285. Theorists, Novelists, and Poor, Struggling Teachers

When I, as a professor of English, first became acquainted with postmodern ways of reading I immediately wanted to find the right set of passages from the toughest epistemologists I knew so that I could show, by impeccable step-by-step reasoning, that the theory of knowledge supporting this new method was unsound.  When Zoë Heller, as an English major, first became acquainted with it she wanted to "lie down in a darkened room and cry."

It's such a sad, sweet story the novelist tells in last week's New York Times Book Review (3-15-15) — coming out of high school and going through her early college years believing that "authors were actual people" who wrote works you tried to explain to a demanding teacher, then discovering that she'd been laboring under a "bourgeois delusion."  Reading was "not an act of exegesis but a kind of creative, semi-erotic play."  You certainly never read an author for his message.

That kind of reading gets its come-uppance in her essay when she reports that the college essays she wrote displaying her expertise at it turned out, on mature review, to be "infinitely duller and cruder than any of my naive high school efforts to figure out what authors actually meant."  Now, with the wisdom of hindsight, she has moved back to her prepoststructuralist position.  "Whatever embarrassment attached to re-embracing the old bourgeois delusions was far outweighed by relief." 

Heller tells us that her disenchantment with reading as creative play is paralleled by that of  Zadie Smith, whose "doubts about the readerly freedoms bestowed by poststructuralist theory set in around the time she became a novelist."

Statements about reading by successful writers have a lot of force in English departments, and I was delighted to see these writers employing it in support of the old way, my way, of teaching.  How hard it had been to hold to that way through the years of poststructuralism's triumph.  Now here was the old counterforce, resurgent.  Go Heller, go Smith.  Sock it to 'em.

But then, in mid-cheer, I had to stop.  The memory of somebody I had taught in my old-fashioned way kicked in.  Ralph Waldo Emerson.  Voice of the independent American Scholar, promoter of Man Thinking, scourge of obedient thinkers.  They'd be socking it to him!

There he was, right in the middle of the canon, an author my students had to read in the traditional way.  "Do you understand his message?" I had asked them.  "Do you buy it?  Are you willing to live by it?"  And what was his message?  Freedom!  "Free should the scholar be, — free and brave. Free even to the definition of freedom, 'without any hindrance that does not arise out of his own constitution.'"  The American Scholar took everything he read on his own terms.  "I had better never see a book, than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system."

Houston, we've got a problem.  Our targets the poststructuralists were working as hard as Emerson to keep people from becoming satellites.  Look at what Heller disparages, their belief that reading was "not an act of exegesis but a kind of creative, semi-erotic play."  Take out the disparagement and what have you got?  Man Thinking, the self-reliant American Scholar.  Nothing's going to keep him from playing with a text.

Where did Heller run into poststructuralist reading, I mean really run into it, as opposed to hearing about it?  Same place she would have run into Emerson's Man Thinking, Columbia University.  She had come there after education at Haverstock School and Oxford.  From what I know of Oxford education in the eighties nothing in it would have softened her up for poststructuralism.  I doubt that Smith's education at Cambridge would have softened her either. 

So welcome to America, Britishers.  Over here there is "creative reading as well as creative writing."  And to do it you have to trust yourself, as Emerson exhorts Americans to do in "Self-Reliance."  There are no holy texts.  "Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind."  Socrates will be proud of you.

This tells me that, after I have given up on the impossible question ("How can I make sure my students get Emerson's message of freedom without infringing on their freedom?") I, side-by-side with my fellow-American though maybe over-eager poststructuralists, have to let those free-readers into my class.  They get in on Emerson's pass.

But that throws me into an impossibility.  I just can't teach my lower-level courses at Ohio University with poststructuralists in the room. In Freshman English I have to curb freedom every three minutes. You cannot play, creatively, with the subject-verb-complement structure of the English sentence.  You cannot, if you are to remain teachable, play with anything established by convention or agreement.  You cannot play with the rules of logic.  You are not free to make any inferences you please.   Tell me you are free, as some up-to-date students have told me, and I will go into a dark room and weep.

Yet I want play.  Especially in  the interpretation-of-poetry course, where every new imagination is encouraged to exercise itself.

What I need is a warning in the Course Catalogue that will give me only teachable students.  A fatwa from the head of the English Department.  "You cannot play with the walls around your playground.  In a work of literature what's given you in declarative sentences — the physical set-up, the time-frame, the evidence given you for your own inference-making, the rules of inference-making — is your reality, and it's as hard as concrete."

For my poststructuralist colleagues a petition.  "Please don't write as if these walls did not exist."  That's the way the founding poststructuralists, the French, wrote, and the way American relativists following them wrote.  Only a careful, statement-by-statement display would make sure of it but I think that if you made a quick survey, or maybe just looked at Barbara Herrnstein Smith's Contingencies of Value, you would see what caused us the teachers, and them the literary theorists, so much trouble: they did not make clear that the relativism they advocated was cultural and esthetic, not epistemic.  The first two relativisms you can get away with; the last will bring a ton of bricks down on top of you.  Alan Sokal's load.  (That's "get away with" in front of scientists and analytic philosophers, not continental philosophers who, in the eyes of the former, will let you get away with murder.)

It's those analytic philosophers who give me now the most exhilarating and finally most depressing thoughts.  First the exhilaration.  Emerson, I realize, has nothing to fear from their analysis!  Emerson, the man people quote when they deprecate logic ("A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds").  He separated the epistemic from the cultural and the esthetic, and gave it its due.  The teaching of "elements," the "indispensable office" of colleges, was outside of everything he gave freedom to, as were "history and exact science," which the scholar "must learn by laborious reading."  The old walls.  (His statement, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, was outside them too — for readers who paid close enough attention to see that the consistency he was referring to was temporal, not logical.)

That is exhilarating, isn't it?  The American ex-preacher doing just the thing all these Europe-sucking intellectuals failed to do.  Ask why they failed, though, and you're on the road to depression.  When you give the obvious answer, inattention (they didn't notice science standing there, demanding its due), you can't stop with the intellectuals, you have to go on to the teachers, who didn't notice that they had nothing to worry about.  Why make a big fuss, a science war, a culture war, over poststructuralist freedom?  Just notice the right passages in Emerson, read them to the intellectuals, and get on with your business.

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.