "The greater the readiness to subordinate purely personal
interests, the higher rises the ability to establish comprehensive com-
munities This state of mind, which subordinates the interests of the
ego to the conservation of the community, is really the first premise of
every truly human culture." But they might be rather upset to learn the
origin of the statement just cited. It was written some seventy years ago
in Landsberg am Lech prison, in Germany. It is in fact part of chapter n
of Adolf Hitlers Mein Kampf2 The irrational animus of race-gender-
class critics against their own society, allied as it is with their innocence
in matters of political theory, allows them to stumble into political
stances characteristic of some of the most brutal and despotic regimes
in the history of the world.3
The collapse of faith in a socialist economics has created an even
deeper problem for race-gender-class scholars. It is now clear that
achieving equality involves problems of great intellectual complexity.

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Class and Perfect Egalitarianism

But the race-gender-class case puts heavy emphasis on a moral choice as

being the only impediment to equality: the implication is that we could
achieve it if we wanted to, but white males do not want to and that is
why inequality persists. The assumption that we lack the will, rather
than the understanding, to bring about full equality is essential if one
wishes to denounce the wickedness of those who obstruct it; if the
problem is mainly one of understanding, then righteous indignation is
out of place. But race-gender-class criticism without righteous indigna-
tion would be like Shakespeare s play without Hamlet: that is its center
and its raison d'être.
The Marxist societies of this century all proceeded as if implement-
ing true egalitarianism were a simple matter. Because they thought that
moral choice was the only important issue, they ruined the economies
of the countries concerned and brought about a considerable reduction
in what was available to be shared equally. Once we acknowledge that
achieving a society that is both highly productive and maximally egali-
tarian involves enormously difficult intellectual problems, the mind-set
of race-gender-class critics seems irrelevant; they want only to de-
nounce, not to confront, real intellectual issues. They live in a fan-
tasy world in which good intentions and moral superiority should
be enough to make any society just and to abolish the barriers to
equal outcomes.
A good measure of the coherence of the political thought of race-
gender-class critics is provided by the works of Fredric Jameson, argu-
ably the most influential of all American literary critics. The consider-
able vogue of Jamesons writings compels us to confront an exceedingly
strange fact: just at the time when in the real world Marxism was col-
lapsing so completely that its viability as a political theory seemed al-
most at an end, its influence in the universities of the English-speaking
world was increasing just as dramatically. Anticapitalist rhetoric was

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heard more than ever among campus intellectuals. Nobody has been
more central to this strange development than Jameson, and his recent
activity is almost a symbol of the situation: as the Wall crumbled, Jame-
son was building a new Marxist edifice of his own in the form of five
books: The Ideologies of Theory (2 volumes), Signatures of the Visible, Late
Marxism, and Postmodernism.
Jamesons current influence in literary studies cannot be overstated.
He is probably the most quoted of all American critics, and citations of
his work are commonly accompanied by almost abjectly respectful
phrases: "Jameson tells us that..." or "Jameson has shown us that "
With the publication of The Political Unconscious in 1981, Jameson
became the patron saint of the race-gender-class criticism that was to
dominate departments of literature over the next decade. Since that
time, his influence has grown even stronger. His dictum that "there is
nothing that is not social and historical—indeed, that everything is 'in
the last analysis' political" became an article of faith for all branches of
the new wave in criticism, from feminism to cultural studies.4 But why
should the popularity and influence of a scholar peak at precisely the
moment it became clear that the central thrust and inspiration of his
work was completely mistaken?
To begin with the obvious: Jameson views politics as inseparable
from and presupposed by literary and cultural criticism. If we fol-
low Jamesons priorities, therefore, we should look first at his political
thought—even though his readers are in the main not political sci-
entists but literary scholars. Before we consider Jameson as political
thinker, however, it is best to acknowledge a potential problem. The
essays in the two-volume Ideologies of Theory were written between 1971
and 1986, and those in Signatures of the Visible between 1977 and 1988.
The speed of events in the transformation of the formerly communist
countries was startling. Views and predictions of just a few years ago

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have been cruelly treated by the passage of time, and much of what was
written about the likely future course of events now seems foolish. Is it
fair to judge Jameson with the benefit of hindsight? To be sure, the
judgment of history is uniquely relevant to political ideas, and Marxists
are especially committed to that relevance. ("Always historicize!" Jame-
son insists.)5 But Jameson himself abolishes this dilemma, for what
is most characteristic of him is an attribute that is hard to label with-
out immediately striking a partisan note: an observer sympathetic to
Jameson might call it a remarkable consistency and constancy, whereas
one less sympathetic is likely instead to see it as a dogged resistance to
any change in his views or to learning from experience. When Jameson
confronts events that must have surprised him, he shows a marked
tendency to assimilate those events to his preexisting framework of
ideas instead of allowing them to modify that framework.
In the earlier essays, for example, Jameson's great admiration of Mao
Zedong and Herbert Marcuse is evident. Maoism is for him the "rich-
est of all the great new ideologies of the 6os," and Marcuse "the greatest
Utopian thinker ofthat period." In the years since Jameson wrote these
words the reputations of both have declined sharply—Mao, in particu-
lar, is now largely discredited. One might assume, therefore, that Jame-
son would be somewhat embarrassed by these judgments. But that
assumption would be wrong, for the same attitudes recur in 1990 in his
Late Marxism, in which Jameson continues to tell us that Marcuse is
"the thinker of the sixties."6
In the case of Mao, Jamesons determination to stick to his initial
judgment produces extraordinary results. Take, for instance, his view of
Maos cultural revolution. By now it is almost impossible to find de-
fenders of this disastrous upheaval; Chinese and non-Chinese, commu-
nists and democrats, are united in their condemnation. The stories of
disrupted lives, of wasted talent, of death and torture, of cruelty and

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humiliation, are far too widespread to be ignored. From our present

perspective, who could view the cultural revolution as anything but the
self-indulgence of an old man grown too used to absolute power?
Yet in characteristic fashion Jameson responds by redoubling his
faith in Mao s correctness. The only problem with the cultural revolu-
tion, Jameson tells us, was that Mao stopped it too soon: "Mao Zedong
himself drew back from the ultimate consequences of the process he
had set in motion, when, at the supreme moment of the Cultural
Revolution, that of the founding of the Shanghai Commune, he called
a halt to the dissolution of the party apparatus and effectively reversed
the direction of this collective experiment as a whole (with conse-
quences only too obvious at the present time)."7 Jamesons dark paren-
thetical hint is tantalizing—he doesn't tell us just what consequences he
has in mind—but his main point is clear enough: China would not be
in the mess it is now if Mao had just given it more of the same. Jameson
does not shrink from the idea of an "experiment" with human lives,
though the added word "collective" may betray some awareness of the
need to make that idea more palatable. But it is a word hard to justify in
the context of a decision first taken and then abandoned, as Jameson
acknowledges, by one man.
The same determination to concede nothing, and to resist revision-
ism at all costs, is visible in Jamesons defense of Stalinism: "Stalinism is
disappearing not because it failed, but because it succeeded, and ful-
filled its historical mission to force the rapid industrialization of an
underdeveloped country (whence its adaptation as a model for many of
the countries of the Third World)."8 This defense assures us of the
success of Stalinism by ignoring everything except industrialization;
but Stalinism also represents extreme ruthlessness, cruelty, paranoia,
senseless purges, the extermination of the kulaks, mass murder, govern-
ment by terror, and more. Can the notion of success be applied to

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Stalins record in this unhedged way? Jameson seems blind to the huge
scale of the human misery caused by Stalin, but even if we leave moral
considerations aside, the widespread revulsion against Marxism that
resulted ought to be factored into any judgment of the so-called success
of Stalinism.
In all of these volumes the pattern of Jameson's moral judgments is
extraordinary. He is capable of expressing outrage when discussing
Mao and Stalin, yet the outrage is directed not at these two for having
caused such suffering but at his intellectual opponents because they
exploit that suffering in their arguments. For example, he denounces
the "current propaganda campaign, everywhere in the world, to Stalin-
ize and discredit Maoism and the experience of the Chinese cultural
revolution—now rewritten as yet another Gulag to the East—all of this,
make no mistake about it, is part and parcel of the larger attempt to
trash the 6os generally."9 Here Jameson presents a startling supposi-
tion: that criticism of the cultural revolution "everywhere in the world"
(including, presumably, criticism by the present Chinese government,
by Eastern Europeans, and even by those who suffered it and survived)
is motivated by nothing more than a desire to undermine a Western
Marxist intellectuals nostalgia for the 19605. How can it not have
occurred to him that people who experienced the cultural revolution
had more important things in mind—their own survival, for example—
than damaging his image of the 19605? In Jamesons mental world,
larger and smaller issues seem not to be distinguished. When he goes
on to exhort his readers not to concede any of this terrain too quickly to
"the other side," he leaves the impression that he has lost sight of the
real human issues in these events and that in dealing with actions that
make or break millions of lives all that matters is how rival intellectuals
may use these tragedies to score points against each other.
Given his determination not to concede any point to critics of

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Marxism, Jamesons own Marxism is inevitably orthodox, conservative,

and even somewhat antiquated. The thinkers to whom he returns again
and again are from the first half of the twentieth century, for example,
Georg Lukács and the Frankfurt school figures Theodor Adorno and
Max Horkheimer, all men whose ideas were formed before Marxists
had to face what Stalin had done. Late Marxism even offers us Adorno
as the thinker for the 19905—surely an improbable notion when so
much that is critical has happened since Adorno s outlook was formed.
Not surprisingly, there is no trace in these volumes of the more
recent (and more realistic) debate about Marxism among political sci-
entists. Some Marxists have recently attempted to reformulate certain
aspects of Marxs thought that have not held up well while retaining the
general spirit of his work. It is not hard to see why this is necessary:
experience has presented Marxism with some very tough questions. For
example: When the state owns and runs everything for the public good,
a huge bureaucracy and powerful state apparatus must be the result. Yet
Marx also wanted the state to wither away.10 How could one half of a
Marxists mind be reconciled with the other? Does the destruction of
the environment in the former socialist countries mean that Marxism is
unable to provide the kind of vibrant public opinion needed to protect
the environment? Was Stalins cruelty an aberration, or do the litde
Stalins of Albania, Romania, and other such countries indicate that
Marxism fails to take account of the old maxim that power corrupts
and absolute power corrupts absolutely? Does a one-party state, in
criminalizing all dissent in advance, inevitably require fear of a repres-
sive secret police to make it work? And to these questions must be
added the one I posed earlier: Is not the labor theory of value, on which
the entire notion of the exploitation of workers depends, just plain
wrong, as proven conclusively by the state economies that ground to a
halt because of it?

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History has forced thoughtful Marxists to take such questions se-

riously, and as a result a number of Marxist writers (for example, G. A.
Cohen, Jon Elster, and John Roemer) have attempted to reformulate
Marxism in light of the lessons of experience.11 But Jameson never even
tries; by contrast with this analytical approach to political theory, his
thought seems most unsophisticated. Rousseau's fantasy of a blissful
state of primitive innocence before the ravages of civilization is never
far from the surface, the one difference being that Jameson makes
Rousseau's general view that man's natural goodness is subverted by
social institutions more specific: he limits the field to one institution—
capitalism. Accordingly, he tells us that "nature and the Unconscious"
are the last bastions, the "precapitalist enclaves" that late capitalism is at
last penetrating. A variation of this theme has it that "the last vestiges of
Nature" are "the Third World and the Unconscious."12
Capitalism, according to Jameson, "systematically dissolves the fab-
ric of all cohesive social groups without exception"; and "authentic
cultural creation is dependant for its existence on authentic collective
life, on the vitality of the 'organic' social group. . . . Such groups can
range from the classical polis to the peasant village."13 Dreamy words
like "authentic" and "organic" invoke a fantasized original harmony,
but one can only wonder how long it would be before a Jameson in his
morally beautiful and authentic Third World village discovered its
rampant (judged by his Western standards) sexism, authoritarianism,
homophobia, tribalism, and racism, to say nothing of its much lower
life expectancy and vulnerability to disease and warfare. History shows
that Rousseau had things backward, as Jameson still does: civilization
alone manages to tame someofthe natural failings in human beings, and
it is always an uphill battle. Rousseau's fantasy of a condition totally
devoid of those failings is an exaggerated and misconceived response to
the fact that civilization's successes are never more than partial.

J25
 Class and Perfect Egalitarianism

When Jameson tells us more about authenticity, it turns out that his
examples are mostly products of the Western society he disdains: "The
only authentic cultural production today has seemed to be that which
can draw on the collective experience of marginal pockets of the social
life of the world system: black literature and blues, British working-
class rock, women's literature, gay literature, the roman québécois» the
literature of the Third World; and this production is possible only to
the degree to which these forms of collective life or collective solidarity
have not yet been fully penetrated by the market and by the commodity
system."14 This strange grab bag must surely be among the most comic
cases of a Western intellectuals fantasy of solidarity with the common
people.
Jamesons world is evidently that peculiar mix of protest movements,
blind Third World adulation, Utopian dreams, and hippie back-to-
nature primitivism that was the 19605. He relives the fantasies of that
time when he tells us of "the widely shared feeling that in the 6os, for a
time, everything was possible; that this period, in other words, was a
moment of a universal liberation, a global unbinding of energies"15—
even though he is forced to concede that this was a historical illusion.
What he is unable to face, however, is that it was a peculiarly Marxist
delusion, for he remains at heart a child of the 1960$ who really believed
that the revolution was at hand.
The quality of Jamesons contribution to the modern debate on more
technical issues in Marxist theory can be judged from his comments on
the notion of class. As I noted above, the fluid social structure of
modern America is very different from the rigid nineteenth-century
European class system that served as the basis of Marxs political theory.
That raises the question of whether Marxism might be a theory tied to
a particular historical situation and thereby doomed to obsolescence as
that situation recedes into the past. Jameson deals with this problem by

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telling us that we can only speak of "a fundamental class structure

inherent in a system in which one group of people produces value for
another group" if we allow for "the dialectical possibility that even this
fundamental 'reality' may be dealer' at some historical junctures than at
others."16 But surely, after George Orwell's Animal Farm we should
have been spared this kind of obfuscation and evasion: "All animals are
equal but some animals are more equal than others."
Jamesons response to the difficulties of Marxism in the modern
world is, as usual, to attempt to hang on to everything and to concede
nothing to critics—but at a considerable price. His "solution to the so-
called crisis of Marxism" is to argue that we are entering the age of
global capitalism and must therefore wait for labor to become global
too; that is, we must wait until "proletarianization, and the resistance to
it in the form of class struggle, all slowly reassert themselves on a new
and expanded world scale." Further: "That a new international pro-
letariat (taking forms we cannot yet imagine) will reemerge from this
convulsive upheaval it needs no prophet to predict: we ourselves are
still in the trough, however."17 In other words, when we have a united
global proletariat, the socialist transformation will follow, after all.
Jameson brushes aside all that we might have learned from the practical
experience of Marxism in nearly twenty diverse nations. Once again,
the same formula he employed to rescue Mao can be seen: if a concept
fails, more of it will bring success. But this formula makes learning
from experience impossible: no empirical test of anything will ever be
allowed to count. Jameson never explains how Marxism on a global
scale will differ from what it has always been locally, but the prospect of
even more territory and power for the next Stalin to abuse is not a
reassuring one.
Jameson has his own, characteristic methods of dealing with both
anti-Marxist arguments and embarrassing historical events, but they

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fall well short of genuine counterargument. Frequently, he simply cites

the argument or event, highlighting the key terms in scare quotes, as if
this scornful gesture were sufficient to deal with the substance of the
issue. How does one deal with the preference of one nation after an-
other for free elections and free speech? Easily: just talk of "freedom" of
speech and "free" elections. What about the problem of socialisms
failure in the real world? No problem: just refer to this as " 'socialism
does not work/ " What about the problem of Utopian thought result-
ing so often in mass murder—Robespierre, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao? Sim-
ple. Just speak of "the 'massacres* of the French Revolution, etc." Are
the revelations about Paul de Man difficult to handle? Not if you make
them "the now notorious 'revelations/ " and the same technique will
work with the "notorious 'anti-Semitic* article." Is the equation of
public ownership with a huge bureaucracy hard to handle? Then just
label it "the anti-Marxist thematics of 'bureaucracy/ " Terrorism? Its
just " 'terrorism/ as a 'concept/ "18 In none of these cases is an argu-
ment presented.
Jameson also makes liberal use of all those fudging devices that Darío
Fernandez-Morera so wittily exposed recently—for example, the habit
of qualifying "Marxism" with the word "late" to remove it from the
reach of objections to "classical" Marxism that could not otherwise be
answered.19 But a more characteristically Jamesonian device is to accuse
his opponents of exploiting historical facts when they fashion argu-
ments that cite those facts. And so he hints darkly that the "massacres"
were "freshly rediscovered" during the bicentennial celebration of the
French Revolution; that anti-Utopian sentiment was "helpfully re-
vived" by the Cambodian atrocities; that "the twin Heidegger and de
Man 'scandals' have been carefully orchestrated to delegitimate Derri-
dean deconstruction";20 that the cultural revolution is being seized
upon to discredit Mao. Jameson never explains why building an argu-

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ment by analyzing real events becomes exploitation, and he never hesi-

tates to refer to historical events he finds useful for his own purposes
("always historicize!").
What makes matters worse is that Jameson s epistemology is riddled
with contradictions. On one hand, he wants to have it that Marxism is
a science that recognizes "fundamental realities." But on the other
he wants to pour scorn on epistemological naïveté on the part of peo-
ple who refer to historical accounts "sometimes called 'the facts' " to
" 'prove/ for example, that the French and Russian revolutions accom-
plished very little." The same contradiction is visible when he suddenly
drops the pose of epistemological sophistication to rest his argument on
the primitive and unanalyzed notion of authenticity. Another example
is the discrepancy between his attempt to shock us by asserting that
Nazism and the New Deal are related systems and his righteous indig-
nation over "the networks' truly obsdene coverage of Gorbachev's 1989
visit to Cuba, where Fidel was compared to Ferdinand Marcos!"21 Yet
Nazism and the New Deal have little more in common than their both
being responses to the Great Depression, whereas Castro and Marcos
could easily be juxtaposed as obdurate, aging dictators who were
propped up by the substantial financial support of superpowers, who
installed close relatives in key governmental positions and imprisoned
critics of their regimes, and who avoided at all costs the elections that
might have deprived them of their power.
Although Marxism makes moral as well as intellectual claims, Jame-
son, on the evidence of these books, appears to lack any moral sen-
sibility. His excuses for even the most outrageous behavior of those not
on "the other side" will astonish the reader. For example, he brushes
aside the matter of the savagery of Stalin or Pol Pot with the following:
"What can be 'postmodern about these hoary nightmare images, except
for the depoliticization to which they invite us, is less clear. The history

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of the revolutionary convulsions in question can also be appealed to for

a very different lesson; namely, that violence springs from counter-
revolution first and foremost, indeed, that the most effective form of
counterrevolution lies precisely in this transmission of violence to the
revolutionary process itself."22 In essence, then, Jamesons reply to the
charge that the millions dead in the killing fields of Cambodia, the mass
starvation of the kulaks, and the Stalinist purges—and more—must be
laid at the door of a system that has so often given absolute power to
monsters is as follows: the victims asked for it, and in inviting their own
murder they waged very effective propaganda warfare against Marxist
regimes. But even the rapist who callously says that his victim asked for
it and that she would not have been hurt had she not resisted never has
the gall to blame her as well for his reputation for violence. It would, I
am sure, not impress Jameson if one pointed out that in each of these
cases the mass killings in question took place after the revolution had
consolidated its power and that most of the victims were helpless people
who were not offering "counter-revolutionary violence."
Of all the excuses for Paul de Mans collaborationist (make that
"collaborationist") World War II journalism, Jamesons is probably the
shabbiest: it was "simply a job." Even Nazis who were tried after World
War II did better than this, with their excuse of "Befehl ist Befehl"
(they were just following orders)—they at least insisted that they had
been coerced\yy orders from above. Here, for once, Jameson is out of
step with Stalin, who would never have accepted this defense; Kurt
Waldheim is now his model. He does his best to persuade us that one of
de Man s plainly anti-Semitic articles should be read as a rebuke to anti-
Semites and follows this up by explaining away Heideggers fascism:
Heidegger was " 'politically naive/ as they like to say, but he was cer-
tainly political," and this earns him Jamesons "sneaking admiration." It

i^o
Class and Perfect Egalitarianism

is hard to avoid the conclusion that Jamesons morality works on a

simple principle that is devoid of intellectual content: there are ideo-
logical friends, who can do no wrong, and foes, who can do no right.
For although he never expresses indignation about "blood, torture,
death, and terror" in connection with the twentieth-century examples
of such that are obvious to everyone else, he does so when predicting "a
whole new wave of American military and economic domination of the
world"—and this just when America's global economic position is in
doubt and its defense industry in recession.23 Jameson insists, neverthe-
less, that here he must "simply remind the reader of the obvious."
What distorts Jamesons vision is an extraordinary animus against
America. He speaks wistfully of a "diagnosis of the American misery
whose prescription would be social revolution," of the "rat race of daily
existence," and of the "increasing squalor that daily life in the U.S.
owes to big business and to its unenviable position as the purest form of
commodity and market capitalism functioning anywhere in the world
today." It makes him angry that the overwhelming majority of Ameri-
cans do not see their lives as the miserable existences he knows them to
be, and so for him one of the virtues of Adorno and Horkheimer is their
capacity to "restore the sense of something grim and impending within
the polluted sunshine of the shopping mall—some older classical
European-style sense of doom and crisis."24 This is an alienated, elitist
intellectual with a vengeance: Can Jameson really hope that everyone
will drop their commodities, read Adorno, and become appropriately
miserable so that he will really have been right about them and their
lives after all? Perhaps here we have the key to Jamesons repeated
lament that big business manipulates people and transforms them into
identical consumers, for he, too, would evidently like to control their
minds. The fantasy of the single, centralized multinational corporate

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agenda is only the mirror image of Marxisms desire for conformity and
control: neither does justice to the diversity of human life.
If neither his political thought nor his moral stance offers us any-
thing to admire, what of Jameson as interpreter of literature and cul-
ture? The trouble here is that Jameson is correct, at least with regard to
his own work, when he takes the position that everything depends on
politics, for his criticism is indeed the routine application of his politics
to cultural phenomena. The very considerable problems of the former
automatically become the problems of the latter. Still, they are not the
only problems. On the first page of Signatures of the Visible, for exam-
ple, Jameson tells us that the "visual is essentially pornographic, which is
to say that it has its end in rapt mindless fascination [Films] ask us
to stare at the world as though it were a naked body." Here he follows
the structure of well-known invalid inference. "All pornography in-
volves staring; all staring is visual; therefore all that is visual is por-
nographic" is structurally the same as "All men are mortal; all mortals
must eat; therefore anything that eats is a man." Because looking is not
necessarily staring, and staring is not necessarily either mindless or
sexual, the equation of the visual and the pornographic is arbitrary.
More arbitrary assertion follows when Jameson says that a tourist tak-
ing a snapshot is making the landscape into a commodity and thus into
personal property: Don't Marxists also take photographs of people or
places to remember them by?
When this loose argumentation is turned on a film, the results
achieve very little. Take Jamesons reading of Jaws. His interpretation is
built on his view of the three main characters Brody (played by Roy
Scheider), Hooper (Richard Dreyfus), and Quint (Robert Shaw). This
is its core: "The content of the partnership between Hooper and Brody
projected by the film may be specified socially and politically, as the
allegory of an alliance between the forces of law-and-order and the new

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technocracy of the multinational corporations: an alliance which must

be cemented, not merely by its fantasized triumph over the ill-defined
menace of the shark itself, but above all by the indispensable precondi-
tion of the effacement ofthat more traditional image of an older Amer-
ica which must be eliminated from historical consciousness and social
memory before the new power system takes its place."25 The death of
Quint, Jameson has just explained, is the "symbolic destruction of an
older America—the America of small business ... but also the America
of the New Deal and the crusade against Nazism, the older America of
the depression and the war and of the heyday of classical liberalism."
Quint is associated with the American past, we are told, "by way of his
otherwise gratuitous reminiscences about World War II and the cam-
paign in the Pacific."
Anyone who remembers the film can easily see how badly Jameson
distorts it. Quint s reminiscences in the Pacific Ocean are of sharks
circling and picking off his comrades in arms while they float in the
water, waiting to be rescued. What Jameson calls gratuitous reminis-
cences provide the central motivation for Quints place in the film
as the obsessed shark hunter. His death is that of an Ahab, consumed
with a desire for revenge and punished for it; it has nothing to do with
the demise of the American past. Jamesons political interpretation of
Quint is so arbitrary that it makes the bloodthirsty shark killer into a
classical liberal. The two other characters are similarly misinterpreted.
The Hooper of the film makes a familiar kind of contrast with Quint:
he is the young, inexperienced, intellectual academic, as opposed to the
shrewd, worldly-wise, practical older man. As such, he is about as far
removed from the idea of multinational corporations as one could
imagine. Nor will Brody fit Jamesons stereotype of law and order; he
has moved to the island to escape his role as a tough, big-city cop; there
he becomes an anguished, liberal public servant, not a repressive tyrant.

¿33
 Class and Perfect Egalitarianism

Jameson's allegory thus projects Marxist categories of thought indis-

criminately into areas where there is nothing to support them. He
concludes that Jaws is an "excellent example ... of ideological manip-
ulation" and of tapping "genuine social and historical content."26 The
ideological manipulation, however, is his own, not the films.
There is more of the same throughout these volumes. Van Gogh's A
Pair of Boots shows, according to Jameson, "the whole object world
of agricultural misery, of stark rural poverty, and the whole rudimen-
tary human world of backbreaking peasant toil, a world reduced to its
most brutal and menaced, primitive and marginalized state." Again,
this has nothing to do with the painting, which shows a strong, ex-
ceptionally well-made pair of boots—the kind that the abjectly poor
certainly never owned. They were, in reality, van Goghs own boots
(though Jameson evidently never knew this), a fact that makes non-
sense of his commentary.27
The Godfather, for Jameson, is not really about the Mafia but (again
predictably) about "American capitalism in its most systematized and
computerized, dehumanized, 'multinational' and corporate form."
Jamesons obsessions blind him once more to how the notion of a
family and its degeneration, for example, is explored in the Godfather
films. Kafka is also subjected to Jameson's routine interpretation: "The
pleasures of Kafka, the pleasures of the nightmare in Kafka, then come
from the way in which the archaic livens up routine and boredom, and
an old-fashioned juridical and bureaucratic paranoia enters the empty
workweek of the corporate age and makes something at least happen!"
Jameson finds his idée fixe in architecture too: "This latest mutation in
space—postmodern hyperspace—has finally succeeded in transcending
the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself. . . . This
alarming disjunction point between the body and its built environment
... can itself stand as the symbol and analogon of... the incapacity of

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our minds, at least at present, to map the great global multinational

and decentered communicational network in which we find ourselves
caught as individual subjects."28
All these different phenomena are emptied of their individual con-
tent so that they can be made to say the same thing, again and again.
Jameson thinks that he is thereby enlarging their meaning: "The ste-
reotypical characterization of such enlargement as reductive remains a
never-ending source of hilarity."29 Let me spell out, therefore, what it
means to say that this habit is reductive: it reduces a diverse world of
endlessly varying objects and books to the same repetitive issue, regard-
less of whether the issue is there or not. To do so is to end up not with
more but with much less content.
Jamesons work on the postmodern is what most attracts admirers. In
Postmodernism: On The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, the most
ambitious of his works, his analysis suffers from the same problems that
I have already noted (as the subtitle suggests), but it also has a weakness
all its own. To identify something past by referring to the time of its
origin with words like new or modern not only avoids a more useful
descriptive title but also eventually leaves us with a reference to some-
thing that is actually old. The present time for the "New Critics" is now
half a century ago, which means that the word new has become a
nuisance. The word postmodern compounds this problem by hanging
on to a present long past and then pointing indefinitely forward from
it. (Even worse, the term post-postmodernism is now sometimes heard.)
Surely, this compounding of vagueness suggests that a descriptive term
should have been used in the first place.
The primary duty of anyone who writes on postmodernism is to
clear up the confusion by explaining what it is, but Jameson shirks
that duty. His first chapter of Postmodernism begins with an exceed-
ingly strange explanation: "The last few years have been marked by an

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inverted millenarianism in which premonitions of the future, cata-

strophic or redemptive, have been replaced by senses of the ends of this
or that (the end of ideology, art or social class; the Crisis of Leninism,*
social democracy, or the welfare state, etc., etc.); taken together, all of
these perhaps constitute what is increasingly called postmodernism."
This definition essentially makes doubts about socialism and Utopian-
ism the key to postmodernism. In Late Marxism, however, we are told
that postmodernism is "the fulfillment and abolition of liberalism as
well, which, no longer tenable as an ideology and a value . . . can
function more effectively after its own death as an ideology." Further
attempts at explanation occur in Postmodernism: he identifies postmod-
ern culture as the expression of "a whole new wave of American military
and economic domination" and tells us that postmodernism must be
thought of as a historical, not stylistic, phenomenon. There are still
other passages: "Postmodernism is what you have when the moderniza-
tion process is complete and nature is gone for good"; and "Postmod-
ernism, postmodern consciousness, may then amount to not much
more than theorizing its own condition of possibility, which consists
primarily in the sheer enumeration of changes and modifications."30
The confusion and incoherence are endless. Each attempt at defini-
tion could be criticized individually. To take just one of them: it is a
mistake to take "stylistic" and "historical" as fundamentally different
kinds of definitions, because styles are historical phenomena too, and
they cannot be referred to without describing them. To say that some-
thing occurs in a certain historical context presupposes that one can
identify what is being spoken of. But analysis of each of these attempts
would not get us to the root of the problem, which lies in Jamesons
logic: he has no conception of the difference between the uses of "is"
that define and those that simply inform, that is, of the difference

