It is not surprising that, in such a context, the topic of power should become a preoccupation of critics of literature and the arts. The cliché strategy at this point in a typical conservative diatribe would be to deliver an indictment against Michel Foucault, the prominent French cultural historian who phrased into easily repeatable form a set of modern mantras about culture being a discourse of power in which artistic products such as poems or paintings encode “power relations.” Foucault’s primary contribution to “cultural criticism,” the doggerel chant that art is about the inscription of authority on the body of an oppressed people, has inflicted considerable damage on the study of culture. What is more dangerous, however, is the myopia that Foucaultism seems to induce: the apparent inability or perhaps unwillingness to regard Foucault’s thought as itself an expression of the increasing powerlessness of humanists, especially of professional scholars.

In the early 1990s, Brian McCrea, writing in his Addison and Steele are Dead, suggested that the quantity of published research is steadily increasing because humanities scholars cultivate ambiguity rather than seek answers to scholarly problems.1Open-ended ambiguity, McCrea continued, promotes the continual production of scholarly essays and thereby justifies salary increases for “productive” faculty members. Ambiguity, which leads to caution rather than resolution, licenses inaction, thereby making the declining social status and diminishing power of humanists not only tolerable but—in the way that The Addams Family draws beauty from horror—remunerative.

­­Foucault is not the only professor or prophet to substitute an aesthetically cleansed “discourse” for a beautiful poem, play, painting, or pirouette. Such operations are now routine in the current selection of literary or art-historical critical regimens, regimens that seem as numerous and yet as interrelated as the monastic orders of the Catholic church. New historicism, postcolonial criticism, feminism, queer theory, eco-criticism, and a host of hybrid movements share in a seemingly esoteric “discourse” which “problematizes” the “production” of literary or artistic “commodities,” commodities which are first stripped of their aesthetic, religious, philosophical, or other interpretative resonances and are then regarded as tokens in a vast process of cultural exchange and economy.

The immediate purpose of such critical movements is to legitimize their favored group, practice, or ideology, whether to demonstrate that statuary witnesses to the wondrousness of homosexuality or to suggest that painting serves as propaganda for colonialist exploitation or to show that literature reports on the progress of women and women’s rights. The fact that some of these interpretations are manifestly contradictory—for example, equal veneration of all cultures cannot be reconciled with western-style feminism—is seldom mentioned. The use of the arts, with all their inconsistencies, to vindicate this or that lifestyle is seldom wholly successful. Critics must often content themselves with achieving the secondary goals of disorientation and “problem-atization,” of suggesting that, lurking somewhere behind the glitzy veneer of a masterpiece, there is a deep and dark problem or secret for which the work in question serves as a mask or encoded image. This seeking of secondary goals might be seen as a species of distraction, of contentment with deflecting attention from the aesthetic properties of works so as to draw attention to favored issues of agendas. Occasionally such deflection is pursued for its own sake, without a clear purpose, as when critics exclaim that we need to get away from the traditional methods of interpretation but neglect to mention what we need to do instead. The degree to which mainstream critical practice allegorizes the economic basis of the humanities and likewise the degree to which it replicates the architecture of professional advancement in universities and other cultural institutions is omitted from such “cultural critiques.” Beauty is dispensed with as what former presidential candidate Al Gore might call “an inconvenient truth.”

­The curiously self-exposing if not self-defeating tendencies of “post-Marxist” cultural criticism can be seen in its own treatment of its own beauties and wonders. The “cultural studies” of the later twentieth century took “expansion of the canon” as a rallying cry. The goal: to “include” in the classroom and in published research an array of “marginalized” authors who allegedly had been pushed out of the “canon” by certain diffuse malevolent influences, many of them members of the “DWEM” (“dead white European male”) tribe. Presumably the cast of marginalized, minority, and women authors would include writers and artists whose skills had been overlooked and whose accomplishments as artists had been obscured by unjust neglect and choosy prejudice. Quickly, however, the question of competence—specifically of recovering valuable, beautiful works—gave way to a quota system in which every course or every essay needed a minimum representation of authors belonging to underprivileged groups. The question of artistic accomplishment was eclipsed by the need for representation—for power. The result today is the establishment of a “second canon” comprised of the works of certified neglected persons who are fewer in number than those who were previously enrolled in the standard canon and curriculum. A review of the critical literature in my specialty field, eighteenth-century studies, for example, will show that the rush to “include” politically palatable female authors such as Aphra Behn and Eliza Haywood has resulted in the removal of writers such as Anne Finch and Hannah More. By substituting a political category such as “representation” for aesthetic judgment, the number of allegedly marginalized persons represented in teaching and research has ended up going down.