The Marketplace of Ideas (10 page)

Eliot’s prescription is a formalism, and so is academic disciplinarity. That is, it isolates one aspect of experience and makes that aspect the basis for an autonomous field of inquiry that can be legitimately pursued without special knowledge of any other field of inquiry. English professors need not be historians, sociologists, psychologists, or philosophers to be regarded as full-fledged contributing professionals. They need no training or credentials in those fields (and, usually, they have none). They can be historians, critics, and theorists of literature knowing, in their professional capacity, only literature.

This stage, in which a new practice is incorporated into the academic institution by providing a theoretical justification for its autonomy, is followed by a final move, which is the erasure of the historical boundary between the professional era (the era of the research university) and the pre-professional era—in the case of literary criticism, the era of the amateur, the man of letters. In the history of English studies, Eliot was the key figure. He was a critic who was never associated with an academic institution, but who produced a criticism whose vocabulary and criteria for judgment were scientistic-sounding, and which could be appropriated by academics without betraying their personal or political interests or ad hoc motivations (which Eliot himself certainly had plenty of: he was trying, in his critical essays, to promote his own poetry). Between the non-academic literary universe of Keats, Arnold, and Wilde and the academic literary universe of the Yale English department, Eliot was the link. Th us Wellek’s
History of Modern Criticism
begins with Immanuel Kant and ends, many volumes later, with Wellek’s Yale colleague, William Wimsatt. And thus Harvard professor Walter Jackson Bate’s widely used anthology of literary criticism begins with Plato and ends with
his
colleague, Douglas Bush, as though there were no meaningful situational distinction between the two figures.
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The anthology, in fact, is the principal instrument by which this elision between the pre-and post-professional eras is performed. So that we get, for example, an anthology of political philosophy that includes Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Harvard philosopher John Rawls, or an anthology of art criticism that includes Charles Baudelaire and the art history professor Rosalind Krauss.

This final step is necessary because the professional organizations and institutions and associations that emerged to control and protect the production of knowledge producers become too visible. They make too easy a target, and the individual practitioner who borrows their credibility also takes on the problem of how to distance herself from those “official” positions she finds inconvenient or unacceptable—but without losing their authority. In a profession in which freedom of thought is both a matter of intense piety and an institutional mechanism for maintaining professional autonomy, the ability to identify with something beyond official organizations and institutions and even disciplines is a pressing one. Academics don’t want to appear to be conformists: their success depends on it.

The consummation of the professional project therefore occurs not when the professional association has achieved independence from outside control, but when the association is no longer perceived as the true source of the professional’s authority. Though we expect the lawyer to have been certified by all the appropriate institutions, his social status derives from the sense of his belonging not to the Bar Association (regarded as a trivial job requirement, particularly by those who already belong) but to the ancient profession of the law. Professions create traditions that exceed their own histories. They do this, again, by isolating a feature of the practice (it can be more than one feature, of course) that requires special attention—in the case of English studies, for example, understanding literary language; in the case of the law, thinking like a lawyer—and they make attention to this feature the chief criterion for determining whether the practice is done properly or not. The profession then forms a canon based on this construction. And by this means, the profession achieves the appearance of tradition and continuity in a social and economic formation—ours—that is characterized principally by change.

4.

After the 1960s, something happened to many of the academic disciplines: a relatively boundary-respecting conception of scholarly inquiry gave way to a relatively boundary-suspicious conception. This coincided, unsurprisingly, with a loss of respect for professional authority in society as a whole. The historian Thomas Haskell has noted that he could find almost nothing negative written about professionalism in the social science literature before 1939; the sociologist Eliot Freidson says that there is almost nothing positive after 1960.
²²
The public began to distrust experts and professionals—or, at least, professionalism. Of course, there has been a large increase in the number of professional degrees awarded since 1960 (one consequence of the growth in the higher education system), but the professionalization of everyone and everything is perfectly consistent with the demise of professional authority.

In some fields, the paradigms got broken and were not ever really repaired. English or anthropology is today the study of what, exactly? If, fifty years ago, you asked a dozen anthropology professors what anthropology’s program of inquiry was—what anthropology professors did that distinguished them from history professors, sociology professors, economics professors, and psychology professors—you might have gotten different and even contradictory answers. But by and large the professors would have had little trouble filling in the blank in the sentence, Anthropology is ____. If they did have trouble, they would not have boasted about it. Today, you would be likely to get two types of answer. One answer is: Anthropology is the study of its own assumptions. The other answer is: Anthropology is whatever people in anthropology departments do. Not every discipline thinks of itself like this, but that is another result of skepticism toward disciplinarity: it is spread unevenly across academic departments. This heightens the worry that professors in different fields are no longer talking with one another, and thus raises the stakes for interdisciplinarity. Part of the promise of interdisciplinarity is that it will smooth out the differences between the empirical and the hermeneutic, the hard and the soft, disciplines. “If we could just get them in the same room together…”

Anti-disciplinarity—the position that since disciplines exclude certain approaches and subject matters, scholars need to work in opposition to them—is an unsustainable paradigm. It begins as a backlash, but as soon as it generates productive work, it can readily be folded into the home discipline by the standard academic practice of adding on. And, in any event, the disciplines still control the production and placement of new professors, and the advent in some fields of a kind of post-disciplinarity does not necessarily mean that departments are obsolete. They still possess the credentialing power and the hiring power, and even if they are losing intellectual respect, it is not at all clear that it is in the interests of the faculty to have them wither away. For one of the functions they perform is the preservation of academic freedom. The discipline acts as the community that judges its members’ work by community standards. When professors can be hired on an ad hoc basis by administrators, or when they are not professionally situated within a department, they can lose some of this protection. Their status becomes a function of lines in a budget. Administrators (at least in theory) would love to melt down the disciplines, since that would allow universities to deploy faculty more efficiently. Why support medievalists in the history department, the English department, the French and German departments, and the art history department, none of them probably attracting huge enrollments, when you can hire one supermedievalist and install her in a Medieval Studies program, whose survival can be made to depend in part on its ability to attract outside funding?

