The Future of Tradition
Bromwich, David
Two distinct topics have been involved in the recent debate about the future of the humanities, and the worst failure of the debate is that it hardly seems to notice the distinction. The topics...
...Doubtless Johnson too has her reasons...
...Michael Oakeshott has quoted in this connection a former master of Eton, William Cory, who distinguished the mere acquisition of knowledge from the making of "mental efforts under criticism...
...For a long time after, it was assumed that the culture of individuals might be formed without much conscious aid from institutions...
...They induct students into a life of reading, looking at, and discussing works of the mind...
...The obvious worldly competition, people also known for their adeptness in the uses of words, consist above all of lawyers and 544 • DISSENT journalists, but scholars seldom rank themselves anywhere on this scale...
...It is too important a matter to be handed over exclusively to far-right journalists and hard-left professors of literature...
...That does not mean a set list of great books...
...But what can it mean, for the most gifted student imaginable, to "learn the conflicts...
...What there is of a live debate on issues of current importance goes on in journals of opinion like the New Republic and the Nation...
...it is time now to return to the practical issues they point to...
...But for the last decade or so, the activist tone in scholarship has been found compatible with a restriction of politics to the universities themselves...
...The topics in question are the traditional study of the humanities and the study of tradition in the humanities...
...What intelligent reviewing we do have occurs sporadically, often in the pages of small academic journals...
...And they bring with them a copious and explicit vocabulary of praise and blame...
...in every discipline the creation of which requires the creation of a new laity...
...An important use of literary theory in the 1970s and 1980s was to ease the rigors of this scene of legitimation-by-knowledge...
...With the unmasking of the disinterested ideal, which many humanities scholars now assume, every choice, whether conscious or not, is easily exposed as "implicitly a political choice...
...It has been put together not by designers but by men who knew only dimly what they did...
...What it has most destroyed in America is our common sense of a public life...
...It was a half-way solution, but it did allow some fresh scholarship, and it kept something good alive...
...Nothing, in either instance, stops us from forcing the transition anyway...
...But it has a clear identity...
...That, I will say, changes the "image" of things as much as any political action could—and perhaps more so, because more elusively so...
...we acquire standards of the excellent and durable...
...Against the critical appreciation of great works, a skeptical pressure has been placed on the words "appreciation" and "great" —the former being put down as the eulogistic name for a blind habit, the latter as a judgment of value that can be altered when and as we please...
...That must be true of television, at least as a potential subject...
...The story is nicely told in a recent book by Gerald Graff called Professing Literature...
...Taken together, these developments betray a weakening of the belief that citizenship requires an active competence...
...To study it in a language that matters, you need some knowledge of how the shows are "created," streamlined, and sold...
...The profile of a voter group, however preposterous its inferences, can in the end be falsified by additional or contradictory evidence, but how can a novel answer back...
...These are radical aims that many Americans endorse—in politics...
...With statements like this, one feels that the circle, not only of worldly advancement, but of mental life itself, has been prematurely closed from within...
...Yet for people doing intellectual work, the way to social acceptance in America has always been through imitation of the sciences...
...His thesis, I think, explains why a single article of faith from the sixties has passed unchallenged into the eighties—namely, the idea that the university is a microcosm of society...
...of the corporation executives, advertising agencies, and onthescene liaison personnel who sell the audience to the sponsors...
...A longer scanning of the evidence for conflicting testimony, a greater reluctance to impute low motives to scholarly or political antagonists: these, at least, are imaginable effects of such a belief...
...But in the last decade literature has taken the path of the rest of the humanities...
...The forest is ploughed under to make a dozen shopping malls, for which a corporate agent puts up the first ten million, a neighborhood pays with its life—and now, as the last extortion of victory, a graduate tutor is asked to interpret the original blueprint in class as a paradigm of a "social text...
...It is a tone that connects a left-wing antihumanist like Fredric Jameson with a right-wing pragmatist like Stanley Fish, and in turn connects both with a utilitarian relativist like Barbara Herrnstein Smith...
...It has more to do with a choice between interpreting the achievements of the past in a steady relation to the present and digesting the molds of contemporary knowledge with occasional dips into the past for comparison, contrast, and condescension...
...There is not, yet, at a major institution, a Don Johnson Professor of Lifestyle...
...Some main innovations are: • The teaching of a canon of great books as one continuous record of deception and betrayal...
...This seems the place to declare a polemical intent in the pages that follow...
...Also, it implies a high-minded estimate of undergraduate students, as of their peaceably arguing professors—a flattering picture all around until you think about it...
...At times of social unrest it may well mean, as it did in the sixties, that turning the university upside-down looks like an appropriate gesture of solidarity with causes that have nothing to do with education...
...Though the subject changes and the participants do too, the sense persists that a certain place is there for belief and doubt, and this somehow keeps smaller projects going forward, with a sureness more utilitarian enterprises give as a forfeit to more immediate ends...
...In consequence they are poorly placed to know how their opinions sound to many of the people who might read, or hear, or even be affected by them...
...And the future of that study may have something to do with the future of political liberalism and of the Enlightenment ideals of rational discussion and individual choice...
...Few institutions have ever adhered to a single such list for more than a generation...
...The belief of the suspicious, that culture has a pervasive influence in politics and so ought to be thoroughly translated into politics, is as defensible as my belief that its influence is nothing like pervasive and that to pretend otherwise only leads to coarse sloganeering...
...A polite silence is the rule here, and that is a pity, for the pedantic-populist view of culture forgets an important fact...
...But they will then ask, "What is the alternative to continuous professionalization, and to the usual professional devices for regulating knowledge...
...Before it can be reformed intelligently, it must be known adequately...
...These phrases are all in the same style and no one has ever believed that they answered the question...
...In all these writers, though in each for different reasons, the liberal idea that knowledge is a cosmopolitan good has been displaced by the professional idea that knowledge is an institutional good...
...It is not clear that you would want to read a novel by Flaubert in the same manner that you read a chart of socioeconomic status...
...The question is how, and where, to approach the thing intelligently...
...The process it names cannot, in fact, be formulated as an official policy or embodied in a state curriculum, for it describes a tacit way of thinking and acting in a moral community...
...Not merely an initiative but an argument will have to be challenged here...
...Something wider and deeper is looked for now...
...Russell Jacoby, in The Last Intellectuals, wrote well about the obscurantist habits of institutional radicals, but he saw their predicament as part of a larger story about the vanishing from American culture of the public intellectual...
...To believe on reasonable grounds that in a given cause, though one may have few living allies and perhaps no visible ones, somebody in a similar predicament once felt the same intuition, can be a sustaining knowledge and the beginning of a persuasive self-trust...
...For it is an unhappy fact that most of the conversation about culture in America now is carried on in universities...
...we may, just now, be entering the era of the hired raider, and the leveraged buyout of whole departments...
...Almost alone, they perform the function Mill and his contemporaries supposed no single institution would ever have to perform...
...I write in the belief that political liberalism and these particular Enlightenment ideals are both, on balance, good...
...If I say in a lecture, "The figuration of Prospero's last speech in The Tempest betrays a slippage from subversion to containment which the occlusive presence of Caliban tends to undermine," I may, in some fantastic dialogue of the mind, be singing the equivalent of a Sandinista Wedding March, but what it means to you practically is, "Look at a slightly different list of secondary works, this time, and don't turn in the paper late...
