The academic job search process is under way, and in the modern languages, things look quite dismal.  Yes, I know, things have looked quite dismal for some time now, but this is extra extra dismal, because the effects of the Great Collapse of 2008 are only hitting this part of the academic machinery now.  Colleges and universities have already taken—and administered—hits elsewhere, via salary cuts and/or freezes, furloughs, elimination of travel and research budgets, etc.  And I don’t know how many searches were cancelled last year after being advertised.  But I do know that in the modern languages, we might be looking at a 50 percent dropoff in jobs from last year, and there’s no federal stimulus coming to bail us out.

Let me explain what that means in raw numbers.  When I first went looking for an academic job, there was a surprise “bubble.”  In 1987-88, the MLA Job Information List advertised over 1900 jobs in English—a spike from the previous year’s 1700, and well above the 1400-1500 average from 1975 onward.  The year I was on the market, 1988-89, an amazing 2,025 positions were listed in the JIL—and that was just in English: there were also 1,824 advertised positions in the foreign languages.  The next year, 1,867 in English, 1,609 in the foreign languages.  People actually spoke of a “seller’s market,” and they weren’t totally crazy, because at the time, there were only about 750 Ph.D.s granted in English annually, and about 400-500 foreign-language Ph.D.s.  (Now you all know how I snuck into the academy in the first place!) These, of course, were the years when you could hear people predicting a faculty shortage in the mid- to late 1990s.  But people didn’t talk that way for long, because starting in 1991-92, the bottom dropped out: English positions declined from 1,480 to 1,271 to 1,133 to 1,054, foreign language positions from 1,453 to 1,214 to 1,090 to 1,037.  And remember, these aren’t tenure-track positions; those are but a subset of all positions, an increasingly small subset.  The number of tenure-track positions advertised in the October edition of the English edition of the JIL was 926 in 1990, 735 in 1991, 620 in 1992, 624 in 1993.  (I’m digging these figures out of an old copy of Profession: Bettina J. Huber, “Recent Trends in the Modern Language Job Market,” Profession 94: 94-105.)

In more recent years, the number of positions advertised in English has hovered around 1600-1700.  This year, one of my students told me that she’d heard the number would be something like 250.  “WTF,” I calmly replied. “Where did that number come from?”  It came from a wiki of some kind, which is apparently what These Kids Today use when they’re not twittering on the FaceSpace.  “That would be a Depression-era number,” I said, “because I don’t believe there’s been a time since the MLA started keeping stats when the number was below 1,000.”  Well, it’s now looking like 250 is indeed a very low estimate.  But it’s quite possible that the number will wind up being below 1,000, which is a problem, because all the MLA charts run from 1,000 to 2,000, so that 2009-10 might require the MLA to redesign the things or face the prospect of publishing one of those cartoon-charts where the plummeting line runs right off the page.

More seriously, a number below 1,000 is a problem for the actual Ph.D. candidates searching for actually existing jobs.  No word yet on how many of those perhaps-fewer-than-one-thousand jobs will be tenure-track.

OK, so that’s the backdrop to what I came to say—a backdrop of anxiety and despair.

What I came to say is this: just as in the dark days of the 1990s, I am stunned by what some departments want their job candidates to submit, and I’d like to hear from people in other disciplines (and perhaps even other countries!  where, I hear, people do things differently for some reason).  I would be stunned by these things even in a year more favorable to jobseekers, but in an abysmal year these things seem especially obnoxious, particularly when they are expensive.  For example: in the 1990s, it came to my attention (and Cary Nelson’s, and many other people’s) that certain schools—and we were looking at you, schools of the University of California system—were requiring job applicants to submit enormous packages of materials up front: not just the usual application letter/ cv/ dossier (sent under separate cover), but writing samples as well.  This doesn’t sound like a major human rights issue, no, but when you stop to consider that these jobs would routinely have 500-1000 applicants, each of whom was sending out 30-page writing samples, you realize that’s an enormous amount of waste paper and a gratuitous expense for the job candidates.  Protestations from various UC professors that their search committees really were reading 500-1000 dissertation chapters between October and December were, how shall I say, not always credible.  It made more sense, Cary and I thought, to ask departments to require only the letter/cv/dossier (and maybe dissertation abstract) package first, and then make requests for writing samples on the basis of those materials.  That’s what most search committees do, after all: they get a huge pile of stuff in September and October, read frantically in order to decide which 50 or 100 (your numbers may vary) writing samples to request, then request them at some point in November, then read those frantically in order to decide which 8-to-12 (your numbers may vary) candidates to interview at the MLA convention, whereupon, after the interviews are over, they meet to determine which two or three candidates to invite to campus.

This year, I’m hearing of universities that want job candidates to send transcripts.  Yes, transcripts.  Transcripts of graduate school grades, and even, in some cases, transcripts of undergraduate grades.  I’m tempted to reply LOLcats style, APPLIKASHUN PROCESS: UR DOIN IT WRONG, but I thought I’d ask around first.  Do other disciplines do this?  If so, why?  You’re hiring professors, people, not students.  You don’t need to look at their GPAs.  You need to look at their dissertations and teaching portfolios.

Now, I hear that one of the places demanding transcripts is the University of Colorado, and who knows?  Maybe this is part of a post-Ward Churchill thing whereby departments are checking to see if their candidates have Ph.D.s.  But still.  It’s expensive for candidates, and (I think) completely unnecessary for search committees.  Which brings me to thing two: are there other disciplines in which graduate school grades actually matter in some way?  Because in my business, the grades usually run the gamut from A to A-, and everybody knows (or else should know) that the really important evaluations are the substantive, written ones—the kind you give students on their essays and/or presentations, the kind you’re asked to submit whenever a student is being assessed by the program as a whole (as, in some departments, when they complete the M.A. and apply for the Ph.D. program).

Again, I know that in a job market this bad, departments asking for transcripts and/or writing samples up front aren’t the worst things that job candidates are facing.  For most people, I hope, these are merely minor annoyances.  (I should probably add that a year this bad will have ripple effects for years to come, just as the lean years of the 1990s did, because of all the 2009-10 Ph.D.s who will still be looking for jobs in 2010-11, 2011-12, and beyond—years that may wind up being just as lean as this one.)  And in an academic job system that is deeply broken, it may sound silly to ask that some aspects of it should be relatively sane.  But I remain curious about how other disciplines (and perhaps even other countries, where I hear they do things differently) conduct their junior-level job searches.

About that broken job system more generally: I’ll try to be back next week with a reply to Louis Menand.

I recently published an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education.   People responded.  The brief recap is here, though you should also check out this post from Andrew Seal, this one from Philip Gentry, and this comment by Josh Gunn, who helpfully kicks things off by explaining that my essay is “bullshit.”

My general reaction to the response is: good.  I wanted to provoke discussion, and I got it.  And, begging your indulgence, I’d like to carry on that discussion here, by picking up where my blog’s last comment thread leaves off.

Warning: Clicking “click to continue” will lead you to a two-part, Internets-straining essay.
OK, you were warned.

Part One: Critical Populism and its Discontents

Well, honestly, I wasn’t hoping to provoke responses like “this article is bullshit,” but that comes with the territory too.  Mostly, I was hoping to hear things like “you’ve overlooked the influence of cultural studies on X,” or “here at the University of Z we have a cultural studies program that does Y,” so that the collective response would actually help to change the public image of cultural studies in the US (and yes, before anyone else steps up to remind me that I am overlooking Latin American, Asian, and Australian cultural studies, I deliberately focused on the situation of cultural studies in the US).  Because I really do believe that that public image is pretty bad, and that’s one of the things I argued in response to Ami Sommariva, one of the UC Davis cultural studies students who showed up on my blog to ask:

I got the impression from your comment in CHE that you thought American cultural studies work today is mostly a bunch of pablum: “associated with a cheery “Pop culture is fun!” approach.” Above, however, you say that you “wish cultural studies had some impact on [economics, political science, psychology, and international relations].”  Do you mean that you want those fields to take a cheery “Pop culture if fun!” approach? Or are you saying that cultural studies—which is a field that produces important scholarship—has an image problem within the university at large that prevents some disciplines from actively engaging with it?

I replied:

I’m very sorry not to have been clearer about this.  The answer is (b), cultural studies has a serious image problem, and it can get pretty depressing explaining to colleagues (and students!) in other disciplines that actually, Michael Warner and Chantal Mouffe are more important to the field than Jon and Kate [note to people who don’t follow the adventures of Jon and Kate: never mind, it’s not important].  That image problem is, in some precincts, even worse outside the university.  Read some of the nonacademic responses to Tom Frank’s One Market Under God—they’re even more depressing.  For example, and for another example.  And a third (that one really hurts, since it’s written by the usually wonderful Michelle Goldberg, who calls Alan Wolfe a cultural studies professor).

The only positive review of Frank’s book that gave me a jolt of schadenfreude was this one, whose title pretty much sums up its sensibility.

The next challenge came from Aaron @ zunguzungu, a graduate student at Berkeley:

It’s true that “it would be a very weird kind of cultural studies that simply didn’t care about, or dismissed out of hand, what nonacademic progressives and leftists think about cultural studies” but I don’t see anyone who’s arguing that we should….

[I] remain confused about what a phrase like this is supposed to mean:

[quoting my essay] “cultural studies now means everything and nothing; it has effectively been conflated with ‘cultural criticism’ in general, and associated with a cheery ‘Pop culture is fun!’ approach.”

Like the Davis signatories, I just don’t have any idea what you’re talking about there; “Pop culture is Fun” still seems like a straw man to me, not at all aided by all the passive voiced verbs through which you’re beating on it.

So reluctantly, I went back into those reviews of Frank’s book to dredge up the relevant excerpts, to try to show that when I say cultural studies has been conflated with cultural criticism and associated with pop-culture-is-fun, I’m not just using passive verbs to beat a straw man.  From the first link:

The 1990s cultural studies profs have rivaled Rush in their rejection of the kind of socio-political analysis of culture practiced by the Frankfurt School—critics like Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, who stressed mass culture’s power to control and alienate.

The cultstuds, on the other hand, lecture about the postmodern and transgressive power of the consumer to mold and manipulate received culture to suit one’s own tastes, which Frank reminds us is not the same as political freedom practiced in a democracy. On the contrary, the license to choose Coke over Pepsi is a freedom emptied of political content. Obsession with the shallow led to absurdities like the normally astute cultural critic bell hooks fawning in Spin Magazine over white corporate computer geek Jaron Lanier because of his fulsome dreadlocks. In a time when rebellion is just another consumer choice, corporate culture loves culture studies.

From the second:

In one chapter, he recounts the curious contemporary history of the “cultural studies” university intellectuals, many of whom have turned the academic defense of popular culture into an institutional apology for the “democratic” wisdom of consumption, and at least some of whom have defected to ad agencies and consultantships, where the rewards are definitely greener and the subjects—the target markets, that is—are truly interdisciplinary. While deftly deconstructing the self-proclaimed “cult studs,” Frank notes ironically (much of the funniest and most telling detail is in his backnotes) that One Market Under God will likely get its only thorough reading among the inhabitants of such university departments.

And the third:

In addition to cheerleaders like Peters, business has also been helped, Frank writes, by its putative opponents, the self-described radicals of university cultural studies departments, where scholars devote themselves to analyzing the “subversive” elements in pop culture. Frank’s indictment of the way cultural studies reinforces the status quo mirrors the argument Russell Jacoby made in last year’s penetrating “The End of Utopia.” The cultural studies professors both writers reprove tend to regard any criticism of consumer society as elitist, since it questions the taste and intelligence of ordinary consumers. Jacoby quotes cultural studies professor Alan Wolfe: “[W]hatever the literati once denounced, cultural studies will uphold: romance novels, ‘Star Trek’, heavy metal, Disneyland, punk rock, wrestling, Muzak, ‘Dallas’ … If shopping centers were for an earlier generation of Marxists symbols of the fetishism of commodities, then contemporary advocates of cultural studies … find them ‘overwhelming and constitutively paradoxical.’” These academics may regard themselves as latter-day Marxists, but this position ensures that they’ll forever be defending the market.

Wolfe, of course, was not championing cultural studies.

Now, I’ve had this debate with colleagues many times.  “Don’t bother with these uninformed journalistic accounts of cultural studies from Tom Frank’s reviewers,” they say, collectively and in unison.  “But, but, but,” I have replied, every time, “it actually matters that liberal and left and progressive journalists think this about us.  It’s one of the reasons cultural studies has had so little impact on American politics and nonacademic left intellectuals.”  Indeed, earlier this year I had something like this exchange with Larry Grossberg, who’s been promoting Stuart Hall’s work in the US for decades now; he looked over the last two chapters of The Left At War and was gracious but, ah, less than completely thrilled with them.  He directed me to his recent essay, “Does Cultural Studies Have Futures?  Should It?  (Or What’s the Matter with New York?)”—which, he said, offered a definitive rebuttal to Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas?  That rebuttal arrives in the penultimate paragraph of the essay, and it consists of this:

In conclusion, let me explain the subtitle of my paper—“What’s the matter with New York?”  I am gesturing to Thomas Frank’s 2004 book, What’s the matter with Kansas? which unfortunately often stood in for a critical progressive analysis both before and after the US election of 2004.  In my argument, the answer to Frank’s question—what’s the matter with people living in the so-called “red states”—is—nothing.  The fact that they disagree with progressives does not mean there is something wrong with them.  On the other hand, there may be something wrong with people in the so-called “blue” states if they think that there is something “wrong” with conservatives (in Kansas) simply because they vote or think differently.  Political struggles cannot be reduced to a simple choice between right and wrong, as much as we may, in our everyday political and moral common sense, believe it.  As political intellectuals, we have to find ways of moving forward, both in our work and in the public realm.

You’ll pardon me, I’m sure, if I don’t find this to be a particularly compelling brief for why liberal and left intellectuals should take cultural studies seriously.  Yes, there’s nothing “wrong” with conservatives, and nothing to be gained by pathologizing them.  But that’s not a rebuttal of Frank’s argument about how conservatives have redefined “elite” so that it refers not to the rich but to to latte-sipping college professors, nor is it an argument against Frank’s account of how the moderate heartland GOP of Nancy Kassebaum and Bob Dole was transformed by movement conservatives into the raging heartland GOP of Sam Brownback and Pat Roberts (and their even wingnuttier Senate colleagues to the immediate south, Tom Coburn and James Inhofe).  Grossberg’s response seems to say, instead, that in the struggle against wingnuttery, cultural studies has nothing much to offer except the promise of “moving forward.”

The heart of the UC Davis letter’s response to me is that my “caricature” of the field is unrecognizable—and potentially harmful.

On the one hand, we want to highlight the dangerous ways in which Bérubé’s critique obscures the more pressing issues facing scholars working in cultural studies.  On the other hand, we hardly recognize the field described at some length in Bérubé’s piece and that cannot pass without comment. Through claims unsupported by evidence beyond the anecdotal, Bérubé sketches out a caricature of a field as opposed to a set of dynamic, complex intellectual and institutional practices.

I think the first sentence is misguided.  By criticizing the prominence of the cultural-populist wing of cultural studies (e.g., its insistence on the figure of the “intellectual as fan” whose analysis should ideally align itself with that of the fans under study), I have allegedly obscured the more pressing issue, namely, the need for funding: “An indictment such as Bérubé’s ignores the larger institutional structures surrounding processes of knowledge production and directs attention away from the economic catastrophe currently threatening public education on a national scale.”  In other words, I should have been arguing for more support for cultural studies programs, full stop, instead of saying that cultural studies has gotten itself a bad rep in many quarters (sometimes deservedly) but should be taken seriously as a rich intellectual tradition that actually offers cogent explanations of (among other things) how hegemony works.  (I’ll get back to this funding question at the end of this post.)

Or, as Ami Sommariva puts it in her followup comment on my blog,

In short, I’m confused about what blaming cultural studies for their own image problem actually accomplishes, as your CHE piece certainly seems to do; most of your readers will come away with reinforced ammunition for exactly the belief that CS is just a bunch of hacks getting tenure for writing articles that should really appear in High Times that you were complaining about in that thread at Frameshift.

OK, I’ll try to be more careful about this.  My complaint about Frank’s account of cultural studies in One Market Under God (in a review essay reprinted in Rhetorical Occasions, titled “Idolatries of the Marketplace”) was (a) that it relies almost entirely on Bob McChesney’s “Is There Any Hope for Cultural Studies?” and (b) that Frank was simply unaware of the rich tradition, in cultural studies itself, of criticism of the field’s cultural populist wing.

So here’s the relevant passage from The Left At War (I tell you, the book covers absolutely everything in the world.  The second edition will cover all the other stuff):

It is, without question, a serious political and theoretical mistake to overestimate the importance of popular culture and the power of its consumers (even if they are also, in some ways, its producers), and to strain to find world-historical political consequences in the film Basic Instinct or televised “reality” shows.  But it is a still more egregious and lamentable mistake to ignore a vast terrain of popular culture and popular experience altogether, or to determine in advance (and in ignorance) that it can serve only reactionary ends, or to decide that certain cultural phenomena might be worth the attention of conscientious leftists—but only if they (the phenomena) have nothing to do with corporations.  At the time McChesney penned his attack, cultural studies had more than its share of enthusiastic celebrants of the “active audience” thesis, it is true; they had already been repeatedly criticized by other cultural studies theorists, as when Tony Bennett complained about his colleagues’ “sleuth-like searching for subversive practices just where you’d least expect to find them” (“Putting Policy into Cultural Studies,” 32) or when Simon Frith wrote of “defending popular culture from the populists” [footnote]. But it also contained plenty of people who understood that the struggle against the Reagan-Bush right could not be engaged exclusively on the terms of electoral politics, let alone defeated on the economic front by dragging out the charts and showing Americans that their real wages were falling while CEO wages were skyrocketing.

