Michael Bérubé - American Airspace

Theory Thursday

Guest post by John McGowan

By adding a Theory Thursday to Michael’s Theory Tuesday, we will quickly discover how many masochists we can count among this blog’s faithful readers.

I had originally intended to use this post to fulminate against the following sentence in the “Introduction” to Theory’s Empire: “Our chief aim is to provide students and interested readers with effective intellectual tools to help them redeem the study of literature as an activity worth pursuing in its own right.” There are many, many reasons—about which I could go on at tedious length—why that sentence sticks in my craw. But, like any self-respecting English teacher, I’m going to ask the class what they think. Does the study of literature—and (surely it is implied) literature itself—need to be “redeemed”? And is the royal road to redemption to understand that study as “an activity worth pursuing in its own right”? Answers to be posted in the comments section. And remember: 15% of your final grade is awarded for “participation.”

I have been put off my polemical horse by the general reasonableness of the discussion of Theory’s Empire over at the Valve. The number of participants is a bit disappointing, but the general quality of the conversation is good, and its tone is even better. This is not yet another round in the culture and theory wars, which have wearied hardier souls than mine long before our current late date in history. Is it possible that academics interested in such questions have won their way through to a place where they can be discussed and examined calmly? As someone whose most usual stance has been a plague on both your houses, I am hopeful. In any case, John Holbo is to be commended for using the blogosphere in this innovative and promising way. Even if this first conversation is a little halting, I hope this model proves, like so many other things on the web, a snowball, gathering more and more readers—and participants—as he stages similar events in the future.

I will confine myself today to thinking a bit about “criticism”—an activity that stands in uncertain relation to “theory.” I’ll start by saying that I am uninterested in whether or not every act of criticism relies on implicit, even if unexamined or unacknowledged, assumptions that a more self-conscious “theory” would make explicit. I seldom agree with Stanley Fish about anything, but I do think he is right that claims about the theoretical underpinnings of all practices are, whether true or not, without significant consequences. The theory/practice model offers us a highly dubious understanding of human behavior. Habits—both personal and social, and ossified in vocabularies as well as in various rituals and routines—are at least as crucially the background of our practices as any ideas or theories we might have about what we are or want to be doing. And habits are notoriously resistant to being changed by thinking. Habits are changed when you start doing something differently—and you need to do that different thing lots of times to undo the old settled ways.

Criticism as a practice, then, rests on the habits inculcated by training. We don’t call them “disciplines” for nothing. And criticism is like playing the piano; you can’t learn how to do it by reading an instruction manual. You learn how to do it by doing it under the tutelage of someone who is more adept and who criticizes your fledgling efforts and urges you to practice, practice, practice. “Theory,” in this view, is not what underpins “criticism,” but is simply another practice, one with different aims, stakes, and protocols. To be very crude about it, “criticism” is the practice of interpreting and judging specific texts, while “theory” is the practice of making wider claims about the characteristics of many texts (Aristotle on tragedy) or of a culture (Carlyle on “The Signs of the Times”) or of a set of practices (Wittgenstein on “language games”).

As both Morris Dickstein and Marjorie Perloff indicate in their contributions to Theory’s Empire, criticism is relatively rare in the tradition. The four elements of “poetics” identified by Perloff do not include interpretation of single texts. The ancients—Aristotle, Longinus, Quintillian—were closer to producing advice manuals for writers than to offering guides for readers. Interpretation enters from the Christian side, an outgrowth of Biblical hermeneutics. Dante was the first person to suggest that secular works might also require learned interpretation. But it is not until the late seventeenth century, with the French neo-classical writers and “the battle of the Ancients and the Moderns” in England, that literary criticism really arrives on the scene. And it does so in a policing and pedagogical function. Criticism—first as evaluation and only later as interpretation—is necessary because the insufficiently educated are making bad judgments. Their taste needs to be cultivated. We might prefer Addison’s displays of how a gentleman reads, thinks, and behaves to Boileau’s laying down the law of the unities, but both writers are engaged in the same enterprise. Growing literacy among relatively uneducated peoples calls forth teachers who will help them discern the good from the trash and to properly understand difficult works.

It is not surprising, then, that criticism moved into the classroom once compulsory schooling took hold in the nineteenth century. It was already a pedagogical enterprise. And it is not surprising that “English” as a school subject originated in the colonies, specifically India, because those to the manner born don’t need these lessons. For all his commitment to education and to culture, Matthew Arnold rarely provides an interpretation of a literary work. He assumes that the audience of his essays is perfectly capable of understanding particular poems on their own. He is, of course, very worried that English readers have the wrong tastes, but he never imagines that they do not understand what they read. But democratic education soon produces that concern—and schoolboys and schoolgirls were set to producing “explications du texte” of various sorts in English, French, and American classrooms.

Just about the time that compulsory elementary education takes hold, we also get the creation of the modern research university. English as a “subject” had arisen for the pedagogical reasons I have suggested combined with nationalistic ones (inculcation into the national culture). Now, in the university, English needed to become a “discipline,” not just a school subject. The two available models for the new American universities were the scholarly Germans (the philologists) and the quasi-amateur English “men of letters.” (For reasons I do not know, French university practices had no influence at Hopkins and Chicago, the two original research universities.) At first, the Germans won the day handily, with Babbitt’s “humanism” the only respectable alternative to full-bore scholarship. Criticism was something for the news papers, the stuff of reviews not of serious academic work. It took the social upheavals of the 1920s, the tremendous influence and prestige of the Anglophile T. S. Eliot, and the scientistic trappings of New Criticism’s account of its work and of the poetic object, to make criticism academically respectable. Dickstein tells this story well. Producing an interpretation of a literary text, after around 1930, counted as “research” in the modern university. So we got lots of such interpretations.

Is there a moral to this story? Not particularly. As many have noted, New Criticism was, and remains to some extent, a valuable pedagogical tool. As others—including Michael in this post on Judith Halberstam’s essay—have noted, the techniques of attentive reading developed by New Criticism are valuable aids to understanding. Criticism was—and remains—a worthy enterprise. Literacy can be enhanced by practicing criticism. That not all English professors are critics in their written work seems neither here nor there to me. That was always the case, since there were always professors who were textual editors, biographers, etymologists, and literary historians. Probably most English professors are critics at least some of the time in their classrooms. But there has never been a seamless connection between what we teachers do in the classroom and what we publish as scholars. Dissing criticism or recommending that all scholars be critics is as silly as dissing theory or insisting that all scholars be theorists.

Posted by on 07/14 at 10:48 AM

Great post, John! What a terrific nutshell history of the discipline. I’m printing this out to use in my classes, particularly the “gateway” course to the English major.

Now, since I hate being the first person to ‘raise my hand’ I’ll let others debate the “redemption” question.

Posted by on 07/14 at 12:46 PM
Is it possible that academics interested in such questions have won their way through to a place where they can be discussed and examined calmly?

I think it’s largely a product of a self-selecting audience. I assure you that I could reignite the culture wars in my home department (UCI) with a reference to Clarence Thomas. But the people who participated--and many, many more people read than commented, at least if the feedback I’ve received via email is any indication--are aware that the stakes of participating in this debate are both much, much higher (the permanent record of one’s participation is and for the foreseeable future but a google away) and much, much lower (the lack of acceptance, nay, the hostility of the academic community at large to the idea of serious scholarship or scholarly interaction taking place on a blog). (Could I nest any more clauses in that sentence?) After I sent out the CFP on the event--which for reasons unknown to me went out with this week’s batch instead of last’s--I received a number of, shall we say, “impolitic” emails from people who wondered why they should bother with the event. That they felt compelled to email me vehement statements of their apathy surprised me, but then I realized: the people who would participate aren’t the ones who would see this as a forum in which to shout everyone else down. (Mostly because, unfamiliar with the medium, they probably don’t realize that you can indeed, through trollish repetition, shout everyone else down. But in the meantime, their ignorance contributes to our bliss. Or what-not.)

