SOURCE: Ryan, Michael. “Literary Criticism and Cultural Science: Transformations in the Dominant Paradigm of Literary Study.” North Dakoka Quarterly 51, no. 1 (winter 1983): 100-12.

[In the following essay, Ryan examines the expansion of traditional literary criticism to include politicization, attributing this change to the renewal of Marxist study in the West.]

Literary criticism is being transformed; it is becoming at once more broad in subject matter or scope and more pointed in its political tone and purpose. Radical and Marxist critics like Raymond Williams, Fredric Jameson, Edward Said, and Tony Bennett increasingly depart from the traditional canon of literary study as well as from the traditionally disinterested and apolitical tone of literary scholarship and instead study culture with a view to transforming it politically. This development is due in part to a renewal of Marxism in the West that has provoked a rediscovery of non-elite or popular culture as well as a rediscovery of politically engaged intellectual work. The work of Jameson and Bennett is exemplary of the broadening of the scope of literary criticism. Each began with studies of Marxist literary criticism, and each now is engaged in cultural studies—Jameson of post-modernism in all its interdisciplinary variety, and Bennett of popular culture and communications. The work of Williams and Said is indicative of a new activism in the domain of cultural study. Williams studies the discourse of contemporary political culture in Europe, while Said, in perhaps the most interventionist vein of all, engages in a kind of counter-journalism that reveals and challenges the assumptions of the U.S. news media and of Orientalist scholarship. I propose to use the label “cultural science” for this broadening and politicization of traditional literary criticism.

Cultural science is the critical study of culture, and “critical” in this sense means a study with what Jurgen Habermas calls a practical intent. In this case, that practical intent has to do with the construction of a good society. If we learn anything from the conflict that divides the world today, it would seem to be that such a good society has to be at least two things—socialist and open, egalitarian yet free. And I don't think those two things are incompatible—at least, that is what Marx argued in his description of the Paris Commune.

A critical cultural science would not only concentrate on the acquisition of knowledge about cultural life, but also make policy proposals with the practical intent of transforming the object of study in the direction of the realization of a good society. This criterion of practicality welded to an ethical intention would seem to violate the ground rules of scientific inquiry; by all rights we should say cultural intervention rather than cultural science. Philosophers of science, from Popper and Kuhn to Lakatos and Feyerabend, treat science as a theoretical mode of inquiry, where hypotheses are verified or falsified, in which paradigms stand or give way to anomalies, where proofs are to be expanded through refutation, in which rationalist method or historicist relativism will prevail, where, finally, the acquisition of theoretical knowledge in a manner detached from practical use or implementation defines science. Science means theoretical knowledge in itself that can and should be elaborated prior to practice or technology.

Certain liberal and “post-liberal” thinkers have begun to explore the practical and historical dimension of knowledge and of science—Toulmin in Human Understanding, Rorty in The Mirror of Nature, Unger in Politics and Knowledge, and Spragens in The Irony of Liberal Reason. But the liberals barely touch their toes to water in which Marxists have been gaily swimming for ages—from Marx to Gramsci and Lukacs to Marcuse, Althusser, and Habermas. The class-related politics of knowledge escape the liberals, and, therefore, the political consequences they derive are limited. They rarely touch upon the concrete and fundamental issue of the relation of knowledge to all forms of power—be it of race, sex, or class.

The theoreticist model of science underwrites the dominant paradigm of literary study. In this paradigm, the purpose of literary study is knowledge about literary texts, not any social practice (except perhaps the conservative traditionalist one of preserving the great works of humanist culture). But texts are also about the world, generally a world that is shown to be quite flawed and in need of improvement. Nevertheless, attempts to apply the knowledge one gains from such texts to the improvement of the world or to use literature itself as an instrument of such improvement are dismissed as unscientific and alien to the objective pursuit of knowledge as an end in itself (and “objective” in the humanities always means not criticizing what is because what is is good). It need hardly be pointed out that in this context, the theoreticist concept of science itself becomes a practical instrument of academic power.

