[An Essay Review of]
Michael G. Becker
English
MSU [Bozeman]
The liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith once said that "good universities have always been places of contention and dispute; bad universities are as silent and tranquil as the desert." If that's true today's schools must be in fairly good shape. The unfrayable fiftyish Hughes, for one, is not convinced, and not that amused. He believes the academic left and the conservative right share some foolish common ground in their censorious attitudes and methods. Some of these lunacies, on both sides, have done great harm to movements of integrity like multiculturalism and feminism; they have leveled western civilization's greatest art and, along the way, denigrated skill and superior effort generally.
The "culture of complaint" of the '80s and early '90s is deplored at entertaining length in the first and longest essay. Much of this has been said before, though not much better. Hughes illustrates with mocking particulars our "twin fetishes" of victimhood and redemption. The range of victims, he argues, grows ever larger--blacks, Chicanos, Indians, women, the abused, homosexuals, dysfunctional family members, now even the "white American male bawling for victim status too." Never before in human history have we seen "so many acronyms pursuing identity." It's as though "all human encounter were one big sore spot, inflamed with opportunities to unwittingly give, and truculently receive, offence." Such "balkanization" leads to "culture war," an unraveling of America. These attitudes, he shows, have found their way into the university.
Clear language is as always the first casualty. The vogue for politically (or patriotically) correct euphemistic language, on the left or right, Hughes contends, is absurd and self-defeating. It is not a true cultural revolution; we surely fail, not "underachieve." Words like "nonliving person" for corpse, "African-American" for black, "chairpersons for chairman ("in Anglo-Saxon, the suffix 'man' was gender-neutral") do not alter much the facts of death, racism, or sexism--"by the time whites get guilty enough to call themselves European-Americans' it will be time to junk the whole lingo of nervous divisionism."
We also have the "PC claptrap" from the academic left serving up a "delicious array of targets for cheap shots" from the right. Hughes cites the UC-Santa Cruz administrator who campaigns against phrases like "a chink in one's armor" and "a nip in the air," and other Baby Boomer academics who set up speech codes enforceable in no place but the Arcadia of campus life. As he ruefully notes, "campus conservatives [are] flourishing, delighted that the PC folk give some drunken creep of a student who bellows 'nigger' or 'dyke' into the night the opportunity to posture as a martyr to speech repression." Paralysis sets in, and progressive young people get turned off--in his fine phrase: "the radical impulses of youth are generous, romantic, and instinctive"; they care about politics-with-action, not political etiquette or priggish, pettifogging posturing.
How truly political or politically active are the "tenured radicals" posturing on the barricades? One could make the case that only the idiocies of the right (viz. Buchanan, Falwell, Quayle, Helms, etc.) preserve the illusion of the radicalism of the academic left. Hughes contends a recent survey at UCLA showing far-left faculty at 5%, conservative faculty at 18%, is probably about right (only 1 in 30 in the sociology department, for example, calls herself a Marxist now). Most of us in this business for a decade or two would not find the figures astonishing. The tenured professoriate is comprised of, in fact, some of the most politically timid folk around. Some PC pushers sound good but rarely act beyond self interest; nor do they invest the time or cash that ought to follow hard upon their rhetoric. Intellectual dishonesty thrives; careerism and cant coalesce. Hughes says it best: the academic left does not care about the politics of the distribution of wealth, real events like poverty, drug addiction, and crime; it is
much more interested in race and gender than in class. And it is very much more interested in theorizing about gender and race than actually reporting on them. This enables its savants to feel they are on the cutting edge of social change, without doing legwork outside of academe.
Hence we have the parlor rebels of this culture of complaint who, paradoxically, are handsomely rewarded for their mincing demonstrations, in writing, of the uselessness of language and their demolition jobs on western culture. PC, Hughes says, can be "a shrewd career move."
Woven through the last two essays is the related theme of the preparedness and performance of students on our campuses. What he has to say goes a long way toward explaining why college today is such an unsatisfying experience for so many American students.
The dismal facts have often been rehearsed: in the society at large, 60 percent of young whites (ages 21-25) cannot locate information in a news article, 44% cannot figure a restaurant bill, 25% cannot read a printed bus schedule. The stats for blacks and Hispanics are worse. For the privileged, colleges like Columbia, Swarthmore, U of Chicago report falling verbal SATs in the last decade. Schools may have compounded this problem by lightweight teaching and lowering standards, and by not responding directly and negatively to students' "personal expression" of loose assertions and plain wrong answers. Colleges have become institutions of "social therapy," fearing to injure students' "self-esteem" by asking them to read difficult texts, sift information, analyze ideas, write more often and better. According to Hughes, students in the '80s who were ill equipped to handle textual argument and embedded facts "fell back to the only position they could truly call their own: what they felt about things. Cycle this subjectivization of discourse through two or three generations of students turning into teachers, with the sixties' dioxins accumulating more each time, and you have the entropic background to our culture of complaint."
Because feelings and politics are so tightly wound, the latter often becomes the main focus of the classroom. Artists and writers are assessed according to their ability to improve social consciousness, as if political messages exhausted the content or value of art. The past is indicted for being the past. Students become either confused or naively confident:
[They] come away with the impression that the correct response to a text is to run a crude political propriety meter over it and then let fly with a wad of stereotyped moralizing. "Boy, Professor Peach really did a job of unmasking the hierarchical assumptions in Dante last week, all those circles and stuff, you shoulda been there."
