Why am I reproducing Sean McCann's post about the conversation Jonathan Goodwin and I were having over at The Valve in its entirety? Am I intent creating the dullest trackback ever? Might "Shameless Self-Promotion" be a shamelessly unironic category? No. I reproduce it in its entirety (and append to it responses by Y.T. and Some The Real Canadian Guy) because some readers of this blog don't read the Valve. Difficult to believe, I know, but some readers insist they have coursework, grading, cooking, cleaning, bathing and a number of other terribly unimportant chores which prevent them from reading it. So for the benefit of some readers who will, I hope, take this gentle admonishment in the spirit with which it is made, I present McCann's initial post:
A few days ago in a thread that followed one of my posts, Jonathan and the admirable A. Cephalous got into an interesting debate about disciplinary distinctions. (See their posts here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.) Though the issues got a full and frank airing, I think they’re too significant to let them just fade away amid a pretty much unrelated discussion. So this is my bid to resusciate the disagreement and open it to other players. (Sorry guys. I don’t mean to be poking a stick in a hornet’s nest or anything. I thought it was an interesting conversation.)
The gist of the debate comes down to the question of what weight to give disciplinary boundaries.
Jonathan’s position appears to be that we should begin with the presumption that they’re invidious. As he puts it, “The disciplines in the humanities and social sciences are only administrative conveniences.” A. Cephalous argues that a lot of what parades as “interdisciplinary” work is substanceless. Quite often, he suggests, it doesn’t depend at all on an effort to bring together the knowledge and perspectives prevalent in different academic specialties. He sees rather cherry picking, or one field scoffing at the other in the guise of critique.
Props are due the headless one--along, of course, with his interlocutor--for commenting so seriously about what is, I agree with him, a big problem for literary study. It’s not hard to see some merit to both positions here. Jonathan is surely right that academic disciplines are professional associations with built in interests in defending their turf--and that patrolling those boundaries easily can become narrowing and even irrational. But Aceph is also surely correct that not all such complaints are merely credentialism. There are bodies of knowledge and wisdom built up in academic disciplines that, even as they may need stirring up, can’t reasonably be treated with cavalier dismissal.
I think Acephalous is on surest ground when he suggests that the problem that concerns him is not so much a lack of expertise as it is a sheer lack of interest. If, e.g., Gayatri Spivak invokes psychoanalytic accounts of human psychology, but can’t be bothered to explain why they’re superior to, say, behaviorist arguments, then the problem isn’t so much that she lacks expertise as that she doesn’t really care about the question of which models are superior.
But that’s not my main concern here. I want rather to draw attention to Acephalous’s suggestion that bad interdisciplinarity is a hallmark of current literary studies in particular. I take it that Jonathan would doubt that this is the case, but I think the headless one has got a real point here. If he does, why so? What is it about literary studies that has led it to the pass where a cri de coeur like Aceph’s seems not just possible, but inevitable?
My inclination is to say that a lot of the problem is actually due to the history Jonathan highlights. The postwar academic professionalization of the humanties has produced many an unfortunate consequence, one of which has indeed been an obsession with methodology and expertise. But because modern literary scholarship is also profoundly indebted to romantic aesthetics--and in that vein to the idea that the literary imagination is a power superior to all classification--a weird synthesis has resulted. Literature became the discipline that specializes in doubting disciplines, the specialty that surpasses all specialization, the anti-scientific science, etc.
That paradox--or just plain contradiction--shows up in the New Criticism, with its stress on both rigor and the superior wisdom of poetry, but it’s also apparent when say the advocates of Cultural Studies cast it as “aggressively anti-disciplinary,” even as they invoke several “major bodies of theory” (“from Marxism and feminism to psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, and postmodernism”). This is not “codification,” they stress, but something closer to “alchemy.” It’s also apparent when the, er, practitioners of New Historicism defend their own determined theoretical salmagundi as an effort “to subvert a programmatic analytical response” in favor of a “quasi-magical” encounter with “the real.” To characterize what these two programs share as charitably as possible, I think you could say that both seek to use expertise against itself. What’s being described isn’t so much scholarship as avant-gardism as it’s been classically defined. The aim is less to build knowledge than to undermine the institutional boundaries that divide art from life. In keeping with this goal, the purpose of theoretical eclecticism isn’t really to draw on diverse bodies of expertise; it’s to undermine (or perhaps better to trump) the grounds of that expertise altogether.
Jonathan, I assume, would endorse at least something of that program. I’m more of A. Cephalous’s mind. I think the references to alchemy and magic above are not incidental. In my view, much of the pretense to interdisciplinarity in current literary studies doesn’t reflect an admirable broadening of the terrain, but an addiction to an old and doubtful notion that literature surpasses and casts doubts on all other forms of knowledge.
Some The Real Canadian Guy replied:
Whenever people talk about literary critics crossing disciplinary boundaries, I’m reminded of Plato’s Ion, in which Socrates grills a hapless rhapsode about what exactly he’s an expert of. Socrates questions him about a series of topics represented in Homer’s poem. Are you an expert in Chariot Driving? No. Medicine? No. etc. Finally, he gets Ion to admit that in fact he doesn’t know much about anything and that he’s merely an irrational, inspired ranter. I think that John Bruce, in his discussion with Sean McCann in that last thread, maybe thought of literary critics in this way. Although John Bruce was certainly no Socrates.
