Theorizing the Culture Wars

J. Russell Perkin

Department of English, Saint Mary’s University
Halifax, N.S., Canada
rperkin@science.stmarys.ca

 

 

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars. New York: Oxford UP, 1992.

 

Graff, Gerald. Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education. New York: Norton, 1992.

 

Spanos, William V. The End of Education: Toward Posthumanism. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993.

 

As Henry Louis Gates, Jr., suggests at the beginning of Loose Canons, the “political correctness debate” or “culture wars” came as something of a surprise to what Gates calls the cultural left. The right was first off the press with a series of books such as those by Allan Bloom, Roger Kimball, David Lehman, and Dinesh D’Souza. Progressive academics replied as best they could in a variety of media, from television to the popular press to academic articles. Now enough time has passed for responses at greater length, such as the three books I am reviewing here.

 

Since political terms are slippery at the best of times, but especially so in the context of debates about culture, I should begin by briefly explaining my use of the terms “conservative,” “left,” and “liberal.” This is additionally necessary because as a Canadian I would use these words somewhat differently to describe the political situation in my own country, and some of the subtleties of the American usage remain mysterious to me. I have tried to follow Gates in referring to people like Allan Bloom, William Bennett, and Roger Kimball as “the right,” “conservatives,” or sometimes, more specifically, “neoconservatives”–but I do not follow the usage of some on the cultural left who would also refer to them as “liberals” or “liberal humanists.” By the “cultural left” I mean the coalition of literary theorists, feminists, and scholars in various fields of ethnic studies who have reshaped the study of the humanities during the last fifteen years, and who are sometimes closely connected with movements for social change beyond the walls of the academy. The cultural left thus includes both liberal pluralists like Gerald Graff and those on the radical left like William Spanos. I have used the most elastic of all these terms, “liberal,” in two senses: first, joined with “pluralist” to refer to those intellectuals whose stance is to some degree oppositional, but who combine that stance with an allegiance to certain traditional humanist values, and second, as a political label in the narrow sense, to refer to views characteristic of the part of the Democratic Party generally described as its liberal wing. My main reason for not using the term in such a way that it would overlap with “conservative” is a strategic one: part of my argument is that the most promising way to defeat the conservative cultural initiatives of the last few years is to build a coalition between liberal and radical scholars who can work for change on a variety of fronts without needing to agree on every issue.

 

It would be easy for a Canadian academic to feel smug while contemplating some aspects of the culture wars that have been fought on campuses, on the air, and in the reviews and popular press in the United States in the last few years. Just as we sometimes feel smug–when looking south– about our national health care programme, we can point to the fact that our country is officially bilingual, and that multiculturalism is the law of the land under the Multiculturalism Act of 1988. We might also feel alternately amused and annoyed that amidst all of their theorizing of postmodern difference and of curricular change, American literary theorists still affirm the goal of shaping the American mind in a manner that strikes us as rather unselfconsciously nationalistic, especially when such theorists, as is often the case, are ignorant of the multicultural nature of Canadian society, writing as though multiculturalism were an American invention. But smugness is often misplaced. Our health care system has problems of its own; similarly, bilingualism and multiculturalism are among the most contentious political issues in Canada. Moreover, American academic politics have a way of spilling across the border, which is why as a Canadian professor of English I have taken a strong interest in the culture wars.

 

As an example of the way that the terms of the American dispute have been appropriated in Canada, I offer the following instance, which also suggests that controversies over political correctness are still being actively played out at the local level, even if they do not engage the national media quite as much as they did in 1991. At Dalhousie University, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, a Committee on Discriminatory Harassment earlier this year released an interim report on procedures to deal with harassment on campus. This led Jeremy Akerman, a former leader of the provincial (and social democratic) New Democratic Party, to write a diatribe entitled “Campus Crazies Are Too Close for Comfort” in a local weekly newspaper Metro Weekly 12-18 Feb. 1993: 7. Akerman writes a regular column under the heading “Straight Talk”). He based his warning about the possible consequences of the Dalhousie report largely on Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education, which he describes as a “closely argued, well documented book” and “a work of courage and a beacon of common sense.” He also asserts that “University of Pennsylvania professor Houston Baker publicly argues against ‘reading and writing’ in the colleges because he claims they are a form of ‘control.’ Instead, he says the university should study the work of the racist rap group Niggers With Attitude, whose songs urge the desirability of violence against whites.”

