Clueless in Academe, Part II

I've reread Gerald Graff's Clueless in Academe [see part I] and come away strongly confirmed in my initial impression that Graff is preoccupied with a much narrower band of the academic spectrum than his title suggests. That's not a big deal, and Graff more or less admits it in comments. But let me illustrate this point by way of moving on to something related and a bit more consequential. I will be quite critical but let me first thank prof. Graff for showing up so unexpectedly the first time and having a nice little discussion with us. He will be an exceptionally good sport if he puts up with it a second time.

Graff narrates a bit of autobiography: "I had classmates who excelled at schoolwork and would later have been called nerds, but these without exception were science or mathematics whizzes, technical geniuses rather than masters of argument or cultural analysis" (p. 215). The implication is that science, math - in general technical disciplines, e.g. logic - aren't concerned with argument. 'Arguing' is what one does in the liberal arts, in places like English departments. I am sure Graff will say this was just a silly slip if he shows up in comments again. I quote it as symptomatic of the degree to which - while apparently discussing 'argument' - Graff is in fact focusing on something quite narrow: the crisis of what counts as an argument in literary studies. At other points similar confusions about scope lead to serious confusion.

Here, a page earlier, Graff praises Street Smarts and Critical Theory, by Thomas McLaughlin:

McLaughlin argues persuasively that "critical theory," contrary to both its adherents and opponents, is not the monopoly of academic intellectuals but pervades the thinking of nonacademics. "Not all the sharp minds get to go to college," McLaughlin writes, "and not all the theorists are in the academy." McLaughin posts 'vernacular theory', which can "happen in lunch break gripes about the boss and the bureaucracy, in women's caustic jokes about the power and foolishness of men, in fanzines where ordinary fans review and discuss new music, in discussion groups on the Internet, in television calls to C-SPAN and talk radio, in letters to the editor, in living room complaints about fifty-seven channels and nothing on, in interoffice memos, in speeches to civic or business groups, in action-oriented newsletters within movements for social change, in pamphlets and broadsides, in articles and books, in kids' games about school and home, in rap music, in coffee shop bull sessions after a movie. (p. 213-4)

I haven't read McLaughlin; our library doesn't have a copy; but what Graff is doing - what McLaughlin must be doing - is conflating two senses of 'theory' that, so it seems to me, must be kept distinct if we are to have any profitable discussion of what actually interests Graff; namely, the crisis of what counts as an argument in literary studies; the crisis of the uncertainly post-theory humanities.

Two senses of 'theory':

First, there is what we may as well call capital-T Theory, i.e. an indefinite, roughly identifiable cluster of intellectual styles and sensibilities - modes plus manners - dominant in American English departments for a generation. There was no Theory before about 1960, although one may grant for the sake of the argument that its intellectual roots go deep, mostly into post-Kantian counter-Enlightenment philosophy and associated Romantic stuff. (But, sure, toss Kenneth Burke on the pile. It's complicated, obviously.) Briefly, 'Theory' picks out a style and a period.

Second, there is what we may call lower-case-t theory. Coleridge: “The meanest of men has his theory; and to think at all is to theorise.”

Obviously it isn't true that the meanest of men have always done something that has only ever been done since about 1965, mostly by English professors. Ergo, "Critical theory" only pervades the thinking of nonacademics if 'theory' just means 'thinking', as per Coleridge. McLaughlin's thesis is false, or it boils down to the dull tautology that thinking pervades thought. Attempts to dress this up as the discovery of 'vernacular theory' constitute unhealthy mystification of Theory, when ostensibly the point is healthy de-mystification. Signs of trouble emerge almost immediately. Graff hints that those who criticize Theory do not realize that they are hereby, absurdly, setting themselves against thought itself. But clearly the sensible thing to conclude from the fact that Theory has many enemies, whereas theory has none, is that Theory and theory are not the same.

