John Guillory: Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study. Part One: The Formation and Deformation of Literary Study. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022.
A skeptic might wonder if, by “professing criticism,” Professor Guillory means that professing criticism is all English professors really do, without ever getting around to criticism itself. But he doesn’t mean it that way, exactly, and it would be odd if he did, since criticism sometimes seems to be about all many such professors now do, using their authority, such as it is, to issue ‘critiques’ of modern societies, critiques informed by a variety of egalitarian sentiments.
Guillory rather intends to consider “an unresolved problem in how literary study understands its purpose.” Should works of literature be studied at university or criticized? Or both? To study, one must first establish a “discipline,” “identify[ing] objects of study by differentiating these objects from others, by specialization”; a discipline is a discipline by virtue of its implied command, ‘Stay in your lane.’ Study requires no university framework, nor indeed an institutional framework of any kind. A student of literature or of physics might even prefer to be a lone wolf. A profession does require such a framework because a profession sets “the requisites and perquisites common to all the disciplines,” with the expectation that all members of that profession will adhere to them. Readers of Plato will understand this as a political-philosophic question, the exigencies of political life (reverence for the gods of the city, deference to the rulers and the laws) versus philosophers’ desire to know and therefore to inquire, to question human rulers, gods, and laws. In modern tyrannies, this tension becomes acute; modern commercial republics have attempted to resolve the matter by establishing liberty of speech and the press, but universities—regimes within the larger regimes—have their own set of rulers and ruling institutions. To “profess” literature, to speak and write within the ruling institutions of a university, may be to collide with the university’s regime, which may want to define scholarship in ways some scholars do not want to follow.
To this perennial problem, literary study has added another, a problem of self-definition. Literary study, the discipline, has become a profession, but it didn’t start out that way. In earlier modern centuries, those who studied literature thought of themselves as literary critics. And before that, those who studied literature considered themselves rhetoricians, or philosophers, or sophists. “The discipline’s enthusiastic embrace of professionalism” in the past hundred years or so “betrays an ambivalent relation to its amateur past.” “The essays in this book consider how literary study has been organized, both historically and in the modern era, both before and after its professionalization.” After all, if literary scholars cannot clearly define what they do, how shall they defend their position within the university regime? In the early twentieth century, scholars labeled what they proposed to do in the university with “a surprising array of names: philology, belles lettres, rhetoric, literary history,” before finally settling on “a new name,” “literary criticism,” after the Second World War.
This is, then, a political question. Guillory addresses it sociologically, however. Sociology focuses on subpolitical categories, while inevitably bringing political considerations in, albeit with insufficient clarity. In this book, one hears about Weber and Veblen, but not Aristotle (except for the Poetics), Tocqueville, or Machiavelli. Tocqueville would be especially helpful, since his analysis of democracy as the ruling condition of civil society remains unsurpassed and supremely relevant to what literary scholars have been doing in modernity. But this caveat should not deter anyone from learning from Guillory’s immense erudition and formidable analytic strength. He knows what he studies and professes, better than just about anyone else. And he does use at least one political term, calling “the perpetual churn in literary study” a “constant revolutionizing of its methods and objects.” Regime change, indeed.
“Literary study in the past did not take the form of a professional activity at all; for most of its history, literary study was a set of practices with many different sites, both within and outside the university,” ‘professionalizing’ itself only in the late nineteenth century, “and then only fully after the First World War”—that is, with the rise of Progressivism, a movement addressed by and in large measure to, the expanding class of persons who thought of themselves as ‘professionals.’ “The theory and practice of professionalization was a hallmark of the Progressive Era, when the university gathered an extraordinary number of disciplines and professions within its pale, organizing them in the bureaucratic form of the ‘department'”—bureaucracy (somewhat contradictorily) at the service of historical movement toward ever-increasing social egalitarianism being Progressivism’s signature. By professional, Guillory doesn’t mean, merely, someone who gets paid for what he does—a professional wrestler, for example. Earlier specialists in literature “achieved great visibility and influence without depending upon academic credentials”—in England, Carlyle, Arnold, and in America Emerson; “they were in that sense truly amateurs, representatives of the common reader,” possessing “a kind of expertise that was self-authorized,” founded on public recognition. Later scholars and critics committed themselves to “the ideal of professionalism,” that is, recognition within the institutional setting, the regime, of the university, which requires credentials.