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between "the Book of Kells is a ninth-century Irish gospel book" and

"the Book of Kells is the subject of a new book from Blackwell." That is
why his attempts to identify and define postmodernism are jumbled
together with other kinds of interpretive or historical statements.
At this point we must face a puzzle. Jamesons political thought is
rigid, narrow, and derivative; his argumentation is poor, and the con-
cepts he uses ill defined; and his literary and cultural interpretation
amounts to little more than the indiscriminate imposition of Marxist
ideas on texts and objects that have no real place for them. What, then,
is the basis of the extraordinary vogue that he now enjoys? I see only
one possible answer to this question. The timing (1981) of Jameson's
The Political Unconsciouswzs exquisitely suited to the developing mood
of literary studies in this country. His "everything is 'in the last analysis*
political" was exactly what the rising tide of race-gender-class critics
needed to legitimate their exclusive focus on oppression as the basic
theme of all literature.
As we have seen above, the justifiable statement that everything has a
political dimension does not imply the quite different and wholly false
statement that politics is the deepest and most important consideration
in every situation.31 But there is still another confusion buried in this
claim that everything is in the last analysis political. One of the essays
included in The Ideologies of Theory ("Pleasure: A Political Issue") ex-
pands upon this view of the political as a category fundamental to all
others and in so doing spells out some of its consequences. Here Jame-
son says that "the right to a specific pleasure, to a specific enjoyment of
the potentialities of the material body . . . must always in one way or
another also be able to stand as a figure for the transformation of social
relations as a whole." That is, pleasure (if it is not to be mere hedonism)
"must always be allegorical"—it must be capable of being "taken as the

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 Class and Perfect Egalitarianism

figure for Utopia in general, and for the systemic revolutionary transfor-
mation of society as a whole."32
Again, this is tailor-made for race-gender-class criticism: our re-
sponse to and enjoyment of literature can now only be associated with
political liberation, and that will justify narrowing criticism to a single
issue with its three variants. But this argument contains a fatal flaw.
Suppose that we reached Jamesons Utopia: what then? It would be
natural to assume that when his politics has done its work (assuming,
for the moment, that the real Marxist transformation is indeed possi-
ble), we shall have reached a state where life s pleasures are at last justly
distributed. The trouble is that if we accept Jamesons model of plea-
sure, what we think of as pleasures could not then be counted as such,
for only those that facilitate the coming social transformation can be
genuine. And what this reductio ad absurdum shows is that the politi-
cal cannot be an independent category of value to which all others are
subservient. As far as Jamesons concern with it goes, politics is about
the way life s pleasures are regulated and distributed—and to that extent
it is a means, not an end in itself. The enjoyment of power itself is the
only exception to this rule, but Marxism can hardly admit that power is
a pleasure at all, for in the coming Utopia no one may wield power over
anyone else.
Jameson s influence evidently derives neither from the power of his
argument nor from the moral force of his position but only from his
having furnished what seems to those who use it a serviceable under-
pinning for the victim-centered criticism that has overtaken university
literature departments; yet that underpinning consists in a clearly falla-
cious argument. Here lurks a profound irony; for in the event that we
were to agree that a political analysis was the most fundamental and
important analysis of all, we should be committed immediately to
seeking out the most sophisticated, learned, and intelligent political

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Class and Perfect Egalitarianism

analysis. The field of political science itself would beckon, and one
wonders if Jameson and the crude political thought dear to contempo-
rary academic literary critics would survive in the process.
In 1991 the Modern Language Association of America awarded the
James Russell Lowell Prize, which honors "an outstanding literary or
linguistic study," to Jameson for his Postmodernism. This action tells
us a great deal both about Jamesons enormous authority in college
literature programs across the nation and about the kind of work that
is now held in esteem by the MLA. Its message could not have been
more depressing for those who still expect humanistic scholarship to be
judged by the intelligence and humane values it reflects, not by its
conformity to a confused, contradictory and, ultimately, inhumane
radical politics.33

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6 Activism
and
Knowledge

Most of us who teach and do research in universities and colleges still

think of ourselves as part of an institution that serves the society around
us in a nonpartisan way; if political considerations were to drive either
teaching or research, results that proved politically useful in the short
term would crowd out more fundamental thought. This assumption is
now challenged by race-gender-class scholars who argue that all schol-
arship is implicated in social philosophies of one kind or another and
that honesty demands an open admission of this. Political engagement
should be neither resisted, they say, nor apologized for. Because there is
no such thing as objective scholarship, we must expect it to serve
political ends. Bias is inevitable and must therefore be unobjectionable.
It is easy to show that these arguments are mistaken, but before we

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examine their logic, we should first look at their practical conse-

quences, because the consequences constitute the most powerful argu-
ments against them. They suggest that the arguments for this view must
be wrong; all that remains is to find the logical errors that lead to such
dangerous results.
First, what would happen if research were judged by the political
desirability of the results rather than by the soundness of the pro-
cedures and thought processes? When a researcher announces a star-
tling new scientific finding or an original view of an important issue in
human history, the first thing that colleagues examine is the steps by
which the conclusion was reached. If those steps withstand scrutiny, the
new finding stands. If, however, everyone were to respond first and
foremost to the desirability of the result and if researchers knew that a
powerful political force would always applaud certain results and attack
others, the reasoning and evidence that led to the result would receive
less attention. Over time, research would gradually become more prone
to leaps of faith and misinterpretation of evidence.
Second, the one indispensable factor in first-rate research is intellec-
tual curiosity—a willingness to follow wherever the facts and the argu-
ment lead. Research that is guided by political and social activism lacks
this crucial element of intellectual freedom. The mind is not free to
explore because it must go in certain preset directions. Under these
conditions, research degenerates into a search for more reasons to be-
lieve what was already believed. A passionate commitment to a political
standpoint forces the researcher to see only what he or she wants to see.
Third, strong political commitments tend to keep research to a low
level of intellectual complexity. Political goals involve specific, finite
courses of action. The need to act in the real world—to choose this
course rather than that—requires that we simplify a complex of many
different factors in order to make a specific choice among the few

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 Activism and Knowledge

realistic possibilities. Research, on the other hand, requires that sim-

plification be resisted; it requires a mind-set that is alive to the full
complexity of situations and that avoids the simplification inevitably
required by action. Action is a blunt instrument compared to analysis,
and if action rules over analysis, the quality of the analysis will suffer. A
corollary of this point is that research depends on careful formulation
of issues, whereas practical politics tends instead toward tendentious
oversimplification. Politics tends to slogans, whereas research cannot
tolerate them. That is why bona fide research is often not useful for
political purposes: it is too full of hedged conclusions.
Fourth, when a researcher has arrived at what seems to be a viable
explanation of the phenomenon being studied, he or she must next
look at other conceivable explanations and weigh as dispassionately as
possible the case for those alternatives. Here the activist researcher will
be unreliable. When strong moral concerns become central in research,
powerful emotional factors interfere with the dispassionate search for
answers. If a politically desirable explanation looks promising, the re-
searcher will be unable to perform the crucial task of scrutinizing the
case for alternatives. A researcher must try to believe for a moment that
his or her preferred explanation is wrong so as to look hard at the
arguments for others. That is a psychological impossibility for the
social activist.
Fifth, researchers need the clash of opposing viewpoints to help
them advance. They may be encouraged by intellectual friends, but
what they most need are hostile critics—researchers who are motivated
to find the weak points in their work. Such critiques allow them to
adjust and refine their work; their intellectual enemies keep them intel-
lectually honest and sharp. Only a hostile critic can push them the last
inch of the way to a solution that works even better than the one they
were prematurely satisfied with. Researchers don't like criticism any

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Activism and Knowledge

more than anyone else does, but they know that without it they will die
intellectually.
Here the activist researcher has a crushing weakness: he regards those
who oppose him as immoral people whose lack of moral worth is the
reason for their disagreement. Because nothing is to be learned from
such people, he allows himself the dangerous luxury of believing that
counterarguments need not be heeded because of their tainted source.
There is nothing left to check a slide into slackness, self-indulgence,
and wishful thinking and no pressure to refine and rethink.
Adverse criticism, however unwelcome, is indispensable to the
health of any intellectual enterprise; without it, weaknesses endure
instead of being exposed and discarded. It is a necessary discipline.
Hostile critics are like predators. They harass their prey, but they also
pick off the weaker elements in a species and keep it strong; without
them, the species degenerates. Intellectual enemies also pick off weak
and unconvincing elements in research and so make it stronger. Politics
is quite unlike research in this respect; in politics, people who oppose
you stand in the way of what you want to do, but in research contexts
opponents ultimately help.
Sixth and last, in political contexts argument is commonly oppor-
tunistic. By opportunistic, I mean that arguments are deployed accord-
ing to the needs of the moment: politicians can often be heard making
an argument today that is the reverse of what they were saying yester-
day. Democratic politicians are for congressional hearings and special
prosecutors when Republicans sins are involved, but not when a Dem-
ocratic administration will be placed at risk, and vice versa. In research,
on the other hand, consistency is indispensable. Arguments must al-
ways be principled, never opportunistic, because research needs results
that will stand the test of time, not short term fixes that serve the need
of a present situation. In politically driven research, even the most

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 Activism and Knowledge

obvious contradictions may be ignored if both sides of an opposing set

of views are used to support a politically desirable conclusion.
In theory, then, politics is inherently likely to corrupt research in
many different ways. Has this actually happened in research inspired by
race, gender, and class? Let us look at some typical results that show
each of these six factors at work.
First, the emphasis on results instead of process. Here there is no
better example than Peggy Mclntoshs theory that men think "ver-
tically" and women "laterally."1 How was the research from which this
idea is derived conducted? The answer is that there was none; Mcln-
toshs having thought up the idea was the full extent of the process. She
never sat down to devise a program of observation that would either
verify that she was right or modify the idea if she were proved wrong.
Another standard procedural question would be: How carefully are
these contrasted behavior patterns defined? More problems are then
revealed, for several mutually inconsistent definitions are offered. Verti-
cal thinking is true/false thinking, it is male thinking, it is aggressive,
competitive, hierarchic, and so on. Lateral thinking is similarly loose in
definition: it is based on empathy, cooperation, collaboration, respect
for others, it is female, it is peaceful, it places one in "a decent relation-
ship with the invisible elements of the universe."
The use of the distinction right/wrong is said to characterize vertical
thinking, but because lateral/vertical is also an example of right as
opposed to wrong thinking—lateral is right, vertical is wrong—the the-
ory suffers from a fatal contradiction at its very center. The only way to
determine that lateral thinking is right is to use vertical thinking, which
is wrong. Therefore, the act of choosing to think laterally is vertical
thinking. The theory thus requires us to abandon hierarchic thinking
and at the same time to use it in pronouncing the superiority of the

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theory. And so the only real basis for this pair of terms is that everything
Mclntosh likes is assigned to the one term, and everything she does not
like is assigned to the other. This has nothing whatever to do with
research; it is a confused and contradictory bundle of prejudices.
What we have here is not an aberration but a typical example of what
happens when the validity of research is judged by results rather than
by process. Ideas that lack both empirical support and internal consis-
tency were nevertheless so politically welcomed by feminists—evidently
because they exalt women at the expense of men—that they were vir-
tually adopted by the American Association of University Women
(AAUW) at its fall 1992 conference.2 (Whether it is really in the politi-
cal interests of women to maintain that they can neither prioritize nor
judge what is right and wrong is another matter.)
Race-gender-class work shows over and over again what will happen
in a results-oriented research climate. For example, Judith Hermans
Trauma and Recovery equates the terrors of war for men with the "do-
mestic captivity" of women, a situation in which their subordinate
position is enforced by male violence; Anne Campbell's Men, Women,
and Aggression argues that the key to the difference between men and
women with regard to violence and aggressiveness is not testosterone
but socially constructed attitudes, men having been socialized to use
violence to control women; Susan Bordos Unbearable Weight claims
that "the widespread fear of women s fat is a symptom of the fear of
women s power"; and Robbie Davis-Floyd s Birth as an American Rite of
Passage, asserts that doctors and hospitals represent a sinister conspiracy
against women that aims, as a reviewer puts it, "to integrate birth—a
female, sexual, intimate, unpredictable and natural process—into a
misogynistic and technocratic society whose central tenets include 'the
necessity for cultural control of natural processes, the untrustworthiness

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 Activism and Knowledge

of nature and the associated weakness and inferiority of the female

body, the validity of patriarchy, the superiority of science and technol-
ogy, and the importance of institutions and machines.' "3
These ideas cannot stand up to even a moment s reflection. Equating
the horrible violence of war with the life of the average housewife is
absurd, as is equating an aversion to obesity with a fear of power. The
notion that men are encouraged to use violence against women in our
society ignores the fact that men who are known to hit women are de-
spised. As for the conspiracy of modern medicine to control women and
nature in childbirth: that control is responsible for the fact that on aver-
age women now live seven years longer than men, a differential that did
not exist some seventy years ago because of frequent deaths from child-
birth.4 (Nature can indeed be a bit "untrustworthy") Yet in spite of
their patently indefensible claims, all these books were warmly wel-
comed by feminist reviewers in the New York Times Book Review,5 ob-
viously because each one finds another way in which women can be
alleged to be victimized by men. The desirability of the result is the driv-
ing force in the research, and corrupted research is the consequence.
These examples also illustrate the second and third features of politi-
cized research—the stifling of intellectual curiosity because of a pre-
determined conclusion and the reduction of intellectual complexity.6
In the wider world, there is a considerable variety in relations between
men and women and an endless fascination with them on both sides.
There is thus much here to be thought about. But if we narrow the
focus of our attention to encompass only what is skewed in favor of
men, intellectual curiosity is stunted. And if the notion of women as
victims is a required conclusion, any complex and interesting conclu-
sions are excluded. A researcher who knows in advance she must always
reach the conclusion that women are victimized is not engaged in
genuine research.

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Activism and Knowledge

An inability to consider alternative explanations is likely to be found

whenever a strong emotional commitment to one kind of solution
exists, A good example can be seen in the debate over gender bias in
schools. David and Myra Sadker claim that girls, but not boys, experi-
ence a sharp drop in self-esteem around the time that they start junior
high school.7 Their interpretation of this alleged drop is that at this age
girls are getting the message that they are less valuable than boys. But
another possible explanation comes to mind: girls reach puberty before
boys, and they do so in a way that is arguably more obvious and more
traumatic. This change in self-esteem occurs exactly at the onset of
puberty for most girls. The alternative explanation, which must at least
be considered, is that the drop in self-esteem, if it exists,8 may be related
to the disorientation, uncertainty, anxiety, or self-consciousness accom-
panying this important physical and psychological change in girls'
lives. But the Sadkers never mention this interpretation. Evidently,
their vested interest in evidence of girls' victimhood ruled out any
scrutiny of alternative possibilities.
Perhaps the most prominent of all the shortcomings of politicized
research is the refusal to accept the clash of different views as a discipline
that keeps research healthy. Race-gender-class scholars see any attempt
to challenge their work as the result not of intellectual differences, from
which something can be learned, but of moral failure or political op-
position.9 Their critics, they believe, are simply serving their interests as
well as those of their race, gender, or class. Critics of affirmative action
or Afrocentrism are dismissed as racists,10 and more generally, oppo-
nents of the race-gender-class agenda are dismissed as conservatives.11
From the beginning, feminist research implicitly asked for, and was
de facto granted, a special status in that to attack the research would be
to attack women. Neither those who demanded this special status nor
those who let them have it seemed to realize that this privileged posi-

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 Activism and Knowledge

tion would effectively deprive feminist research of what it needed to

stay intellectually viable: the kind of criticism that purges intellectual
weaknesses. A more genuine sympathy (as opposed to a wish simply to
avoid conflict) with feminist research would have dictated a different
course of action. To be sure, bitter feminist hostility to any questioning
of their work played its part in inhibiting criticism, but that cannot
excuse the acquiescence of faculty and administrators who should have
known better than to allow this special status to arise.
Inevitably, this determination not to take criticism by outsiders se-
riously has led to a crisis of confidence in feminist research, now widely
considered to be more aberration than solid work. Research carried out
in protected enclaves is bound to be unfit for the challenges of the real
world when questions eventually begin to arise. This results in a high
level of anxiety that has led to some extraordinary actions. Among these
was a startling announcement in the Modern Language Association of
America Newsletter of * "New Project on Antifeminist Harassment." It
was explained that intellectual harassment of feminists was "connected
to, but different from, sexual harassment." Examples of that harass-
ment were "easy dismissal of feminist writers, journals, and presses";
"automatic deprecation of feminist work as 'narrow,' 'partisan,' and
'lacking in rigor'"; and "malicious humor directed against feminists." If
the MLA had its way, any serious criticism of feminism was now to
be considered harassment—a presumably punishable offense. A letter
writer in the next issue of the Newsletter pointed to the irony in the
situation: feminists whose stock in trade had been the easy dismissal
and mockery of white males and indeed of entire intellectual traditions
(the examples he cited included Gloria Hull s easy dismissal of the
modes of white male Western thought as "bankrupt") now primly
objecting to behavior far milder than their own when it was turned on

14*
Activism and Knowledge

them.12 The writer might well have said: let she who has never uttered a
sweeping, dismissive judgment cast the first stone.
The feminist classroom soon produced something similar for femi-
nist teaching. Bright undergraduates, seeing how threadbare much
feminist thought had become, began to speak up in class. Feminists
were unprepared for challenges in classrooms that had hitherto been
rather docile and began to denounce this questioning as disruptive
behavior on the part of reactionary students. In reality, the students
were just doing what they were supposed to do: ask probing questions.
Once again, the focus of this response to challenge was not how to
use it to educational advantage by bringing out different facets of a
question but how to muzzle it. The director of the Center for Research
on Women at Memphis State University, Lynn Weber Canon, pro-
duced a set of "Ground Rules" for her class and required all students
entering the class to sign them.13 Students had to acknowledge that
"oppression (i.e., racism, sexism, classism) exists." The rules in effect
forced students to accept in advance the teacher's values, to share her
beliefs about matters both of fact and of opinion, and to refrain from
asking any fundamental questions. Students had to promise specifically
not to ask questions about whether women were victims (or in what
sense they were victims) and whether the class should presuppose polit-
ical commitment to the instructors notion of the "cause." Education
and free inquiry were being replaced by indoctrination. The rules were
a clear attempt to violate the students' academic freedom, which should
immediately have been condemned by the instructors institution and
her colleagues. But that did not happen; the rules actually spread to
Womens Studies departments on many other campuses.
Just how far this circling of the wagons can go is shown in the recent
national "feminist assessment" of Womens Studies programs, which

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 Activism and Knowledge

resulted in two volumes published joindy by the Association of Ameri-

can Colleges and the national Women's Studies Association.14 The
project director, Caryn McTighe Musil, candidly explains that it was
inspired by the widespread criticism of those programs. Reluctant at
first to allow any such evaluation to take place because "assessment" was
a term associated with "external agencies with highly suspect motives,"
Ms. Musil describes her gradual acceptance of the idea. She proudly
gives the first volume the tide: The Courage to Question, in effect asking
her reader to admire the bravery of feminists who did not shrink from a
searching probe of their programs. But what was actually done to
justify this self-congratulation?
What kind of independent agency did Musil ask to evaluate Worn-
ens Studies? Would it be composed of a random sample of academic
people? Would it ensure diversity of viewpoint—say, some men and
some women, some of each being sympathetic to feminism and some
not? Or would the task be given to an outside agency that would make
those decisions itself? And how was the comparison of the intellectual
quality of Women's Studies programs with that of other academic pro-
grams to be undertaken—what parameters of comparison would be
chosen?
Even someone who already harbored a suspicion that there might be
some attempt to load the dice in favor of Women's Studies would have
been astonished by what the assessment actually involved. This exercise
that was to display the "courage to question" of these brave women did
not concern itself with such questions at all. The procedure was simple:
there was to be no evaluation by an outside agency and no involvement
of anyone who was not strongly committed to Women's Studies! In this
context, chutzpah would perhaps have been a more appropriate word
than courage.
How could such a decision be justified? Joan Shapiro, an assessment

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Activism and Knowledge

team member, tells us that "feminist assessment is decentered." That is,

"it begins to deconstruct the usual 'outside-in' or stringent vertical hier-
archy to create a more open, varied, and web-like structure. It avoids an
'outsider* or more dominant, powerful, and seemingly objective force
determining what questions should be asked and how they should be
framed. It also avoids an attempt to meet some abstract notion of excel-
lence."15 If this had really been an intellectually serious attempt to avoid
a tired, traditional procedure, then presumably the avoidance of the no-
tion of "outsider" would have been matched by an equal avoidance and
deconstruction of the notion of "insider." It was not, the proof being
that it is possible to describe what took place with perfect simplicity in
traditional terms. The insiders did the job themselves.
In spite of the attempt to invoke the sophisticated aura of decon-
struction, the reality was that the usefulness and intellectual integrity of
Women's Studies as a field was to be assessed by the leaders and instiga-
tors of the programs themselves. As a result, The Courage to Question
turned into a volume that completely excluded serious questioning; it
consisted only of individual chapters describing seven campus Wom-
en s Studies programs, written by the leaders of those very programs.
Shapiro formulated the "Guiding Principles of Feminist Assessment"
that were to inform the individual chapters.16 These include Principle
6, "Feminist assessment approaches should be compatible with feminist
activist beliefs"; Principle 7, "Feminist assessment is heavily shaped
by the power of feminist pedagogy"; and Principle 8, "Feminist assess-
ment is based on a body of feminist scholarship and feminist research
methodology." In other words, the only perspective that will be allowed
is ours; we will make the rules, and they will be written so that we
cannot lose.
These principles are rather like the Ground Rules for the classroom:
the price of admission is advance acceptance of everything feminists do

W
 Activism and Knowledge

and say and the promise not to ask serious questions. This may seem to
clash with Principle i, "Feminist assessment questions almost every-
thing related to evaluation," but lest you think that means what it
says, the following will set you straight: "Feminist assessment is open
to questioning how assessment has previously been carried out." It
is certainly ingenious to borrow in this way the language of open-
mindedness to justify its absence, but what this really amounts to is
a declaration that the process will bear no resemblance to anything
that could conceivably be thought of as assessment. For what is to be
questioned—or rather, rejected outright—are the notions that no indi-
vidual should be the sole judge of her own cause and that assessment
must be performed by disinterested people who have not already de-
cided all the important issues in their favor. Evaluation is not ques-
tioned here, it is abandoned.
Adding to the never-never-land quality of this situation was the fact
that Musil then boasted in traditional terms of what she had done. In
an interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education, she said: "I want
critics of Women s Studies to have to verify their claims in the same way
we've sought to give some hard evidence on our side for what is really
happening."17 The deconstruction of traditional evaluation has now
been dropped, and Musil speaks of hard evidence as if she had indeed
mounted a traditional evaluation and as if the mere opinions of de-
voted enthusiasts could count as such. Yet the Chronicles Carolyn
Mooney allowed this double-talk to pass without adverse comment,
and the venerable American Association of Colleges, which should
have known better, supported this meaningless exercise with a research
grant, publication costs and, more important, its imprimatur.
The intellectually weakening effects of the exclusion of contrary
opinion are bound to be felt most when new fields are created in which
virtually everyone has the same political outlook—for example, Wom-

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en's Studies and Black Studies. A number of recent incidents show that
these new departments have become enclaves that shield their members
from different points of view. A white professor who had taught black
history for many years was suddenly a target of protests and sit-ins by
black students demanding that "black experience" be required for the
position. Absent here was the appropriately academic notion that a
different perspective, one afforded by distance from that experience,
might also be useful. A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Educa-
tion noted many recent incidents of a similar kind.18 And at an AAUW
conference, a self-styled male feminist was attacked and bitterly de-
nounced as a womb envier but barely put up a fight in response.19
As an English-speaking student of German culture, I have been
involved in essentially this kind of argument throughout my academic
life. Credible departments of German language and literature combine
the intímate knowledge of native Germans with the outside perspective
of non-Germans; each contributes something that the other cannot,
and both are needed. On occasion, we have heard the claim that those
with native experience should be given preference in hiring, but such
an attitude has generally been recognized as a parochial view that
would degrade the quality of thought and scholarship. Sadly, this hith-
erto largely despised argument threatens to prevail completely in the
context of race and gender. The notion that one might see the experi-
ence of a victim group in a broader perspective is evidently anathema to
many race-gender-class scholars, who perhaps do not wish to have their
focus shifted from moral outrage to intellectual understanding.
The sixth and last of the damaging features of politicized research
is the opportunistic use of argument to support whatever the mo-
ment seems to need, regardless of overall consistency. Race-gender-class
critics routinely use arguments in one place that they cheerfully contra-
dict in another. Sweeping normative judgments about the oppression

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of women and the absolute evil of patriarchy coexist with the view that
all ideologies are socially constructed. Cultural relativism is embraced
to advance the case for non-Western cultures but abandoned when it
might require respect for Western society. Because consistency will not
produce the desired results, it is abandoned. A consistent cultural rela-
tivism would not allow the expression of anger directed at the United
States, so it can only be used sporadically; and a consistent normative
judgment on sexism and racism would make the West actually look
good, so that, too, can only be applied as needed.
The same holds for the race-gender-class combination of Marxism
and deconstruction. Whether one considers what I have called the
randomness-of-meaning strain in deconstruction (meaning is infinite)
or the reversal-of-meaning strain (assertions contain their own op-
posite), neither is compatible with Marxism.20 When Marx attacked
capitalism, he said something definite (thereby excluding the random-
ness strain) and what he said can certainly not be construed as covert
praise of capitalism (which excludes the reversal strain).
Similar leaps between pairs of contradictory positions abound. Gen-
der stereotypes are reprehensible—but women are more nurturing.
Cultural stereotypes are objectionable—but Westerners are sexist and
racist. Hate speech must be stopped—but white males must be de-
nounced. Segregation is evil—but blacks need separate dormitories and
clubs. These contradictions and many more like them are seen every
day on college campuses, and they illustrate a sad absence of principled
discussion.
Imagine, for example, a principled discussion of racism and racial
discrimination. The first step in an academic discussion would be to
confront the question of whether racial discrimination consists in any
act motivated by racial preference (say, a black man marrying a black
woman) or whether it refers instead to a specific subset of those acts,

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and if so, what subset. If, as most people would agree, only a subset
should be stigmatized as racial discrimination, the crucial question is
how that subset is to be defined. But even though the modern campus
is obsessed with the notion of race, I have never heard of any such
discussion, anywhere. When a great deal of energy goes into denounc-
ing racism and very little into defining and analyzing it, we see the
triumph of politics over academic inquiry.
The most dramatic sign of the political corruption of intellectual
inquiry is the bullying and the thuggery often visible in intellectual
exchanges. On many occasions recently an exchange of letters to the
editor of a scholarly journal has degenerated into organized warfare.
Having lost an argument on its merits, an individual will often attempt
to beat into submission the scholar who has gotten the better of the
argument by calling upon supporters to overwhelm the opponent by
the sheer weight of numbers. Logic and evidence are met not in kind
but with brute force and intimidation. Here are three recent cases.
In 1988 Richard Levin wrote an article about the systematic prob-
lems of feminist criticism of Shakespeare, in which he showed that a
zeal to see gender issues in the plays had led a number of critics to
distort them. He argued, for example, that Harry Bergers diagnosis of
Macbeths "machismo" conception of manhood in Malcolms urging
the grief-stricken Macduffto "dispute it [i.e., the death of his family]
like a man" conveniently ignores Macduff s reply, in which quite a
different concept of manhood is expressed: "I shall do so; But I must
also feel it as a man."21
The response to this article was an angry letter signed by no fewer
than twenty-four feminist critics who attacked Levin for failing "to
understand the serious concerns about inequality and injustice that
have engendered feminist analyses of literature."22 The letter insisted,
in general terms, on the achievements of feminist criticism but avoided

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the specific issues and examples that Levin had raised. It concluded
with a nasty ad hominem attack: "Levin has made a successful aca-
demic career by using the reductive techniques of this essay to bring the
same predictable charges indiscriminately against all varieties of con-
temporary criticism"; further, it scolded the journal (PMLA) for having
chosen to publish the essay. In this case, personal abuse and the sheer
weight of numbers substituted for argument, evidence, and analysis. A
later letter writer accurately described the multi-signature letter as one
in which "some of the critics skewered in his essay ganged up to attack
him."23 Levins reply demonstrated the poverty of his assailants' logic
with embarrassing ease.24
The second case is that of Thomas Sheehan, who in reviewing a
book on Heidegger in the New York Review of Books criticized Jacques
Derridas attempt to suppress the book, an attempt apparently moti-
vated by the fact that material in the book relating to Heideggers
Nazism was embarrassing to Derrida.25 This was a sensitive matter so
soon after the revelation of Paul de Mans pro-Nazi writings in Belgium
during World War II, which Derrida had foolishly and unconvincingly
sought to defend.26 In a letter Derrida denied that he had tried to
suppress the book, but Sheehan cited convincing documentary evi-
dence that he had done so. Another exchange ensued in the next issue,
but it was by now quite obvious that Derrida had indeed tried to
suppress the book. As Sheehan later wrote, summing up the point of
the whole episode: Derrida was clearly embarrassed "at having the
whole business exposed, both his suppression of the book (which he
had hoped to keep secret) and his foolish blunder in lying about it in
the New York Review of Books. "2? But having lost the argument, Der-
rida now summoned his troops. The next issue of the magazine carried
an unpleasant personal attack on Sheehan signed by twenty-five promi-
nent scholars. As before, the letter avoided the real issue (Derridas

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Activism and Knowledge

attempt to suppress a book and his having lied about it) to mount a
broad attack on Sheehan, charging that his "vindictiveness contributes
to a climate in which provocation and slander increasingly take the
place of serious, public discussion." The signers included a number of
individuals who had already embarrassed themselves by trying to de-
fend Paul de Man (Hillis Miller, Jonathan Culler, Fredric Jameson) and
who therefore evidently shared Derridas anxiety, though there were
others from whom one might have expected better judgment. Once
again, logic and evidence having failed, an unscrupulous use was made
of the weight of numbers to punish and intimidate.
The third case involves Christina Sommers, who, having written
several articles critical of the arguments of feminist philosophers, found
that a covert attempt was being made to discredit her and to persuade
the Atlantic Monthly not to publish an article it had commissioned her
to write. Sommers published a letter in the Proceedings of the American
Philosophical Association exposing what seemed to her unprofessional
behavior.28 The next issue contained replies by all the primary actors in
the situation and a convincing response by Sommers. Once again,
however, those who could not carry the day with logic and evidence
summoned their legions. This time there was not just one mulrisigna-
ture letter but three. In all other respects, however, the pattern was the
same. The letters made no real contribution to the substance of the
previous argument, instead defending feminism in general terms and
denouncing its enemies.
The prevalence of these episodes in which scholars organize them-
selves into gangs shows how academic life is degraded when po-
litical commitments become central to it: minds become too closed
to inquire.
What I have tried to show in this chapter is a strong causal link
between the politicization of universities and the decline in the quality

*57
 Activism and Knowledge

of their scholarly endeavors. The well-known horror stories of political

correctness are not aberrations but an integral part of the race-gender-
class phenomenon on college campuses. They are warning signs of an
unhealthy condition that has arisen because a great principle—that of
knowledge for its own sake—has been compromised.
Race-gender-class scholars argue that political interests are every-
where and that it is naive to think that they are not present in the
universities. But Peter Washington has answered this point by turning
it upon itself: it is precisely because political interests are everywhere
that we need a place that cultivates—not to perfection but to the max-
imum possible extent—detached, rational inquiry.29 That place is the
academy. The freedom of scholars to follow where the argument leads,
without political guidance or interference, is essential both to its inter-
nal functioning and to its hopes of support by society; taxpayers-
whatever their political persuasion—will not be willing to support uni-
versities on any other basis for long. A professor who uses his campus
office, secretary, telephone, or supplies to campaign for political office
or to support a ballot initiative is guilty of misuse of university resources
for personal business, and there is no reason to view systematic use of
the classroom for open advocacy of favorite political causes differently.
An analysis that has political implications is one thing; but open
advocacy breaks the implicit compact with taxpayers, degrades the
classroom, abolishes the possibility of free inquiry, and denies students
their academic freedom. It is, moreover, simply foolish for professors—
especially political radicals—to endanger their protected haven in this
way. For although they deride the ivory-tower concept of the university,
the truth is that they are uniquely the protected inhabitants of that
ivory tower. Political correctness is a very academic phenomenon, and
it is wildly unpopular with the general public.
An odd incident during the 1993 national conference of the National

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Association of Scholars allowed this reality to emerge. One of the

speakers—John Leo, a columnist for U.S. News and World Report—
mentioned that political correctness is unpopular with the general
public and suggested that publicity was a simple and effective means of
combating it. Leo is correct: if the parents of college students only knew
some of the things that were happening on campuses, they would be
appalled. But then Todd Gitlin, former president of the Students for a
Democratic Society, chimed in to warn the audience that they should
beware of allowing the general public to influence what happened in
the universities. Suddenly the populism of the radical left was dropped,
as the radical political movement revealed itself as an elitist phenome-
non. All the usual talk of the need to democratize the overly elitist
universities is abandoned in a panic when the threat of genuine demo-
cratic feedback from the electorate looms.
The heart of the matter is that the mind-set of a social activist is
worlds apart from that of an academic teacher and scholar. Academic
analysis follows where the argument leads, but activism wants only
support for a predetermined direction. Academic researchers are in-
trigued by the structure of arguments, whereas activists only want to
win them. Activists underestimate the power of ideas to move the world
and try to impose them through political power; but the pursuit of
power corrupts ideas just as it corrupts people.

