Intellectuals in politics

...I would wager that some kind of attention to what Ice Cube is rapping about or whatever new kind of cyborg Arnold Schwarzenegger is impersonating is more likely to be helpful in this regard than reading the complete works of John Stuart Mill or even John Dewey...

...Statistics, like poll-taking, are one of the lowest forms of political consciousness...

...I'm just as interested in Dewey as in Ice Cube (well, almost...

...I'm quite sympathetic to anyone who wants to talk to me about the economic nightmares faced by " 'structurally' unemployed factory workers in the Rust Belt...

...I challenge Professor Rorty's right to trivialize their political endeavors...

...a story that acknowledged that ten generations of American leftists might not all have shared the same vision of democratic progress...

...a story that showed how gay-bashing, racist reporting, and sexual harassment are intrinsically linked to the systematic ease with which the rich go on soaking the poor...

...Since the poor cannot eat it, why in hell's name should we bother with it...

...It does the cultural work through various institutional means— government, the courts, the churches, the educational system, law enforcement, news media, popular entertainment—through various value clusters —morality, prejudice, envy, survivalism, common sense—and through a profusion of daily cultural rituals and practices...

...Cultural politics, then, involves much of what I have described above, but the term is also used in a more particular sense...

...Forty years later, all that's new in the post–cold war liberal imagination is a new old version of Gresham's Law: if you let cultural politics in, you can say goodbye to real politics...

...It's just that Mr...

...From my perspective, Rorty's characterization of the academic cultural left as a scary, unified menace has a good deal in common with the new right-wing image of humanities college professors, hitherto consigned to the outer, tweedy margins of social relevance, now portrayed as pointy-headed dictators of thought or as first-strike threats to national security...

...Thatcher's destructive assault on British higher education, an orchestrated effort that, in retrospect, has all but driven the young left intelligentsia from whatever small niche it might have held within British universities and polytechnics...

...SPRING • 1992 • 263 Why does that recognition not translate into an immediate and unstoppable clamor for the redistribution of wealth...

...if you let "bad" popular culture in the door, then real culture goes out the window...

...Culture does matter, and if proof were needed of this proposition then the recent brouhaha is living testimony...

...Rorty means by "real politics...

...Perhaps, for Mr...

...A cultural politics that wants to describe how they work requires a certain degree of sophistication, a certain amount of habitual analysis...

...Unlike him, I am no "old-timer," whose blood is chilled by memories of Stalinism, but I do speak as an early casualty of Mrs...

...After all, he likes to keep his view of politics (real politics, that is) simple...

...It often refers specifically to someone's positions vis-a-vis issues of race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and ecology, and thus to those new movements of activist thought and experience that have deepened and broadened the idea of democracy in our time...

...After hearing him repeatedly hammer the same dull nail into the coffin of culture, I think I have some idea of what Mr...

...Please allow us to make a little history there, under conditions, as usual, not of our own choosing...

...a story that described some of the pernicious activities pursued at home and abroad in the name of American-style democracy...

...From the evidence of his essay, Rorty would probably find such a story cluttered, obfuscatory, distracting, overly intellectual, and perhaps even unAmerican...

...I do not have the space here to properly address this charge...

...Now either Professor Rorty is playing the naïf, or else the liberal tradition he claims to represent is more bankrupt than the most recent $&L to go down the drain...

...they have only bank accounts...

...In this respect, I am not Rorty's man, and I should add that I don't know of anyone who does fit this one-dimensional description...

...Given more space, I suppose I would want to tell a less simple-minded story: a story that did not have to begin with the Founding Fathers...

...Real simple...

...To begin with, no one in this country has much difficulty recognizing that the rich soak the poor...

...To be fair to Rorty, there is no evidence that he shares the Neanderthal views of the right-wingers or even the monoculturalists in the current debates about PC...

...The answer lies mostly in the realm of culture, ideology, and all of the realms of thought, belief, and social consciousness that Marx once designated as superstructural, and which we have come to see as integral to the maintenance of power...

...I'm tempted to conclude that he just doesn't get it...

...If there are those who doubt the validity of cultural politics after all of this hullabaloo, then, as far as I'm concerned, they can go eat their unreconstructed hats...

...The insistence on plain prose is all too often used as a means of excluding complex or radical insights, and of denying such insights entry into the public discourse of politics...

...But before he does that, perhaps Professor Rorty should tell us what he thinks culture is good for...

...If the test of all political work is to translate instantly into benefits for the poor, then most of the political work done by the nonacademic activists, writers, artists, musicians, journalists, and filmmakers whom I know and whom I count as friends and comrades would flunk outright...