I would contend that a concept of science that limits science only to questions of method, truth, and knowledge is itself unscientific. Science is not unitary; it consists of a range of activities, from the theoretical extreme of knowledge (pure mathematics or microphysics) to the practical extreme of medical surgery and industrial technology. Medicine is a good example of a domain of science that is inseparable from a practical intent, and within medicine, psychotherapy is a good example of how scientific knowledge can be directly practical. The therapeutic cure occurs through an increase of knowledge and through the practice of discovering and communicating knowledge. The acquisition of scientific truth cannot be dissociated from the practice of improvement in this case. Theoretical proof consists of pragmatic validation. Because of this linkage, I will take psychotherapy as a model for what I am calling critical cultural science. As in psychotherapy, such a science would seek to increase knowledge not for the sake of expanding the academic inventory, but instead for the sake of having the direct practical effect of helping to bring about what for want of a better word might be called a “cure,” and by that I mean the construction of a good society. My apparent exhumation of the Enlightenment notion of therapeutic philosophy should not be taken as a subscription to Enlightenment rationalism, the belief that a moral utopia can be created through the dissemination of right knowledge. The acknowledgment of the practicality of reason and of the necessity of a practical intent in cultural science brings with it a sense that limitations on the sort of popular knowledge needed for a just society are practical in nature. They have to do with the maldistribution of wealth and power, as well as with inequities of education and enculturation that result from that maldistribution. Right knowledge, in other words, is not enough without concomitant transformations in this practical domain.

In psychotherapy, the fact/value distinction which allows good objectivity to be distinguished from bad interestedness, thus establishing a norm of theoretical science that excludes practical concerns with matters of justice, becomes moot. In psychotherapy, all facts have value, a practical interest, and they are only true to the extent that they have the value of promoting a cure. A theory or body of knowledge concerning psychotherapy can be separated from the actual practice of therapy, but it will nevertheless be a theory with a practical intent. In order for a critical cultural science to live up to the model of psychotherapeutic science, it must be concerned with communications, especially with the popular media, because the media are the purveyors and maintainers of public knowledge. Psychotherapy occurs through discourse; the cure is a talking cure. The equivalent for a cultural science with a practical intent would be the eliciting of popular expression and the dissemination of information through the media. It is significant in this regard that one of the examples I mentioned—the work of Edward Said—is concerned with the way the news media operates. And it is not surprising that the work of one or more important practitioners of cultural science—Douglas Kellner—consists both of teaching in the academy and of producing the longest running alternate news program on television.

I have indicated what I mean by the words “critical” and “science” but I have not yet defined the word “culture.” In his book Beyond Culture, Lionel Trilling mentions two major definitions of the word: “Everyone is conscious of at least two meanings of the word. One of them refers to that complex of activities which includes the practice of the arts and of certain intellectual disciplines. … The other meaning is much more inclusive. It comprises a people's technology, its manners and customs, its religious beliefs and organizations, its system of valuation, whether explicit or implicit.” It is probably clear by now that by “culture,” I intend the second of Trilling's definitions. I would even expand that already wide definition a bit to include certain things Trilling consciously excludes—economic forms, for example. If we define culture as the general field of human activity and interaction, as technology in the broadest sense of that term—all human construction and fabrication—then we can say that it comprises the range of fabricative or constructive activities from literature to sexual ritual to political institutions to the spatial form of built environments to the communications media. The purpose of giving the word so wide a domain is to emphasize the way different sectors of the cultural field necessarily inter-relate—urban spatial design and economic form, for example, or mode of transportation and family unit dispersion, or contemporary corporatist political ideology and the dominant figures of popular movies. Another purpose is to emphasize the fact that culture is not purely objective. It is constructed by subjects, not only individual subjects but also economic classes as well as political, racial, and sexual groups that interrelate agonistically and that define culture as a terrain of struggle where forces interact differentially and where power is a contested commodity. Another purpose of this broad definition of culture is to suggest that the practical intent of cultural science is a rather complicated enterprise or series of undertakings. No single analytic system and no single cultural critic is likely to be capable of subsuming the entire field into a unified vision, theory, or project. If there is to be a unity of cultural science, it would seem to have to be a diverse unity, and the project would have to be a collective one. Finally, my purpose in defining culture broadly is to imply that disciplinary divisions segment a world that may not be divisible. As disciplinary institutions, sociology and ethics would seem to have nothing to do with law and economics. Such assumptions serve an ideological function in a capitalist society that would prefer that law and economics be seen as purely formal operations in relation to which social and ethical questions are exogenous. One goal of cultural science, then, would be to reintegrate what disciplines now divide, not for the sake of gaining an organic totality, but for the sake of revealing relations that are now programmatically excluded in the name of functional efficiency. Such work would seem to be counter to the ideological requirements of capitalism, but as the reintegration of such divided sectors as ethics and economics, it would also further the construction of a good society, one that would be at least both radically democratic and socialist in character.