 

In the context of public discourse at this level of ignorance, it is reassuring to be able to review a selection of intelligent assessments of the culture wars, and to evaluate some considered reflections about the nature of what Stanley Aronowitz and Henry Giroux call “postmodern education.” I will begin with Gerald Graff’s book, since Graff has had a high public profile in debates over the curriculum, and since his book is, of the three I am discussing, the most specifically concerned with the question of what a progressive curriculum might look like. His subtitle, “How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education,” suggests that the book aims at the same popular audience who read Allan Bloom and E.D. Hirsch. However, for the most part Graff avoids the nostalgic myths, the apocalyptic tone, and the patriotic fervour of such books. Instead he has written a modest defence of the strategy he has been tirelessly campaigning for over the last five years or so: the project of “teaching the conflicts,” that is, bringing out into the open, for the benefit of students, the issues that have been debated behind the scenes among the professors.

 

Graff makes effective use of personal narrative, including a fascinating account of his own resistance to reading at the beginning of his career as a student of literature, and throughout the book he shows great concern for what he calls the “struggling student.” He argues that discussion of pedagogy has stressed the sanctity of the individual classroom too much, without acknowledging that “how well one can teach depends not just on individual virtuosity but on the possibilities and limits imposed by the structure in which one works” (114). Thus he is concerned not so much with what texts students should read–in fact much of one chapter of the book is devoted to showing that Shakespeare still firmly holds pride of place in English studies–as with the way the curriculum is structured, and the concluding chapter looks in detail at several experiments in curricular integration.

 

By organizing the curriculum around conflicts of interpretation Graff proposes to provide students with “common experience” without at the same time assuming the need for a consensus on values and beliefs (178). Though he alludes throughout the book to his own political and social goals, it seems that for Graff, in the end, the conflicts themselves are what matters. That is, his is a liberal pluralist position, as he implies in the Preface when he thanks the conservatives with whom he takes issue throughout the book (x).

 

As I implied at the beginning of my discussion, there are some ways in which Graff’s book is not free from the aspirations of a Bloom or a Hirsch. In promising to “Revitalize” higher education he is implicitly buying into the very myth of fall and possible redemption that is typcially found in conservative texts. But Graff’s own critique of nostalgic myths of golden ages of education, here and in his influential Professing Literature (1987) runs counter to the implications of the word “revitalize,” and he also suggests that in fact “standards in higher education have actually risen rather than declined” (88, emphasis in original). In addition, he seems to underestimate the degree to which “the conflicts” are already part of the experience of education. As Gates comments about Graff’s proposal to teach the conflicts, “I think, at the better colleges, we do. We don’t seem to be able not to” (118). In spite of this, Beyond the Culture Wars presupposes that the university is in a state of crisis which Graff’s particular institutional proposals can repair. In fairness, I should note that it is possible that he adopted the strategy of employing some of the rhetoric of crisis simply in order to try to secure an audience for the book, which considering the sales of books from the right would be an understandable strategy.

 

In his last chapter, where he examines several experiments in curricular integration, Graff says that the proposals he endorses take for granted “the dynamics of modern academic professionalism and American democracy” (195). This is where I have the most serious difficulty with his argument. A more radical critique would surely want to at least question the ideology of academic professionalism, and to consider whether there was any disjunction between the noun “democracy” and the adjective “American.” As a scholar and critic who has been privileged to inhabit elite institutions, Graff seems to me insufficiently sensitive to the differences among institutions, and among the faculty employed by them on contracts of varying degrees of security and benefit. His tone throughout the book is that of someone who is comfortable in the academy, and who wants to make it a more interesting place for the privileged students who study there. The assumption is that there are principled differences among different professional factions, and these can be brought into productive conflict. Thus he does not seriously address the way that a corporate agenda is driving the university, so that the humanities are already situated within a frame of reference that is frequently reified as “economic reality.”

