ABS received permission from Dr. E Michael Jones to post this excerpt from his GREAT book, The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History.
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October 1976: The Jewish takeover of American Discourse
Please buy his book and subscribe to Culture Wars.
October 1976: The Jewish takeover of American Discourse
In October 1976, Leo Pfeffer arrived in Philadelphia to give a talk entitled “Issues that Divide: the Triumph of Secular Humanism." In that talk, Pfeffer declared Victory in the culture wars and announced the Jews had defeated the Catholics in their 40 years war over American culture. The terms of the Carthaginian peace imposed on the defeated American Catholics included abortion, pornography, the loss of Catholic academe, the redefinition of deviance, and the transformation of discourse. In a formal sense, i.e., in reference to literary criticism, that meant war on Logos. It also meant the end of the New Criticism as everyman's democratic
version of Sola Scriptura and its replacement with Talmudic exegesis. Catholics who began their literary careers learning the Protestant rule that every man had the right to interpret his own text, now had to be re-trained in rules of discourse according to which the Rabbi was always right.
At around the same time that Woody Allen was being celebrated as the great American genius, Jacques Derrida and Stanley Fish changed the rules of discourse in American academic circles. Literary criticism was no longer Protestant; it was Talmudic. Those who signed up for literature classes to learn how to read a poem,now learned that there was, as Fish put it, "no text." No text meant any constitutional principle could be subverted by Talmudic reasoning by rabbis like Leo Pfeffer; and that any human right, such as the right to life, could be subverted similarly. No text meant there was no such thing as nature, as the campaign to legitimatize homosexuality showed. It also meant there was no substance or being, as Derrida's attack on "onto-theology" showed.
There was a deeper grammar to this discussion, which eventuated in the campus political correctness speech codes of the 1990s. The heart of that code wasn't racial; it wasn't feminist; it wasn't homosexual; it was Jewish and expressing Jewish culture at its worst. Political correctness was the final expression of the Talmudic redefinition of American discourse which had begun in the '70s under the direction of Jewish critical theorists like Fish and Derrida.
In 1992, Fish authored an essay, "There's no such Thing as Free Speech and It’s a Good Thing Too," in a book called Debating PC. Criticizing Benno Schmidt's view that speech should be tolerated because "freedom must be the paramount obligation of an academic community," Fish says Schmidt has "no sense of the lacerating harms that speech of certain kinds can inflict.". Fish therefore favored campus regulations banning "hate speech." "Speech," he says, "is never and could not be an independent value, but it is always asserted against a background of some assumed conception of the good to which it must yield in the event of conflict."
The catch in this argument revolved around the conception of the good at its heart. The traditional view claimed speech was subordinated to the moral law, the good in question. The Whig Enlightenment claimed, in the case of speech, that
the moral law was subject to individual freedom.
This rallying cry allowed Jewish revolutionaries to take over the university. Once in power, they changed the rules. The "Good" at Duke University, where Fish taught at the time he was being proclaimed as an Apostle of Political Correctness in organs like Newsweek, got redefined as the will of those in power. In the absence of a "text" such as Nature, Being, Logos, the Constitution, etc., there could be no good but the will of the powerful fortified by appetite.
Two years earlier, in an article in Newsweek on Political Correctness entitled "Thought Police on Campus," Fish praised pluralism in a way that had already become dated, when he claimed that "Disagreement can be fun.”
By the 1990s there was no disagreement and little fun in class. Reader Response criticism was Talmudic.
There was "no text." There was no Torah; there was only Talmud, i.e., opinions of literary critics who were the secular equivalent of the rabbi, always right, even when other rabbis contradicted him. Reader Response criticism, as espoused by
Fish, claimed the reader did not discover meaning, he created it out of materials assembled from a text that had no real existence until he appropriated it. This idea appealed to legions of poorly educated English majors plodding through graduate schools in the mid-'70s.
The fledgling critic, overburdened by texts his defective education left him unprepared to understand, leapt to avoid the labor of scholarly pursuit and rejoiced to learn scholarship was nothing but unfettered appetite applied to difficult texts. "The text means what I say it means," the dull-witted grad student chanted. "I am the hegemon of meaning," he crowed, because, Fish told him, the critic is not "the humble servant of texts." The euphoria wore off when the young literary critic discovered, like the denizens of Orwell's Animal Farm, that some literary critical pigs were more equal than others. Animal Farm was especially relevant because the same sort of transformation was taking place in literary criticism that had taken place in revolutionary France, Russia, and Germany.
The passions were aroused as the instrument of revolution against the moral order, but once the revolution destroyed the old regime, there was no moral order to protect the revolutionaries from the will of their new masters.
Reader Response Criticism led to politicly correct speech codes, but the grad students of the '70s still haven't figured out why or how. Stanley Fish engaged in bait and switch. Once the maleducated, baby-boomer grad students accepted the hegemony of the reader over texts in Fish's campaign to bring down the ancien regime, they were informed the reader was not quite as sovereign as he had told them. Indeed, robbed of the text as the source of meaning, the "readers" had no power at all. The determiner of meaning of was not the "reader" after all, but the
"interpretive community."
"Fish," wrote R. V. Young, "follows here the paradigm of Jean Jacques Rousseau: an initial assertion of virtually limitless freedom (reader-response criticism) turns into total constraint, with the individual reader or interpreter figured as a blind prisoner of the collective mind." Once “liberated" from coming to grips with a text, the critic had no source for his interpretations.
He was dependent on the "interpretive community," the lit crit equivalent of the communist party.
