Politics Other Means: Higher Education and Group Thinking.

By David
Bromwich. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992.257 pp. $30.00.

“Politicsby other means’’ is David Bromwich’s polemical description of the

recent, controversial swing to the left by university-based scholarship in the
humanities, or what he elsewhere refers to as “institutional radicalism.”
Bromwich gathers under this rubric many items he finds objectionable,
including feminist theory, the (strongdiscipline administered to hate speech
on campus, the weak discipline administered in tenure reviews, and the
sympathetic teaching of mass culture. But unlike others who have also
objected to these signs of academic degradation, such as Dinesh D’Souza,
Roger Kimball, and George Will, Bromwich dissociates himself from the
Right. As his title suggests, he attacks them in the name of what he calls
“real politics” ( 236).
American leftists may well find something attractive in Bromwich’s
scorn for an “activist tone in scholarship” that “has been found compatible
with a restriction of politics to the universities themselves” (116).But I hope
not. Any reminder of higher tasks that remain undone displays a deflation-
ary but at least momentarily seductive humility about our accomplishments.
Given the state of the world and the limits of any individual effort, such an
appeal is always open, and always open to abuse. This book offers some
unfortunate examples of its abuse.
Writing this review as the Bosnian Serb onslaught against Bosnian Mus-
lims continues to take its daily toll, I note that to call for “real”or extra-aca-
demic politics is not necessarily to speak, as Bromwich implies, in the name
of the Left. Serbian intellectuals who have abandoned the universities in
order to take up arms on behalf of a ‘khite, Christian Europe” are getting
real by going fascist. One wonders, therefore, what lies behind the danger-
ous vagueness of the phrase realpolitics. Bromwich makes little reference to
any such political realities as the invasion of Panama, wage disparities
between men and women, or why veterans’ benefits are not classified as wel-
fare. Composed before the end of the Reagan-Bush era was yet in sight, Pol-
itics by Other Means scores some easy, if also satisfying, points at the expense

Modern Language Quarterly 54:4, December 1 9 9 3 . 01993 University of Washington.

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 568 M L Q I December 1993

of the Great Communicator and his chief ideologues. Even after the failure
of “familyvalues” as a Republican slogan in 1992, it remains useful to insist,
as Bromwich does, that American conservatism cannot claim those tradi-
tional values while uncritically accepting the so-called free market that is
“the single most volatile and relentless force for modernization’*(56) work-
ing to undermine them. But even on the subject of tradition and modernity,
Bromwich gets no closer to “real” politics than this.
He refuses, in fact, to dirty his hands with the messy specifics of whether
particular traditions and particular values deserve to be defended. Nor does
he recognize that such indispensable questions are at the heart of ongoing
debates over multiculturalism, a term that does not appear in the book’s
index. Bromwich is effective in disputing the right of George Will and
William Bennett to the traditions they claim precisely because he and they
share so many assumptions about traditional values. (As David Lodge
remarked in the New Ymk Times Book h i m , “the game is given away**when
Bromwich expresses his “sympathy”with Will and Bennett.) By identifjmg
all change with the modernizing market and assuming, like Matthew
Arnold and Lionel Trilling, that nothing desirable will ever emerge from a
marketdominated society, Bromwich, in a mirror image of neocolonial
developmentalism, maneuvers himself into defending tradition as such
against modernity as such. Discrimination collapses into a blanket condem-
nation of any and all emergent values such as might be associated with new
social movements or with the products of contemporary culture, whether
low or high.
On the evidence of this book, Bromwich’s standards are too lofty for
anything contemporary-either in art or in politics-to elicit his admira-
tion. The Left, new or old, should have nothing to do with this narrow,
embittered conservatism. Since the author troubles himself to tell us how
old he is, it is perhaps permissible to observe that he is not yet old enough
to be quite so petulant about the age in which he lives.
The chief count in Bromwich’s indictment against “politics by other
means” is the book’s other titular term, group thinking. In his tired com-
plaint, any and all reflection on cultural identity is reducible to “the self-
idolatry of groups” ( 13). Denouncing all wider standards, universals, or
commonalities as authoritarian and Eurocentric, Bromwich’s multicultural-
ism affirms nothing more or higher than “demographics”: “People want to
study that which they already are by birth, or have come to be by custom
and habit. And so, women’s studies for women, Judaic studies for Jews, Afro
American studies for Afro-Americans, Asian-American studies for Asian-
Americans. . . . the contents of the list all point in one direction: this is a
genetic code for intellectual identity. It says, I am what I came from (what
my parents or their parents were). And to the extent that my background
does not absolutely define me, the objects of my culture absolutely do” (44).

