Brown, in her introduction to Is Critique Secular? writes the following blurb (referencing Marxist heritage):
“Critique in this tradition has prided itself on explaining both mystifications and human consort with these mystifications from a place imagined to be their opposite in every respect. Thus does the rational, material, real, scientific and human aim both to explain and supplant the religious, the ideal, the unreal, the speculative, and the divine.” (13)

Asad, in his section “Historical Notes on the Idea of Secular Criticism,” writes (as one of three responses to Said) that, “since criticism employs judgment, since it seeks conviction – of oneself and others – to what extent does it therefore seek to overcome skepticism?” (47)

In light of our previous discussions in this class, and the “crisis in the Humanities” which we reference ad nauseum, I’m curious about the relationship between the speculative and conviction as it manifests itself in our critical discourse. I find a continual sense in my classes (largely through critical articles assigned for reading) that the purpose of a critical argument is to ‘supplant’ another person’s (previously ‘accepted’) claim with a new, more rational, way of understanding a particular concept/piece of writing. As a critically engaged member of an academic practice, I learn to see through such postures of conviction (understanding in particular the slippery nature of language and the way my perceptions of the world are created by the particular social and linguistic contexts in which I develop, as both person and scholar). By doing so, I can then, with equal degree of ‘conviction’ (really I always feel like an imposter) I lay my own thoughts open to the world and await the judgment of my fellow thinkers, continually prepared to supplant my supposed ‘ideal’ or ‘unreal’ perceptions of the world with their own rational arguments.

While this may come off as a rant, what I’m really interested in asking is: do we continually support a certain sense of ‘righteousness’ in our own thought-production? If we do, what impact does this have on our understanding of the academic landscape as secular? And, if we accept Brown’s split between ‘rational, material, real, scientific and human’ on one hand, and ‘the religious, the ideal, the unreal, the speculative, and the divine,’ on the other, just what sort of judgments are we attempting to assert through ‘critique’ when we position our own work as supplanting that of our colleagues?

I realize that many of us see our own work as building upon, rather than replacing, the work of other scholars. But the continual need to find the flaws in other people’s arguments suggests to me that while we may want to refine these thoughts of others, we do it in a way that diminishes their work, even if it doesn’t invalidate it. In what ways are we limiting our freedom (as writers, as critics) in perpetuating this practice? Does this practice negatively impact the way our discipline is perceived by a broader public? Could adapting our standard critical practices help address our current humanities ‘crisis’?

Hah, for once I'll be the first to write, even though I don't know that it's a good thing. But I have a writing schedule, and this thing is the next on my list, so let's get to it.

I must admit that I was puzzled as to why we were reading this in the first place. The Danish cartoons? And it took me a while to get it, until Asad's answer to Butler. What triggered me was when he asked: "What does this do to the way one is asked to--and actually--lives?" (140). Indeed.

My main issue when speaking about abstract things like "critique" is the way these things don't really connect with what I do or how I live. So I like that Asad puts "criticism" and "critique" on a scale, instead of separating them. As I was reflecting on this, I realized that this is an exclusively English issue of language. In French, there is no difference between the word for "criticism" and the word for "critique"--both are "critique". The verb "critiquer" has both the sense of criticizing and critiquing. The person who criticizes and the person who critiques are both called "critiques". Of course it doesn't mean they're the same thing--it just means that I think Asad is right when he says that both are linked together.

Let's think about literature for now. Let's say I'm reading a sexist Victorian novel. I think, "oh my, this novel is really sexist." That's a criticism: it is lacking in something, there's something wrong with it. Then it brings me to think: "so what's the ideological implications of this? What kind of message is sent through this narrative?" This is what we would consider "critique", at least in what I conceive to be my academic task. I can't really discuss Butler's intervention, because to be honest I had a hard time following it with all the Foucault and Kant stuff. And I mean, if we don't know that our conception of intellectual work is imbedded in the judaeo-christian foundations of our society, then our basic schooling is doing something wrong. Of course I'm aware.

Our so called "secularity" is really a de-mystification of religious values. Weber's classic Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism has clearly shown that specific religious values can be applied to something that doesn't seem religious at all. It's always been obvious to me, but then maybe I've read the right stuff to make me aware of it. Of course we must recognize this and be aware of it and see when it comes in the way of social justice and when it becomes a tool of oppression. But isn't this what we're always doing as literary critic(izer)s anyway?

Austen

Weren’t we supposed to read some Jane Austen for this month? Having never read any Austen, and always confusing her and all those Brontes, I got started on Pride and Prejudice. I made it 27% of the way through. Sadly, those are hours I will never get back.

Despite the fun I generally make of the Victorianists, I actually quite like a lot of Victorian literature and, when I was an undergraduate trying to figure out what I wanted to do when I grew up, I considered focusing on Victorian texts for my honours project. I like Dickens very much. Great Expectations is probably the only book I’ve read twice—once in En-ger-land: a paperback copy I bought in Winchester on a rainy December day while the aunt I was visiting went to the panto. I first read about Pip et al. during one of those unfortunate teenaged phases in which I attempted to, as Eliot says we must, obtain some tradition through great labour. Being a real rebel, I read the Iliad around the same time and remember being terribly disappointed that the only response I had to it was a genuine enjoyment of the endless battles. I think that’s still my only response. Whatever the importance of the Iliad, I do now know that nothing at all happens in the first 27% of Pride and Prejudice. No one even dies of consumption.

The most interesting thing about reading P+P was that I read what I did of it on a Kobo ereader (that’s how I can be so certain that I read 27%). It’s very strange to read a big thick book on a screen that looks like paper and holds a thousand books but is only a quarter-inch thick. People interested in new media and the-history-of-the-book are surely thinking about these things. I also had a strange worry that I was not reading a “good” copy of the novel—maybe whoever entered the text for Project Gutenberg had got some things wrong, or maybe there were typos, or maybe there were battles that had been edited out. One can only hope.

