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that no longer requires the regulative work of representation and
legitimation that intellectuals once performed? Can progressive
intellectuals speak for the oppressed or does their intervention
inevitably produce the silencing and marginalization of the
oppressed for whom they purport to act? Can conservative intel–
lectuals preserve the common grounds of a democratic social order,
or can they only reproduce structures of privilege and exclusion?
I have quoted Michael at some length-partly to demonstrate that he
is the sort of overheated thinker who would rather bash his way into a
room than turn a doorknob, and partly to make it clear that his ques–
tions arrive with their answers firmly implied.
Indeed, Michael makes no bones about his solid credentials on the
cultural Left, and in particular as a tireless booster for cultural studies.
Harold Bloom once ruffled certain academic feathers when he pointed
out that "Freudian literary study" is
not
Freudian,
not
literary, and
not
study. The same quip can be applied to much that passes for "cultural
studies," especially when one begins to see what is collected under the
wide umbrella of "culture" and what constitutes "study." Shakespeare,
a recent president of the Modern Language Association once famously
pointed out, is simply "different" from, say, Alice Walker, just as a pizza
is different from a calzone. Notions of which one is
better
simply don't
enter into the equation-at least for those who define "multicultural–
ism" as a version of Chairman Mao's hundred blooming flowers. By
contrast, people less adept at moving from Lear to a cereal box rightly
wonder when the stone of errant foolishness will finally hit bottom.
If
Michael's study tells us anything, it is that we have a long way to go
before anything resembling legitimate study makes a return.
Meanwhile, the public debate about our national culture rages on,
even as one academic dean after another figures that the smart money
should get channeled into business departments, computer studies pro–
grams, and the hard sciences. I continue to believe that standing publicly
tall during the worst moments of the culture wars was necessary, but I
also worry that those on both sides of the aisle have not yet been pre–
sented with the full, itemized bill. When, for example, deconstruction–
ists proudly announce that there is no such thing as "Truth," they mean
to make a playful point. What they don't quite realize is that their lin–
guistic razzle-dazzle undermines (or, in their more fashionable lingo,
"destabilizes") the very world that butters their parsnips-for if the
"pursuit of Truth wherever it may lie" is so much old-fashioned
folderol, then I-and many, many others-say the hell with it.
