Assault on the Citadel.(Theory's Empire: An Anthology of Dissent)(Book Review)

FOR decades now, conservatives have been complaining about the failure of the academy to defend the cultural patrimony. If the university is not going to transmit to young people the highest achievements of the human mind and heart, it has forfeited its true mission and become a mere accrediting agency for the Upper Middle Class; such an institution will, for a time, hide its intellectual irrelevance behind huge financial endowments--but the day of reckoning will surely come. The marvelous new book Theory's Empire: An Anthology of Dissent (Columbia, 725 pp., $29.50), edited by Daphne Patai and Will H. Corral, shows that the day of reckoning may be nearer than we think--because it shows that conservatives are no longer alone in their critique of a failing institution.

Theory's Empire is a splendid achievement, a collection of 47 essays by scholars who object to the recent dominance of capital-T Theory in higher education--the historic shift away from an emphasis on intellectual and aesthetic content (artworks, histories, etc.) to a totalizing discourse making generous use of abstractions that are half-baked, pretentious, and arbitrary. The book's tone is established even before page one, by a cartoon opposite the title page: A couple of mice are discussing a box of cereal labeled "Deconstruction Breakfast Food Product." One mouse comments: "Pretty dry and flavorless, isn't it?" The other retorts: "Your question is informed, or should I say misinformed, by the conventionalized bourgeois cereal paradigms that center on such outmoded esculatory notions as taste, nutrition, and edibility." Clearly, this is not your father's textbook; it's closer to The Norton Anthology of Screw-the-Academy.

"What really damages deconstructionist criticism," writes Morris Dickstein in one of the essays, is "its remoteness from texts, its use of them as interchangeable occasions for a theoretical trajectory which always returns to the same points of origin, the same indeterminacy and happy multiplicity.... Skeptical of interpretation, the critic remains faithful to the sound of his voice, the invitation some texts offer to his resourceful cleverness." Many academic maladies--politicization, sexualization, identity politics--are diagnosed by the contributors, who sometimes bring to light hilarious examples of scholarly nonsense. For example, in his essay on "queer theory," Lee Siegel recounts what theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick made of a certain passage in the writings of Henry James. Aged 62, visiting California and looking forward to returning home full of material to reflect on and write about, James wrote in a notebook: "My long dusty adventure over, I shall be able to [plunge] my hand, my arm, in, deep and far, and up to the shoulder--into the heavy bag of remembrance--of suggestion--of imagination--of art." Sedgwick explains this passage as demonstrating "how in James a greater self-knowledge and a greater acceptance and specificity of homosexual desire transform this half-conscious enforcing rhetoric of anality, numbness, and silence, into a much richer, pregnant address to James's male muse, an invocation to fisting-as-ecriture." One need not be committed a priori to the idea that James was a heterosexual to recognize that this is worthless pap.

The strangest of strange bedfellows in this anthology is the left-wing polemicist Noam Chomsky, who contributes an essay deploring recent academic attacks on what is fashionably labeled "white male science"; Chomsky stands up for the rationality of the scientific endeavor. His ...