Thinking about reading etexts reminded me that there were other readings for this month. Like Jeff, I have no idea what “ethics” is or means (that’s what you said, right Jeff?). I remember Pete in The Examined Life talking about vegetarians and spending money while he strolled the streets of New York in what were undoubtedly expensive leather shoes. Ethics seems to be about common sense, some form of collective guilt and/or shame, and a reiteration of the Golden Rule (or Might is Right). Confusingly, ethics seems to be both everywhere and nowhere. My connection now to etexts seems a stretch, but I was left wondering about the ethics of reading downloaded books—not the ones that are in the public domain, like P+P, but the ones that are obtained otherwise. Of course it’s a copyright issue, but wouldn’t the copyright holders (monsters?) claim that there’s an ethical background to copyright? This seems especially pertinent given that our texts on ethics, etc. for this month were scanned and emailed around to us all. As I (barely) understand it, this method of distributing texts to students is no longer ethical/allowed. I would very much like someone to explain this shift in departmental (or is it university?) policy to me—not even explain the supposed rationale for the shift or anything that in-depth but actually fill me in on what happened over the Christmas break. I suspect these answers will provoke many questions related to McIntyre's ideas about institutions, practices, and internal and external goods.

Criterion and on...

Adam Carlson

This month’s readings thematize the “malaise of modernity”, the absence of objective/social horizons of significance against which good can be distinguished from not-good. We know that for Jameson there’s no lack of horizons, but for his Macintyre there is. For Eliot, there’s a synthetic relation between the traditional and the novel that binds the (privileged) individual’s talent to collective excellence. And for Badiou, there’s a strange synthesis between the universal and the utterly singular that for Eagleton forms no horizon at all. Each reading seeks to establish, in particular, a criterion for virtue. But more interestingly, they discuss the preconditions for criteria in general. Tradition and critique, as the two main operators in this discussion, form two modes of answering the question, what counts as an answer? As I’m tinkering together a project roughly dealing with, um, well, I guess we’ll all have to wait for next month to find out, I’m intrigued by the way each of our texts treats alterity in relation to virtue. Badiou criticizes (through Eagleton), the “ideology of human rights”, and “the idiom of difference and otherness that accompanies it [and] reflects a ‘tourist’s fascination’ for moral and cultural diversity; it accepts only those others who are ‘good’ others—which is to say, those like myself; which is to say, not other at all. It has no respect for the difference of those who do not respect its own cherished differences.” Badiou here is voicing a common critique of institutionalized diversity, multiculturalism-as-national-policy, or liberal democratic tolerance. Herbert Marcuse to Wendy Brown have argued that in the celebration of difference, it’s the majority that gets to decide what counts as “good” (or virtuous) difference. And, were Eagleton’s Badiou to stay in the truly revolutionary universal, attempting to “achieve sameness”, we may have a more profound critique of multiculturalism than those typically found on the Left a la Brown (namely, that diversity is an alibi/instrument of imperialism; and/or, it’s yet another expression of liberal democratic hypocrisy). However, Eagleton goes on to complain, Badiou ends up taking a backdoor into the difference party through his national and generational affiliation with the veneration of alterity-in-and-for-itself: “for all his undoubted political zeal”, Badiou is “caught up in an elitist sort of antithesis between the ordinary and epiphanic”, proclaiming “the non-conceptualizable, revelatory, irreducibly singular, evental, subject-constituting character of truth.”

According to Eagleton, Badiou has curiously conservative criteria for universal truth: “The sameness he has in mind is more one of truth than equality. Truths, he insists, are the same for everyone, and anyone at all can proclaim them.” Does this not smack of Hobbes’s cynical contention that the distribution of intelligence is truly democratic and egalitarian, as everyone is always sure they’re right about everything? Perhaps it’s obvious where I’m going here, but it seems to me Eagleton’s main beef with Badiou is that that truth-as-singularity, that is, as alterity, is—dare I say again “metaleptically”, or at least tautologically or analytically—simultaneously example and criterion for what really (counter-normatively) counts as good, meaningful, authentic, an event, or as significance as such: “What is to count as a situation, and who decides? Are there really any ‘singular situations’, as Badiou seems to imagine? And is there any way of analysing, or even identifying one, which does not implicate general categories?” Eagleton has me convinced that I need to read Badiou’s book, and I agree with Eagleton’s Badiou that the real trouble with diversity is not the liberal hypocritical celebration of difference which ignores/contains/disarms difference, and that some sort of non-essentialist, non-strictly-humanist concept of sameness is at least worth thinking about. But I disagree with his leftist fantasy of alterity, or the willingness to equate anything even remotely counter-hegemonic with virtue, especially since this set of criteria superimpose the bad utopia of the easy answer over the possibility of a good utopia in which answers might objectively count for something.

Eliot treats this question of the answer in terms of alterity as well, explaining that we praise a poet for being different from his predecessors, while remaining blind to those parts of his work in which those predecessors live on most vigorously (14). TSE sounds awfully Lukácsian as he describes the “great labour” through which one may gain the “historical sense” and inherit the tradition. This “historical sense”, that is, the consciousness of the present and the place of the present within the historical, and of the individual within a complex inheritance and conditions of inheritance, would in another tradition be read as the coming to class consciousness. For TSE the criterion for aesthetic virtue is historical. It cannot be understood without a complex interrelation between the complete—that is absolute—past and its disjunctive relation with the absolute present—the absolutely new or novel (“the really new”)—that is, alterity. And the tradition is what makes alterity meaningful. TSE is quick to reinforce that this novelty or disruptive force is only felt in the process of its integration or its “conformity” to the tradition it modifies. Thus his is a hegemonic aesthetics that must accommodate for the presence of the non-normative by revising/re-normalizing the whole structure of history, by canonizing the counter-canonical, or by negotiating and compromising with the new that for whatever reason cannot be ignored or suppressed. Really, TSE’s aesthetics is shaped like a liberal democratic theory of equality or diversity, and like liberal theory, his pedantic method is a textbook case of Bourdieuian exclusion via cultural capital (and of course, he makes no pretence to accessibility [16-7]).