Where did the interpretive community get its meanings? Fish could not answer that question, just as he could not explain how this community could change its mind. All that remained was desire, the bait that started this revolution. But the
desires of the weak, disconnected from morals and a constitutive text, inevitably succumbed to the desires of the powerful. There was something "democratic" in the traditional American sense of the word, about the study of literature when the New Criticism gave everyone a chance to come up with a winning interpretation. That possibility disappeared with the disappearance of the text.
When the deconstructor deconstructs all meanings and all texts, all that is left is the hegemony of his desires over everyone else's.
Since there can be no appeal to an objective text with objective meaning, e.g, the Bible or the Constitution, the deconstructor has absolute hegemony over those who lack his power. That was the motivation behind the replacement of Shakespeare with Queer Theory and Deconstruction.
Those who abolished the text were like those who abolish morals in the name of "liberation." Their ultimate goal, no matter how inchoately understood, was libido dominandi. The average grad student, like the average TV watcher went along with the revolution because he saw in it the validation of his own desires. What he failed to see was the simultaneous eclipse of his moral freedom. That realization usually came too late, if at all. Since the abolition of text was a fundamentally
totalitarian project, it should come as no surprise that former Nazis like Paul DeMan were attracted to it.
Sexual morality had to be deconstructed in the name of political power. It must have no "meaning" because if there were no meaning, no one could objectwhen the powerful inflicted their desires on the weak. Aldous Huxley explicated
the meaning of "meaninglessness" long ago in Ends and Means.
"The philosopher,” Huxley wrote, who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics. He is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason
why he personally should not do as he wants to do, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern in the way that they find most advantageous to themselves. The voluntary, as opposed to the intellectual, reasons for holding the doctrines of materialism, for example, may be predominantly erotic, as they were in the case of Lamettrie (see his lyrical account of the pleasures of the bed in La Volupte and at the end of L'Homme Machine), or predominantly political as they were in the case of Karl Marx.
Beginning with Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet in 1968, followed by Portnoy’s Complaint one year later, then by the movies of Woody Allen, Jewish themes and ideas became mainstream American culture. At around the same time that
movie-goers were lining up to see Annie Hall, Jewish literary critics like Stanley Fish and Jacques Derrida were changing the rules of discourse. Interpretations Professor Fish said were the privilege of "interpretive communities," meaning English departments at prestigious institutions like Johns Hopkins University, where he happened to teach. Before long any institution became ipso facto prestigious by the fact that it had hired Stanley Fish to teach there. First Duke and then the University of Illinois at Chicago became prestigious. At the same time Jacques Derrida at Yale was saying that the interpretation of texts was so difficult, that no one could do it. Readings were no longer possible; all that was possible were "misreadings."
Neither of these talmudic forms of literary criticism were compatible with American democratic ideals. According to Fish, the Torah, i.e, the poem or “text" as a secular surrogate for the Bible, had been swallowed by the Talmud of arcane literary theory, for which he was the chief rabbi. Anyone who disagreed was expelled from the synagogue. Jews of an earlier era were free to come up with outrageously irreverent and literarily blasphemous assertions like the claim that Huckleberry Finn and Jim were homosexuals, as Leslie Fiedler did in "Come back to the raft ag'in, Huck Honey," but the days when anyone was free to make any interpretation as long as it was based on evidence from the text were numbered.
Professors who thought they had "academic freedom" were the first to learn about the new rules of discourse, but soon the lessons were taught outside of academe too. Major league pitcher John Rocker may have been earning lots of money, but it could not buy him the freedom to speak his mind.
Anyone who says something in public must take account of the rules of discourse or run the risk of punishment. By the end of the 20th century, cultural commentary was dangerous because the monuments to Jewish culture had become ubiquitous but off limits to the goyim. It is difficult if not impossible to comment on mainstream culture without touching some Jewish monument, yet the number of permissible interpretations was narrowing dramatically at the same time. Mass culture abounds in Jewish artifacts, but unauthorized discourse about them is prohibited.
Derrida's Deconstruction was Talmudic too. Deconstruction was an attackon Logos-synonymous with Christ-by people, in R. V. Young's phrase, "at warwith the word." Derrida's Deconstruction was an attack on "real presence." What followed the revolt against Logos was a convoluted explanation of discourse that
bore an uncanny resemblance to the Jewish world once the Temple was destroyed and "everything became discourse," i.e., Talmudic disputation without contact with Logos:
The surrogate does not substitute itself for anything which has somehow preexisted it. From then on it was probably necessary to begin to think that there was no center, that the center could not be thought of in the form of a being present, that the center had no natural locus, that it was not a fixed locus, but a function, a sort of non-locus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play.
This moment was that in which language invaded the universal problematic; that in which, in the absence of center or origin, everything became discourse-provided we can agree on this word-that is to say, when everything became a system where the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences. The absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and the interplay of the signification ad infinitum.
Derrida's passage is an allegory, describing the destruction of the Temple, after which the Jewish people had no priesthood, no sacrifice, no Temple, no real presence, no Shekinah. After Rabbi Jochanan ben Zakkai got smuggled out of the temple and founded the rabbinic school at Javne, Judaism became a Talmudic debating society, in which "The absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and interplay of signification ad infinitum."
As Young puts it, "Rather than a frontal assault on metaphysics, Derrida proposes subversion from within." Jacques Derrida and Stanley Fish were, like Trotsky, Jewish revolutionaries. The literary critical revolution of the '70s was the mopping up operation which followed the cultural revolution of the '60s, when academe was taken over by a new group of people.
Reader Response Criticism corresponded in time to the Jewish take over of American culture. The speech codes which got imposed on college campuses over the course of the 1990s which came to be known as political correctness, were in fact the practical consequences which were drawn from the Jewish takeover of discourse which occurred in America during the 1970s.
From Page 1000 and following , The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and its impact on world history, E. Michael Jones.
Real Catholics will want to own this book