Readers might remember my series of posts on QUT Vice-Chancellor Peter Coaldrake’s move to abolish the “old humanities” at QUT. It’s pleasing to be able to report that reason has prevailed and a lot has been salvaged from the wreckage:
THE Queensland University of Technology will keep some arts double degrees and may even end up with a reworked bachelor of arts degree.
The outcome of the Council meeting is a significant turnaround from earlier proposals, which some at QUT have characterised as a rejection of Coaldrake’s push. For far too long, academics and students have rolled over when university managements have unilaterally announced school closures. It’s heartening to see that a strong student and staff campaign, supported by the NTEU, can make a difference.
Thats it is good news, and no doubt the result of a good campaign.
The fact is, it aint Melbourne up there. There arent that many unis – UQ hoed back on Arts in 96, Griffith ticks along, there’s ACU (but thats hardly for everyone), so without QUT there’d be a very restrained choice for a large population in Brisbane/ Gold Coast.
Id go so far as to say – if these courses are losing money, its probably due to inept management, not lack of demand.
And Im not some unreconstructed idealist here – I actually think managerialism brought some real benefits to the sector in the first wave of 90s reforms.
But now its a force thats eating itself – look at Melbourne. The only Arts faculty in the country which rates top ten in the world, and now its for the slash.
Net predicted result: Australia will have no top ten Arts faculty next year.
Lefty E,
No doubt you read the “Age” article about La Trobe uni this morning. No doubt about it, this is a society that really has its priorities right!
The only uni I could find that doesn’t have an Arts faculty was this one.
What about this one? It’s already been through the wringer and come out the other side.
You mean this one? The “ailing” is more significant here than the “radical plan”. Anyone who thought La Trobe could continue on its merry way down the toilet is kidding themselves. QUT wasn’t in anything like that amount of trouble and the solution it chose didn’t relate to the realities it faced. Has this guy got all the answers? What are La Trobe’s strengths anyway? Isn’t focusing on bricks and mortar scattered across southern Australia detracting from a focus on learning & teaching? We’ll have to see.
Well done, Mark. No need to campaign for reinstatement of the old ‘Institute’ to replace the inappropriate ‘University’ on the letterhead just yet, then.
One requirement for removing the “cabbage patch” stigma that is currently attached to the humanities and social sciences is to significantly increase the quality of intake through higher Year 12 entry scores etc… It is was downright embarrassing and frustating doing group assignments in my B Soc Science with students who in too many cases were knuckle dragging neanderthals who couldn’t spell, couldn’t use a computer and couldn’t think.
You wouldn’t have enjoyed the conversation between two law students on the bus going out to Uni today, mel. They were discussing their legal writing course and trying to work out what a pronoun and a verb were. It would be quite wrong to suggest that this has anything to do with people doing an Arts degree. I couldn’t pick between Business and Arts students (I’ve also taught tons of the latter) on preparation for Uni, and generally the former have higher entry scores. I suspect it’s got a lot more to do with the state of school education than the cutoffs for uni courses.
Meanwhile … This from the Oz on free degrees and bonding to accounting firms, while asking for more accounting courses. Yep, that’ll help increase the innovation of new products our trade balance needs (not). Ralston-Saul noted that this is a tertiary discipline that doesn’t actually produce anything.
Note to melaleuca: on the same basis, stay away from Engineering students. Med students also, particularly if you plan on going to a medical graduate with a serious health issue. Some economists can be doubtful, just don’t bother with them.
It’s a shame Stan Zemanek is dead – you could have rung his program and told him what idiots uni students generally are.
I was writing quickly at work (after having taught some bright uni students!) and I think we should avoid stigmatising people for the faults of the education they may have had inflicted on them. I might add, though, I suspect that the age of teh perfect grammar is something of a myth. But, really, this is a bit off topic.
My point isn’t so much about spelling and grammar. I’m far from perfect in both areas myself. My point is that some humanities and social science students are just plain dumb. I wasn’t the only one to notice this, especially during group assignments, in my course.
I think even Mark would admit that the average IQ of humanities and social science students is several orders of magnitude below that of law, commerce, engineering and science students. I nonetheless acknowledge that some very gifted people do study humanities and social science. It’s just that we could do without the “Tim and Debbie” types.
Can I have a rant? Do you mind if I don’t spell-check it?
It should be known to all prospective students of the University of Melbourne’s Arts department that the Renewal Strategy about to be implemented has one purpose: minimise the resources students get, while maximising the income from same students. Today the VC sent staff a letter telling them that fees have overtaken HECS, 286 million to 270. While the University staff works hard to maintain teaching standards, poor management at the University level – especially in the implementation of the Melbourne Model – means that no parent can let their student attend in good conscience. It really is just that simple.
The rightfully maligned ‘Dreamlarge’ adverts literally tell the story of neglect; problems are re-cast as opportunities not through hard work or innovative thinking, but by merely glossing over the big issues. Marketing trumps hard work. To add insult to injury, the millions spent on the adverts are compounded by the suspect expenditure of a retainer. In short, the people who made some of the daftest adverts in recent memory are paid 45,000 a month just to be on call to advise about future adverts. Meanwhile, some of the best teachers in the country are told to buy their own office supplies or simply just cut loose. 45,000 a month could transform the University into the world’s best educational institution – and that would be the best marketing of all.
Of course the curriculum needs to be streamlined, and of course a renewal strategy would be welcome – but what is going on at Melbourne is nothing short of a snafu festival. Where did the money go? Why is it so hard to fail students who steal their work from the internet, or literally impossible in the case of full-fee paying students? (I was told ‘not to make trouble’ by University administration when it came to kicking out a full-fee paying student) Why are students allowed to believe they are clients who deserve their degrees, no matter what? Melbourne will soon be no different that the suspect degree farms on the second floor of a dozen city buildings – and at least the staff at those places are treated with respect, trained and encouraged.
The comeuppance for the University’s mis-managing of its transitions will be nigh-Biblical in scope. The ill-conceived push to a user-pays model is to the great detriment of everybody in the country, and by the time students come to realise their part in it, they will have wasted real time and money. And then? Full-fee paying students will leave. In droves. They already talk about taking action.
The Melbourne Model is what happens when you let second-rate marketing consultants decide the education direction of a critical institution. So far, the Model looks like this: pay an external consultant to tell you what you already know, let them charge you as much as it would take to fix the problem, ignore the recommendations anyway, implement something else, pretend it was fully consulted with staff, ignore complaints, and finally fire a third of the people who looked at it on the way through. If you can hire anybody who has overseen the ruination of another University, you may be up for promotion.
Look for a ’surprise’ closure of one of the Parkville campuses’ key libraries, only to make way for a vague and useless ‘hub’ that once again meets the approval of marketing gurus but leaves teachers and students in the dark. Maybe the business school will use it? Good luck to them! Meanwhile Baillieu Library Prospective students should be warned they are entering into a University for which their education comes dead last. In the coming weeks, you can expect another sickeningly expensive and self-congratulatory round of defensive public relations from the University. In the new system, all problems are public relation problems, students are annoying carbunkles to the income system, and teachers are referred to as ‘talent’ by the den of cynical hackery known as the media unit.
I wish there was room for a fight to make things change for the better, but there just isn’t the fight in Melbourne staff. Arts to management there means fee-paying journalism degrees. Deviation from the model is dealt with swiftly by the guards.
