The Marketplace of Ideas (9 page)

It is easy to see how the modern academic discipline reproduces all the salient features of the professionalized occupation. It is a self-governing and largely closed community of practitioners who have an almost absolute power to determine the standards for entry, promotion, and dismissal in their fields. The discipline relies on the principle of disinterestedness, according to which the production of new knowledge is regulated by measuring it against existing scholarship through a process of peer review, rather than by the extent to which it meets the needs of interests external to the field. The history department does not ask the mayor or the alumni or the physics department who is qualified to be a history professor. The academic credential is non-transferable (as every PhD looking for work outside the academy quickly learns). And disciplines encourage—in fact, they more or less require—a high degree of specialization. The return to the disciplines for this method of organizing themselves is social authority: the product is guaranteed by the expertise the system is designed to create. Incompetent practitioners are not admitted to practice, and incompetent scholarship is not disseminated.

Since it is the system that ratifies the product—ipso facto, no one outside the community of experts is qualified to rate the value of the work produced within it—the most important function of the system is not the production of knowledge. It is the reproduction of the system. To put it another way, the most important function of the system, both for purposes of its continued survival and for purposes of controlling the market for its products, is the production of the producers. The academic disciplines effectively monopolize (or attempt to monopolize) the production of knowledge in their fields, and they monopolize the production of knowledge producers as well. This is why, for example, you cannot take a course in the law (apart from legal history) outside a law school. In fact, law schools urge applicants to major in areas outside the law. They say that this makes lawyers well rounded, but it also helps to ensure that future lawyers will be trained only by other lawyers. It helps lawyers retain a monopoly on knowledge of the law.

Weirdly, the less social authority a profession enjoys, the more restrictive the barriers to entry and the more rigid the process of producing new producers tend to become. You can become a lawyer in three years, an MD in four years, and an MD-PhD in six years, but the median time to a doctoral degree in the humanities disciplines is nine years.
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And the more self-limiting the profession, the harder it is to acquire the credential and enter into practice, and the tighter the identification between the individual practitioner and the discipline.

Disciplines are self-regulating in this way for good academic freedom reasons. The system of credentialing and specialization maintains quality and protects people within the field from being interfered with by external forces. The system has enormous benefits,
but only for the professionals
. The weakest professional, because he or she is backed by the collective authority of the group, has an almost unassailable advantage over the strongest non-professional (the so-called independent scholar) operating alone, since the non-professional must build a reputation by his or her own toil, while the professional’s credibility is given by the institution. That is one of the reasons that people are willing to pay the enormous price in time and income forgone it takes to get the degree: the credential gives them access to the resources of scholarship and to the networks of scholars that circulate their work around the world. The non-academic writer or scholar is largely deprived of those things. This double motive—ensuring quality by restricting access—is reflected in the argument all professions offer as their justification: in order to serve the needs of others properly, professions must be accountable only to themselves.

There is one more stage in the evolution of the modern professional. This is when the institutional piece drops out of the formal picture. Stanley Fish calls this the anti-professionalism that is a requisite part of being an academic professional.
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Being an academic professional means—often, although by no means always—maintaining a skeptical, sometimes antagonistic relation to the institutional and organizational apparat that credentializes and supports you. It involves internalizing the autonomy that the system makes possible—making the autonomy of the discipline seem your own. The way in which this final bit of transcendence is managed is crucial to understanding the condition of academic professionalism, and hence the condition of disciplinarity, today.

3.

As an illustration of this process, we can use the example of my own discipline, which is English, keeping in mind that although bureaucratically all disciplines are treated alike—they have parallel requirements for the doctoral degree, for peer review, for tenure, and so on—it is just common sense to acknowledge that some kinds of research fit comfortably within an academic structure and some kinds don’t. Academic shorthand for this is a distinction between “soft” disciplines and “hard” disciplines, but the terminology is invidious. Another way of slicing the universe of knowledge production would be to say that some disciplines are interested in the way things are, some are interested in how people behave, and some are interested in what things mean. The first kind of inquiry is basically empirical, the third is basically hermeneutical, and the second usually involves some combination of measurement and interpretation. There are empirical aspects to the business of English departments, but the work is mainly hermeneutical—figuring out what things mean. And the results of this labor are obviously more difficult to assess objectively than the results of a chemistry experiment or an analysis of voting behavior are. Beyond attaining the assent (usually provisional, and understood to be so) of other people who are trying to figure out the same things, there is no watertight verification procedure. So a hermeneutical field of study is likely to show more vividly the consequences of professionalization. It is obliged to undergo more contortions.

In the first years of the modern university, the field of English was dominated by philologists—so much so that for many years at Johns Hopkins, the school that served as the model of a research institution in American higher education (it opened in 1876), English was part of the German department.
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This way of incorporating literature into the structure of the research university was effective because the disciplines were organized around a scientistic conception of scholarship, and philology—the study of language—could clearly lay claim to being scientific. Eventually, philology was superseded by literary history as the dominant scholarly appraisal, but there was still no problem. Literary history, too, could lay the same claim to a scientific, or sciencelike, status. The problem arose when English professors proposed to produce literary criticism.

