297. Gentlemanly Prose

Gentlemanly Prose

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For disambiguation and demystification see critical pedagogy

 and critical theory.

Gentlemanly Prose is a logocentric stylistic deriving from the classical discourse of privileged classes in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, known at the time as "the Republic of Letters."   Its product is variously self-described as writing that is "easy," "simple," "clear," or "perspicuous."

Gentlemanly Theory is the extension of this stylistic into theoretical or philosophical discourse.

Nomenclature.  Practitioners have retained the class- and gender-inappropriate term "gentlemanly" for its historical, and therefore explanatory, function.  "Prose" is synechdochic for non-metricized discourse.

Foundational proponents.  Frequently cited as avatars are Socrates (Attic or Athenian style) and Cicero (Roman style midway between the humble Attic and the aspiring Asiatic style). 

Foundational frame.  The cultural frame, taken to be foundational, is that of slave-holding Greek and slave-holding Roman aristocracies, with corresponding lifestyle: patriarchal banqueting and discourse while women ("flute girls") provide the music.

History.

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Gentlemanly prose in the purest Attic style was first valorized in England by the theorist Francis Bacon, exemplified by the chemist Robert Boyle, and imposed in 1662 by the founders of the Royal Society for the Advancement of Science in their requirements for submitted papers.  The need for "precision and objectivity" paralleled similar needs and similar impositions in France, where René Descartes was the exemplar.

Less pure, but only slightly, was the Attic of philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, whose conceptual aspirations forced concessions to the Asiatic , making a space for metaphor.

Enlightenment scientists and philosophers retained in their "objectivity" the racialized subjectivity of the Attic avatars, reflecting in the eighteenth century the cultural hegemony of ancient Athens, where Scythian speech was freely called "barbaric" and clumsy forms "barbarisms."  Calling obscure Medieval writers "Gothic" continued this prejudice.

Gentlemanly theorists cite the writing of Joseph Addison as a model of balance between Attic and Asiatic, recreating in the English language Cicero's compromise ("a plain, middle style") in Latin.  Addison's Spectator papers (early eighteenth century) are taken to be the model for the "easy but precise" writing in the magazines produced for the educated middle classes since his time, as now in The New Yorker.  It is the style of Jonathan Swift, taken as the exemplar for longer interventions, observable in the following:

I know not how it comes to pass that professors in most arts and sciences are generally the worst qualified to explain their meaning to those who are not of their tribe.

Politics.  Consciousness-raising efforts have led some gentlemanly practitioners to believe themselves marginalized in some areas of the American university.  They have raised complaints against Communications, Sociology, and English (cultural studies) departments, and have felt condescension in Women's Studies and Black Studies programs.  However, little evidence of oppression has been offered, and none of abuse.  Though many gentlemanly writers are struggling to make a space for themselves, there has been little activism.

Polemics.

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Gentlemanly prose has not lent itself to direct polemical assertion.  Literary satire is favored, as in Alexander Pope's Dunciad, a poem "celebrating the goddess Dulness and the progress of her chosen agents as they bring decay, imbecility, and tastelessness to the Kingdom of Great Britain" (Wikipedia) or in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, third book, satirizing "scientizing pedants" (the theorists' name for them).  The language of all of Dulness's agents, in the Dunciad or out, is taken to be antipodal to the language of liberally educated gentleman.  Duns Scotus, known for jargonized Scholastic abstractions, and giving his name to the Dunciad, is the pole figure.

Difficulty in identifying current targets in these anachronistic satires no doubt accounts for the ineffectiveness of this polemic — that, and their distance from central postcolonial discourse, within which they appear as "belletristic irrelevance."  For those with a sense of political relevance "gentlemanly," then, demarcates not a positivity but simply a positionality vis-à-vis the normative. 

Pedagogy.  Language used in the way of Socrates and Cicero was imposed on students and teachers in the schools identified with the rise of "humanism" and the education called "liberal."  Renaissance court schools like Vittorino's "House of Joy," in which "anything in the nature of fine writing, of prolix or over-laden description, or of empty commonplace decked out in verbiage, was ruthlessly torn apart," are given credit for shifting the paradigm. The revived Ancient and Renaissance models went on to prevail in Oxford and Cambridge tutorial teaching, and the "tearing apart" there was retained in English Composition courses in America where, though often insensitive, gentlemanly prose became generally gender- and class-neutral.  Writers of such  prose held up as models for students today are as likely to be women (like Zoë Heller and Martha Nussbaum) as men (like Atul Gawande and Tony Judt).

Gentlemanly Theory.  Though hidden agendas are suspected, the open agenda of gentlemanly theorists has been to meet objections to gentlemanly prose. Their three most emphatic responses, condensed:

 (1) "No, gentlemanly prose is not just a feature of European cultural hegemony; it appears clearly (in a different idiom, of course) in the classical Chinese of Han scholars.  It appears in India and in Persia.  It is the writing of advanced civilization."

