My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

WHAT'S ART GOT TO DO WITH IT? 37
correctness", the canon, multiculturalism, or the ascent of theory-can be
attributed to the shift from literary to cultural studies. While I am troubled
by aspects of the cultural studies model, my own disagreements have little
in common with the chorus of self-described liberals and conservatives
who see in cultural studies the loss of "disinterested" scholarship and common
cultural standards.
This is a disorienting debate to enter since cultural and new historical
studies, as practiced in American universities, often extend many of the
most conservative features of literary studies. If the naysayers better
understood the issues, they might find they have little to fear from new
developments in the literary academy and that, indeed, cultural and multicultural
studies offer a revitalized version of the traditional humanities,
which have suffered from near asphyxiation by means of the anti-democratic
arguments for the received authority of a narrow band of cultural
arbiters.
Far from challenging the legitimating process of the university, the
cultural studies movement actually extends this process in ways that are
largely consonant with a tradition that comes to us in fits and starts from
the Enlightenment's attack on Scholasticism. Indeed, cultural studies
extends the principles of critical self-reflection and disinterested observation
in ways that actively work to preserve existing cultural values. The
exponents of cultural and multicultural studies represent mainstream
American conceptions of value and practice. In this light, the abusive
series of attacks in the media can be understood in the first instance as
anti-intellectual and in the second, when carried out by scholars, as a
form of intellectual self-hatred.
By speaking of intellectual self-hatred I mean to carry over Sander
Gilman's arguments in Jewish Self-Hatred. The intellectual imagines that
there is a hidden language of truth from which she or he is barred by
reliance on the slippery and partial slopes of metaphoric language. In this
fantasy, intellectuals, like Jews, are exiled from a deeper connection to the
world and so denounce their own language, the only language that they
know or can speak.
Self-hating intellectuals internalize the anti-intellectuals' conception of
their co-workers as professional ciphers, unmoored from the values of the
"larger" society. By internalizing the larger community's most negative
stereotype of their activity, self-hating intellectuals become the most vocal
critics of the relativism and social anarchy that they testify is the true message
of "theory". For who could know better the dangers of theory than
one who has witnessed its dark secret or its corrosive powers? For the selfhating
intellectual, the hidden language of reason is nihilism.