Democracy's Children: Intellectuals and the Rise of Cultural Politics (review)

At one point in his congenial collection of essays John McGowan allows, with some irony, that he is, perhaps, "a sweet-tempered guy" (118). Indeed he is, for he has written a book that surveys the decline of the once dynamic and now sleepy fields of literary and cultural studies, yet he only occasionally bares a molar. I'm not complaining: the academy is packed with hermeneutists making apocalyptic pronouncements to one another about our fallen social world and the last thing they want to hear is a hellfire sermon demystifying what they do. McGowan complains all right, but he does not denounce. He is humble, he is deliberate, he makes nice, he nibbles away.

McGowan is a pluralist because he rejects any comprehensive definition or overriding project for intellectuals, and he is a pragmatist because he believes intellectuals can and must respond creatively to a constantly shifting array of opportunities and obstacles. Intellectuals, he argues, were given life by plural societies with guaranteed rights and relatively unrestricted debates over "competing visions of the good life, the good polity, and good art" (xi). Indeed, what distinguishes the intellectual from the scholar is the former's relative proximity to the cultural and social debates within the public sphere. McGowan believes the profession should produce more intellectuals, individuals who serve as "champions of democracy," and who are "ever-vigilant against the anti-democratic forces of modern society" (xii).

Unfortunately, numerous factors mitigate against such a development. One, ironically, is the sense of belonging, which ought to provide a basis for increased involvement with other citizens, but is more often turned inward by the orthodoxies of dissent that provide emotional and professional rewards within the academy. In a chapter describing his experiences at a Modern Language Association convention (it was in 1986, but little, he implies, has changed), McGowan politely registers the wearisome political posturing, the knee-jerk rejection of prevailing norms (norms always outside the profession of course), and the many grinding sessions that force him to conclude that "three-quarters of what I witnessed outraged me" (36). Yet he also admits he enjoys himself, and that he continues to attend MLA conventions. "The disease I am trying to anatomize," he complicitously declares, "is my own" (36).

Another reason academics demur from a more regular involvement with public discussions, according to McGowan, has been the dominance of "cultural politics" within the discipline. Defined as "the attempt to intervene in cultural processes of representation, categorization, and reflexive understanding, with a focus on the ideological production of values and beliefs along with adherence to them" (x), cultural politics, or "culturalism," tends to regard culture as "a safe refuge . . . held apart from processes of democratic contestation" (177). Although such a focus can be a form of political activity, McGowan thinks it ought not to continue as the main form. Deriving from Victorian anxiety, Western Marxist pessimism, and the exigencies of professionalization, it retreats from a full and direct account of political action and the culture such action requires in a liberal and democratic society. In a highly engaging essay, "Teaching Literature: Where, How, and Why?" McGowan shows how this happens even in the classroom, where the search for the truly oppositional often detracts from an awareness of how the teaching of literature can create a virtual community of critics that links identities to models of public interaction and can draw out the best in teachers and students alike.

Culturalism further discourages interest in the give and take of democratic decision-making with an array of evasive intellectual strategies positing "totalizing general forms that structure the entire social field" (139). These include post-structuralist ethics that require a necessarily blind ethical commitment to an unknowable "other," and a variety of "hidden substrates . . . historical periods, ideology, the social imaginary, or the dominant culture" (139). As a way out...