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 Robbins 0 Review 569

Here it is necessary to introduce a semantic motif to which Bromwich

himself is partial: that of “lies”and “errors.”In thus caricaturing recent dis-
cussions of cultural identity, Bromwich ignores, suppresses, or falsifies a
great deal of readily available information. He seems unaware that the reci-
procal challenges of gender and race, for example, which have been in vig-
orous dialogue for decades now, have forever shattered the claim of either
one to any absolute, unquestionable identity, and have thus made identity
thinking a characteristically complex and controversial practice. It is a rare
piece of simple-minded demographic particularism that goes unchallenged
these days by critics of race and gender, but Bromwich offers no hint of such
challenges. Assigned to cover the topic of identity politics in the academy,
even a journalist with a quick deadline to meet would discern that today’s
inquiries are directed toward themes like hybridity, diaspora, public culture,
and political coalition. If a new ethical sensibility has begun to emerge from
the new diversity, as I think it has, it is surely based on a common recogni-
tion that all identities are multiple, that no one’s suffering is absolute, that
each of us is impure and incorrect, and that we can’t afford not to tolerate
each other.
The “institutional radicalism’’Bromwich assails is almost entirely anony-
mous. The major exceptions (major in the sense that more than one sen-
tence is cited) are theorists Gerald Graff and Barbara Herrnstein Smith,
neither of whom has had much to do with the cardinal sins of canon bash-
ing and ethnic particularism imputed to the institutional radicals. The least
one can say about this refusal to argue with anyone in particular-“group
thinking” with a vengeance-is that it displays a certain disrespect for the
nameless feminist and African-American scholars Bromwich presumably has
in mind. The most plausible explanation for a blindness so unalleviated is
the author’s powerful will not to know. Bromwich presents himself as a real-
ist defender of the Enlightenment against the forces of darkness, but he
apparently has his own dark, inverted Nietzscheanism.
Still in quest of “real politics,” one soon comes upon Bromwich in the
act of cultivating the working class. “Race and gender,” he says, “are our
great diversions.” “It is class that is likely to be most often neglected”
(117- 18). Bromwich thus joins the chorus of voices, including Dinesh
D’Souza and Ronald Reagan himself, who seem to discover the poor and
suffering precisely and exclusively to the extent that the poor and suffering
can be successfully invoked to the discomfiture of women and African
Americans. If one were genuinely committed to altering the situation of the
working (which is to say, frequently unemployed) class in this country, then
one would naturally support a strong gender-and-race agenda, since it is
largely women, African Americans, and Chicanos who in fact-and not just
for the rhetorical purposes of neoconservatives-constitute the working
class. And one would certainly not speak against “group thinking.” For there

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 570 MLQ I December 1993

is no “real politics” at all without “group thinking”-a phrase that surely

applies to class as well as to race or gender.
Bromwich shows no stronger signs of admiring “group thinking” out-
side the academy, however, than inside it. Thus we can conclusively elimi-
nate his portentous claim to speak on behalf of “real politics.” On whose
behalf, then, is he really speaking? On the face of it, no one’s at all. Con-
sider his fondness for the locution that Roland Barthes called “neither/nor.”
Bromwich sets “the self-contained (mostly left-wing) culture of the acad-
emy” against “the static (and right-wing) political culture that dominates
America today” and then characteristically places himself somewhere
between and above these antagonists: “I write as an admirer of neither cul-
ture” (ix). At whatever cost to his supposed affiliation with the Left,
Bromwich makes no secret of his individualism, his desire to be isolated,
apart, distinct. Thinking happens, he observes, only in “a mind alone” (ix).
He paraphrases Keats’s “soul-making”as the effort of individuals to “distin-
guish themselves from others of their kind” (64). After Mill, he reduces
“culture” to “selfculture” (103;my italics). From Nietzsche he takes a “dis-
trust of the herd” (130) and an appreciation of the “solitude”of the scholar.
‘The voice to distrust,” he writes, “is the ‘we’-voice of collective judgment”
( ’94).
This celebration of disinterested nonmembership, which offers an
amusingly unconscious echo of certain race- and gender-motivated refusals
of the critical “we,” has the same effect that other such refusals do: entan-
glement in hopeless selfcontradiction. To create a heroic solitude around
himself, Bromwich is obliged to depopulate a densely settled area. For
example, dividing the world with journalistic insouciance into “high-
minded priests” and “grubbing politicians” (xiii), he does a disappearing
act on a multitude of his fellow academics, a great many of whom, like him-
self, are gamely trying to combine politics and high-mindedness with a min-
imum of grubbiness or priestcraft. For Bromwich to admit the existence of
these many kindred spirits, however, would entail rethinking his vehement
denunciation of professionalism. This he will not do, even when it becomes
an unconscious selfdenunciation. Professionalizing, he says, has led “away
from public engagements and into a professional-even, at times, an eso-
teric-ambition for the refinement of a knowledge all one’s own” (105).
Yet “a knowledge all one’s own” is precisely what he grabs for when he
refuses all solidarities with other live people in the present, preferring links
with the dead or unborn: “A community that may exist in no special place”
and “at no special time,”he says, is the source of “many of the strongest feel-
ings of solidarity for a thinking person” ( 129).What is the professional her-
itage of Arnold, that connoisseur of “neither/nor,” but the solidarity of
thinking persons who join themselves together by each claiming an essential
apartness?

