A Stirring Call to Theoretization
My head hurts. Or is it my stomach. Or is it some finely-tuned moral or cognitive or aesthetic sense situated somewhere between the two – somewhere mid-gullet, perhaps, or resting on the back of the third rib. Whatever it is, it comes of reading this. What is it that’s so irritating about this…
The Culture Wars of the 1980s and 1990s led some of us to believe that the end of the canon, the end of seemingly objective appraisals of “aesthetic complexity” through close readings, the end of the representation of the culture of white males as culture per se, meant that some major battles in the politics of representation had been won. Some scholars however, suspected that the battle had simply shifted elsewhere and so while the critiques of the canon held strong, while courses on queer theory, visual culture, visual anthropology, feminist theory, literary theory began to nudge the survey courses, the single-author studies and the prosody classes aside, the discipline itself lost currency faster than the dollar.
Oh, god, I don’t know. It’s the scare quotes on ‘aesthetic complexity,’ for one thing, as if that’s a stupid or pathetic idea. Well fine. Sod complexity. Up with simplicity. Paint everything one colour, play one note, say one word. Obviously doing anything else is a plot of white males. And then it’s the pathetic lost-in-the-fogness of thinking of this kind of thing as a ‘battle’ – it’s the stupidity of thinking that that’s meaningful politics and something to boast of. (That is a very boastful paragraph, if you look at it carefully. You’d think she’d just got back from the Spanish Civil War with her arm in a sling. Please.) It’s the idiot self-hugging over all those ‘theory’ courses. It’s the crap writing. It’s the whole damn package.
The Birmingham School in England in the 1970’s probably brought an end to English as we know it by proposing that the study of a small selection of texts written in English by a small group of mostly male white writers served to legitimate certain class interests in the university and elsewhere.
Really! Did it! Just like that! A few people in one place say one thing at one moment, and that’s all it takes? English (understood as an interest in Anglophone literature) has been brought to an end! How about that. Here’s me still liking things like ‘The Prelude’ and ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Henry IV part 2’ – don’t I feel silly.
The work that emerged from the Birmingham School and that came to be called cultural studies has combined with postcolonial studies, black studies, queer studies, ethnic studies and women and gender studies to create the humanities as we know it and to spawn the constellation of debates and arguments about empire, subjectivity, hegemony, resistance, subversion, imagination and representation that currently occupy contemporary academics and that briefly but powerfully impact the lives and consciousnesses of the students who pass through humanities class rooms and others who interact in a public sphere with versions of these conversations.
Ohhh, is that what happened. Cool. So ‘English’ has taken over first all of the humanities (which would surprise some historians and philsophers of my acquaintance, among other people) and then the rest of the public sphere – by spawning debates about ’empire, subjectivity, hegemony, resistance, subversion, imagination and representation.’ Really. You know, I wouldn’t have guessed that. I really wouldn’t. Because, see, when I want to think about empire, the first place I think of to look is not, oddly enough, the English department, not even what used to be the English department but is now called the Theory Studies department. See, I tend to think there are other scholars who know more about the subject, so I read their books, instead of the books of Study Theories scholars. Hidebound of me, but there it is.
The beauty of English as a discipline in the last decade has been how flexible the field became, how receptive to new scholarship, how hospitable to queer theory, feminist studies, the study of race and ethnicity, political economy, philosophy and so on. “English” is in fact the anachronistic name we give to a far more protean field of interests and animating concerns; and the fights that we now have over English, over its relationship to the interdisciplinary forms it has given rise to, are really the aftershocks of an event that is well past.
Flexible. Hmm. Yeah, that’s one word for it. But another word (or pair of words) would be mission creep. Or not so much mission creep as mission spread all over the place like watery syrup. Why don’t they get it? Why don’t they get it that nobody wants to learn about political economy or philsophy from people in the (former) English department? Why is it that people in English-turned-Theory think they’re omnicompetent? Why is that? I’ve been wondering for years, and I’m no closer to an understanding than I ever was.