The Frith quote is footnoted like so: “Simon Frith, ‘The Good, the Bad, and the Indifferent: Saving Popular Culture from the Populists.’  diacritics 21.4 (1991): 101-15.  Other classic critiques of populism in cultural studies include John Frow, Cultural Studies and Cultural Value; Larry Grossberg, It’s a Sin; Jim McGuigan, Cultural Populism; Meaghan Morris, ‘Banality in Cultural Studies’; and, alphabetically last but chronologically first out of the box, Judith Williamson, ‘The Problems of Being Popular,’ from way back in 1985.”  In fact, McGuigan’s book, proclaiming itself “a sympathetic critique of cultural populism,” nevertheless argues that “neo-Gramscian hegemony theory’s approach to subcultural analysis was deconstructed and reoriented toward what became an uncritical understanding of youth cultural consumption.  A similar trajectory is traced in the construction of ‘popular television’ as an object of study, exemplified by the turn toward ‘the active audience,’ which in spite of its evident advantages neglects the economic, technological and political determinations of televisual culture.  The uncritical endorsement of popular taste and pleasure, from an entirely hermeneutic perspective, is curiously consistent with economic liberalism’s concept of ‘consumer sovereignty’” (6).

I suppose it can be argued that McGuigan’s critique obscured more pressing matters, like the defunding of public education, which was happening then, too.  But I wouldn’t argue that.  I would argue instead that despite McGuigan’s great arguments, and Frow’s, and John Michael’s critique of the “intellectual as fan” imperative in his 2000 book Anxious Intellects, lots of people inside the academy and out have gotten the idea that cultural studies involves writing books like Henry Jenkins’ The Wow Climax and Fans, Bloggers, Gamers.  And why would they have gotten that idea?  Click that link and check out the Claremont Review of Books review: “Jenkins persuasively argues in favor of taking the fan’s perspective in analyzing television—and this is the cornerstone of the new turn in Cultural Studies.”  And if Henry Jenkins isn’t your cup of tea, there’s always the career of John Fiske, to whom McChesney was responding in that “Is There Any Hope” essay.  That’s why crypto’s joke over at Frameshift hits home:

I read a lot of cultural studies stuff after I left college (in 1990, coincidentally), and by the mid-’90s I’d gotten bored with it—increasingly, a lot of the work felt like it was telling the same story over and over again. Like the kind of fan studies you describe: “Knock, knock!” “Who’s there?” “Subversion!” “Subversion who?” “Um, just Subversion, isn’t that enough?”

As a wise man once said, it’s funny because it’s true.

I thought that all this was widely known by now, and I do not know what purpose is served, at this late date, by acting as if this wing of cultural studies doesn’t exist or that it didn’t dominate public discussion of the field throughout the 1990s.

One last note on this front.  Ms. Sommariva writes:

I agree that there is an image problem, and I agree that it is extremely serious. However, given that insightful, innovative, and politically substantive work is done by people claiming to do cultural studies now (you mention Michael Warner and Chantal Mouffe), I would say that the image problem does not stem from the quality of our scholarship, but from several other factors….  Looking at the responses to the CHE piece, I get the impression that it gave many folks the impression that you believed that the field had become intellectually bankrupt, and thus the poor image was not an inaccurate one (with a few exceptions).

Respectfully, I think this is a serious misreading of those CHE comments.  For the most part, those are not the comments of people who came to cultural studies with an open mind, read my essay, and concluded that the field was bankrupt; those are the comments of people who hate cultural studies and want it to die (though not before it suffers mightily), and the only reason they’re commenting on my essay is that they can’t believe I still take cultural studies seriously and want it to flourish when really it should die, dead.  After suffering.  Because, you know, Marxism failed and evolutionary psychology has a better analysis of Thatcherism and cultural studies is shallow and leftist and pretentious, etc.

Part Two: What is To Be Done?

OK, now that that’s all cleared up, here’s Colin Danby with a question on another front:

Could a reader not conclude, Michael, that your Chronicle piece is first of all a polemic against the Chomsky-Herman-McChesney view, with an attached plaint that Cultural Studies has not had the institutional strength to join you in defeating it?

I write as a comrade in the long struggle against McChesneyism.  But if I were a cultural studies grad student I might be a little pissed off by the way you introduce criteria for the field’s success that I might not choose first.

I will have to accept some pissed-offness on that front, I suppose.  But no, the essay isn’t first of all a polemic against C-H-McC.  Could a reader conclude that, though?  Sure, because the polemic is certainly in there.  (Though I would modify it by way of my largely sympathetic (imho) reading of Manufacturing Consent.)  Like my ritual lament about critical populism in cultural studies, it’s a return to an old, old debate from the 1990s.

McChesney’s “Is There Any Hope for Cultural Studies?” (surprise answer: no!) was itself a reply to Larry Grossberg’s half of an exchange with Nicholas Garnham in Critical Studies in Mass Communication 12.1 (March 1995), titled “Cultural Studies Vs. Political Economy: Is Anyone Else Bored with this Debate?” (surprise answer: no!)  Grossberg argued against (among other things) the “two lefts” approach that sets “merely cultural” politics at a discount:

No one in cultural studies denies the economic realities of racism or sexism, although they are likely to think that such inequalities cannot be directly mapped by or onto class relations. . . .  Thus, while I do agree with Garnham (along with a number of key figures in cultural studies like Meaghan Morris) that too much work in cultural studies fails to take economics seriously enough, I am also convinced that political economy—at least this version of it—fails to take culture seriously enough.  And ironically, I think it also fails to take capitalism seriously enough.

Taking Larry’s side on this one, I’m basically arguing like so: one, when cultural studies is seen as nothing more than the (celebratory) study of popular culture, it’s easy to dismiss—and two,  the political economy crowd has long had a vested interest in doing so, because cultural studies posed a direct challenge to them.  (Curiously enough, Todd Gitlin’s critiques of cultural studies over the past two decades have been nearly identical to McChesney’s.  Joel Pfister’s response to Gitlin in Critique for What? is pretty great.)

But critical populism isn’t the only thing working against the potential effectiveness of cultural studies.  You know what else can hurt the field, particularly in institutional settings?  Things like this, from the UC Davis letter:

We also do not recognize cultural studies as a field characterized by weak treatments of television shows and pop stars. Our field, as we know it, addresses such topics as the “war on terror,” nanotechnology, the visual culture of medicine, immigration and asylum, the corporatization of the university, tourism, the cultural history of food and wine, the science and technology of textiles, environmental racism, psychic formations, transnational media, militarization, memory and genocide, the production of knowledge outside the academy, histories of visual culture, and many many others. While these topics can be studied in other disciplines and fields, what differentiates our practice of cultural studies is a deep historicization of these instances in relation to questions of power.

I’m going to try to proceed very carefully here, because I’m probably stepping on somebody’s toes, and I don’t want to be misunderstood by people like Josh Gunn saying, “I disagree with a fundamental premise of Berube’s piece: that cultural studies is somehow unified by content.”  That was not a fundamental premise of my piece, and it’s not a fundamental premise of my critique of this list of topics.  (Though I do have to note that “psychic formations” and “the production of knowledge outside the academy” are so nebulous as to make the list sound a bit Borgesian.)  Rather, my critique of this list of topics is that it makes cultural studies sound like Whatever Our Students and Faculty Are Doing Right Now.  As one not-entirely-crazy commenter on the CHE thread says,

As a philosopher, I understand ‘no fixed content,’ but neither content nor methodology? Isn’t this reducible to ‘smart people talking about whatever interests them’?

Possibly, yes.  But I should add that this isn’t necessarily a problem by itself, since knowledge is diffuse and rhizomatic and can go every which way; it’s only a problem if you’re concerned about the institutional status (and funding!) of your field.  Because if I were an administrator (or prospective donor) and I was told that the program in cultural studies addresses such topics as these, I would conclude that I was being handed a list of what the program’s students and faculty are doing right now, and that in five or ten years it could be something altogether different (though presumably still committed to the deep historicization of its objects in relation to questions of power), depending on what students and faculty were doing then.

At this point I’m touching on a large (and, for some people, sore) subject—namely, cultural studies’ ambivalence about its own institutionalization.  You could argue that cultural studies has relatively few institutional homes in the US precisely because it has been so reluctant to define itself, and you could argue that this is a Good Thing.  Or you could argue, as did the editors of Lingua Franca in 2000, that this deliberate nebulousness can be a liability—as, for example, when people interpreted the Sokal Hoax as an attack on “cultural studies” (to which my initial reaction, thirteen years ago, was WTF?):

In many ways, the uncertainty over the identity of Social Text reflects the uncertainty surrounding the field of cultural studies itself.  In general, cultural studies has come to stand for the interdisciplinary study of how popular culture interacts with its audiences.  The discipline’s first institutional incarnation was the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, a postgraduate research institute established in 1964 at the University of Birmingham in England.  Today, anthologies of cultural studies come out regularly, and with the exception of one or two early Birmingham Centre pieces, they contain none of the same essays.  American cultural studies is often said to be characterized by a movement away from the Birmingham school’s emphasis on social class toward other aspects of identity, such as race and gender; it has also come to be associated with the ideas of French poststructuralists targeted by Sokal; and it is just as often said to be characterized by a myopic enthusiasm for celebrities.  In fact, none of these characterizations account for the bewildering diversity of work done under its name.  Such ambiguity lent the Sokal debate an added resonance, since arguments about whether or not his article was a successful send-up of cultural studies could not help but presume what the real thing looked like.

Please, no threadjacking about the dang Sokal Hoax, please please.  I cite this passage merely as a fairly accurate account of the bewildering diversity of work done under the name of cultural studies.  And my point is that if you have great difficulty saying, “but that’s not cultural studies,” you’re ripe for pretty much any attack at all.  For my purposes (and I mentioned this in the intro to The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies), this became painfully obvious ten years ago, when a New Republic reviewer attributed Marjorie Garber’s book Dog Love to “cultural studies” (and not in a good way).  To which I replied, at the time, “but that’s not cultu … oh, I give up.”

And here’s another potential liability: people insisting that the field has no specifiable origin.  The UC Davis letter opens by going after my one-paragraph summary of the Birmingham story:

By starting with the conventional account of the Birmingham school, a truly interesting and important aspect of what has become known as “cultural studies,” we lose the opportunity to account for the innovations of film studies in the 1920’s and 30’s, Black intellectual thought in the United States, the development of American studies in the inter-war and post-war period, and the emergence of ethnic studies and women’s studies. In fact, what gets called the “Birmingham School” is itself a reworking of British Marxist social theory in response to critiques from these fields.

Likewise, Josh Gunn insists that I’ve gotten things all wrong:

there is virtually no understanding in his piece about how both cultural studies and communication studies came about: they arose in the midst of adult education movements.  Here in the states, communication studies arose in response to the sudden post-civil war rise of the land grant institution; the new university student created by state systems couldn’t read the standard textbooks. Teachers had to start relating ideas to common, popular objects of the experience of military brats and farmers kids. The founder of my department, Edwin Dubois Shurter, made his name on writing hybrid speech textbooks using popular examples that the “industrial class” kids could understand (incidentally, UT’s department of comm studies celebrates it’s 100th anniversary this year; go horns!).

Similarly, cultural studies arose later in Europe as part of their own adult education movement, which led to the approach and philosophy of the Birmingham School: use everyday life to teach the non-traditional (translated: non-upper class) university student.

(Aside: I have to love Gunn’s parting shot: “perhaps, he makes such pronouncements from the standpoint of someone who teaches literature to the well-to-do.”  Indeed, at Penn State my wealthy littrachur students are fond of sneering at those great unwashed Texas Longhorns.)

Folks, I am getting very cranky in my late 40s, and I have now heard versions of this gambit for over twenty years, so excuse me if I get impatient with this sort of thing.  Person A says, “well, the origins of cultural studies lie in Birming …” and along come persons B, C, D, E, F, etc. to say “but that story of origins excludes C. L. R. James” or “wholly overlooked here is the importance of the discipline of cultural anthropology and the legacy of colonialism” or “it’s diagnostic that this Birmingham account has no place for black intellectual thought in the US and the history of the land-grant university.” Lisa Duggan’s rebuke of the Standard Origin Narrative offers a good capsule summary of these objections:

There are, in addition, other genealogies for “cultural studies” that would include but branch out from the Birmingham School. You are choosing. Others of us might cite genealogies with multiple roots leading from several or many other “origin” sites, you know? I’m sure you think yours is the Right one, the Best one, but that in and of itself is revealing.

I assume that the revealing “that” in the final sentence refers to Lisa’s sense of sureness about my intentions.  But the interesting thing here is that this “oh no it didn’t simply start in Birmingham” gambit is now so routine that Lisa merely has to remind me, in the most general terms, that others might cite genealogies with multiple roots leading from several or many other “origin” sites.  (I hope I can still call her Lisa. Once upon a time we were friends: we met in 1990 when she was a postdoc at the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at Illinois, and she had a quite wonderful and lasting effect on the place.  She also put me in touch with Stacey D’Erasmo and M. Mark at the Village Voice Literary Supplement when I was trying to find someone to publish my essay on political correctness in the spring of ‘91, and for that I will be forever grateful.  So it would be just too cold to say “Duggan.”)

It is possible, of course, to claim that cultural studies began when God expelled Adam and Eve from Eden.  After all, no one, not even Dennis Dworkin, the author of the very fine (and aptly-titled) Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left, and the Origins of Cultural Studies, denies that the Birmingham school arose in response to stuff that happened before it.  (Dworkin’s first chapter, which discusses the Communist Party’s Historians’ Group and radical historians such as Christopher Hill and Dona Torr, really should be read by anyone who wants to get into a serious discussion of Where Cultural Studies Came From.  Also, for Josh Gunn: Dworkin has a good discussion of the adult education movement!)  And no one—not even the editors of Lingua Franca—denies that the field has gone in a thousand different directions since the day E. P. Thompson took exception to Raymond Williams’ The Long Revolution.  But when you combine the insistence that cultural studies has multiple genealogies from a variety of locations, trajectories, and practices with the insistence that cultural studies has no specific methodology or subject matter, well, then you’ve got yourself a field that consists of pretty much anything anybody wants to associate with it.  Which, again, is good in some ways, but not so good if you’re worried about its institutional locations and potential funding, and very, very bad if you want to defend the field from detractors who call Dog Love a work of cultural studies (or, to take an example from Frank’s One Market Under God, from detractors who want to call libertarian economist Tyler Cowen a cultural studies theorist).

So, then, dear (and international and interdisciplinary and exceptionally patient) readers, particularly those of you who are still wondering just what I think “cultural studies” might be, here are a couple of tentative suggestions.  They’re not the Right or the Best ones; they’re just mine, and I offer them as opportunities for further discussion.  Let me propose that cultural studies can be considered a salient field, though not fixed for all time, in the following ways:

(1) it developed (and continues to develop) a rich “culture and society” school of criticism, in which the many and various meanings of the first term (from the Arnoldian to the anthropological) are tracked with relation to the contours of the formal and legal apparatus of the latter term.  For instance: in 1993, Stuart Hall argued, “far from collapsing the complex questions of cultural identity and issues of social and political rights, what we need now is greater distance between them.  We need to be able to insist that rights of citizenship and the incommensurabilities of cultural difference are respected and that the one is not made a condition of the other.” This is not simply a condition-of-England question (as some people have complained about the “culture and society” tradition); it is critical to any attempt to think about hijab-wearing schoolgirls in France or Jehovah’s Witnesses and Christian Scientists refusing medical care for their children in the US.  Yes, this school of thought arose out of radical historians’ work on the English working classes, but it didn’t stay there and doesn’t need to. The Empire Strikes Back:  Race and Racism in 70s Britain and Paul Gilroy’s There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack:  The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation are responses to (and therefore part of) this tradition, and their revisionary accounts of British identity arguably helped result in the Parekh Report.

(2) it developed (and continues to develop) a rich tradition of analyzing the functions of mass media and mass culture in industrialized democracies.  The tradition was kicked off by Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy and the broadly provocative final chapter of Williams’ Culture and Society, and has gone in, oh, roughly a thousand directions since, mostly in critical dialogue with the tradition of the Frankfurt school and the political economy wing of communications studies.  As with (1), there’s a lot of room for maneuver here, and any number of ways to go in the future.  But usually, cultural studies sees the “political economy” approach to mass media as Grossberg does—as necessary but finally insufficient for an explanation of how people understand media.  As I put it in my post on Manufacturing Consent, sometimes people respond to mass media by saying “this is bullshit,” and writing scathing liberal/left critiques of the mass media; or sometimes people say “this is bullshit” and proceed to blow a lot of Hot Air about how Rachel Ray is sending seekrit terrorist keffiyeh messages with the help of Dunkin Donuts and the librul media.  People are funny that way: for a variety of reasons, they sometimes refuse to believe what they’re told.

(3) in the 1970s, it developed New Left-inflected analyses of youth subcultures, “resistance through rituals,” and subcultural formations hovering around things like punk and ska.  This is the branch of the field that eventually led to too-celebratory accounts of fandom in the 1990s, and indeed it could be (and has been) argued that it romanticized white working-class boys back in the day.  But it served as a necessary rebuke to moral panics about “mugging” in the 1970s, as well as to a persistent kind of leftish moralism that sees only decay and hears only noise when it turns to the passions and pastimes of These Kids Today.  And it gave rise to some great, terrain-transforming feminist work on romance novels, slasher movies, soap operas, porn, etc.