Posted by Scott Eric Kaufman on 07/14 at 12:48 PM
I’m printing this out to use in my classes, particularly the “gateway” course to the English major.

Great idea, Tina! This blog charges only $ .35 per copy for classroom use of materials.

Um, kidding, of course. But I’ve added “guest post by John McGowan” in italics to the top of the post, just so no one (in the blogosphere or in your classes) gets the idea that I could’ve come up with so terrific a nutshell history of the discipline.

Posted by Michael on 07/14 at 01:08 PM
Question to the Class : Does the study of literature—and (surely it is implied) literature itself—need to be “redeemed”? And is the royal road to redemption to understand that study as “an activity worth pursuing in its own right”?

John,

I’ll agree that the discussion overall has been thoughtful and tempered. At The Valve, IIRC, both yours and Michael’s responses have been views not as attacks, but (at worst) as evasions: “Aw, c’mon, it’s not really that bad.” Overall, both “sides” had prepared for assaults that were never launched.

So I step gingerly towards your questions above, assuming they are still armed and ready. You ask us to react to a general side-drawing, invidious comparison. And all I could think was that, while much of the anti-Theory rhetoric has been too broad and too ungenerous, its characterizations of “Theory” are not entirely unearned. The days of Theory, themselves, were filled with broad, ungenerous statements against literature and literary study.

For what they’re worth, here are my memories of graduate school, imprinted from reading, coursework, and the discipline’s general atmosphere:

—Students were repeatedly criticized for “eviscerating the history” from their work (as if formal analyses and formal characteristics were any less historical in their own right)

-- Criticism that investigated the political aspects and ramifications of texts was presented, itself, as a form of good politics. Criticism that ignored such issues was bad politics.

—Students were encouraged to foster a more antagonistic and skeptical attitude towards the literature at hand –- talking about what the author “left out” or “silenced” or was unable to articulate. (Unspoken rule: always assume that you are smarter than the author.)

-- Popular culture was slowly making its way in (a good thing), but only as an access point to the culture at large. No one really was all that interested in comics or baseball, but in way that such items embodied natives ideology or the US invasion of the Philippines. The ideas of looking at the formal qualities of popular culture was retrograde. (After all, why study the textual froth, when you should really be studying the sea that churns it up?)

-- Film studies spoke little about the compositions of shots of the structures of visual narrative, unless they were trying to expose the intepellating subject-effects of classical Hollywood cinema (and the transgress effects of the avant-garde)

-- Theoretical names were dropped and hurls, more as conversation-stoppers than argument starters. They also were used to identify the kind of criticism you were doing.

Honestly, I am not trying to be as petulant as I have ended up sounding. But the spoken and unspoken pressures of grad school were real –- and, for me, that unpleasant fact persists even if you make an honest accounting of all the good writers and good techniques that emerged from the heyday of Theory. Or at least that’s how I remember it.

Yes, I do recall a lot of anger from anti-Theory folks. But I mostly remember a certain sadness, as the questions that seemed unique to the field (questions of form, style, rhetoric, tradition, the particulars of THIS line and THIS word) were being shoved aside by the language of neighboring disciplines –- philosophy, Marxist studies, Lacanian psychoanalysis, the social sciences. It was an exciting time, to be sure, because it seemed that you could do anything. But that’s what also made it seem hollow: you could do anything. But English and literature seemed like nothing.

Last note, John. You say that you agree with Fish about how most all theoretical positions and anti-foundational claims have little consequence in practice. But you’d have to admit, that’s not what the theorists said at the time. They thought they were, to paraphrase Cornel West (I believe), kicking the philosophical props out from under Western Civilization.

And the pernicious idea of “literature in its own right” was supposed to be the first thing to fall.

As always, a powerful post: great history and good for all those thinking juices.

Best,
Peter

Posted by on 07/14 at 03:30 PM
Peter,

This isn’t the most relevant or important thing, but I would like to say that the Valve has no unitary position regarding the value of theory or this book in particular. I’m probably at least as critical of the volume as Michael or John McGowan, as I will describe in my next post about it. Also, the site has a loose sponsorship/affiliation with the ALSC; but I personally am not a member of that organization.

Posted by Jonathan on 07/14 at 03:41 PM
I don’t know about “redemption,” but it seems to me that literary studies ought to be considered a special case of a more generally-conceived writing studies, which focuses on all aspects of the production, interpretation, dissemination, and reception of all kinds of texts (see Bazerman and Prior’s *What Writing Is and How It Does It*).

I suppose I might take some flack for that one, but, honestly, I don’t see any other way. We can’t revert to an Arnoldian (or Bloomian) “great books” mentality, and non-Arnoldian positions that still argue for a privileged status of “the literary” as somehow having more potential to help us defamiliarize and, hence, critially examine our textual worlds than do non-literary texts either live on a very slippery slope or simply don’t take into account that a great many of the texts we and our students read and produce are not themselves literary in the traditional sense. Finally, it would be capricious to privilige inerpretation of texts over their production, dissmination, and reception (I’ll budge on this point, since I think litcrit gets a bad rap from some of my fellow writing studies folks, who may not realize how much literary criticism has historically attended to precisely such issues; still, interpretation does seem to be the methodological raison d’etre of literary studies, even today).

Posted by on 07/14 at 04:00 PM
John, just to horn in on the conversation, I’m going to cross-post a comment I left at your blog. Wrote it before discovering that Peter said some of the same more eloquently:

Excellent post, John!

My two bits. Change the word redeem to something less grand--say, “defend” or “pursue"--and what would be wrong with it? (Except, I realize on looking at the sentence again that you might end up with two pursues.) You could say that there’s no need to criticize Theory to be interested in literature, but surely it’s worth taking into account the ritual denunciation of the “naive” or “belletristic” interest in literature. (That’s not just folklore, of course. I’ve heard colleagues make such denunciations often. In fact, I’ve heard a prominent professor of English say that the major goal of the undergraduate curriculum should be to strip students of their reverence for canonical literature. He apparently hasn’t noticed that there isn’t that much reverence out there anymore.)

If you didn’t intend to make it a programmatic goal for all in a field, what would be wrong with wanting to study literature in its own right?

Posted by on 07/14 at 04:04 PM
Lance wrote: “We can’t revert to an Arnoldian (or Bloomian) “great books” mentality, and non-Arnoldian positions that still argue for a privileged status of “the literary” as somehow having more potential to help us defamiliarize and, hence, critially examine our textual worlds than do non-literary texts either live on a very slippery slope or simply don’t take into account that a great many of the texts we and our students read and produce are not themselves literary in the traditional sense.”

Lance, could you break that up into a few sentences? I can’t follow all of it. What does “defamiliarize” mean? I understand that you think that we need to study communication strategies in all written work without elevating the literary above the rest.

Doesn’t this just reduce literary study to a branch of sociology? And why are you only granting a privileged status (I’m not sure that I “privilege” should be used as a verb) to written texts? Some pretty great stuff was transmitted orally.

Posted by on 07/14 at 04:22 PM
Terrific little essay, John. Over the last two weeks as I was thinking about this little Empire-fest, I was thinking it would be nice to have a better handle on just how such a thing as “reading” literary texts came to be the pre-occupation of PhD-level study. Once that had happened, it seems to me that something like Theory was inevitable (as I have remarked over there at The Valve). So Theory’s come, it’s settling into the dust (as has been remarked recently in these parts), and new theory is going to come chugging ‘round the bend one of these days.

