An interesting counterblast to The Valve, which our co-blogger John Holbo helped set up, from Cultural Revolution.
Anyway, what’s kind of interesting about this new site is that it seems to be sponsored by the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, which was devised as a kind of anti-MLA devoted to ridding lit departments of their classracegenderism and deconstructive tendencies. The mottos and manifestos on the website demonstrate the same Frank Luntz-ish spin that you’d find on the sites of, say, the such organizations as the Independent Women’s Forum…
Cultural Revolution then goes on to attack the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics for using such retrograde notions as “imagination,” “shared literary culture,” “serious,” and “classicists and modernists” in its statement of purpose, and to note how it received its initial start-up money from the conservative Bradley Foundation. So far, so pedestrian. What’s interesting about the post is not what it says, but what it assumes: that an interest in literature for literature’s sake is innately conservative. And, by extension, the question it doesn’t ask: why is it that an organization which is interested in studying literature and imagination is perceived as a conservative bulwark, and has no choice but to go to conservatives for funding and support?
First, it’s by no means obvious that post-structuralist literary theory and its cousins are, in any real sense of the word, radical. Indeed, you could make a very strong case (Russell Jacoby is very good on this) that they’re substitutes for radicalism, and piss-poor ones at that. Modern literary theorists are no match for the left-wing public intellectuals of a previous era; as Jacoby unkindly notes, their work is “largely technical, unreadable, and unread.” There are some exceptions – Edward Said for one – but for the most part, even the most prominent literary theorists have no political impact worth talking about. Modern literary theory not only doesn’t add up to a political project in itself; it doesn’t make any real contribution to politics. It has become a self-referential, self-defeating dialogue.
Second is the extraordinarily pervasive notion that there’s something inherently conservative about liking and valuing books for their own sake, rather than as grist for the mill of deconstructionism. I suspect that something like this is at the basis of Cultural Revolution’s suspicion of the Valve, and of ‘classicism,’ ‘imagination,’ etc. And it’s bullshit – there’s no reason why one can’t appreciate and enjoy cultural forms for their own sake, even when their origins and their place in the canon are politically suspect. My favourite example of this is C.L.R. James’ work on cricket. James is the canonical left-wing intellectual, and unlike most left-wing intellectuals (myself included), someone who got his hands dirty with the tough, difficult work of political organizing. But he was also a fan of the game of cricket. It’s hard to imagine a more politically loaded sport – in terms of both class (the distinction between ‘players’ and ‘gentlemen’) and colonialism. Yet James, while appreciating cricket’s political aspects, took an unalloyed delight in the game itself, and was able to communicate his enthusiasm to his readers. It’s rather odd that enthusiasm of this sort (and of the sort that the Valve is interested in promoting) is treated as politically suspicious. It’s even more peculiar that Cultural Revolution has problems with ‘imagination’ (damn hard to imagine any leftist project worth pursuing that doesn’t have some imagination at its heart), and with classicism. Walter Benjamin, and even Jacques Derrida wouldn’t have been who they were without a classical training.
The hostility of many literary theorists to the notion that they ought connect with a wider culture, or that they are, in the end of the day, critics of cultural forms that have a value in themselves apart from the tropes that their methodologies can uncover, seems to me to be connected to the deeper malaise that Scott McLemee talks about in his article on Saul Bellow last week; it’s worth quoting at length.
That the caricature so closely matches the features of the profession is, in some ways, an unfortunate thing. It keeps all parties involved from seeing just how bored and unhappy almost everyone involved really is. You see it at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association, where the rare moments of excitement seem to come from the effort to pass resolutions on political matters. (This is a process offering all the thrill and efficacy of a really heated student council meeting.)It is an anxious kind of low-grade misery. Much of the anxiety is economic. Perhaps all of it is — if only in the sense that economic realities leave their mark on every level of literary study, including what people decided to make a priority in their research and writing. The constant (and to that degree unreflective) emphasis on the “professionalization” of young scholars barely out of adolescence does not exactly place great emphasis on literature as a force for spiritual bildung — not that you would find many people willing to use such terms in the first place.
This seems to me exactly right. An “anxious kind of low-grade misery,” which is connected directly to the conditions of production in the academy. If you don’t produce work which fits a certain set of professional criteria, you aren’t going to get tenure. However, these criteria have perverse consequences. You spend your life studying work which you aren’t supposed to enjoy on its own terms; too high a degree of enthusiasm is anathema, unless it’s couched in political or critical terms that disconnect the value of the text from the text itself (A.S. Byatt’s “Possession” is good on this – the couple who are so trapped by the language of “phallocracy and penisneid, punctuation, puncturing and penetration, … polymorphous and polysemous perversity,” that they have difficulty in recognizing or expressing the thing itself, when they begin to fall in love with each other.) You aspire to a certain vision of literary studies as politics – but are aware (have to be aware) that your profession is almost entirely disconnected from politics as it is practiced in everyday life. You simply don’t have much to say that’s politically useful. It’s a particularly unpleasant version of Weber’s “iron cage.”
This is not to say that ventures like the Valve have to be, or should be, political, or to take a left-wing stance. It is to say that there’s nothing incompatible between a desire to appreciate cultural forms for themselves, to engage directly with the existing culture, and leftwing politics. And further, there’s a strong argument to be made (again, Jacoby has already made it), that the study of literature and culture, as it exists in the academy today, is conservative in practice – it channels the energies and attentions of a large number of very intelligent people in politically sterile directions. They’re trapped in their iron casings; no good way to get out. Thus, while efforts to rebuild the connection between literary theory and the wider culture aren’t necessary political in themselves, they are a necessary first step towards politics. If leftwingers within literary studies had any sense they’d be applauding the Valve, and trying to emulate it, not sniping from the wings.
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And, by extension, the question it doesn’t ask: why is it that an organization which is interested in studying literature and imagination is perceived as a conservative bulwark, and has no choice but to go to conservatives for funding and support?
No choice? Perhaps the question isn’t asked because it is disingenuous.
If leftwingers within literary studies had any sense they’d be applauding the Valve, and trying to emulate it, not sniping from the wings.
So if left-wingers had any sense, they’d try to get funded by the right too. OK.
When I reflect that CT is actually one of the better white left blogs, my cynicism rockets, and the CLR James pimping doesn’t help.
“The hostility of many literary theorists to the notion that they ought connect with a wider culture, or that they are, in the end of the day, critics of cultural forms that have a value in themselves apart from the tropes that their methodologies can uncover…”
To give this a slightly more topical spin: I think this is why you not infrequently find many truly serious leftists, people deeply committed to progressive social and moral ideals, making temporary alliances with conservatives, for which they are excoriated by mainstream liberals, of course. Yes, perhaps some of these leftists are patsies; and perhaps allowing oneself to believe in “cultural forms that have a value in themselves” will suddenly and mysteriously turn you into Roger Kimball. But I doubt it. More likely, they’re looking for people who still take certain principles and certain works to be inherently “good” (even if they disagree on what that goodness consists of) and thus worth fighting for, rather than those who think the process or methodology of choice or construction, rather than its telos, is all.
Drapeto, if you’ve got a point to make, make it (in a couple of years of reading your occasional comemnts on this blog, I don’t recall you once making an actual argument, let alone putting forward your own alternative program. Am I wrong?
Curiously, a similarly dysfunctional phenomenon occurs in discussions of K-12 education where, for example, objections to things like the awful NCTM-endorsed “fuzzy math” curricula are too often pigeonholed as “conservative”.
Could you provide us with specific examples of “[t]he hostility of many literary theorists to the notion that they ought connect with a wider culture, or that they are, in the end of the day, critics of cultural forms that have a value in themselves apart from the tropes that their methodologies can uncover”?
A related question: Given that CT so often has posts on literary matters, why are there no CT contributors who actually work in departments of literature?
“What’s interesting about the post is not what it says, but what it assumes: that an interest in literature for literature’s sake is innately conservative.”
Um, where does the CR post assume this? Apparently the best Henry can do by way of argument is “I suspect…” which is itself bullshit—anyone can suspect anything.
CR’s argument is apparently that certain terms are deliberately being set against certain other terms, and that these oppositions are being aligned politically. This analysis might be mistaken, but it’s a coherent analysis of someone’s rhetoric and it does not proceed from the assumption that Henry tendentiously imputes.
And OBVIOUSLY one can appreciate lit or cricket in a variety of ways and OBVIOUSLY there is no direct connection between particular modes of criticism and politics. Why do we need windy lectures about things everyone knows?
