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tering and rectification of their harmful influences. Moreover, the cor–
ruptions of both language and thinking that are associated with this
group of phenomena have become densely entangled with the organiza–
tional structures taken by these virtuous causes themselves. As a result,
those causes tend to be reciprocally influenced, not for the better, by the
means they are articulated through, by the language in which they are
prosecuted and promoted, by the cultural styles of their representations -
and as in the past the republic of virtue, even before it is realized, has be–
gun to take visible shape as a congregation of dunces, or something even
less savory.
A fundamental assumption of these loosely-associated cohorts is, to
cite the ongoing cliche, that "everything is political." In this axiomatic
presupposition, they appear to agree with Orwell. "In our age," he
wrote, "there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are
political issues." But he then went on to add what few of our contem–
poraries would, I believe, acknowledge in a similarly convincing self-in–
clusive and self-incriminating sense: "and politics itself is a mass of lies,
evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is
bad, language must suffer." Orwell was making his declaration from a
restrictive and specific historical perspective; he was not asserting that
politics were universally and at all times as debased as he believed, with
justification, the politics of his time to be; indeed, he felt trapped in the
poisonous political universe of the thirties and forties and longed, often
nostalgically, for a world and a time in which political life had a less
lethal character to it - his novel of 1939,
ComillJ? Up Jor Air,
is all about
such a daydream. But when our orthodox contemporaries affirm that
"everything is political," they are speaking in error and in contradiction
of certain of their own philosophical convictions: they are universalizing,
absolutizing, and essentializing, to use a few choice fragments of the cur–
rent jargon. They are, in addition, repeating, in a different region of dis–
course, an error that certain of their predecessors had made earlier.
One of the historic disabilities of vulgar Marxism was its tendency
toward economic reductionism. All human phenomena, including such
cultural artifacts as poetry, music and logic, could be "explained" by ref–
erence to the economic base, or modes of production and ownership,
out of which different societies created and perpetuated themselves. This
species of reductive explanation was not to be confused with other kinds
of analysis that strove to demonstrate the socially or historically contex–
tualized nature of cultural artifacts, and that insisted upon multiple de–
termination in any exp lanatory account of social eventuations. Such
analyses sought to anatomize simultaneously both the historically
grounded circumstances that were almost inevitably refracted in most