The fallacy that Theory = theory needs a catchy name. Meno accuses Socrates of being a stingray. I accuse Theory of being a puffer fish. When you can see you are about to be attacked, inflate to several times your actual size in an attempt to intimidate the attacker into backing off. Actually, what Graff and McLaughlin produce is just one genus of the species. We see the puffer in action when thinkers like Derrida imply that Theory is just philosophy, so that resistance to Theory = resistance to philosophy; and when thinkers like de Man imply that Theory is just attention to the nature of language, so that resistance to theory = resistance to language; and when Eagleton declares these days that Theory is just moderately systematic self-reflective study of a subject matter, so resistance to Theory = resistance to any kind of systematic thinking. The page I linked above gives a blurb of sorts for the McLaughlin book, saying he understands 'critical theory' to mean "raising serious, sustained questions about cultural practice and ideology." So resistance to critical theory = a refusal to be intellectually serious in a quite broad sense. In each case a false equation produces the illusion that Theory is necessary, thereby obviating the need to provide any basic account about why 'doing Theory' might be better than doing something else.

The puffer is a standard Theory defense mechanism. But it is tedious and ought not to be employed; it truly doesn't get anyone anywhere. By foreclosing perfectly real possibilities, it forestalls a sober reckoning which is, quite frankly, in everyone's interest. Literary studies needs, above all else, to take stock of what it has got and what it is worth.

Graff and McLaughlin will retort that of course they see the distinction between Theory and theory, if I want to put it that way. (They aren't complete idiots.) Their point is not to deny the obvious differences but to highlight reinforcing links between academic modes of thought and ordinary thought. The problem with this is that it is, again, trivial or at best not to the present point, i.e. the crisis in the humanities. Of course it is going to turn out that Theory has something to do with human mental life. How could it be otherwise? Where does this observation take us? Is theory, i.e. thinking, an appropriate thing for humans to do? Yes. Does theory bear some relation to Theory? Yes. Does it follow that Theory, i.e. a highly idiosyncratic cluster of academic modes and manners, is an appropriate thing for professors to engage in? No, it does not follow. But it is that last question that we need an answer to. It is the hard question.

The question of the value of Theory does not hinge on what it has in common with ordinary thought, or with philosophy as a whole, or with moderately systematic reflections about any given subject-matter, or with the general practice of asking serious questions about culture and ideology. The question of the value of Theory hinges on what specifically distinguishes it from these quite general things that can all be done otherwise than by means of Theory. I do realize that Graff is ostensibly discussing curricular matters but - truly - I think it is the crisis of what counts as an argument, i.e. the question of why Theory is good, that spurs him to discuss how to teach argument. And I think discussing the latter ends up not really shedding light. Yes, the way to teach 18-year olds is to find some point of connection between what you want to teach and what they know. No doubt you can impart a bit of Foucault, a dab of Marx and a touch of Zizek by connecting it with what kids have seen in the movies. But this is really just a general argument for starting with the movies, not for ending by teaching a bit of Foucault, a dab of Marx and a touch of Zizek. Why not start with the movies and end ... somewhere else?

To be continued. I want to talk about the trouble with thorough-going eclecticism about Theory, which is the dominant mode today. Probably I'll leave Graff out of it, since this isn't what he is writing about, but I would be gratified if he would continue to contribute.

 

Comments

[Rich Puchalsky]

I like the puffer fish analogy. I was a bit puzzled by Gerald Graff's response to my suggestion that if incoming students didn't know that academia had a culture of argument, then make them take an introductory course that tells them that there is an academic culture of argument and assume that anyone who couldn't get it after one course didn't belong in the humanities anyway. His response was:

"To Rich: Please check the book, where I do spend most of my time on what you call "remedial" problems."

Why are they qualified as being what *I* call remedial problems? They can only not be remedial problems if what Graff means by argument is a lot broader than what I mean by argument. Sounds like the fallacy of equivocation.

I'll go into more detail. I admit that I've only read Graff's first chapter, and don't have the time/interest in reading more (posting here distracts me from my work in ways that reading a book doesn't). But what I was envisioning as "a culture of argument" could be summed up as "look, when you go to college, people will expect you to defend your reasons for believing in things. In fact, disagreeing with people and backing up your disagreement well is how you gain status. The basics of how to do it involve logic and evidence." If people haven't learned that by late high school when they know they are going to try to go to college, I think that they have a remedial education problem. The most likely reason I can think of for not calling it a remedial education problem is that by "culture of argument", you mean a lot more than what I mean above. Or maybe, as John suggests, that you don't really know what mean by argument.