Henry makes a standard claim: “Modern literary theorists are no match for the left-wing public intellectuals of a previous era; as Jacoby unkindly notes, their work is “largely technical, unreadable, and unread.” There are some exceptions – Edward Said for one – but for the most part, even the most prominent literary theorists have no political impact worth talking about.”
I suppose it is a subjective judgment that Empson or Eliot or Richards or Tate is more readable than Barthes or Foucault or Deleuze or Blanchot. What isn’t subjective is that Foucault, Barthes and Deleuze and Guattari have all been best sellers in France; nor is it subjective that Foucault had a very strong influence in France with regards to laws concerning sexuality in the seventies; or that the connection between feminist literary theory and wider feminist political movements have been much more successful than, say, the connection between new criticism and the Southern agrarian movement, or the Anglo-Catholic movement.
Statements about unreadability are conveyed by those who happen not to have read the works in question. How convenient. How self-exculpatory. On the evidence of the enormous interest of this blog in popular sci fi and the lack of interest in contemporary literary fiction, not to speak of poety, I’m pretty sure the time ‘saved’ by not reading Barthes has not been invested in reading Homer.
Matthew Arnold, nobody’s idea of a radical, had a word for this kind of thing: philistinism.
I didn’t understand Henry to be talking about Foucault et al., but about their American exponents—who, you will have to admit, ahve mostly not been best-sellers.
Well, what about the relationship to the Bradley Foundation? The links Cultural Revolution provides bolsters its argument. There’s nothing here but some tut-tuting about how an affinity for certain thinkers does not make one a radical.
On the evidence of the enormous interest of this blog in popular sci fi and the lack of interest in contemporary literary fiction, not to speak of poety, I’m pretty sure the time ‘saved’ by not reading Barthes has not been invested in reading Homer.
Heh. Indeed.
roger, your quite extraordinary pomposity looks to me to be a pretty standard evasive tactic. It’s very easy to assume away serious criticism by claiming that your critics are quasi-literate ‘philistines’ who prefer ‘popular sci-fi’ to whatever your idiosyncratic definition of ‘contemporary literary fiction’ is. Unfortunately, both I (and many of the others who are making this complaint) have read the people who we’re complaining about. It would be undignified for me to try to justify my personal library; I will say in passing that your nice disdain for genre fiction wasn’t shared by, say, Beckett or Joyce, and isn’t shared by many of the most prominent writers of literary fiction today – DeLillo, Lethem, Oates, Lessing, Chabon off the top of my head (not even to get into Barthes). You can’t duck the question that easily. Russell Jacoby isn’t a philistine by any standard; nor is Scott McLemee (who has incidentally written a highly nuanced appreciation of Derrida). It’s also quite telling that you have to reach to France to provide evidence of literary theorists acting as public intellectuals. Finally, the spectacle of a commentator who defends himself against impertinent critics by appealing to ‘literary fiction,’ while simultaneously invoking those literary critics who are supposed to be breaking down and interrogating the fundamental social distinctions on which the construction of “literary fiction” is based, reminds one of nothing more than those Surrealist machines that were supposed to obliterate themselves in a frenzy of smoke and deconstruction.
gzombie – right back atcha. Why is it that you aren’t creating a competitor blog to us? That is, a collective of lit-theory friendly types who will explain to us exactly why it is that I, John Holbo, Scott McL, Brian Weatherson and others are missing out on something vital by dismissing academic criticism? I’m deliberately framing this post in a tendentious way to provoke a response. If you have good counter-arguments – that is reasons why criticism is politically vital – let’s have them. Or even better, create a group blog or similar endeavour that can demonstrate by example what academic criticism would look like as it connects to a wider audience.
Colin – nope. The Cultural Revolution piece doesn’t present any analysis whatsoever – instead, it describes an opposition and assumes that this opposition is in some undefined way Frank Luntz-ish, or smacking of the Independent Women’s Forum. It doesn’t analyze – it assumes that any manifesto which has these qualities (which is interested in ‘imagination’ etc) is innately conservative. It doesn’t argue, it states.
If I recall correctly, the ALSC hasn’t helped itself by associating its stance towards literature with right-wing politics.
Nevertheless, I sympathize with them. Back when I was going to be an English professor, I was deeply interested in theory, but very suspicious of theory’s tendency to replace the literary work rather than illuminating it. My paradigmatic example is the seminar in which one’s assigned to read the primary texts, comes to class, and then listens to 2 hours of discussion of anything but the text.
Similarly, too much MLA-style writing (you know what I mean) takes the literary work as a springboard for an essay into sociology or politics or whatnot. These may be interesting in themselves, depending on the brains of the author, but they often don’t really relate to the literary work, which is a mere “pretext” (ha).
Besides, if one’s going to do sociology or psychology or poli sci, why not do it in one of those departments & be trained by people versed in the subject, rather than be a dilettante in the English department?
All very mysterious, at least to this ex-English grad student, who abandoned the program in the face of a projected dissertation on the theory of liteary theory, which probably would have led to my disappearance into a singularity (like the end of the “Space Madness” episode of Ren & Stimpy).
I like what the valve is up to, and I hope that they succeed, wherever the money comes from. Writing about books for books’ sake—apart from the PR machinery of most major places of publication for book reviews, and apart from the machinery of the academy—deserves success. I also think that the blog form allows writing at a range of lengths (epigrammatic to Holbovian) more readily than other forms of publication, and this is also to the good.
henry writes: “Why is it that you aren’t creating a competitor blog to us?”
Actually, if you poke around Cultural Revolution briefly, you’ll see that its writer did propose this very idea, with the happy thought of calling it “Crookeder Timber”. It promptly received all the enthusiasm that one might expect.
Well I’d be all on to see this happening – not sure about the name (best to find their own identity)- but I do think that there is a gap in the market there and (my critical comments about this post notwithstanding)Cultural Revolution would be, I imagine, a good nucleus for it – it’s a fine blog.
t has become a self-referential, self-defeating dialogue.”
Well, only if you define “successful” literary criticism in terms of what it does outside the field or outside the academy. I’m sorry, but people’s work does have value within a particular field as long as it makes a contribution to the body of knowledge. Feminist criticism of historical literature, for instance, has taught us much about the construction of gender. Sure, it doesn’t necessarily change how people working at Walmart understand gender, or help them understand that unions aren’t evil, but honestly, how do most peoples’ jobs end up doing that kind of cultural work? That’s a pretty high standard for victorious employment that few people have to set for themselves. Many academics understand their work as progressively minded endeavors, but they do other non-wor related activism that’s meaningful and I dare say, helpful to some
Henry, I do try to oblige in the pomposity department. Thanks. As for the “unreadable” critics who are—still—unnamed – well, I now understand that you are withholding their names out of some principle of charity, lest I be overwhelmed by the evidence for your argument. Its so kind of you to omit any evidence whatsoever. It does make it simpler to have an opinion that way.
As for literary and genre fictions—these are, I think, marketing terms. As such, they reflect a real sociological difference—one that is reflected in what is and is not reviewed, etc. I didn’t make up the difference, and the pretense that it isn’t there because Joyce read Paul de Kock is, to my mind, a pretty silly ploy. Now you might argue, from—say—a deconstructive point of view that the differences subvert themselves. But it misses the point of the way Joyce used Paul de Kock to think that Joyce didn’t see the difference between him and, yes, literary fiction. Subvert the difference and you subvert the subversive moment.
Now, I do not quite understand how I am I am evading the issue by actually naming critics and commenting on what I think their political and cultural successes were. Such a fox, this Roger—instead of making generalizations that name no one, and indicate no real social or historical patterns, like a real macho, he goes the evasive route and does the compare and contrast thing with actual critics who have actually existed and actually felt that their criticism was intrinsically part of a cultural politics.
As for the idea of “the extraordinarily pervasive notion that there’s something inherently conservative about liking and valuing books for their own sake, rather than as grist for the mill of deconstructionism,” well, it is hard to find any good critic in the past—from Samuel Johnson to Eliot to Poulet—who did not use a political bias to judge books. The idea about “liking and valuing books for their own sake” sounds friendly and un-pompous, rather like Charlotte Haze’s taste in the reproductions of the great masters.
But it ain’t good criticism.
Is dismissing academic criticism all you’re doing? Hell. Set your sights higher.
