A quick thought on what happened that academic literary criticism lost its way

Four years ago I quoted Blakey Vermeule as saying:

Theory has taken hold in humanities departments because it is (or was) a branch of theology, not science. Its explanatory aims are finally subordinate to its emotive ones: it gives people energy and the will to do the work. Theory has been more or less overtly driven by a liberationist agenda—and it has developed strong resemblances to religious cults, in which powerful gurus dispense dogma and their disciples disseminate it. Some theory-centered disciplines make this more or less explicit. Take feminist studies. Feminist studies has been driven explicitly by a liberationist agenda but it has signally refused to address—in fact has been entirely contemptuous of—the mounting evidence that there are significant hormonal, neurological, and cognitive differences between the sexes. If you can’t admit the question, you aren’t a discipline.

Vermeule is right, literary criticism has been driven by a liberationist agenda since the late 1960s. I certainly have no problems with human liberation; that doesn’t bother me in itself.

But then there’s that part about developing “strong resemblances to religious cults, in which powerful gurus dispense dogma and their disciples disseminate it.” That’s different, and troubling. That leads, among other things, to star-system excesses like the sad case of Avital Ronell. It also leads to the hectoring tone and superior air of critique.

So here’s my quick and simple thought: the means has become the end. The end WAS liberation and the means was necessarily CRITICISM of the status quo (in one form or another). So now one sets out to critique and needs a plausible target, any halfway plausible target will do. The attack's the important thing. Attack, Attack, Attack!!!

How’d this come about, and why?

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See, for example, my working paper, Cultural Logic or Transcendental Interpretation? Golumbia on Chomsky's Computationalism, where I show that Golumbia simply misunderstands Chomsky and so directs his criticism at something that isn’t there. See also my letter to PMLA, On the Demise of Deconstruction, where I make a distinction between having to oppose an intellectual regime and merely learning the oppositional stance from an earlier group of scholars.