Prof: We've been passing through a variety of discourses
concerning the nature of identity,
the way in which identity is constructed--
incidentally with varying degrees of emphasis,
the way in which identity is constructed in literature.
I'm going to come back to this perhaps missing link,
literature, in a minute.
In the meantime, I just wanted to point out
something that I'm sure you've inferred for yourselves:
namely that each one of these approaches to identity has a
history, and that the history results in
a recent chapter which is something like what you might
call a deconstructive moment, signifying on theory itself
such that the claim of theory as a mainstream discourse to hold
certain views is something that in and of itself,
from a subversive perspective, needs to be deconstructed and
undermined.
There is the idea in postcolonial studies of
hybridity as the undermining of cultural binaries--
that is, the double consciousness in which one
experiences simultaneously a kind of identification with a
state apparatus and a will to subvert it.
By the way, I thought I'd give you another example of how that
works because it applies to me.
I don't actually watch talk shows very often,
but should I be watching a talk show,
they often invite people on to these shows whom they call
professors.
I just wanted to point out to you the degree to which the sly
civility, the hybrid sly civility with
which people are called "professors,"
is for a professor one of the most discouraging sounds in the
language, because they know very well
when someone is addressed by a talk show host as
"professor" what they mean is you are a
pedant.
You don't know how to park a bicycle straight.
You have no understanding of the real world.
I don't know why I've invited you on this show in the first
place, >
except somebody told me you were an expert.
That's what it means in the public sphere to be a professor.
Bhabha perhaps exaggerates a little bit when he says the
discourse of hybridity has an element of terrorism about it.
Bhabha is writing long ago before 9/11 and so on and
perhaps uses the term a little loosely,
but I have to say when I hear somebody addressing me,
someone not in the academy--because of course,
people have contempt for me in the academy,
too, but it's a more complicated thing.
They may not have contempt for other professors,
if you see what I mean, so that's more complicated.
But when someone not in the academy addresses me as
"professor," I suppose I can't say that I
feel terrorized exactly, but I do feel depressed.
>
That's an important part of the double consciousness of the
subaltern, as Bhabha expatiates on it.
Then in any case, finally there is the
deconstructive moment of gender theory in which gender is
understood not as something essential but as something
performed-- something brought into
existence not just by verbal discourse but by all the
semiotic systems, including gesture,
dress, and all the rest of it that constitutes the way in
which gender comes into being.
Now in each case you have instances of knowledge as
negation.
I'm just trying to pull this back into the perspective of
what we recognize perhaps more readily as literary theory.
By "knowledge as negation"
I mean semiotic knowledge, something that I've been trying
to stress really as a central theme throughout this course.
"I am--well, I don't know what I am,
but I'll tell you this: I'm not that."
In other words, the way in which I come to
understand myself as not that-- and I, of course,
am the person who possesses hegemonic discourse,
so I see myself, I come to understand myself for
the first time in the argument of a Toni Morrison or an Edward
Said or, in a certain sense,
of a Judith Butler.
I come to understand, in a way, for the first time
when I reflect on what I'm not-- that is to say,
when I try to objectify or to pigeonhole that which I'm not,
which is of course not what I'm really not but what I suppose
myself not to be.
In all of these ways then, you can see that the way in
which, according to the sorts of
thinking we have been reviewing in recent weeks,
one comes to understand oneself is precisely negative in the
tradition of semiotic and formalist understandings of
language.
I am not at all necessarily what I am.
I am precisely as I understand it not that, not the other;
and I grasp myself perhaps in ways that deepen my alleged
understanding of myself as a result of this negative process.
All right.
So I say all these things again to reassure you that we still
are talking about literary theory,
that the ways of thinking about things that we've encountered
recently really do arise out of issues given to us by
deconstruction and by negation in the semiotic and formalist
tradition.
We can understand what has happened basically--
this in terms of the overall structure of the course--
not as a change in the structure of thought we examined
when we took up language as the primary determinant of
understanding, but as a transformation of
language-- the determinant of social
understanding-- into what we call "a
social text"; so that our head now is not the
repository of Saussure's langue,
that is something that just sits there in and of itself as a
system, but rather it's full of other
people's language.
It is a space in which society itself understood as discourse
jostles for attention and struggles somehow or another to
shape itself into intelligibility.
That's the fundamental change.
Language is still preeminent in the kinds of thinking that we've
been doing.