No, Henry, read what the CR post writes after the second quoted extract. I’ll quote:
“Strange slippage from the diversity of the student body to the “gloomy state of literary studies,” blurring the widening of the canon into the chromatic scale of the student body, and the demand to darken it. Nice to see this from a group ostensibly out to drain the politics out of English departments…”
It’s not a long analysis, it may be a wrong analysis, but it is an analysis of a text, so you’re flat wrong in saying “no analysis whatsoever.”
And have you now backed off your unfounded imputation that CR’s position rests on believing “that there’s something inherently conservative about liking and valuing books for their own sake”?
I’m sorry but the thought of any post or blog on CT about literature or art just makes me laugh.
I’ve explained why this is so enough times, but now your defense of ‘literature as literature’ pisses me off. Why not defend literature as philosophy, as the manifestion of an ethic of curiosity, opposed to programmatics? Why not defend narrative, the narrative as a counterforce to technics and instrumental reason?
The pleasure and danger of a literary imagination is that someone may believe your words are true. Any good author writes bullshit hoping to be believed and not: hoping to be perceived as walking a line, with style. Where is there a defense, any defense at all on Crooked Timber, of the illogic of dreaming while awake, of the necessity of it in the life of any mature adult.
We live life slighly drunk. Some say not drunk enough, while others say they’re always sober. Still others defend the notion while constantly striving to prove by their analysis of drunkeness that they are dry as a bone.
Got me?
I think the value of The Valve will be proved or not proved by what it turns into, not so much what’s paying for its web-hosting. If you look at what we’ve been doing so far, what seems different about it is this: people are debating aspects of literature without starting with the “this author is ideologically suspect, but I still think it might be interesting” move that is a kind of deadening shibboleth for most, if not all, professionally sanctioned conversations about literature.
It’s refreshing, and kind of a relief, actually, to have a conversation about whether Saul Bellow is all that great after all, without having to spend several thousands words worrying over the racism in some of his novels (or his infamous snark about the “Zulu Tolstoy”). Same goes for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s anti-Semitic “Wolfsheim” in “The Great Gatsby.” Unsavory business needs to be acknowledged (in the conversation on Bellow on The Valve, it has been), but why not spend some of our time and energy talking about the best ideas and the best writing these folks produced? Fitzgerald’s neoplatonism seems to me more interesting than his use of the shady Mr. Wolfsheim.
So that’s how I would prefer to frame the debate. It’s not about the Bradley Foundation, and it’s not even primarily about the Theory Wars. It’s about continually trying to find ways to think and discuss what we read openly (non-shibbolethically if you will).
Part of me feels
or wants to feelapologetic for my tone above; but the rest of me screams.I don’t read right-wing blogs, let alone make comments. That’s the best I can do
I scored a perfect left-libertarian ten on that silly compass thing going around a while back, and I post there.
{Yawn}…surely there’s a difference between the PC police and Derrida. {head thunking on table for wasting time on CT}
“…Second is the extraordinarily pervasive notion that there’s something inherently conservative about liking and valuing books for their own sake, rather than as grist for the mill of deconstructionism.”
There is nothing inherently conservative about liking and valuing books for their own sake, and I doubt any serious literary scholar would argue such a thing. What is inherently conservative is to pretend that liking and valuing books for their own sake is the sort of supposedly serious intellectual work that English scholars ought to do. In fact, I don’t know of any serious field of knowledge in which the purpose of inquiry is to recite the virtues of the cultural output of individuals, and I don’t understand how people with considerable sociological sophistication can so easily defend the idea that the study of literature can be fruitfully carried out in vitro, without reference to discourses of gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, etc. Besides, what sort of intellectual exercise is the valoration of aesthetic virtue, especially when it is done in a vacuum? [This is not to say that there aren’t other ways of analyzing literature: ways that ought to be explored and fostered.]
Between having English scholars seriously tackle problems of cultural production and the dynamics of culture, and having them engage in the tired, repetitive adulation of Shakespeare, I prefer the former, by a lot. True it is that “Theory” is fraught with immense problems, and John Holbo often does a good job of exposing them, but at least literary scholars are at last eschewing the facile, silly, unsophisticated perspective, according to which literature is literature is literature. Literary “scholars” who think this way perhaps ought to be adviced to work at the Department of Education, developing ‘the canon’, or at the Chicago Sun-Times, side by side with Roger Ebert.
I love El Quijote, and I love The Canterbury Tales. (Not a Shakespeare junkie, nope.) When it comes to aesthetic, personal judgments, I find preoccupations about gender, sexuality, race, etc., to be a bit out of place, i.e. I don’t need critics to tell me why I shouldn’t like or value these books. Nor do I need high-brow critics to tell me why I should like or value Saul Bellow. Conversations about whether Bellow is better than Atwood, etc., surely belong in amateur book clubs—and I’ll happily join in the conversation. But in serious academic institutions, to be arguing that Bellow is truly great or ‘not really’? No. I value preoccupations about what literature says about culture, about how it represents, fashions, and informs culture, about how it serves, in some sense, as an archeological repository of cultural History. And in this context, to talk about how race gets represented in El Quijote or in Canterbury Tales seems interseting to me, and it in no way diminishes my appreciation for the texts.
Forgive me if I’m incredibly suspicious of claims of cultural universality, and of the possibility of answering the question “What is good art?”.
My sympathies are basically with the Crooked timber side here, BUT:
– Let’s be honest: ALSC is unambiguously a right-wing organization—it’s funded by Scaife, Olin, etc.—with an expliitly poltiical mission. Their goal is to discredit people doing literary theory and instituions that support it, especially the MLA. Does anyone seriously dispute this? – Who you take money from does matter. To insist that your work is totally independent of your funding is either naive or disingenuous. Come on.So I have to conclude that, whatever the merits of CR’s particular criticisms, Valve is kind of asking for it.
Lem,
I have posted and will post about literary theory there, not intentionally discrediting. I’m also the MLA’s biggest internet supporter. Sort of.
I’m really way too wrapped up in paper grading (takes a lot of energy to fail everyone who attends to the literary superstructure rather than the socio-economic base) and a dissertation due to the printers this week to get very wrapped up in this, but I’m glad to see that my post has prompted some discussion…
Anyway, a few quick points:
I certainly am not attacking literature or literary study. I study literature for a living, have signed my life over to it.
The ALSC’s use of the words “Imagination,” “shared literary culture,” “serious,” and “classicists and modernists” is what I’m talking about when I call this rhetoric Luntzian. When they say “imagination,” they mean “not critique.” When they say “shared literary culture,” they mean “not non-canonical – i.e. black, female, gay, etc… When they say “serious,” they mean “not bat-eyed crazy, like that gal Judy Butler.” And when they say “classicists and modernists,” they mean to take us back to the intellectual politics of pre-Enlightenment scholasticism…
In other words, I don’t, as you say I do, have any problems with “imagination” – just the oppositional, euphemistic deployment of the word by the likes of the ALSC.
Henry claims that the assumption behind me piece is “that an interest in literature for literature’s sake is innately conservative.” Not at all. The assumption behind my piece is that the polemical demand that the academic study of literature abandon its wider interests and affiliations is a strong marker of conservative reaction. I saw the Valve as an indirect instantiation of this polemical demand… Especially given the ALSC trademark on its upper parts, which has a history of just this sort of thing.
Listen – I would be the last one in the world to discourage “an interest in literature for literature’s sake.” It’s certain, to my mind, a better thing to be interested in than, say, stock car racing or yachting. The trouble is – just as academic political science generally isn’t much interested in the “appreciation” of politics and political figures, and just as academic philosophy doesn’t spill much ink, I assume, in “appreciation” of big thoughts and big thinkers, neither do we in English departments really want to be penned into the “appreciation” business ourselves. Why? It just doesn’t make for very interesting or significant work. Analysis, critical, contextualization, the drawing out of contemporary ramifications… Like the members of any other department, we’d like to
If, say, political science departments followed the orders your giving English departments, they’d turn into dystopian versions of high school Civics classes, imbuing their students with a healthy and uncritical “appreciation” of US representative democracy, the heroic deeds of our great leaders, and the infallible reason behind our foreign policy successes…
“And it’s bullshit – there’s no reason why one can’t appreciate and enjoy cultural forms for their own sake, even when their origins and their place in the canon are politically suspect.”
So true. I myself just appreciated and enjoyed an episode of 24, which is so deeply politically suspect that it makes my head spin. If I had a Nielsen box, I wouldn’t watch it.
But are you going to tell me that the proper place of the “department of television studies,” where there is such a thing, is simply teaching students to appreciate such shows? Isn’t it just a bit more interesting, a bit more valuable, to take its form, its style, the technical details, and speak to their relationship to the wider socio-cultural context from which they arise – and, perhaps, from which our enjoyment of them arises.