*59
7 Power,
Objectivity, and
PC Logic

It is time to look at the typical habits of mind and patterns of inference

that are at work in the arguments we have examined. We might call
them, collectively, PC logic. Race-gender-class scholars evidently be-
lieve that their thought is highly sophisticated and that this sophis-
tication leads them to subtle and complex conclusions. Where others
have a naive faith in objectivity and truth, for example, they are able
to demystify such notions and demonstrate the covert dominance of
power in human affairs. Yet nothing could be further from the truth
than this belief; PC logic is not an ascent to a higher level of thought
but a regression to cruder and more primitive thinking that appears
sophisticated only to those with limited knowledge of the history of the
topics they address.

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Power, Objectivity, and PC Logic

Let us look first at their showpiece argument to see how it works.

This is the argument (for which Michel Foucault is the inspiration)
that covert relations of power are the driving force in human situa-
tions.1 J. G. Merquiors formulation of Foucault s notion of power is
adequate both for Foucault and for the race-gender-class critics who use
it: it consists in the "systematic reduction of all social processes" to
patterns of domination.2 This notion is thought to provide the correc-
tive to a naive belief in truth and objectivity and to get beneath the
surface of situations to uncover the real forces that are operating at a
deeper level. The site of this uncovering can be almost anything: a
novel, an essay on that novel, a political or legal theory, a law or a legal
ruling, even a conversation—in fact any piece of language about any-
thing whatever. In each case the apparent subject of the language con-
cerned is pushed aside in order to show that the real, underlying subject
is power and dominance. And this operation, so the argument goes,
takes us to deeper levels of meaning and reality.
Unfortunately, this purportedly novel, sophisticated idea is not at all
novel but all too familiar in everyday life. Parents of rebellious teenagers
see it constantly as a predictable and thoroughly tedious stratagem.
When teenagers begin to want to do things they have never done
before, they are impatient with anything that stands in their way. They
go through a stage in which they are apt to reduce any topic of discus-
sion to a question of parental control, that is, power. Parents anxious for
the safety of their children want to set limits—for example, on the use
of a car when their children begin to drive. Teenagers see this as noth-
ing more than parents wanting to control their lives and assert their
power. Parents may try, in vain, to insist that they really are concerned
about other issues, for example, responsibility and safety, but for teen-
agers in this mood, there is only one issue—parents having their way.
I imagine that even race-gender-class critics find it tedious to have

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their children tell them, after they have explained their very real con-
cerns about having their fifteen-year-olds on the streets at 2:00 A.M.,
that all they are interested in is asserting parental power. Anyone who
has had to face such situations quickly sees what is wrong with the
showpiece race-gender-class argument, because he knows that it repre-
sents a primitive, not a sophisticated, train of thought. It amounts to a
refusal to think about the substance of what is being said and a determi-
nation to take the argument down to the lowest, least sophisticated
level, the level at which intelligent thought is excluded. This is, after all,
an immature response, the response of a child who simply wants what
he or she wants, and now. And a primitive argument is what it remains,
whether used by Foucault and his followers or by a fifteen-year-old.
From a logical point of view, this argument works by isolating a
single factor among many in a given situation and then ignoring all the
others in order to reduce—and so distort—a complex state of affairs to
that single factor. To make matters worse, the factor chosen as really
important is the one that remains after reason and intelligence have
been abandoned—after we have in effect returned to a stage of human
development that predates civilization. In that state, presumably, the
only factor that limits human action is the extent to which the individ-
ual is able physically to get away with doing what he or she wants. All
ethical discussion of human behavior is essentially about the ways that
the exercise of power should be limited; and if power were indeed
everything, then ethical discussion would in principle be meaningless—
and all discussion of oppression would be meaningless as well.
Power is certainly a factor in many situations, but it is never the only
factor, and rarely is it the most important. Moreover, the claim that it is
the only important factor is not simply an exaggeration—it is also an
incoherent claim. Suppose that power were indeed the only real factor
operating in a situation. It would then follow that the only salient

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feature of that situation would be who was exercising it, and over
whom. But that question could have no possible interest for us until we
have found a value in the situation on behalf of which that power is
being exercised.
If we care about who is exercising power, it is because we are inter-
ested in the uses to which it is being put. If we care about Nazis seizing
power, it is not because power is involved, but because they are Nazis.
Power is a means, not an end, and it should have no independent
content as an idea. Power is the power to do something, and if we
attempt to justify whether a particular use of power is a good thing, we
shall be considering arguments for or against the value on behalf of
which it is used, not power itself.
If everything were reduced to power relations, we could discern
neither content nor value in human life, but race-gender-class scholars
are rigidly committed to a particular set of social values. This contradic-
tion shows us that they do not understand what their favorite argument
about power implies. If we look beyond their slogans to their behavior,
there too it is clear that they do not believe what they say: in their own
lives, they would not accept the fact that power is the basis of every-
thing. They, too, want a relationship with their children based not on
power over them but on love and respect and they, too, would protest
the uninhibited use of power by the police, for example, as an abuse of
power. The notion that power is fundamental is one of those academic
theories that has become fashionable without its horrendous implica-
tions ever being understood.
Everything that is valuable in a society is thé consequence of its
having progressed beyond "might is right." Knowledge and morality
begin with the recognition that might makes neither right nor truth,
and so it is hard to think of any use for a university if power is the basis of
everything. Whenever our will to determine right by appeal to principle

i*3
 Power, Objectivity, and PC Logic

rather than to force wavers, civilization is in danger. In the former

Yugoslavia, might has for some time been right; the stronger force has
taken what it could, the result being mass rape and genocide. If power is
all there is, and the Serbs have it, why should they not use it? Race-
gender-class orthodoxy has it that such cases are merely the honest and
open use of power, as opposed to the covert hypocritical uses of power
on the part of coercive bourgeois democracy.3 That makes the Serbs
morally no worse than, say, the government of England, which—so the
rote-learned argument goes—hides its use of power behind the window
dressing of laws.
Ideas have consequences, and the consequences of foolish ideas can
be appalling. We cannot doubt that race-gender-class intellectuals,
once ripped from the safety of their cozy campus niche and transported
to Bosnia, would soon rediscover the values of the Enlightenment and
begin to protest the uncivilized behavior of the Serbs, a word that in
such a context would refer precisely to power unrestrained by moral
considerations.
In spite of the crudity of this argument and indeed of the very
concept of power employed in this way, a whole scholarly industry
devoted to it is arising. Volumes such as the recent Rethinking Power
promise "cutting edge" research into the concept.4 This development is
not uncommon in situations where an overly simple concept has been
given too much work to do. The concept is treated as a mysterious and
complex one that needs elaboration and elucidation, and plain-spoken
arguments against it are then dismissed as insufficiently subtle. But the
reality is that there is no mystery, only a primitive idea.
The argument for the overwhelming importance of power relations
in human life illustrates two central features of PC logic that recur in
many other contexts. They are, first, the fallacy of the single factor and,

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second, the reduction of distinctions in kind to unimportant differ-

ences in degree, black and white becoming gray, and equallygray.
The fallacy of the single factor is common in everyday life. We have
seen it at work in the argument that politics is the basis of everything
and again in the argument concerning power relations.5 Let us now
examine how it is supplemented by the reduction of differences in kind
to differences in degree.
This aspect of PC logic is a variant of the "all or nothing" logic that
tries to force us to choose between two extremes, excluding all interven-
ing stages. The ultimate origin of this fallacy lies in the fact that we all
have a tendency to categorize people, for example, as either good or
bad: if they are not one, then they are the other. Sometimes a single
transgression results in the reversal. It is language itself that tempts us to
do this. There are many pairs of opposed terms that predispose us to
choose between them: black/white, long/short, and so on. In reality,
however, these pairs are not mutually exclusive categories but, instead,
the two endpoints of a continuum. Because we have only two terms, we
tend to use the two poles and forget the range between them.
Race-gender-class scholars extend this habit of thought in a charac-
teristic way. They take a pair of opposed concepts—say, knowledge for
its own sake and politicized research. They examine the first of the two
poles to show that it is not absolutely and completely free of the other.
So far, they are on solid ground: there is at least some political implica-
tion in every piece of research, whether in the uses to which its results
can be put, the motivation of the researcher, or any number of other
factors. But having apparently broken down what had seemed a clear
contrast between the two kinds of research, they believe they have
shown that there is no real difference between them and that all research
is equally political. Notice, however, that we could have started with the

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other pole and reached the opposite conclusion: since there is no such
thing as politicized research that does not have at least a tiny component
that is knowledge independent of political inspiration, there is really no
such thing as politicized knowledge, and therefore all knowledge is
knowledge for its own sake. The same logic can just as easily justify the
opposite conclusion. Then what is really going on here?
We can clarify what is happening by using the example of black and
white. To repeat the steps of the argument, we first focus on the pole of
whiteness. We can easily prove that there is no such thing as a pure
white in nature and that white always has a little black in it. Therefore,
the argument continues, there is no such thing as white, and everything
must really be black; and so there is no real difference between things
that only seem white and black. As before, the sequence can be re-
versed, with the conclusion that there is no such thing as black, because
there is no visually pure black in nature, so that everything is really
white and there is no such thing as black. This example demonstrates
clearly the fallacy of such logic: what is ignored here is that shades
matter.
This same structure is present in the attack on other distinctions that
attempt to preserve the integrity of knowledge, for example, the dis-
tinction between true and false statements or that between objectivity
and subjectivity. Follow the structure of the argument again. We take a
pair of concepts: say, objective and subjective. We focus on the pole of
objectivity and can easily show that nothing is absolutely and com-
pletely objective. As before, this first step in the argument is perfectly
valid, but from this valid beginning the false conclusion is drawn that
there is therefore no real difference between the two (shades do not
matter), and so everything is really subjective.
This is a desirable conclusion for race-gender-class critics, because
they think it protects them from being faulted for research that is

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Power, Objectivity, and PC Logic

frankly subjective or frankly politicized, since both truth and knowl-

edge for its own sake are delusions. But note once more that the same
logic starting at the other pole will prove the opposite conclusion: there
is no such thing as subjectivity. All or nothing logic can be made to
work backward, too.
Returning to the example of black and white, the crux of the matter
is this: the fact that we cannot find a pure white or a pure black in
nature, and the consequent fact that everything is therefore a shade of
gray, does not mean that the various shades do not matter, and it
certainly does not mean that everything is the same. There is still a very
large observable difference—the very same difference as before—between
what we call white and what we call black; only the analysis of those
differences has changed.
In theory, we could adjust our language to make it express the fact
that pure whites and blacks do not exist and speak instead of darkest
gray as opposed to lightest gray, but that would not lessen the real
difference between the two, any more than the race-gendei -class argu-
ment lessens the real difference between Isaac Newton and Trofim
Lysenko or between subjective impressions and documented research.
Similarly, we could be hypercorrect and say that there is no such thing
as research that is 100 percent free of politics; instead of talking about
the contrast between knowledge for its own sake and politically in-
spired results, we would therefore speak of strongly politicized (hence
almost totally unreliable) research and minimally politicized (hence
quite reliable) research.
This new way of speaking would soon seem pedantic, however, and
so we should probably revert to talking of black versus white and of
knowledge for its own sake versus politicized research, even though
aware that no pure example of either exists. The point here is that what-
ever the linguistic system we use, the fact remains that great differences

i*7
 Power, Objectivity, and PC Logic

of degree do exist and that they matter. That all research has at least
some political overtones may be true enough, but a huge gulf separates
that fact from the very different idea that all research is equally political.
Moreover, once we have established the fact that politics is present in
varying degrees, we shall have no trouble in seeing that it is better that
it be present to a lesser degree, which is why Lysenko is greatly inferior
to Newton.
I now want to take another formulation of this argument and jux-
tapose it to a different parallel example. This version begins with a
perfectly true statement: we all have a political standpoint. It continues:
therefore everything we do is colored by our political views; therefore
we are all equally politically motivated; therefore there is no point in
trying to separate political considerations from academic analysis; and
so research cannot be distinguished from politics. By now what should
catch the readers eye is the word equally: it does not follow logically
from anything that precedes it, yet everything that follows requires it.
Here is a parallel sequence: none of us is without fault. (Again,
perfectly true.) Therefore we are all guilty; and because we are all
equally guilty, we should not try to distinguish what is morally good
and bad in our behavior. Therefore, there is no real difference between
vice and virtue. Once again, nothing in this argument follows after the
first (true) statement: the fact that we all have faults does not mean they
are all the same in scale or kind, and it certainly has nothing to do with
attempts to make all sins and sinners equal and to abolish moral dis-
tinctions. That parking illegally and committing murder are both as-
signed to the category "illegal acts" does not mean that they are not
different in important ways. And similarly, the fact that running for
election and doing a piece of academic research can both be assigned to
the category "political acts" does not mean that they are not signifi-

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Power, Objectivity, and PC Logic

cantly different within that category or that political considerations are

equally important in the two cases.
We can now generalize about the essential shape of PC logic. It
begins with a pair of categories (here knowledge/ poli tics), breaks down
the distinction, assigns everything to the same category, and finally
claims that, as a result, everything is the same. The fallacy at the root of
this mode of argument is this: putting things into the same category does
not make them identical Shades matter: there is a very real difference
between rallying support for a political cause and finding a cure for
cancer, however you categorize them.
The same argument holds for objectivity and subjectivity. We can
make a practical distinction between claims that are not based on
conventional standards for scientififc verification and accuracy—we
generally call such claims subjective—and other claims based on evi-
dence that can be evaluated by scientists, which we term objective.
These real differences are in no way diminished by the fact that no case
of pure objectivity can be found, because that would not imply that
everything is equally subjective.
It is worth noting one practical consequence of this kind of fallacious
inference. If shades don't matter, and if anything that is not pure white
can simply be labeled black, then the evidence needed to make such a
reversal can be vanishingly small. Anyone who is the slightest bit guilty
is simply guilty, and as guilty as anyone else; anything that is just a tiny
bit tainted by politics is simply political, and as political as anything
else; and anyone who displays just the faintest hint of racism or sexism
is simply a racist and a sexist, and as much so as anyone else. Once this
habit of thought is in place, the power to make qualitative distinctions
in the real world is lost. The power to see what is there is severely
diminished.

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Examples of this loss of the power to see what is there occur through-
out the entire range of topics that engage race-gender-class scholars.
Consider relations between men and women. The arguments of Cath-
arine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin begin by focussing on the
apparent difference between consensual sexual activity and rape.6 The
moves that follow are classic PC logic. Is there any sexual activity that is
absolutely and completely free of the slightest hint of coercion or per-
suasion? Possibly not, but for MacKinnon and Dworkin certainly not,
given their view of the social context of inequality for women. Then the
distinction between rape and consensual activity breaks down; hence,
all sexual activity is coerced and so there is no difference between rape
and any other sexual activity. Here is that same plausible first step to
convert everything that is black and white to gray, followed by the
refusal to recognize drastic differences in the shades of gray. MacKin-
non has been widely praised for her originality because of reasoning
such as this, yet the truth is that her argument is merely a mechanical
application of PC logic.
The evidence needed to convict even a relatively just society of
oppression can be vanishingly small once PC logic is applied. Starting
with the conventional distinction between oppressive societies like the
Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Idi Amins Uganda, or Nicolae Ceau-
§escus Romania, on one hand, and twentieth-century liberal democ-
racies, on the other, we go through the familiar steps. Are liberal de-
mocracies free of all oppression? No. Then they too are simply coercive
and oppressive. Yet once we look at the different shades of oppressive-
ness, the differences are enormous.
This failure of any sense of scale or of shading is basic to Fou-
cault s entire system of thought, and there is no greater influence on
race-gender-class scholars than he. Merquior puts the point succinctly:
"Foucault had no room for the traditional recognition of basic differ-

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Power, Objectivity, and PC Logic

enees between liberal regimes and despotic polities."7 The extraordi-

nary fact is that although Foucault led the privileged life of a professor
at the Sorbonne, he nonetheless believed that his oppression as a citizen
of a Western democracy was comparable to that of the victims of
totalitarian societies.
PC logic is not only fallacious, it is also derivative, and its derivation
does it no credit. We see it emerge in everyday life whenever someone
becomes angry enough to lose perspective on what is happening. When
we are exasperated by a fairly trivial event—for example, sitting through
a boring lecture—we may speak carelessly and inflate the scale of the
event: we may describe the experience as purgatory or hellish or torture.
PC logic represents the congealing of this loss of perspective and the
consequent inability to see differences of scale into a studied inability to
perceive those differences; it is as if the fit of exasperation had become a
permanent feature of thought. We can be sure, however, that a sense of
scale would return if race-gender-class scholars ever saw the gestapo at
their door. They would then rediscover the difference between real
violence—torture, mass reprisals, genocide, executions of women and
children, retaliation against families, sending children to die in hope-
less battles—and the constraints that a modern democracy places on its
citizens.
It is easy to apply PC logic to race relations, because there is no
society and no institution that does not harbor at least one racist. If a
collection of human beings is not completely free of racism, then away
we go again: it is just racist. The resulting reduction of all situations to
the single category "racist" and the refusal to recognize differences of
scale will make it easier to ignore any evidence that a given society may
be relatively enlightened in its racial attitudes.
If we were to focus not on whether modern America, for example,
shows any sign of racism (that is, whether it deviates in any way from

*7*
 Power, Objectivity, and PC Lope

complete racial harmony) but instead on the degree to which it is racist,

a very different result would be obtained. Then we might see that few
other societies have ever made such efforts to be fair to their minorities
or to see the point of view of other cultures. Similarly, when the degree
of racism present among whites is compared not to an absolute absence
of racism but to the degree of racism present in other racial groups, it
can be seen that these children of the Enlightenment are indeed a
relatively enlightened group.8 It is hard to imagine that a white racist
could now get an enthusiastic local audience of fifteen hundred people
to cheer an unabashed display of racial hatred, as happened recently at
Howard University when Khalid Mohammed preached a virulent anti-
Semitism.9 And harder still to imagine that following the outcry caused
by such a speech, he would continue to be invited to one campus after
another to repeat his message.10 Yet even events like these do not
prevent Andrew Hacker and many like him from continuing to casti-
gate their fellow whites as incurably racist.11
Perhaps, however, there is some awareness that scale is an issue, for
race-gender-class scholars use a number of stratagems to suppress it. If
different shades are to count as the same, then light gray must be made
to look darker. A moral factor may be added: the darker shade is more
honest, the lighter more dishonest, even hypocritical. Or the emphasis
may be intellectual: the lighter shade is a disguised darker one that can
be seen only by the discerning. Take, for example, the case of sexual
harassment. Feminists try to expand its definition so that they can
expand the scope of grievance, but although PC logic is usually helpful
in this regard, here it runs into a problem.
A published definition at the University of Minnesota tells us that
"sexual harassment can be as blatant as a rape or as subtle as a look."12
This is the standard elimination of shades, so that a vanishingly light
gray can be counted with the darkest, compounded by the notion that

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Power, Objectivity, and PC Logic

discerning the lighter shade requires subtlety. It is as if the crimes were

the same, but seeing one of them required more skill. But the mechan-
ical application of PC logic has now produced an absurdity that the
unsubtle minds who composed this statement managed not to see. The
trouble is that sexual harassment has to be, well, harassing. Harassment
sp subtle that it is easily missed will hardly do.
Perhaps the framers of this statement sensed its absurdity after all,
however, for in adding that sexual harassment can also be as blatant as
rape, they must have thought that this gesture would create a balance
through the even-handed extension of the definition to both greater
and lesser instances. But that only makes the absurdity greater: rape is
rape, not harassment.
The daily lives of race-gender-class ideologues are a constant reproach
to their theoretical arguments. If a bridge collapses on them because an
engineers recommendation was ignored by corrupt politicians, then
they, just like everyone else, will complain about political interference
with an objective professional judgment. If they are wrongly diagnosed
with Alzheimer s disease and spend agonizing months until they find
that the diagnosis was false, they will not accept the excuse that the
doctor concerned had let his senile mothers condition cloud his judg-
ment. Like everyone else, they will complain that he should not have let
his subjective feelings interfere with his work: he should have been more
objective (more objective—not absolutely and metaphysically objec-
tive). This everyday behavior shows that they can tell the difference
between politics and knowledge when they need to and that they rely on
their ability to do so.
What is most disconcerting about finding this logic so commonly
deployed by academic teachers and researchers is that many of its ele-
ments have traditionally seemed characteristic of an untrained mind.
In my own teaching experience, all-or-nothing logic and single-factor

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analysis are present in most freshman papers, and part of my task has
been to make students understand the inadequacies of such thought
processes before the semester ends. Teachers of literature know that
their beginning students will insist that poems mean whatever the
reader feels, and they realize that teaching means moving them beyond
this subjective absolutism to get them to talk about (and think about)
what a poem actually says.
Similarly, a refusal to respond to shades has always seemed symp-
tomatic of a mental laziness unworthy of academic thought. When a
bribed judge or a corrupt manufacturer of consumer goods elicits the
response "they are all crooks" or when Watergate provokes the response
"all politicians are liars," we see crude thinking that blurs issues and
refuses to make distinctions. Sometimes this is simply mental laziness,
and sometimes it is deliberate obfuscation, but whatever the motiva-
tion the logic is the same: assigning things to one category does not
make them identical. Some lies are much more important than others;
some kinds of corruption are relatively minor and others are a danger to
the social order; some politicians shade the truth a little and some are
pathological liars.
What is so disconcerting is that this kind of thinking is no longer
restricted to untrained minds; it is now common among university
faculty. Worse, it has gained great prestige and power on college cam-
puses. Stanley Fish has become a leading academic eminence precisely
by having applied PC logic (in his recent Doing What Comes Naturally)
to a whole range of issues: literary criticism, of course, but also linguis-
tic theory, law, and social and political issues.13 In each case, Fish
rigorously follows the routine pattern: find a pair of opposed concepts;
show that one pole is not completely distinct from the other; pro-
nounce the opposition an illusion; then conclude that they are really

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both the same and that there are no important differences between
things that originally seemed distinct.
In legal theory, for example, Fish starts with the opposed concepts of
the rule of law and brute force. He then argues that the interpretation
of the law by a judge (who "beats the text into a shape which will serve
his own purpose") is also an exercise of force, and no less so than the
violent criminals use of force. His conclusion is that legal rulings and
criminal violence are the same in that the bottom line in both cases
remains someone coercing someone else, thereby making the force of
law "indistinguishable from the forces it would oppose."14
In science, the initial pair of concepts is fact and rhetoric, and the
predictable conclusion is that all knowledge is rhetorical. Theory of
language suffers the same fate: all discourse is rhetorical; therefore,
words do not constrain meaning. Literary interpretation follows the
linguistic model, with the result that critics make texts mean what
they do. In social theory, Fish starts with the opposition of abstract
principles and individual preferences and concludes that "all prefer-
ences are principled" and "all principles are preferences."15 Even in the
minor, rather parochial issue of academic politics—should articles sub-
mitted to academic journals be judged by readers who dont know the
identity of the author, to protect against editorial bias?—Fish goes
through the same performance. He starts with the opposition impar-
tial/biased, continues that no reading is completely free of bias, and
concludes therefore that every reading is biased and that all readings are
equally biased.
Fish is candid about the fact that conclusions of this sort are
not his invention but the enlightened views of those he calls anti-
foundationalists, though he also refers to them as the intellectual left.16
Included in this term are deconstructionists, Marxists, the Critical

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Legal Studies movement, Foucault, Kuhnian philosophy of science,

and reader-oriented critics of literature.17 Surprisingly, feminists are not
mentioned.
Fishs argument about the status of legal rulings is worth a closer
look. To break down the distinction between the rule of law and brute
force, Fish argues that the policeman no less than the gunman uses
force, just as the judge forces a legal text into the shape he wants. The
inevitable conclusion follows: "The force of the law is always and
already indistinguishable from the forces it would oppose. Or to put
the matter another way: 'there is always a gun at your head."' The
"bottom line remains the ascendancy of one person—or of one set of
interests aggressively pursued—over another, and the dream of general
rules judicially applied' remains just that, a dream."18
Just as Foucault s most celebrated argument (about power) was al-
ready familiar to parents in the form of teenage sophistry and prevarica-
tion, Fishs argument here reminds me of the well-known schoolboy-
cynic argument, which goes like this: I choose to loaf at the beach;
Mother Theresa chooses to care for the poor in India; we both do what
makes us feel good and both do what we want to do; what s the differ-
ence? The schoolboy cynic, too, is trying to get rid of the distinction
between selfish and responsible behavior, but once again parents have
always been able to recognize a reductive and self-serving argument
when they saw it. The adolescent sophistry of the schoolboy cynic is in
fact perfect PC logic: he, too, argues that if a particular conceptual
distinction can be broken down so that one concept can be made to
apply to both of its poles, then no real difference remains. But again,
shades within the new, single super-category still matter: if what makes
Mother Theresa feel good is helping others, whereas what makes the
schoolboy feel good is not having to mow the lawn, that difference is
still important enough to allow us to begin to rebuild the notion of

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responsibility within a different conceptual framework. We shall then

be talking about the degree to which a persons likes are devoted to his
own physical comfort rather than to the physical comfort of others.
That will be quite enough to distinguish Mother Theresa from the
schoolboy cynic.
Like the schoolboy cynic, Fish shows no understanding of what he
has really done and not done in breaking down the distinction between
force and law. He appears to think that he has abolished real differ-
ences, not just a particular way of talking about them. What he does
not see is that even if we decide to use a mode of analysis that makes
force the basis of everything, there would still be many differences to be
noted in the kind offeree used, in the circumstances of its use, in the
legitimacy that can be claimed for it, and in the derivation of that
claimed legitimacy, all of which would effectively put back in place
what Fish thinks he has gotten rid of in breaking down the distinction
between law and brute force. And so even if we grant the thesis that the
rapist, the bank robber, the judge, the legislator, and the soldier on
Tienanmen Square are all exercising force or power, the next step does
not follow: the force of the law is not indistinguishable from the force it
opposes, as Fish maintains. Nor does it follows that all force is "prin-
cipled force" ("there is no other kind," Fish tells us) or that "force is just
another name for what follows naturally from conviction."19
Fish thinks that if he can give all these different actions the same
label—"force"—he has made them all the same, but within his much
expanded category offeree the same distinctions will have to be made
that he imagined he had abolished. What is ironic here is that in
treating everything that can be fitted into a category as the same thing,
Fish has adopted the view of words and categories that race-gender-
class scholars reject as essential ism.20
Just as we can talk of different shades of gray instead of black and

J/7
 Power, Objectivity, and PC Logic

white, so we can talk also of different kinds of force and of differently

legitimated force instead of law and force. These new differentiations
will now handle the readily observable distinctions between rapists,
judges, bank robbers, and legislators. Fish tries to prevent this differen-
tiation within the category of force by claiming that every kind offeree
is principled force, thereby collapsing distinctions on a second level; in
effect, he adds a second layer of PC logic. Now we shall have to dis-
tinguish different kinds of principles and stray even further from ordi-
nary language, but those observed differences will still not go away.
Much the same thing happens when Fish says that everyone acts out
of conviction; if we are to redefine "conviction" in this broad way, then
we shall simply have to distinguish more kinds of convictions. The
fundamental point remains: if we abolish one conceptual distinction
that has allowed us to observe real differences in the world, we shall
have to reinvent it somewhere else.
Fishs other arguments work in much the same way. The attempt to
reduce principles to preferences is more schoolboy-cynic argumenta-
tion and results in our having to make distinctions among preferences
according to their scope and legitimacy to replace the content of a
useful distinction we have lost. The same distinctions will be made in a
less familiar way. And even if all evaluations of articles for publication
in professional journals are biased (true, as the first stage in PC logic
always is), that does not mean that they are equally biased or biased in
the same way. Biases are of different kinds, and one of them is certainly
in favor of merit. The real question that needs to be examined is, Will
blind submission go some way toward reducing (not removing) the
effects of at least some kinds of bias? Whether it will or not is an
empirical question that is not changed by the conceptual juggling of
PC logic.
Fishs relentless sophistry eventually exposes some important in-

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consistencies within race-gender-class orthodoxy. For example, race-

gender-class critics are very much in favor of "theory," because they see
it as the source of useful ideas—such as objectivity does not exist or
everything is political. But Fish argues that theory has no conse-
quences, because seeking the support of an "overarching theory" is
foundationalism, which is not consistent with social constructionism.
(For social constructionists, there are no first principles, because every-
thing derives from social conditioning.) Fish also argues that the intel-
lectual left cannot complain about corrupt professional hierarchies,
because that would assume the existence of noncorrupt hierarchies.
Indeed, if there are only interests everywhere, and no foundational
truth can transcend them, how could anyone complain about the oper-
ation of a particular set of those interests?
These insights into the contradictory nature of race-gender-class
beliefs are, however, a decidedly mixed blessing. It is as if Fish had
performed a reductio ad absurdum but then accepted, not rejected, the
absurdity. For example, having assumed one aspect of race-gender-class
dogma—that foundationalism, that is, a commitment to any princi-
ple—is a characteristic of the intellectual right, Fish ruthlessly asserts the
corollary: left-wing intellectuals become right-wingers when they assert
or imply foundational beliefs. This means that if the Marxist Terry
Eagleton actually believes in the superiority of the socialist system, he
violates the cardinal rule of left-wing intellectuals and becomes a right-
winger. The only puzzle here is why Fish does not then brand the whole
of race-gender-class a right-wing phenomenon, since it is surely based
upon a rigid set of social beliefs. He ignores the fact that if race-gender-
class scholars were forced to choose between their hard-edged views of
capitalism, sexism, and racism (on one hand) and their pretensions to
epistemological sophistication (on the other), there can be little doubt
that they would abandon the latter rather than the former.

