The Scandal of Pleasure by Wendy Steiner

...I agree with Steiner that a fear of pleasure runs throughout the writings of feminist censors such as Andrea Dwork-in and Catharine MacKinnon...

...From a painting or a great novel, we are transported to new worlds, ones that appeal, not to our sense of reality, but to our use of the imagination...

...Beauty, pleasure, individual transcendence, and self-sufficient value have been the promise of both art and education," Steiner writes...

...Even when she ventures into her more controversial (and less well supported) arguments, she offers much to ponder...

...Let the Left win and we would have equality and social justice...

...And De Man, who loved literature and recognized its distance from life, nonetheless wound up advocating a theory of reading out of which all pleasure and wonder were drained...

...When we succumb to the seductive charms of a great work, we will ourselves to live with paradox: to be in the world and beyond it, to be able to think yet to be transported by emotion, and to have our values both undermined and reaffirmed...

...From Steiner's point of view, what is most striking about the culture war is that both Right and Left agree in their basic aesthetic theories...

...We cannot, she maintains, simply dismiss out of hand Heidegger's nazism...

...Why not appropriate the term, Steiner muses...

...But their failure to make distinctions between art and pornography doesn't mean that Steiner should fail as well...

...Let the Right win and we would have obedience and order...

...Art stretches the mind, not for a particular purpose, but because human beings come with minds that crave being stretched...

...Art gives pleasure, and if each person's pleasure is different from others, so be it, for there is no expertise where aesthetic appreciation is concerned...

...Books by academics, usually written in defense of the multicultural project, have tended to be jargonistic and persuasive only to the already convinced...

...That formulation does not get the matter right...

...Both sides, Steiner urges, ought to recognize that "the separation of knowledge from practicality, morality, and action has always been an essential aspect of the idea of liberal education...

...Art, she feels, is a fetish"rightly so since fetishes are things we enjoy because they are enjoyable...

...Yet there is no one kind of thinking called "thinking...

...Steiner asks one deceptively simple question: culture for what...

...To be sure, one side wants to ban Mapplethorpe photographs and the other wants everyone to see them, just as some condemn a book like The Satanic Verses as heresy while others praise it as great literature...

...There is nothing paradoxical about anti-Semitism...

...Let either win and watch our appreciations of awe and wonder, the things that art provides, collapse...

...Heidegger did more than write...

...Alan Wolfe The loser in our recent culture wars was neither the Left nor the Right but the academy...

...Such paradoxes remind Steiner that "thinking, like art, is both autonomous from the world and not autonomous from it...

...Still, I am more inclined than Steiner to think that Jacques Derrida, who argues that words can never have one meaning, proved the absurdity of his own ideas when he resorted to copyright law in a dispute with an American professor...

...Yet when Janet Kardon, the curator of the Mapplethorpe exhibit which was eventually prosecuted in Cincinnati, was asked what made the pictures art, she could only reply in technical and for-malistic terms, as if the language of the imagination was unavailable to her...

...Marxists, sneering down their noses at popular culture, write of the "commodity fetish" of late capitalism, the false consciousness contained in the deadly proposition that words and images can actually be enjoyed...

...But surely not all pornography is art, just as not all art is pornographic...

...Yet artists were traditionally excluded from the university because the latter served practical goals alien to the former...

...Wendy Steiner, the Richard L. Fischer Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, is the first contributor to these debates who makes this professor proud to be one...

...In her concluding chapter, which is devoted to thinkers who were attracted to totalitarianism such as Anthony Blunt, Paul De Man, and Martin Heidegger, Steiner also blends realms a bit too quickly...

...This is no different, in her opinion, from the view of learning offered by canon-reformer Catherine Stimson, who wrote that "literature permits the other, Hegel's slave, to speak...

...So serious have been our debates over these matters, Steiner believes, that we have lost the capacity for pleasure...

...But when a work gets caught in a political crossfire, literalness prevails on both sides...

...Nor am I as convinced as Steiner is that education, enjoyable for its own sake, is also a fetish...

...Those who venture into political and social theory have an obligation which poets and musicians do not: to be responsible for the consequences of the actions they advocate...

...writing about Jews the way they did, and at the time they did, Heidegger and De Man hurt real people in palpable ways...

...It is not just Plato who wanted to ban poets...

...That does not mean that their thought is worthless or their ideas disproved...

...Whatever position one takes on the canon, the best writing, and in many cases the sharpest thinking, was done by people independent of, or marginal to, academic career-tracking: Robert Hughes, Russell Jacoby, Camille Paglia...

...If ever the last book on the culture wars is written, let us hope that this is the one...

...How unusual, then, that not only does it represent the reality of our culture wars with uncommon good sense, but is also an aesthetic pleasure in its own right...

...Senator Jesse Helms and Representative Dana Rorhbacher both know that the whole purpose of Mapplethorpe's art is pornographic, for what else can a picture of a naked boy be other than an invitation to pederasty...

...to excuse him is to repudiate his philosophy, since Heidegger warned against searching for universal truths independent of time and place...

...When she sticks to art, reminds us of the treasures the culture war is taking away from us...

...And her answer, traditional in content but radical in the context of today's debates, is that culture liberates us from literalism...

...The Scandal of Pleasure is not a work of the imagination but one of criticism and commentary...

...As Steiner's own examples demonstrate, efforts to distance humanistic learning from one practical end"rank vocationalism, for example"served another practical end" the training of a gentlemanly class, just as attempts to create a wall between education and religious morality was done in the name of secular morality...

...Educational traditionalists, she writes, who claim to love learning for its own sake, want the university to serve explicitly political goals, such as reenforcing moral virtue...

...But it does mean that those whose specific purpose is to describe or evaluate the real world have to be judged by different criteria than those whose purpose is to create imaginary ones...

...Intellectual life participates in the same antifundamen-talist paradox that characterizes all the struggles documented in this book...

...Writing music or painting a scene is not the same thing as theorizing about the social world which in turn is different from writing literary criticism...

...he campaigned actively, with devastating results, against his Jewish mentor Edmund Husserl...

...Sex, she believes, is also a fetish, which is why she finds "adequate neither to women nor to art" the feminist notion that representations of sex are a form of rape...

...Steiner, however, does get a bit carried away by her enthusiasms...