(4) out of its work on subcultures, its work on mass media, and its work on culture and society, it developed (and continues, etc.) a Gramscian or neo-Gramscian or post-Gramscian analysis* of the dismantling of the postwar welfare-state consensus, the rise of the new right, and the workings of hegemonic political projects in civil society.  The impetus for this school was the rise of Thatcherism in the UK, but, again, it didn’t have to stay there and doesn’t need to.  It served as a necessary rebuke to the “body snatchers” theory of the left’s decline, as when Hall wrote, “Of course, there might be an essential Thatcherite subject hiding or concealed in each of us, struggling to get out.  But it seems more probable that Thatcherism has been able to constitute new subject positions from which its discourses about the world make sense.”  And it also tries to serve—though, as I argued in the Chronicle essay, not with great success so far—as a corrective to the “blame it all on neoliberalism” and “blame it all on false consciousness” tendencies in leftist thought.  Additionally, this tradition’s insistence on the diffuseness of “wars of position” enlisted it on the side of the “merely cultural” left in Ye Olde “Two-Lefts” Debate.  Again, Hall, from “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity”:

The effect [of Gramsci’s work] is to multiply and proliferate the various fronts of politics, and to differentiate the different kinds of social antagonisms.  The different fronts of struggle are the various sites of political and social antagonism and constitute the objects of modern politics, when it is understood in the form of a “war of position.”  The traditional emphases, in which differentiated types of struggle, for example, around schooling, cultural or sexual politics, institutions of civil society like the family, traditional social organizations, ethnic and cultural institutions and the like, are all subordinated and reduced to an industrial struggle, condensed around the workplace, and a simple choice between trade union and insurrectionary or parliamentary forms of politics, is here systemically challenged and decisively overthrown.  The impact on the very conception of politics itself is little short of electrifying.

(5) As the UC Davis letter says, and many many others.  You’ve got transnational cultural studies dealing with diaspora and global flows, refugees and immigration; you’ve got cultural studies of science and technology; you’ve got cultural studies of disability and embodiment (hey, I do that stuff!), and so forth.  But I think it might be the effort to call these things by (something like) these more specific names, and to try to explain where they do and don’t intersect with the schools of thought sketched out above.

Finally, I think one of the best responses to my argument was one of the first, from way back when I delivered that paper to the Cultural Studies Association this past April:  that of my Penn State colleague Jeff Nealon, who said in the Q/A after that panel, and then developed the argument later that night over a couple of beers, that one could argue, contra me, that cultural studies has changed a great deal about the way humanists and social scientists think and work—insofar as nobody goes around anymore proposing to study this one text or that one event in isolation from everything else.  Everyone (well, just about everyone) knows that you’re not done with the analysis, you can’t punch out and go home, until you’ve located the text or event or object in some wider network of relations and explained what it’s doing there.  (Or to use the proper terms of art, until you’ve located the object or practice in relation to the various cultural formations and historical conjunctures to which it is or has been articulated.)  In that sense, Cultural Studies® may have had much less of an impact than people hoped or feared twenty years ago, but a lower-case and amorphous cultural studies has become lingua franca, so to speak, in dozens of fields.  I told Jeff at the time that I would still want to show up at a Cultural Studies Association conference panel on “the university after cultural studies” and refuse the invitation to triumphalism.  But I think his counterargument has considerable merit, so I’ll close with it, and turn things over to you.

___

• For the simple truth is that in the epochal Cup finals between the Althusserians and the neo-Gramscians, the Althusserians were decisively routed (and, even worse, charged with functionalism)—although, as I acknowledge in the afterword to this fine volume, Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy was offside, a few steps ahead of the play.  Many thanks to Ben Carrington for asking me to join the team and write something about cultural studies and sport.

In early July, Laura McKenna, a widely respected and longtime blogger, argued on her site, 11D, that blogging has perceptibly changed over the six years she’s been at it. Many of blogging’s heavy hitters, she observed, have ended up “absorbed into some other professional enterprise.” Meanwhile, newer or lesser-known bloggers aren’t getting the kind of links and attention they used to, which means that “good stuff” is no longer “bubbling to the top.” Her post prompted a couple of the medium’s most legendary, best-established hands to react: Matthew Yglesias (formerly of The Atlantic, now of ThinkProgress), confirmed that blogging has indeed become “institutionalized,” and Ezra Klein (formerly of The American Prospect, now of The Washington Post) concurred, “The place has professionalized.”

This confirms what I’ve been hearing from people like Maud Newton (whom I met last spring) and Lauren Bruce (whom I met last week while sightseeing in West Lafayette, Indiana).  Because of course, when I meet bloggers in real life, we take the opportunity to talk about blogging.  (Well, actually Maud and I were supposed to do that—it was a forum at Penn State on blogging and the arts.)  Note, by the bye, that all three of these bloggers are (1) widely respected, (2) longtime bloggers (Lauren, of course, invented blogging in 1985), and (3) women.  So of course we have to ask them: where were all the women bloggers?

Sorry.  Did I take you back for a moment?  Ah, 2004.  Bad times.  How bad, you ask?  Really, really bad.  Why, back in September of that year, blogging sold out and became corporate.

Anyway, a couple of thoughts on the consolidation-and-professionalization of the blogosphere since its last sellout.  First, Laura’s.  This is point 3 of nine (Laura would have had an even ten but for blogger burnout):

3. Norms and practices. Bloggers have undermined the blogosphere. Bloggers do not link to each other as much as they used to.  It’s a lot of work to look for good posts elsewhere, and most bloggers have become burnt out. Drezner and Farrell had a theory that even small potato bloggers would have their day in the sun, if they wrote something so great that it garnered the attention of the big guys. But the big guys are too burnt out to find the hidden gems. So, good stuff is being written all the time, and it isn’t bubbling to the top.

Many have stopped using blogrolls, which means less love spread around the blogosphere. The politics of who should be on a blogroll was too much of a pain, so bloggers just deleted the whole thing.

Now, mine.

Thing the first. You knew this would happen eventually, right?  Check out Laura’s point four, about blogger burnout.  I said pretty much the same thing when I folded my own blog in early 2007—it’s just too much work.  Yes, I restarted Ye Olde Blog about a year ago, but it’s nowhere near the scale of what I was doing in 2005-06, and it has about one-quarter the readership of those heady days.  Which is, I think, just about right—i.e., manageable.

Thing the second, which follows from thing the first as the night the day.  Group blogs were always the way to go, because successful solo blogs are so difficult to maintain over many years.  Crooked Timber was simply way ahead of the curve.

Thing the third, it’s hard not to succumb to Blog Nostalgia in all this—for the wild and wooly days of the Rittenhouse Review (pbuh) and Steve Gilliard (pbuh) and Respectful of Otters and Fafblog’s interview with James Dobson, back when people wondered if Atrios was really Sidney Blumenthal, back when it was genuinely surprising that a major American political party would issue press credentials to bloggers attending its national convention. You know, back when blogging was cool, before it totally sold out and went mainstream.  Which brings me to

Thing the fourth.  Well, of course Crooked Timber was cooler before I showed up here.  Don’t think I don’t know that.  But I liked Hüsker Dü before you did, so there.

Thing the fifth.  Laura doesn’t mention this, but it came up in my conversations with Maud and Lauren: in the absence of the Koufax Awards, there really is no formal mechanism for bringing lesser-known bloggers to the attention of Liberal and Leftish Bloggers Everywhere. But:

Thing the sixth.  The demise of the Koufaxes is symptom, not cause: they started back in aught-two as a compensatory mechanism, as left-throwing bloggers huddled around the virtual oil can in fingerless gloves and lamented the fact that all the blogging awards, like the young blogosphere itself, were dominated by conservatives and glassy-eyed techno-utopian libertarians.  For the next couple of years, the Koufaxes were something like a big ol’ barbeque where you might meet people like Lindsay Beyerstein or Scott Lemieux hanging out by the keg.  By 2006, though, as the barbeque had to be moved to the football stadium, Dwight Meredith’s idea had gotten too big to manage.  (Here’s Meteor Blades talking up the Koufaxes in late 2005—for what would turn out to be the final year of the event.  And personally, I still have blog nostalgia for the Cobb Awards.  Could those have lasted more than one year?  Sadly, no.)

On the other hand, Open Pajamas Source Media.

Thing the seventh.  Wait a minute, Kathy G. and Jon Swift are no longer blogging?  You say they haven’t been blogging in months now?  But they just started!

Thing the eighth.  Back to Benjamin Carlson’s essay:

Of the top 50 blogs, 21 are owned by such familiar names as CNN, the New York Times, ABC, and AOL.

Well, the “political economy” media theorists were right about that—the Internet gets commercial, the big guys move in, and the weird turn pro.  But look again at the very tippy top of Carlson’s piece, where the teaser reads,

The blogosphere was supposed to democratize publishing and empower the little guy. Turns out, the big blogs are all run by The Man.

Ah, no, not exactly.  For one thing, the top-50 glass is still 58 percent full.  Apparently only 42 percent of the big blogs are Man-run.  Which is kind of remarkable, really, after seven-eight-nine years.  For another thing, the blogosphere certainly did democratize publishing, and it still does.  Why, you could start a blog right now!  Let’s not confuse the question of whether the blogosphere is a democratic medium with the question of how the structure of the blogosphere has changed over the decade, because that would be one of those blog-category mistakes.

Well, that’s all I have for now.  I’d come up with nine things, but I’m feeling blogger burnout.  Also, that’s AOL on the other line—gotta go!

And yet, in a fascinating passage at the outset of his essay on Christopher Hitchens, Scialabba acknowledges the temptations of the partisan review:

All the someone in question has to do is begin thinking differently from me about a few important matters.  In no time, I begin to find that his qualities have subtly metamorphosed.  His abundance of colorful anecdotes now looks like incessant and ingenious self-promotion. His marvelous copiousness and fluency strike me as mere mellifluous facility and mechanical prolixity. A prose style I thought deliciously suave and sinuous I now find preening and overelaborate. His fearless cheekiness has become truculent bravado; his namedropping has gone from endearing foible to excruciating tic; his extraordinary dialectical agility seems like resourceful and unscrupulous sophistry; his entertaining literary asides like garrulousness and vulgar display; his bracing contrariness, tiresome perversity. Strange, this alteration of perspective; and even stranger, it sometimes occurs to me that if he changed his opinions again and agreed with me, all his qualities would once more reverse polarity and appear in their original splendor. A very instructive experience, epistemologically speaking.

“Farewell, Hitch” is the most recent of Scialabba’s essays reprinted in What Are Intellectuals Good For?, dating from 2005; but unlike so many other farewells to Hitchens written after 9/11, Scialabba’s essay manages to be measured and circumspect—and all the more devastating as a result.  Surely Scialabba’s rigorous honesty, his willingness to predicate his review on that very instructive experience (epistemologically speaking), accounts both for the circumspection and the devastation.

The other admirable thing about Scialabba is his unpredictability.  How do you know when you’re dealing with the work of a hack?  When you can anticipate its every move, mentally writing the review talking point by stock phrase before you actually read it.  Scialabba’s reviews are basically the opposite of that.  As if it’s not hard enough to reconcile the skeptical pragmatism of Richard Rorty and the geopolitical worldview of Noam Chomsky, Scialabba also finds ways to reconcile the polemics of Alexander Cockburn and the jeremiads of Victor Davis Hanson.  You wouldn’t think that someone like Scialabba, who admires Chomsky and Cockburn as well as antifoundationalist stalwarts Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish, would file friendly reviews of Hanson’s and Heath’s Who Killed Homer?, Richard Bernstein’s Dictatorship of Virtue, and Roger Kimball and Hilton Kramer’s Against the Grain: The New Criterion on Art and Intellect at the End of the Twentieth Century.  But you’d be wrong.  Reading George Scialabba is always illuminating and often surprising, and I mean that as high praise.  Late in the collection, Scialabba cites Leonardo Sciascia’s response to the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini: “Pasolini ‘may be wrong,’ Sciascia replied, he ‘may contradict himself,’ but he knows ‘how to think with a freedom which very few people today even aspire to.’” That’s precisely my response to What Are Intellectuals Good For?, and may even offer an answer to the collection’s titular question: to think with a freedom which very few people even aspire to.

The case of Bernstein’s Dictatorship of Virtue is instructive, epistemologically speaking.  Scialabba largely—indeed, almost entirely—agrees with Bernstein’s fierce critique of multiculturalism in academe and out, even to the matter of the title, which suggests an ominous parallel between multiculturalism and the Reign of Terror.  Actually, Scialabba offers a parallel to another, more recent reign of terror: “Emasculated text books, the frantic pursuit of an artificial inclusiveness, neglect or even suspicion of intellectual mastery, subtle or unsubtle disparagement of classical ideals and achievements, reflexive accusations of racism, sexism, and elitism– it sounds a little like an earlier Cultural Revolution; though this time, fortunately, the promised hundred flowers have turned out to be not poisonous but only plastic.”  I imagine that those plastic flowers are Scialabba’s way of admitting that the death toll attributable to multiculturalism and political correctness is rather lower than that of the French or Cultural Revolutions.  Be that as it may, Scialabba also agrees with Bernstein’s antidote to multiculturalist terror:  “Real educational equality consists in everyone’s being held—and, if necessary, helped—to the same high standards.  Which standards? Bernstein makes a modest and pragmatic case—which is therefore much more persuasive than the neoconservatives’ strident and dogmatic case—for Americanism and Eurocentrism.”  If it’s hard to imagine a Chomsky/Cockburn fan endorsing a modest, pragmatic version of the neocons’ espousal of Americanism and Eurocentrism, well, see “illuminating and surprising,” one paragraph above.

Part of Scialabba’s disdain for the multiculturalist wing of the academic left stems from his aversion to what one might call the diversity-management bureaucracy.  That much is understandable.  But reviewing these 1990s culture-wars reviews today, I get the sense that Scialabba, like Russell Jacoby and Paul Berman, was a little too eager to believe the worst of the academic left (with a few salient exceptions, like Rorty and Fish).  In a 1992 issue of Dissent, Richard Rorty had written, “One of the contributions of the newer [the radical-academic] left has been to enable professors, whose mild guilt about the comfort and security of their own lives once led them into extra-academic political activity, to say, ‘Sorry, I gave at the office.’” Scialabba is fond of this line, and cites it twice—once in his review of Dictatorship of Virtue and once in his review of Against the Grain.  There’s good reason to be fond of it, I suppose.  It gently deflates all those self-satisfied claims about the political urgency of intellectual work, and Moloch knows,  some of those claims needed deflating.  But in retrospect, I think there’s reason to wonder whether Scialabba’s healthy skepticism about the self-satisfied claims of the academic left didn’t lead him to be rather too generous to some writers and not altogether fair to others.

For Scialabba’s take on Bernstein’s take on multiculturalism didn’t rest wholly on his aversion to the diversity-management bureaucracy; it rested also on his conviction that the conservative critics of the academic left had chosen their targets well.  Here’s how Scialabba puts it in his review of Against the Grain:

In its crusade against the politicization of contemporary culture, The New Criterion is—on the whole, in the main, and not to put too fine a point on it—right. Notwithstanding the importance of legal and social equality for women, homosexuals, and members of racial minorities, most of the cultural strategies employed in the service of these ends have been—again, on the whole; and with many exceptions, not always duly acknowledged by conservative critics—misguided and counterproductive. Multiculturalist pedagogy; the promotion of “cultural diversity” through arts administration, philanthropy, and public policy; academic departments of Women’s Studies and Afro-American Studies; the project of “critical theory”; and in general, the greatly increased weight—in teaching and research, hiring and funding, programming and grant-making—given to explicitly political considerations: altogether these things have done more harm than good. They have undoubtedly made possible some valuable work and attracted some people to culture who would otherwise have been lost to it. But they have also generated a really staggering amount of mediocre and tendentious work. And not only do these ideological priorities make for less accomplished artists and scholars; they also make for less effective citizens. Attempting to turn one’s professional enthusiasms and expertise to political account can distract from—can even serve to rationalize the avoidance of—everyday democratic activity, with all its tedium and frustration.

The following sentence cites Rorty’s line about academic leftists giving at the office.

This is a pretty overwhelming bill of particulars, and even at this late date it’s hard for me to resist the temptation to argue with it line by line. (How, for instance, has the promotion of “cultural diversity” through arts administration, philanthropy, and public policy done more harm than good?)  But I will resist, and confine myself simply to noting an important feature of Scialabba’s account: it is one thing to argue that the politicization of culture is bad for culture, leading to the overvaluation of mediocrity and agitprop; it is quite another to argue that the politicization of culture is bad for politics, making for less effective citizens.  Somehow, Scialabba manages to imply that our fellow citizens would be more deeply engaged in and by politics if more people heeded Hilton Kramer’s formalist call for “a return to connoisseurship i.e., ‘the close, comparative study of art objects [and literary texts] with a view to determining their relative levels of aesthetic quality.’” Scialabba likes Kramer’s conception of connoisseurship, and that’s fine by me.  But however impatient I might become when inundated with mediocrity and agitprop, I have a hard time believing that there is any strong connection between connoisseurship and citizenship.  (I will, however, return to aesthetics and politics at the end of the essay.)

Because he believes that cultural politics are bad for culture and bad for politics, Scialabba also agrees with Russell Jacoby’s complaint that the culture wars are a distraction from real and important business.  Again, in retrospect, it’s clear that there was some merit to the complaint: of all the forms of AIDS activism in the period, surely the protests against the Paul Verhoeven flick Basic Instinct were among the least important.  And yet almost everyone on the American left who complained about the “distraction” of the culture wars spent a good deal of time writing books about them.  Ah, they were a powerful distraction indeed.

