In the Academy
The War Against the Intellect: Episodes in the Decline of Discourse.
by Peter Shaw.
University of Iowa Press. 181 pp. $22.50.
Anyone inquiring into the present state of humanities in the American academy may expect to confront a grotesque spectacle. Many of today’s middle-aged and younger faculty and their graduate-student protégés, entranced by fashionable but nihilistic French philosophies or compelled by the imperatives of politics and ideology, have abandoned the notion that they have a duty to transmit to their students some idea of the achievements of Western art and thought. Instead, we now find a reflexively adversarial questioning of tradition and inherited standards of discourse, a relentlessly subversive hostility toward the Greco-Roman framework and Judeo-Christian fabric of our civilization, and a quasi-sophisticated skepticism toward the artistic and philosophical treasures it has given us. As Peter Shaw puts it in his important new book, The War Against the Intellect, the “guardians” of culture have become its “traducers.”
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The War Against the Intellect is a collection of essays written over the last fourteen years on subjects ranging from a number of currently prevailing trends in literary theory (deconstruction, Marxism, feminism), to Ezra Pound’s abuses of American history in his late Cantos, to the pervasiveness of plagiarism in both the literary and scientific communities. There is even a piece on that most esoteric of fields, textual scholarship. Yet the volume coheres, thanks to Shaw’s ability to extract from each of his subjects a persuasive cross-section of evidence to fortify the thesis adumbrated in his title. Like Jacques Barzun before him in The House of Intellect (1959), Shaw here exposes both the excesses of pedantry and the penchant which some Western intellectuals have for projecting the malheur they feel onto one or another bugbear—capitalism, authoritarianism, the tyranny of logic, or (the newest addition) patriarchy. But whereas in 1959 Barzun believed that intellect was “in peril, though not yet in mortal danger,” in 1989 Peter Shaw is convinced that we have entered upon a “dark age of the humanities.”
Two essays that give grounds for this pessimism are “The Decline of Criticism” and “The Politics of Deconstruction.” It is difficult to overestimate the influence upon literary theory of deconstruction’s skeptical assault upon “logocentrism,” the assertion that texts carry determinate meanings and that words are something more than the playthings of a critic’s subjective fancy. In Skeptical Engagements (1986), Frederick Crews illustrated how deconstruction is a self-validating proposition: since any one reading of a text will not coincide perfectly with any other, all meanings, no matter how manifestly removed they might be from an author’s intent, are admissible. Peter Shaw’s contribution is to show, clearly, how closely this professed relativism of meaning is bound up with the singularly unrelativistic aims of Marxism and other so-called “oppositional” ideologies.
For one thing, deconstructionism’s roots lie historically in the abortive Paris student uprising of 1968, as the Marxist critic Terry Eagleton (cited by Shaw) has pointed out. For another, the jargon of deconstruction is replete with terms borrowed from the Marxist lexicon like “authoritarian,” “reactionary,” “hierarchical,” “tyrannical,” “imperialistic,” “hegemonic.” In an ultimate irony discussed by Shaw, several prominent radical critics have now begun to chide their erstwhile deconstructionist allies for failing to enlist their talents explicitly enough in the service of “radical social change.”
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A similar kind of intramural squabbling beleaguers practitioners of the various feminist literary schools. In “Feminist Literary Criticism,” Shaw traces the evolution of these schools from the early stages of “protest over the traditional depiction of women in fiction” through a period in which positive female role-models were sought in literature to today’s murkier vista, within which feminism emerges as a house hopelessly and bitterly divided. On the one hand are those who might be called the mainstream ideological opponents of “patriarchy,” with their desire to attribute all wrongs to the predominance of male power and the repression of women. On the other hand are the various subgroups—black feminists, Chicana feminists, lesbian feminists, lesbian and minority feminists, and so on—who charge the mainstream group with discrimination and insensitivity toward alternative manifestations of womanhood.
Add to this already volatile mixture the politically radical feminists who believe that patriarchal tyranny goes hand-in-glove with capitalism and economic repression, and then the proponents of “French structural biologism” who argue the merits of “vaginal criticism” as against a “clitoral hermeneutics” (and some of whom actually champion illogical writing and weak-mindedness as quintessentially feminine counterpoints to the rigidities of male “phallogocentric” logic), and theoretical diversity degenerates into sheer intellectual entropy. The net result is stupefying. In the literary field, where, as Shaw writes, women incontestably excel, “feminist literary critics, starting out in the conviction that women writers had long suffered at the hands of male critics, have ended up fostering an image of women at least as insulting as any that they set out to protest.”
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The main flaw of The War Against the Intellect is that one or two of the essays seem outdated or incomplete. Thus, in a note appended as an update to “The American Heritage and its Guardians,” a 1975 discussion of the chaotic state of editorial practice in the Center for Editions of American Authors, Shaw neglects to mention Jerome J. McGann’s A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (1983), now the most readily accessible revisionist polemic in the ongoing debate between advocates of “authorial intention” and the “sociological” textual critics. More seriously, Shaw does not cite the work of G. Thomas Tanselle, the textual scholar and editor of Herman Melville, who is far and away the most rigorously consistent and intellectually formidable spokesman for the doctrine of authorial intention.
On a different note, Shaw nowhere takes issue with the “new historicism,” the latest entry into the field of “oppositional” literary criticism. In its more strident forms, new historical theory blends the (Lacanian) principle of “absence” with both the deconstructionists’ insistence upon subjectivism and the subversive goals of Marxism. By means of this potent combination one recent critic, for example, has discovered that William Wordsworth’s great nature poem, “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” is actually about the appalling social conditions of industrial England which led homeless vagabonds to live around the ruins of the abbey and beg for coins from the tourists who visited it—this, despite the fact that, as the critic herself emphasizes, the abbey is never so much as mentioned in the poem and the “vagrant dwellers” appear only once in its 159 lines. But this, we are told, is because of the poet’s suppression (or “erasure”) of stark reality, his “displacement” of it, and his substitution of “private”reflections on man’s interaction with nature. (For the record, Wordsworth began “Tintern Abbey” as he was departing the region, and his fond memories later prompted him to write that “no poem of mine was composed under circumstances more pleasant for me to remember than this.”)
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In the face of current assaults upon humane studies, Shaw concludes that a “minimal case” to be made for them is that “our predecessors thought and expressed some things in ways that cannot be improved upon.” Not only does this modest premise enable one to gain a valuable perspective on the chaos left in the wake of the various attacks upon the liberal arts, it also revives the honorable belief that the great poets and philosophers of the West have useful truths to impart, that the voices speaking down the centuries can resonate within us, and that the people behind them are human beings, not archetypal class oppressors or proto-lesbians. In Shaw’s trenchant words, such an awareness can provide “a sense that there is something more appropriate than our evaluation of [the past], and more important than anyone’s attempt to deconstruct it. This something is the way in which the past begins to measure us.”
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