We haven't really gotten away from language,
but we have altered our understanding of language.
Language is now a social text.
It is now, in Bakhtin's words, other people's language,
and we understand it therefore not--
and of course, semiotics and deconstruction
don't understand it as our own either,
because language always precedes us;
but we understand it more clearly as something that is
given to us as a social formation that in turn forms us.
In a way that does bring us to our topic today because this
topic, almost the last topic of the
course, has to do with the
preconditions of interpretation.
What makes it possible for us to think something?
How is it that we come to think one thing as opposed to another
thing?
How is it that there are areas of agreement among us?
How is it, for that matter, that there are areas of
disagreement among us and indeed that these areas
characteristically seem to be so nonnegotiable?
>
The point arises at which we just can't find ourselves in
agreement on things just as the point arises when we realize
that we are in some profound way in agreement about other things.
How is it that all of this comes to be?
In order to do that, let's first go back to Tony
the Tow Truck.
Because we've said all along that it's about whatever it is
that we happen to be talking about,
let's think about Tony once again as being about
the things we've been discussing recently.
We can say, for example, that Tony is a Marxist
contestation of the social determinacy of identity in other
forms.
It's a realist text because, as we've said before,
nothing happens.
There is no change in the social formations that are the
givens of the story, but it nevertheless does lay
out the relationship among social norms in ways that show
that life goes on despite social inequality,
despite--of course here I'm going to throw something at you
that you perhaps hadn't thought of so much in terms of Tony
before-- despite ethnic and gender
difference.
Now what happens then in Tony, to move to a
slightly different way of thinking about it,
is we can see that it's a global story masked as a story
of hybridity in the American melting pot.
It should have been perfectly plain to you all along that Tony
is an Italian American with the complex personality of the
subaltern.
On the one hand, he believes in the American
dream.
He likes his job.
He buys into the system, in other words,
but on the other hand he recognizes that he has his own
place in the world, the little yellow garage.
It's his niche in the world and it's something that is partly
what affords him his identity.
Neato, of course, on the other hand is the
neurotic WASP in the manor house,
sort of representing that sort of class,
and Speedy very interestingly is a member of what John
Guillory calls "the professional/managerial
class."
What's interesting about Speedy is that suddenly we realize that
his ethnic origins, his class origins,
and even his gender-- because he may be a woman--are
not perhaps as relevant as one might have imagined them to be
because the professional/managerial class is
interesting-- as Guillory's source,
Alvin Gouldner, points out at length--precisely
as the emergence of a body of people with common interests who
really can't be said, at least, to derive from,
or perhaps in a way even to belong to,
a common class.
Speedy is certainly in Tony the Tow Truck a
representative of this new emerging class.
Perhaps it's no accident that Neato comes first.
I think memory serves me in saying that Neato comes first in
the sort of folkloric triad because Neato represents an
older class, a class which in a certain
sense is giving way to the professional/managerial class.
It makes sense that first you get Neato and then you would get
Speedy.
So then we can also think of Tony the Tow Truck,
of course, in terms of gender.
We've said there are no women in it,
and yet at the same time you do have those frowning and smiling
houses sort of embodying the angel in the house,
but it's not just that.
Obviously, Neato--I've never drawn a picture of Neato but
with his little bow tie and his prissy "Oh,
I don't want to get dirty" he's just a bundle of gay
stereotypes.
>
Then obviously with Bumpy, he pushes and pushes--you don't
even want to go there.
>
In any case, this is plainly a story about
gender, and so you can see that it's about all these things.
So then here is the question, and it really does provide us
with our transition to today's materials: what have I been
doing all this time with Tony the Tow Truck?
I've been doing exactly, as you can see now,
what Fish does with Jacobs, Rosenbaum, Levin,
Thorne, Hayes, and Ohmann.
I've been showing that if you bring a certain supposition to
what you're reading, you're going to perform a
certain kind of hermeneutic act, not with any particular strain
but more or less spontaneously because that's what you are
conditioned to do.
Now Fish's class had no trouble construing the assignment for
his previous class as a poem, and you can see,
of course, that it was sort of ready to hand to be construed
that way.
Fish admits that, but he's lecturing some people
in Kenyon College and he just sort of runs his finger down the
list of faculty names and says, "Look what I could do with
these names."
I think he does make his point because you can do it with
absolutely anything.
We can see, of course, that his class actually missed
a few points.