[McGruff]

I'm sure this is not the sense in which Graff or McLaughlin draws the connection, but there is a conceivable comparison between water-cooler griping and Theory with a capital T--to the extent, that is, that both involve the famed "hermeneutics of suspicion." Though Ricoeur (?) coined the phrase to describe Marx and Freud, it may apply still better to the populist inclination to doubt the legitimacy of any perspective but one's own and to dismiss the thought that arguments and evidence might enable discrimination among rival claims. It's this parallel, I think, more than just the idea of small-t theory as thinking in general that leads populist Theory heads to embrace subcultures and conspiracy theorists as practicing what they sometimes call low theory. I think of this as academia's X-Files moment. (To be conspiratorial, the program, if you remember it, starred a former Yale English grad student.)

To arbitarily piggyback some comments I never made to entry one of Clueless in Academe, I think this is in fact not unconnected to the profound ambivalence about academicism at the core of literary study. I never answered Rich's fair point that every discipline is expected at some level to be able to make its concerns clear to the public. I still think this isn't completely true (when you think of disciplines like, say, Math). But I see the point. Still, English and, to a lesser degree, History are the only academic disciplines that are imagined to be traducing their fundamental mission when they engage in standard academic scholarship. There may be critics of philosophy who say that philosophy lost its soul when it ceased to be therapeutic or a guide to big spiritual questions, but I don't think they have a lot of traction inside or outside the field. There's no poem like Yeats's "Scholars" (bald, ignorant heads unmoved by the poetic address to beauty's ignorant ear) for biology or economics. But it's been a literary commonplace for well over a hundred years now to assume that the academic mind inevitably betrays the humanistic mission of literature. Indeed, that was one ingredient in the New Criticisms's victory over philology--which, in my view, laid the ground work for the situation in which literary study now finds itself.

Weirdly, I think, much of the sheer fluffiness of Theory is related to its late romantic sense that literature must not just be studied and argued about but a virtually spiritual experience that transforms every aspect of life. It's that view that has discredited the patient scribblers working away on Milton minutiae. I think it's also expressed in the thought that everyone is doing theory. This again is a way of seeing beauty, creativity, innovation thowing off dead husks everywhere.

For related reasons, I think Daniel Green's suggestion is quite wrong. But I think I've rambled enough.

[joe o]

A benefit of theory eclectism is that bit of Foucault and a dab of Marx (I am not so sure about the Zizek)never hurt anyone. Having a superficial understanding of a lot of theoretical approaches can be helpful. I think it's better for the student than say a deep theoretical understanding of freudian analysis of literature. Staying away from the single totalizing theory can be a good idea. It would have helped David Horowitz.

Giving students the tools to analyse theories like training in logic, statistics, rhetoric and composition should come first, of course. It would also be a good idea to have a lower tolerance for bullshit.

[jholbo]

McGruff, I meant to make something like your point about hermeneutics of suspicion. Obviously this McLaughlin guy is saying not just that everyone thinks but that everyone suspects. But this is just another puffer - you see this, I think. I meant to fold this point into my follow-up, which is supposed to make the point that once you are eclectic about Theory, the only thing holding it together is a sort of shared cultural/political sensibility. Which is manifestly insufficient.

[SusanC]

I agreed with much of what Prof. Graff had to say in the first chapter of "Clueless in Academe", but - don't we do this already?

During the first month or two of an undergraduate course, one of the most important things we have to get across to the students is that we require arguments to be presented in a certain style, which is significantly different from the style that was acceptable at school. Some of this is explicitly in the lectures, but more of it is in tutorials. When giving feedback on student's work, the supervisor will often need to explain to the student that the content of their answer was OK, but it needed to be presented differently - and the supervisor should show them how to restructure their answer. After the first term, they've usually got the hang of it, but it does need to be taught.

To me, his suggestions seem applicable to many academic disciplines. For example, he points out that you can have badly written mathematics just as easily as badly written literary criticism. (A paper that has ten pages of definitions before it explains what the author is trying to prove and why it's important is bad, even if, strictly speaking, it contains a valid proof. But undergraduates in their first term will, quite likely, not even know what constitutes a valid mathematical proof.)

On the idea of capital-T Theory as a puffer fish: isn't it more like the face-hugging monster in "Alien"? It's acidic blood means you don't dare try to kill it, and meanwhile the victim is suffocating and the acid is dissolving the floor. The arguments of (for example) Derrida or Irigaray are firmly grounded in the traditional Aristotlean framework, so that many of the moves you might make to refute them have logical consequences that are attacks on Aristotle. They are attacks on "philosophy", if by "philosophy" we mean a particular programme of work, with a particular set of methods and assumptions.

