Back in the 1980s, when conservatives such as William Bennett began attacking what they termed “the politicization of the humanities,” they made a basic error. They blamed theorists for reducing texts to vested interests, for planting identity politics on campus, for subsuming aesthetic criteria beneath ideological criteria, and for disrespecting the noble inheritance of Western literature and philosophy. The accusations struck humanities professors as hare-brained and panicky and altogether political, but I observed a number of professional occasions to which they applied all-too-well, even though I despised all things Republican at the time.
But in one respect the critics were mistaken from the start: they included deconstruction among the prime targets. Deconstruction made everything meaningless, they said, removing classroom discussion from a grounding in tradition and truth, and allowing wayward professors to steer the learning any which way. Deconstruction was a canon-buster, too, irreverent and roguish. It set the critic alongside the novelist—remember Hillis Miller gushing about the creative side of criticism? No wonder it appealed to graduate students and junior faculty, who were only too eager to espouse something that licensed them to drop their humility in the face of the past.
In truth, however, deconstruction was an entirely traditional brand of philosophical criticism. The radicalism that Derrida announced in his greatest work, the essay “Differance,” bore upon the concept of being, not on politics. Derrida might put the entirety of Western thought under erasure, but deconstruction remained a parasitical activity, and the hosts continued to be canonical—Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Freud.
And the radicalism that de Man announced was about knowledge and interpretation, not literary values and canon formation. De Man’s theory of figurative language did nothing to displace Wordsworth and Proust from their place on the syllabus, and de Man was always respectful of the previous generation of critics and theorists.
Second-generation deconstructionists in the 1980s understood this well, and so did political critics such as Frank Lentricchia and Terry Eagleton. But neither side could make the distinction and correct the record. For deconstructionists to say, “Look, Chairman Bennett, we believe in aesthetics as much as you do, and we think that the humanities are, indeed, to an extent independent of politics,” well, that would be to align with the powers that be and to relinquish the gadfly identity that deconstructionists at the time cultivated. And for political critics to say, “No, Chairman Bennett, the problem isn’t that deconstruction is political—it’s that deconstruction isn’t nearly political enough, and is in fact downright mandarin,” well, that would be to join the powers that be in attacking deconstruction, if on different grounds.
The result was that the professors didn’t engage the critics fully, and Bennett et al won public opinion over to their side. Meanwhile, the divided import of deconstruction (radical in one sense, traditional in another) was lost, at least outside of humanities departments. Bennett is an important public presence, and if humanities professors had offered back then to debate him on the meaning of theory I think he would have accepted. In fact, in recent years Bennett has visited college campuses and debated academics on their own turf, though outnumbered and despised there. Academics would have been wise to engage conservative critics as much 20 years ago, and been willing to agree with them now and then.