...Dependence and group-narcissism are the paralysis of genuine scholarship...
...Our agreement that it ought to continue, however, is weaker now than it has been for several generations...
...And it may (by a stroke of interpretative acuteness) serve as a stimulus to further discovery, or as an incitement to thinking...
...A loss of articulate energy and even of demonstrable prudence in our political leaders...
...For the foregoing remarks could hardly claim much interest if the new movements had not produced a striking change in the shape of literature departments...
...But they seem to feel sure of this much: that in the humanities generally, and in literature departments above all, strong arguments have been mounted against teaching many of the old books...
...I believe in any case that discussions about the humanities ought to be widened to include people outside both the culture of assent and the culture of suspicion...
...Of the inheritance that is thus passed on to a student, Oakeshott remarks in his essay "Learning and Teaching": It does not deliver to us a clear and unambiguous message...
...I have in mind a mood of belief that fiction could do more with than polemic can: I will be calling it—with a sense that the phrase somehow fails to be satisfactory —"institutional "institutional radicalism...
...How did the older pedagogy lose some of its animating purpose...
...the proceedings of left-wing think tanks and accounts of the same proceedings in right-wing journals of culture...
...We are familiar with the sort of authoritarian (Jerry Falwell) who knows that it is wrong to teach children the theory of natural selection...
...But, in practice, the thing has never been as common as the phrase...
...They offer, in fact, a kind of solitude, and a kind of company...
...Yet the opposition to such teaching is active and energetic, and it seems to grow stronger as defenses of the remembered routine grow duller...
...It does not usually occur as a group with a fixed place of residence, for its interests do not correspond to the chosen emphasis of a single department anywhere...
...But the emphasis on literature in attacks on the humanities seems to me misplaced, and if one allows the blame to fall there, one must do so entirely as a matter of convenience...
...Still, a leading precept of liberal education holds that no subject in itself is low, and none is ruled out in advance as a basis from which genuine learning might start...
...The current defenses of mass culture are in no way novel, and when a surer consensus prevailed they were simply beside the point...
...Combined with a distrust of "the West" (identified with the project of empire) is a distrust of the individual ( = capitalism) and of tolerance ( = repressive tolerance...
...that what is happening now is the inward migration, on campus, of the leaders and followers of the student revolt...
...In sum, one cannot help feeling that the teach-the-conflict idea is a device of convenience worked out for scholars themselves, to give a live constituency to talk that would otherwise be muffled in the iron lung of subsidized quarterlies...
...It is made out to be a scandal that advanced students in English today may have read only a few plays by Shakespeare...
...and that the people in question still think the way they always thought—which means that they are a nuisance and ought to be abated...
...At no earlier period, perhaps, would this have been taken to mean: "Talk long enough about that flower and you will succeed in changing the plant-structure of the universe...
...I do not think the solution lies in bending to the fast answers supplied by the avant-garde in a given department—answers that, as I have argued, tend even in the short run to be parochial and in the long run both antitraditional and authoritarian...
...It is true that thinking is an elusive and indeed a nonutilitarian good...
...literature, so to speak, with a minus sign in front of it...
...This student will already have read some works of history and philosophy and fiction that prompted a fresh kind of thinking about life: one reason that he, or she, went on in school and took the humanities instead of the sciences was to think about books like that in a more organized way...
...Its success as a working doctrine in the humanities owes everything to its alliance with another, and at one time a quite distinct, force...
...The odd thing is that such an experience is not now broadly possible...
...What remains perplexing about their appeal is that the wish for permanent stability and the fear of an endless panic should so often be joined in a single mentality...
...Having equipped yourself in this way, you may eventually be in a position to work for a profit in television...
...This change has been quite marked even in an autonomous publication like the New York Times, which once seemed a great resource for discussion and information and which cannot trace its decline to any apparent sense of rivalry with television...
...This axiom, commonplace in the humanities today, belongs to a pedantic populism that is more typically found in state-run academies...
...At the same time, defenses of the second often try to cover the first as well...
...It would be a fine stroke of poetic justice if the next generation of philosophers elected not to read a word more on "weakness of the will" from professionals until they had consulted several thousand pages of Tolstoy, George Eliot, and Henry James...
...Critical practice along these lines follows from a deliberate policy of crude thinking...
...The comments I have cited by James, Cory, and Oakeshott all suggest a nonscientific defense of education...
...Grown-ups, including many grown-up students, are likely not to want to allow television-for-credit in universities...
...But a difficult paradox holds together the idea of a nonrestrictive tradition...
...That is why only literature departments are relied on to teach a canon of works that have been read for generation after generation...
...But the argument is likely never to come to a head...
...The freedom that works of art now enjoy in a few societies was won, with difficulty, as an effect of the triumphs of Renaissance Humanism and the Enlightenment...
...They resist from a decent modesty, and perhaps also from a sense of inadequacy...
...What troubles the pamphlet-writers and letter-writers about the humanities is that this function might, in the not very distant future, be suspended...
...Or was it just the next, better thing...
...This last deduction has acquired such currency that it can be stated flatly as an axiom: "Professionalization makes thought possible," write the authors of a recent pamphlet, Speaking for the Humanities (ACLS Occasional Paper, No...
...on the other hand, a tremendous widening of scope in areas where no departmental talent can serve as a guide...
...But together they give a distinct tone to current reflections on the function of literary scholarship...
...The one I like best was offered by William James in "The Social Value of the CollegeBred," a 1907 address to the Radcliffe Alumnae Association...
...Carried into every human practice, they work against a strong principle that says that merit ought to be judged separately in separate spheres...
...The intertextual soap crowd and the anonymous ballad crowd got together and theoretically serious exchanges abounded on such topics at the Marriott and the Hilton...
...Close up, the tenacity with which the last view seems to be held is conspicuous...
...and with the sort (William Bennett) who knows that it is wrong to teach grown-ups the history of thought without a religious overlay: the former has more-than-scientific, the latter morethanhistorical, reasons for the authority he invokes...
...A safe consensus cannot be induced by artificial means, in intellectual any more than in moral life...
...Some time ago the universities took on the work of showing by example what the connection might be, and how the connection might vary from person to person...
...And what is true of knowledge is true of thought itself...
...or "just reading for the pleasure of it...
...Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment...
...society that would not assure their survival...
...Traditions are made of something more...
...The teaching of mass culture (including television sitcoms and shoot-em-ups, USA Today, "Postmodern Standup Comics," and so on...
...Is there a social cost or a social benefit in keeping the experiment going...
...By what rituals of consent or symbolic allegiance can we make it mandatory...
...Probably something of both, and we will never have the instruments to measure them...
...Scholarly discovery in the humanities does now and then produce new knowledge...
...Cory and Oakeshott draw some consequences for a liberal education generally...
...In the nineteenth century, the academic humanities were chiefly to be relied on for grammar and rhetoric, both "dripped in" to the student's head with a stupendous dullness...
...But their familiarity was the outcome of shared ideas, of a knowledge of people and things and reputations to be reckoned with (whatever one finally made of them), all to a degree that we are now likely to find incredible...
...For the conservatives offer a distinct image of culture...
...but they cannot grow and they cannot change...