[jholbo]

Susan, just taking your examples, my personal opinion is that Derrida and Irigaray (I know the former better than the latter) are not so deeply rooted in as all that. Taking just the case of Derrida: there is a lot of rhetoric to the effect that he is thinking logocentrism itself through, so that - yes, he would have to be a bit of a facehugger. Kill him and he takes down logocentrism so you are stuck with him on the face of philosophy. I will accept your analogy. But I think this is preposterously puffy (as in puffer fish) rhetoric. Soberly, Derrida is noodling around in semi-poetic, semi-talmudic, semi-logical, highly personal fashion with elements of the quarrel between Heidegger and Nietzsche (just to indicate the central bits). If you don't happen to find Heidegger terribly interesting - as I don't - there is really nothing obligatory about Derrida. It's non-obligatory noodling with a non-obligatory thing. Two levels of optionality, so Derrida's posturing about the 'necessity' of deconstruction just seems empty. Of course, this isn't to say that Heidegger can be brushed off. Obviously he is an important thinker. But lots of philosophy really isn't part of that whole stream of thought, broad as it may be. It's parochial to pretend otherwise.

Putting it another way, defending Theory is not the same as defending Derrida (or Irigaray). Suppose you decide that Derrida is a valuable thinker. That is not actually a good argument for engaging in the sort of entrepreneurial eclecticism that passes for Theory these days. Why should you 'do Theory' rather than narrowly defend Derrida, if Derrida is the wise one?

Putting the point yet another way, it would be extremely salutary for people to say things like 'I think Theory is good because I think the important thing to do is grapple with Heidegger's legacy in certain ways.' Then it becomes clear 1) that if you don't think Heidegger's legacy is terribly interesting, you can ignore Theory until someone convinces you to reconsider the legacy. That is, you have a clear place to start engaging the question of the value of Theory. 2) If you do think Heidegger's legacy is interesting, you can start weeding the Theory garden of things that don't address that legacy.

In short, the problem with hand-waving to the effect that 'Theory is necessary' is that it makes the actually interesting questions apparently nonsensical: why should I care about Theory? I am obviously skeptical about the value of Theory. But those who are not skeptical about the value of Theory should be just as impatient with 'Theory is necessary' disingenuousness as I am. It prevents anything interesting being said one way or the other.

[SusanC]

John,

Thank you ever so much for your reply! (I'm still laughing).

Well, yes.

The puffer fish may be trying to position itself somewhere where it can't be skewered without causing damage to the rest of the framework, but it might not be successful: there's usually the option of finding a counterargument that doesn't cause too much damage, or just walking away.

I'll try to be a bit more concrete. How does the institution stop people asking "How would we interpret 'Mansfield Park' if we thought that Jane Austen was a lesbian?' (This assumes that the institition deems it desirable to stop people asking this kind of question). If no-one finds the question interesting, then no-one will bother asking it. But a framework of argument that declared this kind of question to be un-askable (along the lines of George Orwell's Newspeak) might be unworkably restrictive in other ways. Can the institution declare some assumptions to be "not reasonable", and hence not permissible in argument - even in hypotheticals?

If people are determined to destabilise the traditional reading of the canon, it's difficult for the institution to deprive them of the means of argument for doing so.

I liked Graff's mention of Trekkies: is Eve Sedgwick attempting the equivalent of a Kirk/Spock fanfic, while staying within the rules of academic criticism?

[jholbo]

Susan, if I have understood you rightly you are hinting at a line of defense for Theory that goes like this: it unsettles the terms of the debate, opening up the space to ask new questions. My reply would be: I don't believe it. I think it is not plausible to say that Theory indeed does play this role. But before I build that up, have I read you rightly?

[SusanC]

Sorry if I was being way too obscure by jumping from Derrida to alternative readings of Jane Austen: I was thinking of "Signature - Context - Event" and the idea that the meaning of the text isn't fixed because its interpretive context isn't fixed. People worried about this long before Derrida, but the emphasis was often on reading the text in a context that was as close as possible to the "right" one - e.g. research into the historical background. Getting the context exactly "right" is most likely impossible, but we can also extract new meanings from the text by reading it in gratitously wrong contexts - and these new meanings can be of benefit to us(e.g. they're fun to read) even if they have nothing to do with with the author's original intention. Writing criticism is one way to deliberately modify the context - the reader sees the work differently after reading the criticism, even though the words of the text remain exactly the same.