“And further, there’s a strong argument to be made (again, Jacoby has already made it), that the study of literature and culture, as it exists in the academy today, is conservative in practice – it channels the energies and attentions of a large number of very intelligent people in politically sterile directions.”
Honestly, if this is what was going on here, then I’d have nothing more to say. If it was a truly question of a left critique of theory, then it’d be a whole different ballgame. But what I’m hearing isn’t the left critique of the left practice of literary studies…
Enough for now. Thanks, Henry, for picking up my post – and for the nice comments about my page.
Damn! And it was all going so well
Pedro, you lost me in that last one sentence paragraph.
The best British painter was Holbein and the best British composer Handel. English is a literary culture with the other forms mostly ancillary. [And the popular music of the Afro/Anglo/Irish/American diaspora is a hybrid musical theater.] You may love Turner or Joshua Reynolds but it’s silly to place either next to Giotto either in invention or historical significance. You try telling anyone that the British 18th century was the grandest period of art and even specialists would roll their eyes. They may tell you that it’s their favorite period but that’s not the same thing.
It’s silly and useless to claim that everything can be put on a scale and that that scale will be the true one. But it’s just as absurd to say that one person can not be better than another at communicating. Is an idiot in Zurich smarter than a genius in Kalamazoo?
A work of art is an artificial whole, unified in form and idea through various culturally specific rhetorical devices. Rhetoric itself is universal.
Don’t fall into the trap of replacing one form of vulgarity with another.
Amardeep,
Of course the value of the Valve will be proved by what goes on there. My point is this: if the affiliation with the ALSC is meant as an endorsement of their policies, I’m a bit worried what the site will turn into. On the other hand, if it’s simply a matter of “hey, they offered us cash no strings attached, and we’re taking it!” I guess I’d be taking a long look in the mirror to figure out what about me they loved so much to put the money on the table. Especially if I were an otherwise right-thinking left or center-left leaner.
In other words, if I was happily blogging my cultural and revolutionary thoughts at Cultural Revolution, and received a message from the Heritage Foundation offering some up-front money just because I’m their kind of guy, I guess I would be struck with such a savage case of self-doubt that I’d probably – no definitely – shut the whole endeavor down.
(Heritage, other right-wings groups: my operators are standing by…)
And, I hate to go down this route, but your comment is symptomatic of exactly the sort of slippage that worries me about this sort of endeavor. In the examples that you cite of issues that you’re itching to talk about – Bellow, Eliot, Fitzgerald – your focus even here isn’t on the “greatness,” the “best ideas,” but rather on getting free of the nay-sayers who bring up the racism, the anti-Semitism, etc… In other words, you keep acting as if you want to “appreciate” the works as works, but can’t stop talking about those off-stage others that want to ruin your fun.
In short, I hope that the Valve really does focus on the appreciation of literary art, rather than the denigration of other approaches to literature. So far, a mixed report card, I think…
(This is what I meant to bring out in my citation of the “keywords” from the ALSC document as well – they say they’re all about “imagination,” but the group is really focused on flushing the other stuff out of the system, not advancing “appreciations” of their own.)
What cultural revolution said.
I have posted and will post about literary theory there
“There” meaning Valve, right? Part of the confusion in this discussion, I think, stems from people not being clear if they’re referring—or more often, otehr people are referring—to Valve, which we all like, or to ALSC, which we mostly don’t.
Otherwise I’m pretty much with Cultural Revolution.
Lierature is a species of formal-rational discourse. A formal-rational discourse is “founded” upon the thematic abstraction of aspects of really embedded, practically oriented experience and interaction, and their recombination into a projective construction of an object domain, by which the data of experience are examined in “pre-established harmony” with respect to the formal construction. So what is the object domain of literature, in contrast to philosophy, science, law, historiography, etc.? It’s the modal-relational dimension of meaning-constitution that is suppressed by the referential claims of formal-rational discourses and instaneously disappears from the really embedded, practically oriented experience of the everyday life-world under the rigidifying pressure of need and necessity. In other words, literature, by supressing the immediate “force” of utterance, displacing rhetoric onto the circulating medium of texts, constitutes a play of modalizations, the “literariness” of literature, while mixing up with other modes of discourse. Literature is hence pre-eminently a public medium, even as it constructs the intimate-alienated realm of the private, and explores the experience of the real via counterfactual narrative and figuration. One of the prime functions of functionless literature is that it constitutes a kind of perpetual satire of the mutually incomprehending, mutually reifying relationship between formal-rational discourses and the everyday life-world that they would purport to regulate. As such, literature is neither philosophical, nor political, but rather mediates (the weaknesses of) both. As for science, literature is no rival, except that it expresses the plangency of what the former ignores.
Thanks, Henry, for the nice post. I’ve been independently working up a sort of ‘word about our sponsors’ post for the Valve, which will be up in a day or so. I haven’t done it yet mostly because I didn’t want to launch the Valve with a lot of navel-gazing about our nature and mission. Gotta have some posts about other things up for a while before you have a navel into which to gaze. Well, now we have some posts up. So I’ll write the thing. The punchline: the ALSC really isn’t a conservative outfit. It just isn’t. I’m not being defensive about it. It’s just a fact. Bradley gave money to folks who are, demographically, a bunch of grumpy Democrats. (Near as I can figure.) So ‘the ALSC is conservative’ is straightforwardly untrue, on most understandings of ‘conservative’ anyone is likely to be operating with. But I do understand what it is that causes folks to infer otherwise. I will try to straighten all this out.
And of course my inaugural post was one long navel-gaze. So what I mean is: having done that, I didn’t want to do a lot MORE. Not right away.
(takes a lot of energy to fail everyone who attends to the literary superstructure rather than the socio-economic base)
This is a joke, right?
Between having English scholars seriously tackle problems of cultural production and the dynamics of culture, and having them engage in the tired, repetitive adulation of Shakespeare, I prefer the former, by a lot.
False dichotomy, no? (Of the assumption that all writing on Shakespeare is tired, repetitive adulation, the less said the better.)
True it is that “Theory” is fraught with immense problems, and John Holbo often does a good job of exposing them,
Which we can hope to see more of at The Valve. Plus, it’s his opportunity to show what could be done differently. Put up or shut up, if you will.
… but at least literary scholars are at last eschewing the facile, silly, unsophisticated perspective, according to which literature is literature is literature. Literary “scholars” who think this way perhaps ought to be adviced to work at the Department of Education, developing ‘the canon’, or at the Chicago Sun-Times, side by side with Roger Ebert.
Lotta name-calling there, without much content. (“Adviced?”) As I read it, The Valve is emphatically not just for academics. It is not just for people who can devote themselves full time to literature.
It’s also emphatically not aiming for the PR treadmill that is all that remains of book reviews in most publications, especially daily newspapers.
It’s about expanding possibilities, writing at variable lengths, encouraging conversation.
If it’s not “scholarly” enough for your tastes, don’t read it. Is that so hard?
“Between having English scholars seriously tackle problems of cultural production and the dynamics of culture, and having them engage in the tired, repetitive adulation of Shakespeare, I prefer the former, by a lot.”
False dichotomy, no? (Of the assumption that all writing on Shakespeare is tired, repetitive adulation, the less said the better.)
Yes, but it’s the ALSC side that established this dichotomy.
That’s what’s so frustrating about this debate. Basically, you’ve got a group of people saying, “We need to get away from theory so we can value books for their own sake,” and then when anyone defends theory they’re accused of being against the valuing-books part.
So for example, as CR pointed out above, when Amardeep wants to talk about Bellows’ “greatness” it immediately becomes an exercise in not talking about raace. CR didn’t create that dichotomy; Amardeep did.
Finally, John Holbo says that ALCS is not really right-wing, even tho they’re funded by indubitably right-wing outfits. Someone is getting the wool pulled over their eyes then. And, sorry John, but until I see some evidence to the contrary, I think it’s probably not Bradley/Olin/Scaife, but you.
No trackbacks on CT anymore? My longish response here: http://ghw.wordherders.net/archives/003951.html
Wow. Lot’s of fur flying here.
When I was asked by John to join the Valve, I hadn’t even heard of the ALSC, though I have been a member of the MLA, off and on. (I’m Canadian, eh?) I have to admit, red lights started flashing when I visited their website and read their mission statement—I’m with Cultural Revolution and gzombie on this one. And I’m a pretty unregenerate race/class/gender sorta gal, deeply suspicious of the idea of literature for literature’s sake. So why join the group? For the chance to have some good conversations, with interesting people, about reading and books. I am looking forward to John’s promised post. We’ll see how it goes.
