Michael C. Milam
Bloomington, IN
[NEH Nietzsche Seminar, University of Illinois, Urbana, 1991.]
Let us honestly face the facts. Our America has a bad name for superficialness. Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it.--Emerson
Everyone in America should by now be aware of the "storm" over the American university. Books and articles too numerous to mention have attacked the politically correct, affirmative action hiring of faculty, questionable student recruitment practices, and, last but not least, radical curriculum and "canon" revision. The politically correct revisionists have struck back, sparking an acrimonious debate that often resembles all out war. This debate will no doubt go on for some time. What is of interest here is not so much who is right, although this writer has strong views on the subject which will become apparent, but rather the amazing lack of historical perspective on both sides. Most "traditionalists" assume a Golden Age located somewhere in the 1950s or early 1960s, when the American academy was a monastery dedicated to the disinterested pursuit of truth. The revisionists acquiesce in this assumption; after all, such a position only adds force to their general argument that the "tradition" is rotten with the "phallocentrism" of Dead White Men and that all scholarship is determined by a hidden "ideology." The revisionist agendas which aim to discredit the notions of pure science, the objective pursuit of truth, and the life of the mind, the intellect in general, can be shown to have their roots deep in the American psyche. Ironically, then, something as "foreign" as deconstruction, the esoteric son of French structuralist thought and the darling of American literary theorists, can be demonstrated to have powerful "elective affinities" with the ever-present mistrust of the intellectual in American culture. In fact, the rise of deconstruction in literary studies, often considered an anomaly, may be seen to be another expression of American anti-intellectualism.
In order to understand the similarities of American anti-intellectualism and deconstruction, one could do no better than to begin with Richard Hofstadter's classic study of the plight of intellectualism in America, Anti-intellectualism in American Life (New York: Knopf, 1962). Hofstadter demonstrates how, from early colonial times, American culture was mistrustful of education and learning that went beyond practical use of the abilities of the common man. The life of the mind was associated with aristocracy and a decadent European culture.
At an early date, literature and learning were stigmatized as the purgative of useless aristocracies.... It seemed to be the goal of the common man in America to build a society that would show how much could be done without literature and learning--or rather, a society whose literature and learning would be largely limited to such elementary things as the common man could grasp and use. (Hofstadter 51)
By the late nineteenth century, this attitude was so prevalent in society at large that school textbooks had assimilated such a position. As a result, while children were learning to read they also were being introduced to the American distaste for, and mistrust of, the intellect: "There seems to have been a prevailing concern that children should not form too high an estimate of the uses of mind" (quoted in Hofstadter from Ruth Miller Elson, "American Schoolbooks," Mississippi Valley Historical Review 46 [December 1959]: 308). In such an atmosphere, of course, higher education was not considered a place to pursue high intellectual achievement, rather, "the American college was complacently portrayed as a place designed to form character and inculcate sound principle rather than to lead to the pursuit of truth" (Elson 308).
Hofstadter sums up the national traits that fostered such a position toward education and the university:
[Anti-intellectualism] first got its strong grip on our ways of thinking because it was fostered by an evangelical religion that also purveyed many humane and democratic sentiments. It made its way into our politics because it became associated with our passion for equality. It has become formidable in our education partly because our educational beliefs are evangelically egalitarian. (Hofstadter 22-23)
Evangelical religion, a radical Protestantism which is hostile to rationalism and the disinterested pursuit of knowledge; egalitarianism which insists upon the priority of equality in all matters; and a stubborn insistence on the necessity of the practical use of knowledge are the ideas which came to dominate thinking about education in the United States.
To understand this long-standing tradition that gives education in America its particular character is to begin to understand why the American university of today gives itself so readily to such a passionate pursuit of affirmative action hiring, quota recruitment of students, and politically correct notions along egalitarian lines. The university, according to the prevailing American attitude, is not a place for the disinterested pursuit of knowledge, but an institution in which students may learn sound principles of citizenship. The evangelical spirit provides "political correctness" its passionate intensity while egalitarianism determines what is correct. Nothing could be more American than the reification of the excluded "victim." And what could be more American than the evangelical pursuit of "victimology" with such reckless abandon and passion that all other considerations, intellectual for instance, are effectively ignored? The selection of new faculty members according to the past exclusion of their minority group instead of according their quality as teachers and scholars, the admission of students along the same lines, and the revision of subject matter to reflect current "political correctness" all demonstrate that the American academy is dedicated to the inculcation of selected current values much more than to education in the sense of ensuring that students develop skills by which they may objectively grasp a certain body of knowledge. It is quite clear that the political agenda has priority over the pursuit of truth and knowledge. Universities today are correcting themselves, restructuring faculty and curriculum to revitalize these putatively rotten institutions. This situation betrays an ironic but telling fact: The American academy itself reflects anti-intellectualism. Hofstadter's point, made about America in general some thirty years ago, rings true for the university itself today. The attitude toward the university is one of hostility and mistrust.
Institutions in which intellectuals tend to be influential, like universities and colleges, are rotten to the core. In any case, the discipline of the heart, and the old-fashioned principles of religion and morality, are more reliable guides to life than an education which aims to produce minds responsive to new trends in thought and art...; too much stress on the acquisition of mere knowledge, as opposed to the vigorous development of physical and emotional life, is heartless in its mode of conduct and threatens to produce social decadence. (Hofstadter 19)
The confusion of, or insensitivity to, distinctions between political agenda and intellectual goals in the academy is part of the national character, rooted in a fundamental lack of faith in the value of the intellect. If one remains in doubt about the increasing anti-intellectualism in the American academy, the rise of deconstruction in literary studies may be convincing. To a great extent, deconstruction may be seen as the engine with which to demolish the "egghead intellectuals."
