The Marketplace of Ideas (7 page)

This trend was fundamentally a backlash against the excessive respect for disciplinarity of the Golden Age university. The trend should not be attributed to demographic diversification, because its first theorists were mostly white men, and because the seeds of the undoing of the old disciplinary models were already present within the models themselves. The artificiality of Golden Age disciplinarity made an implosion inevitable. Fields of inquiry become formalized and institutionalized by drawing borders that differentiate them from other fields. The university is, in this sense, a semiotic system: a discipline defines itself in relation to all the disciplines it is not. The study of literature is not the study of philosophy or sociology or history; it stands on its own intellectual foundation. But the more rigidly a discipline’s borders are enforced and the more autonomy it claims, the more vulnerable it is to subversion. Either the premises on which the discipline rests can be extended
ad absurdum
, or it can be shown that the discipline is suppressing some relevant aspect of its subject matter (and this suppressed aspect usually turns out, in the new dispensation, to be what was secretly driving everything else all along).

Take the example of English departments. To the extent that, in the fifties and sixties, teaching and writing in literary studies relied on the notion that texts can be interpreted non-contextually, as stand-alone verbal artifacts, and that these interpretations have hard-and-fast degrees of validity—in other words, that the close reading of literary texts is all by itself a discipline whose practices are transmissible and whose results are verifiable—those departments were exposed to two species of anti-disciplinary virus. One involved pushing the possibilities of interpretation “into the abyss,” as deconstructionists put it—showing that there is no place for interpretation to end, no place for the interpreter to say “This is the limit of what the text can mean,” and that there is nothing outside the process of interpretation against which to measure an interpretation’s validity. The other virus was the political. Of course works of literature are embedded in systems of representation that reflect, and play some role in the perpetuation of, the political structures of their times. In the 1970s, it suddenly became important, just as a consequence of the ordinary process of inquiry, to say this and to explore the implications. Poststructuralism and cultural studies were not alien invasions in literary studies. They grew out of the normal practices of literature professors.

And this is true of the work of virtually all the influential figures in the sixties and seventies who are associated with the transformation of scholarly approaches from formalist and universalist to historicist and hermeneutical. Thomas Kuhn (history of science), Paul de Man (French and comparative literature), Hayden White (history), Clifford Geertz (anthropology), Richard Rorty (philosophy), and Stanley Fish (English):
⁴⁰
it is not a group of people that any contemporary college catalogue would feel comfortable calling “diverse.” They were all white males and their work took place entirely within the disciplinary frameworks in which they had been trained. De Man’s criticism, which played a major role in introducing deconstruction to American academics, was in many respects the culmination of the New Critical tradition of close rhetorical analysis, just as Fish’s was the culmination of the reader-response approach pioneered by two of the founders of modern English studies, I. A. Richards and William Empson.
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Clifford Geertz’s influential book proposing what he called a semiotic theory of culture grew out of one of the most straightforward acts of discipline making in the Cold War period, Talcott Parsons’s division of the social sciences into three spheres: the social system (the province of sociology); the personality system (psychology); and the cultural system (anthropology).
⁴²
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
, Rorty’s attempt to put an end to, or to transcend, the analytic tradition in philosophy, constructs its argument entirely from within the tradition of analytic philosophy, just as
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
, Kuhn’s revisionist interpretation of the history of science, is a perfectly conventional work in the philosophy and history of science. None of these scholars was attacking his discipline from the outside.

Nor were they making explicitly political critiques. Kuhn’s book is emphatically not a work of science studies. But science studies—inquiry into the social and political context of scientific research—is what it helped to bring about. And there is no question that this turn in the intellectual dialectic fed into the collapse of the race-and gender-blind ideal of meritocratic educational theory. It gave members of groups previously excluded from or marginalized within the academy equipment for the business of criticizing the limitations of Cold War–era disciplines. When the politically consequential critiques
did
arrive—for example, in literary studies, via work associated with scholars such as Edward Said (postcolonial studies), Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (feminist criticism), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (queer theory), and Fredric Jameson (Marxist criticism)—an alternative critical paradigm was already in place.
⁴³

5.

The revolution in the humanities disciplines happened in two stages. In the beginning, what took place was not a redefinition of disciplinarity; it was a kind of anti-disciplinarity. Academic activity (peer-reviewed publications, dissertations, and some teaching) began flowing toward paradigms that defined themselves essentially in antagonism toward traditional disciplines. These new paradigms justified themselves as means of accommodating what the old paradigms were leaving out. Women’s studies, cultural studies, science studies, gay and lesbian studies, postcolonial studies, and so on are all non-departmental by bureaucratic design—that is, they generally do not have their own faculty lines or award terminal degrees (sometimes they are allowed to award “certificates”)—and they are interdisciplinary by definition. Faculty members in women’s studies came from a variety of disciplines, from literature and sociology to the natural sciences. The standard institutional niche for these activities was the center.

Anti-disciplinarity arose from the marriage of the theoretical position that the disciplines are limiting and factitious ways to organize knowledge with the institutional failure, initially, to integrate new areas of inquiry adequately into the traditional departments. The fundamental rationale for women’s studies was the perception of a gender bias in the disciplines: that is why its spirit was, in the beginning, fundamentally anti-disciplinary. The centers came into being because the traditional departments, staffed largely by Golden Agers, did not recognize gender or ethnic identity as valid rubrics for teaching or scholarship. Outside the discipline became the good place to be, and there was a period in the eighties and nineties when some disciplines were almost defined by the internal critiques they generated. The stars were the people who talked about the failures and omissions in their own fields.