No, I wouldn’t, mel, in respect of law and commerce students at least where I have about ten years’ teaching experience. Around 60% of humanities/social science students anyway are doing double degrees with law or biz (at least in Qld Unis) and thus have to have the higher entry score, and there are some law and biz students you can’t top for narrowness of outlook and refusal to learn.
Am glad Mel’s blame the victim approach is in virtual parenthesis to the more plausible comments from Ex Melbourne Lecturer.
Some of the comments in the thread make me wonder whether some people ever stop to consider what the purpose of arts/humanities is in a real world. A real world rather than one of zombies as seems favoured by many control-freak neolib employers and politicians, that is.
It suits some to have highly skilled “manufactured” morons doing specific tasks without understanding certain implications involved in certain types of work, or the real $value of certain types of skilled work for those doing such work. This despite the fact that folk are often in trouble when they are thrown on the scrap heap after very specific types of work become obsolete. But Humanities, Social Sciences and Arts are concerned with the human “product” itself- not just in one role amongst many as a culturally-created numb robot, existing as a disposable unit for some un-self- reflexive Platonic corporate or bureacratic fascist, but as someone for themselves family and community, not merely as a artifact within the realm of an exclusive “owner”.
“The unconsidered life is hardly worth contemplating”.
So said Socrates who lived and loved life so passionately that he was prepared to DIE for that maxim.
If life means nothing more than the vicarious animal thrill of pleasure in the pain inflicted on others through dreaming up ways of sacking them, or the fear-driven reactionary spite that drives barbarians to lobotomisation of those they can’t understand a la “Cuckoos Nest”, my thanks at any rate to my betters, who fought NOT to get rid of the various conceptual and intellectual apparatus that allow for a more nuanced approach to LIFE.
One that includes an idea of the person, perhaps?
If only the employers and politicians would WELCOME that, maybe they’d be less inclined to clutch their suitcases of dollars and “live ” comfortably in harmony with life rather than involved in a constant and uninformed battle against it.
But they live their lives filled with fear that the proles will finally after all discover a workable concept of the “person” which includes the discovery of just those rights ensuring a meaningful life.
Else, why a headlong rush to destroy education “into life” in its full sense, rather than promote an opportunity?
Sorry for a long post. Wanted to get it right as much as possible and am not the genius some others contributing here are. To those people I say sorry, I did my best including for myself because I sense misguidedly or otherwise, that this is an important topic.
The average IQ of law students would be higher than arts simply due to the massive difference in entry score. I think the average arts student would be smarter than science students. My uni’s geography department, which is part of the science faculty, says arts students are generally better at the science component of geography than the science students are at the humanities/social scientific component. Many science students are terrible at comprehending anything historical or cultural. They just can’t get their head around cultural change.
Entry scores are simply the product of supply and demand. You increase the entry score, and the arts faculty couldn’t get enough students to sustain itself.
I can’t believe this QUT thing! Abolishing Arts!
Ex Melbourne Lecturer and Paul Walter:
Hooray!
Ex Melbourne Lecturer:
Are you saying they’re closing the Baillieu?
Erk.
I get glossy mags from Melbourne University every month with begging letters for me to give them money. That’s the hyena-like laughter you hear every so often from my humble home.
Yeah that’ll happen!?
OMG of course they are not going to close the Baillieu.
Ex-Melbourne Lecturer, your pain is felt and shared, but look, it’s easier to get a semi-decent outcome by working with marketing types and those who want us to teach more students in less time, etc, than by digging in the heels and ignoring them altogether. That approach only gets you steamrolled. Buying one’s own office supplies really isn’t that bad, anyway.
Andrew, I don’t think you know what you’re talking about w/r/t to La Trobe. Yes, the regional campuses are a problem, but when The Age says LTU is ‘ailing’, keep in mind that they are simultaneously congratulating themselves, in their fatuous way, for ‘bringing down’ the previous VC with their hard-headed investigative journalism type behaviour.
LTU hasn’t leapt on the latest futuristic edjumacational bandwagons some other institutions are so keen on (eg Creative Industries) but this is hardly a sign of decrepitude.
QUT has “Creative Industries” and a completely unfathomable distance education system (from observation of my partner’s frustrations after recently completing a distance education degree interstate).
I could get marked assignments back within a couple of weeks from two states away (a week of that was in an Aussie Post mailbag) – QUT takes 8 weeks AND WE LIVE IN BRISBANE!
When my daughters both did their BA’s at Melbourne, the Baillieu Library rarely met their needs for texts and sources for essays. Melbourne is self-congratulatory. So was Monash under VC Robinson, so are many Australian Unis.
Too much gloss and hype; too little substance.
The “Melbourne Model”, so far, is looking like “Melbourne University Private” – a spectacular failure, and deservedly so.
Meanwhile, other universities in Victoria are hoping for the current Year 12 group to desert Melbourne Uni and flee in their droves to enrol at Monash Clayton or RMIT or Deakin etc. Why should students living in Melbourne or RAR Victoria take a chance on getting entry into a Melb Uni postgrad course after an undergrad course? Straight into a professional degree elsewhere – why not?
As to Melb Uni Arts: in 1997 they had a unit called “Let’s Go Shopping!” and several others with trendy postmodern titles and synopses in the Handbook. Ye gods!! (It wasn’t just the marketeers who brought them down…..)
Ambigulous
Mark,
You are right about students in some courses, like commerce, often being unwilling to think. Many of them seem to prefer rote learning “the facts”.
That observation doesn’t invalidate my original point though.
What’s so bad about the Melbourne Model? I’m not being provocative – I don’t know much about it.
My first impression was that it would help generalist degrees like humanities by preventing people going straight to professional programs. It suggests that a general education is a good basis for life and career. That’s what I thought anyway. Don’t know anymore!
It sometimes seems that some people in humanities are actively trying to sound ‘out there’ to be provocative or something. I don’t know why. I believe in the importance of sexual and cultural inquiry, but it’s as though some people are trying to get mocked in the way they word things.
A version of this debate has been around for some time. The paper by Ian Hunter, Denise Meredyth et. al. that was titled ‘Accounting for the Humanities’ historicised it in an interesting way, at a time (the early 90s) when the decline in arts and humnaities enrolments was being attributed to the Labor party and the Dawkins reforms (check out pretty well any issue of the Arena journal from 1988-1991 on this.
There are often two things conflated in these debates. The first is the complex industrial politics of staff positions and interests relevant to student demand. Just as there are those who feel that their institution has ‘devalued’ their area and this has led to declining student demand, there are also those – often in the same institutions – who feel that they have to deal with the rising student numbers to cover for and cross-subsidise their colleages.
Second, there is the general point about the value of an Arts/Humanities education, and whether the BA in question has actually worked towards these goals. This is not just a matter of the quality of the student intake; it also comes to the question of how the degree has been designed, and whether the staff involved bought in to such a goal.
That said, it is great to see a renewed commitment by QUT to Humanities and Social Sciences education. As people in Brisbane would know, some of the problems arose as much from geography ie. you could only access courses in Politics, History, Ethics, Sociology etc. from the outer suburban campus, as from the nature of what was delivered.
David
Actually, there is a simpler explanation and that is those students accepted into Law have higher IQ’s than Arts and Social Science students. Which is just as well: the vast majority of Social Science and Arts courses taught at Australian universities are far less intellectually demanding than Law.