...for the habit of attention, for the art of expression, for the art of assuming at a moment's notice a new intellectual position, for the art of entering quickly into another person's thoughts, for the habit of submitting to censure and refutation, for the art of indicating assent or dissent in graduated terms...
...A pretty predictable moralism is at work in assessments like these—a moralism that one naturally associates with active public commitments...
...And yet the current plea for a supervised culture rests on evidence open to doubt...
...So the puzzle remains: Even as the language of academic study has been politicized, politics itself has been coded back into the language of academic study...
...Rather, I aim to defend the study of tradition as such...
...Closer in the foreground is Michel Foucault, used chiefly for words that seem to telegraph a truth about whole epochs ("circulation," "currency," "surveillance") and for the clinical irony of his 548 • DISSENT prose in translation...
...One must go slowly here for the subject, properly pursued, would take us the length of another essay...
...This essay itself has been a casualty of the very institutional parochialism that it describes...
...As Horkheimer and Adorno argue there, all Enlightenment knowledge presumes, and believes its own presumption of, impartiality...
...However 552 • DISSENT vastly the character and justification of the enterprises may differ, their practitioners appear to feel that they must stand or fall together...
...James thought that learning of every kind, which was otherwise just a compound of an age's favorite facts and theories, joined the humanities when it became the subject of a story about the past...
...or "the culture of common sense...
...There is an intelligible pattern of motives for this moralizing disapproval of literature...
...For blame: "essentialist," "canonical," "thematize," "containment," "ideology...
...But that is to project rather freely from current tendencies...
...The mistake of the professionalists, I said at the start, has been to exalt knowledge-as-such at the expense of arts and habits...
...Nothing, for example, about the perspective of alternativecanon teaching should make it in the smallest way sympathetic to the concerns of anti-canon teaching, and it is possible to admire much of the work done in the first area and none in the second...
...But if the endowment were offered to a state-of-the-art program in theory and communications, it is hard to see what standard anyone would cite for turning it down...
...But when that happens, it quietly changes everyone's feeling about the kind of place a university can be...
...The timely books and articles that take a 554 • DISSENT position on the conflicts are not built to last...
...nor need you regret the hours spent on much that is forgotten, for the shadow of lost knowledge at least protects you from many illusions...
...That means that if works of art or complex argument hold much interest for you—painting or fiction or moral philosophy or political theory—you are thrown back on your own resources to make what selection you can...
...Besides, there is in fact a line of recent inquiry in the humanities, or rather a convergence of interests, from which a curriculum might be built up to serve the education of students...
...In fact, what is happening now in literature happened earlier, over a longer period, elsewhere in the humanities...
...James's definition also shows why history and philosophy now belong to the humanities only provisionally...
...Incredible — and, many would want to add, elitist, exclusive, pernicious...
...The process of sifting the tradition still continues, or we would be dead as a society...
...There exists now at many institutions, though in an unorganized way, a community that might some day give a vivid character to teaching and research along these lines...
...Such was the common perception of the humanities around the end of the Second World War...
...That culture had its touchstones—serious monuments, local monuments —many of which have dated badly...
...Things are bad, yes...
...Universities, of course, cannot be held answerable for the defects of a general life they did not make by themselves...
...Yet a tradition may itself supply grounds for appeal against the exercise of arbitrary authority—the deeper the tradition, the better the chances for success in the appeal...
...Aesthetics = Politics There used to be a morality of scholarship that warned the interpreter, or commentator, or historian (all of whom were pictured as impartial) never to seek through scholarship to influence the world outside of educational institutions...
...The essay appeared in 1838...
...Everyone hears scraps of this conversation, but it is hard to find the teacher, in a single body anyway, who can keep up with what books of such different sorts are saying...
...There is a warm sea of publications below...
...So too can the very idea of a speaker or writer who addresses a chosen audience...
...I quoted earlier a passage from William James's "The Social Value of the CollegeBred," in which all the humanities were praised as modes of history...
...in philosophy, the pressure always to revise the margins of a given problem in response to discoveries in the natural and social sciences...
...But the first reaction I think is the true one...
...Geology, economics, mechanics, are humanities when taught with reference to the successive achievements of the geniuses to which these sciences owe their being...
...The only possible response has often seemed to be "a genial amateurism...
...And it does so quickly, familiarly, without apology or explanation, as only a gesture can...
...They allow the possibility that we may even build up minds so free as to cherish, for generation after generation, some books more than others, without from that long experiment catching the taint of a superstitious reverence...
...Institutional Radicalism Professionalism in itself is without charm...
...It is a different matter to say how far it might apply to teachers as well...
...It was in deference to some such ideal that a few modern philosophers —among them R.G...
...It also begs a number of questions, as the following parallel assertions may suggest: (A) Milton was making a political choice when he wrote Paradise Lost in a complex idiom that few readers could follow even in 1670...
...But how did things ever reach this point...
...Faced with a choice between the conservative belief that culture is sacred and the liberal belief that it is a common possession of some utility, the truly suspicious reply that it is always partial, always compromised...
...Do these two assertions, in fact, describe the same kind of choice...
...But principles are seldom invoked that could stand in the way of just this drift toward conformity...
...it has taken some time for the humanities to follow...
...An institutional radical will want to say that they do...
...But one ought not to forget a third character in this dialogue, who is present at least as an observer—the aggrieved parent who asks (or wonders if it is still permitted to ask), "Why are my son and daughter watching MTV for a class requirement instead of reading Tocqueville on the tyranny of the majority...
...I do not much like the atmosphere or the effects of the professionalist move in literature...
...Nietzsche's reason was a distrust of the herd, Mill's reason a trust that it would not stay a herd forever, provided all thinking did not come to be identified with the conventions of a certain time and place...
...If one asks what it would feel like, in practice, to respect tradition even while rejecting authority, these words offer a vivid clue...
...About the structure of the humanities in 1989, the same educated Americans are apt to have a much less confident picture...
...of the influence of marketing, and of production constraints, on many details of the final package, such as the timing of plot climaxes for commercial breaks...
...A liberal education tries to assure the persistence of a culture of responsive individuals—people who, in the course of a long experiment in learning, will have discovered the habits of attention that make it possible to be at once thoughtful and critical citizens...
...This is the argument that rebuts even the best arguments for a person or cause...
...This may mean a different way of living, of thinking, of being...
...For example, it should be possible to read Leviathan and Paradise Lost in the same class, just as they were once read by the same culture, without having to be taught by a scholar who makes up in a hand-to-mouth fashion a whole history of poetry or of political theory...
...It would, I think, be a good thing if universities did not follow the example of some other institutions and become a staging ground for contests between rival communitarian orthodoxies...
...And what can we do to restore as much of that purpose as is now worth having...
...But in the current discussions of higher education, in the crude satire of the right and the protective clichés of the left, it has often seemed unclear how strong a consensus remains in favor of the survival of these things...
...It is pointless to object that nobody ever taught "the texts themselves," whatever that may mean...
...Some time in the future, the judicial nominees who try to explain away their opinions with just this logic may turn out to be members of the legalacademic left...
...What is it that they are really afraid of...
...Not the free discourse of equals, they say, but the licensed discourse of peers, creates the conditions for an advance in knowledge...
...I select the example to make a point about the drawbacks of institutional radicalism generally, without respect to party...