For TSE the past is “only” a horizon of interpretation against which the ratio of individuality/conformity may be measured. “And we do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value” (15). For TSE, excellence or aesthetic virtue must meet the dual demands of being new, but not too new, different, but not revolutionary, and this is just one reason why TSE cannot be a Lukácsian (not that Lukács would ever have him as one!). Even despite his modernist aesthetic radicalism, TSE’s criteria for virtue, or excellence, or art, reveal him as a champion of the bourgeois liberal status quo. (What may be interesting to consider here is Jameson’s figuring—in “Postmodernism and Consumer Society”—of the modernist criterion for aesthetic success as commercial failure. I wonder if this puts pressure on Eliot’s maintenance of the status quo, or if the authenticity of commercial failure is just a “new” [sub-] cultural normativity.)

For TSE it is not the greatness of the components that make up the work of art, but the “intensity of the artistic process, the pressure […] under which the fusion takes place, that counts” (19). So, the excellent artist is a Modernist form and never a Romantic content. Content’s relation to the question of the answer follows into After Virtue: if every society values differently, then how do we know that they’re talking about the same concept of virtue? Again, the urgent need is for a criterion. Most interestingly, Jameson takes what might otherwise be read as an exercise in scholasticism and focuses on the collective nature of Aristotelian virtue: the absence of virtue constitutes the non-conforming individual as outside of the auto-fashioning community; or, to put it another way, conformity to norms equals virtue, and alterity is thus at least somewhat evil (151-2).

Contradicting his anti-utopianism, Jameson’s Macintyre must become utopian in order to imagine the communal conditions within which virtue may be regrounded. Perhaps the truly utopian goal is to imagine a way in which middle ground is not always/already an alienating mediation, to find the res publica in medias res.

Yes, more Eliot...

I, too, find myself drawn to Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Although the poet took centre stage, I couldn’t help think about the critic. Where does the critic fit here? (And, yes, I am extrapolating here and being a “bad” critic in my response.) The whole idea of “creation” and its connection to the critic has always interested me. How often are you asked when describing your prospective career, do you write? It makes sense that studying English would mean that we too “write,” right? By this it is usually implied, do we write fiction? I have found myself attempting to justify critical writing on many occasions and usually I feel inadequate and incomplete in my explanation of my “talents.” Perhaps it is my own anxiety about the perceived value of the critic vs. the poet, fiction writer, dramatist, or whatever. Instead of Woody Allen’s dictum, “those who can do teach, and those who can’t teach, teach PE,” I wonder if those who can’t write, write criticism. I’m being hyperbolic, of course, but after reading Eliot, I kept asking myself if the critic is a role designed to those who can’t truly be artists.

In the case of Eliot, he consistently refers to the poet as the example of tradition. “The poet must be very conscious of the main current, which does not at all flow invariably through the most distinguished reputations.” The critic must also follow a similar model and in this way I think the critic does indeed have as much creative license, social agency, and talent as an artist. Eliot then goes on to say, “he must be quite aware of the obvious fact that art never improves, but that the material of art is never quite the same.” And isn’t this the critic’s role? In this sequence of art, tradition, and creation, the critic pushes ideas forward, challenges tradition in order to create new discussion threads, and promotes art forms, such as poetry. Eliot wears both hats in this capacity, but what about the art form as criticism? Although this post might seem a bit incoherent, my main anxiety is that the critic is not considered an artist, is consistently challenged in mass culture as elitist and without any productive ideas, and, finally, has no real “use-value” in society. Certainly these are amplified anxieties, but am I the only one who questions our paths into criticism? After all, we are not reading about pedagogy here, so how do we view ourselves in contemporary academia as opposed to the “traditional” sphere?

My Response (finally! Sorry it's so late! Google hates me.): Virtue and the Desire for Greatness

Virtue and the Desire for Greatness

Of all of the readings for this week’s seminar, Alistar MacIntyre inspired me the most. On one level, this reading allowed me to explore some pressing questions I have been struggling with (especially in the wake of SSHRC and General Awards applications) such as: does the desire for external rewards corrupt virtue? MacIntyre seems to suggest that there is a tension, but not a contradiction, between external rewards and virtuous living. And although I think I understand what he’s getting at, I am not fully convinced. My personal reflection on MacIntyre’s “The Nature of the Virtues” lead me back to a novel that I return to every now and again: Carol Shields’s Unless. In this novel, Shields seems to suggest that there is a radical (and perhaps irreconcilable?) tension between GOODNESS and GREATNESS. Here, Shields sets up and examines two models of ‘the good life,’ where on the one hand greatness is the goal for the good life in a Homeric, heroic, and extrinsically rewarded tradition (which includes rewards such as fame, money, power, and respect), and on the other hand, through Norah (whose name perhaps recalls the protagonist of A Dolls House[?]), Shields gestures towards an alternative understanding of ‘the good life’ where goodness (and not greatness) is the goal. Goodness, according to the narrator, “is respect that has been rarified and taken to a higher level. It has emptied itself of vengeance, which has no voice at all. I’m afraid I don’t put that very clearly. I’m still sorting out the details” (310). And that is also where I seem to stand. I’m still sorting out the details. This novel always moves me to tears, but I am unable to go beyond this catharsis, or translate these feelings into a way of being in the world. Perhaps this is because if we take goodness, if we take virtues seriously, we will be unable to function within the confines of an institution such as a university. Perhaps Norah’s virtues make the world uncanny, and if we, like Norah, “had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.”

************************************************************************

I enjoyed re-reading Eliot’s essay, especially after studying poetry with Derek Walcott, since Walcott so clearly admires and confirms many of Eliot’s ideas. One question that occurred to me in response to Eliot’s essay is: where does form fit into a discussion of tradition and the individual talent? Eliot makes much of the influence of dead poets, and emphasizes the duty of a poet to know his or her history, but I wonder if an examination of a particular form’s tradition might help us “divert interest from the poet(s) to the poetry” while also taking into account the rigor and the intensity of the artistic process. Walcott continually reminded our class that the interest is on the discipline of poetry, and he made the radical assertion that “there is no such thing as a free poem.” He claims (along with many critics and poets before him) that art is not equal; it’s hierarchical. All of these comments at first struck me as dreadfully old-fashioned. But over the course of the class I began to wonder if in fact the 20^th century lost something quite valuable when it gave up on form, and became less interested in discerning excellence. Which brings me back to MacIntyre and his discussion of practice and excellence…

On Eliot

It was interesting returning to Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” after a number of years, particularly in light of the discussions we’ve been having lately about ‘texts,’ ‘literature’ and the absence of a common body of work. Our work as students, as aspiring scholars, bears out Eliot’s point that we tend to insist, “when we praise a poet, upon those aspects of his work or parts of his work in which he least resembles anyone else” (14). That’s always our task, after all: we must launch a defense of our ideas. What’s different? What’s new? Why does this matter? Eliot argues, though, for a “historical sense” that “compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order” (14). I suspect that, as much time as we all spend researching our particular areas, still something important is lost when we lack the order that comes of sharing a historical sense--which is to say a common body of work-- or will be lost for future generations of students as literature gives way to texts. As MacIntyre claims, “every practice requires a certain kind of relationship between those who participate in it. Now the virtues are those goods by reference to which, whether we like it or not, we define our relationships to those other people with whom we share the kind of purposes and standards which inform practices.”