 

Graff expresses concern for the minority students who appear in his classes, but does not address the more fundamental fact that many young people from minority communities, especially African-Americans, do not have access to university education in the first place. Nor would his proposals make much sense to young and often marginalized faculty struggling to gain tenure, while older colleagues with tenure and seniority disdainfully refuse to engage in the sort of dialogue he assumes everyone seeks. But this is surely the reality for many at institutions less prestigious than Northwestern or Chicago. Finally, for all his concern for the struggling student, Graff seems to me insufficiently attentive to the diverse experience of students. Even though he talks interestingly about his own resistance to learning, he acknowledges that he was a middle-class kid at a good school; for students who are working class, especially in a recession, the “life of the mind stuff” Graff discusses may be even more alien. For such students, resistance is a way of registering that they are not destined for the kind of professional career the “life of the mind stuff” presupposes.

 

Henry Louis Gates’s book is a collection of essays, not all directly concerned with political correctness and the culture wars, although since their main focus is African-American studies they are very closely connected to those issues. However, as a result of his keen awareness of the way that the Reagan-Bush years affected African-Americans, Gates is less uniformly upbeat than Graff; in fact, his book is genuinely dialogic, incorporating a variety of tones and voices, and including a number of memorable personal narratives and two chapters in the mode of a hardboiled detective story. Due to the occasional nature of the essays, one can also see a development of Gates’s thought as it responds to particular events and contexts.

 

It is clear that for Henry Louis Gates the question of what books should be read is a much more important one than it is for Graff. Throughout the book he emphasizes the need to “comprehend the diversity of human culture” (xv). There is a celebratory tone to some of the essays, as he considers the achievements and the diversity of African-American studies, but at the same time an awareness of the precarious nature of this achievement, especially in view of the limited number of black doctoral graduates. He suggests that the more radical project remains, namely that of transforming the idea of what it means to be American so that it fully incorporates the African element of American culture.

 

Loose Canons is full of an infectious enthusiasm for the project of literary and cultural studies, and a profound awareness of Gates’s relation to a particular tradition and culture, even as he insists that education must strive for a culture without a centre, and one that accommodates difference. At the same time he rejects a simplistic identity politics, and he asserts that humanists need to learn to live without cultural nationalism (111). For Gates, “any human being sufficiently curious and motivated can fully possess another culture, no matter how ‘alien’ it may appear to be” (xv). The combination of an awareness of the isolating dangers of cultural nationalism and a desire to celebrate his own cultural tradition are particularly apparent in the discussion of the project of the Norton Anthology of African-American Literature; few can have a keener sense than Gates of the force of the arguments on all sides of the canon debate.

 

At times Gates, like Graff, seems rather comfortable with his position in the academy, and seems to refrain from questioning some of its more problematic enabling assumptions. However, this is only one element from a variety of voices, and a personal anecdote makes it clear that comfort–for the distinguished black professor–is liable at any moment to turn to discomfort: “Nor can I help but feel some humiliation as I try to put a white person at ease in a dark place on campus at night, coming from nowhere, confronting that certain look of panic in his or her eyes, trying to think grand thoughts like Du Bois but– for the life of me–looking to him or her like Willie Horton” (135-36).

 

Gates tries to maintain a balance throughout the book between on the one hand asserting the importance of intellectual work, and on the other recognizing that the political and social significance of such work can be overestimated by those who engage in it. He doesn’t deny the importance of critical debate, but insists on the highly mediated relationship of such debate to its supposed referent. As he comments, “it is sometimes necessary to remind ourselves of the distance from the classroom to the streets” (19).

 

I will postpone discussion of the political position Gates take in his important final chapter until I have considered William Spanos, since I think that Gates provides an important corrective to Spanos’s analysis.