Four kinds of literary criticism are relevant to the critical science of culture—Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis, and semiotics. Each tends toward cultural science, yet the tendency in each is curtailed by the dominant paradigm of literary study, a paradigm that defines the proper object of knowledge in the discipline of literature as published, imaginative writing, rather than as the entire range of writing from science to politics, or as all the possible forms of cultural production, and that defines the proper style of criticism by setting limits on the sorts of statements that properly constitute literary criticism, statements that cannot stray beyond the bounds of a strictly enforced scholarly and objective propriety.

Marxism traditionally practices literary criticism as an aspect of cultural science, although Marxist literary criticism too often makes cultural science into an aspect of traditional literary criticism, rather than displacing the institution of literary study into the broader activity of multidisciplinary, cultural scientific work. More than literary critical Marxism, feminism, as it is instituted in womens' studies, is genuinely multi-disciplinary. Yet literary critical feminism finds itself in the same dilemma as literary critical Marxism. It contains the potential for making extra-literary critical statements concerning cultural history, social institutions, and the interworking of language and power, yet it is constrained to make statements strictly concerning literary texts by the rules of the reigning paradigm of literary study. Like Marxism, psychoanalysis offers an ideal mode of analysis for cultural science. It permits relations to be established between the personal and the public, as well as between the aesthetic and the social. But with psychoanalytic, as with Marxist and feminist literary criticism, the rules of the paradigm and of the institution of literary study oblige a limitation of conclusions to either literary historical biography or a formalism of psychic tropes. What links psychoanalysis most to feminism and Marxism is the fact that in order to do service as a literary critical methodology, its multidisciplinary implications and potential must be constrained. Otherwise, literary critics would end up making statements about the world literature is about, the world of sociology or politics or real, as opposed to “literary” history, and havoc would be done to the dominant paradigm. We would lose our disciplinary identity. Semiotics, or the study of sign systems, would seem to constitute an ideal cross disciplinary mode of cultural analysis. Already a large body of work has developed in the semiotics of architecture and spatial design, for example. And at the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, England, semiotics has been used with Marxist sociology in what is perhaps the most successful attempt to launch a cultural science in the past decade. Once again, however, in literary study as it is currently defined and instituted, semiotics becomes a formalism that tends to focus exclusively on texts in an inadvertent revival of the new criticism. Confined to the dominant paradigm of literary study, semiotics loses its ability to establish relations between such things as literary signs and social forces or historical movements. Because those forces and movements are not signs, they appear as blind spots in the literary semiotic gaze.

What would a shift in the dominant paradigm—away from strictly literary study and toward cultural science—entail? In very general terms, we can list at least two implications. First, a shift in the object of knowledge—no longer only written works of imaginative literature, but all writing and all cultural production. Second, a shift in the style of Marxist, feminist, psychoanalytic, and semiotic criticism—no longer issuing in conclusions of a literary nature, but in conclusions concerning history, culture, and society in a manner which adds to scientific knowledge of the cultural world while intervening politically or counter-journalistically in that world with a practical intent.

A political science of culture cannot heed disciplinary boundaries, nor can it respect the injunction against political engagement promoted by the liberal academic ideology of neutrality, disinterestedness, and “scientific objectivity.” In literary criticism, the twin doctrines of formal analysis (dehistoricized and abstracted from the world) and of disinterested scholarship are results of the practical dimension of literary criticism. Literary study dealt with books that were decontextualized and abstracted from their lived societal origins. Hardy's Jude was at best related to literary history, but more often than not its literary form or its humanist themes were the focus of literary analysis. The written nature of literary critical artifacts provoked a sense of abstraction from history and society on the part of critics because the referents of written texts are always absent. In addition, the practical site of the teaching of literature—the university—was equally removed from the historical and social world literature is about. These two practical factors fostered a theory of scholarly indifference and seraphic disinterestedness. Literature was thought to have nothing to do with the world or with politics because writing and the university are abstracted from the world. Their absent referents make literary critics feel absent from the world.

