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PARTISAN REVIEW
tend to be collections of smaller articles rather than sustained arguments;
its titles are meant to grab attention ("Pop Goes the Academy: Cult Studs
Fight the Power"); its language strives for, even if it often fails to accom–
plish, inside-dopesterism; its conferences are usually packed and feature
the academic equivalent of rock stars; illustrations are favored and books
are packaged brilliantly; and the treatment of what is under investigation
resembles fan magazines more than disinterested inquiry. This is not an
effort to study the mass media but to imitate it.
Because work in the media resembles, even if superficially, the work
of intellectuals and academics, there has long been both an attraction and
a repulsion between these two vocations. But whereas Dwight Macdon–
ald and Daniel Bell left the world of Luce either for independent writing
or the academy, cultural studies strives to transform the academy into a
mass market production. Intellectuals, Andrew Ross writes, are those
who "patrol the ever-shifting borders of popular and legitimate taste, who
supervise the passports, the temporary visas, the cultural identities, the
threatening 'alien' elements, and the deportation orders, and who occa–
sionally make their own adventurist forays across the border." Cultural
studies strives for something even more ambitious than an occasional
venture into enemy territory. Marxists thought that one class could abol–
ish all classes; the intellectuals of cultural studies want to see a world in
which intellectuals no longer exist. This is self-hatred with a vengeance.
One might think that American society has already brought into ex–
istence a world in which intellectuals no longer exist.
It
is not necessary
to wax nostalgic for a golden age of intellectuals to recognize that today's
critics have neither the learning nor the audience of a previous genera–
tion. One member of that earlier generation, Richard Hofstadter, went
out of his way to remind us that this has never been a country particularly
attracted to intellectual ideas. But anti-intellectualism, in Hofstadter's
treatment, was especially a movement of the right. No doubt he would
be as surprised as anyone to find a decided anti-intellectualism stemming
from the academic left.
Cultural studies approaches the debate over political correctness by
stripping it of any content, conceiving it a problem of rhetoric, strategy,
and image. The right does a better job making its points stick, adherents
to this trend believe, not because its critique is accurate, but because the
right is unified and never concedes a point. The left fails in its strategy be–
cause it doesn't understand that the right plays by hardball rules which are
uncomfortable to well-meaning leftists; the right lies, for example, while
the left does not.
It
therefore all comes down to image: the left simply has
to do a better job explaining its position. This kind of analysis is unper–
suasive because it ignores reality: there really was an effort to turn English