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 Power, Objectivity, and PC Logic

Fish complains that his intellectual opponents are beguiled by a

belief in "absolutes," but it seems to me far truer to say that his own
argument is beguiled by them. Again and again he argues, in effect, that
if we cannot have an absolute, we must go to the other extreme.
Race-gender-class scholars pride themselves on being theorists, but
theory stands or falls on the adequacy of its analysis and logic, and in
those areas, as we have seen, they are conspicuously weak. In the next
chapter we shall look more directly at their contributions to the field of
theory.

180
8 Is Theory
to Blame?

Many people blame theory for the present malaise in literary studies,
and there is some empirical support for this view: the now predomi-
nant race-gender-class criticism is generally laden with theoretical jar-
gon, and the critics seem less interested in considering what literary
works have to say to us than in applying a particular theory to them.
But it would be wrong to deduce from this that theory is the source of
the problem. What is wrong here is not theory but bad theory.
Theory is unavoidable, and for reasons that are more compelling
than the currently popular notion that some dark ideology lurks at the
bottom of even the most innocent pronouncements. Two aphorisms by
Goethe put the point succinctly: "With every attentive look at the
world we are theorizing" and "Everything that is factual is already

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 Is Theory to Blame?

theory."1 To understand a particular case is already to have placed it

among others. Kant makes the same point, but with movement going
in both directions: "Thought without content is empty; perceptions
without concepts are blind."2 If the general is in the particular, the
particular is in the general, too.
By contrast, current theory is largely a one-way street, going only
from the general to the particular: the theory prescribes political and
social attitudes as the basis of what criticism should do and literature
should be, but it cannot allow for feedback from literature itself because
that would show that there is more to literature than this particular
theory can allow.
This idea of what theory is and what it does is too narrow in yet
another way. Theory has two modes, one assertive, the other analytical.
In the assertive mode, new general views of some aspect of criticism or
literature are proposed: a particular theory is advocated. But in the
analytical mode, ideas are examined and analyzed. The two modes are
never entirely separate: new suggestions for the practice of criticism
may originate from analysis, whereas a better analysis may also be a
consequence of critical practice. At times when many have felt that
criticism needed to change, work in theory has tended to become more
assertive and prescriptive, but after the initial Ímpetus for change has
been spent, it generally returns to a more analytical mode. For example,
around the time of World War II, theory was identified with the New
Critics' proposals for criticism;3 more recently, it has become identified
with advocacy of social change. But this recurring tendency to identify
theory with the agenda of a particular group is unfortunate, because
analysis, not assertion, is the more fundamental of the two modes of
theory. What makes theory valuable to us is the quality and depth of
its analysis; the commitments to which that analysis may lead are a
secondary concern. In the hands of race-gender-clâss theorists, how-

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h Theory to Blame?

ever, the assertive mode predominates: for them, theory is knowing the
right answers and applying them, not looking for a deeper analysis of
the questions.
One result of this limitation is that when theorists from other fields
look at the present state of literary theory, they are not impressed. The
philosopher Guy Sircello suggests (to be sure, mainly on the basis of a
single, indifferently argued, yet by no means completely atypical exam-
ple) that literary theory contains more poetry than theory, because it
generates ideas without the analysis and argument needed to support
and explicate them.4 He is right enough about the analytical incompe-
tence of current literary theory, though his judgment of poetry sounds
rather less reliable.5 The point remains, however, that current deficien-
cies should not be taken to define the nature or scope of theory.
A focus on results that are politically desirable at present has also
produced a discontinuity with the past and a neglect of much valuable
work that is still relevant. Theory of literature is a body of knowledge
and analysis that has accumulated over many years.6 It is the result of a
great deal of thought on all kinds of issues that arise in the study of
literature, for example, the nature and function of literature and its
relation to other aspects of a culture, the purposes and procedures of
criticism, the relation of author and historical context to the meaning
of a literary work, the validity of critical evaluation of literature, the
nature of literary genres, and many others. There have been roughly
three stages in its development. In the first, general reflections on the
nature of literature and criticism were mainly sporadic by-products of
the literary scene, often arising from manifesto-like writings of particu-
lar authors and literary groups or from contemporary commentary
upon them. Herder s theory of cultural relativism, for example, origi-
nated in the launching of the German Sturm und Drang movement.
A new stage was reached when, in the early twentieth century, theory

183
 Is Theory to Blame?

of criticism began to be more self-conscious and more independent of

the creative writing of the time. The first organized groups of theorists
for whom developing a conceptual framework for the understanding of
literature became an issue in its own right were the Russian Formalists
and the Prague Linguistic Circle. This more systematic attitude to
theory spread to Germany, where a spate of theoretical works appeared
in the 19205 as a result of the example of Oskar Walzel; to England,
where I. A. Richards was a pioneer; and then to America, where former
members of the pioneer groups of eastern Europe such as Roman
Jakobson and René Wellek were influential. With the publication in
1949 of Theory of Literature by Wellek and Austin Warren, it was clear
that the analysis of theoretical issues had become well developed and
complex. Even so, theory of criticism remained a minority interest, and
most critics were still indifferent or even mildly hostile to what they saw
as abstract theorizing.
A third phase was reached in the 19705, when a stagnant situation
was energized by the influence of French thinkers such as Derrida and
Foucault. There were gains and losses in this transition from the second
to the third phase. For the first time, theory became accepted as an
indispensable part of the knowledge and oudook of any critic—some-
thing the theorists of the previous phase had not been able to achieve-
but this gain has to be weighed against the loss of analytical depth as
theory became fashionable. And because France had been the most
conservative of the major European nations in literary study, at first
scarcely taking part in twentieth-century theoretical developments,
French influence was not an unmixed blessing. The eventual catch-up
was certainly energetic, but it did not build on analysis already done
elsewhere. This fact, and the adoption of a new vocabulary, helped to
sever links with the past. For example, the imported idea of the "death
of the author" was crude compared to the results of the debate that had

184
Is Theory to Blame?

already taken place in America on the intentional fallacy.7 As we shall

see, when the recent treatment of most theoretical issues is compared
with that of the earlier period, a consistent deterioration in analytical
quality can be seen.
It has always been easy for theory of criticism to become involved in
broad issues that arise in other disciplines. For example, questions
about the objectivity of critical knowledge or the validity of evaluation
take theory of criticism into areas explored more typically by philoso-
phers; questions of style and meaning, into linguistic theory; questions
of human behavior (both of authors and fictional characters), into
psychology; and questions of the social situations portrayed in litera-
ture, into political science and sociology. Theorists in some of these
other fields (most notably Freud and Marx) have become the basis of
particular schools of criticism. This presents both opportunities and
dangers. Literary theorists find many useful ideas in adjacent fields, but
to use them well they must master their meaning in the context of their
origin. Because this mastery is rarely achieved, literary critics have
always been prone to amateurish misuse of borrowed concepts.
Recent theory has relied increasingly on ideas imported from other
fields, and that has led to a drastic increase in the incoherence that
results when those ideas are not fully understood. For example, Ferdi-
nand de Saussure s ideas about language achieved a considerable vogue
among critics because of their use by Jacques Derrida, but (as I have
shown elsewhere)8 Derrida and his deconstructionist followers garbled
those ideas disastrously, in no small part because they knew very little
about their context in the history of linguistic thought.
Let us now measure the contributions of race-gender-class theorists
to four major issues in theory of criticism against the full context of the
debate and analysis already available from the second phase of literary
theory. First, consider historical context and its relevance to the literary

185
 Is Theory to Blame?

work, perhaps the most important issue that divides literary critics and
theorists. Forty years ago a great theoretical debate had already taken
place between those who argued that literary works are the product of a
concrete historical situation, speak first and foremost to the concerns of
that situation, and must be interpreted as such and their opponents
who argued that the transitory concerns of the place and time of com-
position would give too restrictive an account of a works meaning, one
that could not account for the vivid interest of readers who are no
longer part of that context. According to this second view, the test of
time resulted in the survival of only certain writings of a particular era,
after the passions ofthat time had been forgotten. Writers who survive
this test have produced work compelling enough to be of relevance not
just to their own age but to a society conceived, more broadly, as
continuing through time.
Historicist literary criticism originates in Herders cultural relativ-
ism, according to which literature should be measured not by norma-
tive ideas such as those in Aristotle s Poetics but by the standards of its
own time and culture. This idea soon developed into the literary histor-
ical orthodoxy of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Even-
tually a major problem emerged: How was one to determine what was
relevant within the cultural and historical background? In the absence
of a standard of relevance, historicist literary criticism easily slipped
into triviality, because without it all facts of the writers life and times
were equally relevant. It was this lack of focus that helped to produce
the reaction against historicist criticism known as the New Criticism.
What contribution have race-gender-class theorists made to this dis-
cussion? They have essentially adopted the first of these two positions—
the historicist position—and then added to it three additional ele-
ments: first, a belief in a Zeitgeist that closely determines what can be
thought or imagined in a given epoch; second, an assumption that

186
Is Theory to Blame?

politics is the most important content of all literature; and third,

an assumption that the most basic concern of politics is oppression
through imperialism, economic inequality, and unequal power rela-
tions. This complex of positions and assumptions is called the New
Historicism.
The one positive thing we can say here is that the New Historicism
does not suffer a lack of focus. The second and third assumptions
provide the clear standard of relevance conspicuously missing in the old
historicism. Unfortunately, this solution raises more problems than it
solves; as we have seen in previous chapters, these assumptions sharply
reduce the content both of literature and of politics. This remedy for
what had been a continuing problem is therefore worse than the origi-
nal malady.
The contribution of race-gender-class scholars to the more general
question of historicism as a theoretical position is no more encouraging.
In the case of a much analyzed issue such as this, a distinctive new
contribution might consist either in new arguments for historicism or
in new rebuttals to old objections. We get neither. The acknowledged
leader among New Historicists, Stephen Greenblatt, brushes aside the
problems of historicism by insisting that the only alternative is a belief
in "a conception of art as addressed to a timeless, cultureless, universal
human essence" or in "the self-referentiality of literature."9 These are
not only crude caricatures of the issues that historicism raises but un-
original ones at that; they are a reprise of the lowest level the old debate
reached. A valid contribution to the debate would have to deal with the
strongest versions of the arguments against historicism, not the weakest.
The most difficult problem in historicism concerns the quality of a
writer: if all writing simply reflects and responds to the problems of its
age, on what basis can one say that only some writing is important and
valuable? But instead of dealing with the essential logic of this tough

**7
 Is Theory to Blame?

issue, race-gender-class theorists usually avoid the question with the

suggestion that it arises only from the psychological need of some
critics to indulge in hero worship. For example, when Paul Cantor
raised this issue in a critique of Stephen Greenblatts work, Greenblatt
replied that admiration for Shakespeare s art is "better served by histor-
ical understanding than a hierophantic o altitudo"™ From the stand-
point of theoretical analysis this response is no response at all. Green-
blatt seems unable to grasp the problem and so cannot contribute to its
analysis. Judgments about the quality of Shakespeares writing and
thought represent an altogether different mode of response to his work,
not simply a failure to seek historical understanding. Historical under-
standing can extend equally to Shakespeare and political pamphlets,
but only qualitative judgments can separate the two.
The assumption that a Zeitgeist pervades all the phenomena of a
particular age is important for the New Historicism, because it is the
presumed vehicle through which the climate of race-gender-class as-
sumptions exercises its all-powerful effects. And that, in turn, provides
support for the notion that these themes must be central to all litera-
ture.11 The trouble is that this pervasive Zeitgeist is part of a theory
discredited several decades ago; once more, New Historicists seem un-
aware of the devastating arguments that put an end to it.
The German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey was the founder of the
theory in question. It was well known in Germany during the first half
of this century as Geistesgeschichte, a reasonable translation of which
would be "history of the spirit of the age."12 Diltheys theory was at the
height of its popularity in Germany between the two World Wars until
even the resolutely historicist Germans realized that it reduced all the
diverse phenomena that make up an era to an artificial and unrealistic
uniformity. Moreover, the need to make one idea fit an entire period
led to ideas so general that they could be made to apply to anything.

188
Is Theory to Blame?

Consequently, the Germans largely abandoned it. This chapter in the

history of theory was not hard to find; the story is told, for example, in
the classic Theory of Literature, by Wellek and Warren. Yet the New
Historicists picked up this old and long-since discarded theory, evi-
dently unaware that it was a blind alley we had been down before.13
On the question of historicism, then, the New Historicism con-
tributes not new theoretical analysis but only dogmatic assumptions
to support the unlikely proposition that, as Edward Fechter puts it,
literary works are "generated from and directed toward the politics
of a historically remote period."14 And the anachronism of judging
sixteenth-century Europe by modern post-Enlightenment standards
means that even as history the New Historicism suffers from an ele-
mentary incompetence.
One of the best-explored theoretical topics is that of biography and
the authors intention; what is the contribution of race-gender-class
theorists here? "The Intentional Fallacy," the seminal article by W. K.
Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, is among the most celebrated essays in
the field.15 Wimsatt and Beardsley argued that the intention of the
author was neither available nor desirable as a standard by which to
interpret and judge the literary text. Two major themes supported this
conclusion. First, authors are not necessarily the best judge of what they
have done; an author s closeness to the text may be outweighed by the
wider perspective of a critic. Second, the text communicates its mean-
ing through the conventions of language, and those conventions are
public, not personal, in nature. A text means what it actually says, not
what its author later thinks he meant to say but perhaps did not.
What had precipitated the debate was a habit that biographically
oriented critics had increasingly adopted, that of using brief state-
ments by authors as the key to a literary text, forgetting that the fullest,
most explicit, and most relevant evidence of authorial intent was the

189
 Is Theory to Blame?

language of the text itself. The discussion that followed the publication
of this article constituted the most extensive theoretical exploration
ever undertaken in the field.
The core of the theoretical issue here is the special status of literary
texts. Ordinary uses of language have no fixed boundaries, so that it is
possible to seek amplification or clarification of any sequence of words
by looking more broadly at what came before and after it. But if literary
texts have firm boundaries (say, the first and last pages of a novel), then
the question arises, Can a critic in effect add more text taken from the
authors other pronouncements? The logic of the intentionalist case
requires one answer, the anti-intentionalist another.
Once again, race-gender-class theorists are a disappointing letdown
after such a productive debate, and the reason for the disappointment is
easy to see. Instead of immersing themselves in the logic of the question
and trying to carry it further, they are content to find some snippet that
can be made to support their agenda and carry it off. The superficiality
of this approach to the problem of intention can be illustrated by two
feminists who use different snippets from the debate to attack male
hegemony, with the result that they end up on opposite sides of the
theoretical question. One argues that to take a text in the context of its
authors intent is to be committed to a patriarchal notion of authority
and that feminists should resist this "arbitrariness of patriarchal hege-
mony" by putting in question "the authority of authors, that is to say
the propriety of paternity." But the other argued that to ignore author
is to ignore gender and that to oppose "male critics' trivialization,
contempt or neglect of the author . . . is one of the first steps in an
emerging feminist critics rebellion against the critical establishment."16
In both cases the use of theory is opportunistic and superficial, and
neither makes any real contact with the issues that are present in the
well-developed argument and analysis that already existed.

ipo
Is Theory to Blame?

The most common theme of race-gender-class theory with respect to

authorial intention is an attack on the idea that an author s intention is
a means to an objective account of a text, the truth about it. Such is the
import of the dramatic phrase "the death of the author." But looked at
more closely, this has nothing to do with the classic debate on inten-
tion, because its thrust is not a shift from one kind of valid evidence
about the meaning of a text to another. On the contrary, it is part of an
argument against the validity of any evidence for an account of a texts
meaning.17 In effect, race-gender-class scholars are not making a con-
tribution to the debate between intenrionalists and anti-intentionalists
at all but, rather, are taking a radical and uncompromising stance on a
different theoretical question: that of truth or objectivity in knowledge.
Let us therefore turn to their contribution to the exploration of that
question.
Here the position of race-gender-class scholars can be stated simply:
they argue that objectivity and truth are naive illusions of traditional
scholars and, more generally, of the Western tradition and that they
have demystified these ideas. There are no value-free facts, they argue,
because all knowledge is socially constructed.18
The odd thing about this position is that it is diametrically opposed
to the reality of what both newer and older groups have actually done:
first, as I have argued before, the race-gender-class scholars commit-
ment to his and her truths about the reality of sexism, racism, and
oppression is as rigid as anything could be; and second, traditional
scholars—both philosophers and critics—have often been skeptical
about truth and objectivity. In point of fact, one of the most persistent
questions in theory of criticism has been whether criticism gives us
knowledge of the kind we get from other fields of inquiry. Philosophers,
too, have a long history of concern with the question What is truth?
The results in both cases long ago reached a level of sophistication

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 Is Theory to Blame?

that goes well beyond the simple dogma of the race-gender-class rejec-
tion of objectivity.
The most persistent opinion about objectivity in criticism has been
Harry Levins assertion that literary criticism is not an exact science.19
From time to time, however, groups of critics and theorists have tried to
establish criticism as a more systematic endeavor. These two basic posi-
tions have generally alternated as action and reaction. Race-gender-
class critics constitute the most recent phase of this cycle, but far from
being pioneers in their denunciation of objectivity, they represent only
a reprise of the majority view of the past.
The orthodoxy of the nineteenth century represented a synthesis of
both positions: literary history and biography afford genuine knowl-
edge, but criticism in the sense of a critic s writing about the meaning
and impact of a literary text is an impressionistic, subjective matter. It
was precisely this fundamental skepticism about objectivity in criticism
that made the literary historian cling to the objectivity of biographical
and historical fact. At the turn of the century this orthodox synthesis
began to break up, though two different tendencies emerged in its
place. In Germany, critics began to question one half of the synthesis,
namely, the assumed quasi-scientific objectivity of literary history. Re-
acting against what had become a rigidly positivist climate, Wilhelm
Dilthey argued that literary history was unlike science in that it de-
manded empathy and imagination if one was to grasp the spirit of an
age. But elsewhere the challenge was mostly to the other half of the
older synthesis—the notion that criticism was irredeemably subjective.
A major thrust of the New Criticism was a rejection of the older
defeatism about knowledge of the text and a consequent intense atten-
tion to texts through "close reading." The New Critics' refusal to rely
on biography was in large part due to their rejection of the concomitant
view that text-oriented criticism could only be impressionistic. That is

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why Wimsatt and Beardsley, in another notable article, entitled "The

Affective Fallacy," argued that the qualities of the text, not the response
of the reader, were the central concern of criticism.20 The culmination
of the search by Anglo-American New Criticism for a more systematic
study of literature is Northrop Frye s Anatomy of Criticism, an am-
bitious attempt to develop a taxonomy of literary forms, now more
admired for its ambition than its accomplishment.21
Even before the New Critics, the Russian Formalists had also at-
tempted to make literary study more systematic, and when, many
decades later, a belated reaction against nineteenth-century literary
historicism finally appeared in France, it took a similar form, beginning
with Claude Lévi-Strauss' attempt to analyze the basic patterns of nar-
ratives.22 In conscious imitation of the mode of empirical science, Lévi-
Strauss looked for the basic building blocks of narrative. Doubts about
his system soon appeared, however, as his choice of underlying patterns
came to seem arbitrary; some details of the plot of a narrative were
declared essential, whereas others were discarded to make those that
remained fit a common pattern. It was hard to justify radically different
treatment of plot elements that were not inherently different at all.
As before, the overambitious systematizing tendencies of Frye and of
French structuralism provoked a reaction, and by the 1960$ the newest
version of anti-objectivism had appeared. It is this latest swing of the
pendulum that race-gender-clâss scholars are part of. Another manifes-
tation of the same reactive development is reader-response criticism,
which stresses the creative role of the reader in supplying meaning to an
inherently indeterminate text. Still another is the strain of deconstruc-
tionism that stresses the infinite deferral of meaning in language.23
It is perhaps fair to say that this area of literary theory has not
been analyzed with the same penetration that has been evident in
others, and that the mood swings of the field—from attraction to

m
 Is Theory to Blame?

controlled scientific methods to distaste for them and back again—have

been more noticeable than serious analysis of the issue. It has also been
hampered both by unrealistic notions of the mechanical quality of
scientific procedure that do not allow for imagination and creative
ideas in the development of scientific hypotheses and by equally unreal-
istic notions of criticism as a uniquely imaginative activity that has no
place for controlled thought.
Even so, the best work does give the sense of a struggle to solve real
problems. Leo Spitzer gave due weight to both imagination and sys-
tematic thought when he suggested that the procedure of criticism was
circular: it went from general impressions of the text to scrutiny of
particular passages and back again.24 Modification and refinement
could take place in each part of the cycle: thought about particular
passages could suggest modifications of general interpretive ideas, and
those modifications would in turn suggest a closer look at other pas-
sages that now became crucial.
This is very interesting theory, and if we compare it to, say, reader-
response theory, its superiority is clear. In reader-response criticism, the
reader's response is single and final and does not develop, whereas
Spitzer shows us how thought about a text progresses. Interestingly,
although Spitzer thought he had demonstrated that criticism was un-
like scientific work, he had really shown that they are closer than we
often think. His critical circle was much like that of hypothesis and
experiment. By making contact with broader principles of inquiry that
go beyond literary criticism, Spitzer had in fact broken through the
barrier that had kept the literary critic s ideas about critical knowledge
at a fairly primitive level.
By contrast, the race-gender-class view of this issue gives no sense of
a productive struggle with real problems. It is excessively simple, con-
sisting only in a denunciation of objectivity; it is uninformed, because

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Is Theory to Blame?

unaware of more complex prior analysis and of the commonplace na-

ture of its own contribution; and it is inconsistent, in that social activ-
ism requires a suspension of skepticism if a social goal is to be pursued
with the necessary conviction that that goal is desirable.
The race-gender-class denunciation of objectivity and truth goes
beyond literary criticism to encompass philosophical and scientific
truth, but in this broader sphere, too, a strong Western philosophi-
cal tradition of questioning the nature of truth is ignored. Indeed,
this persistent strain in philosophy could well be called an obsession,
and the scope of the resulting conceptual explorations make the race-
gender-class contribution seem small indeed.
The legacy of Charles Sanders Peirce is especially relevant to recent
claims by race-gender-class scholars. Peirce looked at Descartes' deduc-
tive view of scientific knowledge, with its assumption that we proceed
from the known to the unknown, and saw that it contained a major
error: new knowledge is not simply added to old knowledge but can
profoundly change our understanding of what we thought we knew.25
For this reason, Peirce saw the impossibility of producing a final test of
the truth of any proposition and concluded that all knowledge is in the
nature of a hypothesis and that the only test of the validity of a scientific
proposition is the always provisional assent of the scientific community.
This view of science was in fact older than Peirce; Goethe first set it out
nearly two hundred years ago, and Peirce acknowledged that his first
philosophical reading was from the German classical age.26
Attitudes such as these have been rkrt of the basic framework of the
philosophy of science for some time, but when Thomas Kühn popu-
larized them in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), they
finally reached scholars in the humanities, with bizarre results.27 The
trouble was that the humanists who now took up these ideas knew
nothing of their context and development and therefore did not realize

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 h Theory to Blame?

that they had long since become familiar to philosophers of science.

Instead, they thought that something cataclysmic had happened: for
humanists, the nature of scientific truth itself seemed to have been
undermined. Stanley Fish, for example, includes Thomas Kühn in his
list of "anti-foundationalists," along with Derrida, Heidegger, Foucault
and, of course, himself, and suggests that making the criterion for good
science the assent of the scientific community is "Kuhns rhetoricization
of scientific procedure."28 Yet all that had really happened was that
some scholars in humanistic fields had finally made contact with what
modern philosophy of science had to say about scientific objectivity.
A parallel development in historiography is the vogue of Hayden
Whites Metahistory29 a work that race-gender-class scholars found
appealing because it suggested that in history, too, "all interpretation is
fundamentally rhetorical."30 Once again, the objectivity of historical
scholarship was undermined with the help of the false opposition of
final truth, on one hand, and the imagination of the historian, on the
other. White is candid about the anti-Western impulse in his position:
"In short, it is possible to view historical consciousness as a specifically
Western prejudice by which the presumed superiority of modern, in-
dustrial society can be retroactively substantiated."31 The link to race-
gender-class orthodoxy is clear.
In feet, earlier writers on historiography had often stressed the histo-
rians shaping hand32 and even claimed that the best history is an
aesthetically satisfying whole, though one still answerable to the rele-
vant facts. Literary historians, too, had often claimed to have syn-
thesized knowledge to make it an aesthetically satisfying whole. The
literary historian, said Robert Spiller, "uses many of the methods of the
literary artist."33 No one ever thought that this was inconsistent with a
sense that getting the facts wrong, generalizing from the wrong facts,
not knowing enough of them, or not understanding them would pro-

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duce bad and inaccurate history. But White took this familiar partial
truth and pressed it to its limit: historical interpretation was now fun-
damentally rhetorical, and its determinants were tropes, literary figures,
and styles of narrative. Hans Kellner summarizes Whites position:
"White can find no reason to prefer one account over another on
historical grounds alone. The version of the past we choose depends
rather on moral and aesthetic values, which ground both the historian
and the audience and are beyond the call of historical evidence."34
(Kellner is a highly sympathetic interpreter of White.) Someone with
moral or aesthetic values differing from our own (Charles Manson?
Adolf Hitler?) might, therefore, also legitimately interpret the past
differently. In Whites theory, the distinction between history and a
novel disappears: we are no longer able to learn from history as history.
A necessary distinction vanishes.
The fourth and last of these illustrative topics is evaluation. Here
again we see the contrast between a long history of struggling with
difficult logical issues and the assertion by race-gender-class critics of a
logically unsophisticated position that is immediately contradicted by
their own actions. Although theoretically against judgments of literary
value, they are, in practice, perfectly content with their own; having
argued that hierarchies are elitist, they nonetheless create one by adding
Alice Walker or Rigoberta Menchu to their course reading lists. They
vacillate between the rejection of all value judgments and the rejection
of one specific set of them—that which created the Western canon.
Race-gender-class orthodoxy on the matter of evaluation is so incon-
sistent and so driven by what a particular prejudice demands that it can
hardly be called theory at all; and it does not begin to confront the body
of thought on this topic that already existed. The three phases of theory
I distinguished above have markedly different emphases with regard to
evaluation. In the first, evaluation of works of art was simply assumed

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to be central to criticism. There was a strong interest in normative

theories of poetry (for example, how should a tragedy be constructed?)
and in concepts used to evaluate works of art (such as beauty). In the
second stage, however, skepticism arose about the justification for both
normative poetics and value judgments,35 and criticism itself became
correspondingly more descriptive in character. The normative writings
of the previous period now tend to be regarded as descriptions of the
practice of a particular school, each new manifesto showing the ar-
bitrariness of its predecessor. In the third and most recent phase, value
is seen largely as a question of the political interests of socially domi-
nant groups, no other kind of value being recognized.
It was the second stage that began the serious business of examining
the logic of evaluation and distinguishing it from the logic of descriptive
statements: the latter, but, it was thought, not the former, could be veri-
fied by observation. For this reason, the logical positivists thought that
evaluations were mere expressions of emotive response without cogni-
tive content. Northrop Frye, a key figure of the second phase of critical
theory, evidendy followed this ranking when he said that descriptive
criticism was a form of knowledge, unlike evaluative criticism, which
was the province of journalists.36 For Frye, as for the logical positivist
A. J. Ayer, evaluative language was something of an indulgence.37
But this view seemed unable to account for some real facts of experi-
ence—for example, the fact (for so it must always seem to be) that
Shakespeare is a writer of enormous stature. And so later analytic work
tried to rescue evaluative statements from this low status. One attempt
to do this distinguished different valid uses of language, one descrip-
tive, the other appraisive.38 This rehabilitation was not completely
convincing, however, because it still allowed evaluative statements to
fall short of full cognitive status.
My view is that evaluative statements are factual and do have cogni-

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Is Theory to Blame?

tive content but that they are rather like brief summaries of a great deal
of more specific information.39 For this reason it must always seem
unsatisfying to regard them as lacking in cognitive content. A brief
summary can only hint at the full cognitive content of what is sum-
marized, but it has a practical use: it allows one to make decisions such
as whether to take one novel rather than another on a vacation and
whether to include one book rather than another in a syllabus. The key
to much of the theoretical problem posed by evaluations is this: they are
not grandiose conclusions that everything leads up to but a quick
orientation and starting point that must be left behind if we are to
think more precisely. Only the general feeling that their greater weight
should indicate a cognitive superiority misleads us.
Even in an area of theory that has been somewhat inconclusive, the
contrast between the simplicity of race-gender-class thought and the
relative complexity of what preceded it is striking. Instead of a genuine
struggle with a difficult logical problem, we are offered only oppor-
tunistic uses of diametrically opposed attitudes to evaluation; instead of
original analysis, we find only a reprise of the crass measure of literature
according to its current political value that has always been used to
censor and silence writers.40
If we add to these four illustrative topics in theory others where the
race-gender-class contribution has been seen—for example, the defi-
nition and function of literature (both discussed in chapter 2)—then
the inescapable conclusion is that race-gender-class theory when seen
against the context of the field as a whole is poor theory. Yet this
impoverished theory has managed to become so identified with theory
in general that even many of its detractors accept that identification.
How did this illusion arise? How did this antitheory become identified
with theory? To answer these questions, we must look at the history of
the field.