...But you go to a great school not so much for knowledge as for arts and habits...
...The deterioration has sped up noticeably in the last two decades, and the ground note of American culture, as it is experienced by a literate person today, is television—at best the national network news, or some grave and newslike talk show...
...Some of the consequences for practical criticism are traced in a recent article by David Norbrook, "Life and Death of Renaissance Man" (Raritan, Spring 1989...
...I do not accept this morality—it is hard to see how it could be lived...
...It needs to be emphasized that such a use of the Dialectic of Enlightenment leads to an oddly distorted picture not only of the Enlightenment but of the views on aesthetics that Adorno evolved over a long career of thinking...
...The teaching of literary theory for an up-to-date access both to the great-books canon and alternative canons...
...But on the Friday afternoon when the convention began to thin and was replaced at the same hotels by the bigger, rowdier, and (I think it fair to say) more popular clientele of a football weekend, it was not clear, from the results of one informal canvass anyway, how many of the Association's avant-garde could name even one of the teams in the Sugar Bowl...
...And how did we do it...
...John Stuart Mill invented the idea of culture in our modern sense when he spoke in his essay on Jeremy Bentham about the good of "self-culture...
...For a long time, television was refused a place in literature departments—not because of a metaphysical belief in its rottenness but from a general agreement that its goods were inferior...
...By which was meant, originally, the natural sciences...
...The phrase is still in common use because it has a sound that is flattering to Americans...
...The anxiety I mentioned earlier is thus linked to a particular fear: that we now run the risk of thoughtlessly surrendering, in a piecemeal fashion, an educational practice which in turn strengthens a kind of social coherence we believe to be valuable...
...Conversation, because each speaker frames a statement in the belief that someone listening is capable of a reply...
...These sound like the kind of data that any reformer would want to use...
...and a few examples will have to support the claim that an appeal to authority is often the opposite of an appeal to tradition...
...At the convention of the Modern Language Association last December in New Orleans, the undeclared general theme was mass culture, as applied anachronistically to any place or period covered by the curriculum of scholarship...
...For the first of these shifts, from the natural to the social sciences, chiefly a methodical language was taken over...
...It will be instructive therefore to look at a rare occasion when institutional radicalism—or, as it is sometimes called, the "oppositional practices" of a profession—did briefly and memorably come face to face with public opinion...
...There is great variety here, but one may say as a rule that their 550 • DISSENT bureaucratic manners are impeccable, while their generosity and opportunism occur in about the conventional mix...
...To see where it goes wrong, one must have spent time lately on the faculty of a college or university, as most of the article writers have not done...
...it cannot be learned or taught in principle, only in detail...
...The Drift Toward Mass Culture The last two sections have been a necessary excursus...
...Above all, conversation offers a place for coming to know something quite different from what one had known before...
...A few habits still remain in the way of a clean sweep for "knowledge...
...There is a particle of truth in the analysis, the truth of a profile just glimpsed in an unlit room...
...But in a free society, tests of adherence or assent are only warranted in a crisis that demands of citizens an intense, complete, reciprocal trust...
...a tendency among citizens generally to follow protest, grievance, and other acts of occasional citizenship into the paths of legal redress and not public persuasion—these phenomena are both a cause and a consequence of the growing distrust in America of any common discourse concerning the daily choices of politics and morality...
...All we can reasonably be sure of is that they do have some FALL • 1989...
...For suggestions on many points of detail, I thank Thomas Crow, Irving Howe, and Fred Siegel...
...but not so bad, yet, as to warrant an expedient like this...
...A generation ago some classics of historical narrative, which a new-modeled discipline had pushed to the side (Hume, Carlyle, Macaulay), were found to be leading a second life in English departments...
...In all this vast body of recent literature, the words "tradition" and "authority" are used pretty steadily, and they are used interchangeably...
...Yet the logic of his position was the same as theirs...
...We have our academic junk-bond dealers, perpetual negotiators, inside traders sailing close to the wind in several markets at once...
...A troubling fact about the humanities today is that so many on both sides of the argument respect authority but reject tradition...
...It may lie rather in creating a permanent place for collaborative teaching in the humanities...
...If the defense they give is as evasive, and the public sentiment against it as strong, as happened in the case of Bork, then those nominees too will deserve to be defeated...
...Attacks on the first tend to shade into attacks on the second, without understanding the very different challenge this entails...
...and now, prominently at a few institutions, literary scholars show signs of wanting to give up their traditional work for novelty and a clear reward...
...and on the whole the picture was right in its mingled sense of purpose and routine...
...But there is another sort of authoritarian, only now becoming familiar, who believes "Professors should have less freedom of expression than writers and artists, because professors are supposed to be creating a better community" (Professor Barbara Johnson of the Department of English, Harvard University, as quoted by Robert Detlefsen in the New Republic, April 10, 1989...
...But a cynical assumption as well appears to play its part here...
...It is a kind of staring faith—half cynical, half relieved...
...Difficult as it is, the liberal understanding of tradition was for a long time promoted by American politicians, shared by public servants, exemplified by artists, critics, and freelance citizens...
...Jurgen Habermas, a responsible and skeptical expositor of the Horkheimer-Adorno thesis, says in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity that the aim of the Dialectic is to exhibit the perpetual relapse of enlightenment into myth and that for the authors "the permanent sign of enlightenment is domination over an objectified external nature and a repressed internal nature...
...Thus, according to James, it is the historical approach to events, texts, and persons—telling a story about phenomena otherwise linked only by family resemblance—that turns a field of study into one of the humanities...
...I hope to sharpen a certain general anxiety about what the authoritarians say into an active distrust of what they are likely to do...
...What to make of this possibly fortunate and possibly appalling fact remains a matter to be settled by convention...
...To be well sustained, teaching on this pattern requires that the collaborators come to know texts that feel initially strange to their understandings...
...the talk has become tedious and fractious...
...But it is a good habit...
...In making some estimate of the risk on both sides, democratic principles have not till lately been at a loss...
...Professional development really has no more moral claim on us than real-estate development...
...Of institutional radicalism as a social phenomenon, the only analysis so far has come from neoconservative journalists, in articles for Commentary and the New Criterion...
...The teaching of alternative canons in black studies, feminism, and other subjects...
...The classic texts out of which those disciplines grew, the disciplines themselves honored by atomization or polite oblivion...
...Such "elective affinities" are interesting in themselves but they serve a deeper purpose of scholarship...
...If the things that later interest them are specialized topics of research, why not confine the bulk of their teaching to just such topics...
...There are, that is to say, kinds of discovery foreign to one's contemporaries, knowledge that neither a sect nor a school professes, which one can feel called upon to bring to light alone...
...One works in the classroom in the hope of achieving some effect in society...
...to pass outside it is to risk the strangeness of a new routine, without the promise of any reward...
...I think this feeling is mistaken...
...I can enter the political fray with congressional representatives, editorial writers, and so on, and try to get some legislation passed...
...This posture, however, is a little misleading...
...Until lately, however, it was a model scorned by the humanities—where, from personal interest as much as dedication, many professors often chose to teach outside the area of their current research...
...Well, the industry people would be nice...
...and when we see how diverse the types of excellence may be, how various the tests, how flexible the adaptations, we gain a richer sense of what the terms "better" and "worse" may signify in general...