But what of Eliot’s idea of self-sacrifice, of the “continual extinction of personality” (17) in art? “The more perfect the artist,” he writes, “the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates” (18). Does historical sensitivity really demand the extinction of self in art? And how might we answer this question in terms of the critical work we undertake? Like Minhao, I wonder what might be significant about our own experiences as we go about our scholarship. We may have largely dispensed with biographical criticism, consigning it long ago to the status of ‘intentional fallacy,’ yet much of what we read demands a consideration of authorship. Those of us studying autobiography this term, for example, have learned already the vastness of this genre. How do we account for its current popularity? And why do we assert, publicly and constantly, our sense of subjectivity in such realms as facebook? Has personal identity become an obsession, to the point where Eliot’s “historical sense” is no longer relevant?

In Response to T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent”

I hope to raise some questions about Eliot’s impersonal theory of poetry. The questions concerning the role of the poet bespeak my confusion about my own role as a literary scholar (depending on whether or not I could find a job in the academic market). What roles do emotions, feelings, experiences play in the act of critique? To what extend are literary scholars bound up by or changing the tradition? What should literary scholars do when confronted with different traditions of criticism?  

Eliot says that “the elements that enter the presence of the transformation catalyst are of two kinds: emotions and feelings,” and that “greater poetry may be made without the direct use of any emotion whatever: composed out of feelings solely.” Here Eliot claims that emotions and feelings are different, with feelings being on a superior level. But in many other places, he either uses them interchangeably or makes but a vague distinction between them. Then, what does Eliot exactly mean by emotion and feeling? What is, again, the difference between emotion, feeling, experience, and impression when he speaks of them in terms of artistic creation?

Second, Eliot deems futile the search for new human emotions and argues that the poet’s business to work ordinary ones anew. For Eliot, there exists a priori repertoire of emotions (not dissimilar to Maclntyre’s prior repertoire of virtues) that remains unchanged throughout human history. But is it the way to do justice to human psychology and human condition? Don’t new emotions emerge out of new experiences if emotions are products of experiences as Eliot seems to suggest in the essay? Or could it be the case that new emotions do arise but the existing vocabulary is inadequate to describe them, and that the use of old words blinds us to the insertion into the old repertoire new human emotions?

Third, Eliot uses the analogy of the catalyst to illustrate the role of the poet. He argues that just like the catalytic material that makes a chemical reaction happen more quickly without being changed itself, the poet’s mind is only a storage container for “numberless feelings, phrases, images” and a medium in which all these feelings, phrases, and images enter into new combinations. Impersonality, states Eliot, is the ideal state that the poet should strive towards. But is it true that an artistic work has nothing to do with the artist’s own emotions? It may be the case – and, in fact, it often happens – that an artist’s personal life is prosaic (prosaic in the common sense standard) but the emotions in his/her works are complex. But is it convincing to put forward the statement that an artist whose personal emotions are “simple, or crude, or flat” is capable of producing works of complex emotions. Here I’m thinking of the stream of consciousness school of writing. Doesn’t a poet fuse into new combinations of emotions some of his own? Further, if the poet’s business is to form existing phrases and images into different patterns, his “talent” is more technical than artistic. In addition, if the literary tradition is made up of different combinations, where does the first phrase and image come from?

Finally, Eliot talks about tradition from a temporal perspective. The literary tradition for him is that of Europe from Homer onwards; the whole order of European literature, or English literature, will undergo a process of readjustment with every introduction of a new work of art. If Eliot incorporates a geographical perspective into his discussion, will he still be confident to say that the world literary tradition is the European tradition and the European tradition is English literature? What will happen if literary traditions of different geographical areas meet? How would an artist react at the crossroads of several traditions when she/he has only the knowledge of one tradition? 

Fear of Ethics

I must confess up front that I’ve avoided a real engagement with all that ethics brings with it during my training in the academy thus far. I’m incredibly uncomfortable with it (this is a blog so I can talk about my feelings, right?) for reasons I’m equally uncomfortable considering. My response to this set of texts, then, is in the first instance incessant shifting in my chair, wondering when it’ll all stop, and in the second instance reversion to a more comfortable consideration of what’s at stake in these arguments when they’re abstracted out into manageable concepts with familiar contours. Which isn’t to suggest that there isn’t an ethics of abstraction (though I’m uncomfortable thinking seriously about this). It is to say, however, that what I’m more drawn towards the larger political stakes (at least on the face of things) put forth in Jameson’s response to MacIntyre, which I’ll come back to at the end.

But first, one of the reasons I’ve perhaps lazily but nonetheless consciously avoided ethics like the plague, articulated by New York Times columnist and Keynesian economist Paul Krugman (only yesterday):

“Now, inequality of opportunity is only one reason for the inequality in outcomes we actually see. But of what remains, how much reflects individual effort, how much reflects talent, and how much sheer luck? No reasonable person would deny that there’s a lot of luck involved. Wall Street titans are, no doubt, smart guys (although talking to some of them, you have to wonder …), but there are surely equally smart guys who for whatever reason never got a chance to grab the 9-figure brass ring.”

So far so good. The conservatives Krugman rebuts in this entry of “The Conscience of a Liberal” have no solid ground (at least in terms of the flawed infrastructure of American legal, economic, racial, and spatial determinations) upon which to convince anyone of a direct and unbreakable correlation between morality and economic affluence (or even adequacy). The playing field isn’t, and never was, conducive to this fantasy of “equal opportunity.”