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 Is Theory to Blame?

As we have seen, theory of criticism began to emerge as a distinct

field only in this century, for prior to this time it had been largely a
sporadic by-product of events in the contemporary literary scene. The-
ory then began to drift away from the practice of criticism, until, by the
19605, most literary critics were mildly hostile to what they saw as
abstract theorizing. The sudden popularity of French thought in the
early 19705 was less a theoretical revolution than an antitheoretical
coup; critics who had not been involved in the more self-consciously
analytical phase of theory now returned it to a much closer relationship
with the ideological currents of the contemporary critical scene. The
result of this shift was that the word theory became identified with one
of those ideological currents rather than with the activity of analysis.
This development really turned the word theory upside down, as could
be seen when Paul de Man claimed that opposition to deconstruction-
ism was a "resistance to theory."41 Given that theory must imply anal-
ysis, it was de Man himself who was really resisting theory, by treating
his own position as sacrosanct and refusing to accept the possibility that
it might be further analyzed.
As theory became fashionable, there arose a theory cult in literary
studies, and its leadership became a kind of theory jet set, a professional
elite with a carefully cultivated aura of au courant sophistication. In
this atmosphere, only recent theory counted; anything from earlier
times was wooden and outmoded. The persistent ignorance of prior
theory was therefore no accident but an essential feature of this new
development.
The new elite shared a set of assumptions but not a penchant for
analysis. One recognized members not by their analytical skill but by
the standardized quality of their attitudes. All went through similar
motions to come to similar conclusions. Theory was no longer about
exploration but about conformity. Stanley Fish's Doing What Comes

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Is Theory to Blame?

Naturally was typical both in its predictable positions and its ignor-
ing the past: in this book, philosophy of science begins with Thomas
Kühn, serious questions about the idea of truth and the positivist
theory of language begin with Derrida, jurisprudence begins with the
radical Critical Legal Studies movement, and cultural relativism is a
bright new idea without any previous history.
The theory culture also has its own language, which all aspirants to
membership must learn to speak and which functions to preserve an
otherwise unstable situation in many ways. It cuts off new theory from
older thought—which is useful, since if the same terms were used, the
limitations of the new would be much easier to see. It identifies those
who speak it as insiders and those who do not as old-fashioned out-
siders who lack the required level of sophistication. Those who have
learned the language demonstrate their mastery of theoryese in titles of
conference papers that are full of verbal tricks and gyrations. (Unfortu-
nately, this also draws the attention and the well-deserved derision of
the general public.) In addition, the new language serves as a protective
device in that its remoteness from ordinary speech camouflages triv-
iality or absurdity.
The drawback is that standardized language means standardized
thought. Oddly enough, race-gender-class critics insist on the limita-
tions imposed on thought by the use of a particular system of terms in
all other contexts. An important part of their mental apparatus is Fou-
cault s notion of a discourse, by which he means a standard set of terms
that are both the expression of a particular mind-set and the mechanism
that perpetuates that mind-set. Foucault s own examples are rarely con-
vincing, because the normal vocabularies of both English and French
are too large and varied to channel thought so rigidly. A convincing
illustration of Foucault s point would require a specialized terminology
that was able to shut out the rest of the vocabulary of a language. We

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 Is Theory to Blame?

need not look far to find such a case: the perfect example of Foucault s
discourse and its stultification of thought is the highly restricted and
arcane terminology of theoryese: re-presentations, marginalize, decen-
ter, re-vision, difference, discursive practices, hegemony, phallocen-
trism, the "other," and so on. Genuine thought requires more than the
rote learning and ingenious manipulation of a special vocabulary.
A deeper problem is that theorists do not run in packs; they are
individuals who set out to crack particular theoretical problems by
thinking hard about them. Their work is solitary; it is never fashionable
and must always be estranged from orthodoxies. It follows that a theory
elite can arise only when theory has ceased to function effectively and
when the individuals who are a part of it no longer act like theorists.
Real theorists thrive on the concept of argument and counterargument
that is central to theoretical analysis, but race-gender-class scholars
show a marked tendency to avoid facing the substance of the arguments
of their critics. Sometimes, they just seem to hide: as support for de-
construction has eroded under the pressure of recent analyses and dis-
closures, many of its leading figures have fallen silent.42 Yet scholars like
J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman, and Jonathan Culler, who have
enthusiastically urged deconstruction upon students and colleagues for
some time, surely had an obligation to defend it publicly or to recant;
edging quietly toward the door when things begin to look bad is not
what theorists do.
Dissent from the current orthodoxy is routinely met with ad homi-
nem attacks on allegedly ignoble motives that avoid the substance of
arguments. Critics are said to be hostile to progress for women and
minorities or simply conservative, as if no further analysis were neces-
sary. In this vein, Fish insisted that the furor about political correctness
on campus was being stirred up from outside the academy by right-
wingers, implying that there is no legitimate debate going on within

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Is Theory to Blame?

the academy, nor any need for one.43 (He now seems to have changed
his mind, as we shall see in the next chapter.) The same implication
is made when we are told that the controversy constitutes an anti-
intellectual attack on the academy44 (again presumably from the out-
side) or that it has been created in large part by the national press.45
These arguments were the stock in trade of J. Edgar Hoover and Rich-
ard Nixon. Hoover routinely met criticism by claiming that it was due
to outside agitators, and Nixon reduced every issue of substance to
distortion by the press. Gerald Graff even resurrects a McCarthyite
argument when he says that "right-wing ideologues are doing a good
job of exploiting their [NAS members'] resentment and frustration."46
Those who remember the 19508 will recall that if one were not accused
of being a communist sympathizer, one could still be branded a com-
munist dupe.
Although it is ironic that left-wing scholars have so thoroughly ap-
propriated the tactics of figures they have always despised, the more
important point is that race-gender-class theorists have moved so far
away from genuine theoretical analysis that their arguments have come
to resemble some of the most disreputable political behavior in our
recent history. Real theorists would want to meet and engage argu-
ments put forth against their positions by academic colleagues and to
take part in the internal debate that is now under way.
The only conclusion to be drawn from this survey is that what now
passes for theory is a degraded and corrupt shadow of what theory
should be.

203
9 Mow Did It
All Happen-
and What
Comes Next?

The change that has taken place during the past twenty years in the
study of the humanities on college campuses has been bewildering.
Even with hindsight, it still seems utterly improbable, and anyone
predicting this future course of events in the early 1970$ would not have
been taken seriously. One can imagine the seemingly ironclad case that
would have been made against so absurd a prognosis, for the direction
that humanist professors have taken seems to negate everything that
makes their life attractive and every reason that society might have to
support their work.
The life led by professors of literature before this change must have
seemed enviable. They could spend much of their working lives read-
ing and discussing great writers such as Shakespeare, Goethe, and Dos-

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How Did It All Happen?

toevsky, whereas others had to make time for such enjoyable pursuits.
Excellence was their watchword, and they kept company with an elite
group of the greatest minds our civilization has produced. Instead of
earning their living by repetitive tasks, they had at their disposal the
infinite variety of literature; if they became bored with one writer, there
were hundreds more to choose from. And because their work drew on
thought from many times and places, it gave them—or so it would
seem—a broad perspective on life.
Small wonder that professors in humanistic fields enjoyed what they
did and that they argued for the educational benefits of the study of
great literature. If taxpayers could be convinced that Shakespeare added
to the practical wisdom of those who read him, they would continue to
support the splendid life of literature professors.
We would have been amused by predictions of what was to happen,
because it would have been impossible to imagine that professors of
literature would throw away their advantages. Who could have foreseen
so complete a reversal that philistines who had never seen any value
in studying Milton and Keats would eventually derive their most con-
vincing arguments and draw their strongest support from professors
of literature themselves? Or that they would be the ones to tell the
world that great literature, far from broadening the mind (as they used
to say), actually narrows it by implanting constricting, socially harm-
ful attitudes.
Every aspect of the earlier state of affairs seems to have been turned
upside down. A concern with exceptional minds and excellence is now
dismissed as elitism, and many prefer to concern themselves with Ma-
donna videos or gay pornography. Fine writing is no longer valued;
English professors now write in a style that they would formerly have
denounced as clumsy and full of jargon. Many, it would seem, no
longer even like the field that once so delighted them, and they write

205
 How Did It All Happen?

on anything but literature. Thus, professors with prestigious chairs in

literature at major universities routinely write and claim authority on
political and historical topics like imperialism, psychological and socio-
logical topics like sexual behavior—especially nonstandard varieties
thereof—or any number of topics in other fields. This practice has
become so pronounced that a secondary set of scholarly fields has
arisen: there is history as practiced by historians and as practiced by
professors of English literature; theory of language as practiced by
philosophers and linguists and as practiced by professors of English
literature; and even a philosophy of science according to professors of
English. But as for literature simply as literature—even to speak of it
that way sounds old-fashioned.
Another drastic change is the sudden partiality to abstract theoriz-
ing—in a field once so concerned with particular, concrete situations
that it resisted generalization. We would never have expected individ-
uals exposed to the infinite variety of human experience to reduce all
books to any one issue, let alone that of oppression and victimization.
Any broad perspective on the issues of the day that might have
resulted from wide reading seems also to have vanished. Professors in
the humanities might have been expected to be the first to point out
that people who denounce Western culture for its racism and sexism
have missed the fact that politically correct values are exaggerated West-
ern, not anti-Western, values; they, better than anyone, should have
known that the European Enlightenment was the unique stimulus for
the development of enlightened attitudes toward race, sex, and inequal-
ity. We might have expected them to be the first to spot yet another
reprise of Rousseauism and to warn of its historical consequences; we
might also have expected them to provide a corrective to present-day
handwringing about American racism by pointing to what was unique
to North America—not the existence of slavery but the war to end it.

206
How Did It All Happen?

Instead, they have actually led the way in their enthusiasm for politi-
cally correct but historically ignorant and foolish opinions.
Insofar as the literature of earlier periods has played a part in their
thinking, they have used it not to provide a broader context for the
present but to afford more opportunities to express the judgments they
already make about it, thereby adding anachronism to their other mis-
takes. Instead of learning from the past, they denounce it for not being
the present.
How could this bizarre reversal have taken place? How could a group
that would have been expected to behave in one way do exactly the
opposite? Politics seems so central to this development that it is tempt-
ing to seek answers there. One such answer has become well known:
the radicals of the 19605 have come of age; they have tenure, chair
departments, and have moved the campuses sharply to the left. Yet this
one factor, though significant, leaves much unexplained.
The political radicals of the 19605 were distributed across the full
range of university departments, the most active area probably being
the social sciences; yet political correctness is heavily concentrated in
the humanities, which suggests more specific factors. Moreover, al-
though the children of the 19605 have come of age everywhere, it is the
campuses that have moved sharply left. In fact, the direction of political
influence is not from the larger society to the campuses but the reverse:
in many areas, politically correct graduates are moving the culture in
their direction. The sudden leftward tilt of museums, for example, can
be traced directly to pressures originating from campus race-gender-
class scholars.1 Politically correct egalitarianism has its stronghold in
the university, not among the general public, and its movement within
the academy confirms this: it is trickling down from the most elite to
the least elite institutions.
That the most extreme distortions have occurred in literary studies

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 How Did It All Happen?

makes the influence of political factors unlikely, because traditionally

professors of literature have not been the most politically active group
on campuses. They have been more at home reading and writing in
their offices than in the world of political action.2 Few members of
my own department, for example, were seriously involved in the anti-
war movement during the 19605 and early 1970$; current faculty in
departments like philosophy, sociology, and mathematics were much
more visible in that era. Yet despite their apolitical position at that
time, literature departments are now heavily committed to race-gender-
class perspectives.
Most of those who now enthusiastically embrace race-gender-class
perspectives and the proposition that everything is political are recent
converts to that point of view. By temperament, the great majority of
them were not, and are still not, serious political radicals. The critical
fact that is central both to an explanation of what has happened and to
a prognosis for what the future may hold is that for the most part they
are primarily members of a literary-critical movement, not a political
one. For that reason the most important determinants of what has
happened are to be found in the structural features of the academy, and
here a familiar question arises: Whose interests are being served?
The circumstances mentioned earlier, which should have made lit-
erature professors happy and productive members of the academy,
are real, but, unfortunately, other conditions work powerfully against
them. Twenty years ago, W. K. Wimsatt, the most influential analytical
theorist of his day, noted that literary criticism was decidedly moving in
a new direction, one he evidendy felt was unsound. In considering the
reasons for this shift, he made a remark that would be incomprehensible
in most other fields of inquiry, though it is all too relevant in the case of
literary criticism and other fields in the humanities. "New persons," he
said, "need new platforms."3 New careers needed to be launched.

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How Did It All Happen?

A remark such as this would seem odd if made by, say, a biologist;
why would anyone think that a commitment to some ill-considered
ideas might advance one s career simply because the ideas were new? In
the natural sciences, such a misjudgment would wreck a career. The
difference here cannot be explained by the usual notion that the sci-
ences demand more precise thought; even if intelligence manifests itself
in different ways in different fields, it is hard to understand why unin-
telligent thought should help, rather than hinder, a career.
The relevant difference between the sciences and at least some of the
humanities is this: in the former, but generally not in the latter, new
discoveries constantly open up new areas for research. When the struc-
ture of DNA was discovered, one area of career possibilities was taken
out of circulation, while, at the same time, dozens of new opportunities
were created. This breakthrough in research opened up entirely new
questions, thereby helping the careers of the next generation of scien-
tists. But in the study of literature (and to a greater or lesser degree in
other fields in the humanities) we return again and again to the same
basic stock of great texts; each new book or article on King Lear, far
from opening up new fields of inquiry, generally makes it harder for
those following to say something new and intelligent about the play.
Yet in all fields, academics are rewarded more for their originality than
for any other aspect of their performance. The few outstanding critics
always find ways of demonstrating their originality, but the rest are put
under increasing pressure as time goes by and the bibliographies get
thicker. To be sure, new additions to the canon occur from time to
time, and occasionally a piece of literary criticism suggests further
intellectual pursuits for others, but such innovations in thought are too
infrequent to relieve the pressure on humanists.
This pressure produces a crucial feature of literary studies, namely,
its proneness to fads and fashions. Some of these grow large enough to

20Ç
 How Did It All Happen?

predominate at a particular time, as deconstructionism did, but others

—for example, literary Freudianism—are never more than a minority
cult within the larger profession. Whatever the extent of their in-
fluence, however, their function is similar: once a new intellectual
fashion arrives on the literary scene, the way is open for a new reading
of every classic text. The process is quite simple: one learns the terms
and categories of the new fad and applies those terms to any text, and
new thought seems to have been created. New fads are thus a tre-
mendous boon to the great majority of practitioners in the field of
literary studies, which is why they are embraced with such enthusi-
asm. They provide professional opportunities for many who otherwise
might languish.
Much becomes clearer once we understand the reason for the rule of
fads and fashions in literary studies. Fads have to come from some-
where, and most often other fields are the source. This interdisciplinary
borrowing explains why people whose field might seem attractive nev-
ertheless so often stray from it, either to grab ideas from somewhere else
and bring them back or, as in the more extreme recent case, to settle in
an entirely new field. Thus arises the impression that some literature
professors have no interest in literature.
When ideas are adopted not primarily because of their own power
but because of the unrelated needs of the field that borrows them, the
life of those ideas in their new setting can be strange. Everyone won-
ders why Marxist thought has permeated literature departments while
Marxist regimes are collapsing everywhere, and the puzzle is only in-
creased by the fact that these literature professors do not behave like
Marxists in their daily lives. The answer is that these are literary Marx-
ists and, therefore, members of a literary-critical movement that must
not be confused with the real thing.
Only thus can we begin to understand why large numbers of people

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who have always been conspicuously apolitical now take politics to be

the foundation of their literary work. This is also the way to understand
the otherwise baffling contrast between the self-absorption visible in
the wave of memoir writing now sweeping the Duke University En-
glish department, for example, and that departments status as the
national flagship of politicized criticism; the self-dramatizing and self-
absorption are real, the politics of social conscience is literary-critical.4
We can also find here an explanation of why people whose field is
remarkable for its infinite variety of theme frequently get stuck on one
repetitive and inflexible note. The cost of following the literary-critical
fashion of the moment in order to achieve a semblance of creative
originality and be published in professional journals is that the mean-
ing of texts must be overridden so that the ideas constituting the new
fashion can be imposed on them.
So far, this diagnosis might seem to contain both bad and good
news. The bad news is genuinely bad: it is that literature professors will
probably always be caught jumping from one fad to another, that is,
committing mass acts of foolishness from time to time because of a
built-in factor that will not go away. (This is rather like the Irish elk
syndrome: competition for dominance within the species led to the
evolution of ever larger antlers, but the larger antlers caused the species
as a whole to become dysfunctional and dragged it down.) The good
news, however, might seem to be that the race-gender-class fad, though
it has been far worse than its predecessors, will be gone once it is
exhausted as a source of new readings of the classic texts.
Unhappily, there are reasons to think that things are different this
time. To be sure, race-gender-class was at first just one more literary-
critical fashion that took hold for the same reason that others before it
had. But there are new factors at play this time, one of which makes the
situation entirely different from anything we have seen before. First,

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this latest case is on a scale that dwarfs its predecessors. In the past,
literary-critical fads and fashions were embraced by particular groups
within the profession, but this one now dominates the entire field.
Second, it reaches beyond the field of literature and dominates or has a
strong presence in other departments (for example, Women's Studies).
But what makes the current situation completely unlike its pre-
decessors is that for the first time the fad has managed to determine the
character of faculty appointments. For some time, race-gender-class
concerns have been a touchstone for the great majority of junior ap-
pointments in literature, with the result that a completely new class of
faculty has appeared. To understand the situation we are now in, one
must appreciate that these new appointees are for the most part not
literary-critical race-gender-class faddists who would normally jump to
the next fad when it arrives but true believers in the race-gender-class
issue who are not interested in literature and will not suddenly become
literary scholars when the fashions change.
Moreover, this new class of faculty has been much strengthened by
the creation of departments of Women's Studies, Black Studies, Chi-
cano Studies, and so on, whose sole rationale is bound up with race-
gender-class orthodoxy. This time, therefore, the literati will not be so
free to move on to something else when they have exhausted the cur-
rent fad, because large obstacles will be in their way in the form of
real—as opposed to literary—race-gender-class enthusiasts who make
up a large segment of their departments and virtually all of some
adjacent ones. Even if the faddists were to move on to something new,
the results of the appointments made during these years would remain,
and the presence of the race-gender-class contingent, though reduced,
would still be formidable.
How would the true believers respond to a change of direction by

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their colleagues? Surely, the prospect is for bitter conflict should they
try to do so. This possible conflict between the literary radicals and the
real ones is no longer simply conjecture. There are many signs that it
has already begun. On the one side, some prominent literary race-
gender-class exponents seem restive. Elaine Marks, the 1993 president
of the Modern Language Association of America, having celebrated in
the President s Column of an MLA Newsletter "the dominance of the
social and political over the ontological and the poetical, the domi-
nance of cultural studies over literary studies," suddenly in the next
issue of the same Newsletter questioned whether criticism and litera-
ture always had to be about social change.5 And at about the same time,
no less a politically correct mogul than Stanley Fish wrote in the Lon-
don Review of Books that "there is a great difference between trying to
figure out what a poem means and trying to figure out which inter-
pretation of a poem will contribute to the toppling of patriarchy or to
the war effort."6
Coming from the other direction, Steven Watts, in an article entitled
"Academes Leftists Are Something of a Fraud," referred disparagingly
to the literary race-gender-class set as "discourse radicals."7 Watts is "in-
creasingly annoyed by the revolutionary posturing of prosperous aca-
demics who like to pretend that they are something else," and he misses
a genuine "sensitivity to real people" in all of their "otherworldly"
poststructuralist politics. The conflict that we see here is also beginning
to appear in the literature departments of major universities.8
This time the faddists evidently committed themselves to something
that grew to be bigger than they were. But what made this fad so much
stronger than its predecessors that it was able to transcend its ori-
gins, dominating literary studies and even re-creating itself in new
departments? How did it grow so powerful that the literati lost control

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of it and of their own fate? Once again, there are many important
factors, but one that is overwhelming.
To begin with, traditional literary scholars were all too receptive
to one important aspect of race-gender-class: its bourgeois baiting.
In theory, immersion in literature should afford wider perspective on
everyday life, but in practice the effect has been mostly the reverse. The
genteel, bookish world easily becomes a refuge that allows literary
scholars to isolate themselves; they often become suspicious of, and
even hostile to, life outside the academy, especially where the world
of business is concerned. A casual remark by Barbara Herrnstein Smith,
a recent MLA president, implied a good deal about the culture of liter-
ary academics.9 Discussing E. D. Hirschs ideas on a national culture,
Smith referred contemptuously, though without any explanation of
that contempt, to "Fourth of July speeches." She must have assumed
her readers would understand what she meant and share her contempt.
(They probably did.)
Oddly enough, it is the intellectual snobbery and elitism of many of
the literati that politically correct egalitarianism appeals to; their par-
tiality to literary Marxism is based not on its economic theory but on its
hostility to business and the middle class. The character of this anti-
bourgeois sentiment therefore has more in common with its origin in
aristocratic disdain for the lower orders than with egalitarianism.10
Second, although one might think that the mind-set of a literary
scholar would preclude any general denigration of literature, it is not
necessarily so. Many are attracted to the field because they have literary
ambitions of their own, and because very few achieve those ambitions,
the failed poets among them are impatient with their secondary role as
interpreters of the great. They would have preferred to be subjects of
critical attention rather than critics. This explains, at least in part, the
otherwise baffling fact that literature professors now denigrate litera-

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How Did It All Happen?

ture and replace it with theory, for that new emphasis shifts the pro-
fessor from secondary to primary status. The gyrations of Stanley Fish,
for example, are the mark of someone anxious to be recognized for his
own performance rather than as an explicator of someone else's.11
A third factor that helped race-gender-class become so powerful is
found in the conditions created by the critical fashion that immediately
preceded it: deconstructionism. Deconstructions initial focus on lin-
guistic indeterminacy and the independence of language from reality
had an aura of ivory-tower amusement for scholars, which invited a
sharp swing of the pendulum to the opposite end of the spectrum.
Linguistic games were followed by the (apparent) down-to-earth social
reality of race, gender, and class. Because deconstruction had been
cultish and more than a little irrational, it was unstable and therefore
particularly vulnerable to a swing to the other extreme. Moreover, its
ascendancy had also cleared the ground of anything that might have
stood in the way of race-gender-class; by the end of the deconstruction-
ist era of literary studies, a generation of younger scholars knew very
little about the history of theoretical debate in their field.
The most important contribution of deconstruction to the success of
race-gender-class, however, was its making respectable a mode of argu-
ment that had always been despised in the academy, namely, ad homi-
nem argument. The deconstructionist rationale for ad hominem made
it now seem, at least to those who used it, avant-garde and highly
sophisticated.12 That rationale runs as follows: instead of dealing with
the mere surface of an argument, we should look deeper to discern
hidden ideology, at which point we have its real basis. (When race-
gender-class critics say that they have absorbed the lessons of decon-
struction, this is in practice what they mean.) But ad hominem by any
other name is still ad hominem; it still ignores the logic of an argu-
ment and counters it only by denouncing the ignoble motives of the

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 How Did It All Happen?

opponent. Under the influence of deconstruction, this crudity was not

only permitted but encouraged as the deepest form of argument, and
this is why feminists, for example, now think that they can brush aside
objections simply by identifying a critic as sexist or conservative. In this
way and others, deconstruction made matters easier for race-gender-
class supporters by degrading the intellectual climate of the academy.
Although all these factors are important, they are all overshadowed
by another, without which race-gender-class criticism could never have
achieved the commanding position that it now has: affirmative action,
which provides both the content of this new intellectual fashion and
the means to implement it. Most of the key ideas of race-gender-class
scholarship (oppression, discrimination, and so on) are carried over
from affirmative action. (The difference is that whereas affirmative
action ostensibly asks for some admissions and appointments, the race-
gender-class transformation wants the entire curriculum.)13 The intel-
lectual catastrophe that has overtaken the humanities is not just a by-
product of affirmative action. It is affirmative action transformed into a
curricular and intellectual climate. In literary studies, what began as a
program for social justice in hiring has long since developed into hiring
to service a teaching program that is about the themes of affirmative
action. A vicious circle ensues, as changed hiring patterns drive changes
in the curriculum and those curriculum changes then intensify the
need for more skewed hiring. Even if affirmative action on behalf of
faculty diversity were to be abandoned tomorrow, much of the same
kind of hiring would have to take place to service the new curriculum.

The impact of race-gender-class on college campuses has been incal-

culable. The academy has degenerated so much that it in some respects
has become a social liability rather than an asset. For example, in the
past the knowledge and analysis provided by academics often exerted

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How Did It All Happen?

something of a calming influence where a divisive issue had aroused

strong emotions in the general public; the debate became better in-
formed and more objective. Yet the reverse now seems frequently to be
the case. In matters of race relations, the campus generates and exports
hysteria, and it is the common sense of the ordinary man and woman in
the street that must provide a corrective. The college campus is the last
place one would now expect to have a rational discussion of affirmative
action. And a genuinely academic discussion of multiculturalism—one
that was analytical and informed by a knowledge of the experience of
other multicultural societies, past and present—would also be close to
impossible. Failure to conform to race-gender-class orthodoxy results
in the outright moral condemnation of any train of thought, however
well worked out, that does not reach the right conclusion. Thomas
Sowell's account of how peaceful coexistence in Sri Lanka was trans-
formed by preferential policies into implacable hostility and civil war,
for example, is simply incorrect thinking on campus.14 Analytical
thought on multiculturalism is best aired elsewhere—say, in the Wall
Street Journal.
The campus now also seems to be the last place where one could
hope to have a serious academic discussion of women's issues. In a
transitional period, one would normally expect women in the general
workforce to be more unreflectively irritated by the remaining inequali-
ties of pay and status, with women in academe exerting a calming
influence because of their greater awareness of historical context. But at
the moment things are the other way around: far from being a moder-
ating influence, academic feminism drives up the level of hysteria with
all kinds of unrealistic fantasies about patriarchal conspiracies against
women past and present. Again, campus frenzy has to be countered by
common sense from beyond the campus.
Many attitudes now popular on campus amount in principle to a

2/7
 How Did It All Happen?

complete rejection of knowledge. Take, for example, the fascination

with Foucault s notion that power relations are the real basis of any
situation. It never seems to occur to those who find this notion so
appealing that they are adopting a twin of the despised proposition
"might is right"—namely, "might is truth." Both are starding positions
for educated people to adopt, especially people with much-flaunted
social consciences, for these are positions more commonly associated
with fascist regimes. Knowledge and morality begin with the recogni-
tion that might makes neither right nor truth.
The extraordinary degree of reliance on ad hominem rather than
logical argument is also in effect a rejection of academic knowledge.
Typical was an exchange of letters following Helen Vendler s review of
several feminist books in the New York Review of Books.15 Vendler
had analyzed some typical feminist arguments, but the response from
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar avoided the logic of what Vendler had
said and instead attacked her personally as a woman fearful of change,
unsupportive of other women, and so on. The character of this attack
was so familiar and so similar to hundreds of others like ¡t that had it
stopped in mid-paragraph, anyone could have finished it. Its intent was
not to clarify issues and so to contribute to knowledge but, instead (to
quote John Le Carré s George Smiley on the assassination of General
Vladimir), "to obliterate, to punish, and to discourage others."16 The
same intent to obliterate rather than to answer, but on a much larger
scale, could be seen in the desperate (but ineffective) attempts of cam-
pus feminists to suppress Christina Sommers' Who Stole Feminism?17
An even more striking sign of the extent of the degeneration of
academic debate is the spate of letters I discussed in Chapter 7, in
which whole groups of scholars ganged up to denounce the views of
others. This is a consistent extension of ad hominem. Logic and argu-
ment go under their own steam, winning or losing by their coherence

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How Did It All Happen?

and having the same force whether signed by one or many. Personal
attack, however, gains force through the number of people making the
attack; multisignature letters are more punishing, more discouraging.
If there is a malignancy left over in the academy from the 1960$, it
consists less in the middle-aged political radicals it has bequeathed us
than in the denigration of knowledge that began at that time. The
demand for a narrowly construed "relevance" amounted to rejecting
any relevance to the present of our knowledge of the past. This willed
ignorance has made it possible to repeat with Foucault the folly of
Rousseau's primitivist attack on civilization. (A little knowledge about
the consequences of Rousseau would in fact have been extraordinarily
relevant.) Fits of unhappiness over the fact that civilization's advances
have left us far from perfect occur with regularity throughout the his-
tory of Western civilization, and as I have already argued, many have
imagined that civilization to be the cause of the evil in us, not a restraint
on it.18 But the peculiarity of our time is that the institution best
equipped to correct this delusion is the one that, because of its obses-
sion with race-gender-class, is spreading and intensifying it.

