The Little Professor is being Critical

Le Penseur. Photo by Mark Paciga.

There have been two interesting posts on the subject of theory in literature studies, but which are probably relevant to many of the social sciences. The Little Professor has a long but rewarding post Critical which tackles an article by Lindsay Waters in the Chronicle of Higher EducationLiterary Aesthetics: the Very Idea. The original is accessible for a fee of $45. For those of us who don’t think in dollars – that’s just over twice as much as the complete works of William Shakespeare (leather bound). But hopefully the preview of the article makes the point clear.

Trying to figure out what’s up with American literary scholarship — I mean the writing coming out of colleges that relates to literature — is difficult. This stuff cannot be understood by the norms of healthy literary criticism as it has been practiced from Aristotle to Helen Vendler.

Ever since it became professional and, for the most part, lost touch with the readers who have fostered the little-magazine criticism that reaches back to The Spectator, today’s academic scholarship has become separated from its grounding: It is no longer connected to the very medium that gave it rise, literature.

I recommend reading the whole of the Little Professor’s response but her reply to this:

At the risk of sounding like Ophelia Benson (not, I’d add, that I consider that at all a bad thing): “norms”? Which “norms”? What sort of historical narrative easily encompasses everyone from Aristotle to Vendler?

The obvious answer is “a shonky one”. I’m not a fan of Kuhn’s paradigms being applied to science for various reasons, the biggest one being that it doesn’t work. Broadly speaking the idea that science moves on in revolutions and explores the limits of the theoretical phase space before rejecting the whole theoretical structure.

Where is breaks down is that Kuhn thought that one paradigm was incommensurate with another so that Ptolomaic astronomy simply didn’t have the common ground to talk to Copernican astronomy. A Copernican simply couldn’t understand the Ptolomaic universe, the paradigm shift locked the one from the other. Yet when you look they actually have a lot of common ground and share basic concepts. But I do wonder of Kuhn’s paradigms do work for the Arts. Consider how you gain your stamp as a PhD at the moment.

You need a PhD to become an academic, and the PhD is supposed to be an original contribution to knowledge. The easiest way would be to take what is already known and simply look in an unexplored corner of the world to add-on some knowledge to the dominant paradigm. So if, overnight, Marxism becomes terribly hip in Classics then you see that people have produced theses on Socrates and Marx, and the Marxist Plato and spot the gap to produce Aristotle: A Marxist Perspective. It’s new, but it’s exploring the area laid out by the paradigm. Sooner or later the phase space is getting crowded. Now consider the expansion of Higher Education in the past century. The fundamental forces of research haven’t changed, but if you though more researchers into a phase space they will fill it up more quickly. Hence some of the explosion of progress in research. I’d suggest this works for the sciences, but not for the Arts.

In the Sciences there’s an increasing body of data which doesn’t fit the dominant paradigm. It becomes clear that the rules of the game are wrong, or if you want me to sound more like a relativist that Nature isn’t playing by the right rules and so a new game has to be invented. This brings on the revolution. The Arts on the other hand work in culture rather than nature. This might suggest that Arts are more amenable to stasis because culture is malleable and can be made to fit theories. However this malleability is also a problem. Nature today is the same as nature in the 1950s. Culture is different. A theory of society built in the 1950s is dated because society has moved on, it simply isn’t the same thing as it was in 1950. The change in cultural attitudes also causes paradigm shifts, but because these attitudes are embedded in personal cosmologies then the revolutions really do become incommensurate. Much as I study Sparta, I am not ever going to understand it as the ancient Greeks studying Sparta did because we are simply of from different cultural environoments.

But I also said that more researchers also makes for revolution. In the case of the Arts the revolution is a revolution in culture. Arts researchers produce culture. In the case of the Arts increasing revolutions produces a culture of revolution, and revolution is based on theory. Rather than using a process to examine norms of the time, revolution itself has become the norm.

At this point it’s time to look at Ophelia Benson, who the Little Professor links to.

Over twoposts Benson tackles another article in the Chronicle of Higher Education: The Fragmentation of Literary Theory by Jennifer Howard. Between the two they show the absurdity where perpetual revolution is the mainstream orthodoxy.

Howard notes: Literary theory of one sort or another goes back at least as far as the ancient Greeks. But it has had a particularly busy hundred years or so. The function of a lot of literary theory is to be read by scholars, and the number of scholars of literary theory has exploded in the past century. If someone knows of a study of this please point it out to me in the comments below, because I’d love to read something better than my own take on this, but this quote from the Chronicle makes the connection between payroll and progress pretty explicit.

It may be neither fair nor accurate, decades after Theory hit its high-water mark, to keep using it as a whipping boy for everything that has gone wrong with literary studies. “The problem of the humanities is funding, lack of institutional support, lowering enrollments, lowering numbers of hires, the rise of part-time labor,” says Andrew Parker, a professor of English at Amherst College. “This is the real crisis, not whether we have theory with a capital T or a small T.”

You may think I’m being simplistic. I’d love for someone to prove me wrong on this. But that would suggest that quantity rather than quality of research is the issue.

Is there a dearth of quality?

Mark Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University and a contributor to Theory’s Empire, describes the current situation as “a free-for-all. Theory has no material coherence, only an attitude. That is, if you claim to be a theorist, you say little about what your interests and materials are, only how you approach them,” he wrote in an e-mail message. “I just checked the latest issue of Critical Inquiry and spotted articles touching upon homeland security, the American toy industry, microcinematography, and Wired magazine. Anything, it seems, is fair game for theorization.

Yet, as both Benson and Howard (at the foot of the CoHE article) make clear, Theory which can tackle anything seems to come from a rather small source. The result that Benson ridicules is that radical theory is operates within very parochial limits and is highly conservative in its engagement with the world.

This shouldn’t be too surprising. There is obviously a fundamental paradox in insisting that the orthodoxy be challenged and also relying on the academic establishment for promotion. What would be the ideal survival strategy? I’d make sure that my radical new critique followed exactly the same rules as everyone else’s so that it could be understood. I’d critique someone dead for preference, possibly even defining rigid limits on what can be critiqued. It would have to be theoretical perspective that was critiqued rather than arguments of fact, because knocking out the latter might cause trouble for people who’d accepted them for their own theses. I’d also make it obscure and opaque, just in case I do challenge someone important. That way no-one will find it, and even if they did I could claim they’d misunderstood it.

It’s not that I don’t think theory is relevant, more that from the point of view of satisfying the metrics, whether it’s RAE or citation indices, mechanistic theory – you throw in the names Foucault and Barthes and out pops theory – is just as effective as rigourous theory and safer. It perhaps should not be a surprise that Theory is both over and omnipresent. It has to be there to satisfy the social norms of academia and much of it is designed to be ignored and inoffensive. —–