Or, as Krugman agrees, “economics is not a morality play; the social and economic order we have doesn’t represent the playing out of some kind of deep moral principles.”

But then the liberal twist, the return of a political and ethical horizon, the point at which I once again go to my room and slam the door because auntie ethics came to visit bearing a big basket of “if only everyone abided by this set of regulatory ideals” (my aunt has never said any such thing, but I bet she thinks it all the time):

“That doesn’t mean the order we have should be overthrown: the pursuit of Utopia, of perfect economic justice, has proved to be the road to hell, while welfare-state capitalism — a market economy with its rough edges smoothed by a strong safety net — has produced the most decent societies ever known. The point, though, is that anyone who claims that transferring some income from the most fortunate members of society to the least is a vile injustice is closing his eyes to the obvious reality of how the world works.”

While one could perhaps make the argument that the use of the word “Utopia,” here, is simply a shorthand for something more akin to that which seems absurd, irrational, a commitment to something ruined long ago, I think there’s far more at stake, at least when we consider Jameson’s critique of MacIntyre’s disavowal of Marxism for what MacIntyre repeats as a realistic engagement with practices determined by historical sequence, as opposed to practices that seek to break from them. To be clear, I’m not working towards an argument about MacIntyre’s liberal tendencies, here; rather, I’m resorting to the abstraction (or perhaps the right word is distillation) of an argument in order to avoid the more stomach turning task of thinking seriously about ethics, and I’m doing so by way of the structural limits and imperatives of what Jameson here (indeed, through his whole career) endorses as Utopic thinking. Which is to say that we can see Jameson’s critique (though he then let’s MacIntyre off the hook for what seems like a “he doesn’t even know how Utopic he really is!” kind of conclusion) about the self-fulfilling prophecy of anti-Utopic thinking (the kind of thinking that constantly limits itself to the imaginable, to historical practices in and of themselves) articulated at a different register in Krugman’s caveat to an otherwise sound dagger through the ethical heart of American neo-conservativism: “the pursuit of Utopia, of perfect economic justice, has proved to be the road to hell.” Krugman is quite clearly gesturing to historic failures of a “road” we abandoned long ago (he would probably name 1989 as this final abandonment). Of course the two operative terms in what Krugman hopes is a self-evident shorthand are “Utopia” and “perfect economic justice.” The road was an attempt, but the hell (so the claim goes) comes from the first two (not the road itself).

And this is where we can see, if not in content then certainly in form, the force of Jameson’s critique of MacIntyre’s anti-Utopianism: what makes Utopia utopic is not that it takes contradictions of extant conditions (economic justice understood as identical logics across conservative, liberal and communist policies and morality) and points to some easy resolution within the same system that produced the contradictions in the first place (i.e. communism with capitalist economics) but rather that the formalization of the unimaginable in utopic form (radical politics, cultural fictions, etc.) make explicitly clear the structural and imaginative limits to the actualization of radical alternatives. Utopic thinking isn’t an end in of itself, but rather a means for recognizing the conditions of such means in the first place. And so if ethics (or liberal morality for Krugman) resides immanent to historical practice but also limits itself to reproducing those historical practices, then it, like Krugman’s so-called trump card (communism failed, long live capitalism), makes me want to take anti-depressants.

Maybe I’ll face my fears another day.

Faith, ethics, and academic calling

It is with great reluctance that I find myself having no choice but to respond to Terry Eagleton's review. This reluctance has nothing to do with the quality of the piece, but rather a combination of what could be aptly named ethics and sheer perverse stubbornness.

Let me start with the simplest: I initially did not want to write on Eagleton because I felt that I could not properly engage with his arguments without having read Badiou. Can one, in other words, make an original, stand-alone argument in a review? This seems to me to be in part a question of ethics: while people do use reviews for all sorts of interventions (if I am being charitable) or self-aggrandizement (if I am not) should we? I realize this is a bit of trite question and one that has been solved by years of academic practice, but I had enough of discomfort at the thought of responding to the text that it gave me pause. Even now, upon a few days of reflection, I still cannot pinpoint an explanation, but evidently it was stayed in my head long enough to warrant this response. So perhaps what has ultimately happened is a revelation as to the fluid state of my own personal code of ethics.

Attendant upon this reflection was a single question: what does it mean that a review of a book on ethics deals so heavily with faith? I do not take "faith" to mean one that is attached to a particular religiosity or perhaps not even to a spirituality, but rather a long view that seems to pertain to both academics and activists: that our work will survive us, that it will mean something, that it will make a positive impact. This brings me to the second reason that I did not want to respond to Eagleton: his opening paragraph is so polemic I -- like a good responsible academic -- decided that I would ignore it entirely. But despite my declarations and protestations to the contrary, here I am.

My goal has always to become what Julia Sudbury calls an "activist scholar." A conceited title perhaps, but one that defines how I think of myself. Faith is fundamental here; revolutions (however one wants to think of those) are comprised of small steps. It seems than that an ethical faith of this variety would demand an impossible farsight: the ability to see the consequences of our actions. Eagleton's dichotomous consequences of transformation seem to be full of despair; what would a revolution look like that would leave us with the tools to understand the change?

At the end of things, the question that Eagelton's article leaves us with is this: why do we do what we do? If this question demands an ethical answer, or at least carries an assumption that our work has an imperative for change -- regardless of how small or large -- then we must be careful in how we answer this question. When this question is re-imagined as "what can you do with an English degree?" I, as Brianna posted, have answered along the lines of external goods. But it seems to me that internal and external goods are a false binary and neither is wholly satisfactory. At the very least, neither is ethical if we are to think of ethics and faith as important factors in academic scholarship.

But many people do pursue academic work for a good job or because they love research and teaching. Are these not valid answers? Are they devoid of faith and/or ethics? Badiou claims that ethics is a loyalty to truth, not in a universal way but truth events which may be singular and unique to each of us. Eagleton rightly questions what can count as a truth event, but without having read Badiou, I want to know whether or not our academic practice counts as a truth event. If so, then ethics as imagined by Badiou demands that we strive to remain loyal to the aims of our academic practice. If one's only goal is to get a job, than an ethics would be to do what one can to get that job. This seems to be the place where faith becomes so important in academic practice -- the question of whether that work that we do is bigger than us looms large.