Close reading will come back—has it really left? PMLA recently had a (not too inspiring) issue on poetry, feeling that it has been neglected in the Theory era. The cognitive poetics folks are busy at working reading poems, though some, myself included, feel that looks just a bit too much like slapping new labels on 50-year old wine. But they’ll get beyond that as well.

It’s not that I think things are find, I don’t. But some historical perspective is useful.

Posted by bill benzon on 07/14 at 04:40 PM
John asks: ‘Does the study of literature—and (surely it is implied) literature itself—need to be “redeemed”? And is the royal road to redemption to understand that study as “an activity worth pursuing in its own right”?’

*My* question/beef with the language of Theory’s Empire (which John quotes here) is not with “redeemed” but with “in its own right.” What exactly does that mean? It does seem, as Lance suggests, to give a whiff of Arnoldian or Bloomian ideas of great books and genius. Such a “redemption” would have grave consequences for a lot of current literary study.

Take, for example, a medieval manuscript now called Bodleian MS Laud Misc. 108 and once owned by a 15th century London draper named Henry Perveys. Only three texts in this manuscript have been edited and published in modern editions: Havelok the Dane (a romance—and a ripping good yarn, I might add!), King Horn (another romance), and the South English Legendary (a bunch of saints lives). And when they are edited and published, it’s either on their own, or with other texts of the same genre (which is what literary study “in its own right” tends to do). And the rest of the manuscript has been ignored. And yet someone in the Middle Ages thought these texts went together, even though to us they seem “miscellaneous.” And certainly old Henry, the merchant-cum-book-collector, thought they were worth owning and reading.

*Anyway*, all this “external” information is, to me, at least as interesting as the texts “in [their] own right.” And what’s more, maybe the unpublished/unstudied ‘minor’ texts of the manuscript aren’t works of ‘genius,’ but they are part of this manuscript, and the manuscript itself—its contents and its physical being—is a cultural object that could shed a little light on a whole mess of issues related to literary study that can’t be addressed by literature “in its own right” alone: the history of the book, the culture of reading and readers, books as ornamental possessions and cultural capital, literature/writing/reading and subjectivity, the impact of material conditions on what texts survive (by which I mean physical conditions and also economic conditions—Perveys’ wealth allows him to collect books, for example) and what gets lost or rejected, and so on and so on.

Such work as I’m describing is necessarily inter- or cross-disciplinary, and also theoretically informed, but it’s also still very much first and foremost a literary study. But I’m pretty sure it’s not literary study “in its own right”—at least not as I suspect that phrase is meant to be taken.

Posted by on 07/14 at 05:35 PM
Abby: What does “defamiliarize” mean?

Hey, don’t go jumping the gun here! That’s the subject of next week’s Theory Tuesday.

Posted by Michael on 07/14 at 05:48 PM
Sucking back on an overblown line in my post above: kindly replace “always assume that you are smarter than the author” with “always assume that you can understand the (real) workings of a text better than its author ever could.”

There, now I feel much better. Exhale.

Posted by on 07/14 at 05:52 PM
Okay Michael, I’ll hold my horses.

Tina, you sound almost like a philologist. Not quite, but the insistence on mastering every detail, including the historical, surrounding the production of a work seems to be philology-like or lite. Take your pick.

Posted by on 07/14 at 06:09 PM
Having spent a lot of time looking at the newer psychologies—cognitive, neuro, evolutionary—it’s clear to me that literary studies has something to offer them. And that something is, at least, literary form. In order to make the offer in an intelligible way, yes, we need to understand those other disciplinary languages. But we also need to be able to understand and describe literature “in its own right.” Perhaps even in more textual detail than ever before.

I also think all those contextualist and historical questions that Tina raises in #10 are spot on.

Getting all this to work (together) is going to take a lot of theory. But much of that theory will have to be of a new (and perhaps very strange) sort.

Posted by bill benzon on 07/14 at 06:18 PM
Abby:

Good questions.

I have already written and accidentally erased one response to you, in which I offered a brief definition of defamiliarization (and in which I actually suggested that Michael might have more to say on that in his Russian formalism post). So I’ll wait with you until Tuesday.

First, sorry about the heavy-handed prose. Sometimes it’s easier to just let the thoughts pile up as I write than to subject them to any craft. There’s more coming, too, so apologies in advance.

As for the sociology comment: there’s some truth to that, though I would say that what I’m talking about expands the domain of English to include the kinds of questions sociologists might ask rather than reduces it to sociology. It’s also influenced by composition, literary studies, anthropology, education, sociolinguistics, communications, and other liberal arts.

My first instinct at reading your implication that “writing” is an arbitrary, or at least incomplete, nexus of inquiry is to say, you’re right. But all nexes of inquiry contain an element of arbitrariness, and writing happens to be an important, complex, and interesting mode of social action, expression, organization, and (re)production and, as such, is of great interest to many people. And, the ways writing is studied by many people in “writing studies,” it includes not only texts, but also talk and other social practices (both abstract and material), conceived as ecologies of writing, knowledge, and/or meaning. If you’re interested, check out Bazerman and Prior’s *What Writing Is and How It Does It*. While it may have a stronger sociohistoric bent than I prefer, it is a very good book.

All this is not to say, as has been said of rhetoric in the past (but which is being said less and less frequently) that “everything is writing;” rather, it is to say that writing can serve as a productive focal point for inquiry into the whos, wheres, hows, whys, whats, whens, and whethers of human social interaction and organization.

Posted by on 07/14 at 06:58 PM
Tina, I think you draw a false contrast and make a false implication--both of which we’re part of the standard armature of the Theory argument and both of which are prejudicial. There’s no reason, why an interest in literature would preclude the concerns you mention (either in the sense of pursuing them because you were interested in the lit or in the sense that pursuing your scholarly or pedagogical interests wouldn’t necessarily restrict anyone elses.) Likewise, the implication that being interested in literature means you must be Arnoldian or Bloomian just isn’t so. Those are the kinds of charges that were tossed around loosely in the way Peter points out, and because they are so impecise they don’t do the defenders or the critics or Theory any service.

Posted by Sean McCann on 07/14 at 07:13 PM
Abby—We medievalists are jacks of all trades. If I had to pick a label (oh god, must I?) it would be New Historicist. But I’m getting kind of sick of that one (the label, that is). A philologist, on the other hand, would take a line from Havelok like, say, this one, “Hwan he was clothed, osed, and shod” (l. 972), and then explain why the -ed in “clothed” is pronounced, but the one in “osed” isn’t (and why there’s no h-), and why there’s no -e- in the -(e)d in “shod”—not to mention what’s up with “hwan.” (I have to do such things when I teach Middle English as a linguistics course, but I don’t regularly do them in my scholarship.) And, of course, this is all part of John’s history of literary study, as well.

Posted by on 07/14 at 07:20 PM
True enough about the philologists. Counting the auts in Cicero is what you’re talking about.

Lance, the big non-written texts that I’m thinking of are the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Posted by on 07/14 at 07:41 PM
I’ll agree that we needn’t all do the same thing, but please let’s all agree that it’s actually “to the manor born.” Unless we are trying to make a pun, in which case I regret to point out that this one didn’t quite come off.

Posted by bitchphd on 07/14 at 08:41 PM
Prof. B, That was a great TV show too.

Posted by on 07/14 at 09:00 PM
I’ll agree that we needn’t all do the same thing, but please let’s all agree that it’s actually “to the manor born.”