Which brings us back to interdisciplinarity. Interdisciplinarity is not something different from disciplinarity. It is the ratification of the logic of disciplinarity. In practice, it actually tends to rigidify disciplinary paradigms. A typical interdisciplinary situation might bring together, in a classroom, a literature professor and an anthropologist. The role of the literature professor is to perform qua literature professor, bringing to bear the specialized methods and knowledge of literary study to the subject at hand; the role of the anthropologist is to do the same with the methods of anthropological inquiry. This methodological contrast is regarded as, in fact, the intellectual and pedagogical takeaway of the collaboration. What happens is the phenomenon of borrowed authority: the literature professor can incorporate into his work the insights of the anthropologist, in the form of “As anthropology has shown us,” ignoring the probability that the particular insight being recognized is highly contested within the anthropologist’s own discipline.

Because professors are trained to respect the autonomy and expertise of other disciplines, they are rarely in a position to evaluate one another’s claims. So there is nothing transgressive about interdisciplinarity on this description. There is nothing even new about it. Disciplinarity has not only been ratified; it has been fetishized. The disciplines are treated as the sum of all possible perspectives. One of the benefits that is hoped for from interdisciplinarity, especially in the classroom, is that differing perspectives will provide mutual critiques—that putting an economist in the same classroom as a psychologist and an art historian will give students a sense of the limits of each academic enterprise. This seems a little wishful, as though the process can be automatically self-correcting. Critique is the beginning of correction, it’s true, but the aim of knowledge is not only to recognize limitations. The aim is also to transcend them.

In the humanities, where talk of interdisciplinarity is most common, these practices tend to reinforce the Balkanized structure of knowledge production that universities inherited from the nineteenth century. This is the structure that divides literature by nationality and the arts by medium. It is a retrograde way to teach the humanities, but it is hard to see how interdisciplinarity per se can do more than mildly ameliorate it. Professors are still trained in one national literature or artistic medium or another. In an interdisciplinary encounter, they just shout at each other from the mountaintops of their own disciplines. For, as we have already seen, the key to professional transformation is not at the level of knowledge production. It is at the level of professional reproduction. Until professors are produced in a different way, the structure of academic knowledge production and dissemination is unlikely to change significantly.

5.

The professionalization of higher education was a perfectly reasonable development. It was consistent with the transformation of higher-status occupations generally after 1870, and it served many interests well. Among other things, it made research the main mission of higher education, a change reflected in the statistic that between 1920 and 1950, undergraduate enrollment increased by a factor of ten, but graduate enrollment increased by a factor of fifty.
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What is significant about the post-1960s backlash against professionalism and disciplinarity is that it was not accompanied by a loosening of the requirements for admission to and promotion within the academic profession. On the contrary: the road to a professorship is much steeper than it was fifty years ago. Even as late as 1969, a third of American professors did not have PhDs.
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Today, the PhD is a virtually universal prerequisite for professorial appointment. And the discourse of the professoriate has become national and disciplinary, not local and institutional—another characteristic of professionalization. In 1989, 40 percent of professors reported that they felt loyalty to their institution; 70 percent said that they felt loyalty to their discipline.
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We can assume that this sense of identity is a function of another statistic: in 1969, 21 percent of professors agreed with the statement that it would be difficult to get tenure in their departments without publications; in 1989, 42 percent of professors agreed with that statement.
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One of the reasons it is difficult to establish interdisciplinarity locally is that there is little interdisciplinarity nationally, and professors regard institutional initiatives as provisional and as unrelated to career advancement, which comes from recognition at the national level.

So, what is the fascination with interdisciplinarity all about? The art critic Harold Rosenberg once published a book called
The Anxious Object
.
²⁷
The title was a reference to the art of the sixties—Pop Art, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art. Rosenberg thought that those art objects were anxious because they were uncertain of their own identity. They kept asking themselves questions like, Am I a work of art, or just a wall of Polaroids? Am I a sculpture, or just a pile of bricks? More existentially: Am I an autotelic aesthetic artifact, or just a commercial good?

What causes anxiety to break out in a work of art? Self-consciousness. Maybe, in the case of the academic subject, self-consciousness about disciplinarity and about the status of the professor—the condition whose genealogy I have been sketching in this chapter—is a source of anxiety. That status just seems to keep reproducing itself; there is no way out of the institutional process. And this leads the academic to ask questions like, Am I an individual disinterested inquirer, or a cog in a knowledge machine? And, Am I questioning the status quo, or am I reproducing it? More existentially, Is my relation to the living culture that of a creator or that of a packager? The only way to get past the anxiety these questions cause is to get past the questions—to see that they are bad questions because they require people to choose between identities that cannot be separated. A work of art is
both
an aesthetic object and a commercial good. That is not a contradiction unless you have been socialized to believe that it must be.