...This hybrid voice, which is usually but not exclusively male and heterosexual, is increasingly heard amid the rising crescendo of attacks on the academic cultural left...

...As to the questions of academic politics, let me say that if minute changes in curricular procedure on college campuses can be received on the order of threats to national security, as has been the case of late, then the reformers must be doing something right...

...But the difference is that I, unlike Professor Rorty, don't see these two sources of inspiration as mutually exclusive...

...But I do realize that my name is simply being used to represent a tendency that Professor Rorty wants to nail, an academic tendency that he sees as dangerously pervasive and as Stalinistically (that is, undemocratically) stage managed...

...In the course of the last century leftist thinkers have increasingly turned their attention to culture to explain how structures of wealth and power are maintained and reproduced from day to day...

...In the present is a malaise of inactivity, germinated, in some part, by postmodern intellectuals who seem more concerned about gay-bashing in the streets, racist reporting in the press, and sexual harassment in the workplace than they are about the rich soaking the poor...

...Consequently, it is possible to be liberal or left in matters of class politics and economics while holding conservative views in matters of cultural politics...

...On the face of it, we didn't learn much there about how the rich soak the poor...

...But it's more difficult for me to figure out whether he really understands what cultural politics is...

...Sad to say, but things don't seem to have changed much since the cold war debates among liberal intellectuals who saw popular culture as a filthy contaminant to democratic life and to left thought alike, rather than as an opportunity for intellectuals pumped up on high moral seriousness to learn something about the messy world of popular pleasures, popular resentments, and popular prejudices...

...Rorty wouldn't be the first person whose writings I would rush to in order to find out what such workers, or what "the stoop laborers along the Rio Grande, and the children in the ghettos" have on their minds these days...

...he does not actually rebut the "politics of difference" espoused by the advocates of multiculturalism, although he shows scant appreciation in his essay for the substance of their claims...

...Don't get me wrong...

...In fact, Mr...

...Nor will it do to insist on the language of clarity and plainspeak that Rorty commends as the most "democratic" medium for intellectuals to communicate such challenges...

...Just remember that the left is temporarily enjoying its first real foothold within the North American academy...

...Like some kind of mantra, he repeats over and over his definition of "real politics" —it's about the rich soaking the poor, or the rich ripping off the poor, or the poor resisting the rich...

...Suffice it to repeat that I find the terms of such a complaint to rest upon a profoundly restrictive view of politics...

...And, in this respect, no, of course it is not good enough to simply "cite statistics about rape, wifebeating, gay-bashing, income differences, and differences in per-pupil expenditure in various school districts...

...According to his view of real politics, neither the rich nor the poor have vaginas or penises...

...Rather, his complaint is that such a politics does not translate instantly into visible benefits for the poor and that advocates of such a politics, like myself, are living 264 • DISSENT in cloud-cuckoo land if we believe that it does...

...Are we to conclude that the cataclysmic ThomasHill hearings had nothing to do with real politics...

...The point of such a politics is to sort out and to challenge what is being said in our society about race, class, sexuality, and gender under the cover of dominant notions of democracy that encourage people to see themselves as free to exploit their fellow women and men...

...Nothing more, nothing less...

...Rather than give him the benefit of the doubt, let me briefly recount why cultural politics is important...

...Anyone who knows me or my work will know that I am no certified apologist for what Rorty calls "advanced literary theory" (but he, of all people, surely knows better than to describe that theory in the flip way he does, barely distinguishable from the journalistic accounts he himself derogates...

...Among other things, Professor Rorty's essay will be read as a fulsome contribution to the dirty campaign of PCbashing...

...Every single day of the year, someone once said, from sunrise to sunrise, the unequal world of capitalism has to work hard in order to reproduce itself, culturally as well as economically...

...Rorty's sentiments seem to represent exactly what has become a familiar hybrid, the economic liberalcultural conservative...

...As his all too visible contempt for "schlock" reveals, Rorty still subscribes to Gresham's Law of Culture...

...In the beginning were the Founding Fathers, fearful of mob rule...

...Nor do we learn too much about economic violence, on the face of it, from Jesse Helms, when he rises on the Senate floor to periodically vent his spleen against gay people...

...These channels of power are highly evolved...

...In the interim were the spread of literacy and the struggles for democratic progress of ten generations of liberal-leftists...

...Rorty, those kinds of spectacles belong to culture, not politics...

...It is equally bizarre to find myself described as someone who goes around preaching the cause of academic politics, and "improvising new professional jargon...