My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

38 WHAT'S ART GOT TO DOW I T HIT?
The vehemence of the attacks on cultural and new historical studies has
left too little room for a critique of the ways in which these approaches
continue to perpetuate a deterministic or professional rather than rhetorical
or poetic approach to its subjects. This left-libertarian or aesthetic critique
of cultural studies becomes almost impossible to hear amidst the mischaracterizations
of the goals of cultural studies that seem mischievously
aimed at preventing any thoughtful discussion of the issues. As in national
politics, the right has been able to define the terms of the debate.
What, for example, could be more disorienting than casting Stanley
Fish as a radical? Fish's defense of professionalization is the model of an
enlightened, pragmatic approach to the humanities. He is witty and ingenious
in his critiques of any attempt to give special moral weight or ideological
force to one theoretical position rather than another. While that
may undercut the Romantic humanism that gives a self-righteous tone or
hubris to so many traditional professors of English literature, Fish's
antifoundationalism is rooted in the values of the profession of which he
is a part. Moreover, he insists on politesse, against the authoritarian demagoguery
that tends to undermine the values of consensus and reason in an
academic setting.
Fish's position is aimed at preserving and respecting institutional memory;
it assures continuities and the representation of a variety of viewpoints
in any dispute. That is, Fish's antifoundationalism is a moderate and centrist
position-no more radical than the democratic principles upon which
it is based. It is a measure of the corrosiveness of racism and misogyny that
his position favoring the inclusion of African Americans and women in
determining curricular policy is so routinely caricatured as extreme.
My own misgivings about Fish's position take an entirely different
direction since I find his professionalization of discourse undermines the
possibility of any trenchant critique of canonical values or indeed of the
institutionalized rationality that Fish enacts. Fish's system suffers from
being a self-enclosed artifact, unable to confront its own, inevitable positionality.
It represents the professionalization of professionalization and
precludes the aestheticizing of its own values, insofar as such aestheticizing
might ground judgments outside the context of a profeSSion, holding
one's judgments to a continual testing of and in the world.
Many of the welcome changes in the humanities curriculum reflect not
revaluations of the role of high or canonical culture but shifts in the representation
of various groups in determining what these canonical works
should be. The Arnoldian criterion of touchstone works of a culture simply
has been applied to a greater number of contexts, just as the Jeffersonian
conception of democracy has at times been applied to a greater