...It is an odd and unhappy terminus for thought to arrive at...
...That is why what one does at a university will suffice as a complete account of what one does in society...
...I take these words from a recent public lecture in which "literature itself" was said to bear "some of the responsibility" for the inadequacy of the sanitation laws of Victorian England...
...And the only way will sometimes be through a personal reading of the past...
...Logically, this last element in a curriculum comes first, but it may be the hardest of all for us to think about now...
...Many readers will agree that none of these developments has been altogether happy for education...
...No matter what their program, the adepts of institutional politics seldom encounter members of the general public which they have written off...
...At times of relative tranquility this means that "the politics of interpretation" can be pursued with only the usual iconoclasm...
...And on the whole, once the focus has been restricted to the academy alone, it comes to seem a story of continuous improvement in the humanities...
...Are there also some kinds of thought that it makes impossible...
...with assorted cris de coeur from editorial writers and unattached observers, as well as exchanges of bewildered anecdotes in the letters columns of newspapers...
...The truth is that nobody knows, or ever has known, how works of art dispose us to act...
...The Importance of Being a Science A curriculum based on certain books is not as silly a therapy as it is often made out to be...
...What is sometimes possible, in the intervals of a controversy, is to offer reflection on a change that is already in progress...
...But the prejudices of institutional radicals tend to be antihumanist and anti-Enlightenment...
...Presumably they have gone to school already, and so are already acquainted with the arts and habits in question...
...Occasions like this give them some free advertising and add to their products a gloss of respectability that even the most whimsical sponsor cannot bank on...
...Once the analogy with science has been accepted, the humanities can move very fast in any direction...
...But until that preference is widely known, professionalists in the humanities will, as far as possible, take the high democratic ground and identify mass culture with popular consciousness...
...In doing so they may be reminded, not of the sense in which their students are protoprofessionals, but of the sense in which they themselves continue to be students...
...The confusion seems to be widespread...
...Indeed, many of the strongest feelings of solidarity for a thinking person are likely to be of this kind...
...And yet, educated Americans tend to feel that there are good books that students ought to know—a reason for universities to exist is that you read 542 • DISSENT the books there, and learn to think about them...
...This concern has led away from public engagements and into a professional — even, at times, an esoteric—ambition for the refinement of a knowledge all one's own...
...Not that a disaster is on the point of occurring—but that it might, gradually, occur—because we have forgotten the arguments for preserving a state of things we took for granted...
...Yet hardly a single telling criticism has been ventured by any of these tendencies against the interests of any other...
...551 effect: It would be odd if one part of human life were alone exempt from such hazards...
...Even a first-year instructor will now be advised, by the cleverer sort of colleagues, to negotiate as early as possible for a sequence of seminars that follow an intended sequence of publications...
...Habits of thought like these are now dominant, if not yet exclusive, in two areas of literary study, the Renaissance and American literature...
...The situation is not the same yet in American universities...
...We could then cut back to a regimen of politics that needed no translation, and have one fewer set of virtues to worry about...
...This was the milieu in which the author of a radical defense of liberty could look forward to seeing his arguments reviewed in Fraser's Magazine or the Athenaeum, the Edinburgh or the Quarterly Review, any of a dozen journals neither academic nor popular, which kept a cultural conversation alive...
...Yet such a curriculum is, at most, a therapy...
...For the products of television are themselves produced by a market culture far more debased and far more powerful than the bookish tradition that some academics hope by this alliance to destroy...
...B) The professor is making a political choice when he says the good of studying Paradise Lost is to expose the elitist pretensions of its author...
...It is the thing you can always be "with," without being of it...
...We want a new knowledge, and we want a knowledge no one will accuse of pretending to be central...
...Yet knowledge, the knowledge of the sciences, if it adds nothing worthwhile to human conduct, still gives us the mixed benefit of progress...
...Because I want to sketch a position here that I have not seen argued elsewhere, it will be best to start with a disclaimer...
...Correctly translated, it means: "We need to teach not interpretation but the sociology of knowledge...
...The conservative great-books plans that I mentioned earlier have come to be associated with a design of assuring assent to a political and economic establishment...
...A concise professionalist thesis in literature departments now runs as follows: "We need to teach not the texts themselves but how we situate ourselves in reference to those texts...
...They moved away at the bidding of strong internal motives— in history, distrust of the ideal of a single story about a common past...
...Why conversation?—as opposed to, say, contest, or market, or stockpile...
...But suppose we imagine a student more remarkable still: one who sees just how far his or her teachers stand for unharmonizing points of view, who even takes pleasure in arranging mental wars between them (in which, perhaps, some perish forever) but who, far from wanting such an exchange to be formalized in every class, thinks of education as something more than a professional debate...
...Or anyway, not yet: the literary humanities embody large numbers, they command many journals, fellowships, and institutes for advanced study, and a volatile tendency is always more likely to spread than an inert condition is to stay inert...
...It may also (by a fresh arrangement of facts) help to create the intuitions of a whole generation...
...Here the social sciences were merely the first to go...
...It is true some of the sixties people are still around...
...For culture and politics involve not the moral good of discrete virtues but the fighting of successive battles in a single war: The two activities are infinitely translatable into each other...
...The same sort of adaptation is now occurring across a wider range of subjects and with more regular support...
...And, mainly, they look to universities...
...If, FALL • 1989 • 549 then, a scholar (say, an intellectual historian in a department of social historians) should leave her institution but go on writing books, she would be doing something in those books, but we could no longer say that she was having ideas...
...But the effects are never edifying, and the public in a democracy has a natural interest in those effects...
...After all, the titles with which we fill our "required" reading lists make only the details of a collective portrait—the sharp outlines of which are decided by a story we want to tell about ourselves as a culture...
...The mood of a related discipline like art history is so different that the same generalizations hardly seem to apply...
...The sudden fortune of knowledge as an ideal of the humanities is all the more puzzling when one recalls that ever since the early sixties a majority of scholars in departments of literature have been trained not as historical researchers at all but as critics...
...Indeed, the standard defense of institutional radicalism in the humanities, and increasingly in the study of the law as well, is that scholars can have their deepest influence on public discourse simply by doing what they do anyway...
...For the objects of research here offer a very perfunctory resistance—they have an almost infinite amount of "give...
...It is, on the face of it, a creed of social despair...
...They know that an unreflective tradition, of the sort the conservatives plead for, is not a medium of thought but rather a lulling therapy for acceptance of things-as-they-are...
...It is a culture in which people can always be trusted to derive much the same truths from the same books—a culture of assent...
...I think television is a way of death...
...Professional institutions are defined from within by their socializing codes...
...it often speaks in riddles...
...For students now in their teens and early twenties, the genuine struggles of this society, over civil rights in the fifties and sixties, over Vietnam in the late sixties and early seventies, can seem a thing of the past...
...At the same time, they have felt pressed by the usual expectations of the academy itself to identify their work as far as possible with special credentials...
...We are not at a moment like that, and besides education does not feel like that, not even at moments of low self-confidence...
...He had nothing but contempt for those who sought in art the fluent and translatable meanings of propaganda...
...When one looks back at Victorian England and the America of Whitman and Lincoln, one is impressed by the consensus a majority of the educated observed in the arts and moral sciences...