The study of contemporary popular culture, on the other hand, necessarily undermines that disinterestedness and that exclusive focus on a literature abstracted from the world. The absent referent in writing that produces a sense of absence from the world no longer operates in films, television shows, news, rock music, and advertising. More often than not, the referent is the contemporary social world. To study such cultural artifacts is to study society; no absent historical referent permits a sense of detachment and absence. In addition, contemporary culture is one of the few areas of academic work in which a non-segmented sense of the multi-disciplinary nature of the cultural world is possible. The study of popular culture cannot heed the rules of the paradigm of literary study. The very nature of the object of knowledge dictates that the conclusions of cultural study cannot be confined to statements which are aesthetic or literary, and not political or socially critical, in character. It is through the critique of popular culture that a glimpse of a new critical style is available, one that would be relevant to other diciplines. Finally, by studying culture on an interdisciplinary basis, one sees that the principle of selection and exclusion which over time has come to justify the isolation of literary study by defining its object as imaginative or dramatic literature is unacceptable. The disciplinary boundary line that separates fiction from discursive prose is not always tenable. The referents of Milton's Paradise Lost and Hobbes's Leviathan are both equally imagined to the extent that each text must construct its referent discursively or rhetorically. But also, each text refers equally to reality to the extent that all texts are history-bound. All texts—be they fictive or discursive—are about the historical moment in which they were written. A novel by John Irving and a book of discursive prose by Christopher Lasch both refer to the contemporary anti-feminist movement in our culture. It doesn't matter that the referent in one is imagined while the other is supposedly observed. Each nonetheless permits a scientific description of the same cultural content. In addition, the distinction between the imagined and the real comes undone once one sees the extent to which the so-called real against which literature poses itself as an other is itself structured by fiction, rhetoric, and dramatic acting. As Richard Cohen argued in the Washington Post, Reagan's program is based entirely on sentiment, not how things are, but how they should be. Ideology is living and lived fiction.

But are the lessons of literary criticism—the importance of form, for example—to be sacrificed entirely? Do they have relevance to cultural science? Figure and form are important in culture in that how culture is arranged, the forms it takes, plays a role in determining its content. The form of the patriarchal family programs certain attitudes toward authority and political form. In George Gilder's Wealth and Poverty, that family form is inseparable from an authoritarian political economic vision. The content of our culture is also figured in the form of urban architecture and in the spatial design of the built environment. The newly gentrified form of many cities can be read as indicative of the re-urbanization of the white professional class as a result of higher gas and commuter costs.

Literary analysis, in other words, can extend beyond the established canon simply because what we call literature—as fiction and figuration—itself is a characteristic of the cultural world. This does not constitute a reduction of culture to some formalism. The expansion of the concept of literature merely extends what Marxists have always contended, that is, that to study literature, even formalistically, is, whether one likes it or not, simultaneously and necessarily, to study history and culture, as well as to engage oneself in a historical and cultural practice.

This shift of focus, away from the dominant paradigm of literary study and toward cultural science, will raise questions concerning such things as disciplinary divisions and disciplinary jurisdiction. Raymond Williams put it best, I think, when he reflected on the recent denial of tenure to an English scholar. Williams believes that a crisis is taking place, a “crisis of the dominant paradigm and of its established professional standards and methods. It is in the fullest sense, one of the key areas in which a very general cultural crisis is being defined and fought out.” And Williams asks, “Can radically different work still be carried out under a single heading or department when there is not just diversity of approach but more serious and fundamental differences about the object of knowledge? Or must there be some wider reorganization of the received divisions of the humanities, the human sciences, into newly defined and newly collaborative arrangements?” Williams' own work has taken him away from the traditional paradigm of literary study and toward what he calls cultural materialism. Cultural materialism, he writes, “has moved much wider than literature in its paradigmatic sense, but it still centrally includes these major forms of writing, which are now being read, along with other writing, in a different perspective. Cultural materialism is the analysis of all forms of signification, including quite centrally writing, within the actual means and conditions of their production.”

Williams is probably the best example of someone who has theorized the expansion of literary study toward cultural science. However, in his new book, Culture, he defines culture narrowly as a “realized signifying system.” In other words, he uses the first rather than the second of Trilling's definitions, and although he does argue that “a signifying system is intrinsic to any economic system, any political system, any generational system and, most generally to any social system,” he nonetheless maintains that culture “in practice [is] distinguishable as a system in itself: as a language, most evidently; as a system of thought or of consciousness, or, to use that difficult alternate term, an ideology; and again as a body of specially signifying works of art and thought. Moreover all these exist not only as institutions and works, and not only as systems, but necessarily as active practices and states of mind.” Williams acknowledges that the broader anthropological definition of culture as a way of life is a powerful weapon “against the habits of separated analysis, historically developed within the capitalist social order, which assume in theory and practice, an ‘economic side of life,’ a ‘political side,’ a ‘private side,’ a ‘spiritual side,’ a ‘leisure side’ and so on.” Nevertheless, Williams insists that there is an area of material and social interaction and organization which lies beyond culture defined as a realized signifying system and that this domain cannot be subsumed by culture. Williams offers as examples currency and dwellings. Currency, he argues, is a sign system, but “there is no real doubt that in any genuine currency the needs and actions of trade and payment are dominant, and the signifying factor, though intrinsic, is in this sense dissolved.” Similarly, dwellings may with time become art forms, but they are essentially a “solution to socially developed primary needs which are always at one level dominant.”