Spoken language isn't immune from this process either - we can still get the wrong end of the stick when hearing someone speak.

Even if we don't use all the high Theory jargon to explain how all ths works, we can still apply the process at a practical level. It's hard for the institution to put the toothpaste back into the tube and assert its authority over the meaning of the text.

There are other examples of Derrida-esque things that can be done to texts, but that was the easiest example that came to mind.

(I wish I could put a special effect of a deflating puffer-fish into this thread - I have a mental picture of one of those inflatable toy fish with the bung taken out).

[Rich Puchalsky]

SusanC, I disagree with your implication that the institution really wants to "assert its authority over the meaning of the text." I think that this disagreement goes even further than John Holbo's; he characterizes your claim as that Theory "unsettles the terms of the debate, opening up the space to ask new questions" and says that it's not plausible to say that Theory plays this role, while I think that no one really needs this role to be played.

This represents a form of argument that I find just as tedious as the "puffer fish" in other contexts. One generally encounters it from creationists. When you try to explain why youth-earth creationism should not be taught alongside evolution, they will often start in about how professors all have an interest in defending established theory.

Well, they don't. Every biology professor knows that if they really found evidence to disestablish evolution or hold that the Earth is much younger than it appears to be, they'd be an academic superstar. A fundamental part of the "culture of argument" is that disagreement, if sucessfully backed up, brings status. So if someone found an alternate reading of Jane Austin as lesbian that truly brought something of value, who would object? ("Value" may be hard to define at the moment within literary studies, but that's John Holbo's point.)

Note that I don't think you can define the institution as asserting its authority over the meaning of the text whenever a professor finds a meaning for a text. That's the kind of puffer fish tautology that some Theorists seem to like.

Maybe I should call this the James Dean argument. It presupposes that there is an orthodoxy that wants to keep everyone down, so striking out in any random direction is valuable because it damages the orthodoxy. The only problem is that no one has really shown that there is an orthodoxy that functions in this way in this case.

[McGruff]

I was afraid this moment was coming, and, alas, it’s here. Yes, I want to add two cheers for the puffer fish.

John, I’m completely on board with just about everything you say, but I want to suggest that what you now see in literary studies is, as some one like Eagleton has implicitly noted, is the last decadent stages of an academic movement and that in this respect its features, though multiplied by the institutional factors you’ve noted and some intellectual ones I’d also stress, are not distinctive either to this exact moment or perhaps to the discipline.

The reason it’s worthwhile to make that point, I think, is that, for all its current evident faults, the Theory revolution in the literary academy that began circa ’65 and picked up full steam about 15 years later did produce genuine and valuable innovation. Indeed, there was, I think, a kind of crowded-by-genius moment when a cohort of innovative intellectuals fed off each other to produce a lot of superb scholarship directly and indirectly inspired by Theory As with all exciting movements, innovation hardened into orthodoxy and imitators and acolytes ended up becoming the most prominent face of the phenomenon. That’s where we are now. The interesting thing in retrospect, I think, is that it’s relatively easy to look back and distinguish between thinkers who (for lack of a better phrase) handled their Theory with a light touch and did excellent things with it and those who were just kind of dopey and became enthusiasts or devotees.

For those who did handle it lightly, I don’t think you could often say that Theory was necessary in a logical sense—but it might have been in a developmental or institutional way. I.e., a ladder that needed to be constructed so it could be kicked away. The ladder now often seems silly because many of the premises it was used to climb to now seem widely acceptable—where that was once not the case. (To chose one example, it’s amazing to me now to see that Richard Slotkin, whose accounts of the way the myth and ideology of the frontier pervaded American popular narrative and political rhetoric are as lucidly and compellingly argued as one could hope, undergirded his arguments with vast and, yes, eclectic readings in anthropological and literary theory—though only in footnotes--just so he could make his case with credibility. I don’t think he had a profound investment in combining Marshall Sahlins, Clifford Geertz, Mary Douglas, and Northrop Frye, but he did need the legitimacy and authority they provided—in good part because he wanted to show that popular culture is culturally and aesthetically rich and politically important.)