...Literature owes what prestige it still commands to the idea that it is a sphere where influence cannot be bought, or leveraged, wheedled or bullied for, in quite the same way it can in politics through the machinations of skillful lobbyists...
...but, by a happy symmetry, the social effects are already there in the classroom...
...Another name for the subject of the debate about the humanities today is "liberal education...
...nothing less than this is what we ought to mean by the humanities...
...Everything that comes to light in this way is known in order to be assimilated and therefore exploited by the knower...
...A provisional answer is that the benefit here relates to the ideal of an open, informed, and reflective discourse...
...The words are James Kincaid's, but similar formulations can be heard, these days, at almost any session of a professional colloquium on literature...
...Or—to adapt the police-blotter slang that has helped to make these discussions sensational—a work of art is complicit in crimes it does not confess...
...His explanation, had it been accepted, would have cleared him from the kind of scrutiny by the representatives of a common tradition to which he was in fact exposed...
...Dullness apart, that may have been pretty much what was looked for then...
...Yet counterarguments will scarcely make much headway where a professional convenience is at stake...
...By contrast, the practice of teaching it now, and so giving students in the classroom more of what they can find outside, has acquired a shock value that is hard to top...
...which is why people worry about the humanities...
...At any rate I offer no argument here about the older patterns of teaching and research...
...This mood has its own tightly regulated conformities...
...Here again one may blame the lapse in some measure on the effects of rapid professionalization: on the one hand, a loss of confidence, in areas where some real competence might still be fostered...
...If enough people want to slow down the trend, maybe it can still be done...
...And one should not underrate the element of costume here, or the extravagant tokens of normal insincerity...
...Mixed in with the other motives of the style may be a touch of envy for those whose suspicion has climbed to the higher stage of unqualified cynicism—those who work in the industry of television itself, yet reserve the right to say how little they are of it...
...But different answers have also been 546 • DISSENT given from time to time...
...Culture does relate to society, after all: to say more would be portentous, to say less merely false...
...The populist affectations of a teacher at any level make for benign entertainment...
...If I am right, the humanities are the proper place for that study to go on...
...Because all of the speakers have an interest in common that none can easily describe...
...In an area where our habits and opinions were never meant to fit us snugly, we ought instead to be asking questions that lead away from tests...
...But they are no more the reasons of a liberal or an educator than are Bennett's or Falwell's...
...In pursuing the subject anyway, it will be useful to hold in mind an aphorism by the great art historian Erwin Panofsky, who described a humanist as someone who "rejects authority" but "respects tradition...
...A professor who went said afterwards, "The industry people were really very nice...
...Traditional Past, Professional Present A definition may now be needed to suggest what the humanities ideally ought to represent...
...In passing from the social sciences to the humanities, only the memories of such a language are needed...
...I believe the defeat of Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court—not only that it was accomplished, but the way it was accomplished —was one of the most hopeful events in our recent politics...
...But it was an understandable product of liberal selfconfidence a generation ago, of pluralism in politics and positivism in science...
...Members of the culture of suspicion see through all the possible mystifications of "the given," whether that means a given pattern of interpretation, a familiar social order, or a received habit of distinguishing political education from political recruitment...
...The new academic professionalism shows that the schools at this level are just one more casualty of an ethic of market rationalization that controls our society today as never before...
...quoted the Chevrolet motto "the heartbeat of America" without quotation marks, to evoke all the pathos he could find in an idea of public service...
...Then, too, the best way to overcome the aesthetic prejudice against mere packaging will be by teaching in a solemn spirit works of commerce that profess to be nothing but packaging...
...These facts say nothing about how they conduct themselves...
...And yet the difficulties themselves suggest a shared belief that books talk to each other in subtler ways than the existing map of the departments can reflect...
...One further motive seems to unite the several available versions of institutional radicalism: a belief in the priority, no matter what the context, of the twin ideals of equal representation and universal rights...
...It seems very probable that if, in keeping with the same pattern, departments of literature ever decide in earnest to unload their great books, somebody else with different motives will want to take them up...
...and yet, unless one recognizes first that it can be reformed, one will come to know FALL • 1989 541 it only as a matter of rote—with the result that the knowledge of a tradition will seem as unimaginative a business as the knowledge of an alphabet or a catechism...
...But such an account of the curriculum cannot reflect the disparate functions that a given study may have served for the culture of different periods...
...The culture of assent and the culture of suspicion have done well at least in reminding us that America is all one society and that a deep sickness somewhere will eventually be felt, though under a different name, everywhere...
...Anyway the 556 • DISSENT calm and imperturbable voices here, who say that changes have always happened, that things will shake themselves again into an accustomed shape, miss the whole point that their overexcited neighbors have somehow grasped...
...But for a citizen of modern America, the largest, almost the only unimaginable difference, is between the new which we inhabit and the old which we have never seen enough of to forget...
...But this view only offers a sense of the purpose of education for students...
...But it is also part of the history of America in the 1980s...
...Where a pedagogy like this has been tried, in the more arid tracts of the social sciences, it cuts down the generations of students to blocks of five or six years, and one generation is reduced to talk with the last about the fraying ends of a half-dead quarrel...
...Conversation and the Survival of the Past I have mentioned the worth of a community that may exist in no special place...
...The sifting of human creations...
...One thereby improves the odds in favor of reflective change...
...The government accuser who frames the matter in this way will receive from the academic comforter a ready reply: "Schools are much the same as they always were—just come and see...
...The truth is that with much refinement and convenience, professionalization has brought much damage everywhere...
...Doubtless this idea is to some extent an idealization— even in the heyday of romantic and modern art, it was partly that—but we hold on to different words for culture and politics because the idea has continued to serve a human need...
...But it has led to occasional displays of unity, and on an interesting front: the worth of teaching mass culture...
...there will be another debate, with different books and articles, for the early 1990s and for the late...
...Once those meanings take on the apparent solidity of conventional truths, they serve to keep in place all the hierarchies of social, economic, and sexual subordination...
...Growing solitude...
...but scholars, like citizens, to whom that seems a healthy state of things will always invoke the argument of growing solitude...
...When a tacit consensus starts to break down, a panic reaction asks, How can we hold on to it...
...you will at any rate be well situated to unmask its products, if you have a taste for doing so...
...The public discourse now is fashioned by front men and anchor-persons who read expressively from an electric roll of words and address an audience of everyone...
...All this the culture of suspicion has taken in, and wants to teach, and wants students to consume, more and more...
...Professionalization along these lines has been going on for most of the century, and yet here again the last twenty years have seen a remarkable acceleration of the process...
...Not, indeed, a consensus of judgment, but a consensus about the grounds of judgment...
...The point of the statement above is less to argue or persuade than to announce that the subject has been changed...
...All the articles agree that the new tendency grew out of sixties radicalism...
...These are run by factions, and their coverage outside politics is limited, but they are the only feature of our landscape that gives a remote idea of the intellectual life that Mill could rely on, when he trusted culture itself to be acquired as "self-culture...
...Don't jump off that cliff...
...Indeed, the adjective most commonly paired with enlightenment, by academic writers of this tendency, is totalitarian...
...Teach the Conflicts...
...To the institutional radical, however, that kind of separation can only be defended as a tactical move...
...Collingwood in The Idea of History, Michael Oakeshott in Rationalism in Politics, and Richard Rorty in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature—came to think of inquiry in the humanities on the analogy of "conversation...