The general exception would be economics. Of course there are oases of erudition, but they are rare. Though even Law degrees have been watered-down as they continue to be offered further and further down the university quality chain.
Most Australian undergraduate Arts/Social Science (non-economics) degrees produce people will very low-grade analytical skills. Just about all employers will interview a fresh graduate regardless of what degree they have.
Arts/Social Science grads are then given an opportunity to show evidence of their analytical abilities. To the extent you think employers are ‘missing out’ the cause lies with the grads and the poor quality of their educations.
I see no evidence for what you are saying. Giving that (in NSW) scores for Law are up to 99.6 while Arts are only up to about 85, with all sorts of secondary ways to get in, I’m surprised the difference isn’t greater than it is. When a degree is only admitting people over 99.6 they are obviously smart to start with. I would like to see an empirical study of graduate results AFTER controlling for starting score.
Many employers actually do specify a particular degree, but I agree that most who don’t are very open minded to assess each candidate on his or her merits.
John rarely provides evidence for his assertions. And as noted above, a very large number of arts students (the majority at QUT) are doing double degrees where the score for entrance is effectively the higher one – for instance a BA/LLB student would need to get a very high score.
Well, not that I’m in any position to question JGs holy pronouncements, but spinning off my own narrow evidence base of 10 years teaching in an Arts faculty, and a Law degree of my own, id say:
a. up to 50% of my Arts students do double degrees nowadays
b. Law degrees ain’t what they used to be. The amount of material students have to cover is greater than in Arts, yes, but not conceptually more difficult. Possibly less so (with the exception of say, Law of Evidence, which will generally separate goats from sheep). Plus they get spoon fed these days – an equity measure on the back of the international student dollar.
And frankly, its kinda hard to spoon fed essay/ argument based subjects in Arts to the same degree as problem based law questions.
I do think spoon-feeding has become pretty bad in all uni stuff, including arts. I think it’s largely a function of this that rightists get their evidence for a sustained lefty political conspiracy. Complex ideas tend to get reduced in Arts 101 subjects to “ok in this text we will find 1. Women are oppressed, 2. Indigenous Australians are oppressed, and 3. Indigenous-Women Australia are especially oppressed. Actually this serves as a good all-purpose rule for analysing any text.”
But I think over-simplification is a problem everywhere now… I do think that some kind of critical-historical inquiry is essential for a healthy society.
David, that example doesn’t bear any relationship to any subject I’ve ever taught in an Arts Faculty over the last decade.
I’m exaggerating but I do think things tend to go to far that way, depending on the subject, lecturer and tutor. I’ve also experienced the very best and most rigorous kind of thought in arts faculties.
It’s also true that all disciplines have crappy stuff. Interesting JG rates economics – I think that tends to be one of the less scientific of the social sciences (read McCloskey’s trashing of it…).
Mark,
For example, I’ve once had a lecturer who said that whole notion of GDP was mythical, just a fabrication by the capitalists… I am not simplifying some complex conceptual critique, because I carefully clarified what he meant. He literally said GDP change won’t have any consequence for our lives. This is stuff he was teaching students… and to which they were carefully taking notes…
There are also some feminists who maintain that the moment you use a numerical measure you are engaging in patriarchal oppression (I have journal published quotes).
I do think that various oppressions are often taught in a manner where they seem to move from empirical generalisations to some kind of quasi-transcendental law. I think this is an especial problem in subjects like literature, because a good imagination combined with argumentative skill can twist almost anything into the pre-determined idea. For example, when you find that men and women are represented identically in particular case, all you need to do is say “ahh but they signify something different because we have to *first* contextualise it by reference to differential positioning inside a network of power�. And of course the network of power will mean the woman’s representation is subordinate to that of the man’s. It’s wonderfully circular, but that kind of reasoning goes on all the time.
As David implies, many humanities courses seem to insist that all we need to know of any political, social, economic or historical topic is who is oppressing who, and how. The answer is allways rather predictable too. The “analytic skills” involved in this are negligible and there is a high potential for self righteousness as well, (which perhaps has even worse consequences). Aggressively advocating a particular “theory” may have it’s place, but being ignorant or contemptous of any alternatives is more akin to religous training than traditional humanities scholarship.
It does seem to create at least a substantial minority of graduates who are reflexively hostile to anything to do with science, technology, commerce and allmost any government. They combine this with ludicrous assumptions of their own intellectual and moral superiority over all the “capitalists” and “proles”. Paul Walter’s post (above) is a beautiful example of the genre.
I am sure this does not apply to all humanities departments and graduates, especially double degrees – but it does seem to be very common.
It’s possible that these sorts of attitudes might be part of some literary studies/cultural studies courses, taught badly, but they certainly aren’t found in social science from my extensive experience teaching in four universities over a decade. But I’m sceptical because so much of the “postmodernists dumb down everything into a tale of oppression” narrative can usually be demonstrated to be a beat up when people are asked to provide evidence rather than generalisations.
Plus, “self-righteousness”? The classes I’ve taken which have involved examination of inequality have had a strong emphasis on reflexive and critical examination of one’s own privilege, as part of the learning process.
If you come out of them feeling self-righteous or entitled, you’re not paying attention.
Blaming Arts and Humanities lecturers for the poor quality of Arts and Humanities education in the past ten years is true fucking cart before the horse material. Well done to all involved for a magnificent intellectual tumble roll. How about some accountancy for course structure at the University level? No?
Oh well, better luck next decade…
Or twenty years of government funding decisions. When I was an Arts student, we used to have tutorials with a maximum of twelve students and the tute work would be a thousand word essay for discussion. In some of the unis I’ve taught in, you get no tutes at all, or five a semester with thirty students in them.
David, I just don’t see it at the ground level. I have a little experience teaching gender studies now, and while the students may sometimes be interested in lapsing into those simplifications (because it’s easier to engage with something formulaic, or it’s easier to engage in activism without having to ask difficult questions) I haven’t encountered any situation where we’re actually offering simple explanations. If anything the refrain is: look, this is more complex than it appears, it has unexamined political and social effects, it relies on unexamined assumptions that need to be evaluated. And this is as true of how we approach the texts we are teaching as it is of the things that those texts are themselves discussing It is always about adding something to the process of thought and not just halting everything at the monotonous recognition of oppression.
It depends a lot on the teacher. I do think there might be a bit of an unconscious conspiracy of silence – the ‘good’ academics don’t really look over their shoulder about how the ‘bad’ academics are teaching. That way, the good ones can present a sort of acceptable public face, and with all sincerity say, ‘hey that kind of stuff doesn’t go on in arts faculties, it’s all a conservative myth!’.
Mark and ex-Melbourne, I’m all for finding causal and non-moralistic explanations. But I don’t think the Australian funding situation can be blamed. I think the issue is a longer-term one, and one that spans Anglo-American countries.
I would suggest it is primarily caused by the declining availability of academic jobs compared to graduates. This was not caused primarily by funding changes, but rather by demographic changes since the baby boom (the baby boom filled up all the jobs, now the ratio of young people to old people has not kept up, meaning the university doesn’t need all that many new teachers). Funding would make a difference, but nowhere near as big a one as that.