To be accepted within such a regime, literary criticism needed redefinition. No longer a “practice of judgment”—how shall a bureaucracy assess that?—it became a “method of interpretation” focused on a “proper disciplinary object,” in this case “the verbal work of art.” As a method, it made sense, at least marginally, to the university administrators; interpretation sounded sort of scientific, or at least something that could make a claim to know. Famously, the kind of knowledge claimed by post-World War II literary scholars proved unsatisfactory to administrators after the administrators’ student population deemed it ‘irrelevant’ to the social and political controversies of the late 1960s: sexual liberation, psychedelic drugs, and fear of getting shot in a rice paddy in Southeast Asia (a fear dignified by the term ‘anti-imperialism’). In response, “the discipline and its institutional structures, especially the curriculum, were reimagined as surrogates for the social totality,” an ambitious claim indeed, which Guillory kindly calls “the profession’s overestimation of its aims.” But at this same time, not only the well-calculated irrationalism of the New Left but “the proliferation of new media” has “displaced literature itself from its historical position as the premier medium of entertainment and edification.” Guillory cogently remarks, “It does not matter how politically ambitious the aims of literary study might be if literature itself continues to contract in social importance.” The ‘social-activist’ turn in literary study brings the discipline to the bar of its “real effects in the world,” a “position of justification by faith,” which he doubts to be “either warranted or likely to sustain the discipline in the future.” This may then be what educationists call a ‘teachable moment’ for teachers of literature, and Guillory undertakes “to give an account of the profession’s formation and deformation according to a guiding principle of what the Greeks called parrhesia, or speaking the truth freely.”
Every regime features a way of life that tends to produce a characteristic human ‘type.’ In Guillory’s preferred sociological terms, “all professional formation is also, by necessity, deformation,” not necessarily in a pejorative sense but indeed as a necessity of mastering the task. The hand of the dyer gets stained; the back of the scholar, leaning over the book on the table, gets hunched. And of course these habitual behaviors form and deform minds at least as much as bodies. This is true of scholarship pursued in solitude or within the university bureaucracy, that “highly organized, even byzantine form of collectivity.” Bureaucracies ‘compartmentalize’ human activities, thoughts, habits; “the fact that the division of knowledge during the nineteenth century into ever more specialized disciplines necessitated the reorganization of university faculty into departments, the most conspicuous feature of our institutional geography.” A type of human being called a ‘clerk,’ closely aligned to ‘clericalism,’ could be described by Nietzsche as zealous, serious, and even furious; this character hasn’t gone away but it has adapted itself to the universities’ turn “away from the church.” “Literary study is not alone among the humanistic disciplines in its struggle to define a social mission that would justify its corporate identity as a profession or to resort to overestimation as compensatory response to uncertainty of aim.” And as Nietzsche well knows, scholars are not philosophers; they are oxen, plodding over the field of knowable things, at best directed by philosophers or, as likely, followed by philosophers who harvest their gleanings. In Nietzsche’s formulation, however, philosophers imitate life itself by partaking of life’s universal will to power, a doctrine that distorts Plato (Guillory cites the superficial Hannah Arendt on this, with altogether too much credence) and deformed Heidegger (fair enough). The problem of deformation, Guillory maintains, in philosophy or in any other discipline, must be “redressed by a better estimation of philosophy, as of any scholarly discipline.” (Yes and no: a better estimation than Nietzsche’s, to be sure, but not an estimation that fails to distinguish philosophers from scholars—in this instance, from professors of philosophy or, to use an older word, philosophes.)