...These difficulties are now being felt above all in departments of literature...
...For Herman Rapaport, in Milton and the Postmodern, Milton's defense of the regicide marks him as a predecessor of Himmler...
...Or I can increase the representation of the same person or class of persons by altering the reading list for a course I teach...
...The points of accord I have listed above are negative and minimal—necessary and not sufficient elements of an orthodoxy that may never crystallize...
...The habit of teaching them still survives because the numbers (of teachers, of students) are still on its side...
...By the proposal we are now considering, such a student is sold short...
...When I first heard a theorist praise the militant intertextuality of a soap commercial, I thought that to have made the ad was the next best thing to interpreting it...
...The unity one looks for in a tradition is the loose fitting together of lots of facts, stories, and the shadows of strong impressions...
...And what do they mean when they talk about an `interpellated discursive body hierarchy...
...say a host of concerned citizens, but we know better...
...In the process an alternative or contrary truth is cut off, and the task of theory is to recover what has been lost, by exposing the dead-end of what has been gained...
...Where the future of the university is discussed, or just the future of the humanities, what appears to be most under challenge now is precisely what this understanding of a liberal education had presupposed: the value of coming to know a tradition that is not the property of any party...
...It is as if Colonel Sanders, because his products are consumed by millions, were to be treated as an authentic representative of southern military folk cuisine, and as if to question his practice by cooking something better or going to a real restaurant were the expression of an anti-democratic elitism...
...and it has a history...
...To what end...
...For praise: "decentered," "marginal," "reproblematize," "subversion," "ideology...
...I have spent much of the last two years reading the pamphlet wars on higher education in America: on budgets, demographics, first principles, open-mindedness and "the souls of America's young people...
...It would be wrong to draw a nostalgic picture of the general life to which the humanities have lent themselves in earlier periods...
...It can be a liberating discovery to feel that there are thoughts one has in common with people who lived and worked, acted and suffered a long time in the past...
...FALL • 1989 • 557...
...Humanities scholars tend to resist thinking of themselves as exemplars of a meaningful discourse that is missing elsewhere in their culture...
...At present, the curious airlessness of the debate is typified by a trimming proposal that has just emerged from a group of moderate, humane, and thoroughly optimistic professionalists...
...People in this position tend to look for help...
...Our critical sensibilities grow both more acute and less fanatical...
...What do arts and habits give us...
...Norbrook says that once the general reaction against the liberal culture of modernity has been accepted, even the English Revolution can be seen as a key moment in the installation of the logocentric, repressive, bourgeois subject [who is] the source of most evils of the contemporary world...
...But I think it is fair to begin by looking at institutional radicalism as a nonconforming reaction—a spirit of partisanship brought in to cure something as virulent on the opposite side...
...The confusion of "mass" with "popular," and of "popular" with "democratic," shows a decay of the social sense of scholars that it would take another essay to explore...
...Nowhere do we see the face of that culture more in the real FALL • 1989 • 553 glare of its mastery than in a political year like 1988...
...I cannot imagine a good This essay grew out of an earlier, shorter one commissioned by Stanley Katz of the American Council of Learned Societies and published in Learned Societies and the Evolution of the Disciplines (ACLS Occasional Paper, No...
...Yet it does so for the sake of conquering the objects of knowledge (among which are included other people...
...That has long been the model of academic work in the sciences...
...Teaching Culture The crisis affects the humanities most of all because traditions are made from books...
...And because the good of conversation is not truth, or right, or anything else that may come out at the end of it, but the activity itself in its constant relation to life...
...Consider, as a symptom of our different milieu, the fact that we have not a single journal that still makes a practice, as the TLS does in England, of reviewing a great many new books soon after they appear...
...This certainly looks like the path of least resistance and will therefore recommend itself to many university administrations...
...It says something about the consequent state of mind that no word in the academic humanities is used more frequently and uncritically with the intent to praise than the word "marginal...
...they must be, or so many people would not cling to them...
...and so on, far into the domain of economics and sociology and behavior modification— assuming all the while a fair acquaintance with statistical analysis and the newer techniques of audience demographics...
...High theory, in the humanities, needs mass culture to test its concepts on, just as a scientist needs a control condition in an experiment...
...None of this knowledge is at home in the humanities, and no one yet has offered to transport it there...
...we feel the pathos of lost causes and misguided epochs even while we applaud what overcame them...
...It has been a long time since even the most eminent professional philosophers or historians were expected to have read all of Hume or Kant or Thucydides or Gibbon—unless, of course, their particular interests happened to incline them that way...
...accordingly, it must be not interpreted but interrogated...
...The history of philosophy at a FALL • 1989 • 555 number of schools has partly migrated into departments of religion, and moral philosophy is often at the center of the curriculum in departments of politics and law schools...
...Now, if the lobbying for representation in culture ever reached a pitch where it was clear what was happening, at that point all the advantages of iconoclasm would have been played out, for culture would have been emptied of its prestige...
...Extremes meet: the fundamentalist of the parochial religious community has the same foresight regarding what is "better," and the same methods for achieving it, as the fundamentalist of the parochial academic community...
...In Aesthetic Theory he writes: "To instrumentalize art is to undercut the opposition art mounts against instrumentalism...
...Studying in this way, we learn what types of activity have stood the test of time...
...Television has the perfect charm to suit a style of affectless dandyism that now flourishes among the prospering intelligentsia of the West...
...Teaching on this pattern became a marginal option long ago in more thoroughly professionalized fields like philosophy and history...
...Not taught thus, literature remains grammar, art a catalogue, history a list of dates, and natural science a sheet of formulas and weights and measures...
...When they challenge such a therapy, they are apt therefore to appear as the defenders of a liberal freedom of conscience...
...Everywhere: in the medical and legal professions, too...
...Knowledge, without these, though it may lead to intricate speculation, will never pass into self-knowledge...
...The representative figures of the culture are lawyers, especially those paid to plead a cause behind the scenes...
...They are now some way down the road to putting aside that work...
...To say why this should be a cause of anxiety will require a digression on how universities got into the curious business of teaching culture...
...It was the last step of a long downward path when George Bush (or was it Michael Dukakis...
...As illusions go, it was not a bad one...
...We sympathize with men's mistakes even in the act of penetrating them...
...Of course the more adhesive unities are good for something...
...Both ignore, or deride, the teaching of a strong tradition of tolerance in politics and learning...
...Suppose, for instance, I want to increase the political representation of some person, or class of persons...
...Combine, now, these typical "inside" statements with the rarer "outside" statement I quoted at the start— "Professors should have less freedom of expression than writers and artists, because professors are supposed to be creating a better community" —and it will be plain how the anti-elitist humanities elite could come to be oppressive in some of its daily effects...
...It is instructive in this respect to compare the social influence of the Protestant ministry, in the abolitionist period, with that of the Marxist professoriate in the 1980s...
...I have in mind the growing agreement that historically important books ought to be read across genres, even when that means passing across the boundaries of departments...
...Against this, Bork's main defense rested on the assumption that his offensive views belonged merely to oppositional practices within an academic profession...
...or rather, nothing stronger than social and moral conventions: a convention about the difference in character and dignity between astronomical entities and individual persons...