At this point, though, it might be instructive to do a side-by-side comparison between Scialabba’s assessment of Dictatorship of Virtue and that of Louis Menand, who reviewed it for the New York Review of Books in October 1994.  Like Scialabba, Menand agrees that Bernstein has a case: “I think it was inevitable,” Menand writes, “that new groups entering the professional culture would ask, about the standards and the mores and the ‘great books’ they found already in place there, ‘Why are these things good for us?’ And I think that a culture that cannot answer this question reasonably and persuasively, or see that there are indeed other ways of doing things and other books to talk about, is not a culture entirely worth defending. But I agree with Bernstein that this questioning has been the excuse for the promulgation of a shallow, reflexive, self-righteous political orthodoxy.”  But Menand offers a few reasons for skepticism about Bernstein’s book that seem not to have occurred to Scialabba at the time.  I quote at length, because Menand lays out a principle that subtends this entire discussion:

Was it legitimate for Clarence Thomas to “play the race card” after listening to Anita Hill’s testimony against him? Was Hill justified in feeling “sexually harassed” by the behavior she alleged? Is it inappropriate to raise the subject of race in a discussion of the O.J. Simpson case? Would the first Rodney King jury have let the officers off if King had been a white man? If Robert Mapplethorpe’s “X Portfolio” photographs are objectionable, is it because they depict sexual acts, or because they depict homosexual acts, or because they depict sado-masochistic homosexual acts? Exactly how solicitous are we supposed to be about the self-esteem of sado-masochists?

These are possibly questions a society with a lot of other problems shouldn’t be quite so obsessed with. But we’re obsessed with them anyway, and the consequence is a nearly complete lack of consensus about what’s tolerant and fair and what’s fanatical and “politically correct”; about what’s legitimate criticism or distaste and what’s racist, sexist, or homophobic; about what’s an excellent pickup line and what’s grounds for a lawsuit. It’s not just that people don’t want to get hauled up before some disciplinary tribunal for what they thought was a perfectly innocent remark; it’s also that people honestly don’t want to give offense when none is intended (and also, I suppose, want to be sure that they have given offense when it is intended), and they would like to know just where reasonable people think the line ought to be drawn.

The credibility of a book about multiculturalism depends to a considerable extent, therefore, on the author’s instinct for distinguishing the innocuous from the objectionable—or, perhaps more often, the objectionable from the more objectionable. Readers not already confident of their own instincts in these matters need to feel that the writer sees the merits in the cases he discusses in roughly the way they would see them, and that he won’t excuse offensive behavior just because the response to that behavior is also offensive. I think my attitude toward multiculturalism’s claims to represent a cogent and useful educational and social philosophy is fairly skeptical, but I had a very hard time entering into Bernstein’s sense of some of the situations he describes.

Bernstein is generally interested in cases in which people seem to have overreacted to inadvertent, misunderstood, or trivial affronts to their self-esteem. But his idea of what constitutes overreaction is sometimes hard to credit because his idea of what constitutes an affront seems rather limited. He tells us, in his opening pages, about an editorial run by the Philadelphia Inquirer proposing to decrease the number of poor, specifically black children by offering welfare mothers added benefits if they agree to use a contraceptive called Norplant, which makes women infertile for five years. Bernstein regards this rather eugenicist and racially targeted proposition as “the normal expression of opinion,” and he cannot understand why both black and white reporters became extremely upset about it, and why the paper decided to run an apology. . . .

The reaction to the Inquirer editorial does not seem to me, even on Bernstein’s account, to have been inappropriate. Among other things, the paper decided to require that editorials on controversial topics be approved in the future by the entire thirteen-member editorial board. Bernstein complains that this gives “veto power to the board’s three black members.” True enough. It also gives veto power to any one of the board’s ten non-black members.

I admire the distinctly Menandian deadpan quality of that final sentence.  But I admire even more Menand’s sense of how to gauge a writer’s credibility when it comes to matters about which there is no social consensus.  And on that count, I think it’s diagnostic that Bernstein directed his criticism not at an editorial calling for the temporary sterilization of black women but at the possibility that three black members of the Philadelphia Inquirer editorial board be granted veto power over editorials on controversial topics.  It’s a handy index to Bernstein’s sense of political priorities.  And it’s regrettable that Scialabba didn’t pick up on it, or, perhaps, didn’t have a harder time entering into Bernstein’s sense of some of the situations he describes.

If Scialabba is a bit too generous with Bernstein, he is not altogether fair to Edward Said. Culture and Imperialism, Scialabba writes, is “an inexhaustibly tiresome book.” “The writing is clumsy, stilted, verbose, imprecise, and marinated—pickled—in academic jargon”; worse still, “Said’s polemical manners, here as elsewhere, are atrocious: sneering, overweening, ad hominem. Too often, he innocently misinterprets or not-so-innocently misrepresents other people’s arguments.”  I suppose this is plausible enough—I’ve heard similar complaints about Said before.  But Scialabba’s distaste for atrocious polemical manners did not prevent him from writing an admiring review of Alexander Cockburn, so perhaps this is one of those cases to which Scialabba refers in his essay on Hitchens. Still, Scialabba is probably right to find Said’s reading of Austen’s Mansfield Park reductive and tendentious.  In response to Said’s claim that “the extraordinary formal and ideological dependence of the great French and English realistic novels on the facts of empire has never been studied from a general theoretical standpoint” (a claim which is buttressed in part by making much of Sir Thomas Bertram’s departure from Mansfield Park for his estate in Antigua), Scialabba is withering:

[Said’s] interpretive strategy is bold and ingenious. “How are we to assess Austen’s few references to Antigua, and what are we to make of them interpretively? … My contention is that by that very odd combination of casualness and stress, Austen reveals herself to be assuming … the importance of an empire to the situation at home.” This is the hermeneutics of suspicion a la folie.

In fact, not much more can usefully be said about the relation of Mansfield Park to the British Empire than that the former was written in the latter. “Extraordinary formal and ideological dependence,” my eye. It is just this sort of grandiloquent assertion that excited so many people about Orientalism and that makes Said’s celebrity so depressing.

It was a heady time—I remember it well, that particular postcolonialist moment in which the most urgent task at hand involved finding some way of linking Jane Austen to imperialism, slavery, and genocide.  I’m not surprised that Scialabba finds it all a bit overheated.  But I am surprised by the final paragraphs of the review, which basically charge Said with giving at the office:

For many people with aesthetic tastes and talents, real politics—anything likely to produce new legislation, not just new curriculum—is bound to seem like fearful drudgery. Since neither accepting irrelevance nor plunging into the pedestrian is an attractive option to most literary people, some have looked for reasons to consider the aesthetic as political. It’s too difficult getting up to speed to debate economics or foreign policy with smart right-wingers. And organizing the unfortunate is appallingly dull. So, since finding evidence (however far-fetched) of the “formal and ideological dependence” of art on social structure appears to provide work both congenial and useful, it is denominated “political.”

This is not such a contemptible evasion. The dilemma it is meant to resolve is a subtle one; to feel it at all is honorable. And Said has, to his credit, plunged into the pedestrian—into the details of contemporary political debate—more than most. But few of his epigoni have the energy to follow him there.

Here the strain is evident.  For whatever one’s opinion of Said’s politics—and he had legions of admirers and detractors on that score—it would seem incontrovertible that he had a politics, that he was intimately involved in one of the most explosive geopolitical conflicts on the left for most of his intellectual career, that he was a champion of the Palestinian cause in a United States deeply hostile to such champions (see also Chomsky, Noam).  It is simply implausible to accuse Edward Said of evading real politics by finding far-fetched evidence of the formal and ideological dependence of art on social structure.  And so Scialabba does not throw that pitch; instead, he sets, winds up, delivers . . . and stops himself at the last moment, admitting that Said plunged into political debate more than most and leveling the accusation instead at Said’s “epigoni.” They’re the ones who are giving at the office, yet for their lapses Said is apparently to blame. This, I think, is not quite cricket.

I’ll close, however, on another note.  Because insofar as Scialabba’s culture-wars dispatches argue that the politicization of culture leads to a trivial or attenuated form of politics, Scialabba clearly has a point, regardless of whether I agree with his reviews of Bernstein and Said.  So let’s take up matters of aesthetics.  In his review of Against the Grain, Scialabba takes issue with the New Criterion’s faith in “intrinsic merit.”  Kimball and Kramer write: “We proceed on the conviction that there is such a thing as intrinsic merit, that it can be discerned and rationally argued for, and that its rejection is a prescription for moral and cultural catastrophe.”  Scialabba’s response is smart and eloquent—and, in the end, questionable:

Well, then, what is intrinsic merit? “Intrinsic” can’t mean “universally agreed upon,” since no aesthetic criteria are. It can’t mean “independent of inherited, unconscious, or other local determination,” since no beliefs are. It can’t, in short, mean supra-historical and non-contingent, since nothing whatever is. What Fish, Rorty, and other pragmatists contend is that all criteria start out equal and must be justified to those who would be affected by their adoption—that democracy, in other words, is prior to philosophy. Beyond this, as Fish never tires of pointing out, antifoundationalism has no consequences. In any case, if Kramer and Kimball believe there are objective, irrefragable, rationally demonstrable aesthetic and moral criteria, they ought by now to have offered the rest of us a fairly precise idea of what they are, or in whose writings they can be found.

They haven’t, and they can’t. But then, they needn’t. They need only muddle along, employing and occasionally articulating the criteria that have emerged from our culture’s conversation since the Greeks initiated it, and showing that what used to and still usually does underwrite our judgments about beauty and truth is inconsistent with giving Robert Mapplethorpe a one-man show, or Karen Finley an NEA grant, or Toni Morrison a Nobel Prize. More than that, no one can do.

OK, I’ll take Finley off the table—she’s not exactly my cup of chocolate.  But Mapplethorpe and Morrison?  Really?

It’s hard to tell whether Scialabba is seriously saying that what used to and still usually does underwrite our judgments about beauty and truth is inconsistent with critically acclaiming Mapplethorpe and Morrison, or whether he is simply inhabiting and ventriloquizing the New Criterion worldview as a good reviewer should do.  But in either case, I think there are two possible responses.

The first is to take the low road, and deal simply with the political aspect of this judgment, be it Scialabba’s or Kimball and Kramer’s.  Mapplethorpe, Finley, and Andres Serrano (for Piss Christ) were, infamously, the basis for Patrick Buchanan’s kulturkampf campaign for the Presidency in 1992, and many leftists might reflexively think that any artist on the wrong side of Buchanan must be on the right side of history—and that anyone who criticizes such artists is therefore objectively pro-Buchanan.  But to make that argument is precisely to take cultural artifacts and cultural debates on narrow political terms, and to confirm Scialabba’s sense of why this is a bad thing to do.  So I’m going to go with the second response, and demur from this judgment on aesthetic grounds.

Regardless of whether one thinks Mapplethorpe’s X Portfolio is “objectionable,” as Menand put it, I honestly don’t believe there can be any serious question as to the aesthetic quality of Mapplethorpe’s work in formalist terms; his photography is exquisite, and I’m willing to bet that quite a number of the people who have employed and articulated aesthetic criteria since the Greeks might agree.  Likewise, I see no problem whatsoever with awarding the Nobel Prize to Toni Morrison; I think her narrative talent is on a par with Coetzee, Lessing, and Garcia Marquez, and surely neither the standards of the Nobel Prize nor the history of aesthetics was traduced when they received the award.

But to make this argument is to suggest that the faculty of judgment we bring to art and literature is inseparable from the faculty of judgment we bring to the rest of the world.  It is also to suggest that some aspects of the culture wars weren’t distractions at all; on the contrary, they were about nothing other than the employment and articulation of public standards of judgment.  And George Scialabba knows all this very well, which is why his many contributions to that conversation, then and now, remain so valuable—even, or especially, when his judgments don’t concur with mine.

OK, that was a moment.  Now back to talking about blogging.  Here’s Hilzoy:

The main reason I started blogging, besides the fact that I thought it would be fun, was that starting sometime in 2002, I thought that my country had gone insane. It wasn’t just the insane policies, although that was part of it. It was the sheer level of invective: the way that people who held what seemed to me to be perfectly reasonable views, e.g. that invading Iraq might not be such a smart move, were routinely being described as al Qaeda sympathizers who hated America and all it stood for and wanted us all to die.

I thought: we’ve gone mad. And I have to do something—not because I thought that I personally could have any appreciable effect on this, but because it felt like what Katherine called an all hands on deck moment. I had heard about times like this in the past—the McCarthy era, for instance—though I had never expected to live through one. Nonetheless, I was. And I had to try to do something, however insignificant.

When I read this, I had the eerie feeling that I’d heard it before—from Tristero, from Atrios, from pretty much everyone who started blogging in 2002, back when the blogosphere consisted mainly of techno-utopian libertarians, back when “Liberal Oasis” truly was a liberal oasis, back before the concept of the “shorter” was invented as a way of taming the Den Bestean beast.  (I didn’t start blogging then—but I started reading blogs then, searching for a liberal oasis in the midst of the madness.)  It’s not too much to say that the liberal blogosphere began largely in response to the insane policies and the sheer level of invective in the runup to war in Iraq—not only from the right, of course, but from the Very Serious People who, just after promising us a rose garden and a cakewalk, described even the most measured critics of an Iraq invasion as raving lunatics unfit for serious public discussion.

Does Hilzoy exaggerate?  Do I?  I’m afraid not.  Hilzoy’s farewell address reminds me of something I came across in the course of writing the-book-that-will-be-out-in-November, something that might be worth revisiting now.  In that book, whose title I forget, I spend a few dozen pages on the prelude to war in Iraq, and I mention Al Gore’s September 23, 2002 speech to the Commonwealth Club of California.  In that speech, Gore said things like this:

To begin with—to put first things first—I believe we should focus our efforts first and foremost against those who attacked us on September 11th and who have thus far gotten away with it. The vast majority of those who sponsored, planned and implemented the cold-blooded murder of more than 3,000 Americans are still at large, still neither located nor apprehended, much less punished and neutralized. I do not believe that we should allow ourselves to be distracted from this urgent task simply because it is proving to be more difficult and lengthy than was predicted. Great nations persevere and then prevail. They do not jump from one unfinished task to another. We should remain focused on the war against terrorism.

I believe that we are perfectly capable of staying the course in our war against Osama Bin Laden and his terrorist network, while simultaneously taking those steps necessary to build an international coalition to join us in taking on Saddam Hussein in a timely fashion. If you’re going after Jesse James, you ought to organize the posse first. Especially if you’re in the middle of a gunfight with somebody who’s out after you.

I don’t think we should allow anything to diminish our focus on the necessity for avenging the 3,000 Americans who were murdered and dismantling the network of terrorists that we know were responsible for it. The fact that we don’t know where they are should not cause us to focus instead on some other enemy whose location may be easier to identify. We have other enemies, but we should focus first and foremost as our top priority on winning the war against terrorism.

Nevertheless, President Bush is telling us that America’s most urgent requirement of the moment—right now—is not to redouble our efforts against Al Qaeda, not to stabilize the nation of Afghanistan after driving its host government from power, even as Al Qaeda members slip back across the border to set up in Afghanistan again; rather, he is telling us that our most urgent task right now is to shift our focus and concentrate on immediately launching a new war against Saddam Hussein. And the president is proclaiming a new, uniquely American right to preemptively attack whomsoever he may deem represents a potential future threat.

Moreover, President Bush is demanding in this high political season that Congress speedily affirm that he has the necessary authority to proceed immediately against Iraq and, for that matter, under the language of his resolution, against any other nation in the region, regardless of subsequent developments or emerging circumstances. Now, the timing of this sudden burst of urgency to immediately take up this new cause as America’s new top priority, displacing our former top priority, the war against Osama Bin Laden, was explained innocently by the White House chief of staff in his now well-known statement that “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.”

Nevertheless, all Americans should acknowledge that Iraq does indeed pose a serious threat to the stability of the Persian Gulf region, and we should be about the business of organizing an international coalition to eliminate his access to weapons of mass destruction. Iraq’s search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to completely deter, and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power. Now, let’s be clear, there’s no international law that can prevent the United States from taking action to protect our vital interests when it is manifestly clear that there is a choice to be made between law and our survival. Indeed, international law itself recognizes that such choices stay within the purview of all nations. I believe, however, that such a choice is not presented in the case of Iraq. Indeed, should we decide to proceed, our action can be justified within the framework of international law rather than requiring us to go outside the framework of international law. In fact, even though a new United Nations resolution might be helpful in the effort to forge an international consensus, I think it’s abundantly clear that the existing U.N. resolutions passed 11 years ago are completely sufficient from a legal standpoint so long as it is clear that Saddam Hussein is in breach of the agreements made at the conclusion of the Persian Gulf War.

Go ahead and read the whole thing, as we used to say on blogs.  Pretty sane, centrist stuff, right?  Not according to the late Michael Kelly, who famously responded like so:

Politics are allowed in politics, but there are limits, and there is a pale, and Gore has now shown himself to be ignorant of those limits, and he has now placed himself beyond that pale.

Gore’s speech was one no decent politician could have delivered. It was dishonest, cheap, low. It was hollow. It was bereft of policy, of solutions, of constructive ideas, very nearly of facts—bereft of anything other than taunts and jibes and embarrassingly obvious lies. It was breathtakingly hypocritical, a naked political assault delivered in tones of moral condescension from a man pretending to be superior to mere politics. It was wretched. It was vile. It was contemptible. But I understate.

Read that whole thing, too.  Kelly’s rant may have been spittle-flecked, but it was merely the spittle-flecked version of the conventional wisdom of the time.

And here’s something I decided to leave out of the book.  Kelly, you may recall, was the first American journalist to die in the Iraq war; he was killed on April 3, 2003 in a Humvee crash.  Today, there is a Michael Kelly Award in his honor—sponsored, as that home page tells you, by “Atlantic Media Company where Michael Kelly was Editor and Chief Editorial Advisor.”  Now, of course I understand that the man must be memorialized in some way, and of course it’s good to see that the award goes to actual investigative journalists doing actual investigative journalism.  But I have to admit that this bit makes me feel all squicky inside:  “The Michael Kelly Award honors a writer or editor whose work exemplifies a quality that animated Michael Kelly’s career: THE FEARLESS PURSUIT AND EXPRESSION OF TRUTH.”