It forgot to mention that an ancient and important meaning of
the word "Levin" is lightning,
so that a flash of revelation is entailed in any religious
understanding of the poem.
It's almost impossible to understand why his class was
stumped by the word "Hayes"
because "Hayes"-- well, we see things through a
glass darkly.
We see them in a haze, and that's exactly the way in
which we're likely to respond to instances of religious
revelation as they are given in the devotional poetry of the
seventeenth century.
In any case, what we've been doing with
Tony the Tow Truck is of this kind.
We've taken a text with a--by the way,
you may want to know whether I think Tony is really
about something as opposed to about all those things.
Well, I actually do, and I mentioned it in passing,
but it's only an intuition and it really doesn't arise out of
any particular predilections I have for psychoanalysis.
It does seem to me, however, that a story written
to that age group in which the climactic line is "He
pushed and he pushed and I'm on my way" is pretty obviously
about one thing as opposed to a lot of other things.
If you really pushed me about what Tony the Tow Truck
is about, I would say,
"Well, I think it's an anal phase parable and that
Robert Kraus very possibly wrote it for that purpose.
In other words, this would engage the attention
of the toddler who is having the story read to him or her,
and its meaningfulness probably is going to come across to the
toddler in that way perhaps in more pronounced fashion than in
any other-- certainly and obviously in a
more pronounced fashion than most of the ways in which we've
been talking about the text.
So that's what I think.
Of course, I've disclaimed any connection with psychoanalysis
but nevertheless I know something about it,
and so that's part of my interpretive community.
We'll get back to that.
In any case, we've been treating Tony the
Tow Truck in this way and we have been,
well, nodding our heads and saying,
"Yeah, yeah, it's about that,
too," and "Guess so, yeah.
Interesting, isn't it?
Wonder what it's going to be about on Thursday."
We've been doing this because we belong to an interpretive
community.
Now I want immediately to add here two caveats.
I would say that within the interpretive community that
makes up this room, a community of people who are
interested in interpretation, you probably have suspected all
along that interpretation was a mug's game and therefore wanted
to take a course of this kind to find out just how bad it was.
All of us at least have in common a concern with the
potential complexity of those circumstances that surround
interpretation.
We are an interpretive community that's interested in
interpretation, so we play the game.
However, I would hazard that within this interpretive
community there are two sub-communities which probably,
in a certain sense, while they see the significance
of the exercise, nevertheless want to hold out
against it.
One of them is the community which either always has or has
now come to have a very, very strong commitment to one
or another point of view that's been passed in review in this
course and who therefore finds it demeaning of the important
point of view that it would be treated simply in a survey in a
serial way with all sorts of other points of view that may or
may not supplant or jostle with it.
Now this takes us back to the remarks I was making at the
beginning about the way in which one can perhaps acknowledge the
usefulness of a survey course but nevertheless bridle at the
very idea of a survey course when,
after all, the only thing that matters is Marx's thought.
Why do we spend any time with all of these other approaches to
things and so on-- just sort of whichever form of
thought is the only thing that matters to you.
This would probably lead you to say not so much that Tony
is only about this one thing but "Oh,
this is a really facile and irrelevant exercise because the
important thing is to take this one thing seriously."
The implication is that if you take a lot of other things in
review, you're not taking this one thing seriously.
So that might be one sub-community within our
interpretive community.
Another one might be a sub-community that is still
committed, as one's tempted to say,
to high culture and says, "I think we should have
used 'Lycidas' or 'The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner.'
It was demeaning to high culture to use Tony the Tow
Truck and furthermore," this sub-community might very
well say, "if we had used 'Lycidas'
or 'The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner,' a certain approach,
a certain way of reading either of those poems,
would have made sense self-evidently--
meaning that all of the other approaches are trivial."
If your commitment is not so much to one point of view as to
some idea of high culture, you're not going to say in
advance which approach it is, but you're going to suppose
that somehow or another such is the value and nature of high
culture that it will be possible to arrive at a sort of consensus
view of what's going on in one of its products.
This is what Guillory is talking about at least in part
in his review of defenses of Western civilization,
Western culture and so on.
They have a meaning.
They have a continuity.
They have a stability which is worth preserving and which ought
to be the central business of the schools to promulgate.
So those are possible sub-communities within our
interpretative community, but we all do have in common
the recognition that it's possible to riff on a text in
this way.