What are the now widely accepted premises that Theory enabled? Off the top of my head, I can think of three or four:

that writers have rhetorical or pragmatic purposes and that these can be as or more significant than their expressive, or aesthetic, or conceptual intentions;

that all expressions or utterances or statements are part of larger patterns, systems, structures, or institutions that can override the distinctions between high and low art or between art and non-art;

that for various reasons the full range of the significance of any writer’s or speaker’s words is never entirely present to her conscious awareness;

and that directly and indirectly each of these issues can become self-reflexively subjects of concern to writers.

As Susan and you have suggested, you don’t really need Derrida or Foucault to arrive at these premises, but they were helpful vehicles and bludgeons when people needed them—at a time when there was in fact an obstructive and tired academic orthodoxy that made them hard to take seriously. I graduated from college twenty years ago and I can remember pretty well the stultifying effects of that orthodoxy. (For what it’s worth, I first heard of Derrida in those days not from anybody in the English dept., but from Charles Griswold, then just beginning his career and who I think would now be widely regarded as a pretty eminent philosopher. He was, by the way, also a fabulous teacher. Even if Griswold thought Jacques was wrong, he took Derrida quite seriously in those days and wrote a whole book about the phaedrus partly in response to Derrida’s account of the pharmakon.)

All of this will naturally lead to demands for examples. I could and will give more strictly academic ones if you like, but in response to the request for admirable literary critics who are able to write for a wide public and who were influenced by or sympathetic to Theory, let me quickly mention three: Denis Donoghue, Janet Malcolm, and Louis Menand. I don’t think anyone would argue that any of them are not superb readers of literature who write about it with grace and clarity and who can speak to very big publics indeed. Each of them handled their Theory with a light touch.

Finally, I want to say: Damn you, John Holbo, for so effectively enticing me from what I should be doing.

[Doug M]

Well put, Rich. I'd add only that it's interesting how SusanC picks "fun" as her example of Theory's benefit to us. French academics can be every bit as fatuous as Americans, but they'd never defend themselves on the basis of the "fun" they provide. They tend to be dour to the core. In America, where fun is the summum bonum, to prove that you increase it is to absolve yourself of just about anything.

(Of course, Theory is actually not fun, or fun only to those like SusanC who see it as a tool in their heroic underground quest to defeat the Institution.)

Finally, I'd just like to say "We exist" on behalf of those who see the continued expansion of science departments, and the continued defunding of English departments, as a good thing; someday, inshallah, the English departments will be disbanded entirely, and people like John will be recruited to replace them with what they should have been all along, perhaps departments of "Reading and Writing".

[Jonathan]

Not that this is a particularly novel observation, but the New Criticism was regarded by old historicists with roughly as much cheer and understanding as New Critics greeted deconstruction. And where would the Russian Formalists or Richards, for example, fit into Prof. Holbo's history of "Theory?"

[McGruff]

Bound to happen. Someone was going to ignore John's request for civility. Congratulations, Doug. It was you.

Beleive me, no one in the academic world doubts that scientists exist--or is unaware that quite adequate funding and prestige, far outweighing anything seen by English depts, flows their way. It's not at all obvious, though, why you think departments of reading and writing would differ from English depts. Same difference. And, dollars to donuts, the same issues would arise.

Much as I respect Rich's posts, too, I have to enter a small demurrer. Yes, it's true that the culture of argument values disagreement and innovation. But it's easy to idealize this in a way that discounts other factors of institutional life that cut against it. For, it's surely also true that, even in the most contentious disciplines, received ideas, preferred hypotheses and methods, consensus, etc. have a way of getting institutionally ingrained so that, in fact, unorthodox ideas can have a hard time getting heard--or funded. That may be especially problematic in fields like literature or history where experimental evidence can't resolve clear questions. But to some degree it's a feature of every academic discipline.

[Rich Puchalsky]

McGruff -- I agree that institutional culture resists innovation, and that it's more difficult to overcome this in fields, unlike the sciences, where you can't make testable predictions and then say "I told you so" when they pan out.

But in some historical periods one factor is stronger than the other. Really, I think that all I'm doing is restating ideas that John Holbo already stated more allusively or wittily. Remember the previous post where he wrote: "But excessive bardolatry, attachment to the traditional Canon, etc. has hardly been the source of all the mockery for the MLA. (Those damn English profs. They're too traditionalist and unwilling to consider radical new subversive perspectives from the margins.)" If English departments ever once could justify Theory through the James Dean argument that they need it to overcome institutional resistance to innovation, they certainly can't now.