I seemed to have returned to the beginning, but perhaps it is worth repeating again: why do we do what we do?

It seems the point of MacIntyre's exercise is to locate a premise of “unity” in the ways we have come to identify virtue and extend its moral, intellectual traditions (186). Nevertheless the implication of his work is that virtue often serves as a marker of difference and hence value between different kinds of activities and people: the broader, organized practice versus its mere metonymic action (187); those who let virtue breed goodness to sustain practices both internally and to a lesser extent externally versus those who let virtue breed vice as well as the disruption of practices and communities. Thus we can perhaps approach projects of enlightenment in a world often generally dubbed “post-modern” by questioning if virtue is a narrative of necessary difference, complex unity and integrity sought through pluralistic debate.

What makes education both a good and qualitatively "good?" How do we in respect of and sometimes in opposition to our university’s regulations take up MacIntyre’s crucial concern for what the notion of virtue entails? In other words, how does virtue operate in academic communities? Moreover, which virtues are privileged as being integral to practices of becoming a “whole,” self-knowing, successful citizen? In Humanities classrooms are we more caught up in the activity of delineating common ideas of virtue in opposition to other possible terms: i.e. investigating how each of us, in light of our respective material realities, can re-conceptualize potentially confining, elitist, uniform traditions of art, sport, intellectualism, science, etc.? Or are we educated to preserve traditional espousals of virtue, as MacIntyre does to a certain degree with Aristotle?

In "Morality Versus Ethical Substance" Jameson summarizes MacIntyre’s view: “individual conceptions of morality are dissolved in a vision of collective ethical substance; and indeed for MacIntyre the one great deficiency of Aristotle from any modern standpoint is the absence of from classical thought historicity” (151). Based on the short texts we have read this week, it appears unsound to judge virtue apart from tradition insofar as history itself is given the role of a temporal, aesthetic virtue for which complete adherence is not the absolute rule but rather a principle with which any artist, poet, philosopher or educator creating anew must exist in a state of tension. In T.S. Eliot’s words this is a relationship of “responsibili[ty]” and mutual “conformity” ("Tradition and Individual Talent" 15). If this is true, what occurs during transitions from one theoretical movement or critical mode to another? From modernism to post-modernism? From new criticism to new historicism? From feminism to post-feminism? From Marxism to Marxianism? Are these shifts somehow the work of virtue? Do we respect historical practices when we dismiss past methods as being outmoded and thus no longer indicative of today’s intellectual excellence?

What does it mean to enjoy a “whole human life” (MacIntyre 203)? MacIntyre himself admits that a complete understanding of virtue cannot be achieved by discussing practices and their effects (200-01). Arguably the question of wholeness may be approached through the topic of process. Whether it is the pursuit of “a certain kind of life,” a je ne sais quoi intrinsic to art (MacIntyre 190), or the “transmutation” (Eliot 19) achieved by the poet who gives away particular expressions of his/her ego to produce art which is generically emotional (22), clearly process and not product is attributed, here, with great ethical weight. Learning how to transform words, images and ideas is equated with not just the process of becoming human but with the work required to render this activity as “telos” (MacIntyre).

But why must there be violence involved in this transformation of the self into something that is other-than, more-than but less-than? However esoteric, Eliot’s concept of “depersonalization” (17) brings to mind fears of reification. The pained yet liberated artist/thinker trope has currency in academia, and it is even institutionalized: i.e. funding—or lack thereof— often determines how busy, how introverted and how social we will be, to what extent we will fulfill expected roles, uphold competing communities and potentially deprive ourselves of a so-called balanced existence: “a man may be so engrossed by his painting that he neglects his family…” (MacIntyre 200).

Scholarly Narratives?

Jameson notes that “…one of the other striking features of MacIntyre’s book is one of the newest and most profound tendencies of contemporary thought in general, namely the increasing foregrounding of narrative itself as a fundamental instance of human understanding” (152). While I find myself inclined to agree with the argument for the value of narrative, I wish, for a moment, to lay this conception of narrative alongside the following:
Yet it is precisely from the standpoint of anti-Utopianism that MacIntyre renounces the active part of his Marxian heritage – as well as repudiating the Nietzche-an Utopia of the Ubermensch and indeed all overtly political movements and causes generally (152).
I confess this passage is largely unintelligible to me. I have a vague sense of what Utopia is, and therefore an equally (if not more) vague sense of ‘Anti-Utopia’. However, I have no understanding of the particularly ‘Nietzche-an Utopia’ Jameson references, nor do I have any idea of what sort of Marxism MacIntyre is in particular indebted to for his heritage. Perhaps none of this matters; after all, despite offering so many particulars, Jameson suggests that MacIntyre ‘renounces…all overtly political movements and causes generally.’ But I think it’s worth questioning why Jameson writes in such a fashion. Who is his intended audience? (I am certainly not it – if so I’m sure he would never have used such specific rhetoric.) What is the intended goal of this short paper? (I assume it is to point out MacIntyre’s debt to Marx – but what I don’t understand is why that in and of itself is important.) I have no doubt that to his intended audience these detailed references carry weight, and that the meaning of his article is far clearer for the inclusion of them (perhaps those among you to whom these all make sense think my relegation of terms like Ubermensch to ‘details’ is absurd). I don’t suggest Jameson should be broader in his description or approach. But I do wonder whether his argument – even his key point – would be clearer were it delivered with a greater degree of narration.
Partly I offer this suggestion because I am frustrated by the format of the scholarly article in general. The specific passage I’ve outlined offers a microcosm of some reasons why: the chosen tone and the specifics offered divide the audience into those who really struggle to understand the argument and those to whom it is crystal clear. Yet I have a feeling that those to whom this passage is murky far outweigh those to whom it is crystal clear. While I recognize the value of communicating with a specific audience, I wonder whether it is possible for the same message to be communicated to a broader audience? Or if it is indeed necessary to the advancement of Jameson and MacIntyre’s joint audience that this article be written exactly as it was. Perhaps more importantly, if it was not necessary for the article to be written exactly as it was, why was it written in this way?
Partly I offer the question about narrative because I think my own response to these articles would be of more value if I felt it were acceptable for me to write a narrative of my own response. But previous efforts to offer narrative in my academic work have generally (admittedly not always) been met with disdain, the typical criticism being that they are neither critical nor analytical. Given that I think most clearly in narrative form and understand other people’s ideas best when they are delivered with some story-telling aspects, I wish to challenge the assumption that good scholarship avoids narrative.
I think Jameson does this as well, to some degree, in the second full paragraph on page 152. Yet his choice to write his article in a more scholarly form suggests that, much as the idea of narrative as a form of ethical or philosophical argument piques his interest, he is not actively in support of it (or at least, he isn’t here). To bring this back to ethics: what are the implications of choosing to write in a certain style? Do Academics have a responsibility to make their writing intelligible to a broader audience? Should the consideration of private vs. public funding impact this decision? Where do we situate this particular article?