If somebody does it, we recognize that whether we
like it or not, we ourselves could probably do
it ,too-- which is proof,
from Stanley Fish's point of view and also from John
Guillory's point of view, because we're in a school that
we have a great deal in common.
It's what we have in common that brings the text into
visibility in the variety of ways that we've performed on it.
Now with all of this said, let's talk a little bit more
about what an interpretive community is first,
according to Stanley Fish, and then move to the point
where we may wish to suggest one form or another of criticism of
this idea.
Let's begin with Fish's first sentence, which is on page 1023,
the upper left-hand column.
This is a series of lectures, and so he begins by saying:
Last time I sketched out an argument by which meanings are
the property neither of fixed and stable texts nor of free and
independent readers but of interpretative communities that
are responsible both for the shape of a reader's activities
and for the texts those activities produce.
I don't know that he really carries his argument all that
much farther forward in this lecture,
which is why I think it's worthwhile to begin with this
sentence because in some ways it does anticipate what he then
lays out once more in this lecture.
Now an interesting thing about the career of Stanley Fish is
that he actually, in the course of that quite
high-visibility career, changed his mind twice.
His changes of mind are actually recorded residually in
this essay that you read, "How Do We Recognize a
Poem when We See One?"
which, by the way, is a completely disingenuous
title because we don't see poems.
>
That's the whole point.
There is no poem there.
If it's there, it's because you put it there.
In any case, these changes of mind are
residually present in this text.
They are actually manifest in the peculiar vagary of the
argument of an earlier essay he wrote called "Interpreting
the Variorum," which is what was in the second
edition of >
the Richter anthology and the one that I used to teach,
but I think it's still worth harkening back to those changes
of mind.
When I was his student at the University of California,
he held his first opinion.
This was just before he published Surprised by Sin:
The Reader in Paradise Lost,
a book for which a seminar that I was in was a kind of
guinea pig.
To give you an example of what he meant by saying that a stable
text produces a reader, which was his first belief,
I give you an example that he uses from Milton about Satan's
spirit.
This is Satan standing by the fiery lake.
He's just pulled himself up to his full height,
he has a spear, and Milton writes about it
[points to board]: His Spear, to equal which the
tallest Pine [okay: spear, pine about the same
size] Hewn… to be the Mast
of some great Ammiral [well, let's see, mast-pine-spear]
were but a wand… Then you realize that the
sequence of sizes is completely reversed and what you thought,
what you'd already filled your consciousness with--
the tallest pine--is just a wand compared with the size of
Satan's spear.
So what's he saying?
He's saying you think that your mind can grasp the magnitude of
Satan, you think you know how big
Satan is, but the language of Paradise
Lost is going to teach you, is going to educate you into
realizing that you shouldn't mess with Satan because Satan is
much bigger than you think he is.
What I didn't write here, and what continues the passage,
shows that even here Satan is absolutely at his weakest.
The passage continues [points to board]: "He walkt with
to support uneasy steps…"
In other words, he's just risen from the fiery
lake.
He's as weak as he's ever going to be right now
>
and yet he's already a lot more than you can handle.
That is the way the syntax of Paradise Lost educates us
into realizing that every time we think we grasp the point of a
text, we prove that we are fallen
readers, that we have prematurely
understood what's there, and that only understanding it
in the long run can prevail upon us to realize the fallen
condition, which the text is obviously
after all about.
That was Fish's first opinion.
Not too long after that, in the course of writing a book
called Self-Consuming Artifacts, he began
to have a different opinion which more or less reversed the
first one.
He decided it isn't the text that brings the reader into
being-- that is to say,
brings about the self-realization on my part that
I'm a fallen being in the case of Paradise Lost.
It isn't the text that brings the reader into existence.
It's the reader that brings the text into existence.
It's the reader, after all, who performed this
act of reading, and it's the reader who made
visible in the text the possibility that this is what
Milton is doing.
So he reverses his field while retaining the same structure of
argument and the same range of insight about what one can think
about a text.
Well, that was fine until he realized that a reader has to
come from someplace.
A reader isn't just an autonomous being.
This is where he realized that the third step in his
development, his second change of mind,
means this: it's not the text that produces the reader,
it's not the reader that produces the text,
but it's the community that produces the reader who in turn
produces the text.
Those three points in other words map the progress of his
thinking on these issues.
Take a quick look at page 1025, the right-hand column.
He says, bottom of the paragraph: "Interpretation
is not the art of construing but the art of constructing.