...These are, to repeat, only conventions...
...You can give humanistic value to almost anything by teaching it historically...
...One must cultivate one's garden...
...The rest of the same thought in James's lecture says briefly what I have tried to say at length...
...I have written steadily of "the humanities," and yet I write as a teacher of literature...
...it offers us advice and suggestion, recommendations, aids to reflection, rather than directives...
...At most, they portray the life they have chosen as an interesting line of work, something intelligent students can "go into" if they care enough...
...By affirming a certain traditional interpretation (as it happened, the liberal interpretation, which in civil rights has become traditional) of the impact of modern history on public life...
...Until recently, one could have said that it therefore had a home in the humanities...
...But an advanced student of literature now who justified a project in this way would risk being sent to the provinces for reeducation...
...Given the practical need for coherence in education, what could ever replace the idea of tradition that I have been summarizing...
...Indeed, it exists not only as something to know, but as something to interpret and reform...
...Conversation is the right metaphor because it marks an event, in time, that had a beginning and perhaps will have an end, though no one afterwards will remember just how either occurred, or why...
...In departments of literature, the pull away from the humanities has had weaker but still sufficient internal motives...
...No one can quite remember when they assumed this responsibility, but without them certainly nothing else would fill their FALL • 1989 543 place...
...They permit no test of right representation in a work of art, any more than of right perspective in a licensed interpreter...
...Thus Jonathan Dollimore's Radical Tragedy . . . sees the Enlightenment one-dimensionally as a fall into essentialism that paved the way for racism, and manages to move in one page from Kant to a Nazi ideologist...
...Perhaps that of some day evolving a wholly negative "knowledge...
...It is because the distance between our lives and those of the past seems to be so commanding a fact—greater than the difference that separates us from any alien culture today—that I have kept coming back to the arts and habits associated with the study of the past...
...One further preliminary word about tradition and authority...
...though, in America, few scholarly practices are of more than three generations' standing: a fact that ought to make us suspicious of theories which hold such practices to be either altogether oppressive or altogether sacred...
...Institutional radicals begin with an uneasy truth: that meanings in any culture are arbitrary—produced, that is to say, by choice and circumstance and the accidents of power...
...And yet, FALL • 1989 • 547 precisely if one does look at the whole society with the same degree of realism, one will want to take with some caution the usual advice to follow professional development wherever it leads...
...Every such academy beginning with France in the eighteenth century has enforced a criterion of value based on subject matter and appropriate "treatment...
...a convention about the way to look at works of art, as distinct from other sorts of social documentation...
...Mill, however, had in view a middle-class public so much more conversable than ours that it takes some imagination even to recall the milieu he was working from...
...But they are what we have—nothing better—to tell us how to spend our time well or ill...
...On his view, the difference between the humanities and other areas of learning is not to be explained by the presence or absence of a method...
...What is going on...
...For such an "unrehearsed intellectual adventure" (to borrow Oakeshott's phrase) is constituted by something less than knowledge and something more: the learning of arts and habits...
...Let us, for contrast, think of the institutional radicals as people who aim to exemplify an opposite ideal—a culture of suspicion...
...But the scripture of institutional radicalism—a work so available that many readers can accurately reproduce its argument without having read the text—is Max Horkheimer and T.W...
...A tradition on this view, far from being fixed forever, may be shaped by the voluntary choices of readers and thinkers...
...The academic in this case was Robert Bork, a professional man of the right—a different type from the scholars I describe here, on the face of things...
...Some of these predigested beliefs go back to Fanon and Marcuse...
...It was part of the same step when Dukakis (or was it Bush...
...That is only one of the interesting things it does...
...and true, sometimes now they have tenure...
...If, in fact, as the culture of suspicion asserts, the Enlightenment did not enlighten, if the liberal idea of tradition was always and only a mask for oppression, and if, in the invention of an aesthetic sphere a little apart from science and politics, the Enlightenment and modern liberalism together must be judged a cheat and a swindle, then the kind of interest we have come to associate with works of art is only the result of a single long unhonorable error...
...There is a possible answer: an idea of authority...
...For the argument I began with, it seems worthwhile to add that this is a community that exists at no special time...
...At present the belief is that the codes of professionalism and its customs at any time are good in themselves, since what one learns by standing outside them is not knowledge...
...These enterprises look like an odd assortment, and it might be supposed that they would not have much to say to each other...
...The gesture makes a direct score against the older democratic belief in the liberating uses of culture...
...quoted the network Olympics logo "Go for the gold," in answer to a question about economic policy...
...Our crisis, then, feels like a crisis because, by an accident of institutional arrangements, the teaching of humane letters has for some time been entrusted to departments of literature...
...A cold look," as Nietzsche describes it, "a sneer on the face of those among whom and for whom one has been educated is feared even by the strongest...
...rather, teachers conducted a class on a book for the sake of showing a way of thinking and talking FALL • 1989 • 545 about books...
...Anti-aesthetic theory can prove very handily that there is no intrinsic difference between high art and mass art: the only difference that counts has to do with habits of interest and perception...
...There is an irony in the recent professionalist effort to legitimate television that can hardly be savored too much...
...It has no meaning as a whole...
...The news magazines are done in the same style and written by the same people who go on the shows...
...Maybe the only aim that Nietzsche ever had in common with John Stuart Mill was to disarm of its sting the "argument of growing solitude...
...Still, some common belief is needed to enforce agreement and to excite enthusiasm...
...But here they are used with a disdain for every practicable design of reform...
...Thus by a kind of extended pun, the structure of representation in a political order is said to be linked directly with the choice of objects for representation in art...
...The refutation lies in a history of the academy itself: the teaching methods of the old grammar and rhetoric created, for most of two centuries in America, as desolate a waste as a pervasive antiliterary theory of literature may now create again...
...A step further along the same path lies the proposition I heard advanced, without irony, at a recent symposium on the humanities: "There are no ideas except in institutions...
...Maybe it helped to induce a degree of conscious fair-mindedness even in scholars who knew exactly where they stood at the beginning of a plan of research...
...Maybe the only good that is lost in the process is a certain ideal of "range...
...You cannot predict the behavior of someone suffering from an anxiety disorder in the same manner that you predict the behavior of a planetary body...
...Gerald Graff, in the book I mentioned earlier, together with Jonathan Culler, Catharine Stimpson, and a number of others argue that universities can best adjust the innovations of research to the older habits of pedagogy by teaching the curriculumcontroversy itself...
...The crisis of the humanities is an episode in the internal development of an area of study...
...I have nothing to say for or against what is now called the traditional study of the humanities...
...That was the year before the humanities conference about television at Johns Hopkins University, to which some of the show-makers themselves came to answer their (quite sympathetic) explicators...
...But most readers at any time use a body of writing for what they think they will find there, and what literary theorists have been drawn to in Adorno is the part that looks simply iconoclastic...
...We live in a different atmosphere, from which the available signs of a public culture have for the most part been withdrawn...
...A certain amount of knowledge you can indeed with average faculties acquire so as to retain...
...Maybe the books have gone on being taught in some measure from sheer habit...
...It is true such a proposal envisions a student generous enough and inquisitive enough to thrive in any atmosphere...
...All our arts and sciences and institutions are but so many quests for perfection on the part of men...
Vol. 36 • September 1989 • No. 4