Anyhow, the obvious response to this dialogue is to argue that literary critics are in fact experts in literary form and rhetoric, and thus Ion is perfectly justified in talking about Homer’s representations of chariots, medicine, the art of war, etc., without knowing much about any of these things. But few critics, with the exception of the New Critics, have been fully satisfied with this solution. Even the New Critics weren’t, at least not the early New Critics. I.e., think of John Crowe Ransom or Allen Tate’s various rants about scientific theory, the economics of the South, etc., none of which either of them really knew much about.
My point is that straying into other disciplines is inherent in the practice of literary criticism itself. However, Acephalus is absolutely right that it leads to an immense amount of BS - Spivak, Bhabha, all of the other familiar bullshit artists of the academy. There isn’t a good solution to this, except that critics have to make sure that they actually immerse themselves in the topics they write about. I.e., they should immerse themselves to the point where they can actually talk intelligently with a person of the field they are straying into without sounding like too much of an idiot or alien from outer space (literary critics sound this way when they talk about Lacan to psychologists, for whom Lacan is an absolute nobody). This means that literary critics should also have a certain degree of humility when they stray into other fields - i.e., not assume that because they’re trained in Derrida, etc., that they automatically have access to a “critical understanding” of economics, psychology, sociology, etc., unavailable to people in those fields.
Since many of the points I would've welcomed into my response had already been wined, dined, and spirited away to Canada, what follows ain't what it could've been but ain't all bad:
I think Blah has a point that the debate is largely evidentiary, but I don’t think we can simply determine the state of the field with a quick count of how many interdisciplinary projects are “done well” and how many are “done poorly.” Consider Randall Knoper’s “American Literary Realism and Nervous ‘Reflexion’", in which he argues that “Scholarship has not attended to realist writers’ interest in sciences of the brain and nervous system or explored the effect of rapid developments in neurology and brain biology on these writers’ conceptions of mimesis.” I’d consider Knopper’s a legitimate interdisciplinary project, not only on its face but also because it unseats the results of what I’d consider an illegitimate interdisciplinary project: “My history here of the intersection between literature and neuroscience in the late nineteenth century is offered partly as a rethinking of American literary realism, in order to put back into the cultural configuration that includes literary realism the physiological psychology that was more or less dashed from view in the early twentieth century by behaviorism and psychoanalysis.” Knopper aims to correct 60 years of psychoanalytically-inflected interpretations of realists’ mimetic claims. Do I need, as Jonathan suggests, credentials/expertise in fin de siecle neuroscience to evaluate Knopper’s claims? Perhaps. But I don’t need credentials/expertise to recognize that Knopper’s discussion of pre-Freudian theories of “unconscious cerebration” is productive of facts about the realist movement; whereas a psychoanalytic account would be productive of a psychoanalytic account of what critics now think the realist movement was really about. In short, some interdisciplinary work produces information about the object or objects studied; other interdisciplinary work produces information about, well, about the ways in which a given theoretical apparatus produces information. A Freudian interpretation of a C.P. Gilman novel won’t tell you a lick about the novel itself, but it’ll tell you more than you’d like to know about the conclusions Freudians draw when confronted by a C.P. Gilman novel.
I second Sean’s claim that the teleological nature of “theoretical ecclectism” is largely to blame for the worst examples of “interdisciplinary” work. To draw from American Literature again, Herbert Spencer himself would blush at the number of teleological references Sharon Harris stuffs into “‘A New Era in Female History’: Nineteenth-Century U.S. Women Writers." All the “complementary” work she discusses “advances” the field; but it can be advanced further still if scholars “looked at women’s implication in and resistence to nineteenth-century imperialism, colonization, and empire building.” She’s no doubt correct that more work needs to address, say, popular and literary responses to the Spanish-American War; but consider the pretext for her admonishment: “Look! There’s a new interpretative apparatus in my field! It must be built upon the last! We should adopt it! What? We haven’t adopted it yet? Why not? Adopt already! ADOPT!” The assumption behind her claim is that postcolonial theory should be brought to bear on the study of nineteenth-century U.S. women writers because it exists. Not because it’s methodologically sound, mind you, but because it’s there; and if it’s there it’s meant to be there; and if it’s meant to be there, it must be an advancement. Harris’ (otherwise smart and informative) article demonstrates how deeply buried an evaluative determination about the appropriation, applicability and actual use of methodologies from other disciplines is, not to mention how powerful whatever it is that binds theoretical ecclectism to old school intellectual teleology is. (Think I could chock-a-block more being into that sentence? Next time I criticize someone’s prose feel free to shout “kettle Kettle KETTLE!")
I’m interested in that “whatever it is” I mention above because I’m not entirely sure I understand, um, what it is. I don’t know why the uncritical adoption of a methodology originating outside literary studies is so damn viral within it. It’s as if the enthusiam your Intro. to Philosophy professor created about whatever philosophical system he or she tabled that week has become a professional mandate. Just as the Kantians of Week 9 would embrace Hegel in Week 10 without having the background necessary to understand the implications of dispensing with the old or adopting the new affiliation, so too do many self-proclaimed “interdisciplinary critics” adopt methodologies they’re unable to defend and unfit to practice only to discard them in favor of another methodology they’re unable to defend and unfit to practice.
So I wrote all that, pasted it into an email, let it simmer in my inbox for a while, and realized it still doesn’t say what I want it to say. But I’ll put it out there anyway because it says a lot of what I want to say. Only not particularly well and incompletely.
UPDATE: All parties involved in the initial discussion have since posted again. Ain't that exciting?
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