No can do, Dr. B. It’s both. It started off as Hamlet’s “But to my mind, though I am native here/ And to the manner born, it is a custom/ More honor’d in the the breach than the observance,” but then, there’s also the late 1970s British sitcom, “To the Manor Born,” to which Abby is probably alluding (unless Hamlet was also a great TV show—perhaps the basis for a sitcom, All in the Family).

Posted by Michael on 07/14 at 09:31 PM
Tina: I really enjoyed reading your comment.

It was primarily medievalists and restoration/C18 scholars I had in mind when I asserted that some people in writing studies are too quick to assume that lit scholars don’t attend to the production and reception of writing in material and historical, as well as philosophical and epistemological, contexts (Bazerman and Prior flirt with this claim, then back off somewhat, but not entirely). Other areas of literary study have their examplars, too (like Blake scholars who don’t separate his poetry from his artwork and his preference for engraving as a means of inscription), but medievalists and C18 scholars stand out in this regard. I want such people in my discipline, whether “literary studies” or “writing studies” or some name nobody has thought of yet.

Posted by on 07/14 at 09:44 PM
Berube’s button-down shirt is awful. Wrong color and it lacks the distinctive roll of the collar. Sir, Get thee to Brooks Brothers.

Come on, you can do better.

Tally ho,

H.

Posted by on 07/14 at 10:53 PM
*boggle*

Can I come to class stoned next week? I think it might help.

Love,

Hanna

(Which is really just to say that y’all are so very smart that I don’t think I can even come close to understand anything you’re discussing, but I find it absolutely fascinating to read. Sorta like watching a laser show without having any idea what a laser is.)

Posted by Hanna on 07/14 at 11:40 PM
Michael--

Adding to Abby’s question. In your defamiliarizing post can you expressly explain how skepticism and perspectivizing differ from defamiliarizing, if they do.

Posted by on 07/14 at 11:47 PM
Too much theory. I only read this blog for the purple-veined cock jokes.

Posted by on 07/15 at 03:27 AM
"Duh!” Headline Department, but good question:

Expert says universe hard to understand

“… ‘Are there things about the universe that will be forever beyond our grasp, in principle, ungraspable in any mind, however superior?’ he asked. ‘Successive generations have come to terms with the increasing queerness of the Universe.’”

===

“Does the study of literature—and (surely it is implied) literature itself—need to be ‘redeemed’?”

I think “yes.” Some opinions, not herein embedded in explcit Theory: (1) Many teachers of literature honestly misunderstand what writers do, why they do it, how they do it, and cannot themselves write anything worth reading. (2) This is true, of course, in any discipline, although I think the appartus of disciplines is itself an impediment. (3) Although I strenuously disbelieve the C. P. Snow “Two Cultures” theory, many teachers do believe it, and use it to excuse their laziness and ignorance. (4) The issue of pop culture raised hereinabove is incomplete without a recognition of the true role of genre literature—Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, Mystery, Westerns, Romance, Sea Stories, Air Stories, Sports fiction, Pornography, Manga, etcetera, and its proper relationship with Literature as a whole. [I awakened 5:30 a.m. this morning—and I’m not a morning person—to hear a story of KPCC about Fred Patten donating his (world’s largest) collection of anime and manga to the Eaton Collection of the University of california at Riverside]. (5) Heroic efforts exist by the professional organizations of writers in many of these genres, but Academe is resisting the help. (6) I am still glowing from the delights of this year’s annual meeting of the Science Fiction Research Association, held this year in Las Vegas, where Professors of (mostly) English Literature assembled to apply Theory to specific works by specific authors in the genre, admixed with significant others, grad students, and a handful of professional authors in the genre, headed by Ursula K. Le Guin. My 20,000 word paper “Beyond the Frontier: Science Fiction and the Western” was wel received, but what mattered more to me was seeing people use Theory out of love for writing, rather than to advance primarily political agendae. I look forward eagerly to next year’s conference, 22-24 June 2006, “When Genres Collide.” I’ll be assisting with a programming track about actual Scientists operating in the Science Fiction genre.

What do writers know, and how do they know it? What do fictional characters know, and how do they know it? What is the true significance and future of Hypertext and Hypermedia as invented in the early 1960s by Theodor Nelson, and only partly implemented in the World Wide Web, based on his theory that “Literature is debugged?”

Yes, the universe is hard to understand. But in any course I’ve taught, in over a dozen different disciplines, I insist that what I’m really addressing is the big 3 questions:

(1) What is a human being?

(2) What is the universe?

(3) What is the place of a human being in the universe?

Posted by Jonathan Vos Post on 07/15 at 10:31 AM
"Redemption” seems such a loaded word for a discussion of praxis in English departments and such.

Much of the prior bad blood seems to arise out of a kind of mistaken absolutism--the idea that there is one best way to interpret a text, in the face of much evidence to the contrary. I recently became somewhat alarmed when I noticed some students “taking sides” on the subject of interpretive methods, with some embracing my own historicist approach and denigrating the authorial-intention preferences of one of my colleagues. I pointed out how silly it was to think that there was only one path into reading, and that it was more important to know how to do various types of analysis well than it is to decide which type is “best”.

I like the toolbox analogy. We have a set of different tools, and a collection of different tasks. The truly able worker has a sufficient collection of tools (modes of interpretation), knows how to use each tool with skill (mastery), knows what tasks each tool is best suited for, and knows what the limitations of each tool will be. Otherwise, you have a weekend fixer-upper trying to fix the sink with a hammer, because a hammer was the tool that was in the garage.

This analogy obviously partakes of the concept of the bricoleur, and ignores the very real epistemological and political differences that inform the various interpretive tools. But (to shift metaphors) diversity is the hallmark of a healthy ecosystem, and monocrops are famously prone to disease and disaster. Perhaps the current differences and squabbling are not a sign of our needing redemption, but instead the hallmarks of a healthy diversity of thought? It would be very boring to work in a department where everyone thought as I did.

Posted by on 07/15 at 10:52 AM
I was pretty far from any graduate program in the 1980s since I taught in a Humanities Department that had no undergraduate majors, not to mention grad students. So I’ll have to take Peter’s word that some grad programs were pc and theory boot camps. That would be enough to generate lots of anti-theory animus--and rightfully so. I do imagine conditions would have differed from place to place, since the University of Rochester (the only place I can speak of authorotatively during those years) ws not so dictatorial.

As for calling my post a “history,” can I demur? It’s a very short and inadequate attempt to think about where the practices of “criticism” came from and to provide a working definition of criticism that many can agree with and which can prove productive as a jumping off place for those who don’t agree with it. I wasn’t trying to--and certainly did not-- achieve anything as authoritative as a history.

I wasn’t born to either the manor or manner--and didn’t know the Shakespeare source or the TV one. Clueless in academe, that’s me. But you people keep me on my toes--and give me plenty of food for thought.

Posted by mcgowan on 07/15 at 12:20 PM
Tina and John and Others,
I posted over on the Valve yesterday a little about philology (excerpt below), and as a fellow medievalist I urge you to re-embrace the moniker “philologist,” if necessary through the New in New Philology. The Speculum issue of that name (I believe it was 1990) is worth reading, by the way, and will make you more comfortable in bridging the gap between the linguistic and the interpretive. Nietzsche, not for nothing, called philology “that venerable art” and praised its power to make the reader-thinker slow down in the midst of “indecent sweat and hurry.”