When it became clear, in those years, that a split was developing between Golden Age and post–Golden Age approaches to inquiry, it was common to argue for a teach-the-conflicts resolution, an idea championed notably by the English professor Gerald Graff.
⁴⁴
The notion was that professors might neutralize the divisiveness within their own disciplines by making that divisiveness the subject of their teaching. But this teach-the-conflicts approach eventually came to seem otiose because resistance to the new paradigms largely evaporated (or took early retirement). New courses were added to department offerings: in 1997, the
New York Times
reported that courses on sexual identity could be found in virtually every liberal arts college catalogue in the country.
⁴⁵
The traditionalists were co-opted. And so, in a way, were the iconoclasts. They awakened to find that history, in its cunning, has made them rulers of the towns they once set out to burn down.

What took place after the nineties was not exactly a return to disciplinarity. It was a movement in two only partly related directions: toward interdisciplinarity, and toward what might be called postdisciplinarity. These terms are harder to define than they seem. What true interdisciplinarity might look like no one really knows.
⁴⁶
Postdisciplinarity signifies a variety of tendencies, including methodological eclecticism, boundary-crossing work (a literature professor writing on music or fashion), post-professionalism (writing for a non-academic audience), and the role of the public intellectual. These trends were not consistent across the disciplines, though. Some fields were transformed and some were not. Anthropology became more postdisciplinary; sociology did not. English became highly interdisciplinary; comparative literature, a field that has always been definitionally challenged, sought a heightened sense of disciplinarity. History, for the most part, was accommodating to the new dispensation. Social history and other “ground-up” approaches were added to traditional approaches, and historians engaged with the problematics of objectivity and interpretation. Philosophy, on the other hand, was not so accommodating. Rorty was persona non grata in the philosophy departments at the two universities where he worked in the second half of his career, the University of Virginia and Stanford. At Stanford, his appointment was in Comparative Literature. One of the reasons Jacques Derrida is persistently identified as a literary critic in the United States (he was a philosopher) is because when he taught in American universities he was a guest of literature departments. His work, like the work of many European philosophers who are associated with structuralist and poststructuralist thought, remains virtually untaught in American philosophy departments. The existence of incompatible scholarly standards and assumptions across the different liberal arts fields is part of the problem people searching for a consensus paradigm for humanities scholarship face.

The unevenness turns up quickly in any comparative look at undergraduate curricula. The biggest change in college catalogues after 1970 was an enormous increase in the number of offerings, even in departments in which enrollments remained constant.
⁴⁷
At the same time, courses became much more specialized; that is, the broad survey or introductory course began to disappear, something that is usually a symptom of uncertainty about the essential character of a discipline. But the changes are interestingly uneven, as though some colleges and departments make a point of clinging to a narrow definition that other colleges and departments make a point of rejecting. In the catalogue for Trinity College, for example, the philosophy department’s announcement asserts: “A good philosopher should know at least a little something about everything.” The department then recommends the study of a foreign language, but only because it “encourages the habit of careful attention to a text.” It recommends a “broad understanding of modern science,” but suggests that “any good science course…is suitable.” It goes on to recommend courses in history, literature, and the arts, but advises that students generally select courses in these fields according to the amount of reading assigned (the more reading, the more desirable). It ends by saying what was already clear enough: “We require no particular nondepartmental courses as part of the major.” The next section, entitled “Introductory Courses,” begins: “There is no single best way to be introduced to philosophy.”
⁴⁸
At Carleton, on the other hand, philosophy majors are required to take one of three introductory courses; courses in logic, metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics; and a course in the history of philosophy, as well as electives and advanced courses.
⁴⁹

To take another example, compare the English departments at two otherwise quite similar schools, Amherst and Wellesley.
⁵⁰
English majors at Wellesley are required to take ten English department courses, eight of which must be in literature. (Wellesley’s English department also offers a number of courses in film.) Basic writing courses do not count toward the major. All English majors must take a core course called “Critical Interpretation” one course on Shakespeare; and at least two courses on literature written before 1900, one of which must be on literature written before 1800. Crosslisted courses—that is, interdisciplinary courses—are, with one exception, not counted toward the major. The course listing reflects attention to every traditional historical period in English and American literature. Down the turnpike at Amherst, on the other hand, English majors have only to take ten courses “offered or approved by the department”—in other words, apparently, they may be courses in any department. Majors have no core requirement and no period requirements. They must simply take one lower-and one upper-level course, and they must declare, during their senior year, a “concentration,” consisting of three courses whose relatedness they must argue to the department. The catalogue assures students that “the choices of courses and description of the area of concentration may be revised as late as the end of the add-drop period of a student’s last semester.” Course listings, as they appear online, are not historically comprehensive, and many upper-level offerings focus on such topics as African (not African-American) writers. At Amherst, in short, the English department has a highly permissive attitude toward its majors. At Wellesley, the department evidently holds an opposing view, envisioning the field more substantively and concretely. What this contrast suggests is that there has been a great deal of paradigm loss within the humanities disciplines, and that this loss is manifesting itself at the undergraduate level, as well.