(Stating things wittily is fun, of course, but I do think that there's a certain value in the social role I've assumed in this thread -- the naive, blundering "outsider critic" (in the sense of "outsider artist") who seems to think that everything should be as it is in the sciences and needs everything to be spelled out. Less fun sometimes equals more clarity -- another of the things JH wrote at the start of the thread.)

DougM -- You went wrong with the "those like SusanC" part of your post with regard to civility. But I should add that while fun isn't the only source of benefit, it certainly is one of the possible sources of benefit. (Though maybe not in an academic sense. We're getting back to the question of the definition of value again.)

Also, be aware that there are entire following attacks that would occur on "Departments of Reading and Writing", even if English Departments were stripped of Theory. For instance, as a hobbyist poet, I'm familiar with an argument that professors of Creative Writing may have done more to destroy poetry than any other modern factor. Once you create professors whose primary duty is to teach how to write poetry, you inevitably create academic journals overflowing with those professors' poetry, because after all they must still publish or perish. So you get expansion of the number of poetry journals far beyond anyone's ability to read, and destruction of any academically-based critical theories of value because no one wants to piss off their peers, and finally no one reads poetry except those who write it.

[Doug M]

Sorry; I don't mean to be uncivil. Unconstructive, yes -- I am aware that I have little constructive to say about reforming the humanities. I just wanted to "recontextualize" the debate itself by pointing out that some people think reform is hopeless, and that not all people who think this are barbarians or uncultured techies. I guess I failed. I should have been more polite. I also hope that I'm wrong in thinking that the silliness of college-level humanities is ineradicable; good luck to all in your reforms.

[Jonathan]

Doug, I'm by no means convinced of your characterization of the "reform is hopeless" faction. In fact, it's strikingly counterintuitive.

[baa]

Doug, you uncivil bastard. You are the ultimate pedophile.

Seriously, though, I think the Doug-detractors misunderstand him. He values high culture, but wants the academic humanities to stop existing. No one has yet suggested why these two ideas should not coexist happily. So let me pose it to defenders of the humanities: Even taking the value of high culture and liberal education as given (as Doug does, and as I do), why should the academic humanities exist in its current form and at its current scale?

Perhaps, as McGruff argues, Theory makes literary critics sharper. This, however, is an argument that Derrida should write books, and that James Wood (or whomever) should read them. It isn’t an argument for a theory-industrial complex that employs 10,000 people.

[Rich Puchalsky]

baa writes: "why should the academic humanities exist in its current form and at its current scale?"

If "its current form" equates to Theory, then I don't have an answer. But if "its current form" means that there are specialist professors who study literature, then there is a very good basic answer. Our society expects that everything which is important to people should have specialist academicians studying it. And literature is important to people.

"At its current scale" is a more difficult question, and can only be answered by comparison with other fields. If there were only enough resources for there to be 1,000 people in the world who studied biology, then 10,000 studying literature would be far too many. But 10,000 doesn't seem like too many to me, given the general scale of academia.

[McGruff]

Rich: "If English departments ever once could justify Theory through the James Dean argument that they need it to overcome institutional resistance to innovation, they certainly can't now." Right. That's why its hegemony is now plainly crumbling. When even Critical Inquiry can see the handwriting on the wall, Theory is pretty near dead.

Baa: I don't quite follow your point. At this stage in the game, it's difficult to imagine a high culture that would not be profoundly dependent on academic institutions. It's also hard for me to conceive liberal education without the humanities. What would it include? If what you mean is that higher education in the humanities itself should just be tossed, well, I could see that as a possibility, but it seems obvious to me that it would leave the world even more impoverished than it is with the terrible industrial Theory complex of the MLA. (Not to be defensive or anything--since I would gladly never have anything to do with the MLA again--but have you noticed the way what is, after all, mainly an example of large scale mediocrity turns pretty quickly into an ominous bogeyman? The theory industrial complex?)

