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Thursday, November 17, 2005
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More Trouble with Slate Slate magazine, we can now conclude, is over UD’s head. Not only did she fail to get its recent essay about blogs (scroll down to "Blogoscopy"), but she also fails to get its more recent essay on literary theory. The author seems to say that there’s always been something pathetic about English professors as intellectuals and academics. They’ve never known what they are, or what they’re supposed to do. Indeed, no one knows what English professors are or what they’re supposed to do. So for a long time English professors have simply consulted their particular literary loves and worked up courses about them. There wasn’t anything systematic or utilitarian about what they did in the university. They were adorable amateurs among the professionals, playing kittenishly with this text and then that in front of their students and in their written work. As a kind of afterthought, they’d work up some sort of legend about the literature they liked to make it seem central and important to their institutions: No one knows what an English professor does. In waking up each day only to rejustify their entire existence — to jealous colleagues, to class-shopping undergraduates, to the administrative purse strings — professors of literature invoke the literary past in whatever way will most advance their own institutional self-interest. This approach made English professors “suckers,” the author writes, because their fond passion for certain aesthetic forms meant they were susceptible to literary hoaxes like Ossian. And English professors remain suckers today in their more recent guise as literary theorists so enamored of anti-Enlightenment legends that they fell for the Sokal hoax. English professors have always been suckers, then, except for one brief period: the heyday of deconstruction: The English professor himself was slowly evolving. The key to that evolution was what is sometimes called "the linguistic turn." Language is of course the necessary medium for all advanced learning; but after Wittgenstein, the default position of the tenured philosophe has been that only within language can we order and experience human reality. If the English professor is the expert in charge of understanding how we use language—how metaphors shape history, how history shapes our metaphors, etc., etc. — he holds a position of enormous intellectual authority on a college campus. Con man, because he was no longer the old sucker, “vulnerable to charlatanism and dupery” on account of his know-nothing love of Jane Austen. Now he knew that he understood language, the very medium of human understanding, better than anyone else. Only he didn’t, really, or he got it all wrong somehow, but anyway he temporarily convinced everyone (hence, con man) that he had all this intellectual authority. How are you doing with this argument? I’m having trouble. I think what would help me is the inclusion of the real con man who did in literary theory. It wasn’t Alan Sokal. It was Paul de Man, embodiment of that brief shining moment of the English professor’s moral, intellectual, and institutional authority. (He was in Comp Lit, but that's close enough.) Anyway, the Slate writer concludes, literary theory is now dead: These days, no think tank pundit would bother to denounce literary theory; its biggest stars, by way of generating some final headlines, have publicly disowned it; and no fresh cohort of terrifying intellectual charismatics has crossed the Atlantic to revive it. The writer concludes elegiacally that something was lost when the English department relinquished its status as the all-purpose intellectual nerve center on the American college campus. In its weakness lay its great strength: For not knowing exactly what an English professor does, the English department, though vulnerable to charlatanism and dupery, was also the last great repository for the nonutilitarian hopes of the university. [W]as it so wrong for a university to indulge one department whose time was spent agonizing over the entire mission of knowledge production itself? By never firmly establishing what it itself was for, the English department cultivated habits of withering self-reflection and so became one mechanism by which the university could stay in touch with its nonutilitarian self and subject its own practices to ongoing critique. Did the theory era produce bullshit by the mountain-load? Of course it did. But by allowing "literary theory" to turn into a pundit's byword, signifying the pompous, the outmoded, the shallow, the faddish, we may have quietly resolved the argument over what a university is for in favor of no self-reflection whatsoever. UD does not remember literary theory in those days (she studied it with a variety of people at the University of Chicago -- including de Man, when he was a visiting professor there) as a fruitfully self-reflective, non-utilitarian sort of thing. She remembers it as involving one of two intellectual positions: either you took on what Harold Bloom called the “serene linguistic nihilism” of de Man (which was certainly non-utilitarian, but was also totally despairing about the possibility of our using language to understand and change the world), or you took on the ultra-utilitarianism (in the sense of subordinating everything to desired political outcomes) of the higher Marxism associated with Fredric Jameson. So while UD loves the idea of English departments as great repositories for the nonutilitarian hopes of the university, she does not see how literary theory, even at its peak, helped them be this. |