From a purely intellectual point of view, the obstacles to including literary criticism among the professional activities of English professors are slightly absurd. Literary criticism would seem a natural part of the job description. But there were obstacles, and they were thrown up not by problems most people would otherwise have had with the practice of criticism, but by the design of the institution. In order for literary criticism to be recognized as a valid professional pursuit—that is, an activity amenable to the process of self-regulation that governs the production of academic knowledge—several points needed to be established. The first was that literature is indeed an object that can be isolated for academic inquiry. This meant demonstrating that literature is a field whose study requires a transmissible but untranslatable body of knowledge and skills; that literary criticism, or a particular form of literary criticism, constitutes such a body of knowledge and skills; and that proto-specialists in literary studies can be vetted and credentialed by standard academic methods—that is, by the writing of an original contribution to knowledge (a dissertation), by the submission of scholarship to peer-reviewed journals and presses, by tenure review, and all the other machinery of the academic profession.

To the extent that literary criticism is thought of as the possibly idiosyncratic interpretation and appreciation of works of literature and the drawing of moral and other non-aesthetic conclusions from those activities, the university literature department is not especially well suited to the business of producing either interesting literary criticism or interesting literary critics. But to the degree that literary criticism is thought of as a discovery about the nature of literature or of literary language by the application of philosophically grounded methods of inquiry, then the modern academy becomes a relatively congenial place in which to practice criticism. The challenge as it presented itself to literary critics in the first half of the twentieth century is summed up by the literary historian Wallace Martin: “So long as they doggedly insisted on the importance of values and taste, in opposition to the positivistic conception of knowledge defended by the scholars, critics had little to contribute to the institutionalized study of literature. What they opposed, ultimately, was not simply the scholars, but the conception of knowledge on which the modern university is based. In their turn toward principles and theory, they found a means of legitimating criticism as a form of knowledge.”
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This task of professionalizing literary criticism took a long time to perform. The word “criticism” was not added to the Modern Language Association’s constitution, which enumerates the objectives of professional literature and language studies, until 1951.
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A transformation on this scale is a function of many factors operating together, from changes in student demographics to changes in funding. But to pick one prominent intellectual contribution to, or reflection of, the change, we can compare the English scholar George Saintsbury’s three-volume
History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe
, published from 1900 to 1904, with two great scholarly testaments of the academic New Criticism, René Wellek’s multivolume
History of Modern Criticism: 1750–1950
, which began appearing in 1955, and Cleanth Brooks and William K. Wimsatt’s not-so-short
Short History of Literary Criticism
, which was published in 1957. (Wellek, Brooks, and Wimsatt were all professors at Yale.) In 1904, Saintsbury, who was a professor of rhetoric at the University of Edinburgh, noted that friends had questioned the point of writing a book called
A History of Criticism and Literary Taste
by asking him whether literature really was something one could talk about as a thing in itself. Saintsbury said that he could only answer those friends by asserting his faith that literature is in fact such a thing, and that there was a history of people doing it.
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For the New Critics, who constituted the first generation of literary critics in American English departments, an assertion of faith was not sufficient. Wellek took the trouble in the preface to the first volume of his
History of Modern Criticism
to complain that although Saintsbury’s history is “admirable in its sweep and still readable because of the liveliness of the author’s exposition and style…[it] seems to me seriously vitiated by its professed lack of interest in questions of theory and aesthetics.” It was Wellek’s belief that, as he put it, “the history of criticism is a topic which has its own inherent interest,
even without relation to the history of the practice of writing
,”
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and it was the purpose of his history to furnish the proof.

Brooks and Wimsatt went further in the
Short History
. What the history of criticism proves, they argued, is not just that literary criticism is a discipline, but that literature itself is a distinctive object of study—that literature is something that can be talked about “as literature,” and not as a branch of moral philosophy or social history or the history of ideas. We write, they explain, in the belief that there is “continuity and intelligibility in the history of literary argument…. Literary problems occur not just because history produces them, but because literature is a thing of such and such a sort, showing such and such a relation to the history of human experience.” What the study of literary criticism opens up, they claim, is “not so many diverse views into multiplicity and chaos but so many complementary insights into the one deeply rooted and perennial human truth which is the poetic principle.”
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This argument—that there is such a thing as specifically literary language, and that literary criticism provides an analytical toolbox for examining it—was the basis for the New Criticism’s claim to a place in the structure of the research university. It justifies the emphasis on the formal properties of literary texts and the concentration on “close reading” that characterize New Critical scholarship and pedagogy—an emphasis that is reiterated right up through the time of the Yale school of criticism, in the 1970s.
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The story of the way literary criticism adjusted to the requirements of disciplinarity is interesting in the context of professionalization because of its use of a figure who played a central role in the process, even though he was not an academic and had little use for academic criticism. This was T. S. Eliot.
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Eliot was a hero to the New Critics when they were young, because of his poetry, his conservative social thought, and his literary criticism—but also because of his example. He had gone to England to write his dissertation (he was a doctoral student in philosophy at Harvard) in 1914, when he was twenty-six and knew almost no one there. Eight years later, he was famous as the author of two of the most spectacular books in twentieth-century poetry,
Prufrock and Other Observations
(1917) and
The Waste Land
(1922), and the editor of his own quarterly journal,
The Criterion
. He had also published one of the seminal collections of critical essays in English studies,
The Sacred Wood
(1920). All of Eliot’s criticism, and particularly its tone and special vocabulary, is important to the story; but his most widely cited and reprinted essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), is a powerful statement of the basis for criticism as an autonomous discipline.
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The question that essay essentially asks is: What does the poet need to know? And the answer it gives is: Poetry. The corollary to this is that the best way to understand poems is by their relation to other poems. This is a premise without which the enterprise of academic literary criticism would be unable to function.