(2) "Yes, the language of Athenian gentlemen, Roman patricians, and Florentine governors is appropriate for the democratic masses in America because Americans — in their periodicals, on their websites — have to debate, and the language of these 'oligarchs' and 'hegemons' is still the best language for democratic debate.  It is clear, ample, and part of an easily dramatized revolutionary tradition: Paris ferment, salon exchanges, editorial wars, biting commentary, plain-spoken philosophy.  It's the great medium of the dialectical testing democracy depends on."

(3) "No, gentlemanly prose is not a belletristic indulgence; it is a necessary feature of realistic philosophy, as witness the appeals to its standards by the Ordinary Language philosophers of Oxford."

Some gentlemanly theorists argue (4) that meeting the standards of gentlemanly prose is a reliable test for sound philosophy.  Since "the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts" (George Orwell, taken axiomatically), slovenly philosophers are going to present readers with foolish thoughts.  To avoid this "foolishness" careful thinkers are urged to go to the most gentlemanly teacher or tutor they can find.  "Does this word make sense to you?  Is that paragraph foolish?"  It is claimed that no other test or appeal, as to "reality," provides more reliable protection against folly than this.

Philosophy.  A claim for the deepest relevance of gentlemanly prose has been made as follows: "What philosophers most need is a precise language that is in touch with the world.  Gentlemanly prose satisfies that need better than any other. The language of medieval theologians, the Scholastics and other abstract schematizers was, like that of mathematicians and logicians, precise, but it was not in touch with the world. The language of the marketplace, like that of poets and novelists, was in touch with the world, but it wasn't precise.  The gentlemen who held students to the standards of Socrates and Cicero and Locke and Addison were men of the world, in touch with the world, readers of literature that kept them in touch, and therefore the best servants, and trainers, of philosophers" (feetofsocrates 239).

235. Just ONE Manifestation of Postmodernism

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When you say you're hurt by postmodernism you've got to make clear which postmodernism is doing the hurting and where it hurts.  Because I didn't do that in Post #233 (Regrets of an Anti-Postmodernist Bore), I'd like to do it here.  There are too many people — architects, painters, interior designers — who aren't hurting anybody for me to give the impression that there's a general plague of abuse.

What hurt me was the manifestation of postmodernism in English departments, poststructuralism.  In one respect, its insistence on the many voices in a literary work ("multivocality"), poststructuralism had much in common with what I was used to, with what anybody of my generation was used to.  We were weaned on Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity, cynosure of the New Criticism, and a most loving display of multivocality.  So in one way poststructuralism did not look so revolutionary — though its first advocate in our department made it appear so, setting it against the "univocal" New Critics.  (Just the way we distorted the Old Criticism when we had to give the New Criticism its revolutionary steam.)

In another respect, though, poststructuralism knocked the props out from under us.  It attacked the objectivity that we thought was necessary in the teaching of our courses.  How could we claim a place in the academic tradition if we weren't objective?  How could we claim tenure which (in the AAUP statement of 1940) was won from administrations and boards of trustees almost entirely by the promise to avoid advocacy (in those days, advocacy of communism) and present our material objectively. 

Poststructuralism's treatment of objectivity can now be seen as complicated and nuanced, but in the eighties it came to the Ohio University English Department in a pretty simple way, though our chair did his best to give us the full picture.  He set aside two years for instruction by specialists in the new approach, with plenty of time — time needed by a department so full of traditionalists — for discussion.

For me the whole two years can be summed up in one reply to one question, asked of one specialist (his areas of concentration were critical theory and cultural studies), late one afternoon.  He had gone over our earlier ideas of objectivity and shown, after poststructuralist critique, how little was left of them.  There was no such thing as objectivity.   Is there, he was then asked, such a thing as relative objectivity,  "No," said.  "There is no relative objectivity."

"Surely, you cannot mean what you are saying," said one of our traditionalists.

"Yes, I mean it," he said.  "There is not even a relative objectivity."

This was no young instructor, this was no graduate student, this was no sophomore.  This was a professor at the University of Californian, Irvine, who had just published a notable book, Interpretive Conventions, and would go on to publish several more in the field.  It wasn't till I was on the stairs heading out that I thought of the question that would have made sure he wasn't pulling our legs: "Do you mean that there is no difference between the statement, 'You are five feet six and weigh two hundred pounds' and the statement, 'You are fat'?"  But alas, I (no doubt along with others) was too late.  What was left dominating our minds was the notion that because of defects in our ideas of objectivity the subjectivity of social construction was justified.  "It all depends on which person, in which culture, is delivering the stuff to you, including the stuff you are accustomed to calling 'facts.'"

You can see how that is going to drive scientists up the wall.  "Look, it doesn't matter who is doing the experiment.  Are the needles in the same place when I lower the magnesium as they were when she lowered it?  Is the setup the same?  If so then her experiment is replicated and what she has discovered we'll call reliable knowledge, more reliable than what we had before.  Our gender, race, culture, politics, religion, and power relation to each other don't matter shit.  It's the needle position, you idiots, the objectively (or intersubjectively) verifiable position of the goddam needles."

