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evading such political questions [as Vietnam, Guatemala, Stalinism]
altogether." How the definition of a poem as a verbal icon or as a play
of signs kept one from storming the Columbia University administration
building Eagleton does not say. But the fact that one could draw paral–
lels, however factitious, between a formalist analysis that asked no
political questions and a general political quietism suffices for Eagleton
to indict New Criticism and deconstruction as reactionary bad faith.
How one reads a poem and how one engages in political life are all of
a piece. Daniel Bell may claim to be "a socialist in economics, a liberal
in politics, and a conservative in culture," and the art historian Anthony
Blunt may have counseled students to downplay politics in their studies,
all the while serving as a postwar Soviet operative in England, but ulti–
mately, Eagleton presses, inquirers have no latitude to modulate their
actions, for there is no real disjunction between scholarship and social
conduct, between teaching and voting. One cannot be a progressive on
issues of, say, gun control and abortion rights and a conservative in mat–
ters of scholarly method .
Literary Theory: An Introduction
hardly counts as a serious discus–
sion of literary theory, but its tactics have come to dominate humanities
criticism. Commentaries on ideological origins and ethical results far
exceed conceptual analyses and logical expositions. Evaluating concepts
and arguments by their political backgrounds and implications has
become a disciplinary wont, a pattern of inquiry. It is the natural
method of constructionist epistemology, the outlook that will not dis–
tinguish between a truth and its origination, which is to say the outlook
that is not really an epistemology at all.
It
speaks an epistemological lan–
guage, but it has no epistemological principles. This is one of the
curiosities of social constructionism, and why people err in attacking it
on epistemological grounds, that is, on grounds of truth, evidence, and
objectivity. Constructionists affirm that truth is a construct, dependent
upon the conditions of its discovery. This is a flat contradiction, since
truth by definition is independent of the means by which it is discov–
ered.
If
constructionists mean by "truth" merely "what passes for
truth," then the contradiction disappears, but now we are no longer
talking about truth in epistemological terms, but in historical terms, that
which is accepted as truth in this or that time and place. The acceptance
of something as true is one thing, the truth of that belief is another.
Establishing the latter is a routine epistemological task. Documenting
the former is a traditional historical endeavor, carried out by Gibbon as
well as by Sedgwick. In this distinction lies the novelty of social con–
structionism: in a word, constructionism disregards it, mingling history