 

With The End of Education we enter a rather different world. Graff and Gates both write in an elegant straightforward English, largely free of technical theoretical language; much of the material in each book has its origin in material prepared originally for oral delivery or for publication in literary reviews rather than academic journals. It is also clear that the publishers are hoping that the books will appeal to an audience beyond the academy. Spanos, on the other hand, writes in a dense discourse owing much to Heidegger and Foucault, and in a tone of unqualified assertion, without any of the engaging personal voice of Graff or Gates. The words “panoptic” and “hegemony,” together or separately, occur with numbing insistency. To make matters worse, the book is printed with small margins in a small typeface, and with forty-seven pages of long footnotes. One of my colleagues, looking at the review copy lying on my desk, commented that this seems like the kind of book that gives you a headache to read. It is likely to be read only by committed postmodern theorists, which is unfortunate, because The End of Education is an important book, and one which in many ways makes a challenging and necessary critique not only of neoconservative humanism but of the structure and discourses of the university which, Spanos asserts, support and are reinforced by such humanism.

 

The book originates in a response Spanos wrote to the Harvard Core Curriculum Report of 1978. He developed this response into a manuscript which was rejected for publication by an Ivy League press in spite of favourable readers’ reports, because it seemed to that press politically inappropriate to publish a “destructive” critique of the ideology informing the Harvard Report. Some of the material was published during the 1980s in articles in boundary 2 and Cultural Critique, but the final version has obviously been overdetermined by the intervening culture wars, which in some ways vindicate Spanos’s critique of the Harvard Report, but in other ways, I think, qualify the political conclusions he draws, in ways that he does not want to recognize. I should repeat that I find The End of Education at once a difficult, brilliant, forceful, and maddening book. My view of it changed several times as I read it, and the critique that follows is, more than most reviews, a provisional response.

 

What is impressive about the book, after the essays of Graff and Gates, is the density of its documentation and the erudition of its theoretical argument. Because of this, and because of his relentlessly oppositional stance (Spanos is no liberal pluralist), the book is a far more radical questioning of the institutional structure of the American university, whose complicity–including that of the humanities–with the more repressive and militaristic aspects of American society he clearly documents. His use of Althusser and Foucault prevents the too easy acceptance of the ideology of academic professionalism that Graff and to some extent Gates can be charged with. Furthermore, the most general project of the book is a Heideggerian critique of Western humanism per se. The result is obviously a much more ambitious book than the other two, though at the present juncture it must be evaluated in the context of the political debate over the future of the humanities, since the culture wars have placed it in a more specific frame of reference than Spanos originally anticipated.

 

The End of Education operates on several levels. The most basic is the Heideggerian critique of the onto-theological tradition of Western humanism, of which the humanities in the modern university are one particular part, and for which the Harvard Report in turn is a particular, synecdochic example. Secondly, Spanos argues that Foucault’s critique of panopticism as a “Benthamite physics of power” is not restricted to scientific positivism, but can be applied to the humanities as well, and to liberal, pluralist humanists as much as to neoconservatives: Far from countering the interested rapacity of the power structure that would achieve hegemony over the planet and beyond, the Apollonian educational discourse and practice of modern humanism in fact exists to reproduce its means and ends (64). The only hope is a postmodern (or, as Spanos prefers, posthumanist), “destructive”–in the Heideggerian sense– coalition of Heideggerian ontological critique and a social critique deriving from Foucault and Althusser, leading to an oppositional politics in the academy.

 

The genealogy Spanos constructs is impressive, and later developments have certainly vindicated his view of the Harvard Report, which in the early 1980s might have seemed overly paranoid. Spanos clearly shows a pattern in the recurrence of general education programmes based on restricted canons, beginning with the period during and following the first world war, then during the cold war, and finally in the post-Vietnam period. His insistence on acknowledging the importance of the Vietnam war in discussing the humanities at the present time is an important act of cultural memory. As an uncovering of the motives impelling the right in the culture wars, this book should be required reading for oppositional critics. However, as a political intervention it is flawed in several important ways, and I will conclude this review with an account of these, and a suggestion by way of Henry Louis Gates of a less paranoid and more pragmatic strategy for the cultural left.

