The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in an Age of Fundamentalism.

The loser in our recent culture wars was neither the Left nor the Right but the academy. 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. Books by academics, usually written in defense of the multicultural project, have tended to be jargonistic and persuasive only to the already convinced.

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. Steiner asks one deceptively simple question: culture for what? And her answer, traditional in content but radical in the context of today's debates, is that culture liberates us from literalism. 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. 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. Art stretches the mind, not for a particular purpose, but because human beings come with minds that crave being stretched. 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. 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. But when a work gets caught in a political crossfire, literalness prevails on both sides. 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? 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 formalistic terms, as if the language of the imagination was unavailable to her.

So serious have been our debates over these matters, Steiner believes, that we have lost the capacity for pleasure. 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. Why not appropriate the term, Steiner muses. Art, she feels, is a fetish--rightly so since fetishes are things we enjoy because they are enjoyable. Let the Right win and we would have obedience and order. Let the Left win and we would have equality and social justice. Let either win and watch our appreciations of awe and wonder, the things that art provides, collapse.

Steiner, however, does get a bit carried away by her enthusiasms. 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. But surely not all pornography is art, just as not all art is pornographic. I agree with Steiner that a fear of pleasure runs throughout the writings of feminist censors such as Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon. But their failure to make distinctions between art and pornography doesn't mean that Steiner should fail as well.

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

That formulation does not get the matter right. 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. "Beauty, pleasure, individual transcendence, and self-sufficient value have been the promise of both art and education," Steiner writes. Yet artists were traditionally excluded from the university because the latter served practical goals alien to the former. It is not just Plato who wanted to ban poets.

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. We cannot, she maintains, simply dismiss out of hand Heidegger's nazism; to excuse him is to repudiate his philosophy, since Heidegger warned against searching for universal truths independent of time and place. 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. Such paradoxes remind Steiner that "thinking, like art, is both autonomous from the world and not autonomous from it. Intellectual life participates in the same anti-fundamentalist paradox that characterizes all the struggles documented in this book."

Yet there is no one kind of thinking called "thinking." 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. 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. There is nothing paradoxical about anti-Semitism; writing about Jews the way they did, and at the time they did, Heidegger and De Man hurt real people in palpable ways. (Heidegger did more than write; he campaigned actively, with devastating results, against his Jewish mentor Edmund Husserl.) That does not mean that their thought is worthless or their ideas disproved. 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. 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.

The Scandal of Pleasure is not a work of the imagination but one of criticism and commentary. How unusual, then, that not only does it represent the reality of out culture wars with uncommon good sense, but is also an aesthetic pleasure in its own right. When she sticks to art, Steiner reminds us of the treasures the culture war is taking away from us. Even when she ventures into her more controversial (and less well supported) arguments, she offers much to ponder. If ever the last book on the culture wars is written, let us hope that this is the one.

Alan Wolfe is University Professor and professor of sociology at Boston University. His most recent book is The Human Difference: Animals,computers, and the Necessity of Social Science (1993).