Interpreters do not decode poems;
they make them."
When he says that, he's only at phase two of his
thinking, because there is still the
possibility open to the reader of thinking that the interpreter
is an autonomous being whose thoughts,
whose interpretive powers, and whose strategies of reading
emanate from something from within.
Then on page 1027 he clarifies, toward the bottom of the
right-hand column: "This does not,
however, commit me to subjectivity..."
In other words, it's not just a question of
whatever I think is in a text is in a text.
I'm the one who makes the text, and you make the text,
and the other person makes the text.
We all make different texts because we all have different
subjectivities--that's not what he's saying.
This does not, however, commit me to
subjectivity because the means by which they are made are
social and conventional.
In other words, I can't have an off-the-wall
interpretation of anything if anyone else ever hears it.
Yeah, if I'm >
just in my room, surrounded by yellow wallpaper
or something like that, I suppose I can have an
off-the-wall interpretation of something,
but if I try to publish it, forget it.
When I try to publish, when I try to express myself,
when I expose myself to any aspect of the public sphere,
my interpretation--if it's to be judged as an interpretation
at all, if it's to count as an
interpretation, and if it's to count as an
opinion-- must already be enmeshed in the
interpretative community to which it's addressed.
It must have some sort of link with that community.
It must involve some sort of membership or relationship with
that community, so that what Fish concludes is
that there are neither subjects nor objects.
In other words, this is Fish's way,
following Derrida and deconstruction,
of attacking the Western metaphysical tradition.
As long as we suppose that understanding is a matter of
parsing or coming to terms with subject-object relations,
we're on the wrong track to understanding.
We have to understand the way in which neither the subject nor
the object can be said to have a stable existence,
to have integrity of any kind, before we can come closer to
grasping how it is that interpretation is made and
achieved.
We've seen this before all the way back at the beginning of the
semester when we talked about fore-having in Heidegger and
Gadamer, about the way in which we
always see something as something: we never see it as an
object, we never see it in and of
itself.
We've seen this before, but there is a slight
difference because Heidegger and Gadamer hold out the object as a
standard against which one's opinions about it can be tested.
In other words, the hermeneutic circle is a
movement back and forth between interpretation and what's being
interpreted, so that what's being
interpreted is a constant check on the process of interpretation
just as interpretation, as it deepens,
is a finer and finer outlining of the nature of the object.
So the hermeneutic circle which resembles,
which anticipates the thinking of Fish in that it insists on
the way in which all interpretation begins as
preconception, nevertheless does also entail
that subtle difference in that the object is there.
It's not that Fish denies the existence of objects--although
sometimes his rhetoric makes it seem that way.
He simply denies that we can know them as objects at any
point.
We bring them into being, and in bringing them into being
we construct them in whatever way it is that we construct
them.
Okay.
Interpretive community.
What do we make of this idea of interpretive community?
I have just said we all belong to an interpretive community.
We sitting here all belong to an interpretive community.
There may be a couple of sub-communities here,
but basically we're an interpretive community.
We understand each other, and yet at the same time it's
equally the case, as I'm sure all of you are
thinking to yourselves, that no one of us has exactly
the same set of opinions as anyone else.
We say we belong to an interpretive community.
We can in fact, according to a certain weak
form of the argument, understand the way in which
yes, we do bring things into being according to certain
habits that have evolved through our membership in such a
community; but at the same time we say,
"Guess what?
I don't quite interpret >
Jacobs, Rosenbaum and the rest of them in the way Fish's class
did.
I still don't interpret it in the way that Professor Fry
supplemented their interpretation.
I interpret it a little differently, and furthermore I
knew all along it wasn't a poem.
You can't fool me," and so on.
Each of us says to ourselves, "Okay.
Yeah, we have certain things in common, but there are also ways
in which we differ."
What would Fish say to that?
I think what he would say is this, and I do think this needs
to be acknowledged: it weakens his position.
He would say, "All right, granted: in a rough sense,
we belong here-- just as John Guillory says in a
rough sense we're all in a school--
we belong to an interpretive community;
but there's another sense in which we are each of us the sum
total, the composite,
of all the interpretive communities to which we now in
some way or another have an affinity and from which,
in all the variety of ways one can mention,
we have emerged.
Yes, we're each different because the sum of the
interpretive communities to which we belong,
constituting the ultimate interpretive community that
indeed we are, is always going to be a little
different from the sum of the communities to which other
people belong.