--AK

From akinch on The Valve on “philology”:
Finally, a disclosure and a little note on philology: I am a medievalist, and no field of literary study has been more resistant to t/Theory than mine, partly because our field was deeply enmeshed in the development of Philology in the 19th century, and we carry along with this history the sense that we have been fighting certain theoretical battles for some time. We can thus take our time with the “new” stuff. (We also have retrenched conservatives, just like all fields, and perhaps more of them, but I am trying to be positive). Philology—and New Philology, its theoretically-dressed modern variant—operates at the intersection of criticism and empirical research, an intersection (in my opinion) where the most powerful ideas in literary study have emerged. Without the technical disciplines of codicology and paleography, medieval studies would not exist except in John Keats’ fantasy world of knights “alone and palely loitering.” Philologists of the 19th c. prided themselves on their interdisciplinarity and their hard-nosed pursuit of objective fact, but they were not scientific in the modern sense of developing a rigorous methodology with repeatable methods valid in all cases. Philology was—and IS—a craft of interpretation, with an incredibly wide net (so wide that one’s eyes pop out at some of the claims 19th c scholars made about the culture lying dimly behind the texts under consideration). Indeed, the emergence of linguistics as a scientific study of language led ineluctably to the decline of “philology” as a noble practice. Linguistics edged out philology in the close technical study of language, while foregoing the “interpretive” gestures of philology, especially with respect to written language and historical language, both of which are increasingly inconsequential in linguistic study.
Note, for example, that Whorf, reporting to the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian in 1941, nods to the continuing interest in philology, but distinguishes it from proper linguistic study: “As the major linguistic difficulties are conquered, the study becomes more and more philological; that is to say, subject matter, cultural data, and history play an increasing role… This is philology. But at the base of philology we must have linguistics.” But Philip Gove, in his triumphalist essay, “Linguistic Advances and Lexicography,” written as flak for Webster’s Third International, recognizes that “Linguistics has had...hardly any effect on meaning and vocabulary,” but goes on to trumpet the exciting breakthroughs in phonology and pronunciation, adding: “This should not be surprising, since linguistics became a science through scientific observation of the sounds of language, and philologists who had known for over 100 years all there was to know about historical sound shifts did not become linguists until they took to studying scientifically the sounds of their own speech in the early decades of this century.” We are peering here into a discipline’s anxious displacement of the Old Monolith, which has failed as a “science” to progress (note the needless repetition of “science” and its variants), and thus had—and the determinism here is palpable—to evolve into linguistics. There are many of us who cannot help but think that something was lost in this transition, in the shift between Whorf and Gove: some theoretical ground, and some practice, as well.
This little history, which is less familiar perhaps to American scholars working in modern fields, especially in modern American literature, is the essential backdrop to Derrida’s critique of Saussure, by the way. Most American literary scholars got post-structuralism before they got linguistic structuralism (in all its variants), and wrongly equated it with their own sense of formalism. But the larger point is that American academic institutions have pressured scholars to remake themselves as “scientists,” even if they work in non-scientific fields. The love affair with the importation of exotic methodologies from other disciplines—especially anthropology and linguistics, but also philosophy—is nothing other than discipline envy, and it plagues our professional identity, while also making our “product” look like an inferior version of a real science.

Posted by on 07/15 at 12:42 PM
Well that’ll teach me to be a pedantic asshole. It’s just as well, as “pedantic asshole” really isn’t a role I play very well.

Posted by bitchphd on 07/15 at 12:46 PM
I neglected to quibble with John’s thumbnail history over on the Valve, but it seems worth noting here that the claim about the medieval period is a little hasty and not a very good description of the literary system. It is true that a dominant Christian exegetical tradition focused on Biblical interpretation. It MAY be true that Dante was interested in importing that model (patristic exegesis, as it is often called) to the study of what John calls “secular” literature. I suppose the term “secular” here is doing the work of both “secular” and “vernacular,” and perhaps obscuring the differences and relationships between the two. That is, one can have a vernacular literature that is not secular, and Dante would probably argue that the Commedia is one such text; and, conversely, one could have a secular text that is not vernacular. Dante’s major model, Virgil, would be the example of the latter. And this is not mere hair-splitting, since, in fact, there was a MASSIVE commentary tradition on Virgil’s text that predates Dante by about 1000 years. That commentary tradition (in Latin) included authors who wanted to try to square the text with Christian theology, but it also included just plain old literary commentary, and it was most certainly designed for readers (that is, a systematic interpretation of the text designed to aid readers in understanding). It did, however, take Virgil’s excellence--his auctoritas--for granted, unlike modern criticism. Similar commentaries exist for Ovid and (less vigorously) Horace, though in the former case the tension of squaring Ovid’s baroque sensuality with Christian morality (the Ovidus moralizatus tradition) always betrays a fascination with the text and the poetry: line by line and word by word analysis is close reading, no matter what package it’s wrapped in.

Whether the troubadour jeu partis or tenso debate poem traditions qualify as “criticism” is another (very interesting) matter, but there are unusually direct and specific comments made about style, voice, image, etc., that suggest the kinds of discussion of taste that we later come to associate with criticism. There are also, around the time of Dante, manuscripts that record the reception of troubadour poets (through vidas and razos, that is “biographies” and what we might call “explications,” but literarally would be “reasons” or “rationales"), and comment explicitly on their texts. The evolution of this commentary tradition in Italy (after the break-up of the courts of southern France) contributed directly to Dante’s understanding of a new model of authorship, which both he and Petrarch directly inherited. Indeed, in John’s posting, Petrarch’s name belongs in the sentence more powerfully than Dante’s, since Dante left much less of a track record as a reader than Petrarch, who made meticulous notes and annotations in his manuscripts and wrote commentaries on both ancient and contemporary poets (including both Dante and Boccacio). Dante towers in our minds, of course, because he folds so much of his criticism--both literary and moral--into the imaginative structure of his writing (both the “Vita Nuova” and the “Commedia"), but, aside from the dubious “Epistle to Can Grande” and the more general, philosophical “De vulgaria eloquentia,” he did not really practice what we would call literary criticism at all.

I think the moments John points to ARE crucial for us. The conjunction of compulsory education and a new variant of criticism that focuses on the “pedagogy” of reading itself is essential to our cultural system, where more people have access not to literacy (that old chestnut is inaccurate in a hundred ways) but to “literariness.” In the bigger picture, this is why moments when the academy is in tension about the basic activity of reading are so important, because we feel that the underlying premises of a larger principle are at stake in the system as a whole.

That principle, put most simply, is that reading re-shapes identity in a powerful way. I think the anti-theorists worry that Theory has gotten in the way of reconfirming this principle by taking the power away from a text to re-shape the reader. But I think the theorists think that their model powerfully reconfirms that principle by giving the reader greater and greater agency, making reading not just an isolated act of appreciation and understanding, but an act that participates in a social world.

And I guess that is why I advocate a return to the notion of “philology”: love of the word.

And I unfortunately left out a bit of Latin in my Valve posting that is relevant here: the old Humanist slogan that Erasmus adapted as his motto was: Lectio transit in mores. (I left out the “in") Reading turns/goes into--even “translates”?-- ....how you translate that Latin word “mores” is a revealing pyschological test..."customs"? “moral principles”? “actions”?

--Ashby Kinch

Posted by on 07/15 at 12:49 PM
Ashby Kinch: “That principle, put most simply, is that reading re-shapes identity in a powerful way. I think the anti-theorists worry that Theory has gotten in the way of reconfirming this principle by taking the power away from a text to re-shape the reader. But I think the theorists think that their model powerfully reconfirms that principle by giving the reader greater and greater agency, making reading not just an isolated act of appreciation and understanding, but an act that participates in a social world. “

That—“giving the reader greater agency”—is certainly how it seemed to me as an undergraduate a Johns Hopkins in the late 60s. While I was certainly schooled in close reading—both through professorial example and through assignments I had to execute—I also was exposed to continental theory as it disembarked. It was the most exciting stuff going.

The question, now, is whether or not those ideas and models have solidified into cookie-cutter templates that take “the power away from a text to re-shape the reader.”