My point about Doug's post is that disestablishing English to create Reading and Writing would be simply a switch in names. The rose would smell the same. But my more serious objection to his post and to what I think is the gist of yours and likewise to the position of Daniel Green is the way in all cases, I think, a quite legitimate distaste for the silliness of some egregious examples of academic nonsense tends toward outright anti-intellectualism--the substance of which is: c'mon, get over all this nonsense and just say great literature is great. It's my belief that, weird though it may seem, this is an attitude that's actually quite consistent with some of the tendencies that got literary study into its current bind. That is, they're both versions of a romantic sense that literature should be experienced not analyzed or argued over and that in this way it embodies an alternative to rational argument. This attitude is also,I think, a recipe for dullness that in fact would not be fun at all.

[Jonathan]

I dispute the claim that "Theory" ever was a hegemony. People tend to, in these discussions, take that for granted, but I've always thought that revealed ignorance of conditions on the ground.

[baa]

At this stage in the game, it's difficult to imagine a high culture that would not be profoundly dependent on academic institutions.

This is exactly what is at issue. How, precisely, are art, music and literature dependent on the academy now? I submit that if 80% of literature professors immediately retired to villas in the south of France the practice of literature as an artform would not be impeded at all. Don't take this as a Romantic call to feel! feel! Tolstoy coursing around you! I am as logocentric as they come. I just do not observe a connection between the majority of academic humanities and the practice of art.

If the academic humanities (and colleges themselves) served as custodians of culture and liberal educators then I would agree: they are essential in maintaining high culture. Do you think this is the role they are now playing?

And just as an aside, "theory-industrial complex" was meant as gentle mockery, the idea being, that with 30,000 people beavering away, surely they must be assembling an airframe or something.

Jonathan: I don't think anyone is claiming that Theory is homogenous. Rather the claim is that as a research program it's largely worthless and could profitably be left to 100 professors and assorted amateurs.

[Mandos]

Speaking as an outsider scientist in this eye-opening discussion, I'm confused about something. Are you arguing about public perception of the academic study of literature...or about a crisis in literary academia regarding the direction and quality of scholarly work?

I bet someone might say now the obvious: the two are linked. Yes, they are. But approaching it from one side or the other seems to me to lead to different results. At the moment the discussion seems centred on the internal aspects of the field, not why external observers (students, the public, and so on) might see the study of literature in a certain way. This suggests to me that you are expecting that if someone comes up with some form of post-Theory (whatever that is), external perception of the field should rise.

Am I completely misunderstanding the terms of the debate?

[McGruff]

Sorry, Baa, but you're way off target. "How, precisely, are art, music and literature dependent on the academy now?"

How are they not? Take the visual arts as an example. How many of the currently prominent visual artists are not products of the MFA system? How many curators do not have graduate degrees and have not been trained in the canons of scholarship? How many viewers of art have been taught how to care about it in ways that did not involve higher education? How many funding panels do not involve academics or academically trained artists and critics? How many successful artists are not at some point in thier careers supported by university positions? What chunk what it take out of the feeder system for the international art market to do away with university galleries and arts programs?

"If the academic humanities (and colleges themselves) served as custodians of culture and liberal educators then I would agree: they are essential in maintaining high culture. Do you think this is the role they are now playing?"

Short answer: yes. Maybe not in the style you'd prefer, but still in a way structurally indisepnsible to the existence of a high culture. Without academia, there would be no successful large scale patronage system. Nearly all art would be commercial art. That might be preferable to your tastes, but I don't think it would make sense to call it high art anymore.

[Doug M]

McGruff's point is right in a way. We could even extend it to say "Most serious art, most music in the classical tradition, and most literary criticism is today created by holders or seekers of MFA's or PhD's." What Baa and I would dispute is whether most of their output is high, or valuable, or good art/music/criticism. So while McGruff is right that a shutdown of the feeder system would depress global output, Baa and I propose that it wouldn't matter. Of course, this debate will end up being an irreducible conflict of values. On the other side are those who think (a) that Derrida and his epigones write valuable stuff, (b) that Schoenberg and his epigones compose valuabe stuff, (c) that academic artists of what might be called the Whitney Museum school install valuable stuff. We on my side deny all three of those statements. My side has lost as far as academic humanities go. This doesn't directly bug me because I don't personally want to be a professor. What bugs me indirectly about the other side's near-monopoly on academic humanities, is that it precludes what McGruff called a "crowded-by-genius" moment. A young Goethe or Schiller in modern America would not, I think, end up creating a fruitful Weimar-type situation at a university. He would more likely be so repulsed by the mediocrity of academic humanities that he'd end up a Tom Wolfe, if not an investment banker.