I propose that the discipline is dead, that we willingly killed it and that we now decide as serious scholars and committed intellectuals what should replace it in this new world of anti-intellectual backlash and religious fundamentalism. While we may all continue doing what we do — reading closely, looking for patterns and disturbances of patterns within cultural manifestations, determining the complex and fractal relations between cultural production and hegemonies — once we call it something other than “English,” (like cultural studies, critical theory, theory and culture, etc.) it will neither look the same nor mean the same thing and nor will it occupy the same place in relation to the humanities in general…
The fractal relations between cultural production and hegemonies – ain’t that great? Original, too. Man, I wonder what it would be like to take a course from Judith Halberstam. I’m not tempted to find out, though.
In the process of changing from women’s studies to critical gender studies, these programs have rearticulated their theoretical projects and shifted the emphasis away from reclamations of lost pasts and affirmation of neglected perspectives and towards the consideration of transnational feminisms, gender and globalization, gender and sexuality in relation to race and so on…These interdisciplinary programs emerged as the result of shifts in the discipline that English could not accommodate and, in my opinion, they should be able to replace the traditional English department in the future by recognizing the impossibility of studying literature separate from other forms of cultural production and by exposing the counter-intuitive logic of building Humanities divisions around departments dedicated to the study of the literature and culture of the British Isles…Spivak argues that comparative literature and area studies, like certain forms of anthropology, constitute a colonial legacy in terms of the circulation of knowledge and that in order to confront and replace such a legacy, we have to reconstitute the form and the content of knowledge production.
Argh. Those last quotes come less than halfway through the article. It’s all quotable, and it’s long – so I’m going to have to stop! But how depressing. Note how bad the writing is, just for one thing. Note the boilerplate, note the endless empty listing of approved words, note the self-congratulation throughout. Note all that, and then be glad you’re not stuck in one of those departments. Life has its rewards.
The bit where she disses close reading! You missed out on taking the piss out of that. That was the best bit!
I am indeed very surprised to find that modern Humanities are one big English department. Far as I knew, most of the Postcoloniofeminist Theorizing went on at fringe departments such as Cultural Studies, Film Studies and, well, English – with most of the students enrolled at Hum. departments faithfully slogging away in respectable subjects such as History and Linguistics and Historical Linguistics.
(the local student union has elections here. One of the participating parties has made it a point of program to have a “gender perspective” built in all education. Worrying how to get a “gender perspective” in a course on Finnish historical morphology, I got such a headache that I decided to cast my vote for a party that abolished the position of Secretary of Gender Equality and wants to sell of the campus gym as well)
One of the things that bothers me most about pomo studies is that they aggrandize themselves by acting as if they were the only humanities being taught anymore. They’ve succeeded to the point that educated people often think I study Derrida and Freud when I tell them my degree is in philosophy.
By the way, I’ve been wondering for a while about the categorization of linguistics. It seems to combine parts of history, grammar, philosophy, computer science, psychology, rhetoric, sociology, and several other fields in and out of the humanities. Would I be insulting linguists to call their field one of the humanities rather than, say, a social science?
You wouldn’t insult me – but I imagine some linguists might be insulted.
Quite a bit of linguistics seems much closer to formal sciences, mathematics, logic, etc. Philology and historical linguistics on the other hand seems grounded in the humanities firmly enough.
I know, Chris. I meant to – but there was so much, so finally I just arbitrarily called a halt.
That’s terrible about Derrida and Freud. (It’s one of my minor peeves that now it’s obvious that Freud wasn’t a psychologist, his fans have shifted to calling him a ‘thinker’ – or, indeed, even a philosopher. The Cambridge Companion to [various philosophers] series includes Freud. Makes me grind my teeth, that.)
It must be so fucking cool to be in the vanguard of the revolution like that–and all without having to risk so much as a bloody nose!
P.S. What’s with all the sarcasm, Ophelia?
“American national culture, after all, does not derive in any obvious way from Britain”
So what was 1776 all about then?
And I’m a bit worried about the commenter who thinks that the liberal arts includes science; but then as Halberstam doesn’t know what a fractal is, she probably agrees.
Ophelia, just one clarification: the Cambridge Companion series is not restricted to philosophers, so you can’t pin that one on CUP I’m afraid.
This is the best line:
“English as a discipline poses a real threat to the status quo.”
Chris Whiley: don’t forget language issues here. In Dutch, you would have “Letteren” (history, linguistics), “Sociale Wetenschappen”, “Natuurwetenschappen”, among others; in German “Geisteswissenschaften”, “Naturwissenschaften” – and I personally wouldn’t have a clue how exactly “Liberal Arts” would map onto any of them.