* * * * * *

Thanks for the further history lesson, too.

Posted by bill benzon on 07/15 at 01:36 PM
Well that’ll teach me to be a pedantic asshole. It’s just as well, as “pedantic asshole” really isn’t a role I play very well.

Damn right. That’s my job, sister. Step off.

Which reminds me: the only proper function of literary criticism is to aid students in the correct identification of literary allusions.

Posted by on 07/15 at 01:43 PM
Various among you will be happy (or crushed) to know that Hayden White, when he visited Chapel Hill last fall, told his audience that he was having business cards printed up with the follwing text:

Hayden White, Philologist

Posted by mcgowan on 07/15 at 02:02 PM
Oh, yeah, and another thing: thank goodness I published my disclaimer about my history before someone who knows something stepped in. Thanks, Ashby, for the lesson. Twelve years of teaching great books, sailing from Homer to More and Erasmus in 14 weeks, didn’t exactly make me an expert. That erudition stuff stikes again.

Can you give us a link to your Valve piece, Ashby? I went over to that site to look for it but couldn’t find it.

Posted by mcgowan on 07/15 at 02:11 PM
<i> the only proper function of literary criticism is to aid students in the correct identification of literary allusions.</iL>

Or, alternately, to look shit up before they shoot their mouths off.

But now we’re back in the realm of “English is encroaching on everyone’s discipline now.”

Posted by bitchphd on 07/15 at 03:49 PM
I’m not all that sure how to link to blogs, but I guess this would be it: http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/theorys_empire_its_the_institution_stupid/#2396.

Mine is just a comment under McCann’s piece from yesterday, and most of it is that kind of reflexive arm-chair commentary that most of us engage with ourselves and occasionally over beers with others.

By the way, I confirmed my faulty memory of the Speculum issue on New Philology (vol. 65, no. 1, 1990), which marked an important juncture in medieval studies where certain kinds of theoretical formulations were aired in this notoriously conservative (in the best sense) journal.

Others might also be interested in the Comparative Literature volume of essays on philology of that same year (vol. 27, no. 1, 1990), emanating from a conference at Harvard and featuring essays by Jan Ziolkowski, Gregory Nagy, Calvert Watkins, Barbara Johnson and Jonathan Culler, who writes:

“Philology has a relational identity; it depends on what it is opposed to, so the question what is phililogy is the question of what are the relevant oppositions that divide, delimit, articulate the domain of the Ps [in the Library of Congress catalogue with which he glibly refers]. Naturally, those who consider themselves philologists wish to have some of the better books on their side, and those who have used philology as a whipping boy have sought to relegate to its domain what they take to be duller and less productive works of linguistic and literary scholarship.”

--AK

Thanks for that choice anecdote about Hayden White. And for such rich food for thought.

--AK

Posted by on 07/15 at 04:13 PM
Over at the Valve I’ve been exploring a parallel between the rise and demise of Theory and that of cognitive science. Here’ ‘tis.

Posted by bill benzon on 07/16 at 09:32 AM
My take on these things evolves from my parents having worked in the book industry in New York City. My father, who passed away in May, was a famous editor who published a dizzying range of authors, from Winston Churchill and Pearl S. Buck, to H. P. Lovecraft and Philip K. Dick.

I also have a strange initial set of degrees, namely B. S. in English Literature from Caltech (specializing in Poetry), along with a B.S. in Mathematics (specializing in Advanced Logic and Number Theory), then M.S., Cybernetics and Artificial Intelligence, and the first Ph.D. dissertation on what are now called Nanotechnology and Artificial Life.

At Woodbury University, in Burbank, California, where my wife is in her 4th year as full-time Physics Professor (having taught in 4 countries), and I taught 2 years of Mathematics, there’s just been a completely shake-up of the Humanities. The brilliant and wonderful VP of Academic Affairs (Ph.D., English Lit, Columbia) forced the Dean of Arts & Sciences to step down; while the Chair of the Faculty Senate (who taught English Composition) fled, and the Chair of Humanities turned back into a mere teacher. The Dean’s lapdog, a Physics professor with NO science degree, and no publications, who is hated by his students, has viciously attacked my wife and myself, including cberating (in promotion committee) one of our series of papers on Mathematics Physics published in a refereed conference in Complex Systems, where the standards are high enough that a Nobel Laureate had a paper rejected (he gave it at a Poster Session), on the grounds that the conference standards were low, and that “this isn’t a Physics paper at all; it reads more like the fiction of Isaac Asimov.” Hence my interest in the word “mediocre” as used in this blog. It is fascinating how the MOST mediocre person in an entire division can be promoted to Chairman, and make life hell for those highly-published faculty of whom he is jealous.

One’s stance towards Theory, including Queer Studies, and various shades of political belief, are clearly life or death in Academe today. This is no tempest in a teapot if it directly affects so many lives and careers.

I’m hoping to get back into Woodbury, as I search for tenure track professorships in other universities. The outgoing Dean had refused to renew my Adjunct contract in Mathematics, despite the students giving me the highest ratings, and my having more publications that then entire rest of the faculty combined, on the specious grounds that I didn’t have a Master’s degree specifically in Math. In fact, the Executive Officer of Mathematics at Caltech, Dr. Gary Lorden (who is also Math Advsisor on the hit CBS-TV series NUMB3RS) certified that I had far more than the equivalent of a M.S. in Math. In fact, 54 graduate credits beyond the M.S. However, I disagreed seriously on matters of Theory, personality, and politics.

Theory matters, if getting a regular paycheck matters. Though, of course, my publications in Mathematical Biology, Mathematical Economics, and Mathematical Physics at refereed conferences use the word “Theory” in a different way. So what is the Metatheory that explains this, given that I’ve railed at the artificial apparatus of Disciplines, the evolution of ideas as exploration of the Ideocosm (space of all possible ideas), and the fallacies of C. P. Snoew’s “The Two Cultures?”

Posted by Jonathan Vos Post on 07/16 at 11:52 AM
Folks have been railing at the disciplines for forever. Here’s what I say at the end of a recent essay on “Kubla Khan”:

Human life is extraordinarily complex. Intellectual specialization is necessary to cope with the manifold details that must be observed, ordered, and interpreted if our understanding is to deepen. Specialization cannot be avoided. Yet for much of my career I have listened to people bemoan the deleterious effects of specialization, the production of more and more knowledge about less and less. Our libraries are thus replete with earnest essays and books storming the breech between the sciences and the arts and humanities. These sorties generate much sound and fury, but have left few passable bridges behind. I acknowledge that specialization has grave dangers, that science needs a richer account of human life, and that these dangers threaten to turn our intellectual progress into a series of unsatisfying side-trips. But good intentions and hard work will not fix this problem, for it is not primarily one of professional perversion, whether willful or inadvertent.
The problem is that we do not have a way of bringing these disparate specialties to bear on one another. The study of literature and the arts is one way to provide a focal point for such integration. But literary analysis can serve in this way only if it is conducted in terms commensurate with these other disciplines. We must learn enough from these new psychologies so that we can ensure that will happen. Thus informed we can create a body of detailed textual analysis that others can use in formulating their research agenda. Any model of the human mind, or some aspect of it, must be consistent with literary analysis. A linguistics of sentences that cannot account for the sentences of “Kubla Khan,” and for the entire discourse as well, is not an adequate linguistics. A neuroscience of feeling that cannot account for our wonder and joy in “Kubla Khan” is not an adequate neuroscience. If we do our work well, investigators in neighboring disciplines will be more fruitful in theirs.
We need to know: What is the nature of the human mind such that it continually inquires into its own nature, into its place in the world? What is the nature of a poem such that it stills, for the moment, such questioning? A science that fails to address such questions may indeed be a science, but it will not be profoundly of man. As humanists it is our responsibility to see that the new sciences of man are adequate to these questions.

