The Pursuit of Knowledge: The Legacy of 1968

...I have been even more distressed by the tributes paid to Rorty since his death last year, hardly one of which mentions his capitulation in the face of nihilism, and by the recognition still granted to Stanley Fish today, long after he showed himself to be more concerned with protecting his revolutionary image than the culture that made it possible...

...It distressed me to read their groveling tributes to the frauds who had risen from the gutters of Paris in my youth to enjoy the mega-salaries provided by the culture they scorned...

...And behind that nonsense lies the promise of liberation from the very thought of the human community as something more important than yourself...

...On the contrary, that is merely a proof that its argument operates at a level of profundity that makes it immune to criticism...

...But to no avail...

...In the wake of Althusser a torrent of gobbledygook came streaming from the womb of history, which at that time was situated in the Left Bank journal Tel Quel, which published essays by Derrida, Kristeva, Sollers, Deleuze, Guattari, and a thousand more, all of them manufacturers of junk thought, only one aspect of which was clearly meant to be understood, namely its character as “subversion...

...The nonsense has been piled too high to yield to a spade, however energetically used...

...The Intercollegiate Studies Institute grew to provide a nationwide relief operation, reaching out to students who could find no hope on the campus, but whose demand for a truth-based curriculum could still be met by visitors and reading matter...

...But Rorty and Fish are at fault only because they didn’t have to acquiesce...

...A A nd yet the disaster continues...

...The best way to create a left-wing orthodoxy in the academy is to fortify the leftist position with armored nonsense: for then criticism becomes impossible...

...And their nonsense, footnoted and referenced in a thousand academic journals—the Modern Language Review being the most important and the most offensive—have now been deposited in Augean quantities over every available space of the curriculum...

...The next generation is less to be blamed...

...Pour Marx is composed entirely of such boxes of fortified emptiness...

...Roger scruton, the writer and philosopher, is most recently the author of Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged (Encounter Books...

...But it has also been the target of satire: from Abelard and Averroës to Schopenhauer and Lewis Carroll, academic incoherence has been lampooned from within the academy with the same verve as it has been scoffed at by the rest of us...

...As long as a text can be read as in some way against the status quo of Western culture and society, undermining its claim to authority or truth, it does not matter that it is gibberish...

...This, it seems to me, is the most depressing legacy of 1968...

...Even the spoof article published by Sokal in 1996 in Social Text, deliberately designed to expose the intellectual fraudulence of the ’68 idiom, has left the intellectual landscape unchanged...

...But there is another aspect to the great changes that came about during the 1960s, one that is not often commented upon in America, where people have been primarily interested in the political antics of the “destructive generation,” as reformed ’68ers Peter Collier and David Horowitz described it in a book of that title...

...You could just write like this: Within that conflictual economy of colonial discourse which Edward Said describes as the tension between the synchronic panoptical vision of domination—the demand for identity, stasis—and the counter-pressure of the diachrony of history—change, difference—mimicry represents an ironic compromise...

...I struggled against this nonsense as a university teacher, but it proved too much for me and, to the relief of my colleagues, I left the university of London, first for a part-time position at Boston University, where the great John Silber was confronting the new professoriat with the aggression that it deserves, and then for the world of freelance journalism and business...

...Even if you don’t think, as I do, that les événements de mai were a moral and spiritual disaster, you might agree, after a month or two studying their written aftermath, that they were an sePTeMbeR 2008 THe aMeRIcan sPecTaToR 51 THe PuRsuIT of KnowledGe intellectual disaster—one comparable to the burning of the library at Alexandria, or the closing of the schools of Greece...

...For if you want to be considered for an academic position in the humanities today you would have little chance if you did not stand squarely in the flow of nonsense...

...or Irigaray’s equally important proof that E = MC squared is a “sexed equation,” have nothing else to offer them...

...There is no doubt that he is right...

...For conservative intellectuals like myself 1968 initiated our break with the university...

...Alas, had he been against Marx, he would have been greeted with the derision that he deserved...

...Maybe we are entering a new period of scholarship: a period in which students and professors have regained the most important of all academic freedoms, which is the freedom to say no to nonsense...

...This was not because the universities had all gone left—though of course they had, and with a vengeance (vengeance being a left-wing specialty...

...It is not surprising that Althusser’s disciples could agree, at the time, only in the meaning of the title: Althusser was very definitely for Marx, not against him...

...For a long time I looked with compassion on the dwindling band of academic conservatives in the humanities and wondered whether their efforts on behalf of thinking were really worthwhile...

...Fashionable Nonsense (1998), Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont took some of this nonsense apart...

...The National Association of Scholars set out to defend the old humane curriculum, in which truth and reason still occupied a sovereign place...