Williams belongs to a tradition in Marxism that tends to conceive of materiality as a natural bedrock that stands in opposition to human interaction and human technology, rather than seeing human technology as merely an extension of productive natural processes that could also be called technological. Nature is not a material bedrock outside human life that stands in opposition to it; rather it is an active process of production and reproduction of which human life is a part. Marx placed more of an emphasis on the interaction between human productive activity and material nature, which is conceived itself as an active process. Human technology makes nature human, and it shows human life to be natural in that it aims at reproducing natural life through production. My own definition of culture as technology broadly conceived derives in part from Marx. By emphasizing human construction, fabrication, and technology, this concept of culture would not separate out the exchange of goods and the construction of dwellings in response to primary needs from culture. Trade is a human construct, and dwellings embody social meanings. Another word for human cultural technology is, of course, communication. And if Williams had defined culture as communication, rather than as a signifying practice, he would have been able to include currency and dwellings in culture. Trade and payment may not constitute a signifying practice, but they do constitute a system of communication, not in the verbal sense, but in the sense that goods are exchanged, something is received and needs are met in exchange for something given or expended. Dwellings are cultural in another sense. They are examples of human technology responding to material nature, one could even say, of a communication between humans and nature. More importantly, dwellings are significant; they communicate prestige and power, or their absence; they signify social divisions and economic positions. And finally, as Pierre Bourdieu argues in Outline of a Theory of Practice, they divide up the natural environment and arrange social space in ways that have significance for human life in communities.

My point is not to reduce culture to communication. It is rather to suggest that Williams' attempt to erect culture as a signifying system on top of more primary need-oriented activities overlooks both the dialectical interrelation between human activities and the natural environment as well as the constructed and social character of such “basic” activities as trade. The fact that the so-called primary activities can be described using the terms Williams would reserve for culture—communication especially—indicates that his boundary line is questionable. An absolute division between mental signifying practices and productive activities that communicate between humans or between humans and nature can only be maintained through recourse to a separation of ideality from materiality. Williams avoids this ultimately by making culture a social activity among others, but he still sacrifices the opportunity to pursue an undoing of such metaphysical oppositions as that between superstructure and infrastructure in Marxist theory and that between culture and nature in conservative theory.

Ultimately, of course, whether one calls it society or culture does not really matter. But there is a danger, especially for orthodox Marxists, in isolating culture in the narrow sense from an external material or natural realm which determines it. The anthropologist Marvin Harris' cultural materialism is susceptible to this pitfall. Like Williams, Harris accepts a narrow definition of culture. It refers, he writes, “to the learned repertory of thoughts and actions exhibited by the members of social groups.” Culture, for Harris, is overwhelmingly determined by natural material necessity. Harris, like Williams, seems to overlook Marx's description of human life as a constructive activity which built up a cultural world out of nature and which would lead eventually to a consciously organized egalitarian society. If, as Harris maintains, culture is a limited domain hedged in by powerful forces over which humans can never gain control, then the prospects of Marx's vision ever being realized are dim indeed. It is not surprising that Harris' proposal for solving America's current problems, in America Now, consists of calling for a decentralization that would satisfy needs almost by accident rather than through consciously constructed mechanisms of distribution.

Conscious construction in the human technology of cultural life, however, implies popular hegemony, not central state management which merely preserves hierarchically invested power. A theory of culture that would include politics and economics within the domain of human constructive practice, instead of seeing them as belonging to an extracultural area of natural, material, or objective laws, is more likely to promote a radically popular, unmediated control over political and economic institutions.

