BOOK REVIEW / NONFICTION : A Complicated Path Through Battles Waged Against the Arts : THE SCANDAL OF PLEASURE, by Wendy Steiner, University of Chicago, $24.95; 237 pages

“It has taken me a long time to admit that the thrust of criticism is the ‘I like,’ ” writes Wendy Steiner, chairman of the English department at the University of Pennsylvania. Her title and years of study and cogitation might seem to assert an objective expertise. “But at the heart of any critical act is a subjective preference.”

No news to most of us, perhaps, but in the academic culture wars it is tantamount to the suggestion by Vermont’s late Sen. George Aiken, in the earlier stages of the Vietnam morass, that we should simply declare victory and leave. Steiner, a somewhat shellshocked veteran, has put out a message likewise reminiscent of Vietnam: Make love (with precautions) not war.

Steiner is not entirely a trumpet-voiced peacemaker, equidistant from the cultural right (who uphold the Western literary canon down through such modernists as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens) and the cultural left (who engage in various post-modernist deconstructions in the name of theory or multiculturalism).

For one thing, there are confused fluffs in her admittedly difficult double- and triple-tonguing. For another, her former comrades-in-arms tend to be on the cultural left and she scolds them somewhat more gently. Essentially, though, like Tolstoy’s Prince Andrei lying wounded at Borodino, she has become less interested in glorious battles than in the pattern of clouds moving across the sky.

Besides the rival academic regiments, whose gunpowder obscures the cloud view, Steiner distinguishes a whole army quite outside the school gates. This one uses not just powder but shot and shell as well. It belongs to those who take art literally; who react with charges of corruption, subversion or incursion; and who seek to do something about it.

We may think of the obscenity trial of the Robert Mapplethorpe show in Cincinnati and the political outcry against the funding of Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” installation. We may also think of the Iranian death threats against Salman Rushdie, of Communist and Nazi suppressions of formalist and decadent art, respectively; and for that matter, of Plato’s strictures against the morally damaging role of poets.

And we may further think of the neighbors who simply did not want a huge Serra iron sculpture to dominate their little park. Or--a personal memory--of a visit to Belgrade by the Living Theater in the late 1960s. As part of its program of aesthetic violence on behalf of “truth,” one near-naked performer tried to sit in the lap of my neighbor, a grizzled partisan veteran of a different sort of violence. Roaring softly, the partisan rolled up a copy of his newspaper “Borba” (“Truth”) and belabored the skinny actor all the way back to the stage. “Truth” versus “Truth.”

“The Scandal of Pleasure” charts a path through the complex skirmishes and warring claims in the battles waged by and upon the arts and those who write about them. It is a twisting, complicated path and sometimes she passes herself going the other way. She stands resolutely against political and legal censorships; she tries to distinguish censorship from protest but does not always succeed.

I think it is wrong to compare a veterans’ march against a Chicago show, “How to View an American Flag,” with the death-to-Rushdie campaign. The veterans were not armed and besides, protesting art is a part of the vital life of art. Look what the Paris audience did for the first performance of “Sacre du Printemps,” and what the hooting, fruit-throwing small-town opera audiences in Italy used to do on behalf of their (other) national religion. Also, though a political refusal to fund publicly controversial art is wrongheaded and stultifying, it is not the same as censorship.

If Steiner missteps sometimes, it is not because she simplifies; quite the contrary. She is not the blind man asserting one aspect of the elephant; if anything she is the same man trying to locate all seven sides at once. Her writing ranges between a lucid, sometimes witty English and the discourse used by academic critics to call out to each other across their savanna. This American equivalent of katharevousa--the elaborate form of Greek used until recently by scholars and writers, though not when they were making love or ordering lunch--breaks in throughout, notably in discussing the philosopher Martin Heidegger and the critical theorist Paul de Man.

Steiner’s essential thesis is simple. She does not altogether dispute the repercussions of art on life that so inflame political and religious fundamentalists. She does not dispute the quasi-religious claims for the reality and value of art, maintained by the literary right and attacked by the left. She does not dispute the relativisms--political, ethnic, gender-bound, deconstructionist--argued by the left and assailed by the right. She does not hesitate to point out the absurd extremes of all three.

The chief absurdity, she suggests, is to treat such divergences as an embattled either / or:

“No longer needing a modernist ‘religion of art’ or the frightened demystification of that move in postmodernism, we might indulge in a little aesthetic bliss, I reckon, secure in the belief that whatever similarities art may have to reality will not determine either us or that reality, and whatever pleasures it provides will hurt no one.”