“I guess the sad truth is that no one really thinks (if they ever did) that English as a discipline poses a real threat to the status quo.”
I think this is really sweet, if you substitute something else for ‘English’ you can see why:
“I guess the sad truth is that no one really thinks (if they ever did) that Woodwork as a discipline poses a real threat to the status quo.”
I have this image of all these English Professors sitting around writing their discourses about Western hegemony in the canon, and sincerely believing that they could have an impact on the wider world. No wonder these pomo approaches have proved so popular, anyone I know working in, what people here would regard as, the respectable end of English departments (close reading etc) is well aware that no one outside their tiny corner of academia cares about what they have to say.
“And I’m a bit worried about the commenter who thinks that the liberal arts includes science”
Does it not? I thought liberal arts meant any non-professional/technical training (e.g. maths, pure sciences, literature, logic). Its used more and more to refer to the humanities but that isage hasn’t replaced the original meaning as far as I know. I guess American usage has a specific meaning in terms of liberal arts colleges, but don’t they also teach sciences?
Thanks, Jonathan. I do seem to have got it wrong – I thought there was an explicit subset of the Cambridge Companions that was for philosophy. But I can see why I thought that…In the CC to Mill, for instance, there is a long list of other CCs and they’re almost all philosophers, with a few wild cards like Galileo and Foucault – and Freud. In fact those are the only wild cards, I think, among more than thirty philosophers. So CUP is at least conveying an impression that Freud can be seen as a kind of philosopher (not to mention a Galileo-equivalent), even if they don’t explicitly say it! So I do pin it on them! In fact it’s all the slyer since they don’t explicitly say it. Naughty CUP.
I got a PhD in Chemistry, and I had never heard the word “hegemony” until I met a communications professor who was trying to convince me that all the evil in the world derives from private property.
I have delved (a little) into pomo, deconstruction and postcolonial studies, just to try and understand what my friends are talking about over beers, but damn me if I can figure it out. Sometimes, I have to go back to the lab and boil something, just to retain my (patriarchal? eurocentric, white male?) grip on reality. I find humanities scholars lovely people, but I don’t have fuck all of an idea of what they are talking about. It makes me feel provincial and narrow, frankly, and I apologize if my incessant insistance on my humanities friends being clear and definite is boorish.
shriek of laughter
“Sometimes, I have to go back to the lab and boil something, just to retain my (patriarchal? eurocentric, white male?) grip on reality.”
Can I put that in our quotations?
P.S. You know what, Dave? The truth is they’re the provincial ones, not you. And I mean that pretty flat-footedly – it’s not irony. I am consistently struck when reading them by their amazing provinciality. That Halberstam article just reeks of it. She seems to have no clue that no one outside her department thinks people inside her department are universal experts.
Sure, OB.
I try to take seriously the intellectual work of others. There’s a lot of physics and abstract mathematics that I haven’t a clue about, too, despite years of trying, so I’m willing to entertain the idea that it’s just me not getting it. Even so, I do bristle somewhat at the “universal expertise” conceit in some of my humanities friends. Science teaches me humility, that to know anything is hard, hard, hard.
I guess I get used to people hating and mistrusting the discipline that I love, so it’s hard for me to judge whether others are provincial or not. Chemistry is unforgiving, demanding and stinky, after all. Plus, I’ve never had to worry about a text (however wrongheaded or self-important) catching fire or exploding in my face.
That article puts me in mind of (say) Borman emerging from the bunker in 1945, surveying the smouldering ruins around him and saying ‘Now is the time to build on our great victory’.
Ungh. I don’t even know where to start. My brain nearly melted when I read that awful afticle.
Fairly good reminder of why I went to a liberal arts college without departments – NO SPECIALIZATION! (Of course, reading the evil ‘canon’ totally oppressed all the non-white-males at the school.) There is something to be said when the author’s of every book you read are dead. Gave each of us an opportunity to declare English dead at various points in history.
Nothing particularly wrong with specialization. It’s idiotization we need to watch out for.
Halberstam seems bent on putting parodists out of a job. But when they find themselves unemployable, these English majors, of Western Hegemony majors, can always panhandle with the postmodern refrain, “Buddy, can you spare a pair o’ dimes?”
Ha! Very good, Jeremy.