The outlook seems gloomy to me, for three major reasons: first, this
latest intellectual fashion, unlike all its predecessors, has managed to
create new departments and new bodies of faculty in existing depart-
ments, all of which are dedicated to the movement and will not let it
fade away; second, the mechanism that has fed this development-
affirmative action—is still in place and is still, day by day, generating
more obstacles to its fading; and third, respect for the essential under-
pinnings of academic life—knowledge, argument, evidence, logic—is at
an astonishingly low level. Yet one cannot help noticing that the whole
edifice often seems remarkably unstable.
Although race-gender-class scholars have won control of large

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 How Did It All Happen?

expanses of the academy, they seem anxious, as if aware that their

position is indefensible and could fall at any minute. They run scared
even as they win. When their audience is friendly, they boast about the
revolutionary nature of what they are doing, but when the wider public
is looking on, they are anxious to make it seem like business as usual.
The leadership of the Modern Language Association, for example, has
been devoted to race-gender-class for some time, yet recently it tried to
reassure the public that a survey of college courses had found that the
classics are being taught much as they always have been.19 (The tides of
two articles that appeared soon after suggested that this attempt was
not entirely successful: "The Modern Language Association Is Mislead-
ing the Public" and "The MLAs Deceptive Survey.")20
Similarly, critical legal theorists when on campus make the claim
that their program amounts to a revolution in legal thought, but when
one of them—Lani Guinier—had to face the general public, she quickly
backed off, telling television interviewers that her academic essays
were just "musings" that should not be taken too seriously. She then
mounted a public relations campaign to persuade everyone that she was
comfortably in the mainstream after all, expurgating the most incrimi-
nating passages when she published a collection of her essays.21
An especially intriguing example of this awareness of two different
audiences is that of Johnnetta Cole, who after many years of extrava-
gant enthusiasm on campus for Marxist-Leninist regimes, especially
Cuba, began to have national political ambitions following her ap-
pointment as president of Spelman College. Her audience having be-
come the general public rather than the campus, she too abruptly
changed her tune and tried to sanitize her record, omitting her most
substantial publication—a book published in Cuba—from her vita.22
What we see here is not simply traditional academic disdain for the

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How Did It All Happen?

philistinism ofthat sector of the public that is not college educated. It

is, rather, the realization that what has fueled brilliant careers on cam-
pus cannot be defended against even the most elementary criticism
when the literate, college-educated public is the audience. On campus,
one can answer criticism of using the classroom to promote a radical
politics by saying that everything is political, but off campus that tactic
will not eliminate the commonsense distinction between teaching a
body of knowledge and trying to make political converts. On campus
one can be applauded for the intellectual daring of the proposition that
Madonna can be studied instead of Shakespeare, but off campus liter-
ate, educated people ridicule such opinions, and there is no real defense
against that well-deserved ridicule.
The more naively committed among race-gender-class scholars are
evidently baffled and frustrated by this recurrent strategic retreat. Greg-
ory Jay (cofounder of the Teachers for a Democratic Culture, an orga-
nization formed to defend race-gender-class academics against their
critics) laments the fact that academic leftists are losing the battle of
public opinion "because they have not heralded their achievements"
and "communicated the value of ftheir] work to a larger public au-
dience."23 Unable to understand this reticence, Jay, with evident impa-
tience (another sign of the strain between the two groups), tells his
colleagues: "We ought to be proud of the new knowledge and new
truths we are producing and ready to defend them." But in the depth of
his frustration, Jay punches a hole right through the deceptive MLA
survey of books taught in college literature courses. The MLA claim
misrepresents the curricular reform that has taken place, Jay says, be-
cause it "does not reveal how canonical authors are being taught. When
you pursue that question, it appears that the new scholarship may
be making some real headway." Here Jay sides with his intellectual

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 How Did It All Happen?

opponents who charge that the MLA study is dishonest, but he does so
because, unlike many of his race-gender-class colleagues, he has not
grasped the fact that the public would be horrified if it knew what is
happening in college literature programs.
To judge from their behavior, many devotees understand only too
well that race-gender-class is a game that brings power and prestige on
campus but lacks any validity in the wider world. Perhaps they even
understand the contradictions involved in their using cultural relativ-
ism in support of their rigidly held views on sexual and racial matters or
employing skepticism in support of dogmatic claims to political and
moral truth. Still, these are the faddists, not the committed younger
members of the movement. The opportunists have ridden faddish cur-
rents before, and their knowledge that those currents have a finite
existence is what fuels their insecurity.
Sometimes this insecurity manifests itself in a direct, dramatic way;
for example, in the attempt (in the MLA "New Project on Antifeminist
Harassment") to stifle criticism by indicting it as "intellectual harass-
ment."24 By far the most common reflex, however, is to edge toward the
center when danger threatens.25 If this were simply the refuge of a few
of the fainthearted among the rank and file of the movement, it would
not be remarkable. What is truly strange about the race-gender-class
movement is that its leading figures act in this way—its major spokes-
persons are the ones who seem uneasy about defending it. Catharine
Stimpson, for example, though a leading partisan, likes to pose as a
centrist and seems more comfortable denying that PC exists than in
extolling its virtues.26 But the oddest example of this contorted effort at
safe self-positioning is, once again, Gerald Graff.
By cofounding Teachers for a Democratic Culture with Gregory Jay,
Graff offered himself as a leader of the race-gender-class cause, yet his

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How Did It All Happen?

discomfort in that role is evident throughout his recent Beyond the

Culture Wars. The thrust of Graff's argument is that we should teach the
conflicts and let both sides be heard and argued in the classroom. It is
strange to watch Graff rehearse the familiar arguments for listening to
both sides of an issue, as if unaware of recurrent complaints about the
dogmatism and zealotry of those he speaks for. He recommends the
marketplace of ideas as if he had just discovered it and proclaims it to be
a progressive new idea that will "revitalize American education," as
Graffs subtitle put it. But that is absurd: the cornerstone of a liberal
education has always been teaching students how to examine different
sides of a question. What could be new about that? There is something
unreal about Graff s urging the marketplace of ideas upon us as an
apologist for the very people who have tried to shut it down and are
under fire largely for that reason. Examples are well known: when
Camille Paglia was invited to speak at Brown, campus feminists were
outraged, though their voices greatly outnumbered hers; when Ward
Parks criticized radical feminism at Louisiana State University he faced
a harassment charge; when Alan Gribben dissented from multicultural
orthodoxy at the University of Texas at Austin, he was ostracized.27 And
so on, and so on. These are not accidents; they are the predictable
consequence of making the classroom a place where social and political
change is initiated. Intellectual curiosity is flexible, moral fervor is not.
One seeks answers, the other already knows them. Departments of
Ethnic Studies and Women's Studies are in practice places where the
conflicts are highly unlikely to be taught, because their members are
virtually limited to a particular interest group. The subject of tough
questions from undergraduates has emerged recently as a topic of dis-
cussion among feminists, yet the emphasis has been not on the value of
diversity of opinion but on how to contain and neutralize questioners.28

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 How Did It All Happen?

Graff makes a halfhearted attempt to argue that it is anti-PC

traditionalists who need to be lectured about "teaching the conflicts,"
because they want the academy to be a conflict-free ivory tower.29 But
professors are typically contentious individuals who will argue over just
about anything, and critics of political correctness are the last to shrink
from conflict—they know how roughly their opponents treat critics.
Graff also complains of their use of invective (odd for people who
supposedly shrink from conflict) rather than argument, but his own
text is full of personal abuse of his opponents. According to Graff, his
opponents use "patent falsehoods" and do not tell the truth (his pages 3
and 25), are ignorant (31, 46, 160) because they don't do their home-
work, criticize deconstruction because they haven t read it (158), "revel
in self-pity" (49), are "frightened and defensive" (148), motivated by
fear of change (3) and anger at their failure to dominate the academy
(157), suffer from hysteria (3, 32), sneer instead of arguing (in), are
frustrated at no longer getting their own way (8), dislike theory and
dont even bother to read it (31), make excuses for social inequality and
injustice (46), and are angry at the challenge to their rule by gende-
man's agreement (56). Graffs penchant for ad hominem attack is so
strong that it makes him unable to understand his opponents' case,30
and his insistence that criticism of political correctness reduces to vari-
ous character flaws precludes any but the most primitive understanding
of the issues.
The trouble with a position that lacks conviction is that one can
easily lose one's way, because nothing in it is natural. Graff eventually
forgets what he is supposed to be arguing for long enough to blurt out
the truth: "If the left hopes to advance it must risk entering a debate
that it would not necessarily be guaranteed to win."31 And so Graff
shows that he knows perfectly well that the campus left does not want a

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debate and stands in the way of teaching both sides of the conflicts. He
even doubts that the lefts position is defensible. No wonder the real
radicals doubt the integrity of the literary radicals.
Graffs fear of his newly adopted position shows even more clearly
when he tries to make multiculturalists and feminists sound moderate
and sensible. As he tells it, feminists do not really harp on the sexism of
males; multiculturalists only want the marginal change in the canon
that always happens with time; nobody really chooses texts on the basis
of the authors gender, race, or sexual orientation; nor do they use their
classrooms to further their social and political agendas—they just want
political factors to get their due alongside others that are important.
Being a moderate and a radical at the same time is evidently not easy.
Something has to be sacrificed—in this case, reality.
Graffs contribution to the question of whether to study Shakespeare
or pop culture betrays the same lack of conviction: "A neo-Marxist
analysis of Vanna Whites autobiography, Vanna Speaks, one that em-
phasized, say, the commodification of the self under postmodern cap-
italism, might be more challenging than any number of analyses of
weightier tomes than Vannas." Graff can only bring himself to say that
when compared to run-of-the-mill traditional work the newer stuff
might not come out too badly—hardly a ringing endorsement.32
I have dwelt on Gerald Graff because he epitomizes the evasiveness,
the anxiety, and the underlying lack of commitment of the group
within the race-gender-class camp that might well be ready to move on
to the next fashion if only the flood of new appointees who are real be-
lievers had not created a new situation. It is this group of faddists,
caught between the need to maintain their leadership position on cam-
pus and the desire to stay respectable in the eyes of outsiders, that makes
the whole so unstable and the future course of events so uncertain. Even

225
 How Did It All Happen?

if the faddists do change course, the continuing presence of a large

group that will probably never have a real interest in literature, together
with the severe tension between the two groups, will cripple literature
departments for many decades to come.

What can be done to reverse or at least halt the deterioration? The

ambiguous behavior of the literary radicals, and the strain that is visible
in their having to maintain a campus stance inconsistent with their
public posture, suggests one obvious measure. The more the literate
public hears of what is happening on campus, the greater that strain
becomes; and the greater the strain, the sooner the literary radicals will
look for something new to do that does not embarrass them. But the
most obvious step that could be taken is to stop the mechanism that
continues to make the situation worse day by day: affirmative action.
Fortunately, there is no conflict between what is best for college
study of the humanities and what is good for society generally and
minorities and women in particular. A more serious study of history
and literature would enable minorities and women to gain a broader
perspective on recent events in their country and to see them as part of
a historical pattern in which the effects of the Enlightenment are still
being played out. By contrast, race-gender-class perspectives rob them
of historical context and instead channel their energies into resent-
ment. Many of the most able move into the bureaucracy of affirmative-
action enforcement, where their further intellectual development is
permanendy arrested.
Artificial intervention in the progress of young people through the
educational system ignores the fact that the momentum gained by
achievement on one level is an essential part not only of their scholastic
preparation but also of their psychological capacity to perform well at
the next level. Achieving mastery on one level gives a student the

226
How Dia h All Happen?

confidence needed to face difficult material on the next. Even the

best students sometimes doubt whether they can meet the challenges.
When those doubts hit, two things keep them going: first, the memory
that they have done it before, and second, the certainty that they must
do it again if they are to progress to the next level in the system.
Students who know they owe their education to the artificial interven-
tion of affirmative action lack both resources, and that is why affirma-
tive action is damaging even to able students. Much as we would like
to, we cannot make young people achieve, and trying to thrust it upon
them only harms them. The educational system itself is damaged as
pressure mounts to do more, and still more, to remedy inevitable fail-
ure; first, standards of performance are abandoned, then the integrity of
the curriculum.33 We should remember that there has long been a
splendid quasi-affirmative-action program for the underprivileged in
this country, one with a long record of excellent results: it consisted in
high-quality public education. But that resource is precisely what has
been damaged by misguided radical activism on behalf of the under-
privileged groups who so urgently need it.

227
 Conclusion

Disputes between different ways of approaching literary criticism have

been common enough throughout the history of the field, just as argu-
ments about the theory and practice of other academic disciplines have
been. Seen in this light, the arguments I have made might seem no
more than a normal part of academic life, business as usual. Yet some-
thing is lost if we put this recent controversy on a par with, say, the
often sharp disputes between the New Critics and the Literary Histo-
rians, substantial positions both. The analysis developed in this book, if
correct, points to something more serious: a startling decline in the
intellectual quality of work in the humanities and a descent to intellec-
tual triviality and irrelevance that amounts to a betrayal of the univer-
sity as an institution.

228
Conclusion

The idea of knowledge for its own sake, of letting an argument go

wherever its logic leads, without fear or favor, is an extraordinarily
precious part of our Western heritage. Who can doubt that it is re-
sponsible for the brilliant success of Western universities? But it is
also a fragile idea, and institutions based on it are, we now know,
fragile, too. For we have recently had a real-world test of that fra-
gility—a test of what would happen if we decided that it was not
necessary to insist that knowledge and understanding be the unique
focus and purpose of the academy and that it could also promote
desirable social causes and experiments. We have seen the results, and
we now know (what we should have known all along) that universities
cannot serve two masters—knowledge and political and social causes.
The former is a delicate creature, too easily crushed by the rougher,
cruder nature of the latter. Like a cuckoo, a social cause can only make
room for itself in the campus nest by ousting the rightful inhabitant-
it must attack knowledge for its own sake and has done so with disas-
trous results.
The present campus left complains that any attack on what it has
wrought is inspired by and serves the interests of political conservatism.
The left is wrong. Abuse of the academy for political ends has been an
equal opportunity pastime for despotic regimes of both left and right.
Everyone who is committed to a liberal democratic way of life—again,
left and right—has the same vital interest in an academy that makes
knowledge and understanding its undiluted focus. In their pursuit of
knowledge for its own sake, Western universities have been an impor-
tant force for social change; in America, high-quality public education
has provided upward mobility for generations of poor immigrants. But
the lesson of recent years is that the academy can remain a force for that
kind of social change only if it keeps knowledge and understanding
firmly at the center and resists the call for direct involvement in social

229
 Conclusion

causes. On the campus, the first and last concern must be to follow
where the logic of the argument leads.
In the past, a quality-control mechanism was in place to prevent the
corruption and decline of teaching and research: the dean. If deans
heard of a classroom where the main focus was not on teaching stu-
dents how to think and learn but on making them serve—directly
serve—political and social ends, they could intervene to insist that
classrooms were for education, not for faculty hobbyhorses or social
activism. But deans became confused when they heard senior faculty
loudly proclaim that everything was political. Not knowing how to
respond when this view was advanced as au courant academic thought,
they retreated into silence and allowed entire programs to slide into
overt social activism. One purpose of this book is to stiffen their re-
sistance by clarifying the logic of this claim. But deans will also have to
regain the courage to correct situations that need correction. They
must emerge from their intimidated state and begin once again to act as
the quality control of the academy.
There is no doubt, however, that the road back to a functioning
literature program on American college campuses will be long and
hard. A whole generation of bright graduate students of literature (and
therefore potential future literature professors) is looking at the present
state of the field and many of the best of those students are deciding
they do not see a productive life for themselves in the conditions that
prevail. Too many of the most able are deciding to do something else
with their lives. One of the saddest commentaries on the present state
of affairs is that professors who have kept intact a sense of the power
and variety of literature find it hardest to counsel them against that
decision.

230
 Notes

Introduction

1. The claims and counterclaims alluded to in this introduction are analyzed

and documented in the chapters that follow. The particular contradiction
noted at this point is pursued in Chap. 9.
2. A representative example of this ambiguous response is chronicled in Scott
Hellers " 'Frame-Up' of Multicultural Movement Dissected by Scholars and
Journalists," Chronicle of Higher Education, 27 November 1991, p. Ai5~Ai6.
On one hand, the race-gender-class scholars who organized the conference
that Heller reports on gave it the title: "The PC Frame-Up." But on the
other, one of their number, Jon Wiener, said that "the uproar indicated that
progressives had won significant victories on campuses."
3. The first full-length book to do so was Dinesh d'Souzas Illiberal Education:
The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (New York, 1991). Notable among
those that followed are David Bromwichs Politics by Other Means: Higher
Education and Group Thinking (New Haven, 1992) and Richard Bernsteins

231
 Notes

Dictatorship of Virtue: Multiculturalism and the Battle for America's Future

(New York, 1994).
4. For more on this point, see Chap. 2.
5. E.g., Frank Lentricchia, Criticism and Social Change (Chicago, 1983), p. 3: "I
come down on the side of those who see our society as mainly unreasonable
and that education should be one of the places where we can get involved in
the process of transforming it."
6. See my The Theory of Literary Criticism: A Logical Analysis (Berkeley, 1974).

1 The Origins of Political Correctness

1. I am concerned here not with the origin of the term "political correctness"
but, rather, with the phenomenon now associated with it. The term itself
originated as part of the attempt to standardize thought and opinion accord-
ing to the views of the party leadership following the successful Bolshevik
Revolution.
2. Tacitus, The Agrícola and the Germania, translation and introduction by H.
Mattingly, revised by S. A. Hanford (Harmondsworth, 1970). The passages
cited are from sees. 7, 8, n, 19, and 26.
3. See Derek Freeman, Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking
of an Anthropological Myth (Cambridge, Mass., 1983).
4. John Searle, "The Storm over the University," New York Review of Books, 6
December 1990, p. 35.
5. See especially "Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi
les hommes" (A discourse upon the origin and foundation of inequality
among mankind), in Œuvres complètes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. Bernard
Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, vol. 3 (Paris, 1964), pp. 111-237.
6. Rousseau, "Discours sur l'origine," p. 164.
7. Tacitus, Germania, sec. 44.
8. Gwyn Jones, A History of the Vikings, 2d ed. (Oxford, 1984), p. 183.
9. See, e.g., Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New
York, 1989), p. 791: "Every atrocity the time could imagine was meted out to
the defenseless population. Women were routinely raped, children killed,
both mutilated."
10. The loss of life in some regions amounted to one-third of the population
(Schama, Citizens, pp. 791-92).
11. See Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (Oxford, 1990).
12. Rousseau, "Discours sur les sciences et les arts" (A discourse on the sciences
and the arts), in Œuvres complètes, vol. 3, p. 7.

232
Notes

13. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction. (Minneapolis, 1983), p, 25.

14. These are the words of Gerald Graff, who insists that this is the real point of
deconstruction ("Toward Constructive Deconstruction: Reply to Cham-
pion," Critical Review 3 [1989] 90-92). Here Graff joins the long line of
those who have undertaken to tell us what deconstruction really means,
usually after the appearance of a highly critical account of what most other
deconstructionists take it to mean.
15. See my One Fairy Story Too Many: The Brothers Grimm and Their Tales
(Chicago, 1983).
16. Nicholas D. Kristof, "Stark Data on Women: 100 Million Are Missing,"
New York Times, 5 November 1991.
17. I consider this point in more detail in Chap. 4.
18. The claim by some feminists that this is a "rape culture" seems absurd when
it is measured against the kinds of horrors that still occur outside the West—
for example, the recent Serbian use of mass rape as a weapon of war. For a
convincing demonstration of the fraudulence of the inflated statistics used
by feminists to bolster this claim, see Christina Sommers, Who Stole Femi-
nism? (New York, 1994), chap. 10, "Rape Research."
19. Annette Kolodny, "Among the Indians: The Uses of Captivity," New York
Times Book Review, 31 January 1993, pp. i, 26-29.
20. See David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of
the New World (Oxford, 1992), for this blinkered view of a beautiful civiliza-
tion subjected to a genocida! holocaust by depraved Europeans. A useful
corrective is Michael Berliner, "Mans Best Came with Columbus," Los
Angeles Times, 30 December 1991.
21. For details, see two level-headed analyses that question the Goddess cult:
Philip G. Davis, "The Goddess and the Academy," Academic Questions 6
(1993): 49-66; and Mary Lefkowitz, "The Twilight of the Goddess," New
Republic, 3 August 1992, pp. 29-33. The most important academic propo-
nent of the Goddess theory is Marija Gimbutas, for example, The Goddesses
and Gods of Old Europe (London, 1982). A fuller discussion of the Goddess in
the context of academic feminism is given in Chap. 3.
22. See Molefi Kete Asante, The Afrocentric Idea (Philadelphia, 1987), p. 65:
"African society is essentially a society of harmonies." Johnnetta Cole, in her
Conversations: Straight Talk with America's Sister President (New York, 1993),
also gives us an idyllic picture of Africans before the Europeans, e.g., pp. 61
and 83.
23. This is the opinion of Fredric Jameson; see, e.g., his Postmodernism: Or, the
Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C., 1991). For fuller discussion
of his view, see Chap. 5, this vol.

233
 Notes

24. A more detailed critique of these ideas and of the theory of cultural relativ-
ism is given in chap. 4.
25. Kolodny, "Among the Indians," p. 28.
26. Fredric Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory: Essays, 1071—1086, vol. 2, Syntax of
History (Minneapolis, 1988), p. 189.
27. Robert Edgerton, Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony
(New York, 1992), p. 70.

2 The Diversity of Literature

1. Peter Washington, Fraud: Literary Theory and the End of English (London,
1989), p. 168. See also my review oí Fraud: "Radical Literary Theory," Lon-
don Review of Books, 8 February 1990, pp. 6-7.
2. Ruth Bottigheimer, Grimms' Bad Girls and Bold Boys: The Moral and Social
Vision of the Tales (New Haven, 1987).
3. Some aspects of this argument were first set out in my Theory of Literary
Criticism, chap. 3, "The Aims of the Study of Literature."
4. The painters unhappy marriage complicates the picture: Is his unfaithful
wife a psychological burden through which he excuses his failure or a further
sign of the lack of any charismatic quality in his personality—or both?
5. This is Walthers "Owe war sint verswunden alliu mïniu jar." A convenient
edition is Walther von der Vogelweide—Gedichte, trans, and with a commen-
tary by Peter Wapnewski, 7th ed. (Frankfurt am Main, 1970).
6. This failure of criticism is now feeding back into literature itself, with
disastrous results. Toni Morrison, for example, seems now to limit her
writing to group grievances of race-gender-class issues, which results in a
poverty of content that will make her work seem badly dated within a few
decades and that will bring contempt on the Nobel committee that so
foolishly allowed its mental horizons to be narrowed by the fads of our time.
Morrisons critical writing follows the same path; see Heather Mac Donald,
"Toni Morrison as Literary Critic," Academic Questions j (1974): 26—36, a
devastating account of Morrisons "painfully bad critical prose." See also
Bruce Bawer, "All That Jazz," New Criterion 10 (May 1992): 10-17: "Mor-
rison doesn't flinch from employing the dreariest academic jargon of the
day" (p. 16).
7. A case in point is Fredric Jameson; see below, Chap. 5.
8. See, e.g., Eagleton, Literary Theory, pp. 205, 209.
9. Eagleton, Literary Theory, p. 204; see also p. 197: "I began this book by
arguing that literature did not exist."

234
Notes

to. Eagleton, Literary Theory, p. 213; see also p. 205: "My own view is that it is
most useful to see literature' as a name which people give from time to time
for différent reasons to certain kinds of writing within a whole field of what
Michel Foucault has called 'discursive practices', and that if anything is to be
an object of study it is this whole field of practices rather than just those
sometimes rather obscurely labelled literature." This is pure invention: there
is nothing obscure about the word literature, nor is "from time to time" a
justifiable qualification in view of the consistent use of the word to refer to a
well-known body of writings.
11. It should be noted that there is another sense of the question What is
literature? one that concerns the function of literature more than its defini-
tion. See my Theory of Literary Criticism, chap. 8, "The Function of Litera-
ture."
12. Ellis, Theory of Literary Criticism, chap. 2, "The Definition of Literature."
13. Eagleton, Literary Theory, p. 9
14. George Hunter, "The History of Styles as a Style of History," in Addressing
Frank Kermode: Essays in Criticism and Interpretation, ed. Margaret Tudeau-
Clayton and Martin Warner (London, 1991), p. 83.
15. This is not to say that some feminist critics do not sometimes read some
texts appropriately; but to do so they have had to respond to what the text
says, not measure it against race-gender-class expectations. That is, they
have had to behave like critics, not feminists.
16. Gerald Graff, Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can
Revitalize American Education (New York), pp. 103, 52.
17. Graff, Beyond the Culture Wars, p. 49.
18. Ibid., pp. 71, 47.
19. Alice Walker, Living by the Word (New York, 1986). The adoption provoked
a controversy that is summarized in Nanette Asimov and Evelyn C. White,
"State Reversal on 2 Stories by Alice Walker," San Francisco Chronicle, 12
March 1994. The previous December, the State Board had voted to remove
the story from the test, but following protests about "political" motivation,
that decision was reversed three months later. A common irony is present in
this sequence of events: the protest about the removal of the story decried
political motivation, but its inclusion had clearly been motivated by the
politics of racial grievance in the first place.
20. For further discussion of this point, see my Theory of Literary Criticism,
chap. 8.
21. Eagleton, Literary Theory, p. 200. One of the oddities of the present state of
literary studies is that this now rather archaic Marxist language is repeated

235
 Notes

by literary critics long after events in the real world have made it embarrass-
ing to do so.
22. Peter Parrinder, " 'Secular Surrogates': Frank Kermode and the Idea of the
Critic," in Addressing Frank Kermode, pp. 59, 61, 63,66,71-72.
23. Parrinder here separates interpretation from any concern with the content of
what one is interpreting, needlessly, because interpretation is about diagnos-
ing content. The real contrast should be between a concern for the unique
content of each text and a rigid view of what is allowed to count as content
before the text s character is known.
24. Frank Kermode, "The Men on the Dump: A Response," in Addressing Frank
Kermodey p. 103.