Golly, I don’t know.  We are, after all, talking about the guy who replied to Gore’s sane speech with some pretty vile and contemptible hysteria—and who had spent, by that point, more than five years sliming Gore in this way.  Check out this timely column from November 15, 2000:

It’s a tossup as to what is most revolting about Al Gore’s determination to vote-rig his way into the White House. You could argue that it is the daylight-brazenness; decent people know that this sort of thing is done under cover—that’s how Boss Daley, father of Gore’s campaign chief, Bill Daley, always did it. Then there is the utterly reckless selfishness; the price of a Gore presidency will be a constitutional crisis, a divided nation and a taint on the presidency. But we’ve been there before, and as Gore’s boss said at that time, the important thing is just to win.

My sense is that there are already a couple of real awards for actual investigative journalists who are dedicated to the fearless pursuit and expression of truth; maybe the Kelly Award (since the man really should be memorialized in some way) should be reserved for something else, something that exemplifies some other quality that animated Kelly’s career.  Perhaps, to take a cue from Hilzoy, someone should propose a alternative Kelly Award honoring writers who, by means of their sheer level of invective, work to demonize liberals who hold perfectly reasonable views?

There is much talk among the literary Darwinists and their allies about not wanting to go back to the days of “old-boy humanism,” with its “impressionistic” reading and “belletristic” writing. (Only in English departments could good writing be considered a bad thing.) But no matter the age or gender of the practitioner, any really worthwhile criticism will share the expressive qualities of literature itself. It will be personal, because art is personal. It will not be definitive; it will not be universally valid. It will be a product of its times, though it will see beyond those times. It will not satisfy the dean’s desire for accumulable knowledge, the parent’s desire for a marketable skill or the Congressman’s desire for a generation of technologists. All it will do is help us understand who we are, where we came from and where we’re going. Until the literary academy is willing to stand up in public and defend that mission without apology, it will never find its way out of the maze.

OK, well, certainly Deresiewicz knows that the standard complaint about “belletristic” writing is not that it’s well written.  Traditionally, “belletrism” suggests a kind of glib, breezy dilettantism, the kind of thing for which this blogger is deservedly notorious.  So let’s get that straight.  But after that glib, breezy parenthesis, the rest of the paragraph is quite wonderful.  And I say so not only because it agrees so nicely with my conclusion in my 2003 essay, “The Utility of the Arts and Humanities,” where I write,

if we understand human history in its historicity, there will be no final answers to any of the questions we might pose about the American Civil War or the rise of the caliphate or the Edict of Nantes or the emergence of homo/hetero classifications for sexuality or any other significant historical event or process; no final interpretations in literature, anthropology, dance, philosophy, or music; no answers that cannot be challenged and answered again from fresh social and historical perspectives.  This is what we humanists do:  we try to determine what it all means, in the broadest sense of “it” and “means,” and just as important, how it all means.

No, I think Deresiewicz’s final paragraph is quite wonderful all on its own.  Its agreement with stuff I believe is just extra bonus points.

And even better, Deresiewicz’s essay contains a bunch of things I wish I’d said, like the conclusion of this piquant paragraph:

Again and again, Darwinian criticism sets out to say something specific, only to end up telling us something general. An essay that purports to explain Shakespeare’s preeminence as a playwright argues instead that drama appeals to us because it portrays the social dynamics of small human groups (as evidenced by the fact that Shakespeare’s casts range from eighteen to forty-seven characters). [Brian] Boyd devotes a hundred pages to the Odyssey without saying anything he couldn’t have said with Anna Karenina or Middlemarch or Proust. The discussion is nothing more than an illustration of Darwinian ideas, not an explication of Homeric meanings. Indeed, it’s an illustration of largely one idea, that before an artist can even worry about meanings, he needs to figure out how to hold his audience’s attention. If the point sounds banal, that is squarely within the emerging disciplinary tradition. I have read any number of Darwinian essays about Pride and Prejudice (one critic calls it their “fruit fly”), but I have yet to read one that told me anything interesting. The idea that the novel is about mate selection does not count as an original contribution.

Now, I haven’t yet read Boyd’s book (I’m slated to review it for the same place I reviewed Alan Sokal’s book last year), so I’ll reserve judgment about that, of course; I’m encouraged to see that Deresiewicz says that Boyd is “a clearer and more careful thinker than most of these other writers,” because those other writers are people like Denis Dutton, whose work has always seemed to me to be a variation on “the giraffe has a long neck, and the elephant has a long trunk, and therefore humans make abstract sculptures, just so!  Thus I have refuted Judith Butler!”  But, even with judgment reserved, I have to say I do love Deresiewicz’s final sentence, the idea that the novel is about mate selection does not count as an original contribution.  Besides, everyone knows that Pride and Prejudice is not about mate selection.  Hart Crane’s The Bridge is about mate selection, as is Blake’s “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” and that’s where your literary Darwinism really comes in handy.

But I can only admire Deresiewicz’s essay so much, you know, because there are a couple of really false notes in it.  Here’s the worst of ‘em:

The humanities, meanwhile, are undergoing their own struggle for survival within the academic ecosystem. Budgets are shrinking, students are disappearing, faculty positions are being lost, institutional prestige has all but evaporated. As the Darwinists are quick to point out, a lot of this suffering is self-inflicted. In literary studies in particular, the last several decades have witnessed the baleful reign of “Theory,” a mash-up of Derridean deconstruction, Foucauldian social theory, Lacanian psychoanalysis and other assorted abstrusiosities, the overall tendency of which has been to cut the field off from society at large and from the main currents of academic thought, not to mention the common reader and common sense. Theory, which tends toward dogmatism, hermeticism, hero worship and the suppression of doctrinal deviation—not exactly the highest of mental virtues—rejects the possibility of objective knowledge and, in its commitment to the absolute nature of cultural “difference,” is dead set against the notion of human universals. Theory has led literary studies into an intellectual and institutional cul-de-sac, and now that its own energies have been exhausted (the last major developments date to the early ‘90s), it has left it there.

This is the kind of thing “Landru” was saying in a recent thread at my place, and I think it’s worth taking up at some length.  So here we go, at some length.

First: there’s a grain of truth in there about the dogmatism and hermeticism associated with Theory.  I touched lightly on that phenomenon in my opening post on the great Valve-Theory’s Empire Wars of 2005, which led my theory-besotted blog to develop the series known as “Theory Tuesdays.”  In one of the better contributions to that debate, John McGowan acknowledged,

There is evidence of group-think out there. Let me give an example that bugged me for years. For a long time (happily that time now seems over), lots of people in literary studies knew that if Habermas said it, it must be wrong. The man couldn’t get a fair hearing in certain circles. The reasons for this failure in open-mindedness are many and complex. But we certainly should not discount the bad effects of a lousy job market and of the increasing pressure to publish. Conformity will result when it is very hard to get—and to keep—a place at the Theory’s Empire table.

(The passage has disappeared from the Internets but can be found on page 22 of this fine dead-tree publication, thanks to John Holbo.)

The “if Habermas said it, it must be wrong” era isn’t quite over, as evidenced by the response of some of the Theory crowd to What’s Liberal; that response went something like, “it’s all very well and good to talk about the separation of powers and the relative autonomy of civil society as forms of ‘liberalism,’ but everyone knows that liberalism is really just a stalkinghorse for the imperialist Enlightenment project of universal reason and also cannot account for its imbrication in the system of power/knowledge.”  People can write this stuff in their sleep, and some actually do.  Anyway, the claim that Theory involves hero worship is sometimes true.  But then, not everyone who does theory worships Theory’s heroes, and there are plenty of people who hate Theory and worship anti-Theory heroes of their own.

Second: when Deresiewicz charges that Theory “rejects the possibility of objective knowledge and, in its commitment to the absolute nature of cultural ‘difference,’ is dead set against the notion of human universals,” again, there’s a grain of truth there.  Those of us in the humanities who know something about human biology—and this group would include Richard Powers, whose most recent novel Deresiewicz disdained for telling us too much about human biology—tend to agree that the Theory wing reaches for its guns when it hears the term “human universals.”  But as for “objective knowledge”—my stars!  What is this thing called “objective knowledge”?  Can you explain it for me?  Can you give me an example of it?  (And don’t give me an example of a brute fact, like “carbon is the sixth element in the periodic table.”  Give me an example of something that humans know objectively, independently of their sense impressions, beliefs, etc.)  And then, when you’ve done all that, can you give me an explanation of what this appeal to “objective knowledge” is doing in an essay that insists that criticism “will be personal, because art is personal. It will not be definitive; it will not be universally valid”?  Because I could use an objective explanation of what’s going on here.

But enough with the grains of truth already!  Let’s get to the really annoying stuff.

Budgets are shrinking, students are disappearing, faculty positions are being lost, institutional prestige has all but evaporated.

All of these things are true: our budgets are shrinking, our faculty positions are being lost, and our institutional prestige has all but evaporated.  All of these things are true, except the bit about the students.  Honest to Moloch, I’m beginning to think nobody takes me seriously when I cite the Digest of Higher Education Statistics, and that makes me sad.  But go ahead and click that link!  Discover there the shocking and surprising truth—that English enrollments plummeted between 1970 and 1980, from 63,914 degrees to 31,922, and then rebounded thereafter, reaching the 50,000 mark in 1990 and hovering in that vicinity ever since.  In other words, during the years when Theory was at its peak, when everybody knew that Habermas was wrong and that anything Gayatri Spivak told you three times was true, the English major actually drew in tens of thousands of new students, some of whom may actually have liked the fact that their literature classes were places they could read and think and talk about gender and sexuality and textuality and even some of that power/knowledge flimflammery.  (And in graduate programs, where Theory was thickest, enrollments soared:  to take one readily-available measure (.pdf), 3,299 humanities doctorates were awarded in 1987, 5,109 in 2007.)

Besides, everybody knows that the decline of the humanities, with regard to funding and prestige, has nothing to do with student enrollment.  It has to do with the Sokal Hoax, which proved once and for all that everything Sokal’s fans can’t stand is objectively wrong.  But since Janet has promised to bury me alive and cover me with quicklime if I ever mention the Sokal Hoax again, I have to offer an alternate theory of What Went Wrong with the Humanities.  And I have decided that the real reason that people no longer trust or respect humanists is that some of us write solemn essays about how their elite educations have rendered them incapable of making small talk with plumbers.  Call it the Higher David Brooksism.  (A serious aside: if your plumber is wearing a Red Sox cap and talks with a thick Boston accent, and you can’t even say a few words to him about the recent history of the Red Sox, that’s not the fault of your elite education.  It’s just you.  Sociability fail.)

More seriously, and on a less personal note: the truly false note in this lament about the baleful reign of Theory is this.

… other assorted abstrusiosities, the overall tendency of which has been to cut the field off from society at large and from the main currents of academic thought, not to mention the common reader and common sense.

To paraphrase the mighty Fafblog, “Oh no! Not common sense! That’s where all my friends live!”  Certainly, we can’t have a form of literary criticism that cuts the field off from common sense.  Literary criticism should be devoted to the elaboration of insights that pretty much anybody could come to, and that most people would agree with.

And has Theory and its assorted abstrusiosomousiosites cut the field off from “society”?  Undoubtedly, because that’s where all my friends live, too.  Back in 1970, the field of literary criticism was part of society, and was even mentioned in the society pages of the New York Times.  Then Theory came along, and M. H. Abrams never appeared on The Tonight Show—or in the pages of the Times—again.

But the claim that Theory has cut the field of literary studies off from “the main currents of academic thought” is surely the strangest claim of all.  Because if there’s one thing that Theory clearly did, for good or for ill (mainly for good, I think, but with my usual caveats), it established a kind of interdisciplinary esperanto for humanists, artists, and social scientists.  As Michèle Lamont put it in one of her guest-posts here:

The relationship between philosophy and the humanities—where is it going in substantive terms? Is philosophy truly so disciplinarily isolated? With the progressive importation of French structuralism and post-structuralism over the last thirty some years, “European theory”—which generally means French, but also German and sometimes British theory) has become lingua franca across a number of humanities disciplines and interpretive social sciences and has allowed English and comparative literature experts to converse with art historians, architects, musicologists, anthropologists, etc. In philosophy, the continental tradition remained marginal. The influence of analytical philosophy facilitated other forms of interdisciplinary exchanges with fields such as cognitive psychology, linguistics, legal theory, etc. We have many forms of interdisciplinary dialogues, which function on different kinds of shared cognitive platforms—different currencies.

Interesting, is it not, when you adopt a wider disciplinary perspective than that provided by Deresiewicz?  Suddenly it looks like philosophy might have been isolated from the rest of the arts, humanities and interpretive social sciences, and “theory” might have been the means by which scholars conversed across the disciplines of  English and comparative literature, art history, architecture, musicology, anthropology, etc.  For really—and I think we’re in the realm of objective human knowledge here—there’s no plausible way to claim that when literary studies started talking about Foucault, the discipline cut itself off from history and political theory and sociology and philosophy and anthropology.

Now, it’s always possible to claim that the rise of Theory and its spread across the disciplines is responsible for the decline in funding and prestige in certain sectors of the humanities and interpretive social sciences.  I think that claim would be contestable, but it is not implausible, since there might indeed be some correlation between “challenging common sense” and “losing funding and prestige.”  But you really can’t claim that the rise Theory cordoned off literary critics and left us unable to converse with people in other disciplines.  Because that would be just silly and blinkered and also wrong.

OK, I’m off to talk about these things with a bunch of people from the arts and humanities and sciences.  I’ll check in when I can.

x-posted.

Gail Collins:  David, can we talk hot-button social issues for a second? I know this is not really an area where you fly the conservative colors, but you’re the go-to guy on how America lives, and I’d like to hear your thoughts even if we can’t work up a fight.

This just makes me want to lie down on top of the Applebee’s salad bar and never get up again.

OK, I admit it, I did indeed finish that conversation.  But only because I was fortified by this old chestnut first.  Once I regained the will to live, I read Brooks’ final comment:

what I’m trying to say is that people seek to preserve the orderly bonds around them. Most people, even on these hot button issues, gravitate toward positions that seem to best preserve unspoken communal understandings. As a result, I don’t expect sharp change on any of these subjects. There is a gradual acceptance of gay and lesbian rights, but I think progress will take longer than people anticipate. On gun control and abortion, I don’t see much change of any sort.

There are fewer and fewer culture warriors in America. Most people want order and peace.

Right, of course, except for the people who don’t.

More importantly: to revive an argument I made in What’s Liberal and have been repeating ever since (like right now!), this kind of sober centrism doesn’t explain why seventy-something percent of Americans disagreed with the Supreme Court’s rejection of state bans on interracial marriage in Loving v. Virginia in 1967, but only about seventy-something people consider this a “hot-button social issue” now.  (For those of you who still haven’t read What’s Liberal despite my most earnest entreaties: I note in the epilogue that TV’s first interracial kiss occurred the next year, in 1968, on Star Trek—and that the episode was widely banned in the South.  This despite the fact that (a) Uhura and Kirk, the kissers in question, were not acting under their own power at the time, and (b) Kirk kisses every woman in the galaxy eventually.  Not to mention the ancillary fact that since this is Star Trek we’re talking about, the kiss took place in the twenty-third century, so even in 1968 it hadn’t really happened yet, which should have reassured Southerners and racists everywhere that their unspoken communal understandings about such matters would persist for quite some time.  (Flash forward to the twenty-first century: a check of the Google tells me that the only people upset by the Spock-Uhura kiss in the new Star Trek movie are the people at Stormfront, and no, no link to them.)

I keep coming back to Loving v. Virginia not only because it’s the obvious reference point for contemporary debates about gay marriage, but also because I think it’s an especially good device for asking one of Ye Oldest Questions in Ye Olde Historicist Handbook, namely, how does seismic cultural change like this happen?  Base, superstructure, determination in the last instance, you know the tune—the last time I tried to sing it, I wound up with this three-part essay on Raymond Williams’ “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory.”  When I was out at Reed College earlier this month, I mentioned this in the course of a talk on the history of cultural studies, and since my audience consisted of about fifty alumni most of whom were twentysomethings when Loving v. Virginia was decided, we had a spirited discussion of this and much else.  One younger alumna wanted to know why there seems to have been such an amazing liberalization of popular opinion with regard to gay marriage, gays and lesbians in the military, etc., while progress on gender equity, measured from (say) the Neolithic period, has been so glacial; I responded, of course, by saying “you know, when you feel like you’ve been leapfrogged by gay marriage, this is where Williams’ dominant/ emergent/ residual argument comes in really handy.”  Then someone asked how I would account for the decline in smoking over the past forty years.  I said, more or less, that (a) maybe, just maybe, sometimes enormous, decades-long public-health campaigns actually work! and (b) at some point over those forty years, as the social stigma of smoking got stronger and stronger, smoking got itself more and more strongly associated with the poor and the working class, which surely accelerated the process of stigmatization.  These are pretty obvious arguments, I know.  If only I’d waited until Henry’s post went up!

Anyway, the point remains that the “people gravitate toward positions that seem to best preserve unspoken communal understandings” argument is just lazy and bad and also wrong.  Because sometimes, those unspoken communal understandings turn out to be no more substantial than a puff of smoke.

Here’s the Oyez summary of the case.  Since Garcetti involves the fate of a deputy district attorney in Los Angeles who was whistleblowing with regard to what appeared to be a fraudulent affidavit, most people didn’t realize that it might have implications for academic freedom.  Ah, but not the AAUP’s legal staff!  They were on the case, so to speak, from the start (here’s a .pdf of the brief).  Which is yet another reason you all (if you’re college professors) should have joined the AAUP by now, because (a) the AAUP sees these things coming when most of the rest of us don’t and (b) helps to fight ‘em in court.  Indeed, the AAUP/ Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression brief seems to have caught the attention of David Souter, who, bless his retiring heart, wrote in dissent:

This ostensible domain beyond the pale of the First Amendment is spacious enough to include even the teaching of a public university professor, and I have to hope that today’s majority does not mean to imperil First Amendment protection of academic freedom in public colleges and universities, whose teachers necessarily speak and write “pursuant to official duties.”