“Literature is a species of formal-rational discourse.”
By this I hope you mean it is in conflict with itself.
Literature is discourse as description rather than as logical analysis; description of the author as describer and of the world- the experinces of the subject- as described. That’s why honesty in literature is more important thatn truth. T.S. Eliot described himself- his subjective world- honestly. He was pretty good on literary structure, but as understanding of the world ‘itself’ he sucked (of course).
Godard the radical was vague about the Algerian war. Truffaut the moderate was angry. Literary leftists involve themselves in arcane topics and end up much less politically active than moderates. Moderates being moderates are intellectually lazy but move around at least in the world. Another dichotomy.
I’m with the leftists of course, but I also get on well with their janitors and cleaning ladies, who laugh at them. T.J.Clark is brilliant, and brilliantly perverse.
I have to go put on my tool belt now.
bye.
Actually I think it’s a bit different in GB. But Clark moved to California didn’t he? So it’s American leftist academia. An old friend of my father called them Yummies. Young Upwardly Mobile Marxists
I’m late
I’ll get back to Cultural Revolution on the main point (want to read John H.’s response first – and to make it quite clear, we haven’t discussed any of this – the post above was my initiative entirely). But I do want to lay to rest a fairly pervasive misreading of what I’m arguing for (cf. Pedro et al.). I’m not arguing for a literary-studies-as-great-book-appreciation-club model, and if you read my post carefully, I don’t see how I can reasonably be accused of being. The model which I specifically single out for praise is C.L.R. James’ work on cricket, which isn’t by any stretch of the imagination a non-political gush of enthusiasm – it manages to mix James’ clear love of the sport with a flinty-eyed assessment of where the sport came from, and what its politics are. That’s not what I’m seeing in the academic literary criticism that I’m reading. I don’t get a sense either of the book itself, or of the politics themselves being taken seriously – both become a sort of rhetorical game in which the object is to jump through the right hoops to get tenure. As said, I’ll reserve replying on the major points (while thanking Cultural Revolution for the response above) until John sets out his stall on this – but I honestly don’t see why a version of literary criticism which isn’t aimed at the academy, but is aimed at a wider audience, can’t be, and shouldn’t be, a more effective political move than continuing on the way that things are. There’s no reason that the kinds of work that say Guy Davenport, Frank Kermode, James Wood etc can’t be infused with a more particularly political sensibility. And there are recent and current examples from within the academy and without of people who can do this border-crossing – Edward Said, Susan Sontag, and, in a different way, Michael Berube. But they’re exceptions. I’ll point out that it isn’t just impertinent critics like me who are making this point – it’s people at the heart of the academic critical establishment. My very strong impression as an outsider is that there’s a very serious crisis in the field, and that nobody quite knows what to do. I think a lot of the self-confidence issues come down to the sense that academic literary criticism doesn’t feel it has either an audience outside the academy, or the degree of internal coherence that it would need to go it alone without an audience. What I’m suggesting, in a sense is that it start building one (and that this doesn’t by any stretch of the imagination require a non-critical flattering of the text – instead, it requires a critical engagement with the text, but of a sort that non-academic readers of the text, or the authors of the texts themselves, are going to respond to).
I’ll try again.
“I don’t get a sense either of the book itself, or of the politics themselves being taken seriously – both become a sort of rhetorical game in which the object is to jump through the right hoops to get tenure.”
Henry, what are you talking about? What are you reading that’s giving you this impression?
“it requires a critical engagement with the text, but of a sort that non-academic readers of the text, or the authors of the texts themselves, are going to respond to”
What is the antecedent of “it” in this sentence?
How concerned are political scientists that their scholarship be something that citizens and politicians are going to respond to?
“The punchline: the ALSC really isn’t a conservative outfit. It just isn’t. I’m not being defensive about it. It’s just a fact.”
I’m sorry John, but simply ardently asserting that the right-wing money flowing into the ALSC, and now into your site, doesn’t make it true.
It may be that some of us who actually work in English departments in the US - who have been taught by or worked with those on the ALSC - might have a slightly better idea of what they’re up to than you.
Other fundees of the Bradley Foundation: Charles Murray (of Bell Curve fame – they gave him $ after the Manhattan Institute kicked him out!), The Heritage Foundation, The American Enterprise Institute, William Bennett. Oh, and Harry Bradley was a founding funder of the John Birch Society.
Here’s the thing, John. Not every single – or even most members of the ALSC - are politically conservative. This is surely true. But the leadership is – and the money is.
You keep acting as if it’s just an accident, or a rare stroke of enlightened disinterest on the part of these orgs, or that perhaps you’ve got them all fooled. But I think it’s you that’s been fooled…
My argument: “Look at the money!”
Your argument: “Don’t look at the money! It doesn’t matter!”
Sorry, I left out a few words in the second paragraph of my previous post:
“I’m sorry John, but simply ardently asserting that the right-wing money flowing into the ALSC, and now into your site, doesn’t matter doesn’t make it true.”
Well, folks, I apologize. I didn’t mean to imply that Henry was arguing for one side of the caricaturesque dichotomy that I brought up. Furthermore, I wasn’t criticizing Valve, which I haven’t read much, nor was it my intention to endorse a criticism of Valve on the grounds of where they get their money. I read Holbo & Goodwin with pleasure, darnit.
I do endorse certain specific criticisms of the way in which race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and especially psychoanalysis, get used in lit. crit. I just have a strong distaste for the sort of insinuation that the right way to think about literature is to return to the business of ‘appreciation’, an insinuation that I shouldn’t have detected in Henry’s post, but which is there nonetheless in the larger discourse, with conservatives constantly complaining about the erosion of the canon, the inclusion of ‘minor figures’, etc. In this regard, I see myself in complete agreement with cultural revolution.
One of the things I remember in the early protests against the Iraq War is that when it turned out ANSWER was sponsoring or paying for some of the rallies, many people on the left who don’t care for ANSWER said, “It doesn’t matter who paid for or organized the damn march, just look at who was in attendance and what was said! Engage the content of the rally: don’t have a theory of politics as contagion!” This in general is a pretty consistent response by many on the left to right-wing assertions of contagion of many kinds—I’m making one version of that very response to David Horowitz imminently over on his site.
Now on one hand it does matter in the case of ANSWER or the fnding of the ALSC—but not if one is planning to engage what was said at a rally or what was said on the Valve (or for that matter what is said by the ALSC about their mission). It matters as a question of operational politics. What ANSWER was doing by funding and organizing rallies, even when they ceded the right to the podium or controlling the message, was a kind of ideological version of money-laundering, an attempt to legitimate their organization through indirect association with many organizations and individuals who did not share their beliefs. Arguably that’s what some of the conservative funders of the ALSC are up to as well: buying their way into an association with a project whose purposes they thiink they recognize.
However. I think Henry is to some extent pursuing a red herring here by rehearsing the “appreciation and imagination VS. sterile critical theory” disagreement. Not to say some of that isn’t wrapped up in this: one of CR’s comments above makes a modest and careful defense of the literary-theory-as-too-difficult-to-be-left-to-amateurs line, and betrays a general anxiety about what is being asked for in an “appreciative” mode of criticism. (And I think in that comment misrepresents what “appreciation” might mean: it doesn’t mean gushing enthusiastically about Literature, necessarily.) Still, this is one debate, but it’s not the real thing that I think the CR post (and this discussion) is about.
Instead, I think it’s about this idea of politics as contagion, that you can read “real” intent of a new project by following the money back to its sources. It’s there that I think the real problems emerge. Part of the problem is the asymmetry involved in how we read the intentionality of monetary support. At elite US universities, many humanities departments are funded indirectly—and sometimes directly—by donations of wealthy alumni. Many of those alumni may be conservative to some degree or another. We do not read from their politics to the end state of their money, and rightfully so. But why not? Because we know academic institutions intimately, and so we know that there are few ways for the money to carry with it some intentionality that supercedes the academic institution itself.
But in his complaint about the Valve, CR invokes a different idea about money: that the intentionality of its sources inevitably captures or owns the project to which it flows—and the argument here is advanced very much in terms of contagion or conspiracy, as an associational pattern These institutions have funded X, Y and Z, ergo anything they fund must be in the same alphabet even when it is not evident on the surface that it is.