Returning to the Progressives and their distinctive kind of bureaucracy, Guillory cites the “new professions [that] both displaced and transformed the system of the three ‘ancient’ (that is, medieval) professions” of law, medicine, and divinity. As Plato almost says of the idols of the cave, “it is difficult to see through the professionalization of literary study to its long prehistory”; “almost” because the Platonic ascent rises to nature, not to history. Guillory presents an “epochal break” whereby “claims to professional identity b a proliferation of new technical and managerial workers effectively entailed a reconceptualization of cognitive labor itself,” a reconceptualization “expressed in a great burst of theorizing that lasted from the later nineteenth century until the Second World War.” That theorizing, it should be seen, consisted precisely of a shift in political thought that mirrored a prior shift in philosophy, the shift called ‘historicism,’ replacing both Biblical commandments and natural right as the source of moral and political principles. Guillory here cites Kenneth Burke, who, although no Edmund Burke, understands clearly enough that “a society’s ways of life affect its modes of thinking, by giving rise to partial perspectives,” which both form and deform citizens. Guillory provides the necessary application: in “much Progressive Era theory, the professional organization serves as a model for society itself.” As both Burkes, Aristotle, Progressive stalwart John Dewey, and many others acknowledge, “all education can be understood as a process of habituation, the embodiment of knowledge,” and “what one learns changes one’s behavior, but it can also induce a maladaptive hardening of behavior over time.” Progressives especially concerned themselves with inculcating expertise, wielded by (in Woodrow Wilson’s phrase) “experts in the relations of things,” prepared to coordinate the relations of those “things,” including persons, in the march toward social justice as they conceived it. “This ideology of professional expertise is in some ways as constitutive of modernity as the rise of the natural sciences,” and indeed conceives the ‘social sciences’ and at times the humanities along the model of experimentalism at the service of the mastery of nature and of ‘fortune.’ Dividing intellectual from manual labor, professionalism animates “a new class” of professional managers, which “arrogates ‘intellectual’ labor to itself,” and thus moral and political authority to itself. Although Guillory finds “the explosion of professions in the Progressive Era” “difficult to explain,” that may be because he considers neither Machiavelli (and following him Bacon), whose prince knows how to “master Fortuna” by the means of the lion and the fox, nor Tocqueville, who traces the longue durée of democratization. If the professions valorized by Progressivism as instruments of historical progress toward egalitarianism have proliferated, this registers the modern philosophic attempt to rule nature combined with the modern philosophic esteem for equality; the ambition to rule according to the dictum, ‘Knowledge is power’ and to ‘democratize’ the ruled, simultaneously, requires the expansion of professionalism to disciplines well beyond the medieval trinity.
For literary scholars, the problem has been that their discipline “was not an easy fit for the university,” so reorganized. “The establishment of new disciplines in the university system, and their ultimate bureaucratic organization into departments, was premised on a normative conception of knowledge identified with what the age called science.” Science meant not only natural science but “other forms of empirical investigation, such as history and philology,” both of which had to do with the study of literature. As scholarship generally became increasingly institutionalized within universities, “many nonscientific professions came increasingly to imitate the scientific form of knowledge production through disciplinarization, that is, by the strategy of locating the production and reproduction of their expertise in the university,” as universities “brought the professions into permanent fusion with the system of the disciplines, which in turn transformed the university itself.” In the United States, in the eighteenth and well into the nineteenth centuries, colleges had trained clergymen and coated the sons of commercial and industrial entrepreneurs with “the veneer of European civility.” American gentry, so formed, returned to the enterprises of their fathers, or invented new ones, but had no substantial bureaucracy to enter and so needed no education to fit them for it. When philosophic doctrines of historicism, democratized as a reader of Tocqueville might anticipate, turned the universities away from Bible-based theology and natural rights-based civic life, there was no political class to resist them, to guide democracy away from them, as Tocqueville had hoped his own aristocratic class would do. Thus, “in the era of the great university presidents—Charles William Eliot of Harvard, Danield Coit Gilman of Johns Hopkins, Andrew Dickson White of Cornell” (one might add Wilson at Princeton)—the “Latin and Greek curriculum was replaced by the system of electives, which permitted specialization directed toward a career” and also permitted professors not only to teach but to do research. “These professors acquired sophisticated new conceptions of research in part as a consequence of study abroad, primarily in the German universities.” The American universities (and, under Dewey’s influence, high schools and elementary schools) taken together amounted to “a new kind of school,” one committed not to transmitting the principles of the existing regime to subsequent generations but to move toward a new regime altogether, one founded upon the new, historicist principles. Under this new dispensation, literary study could thrive in the universities under the rubric of philology, the scientific study of language. “But this was only a temporary rapprochement” between literary study and the ‘harder’ sciences.