You can find that essay here:

http://www.clas.ufl.edu/ipsa/journal/2003_benzon02.shtml#benzon02

Posted by bill benzon on 07/16 at 12:18 PM
bill benzon raises some of the most important questions from the enemble of all possible questions. I’m virtually unpublished in the Neurosciences, for instance, despite many graduate courses in Microneuroanatomy, Neurochemistry, and the Mathematical Theory of Neural Networks, for instance. I was programming Neural Networks when they were out of fashion, following the Minsky & Papert book.

I did win a grant from NASA at one point to use the Genetic Algorithm to evolve parameters of a Neural Network that evaluated live data from Space Shuttle fuel cells.

One reason I ceased publishing in that burgeoning field was precisely that many of its practitioners were oblivious to exietcne of Literature, Art, or other phenomena worthy of explanation. Another was that the department chairman who torpedoed my Ph.D. process, one Michael Arbib, was someone often accused of plagiarism, who removed my name as coauthor of a lucrative textbook we coauthored, and removed my name as sole author of the Teacher’s Guide to said textbook, which earned him in the neighborhood of $250,000 in paperback and translation editions, while I lived in deepest Grad Student poverty.

That polarized parts of the Cognitive Science folks, earning me withering attacks on, for instance, television interviews on Neurophilosophy with the lesser Churchland, as I made the 3rd consecutive on-camera correction on a matter of published fact.

I could tell stories of naive Linguistics professorswith whom I’ve argued, who were unable to know poetry as I do, since I’ve published over 220 poems, with such distinguished coauthors as Ray Bradbury and Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman. If your car is broken, do you go to an Automobile Mechanics Theorist, or someone who builds and fixes cars for a living? At least Marvin Minsky reponded to our years of arguing Poetrics by writing 2 chapters of one of his most influential books in verse, a fact hidden by the editor removing the line breaks to make it appear mere prose.

Kubla Khan is a surpassing work of genius, and the bst-known book about it traces the origins of its historical, literay, and geographic references wonderfully, but begs the questions of creativity and literary quality.

I agree with bill benzon’s questions. I’ve been grappling with answers for most of my professional career.

Posted by Jonathan Vos Post on 07/16 at 02:08 PM
I assume, Jonathan Vos Post, that by “best known book” you mean Livingston Lowes’s The Road to Xanadu. You are correct about its limitations. And yet I trust you’ll agree that, despite the limitations, it remains a fascinating and brilliant bit of historical detective work, full of the wonder of Coleridge’s poems and the worlds they imply and evoke.

One of the themes that’s been popping up here and there is that current career pressures make it much more difficult for such research to be undertaken and such books to be written.

Posted by bill benzon on 07/16 at 02:49 PM
bill benzon, I agree with you again. Grantsmanship means promising what they completely believe that you can deliver, based on past results, which completely agrees with their agenda, and which they completely trust can be done on time and within budget, no aspect of which includes fascination, brilliance, or wonder.

Posted by Jonathan Vos Post on 07/16 at 04:58 PM
There is a story told of, I believe, Leo Szilard (mathematician and physicist), that goes like this:

In year X he submits a proposal to investigate some problem, call it A. This is, in fact, something on which he has completed his investigation and thus knows the result. In due time he gets his funding and uses it to investigate B. When year Z comes around he reports on the year-X grant for A, indicating that the results are what he had expected. He then submits a new proposal in which he requests funds to invesitage B (which he has already done using the year X money).

And so forth.

I have no idea whether or not it’s true—I kinda’ think he would have been caught out. But the story itself betrays deep cynicism about the whole grantsmanship racket.

Posted by bill benzon on 07/16 at 05:34 PM
Leo Szilard was one of the deepest minds of the 20th century, and also, by the way, a published Science Fiction author. He was one of what the Manhattan Project folks (today is the 60th anniversary of the first atomic bomb explosion, by the way) referred to as “The Hungarian Mafia” or “The Martians,” along with John Von Neumann and others from the Jewish quarter of Budapest, who seemed driven by more than the Nazi and Communist takeovers of their city. I would not be surprised if the grant story is true. Once Edward Teller praised my solutions to nonlinear differential equations in a proposal I submitted on laser propulsion, involving chopped-up optical fiber in the propellant to modify the thermo-optical gradient, but, alas, I was told that the grant money had dried up before I could collect.

The inverse, of course, is by people so mediocre that they spend the money from the current grant on the cost overruns of the previous grant’s administration. I worked under a tremendously corrupt and horrible manager at Boeing, named Doggett, who was always 3 grants behind on expenditures. Last I heard, he’d been eased out of Boeing and was in management at one of the more notoriously mismanaged nuclear power plants in the nation.

In the short run, grants go to people who make the most impressive promises. Of course, when they fail to deliver, they don’t win another, but meanwhile they drive nuts all those with modest promises, who don’t win, and do their same proposed work out-of-pocket.

Then there are the grant referees who deny the grant to someone, then win one themselves a year or two later, which seems frankly plagiarized from one of the ones they turned down. Sometimes one can sic Federal investigators on them. Most often, nobody cares except the ripped-off researchers.

I also remember, literally before leaving the room where I’d been forced to watch a Federal video on why not to misreport on timecards, my boss tellng me “of course, you have to do unreported unpaid overtime when I order you to do so.”

Such tales apply to the so-called Ivory Towers of Academe as well as in the belly of the Beast of the Military-Industrial Complex. It has become increasingly hard to tell where one stops and the other begins.

Posted by Jonathan Vos Post on 07/16 at 06:18 PM
On the military industrial complex . . . .

My mentor, the late David Hays, worked at Rand during the 50s and 60s. He tells me that during the early part of the period Rand got half of its budget from a single Air Force contract signed by the Secretary of the Air Force. The work order in the contract: Do something for the good of the nation, No more, no less. Now that’s having faith in your researchers.

As for von Neumann, I figure he was the Einstein of the 20th century. His little 1956 book on The Computer and the Brain is still worth reading, no matter what your expertise on computing or the brain. He knew how to frame complex issues in ways that allowed you to think usefully about them.

Posted by bill benzon on 07/16 at 07:44 PM
bill benzon, academically, this makes us cousins. At RAND, we know that David Hays developed the first parser based on dependency grammar. The research began under Leon Dostert at Georgetown University. I took Linguistics from Bozena Dostert, and used some of those early papers, such as Hays, “Dependency Theory: a Formalism and Some Observations”,
Memorandum RM4087 PR, The Rand Corporation, 1964. David Hays had quite an impact on Machine Translation.

I know von Neumann through his coauthor Stan Ulam (coinventor of the H-bomb, coinventor of Cellular Automata, co-inventor of nuclear blast-powered spaceships). Ulam was impressed by my application of Krohn-Rhodes Semigroup Decomposition to analyzing the dynamics of metabolisms. We were going to work on this together, but he died not long after a Bell Labs teleconference he had on this, before we could even jointly submit an abstract.

Ulam passed on some stories to me on how, on his deathbed, von Neumann wept that he’d wasted his last two years or so, working lucratively on some 50 projects at once for corporations and government agencies, when he “could have discovered the secret of life.” von Neumann intended to take the von Neumann-Ulam self-reproducing automata theory and shrink the cells to points, and the difference equations to differential equations, that only he, von Neumann, in all the world was smart enough to solve.

I also had a chance to work briefly with John Mauchley, who shared the patent on the Stored Program Digital Elctronic Computer, who went to his grave bitter that this architecture was called the von Neumann architecture. Long story, still being fought by widows and colleagues in the Annals of the History of Computing, and similar venues.