Why this fashion for judging art in political terms? "Because it is easy to teach"; it relieves students of "the burden of imaginative empathy, the difficulties of aesthetic discrimination." And, he might have continued, it also relieves professors of the plain hard work of cultural contextualizing. Naturally, profs need not be prostrated with professorial melancholia and guilt for latching onto anything that might liven up today's classroom; we are increasingly held hostage by student evaluations of our work, by students as clients who expect the classroom to be as animated and orgasmic--and as vacant--as the latest video. Keats as HBO. But as one student recently told me, "I like all the excitement of the class give-and-take, but after class I look at my notes and find I don't have much of anything."
Scholars must also take their lumps. Hughes sums it up nicely: "The present state of university writing about the arts is somewhere between a sleeping-pill and a scandal." Because post-structuralist writing weakly challenges the status quo in lumpen prose, no one fully understands its purpose unless it is merely to spread suspicion, of language, of history, of human possibility in a web of power and control. Students, bent low by theory, are mystified by the jargon but energized at times by the iconoclasm. Scholars are overwhelmed by a mound of unreadable criticism, and forced to rely for the proper publishing argot on simplistic commentaries on the primary sources. The public, bemused by our pious hobbyism, remains largely unaddressed, and untouched by anything resembling an uplifting, passionate transmission of Western (or any nation's) cultural ideas or artifacts. Hughes faults us for our petty attempts at relevance, our actual irrelevance. Citing Chinese students who clearly had not read their Foucault on inscriptions of power before courageously fronting the tanks at Tiananmen Square, he sarcastically observes:
The world changes more deeply, widely, thrillingly than at any moment since 1917, perhaps since 1848, and the American academic left keeps fretting about how phallocentricity is inscribed in Dickens' portrayal of Little Nell.
Hughes spends a good part of the remainder of the book addressing the larger question of excellence, which I believe is the real subject lurking in his scouring cultural criticism. Like the well-known professor who once taught in the English department here in Bozeman and wrote a great long book on motorcycles and Zen ("there's such a thing as Quality in this world and it's real, not style," R. Prisig, 286), Hughes has some good things to say about quality, but at a more toothsome length.
To my taste, Harvard critic Helen Vendler explains the formation of an artistic canon best--one stable, yet with the usual sifting historical flux--when she observes that canons appear to be made over time not by publishers, governments, critics, or professors but by artists who admire other artists' work. Hughes' thoughts on the formation of that "oppressive Big Bertha whose muzzle is trained over the battlements of Western Civ at the black, the gay, and the female" are quite similar. He is no doubt an elitist, if the word means having a critical sense that perceives inequality between books, paintings, musical pieces, and performances. Some works, he says, speak more convincingly, are simply better than others, more forceful and intense, "more articulate, more radiant with consciousness." Quality is not "an enemy of justice," a "conspiracy," a repressive "plot," or a "political matter"--such ideas, above all, "the serious [art] museum must resist. We have seen what they have done to academic literary studies."
Nowhere does Hughes prescribe an ossified canon, only a polyphony of excellent voices. He suggests what the two sources of this futile canon debate may be: the fear that if students do not like a text they will never pick up a book again--and, secondly, the belief that students will become what they read. The first may be quite beside the point since 60% of American TV-loving households last year never bought a single book (the figure is the same for Spain). The second, Hughes says, derives from our faulty view of art, our trust in the "therapeutic fallacy:" "If you read Evelyn Waugh before Franz Fanon you may become a racist (if white), or (if black) suffer an attack of the bends through sudden decompression of self-esteem." Such a remedial view of art is of course belied by the great variety of artists who have absolutely no design on us at all, or by the many "writers of indisputable gifts, even of genius whose views are by any reasonable standards repellent." There must be another criterion besides "Literature as Instrument of Social Utility."
Hughes cites with undisguised contempt the ranking in the new Columbia History of the American Novel of Harriet Beecher Stowe over Melville because she was "Socially constructive." (Having taught Uncle Tom's Cabin myself for three years in a black Southern college, I have no worry the Uncle Tom vogue will last long. The book's champions should be condemned to reread it.) His example is paradigmatic. Having raised the question of quality in dozens of like instances from literature and painting, he ends with the Mapplethorpe case, whose overrated photographs nearly brought down the NEA House and roused the censorious predilections so dear to the culture of complaint. To Hughes, this affair that so inflated political tempers and art prices, marked "the demise of American aestheticism, and revealed the bankruptcy of the culture of therapeutics."
In the America of the '90s it does appear that everything in the cultural scene boils down to politics. But the phenomenon will surely pass just like the other media events that have joined the obsolescence capitalism loves so well. "One generation abandons the enterprises of another like stranded vessels," is the way Thoreau once put it. Hughes is the first to recognize that "quite minor, or aesthetically negligible, or even repellent works of art can tell [us] a lot about social assumptions"--if that is what art is only about. But it isn't. He notes that like our popular sport spectacles, the fine arts are elitist to the core. So is good literary and art criticism. I believe the time will come again when a critic will no longer be able to get away with the flash comment that the "rectilinear frames" around paintings "provide a dramatic demonstration of white power and control." Robert Hughes' sound book should help speed the process along.