The low job market means that the pressure towards conformity is far greater than it used to be. When a field has such strong control on all new entrants, the result is stagnation. What Bourdieu calls the “bureaucrats of normal science� hold sway. The field becomes self-sustaining, turning into a feedback loop; in the case of academe, a feedback loop of exponentially ‘out there’ sounding radicalism.
lauredhel “reflexive� and “critical� are buzz-words. But usually they seem to function as means to an end of undermining white males’ taken for granted assumptions about the world. Not so much for undermining other subject positions’ taken for granted assumptions. The usual explanation for this would be that white males are the ones more in need of reflexivity, because it is their perspective that is more or less universally dominant. When minority positions are reflexively examined, the causal bases are invariably ‘nice’ sounding ones, like being positioned to act as a ‘voice’ due membership of a collective experience of oppression. The white male reflexivity will invariably involve recognition of a power over other subject positions. It’s soul-cleansing, penitence stuff. This would all be fine, except it presupposes certain hazy empirical generalisations of differential power in certain contexts as though they were some kind of a priori basis for reality – as though ‘white males’ fit into some kind of neat category that are always already privileged due to some spooky grid of power.
The sociological aura around gender, race and class goes well beyond treating them merely as useful variables for predicting social interaction. The whole point is that they are meant to serve a political purpose. And ANYONE knows you can read dozens of theorists stating this explicitly. Some of a Gramscian persuasion believe that the very point of academia is encouraging political transformation. Well, if that is so, why not just give the conservatives bad grades? But things are set up so it doesn’t need to be as overt as this. Rather, the conservatives will be described as insufficiently critical, reflexive or deep; they will be described as banal, etc. This is because the very definition of critical depth in certain teachers’ minds seems to be attached to a specific kind of class/gender/race/sexuality critique.
But I do agree that most of this comes from professional self-interest within institutional/bureaucratic arrangements rather than a substantive revolutionary political commitment. I think most of us accept that the university is now structured in a way that encourages lecturers to system-reinforce, to actively *market* their particular approach, rather than to countenance a nice Socratic dialogue. When the approach involves a prescriptive political theory, how exactly can the uninitiated distinguish the teaching from activism?
I think many ‘good’ academics are vaguely aware of these problems. But they prefer to shut up about them, partly because they are personally attached to ‘bad’ academics and don’t want to diss their hard work, and partly because they view them as lesser evils compared to giving ammunition to the right wing anti-intellectuals. I actually think this policy is mistaken. The right wing populists have a field day selectively quoting bad academics anyway. The best political strategy is to promote a culture of intellectual rigour and quality by means of a deterrent effect of stigmatising bad research. I think it’s time to accept that the conservative attacks, although exaggerated, are not complete myths. By culturally castigating bad studies, and thereby deterring them, we can deprive conservatives of their ammunition by taking away stuff for them to mock.
Maybe this has all sounded too harsh. I love the idea of a critical scholarly community. But there are some problems, and *complete* denials by ‘public faces’ of arts faculties really bug me. Everyone should admit their own problems.
David, I’ve not been particularly reticent in the past about criticising what I see as bad or unsound research. There’s a fair bit of it about, to be sure, but there are some reasons why that’s the case as well which don’t go to ideology or politics. I’m also wondering whether there ever was a golden age of humanistic critical enquiry – if we’re talking literary studies, I very much doubt there was more openness in the heyday of “the new Criticism” and the rule of the Leavisites than there is now. I know there was bad teaching when I was an undergrad in the late 80s and early 90s and I know my parents had bad university teachers in the early 60s.
David, I was talking explicitly of my own experiences in social sciences and humanities classes, and I’m not a white male.
I’m not convinced that literary studies as it is today should have any place in universities. However a couple of units in literature would be valuable for prospective English teachers.
The bizarre theorising, much of it pseudo-Freudian, produced by the characters in literary departments serves no social function and is little more than academic boondoggling.
It is a great shame that the minds of so many talented young people are poisoned by this noxious nonsense.
True that – no golden age. But I would be interested to do a survey of the politics of the changing generations, and see which had more diverse members. In the mid-60s you found conservatives, liberals, radicals… While I do think now things are more one-dimensionally, politically, at least. Now I don’t think this was due to a big bad leftist conspiracy as the first step to world domination. There were other causal factors. But I do think some academics should be more self-conscious about this, and actively try to guard against appearing to impose a particularly belief system. Obviously leftist monotony is going to piss conservatives off, and obviously that’s going to open up academia to attacks from reactionaries.
Cultural studies also has bucket loads of nonsense. Look at this subject at Melbourne University called “Rock to Rave: Cultural Formations”: http://www.unimelb.edu.au/HB/subjects/106-057.html
Lord give me strength.
Lauredhel, so I assume you’re not working class or queer?
The reason that almost everyone finds something to feel un-entitled about is because the vast majority of people have at least one ‘oppressor’ side of the binary in their subject position. But assumptions about hierarchy on each particular variable are very rigid – eg. You will very rarely find an academic saying ‘ok in this particular social context, it would actually better to be a woman than a man’. Those kind of contexts are ignored.
Again, your assertion doesn’t reflect my experiences. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a humanities or social sciences academic make bald remarks like “in this particular social context, it would actually be better to be a man than a woman”, let alone the reverse; the analyses I’ve encountered in the course of my studies have been far, far more nuanced and supported than that.
You’re the one making the assertion that other people’s personal experiences and knowledge are invalid and that you can reliably generalise about everything that goes on in humanities classes: perhaps you could put up or shut up. Where’s your evidence?
Sorry, Lauredhel, but I really struggle to find where I said that other people’s personal experiences are invalid. As far as I can see, we are all making generalisations from personal experience. Earlier, I did provide some examples. Would you like names, dates and times as well?
If “be better” is too banal a term, substitute “have more power”.
I agree, and I am myself very conscious of it.
But let’s give students a bit of credit. When I was studying political science in the late 80s, we had lecturers who were strong Labor and National partisans, and history lecturers who were Liberals. It’s not too hard to adjust for bias.
I also think you’d find that until the 60s academics were predominantly conservative. Even now, the degree to which they’re not is overstated and the influence of politics on particular subject areas is also vastly overstated in my view. How many courses in 19th century Russian literature or French symbolist poetry are going to have some sort of overt political agenda? (Of course university managerialism has disappeared many such fields of learning.)
I only remember two teachers from first year uni (Qld).
An Orwell/Kroptokin/Bakunin loving Politics lecturer, tutor and Lothario who, reputedly, a decade or so later found God, and an LSD-gobbling Modern English Literature tutor who declared the set texts were perfectly fine but he was only going to discuss Carlos Castaneda and The Teachings of Don Juan. He cleared the chairs out of the tut room and we sat cross-legged in a circle, facing an inner circle of incense sticks, or, when he was feeling more lively, flanuered by the lake sequentially relating shaggy dog stories about our parents and families, until the goody two shoes anal types petitioned and he was sacked, sadly, at the end of the year.
Anyway, the best and the brightest had pissed off by then to far more fruitful, stimulating and enjoyable endeavours.
Why’s it automatically nonsense to study rock music and rave culture? I’m not seeing it.
David, what you seem to require from humanities scholars is a confession: admit to bias, admit to poor quality research; if you haven’t done it, you’ve facilitated it. I am very interested in this, because it’s exactly the sort of thing that you seem to be suggesting that humanities scholars require of students when they use those buzzwords (eg reflexive, critical).
Why do you feel that you can demand this with impunity and ‘we’ cannot? It seems inconsistent.