Fortunately for the status of literary studies in the university, not science itself but professionalism became the authoritative criterion for inclusion in the new regime. “Social authority” “came to be based on the very institutional and cultural forms science had helped to establish: the professional association, the academic discipline, the department, professional and graduate schools, the higher degree”; “in the end, professionalism triumphed even over science.” “Knowledge workers” have become “a new ruling class,” and as that class invents more new technologies that enhance their rule, more wealth, prestige, and political power accrues to them. All regimes have rulers; all rulers make claims to rule, upholding some idea of justice and maintaining that they know how to obtain it. Rule by experts maintains its authority by defining professionalism in terms of cognitive or abstract work, by asserting a specialized knowledge that excludes non-experts from the work of rule, by organizing ruling institutions, including publishing enterprises that make their principles and practices known to one another and to the general public, along with professional organizations and educational institutions, by establishing bureaucracy as a main arm not only of government conventionally defined but in education and in ‘private enterprise’ (the business corporation), and finally by “ideologies of social presentation or legitimation” such as “public service” (a nod to democracy by the undemocratic) or, even more pointedly, by means of such locutions of ‘being on the right side of history’ and indeed on the ‘cutting edge of history,’ and the now-familiar ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’—all within the bureaucratic institutional framework peopled by the new ruling class. Commerce and industry can thus be brought to heel—more readily than one might suppose, thanks to their own bureaucratic structures peopled by university graduates saturated by historicist ideologies.
Within those universities, given the material difference between “a new and potentially lucrative discovery in chemistry” and “a new reading of Joyce’s Ulysses,” “much depends on the maintenance of professional identity” among those who produce the latter sort of thing. Such professionalization “insulates some kinds of knowledge work to a certain extent from the volatility of the market,” seldom kind to new readings of Joyce’s Ulysses. To keep literary studies in the same institutional setting as chemistry, physics, and biology requires not only a claim to professionalism, however, but an additional claim not to commercial or industrial benefit, which would be supremely implausible, but to social benefit. And this, too, is only somewhat less tenuous. To the rescue comes the ‘market’ within the universities themselves, where the humanities have competed fairly well with natural and social sciences in terms of ‘customers’ and ‘products’ —the “number of students taught or books published and, ultimately, to a measurable index of institutional reputation.” Three consequences follow from these circumstances: “standardized, universalized, ritualized, and above all compulsory” professional standards such as academic degrees, attendance at academic conventions and conferences, and publications; the attempt to innovate (fitting well with Progressivism); and the “professional profile,” most notably “the ability to analyze or make complex arguments, in spoken or written form.” For professors of literature, this has issued in “desires to effect change directly through the critique expressed in literary criticism.” And this leads back to the problem of “overestimation” of the value of literary studies and criticism, or what an advertising man would call ‘puffing.’ Among academics, however, puffing is very close to professing, and may often be done with considerable sincerity, if not naivete. This can be a problem, since literary study now calls itself literary criticism, and “no other discipline” than literary criticism “incorporates the concept of criticism into its name.” Puffing and criticism rest uneasily together, given the inclination of the criticized to answer with critiques of their own, and given the occasional inclination of critics to criticize themselves. “If criticism is a kind of Archimedean lever by which literary critics hope to move the world, it must be a wonderful device indeed, wherever one stands in order to push down on this lever.”