On Ethics . . .

Perhaps because of our introduction to research ethics in last term’s proseminar, Eagleton’s and Jameson’s discussions of ethics grabbed my attention. Some of you bloggers have touched on ethics, virtue, etc., but what is this curious thing called ‘ethics’? (I am not convinced that either Eagleton or Jameson provide an answer to this question... nor do I think that this is necessarily an answerable question) Is ethical behavior collectively determined and enforced, or is it more of a personal matter? (Jameson touches on this point more than does Eagleton.) Perhaps most pertinently to us, what role do ethics play in the academic environment?
The OED Online (“the definitive source”) provides multiple definitions for ‘ethics’, predominantly connecting the term with morality. In his article, Jameson challenges such a link. Rather than being interchangeable conceptions, for him, morality and ethics are distinct. Likewise, Eagleton’s consideration of ethics deviates from the ‘definitive’ denotations that the OED proffers. Examining the work of Derrida and Badiou, Eagleton foregrounds the connection between politics and ethics (as opposed to morality and ethics). Specifically, he points to Badiou’s belief that ethics “have now come to displace politics . . . as a bogus humanitarian ideology of victimage, otherness and ‘human rights’ thrusts aside collective political projects (157). Further, he observes that the later Derrida considers ethics to associated with the collective, as they are “a matter of absolute decisions” (156). Eagleton’s analysis of ethics leaves more questions than answers, as the only conclusion he draws is that “There are problems, then, with Badiou’s ethics, as there are with anyone else’s” (160); but, to move to the second question that I posed, to what extent are ethics an individual or collective matter?
As I have noted, Eagleton indicates that Derrida’s conception of ethics is potentially a collective matter. For Derrida, Eagleton contends, “ethical choices are at once necessary and ‘impossible’, wholly mine yet ‘the decision of the other in me’, a kind of implacable destiny for which, like Oedipus, we are nevertheless entirely to blame” (156). The ‘other’ is not clearly explicated, but is suggestive of an external force which acts upon the individual. Jameson similarly indicates that ethics is a collective matter (151). Indeed, ethics are collectively determined, and internalized and enacted individually. In the university, a very specific guideline for ethics is established, imposed, and enforced, and the individual students must adhere to the ‘collectively’ established prescriptions.
To respond to the final question I posed at the outset--how does ‘ethics’ factor into academics?--is to also invite responses from my colleagues. Ethical behavior (responsible research practices, avoiding plagiarism, etc.) is central to academic life. Knowledge of (and adherence to) research ethics is a requirement of our doctoral program. A blurb on ‘academic integrity’ is included in the course syllabi we receive and will soon be distributing as teachers. But how have such ‘ethical lines’ been drawn and do academics truly buy into them? Does it become difficult to adhere to prescriptions for ‘ethical academic behavior’ when the concept of ethics is, as Eagleton argues, so problematic?

Practice: Discussing

I would like to take up MacIntyre’s “The Nature of the Virtues” via Brianna’s discussion of the oscillation of internal and external goods that accompanies our chosen practice of study: her post strongly parallels my own experiences justifying my studies, and I would appreciate a discussion of how the (corporate) university and larger western society privilege the achievement of external goods over internal ones as well as how we perpetuate this valuation through our discussion of the study of English. Here’s my interpretation:

In suggesting that “[t]hose who lack the relevant experience are incompetent thereby as judges of internal goods” (sorry, I have no page numbers), MacIntyre emphasizes that outsiders’ under-appreciation of the internal goods of particular practices is inevitable. However, I wonder what models we as insiders to the practice of studying English literature, have of those who have attained the internal goods of study, or better yet, what models we have of those who have not.

I can think of several professors I admired during my undergrad, but I have no means by which to assess their achievement of internal goods except to say that I felt the manner in which they conducted themselves, the ways in which they could discuss literature and edify hinted at some level of pleasure and gratification in their accomplishments as scholars. I interpret this as a marker of success and achievement of internal goods, yet because the evidence internal goods is only empirically observable, their presence must be taken in academic faith. We can only guess at who has achieved such internal goods, and we discuss such achievements only in private and seemingly never as a collective. Can we talk about our internal goods to one another? To those not engaged in the same level or area of study without the risk of pontificating? Or should we pontificate?

Furthermore, our discussions of the profession focus on those who are tenured and employed by research universities as if these are the only ones who have truly succeeded in achieving internal goods through their studies; all others slope down towards academic mediocrity for failing to achieve employment that will support their continued cultivation of internal goods.

This, of course, is a banal stereotype: we all have worked with sessional instructors, TAs, and college or trades instructors who disprove such hackneyed understandings, yet we are still told on a daily basis that there will be no work for us. What actually seems to be meant by such grey predictions is that there are few tenure track positions at research universities with a 3/2 teaching load for us to slip into upon graduation. This statement privileges a particular position in academia. I think it also reproduces what MacIntyre describes as Homeric understandings of virtue, which the corporate university seems to have taken up with some gusto: one’s academic position (virtue) is validated insofar as it supports one’s social role (educator). The more tenured, Ivy League, or published you are, the more you are fulfilling your social role. Internal goods are nowhere to be seen in this model nor it would seem in universities or academics that accept it.