If you think there is no reflection on, or critique of, the humanities by humanists, then you are simply wrong. It is all there in the journals, the books, at the conferences and seminars. Where it isn’t is in the mainstream media, and that’s because humanists, particularly those in the ‘new’ humanities, are wary of invoking knee-jerk reactivity in order to do critique. That’s not how universities work, or it’s not how they used to, and it will only feed an agenda that refuses to differentiate between (for example) good and bad cultural studies research.
“Why’s it automatically nonsense to study rock music and rave culture? I’m not seeing it.”
It’s obvious: if millions upon millions of people engage in a practice, enjoy it, devote countless hours to it, it couldn’t possibly be worth studying.
I agree with Mark that it’s fair enough to study rave culture. I think the key is how it is studied.
Adam, I think you misunderstood what I was saying. I wasn’t saying that students shouldn’t be told to be reflexive and critical. By using the term “buzzwords” I didn’t mean to imply they’re bad concepts (perhaps it was a poor choice of term). What I said was that they are usually one-sided in how they are taught.
Thanks for informing me that reflection on academic practice exists within the humanities (did my own Bourdieu reference escape you?). Just because it’s been debated a lot, doesn’t mean the result is satisfactory or coherent.
cultural studies has been definitely demolished and disembowelled by the superlative Camille Paglia. It is mickey-mouse stuff. Anti-intellectual, shallow rubbish.
Paglia attacks the kind of French-US pseudo-radical theory that I want to attack, but, unlike her mentor Harold Bloom, she strongly believes in the merit of studying popular culture.
yes she does, but secondarily to architecture, archaeology, religion, mythology, and classical literature.
“Cultural studies” isn’t a unified thing, anyway, and the Australian/British style of doing it is very different in its origins and theoretical tradition than the American. I imagine that Paglia, like many other US pundits, writes as if the rest of the world doesn’t exist. In the States, what we think of as cultural studies is often done under the banner of “the new cultural sociology” though as with American sociology generally, with more of a Durkheimian twist.
I’ve never heard Paglia trash cultural studies – she trashes a specifc kind of wacky literary theory that originated in the US. And I’ve never heard her suggest that popular culture was a secondary study pursuit compared to ‘high culture’.
And she doesn’t ignore British cultural studies – on a discussion with Laura Mulvey:
http://www.salon.com/it/col/pagl/1998/10/07pagl.html
I haven’t read Paglia, and I was just speculating based on jinmaro’s statement.
Any significant difference between Brit and US cultural studies orientation and scholarship has long gone. In any case, they have in common key theoreticians that Paglia abhorred: Adorno, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Irigaray, etc, revered by fashionable cultural studies aficionados today in Oz. Raymond Williams is who?
“Why’s it automatically nonsense to study rock music and rave culture? I’m not seeing it.”
If you want to study go to a club or pub. Don’t sit in class listening to some uptight goose carrying on about Lacan.
I suppose I’d learn about musicology by going to hear a string quartet?
And I very much doubt that Lacan has anything to do with this course. Your comments reflect your own obsessions on this one, mel.
“What I said was that they are usually one-sided in how they are taught”
This implies that there are only two sides, and that what is required is balance. I think there are probably closer to n-sides, where n is more than two, sometimes many more.
“Any significant difference between Brit and US cultural studies orientation and scholarship has long gone.”
I strongly disagree with this because it implies two internally homogeneous traditions that have merged. The current divisions within the Brit and US fields are immense in themselves. Also, I would cite Meaghan Morris as the perfect example of a counter-argument to the idea of monolithic, unidirectional cultural studies tradition emanating from ‘the North’. Morris speaks back in a very Australia-situated way to US-centric assumptions.
“In any case, they have in common key theoreticians that Paglia abhorred: Adorno, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Irigaray, etc, revered by fashionable cultural studies aficionados today in Oz”
The ‘etc’ is telling because those are some very different thinkers being listed. Virtually all they have in common is that they are hated by Anglophonic conservatives. Plus, show me a paper that uses all of the above consistently, and I’ll show you a genius or a crackpot. Not everybody loves those thinkers. Myself, I like a lot in Derrida and Irigaray, although I think there are serious problems with aspects of their work.
Actually, no it doesn’t. Is that the kind of “analysis” you use in your critical interrogations?
(Cliche critical analysis trick 1 – pretend that faulty metaphysical presuppositions lay behind interlocutors’ discourse. Proceed to ‘reveal’ them by twisting and over-interpreting.)
Okay, my reading of your comments may be less than generous because the mode of engagement here has become polemical, so perhaps we can start again?
I’m not really sure what you are expecting to happen in relation to the problems that you identify. It seems to me like you are trying to elicit a confession, whereas I would prefer not to confess because I think that such a demand is, in one way or another, politically motivated and designed to produce, well, what exactly?
This discussion is simply bizarre!
“This is because the very definition of critical depth in certain teachers’ minds seems to be attached to a specific kind of class/gender/race/sexuality critique.”
I’ve noticed, David, that your characterisation of bad research/teaching always takes the form of a particular (and particularly one-dimensional) type of identity politics: i.e. critique as the privileging of one social “identity” (e.g. woman) over another, apparently dominant identity (e.g. man). Just wondering whether this kind of research/teaching defines bad research/teaching for you, or whether it’s a convenient example and there are other kinds of research/teaching that you would also judge as bad?
If it’s the latter, would you be so kind as to provide characterisations of the other kinds of research/teaching you deem poor?
If it’s the former, then never fear! That kind of stuff just doesn’t go on that much anymore, if it ever did. While I’m sure a melaleuca could trawl university handbooks, etc. and pick out dozens of unit titles that have words like “queer”, “feminist”, “race”, and quite possibly “black lesbian working class transgenders” in them, the great bulk of these units concentrate on exploring the history and the critique of their enabling concepts and their original political objectives. Thus, a unit called “Representation and Gender”, for instance, is far more likely to be about the problematic nature of identity categories such as “woman”, about the institutionalisation (hence powerful and potentially dangerous nature) of feminism, about the utter naïvety of critiquing representation with the aim of demonstrating its oppression of women, etc. than about “undermining white males’ taken for granted assumptions about the world”.
In other words, your characterisation of bad research/teaching is a caricature that bears little resemblance to any reality.
Of course, the caricature is instructive insofar as it indicates at least some of the ways in which contemporary works form the humanities and social sciences (oh fuck it! let’s just call it “postmodernism, since that’s what everyone’s thinking anyway) are received by “the general public”, by the media and by the other self-appointed saviours of the Great Tradition and Intellectually and Morally Sound Scholarship (but also by students, which poses some interesting questions for pedagogy). It thereby indicates that a certain understanding of what “critique” entails is widely established outside the particular disciplines in which “critique” is practised or valued. And, while that non-specialist idea (for want of a better word) of critique bears little resemblance to the diverse range of critical practices utilised in postmodern argument, that idea nevertheless makes it very easy to presume to know what’s going on in humanities and social sciences units on gender (e.g.), which wouldn’t be the first time in history that ideas and activities related to women were subject to prejudice.
So it looks as though even “bad” critique can be useful — by helping show up the operations and reproduction of a familiar, utterly inane stereotype.
“What Bourdieu calls the “bureaucrats of normal scienceâ€? hold sway. The field becomes self-sustaining, turning into a feedback loop; in the case of academe, a feedback loop of exponentially ‘out there’ sounding radicalism.”