Where, then, shall the literary critic stand? What is “the particular field of professional expertise” where he “plants his flag”? After all, the professional training of literary scholars “by no means confers upon literary scholars the authority to speak on social and political matters in public venues,” a point about which no less an eminence than Joseph Schumpeter groused about back in 1942, calling literary criticism the “profession of the unprofessional”—a palpable hit, indeed, if one makes much of one’s professionalism, as literary scholars and social scientists like Schumpeter must alike do, if they profess within a modern university.
Criticism came to sight in the late seventeenth century as “the name of a genre of writing” in which writers judged plays and poems, usually in prose but occasionally in poetry, as Alexander Pope did. As the eighteenth century saw Enlightenment philosophes coming to the fore, and as the nineteenth century saw the acceleration of the movement toward ‘democracy’ or social equality, criticism ranged afield, eventually to critiques of “society itself.” This attracted no stern objections until literary criticism “competed for territory among the academic disciplines,” as it was compelled to do in the decades before Schumpeter published his riposte. Guillory hastens to say, “I do not believe the criticism of society is the province of any particular discipline, much less that it can be institutionalized in departments of literature”; “criticism is the privilege of no one discipline and the obligation of all.” Other university denizens are less ‘inclusive.’ Yet criticism implies a criterion or set of criteria for judgment. What will that be, for literary scholars?
At the time literary criticism had established itself outside the universities, formidable Samuel Johnson had defined its task as “to establish principles,” thereby “improv[ing] opinion into knowledge” with his essays in The Gentleman’s Magazine. Although Guillory does not mention it, Johnson was speaking in Platonic terms, the ascent from opinion to knowledge of nature being the philosophic ascent, the ascent from the Cave. A ‘discipline’ indeed, as Plato himself makes plain in his Letters. [1] In a sense, the ‘caves’ of Europe had multiplied by Johnson’s time, as many clergy and statesmen alike had separated their regimes from the Catholic Church, causing Bibles to be translated into vernaculars; literary critics, for their part, wrote in the vernacular on literary works written in the vernacular. The reign of Latin had weakened and would weaken still more.
Johnson’s life ended shortly after the United States of America gained independence from his sovereign. As in England and in Europe generally, American literary critics operated outside of academia for the next century, but when the study of literature gained entrance into the universities, “the classically trained teaching corps of the university system had to be recommissioned for the new vernacular curriculum.” Between the world wars, universities welcomed many of the literary critics to their faculties, “whatever their credentials.” This meant that literary criticism “became an academic profession before it became a discipline.” The critics professionalized themselves by formulating a method of interpretation, the most successful being the New Criticism of John Crowe Ransom at Vanderbilt, later at Kenyon. Ransom “made the stakes of the procedure explicit: ‘Rather than occasional criticism by amateurs, I should think the whole enterprise might be seriously taken in hand by professionals.'” This amounted to a challenge to the scholars, by now primarily literary historians; the New Criticism insisted that a literary work be interpreted within the framework of the text itself, not as a token of the ‘time’ in which it was written. Although Guillory describes the literary historians as positivists, one might more cogently describe them as historicists, meaning historical relativists—having derived their intellectual assumptions from the several neo-Hegelian doctrines then taught in the graduate schools, the philosophic framework of Progressivism. Ransom and his allies often resisted Progressivism not only in literary study but also in politics, as seen in their collection of essays on social and economic topics, I’ll Take My Stand.
By the years subsequent to World War II, literary and social critics independent of the universities had dwindled in number, the “New York Intellectuals” being the most conspicuous holdouts. Historians and textualists papered over their differences and proceeded to school the Baby Boomers. But “the postwar settlement was fragile: the merger of criticism and scholarship drove the criticism of society underground, as the cost of compromise.” Pressured by the New Left, and at the same time getting a bit bored with what they were doing (“endlessly repeated celebrations of great literature”), the literary professoriate welcomed “the reassertion of criticism,” and indeed of criticism of topics well beyond literary forms. If neo-Hegelianism galvanized the professors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, neo-Marxism or ‘cultural Marxism’ galvanized the younger scholars in the universities, soon joined by the New Leftists who had escaped conscription by going to graduate school. (New Leftists began as critics of academic professionalism, as seen in Tom Hayden’s 1962 Port Huron Statement, but quickly adapted to university forms upon getting gainful employment—tenured employment, at that.) New methods were needed to maintain this professional status, and there was no shortage of those, thanks to prior efforts by European leftists, among whom Jacques Derrida, armed with ‘deconstructionism,’ was perhaps the most popular initially, although feminism to some extent eclipsed it. “At present, theory is disseminated largely by means of anthologies that offer theoretical approaches to interpretation, like choices on a menu (I invoke the banal simile to underscore my point).” As a result, in literature departments today, “criticism is what we really profess,” “claim[ing] to wield an Archimedean lever,” “want[ing] to rule the world.”