...Of course, nonsense has found a home in the academy almost from the time when Plato started it...

...As it is, he was at once adopted as a foundational authority of the new curriculum, someone whose work it became instantly imperative to discuss...

...Here is a representative passage: This is not just its situation in principle (the one it occupies in the hierarchy of instances in relation to the determinant instance: in society, the economy) nor just its situation in fact (whether, RoGeR scRuTon in the phase under consideration, it is dominant or subordinate) but the relation of this situation in fact to this situation in principle, that is, the very relation which makes of this situation in fact a variation of the—“invariant”—structure, in dominance, of the totality...

...ing is impossible and all language metaphor (yes: literally...

...And behind that nonsense lies the ever mischievous promise of liberation—liberation not from truth and reason only, but from the very thought of the human community as something more important than yourself...

...But their aging teachers, who have made their careers with articles on Derrida’s somewhat too convenient proof that meanTruth, validity, and knowledge were driven from the curriculum by the sacred texts of ’68, and nonsense put in their place...

...Finally there was the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, founded at Princeton by Professor George, and now being imitated elsewhere: a program expressly designed to inject truth, rationality, and knowledge into the study of social and political science, and inviting professors and students in from the cold after the long years of madness...

...Even talented thinkers like Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish fell for this nonsense, thereby betraying the culture of which they were the appointed guardians...

...Young people may have little time, now, for the “theories” of the Parisian gurocracy...

...The young people whom I knew in Paris in 1968 were obsessed by a particular street intellectual, Louis Althusser, whose Pour Marx reads like a liturgical invocation of the Devil, composed by someone who is lifting uncomprehended phrases from a poor translation of Das Kapital...

...It was no longer necessary to have an idea of your own, or to have studied how to express real thought and emotion in careful words...

...I I t did not begin in america, but in Paris, the place where revolutions tend to begin, and where intellectual life has always been rooted outside the university...

...In 1968, however, a 50 THe aMeRIcan sPecTaToR sePTeMbeR 2008 wholly new kind of nonsense came on the scene: nonsense produced by radical gurus for the consumption of the revolutionary young...

...Only someone who had “seen through all the pretenses” could write like that...

...In their important work, Even if you don’t think that les événements de mai were a moral and spiritual disaster, you might agree, after a month or two studying their written aftermath, that they were an intellectual disaster—one comparable to the burning of the library at Alexandria, or the closing of the schools of Greece...

...52 THe aMeRIcan sPecTaToR sePTeMbeR 2008...

...It seems to me that it is only as post-’68 that writers like Derrida, Kristeva, and their more recent successors such as Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous should be read...

...One by one, however, lights began to appear in the darkness...

...This brandnew species of nonsense was almost instantly adopted by the professors—who were not to be outdone in revolutionary zeal by their students—and made into the foundation of the postmodern curriculum...

...Its very incomprehensibility was a guarantee of its relevance...

...Nor was it because the ’68ers had made transgression and self-aggrandizement into the primary goals of education—though of course they had, with all the disastrous consequences that Professor George describes...

...Professors in the humanities learned from their French mentors that there is a way of writing that will always be considered “profound,” provided only that it is (a) leftist and (b) unintelligible...

...Truth, validity, and knowledge were driven from the curriculum by the sacred texts of ’68, and nonsense put in their place...

...And in any case Sokal and Bricmont, who identify themselves as leftists, disappointed with the intellectual betrayal of their beliefs, fail to see that leftism is what it is all about...

...If I may adapt Samuel Weber’s formulation of the marginalizing vision of castration...

...THe PuRsuIT of KnowledGe The Legacy of 1968 by Roger scruton R obert p. george points out that “the class of ’68” turned its back on the old idea of liberal education and substituted a new one more in keeping with its ethos of self-expression...

...Or like this: The rememoration of the “present” as space is the possibility of the utopian imperative of no (particular)-place, the metropolitan project that can supplement the post-colonial attempt at the impossible cathexis of place-bound history as the lost time of the spectator… Those two quotations from people who hold distinguished chairs in Ivy League universities illustrate what has become the lingua franca of the humanities: gibberish with sideswipes...

...From that moment on the most appalling intellectual confusions could be propagated in the universities and—provided only that they appeared impeccably left-wing in their implications—were immediately set beyond criticism...

...The French philosopher-priest is not a university professor but a glamorous street urchin of the Sartre variety, for whom all institutions, universities included, are a compromise with the “bourgeoisie...

...At last, anybody could be a thinker...

...Their vatic style, in which words are cast as spells rather than used as arguments, inspired a thousand imitators in humanities departments across the Western world...

...It was because 1968 took hold of the old curriculum in the humanities and covered it with such a mound of impenetrable nonsense that in a great many fields of inquiry knowledge disappeared from view...