The issue, however, is not simply one of style; it concerns the categories of truth. Art too has its truth, but this is ignored. The new literary scholars extol an artistic approach, which yields neither literature nor rigorous thinking about literature. The practitioners of a literary mode aestheticize reality. Art devolves into theories about art. Anthropologists become literary; historians imaginative. However, this is not art, but its debased form, a pretense to be artistic, as if multiple perspectives and self-referential writing constitute art. The new literary professors abandon truth for art, and art for art appreciation. In their rebellion against scientism they alter the values but accept the terms. Objective is bad; subjective is good. In the name of subversion, they consign art to the reservation called subjectivity, in which it has long been imprisoned. Yet art is not simply subjectivity, multiple perspectives, and thick descriptions; it also partakes of truth, and hints of freedom and happiness. For this reason, poets like Wordsworth protested the casual talk of art as a taste, as if poetry did not also partake of truth and insight. The object of poetry, he stated “is truth, not individual and local, but general, and operative.”* Many scholars and academics have not only prospered in the marginality business, they have unloaded old, slow-selling stock. In the close-out sale, they drastically mark down concepts that hint of old world Enlightenment or out-of-the world utopia. The new lines dispense with balky universals and one-size-fits all engineering. Designed for local markets, the new items are smaller, easier to handle, neater. A preference for the local and the specific is benign, even salutary. What is wrong with favoring the unique and distrusting universals? In the short run, nothing. Yet over time the suspicion of universals takes its revenge. (…) With deep misgivings about universals, an unwillingness to judge on the basis of them, and a trite notion of history, leftist intellectuals drift into a major current of conservatism that includes Burkean traditionalism, German romanticism, and American regionalism. All repudiate abstract and uniform systems of thought, usually associated with the French Enlightenment, and champion the particular and the different. The flat rejection of the universal leads to the rote affirmation of the unique and specific. History becomes the great excuse. This train of thought inexorably becomes conservative inasmuch as it sabotages the general propositions required to judge. Once writers and scholars isolate local conditions from universal categories, they lose the ability to evaluate them. They become cheerleaders, nationalists, and chauvinists.
JACOBY, Russell (1999) Thick Aestheticism and Thin Nativism. In “The End Of Utopia: Politics And Culture In An Age Of Apathy“
In “Thick Aestheticism and Thin Nativism,” he criticizes the turn toward aestheticism in cultural studies, with the attendant adoption of a literary mode that seeks only to paint pictures of events and practices rather than probe their deeper meanings. He denounces simplistic conceptualizations of power (and its endless rediscovery): “Traditionally, political thinking began, not ended, with the recognition of power. Now the fact of power appears as a dazzling insight.” And he criticizes the expansion of relativism into various outlets that, through its disregard for universals, weakens political thinking (and ends up, in its abandonment of universalisms, can engage in troubling forms of essentialism). Jacoby explains, “Although music or poetry may be culturally specific, this is less true for scientific axioms and philosophic principles. Are human rights invalid because they are violated or ignored–or unknown? If they are not recognized, does this make them false?” [Jonathan