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 Robbins 0 Review , 571

“The intelligence is defeated,” reads the epigraph to the book (from

Simone Weil), “as soon as the expression of one’s thoughts is preceded,
explicitly or implicitly, by the little word ‘we.”’On the first page, however,
and again and again in the pages that follow, “we” comes back in the form
of “our tradition” (3). Although I for one do not believe that intelligence is
defeated by the use of ”we”-indeed, I do not believe that intelligence can
do without it-Bromwich’s own peculiar, selfcontradictory appeal to the
first person plural pronoun is indeed the defeat of his book. While censur-
ing professionalism as such, the book covertly defends one version of pro-
fessionalism’s‘he”-a ‘he”that has been and will continue to be taken, with
some justice, as an expression of scornful exclusiveness on the part of a
white male who does not want to share the playground of culture with the
new kids on the block.
It is not the mission of the university to offer a “compensatory relation-
ship” (47) to the culture outside it, Bromwich argues; the university should
not try to embody a different, higher sort of community. But this is exactly
what he asks it to do when he tells it to stay out of “politicsby other means.”
Like Arnold, Trilling, and the professionals inspired by them, he asks the
university to embody a tradition of disinterested individual inquiry that he
claims is elsewhere unavailable. Unfortunately, this unacknowledged mem-
bership repeats the worst of an older, far more hermetic professionalism.
Those Bromwich accuses of believing “that the codes of professionalism and
its customs at any time are good in themselves” (105) could scarcely
improve on the following, for example: “who, after all, is better qualified to
know the obligations that come with a given subject than the professor who
has chosen to spend a career in that subject?” (28-29).Defending profes-
sional antifeminist Christina Hoff Sommers against an “activist”administra-
tion urging curriculum reform, Bromwich writes, “Choices like these are
never more wisely made than by someone like Professor Sommers, who has
the good fortune to teach the things she cares about.” Anyone discontented
with the wisdom of Professor Sommers’sprofessional opinion is thus denied
grounds for appeal-by the form of professionalism that Bromwich himself
espouses, though luckily not by those forms he attacks (29).
If it is a mistake to take Bromwich, at his word, as a prophetic amateur
crying in the wilderness, it would be no less mistaken to grant him that dif-
ferent exteriority to the academy enjoyed by the journalist, even if this is
another mask of the macho real he seems eager to don. Many full- or part-
time journalists have played a responsible, constructive, and even creative
part in the recent culture wars. The failings of this book cannot be blamed
on interprofessional rivalry. They are the failings, rather, of a highly moti-
vated inattention to reality. William James’s notion of “what the humanities
ideally ought to represent,” Bromwich writes, is that “you can give humanis-
tic value to almost anything by teaching it historically” ( 108). Characteristi-

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 572 M I Q I December 1993

cally, Bromwich takesJames’s ideal as a desirable alternative to the present.

In fact,James’s ideal offers an accurate description of cultural studies as it is
frequently practiced. Bromwich does not want to admit that any ideals
might ever be realized, however incompletely. For him, “real politics” finally
means “ideal”politics-a politics floating high enough above reality to dis-
tort, disparage, and discourage real involvement, whether outside or inside
the academy. This is politics only in the least appetizing sense: politics as a
high-minded excuse for not seeing what is there. Bromwich’s harsh judg-
ment of the tenure review process seems cruelly apposite to his book: ‘What
I have been describing is not a system that incorporates some risk of error.
It is a system moved, operated, and daily extended by error” (183).
Bruce Robbins

Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign. By Murray Krieger. Emblems by

Joan Krieger. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.xvii +
292 pp. $38.00.

Krieger’s book’s declared intention is to offer a straightforward critical h i s

tory of ekphrasis, or at least the sketch of such a history, from antiquity to
the present (postmodern) moment. Strictly considered, ekphrasis is the fig-
ure by which the poet vies with the painter or sculptor in “depicting”a work
of visual art in language. The quotation marks remind us that such depic-
tions are literally impossible in a literary medium, but it is that very paradox
which challenges the ekphrastic poet and intrigues the critic. The extraor-
dinary description of Achilles’ shield in book 18 of the Iliad-impossible to
picture because of the very profusion of specific detail described-is the
founding instance of ekphrasis in Western literature. Emulating Homer,
Virgil in turn supplies Aeneas with a shield bearing obscure visions of the
Roman future, but also with a set of wall paintings in Dido’s temple com-
memorating the Trojan past-scenes of the destruction of Troy that in their
vividness seem not only to call forth tears from the spectator but to exude
tears themselves, the Zucn’mae rerum of Virgil’s melancholy vision. On our
end of this long tradition, the canonical examples of ekphrasis include,
inevitably, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and more recent poems such as
Auden’s evocation of Breughel in “Musie des Beaux Arts” and Ashbery’s
reflections on Parmigianino in “Self-Portraitin a Convex Mirror.”
As Krieger employs the term, however, ekphrasis expands into some-
thing both more pervasive and more vague. For him it refers to a funda-
mental “impulse” or “ambition” of poetry as it aspires to the formal con-
stancy of painting-a craving for “the spatial fix”-and the Platonic
“immediacy of a sightless vision” of the real (10).Ekphrasis in the narrower
sense becomes for Krieger the most prominent instance of a more general

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