In response, Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion, citing Bugs Bunny, replied, “ehhhhhh … could be!”  Though the actual language was this:

There is some argument that expression related to academic scholarship or classroom instruction implicates additional constitutional interests that are not fully accounted for by this Court’s customary employee-speech jurisprudence. We need not, and for that reason do not, decide whether the analysis we conduct today would apply in the same manner to a case involving speech related to scholarship or teaching.

In other words, we’re leaving that door open, thanks—if any lower courts want to walk through it, just make sure they wipe their feet on the 1940 Statement of Principles of Academic Freedom.

And don’t be fooled by Kennedy’s reference to “scholarship and teaching,” either. Anything you do or say as part of your job as a public-university employee—including ordinary university committee work that touches on matters of institutional policy and procedures—can now be grounds for disciplinary action, up to and including dismissal.

Or so held the Hong court.  And as a result, the members of the Faculty Senate at the University of California-Davis recently received this letter:

Academic Senate colleagues,

The UC Davis Academic Senate Committee on Academic Freedom and Responsibility has been carefully reviewing recent court cases in which professors have sought relief from real or perceived disciplinary actions against them by the university administrations at their institutions. These cases include Hong v UC Regents, Renken v Gregory et al. (representing University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee), and Gorum v University of Delaware. Each case has unique circumstances, but the uniformity of the judicial rulings across these cases provides a clear and important message that we feel is necessary to make you aware of.

According to recent court rulings, your speech and behavior in job-related duties as a public employee rather than a private citizen have no First Amendment protection. This means that disciplinary action may be taken against you (including dismissal) for statements you make in the course of your employment. Any activity performed on the job falls within this purview. According to the recent court rulings, speech and actions in shared governance activities are certainly not protected. Historically, courts perceived that some First Amendment protection may exist for speech and actions related to your academic scholarship, but that subset of activities has never been directly evaluated by the Supreme Court. It may be that future cases will reverse the present trend and give support to faculty. Nevertheless, we recommend that you expect that your speech and behavior outside of your field of scholarship is absolutely not protected by the First Amendment.

Further, university policies on academic freedom (APM 010 and 015) only protect speech and behavior in your area of demonstrated academic scholarship. Do not expect that university policies give you a right to speak and act freely in your job duties on campus outside of your scholarship. For example, the Renken case illustrates that your speech and actions related to the management of your research grants are not protected, even though the activities covered by those grants are part of your academic scholarship. Our employment culture at UC Davis has been supportive of transparency and freedom, but it may not be a right.

In light of the present deep economic recession and dramatic cuts under discussion at UC Davis, faculty participating in shared governance are in a position in which they may voice strong views and concerns that could lead to lawful but punitive reaction by the administration, including denial of merits and even dismissal. Given the legal and policy realities at hand, we highly recommend that you use caution, restraint, and judgment in your speech and actions in all job-related duties.

Committee on Academic Freedom and Responsibility

How do I know this?  Because UC-Davis historian Eric Rauchway passed it along to me this weekend, and I forwarded it to the AAUP (with his permission), and now Eric has blogged about it as well.  (I did not know there was an Ari Fleischer University!  Ah, well, We Are All Ari Fleischer University Now.)  Here’s Eric:

In Hong v. Grant, Judge Cormac Carney ruled that it didn’t really matter why Hong had been denied his merit, because even if he had been denied on account of his statements, rather than on account of a modest research record, it would have been acceptable under Garcetti v. Ceballos.

Mr. Hong is under professional obligation to actively participate in the interworkings and administration of his department, including the approval of course content and manner of instruction.

If I follow the logic correctly, Hong is obliged to participate in the administration of his department. But the definition of “actively participate in the interworkings and administration of his department” appears here to be, “say only those things which won’t lose you a merit increase.”

Now so far, the implication of the case seems to be, don’t say anything bad about how the administration runs the university. None of this seems to touch utterances in the classroom or research. But it doesn’t exclude them, either. As Carney notes, “In the University of California system, a faculty member’s official duties are not limited to classroom instruction and professional research.” Which is to say, official duties include serving on committees and suchlike in addition to classroom instruction and professional research. The clear implication of this sentence is that classroom instruction and professional research would be covered under Garcetti, unless they were specifically exempted by such precedents as Souter cited.

What is to be done?  Well, I’ve already suggested, and will suggest again, that it’s a good time to join the AAUP and help fund our attempts to get this stuff overturned and reversed and rendered moot.  But in the meantime, if you’re working at a public university, you should probably set about revising your faculty handbook as well, just in case.  As it happened, earlier this year the Penn State Faculty Senate asked me to consult with them about threats to academic freedom, and asked whether I had any advice for them as they reviewed Penn State’s academic freedom guidelines.  “Oh boy, do I,” I replied, “and this time, my advice has nothing to do with He Who Shall Not Be Designated By His First Initial and a Drastic Truncation of His Surname.”  I showed up and proposed a specific revision to our handbook, along the lines of the language proposed by the University of Minnesota Faculty Senate.  At Minnesota, they’ve struck the phrase “as a public citizen” from the following, because the logic of Garcetti (and all its children) is that you still have First Amendment rights when you speak as a citizen; you just don’t have them as a public employee.  The italicized passage is the new language:

Academic freedom is the freedom to discuss all relevant matters in the classroom; to explore all avenues of scholarship, research, and creative expression; and to speak or write as a public citizen without institutional discipline or restraint on matters of public concern as well as on matters related to professional duties and the functioning of the University. Academic responsibility implies the faithful performance of academic duties and obligations, the recognition of the demands of the scholarly enterprise, and the candor to make it clear that the individual is not speaking for the institution in matters of public interest.

Hat tip to my friend Cary Nelson, AAUP President, who called this to my attention in his forthcoming book, No Campus is an Island: Saving Academic Freedom.  (Due next spring from NYU Press.  Keep an eye out for it!)

It’s so funny, except of course that it’s not funny at all: you spend so much time and energy defending academic freedom from the culture warriors of the right, and then something else, completely unrelated, comes along and does far more systemic damage.  Interestingly, Ye Olde Culture Warriors of the Right haven’t had much to say about the Children of Garcetti either.  But since this development could certainly affect conservative professors (if there are any left in the United States after the Great Purge) at public universities who comment on their schools’ policies and procedures, maybe it would be a good time for everyone to recognize that it makes sense to protect faculty from institutional retaliation when they speak on matters “pertinent to official duties.”

x-posted.

By the time Leon Wieseltier had taken to the pages of The New Republic to thunder that Cornel West’s work was “noisy, tedious, slippery . . . sectarian, humorless, pedantic and self-endeared,” indeed, “almost completely worthless,” and Adolph Reed Jr., doing his usual contrarian thing, had shot back in the Village Voice that Wieseltier’s essay was a “right-for-the-wrong-reasons attack,” I could see that there was a bona fide pile-on in progress. As even the leftist Adolph Reed Jr. says about Leon Wieseltier’s essay in Even The Liberal New Republic. . . . And so, uncharacteristically, I decided to stay mostly out of the fray—until Sean Wilentz published “Race, Celebrity, and the Intellectuals: Notes on a Donnybrook” in the summer 1995 issue of Dissent.  At the time, I was a little bit pissed off that Wilentz accused me of “liberal racialism,” and a little more pissed off that he wrote,

in 1963, it was possible to open the New Yorker and find Dwight Macdonald there descanting thoughtfully and at length about The Other America.  Now in place of Macdonald there is Michael Bérubé celebrating Race Matters and works by the other new black intellectuals—a case of misjudgment, no doubt, but also a sign about more general trends in intellectual reportage.  Whereas Harrington could count on tough remarks and rebuttals as well as praise, especially from his closest associates and friends, West and many of the other prominent black writers have been treated (at least until recently) to the sort of tumultuous acclaim that suffocates their better intentions.

And

the hype has been picked up by writers for the national media and turned into more disturbing forms of celebrity mongering—the latest example of a trend that has gripped almost every field of artistic and academic endeavor.  And some of the mongering has managed to slip into some unexpected places.  The grandest puff appeared last winter in a group review by Michael Bérubé that turned up in the New Yorker. . . .

Now, I admit that I have a funny reaction when people sneer at me like this and ask who let me into the club; I usually extend my hand to them and say, “it’s such a pleasure to meet you—I’m your replacement, and I have to ask you to leave.”  So part of my reply to Wilentz in the fall ‘95 Dissent included my Deeply Considered Opinion that his essay was “half pot-shot, half rehash, wholly inadequate to the task,” and it closed by asking Dissent “how Sean Wilentz’s piece managed to slip into your pages.”  (In the following issue, Martin Kilson chipped in, writing, “I do not think the Sean Wilentz article . . . warranted publication in Dissent.”  I liked that.)  But seriously, I did think it was a bit rich for me to be accused of celebrity-mongering in an essay that included passages like this:

“The proper starting point for the crucial debate about the prospects for black America is an examination of the nihilism that increasingly pervades black communities,” [West] writes in Race Matters.  This is a risky position for any progressive social critic, and particularly for any black social critic who appeals for the remediation of black poverty but does not wish to present poor blacks as, yet again, passive “targets” for social reform or as participant-victims of a dysfunctional culture.  West wants to generate concern about the black poor without pathologizing them (or construing the black middle class as greedy wannabes); at the same time, he wants to defend “traditional morality” and traditional institutions, like churches and schools, from that dread culture of consumption without simply reciting the neoconservative mantras—  religion, family values, private associations—of our day.  It’s a tricky double play, and he doesn’t always pull it off.  The fact is that it’s often difficult to distinguish between conservative and progressive critiques of the social corrosiveness of consumer capital.  For one thing, both points of view tend to rely on the idea of some once unalienated human community that has been violated by modernity: leftists can look back at precapitalist gemeinschaft and conservatives can long for the agrarian pastoral with more or less the same ardor.  It’s remarkable but altogether fitting that West’s work turns out to make some common cause with that of the cultural conservative Daniel Bell—who “in stark contrast to black conservatives,” West writes, “highlights the larger social and cultural forces, for example, consumerism and hedonism, which undermine the Protestant ethic and its concomitant values.”

Because the funny thing was that my little essay was not, in fact, totally bereft of “ideas.”  OK, they weren’t very great ideas, and yes, I admit that I opened the piece by writing “Cornel West is Teh ROxxOr Intellectual Of All Times! 1 ! 1”—but even there, I think I deserve some credit for being the first person to use “Teh” in the New Yorker.  (Dwight Macdonald was actually the first to write “ROxxOr,” though few people remember this today.)  But I did try to suggest a thing or two along the way, like this, for example:

What Marxism was to Lionel Trilling, Clement Greenberg, Philip Rahv, and company, black nationalism is to West, Gates, hooks, et al.:  the inspiration, the springboard, the template, but also the antagonist and the goad.  Just as the postwar Jewish intelligentsia largely abandoned radical politics but remained committed to rethinking America’s progressivist traditions (often by delivering scathing critiques of radical politics), the black intelligentsia of our fin de siècle has largely abandoned cultural nationalism while remaining committed to refiguring forms of African-American collectivity (often by delivering scathing critiques of cultural nationalism).  But the new intellectuals have a markedly different relation to the vernacular of their time.  A major part of what the New York intellectuals represented, in cultural politics, was a collocation of the politics of anti-Communism with the literature of high modernism–something that required its inventors to erect a cordon sanitaire protecting “real” culture from contamination by the kitsch, dreck, schlock, pop, and camp that surrounded it.  One cannot imagine, given the past decade’s controversies over black popular culture, the new black intelligentsia adopting the same cultural politics.

And this:

Because non-black audiences are still the ones that have the power to put black artists at the top of the charts, African-American intellectuals’ uneasiness about black commercial and professional success stems in part from the long-standing fear that “crossing over” must entail selling out.  It’s what leads to hooks’ attack on [Spike] Lee—the unstated suspicion that any critical or commercial success with white audiences is, de facto, political failure. [hooks had argued that “Lee’s work cannot be revolutionary and generate wealth at the same time,” so that he is confined to “reproducing conservative and even stereotypical images of blackness so as not to alienate that crossover audience”; specifically, she insisted that his version of Malcolm X “has more in common with Steven Spielberg’s representation of Mister in the film version of The Color Purple than with real-life portraits of Malcolm X.”]

So if black public intellectuals are legitimated by their sense of a constituency, they’re hamstrung by it, too: they can be charged with betraying that constituency as easily as they can be credited with representing it.  On the one hand, they have an unprecedented opportunity to speak from, to, and for a public, since their professional bona fides depend not on their repudiation of vernacular African-American culture but on their engagement with it.  On the other hand, they inhabit an intellectual tradition of extreme sensitivity toward the issue of who represents what to whom—a tradition in which the weightiest term of disapprobation is that familiar bludgeon “Uncle Tom.”

And, finally, this:

Nor is fluency in popular culture a guarantor of popular influence.  In the preface to Making Malcolm, Michael Eric Dyson recounts that when he quoted Snoop Doggy Dogg during a United States Senate subcommittee hearing on gangsta rap he was told by a young black admirer that “for a guy your age, you really can flow.”  He’s right to be pleased by the compliment.  An intellectual generation that responds broadly and sympathetically to popular culture has numerous advantages over an intellectual generation that defines itself against popular culture.  But for cultural critics the danger of popular acclaim is that it can tempt them to pay more attention to the responses of young admirers than to the deliberations of Senate subcommittees.  And it can tempt them to pull their punches, as when bell hooks, in an interview with the rap artist Ice Cube that appears in Outlaw Culture, sounds uncharacteristically tentative about Cube’s misogynistic lyrics and declines even to ask him about his role as a pitchman for St. Ides.  Intellectuals need not be so arrogant as to claim to occupy the cultural vanguard, but in renouncing that role they need not settle for the role of fan, disk jockey, or press agent….

The overwhelming irony here is that black public intellectuals are doing their work—at colleges, in churches, and on cable TV —at a time when the very idea of “the public” has become nearly unthinkable in national politics.  Such has been the signal achievement of the New Right, whose religious wing has built its organizations on the bedrock of home, school, and family while attacking the realm of the public in the name of the people.  Public housing, public education, public health, public ownership, public welfare—to much of the American electorate these terms signify that which is not in the public interest.  Black public intellectuals like West or hooks may have a large public following, but the paradoxical conditions under which they operate dictate that they will have to revivify the nation’s faith in the “public” if their work is going to have broad political consequences.  The measure of their success will be the degree to which they help generate a sense of the public as elastic and capacious as their sense of the intellectual.

Controversies over Snoop Dogg and St. Ides!  Ah, it was another time, you understand.  A long, long time ago. And more than a decade ago, I gave all this stuff its very own file in my office file cabinet, stuffing in all the essays by Sean Wilentz and Leon Wieseltier and Adolph Reed and Ellen Willis and Jon Weiner and Michael Hanchard and then later academic essays by Henry Giroux and Herman Gray and even bell hooks’ reply (she wasn’t very pleased either), and I haven’t looked at it since.

So why am I looking at it now?  Because, dear reader, I recently came across an essay in the Blackwell Companion to African-American Studies, edited by Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon and published in 2007.  It’s Hazel Carby’s “The New Auction Block: Blackness and the Marketplace.”  And guess what?  Part of the essay is yet another attack on Ye Olde New Yorker Essay of 1995, written by me.  And this time, my essay isn’t just celebrity-mongering and grand-puff-daddying.  It’s also “paternalistic”—and worse!

But before we get to the worse part, let’s explain the “paternalistic” part.  It has to do with Carby’s belief that Robert Boynton and I claimed to have discovered black intellectuals for the first time in all of recorded history.  The lead-in goes like so:

Marketing the field has led to a preoccupation with the “newness” of African-American Studies, an arena in which scholars continually make “discoveries” erasing the history of any previous engagement with these texts (124).

In the next few years the media would become obsessed with the newness or novelty value of African-American Studies and the originality and rarity of their “discovery” of black intellectuals. . . .  The “traffic between culture and authority” would be apparent in the 1990s, when contemporary black intellectuals were “discovered” and in the process authenticated by the New York literary establishment.  Media investigations into African-American Studies and the role of black intellectuals read like journalistic sorties into the colonial wilderness of the academic outback. (125)

OK, so by this point I’m a member of the New York literary establishment, hacking his way into the colonial wilderness of the academic outback.  All the way from central Illinois. And then comes the bit about how my essay didn’t talk about any, you know, books and ideas:

Bérubé ’s review, instead of being a review of this work, of books and ideas, turns out to be a review of these authors; they are paraded like models on the catwalk of the latest academic fashion shows.  (125-26)

But of course it is not intellectual history that is at stake in this story, it is marketing.  The point is to erase history and to deny an organic relation between contemporary black intellectuals to a past of collective struggle.  (127)

Well, I’m used to this sort of thing by now, so I’m thinking, “yeah, yeah, I didn’t discuss West and Dyson on black nationalism or hooks on feminism, or the relation between contemporary black intellectuals and black popular culture, or the relation between cultural politics and public policy.  And even when I suggested some kind of organic relation between contemporary black intellectuals and a past of collective struggle, I got myself accused of ‘liberal racialism.’  But I knew all that already!  Where’s this ‘new action block’ I heard about in the title?”