It’s two very different ways of understanding how funding creates power. In one case, we’re not terribly anxious in a specific way even when we may be generically anxious as left academics sometimes are about the overall placement of the academy within systems of financial and political power. In the other case, a very specific anxiety—and accusation. The specific anxiety vanishes in the former case because we intimately know the working sociology of the money, we know there’s a layered disconnect between the intentionalities of donors and the dispositions of funding. So my question to CR would be: why not assume the same here? There’s no visible sign in the Valve itself or in the careers, outlooks and disposition of the chief participants that their work there is “captured”. Absent a specific knowledge of an interior sociology in which the politics of the Bradley money maps onto the purchase of specific sentiments, or a hidden plan of conspiratorial intent on the part of the Valve participants themselves, why not assume that they are what they are? Why assume that the money which flows into the academic humanities is cleansed by its flow but that money from Bradley into ALSC and thence to the Valve remains forever dirty? Why not assume that the Valve, and perhaps the ALSC itself, is just being pragmatically clever about grabbing at proferred money and then doing its own thing? If the funders intend to enforce their own agenda, they’ll do it sooner or later, and that’s when I think you can make claims about the political meaning of money—not as contagion, not as inference, but at that moment when an organization actually perceptibly changes what it says and does in order to dance the jig it is being ordered to dance.
Otherwise what happens here (and this brings it back to Henry’s main point) is that the very assertion that critical theory is sterile and that the mode of literary criticism today should look something more like public-sphere practice of a generation or two ago becomes by definition contagious and suspicious, a “bought” sentiment, merely because the wrong kind of people (and the wrong kind of money) like such a sentiment. A drawing of boundaries, an assertion that some arguments are wrong because they appeal to the wrong people—which is a way to prevent ever having the argument in the first place. If Holbo, Singh and the other Valve contributors (or the ALSC) want to explore a new mode of writing about literature and culture and there are right-wing commissars who mistakingly perceive that mode as an endorsement of their own agenda and throw money at them, I don’t think that’s intrinsically a problem. Now if suddenly the Valve starts reading like Horowitz’s FrontPageMag, then go ahead and complain, but sufficient unto that day is the evil thereof.
Hi pedro
Didn’t take your comment personally – but as I said, it did reflect a misunderstanding of what I was saying. Glad we’re both on the same page (or at least in a position where our continuing points of disagreement are clearer). Tim’s comment is a useful clarification, and says some of the things that I was trying to say rather better, and in a more nuanced way, than I did in my original post. To which I’d add (following Jacoby again) – an academic literary criticism that seeks to build, and talk to, a public sphere, seems to me to be much more obviously compatible with the basic left values that I share with most of the people with whom I disagree in this thread, than academic literary criticism as it exists today. Which brings us back to Tim’s point as I read it – funding or no funding, there’s no reason to believe that John’s project is inherently conservative, or that the ALSC agenda can’t be adopted (with changes) towards progressive ends. A more public sphere oriented criticism isn’t intrinsically right wing, regardless of who funds it. Funding becomes an issue when people start bending or corrupting their work in order to get more of it; given the people who are doing this, I don’t think that this is likely to be a problem in this instance.
Oh, and I’d like to point to the key para in Tim’s post that says what I was trying to say.
I feel that there is some of that going on here, to a lesser extent in Cultural Revolution’s original post, and very clearly in the comments of people like ‘roger,’ and gzombie’s claim that people like me aren’t “qualified to comment.” A boundary drawing that allows arguments to be dismissed out of hand, when engaging in these arguments is (this outsider would submit) the best way to revitalize academic literary criticism as it exists at the moment. I can understand why many people in the field have good reason to feel defensive – the right has been demonizing them for a couple of decades – but there’s a fruitful argument here, which could go some way towards solving the internal and external problems that the field has.
Read Chip delany’s STARBOARD WINE for why enjoying real literatute aint cool-trick question unless you have access to an Univercity Library its an imposible book to find. mine cost me $200 and a year on a book-search list. I’m such a nice gut tho send me your e-address and I’ll attach you a text file of the relevant passage. Its worth readinfg take my word for it
MIKE (dmsherwood53@hotmail.com)
Timothy,
You are assigning me a position – a hypocritical position – that I’m sure I don’t hold. I would never claim that university money is somehow inherently “clean.” Obviously, there are some structures in place that mitigate the influence of that money upon what I do in the classroom etc. But it’s not an absolute firewall…
For obvious reasons, I can’t go into the details, but lets just say I recently given a choice as to the source of my funding (my salary as an asst. professor), and I voted with my feet to enter into a situation in which I was more comfortable with the provenance of the funds. The state rather than, ahem, the guys in scarlet milling around a certain southern European city just about now. Both institutions ostensibly offered “academic freedom.” But still… Sometimes it’s best to be sure…
So – yes – where the money comes from always matters. To different degrees, of course, but it always matters.
Your argument, like Henry’s, seems to be staked on the claim that ALSC is unaware of some potential secret, left agenda of the Valve:
“Arguably that’s what some of the conservative funders of the ALSC are up to as well: buying their way into an association with a project whose purposes they think they recognize.”
“If Holbo, Singh and the other Valve contributors (or the ALSC) want to explore a new mode of writing about literature and culture and there are right-wing commissars who mistakingly perceive that mode as an endorsement of their own agenda and throw money at them, I don’t think that’s intrinsically a problem.”
You absolutely need this “mistakenly perceive.”
Fine – if this is some elaborate hoax – drawing right-wing money and putting it to perverse uses – then I’m all for it. That’s fantastic. Wish I could do the same.
But how are we to know? We really do have to put a lot of faith in John, don’t we? What if ALSC is right after all?
You bring up ANSWER - I think there’s a scenario that’s actually a little closer to the case than being one of half a million marching in NYC.
Take Ralph Nader during the last election. Don’t you think he should have paused for a moment when the checks started rolling in from Deep Faith, Texas and Oil Well, Oklahoma? I sure as hell would have…
All that I am trying to say here is that John and the others should be very, very sure that the ALSC truly is mistaken, that they’re pulling one over on them – and that it’s not the other way around. Unless their comfortable with being the mouthpiece or alibi of the group…
Henry,
“To which I’d add (following Jacoby again) – an academic literary criticism that seeks to build, and talk to, a public sphere, seems to me to be much more obviously compatible with the basic left values that I share with most of the people with whom I disagree in this thread, than academic literary criticism as it exists today.”
“A boundary drawing that allows arguments to be dismissed out of hand, when engaging in these arguments is (this outsider would submit) the best way to revitalize academic literary criticism as it exists at the moment.”
I just think you’re jumping and skipping from one point to another here. If it were the case that the Valve was devoted primarily to the revitalization of left-literary discourse through the rediscovery of the public sphere, obviously my pointing out of the ALSC influence would hold less water.
I’m not too sure that the ALSC would be involved if that’s what it was – if that’s what it turns into. Let’s hope so…
Revitalization of literary discourse, perhaps… But toward left ends? I haven’t seen that there!
In short, your claim that the ALSC money doesn’t matter depends upon my acceptance that the ultimate (and secret? guerilla?) aims of the Valve are contrary to the aims of the ALSC… Are we sure that this is the case???
One more question to add to CR’s good ones: Why does Valve need funding from anyone? Last I heard, lots of people were blogging for free.
Drapeto, if you’ve got a point to make, make it (in a couple of years of reading your occasional comemnts on this blog, I don’t recall you once making an actual argument, let alone putting forward your own alternative program. Am I wrong?
Uh, yeah, you’re wrong. But if you can’t work out the point I made in this very thread, that doesn’t really motivate my typing energies.
Henry, why does academic literary criticism need to be revitalized? It’s not clear that you’re even familiar with what’s going on in literary studies as practiced by the vast majority of scholars today; you haven’t referred to any contemporary work that you think exhibits the problems you claim (via McLemee) exist. And that is why I say you’re not qualified to comment on the state of the field.
Do you know what articles and books have won awards from the various professional organizations affilitated with literary studies? What’s your opinion of them?
Lemuel, we are blogging for free. The funding, I imagine, though John can speak to this, is for hosting.
Cultural Revolution, if you can point me to something specific that John’s written and really do a good interpretative reading of it as a reactionary sentiment that closely coheres to the ideological project of The Bell Curve or The John Birch Society, then I think you’d have an argument. If you’re saying that the critique of critical practice that some of the Valve posters have pursued is definitionally reactionary in some respect, then I think Henry’s initial remarks are actually on target. At the very least, I think it’s time to go back and explain very slowly and carefully why what they propose is actually reactionary in content if that’s what you believe: I hear a lot of insuinuative claims, as I often do in these conversations.