3 Gender, Politics, and Criticism

1. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic

Act (Ithaca, 1981), p. 20.
2. See my "Radical Literary Theory," London Review of Books, 8 February 1990,
p. 7, for further treatment of this point.
3. Graff, Beyond the Culture Wars, p. 31.
4. Marilyn French, The War Against Women (New York, 1992); Catharine A.
MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge, Mass.,
1989), p. 174; Peggy Mclntosh, Interactive Phases ofCurricuLtr Re-vision: A
Feminist Perspective, Working Paper no. 124 of the Wellesley College Center
for Research on Women (Wellesley, Mass., 1983). A recent article by Dennis
Farney ("Blackboard Rumble: For Peggy Mclntosh, 'Excellence' Can Be a
Dangerous Concept," Wall Street Journal, 14 June 1994) documents well
both the extent of Mclntosh's influence and the nonsensical quality of her
views.
5. Nan Robertson, The Girls in the Balcony: Women, Men and the New York
Times (New York, 1992), p. 231.
6. French, The War Against Women, p. 16. French refers to this system as
"institutionalized male supremacy" (p. 16), and she believes that it "began
and spread as a war against women" (p. 14).
7. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The
Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New
Haven, 1979), p. 6.
8. Although feminists like Andrea Dworkin insist that our society is a "rape
culture," it is clearly not in the same league as other areas of the world. Mass
rape in Bosnia is one example. Rape is also used as political retribution in
many countries. See, e.g., "Pressure Grows on the Moi Regime," Guardian

2)6
Notes

Weekly, 4 August 1991, p. 10, in which Victoria Brittain reports the rape of
teenage girls by security forces in the aftermath of a prodemocracy rally in
Nairobi; or Melissa Robertsons "Unveiled: Rape in Pakistan," New Re-
public, 9 March 1992, which tells of politically motivated rapes in a society
where "a man can hurt his enemy most by raping his wife" (p. n).
9. Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, i$th-i8th Century, vol. i, The
Structures of Everyday Life, translated from the French and revised by Sian
Reynolds (New York, 1981), p. 90: "None of the royal families escaped the
terrifying rate of infant mortality of the period." Braudel cites an enormous
quantity of compelling evidence about the "precariousness and brevity of
life" in those times.
, lo. The relevant data is available in a series of articles in the Encyclopedia
Britannica, I5th ed. (Chicago, 1980). At the end of the eighteenth century,
life expectancy in North America and northwestern Europe was 35 to 40
years (s.v. "Life-Span," Macropaedia, 10:913). By the eve of World War I, it
was over 50 in the most advanced countries (s.v. "Population," 14:816). In the
case of Italy, life expectancy for men remained within one year of that for
women until the 19205, when the figure for both reached 50. As longevity for
both increased sharply in the next forty years, the gap widened, to 6.5 years
by 1967 (s.v. "Italy," 9:1096). Life expectancy in the United States is nearly
double that in many underdeveloped countries (s. v. "United States of Amer-
ica," 18:929). That of Tanzanians is now approximately 40 (s.v. "Tanzania,"
17:1029).
11. Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman in the Attic, pp. xi, xiii.
12. An example of the use of Desdemona to discuss the mistreatment of women
in the sixteenth century, rather than to illuminate Shakespeare's Othello, is
Lisa Jardine's " 'Why Should He Call Her Whore?' Defamation and Desde-
monas Case," in Addressing Frank Kermode, pp. 124-53.
13. Philip Davis, "The Goddess and the Academy," Academic Questions 6 (1993):
49-66, and Mary Lefkowitz, "The Twilight of the Goddess."
14. Davis, "The Goddess and the Academy," pp. 50, 52.
15. Lefkowitz, "Twilight of the Goddess," p. 31.
16. Chéris Kramarae and Dale Spender, eds., The Knowledge Explosion: Genera-
tions of Feminist Scholarship (New York, 1992).
17. Marilyn J. Waring, "Economics," and Liz Stanley, "The Impact of Femi-
nism on Sociology in the Last 20 Years," in The Knowledge Explosion, ed.
Kramarae and Spender, pp. 305 and 257, respectively.
18. Shulamit Reinharz, "The Principles of Feminist Research," in The Knowl-
edge Explosion, ed. Kramarae and Spender, p. 426.
19. Self-citations are ignored in this account.

237
 Notes

20. Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse (New York, 1987).

21. See David Horowitz, "Cuss me Kate: The Lunacy of Catharine MacKin-
non," Heterodoxy2 (November 1993): 14-15.
22. Ronald M. Dworkin, "Women and Pornography," New York Review of
Books, 2i October 1993, pp. 36-42.
23. Richard A. Posner, "Obsession," New Republic, 18 October 1993, pp. 31-36.
For example, the book lacks "the careful distinctions, scrupulous weighing
of evidence, and fair consideration of opposing views that one is entided to
expect in a work written by a professor at an eminent law school (Michigan)
and published by a distinguished university press (Harvard)" (p. 31).
24. Anthony Daniels, "Feminisms Confused Fanatic," Sunday Telegraph, 29
May 1994, p. 9. Daniels goes on: "There is a good case to be made (whether
one agrees with it or not) for the control of pornography. . . . Professor
MacKinnon lacks the power to make such a case."
25. Elaine Showalter, ed., The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Litera-
ture, and Theory (New York, 1985); Gayle Greene and Coppélia Kahn, eds.,
Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism (London, 1985).
26. Catharine Stimpson, "Feminist Criticism," in Redrawing the Boundaries:
The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies, ed. Stephen
Greenblatt and Giles Gunn (New York, 1992), p. 262.
27. The most prominent example of this turn is Carol Gilligan, In a Different
Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge, Mass.,
1982).
28. Peter Shaw, The War Against the Intellect (Iowa City, 1989), p. 85.
29. See Sommers, Who Stole Feminism? p. 67, citing a videotape of Mclntosh
expounding her system.
30. Dale Spender thinks that the difference can be found in womens lack of
male arrogance; for Spender, women are "looking for an inclusive rather
than an exclusive way of knowing" that avoids "replicating the mind-set of
the male model—declaring that what one knows is all that there is to know."
(Men, apparently, think they know everything.) "The Entry of Women to
the Education of Men," in The Knowledge Explosion, ed. Kramarae and
Spender, p. 241.
31. Sue Rosser, Female-Friendly Science (New York, 1990), pp. 60-61.
32. Ruth Bleier, ed., Feminist Approaches to Science (Elmsford, 1986), p. 16.
33. In the case of Carol Gilligan and Lyn Mikel Brown (Meeting at the Cross-
roads: Womens Psychology and Girls'Development[Cambridge, Mass., 1992]),
womens ways of knowing are virtually equated with the counterculture
values of the 1960$: to combat the influence of patriarchy, female students
should do their own thing, mistrust anyone over thirty, discard their sexual

20
Notes

inhibitions, feel rather than think, do what feels good, and so on. See
Barbara Rhoades Ellis s critique: "Big Girls Don't Cry," Heterodoxy 2 (Octo-
ber 1993): 8-10.
34. Helen Vendler, "Feminism and Literature," New York Review of Books, 31
May 1990, p. 23.
35. Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca, 1986), p. 113. See
also her Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women's Lives
(Ithaca, 1991).
36. Another staple of feminist writing on science is Donna Haraway s Primate
Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York,
1989), which prompted Robin Dunbar ("The Apes as We Want to See
Them," New York Times Book Review, j January 1990, p. 30) to comment,
aptly, that "the less knowledgeable may greet it with enthusiasm" and "verbal
complexity is too often a substitute for intellectual vacuity."
37. Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left
and Its Quarrels with Science (Baltimore, 1994), p. 227.
38. Andrew Kadar, "The Sex-Bias Myth in Medicine," Atlantic Monthly, August
1994, pp. 66-70.
39. Kramarae and Spender, The Knowledge Explosion, p. i.
40. Sandra M. Gilbert, "What Do Feminist Critics Want? A Postcard from the
Volcano," in The New Feminist Criticism, p. 40.
41. Peggy Mclntosh, "Warning: The New Scholarship on Women May Be
Hazardous to Your Ego," Women's Studies Quarterly 10 (1982): 29-31.
42. Kramarae and Spender, The Knowledge Explosion, p. 335.
43. Sommers, Who Stole Feminism?-, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Feminism is NOT
the Story of My Life (New York, 1996); Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge,
Professing Feminism: Cautionary Tales from the Strange World of Women's
Studies (New York, 1994).
44. Sommers, Who Stole Feminism? p. 160.

4 The Academic Politics of Race

1. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York, 1993), pp. 69-71.
2. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978), pp. 6,123.
3. Stephen J. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare
(Chicago, 1980), pp. 253,174, 46.
4. Paul A. Cantor, "Stephen Greenblatt s New Historicist Vision," Academic
Questions 6 (Fall 1993): 21.
5. For more on this point, see Chap. 9, this vol.
6. See Chap. 2, this vol.

239
 Notes

7. An intriguing clash of politically correct values with the reality of cultural

diversity was reported in Jack Foley, "Cockfighting Clash: Arrests Called
Cultural Discrimination," San Jose Mercury News, 22 February 1993. A Fil-
ipino cockfighting enthusiast complained of "cultural discrimination" when
animal rights activists filed charges against him.
8. See William Finnegan, A Complicated War: The Harrowing of Mozambique
(Berkeley, 1992).
9. Barbara Crossette, "The Island that Fell from Grace," New York Times Book
Review, 26 April 1992, p. 14, reviewing William McGowans Only Man Is
Vile: The Tragedy of Sri Lanka (New York, 1992).
ID. See Thomas Sowell, Preferential Policies: An International Perspective (New
York, 1990), pp. 76-89.
11. Jill Joliffe, "Behind the Timor Massacre," Guardian Weekly, i December
1991.
12. Michael Berliner, "Mans Best Came with Columbus," Los Angeles Times, 30
December 1991.
13. See, e.g., David Brion Davis, "Slaves in Islam," New York Review of Books, n
October 1993, pp. 35-39.
14. Bernard Lewis, cited in Davis, "Slaves in Islam," p. 35.
15. Encyclopaedia Britannica, s.v. "Slavery, Serfdom, and Forced Labor," Mac-
ropaedia, 16:853-62.
16. "Alas, Slavery Lives," Time, 22 March 1993, p. 26.
17. B. J. Cutler, "Poor Kids Get Sold as Slaves," San Jose Mercury News, 4
October 1991.
18. San Jose Mercury News, 9 July 1991.
19. Dario Fernandez-Morera, "Anti-Americanisms Here and There," Hetero-
doxy 2 (February 1994): 14: "As in so many other fields of human endeavor,
the Europeans and Americans just happened to be far better at this endeavor
than anybody else."
20. See Richard Grenier, "The Greening of the Merciless Red Man," Heterodoxy
i (October 1992): 8-9; also his "Indian Love Call," Commentary (March
1991): 46-50, a devastating critique of the romanticized picture of American
Indians in the movie Dancing with Wolves.
21. J. H. Elliott, "The World after Columbus," New York Review of Books, 10
October 1991, p. 10.
22. I should note here that the term Renaissance is now considered too Euro-
centric by many. The new politically correct term is "early modern Euro-
pean."
23. V. S. Naipaul, "Our Universal Civilization," New York Review of Books, 31
January 1991, pp. 22-25.

240
Notes

24. L. H. Gann, "African Reappraisals," Heterodoxy z (January 1994): 14-15.

25. See George B. N. Ayittey, Africa Betrayed'(New York, 1992). This quotation
is from the summary on the dust jacket.
26. See Chap, i, this vol.
27. Edgerton, Sick Societies, chap. 6, "From Discontent to Rebellion."
28. Paul Sniderman and Thomas Piazza, The Scar of Race (Cambridge, Mass.,
I993).
29. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multi-
cultural Society (New York, 1992), pp. 126-29.
30. Johnnetta Cole, Conversations: Straight Talk with Americas Sister President
(New York, 1993), pp. 62,177.
31. Henry Louis Gates, Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (New York,
1992), p. 35.
32. Mercifully, a realistic assessment of Said's writings has begun to emerge.
Reviewing his "silly, vain, and meretricious" Culture and Imperialism^ Rhoda
Koenig writes: "One does not weep for Africans in bondage, but for aca-
deme, colonized by charlatans and sycophants who have put truth in chains"
("Limp Lit," New York, i March 1993, p. 119). Ernest Gellner, "The Mightier
Pen? Edward Said and the Double Standards of Inside-out Colonialism"
(Times Literary Supplement, 19 February 1993, p. 3-4), argues that Said's
book is not a significant contribution to the discussion of colonialism. The
New Republic ("Notebook" 14, March 1994, p. 8) goes further, but is not
unfair, in calling Said "a faculty club revolutionary."
33. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (Lon-
don, 1992), pp. i, 4.
34. Pratt's book abounds in blatant double standards, however. For example,
when white males look at a landscape with interest, they do so for Pratt with
"imperial eyes" that seek to possess, but when women or black men do so,
their perception is simply and genuinely appreciative. This difference of
perception can be found only in Pratt's personal prejudices. See the review of
ImperialEyesby Douglas Fowler, Heterodoxy \ (November 1992): 15.
35. "More Bias Found among Younger Whites, " San Francisco Chronicle, 12
June 1993.
36. Arch Puddington, "Black Anti-Semitism and How It Grows," Commentary
(April 1993): 23.
37. For an incisive critique of Afrocentrism, see Mary Lefkowitz, Not Out of
Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History (New
York, 1996).
38. Schlesinger, Disuniting of America, chap. 4.

241
 Notes

5 Class and Perfect Egalitarianism

1. An amusing case is that of Sandra Bartky, who after years of using Marxist
rhetoric suddenly, during a sharp exchange with Christina Sommers, ob-
jected to being linked to "moribund Marxist-Leninist rhetoric," as if to
suggest that the collapse of Marxism had made the criticism, not the system,
obsolete. Letter to the Editor, Proceedings and Addresses of the American
Philosophical Association 65 (January 1992): 5.
2. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim (Boston, 1971), chap, u,
"Nation and Race." The German original is no longer available; it has been
unlawful to publish it in Germany since 1955.
3. Race-gender-class scholars are often remarkably impervious to the notion
that their political views may be related to such monstrosities as fascism. As
an example, in response to my "The Origins of PC" (Chronicle of Higher
Education» 15 January 1992, pp. Bi~B2), Douglas Robinson (Letters to the
Editor, 5 February) wrote that the alternative to political correctness was
Nazi Germany, forgetting entirely that the essay he was ostensibly respond-
ing to had argued that cultural relativism was implicated in the rise of
fascism in Germany.
4. Fredric Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory: Essays, 1971—1986, vol. i, Situa-
tions of Theory, vol. 2, Syntax of History (Minneapolis, 1988); Signatures
of the Visible (London, 1990); Late Marxism: Adorno, or, the Persistence of
the Dialectic (London, 1990); Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of
Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C., 1991). Jameson, The Political Unconscious,
p. 20.
5. Ibid., p. 9.
6. Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory, vol. 2, pp. 188,76; Late Marxism, p. 5.
7. Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory, vol. 2, pp. 207-08.
8. Jameson, Late Marxism, p. 250.
9. Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory, vol. 2, p. 189.
IQ. It is hard to avoid the thought that Marx's comment on the withering away
of the state should have made it unnecessary for the world to endure the
many decades of suffering by billions of people before it found out that
Marxism was an unworkable political system. This was surely a sign of a
broad streak of political naïveté in Marx.
11. See David Gordon, Resurrecting Marx: The Analytical Marxists on Freedom,
Exploitation, and Justice (New Brunswick, 1990).
12. Jameson, Late Marxism, p. 5; Postmodernism, p. 49; The Ideologies of Theory,
vol. 2, p. 207.
13. Jameson, Signatures of the Visible, p. 23.

242
Notes

14. Ibid., pp. 23-24.

15. Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory, vol. 2, p. 207.
16. Jameson, Signatures of the Visible, p. 37.
17. Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory, vol. 2, p. 208; Postmodernism, p. 417.
18. Jameson, Late Marxism, p. 250; Postmodernism, pp. 207, 335, 256, 258; The
Ideologies of Theory, vol. 2, pp. 189, 203.
19. Dario Fernandez-Morera, "Materialist Discourse in Academia during the
Age of Late Marxism," Academic Questions 4 (Spring 1991): 15—29.
20. Jameson, Postmodernism, pp. 335, 401, 25.
21. Jameson, Late Marxism, pp. 6, 3; Postmodernism, pp. xviii, 354.
22. Jameson, Postmodernism, pp. 401-02.
23. Ibid., pp. 257, 5.
24. Jameson, Signatures of the Visible, pp. 22, 32; Late Marxism, p. 248.
25. Jameson, Signatures of the Visible, p. 29.
26. Ibid.
27. Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 7. Jamesons incompetence regarding this paint-
ing does not stop here. He introduces it as "Van Gogh's well-known painting
of the peasant shoes." Unfortunately for Jameson, it is well known that Van
Gogh painted many pairs of shoes, and although he thinks he is continuing
and modifying Heideggers discussion of a Van Gogh shoes painting, he has
the wrong one. His illustration (facing his p. 10) is not the one illustrated by
Meyer Schapiro, who in a 1968 paper established (after corresponding with
the philosopher) which of the shoes paintings Heidegger was talking about:
"The Still Life as Personal Object: A Note on Heidegger and Van Gogh,"
reprinted in his Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist and Society (New
York, 1994). In this paper Schapiro had already noted that Heidegger was
clearly ignorant of the fact that these were Van Goghs own boots; Jameson
simply repeats Heidegger's mistake. I am indebted to John Hollander for
drawing my attention to Schapiros paper. Heidegger's discussion is in his
Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes (Frankfurt, 1950), which Jameson cites in the
English translation ("The Origin of the Work of Art," in Albert Hofstadter
and Richard Kuhns, eds., Philosophies of Art and Beauty [New York, 1964]).
28. Jameson, Signatures of the Visible, p. 31; Postmodernism, pp. 309, 44.
29. Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory, vol. i, p. xxvii.
30. Jameson, Postmodernism, p. i; Late Marxism, p. 249; Postmodernism, pp. 5,
45-46, ix.
31. See Chap. 3, this vol.
32. Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory, vol. 2, pp. 74, 73.
33. Second only to Jameson in influence among race-gender-class scholars is
Terry Eagleton, and that too is disturbing. Eric Griffiths said recently that "a

243
 Notes

Marxist could not but be ashamed of Terry Eagletons productions—their

disgraceful sloppiness in formulation, the abeyance in them of any sense of
history more detailed than that of a 'quality colour magazine, their self-
publicizing, opportunism and political futility." "Dialectic without Detail/*
Times Literary Supplement, 28 June 1991, p. 7.

6 Activism and Knowledge

1. See Chap. 3, this vol.

2. See Barbara Rhoades Ellis' account of the conference, "Pod People Infest
AAUW," Heterodoxy i (December 1992): 4-5. At last, the AAUW seems to
recognize that Mclntosh is a liability; see "AAUW Self-Défense," National
Review, 26 September 1994, p. 2, where Anne Bryant, the executive director
of AAUW, attempts to deny the degree of its involvement with Mclntosh s
ideas. In a reply in the same issue, Christina Hoff Sommers shows, however,
that to do so Bryant has to misrepresent the facts.
3. Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York, 1992) ; Anne Camp-
bell, Men, Women, and Aggression (New York, 1993); Susan Bordo, Unbear-
able Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley, 1993); Rob-
bie F. Davis-Floyd, Birth as an American Rite of Passage (Berkeley, 1992); Sara
Ruddick, "A New Birth of Birth," New York Times Book Review, 8 November
1992, p. 23.
4. See Chap. 3, this vol.
5. Phyllis Chesler, "The Shellshocked Woman," New York Times Book Review,
23 August 1992, pp. 11-12; Beryl Lieff Benderly, "The Perps Are Almost
Always Male," New York Times Book Review, 20 June 1993, p. 10; Maud
Ellmann, "Love Me Slender," New York Times Book Review, 26 September
1993, p. 14; and Ruddick, "A New Birth of Birth," p. 23. Ruddick assures us
that "I share Ms. Davis-Floyd's suspicion of technocratic values, and can
imagine the act of giving birth becoming an occasion for philosophic and
political as well as personal transformation. And I admire, without qualifica-
tion, the generous, critical, passionate spirit that animates this book." Many
more such cases are cited in my "The Takeover of The New York Times Book
Review," Heterodoxy ^ (November 1993): 4, 5,15.
6. See Kenneth Minogue, "Enlivening the Victims' Lives," Times Literary Sup-
plement, j June 1991, p. 8: "Feminist Theory... does not really belong in the
cool groves of academe. It is passionate and Salvationist in a similar way to
Marxism, new religious movements and occult enthusiasms: all of them
know in advance not only the conclusions they will arrive at but the appro-
priate attitude towards those conclusions."

244
Notes

7. Myra Sadker and David Sadker, Failing at Fairness (New York, 1994).
8. Christina Hoff Sommers, however, has thrown considerable doubt on the
existence of this drop in self-esteem in Who Stole Feminism?'chap. 8.
9. For Susan Faludi, for example, all criticism of feminist thought is simply
backlash: Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women (New
York, 1991).
IG. An especially virulent example of this refusal to consider possible good faith
in an intellectual opponent is former Harvard law professor Derrick Bell; see
his Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism (New York,
1992). Bell sees racism everywhere and thinks blacks worse off now than at
any time since the end of slavery. But even figures who cultivate a more
moderate image, such as Cornel West, allow "the inference to stand that
opposition to these policies [affirmative action] can be more or less legit-
imately perceived as racism," as Carol lanonne puts it in her "Middle Man"
(National Review, 19 July 1993, pp. 60-61), a review of West's Race Matters
(Boston, 1993).
11. The most egregious example is still that of Stanley Fish, who, following the
formation of a new chapter of the National Association of Scholars (NAS) at
Duke University, said in a letter to the student newspaper ( The Chronicle, 14
September 1990) that "the NAS is widely known to be racist, sexist, homo-
phobic." Fish was trying to justify a letter he had written to the provost,
Phillip Griffiths, in which he attempted to exclude the members of the
organization from serving on key faculty committees, a letter Fish at first
denied having written.
12. MLA Newletter (Summer 1991): 21; Peter Breuer, letter to the editor, MLA
Newsletter(Fall 1991): 18.
13. See Linda Seebach, "Ground Rules Twist the Academic Game," Los Angeles
Daily News, 18 February 1993; see also Sommers, Who Stole Feminism?chap. 5.
14. Caryn McTighe Musil, ed., The Courage to Question: Women's Studies and
Student Learning (Washington, D.C., 1992); Musil, ed., Students at the Cen-
ter: Feminist Assessment (Washington, D.C., 1992).
15. Musil, Students at the Center, p. 33.
16. Ibid., pp. 29-38.
17. Carolyn J. Mooney, "Review of Women's Studies Cites Personalized Learn-
ing as Strength," Chronicle of Higher Education, 10 March 1993, p. Ai5.
18. Denise K. Magner, "When Whites Teach Black Studies," Chronicle of
Higher Education, i December 1993, pp. Ai9~A2O. See also Magner s "White
Professor Wins Discrimination Suit against Black College," Chronicle of
Higher Education, 21 April 1993, p. Ai7, a report of the case of a white
professor denied tenure at a historically black institution. Many black

245
 Notes

students supported the professor, and the seniors voted to dedicate the 1993
college yearbook to him; here, as so often happens in matters of political
correctness, students were more in touch with reality than were the pro-
fessors and administrators.
19. See Sommers, Who Stole Feminism?'pp. 36-37; and Ellis, "Pod People," p. 5.
20. John M. Ellis, Against Deconstruction (Princeton, 1988), p. 67.
21. Richard Levin, "Feminist Thematics and Shakespearean Tragedy," PMLA
103 (1988): 129.
22. PMLA 104 (1989): 77-78.
23. Arthur J. Weitzman, letter to the editor, PMLA 104 (1989): 357.
24. PMLA 104 (1989): 78-79.
25. Richard Wolin, ed., The Heidegger Controversy (New York, 1992); Thomas
Sheehan, "A Normal Nazi," New York Review of Books, 14 January 1993, pp.
30-35-
26. An excellent account of this episode is David Lehman's Signs of the Times:
Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man (New York, 1991), especially chap.
9, "A Scandal in Academe." Lehman cuts through the special pleading of
Derrida on behalf of de Man, neatly exposing double moral standards.
Lehman leaves no doubt that this was shabby and dishonest behavior on
Derrida's part.
27. New York Review of Books, 22 April 1993, a continuation of letters and replies
printed in the n February, 4 March, and 25 March issues.
28. The multisignature letters were in Proceedings and Addresses of the American
Philosophical Association 66 (January 1993): 97-108, following earlier ex-
changes in vols. 65 (January 1992): 92-99 and 65 (June 1992): 55-84. Som-
mers' reply was printed in the issue following the main body of letters, 66
(June 1993): 56-57.
29. Peter Washington, Fraud, Literary Theory and the End of English (London,
1989), p. 20. See also my review of Fraud: "Radical Literary Theory," London
Review of Books, 8 February 1990, pp. 7-8.

7 Power, Objectivity, and PC Logic

i. See, e.g., Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Essays and Interviews,

1972—77, ed. Colin Gordon (New York, 1977). I am concerned here with the
general shape of the idea that has entered into race-gender-class orthodoxy:
power as the most important explanatory factor in human affairs. To exam-
ine the development of the idea and its use by Foucault in specific contexts—
for example, in relation to sexuality or criminality—is beyond the scope of
this book. The best general account of Foucault seems to me that by J. G.

246
Notes

Merquior, Foucault (Berkeley, 1985). See also James Miller, The Passion of
Michel Foucault (New York, 1993). An uncommonly insightful short account
is Mark Horowitz's review of Millers The Passion of Michel Foucault, in
Heterodoxy'i (February 1993): 14-15.
2. Merquior, Foucault, p. 115.
3. This is essentially the stance of Michel Foucault in his Surveiller et punir:
Naissance de la prison (Paris, 1975); translated by Alan Sheridan under the
title Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York, 1977).
4. Thomas E. Wartenberg, ed., Rethinking Power (Albany, 1992).
5. See Chap. 3, this vol.
6. Ibid.
7. Merquior, Foucault, p. 117.
8. See, once more, Sniderman and Piazza, The Scar of Race.
9. See Jeremy L. Milk, "Inspiration or Hate-Monger?" Chronicle of Higher
Education, 19 January 1994, pp. A33-A34. The fact that the Chronicle of
Higher Education felt the need to keep an open mind in this title is itself
remarkable.
10. See Mary Crystal Cage, "The Fiery Speeches Continue," Chronicle of Higher
Education, 16 February 1994, pp. A4I-A42.
11. Andrew Hacker, Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal
(New York, 1992).
12. See Linda Seebach, "Thwarting Attacks on the Constitution," Los Angeles
Daily News, n March 1993.
13. Stanley Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice
of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies (Durham, 1989).
14. Ibid., pp. 516 (here Fish borrows a phrase from Richard Rorty), 520.
15. Ibid., p. ii.
16. Ibid., pp. 345, 225.
17. An introduction is Mark Kelmans A Guide to Critical Legal Studies (Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1987); Thomas S. Kühn, The Structure of Scientific Revolu-
tions, 2d ed. (Chicago, 1970).
18. Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally, pp. 520, 516.
19. Ibid., pp. 522,521.
20. This is the view that words name the distinguishing characteristics of things;
for a critique, see my Language, Thought, and Logic (Evanston, 1993).

8 Is Theory to Blame?

i. Erich Trunz, ed., Goethes Werke, Hamburger edition, i2th ed., 14 vols. (Mu-
nich, 1981), 13:317: "Und so kann man sagen, dass wir schon bei jedem

247
 Notes

aufmerksamen Blick in die Welt theoretisieren"; and 12:432: "Das Höchste

wäre zu begreifen, dass alles Faktische schon Theorie ist."
2. Ernst Cassirer, ed., Immanuel Kants Werke» n vols. (Berlin, 1912-23), vol. 3,
Kritik der reinen Vernunft, p. 80: "Gedanken ohne Inhalt sind leer; An-
schauungen ohne Begriffe sind blind."
3. See, e.g., René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (New Haven,
1949).
4. Guy Sircello, "The Poetry of Theory: Reflections on After the New Crit-
icism," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 42 (1984): 387-96. The exam-
ple is Frank Lentricchias After the New Criticism (Chicago, 1980). Sircello
confesses to inadequate knowledge of the field as a whole, and he does not
grasp the fact that although Lentricchias book is representative of the pres-
ent state of the field, it is decidedly not "a good orientation to the whole
field" (p. 387) in the sense of being a guide to its most distinguished and
enduring work.
5. Inadequacies of this kind have led occasionally to the blanket claim that
theory of criticism is not a useful activity. See W. J. T. Mitchell, ed., Against
Theory (Chicago, 1985). Stanley Fish makes an argument for the irrelevance
of theory a leading issue in his book Doing What Comes Naturally, but for
reasons given in Chap. 7, it is logically unimportant in that context. An
older version of this rejection of theory can be found in the critical pluralism
that advocated an eclectic acceptance of all critical approaches, a view that
precluded any analysis of their relative strengths and weaknesses. For argu-
ments against this position, see my Theory of Literary Criticism, chap. i.
6. A survey of the field and outline of an analysis of major issues is contained in
my contribution ("Theory") to The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and
Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan, 3d ed. (Princeton, 1993), pp.
1282-90. See also my Theory of Literary Criticism for further development of
issues briefly raised here.
7. This debate began in earnest in 1946 with the essay "The Intentional Fal-
lacy," by W. K. Wimsatt with Monroe C. Beardsley, republished in their
collected theoretical essays, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry
(Lexington, Ky., 1954). Michel Foucault, "Qu'est-ce qu'un auteur?" Bulletin
de la Société française de Philosophie 63 (1969): 73-104, appeared more than
two decades later. An English version, "What Is an Author?" appeared in
1977 in Language, Counter-Memory, and Practice: Selected Essays and Inter-
views, trans, and ed. Donald Bouchard (Ithaca, 1977), pp. 113-38.
8. Ellis, Against Deconstruction, chap. 2.
9. Stephen J. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare

248
Notes

(Chicago, 1980), p. 4; and "Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and Its

Subversion," Glyph S (1981): 56.
to. "Is a New Historicist Free" (exchange of letters between Stephen Greenblatt
and Paul Cantor), Academic Questions j (1994): 5-6.
n. See Paul Cantors excellent discussion of this point in "Stephen Greenblatt s
New Historicist Vision," Academic Questions 6 (1993): 21-36.
12. For details, see John M. Ellis and Evelyn W. Asher, "German Theory and
Criticism: Twentieth Century to 1968," in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Liter-
ary Theory and Criticism, ed. Michael Groden and Martin Kreiswirth (Bal-
timore, 1994), pp. 348-52.
13. It is worth noting that the original proposal for the graduate program in the
"History of Consciousness" at the Santa Cruz campus of the University of
California was simply an exposition of Dilthey's Geistesgeschichte.
14. Edward Pechter, "The New Historicism and Its Discontents: Politicizing
Renaissance Drama," PMLA 101 (1987): 299. Pechter continues: "When
addressed to the left-liberal academic community, for whom the monarchy
is an anachronism, feminism an article of faith, and colonialism a source of
embarrassed guilt, these critical versions cannot help draining the plays of
much of their potential to involve an audience."
15. Wimsatt, with Beardsley, The Verbal Icon, pp. 3-18.
16. These two contradictory viewpoints, which are both obsessed with male
wrongdoing but which find it in diametrically opposed places, occur in the
same anthology of feminist writing: Gayle Greene and Coppélia Kahn, eds.,
Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism (London, 1985). The writers
are Nelly Furman, "The Politics of Language: Beyond the Gender Princi-
ple," p. 71; and Sydney Janet Kaplan, "Varieties of Feminist Criticism,"
p. 41.
17. For an extended discussion of this strain in recent theory, see chap. 5 of my
Against Deconstruction.
18. The number of race-gender-class scholars who have expressed this view is
overwhelming. One example will suffice: Lorraine Code, What Can She
Know? Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge (Ithaca, 1991.)
19. Harry Levin, Why Literary Criticism Is Not an Exact Science (Cambridge,
Mass., 1967).
20. Wimsatt, with Beardsley, The Verbal Icon, pp. 21-39.
21. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, 1957).
22. E.g., Claude Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologie Structurale (Paris, 1958).
23. Another strand of deconstructionist criticism suggests a different goal for
criticism, however; it asserts that all texts undermine their surface meaning

249
 Notes

and embrace the reverse of what they appear to say. Here, meaning has a
much more determined shape, one knowable to readers if they will only read
in a certain way. This strand is analyzed in my Against Deconstruction,
chap. 3.
24. Leo Spitzer, Linguistics and Literary History (Princeton, 1948).
25. See the excellent discussion of Peirce s "Assault on Cartesianism," in W. B.
Gallic, Peirce and Pragmatism (Harmondsworth, 1952), chap. 3.
26. Ibid., p. 35. See also the two aphorisms cited above, note i.
27. Thomas S. Kühn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2d ed. (Chicago,
1970).
28. Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally, pp. 345 and 487. Part of the blame here
must go to Kühn, who does not mention Peirce in the course of his book and
appears not to have known the source of his own ideas.
29. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-
Century Europe (Baltimore, 1973). Whites position is developed in two
further books: Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore,
1978) and The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Repre-
sentation (Baltimore, 1987).
30. This is the summary of Hans Kellner in his "Hayden White,** in The Johns
Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. Michael Groden and
Martin Kreiswirth (Baltimore, 1994), pp. 728-29.
31. White, Metahistory, p. 2.
32. E.g., E. H. Carr, What Is History? (New York, 1961).
33. Robert E. Spiller, "Literary History," in The Aims and Methods of Scholarship
in Modern Languages and Literatures, ed. James Thorpe (New York, 1963),
P. 53-
34. Kellner, "Hayden White," p. 728.
35. A typical instance here is the collection of essays Aesthetics and Language, ed.
William Elton (Oxford, 1954).
36. See Northrop Frye, "Literary Criticism," in The Aims and Methods of Schol-
arship in Modern Languages and Literatures, ed. James Thorpe (New York,
1963), pp. 57-69-
37. A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic, 2d ed. (London, 1946), chap. 6.
38. E.g., P. H. Nowell-Smith, Ethics (Harmondsworth, 1954).
39. This view is discussed in my Theory of Literary Criticism, a somewhat belated
contribution to the second phase of literary theory. Its underlying logic is set
out much more explicitly in Language, Thought, and Logic.
40. Barbara Herrnstein Smiths Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for
Critical Theory (Cambridge, Mass., 1988) is the only sustained attempt to
provide a theoretical basis for race-gender-class skepticism about evaluation.

