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Saussure, but subsequently continued, in a distorted form, by the other
French luntinaries. The result was to make language autonomous, and to
deprive it of meaning and interpretive power. The American literary
theorists imported this concept of language and its corollaries: the au–
tonomy of the text and the multiplicity of meaning. Furthermore , to
this intellectual baggage was added, from Derrida and Foucault, the
Marxian and Nietzschean rejection of the past, and of the principle of
objectivity. Vickers further points out that the systems of the American
theorists, like those of the French, are self-referential and self-contained.
Thus they cannot be checked against either reality or with other ideas.
These concepts died a natural death in France, yet they found a new life
in the American academy.
11. The Culture
As I have suggested - and the point has been elaborated by Edith
Kurzweil and Mark Lilla - political correctness would not have spread so
quickly and widely in the academy if it were not also supported by more
primitive but basically similar trends in the culture as a whole in this
country. The native anti-intellectualism, the disdain for "elitism" and
high culture, the egalitarian myth, the liberal guilt over the heritage of
black slavery, the indifference to cultural standards, the immersion in
popular culture, the widespread notions about the relativity of truth,
morality, and aesthetic criteria - all these cultural currents create a popu–
lar parallel in the larger culture to the acaden'lic political correctness. It is
hard to say whether the political correctness of the academy is the cause
or the symptom of the malaise . Perhaps the academy and the popular
culture influence and fertilize each other. In any event, the popular cul–
ture did not need Derrida, and the academy did not need Madonna.
In this respect, political correctness is an American phenomenon and
one indigenous both to academic and popular culture in this country.
But, at the same time, it is in this respect difficult to eradicate. The hope
is that a false ideology will run its course and that those writers and in–
tellectuals with a sense of their craft and their traditions will have an ef–
fect on the rest of the culture. For the opposition to PC, in addition to
independent acadentics, exists largely in the serious culture of writers and
practicing critics.