This reduces the idea of interpretive community to a kind
of atomism whereby we all concede and all say,
"Yes, it's true.
I am in a certain sense a community."
That's all Bakhtin said: "I am a community.
I am a community and, of course, what communities do
when they think is interpret."
Thinking is interpretation.
But at the same time "What's the point,"
we then say, "of saying I'm a community
if, in fact I'm a little different
from everybody else?"
Why not retain a certain sense of subjectivity,
or why not at least retain that sense of individuality which
results from the fact that none of us ultimately or completely
on every particular agree with anybody else--
the reason being that the sum of our interpretative
communities that makes up that fundamental community to which
we say we belong is always a little bit different?"
Now there is another argument against this position which
might be called radical constructivism.
We hear very frequently from sociobiological thinkers like
Edward O.
Wilson, for example, who point out that
consciousness is hard wired to do and to recognize all sorts of
things.
It has been shown in the lab that aesthetic preference,
which of course was always held up to derision as anything like
an objective standard-- "There is no disputing
tastes," we always say--
but even aesthetic preference, it's been shown in the lab,
involves certain predilections we all do have in common.
We all prefer the so-called golden section,
we love arches, and this can explained in all
sorts of ways.
The most common explanation has to do with what's called shelter
theory.
We like shapes that somehow or another offer shelter or
protection.
In any case, the fairly conclusive evidence
is that in a variety of ways, we are hard wired to recognize
things.
Darwin's last book is all about how we recognize each other's
expressions, we recognize the expressions of
animals with which we have a great deal in common,
and that we do this from infancy--in other words,
all sorts of evidence to this effect.
I'm not sure Fish's argument is vulnerable to that position
because, after all, hard wiring is communitarian.
>
The point is precisely that we all have it and that it's not
something that we can call individual,
not something that we can call autonomous to any one of us as
individuals.
So it seems to me that although the argument against so-called
radical constructivism usually does take this form,
it actually is not a very good argument,
and that the argument objecting to the mere weakness of the way
in which interpretive community as a concept ultimately becomes
atomistic is a stronger argument;
because what does it matter if I'm an interpretive community if
I'm still a community of one?
In some measure, it's something that seems less
worth talking about once one's put it in those terms.
Very quickly then on Guillory whose argument actually ended
the very debate that he thinks is going to intensify and get
worse.
In other words, he thought that the big,
hot-button topic in the academic world for the next
twenty-five years or more would be the canon wars:
canonical, non-canonical,
cultural, and multicultural-- he thought this would be the
fundamental point of contention in the academic world.
Well, it wasn't, and the reason it wasn't is
that his argument was so brilliant everybody came to
their senses and realized >
that they were barking up the wrong tree, literally.
His book, Cultural Capital, simply silenced not the
public, because nothing ever silences the public,
>
but simply silenced the debate about the culture wars in the
academy.
In some ways Guillory amusingly undermines his own prophecy,
which by the way is on page 1477 in the upper right-hand
column if you care to read it.
Now Guillory's main preoccupation--
which he takes largely from Pierre Bourdieu but also,
as he argues in a long constructive digression,
from Antonio Gramsci--his main preoccupation is with the school
as a means of establishing and proliferating what Gramsci
called "hegemony."
The school, in other words, on this argument doesn't
typically-- and we'll come back to the
exception that Guillory himself does make--
doesn't typically send out into the world minds armed with
specific bodies of knowledge or understanding.
It sends out into the world, especially when it's a question
of the humanities-- which Guillory thinks are
painting themselves into the corner in their obtuseness--
the school sends out into the world people endowed with a
certain quantum of cultural capital.
It repeats, in other words--in Bourdieu's term it
"reproduces"-- a structure of class,
but really class in the sort of super-structural sense:
class superiority that regardless of the specific
content that a person supposes himself to have been mastering,
simply replicates an orientation to the ruling class
that the school in Western culture,
according to Guillory, has always had.
What the school reproduces is not knowledge so much as itself,
the attitude that it embodies, its reason for being,
its reason for continuation, and its relation to power and
state apparatus.
That's Guillory's basic position and it's why he says
that the culture wars simply play into the hands of the
monolithic ideology of the school.
What happens when you embrace multiculturalism as the only
means of inculcating what Guillory calls "progressive
pedagogy"-- what happens when you embrace
multiculturalism, according to Guillory,
is that you deracinate the objects of your intention from
the culture to which they belong in precisely the way that the
great monuments of Western civilization have long since
been deracinated from their historical and cultural
circumstances.