250
Notes

Smith argues that "all value is radically contingent" (p. 30) and is therefore
not an inherent quality of things; and that literary value is "relative," that is,
. "a changing function of multiple variables" (p. n). Value, then, exists only in
a particular situation for a particular set of people. Smith regards notions
such as "the test of time" only as a surrogate for the illegitimate claim of
universal value on the part of "those with cultural power" and believes that
texts that survive this test do no more than "reflect and reinforce establish-
ment ideologies" (p. 51). She also takes aim at those whom she calls "the
custodians of the Western canon" for being unable to grasp the fact that
Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare have value only for the "orthodoxly edu-
cated population of the West" and do not possess "transcendent universal
value" (p. 53). For all her attempt at logical sophistication, Smiths argument
thus descends into orthodox race-gender-class crudities and anti-Western
animus. Her logic is not original: the attempt to veto all statements of value
that are not statements of fact about the value of something in a particular
situation is in fact logically identical with A. J. Ayer s logical positivism, and,
like Ayer, she evades the crucial question of the use and function of general
evaluative judgments. Nor is her logic truly supportive of the race-gender-
class outlook she tries to bolster with it: her reduction of value to particular
situations still could not prevent judgments about the relative universality of
Western culture that would be based on the sheer number and variety of
situations in which its influence is felt. The notion that Shakespeare will
appeal only to one who is educated "orthodoxly" is particularly silly. Nor is
Smiths position consistent with the highly negative attitude of race-gender-
class critics to positivist logic. An excellent longer discussion of Smiths
"hard-line utilitarianism" is Bromwich, Politics by Other Means, pp. 204-14.
41. Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis, 1986).
42. See my Against Deconstruction and Lehman's Signs of the Times.
43. In an interview on PBS s McNeil-Lehrer Newshour (19 June 1991), Fish said:
"We have to realize that there are persons from outside the academy who are
spearheading the attack on multiculturalism or political correctness, as it is
sometimes called, organizations like the National Association of Scholars.
... What this means is that much of the agitation occurring on campus has
been produced by political, a political effort that originates off campus....
The two groups to whom the neo-conservatives address their complaints
and their attacks first of all are alumni and second of all concerned commu-
nities around the various universities." Although his television audience was
probably largely unaware that the National Association of Scholars (NAS) is
an organization of academics—professors, college administrators, and grad-
uate students—Fish himself knew it well; see above, Chap. 6, note 11. See

251
 Notes

also Dorothy Rabinowitz, "Vive the Academic Resistance," Wall Street Jour-
nal, 13 November 1990.
44. See Scott Heller, "Changing Trends in Literary Scholarship Modify the
Appearance of English Institute as It Celebrates 5Oth Meeting at Harvard,"
Chronicle of Higher Education, n September 1991, pp. A9-Aio.
45. Two news items on the same page of the Chronicle of Higher Education (n
September 1991, p. Ai9) report opinions that the press is responsible for
much of the political correctness controversy. The first cites Alan Wald s
concern about impressions generated by "news organizations and conserva-
tive critics." The second announces that a special session of the next con-
ference of the Modern Language Association of America is to be devoted to
how the press covers new scholarship and speaks of "the tension between
academics and journalists." The recently circulated manifesto of the Teach-
ers for a Democratic Culture also attacks "media reports" and tells us that
the "mainstream media have reported misinformed opinions as if they were
established facts" (Scott Heller, "Scholars Form Group to Combat 'Mali-
cious Distortions' by Conservatives," Chronicle of Higher Education, 18 Sep-
tember 1991, pp. Ai9-Aio; Heller reports that the new group claims it has
been "consistendy misrepresented and unfairly attacked by conservative
critics, journalists, and authors" [p. Ai9]). Although such claims are com-
mon, the distortions are rarely specified. The unbiased observer would in
any case conclude that Stanley Fish, Catharine Stimpson, and others like
them have had more than their share of access to the news media. Their
image problem is due not to the public s being unaware of their opinions but
to its knowledge of them.
46. Graff made this remark when interviewed by Denise Magner; see her "Gath-
ering to Assess Battle against 'Political Correctness': Scholars Look for New
Ways to Resist 'Illiberal Radicals,' " Chronicle of Higher Education, 30 Octo-
ber 1991, pp. Ai7-Ai9.

9 How Did It All Happen?

i. Three recent articles from the Chronicle of Higher Education show this pres-
sure at work: Ivan Karp and Stephen D. Lavine, "Museums Must Take on
New Roles in This Multicultural Society," 14 April 1993, pp. 83-64: "The
elite museum's theory of education, where high culture trickles down to the
masses, is no longer unthinkingly accepted Museums are being asked to
open up [to] . . . participation by previously marginalized groups"; Alan
Wallach, "Revisionism Has Transformed Art History, but Not Museums,"
22 January 1992, pp. 82-63; and Lisa G. Corrin, "Do Museums Perpetuate

2J2
Notes

Cultural Bias?" 15 June 1994, p. 848: "Under enormous pressure, the mu-
seum community has been forced to consider the relation between what it
does and the historical, political, and social context in which it operates."
The Smithsonian has shown the kind of results these pressures will in-
creasingly produce. According to William H. Truettner, a curator, an exhibit
on the Wild West "relied heavily on the writings of the 'new' Western
historians," and the accompanying texts "sought to explain the images on
display as ideological constructions designed to justify national expansion"
("The West and the Heroic Ideal: Using Images to Interpret History,"
Chronicle of Higher Education, 20 November 1991). But the distinguished
historian Daniel Boorstin saw it, rather, as "a perverse, historically inaccu-
rate, destructive exhibit" (Kristin Huckshorn, "Wild West Tamed in Rein-
terpreted Art," San Jose Mercury News, 22 May 1991). Two more examples of
the new Smithsonian style are noted in a recent Wall Street Journal editorial
("War and the Smithsonian," 29 August 1994). A television special informed
viewers that cannibalism in a New Guinea tribe was "a well-functioning
example of how a complete criminal justice system works"; and a proposed
script for an exhibit centering on the Enola Gay (the plane that bombed
Hiroshima) was to read: "For most Americans, this war . . . was a war of
vengeance. For most Japanese, it was a war to defend their unique culture
against Western imperialism." (After much public criticism, the exhibition
was canceled.) It is interesting to observe that ideological obsession here goes
hand in hand with moral obtuseness and serious ignorance of history—all at
the nations most important museum of American culture and history.
2. This is also Camille Paglias impression, to judge from her "The Nursery-
School Campus: The Corrupting of the Humanities in the U.S.," Times
Literary Supplement, 22 May 1992, p. 19.
3. W. K. Wimsatt, "Battering the Object: The Ontological Approach," in
Contemporary Criticism, ed. Malcolm Bradbury and David Palmer (London,
1971), p. 65.
4. See Adam Begley's "The Is Have It: Dukes Moi Critics Expose Them-
selves," Lingua Franca 4 (March-April 1994): 54-59.
5. Elaine Marks, "Presidents Column," MLA Newsletter, Spring 1993, pp. 2-3.
6. Stanley Fish, "Why Literary Criticism Is Like Virtue," London Review of
Books, IQ June 1993, p. n. See also Dinesh D'Souza, "Pied Pipers of Relativ-
ism Reverse Course," Wall Street Journal, 27 July 1993.
7. Steven Watts, "Academe s Leftists Are Something of a Fraud," Chronicle of
Higher Education, 29 April 1992, p. A4O. See also Paglia ("The Nursery-
School Campus"), who also insists that "they are not radicals at all.... They
are people without deep beliefs."

253
 Notes

8. For example, in the literature department at the University of California,

Santa Cruz, a bitter conflict has broken out between two factions that are
roughly equal in size. The conflict is not about the value of race-gender-class
perspectives, for both sides share that orientation; it is over a différence in
the interpretation of the new creed. The older group uses race-gender-class
to do new readings of classic texts; these are the literary radicals, who may
denounce the canonical authors in ritual fashion but still keep writing about
them. In the other group are the real radicals. Their position on race, gender,
and class is no literary-critical pose, and so they actually read and teach the
literature of the downtrodden ("World Literature" is the technical term
here). In their favor, it must be said that they can recognize something
phony when they see it, but even so, it is chilling to come face to face with a
race-gender-class group that really means what it says and accepts the grim
consequences.
9. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, "Hirsch, Literacy, and the National Culture," in
The Politics of Liberal Education, ed. Darryl J. Gless and Barbara Herrnstein
Smith (Durham, 1992), p. 89.
IQ. See also Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York, 1987),
p. 159.
11. On the more general question of the dangers posed by the intellectual
ambitions of the intelligentsia, see Gary Saul Morson, "What Is the Intelli-
gentsia? An Old Russian Question," Academic Questions 6 (1993): 20-38.
12. It is, of course, neither, for Marx, not Derrida, is responsible for this train of
thought. In a forthcoming book, Dario Fernandez-Morera points out that
this allegedly deconstructive technique is only the standard dialectical mate-
rialist reduction of motivation, known to academicians and students in the
formerly communist countries of eastern Europe by the derogatory short-
hand "diamat." It is ironic that this elderly reductionist habit is now seen as
avant-garde thought by campus radicals in the West.
13. Many colleagues seem to me to be blind to this connection. When I ask
them how they think affirmative action has affected the department, they
understand the issue I am raising to be the quality of the new minority and
female faculty and students but never the content of the curriculum or the
intellectual climate of the department.
14. Sowell, Preferential Policies» pp. 76-87.
15. Helen Vendler, "Feminism and Literature," New York Review of Books» 30
May 1990, pp. 19-25.
16. John Le Carré, Smiley s People (London, 1979), p. 67.
17. For example, when Rebecca Sinkler, the partisan feminist editor of the New
York Tûmes Book Review, gave the book to her old friend and former teacher

254
Notes

Nina Auerbach for a predictable trashing (12 June 1994), the malice and
dishonesty of Auerbachs review was so obvious (e.g., "Christina Hoff Som-
mers is a wallflower at feminist conferences. In revenge, she attends them
obsessively, writes down all the stupid things she hears, and has now spewed
them back") that it provoked not just a storm of protest but a response
almost without precedent. A whole series of columns in other newspapers
commented on this unethical behavior by Sinkler and Auerbach: the New
York Daily News (12 June), Washington Post (14 June), New York Post (14
June), Worcester Telegram and Gazette (14 June and 16 June), and Boston
Globe(i6 June).
18. See above, Chap. i.
19. Carolyn J. Mooney, "Study Finds Professors Are Still Teaching the Classics,
Sometimes in New Ways," Chronicle of Higher Education, 6 November 1991,
pp. Ai-A2.
20. Peter Shaw, "The Modern Language Association Is Misleading the Public,"
Chronicle of Higher Education, 27 November 1991, p. 83, and Will Morissey,
Norman Fruman, and Thomas Short, "Ideology and Literary Studies," pt.
2, "The MLA's Deceptive Survey," Academic Questions 6 (1993): 46-58. See
also the subsequent correspondence in the Chronicle of Higher Education, 18
December 1991 and 8 January 1992; and John Sutherland, "The Annual
MLA Disaster," London Review of Books, 16 December 1993, pp. 11-12.
21. See Clint Bolick s review of Guinier s The Tyranny of the Majority (New York,
1994), in TheDefender-i (May 1994): 12-13.
22. See my review of Conversations: Straight Talk with America's Sister President,
by Johnnetta Cole (New York, 1993), in Heterodoxy i (March 1993): 15.
23. Gregory S. Jay, "The First Round in the Culture Wars," Chronicle of Higher
Education, 26 February 1992.
24. See Chap. 6, this vol.
25. As Carol lannone apdy observed, this is a mythical center: "PC with a
Human Face," Commentary 95 (June 1993): 44-48. It is inhabited either by
people who are really in favor of race-gender-class but are scared of looking
like radicals or by people who are really against race-gender-class but are
scared of being labeled right-wing. There are two positions here, not three.
26. See the interesting article by John Leo, "The Professors of Dogmatism,"
U.S. News and World Report, 18 January 1993, p. 25, on the 1992 annual MLA
conference, at which Stimpson was still insisting that PC "doesn't actually
exist."
27. See, on Paglia, the "Reductio ad Absurdum" column, Heterodoxy i (May
1992): 3; on Parks, "LSUs War against Men," Heterodoxy i (June 1992): 4-5;
on Gribben, Richard Bernstein, Dictatorship of Virtue, chap. 9.

255
 Notes

28. See the account of this phenomenon in Sommers, Who Stole Feminism?
chap. 5, "The Feminist Classroom."
29. Graff uses a personal anecdote to prove his point: he tells us that as a student
he listened at ten o'clock to a lecturer who took a New Critical approach to
Milton, then at eleven went to a class where New Critical theories were said
to have no applicability to Milton. That is what I, too, remember from my
student days, and how interesting it was. But Graff? "I hardly focused at the
time on the fact that my two teachers were in disagreement Since no one
was asking me to think about the relationship between the two courses, I did
not" (Beyond the Culture Wars, p. 108.) This is an astonishing admission. The
only thing that this anecdote suggests is a remarkable lack of intellectual
curiosity on Graffs part at the time.
30. See also Stephen Burd s "Defiant Conservative Relishes the NEH Fights to
Come," Chronicle of Higher Education, 29 June 1994, p. A25, a profile of
Peter Shaw, member of the National Council on the Humanities. When
asked to comment on Shaws views for this profile, Graff responded: "Peter
Shaw is an ignoramus."
31. Graff, Beyond the Culture Wars, p. 169.
32. Ibid., p. roo. Graffs attempt to attack economists from his new position on
the radical left is equally embarrassing, but his silliest assertion is the claim
that Fredric Jameson is "not as far as he may seem from Orwell" (p. 159). A
man who must persuade himself that an unreconstructed apologist for Sta-
lin and Mao is not far from Orwell is clearly under strain.
33. For an account of an effort that is already under way in California, see Joye
Mercer, "Assault on Affirmative Action," Chronicle of Higher Education, 16
March 1994, p. A25.

256
 Index

Adorno, Theodor, 124,131, 242 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 22

Alexander the Great, 56 Begley, Adam, 253
Amin, Idi, 109,170 Bell, Derrick, 245
Aristotle, 186 Berger, Harry, Jr., 155
Arpad, Susan, 86 Berliner, Michael, 97, 233, 240
Asante, Molefi Kete, 233 Benderley, Beryl Lieff, 244
Asher, Evelyn W., 249 Bernstein, Richard, 231, 255
Asimov, Nanette, 235 Bleier, Ruth, 83, 238
Auerbach, Nina, 255 Bloom, Allan, 254
Austen, Jane, 75 Bokassa, Jean-Bedel, 109
Ayer, Alfred Jules, 198, 250-51 Bolick, Clint, 255
Ayittey, George, 107, 241 Boorstin, Daniel, 253
Bordo, Susan, 145, 244
Bartky, Sandra, 242 Bottigheimer, Ruth, 234
Bawer, Bruce, 234 Bouchard, Donald, 248
Beardsley, Monroe, 189,193, 248-9 Bradbury, Malcolm, 253

257
 Index

Braudel, Fernand, 67, 237 Derrida, Jacques, 18,128,156-7,184-

Breuer, Peter, 245 5,196, 201, 246, 254
Brittain, Victoria, 237 Descartes, René, 195
Brogan, T. V. F., 248 Dickens, Charles, 37-38,48-9
Bromwich, David, 231, 251 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 188,192, 249
Bronte sisters, 75 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 9, 204
Brown, Lyn Mikel, 238 Dreyfus, Richard, 132
Browning, Robert, 37-9 D'Souza, Dinesh, 231,253
Bryant, Anne, 244 Dunbar, Robin, 239
Burd, Stephen, 256 Dworkin, Andrea, 78-9,170,236, 238
Dworkin, Ronald, 78, 238
Cage, Mary Crystal, 247
Campbell, Anne, 145, 244 Eagleton, Terry, 19,43-5, 51,179,233-
Canon, Lynn Weber, 149 5> M3-4
Cantor, Paid, 91,188,239,249 Edgerton, Robert, 30,96-97,108,
Carr, E. H., 250 234, 241
Cassirer, Ernst, 248 Einstein, Albert, 35
Castro, Fidel, 129 Eliot, George, 75
Ceausescu, Nicolae, 170 Elliott, J. H., ici, 240
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 57 Ellis, Barbara Rhoades, 239,244,246
Chavez, Linda, 87 Ellmann, Maud, 244
Cheney, Lynne, 87 Elster, Jon, 125
Chesler, Phyllis, 244 Elton, William, 250
Clinton, William Jefferson, 74
Code, Lorraine, 249 Faludi, Susan, 245
Cohen, G. A., 125 Farney, Dennis, 236
Cole, Johnnetta, no, 220, 233, 241, 255 Finnegan, William, 240
Conquest, Robert, 232 Fish, Stanley, 174-80,196, 200-1, 213,
Corrin, Lisa G., 252 215, 245, 247, 250-53
Crossette, Barbara, 240 Fernandez-Morera, Dario, 99,128,
Culler, Jonathan, 157, 202 240, 242,254
Cutler, B. J., 240 Foley, Jack, 240
Forster, E. M., 56
Daniels, Anthony, 79, 238 Foucault, Michel, 18,27,161-2,170-1,
Dante Alighieri, 4-5, 251 176,184,196,201,202,219,246-8
Davis, David Brion, 240 Fowler, Douglas, 241
Davis, Philip G., 76, 233, 237 Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, 86, 239
Davis-Floyd, Robbie F., 145, 244 Frederick II the Great, 56
De Man, Paul, 128,130,156-7, 200, Freeman, Derek, 232
246, 251 French, Marilyn, 64-6, 236

258
Index

Freud, Sigmund, 36,185, 210 Hacker, Andrew, 172, 247

Fruman, Norman, 255 Hanford, S. A., 232
Frye, Northrop, 193,198, 249-50 Haraway, Donna, 239
Furman, Nelly, 249 Harding, Sandra, 84, 239
Hartman, Geoffrey, 202
Gagnebin, Bernard, 232 Haydn, Joseph, 22
Gallic, W. B., 250 Hebbel, Friedrich, 56
Gandhi, Mohandas, 101 Heidegger, Martin, 128,130,156,196,
Gann, L H., 107, 241 243
Gates, Henry Louis, no, 241 Heller, Scott, 231, 252
Gellner, Ernest, 241 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 21-24,112,
Gilbert, Sandra, 66, 75, 85, 218, 236- 183,186
7» 239 Herman, Judith Lewis, 145
Gilligan, Carol, 238 Hills, Carla, 87
Gimbutas, Marija, 77, 233 Hirsch, E. D. Jr., 214
Gitlin, Todd, 159 Hitler, Adolf, 112, n8,197, 242
Gless, Darryl J., 254 Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus,
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 4-5, 56
22, 39,47, 54-5,181,195, 204, Hofstadter, Albert, 243
248-9 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 22
Gorbachev, Mikhail, 129 Hollander, John, 243
Gordon, Colin, 246 Homer, 4-5, 24, 40-1, 54,100, 251
Gordon, David, 242 Hoover, J. Edgar, 203
Graff, Gerald, 47-9, 62, 203, 222-5, Horkheimer, Max, 124,131
233, 235-6, 256 Horowitz, David, 238
Gramsci, Antonio, 18 Horowitz, Mark, 247
Grass, Günter, 56 Huckshorn, Kristin, 253
Greenblatt, Stephen, 90—1,102—3, Hull, Gloria, 148
187-8, 238-9, 248-9 Hume, David, 4
Greene, Gayle, 238, 249 Hunter, George, 235
Grenier, Richard, 240
Gribben, Alan, 223, 255 lanonne, Carole, 245, 255
Griffiths, Eric, 243
Griffiths, Phillip, 245 Jakobson, Roman, 184
Grimm brothers, 22-4, 34, 233 Jameson, Fredric, 29-30, 60,119-39,
Groden, Michael, 249-50 157» ^33-4, ^36, 242-3, 256
Gross, Paul, 84, 239 Jardine, Lisa, 237
Gubar, Susan, 66,75, 218, 236-7 Jay, Gregory, 221-2, 255
Guinier, Lani, 220, 255 Joliffe, Jill, 240
Gunn, Giles, 238 Jones, Gwyn, 17, 232

259
 Index

Kadar, Andrew, 84-5, 239 Mac Donald, Heather, 234

Kafka, Franz, 56,134 MacKinnon, Catharine, 64,78-80,
Kahn, Coppélia, 238, 249 86,170, 236
Kant, Immanuel, 22,182, 248 Madonna, 205, 221
Kaplan, Sydney Janet, 249 Magner, Denise K., 245, 252
Karp, Ivan, 252 Mao Zedong, 52,121,123,127-8, 256
Keats, John, 205 Mann, Thomas, 56
Kellner, Hans, 197, 250 Manson, Charles, 197
Kelman, Mark, 247 Marcos, Ferdinand, 129
Kermode, Frank, 46, 57-9, Marcuse, Herbert, 121
235-7 Marks, Elaine, 213, 253
Keynes, John Maynard, 56 Marlowe, Christopher, 90
Kleist, Heinrich von, 22, 56 Manheim, Ralph, 242
Kolodny, Annette, 28-30,86,107, Martin, Lynn, 87
^33-4 Marx, Karl, 6,15,18, 31, 36, 52,116-21,
Koenig, Rhoda, 241 123-30,132,134,136-8,154,175,
Koertge, Noretta, 87, 239 179,185, 210, 225, 235, 242-4, 254
Kramarae, Chéris, 78, 237-9 Mattingly, H., 232
Kreiswirth, Martin, 249—50 Maugham, W. Somerset, 56
Kristof, Nicholas D., 25, 233 McCarthy, Joseph, 203
Kühn, Thomas, 176,195-6, 201, 247, McGowan, William, 240
250 Mclntosh, Peggy, 64, 82-4, 86,144,
Kuhns, Richard, 243 236, 238-9, 244
Mead, Margaret, 14
Lavine, Stephen D., 252 Mellaart, James, 76-7
Le Carré, John, 218, 254 Menchu, Rigoberta, 197
Lefkowitz, Mary, 76-7, 233, 237, Mercer, Joye, 256
241 Merquior, J. G., 161,170-1, 246-7
Lehman, David, 246, 251 Milk, Jeremy L., 247
Lenin, Vladimir, 136,242 Miller, J. Hillis, 157,202
Lentricchia, Frank, 232, 248 Miller, James, 247
Leo, John, 159, 255 Milton, John, 205, 256
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 54 Minogue, Kenneth, 244
Levin, Harry, 192, 249 Mitchell, W. J. T., 248
Levin, Richard, 155-6, 246 Mohammed, Khalid, 172
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 193, 249 Moi, Daniel arap, 236
Levitt, Norman, 84, 239 Molière, 54
Lewis, Bernard, 97, 240 Mooney, Carolyn, 152, 245, 255
Lukács, Georg, 124 More, Sir Thomas, 239, 248
Lysenko, Trofim, 6-7,167-8 Morissey, Will, 255

260
Index

Morrison, Toni, 91, 234 Roemer, John, 125

Morson, Gary Saul, 254 Rorty, Richard, 79-80, 247
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 22 Rosser, Sue, 83, 238
Musil, Caryn McTighe, 150, 245 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 15-19, 21, 24,
28, 55, 76,125, 206, 219, 232
Naipaul, V. S., 106, 240 Ruddick, Sara, 244
Newton, Isaac, 84,167-8
Nixon, Richard, 203 Sadka, David, 146, 245
Nowell-Smith, P. H., 250 Sadker, Myra, 146, 245
Said, Edward, 90-1,102-3, HO—m,
Orwell, George, 127, 256 239» 241
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 185
Paglia, Camille, 223, 253, 255 Schama, Simon, 232
Palmer, David, 253 Schapiro, Meyer, 243
Parks, Ward, 223, 255 Scheider, Roy, 132
Parrinder, Peter, 57-9, 236 Schiller, Friedrich, 22, 56
Patai, Daphne, 87, 239 Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr., 109-110,113,
Pechter, Edward, 189, 249 241
Peirce, Charles Sanders, 195, Schopenhauer, Arthur, 22
250 Schubert, Franz, 22
Piazza, Thomas, 109, 241, 247 Searle, John, 15, 232
Plato, 4-5, 48 Seebach, Linda, 245, 247
Pol Pot, 18,128-9 Shaka, 107
Posner, Richard, 79, 238 Shakespeare, William, 4—5, 9, 38—9,
Pratt, Mary-Louise, in, 241 43» 45» 47-9» 54» 57» 75» 9O-i» 94»
Preminger, Alex, 248 102,119,155,188,198, 204-5, 2O9>
Puddington, Arch, 113, 241 221, 225, 237, 239, 248, 251
Shapiro, Joan, 150—2
Rabinowitz, Dorothy, 252 Shaw, Peter, 82, 238, 255-56
Raymond, Marcel, 232 Shaw, Robert, 132
Reinharz, Shulamit, 237 Sheehan, Thomas, 156, 246
Remarque, Erich Maria, 57 Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 75
Reynolds, Sian, 237 Sheridan, Alan, 247
Rice, Condoleezza, 87 Short, Thomas, 255
Richards, I. A., 184 Showalter, Elaine, 238
Robertson, Nan, 236 Sinkler, Rebecca, 254
Robertson, Melissa, 237 Sircello, Guy, 183, 248
Robespierre, Maximilien-François- Smith, Barbara Herrnstein, 214, 250-
Marie-Isodore de, 17, 24,128 5i» *54
Robinson, Douglas, 242 Sniderman, Paul, 109, 241, 247

261
 Index

Sommers, Christina Hoff, 86,157, 218, Wald, Alan, 252

233,238-9,242, 244-6, 255-6 Waldheim, Kurt, 130
Sowell, Thomas, 217, 240, 254 Walker, Alice, 50,91,197, 235
Spender, Dale, 237-9 Wallach, Alan, 252
Spenser, Edmund, 90,102 Walther von der Vogelweide, 41,
Spiller, Robert, 196, 250 234
Spitz, Mark, 40-1 Walzel, Oskar, 184
Spitzer, Leo, 194, 250 Wapnewski, Peter, 234
Stalin, Joseph, 7,18, 52-3,122-4,127~ Waring, Marilyn J., 237
30, 256 Warner, Martin, 235
Stanley, Liz, 237 Warren, Austin, 184,189,248
Stannard, David E., 233 Wartenberg, Thomas E., 247
Stimpson, Catharine, 81,86, 222, 238, Washington, Peter, 34,158,234,
252, 255 246
Sulzberger, Arthur, Jr., 64 Watts, Steven, 213, 253
Sutherland, John, 255 Weitzman, Arthur J., 246
Wellek, René, 184,189, 248
Tacitus, 13-7, 20, 24, 55,232 West, Cornel, 245
Tchaikovsky, Peter Ilich, 56 White, Evelyn C., 235
Theresa, Mother, 176-7 White, Hayden, 196-7, 250
Thorpe, James, 250 White, Vanna, 225
Trunz, Erich, 247 Wiener, Jon, 231
Truettner, William H., 253 Wilde, Oscar, 56
Tudeau-Clayton, Margaret, 235 Wimsatt, W. K., 189,193,208, 248-9,
Tolstoy, Leo, 40 *53
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 56
Van Gogh, Vincent, 134, 243 Wolf, Christa, 53
Vendler, Helen, 83, 218, 239, 254 Wolin, Richard, 246

262