Wherever Could I Be Headed with This? Part the First of Many

In June of 2006, a law student named Laura Ventura wrote a critical response to Anne Stevens and Jay Williams’ “The Footnote, in Theory” [.pdf], an article which tells “the story of theory’s reception in the American academy” (219) by tabulating citations in Critical Inquiry.  Her complaints were consonant with the ideology of the venue in which she aired them, the conservative Campus Report. “Academics Footnote Liberals Exclusively” contains all of the nuanced thought suggested by its title. Deconstruction, Ventura declares, “is a method for discrediting historical theorists such as Aristotle and Plato for the sole purpose of promoting Derrida’s belief”; C.S. Lewis “was most likely left off the list because of his strong Christian beliefs and influences”; Thomas Jefferson and Mark Twain “were not included because of their patriotism to a country that the cited authors despised.”

While critical in the colloquial sense, her response assumes every citation took the breezy form of the one Stevens and Williams criticize in which “a well-known theorist” submitted an essay containing the footnote “See Jacques Derrida” (221). That is, Ventura assumes all acts of citation entail a tacit acceptance of the ideological beliefs of the thinker being cited. Any citation of Mark Twain demonstrates, to her mind, a patriotism similar to the one she attributes to him. An author would remain a patriot even if the article cited is his infamous anti-imperial tract “To the Person Sitting Darkness,” even if the passage quoted is:

And as for a flag for the Philippine Province, it is easily managed. We can have a special one—our States do it: we can have just our usual flag, with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and cross-bones.

The absurdity of Ventura’s response—her patent ignorance of deconstructive thought, her inability to understand the difference between primary (Twain) and secondary (Jefferson) works—underscores the problem with the way those outside the humanities criticize work done within it. This is especially true of a time of disproportionate access to different venues. Anyone with an internet connection can log onto campusreportonline.net and read Ventura’s article, but it would cost someone $42 to access the Stevens and Williams’ article online.

The price a Campus Report reader would have to pay to fact-check Ventura almost guarantees none will. Instead, the quality of “The Footnote, in Theory” will be judged by an article written by someone not merely unqualified to judge its merit, but one who is ideologically predisposed to declare it valueless. The problem, however, is not primarily of qualifications or ideological disposition but, as Lindsay Waters’ “The Lure of the List,” one of venue. Writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Waters uses Stevens and Williams’ article as an occasion for criticizing “the human cost of such list making,” as “the learned duplicate unthinkingly the worst behavior of society as a whole.” His evidence, such that it is, consists of rejoinders that address, without correcting, the limitations of Stevens and Williams’ methodology. “You humanists,” he scolds, “should have looked into the literature on the methodology of lists, which the social scientists who pioneered making them have reflected upon…the way the numbers fall out in CI’s ranking seems to reveal of what [the sociologist, Robert] Merton called the ‘Matthew Effect,’ where fames becomes its own promotion.” The casual, condescending quality of his dismissal fails to embody to the standards it claims to uphold.

He attacks them for what, to his mind, “seems” like a relevant principle without attempting to establish the veracity of his suggestion himself. Of course, a study of the sort Waters proposes would not belong in The Chronicle’s “Review” section: it would be too long, too detailed, contain too many charts, graphs and footnotes to be placed there. For a long time, Critical Inquiry “Critical Responses” section would have been the appropriate venue to write a serious, sustained riposte to “The Footnote,” but with a few exceptions—Christopher Newfield’s response to John Guillory’s “The Sokal Affair and the History of Criticism” and Peter Havholm and Philip Sandifer’s response to Jerome Christensen’s “Corporate Authorship” among them— “Critical Responses” has disappeared from the pages of Critical Inquiry.

This disappearance both diminishes the quality of the work appearing between its covers—writing with the knowledge of inevitable challenge having a salutary effect on a work—and cedes the place of criticism to an unsympathetic public unwilling to acquire the expertise required to produce substantive critique. A new forum, a new venue for critique must be found to revivify the culture of argument we abandoned in favor of artificial comity...

Comments

[J]

Are you suggesting/implying/foreseeing some kind of online space for said sustained, detailed, critical responses? And would this be an independently refereed journal, or affiliated with something like Critical Inquiry?

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

J., I'll crib the short version from my friend John, since he's the one with the big ideas. I'm just the popularizer. But if you look here, you'll get a sense of what it is we're looking to create. Utopian? Perhaps, but in a way which is more realistic than most, since the architecture and willingness already exists. I'll respond in more detail soon, however, as this is just the first post of many.

[Adam Kotsko]

This is slightly off-topic, but what exactly is the mechanism for getting recognized "officially" as a peer-reviewed journal. I know that everything is in place to create online journals, and I think that John's various models for how peer review, etc., should be handled are very appealling. What I'm wondering is how we can assure the big Other that something is "for real," above and beyond the obvious fact of literally doing peer-review, etc. Can you just set up a domain name for "contracriticalinquiry.org" and declare yourself a journal, or is there some kind of registry? (This was one question that I was unsure about during my brief attempt to get my school to start an online journal.)

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

I'm not sure about your discipline, but in English, "official" recognition comes when you're indexed by the MLA periodicals, which is done by submitting something to someone with the awesome title of "The Indexer." Generally speaking, however, I'm not sure.

[Andrew R.]

You know, if this idea of yours ever bore fruit, it would be fantastic. As it stands, I tend to think "critiques" of Theory such as the one mentioned at the beginning of the post are so laughably done that the only possible explanation is that people like Stevens and Williams are secretly being funded by modern language departments in an effort to discredit those who would point out some methodological difficulties with Theory.

[Adam Kotsko]

Modern language departments can't even hide their liberal biases -- are you suggesting they'd be able to hide a conspiracy like this?

[ben wolfson]

That language departments seem unable to hide their liberal biases is part of the way they're able to hide that conspiracy.