Cultural studies. Textual analysis. Liza Minnelli. Structuralist. Poststructuralist. Postmodernist. Postcolonialist. Inductive method. Theoretical abyss. Aphorism. Aztecs. Clever dudes.

Life is a what? . . . Cultural studies, yes. They cover a society's whole range of beliefs, etc. No time for high culture (Beethoven, Mike Royko etc.), only for "the culture of everyday life."

In that vein, consider "the killing of history," as explained by Keith Windschuttle in his book of that name, subtitled "How a discipline is being murdered by literary critics and social theorists.”

It's done with "textual analysis." There is nothing like a text, says philosopher Jacques Derrida, nothing in the world like a text. He goes beyond that: there's nothing outside the text. There's nothing but text, do you understand? You don't? You're a very dumb person.

Liza Minnelli had it wrong: Life is a book, not a cabaret. You think the world came first, then the book? Let Derrida tell you something: words are related to their meanings, and vice versa. Neither of them have anything to do with the world. We call Derrida a structuralist, for what it's worth.

And those meanings are slippery. For Derrida and his Merry Men and Women, there is no such thing as fixed meaning. This is good news to the wink-and-a-nod folks who would rather go with the flow.

Derrida got this from the philosopher Heidegger, who wasn't even a good German as we speak of one who timidly goes along. Heidegger profited from being a Nazi, watching his Jewish and non-conformist colleagues go job-hunting in the '30s while he held on, honored and sung.

Here's what it comes down to: philosophy by aphorism and verse, not argument, which is ideal for the fuzzy-minded and for the gnostic, who knows, don't ask him how. He just knows.

It's great for the burnouts too. Another French higher-thinker, Michel Foucault, said what he wrote as a historian should be considered fiction. Him and his tricks. He's a poststructuralist. Another category is postmodernist. There are several kinds of these, but they all reject Western thinking. If you are addicted to Western thinking, they have just the thing for you.

One question is whether truth is to be discovered, as Enlightenment thinkers held, or upheld, or to be decided, as "critical theorist" Jurgen Habermas holds. Do we discover what happened in the past (in history), or do we invent it, as each age before us has done, for our own purposes?

Another gang are the postcolonialists; one of their books has a title to die for: The Empire Writes Back. These would be your wretched of the earth who, no longer colonized, finally have their say. The famous Salmon Rushdie, whom Ayatollah Khomeini fingered, is one of these, by the way, considered in some sense part of the struggle against European imperial aggression.

And so on. Windschuttle maps the terrain in his first chapter, then gets down to cases -- Aztecs, Tahitians, etc. Whatever the various new thinkers have in common, they all:

* reject the inductive method, our good old arguing from data to conclusions

* embrace relativism, denying we know anything for sure and saying each culture creates its own truth

* deny our ability to make contact with reality, prisoners as we are of language and culture, able to know only our thoughts

A "theoretical abyss" beckons. Giddily perched on its rim, history as we have known it since Thucydides is in big trouble.

At issue is how historical fact has been replaced as the historian's holy grail by how a given scenario proves a theory. Take the Aztecs. Please.

We hear Cortez the Spaniard was the vicious aggressor against an advanced civilization. We are furthermore convinced or led to think that Cortez defeated them by imposing a whole new set of rules on people who couldn't adapt.

So then. Were the Aztecs spooked by the Spaniards, whom they greatly outnumbered? Were these smart but innocent people befuddled by these critters from across the waves? This is how Tzvetan Todorov puts it in his book, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, in which he examines both Columbus and Cortez.

This book by Todorov, a Paris-based theorist of literature and language, was hailed by literary critics as a new way to address historical issues. In it he said the European conquest of America was worse than the Nazi Holocaust and was hailed for that too, apparently by academics eager to hear it.

As for Aztecs as spooked innocents. They actually were the Romans of their century in Old Mexico, ruling the roost. And if they were spooked at first, they learned fast, improvising in pitched battles that nonetheless led to victory for Cortez and his Mexican allies.

When Spaniards shot at them from long distance, for instance -- something brand new for the Aztecs, who fought to take captives alive for killing and mayhap eating ceremonially -- the Aztecs were bowled over.

But they learned to bob and weave, zig-zagging in their canoes. They also trapped the Spaniards' brigantines, killing the crews on the spot, and made other captured Spaniards show them how to use a crossbow. Clever dudes.