As Guillory satirically puts it, this combination of university requirements and perquisites—a quasi-aristocratic status—and taking one’s stand on the Left, for ‘democracy,’ means that “the professional career of the scholarly critic today functions simultaneously as a covert prophetic career.” Guillory hastens to remark that this is indeed literary criticism is “a spurious form of prophecy, the religious trope by which Weber grasps the politicization of the lecture hall and of scholarship,” warning, as Weber put it, that “the prophet and the demagogue have no place at the lectern,” that they belong out on the street, haranguing passersby. In Weber’s Germany, things of that sort would get noticeably worse before they got better, a point one may take when considering the universities today, although for the moment Guillory considers academic prophets to be animated by “the scholarly imaginary.” Taken by themselves, yes, but when backed by the administrators, they influence the people who go on to find jobs in the ruling professions, do they not? Yes, he soon observes: “It seems reasonable to suppose…that teaching in humanities disciplines has had a significant impact on political attitudes in the demographic of the ‘college-educated.'” But this doesn’t “mean that the college-educated fully understand the structural bases of social injustice or see clearly what must be done politically to transform these structures.” In fact, your reviewer has encountered distinguished professional political scientists who have never read Aristotle’s Politics.
What is more, lit-crit attempts to address politics via such subpolitical, social and economic categories as “black, Chicano, or female studies,” or such polemicized political categories as “Revolutionary Literature,” “Imperialism,” or “The Antislavery Struggle” have achieved results less than satisfactory to the ideologues who teach in accordance with them. This brings “renewed uncertainty about the justification of the discipline,” as well it might. In today’s academe, “the system of rewards encourages us to imagine that we are being rewarded for the criticism of society. I think we might expect such rewards in heaven.” (Or not. Heaven reportedly declines to reward hubris.) “The absurdity of the situation should be evident to all of us: as literary study wanes in public importance, as literature departments shrink in size, as majors in literature decline in numbers, the claims for the criticism of society are ever more overstated.”
With its excess of “rebarbative” jargon and its failure to identify a “proper clientele” for the multisyllabic and bloodless words it has on offer, academic literary critics have ignored “readers of literature.” “To name our clientele as the readers of literature argues rather for…the reestimation of aim, a better understanding of how literary works are read, both in the schools and without, and what literary study might do to improve the reading of literature, even reading as such.” As implied by the adjective itself, “amateur readers” “love what they read” (or sometimes hate it—are engaged by it, at any rate). “I would like to believe that the value of criticism inheres in its discovery of a truth in literary or other cultural works, whatever feelings of affection or disaffection the critical reader might have about a given work.” Dr. Johnson and his guide, Aristotle, were right: Man does indeed want to know.
The regime of the university, with its departments of literary study, thus need a new purpose. “The criticism of the text can also be the criticism of society,” but this criticism needs “to move beyond the phase of manifesto.” “Long ago, literary education was the chief requisite for a voice in the public sphere; that day is over.” Get over it and move on. One way to do so (if I may so bold as to suggest) would be to assume that the ‘canonical’ authors are often smarter than the professors and students who study them, then take things from there, both in class and in the journals.
Note
- See Ariel Helfer, ed.: Plato’s Letters: The Political Challenges of the Philosophic Life. For commentary, see “Plato’s Politic Practice” and “What Is Politic About Political Philosophy?” on this website under the category, “Philosophers.”
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