For those unenlightened, it is in order to briefly describe the deconstructive "mission." Deconstruction was introduced to America through Jacques Derrida's view of language and the interpretation of texts. All "writing," for Derrida, is subject to the ineluctable vagaries of interpretation. He insists that writing is a series of signs whose signification can never come to rest in a determinate reference. Consequently, words have no absolute or final context within which they may be understood. Meaning is incessantly deferred, put off, or delayed. According to Derrida, no piece of writing can have an absolute, determinate meaning because words do not refer to any world outside of the text itself. The idea of determinate meaning is the result of "trace" which is not a "presence," a reference to a real world of things, but a kind of "simulacrum" of a signified presence which is an accumulation of all present and past connotations of a word. Definition and interpretation of a sign are merely the interpreter's putting in its place another sign. Interpretation results, then, in a "freeplay" of signification in which all interpretations are relativized and ultimately indeterminable. Put in an historical perspective, the idea of determinate meaning, according to Derrida, is a linguistic vestige of the tradition of metaphysical thinking in the West. The deconstructionists insist that language is "burdened" with "logocentric" notions such as "order," "purpose," "center," and others which reflect a now-untenable tradition. In other words, logocentrism "is taken to involve a set of value priorities typical of Western philosophers and intellectuals: the value of truth over illusion, of science over art, of logic over rhetoric, of literal language over figurative" (Maudmaurie Clark, "Deconstructing The Birth of Tragedy," International Studies in Philosophy 19.2 [1987]: 71). The purpose of deconstruction then is to seek out and discredit these notions in all texts and, thereby, to liberate them from logocentrism (i.e., metaphysical "presence").
According to deconstruction, historical interpretation of a novel, for instance, does not relate any truth or facts about history or literature to the student because language cannot embody history and the notion of literature is exhausted in the figural "freeplay" of language. From the deconstructive point of view, the cultural education of the student becomes "problematic" at best. (Of course, this does not stop literature professors who profess the "truths" of deconstruction from making their living by "teaching" novels). The logic of deconstruction, therefore, does away with cultural and historical perspective. Without it, there is no intellectual context within which judgment, evaluation, and comparison of ideas can take place. The result is the triviality and wild generalizations of an a historical perspective. Since language really does not communicate truth or knowledge and texts may be interpreted at will, what one says about them is all the same. The student is as right as the professor about any interpretation. As Robert Kimball has pointed out in Tenured Radicals about deconstruction in the American academy, "In so much academic writing these days, arcane references and wild generalizations are thrown around wholesale" (Tenured Radicals [New York: Harper and Row, 1990], 115).
Deconstruction, more than anything else, represents a rebellion from traditional scholarship. From the beginnings of the university in Europe, scholarship has had the ideals, at least, of close textual scrutiny, scrupulous documentation, and objective judgments based upon knowledge and experience. The academic intellectual has been required to possess the critical thinking and verbal skills necessary for these tasks and to attempt to develop them in the student. Overall, this vocation was the life of the mind. The value rested in Aristotle's idea that the highest activity of man is thought and in the idea that the great minds of the past could speak to the present. Deconstruction insists that the medium in which this cultural activity, the intellectual heritage of the West, is preserved is fundamentally and irretrievably faulty. According to the deconstructionists, intellectual heritage is an illusion which rests on incorrect assumptions about the function and abilities of language: the great tradition of the West becomes a Tower of Babel. Quite clearly an unyielding mistrust of the value of man's intellectual abilities is embedded firmly in deconstruction.
Given the American predilection for anti-intellectualism, it is no wonder that deconstruction, with its mocking attitude toward rigorous intellectual thought, the pursuit of hard-won objectivity, and the idea of intellectual disinterestedness, could hold such a fascination for American literature professors. The prevalent attitude in literary studies at many (most?) of the nation's prestigious universities is that "no position is objective," reflecting the American suspicion that intellectual achievement is a sham or a front for some ulterior motive. Keeping this in mind, one is in no way perplexed about the happy marriage of post-structuralist French theory and the American literature professor. Once again, Hofstadter's words from the past are apropos: "Ours is the only education system in the world vital segments of which have fallen into the hands of people who joyfully and militantly proclaim their hostility to intellect" (Hofstadter 51). The affirmation of deconstruction, which now threatens to invade other disciplines, demonstrates just such a militant hostility toward the intellect.
In no way should deconstruction, anti-intellectualism, and "political correctness" be seen as an original attack on an institution dedicated to the objective pursuit of truth and knowledge. The American academy has always followed a precarious existence between the practical demands of the nation and the pursuit of the life of the mind, between political education for citizenship and the development of the intellectual abilities of the student. And of course, equal opportunity and a curriculum which is responsive to revision certainly have their places in the American academy. An atmosphere charged with the rhetoric of political revisionism and political agendas, however, is hardly compatible with developing a respect for knowledge and the ability to pursue it with a certain amount of disinterestedness, necessities for a healthy culture. The rise of deconstruction and "political correctness" may be the high point of just another ugly incident in the history of the American academy. Hopefully, these fads will pass and an atmosphere more congenial to intellectual and academic rigor will return. In the meantime, the traditional scholars must hold their ground.