Oh, wait, here it comes:

Bérubé ’s and Boynton’s “discovery” of black public intellectuals in 1995 was a fraudulent journalistic invention that ranks with the historical recording of the “discovery” of America by Europeans as if the peoples already in residence were incapable of conceptualizing their own material existence.  Their claims of discovery, the assertions of the newness of black, public, intellectual life, allow them to tell and sell their stories.  Boynton wonders how substantial the legacy of his group of black public intellectuals will be, as if he did not already know that two centuries of substantial work by black thinkers in the Americas already exists, and then he questions whether this legacy “will be compromised” by their media popularity: “As public intellectuals gain greater access to mainstream culture,” Boynton asks, “do they become more important thinkers or only better known?”  But while Boynton speculates about the ways in which the work of black public intellectuals could be compromised by the culture industry, he and Bérubé remain totally unselfconscious of the ways in which they are trading in “blackness” in the journalistic marketplace with their newly “discovered,” designer-brand black intellectuals. (128)

Trading in “blackness”—but not in the manner of the old auction block, see.  The new auction block involves people like me and Boynton unselfconsciously engaging in fraudulent journalistic inventions in order to tell and sell our stories.  OK, so now that’s all cleared up.

Well, I don’t know.  I think Boynton’s question about public intellectuals and mainstream culture is a pretty good question for public intellectuals of any color, tint, or stripe, and I’m not seeing how it erases any history.  In fact, I might note that Carby addresses a version of the very same question later in her essay: “In an era in which ideas are of little value, the only possible ‘public’ role for intellectuals is circumscribed by the extent to which they can perform for the market” (132-33).  And I have to say I think Carby’s characterization of my essay as the Second Coming of Columbus is a teeny bit harsh, seeing as how my essay actually says things like this:

Of course, there have been black intellectuals on these shores from 1619 or so, and Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, and Ida B. Wells were about as effective in their day as any nineteenth-century public intellectual could hope to be.  What was lacking, until very recently, was a black public sphere of commensurate size.  Even in the nineteen-twenties, when writers of the Harlem Renaissance set out to theorize about the relation between lumpen black folk and what Zora Neale Hurston wryly called the “niggerati,” black intellectuals were playing to a small crowd indeed.  As Langston Hughes put it, “The ordinary Negroes hadn’t heard of the Negro Renaissance.  And if they had, it hadn’t raised their wages any.”

Until the nineteen-sixties, America’s nationally known black intellectuals tended also to be its nationally known black novelists—the triumvirate of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin, two of whom eventually chose exile over life in their native land.  Meanwhile, within the tiny public arena bounded by segregation, African-American intellectuals like Oliver Cromwell Cox, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Alain Locke, J. Saunders Redding, and Carter G. Woodson were creating African-American history, sociology, and literary criticism in black colleges, black journals like Phylon and The Crisis, or black newspapers like the Pittsburgh Courier and the Afro-American (published in five Eastern cities).  But as long as segregation prevailed in higher education and in the publishing world it was quite easy for white Americans to believe that—Wright, Ellison, and Baldwin aside—the most important books on race in this country were written by white Americans.

I don’t see how this amounts to a claim to have “discovered” black intellectuals in 1995, and I don’t think Carby does either—as she acknowledges in an aside: “Later in [his] article Boynton is forced to admit”—by whom? one wonders—“just as Bérubé conceded in his review, that contemporary black intellectuals are not, of course, the first generation of black public intellectuals” (127).  So I guess you could say that at some point in her essay Carby is forced to admit, or merely concedes, that Boynton and I did not in fact claim to have discovered black intellectuals. But it didn’t prevent her from leveling the charge of “fraudulent journalistic invention” anyway.

But hey, I understand what’s going on here.  As it is in blog comment sections, so it is in the world of serious scholarship: the person who comes very late to the pile-on has to take the invective to the next level.  So it’s not sufficient, any longer, to accuse me of starry-eyed celebrity-mongering.  Now I have to be accused of crimes that rank with the historical recording of the “discovery” of America by Europeans as if the peoples already in residence were incapable of conceptualizing their own material existence—and, oh yeah, the auction block.  Well, ain’t that a shame, since I learned some of what I know about Ida B. Wells and Anna Julia Cooper as black public intellectuals from reading and teaching Carby’s Reconstructing Womanhood back in 1990-91, and I’ve been an admirer of Carby’s work ever since.  But Professor Carby has indeed re-set the bar at the next level, and perhaps in another decade or so I will learn that my little New Yorker essay was the journalistic equivalent of distributing smallpox-infested blankets to the editors of Phylon and The Crisis.  Only worse, for being totally unselfconscious.

x-posted.

I’m at a loss to explain where all these interdisciplinary experts will get their disciplinary expertise. Yes, a significant part of grad school involves exploring new questions. But another significant part—the part he skips—involves getting grounding in the history of a given line of inquiry. Call it a canon or a discipline or a tradition, but it’s part of the toolkit scholars bring to bear on new questions. Abandoning the toolkit in favor of, well, ad hoc autodidacticism doesn’t really solve the problem. If anything, it makes existing grads even less employable than they already are. I need to hire someone to teach Intro to Sociology. Is a graduate of a program in “Body” or “Water” capable? How the hell do I know? (And even if I think I do, can I convince an accrediting agency?) Am I taking the chance? In this market? Uh, that would be ‘no.’

I agree that Taylor’s proposal is unworkable, but I have a tangential-but-related point.  Challenging the departmental structure of universities (whatever you might think of that project) isn’t the same thing as doing away with disciplines.

People elide the two all the time, and it makes me fidget and squirm in my seat and exhale loudly—not least because lots of people in the humanities are responsible for the confusion. Especially those of us in cultural studies.  For a couple of decades now, we’ve prided ourselves on being not merely interdisciplinary but “post”-disciplinary and “anti”-disciplinary.  “Disciplinarity” basically became a dirty word, associated with stodgy, stultifying bureaucracy and, oh yes, punishment (for this I blame Foucault, of course), so that being post- or anti- it seemed like a Good Thing at the time.

But at some point in the late 1990s, while I was just minding my business directing a humanities program (and hey!  check it out! their theme for the 2008-09 year is “disciplinarity”!), it finally occurred to me—well, actually, it occurred to me during a lecture by anthropologist Richard Handler—that 96 or 97 times out of 100, when people complain about “disciplines” they’re actually complaining about departments.  Think of it this way: wherever you see the term “discipline,” substitute “intellectual tradition,” as Dean Dad does in the excerpt above.  Now, what’s coercive or stultifying about an intellectual tradition?  Not much, really.  You want to learn about sociology following Durkheim or Simmel?  Go right ahead.  You want to immerse yourself in the history of object relations theory or ego psychology?  Be my guest.  Disciplines are pretty fluid that way.  For example: let’s say that one of the great literary critics of our era, perhaps one of the founders of queer theory (PBUH), decides one day to engage with the work of Sylvan Tomkins.  Who’s gonna stop her?  You?  The discipline?  I don’t think so.  Or let’s say that a bunch of sociologists, psychologists, rehabilitation counselors, queer theorists, and disability-studies types decide over the course of a couple of decades that Erving Goffman’s work could be really important to them.  Does any discipline have an exclusive claim on Goffman?  Are there intellectual-property statutes involved?  No and no.

Now, I’m not saying that disciplines are infinitely flexible, or that they’re simply a matter of reading this or practicing that; they do indeed have institutional incarnations, and it’s possible for the International Association of Stodgy Stultifiers to bar people from the annual conference program on the grounds that they are no longer “doing” Stodgy Stultifying the way the Association thinks it should be done.  (Not to single anybody out, of course, but surely you remember the days when people would say, “Richard Rorty, PBUH, doesn’t really do philosophy.”) I am, however, saying that (a) disciplines and departments aren’t the same thing, and (b) the former are far more flexible and capacious than the latter.  As for (a): the Department of Anthropology does not consist of one discipline; nor do the Departments of Sociology or History.  The discipline of literary criticism, loose and baggy as it is, is practiced in more than one department: not only in English but in all the modern languages and Comp Lit too.  And English, for its part, houses literary critics and creative writers and rhetoric and composition and sometimes even film scholars (though this “film” fad will surely pass—it’s not really an art form, after all).  As for (b):  becoming interdisciplinary involves training in more than one intellectual tradition; becoming interdepartmental means dealing with a lot of stodgy, stultifying bureaucracy (like figuring out who’s supposed to conduct your pre-tenure reviews and whether a 50 percent appointment translates into 50 percent voting rights).

So the next time someone complains about the constraints imposed by disciplines, ask yourself (or them!) whether they’re not really complaining about the constraints of departments.  And the next time someone claims to be post-disciplinary or anti-disciplinary, ask yourself (but probably not them!) what it would sound like to be “post-intellectual traditions” or “anti-intellectual traditions.”  And then pick up a copy of this illuminating collection of essays, which I blurbed enthusiastically some years ago (as Amazon duly notes) for what will now be obvious reasons.

x-posted, too.

And without further ado:

One useful way to ask about the university after cultural studies is to ask what impact cultural studies has had on the American university as an institution over the past twenty or twenty-five years.  Has cultural studies transformed the disciplines of the human sciences?  Has cultural studies changed the means of transmission of knowledge?  Has cultural studies made the American university a more egalitarian or progressive institution?  And one useful way of answering these questions is to say, sadly, no.  It hasn’t had much of an impact at all.

I’m putting this baldly and polemically for a reason.  I know there are worthy programs in cultural studies at some North American universities, like Kansas State, where there were once no programs at all; I know that there is more interdisciplinary work out there than there was 25 years ago; it seems that there is even an entire Cultural Studies Association of some kind.  But I want to accentuate the negative in order to point out that over the past 25 years there has been a great deal of cultural-studies triumphalism that now seems unwarranted or embarrassing.  In the late 1980s and early 1990s, we heard (and I believed) that cultural studies would fan out across the disciplines of the humanities and social sciences, inducing them to become at once more self-interrogating and more open to public engagement.  Some people even suggested, either in hope or in fear, that cultural studies would become the name for the humanities and social sciences in toto.  And lest this sound grandiose, I want to insist that there was, at the time, good reason to think this way.  The period of theoretical ferment that began in the late 1960s and gained traction in the 1970s seemed to have reached the boiling point:  when Illinois held its “Cultural Studies Now and in the Future” conference in 1990, the program included historians, media theorists, sociologists, anthropologists, and AIDS activists; and the theoretical terrain, over which cultural studies had held its earlier skirmishes with deconstruction, with psychoanalysis, with feminism, and of course with the epochal struggle of Althusserians and neo-Gramscians, had lately been enriched by the arrival of Foucauldian historicism and queer theory.  It really did seem plausible that cultural studies could be the start of something big, something that would have a profound intellectual and institutional impact on the American university.

I’m not saying that it has had no impact. I’m sitting here next to three people [these would be Bousquet, Nelson, and Williams] whose indispensable accounts of the academic labor force in the US have been inspired, in part, by some of the best work in the cultural studies tradition.  And I remember well coming to Kansas State in 1995 and attending a terrific conference whose breakout sessions offered memorable work on everything from Pulp Fiction to pedagogy.  But if you compare the institutional achievements of cultural studies to its initial hopes, I don’t see how you can’t be disappointed by the last twenty years.  In most universities cultural studies has no home at all, which means (among other things) that graduate students doing work in cultural studies have to hope they’ll be hired in some congenial department that has a cultural studies component of some kind.  The good news on that front is that you can now find cultural studies scholars working in anthropology, in critical geography, even in kinesiology.  The bad news is that the place where cultural studies has arguably had the greatest impact is in English departments.  And though people in English departments tend to forget this, English departments are just a tiny part of the university.  Cultural studies may have congenial relations with some wings of some departments of modern languages, in communications, in education, in history or anthropology.  But sociology won’t even open our mail or return our calls, and in that respect the contrast between the situation in the US and the situation in the UK —where cultural studies engaged critically (and often caustically) with sociology from the outset, witness the careers of Stuart Hall, Paul Willis, and Paul Gilroy—could not be more stark.  I recently gave a paper in which I argued that the rise of the political blogosphere was a vindication of one of cultural studies’ central beliefs and a rebuke to the McChesney-Chomsky-Herman model of mass media (all three of those influential theorists, by the bye, said at the outset of this decade that the Internet could not work as a progressive political force because it was commercial). [And then, while I was in KC, I rehearsed that argument in a recent thread on this very blog as well.]  That is to say: cultural studies has taught us—or has tried to teach us—that you don’t know the meaning of a mass-cultural artifact until you find out what those masses of people actually do with it.  After my talk, someone asked me, “but isn’t that really more a question for sociology?”  To which I replied, well, the questions of sociology shouldn’t be considered alien territory for cultural studies.

At the same time, I know you can’t measure the impact of cultural studies simply in institutional terms; it’s not a matter of whether there will ever be as many Cultural Studies programs as there are Women’s Studies programs, and for that matter it’s not clear that the proliferation of Women’s Studies programs has been unambiguously beneficial to the intellectual projects of feminism. [I was thinking of, among other things, Maurice Meilleur’s comment from a recent thread.]  So let me proceed to throw some cold water on the intellectual history of cultural studies in the US.  First and foremost, it has been understood, that is to say misunderstood, as coextensive with the study of popular culture. This is very much our fault: this is what we get for saying that cultural studies has no specific methodology or subject matter, so that it gets elided with “cultural criticism” in general.  At this point in history, anybody writing on The Bachelor or American Idol is generally understood to be “doing” cultural studies—especially by his or her colleagues elsewhere in the university.

This aspect of US cultural studies has often been lamented, and rightly so.  The usual refrain is that once upon a time cultural studies was part of a political project, and now it’s just a matter of watching TV.  But I think that in the US, even the political project of cultural studies has been widely misunderstood.  I argue this point in some detail in my forthcoming book, The Left At War, so I’ll keep this very brief for now.  But much of the American academic left, from education to communications, continues to subscribe to the “manufacturing consent” model in which people are led to misidentify their real interests by the machinations of the corporate mass media.  The point to be made here is not that corporate mass media don’t dupe people; on the contrary, they do it every day.  The point is that Stuart Hall’s work on Thatcherism sought to complicate this picture by recourse to a theory of hegemony that was one part Laclau, one part Poulantzas, one part Gramsci, and one part homegrown Hall.  To this day, Hall’s work is routinely and reverently cited, even as his work on Thatcherism—and the challenge it posed to the intellectual left—is quite thoroughly ignored.  (The Hard Road to Renewal, by the way, is out of print and has been for some time, and most major cultural studies anthologies, including the one organized around Hall’s work, do not include any of the essays from Hard Road.)  The first thing to ask about any ideology, Hall insisted, is not what is false about it, but what is true—what about it actively makes sense to people whose beliefs you do not share.  Does anybody on the left actually operate this way?  Even in the 1980s, there were those who were quite foolishly willing to accuse Hall of betraying the left by proposing that the left could learn from how Thatcherism constituted a hegemonic project. [Addendum: indeed, there was someone at the conference who was willing to repeat that charge today!  I gotta love the fact that someone came to a cultural studies conference to say that.]  And if there was one thing that Hall inveighed against above all others in his debates with his fellow leftists, it was economism, the favorite monocausal explanation of the left intellectual.  As he put it in 1983:

I think of marxism not as a framework for scientific analysis only but also as a way of helping you sleep well at night; it offers the guarantee that, although things don’t look simple at the moment, they really are simple in the end.  You can’t see how the economy determines, but just have faith, it does determine in the last instance!  The first clause wakes you up and the second puts you to sleep.

I read that passage today and I think, how often do we find ourselves ascribing disparate political events and cultural phenomena solely to neoliberalism?  Again, not to say that neoliberalism is immaterial; it has dominated the political and economic landscape for thirty years, and its effects on higher education are palpable, baleful, and undeniable—from the corporatization of administration and research to the withdrawal of state funding for public universities. (In fact, recent analyses of academic neoliberalism by Henry Giroux, Susan Searles Giroux, and Sophia McLennen—in the special issue of Works and Days devoted to academic freedom—have apparently induced Stanley Fish to admit, in so many words, yes indeed, I are an neoliberal, and oh, by the way, people who disagree with me support an academic boycott of Israel.  Kudos to Henry, Susan, and Sophia!)  Indeed, Hall was writing on Thatcherism—and recognizing it correctly for the radical break it represented—just as neoliberal ideology was beginning to discover its powers, and we are meeting just as it has gone off the rails altogether, hopefully to rest in that ash heap of history.  But I raise the question at this conference for obvious reasons—it’s literally on the agenda, in the form of conference seminars on neoliberalism.  And I want to ask, in a general way, whether we’re starting from neoliberalism and then proceeding to the analysis, or whether the analysis simply concludes, it’s the neoliberalism, stupid.  There seems to me all the difference in the world between those two approaches; the latter seems to me to enshrine neoliberalism as the monocausal explanation we had long derided but secretly desired.

Thirteen years ago, in a scathing, freewheeling, and woefully underinformed critique of the field, Bob McChesney asked, is there any hope for cultural studies?  He said no, because cultural studies had gotten distracted by postmodernism and identity politics and had lost sight of the simple truth that the free market is a sham and that people are misled by the mass media.  Enough cultural studies already—we have to get back to good old political economy.  I’m sorry to say that McChesney’s arguments have carried the day in all too many precincts of the university, and I’m even sorrier to say that McChesney’s claim that cultural studies “signifies half-assed research, self-congratulation, farcical pretension” has been gleefully seconded by much of the mass media and underwritten by some work in cultural studies.  But despite what I’ve said here today, I still have hope that the history of cultural studies might matter to the university—and to the world beyond it.  My hopes aren’t quite as ambitious as they were twenty years ago; I no longer expect cultural studies to transform the disciplines.  But I do think it can do a better job of complicating the political economy model in media theory, a better job of complicating our accounts of neoliberalism, and a better job of convincing people inside and outside the university that its understanding of hegemony is a form of understanding with great explanatory power, that is to say, a form of understanding that actually works.

x-posted.

Just as in 2007, veteran Calgary Flames fan Scott Lemieux will offer his take on the playoffs over at Lawyers, Guns, and Money, and I’ll do the honors here, where rumor has it that people have been clamoring for hockey blogging with a mighty clamor.  Though I’ll put most of this under the fold, so that the three or four clamorers and I won’t disturb all the rest of you.