This fury turned to laughter when the physicist Alan Sokal produced a jargon-filled manuscript that suggested that pi — you know, 3.14159, the relation of the circumference of a circle to its diameter — was culturally (i.e., not physically, not mathematically) determined, and had the manuscript accepted by the editors of the leading journal in [postmodern] cultural studies. 

All right, I could accept that as just more shouting over the gulf between science and the humanities if it weren't for the fact that half of what I taught in my part of the humanities was indistinguishable from science.  Aside from all the supporting historical and linguistic scholarship there was this, right at the heart of our discipline: reading a poem.  In the early stages of that crucial activity an inexperienced student had to be a scientist, a good scientist, or he wouldn't get anyplace.  Not any place that paid off, anyway.  To get to that place he first simply had to construe the sentences.  In that task everything depends on his making good (i.e., probable) inferences.  "There's a word I haven't seen before.  It's in a position in a structure I have seen before, though, so it's probably a verb.  I'll proceed on the assumption that that's what it is.  Now here's a word that has two meanings.  One goes with the others I have already decided on, and one doesn't — especially since it's not a verb.  So I'll take the first one."  

Note how he follows the precept given biology students learning to identify what they see under a microscope: when you hear hoof beats think horses, not zebras (i.e., first make the most probable inference).  Note more importantly that what he recognizes as a given, the grammatical conventions that tell him a word is a verb, is like what the scientist recognizes as a given, the nature that determines the position of the needles.  Neither one can be changed by the observer and both are independent of the observer — his gender, race, religion, politics, etc.  They are "objective entities."

By taking them so the inexperienced student is able to put the poem together — much more quickly, of course, than in my spell-out.  Before he's finished his similarity to the scientist will be clear: both advance into the unknown by making inferences from the known.  Both use the word "fact" for what they have established, or find established, as known.

How much did this change when I moved from first-year "Introduction to Literature" to fourth-year honors seminar?  The students there could construe sentences more easily, and we could start at a higher level, but still, if I were to hold to Socratic teaching, we had to inquire, and build, and establish beliefs much in the way of the scientist — which was, indeed, the way (though disguised by its unscientific, non-empirical premises) of the Platonic dialogue.  Make each step carefully, checking, testing, ordering, and if you avoided fallacy and stayed coherent you could credit yourself with an advance.

And what was the payoff?  With a poem you advanced onto the ground where the imagination, the freely ranging imagination, could take off, making all the bells of image, metaphor, and symbol ring.  Ring with ways that could vary with each reader.  With a piece of DNA you advanced onto the ground where conjecture could take off, making a whole line of future experiments light up the sky (and the NSF).  With lights that could vary with each scientist.  Even in the payoff the two were similar.

The way we each got into that happy, free land of the imagination was the way of Socrates and that, I take it, is the way of the academic tradition.  And that's what I saw postmodernism knocking the props out from under.  When I faced my students I felt I would have no ground to stand on, no theoretical foundation.  If a student, preferring a noun to a verb, said, "Grammatical conventions are what I see them as," I had no supported way to deny him.  Horses could become zebras any time he wanted them to. 

Richard Rorty or Stanley Fish (I forget which) calls that student an "obliging" student, meaning the rare one who gives attacking traditionalists the extreme example they need, but still he's the kind of student I felt facing me after postmodern literary theorists, represented most vividly in my mind by the California professor, had removed the ground of objectivity from under me. 

And, by what my postmodernist colleagues soon were writing in the journals, I saw I would have to feel the same groundlessness when I faced the administration or board of trustees.  Say they wanted to move against tenure.  In 1940 I could oppose their move on the ground that tenure was necessary to academic freedom, which was supported by a promise of objectivity, or disinterestedness.  And, looking at academic writing at that time, no administrator or trustee could find reason to doubt that promise.  But in 1990?  Look at what a trustee might see.  The two below are from College English, the teacher's journal with the largest circulation.

[For equality and democracy] the teacher must recognize that he or she must influence (perhaps manipulate is the more accurate word) students' values through charisma or power — he or she must accept the role as manipulator.  Therefore it is of course reasonable to try to inculcate into our students the conviction that the dominant order is repressive.   (Lead article.)

I would argue that political commitment — especially feminist commitment — is a legitimate classroom strategy and rhetorical imperative.  The feminist agenda offers a goal toward our students' conversions to emancipatory critical action.

If the trustee had said to me then, "It looks to me as if you in the English Department have broken your promise," I'd be hard pressed to say him nay.  Statements of the same kind, advocating advocacy courses, could be found in Rhetoric Review, College Composition and Communication, and the Journal of Advanced Composition.  And if he said to me now, "You are still, on the evidence of those courses in Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability, and Sexuality Studies at UCLA, breaking your promise, I'd be hard pressed to deny it.  I'd have to establish that, in the teaching of those courses, there was no advocacy, and I doubt that I could do that.

Even if I'm speaking ing from some distance up the wall, my friends in fine arts can see, I hope, how what postmodernism meant to me (a tectonic philosophical shift that deprived me of my foundation, my tradition, even my calling) is different from what it meant to them.  Their postmodernism, I take it (though I haven't looked carefully), knocks far fewer props out from under them, and does its knocking less forthrightly, with fewer words.