Since you drew my attention back to this, I thought I should address it. I see this risk as having been averted with the way in which cultural studies and other ‘new’ humanities disciplines have moved, especially in Australia. There are strong critiques of ‘out there’ radicalism, and the big projects tend to have solid empirical or archival components. There have been calls for a return to more radical positions, recently by Simon During, but these are far from representative. More representative in the case of cultural studies would be the direction that is advocated for by Ien Ang – ie of embracing the move to ‘cultural research’ and of necessarily being politically ‘compromised’.
Trapped in moderation again. Next time I’ll use a different name and email….
Jebus! How times have changed!
I well remember Ang’s thinly-veiled swipes at any kind of cultural studies that engaged with concepts and didn’t wear its politics on its sleeves (aka “deconstruction”), which she dismissed as “theoretical professionalism”.
And so begins the process of elimination to work out why every one of my comments goes into moderation…
Chnage of name does nothing. A different email address perhaps?
Continuing the process of elimination to determine why all my comments go into moderation…
A change of name and a change of email address don’t fix it.
Could it be the IP address (surely not)?
Captain Oats, this has been explained to you before, but you’re not in moderation which would imply a decision on our part to filter your comments, but accidentally getting caught up in the spam filter which often returns false positives. Because one of the things its algorithm recognises as characteristic of spammers is posting large numbers of comments in quick succession, you only compound the problem by posting comments about it, because you’re convincing it it’s right. People are advised to email us if their comments don’t appear. Please do so.
Hoorah! A different IP and I’m straight into the discussion.
But what does this mean?
Oats – same thing happened to me a while back, and nothing short of a different email address would do.
I did nothing to deserve it either, as best I could tell, and there was nothing LP admin could do but keep fishing them out. Which I imagine gets boring before too long.
It means the spaminator has pinged your IP address as that of a spammer. Wasn’t my previous explanation clear?
Yes, it does.
She’s still not too happy with ‘deconstructive criticism’…
Mark, I haven’t been advised of any such thing. I’ve assumed that, but the regularity in which my comments are “accidentally getting caught up in the spam filter” has caused me to have doubts. I’ve been given a different explanation (specific mention of John Greenfield’s name, even though it started happening well before I ever used his name), and I’ve sought advice on what I might try to avoid in order to prevent it from happening.
Nevertheless, it continues to happen. Can you advise what might be causing comments to to get “accidentally caught up in the spam filter”? I’ve noticed, for instance, that it seems to happen on my first, lengthy post in a topic. Is length being treated by the filter as a probable for spam?
Mark
Is this IP address linked to “spam” as I’ve posted here, but can’t see them? ta.
“It means the spaminator has pinged your IP address as that of a spammer. Wasn’t my previous explanation clear?”
Well, if our posts hadn’t crossed there would have been a better chance of me understanding your explanation, since I would have had the chance to read it.
Thank you for clarifying your vague explanation by narrowing down “false positives” to IP address. Am I to take it from your response to FDB that you’re unable to fix the problem?
yours awaiting rescuing from the spam filter
I’m sorry, Jerry, I thought you had been. It’s very difficult to say – from time to time it seems to treat everyone as a false positive – including me and other LP collective members. Names seem to be the first thing it looks for (as well as excessive links and the use of certain words which are commonly found in spam and speed of commenting) – either nicks that aren’t real names or single first names tend to attract its attention. But, basically, once it’s got you in its grip, it’s very hard to teach the thing – in theory it learns from us ticking manually “not spam” but it appears to be a very slow learner. Sometimes this can be compounded if people are posting to other blogs with Akismet installed and their owners are failing to despam.
There is no way of just telling it “don’t treat this commenter as spam”.
I gather you can email Akismet themselves and they might be able to do something for you, but I think FDB’s experience was frustrating.
However, it’s saved us from almost 600 000 spam comments so despite its imperfections it’s a good defence.
But I’d ask people not to discuss it endlessly on this thread. One of the other reasons we ask people to email us is that discussion of it on threads is off topic and of little interest to people who come to the threads for substantive discussion.
david/jinmaro
I have yet to encounter a Cultural/Gender/Media Studies academic worthy of tying Camille Paglia’s bootlaces. She is a REAL popular culture critic. Her strength? A very traditional and demanding humanities education, rooted in the Classics and Art history. And unlike just about every Australian arts students she also studied Science.
Reading her as she zips from Middle Kingdom Egypt to late Classical Dionysus, Spenser, Milton, the Book of Leviticus, geology, French grammar, Elvis Presley, Keith Richards, Princess Di, Byzantine iconography, Chinese calligraphy, lesbian motherhood, Freud, Ru Paul, and the Smiths was like witnessing the parting of the Red Sea.
Every time I read some porridge in Social Text and similar journals, it just makes me seethe that these people call themselves “scholars.” They are destroying the minds of undergraduates and producing a generation of castrated Stepford luvvies.
‘It feels less a survey than a curiously ornate harangue. Her percussive style — one short declarative sentence after another — eventually wearies the reader; her diction functions not so much to elicit the secrets of books as to hammer them into submission…. The weary reader longs for the mercy of a qualification, a doubt, a hesitation; there is little sense, in her uncompanionable prose, of exploration occuring before our eyes, of tentative motions of thought reflected in a complex syntax.’
I agree on this matter with Mr Updike.
Adam Gall
See what I mean? Scholarship by Wikipedia. Those poor undergrads. What a waste of taxpayer’s money.
So there’s something wrong with cut and paste now?
Listen, I’ll give Paglia the attention you seem to think she deserves when you give Foucault the attention that I think he deserves, ie never. I was just happy to find that Updike had expressed better than I could what I felt upon first reading Paglia ie that it is not at all scholarly in the sense that I understand it.
I’ll pay that one!
She takes a combative polemical style. I think you have to admit she does it well.
What she does have is extremely broad learning and distinctiveness. I do agree with her that the current institutions of humanities and social sciences discourage breadth and distinctive boldness in favour of trendy careerism.
Adam I agree that Foucault is a serious and major scholar. (It’s not his fault that anglophone sheep have distorted his writings when citing him to suggest scary networks of power exist on simple race/gender/class lines.)
So does that mean you will engage with Paglia? I think it is obvious that Paglia is extremely learned and talented – no wonder she is a bit bitter when she couldn’t get an academic job or publication despite her extraordinary intelligence and Yale PhD.
Adam Gall
Of course there is. Always. What a stupid question. Any academic who avoids research by relying on unattributed cut and pastes from Wikipedia should be fired. If your “scholarship” is based on cut and pastes from Wikipedia, you should be ashamed of yourself.
David
Her polemical style is masterful. Her classical training shines through.
Sorry David, that was a John Greenfield-only offer. I don’t doubt that you’ve given as much attention to Foucault as I think he deserves, but it’s not going to get me reading more Paglia, at least not until after I get this thesis written. One day, perhaps. I’ve always been a fan of Susan Sontag, and given that Paglia is one of her most vocal critics it seems like I should look into it more.
Not only has Paglia had plenty of academic jobs, she’s also had plenty of publications. Her career wasn’t a stellar ascent to tenure at an Ivy League, but I think the US superstar system was a mixed blessing even for those it benefited. If only extraordinary intelligence and a PhD from a world class university were enough…
“If your “scholarshipâ€? is based on cut and pastes from Wikipedia, you should be ashamed of yourself.”