 

On the one hand, Spanos gives his book theoretical depth by beginning at the most basic level of the question of being. On the other hand, in purely rhetorical terms, many readers will probably find the juxtaposition of the heavily Heideggerian first chapter and the details of the Harvard Report to be catachrestical; it is hard for even a sympathetic reader to grant the enormous linkages and assumptions involved in the argument. If Spanos had let his Heideggerian approach inform his genealogy without feeling it necessary to include so many long quotations from Being and Time and other works, the book would have a wider rhetorical appeal and thus a potentially greater political effect.

 

Another problem is that the book makes huge historical assertions that have the effect of lessening difference, even while it attacks the metaphysical principle “that identity is the condition for the possibility of difference and not the other way around” (4; emphasis in original). This is something Spanos has in common with some followers of Derrida who turn deconstruction into a dogma, rather than realizing that it is a strategy of reading that must take account of the particular logic of the texts being read. Spanos asserts that the classical Greeks were characterized by “originative, differential, and errant thinking” (105), which every subsequent age, beginning with the Alexandrian Greek, through the Romans, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Victorians, and right up to the present, misunderstood in a reifying and imperialistic appropriation. This not only implies a somewhat simplistic reception-history of ancient Greek culture; it also, significantly, perpetuates a myth–the favourite American myth that Spanos in other contexts attacks in the book–of an original period of innocence, a fall, and the possibility of redemption.

 

There are further problems with the narrative built into The End of Education. Humanism is always and everywhere, for Spanos, panoptic, repressive, characterized by “the metaphysics of the centered circle,” which is repeatedly attacked by reference to the same overcited passage from Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”–not coincidentally one of the places where Derrida allows himself to make large claims unqualified by their derivation from reading a particular text. In order to make this assertion, Spanos must show that all apparent difference is in fact contained by the same old metaphysical discourse. Thus, within the space of four pages, in the context of making absolute claims about Western education (or thought, or theory), Spanos uses the following constructions:

 

1.      “whatever its historically specific permutations,”
2.      “despite the historically specific permutations,”
3.      “Apparent historical dissimilarities,”
4.      "Despite the historically specific ruptures."(12-15)

 

Western thought, he repeats, has “always reaffirmed a nostalgic and recuperative circuitous educational journey back to the origin” (15). This over-insistence suggests to me that Spanos is a poor reader of Derrida, for he is not attentive to difference at particular moments or within particular texts. He seems to believe that one can leap bodily out of the metaphysical tradition simply by compiling enough citations from Heidegger, whereas his rather anticlimactic final chapter shows, as Derrida recognizes more explicitly, that one cannot escape logocentrism simply by wishing to.

 

The destructive readings of particular humanist texts certainly show the complicity of Arnold, Babbitt, and Richards in beliefs and practices that are not now highly regarded (although Spanos has to work a lot harder with Richards to do this than with the other two). It is certainly true that Arnold made some unpleasant statements, and they are all on exhibition here. But Arnold was also an ironist, and the simple opposition between bad bourgeois mystified Matthew Arnold and good radical deconstructive Friedrich Nietzsche is too easy, as some recent work in Victorian studies on Arnold has begun to demonstrate. A deconstructive reading of Arnold would be alert to these possibilities, and would be able to argue, against William Bennett and Dinesh D’Souza, that Matthew Arnold amounts to more than the cliche, “the best that has been thought and said in the world.” Such a deconstructive reading would be of more practical use in the academy at the present time than Spanos’s wholly negative destruction.