If “postcolonial studies, black studies, queer studies, ethnic studies and women and gender studies ” is the answer, what is the question?
Seriously, you can look at a university’s faculties/departments as each representing an effort to answer a question. Science goes after “what is the nature of the physical universe”, engineering after “how do we control the physical universe”, philosophy “how can we think straight” [correct me if I’m wrong], linguistics “how do people communicate verbally” and so on.
All this mission creep on the part of English departments suggests they never had much of an intellectual purpose anyway. Which reminds me that Anthony Burgess wondered why we had such departments, when after all should not a familiarity with literature be expected of every educated person?
My last year as an undergrad, I wheedled my way into an American Lit upper division English course. Am. Lit up to the civil war, I think. We read a lot (duh, though I often ended up speedreading for several hours while slamming little square greasy burgers at Crystal’s before class so I wouldn’t be the asshole science geek who knew nothing about literature…)
Anyway, we talked about the literature. We discussed methods used to tell the stories. We put the works in historical context. We wrote about it.
To me, that seemed logical, and I learn ed a bit about lit, and it made my life better for it. I guessed that this sort of thing was the raison d’etre of the English department. I might have read Moby Dick without the course (or not) but I got a great deal out of seeing in context. If we deconstructed anything, I missed it. So if something other than this is generally done, I think it’s kind of sad, as it’s a loss of respect for the thing in itself, the art that English encompasses. Or so it seems to me.
Dave said: “So if something other than this is generally done, I think it’s kind of sad”
In my experience, what you describe is precisely what goes on in the majority of classrooms. The nonsense with theory is reserved for professional journal-writing, and the odd upper-level course for English majors constructed around theory rather than lit (and those more frequently come in grad school, not undergrad).
Paul said: “All this mission creep on the part of English departments suggests they never had much of an intellectual purpose anyway.” Wow. Ouch. I admit literature departments are now suffering from a particularly odious disease, but they do indeed serve an intellectual purpose.
Of course, I’m an English teacher, so I can’t claim to be unbaised.
Of course, it’s been an issue (what is the point of English departments anyway – that issue) as long as English has been an academic subject, i.e. not all that long. The whole chatter about Shelley thing. I do think they serve a purpose (big of me, isn’t it) – but it may be weighted more toward the pedagogic than toward research. But that’s not how the reward system works – so lit types still have to publish – so it goes…
OB notes that the study of English “may be weighted more toward the pedagogic than toward research. But that’s not how the reward system works – so lit types still have to publish….”
I am actually a composition teacher (though you wouldn’t know it from my typos!). As a subset, we are certainly focused on the pedagogic, and I for one am very comfortable with that. Not all of my colleagues are, however, and pursue the status of theory. What kills me is that one can still publish interesting, useful, and dare I suggest necessary discussions about pedagogy. But it’s a subject that the folks on the lit-side often shun as beneath them. (Did you know there is a divide between compositionists and literature profs? Oh, yes, just what we need, more inter-departmental politics!)
Yes, I knew that. Mirrors the one between people who take comp and those who don’t, no doubt! More inter-departmental politics…tell me about it. I know some academics who seem to be vastly more interested in (not to say obsessed by) academic politics than they are in, you know, their subjects. Depressing, that…
Amy L-B:
Sorry for putting my point in such an extreme manner. I would rather ask what makes such departments vulnerable to the disease you write of.
As a man I wonder how the existence of a “Women’s Studies” section in a university can be squared with an anti-sexist ethos. I wonder, which section is “Men’s Studies”? Science? Engineering?
Questions, questions
Paul:
Thanks. I’ve been wrestling with our vulnerability to nonsense for years, as have my more level-headed colleagues. Personally, I think it has to do with fear. Funding does not runneth over for literature studies, and we fear losing jobs, so we create “politically necessary” areas which may generate funding. After a while, departments are too invested in in such nonsense, enjoying the funds these programs bring, to admit that they are ridiculous, or at least that they detract from the actual study of literature.
I teach at a teeny-weeny school with no Women’s Studies or Cultural Studies. At the same time, we are one of the most poorly funded departments, and watch our faculty shrink, our reseources shrivel. Where students were once asked to take 4 literature classes, they now are required only 2. No writing course is required at all. And yet, much of the rest of the faculty laments students’ inability to critically read and write.