Yes, but John, this is a comment thread on a blog, and I had all of two or three minutes to reply between doing other things. The wikipedia entry contains a reference to the source, and given that this isn’t an opinion piece let alone a scholarly publication, I took it at face value that Updike had actually written those things. Whoever wrote them, I agree with them, from what little Paglia I have read in the past.
By the standards of scholarship exhibited in your comments, John, I would give you about thirty percent for a first year essay.
She struggled to find a job until *after* she made herself famous in popular publications, which made her a star, and therefore desirable for American universities. She does herself attack the star system. And she couldn’t get her major book published for 9 years.
She desribes her career as “disastrous�.
There are always lots of factors other than merit that go to why some people prosper in academia and others don’t. Sometimes that’s appropriate – there are some dispositions which really work against collegiality which appear to be common in academic personality types, and many times it’s inappropriate – ancient factional feuds and the feudal nature of recognition from above that you need for a career. Academia can be a very bitchy place indeed, and I’m always a little suspicious of arguments built on the basis of “my work hasn’t been recognised”. It’s better to evaluate the quality of the work itself. I’m not saying all this apropos of Paglia personally, because as I said, I haven’t read her, but it’s a general point that I think applies.
If you check the Amazon comments for “Sexual Personae” you’ll find most of them are of this ilk and tenor.
A lot of people, and I am one, find Paglia’s writing, enthusiasm, and provocative thought and interpretation completely intoxicating, persuasive and intellectually riveting.
She does expect readers to keep up with her but the vast interdisciplinary knowledge she draws on for her arguments is done in such a way that is intelligible to a non-specialist or non-academic reader with a huge interest in and curiousity about many things – like myself. This is highly important: to not be a difficult writer in the way so many of the French postmodern school and those who study them and are guided by them. I didn’t have to study any of those writers, thank the goddesses, and nothing I have read about any of them, or of them, tempts me to dip my toe in the stream a cm more.
Most of all I am persuaded, for these are strong interests and influences too, by what Paglia says about the importance of the study of religion, art history and the classics and how so much of “cultural studies” neglects or is ignorant of that sweep of human knowledge and the essential tools they provide for understanding so much.
Well, she wouldn’t be the first to be mistreated by the US tertiary system. I, for one, am staying well clear. I don’t have a lot of sympathy, but I admire her tenacity. She had academic publications well in advance of her popular ones, she just didn’t have a book, which is not uncommon. She had teaching, a career until a certain point in the 70s as well, she just didn’t have tenure. Also not uncommon, even for the very bright.
It seems like her disastrous career functions rhetorically in the same way as Geoffrey Blainey’s ‘dismissal’ in the 80s – to show how great thinkers are the victims of the contemporary university and its ideological preoccupations.
jinmarro
The woman is a genius and a true aesthete, which is after all what the humanities are all about. Unlike the constipated Presbyterean luvvies who work in university “xxx Studies” departments, she has lectured factory workers in Adult Education courses, never goes to conferences, and could Bitchslap any of them for sheer knowledge, intellectual firepower, and charisma.
“Functions” is a very ambiguous term… is it intentional or not… are the claims true or not?
I think genius is getting a bit carried away.
She’s distinctive and powerful with rhetoric. I don’t think she’s always right, like the obsession she has with some weird transcendent power of the feminine. Also, if we’re bagging out loopy French writing, Paglia can be pretty loopy herself. But loopy is ok for imaginative people, providing it is visionary, rather than tedious careerist cliche-mongering.
David
Oh good god, I do not read here as if she is the final word on anything. I just become bewitched by her intellectual energy. After I read Sexual Personae and especially Sex, Art, and American Culture I realised I had a lifetime of reading and learning ahead of me to catch up. So many of her metaphors and epithets are just priceless.
Pfft Paglia. Only ever interested in one topic and that was Paglia. Molly Ivins was all over her:
Sad fact is you could make a talking Bass that said “cultural studies bad” and there’d be people trumpeting it as a bold and inspirational statement in animatronic home furnishing.
Ok I think she is a bit smarter than that. Big narratives about literature require you *invent* central themes to guide discussion. The key is how imaginative you are. There is a certain genre of literary criticism that is itself closer to poetry than science. Howard Bloom was brilliant at this. I think the important qualities are breadth, novelty, argumentative power and allure.
David
I share your views on her elevation of the feminine. But what I see her doing is drawing a huge polemical cross through the gender feminism French nonsense. I have learnt a bit since I first read her and my take now is that she is far more impressed with Freud and Jung’s take on Greek mythology than I am. But I thank her for presenting it all in such an accessible manner and for introducing me to James Frazer.
I was in my early 20s, when I first stumbled upon her in a New York bookstore. She was unknown in Australia, but when I finished reading back in Sydney, both books got passed around more than a two-bob tart. At that stage, I was totally soaked in the world of neo-marxist and Stepford gender feminism. I had no clue about Art, History, or beauty. So, the snappy way she presents the power of Helen’s (of Troy) beauty was like a bolt of lighning for me. Her stuff on the sacred, Catholic iconography, and gay men made the rest of my twenties much more interesting.
Then all her stuff about fashion photography, soap operas, Robert Mapplethorpe, Dionysus, rock-music, football players just blew me away. And all without that French verbal porridge. Which, by the way, I see as nothing more than an ornate continuation of Marxism.
I had read Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth, which was arguably the first popular culture war book heavily influenced by the French crap. At the time I said “this bint knows nothing about either beauty or myth,” so reading Paglia’s merciless destruction of her was great.
I just really wish she’d write that Part 2 of SP that she has always promised.
I my last post I said Howard Bloom – of course I meant Harold!
David
Apparently when Paglia presented her Yale Ph.D thesis topic suggestion, Bloom rushed up to her after the seminar and said, “oh my dear, you know I am the ONLY person at this university who can supervise you.” Quite.
“”Functionsâ€? is a very ambiguous term… is it intentional or not… are the claims true or not?”
I think there probably some truth, but these stories come too readily to hand to those interested in criticising universities, and they are only part of the story in both of those cases. I’m sure there were sound reasons for Paglias dismissal in the late ’70s – or at the very least, reasons that weren’t outside of the norm. All of the quiet failures and dismissals of other scholars are left to stand, because they don’t suit the stereotype of conformist academics being too stupid to recognise genius because of political correctness (for example). Why are some failures cited more often than others?
Well obviously because they have a bigger fan club outside academe, possibly because of their politics. How is that relevant?
It’s totally relevant, because the stereotype of the out of touch academic is exactly that, a stereotype, and it’s spectre is raised by reference to Paglia’s ’struggle against the universities’. In my experience those in universities are out of touch in similar proportions to those outside. Sure, there are people with heads up their arses, but I met plenty of those working as a labourer as well.
What I’m saying is that Paglia’s failure is not evidence of anything in general, and it is usually brought up to score points off of academics. If anything, Paglia’s academic failures, alongside her popular success and media profile indicate that she is better suited to the role of public intellectual and polemicist than disciplined scholar. I don’t agree with many of her arguments, but I do agree David that she is good at what she does. I also think that if she is leading people to read things and think about things they haven’t been previously exposed to, then that too is a good thing.
Talk about damning with faint praise. And how appallingly patronising. I would suggest this is more than “a good thing”. Surely, it is , or should be, the whole purposeful meaning of philosophy.