David Hays—wow! A very impressive mentor. My mentors include Richard Feynman, Herman Kahn, “Ned” nethercot (head of Thomas J. Watson Research center for IBM, with some 9,000 scientists and engineers under him), and many other interesting figures as outlined in my educational geneology:

http://www.magicdragon.com/JVPteachers.html

Posted by Jonathan Vos Post on 07/16 at 08:23 PM
Hot damn! Jonathan, ain’t cyberspace grand, both spacious and intimate at the same time?

If you go on over to my website you’ll some more recent work by Dave (and me, and the both of us). The deepest paper there is one we did on natural intelligence. You’ll also find a short eulogy for Dave.

For those who may not know, Chomsky didn’t take linguistics quite by the storm his PR makes it seem. Of course, there were old fuddy-duddies who dug in their heels and didn’t take to this new more mathematical approach to syntax. But others were fine with mathematical formalism, they just thought Chomsky chose the wrong math. Dave Hays was one of those; he chose to formalize dependency grammar (think of it as a sophisticated version of the sentence diagrams you did in elementary school). Syd Lamb was another; he was inspired by Hjelmslev and the brain and developed something called stratificational linguistics. It uses an elegant graph notation, one of the earliest such uses in modern linguistics. Both Dave and Syd were elbow deep in computational linguistics, and that is an important factor in their dissent from Chomsky, but I’ll let that alone for here and now.

As for the “von Neumann architecture,” I get the creepy crawlies every time I hear some numskull use that phrase in opposition to parallel processing, as though they don’t know that von Neumann was deeply interested in that as well.

Posted by bill benzon on 07/16 at 08:58 PM
So let’s check out possible NASA connections. In the summer of 1981 I was part of a summer study NASA/Goddard & U of Maryland put together to review NASA computing and make recommendations to bring it up to university standards. Rob Freitas was tech editor on the project; now, as you probably know, he’s deep into nanotechnology (which I don’t follow at all). One of the JPL folks I liked was David Callendar, though I hardly remember him, it was so long ago. James Blinn came in for a day to talk about computer graphics.

Posted by bill benzon on 07/16 at 10:57 PM
I gave several talks at Goddard/UofM Software Engineering conferences in that era, while at Boeing. I won several contracts from RADC in the area of Software Metrics.

I know Rob Freitas, though I’m not sure how well he’d remember me. The overlap between Space Activist Community and Nanotechnology community is significant, but manages to be more political than either of the two intersecting sets.

James Blinn was king of the Graphics guys at Caltech/JPL, unquestionably. He had a salary tripling (or more) job for a day at one of the major Special Effects studios Industrial Light & Magic?), and quit as soon as they tried to get hom to switch langauges away from his hand-crafted FORTRAN routines. He did the great graphics for the sward-winning Project Mathematics with professor Thomas Apostol, now Emeritus at Caltech, whom I still see 2 or 3 times a month.

There may be other folks we know in common. I’m hoping that people on this blog have collected some dtat points for their belief or disbelief in the utility of Social Network Theory, Erdos Number, Kevin Bacon number, and so forth.

And is that useful in Literary Theory? I’ve been trying to apply it in genre fiction, and have voluminous data on my definition of Asimov Number.

Posted by Jonathan Vos Post on 07/16 at 11:10 PM
If we’re talking social networks, what interersts me is networks of readers and fans. The net makes it relatively easy to track such things, though to do it in a thorough way would take some work. A couple of years ago I hung out with a particular group of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” fans. The group started out in Salon’s Table Talk and when TT decided to charge for use, the group migrated, first to World Crossing, and then they built their own site (The Phoenix). But there must be lots of “Buffy” sites out there and there must be some contact between folks at these various sites, with some folks actively participating in several. Getting a handle on that would be interesting.

And then there’s, for example, “kissage.” That word appeared in the postings of this particular group at some time and quickly became standard. Where’d it come from, where’d it go? Is it still current—haven’t been to The Phoenix in some time.

Of course these networks extended through to the real world, that is, the “meat” world, too. And buffista’s have face-to-face meetings. More stuff to investigate and track.

But how do we get at this sort of thing for, e.g. the world of Jane Austen fans in early 19th century England? That we’d have to extrapolate from scattered documentary evidence—diaries, letters, reviews, etc.

* * * * *

Asimov number?

Posted by bill benzon on 07/17 at 06:50 AM
Meanwhile, I’m feeling that I should do something to connect this spate of computer stuff with the origins of this discussion, namely John McGowan’s most useful little sketch of the history of critical “theory.” I’d like to offer a few comments from the history of computation. One leg of that history goes back to Aristotle’s logic, but another leg goes back to the mathematics of ancient China and India. These two legs meet in medieval Europe.

The notion of an algorithm is central to computation. The word itself derives from the name of an Arabic mathematician and the word “algebra” is derived from the name of his book. Here are a few paragraphs David Hays and I published (The Evolution of Cognition) on the significance of this particular confluence between Europe and Asia:

The algorithms of arithmetic were collected by Abu Ja’far Mohammed ibn Musa al-Khowarizm around 825 AD in his treatise Kitab al jabr w’al-muqabala (Penrose 1989). They received an effective European exposition in Leonardo Fibonacci’s 1202 work on Algebra et almuchabala (Ball 1908). It is easy enough to see that algorithms were important in the eventual emergence of science, with all the calculations so required. But they are important on another score. For algorithms are the first purely informatic procedures which had been fully codified. Writing focused attention on language, but it never fully revealed the processes of language (we’re still working on that). A thinker contemplating an algorithm can see the complete computational process, fully revealed.

The amazing thing about algorithmic calculation is that it always works. If two, or three, or four, people make the calculation, they all come up with the same answer. This is not true of non-algorithmic calculation, where procedures were developed on a case-by-case basis with no statements of general principles. In this situation some arithmeticians are going to get right answers more often than others, but no one can be sure of hitting on the right answer every time.

This ad hoc intellectual style, moreover, would make it almost impossible to sense the underlying integrity of the arithmetic system, to display its workings independently of the ingenious efforts of the arithmetician. The ancients were as interested in magical properties of numbers as in separating the odd from the even (Marrou 179-181). By interposing explicit procedures between the arithmetician and his numbers, algorithmic systems contribute to the intuition of a firm subject-object distinction. The world of algorithmic calculations is the same for all arithmeticians and is therefore essentially distinct from them. It is a self-contained universe of objects (numbers) and processes (the algorithms). The stage is now set for experimental science. Science presents us with a mechanistic world and adopts the experimental test as its way of maintaining objectivity. A theory is true if its conceptual mechanism (its “algorithm") suggests observations which are subsequently confirmed by different observers. Just as the results of calculation can be checked, so can theories.

More concretely, Europe’s economic expansion and imperial conquests would have been impossible without Arab mathematics. That expansion required thousands of long ocean voyages. Reliable navigation would have been impossible without logarithm tables, and they would have been impossible without the mathematics. What we think of as “the West” is thus as deeply grounded in Asian mathematics as it is in Greek philosophy and Hebrew religion.

In the pedagogical manner of mathematics and science textbooks, I leave it as an exercise for the reader – gentle reader? – to sketch out developments to the present.

Posted by bill benzon on 07/17 at 08:52 AM
Is it possible that academics interested in such questions have won their way through to a place where they can be discussed and examined calmly?

I sure hope so. The discussion at the Valve has been quite good. But I was surprised by how quickly Michael got his back up over a few negative comments about Derrida in an earlier thread here, especially since Michael isn’t a Derridean himself.

Posted by on 07/17 at 11:58 PM

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