Otherwise, what you’re saying is, “Sure, Holbo hasn’t said anything that’s suspicious, YET, but since some of the money for this project comes from a suspicious source, it must be that he will say something soon that will help that source. Ergo, we cannot trust him.” Unless he’s stolen your lunch money recently or something, it’s hard to know why a guy with a long track record of writings warrants preemptive distrust that overrides any need to deliver an interpretation of what he’s actually written.
This view also assumes a kind of superrationality on the part of right-wing foundations, that they always purchase precisely the sort of hegemony-building institutions and discourses that they require and they always accurately foresee the institutional consequences of supporting various enterprises. For another, it really is politics as contagion, not to mention with a modest dollop of conspiracy on the side. There’s a kind of vulgar political economy to the notion that one can read hidden operations of power into arguments simply by following a money trail.
I don’t think you need to pose a “hoax”, that somehow the Valve has to be a cunning attempt to hoodwink the right in order to be legitimate. I just think you can say that if Holbo & Co. are trying to write a mode of literary criticism that invokes public-sphere writing of the first half of the 20th Century, and the ALSC finds that congenial because of their own dissatisfactions, and the ALSC in turn are found congenial by some right-wing organizations, you can’t just assume that you’ve Q.E.D some critique of the Valve itself (or even the ALSC) as if the mere fact of a second-order association constitues a critique. No hoax is necessary: it is entirely possible that even right-wing associations give out money without a Plan to Conquer the World on occasion.
This is what I sometimes call in my classes “spot the hegemon”: a form of critique that thinks it is enough to merely draw a lineage of historical descent that ties some practice or text to some originary figure whose extreme badness the critic feels safe in merely assuming rather than demonstrating.
At all stages of the game, you’ve got to actually make arguments and interpretations with some specificity, not just play connect-the-dots. What has the Valve said that the ALSC finds congenial? What has the ALSC done that the Bradley Foundation finds congenial? Is the Bradley Foundation correct to find that congenial, e.g., that the ALSC members are actually fellow travellers of the John Birch Society, or that what they’re doing in criticizing literary criticism is actually functional to or useful to the Bradley Foundation’s agenda? Is what the Valvle saying actually congenial or useful to the ALSC and thus to the Bradley Foundation? Useful or functional how exactly?
What Tim said.
I haven’t claimed that the Valve is a left wing project, or is in any way trying to pull the wool over the ALSC’s eyes. It isn’t. But there’s good ex ante reason to believe that democratizing argument, and trying to create a broader public sphere is exactly the kind of thing that the left should be doing. I think I’ve been quite clear about that throughout.
I’ll go further: the kind of division that some commenters here are trying to create, between academic literary criticism (which only other specialists, or those who read “contemporary literary fiction” are allowed to criticize), and vulgar debate over books is very strongly reminiscent of the division between “high culture” and “ordinary culture” that Raymond Williams tells us about, or the processes of distinction that Bourdieu describes. To be blunt, it smacks of defensive manoeuvres that aim to preserve discursive power, and to shut out debate that might be awkward or uncomfortable. Why, in the absence of evidence of right-wing intent, is a project like the Valve perceived as a political threat? I don’t believe that the answer to that question actually has to do with right-left divisions in politics.
What Timothy Burke said.
And this kind of disagreement raises some interesting questions. Like ones about areas where either 1) left-right distinctions break down, or 2) the preoccupations of some on the left overlap with those of some on the right, or 3) some subjects are not really best described in the vocabulary of binary political handedness.
I’ve mused a time or two lately about why there are not more people on the right worried about or disgusted by the hostility to science and rationality in the dominant (governing) branch of the US Right or Republican Party. It seems odd to me, for a lot of reasons.
The automatic linkage of literary ‘theory’ with leftism and criticism of it with conservatism is at least as odd. What exactly is inherently left-wing about literary theory? Nothing that I’ve ever been able to figure out. And many of the posts on here just reinforce that impression – that the assumption is automatic, and its holders are not at all good at grounding it.
snicker
I didn’t mean to echo Henry. That was a cross-post. In fact I literally echoed him the first time – I said ‘what Tim said’ – but then made it more formal, so as not to presume.
Good God, this discussion is depressing. The problem here isn’t with critical methods, it’s with this view of the study of literature (and everything else) as just another branch of political activism. That’s what’s poisoning the well.
I’m not sure that Henry is making this argument and I won’t attribute it to him; but if he were, it’s his credentials I would trust in this context, not those of a literary theorist.
First of all this is kind of interesting. I hedged my bets early on by saying that the Bradley Foundation gave “start-up money” to the ALSC. Turns out that it’s not just start-up money, and not just Bradley, but Scaife in all its many shapes and sizes –a wide coalition of right wing foundations. Actually, a roll call that collectively represents the “vast right wing conspiracy,” at least from the “philanthropic” angle. Have fun clicking around the links –
http://www.mediatransparency.org/search_results/info_on_any_recipient.php?recipientID=29
Anyway, Tim,
Your series of questions:
“What has the Valve said that the ALSC finds congenial? What has the ALSC done that the Bradley Foundation finds congenial? Is the Bradley Foundation correct to find that congenial, e.g., that the ALSC members are actually fellow travellers of the John Birch Society, or that what they’re doing in criticizing literary criticism is actually functional to or useful to the Bradley Foundation’s agenda? Is what the Valve saying actually congenial or useful to the ALSC and thus to the Bradley Foundation? Useful or functional how exactly?”
Well, this is EXACTLY what I’m asking John and the other member as well as the readers of the blog to ask themselves. Thanks for putting it out there so clearly. This is what I’d like them to speak to. Obviously, they don’t have to… But I’d appreciate it if they did – and I’m sure others would as well.
Here, I’ll state my question very, very clearly:
What do you think it is about your approach to literary studies (and/or attacks on literary theory) that makes the idea of the Valve attractive to the likes of the ALSC, given who they are and what they’re up to?
I’m certainly not saying that the ALSC or the Valve are necessarily intentionally fomenting right-wing revolution on campus. The point is that others seem to think they’re good bets for pushing the line ever further toward the right. The Bradley people surely didn’t think that Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve, whose composition they funded, was going to set racial hierarchies “back where they belong,” but it’s a drop in the bucket.
Unfortunately, those drops have stopped pinging on the bottom of the bucket – the water’s starting to rise… The frigging Academic Bill of Rights is up for debate or vote in a bunch of states (an invention of Bradley/Scaife fundee David Horowitz)… International Studies departments have been decimated in the wake of 9/11…
So, yes, I’m a little touchy about the entrance of right-wing groups – or groups funded by right wing foundations – into the game. The point is this:
When I get anxious about the future of the profession that I have chosen to join, by anxiety comes not of the fear that my works won’t be read (they’ll be read by enough to matter), but that, given a few more turns of the screw, the freedom to speak, and argue, and write the way that I see fit will be abridged, suspended, cancelled.
Seriously – the “crisis of the humanities” that I worry the most about is not the relevance or irrelevance of my theoretical armature, but the idea that in a few years I might be sued or dismissed for not, say, “teaching both sides” of the literature of apartheid, or what you will.
Touchy, but it’s not stupid to be, the way things are going. Disappointed to see Holbo lining up on (or at least with, behind, in front of, wherever) the wrong side.
The hegemon, Tim, is winning – big time. If that’s not clear to you…
Henry –
Never had a harsh word for the “vulgar debate over books,” so I sure as hell hope you weren’t talking about me. Believe me – the last thing on my mind (or under it) is an anxiety about the non-elect stealing my place at the pulpit. That’s not what this is about. At all.
The “vulgar debate” jibe was aimed at roger more than anyone else. But your response to Tim seems to me to be ducking the issue. It’s you who needs to be answering that question – not John Holbo, or the other people who are blogging on the Valve. In what way is the kind of blogging that is happening on the Valve useful to the right wing? You’ve made some quite harsh accusations – that John Holbo and others are joining up with the wrong side, advancing the cause of those who want to stifle debate in the academy. But you’ve yet to provide even the beginnings of the ghost of an argument as to how the Valve is advancing this agenda. It’s this that makes me ask whether or not there’s something else going on here. There’s a missing middle in your argument between right wing money that is funding an association that is then sponsoring a blog, and the possibility that you might be sued, dismissed etc in a few years. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to speculate, as I’ve done, that this missing middle has something to do with the form of blogging that is taking place over there. I could certainly be wrong – but to show that I am, I really think that you need to lay out your actual argument as to how the ultimate source of funding translates into a blog abetting the possible triumph of the right wing in the academy. You haven’t done that.