 

Spanos’s extensive reliance on Heidegger raises a political question that he doesn’t adequately face. The humanists are lambasted for every ethnocentricity that they committed; Babbitt, perhaps not without justification, is described as having embodied “a totalitarian ideology” (84). But the book is defensive and evasive on the topic of Heidegger’s political commitments. Spanos seems to think he can testily dismiss those who bring up this matter as enemies of posthumanism, and his treatment of the topic consists mainly in referring readers to an article he has published elsewhere. But the problem remains: Heidegger’s ontological critique, when translated into the political sphere, led him to espouse Nazi ideology. If Heidegger is to be praised as the thinker who effected the definitive radical break with humanism, surely the question of his politics should be faced directly in this book.

 

My final criticism is that Spanos, by his attempt to put all humanists into the same category and to break totally with the tradition of humanism, isolates himself in a posture of ultraleftist purity that cuts him off from many potential political allies, especially when, as I will note in conclusion, his practical recommendations for the practical role of an adversarial intellectual seem similar to those of the liberal pluralists he attacks. He seems ill-informed about what goes on in the everyday work of the academy, for instance, in the field of composition studies. Spanos laments the “unwarranted neglect” (202) of the work of Paulo Freire, yet in reading composition and pedagogy journals over the last few years, I have noticed few thinkers who have been so consistently cited. Spanos refers several times to the fact that the discourse of the documents comprising The Pentagon Papers was linked to the kind of discourse that first-year composition courses produce (this was Richard Ohmann’s argument); here again, however, Spanos is not up to date. For the last decade the field of composition studies has been the most vigorous site of the kind of oppositional practices The End of Education recommends. The academy, in short, is more diverse, more complex, more genuinely full of difference than Spanos allows, and it is precisely that difference that neoconservatives want to erase.

 

By seeking to separate out only the pure (posthumanist) believers, Spanos seems to me to ensure his self-marginalization. For example, several times he includes pluralists like Wayne Booth and even Gerald Graff in lists of “humanists” that include William Bennett, Roger Kimball and Dinesh D’Souza. Of course, there is a polemical purpose to this, but it is one that is counterproductive. In fact, I would even question the validity of calling shoddy and often inaccurate journalists like Kimball and D’Souza with the title “humanist intellectuals.” Henry Louis Gates’s final chapter contains some cogent criticism of the kind of position which Spanos has taken. Gates argues that the “hard” left’s opposition to liberalism is as mistaken as its opposition to conservatism, and refers to Cornel West’s remarks about the field of critical legal studies, “If you don’t build on liberalism, you build on air” (187). Building on air seems to me precisely what Spanos is recommending. Gates, on the other hand, criticizes “those massively totalizing theories that marginalize practical political action as a jejune indulgence” (192), and endorses a coalition of liberalism and the left.

 

The irony is that in the last chapter, when he seeks to provide some suggestions for oppositional practice, Spanos can only recommend strategies which are already common in the academy, especially in women’s studies and composition. He praises the pedagogical theory of Paulo Freire, which as I have noted is hardly an original move; he recommends opposition to the structures of the disciplines, and oppositional practices within the curriculum. But again, many liberal as well as left academics are already teaching “against the grain,” enlarging the canon and experimenting with new methods of teaching. I have been teaching full-time for five years now, and the texts my younger colleagues and I teach, and the way we teach them, constitute something radically different from the course of studies during my own undergraduate and even graduate career. Women’s studies, which is not mentioned much in The End of Education, has provided a great deal of exciting interdisciplinary work. Gates’s book shows in detail how African-American studies has constituted not only an oppositional discourse, but one that has started to reconfigure the dominant discourse of American studies.

 

Thus Spanos seems to me to present, in the end, an unnecessarily bleak picture. It was surely the very success of some of the practices he advocates which precipitated the “anti-PC” backlash. The problem the cultural left faces is that books from the right have been hugely successful in the marketplace, with Camille Paglia as the latest star. But the vitality, scholarly depth, and careful argument that characterizes the books reviewed here show that the intellectual initiative remains with the left. These qualities also refute the wild allegations that have been made against current work in the humanities. Collectively, Graff, Gates, and Spanos suggest a way of moving beyond the culture wars, and I particularly recommend Gates’s final chapter as a careful and pragmatic analysis of the possible course of the humanities for the rest of this decade.