Just the opposite program is implied in Juri Lotman's theory of culture. Like Williams, Lotman works out from literature toward cultural science. But even more than Williams, he tends to conceive of culture in strictly literary terms. In his “Theses for the Semiotic Study of Culture,” he calls culture a secondary language. “Culture is constructed as a hierarchy of semiotic systems on the one hand and a multilateral arrangement of the extracultural sphere surrounding it.” Above all else, culture means organization, the reduction of the non-cultural realm of chaos or entropy to an organized form. Elsewhere, Lotman defines the task of culture as “structurally organizing the world around man. … It creates a social sphere around men.” This is a markedly non-participatory formal definition, one appropriate, I would suggest, to a technocratic managerial culture. One can imagine a definition of culture emerging in a society where genuine popular and workers' control over political and economic institutions existed going something like—“culture is the sociosphere people build to meet their needs.” Formal definitions of culture, one could argue, are themselves cultural dialects.

Some of the most fruitful work in cultural science, work that promotes the sort of practical intent I have been advocating, was done over the past decade at the Birmingham Center for Cultural Studies. Stuart Hall, the former head of the center, in his account of the Center's work, describes the way their definition of culture shifted from a narrow one to a broad one. “Culture no longer meant a set of texts and artefacts. Even less did it mean the ‘selective tradition’ in which those texts and artefacts had been arranged and studied and appreciated.” Hall goes on to describe two moves involved in this shift of emphasis that are also crucial to the program of cultural science I have outlined: “First, the move to an anthropological definition of culture—as cultural practices; second, the move to a more historical definition of cultural practices: questioning the anthropological meaning and interrogating its universality by means of the concepts of social formation, cultural power, domination and regulation, resistance and struggle. These moves did not exclude the analysis of texts, but it treated them as archives, decentering their assumed privileged status—one kind of evidence, among others.”

I will conclude by mentioning the work of Edward Said again because he has successfully expanded his work from literary criticism toward cultural science, pushing beyond the sort of textual archeology Stuart Hall describes and moving toward a cultural analysis that is intended simultaneously to be a political intervention. In Covering Islam Said brings his skills in the analysis of literary language and literary institutions to bear on the institutions of scholarship which construct our prejudicial view of the Third World and on the language of the media which operates to mobilize negative opinion against a world about which we know in truth very little. Said is most pertinent to what I have argued when he relates a cultural analysis that pretends to be above practical concerns and the field of human struggle to a managerial and imperialistic attitude in policy practice: “Empires are not born instantaneously. … If the development of learning involves the redefinition and reconstruction of fields of human experience by scientists who stand above the material they study, it is not impertinent to see the same development occurring among politicians whose realm of authority is redefined to include ‘inferior’ regions of the world where new ‘national’ interests can be discovered—and later seen to be in need of close supervision.” Said argues in favor of activist cultural scientists of the Middle East. “For them,” he writes, “knowledge is essentially an actively sought out and contested thing, not merely a passive recitation of facts and ‘accepted’ views.” Said's argument for an active concept of knowledge is akin to my own concerning cultural science. And he points out why the politics of knowledge is so important: “The production and diffusion of knowledge will play an absolutely crucial role. Yet until knowledge is understood in human political terms as something to be won to the service of co-existence and community, not of particular races, nations, classes, or religions, the future augurs badly.”

Paradigms shift when anomalies emerge that propose work models that challenge the dominant paradigm from an initially marginal position and that slowly move to a more central position that displaces the old paradigm. The work of Said, Williams, Bennett, Jameson, and others is now anomalous in relation to the dominant paradigm of literary study, but it promises to displace that paradigm in time for two reasons. The first is that it is richer in content, being both cross-cultural and multi-disciplinary. In this sense, it is more scientific, a better, more accurate account of the world. The second is that it is more pertinent or relevant to social transformations under way. The present paradigm is the fruit of a liberalism that is now in eclipse across the academic disciplines and in the political and economic world. Liberalism has lost its explanatory power and its socially critical value because the capitalism for which liberalism was in large part merely a legitimating ideology is disappearing from the face of the earth. The explanations liberalism now offers and the work its various academic paradigms program are increasingly untruthful and defensive. In political science and economics, they justify reaction, authoritarianism, and repression in the name of objectivity, and in literary studies the reigning liberal paradigm promotes faith more than critical analysis while trumpeting “humanist” values that obscure the realities of the world. Capitalism shows increasingly repressive tendencies in response to its crisis, tendencies that appear in the academy either as the technocratic authoritarianism of rationalism or as the libertarian irrationalism of subjectivism. That crisis would be solved through the democratic socialism that is the implicit political, economic, and social equivalent of the new cultural criticism. This science of criticism cannot therefore be understood simply as a theoretical advance; it is inseparable from a practical transformation of the world.