I think there are so many degrees of separation between Horowitz and the Valve that to try and connect them becomes a kind of accidental re-enactment of Horowitz’ Discover the Network, suffused with the same kind of associational reasoning. If you’re worried about the Academic Bill of Rights, worry about the Academic Bill of Rights. Isn’t that worry enough for you? Why go on a snipe hunt armed with the hermeneutics of conspiracy?
Again, I’m also struck at the superrationality you ascribe to right-wing foundations, that if they fund something, they must not only have an idea of how it serves their instrumental purposes, but that they must be correct in their idea, even if the ostensible evidence suggests otherwise. The ostensible evidence in this case being the actual content of the Valve. How a commentary on Lethem’s opinion of Jack Kirby connects to the cultural right’s agenda is beyond me. In fact, to a very significant extent, if the Valve were one example among a number of a revivification of “the culture of letters” in the public sphere, it seems to me that such a development couldn’t help but undercut the philistinism of much of the cultural right, and it might also give people who are drawn to that right only because they feel shut out of the academic humanities as they presently exist a home much closer to their real instincts and desires. Now it might be at that point—when the people on the right who say they love literature and meaning and so on actually have to start talking about literature and meaning and stop talking about the Blue Meanings in the English Departments—that the money flow to something like the Valve would stop. But ok, fine, good: the major point it seems like the antithesis of interpretative, critical analysis to argue that the actual content Valve means something other than what it seems to mean simply because of the money that it receives.
I think there are a number of separate issues here.
1. The issue of funding the Valve. Myself, I think it is great that the Valve got some body to ante up some money. Short of the money coming from the Aryan nation or exiled Saddamist officials, it is good to have money. I don’t think the Valve is going to give it back.
2. the issue of the “readability” or not of modern literary critics, and Jacoby’s idea, supported by Henry, that literary critics are unreadable and unread, and have no effect beyond the discipline of English. Unreadability is a subjective judgment—I’d rather read J. Hillis Miller than Helen Vendler. But unread is a more objective claim. I would say that it is a very poorly supported one. Did Partisan Review writers, in the forties, write NY times op ed reviews, as Stanley Fish has done a number of times? Did those writers put such influential memes into everyday speech as (alas) postmodern and deconstruction? Arguably, they did popularize a mix of Freud and Marx. Still, I think Jacoby’s argument, objectively, ignores the fact that the fifties saw the first GI Bill wave of college students, overwhelmingly white and male, and the effect of public intellectuals was ramified by this new audience, and the stability of such pillars as the unions, the political parties, and the remnant of activist culture from the thirties and forties. The new public intellectuals are more likely to reflect a new audience—female, for one. So instead of Daniel Bell, you have Elaine Showalter. But, pace Henry’s excluding of the example of France (France, apparently, is composed exclusively of Coneheads), the much ballyhooed Jacoby thesis doesn’t seem to hold water to me.
3. The posture of CT vis a vis literature. Myself, I think it stinks. And I think it is representative of something else that has happened (pace Jacoby) to literary culture in the past twenty years—the disappearance of the male reader of literary fiction. Henry, while dissing my distinction between sci fi and literary fiction by citing “prominent writers of literary fiction today – DeLillo, Lethem, Oates, Lessing, Chabon”—talk about a double bind—seems not to notice that none of those writers get very much attention in CT —in fact, if the novel doesn’t have a wizard or an alien in it, it goes right by. I can’t remember a post even mentioning Lessing or Oates. Now, I would simply mark this down to the peculiar tastes of the CT writers (and mark down, in addition, their judgments about literary criticism) if it weren’t exemplary in a very interesting way. Roth has complained about the same topic, and in fact it isn’t a secret in the publishing industry that the audience for serious fiction has become overwhelmingly female.
Which makes me all the more curious about the infantilization of male taste (ah, here’s that pomposity again, eh?)
Damn, we’ve been rumbled. If it weren’t that Proust, Davenport, Babel, Grass, Sebald, Crumey, O’Brien, and Joyce, (to chuck a few semi-randomly remembered names into our internal search engine) were such dab hands at describing robots and rocketships, we’d never have said a word about them. And we’d have passed over Shakespeare ’s sonnets in silence, were it not for the nifty wizard in The Tempest (not as good as Gandalf, mind you, but for four hundred years ago, not bad).
Why should a post mention Lessing or Oates? Third-rate writers, both of them. The James Gould Cozzenses of their day. They’ll be forgotten before the paint dries. And ain’t I a woman?
Ophelia, I’m no fan of Oates—but of Lessing, I think you are dead wrong. From the Golden Notebook into the novels of the seventies, the woman was, as Joan Didion puts it, the Hound of Heaven in the Attic.
But really, how about say David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Stuart Dybek, Lionel Shriver, A.S. Byatt, A.L. Kennedy, James Kelman, etc., etc. Even bad fiction that ruminates about the alternative worlds in this one—hell, Bruce Wagner would do. How about the effect Delillo seems to be having on, um, genre novelists like Ellroy. How about, hey, Bellows. And that is just the English and Americans. How about Echenoz? How about Gao Xingjian? How about the most heavily philosophic novel since Doctor Faustus, Peter Esterhazy’s Celestial Harmonies?
When an academic audience bugs out of any interest in contemporary literary writers and then goes ranting on about gist for the deconstructive mill, well, I’m sorry—I have no confidence in these judgments.
Did it again. I keep crossing Henry. I should just wait.
And Henry,
As for the wizard in the Tempest—to see no difference between Shakespeare’s use of magicians (remember, Bacon refers to various people we would refer to as “scientists”—Whewell’s word -as magicians) and J.K Rowling’s show pretty plainly why literary critics of the new historicist bent are needed.
You rather prove my case. Thanks.
Well, the Golden Notebook is interesting, certainly, but the writing…? Just not good enough.
“When an academic audience bugs out of any interest in contemporary literary writers”
I don’t know – maybe I have a warped view. But I know so many people who are intensely interested in contemporary literary writers but not interested in any other kind of writers at all – I’ve gone off the whole idea, frankly. I think most contemporary literary writers are a waste of time and attention. There’s such an avalanche of rich, idea-sparking writing in all sorts of fields out there (and that kind of writing CT does talk about) that contemporary literary writers just seem wan and impoverished beside it.
Byatt herself (since you mention her) said much the same thing on Nightwaves a couple of weeks ago, in a discussion with Julian Baggini, Norm Levitt and a theologian named Philip Blond. She finds reading science such a relief from the humanities, she said, now the humanities have gone mad. There was a good deal of suppressed snickering around the table when she said that. You could tell they knew what she meant…
Psst, Roger, Gandalf isn’t J K Rowling’s wizard. Different wiz, different set of books.
I’m on the verge of becoming a troll in this thread, so I promise to do my best to make this my last comment. I’m also doing my best to purge my comments of all snark. I apologize if I am unsuccessful.
My concern is with the characterization of contemporary literary studies taking place here. (By the way, no one I know personally or professionally uses the term “literary criticism” to describe what we’re about.)
I’m an English professor, meaning obviously that I have an advanced degree in English, I read the relevant scholarly monographs and journals, I go to the conferences, I correspond with other English professors.
Henry Farrell is a political science professor.
Henry says contemporary literary studies is one thing.
I say Henry is wrong.
Whose opinion carries more weight?
I also say that people with PhDs in English are more qualified to opine on the state of contemporary literary studies because they read the relevant scholarly monographs and journals, they go to the conferences, they correspond with other English professors.
Perhaps Henry does these things, too. I’ve asked him to mention some of the scholarship he’s read recently that have led him to develop his opinion. He’s remained silent on the issue. Fair enough, but it would be easier for people like me take his opinion seriously if he demonstrated familiarity with what he’s talking about, rather than familiarity once removed gleaned from reading the comments of others about the field of literary studies.
Does this make people like me elitist? No.
Either you’re familiar with the subject you’re talking about or you’re not. If you’re not, then you’re not qualified to opine on that subject. I suspect a political scientist would say the same thing if the positions were reversed.
One can safely assume that an English professor is familiar with the field of contemporary literary studies.
It would be much more unusal for a political science professor to share that familiarity. Therefore, the political science professor is under a greater burden of proof to demonstrate said familiarity.
No?