This brings me to MacIntyre’s discussion of the institution. I wonder if the individual academic has not become (and is being encouraged to be) more like an institution in the corporate university, with a primary goal of self-reproduction and perpetuation, and less a member of a practice community (I see Elliot as protesting something similar in his discussion of how artists are problematically seen as individuals separate from a larger culture in “Tradition and the Individual Talent”).

Is the study of English literature a practice in which “we enter into a relationship with its contemporary practitioners,” or have we as individuals become like institutions “characteristically and necessarily concerned with […] external goods…. structured in terms of acquiring money and other goods” and focused primarily on “power and status as rewards”? I’m struck by how moralistic this sounds, but individual scholars are rarely discussed in terms of their internal goods so much as their placement or publications, a troubling trend that lifts the academic out of a community or culture and evaluates them as individual talents.

I haven’t touched too much on ethics here, but for those interested there is a good blog post that discusses Tom Flanagan, an tenured professor in Political Science at the University of Calgary who suggested Julian Assange should be assassinated in a recent interview on CBC’s Power & Politics with Evan Solomon, and academic freedom:

http://www.academicmatters.ca/bloggers.blog_article.gk?catalog_item_id=4589&category=/blogger/unbecoming

Flanagan’s case strikes me as an example of the institutionalization of the individual scholar, and makes me question the role of tenure in the modern university: it offers protection, but in some ways tenure appears to perpetuate the institution more so than the scholar in the corporate university, yet this is the carrot the 19 of us are supposed to be grasping for. Thoughts?

Art, Criticism, Virtues

I've always found it odd that Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent" is so closely connected to New Criticism, since to me it seems to promote historicization and intertextuality. While Eliot considers poetry, I think the fine arts (painting and sculpture mostly) illustrate his argument more apparently. We can't look at modern art (or for that matter any pre- or neo- movements) without considering the tradition to which it was responding (how do we differentiate Mondrian from design, or understand Rothko or Pollack, without a sense of tradition?). Perhaps because language is arguably our most familiar and prevalent form of communication, it is less apparent that we need to look at the language arts within a certain tradition to contextualize/historize. My Derrida references should relent a bit now that the class is over, but Eliot's essay recalled to me Derrida's spectres and disjointed time. Texts do not exist in a self-referential vacuum.

I'm assuming that most of us aren't doing New Criticism in our doctoral work, but just to what extent do we have to look at the tradition in order to do justice to the text? And, of course, what does doing justice to the text mean? Anabelle brings up the issue of canons--what constitutes the tradition? Eliot talks about the poet being a catalyst and that poetry is not personal expression. More often we think of theory/criticism as impersonal. What room is there for the personal in the production and reception of art?

The virtues of an academic profession seems to be many, in terms of teaching and research as practices, or in a more synthesized way, the pursuit of knowledge "for it's own sake," that is, not for any external good (although some academics achieve fame and wealth, I doubt it's their overriding motivation to work). Perhaps we can look at the work of scholarship, the virtuousness of it, in the abandonment of the self to the social need for the advancement of knowledge. Then again, I am a bit embarrassed to admit that I would have probably taken more time to construct this response if I was offered some sort of external good, like getting a good grade, but I would justify that by saying that my desire for the external good of a grade is so I can advance my career to the point where I don't have to worry about external goods and can focus on the internal goods of scholarship--is that what they call tenure?

I had a good title at first but then I wrote and the entire argument changed

As Brianna has suggested, I'd also like to think through what may (or may not) make what we do a practice. The first question that came to my mind as I was reading was, do excellence and virtue matter to us as literary scholars? If so, what form would that excellence take, and what virtues would be cultivated by its attainment? It is easy to understand excellence in chess or football: you win the game, or at least play very well. In the case of football, you might have collective excellence (winning the Grey Cup) and individual excellence (running x yards in a season). How do we define excellence in literary studies? Is it the amount of articles we publish? Is it how many times we're quoted by other scholars? Is it the sales record of our books? Teaching-wise, is it positive student evaluations, or a class with a high average? How do we know we've "arrived" as English professors? Is it with tenure?

In our case, the criteria for evaluation are so muddy and multiple that I find it difficult to arrive at a measurement of excellence that would work for all of us. Personally I feel like my teaching record will mean more to me than my publication record, and it will be different for each of us. Does that mean that I am more excellent in the practice of English professorship than the person with a high publication turnover but a bad teaching dossier? Should I even make these comparisons at all, and just be happy with what I've achieved for myself? But that would evacuate the collective character of MacIntyre's argument. Sure, the institution of the university recognizes tenure and publication numbers as markers of excellence, but I do think we are all aware of the often arbitrary nature of tenure, and even publication (who has not read bad, uninteresting, commonplace articles that bring nothing at all to the practice of literary scholarship?) Do we need to find alternative ways to measure excellence?

Which brings us to a question we've already touched in class: the lack of a common canon. Who am I, as a Victorianist, to evaluate the work of a post-modernist scholar? I know nothing of their language, field, texts. It seems impossible for us to evaluate each other outside of our own fields. And yet, we are expected to have interdisciplinary (and inter-field) projects. Should we then divide the measurement for excellence within sub-fields? Medievalists with medievalists, Shakespeareans with Shakespeareans, and so on. But this has the consequence of turning our discipline into little bubbles that would be even harder to burst than they are now, even with all the push towards multiple specializations. I do admit I am a believer in the concept of a common canon, and I don't think that the common canon is as exclusive and elitist as its opponents make it look, but I have not thought this through yet and I don't have anything coherent to present as support for my claim. However, in my personal experience my knowledge of a certain canon has made it easier for me to relate to work outside my preferred field.

I have now digressed a little bit. My other question, which I suppose I will leave open for the sake of brevity, is something that came out when I read MacIntyre say: "the good of a certain kind of life" (190). Is academic identity a certain kind of life? What kind of life is the academic life, as opposed to the office drone who works, as the song says, for the weekend? Is there one more virtuous than the other, or are they both equally so, but with different virtues, different goods? Should it even matter to us what people outside of our chosen life and institution do?