You reduce both Western Civ and alternative canons to the same
deracinated, rootless sort of nature as cultural capital.
"I have read this.
I have a certain status and negotiability in the world as
having read this."
In the case of Western Civ, it's quotations from the poets
and after-dinner speeches.
In the case of multicultural curricula,
it's the opportunity to allude in precisely the same way on
largely the same occasions, and in either case it has
nothing to do with learning anything,
according to Guillory, about the historical and social
circumstances in which any kind of cultural production are
grounded.
Now the argument depends, of course,
on supposing that the way in which the great works are taught
is as though they embody certain ideas of principles.
That is to say, they're taught as messages,
in Guillory's view, whatever form of message it
might be.
The Western canon has a message about the importance of being an
American.
The multicultural canon has a contestatory message about the
importance of being whoever happens to be speaking,
but in each case they're merely messages.
They're not cultural artifacts.
They don't emerge from the real sort of historical and living
circumstances in which they are written,
which of course is, most broadly speaking,
simply an appeal to method, a new way of teaching.
Guillory's own deepest commitment is,
in fact, to the great works.
Guillory began as an early modern scholar.
He wrote a very, very fine first book on Spenser
and Milton.
His later work in literary sociology in no ways discredits
or undermines the fact that earlier in his career he was
interested in a cultural canon.
In fact, probably the most interesting chapter in
Cultural Capital is maybe not this introductory
theoretical one but an amazing chapter in which he shows how
Thomas Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard"
came to predominate in English curricula even though it was
written in the vernacular, in English.
He shows in other words how "Elegy in a Country
Churchyard," in the way in which it situated
itself in culture at that time, actually undermined the premium
place on the classics, on Latinity,
and helped the emergence of a vernacular national curriculum.
It's an absolutely brilliant argument in which "Elegy in
a Country Churchyard" is itself constantly and
steadily and fascinatingly invoked.
In other words, Guillory himself likes the
classics.
Perhaps the most interesting part of this argument is the way
in which the Western Civ mavens are simply fooled about their
own understanding of what a canon is because perpetually,
history changes canons.
The more books you get, the fewer you can read,
and the more gets dropped out of any curriculum,
including the Western Civ curriculum.
Today we're proud if we're proponents of great books.
We're proud of reading Plato and Aristotle.
In the old days, people didn't stop with Plato
and Aristotle.
They read everything there was to read in Greek and Latin
culture and then they read such few books as may have been
published in English.
Well, a great deal has happened since then, and perforce modern
languages and literatures have altered the canon always to the
end of thinning it out.
More and more gets left out.
This is an inevitability even in the so-called
"canonical" and therefore itself needs to
acknowledge the centrality of historical change.
Guillory's argument obviously hinges on the failure of anybody
involved in these debates to distinguish between the two
forms of culture.
>
There is culture, the kind of culture on which a
person without any education at all and the new
professional/managerial class can meet,
the kind of culture in which precisely literature doesn't
matter.
Who needs literature?
"I'm running Hewlett-Packard.
Do I need literature?"
At the same time, there is the kind of culture
with a capital K, as we say, which is all about
the great books, high culture,
the monuments of civilization, and so on.
Guillory says the total disconnect in the way in which
we understand the relations between these two forms of
culture is what leads to the kinds of deracination in
teaching that he complains about.
He himself finally thinks that anything is fair game to be
taught, and it can be taught
progressively as long as it is taught in terms of its social
and historical circumstances.
He points out that a great book--I will quote this and then
I'll leave you-- is great in part because it
can't possibly be reduced to the silliness that the advocates of
Western Civ attach to it.
He says, page 1482, right-hand column:
No cultural work of any interest at all is simple enough
to be credibly allegorized in this way,
because any cultural work will objectify in its very
form and content the same social conflicts that the canon debate
allegorizes by means of a divided curriculum.
The Odyssey is full of lying, trickery,
class betrayal.
In The Iliad, perhaps the most
interesting character, as I'm sure you'll all agree,
is Thersites who is scarcely an advocate of the values that we
associate with Western culture.
In any case, this is what Guillory means by
saying that you cannot monumentalize anything in this
way if you read it carefully and attentively enough.
So ultimately it's simply a program for reading.
Okay.
Next time we'll talk about the idea that we shouldn't have
theory at all.