This year, the consensus—and by “consensus” I mean “the opinion of the ten or eleven guys from the Nittany Hockey League with whom I had an end-of-season beer last week”—is that Detroit is the prohibitive favorite to repeat.  There’s a good reason for that, namely, that Detroit is very good.  Speed kills, and speed-plus-skills kills even deader.  Last year they outskated, outforechecked, outshot and utterly outclassed the Penguins, who managed to extend the series to six games by stubbornly refusing to realize just how out of their league they really were.  Indeed, since the Pens had gotten to the finals by crushing their three talented Eastern opponents, winning three series in only 14 games, it was kind of remarkable how out of their league they were when they ran up against Detroit; the lesson was not lost on winger Marian Hossa, who was picked up by Pittsburgh at the trading deadline last season but decided, after seeing Pavel Datsyuk, Johan Franzen, and Henrik Zetterberg blow the doors off the Penguins bus, that he’d rather switch than fight.  His reward for suiting up with the Red Wings this year?  A 40-goal season, good enough to lead the team in that department.

So it’s really unpossible for the defending-champ and second-seeded Red Wings to lose in the first round to the Columbus Blue Blazers, who have made the playoffs for the first time in franchise history (though you should be aware that the Blue Sport Coats didn’t exist a decade ago).  But then again, it was also unpossible for the top-seeded Red Wings to lose to the infant San Jose Sharks (playing in only their third year) in the first round in 1993-94; completely unthinkable for the second-seeded Red Wings (with 49 regular season victories) to lose to the lowly Los Angeles Kings in the first round in 2000-01; utterly unbelievable that the second-seeded Red Wings (48 wins) would be swept by Anaheim in four in the first round in 2002-03; and simply inconceivable that the top-seeded Red Wings, winners of a staggering 58 regular-season games, would lose to the Edmonton Oilers in the first round in 2005-06.

Or, as I said to my fellow NHLers last week, “I can’t imagine Detroit bowing out in the first round.  But I couldn’t imagine it the other four times it happened in the past 15 years, either.”

OK, well, the reason I’m opening by discussing the unlikeliest playoff possibility of them all is that yesterday, I logged onto espn.com and made my Official and Deeply Considered Predictions: in the east, Bruins over Canadiens in six; Capitals over Rangers in seven; Devils over Hurricanes in six; Penguins over Flyers in seven.  In the west, Sharks over Ducks in six; Red Wings over Blue Jackets (for that is indeed their real name) in five; Canucks over Blues in six; Black Hawks over Flames in six.  When I submitted my picks, I realized to my horror not only that I had picked eight favorites (as if this would not be foolhardy enough on its own), but that I had picked eight favorites in so drearily conventional a fashion that my selections aligned with the top one or two fan picks in seven of the eight series (my only “outlier” was my hopeful suggestion that the Rangers will take the Caps to seven games).

That sucks.  And it tells me something about myself I’d rather not have learned.  So I’ve decided to complicate things.

Here’s the overall picture, for those of you who didn’t follow the season.  This slate of sixteen playoff teams breaks down as follows: some of these teams played very well all season long, but have Nagging Questions about their playoff durability.  And some of these teams were bafflingly mediocre in the first half of the season, but caught fire in the second half and are now riding a wave of adrenaline that might well carry them into the second or third round.  There really is no way to know which teams from group A will cough up a hairball or fail to answer their Nagging Questions, and which teams from group B will find that a wave of adrenaline is no match for, you know, individual talent and team discipline.

To wit: in group A, the Boston Bruins appear to be the real thing.  They got off to an eh start, but then scorched through November and December, going 23-2-1 and setting the pace for the East.  Speed and skill on offense, solid D led by the seemingly eight-foot-four Zdeno Chara, and terrific goaltending: clearly this was an unstoppable team, worthy of meeting Detroit in the finals.  Then things got weird: from Feb 7 to Mar 19 the Bruins went 6-9-4, and people began to remember that the team hasn’t gotten past the first round since 1999 (or past the second since 1992).  To make matters worse, they’re facing the Canadiens in round one, a team to which they have lost, I dunno, maybe 37 consecutive times, both as severe underdog (last year) and as overwhelming favorite (2002, 1971).

Likewise, the Devils, Capitals, and Flyers seem to be stocked and healthy, but New Jersey has looked abysmal at inopportune moments (even after Brodeur’s return), the Capitals are still not sure they’re not a one-man team, and the Flyers are wondering how the hell they lost home-ice advantage to the Penguins, who were an eleventh-place team only two months ago.  Indeed, on Feb 16 the Pens were an eleventh-place team at 27-25-6, having just lost in a shootout to the Islanders, which is a little like losing to the Gwinnett Gladiators of the East Coast Hockey League’s southern division.  Two days earlier, they’d fired coach Michel Therrien after an embarrassing 6-2 loss to twelfth- or thirteenth-place Toronto.  Since then, the Penguins are a terrifying 18-3-3, and riding a wave of adrenaline, etc.  Some say they were revived by the firing of Therrien, some say by the return of Sergei Gonchar, who runs their power play.  Either way, they’ll probably be too much for the Flyers.

As went the Pens, so went the Canes: 21-20-5 as of three months ago, 24-10-2 since.  Do the Rangers fall into this category?  Not really: they were always in playoff contention, and haven’t gotten as hot as Carolina or Pittsburgh in recent months.  All we know about the Rangers is that (a) their fortunes seem to depend, rather odiously, on the play of the psychotic yet strangely effective Sean Avery, since nobody else on the team is capable of motivating any of his mates to play like they mean it, and (b) they are capable of playing very well for entire games at a stretch, sometimes as often as twice in the same week.

As for the Canadiens, I’m not convinced they belong in the playoffs at all.  But then again, their powerful C-H insignia has a proven record of sapping the vitality from the Bruins’ large and small muscle groups, so here too, the unpossible may be possible.

In the West, group A consists of the Red Wings, whose Nagging Questions I have already addressed, and the Sharks, who seem to be solid this year but who have established a clear playoff pattern of collapsing completely and unfathomably right around game four of the second round.  The counterparts to the Bruins are the surprising Black Hawks: while it’s great to see professional hockey being played in Chicago again after fifteen years, no one knows if the spunky 20-year-olds who lead this team (Patrick Kane, Jonathan Toews—old guy Kris Versteeg is already 22, and grandpa Havlat is 27) are old enough to grow serious playoff beards.

Group B consists of Anaheim, St. Louis, and the Vancouver Canucks; the Canucks, most mysterious of these three, were stuck in a Penguins-like rut for quite some time.  How long?  Well, in January they played twelve games and won two.  Since then they’re a scary 23-7-2, and since they have the planet’s best goaltender in Roberto Luongo, they’ll probably manage to stanch the adrenaline of those St. Louis Blues, who actually weren’t even “bafflingly mediocre” in the first half.  They were abysmal, just as everyone expected them to be.  They were who we thought they were!  And they were dead last in the Western conference.  On Feb 12 they were 22-25-7 and nowhere near the playoffs; since then they’ve gone 19-6-3.  Alas, the Blues have been so good lately that they just couldn’t stop winning and found themselves with the sixth seed; if they’d had the sense to lose their final game to the sinking Avalanche they would have drawn the eighth seed, giving them a matchup against the Shaky Sharks and a chance for karmic payback for the 2000 season in which the eighth-seeded Sharks bounced them from the postseason in the first round.  As it is, they now have to play a team that’s just as hot as they are.

So, then.  Instead of going with the Safe Picks I enumerated above, in which I weigh teams’ strengths and weaknesses and try to come up with a rational sense of playoff likelihoods, I’m going to make a bunch of Crazy-Ass Picks by weighing a woman and a duck and admitting that I’m rooting for all four of my teams—the Rangers, of course, with whom I grew up, and also the Blues and Penguins, whom I’ve adopted, and the Canadiens, to whom I owe some kind of tribal loyalty.  Without further ado, Crazy-Ass Picks:

East:  Canadiens over Bruins in seven heartbreaking games.  Rangers over Capitals in six headscratching games because I want it that way, even though Washington needs some hockey love.  Hurricanes over Devils in six stormy games.  And the Penguins still beat the Flyers in seven. West: Sharks over Ducks in six, because the collapse isn’t scheduled until round two.  Morning Jackets over Red Wings in seven headexploding games because someone has to say so.  Blues over Canucks in six because I want it that way, even though Vancouver is a very nice city.  And the Black Hawks still beat the Flames in six because the Flames don’t have any defensemen, and they’ll need defensemen to stop those spunky twenty-year-olds.

OK, now this should be fun.

__

*  You understand that for most Americans, all Canadian cities are obscure.  Medicine Hat, Toronto, Rimouski—we have no idea where these places are.

Inviting one and all to the April 15 Tin Foil Hat Parades Tea Parties to protest Obama’s gay Islamic socialism and the Obama Depression it has brought upon us all.  And also to protest fraud in government, a subject about which Newt is an acknowledged expert.

Please join Newt and the “big ideas” people of the new GOP —Michelle Malkin, Glenn Beck, and J. T. Plumber—as they issue their bold new Declaration of Independence from Economic Reality one week from today.

Also, in totally unrelated news, I have a very long post on Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials and C. S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy, if you’re interested in such things.  I kept it over there because I didn’t want to burden CT with a 4000-word treatise, which this margin is too small to contain.

Now, of course I know the joke was supposed to be self-deprecating.  But there are much better ways to be self-deprecating!  Obama could have mocked his bowling skills by saying “I brought my Z game,” which would have been Very Funny because it would have been a play on the sports-cliché of bringing one’s A game, you see, and it would not have offended any Z-Americans, since they have notoriously generous senses of humor.

Then again, a joke about one’s Z-game would not have provided us with the “teaching moment” we’re apparently living through as I write.  The timing of Obama’s misstep is interesting: the Special Olympics has launched a new initiative to retire the R-word, and I hope they have more success with this than I did back in 2005, because my little post on cognitive-disability slurs seems to have had precisely zero effect on the frequency with which “that’s so retarded” is uttered in public and “WTF are you a Fing retard” appears in the blog comment sections in Left Blogistan. (Though not here!)

(Extended aside:  before anybody asks me about Tropic Thunder: strange as it may sound, I actually kind of appreciate how the movie was trying to skewer the Rain Man – I Am Sam – Radio representation of intellectual disability.  It did so in a ham-handed and aggressively unfunny way, but then, it was a ham-handed and aggressively unfunny movie, though not quite so aggressively unfunny as Burn After Reading.  My sense is that it was trying to do for Vietnam War flicks what Galaxy Quest did for SF: to wit, parade and lampoon the cheesy, well-worn tropes of the genre and then work those tropes back into the script for a clever and meta- closing sequence.  Except that Tropic Thunder forgot about the “clever” part and the “funny” part.)

The rest of my reply had to do with the fact that we really, really don’t know how or when or whether to laugh when the subject is cognitive/intellectual disability. The Ringer made a remarkably brave attempt at it, starting from a patently offensive premise (Johnny Knoxville feigns intellectual disability in order to win the Special Olympics) and offering some, but only some, genuinely surprising and warmly humorous moments as the plot unfolds.  (I think Stephanie Zacharek’s review of the film had this just about right.)  And the reason humor is important here will become clear (I hope) at the end of the post.

First, though, here’s what the graduate student said in response: she said that she’d been hearing not merely that this should be a “teaching moment” with regard to cognitive disability but also that we should take the opportunity to revisit the term “Special” itself, in order to ask whether the word hasn’t become the kind of default euphemism that needs to be retired along with the R-word.  “Well,” I said, “I imagine that the Shriver and Kennedy families would have something to say about that, and I don’t imagine that they’d take it as a friendly amendment.”  No doubt, said my interlocutor, but whoever made the suggestion to her had also suggested that Special Olympians themselves take the lead in determining the appropriate language for cognitive disability.  “Hmmmm,” I hmmmed, “now that’s an idea.”  I promised I would throw it up onto the Internets for further discussion, and that’s exactly what I am doing right now.  Discuss!  Or don’t!  Or best of all, just listen when someone with an intellectual disability speaks to you about this!

I did say one more thing that morning, as well.  (Just so you know.)  I drew on something I wrote recently that may or may not appear someplace or other, in response to a request that I write a (very) brief essay on the languages of disability.  Here’s the relevant snippet from the essay I submitted, which I more or less paraphrased at LSU:

The last time I taught Erving Goffman’s Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (a text that has become as important for disability studies as for queer theory), I couldn’t help noticing that at certain moments in Goffman’s text, the most heterogeneous conditions are yoked by violence together, as when Goffman writes that “ex-mental patients and expectant unmarried fathers are similar in that their failing is not readily visible” (48) and that “a woman who has had a mastectomy or a Norwegian male sex offender who has been penalized by castration are forced to present themselves falsely in almost all situations” (75).  What’s going on in these weird passages?  I think Goffman is winking at us, as one of the “wise”: he knows that stigma has a temporal dimension, that social opprobrium, like everything else, can be historicized.  He just doesn’t get around to saying so explicitly until the closing pages of his book, when he suggests that “when, as in the case of divorce or Irish ethnicity, an attribute loses much of its force as a stigma, a period will have been witnessed when the previous definition of the situation is more and more attacked” (137).  Divorce and Irish ethnicity aren’t discrediting attributes any longer; likewise, mastectomy and unwed fatherhood have lost much (though not all) of the stigma once attached to them.  Mental patients and sex offenders, by contrast, continue to be stigmatized, and many people might add that sex offenders are properly stigmatized.  My point—and, I think, Goffman’s implicit point—is not only that stigma has a history but that different forms of stigma move at different speeds.  Why, it is even possible, in today’s modern society today, to find openly gay men and women in elective office—something that was unimaginable at the time Stigma was published.

And yet disability remains deeply and widely stigmatized; I often suspect that cognitive disability is the slowest-moving of the stigmas, and will remain a subject of horror and avoidance for decades to come.  We argue about terminology, in other words (and it is always about speaking in other words), because we don’t yet know which fights to pick and which battles we can actually win.  Perhaps someday, when physical and cognitive disabilities have finally lost much of their stigmatizing force, we’ll be able to look back and determine which arguments about language made a difference, and which were simply clever language games.  Until then, we work in the dark, we do what we can.

I should have added that Stigma practically develops an entire lexicon of disability unto itself; and I might also have added, had I more room to work with (as here, on the Internets), a citation to the passage where Goffman writes, “There is also ‘disclosure etiquette,’ a formula whereby the individual admits his own failing in a matter of fact way, supporting the assumption that those present are above such concerns while preventing them from trapping themselves into showing that they are not.  Thus, the ‘good’ Jew or mental patient waits for ‘an appropriate time’ in a conversation with strangers and calmly says: ‘Well, being Jewish has made me feel that . . .’ or ‘Having had first-hand experience as a mental patient, I can . . .’” (101).  Yes, indeed, here are your good Jews and your discreet ex-mental patients, disclosing their “failings” via the proper disclosure etiquette (and see how the lexicon just taught you the term “disclosure etiquette”?).  I tell you, Goffman knows exactly what he’s doing by juxtaposing these two examples, and it isn’t about likening the two, any more than women who’ve had mastectomies are like Norwegian male sex offenders.

“Another strategy of those who pass,” Goffman writes seven pages earlier, “is to present the signs of their stigmatized failing as signs of another attribute, one that is less significantly a stigma.  Mental defectives, for example, apparently sometimes try to pass as mental patients, the latter being the less of two social evils” (94).  It’s passages like this—and “teaching moments” like ours—that lead me to think that cognitive/intellectual disability is the stigmatized identity that trumps all others, the one everyone else wants to distinguish themselves from, the one that will be hardest to destigmatize.

Which leads me back to humor.  The passage about divorce and Irish ethnicity losing their stigmatizing force goes on to say how “the previous definition of the situation” might be attacked: “first, perhaps, on the comedy stage, and later during mixed contacts in public places, until it ceases to exert control over both what can be easefully attended, and what must be kept a secret or painfully disattended” (137).  I think The Ringer was sincerely trying to destigmatize cognitive/intellectual disability with humor, and at least trying to imagine mixed contacts in public places.  And maybe we can use this teaching moment to think more productively about destigmatizing cognitive disability.  But we don’t quite know how to laugh, just yet, and we don’t quite know what to say.

x-posted for still further discussion

My extensive online research has uncovered the existence of a secret Internet cabal of reporters, journalists, bloggers, writers, and reporters.  Apparently, their self-assigned mission is to ignore major news stories, pass silently over rampant corruption in American government and business, and ridicule wonks and elected officials who take “issues” seriously.  Instead, they seek—often by fawningly citing each other’s work—to inundate American media with inane, trivial bullshit and deliberate stupidity.

The group is called “Twit,” and it is allegedly responsible for innumerable stories and op-eds about Michelle Obama’s biceps, Hillary Clinton’s cleavage, Al Gore’s wardrobe, and Barack Obama’s flag pin.

But beyond these specific examples, it’s hard to trace Twit’s influence in the media, because so few Twits are willing to talk on the record about it.

One byproduct of that secrecy: For all its high-profile membership—which includes Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Maureen Dowd, Mike Allen of POLITICO, Camille Paglia of Salon, Mickey Kaus of Slate, Richard Cohen of the Washington Post, and Caitlin Flanagan of the Atlantic—Twit itself has received almost no attention from the media.

A LexisNexis search for Twit reveals exactly nothing. Brad DeLong, a nonmember, may be the only academic blogger to have referred to it “in print” more than once—albeit dismissively, as “a bunch of twits.”

While members may talk freely about Twit at, say, a Georgetown dinner party, there’s a “Fight Club”-style code of silence when it comes to discussing it for publication.

Kaus, however, did agree to speak on the record, acknowledging that the idea of journalists and writers forming email discussion groups “seems contrary to the spirit of the Web.”