Ah, irony bypass personified. I like the use of the word “disciplined” here and the (in this context) repulsive value judgement herein. I can name plenty of disciplined scholars, expert interpreters to 500 top people internationally of Kantian ethics, e.g. Give me a public intellectual or polemicist over them, any day. Isn’t the whole point not merely to interpret to a tiny coterie of cognescenti, but to challenge and change, to motivate and move?
Yeah agreed Jinmaro, the wannabe-science approach to literature, you know, where everything is meant to move in little linear steps, is pretty silly giving the subject matter. It kind of forces artificial consensus and bland uninspiring research. Eg. scholar a showed how class was important in the text, scholar b has shown how class interacts with gender in the text, now I will advance this field of research by demonstrating how class and sexuality relate to gender in chapter 6.
In think academic literary study has always had a more idiosyncratic, imaginative streak until now. Unfortunately the science model as applied to literature doesn’t produce anything scientific or ‘rigorous’, so we should go back to the poetic model.
As an old graduate from QUT from the crossover era, ie during the amalgamation of QIT, Kedron Park and Kelvin Grove, I well remember a previous attempt to shift IR and Human Resource Management into Humanities from Business.
A concerted effort from students in those disciplines, the Student Union and the Academics Union (don’t think it was NTEU then) resulted in a back-down by the University with the schools remaining where they were resulting in great celebration by activists and mean spirited sulking by the Administration.
To this day I still agree with what happened and am pleased that democracy can still play a role in the decision making process.
“Mark on 31 July 2007 at 1:35 pm
So there’s something wrong with cut and paste now?
I’ll pay that one!”
Mark, I would never have been able to graduate without becoming skilled at that.
“John Greenfield on 31 July 2007 at 1:06 pm
Adam Gall
See what I mean? Scholarship by Wikipedia. Those poor undergrads. What a waste of taxpayer’s money.”
John, I wish I had the internet and Wikipedia when I was an undergraduate.
IR was wiped out in the School of Management in 1998 more or less, Scorpio, I’m sorry to say. I taught some of the courses the last time they were offered. It was done pretty unashamedly for ideological reasons.
What courses did you lecture in Mark?
Do you remember old Professor Sykes? We used to have some classical Law lectures from him. He knew his stuff though and all text books in his units were either written or co-written by him.
Howard Guille was another one of my lecturers. I had a number of dealings with him during EB negotiations when he was Secretary of the NETU. I was then an ASU Official.
Australian IR, Industrial Relations and the Economy, and IR Theory, Scorpio.
No Prof. Sykes that I can recall.
Howard stayed with the Arts Faculty teaching political economy, and he’s been one of the leading lights of the NTEU/staff/student campaign against the abolition of humanities and social science.
“Surely, it is , or should be, the whole purposeful meaning of philosophy.”
What, to do public education? To expose lots of people to Jung etc? No, I don’t think philosophy can be reduced to that at all. That is underestimating it a great deal. I’m sorry you take my comments as patronising jinmaro, but this is as far as I’m going in praise of Paglia. It’s a gesture of hospitality to a thinker that I think is totally over-rated. Anyway, if academics are as pathetic as you seem to be implying then it’s far from faint praise to suggest Paglia is not suitable.
“I like the use of the word “disciplinedâ€? here and the (in this context) repulsive value judgement herein.”
Nah, not really. An academic discipline is a pretty straightforward concept. Get over your crippling inferiority complex, it’s making you see ivory towers everywhere.
“the wannabe-science approach to literature,”
You show me where this is ascendant. It’s been a good while since structuralism, David. I’m trying to defend the humanities as a broad church and nothing more. You seem to want the whole thing torn down from the outside.
With his decades of experience in IR, Howard would have been a formidable advocate and very useful in that campaign I would expect. I still have some of his Discussion Papers in the cabinet about a metre away from my keyboard.
I found them very insightful and have often read them to compare his analysis from those days to current developments.
Sykes was elderly, over 80 and I think they offloaded him at the end of 1986. I think he passed away not long after. He sure was a character though.
There’s been a bit of this on both sides, but perhaps that’s a sign that we should end the Paglia wars. I don’t think they’re going anywhere much anyway.
Oh man… I didn’t mean scientific in terms of content.
I meant in terms of developmental logic, with each new study supposedly being a little a advance on an established research area. Yes, I know most post-structuralists etc would puke if their approach was described as wannabe-scientific, but from a certain perspective (although certainly not in terms of content, as I suggested) that’s just like it is. And this is all to do with institutional causes, how academics establish reputations, what the rules are for securing grants etc.
Or the whole idea of applying a “method” like deconstruction, as though it was something stable and rigorous rather than a creative concept that worked for one imaginative individual. Rorty talks a lot about this stuff.
Well, the cultural warriors can relax. The situation in universities must be very much under the control of the right people if cultural studies teachers/students can happily defend the disciplining role of disciplines. What a hoot.
If cultural studies is a discipline then how can it simulaneously be a space of critical-subversive intervention within academia and, more importantly, the larger societ, pray tell?
“If cultural studies is a discipline then how can it simulaneously be a space of critical-subversive intervention within academia and, more importantly, the larger societ, pray tell?”
Have you been around cultural studies as it’s practiced? I don’t think there is anything especially or necessarily subversive about it whatsoever, whether it has that in its heritage or not. Have I suggested it does or should have subversive effects? Critical, sure, but then that’s not the same thing. And just because some research is interdisciplinary doesn’t mean it’s not still disciplined in the academic sense – ie beholden in some way to the disciplines that it is drawing on. It’s not a free-for-all. If it were, I wouldn’t be defending it.
Also, um, I’m not a cultural studies teacher – I tutor in gender studies, which is a very different thing – and my own work as a student is in Australian studies and literature.
Cultural studies has understood itself from the outset as an interdisciplinary method; As the collection ‘Introducing Cultural Studies’ (Ziauddin Sardar, Borin Van Loon) puts it:
And didn’t gender studies arise out of cultural studies under the influence of feminism?
I find critical is one of those useful doublecode words. Kind of like the way people advise George Bush how to drop in words that only Christians perceive as having Christian overtones. Secularists don’t get the reference, so he doesn’t sound like he’s violating church/state distinction (well yes I know he does anyway…).
To the outside, “critical” means analytic skills with a touch of ‘thinking outside the box’ or some such. On the inside, “critical” often can mean subverting the heteropatriarchal normalcy. But they can’t write that in the subject descriptions.
Surely, the key concepts contained in the repertoire of the philosophical tradition: truth, democracy, equality, justice, compassion, friendship, reality and the like have everything to do with the public realm and the personal, that the two are indivisible, and that philosophical work is meaningless without reference to or engagement with the citizenry regardless of class, gender, race, ethnicity, country of origin, sexual preference, etc.
and far from being reductionist, philosophy, the term we use to describe forms of the imaginative engagement of one individual’s thought with other/s, showed from the beginning (in the Western tradition) with dramatist/philosophers such as Sophocles, that mainly male spectators could be expected to empathise with Trojans, Persians, Africans, wives, daughters and mothers.
The author-philosophers knew that such an extension of sympathy was possible even given the extremely hierarchical, male-dominated character of society, in this case Athenian.
They also thought it desirable, which is why they were both sublime poets and philosophers.
My point stands, jinmaro, insofar as cultural studies is interdisciplinary that does not mean it is undisciplined, or has no concept of disciplined scholarship. I don’t take Sardar or Van Loon as the last word on the matter, either. ‘Anti-discipline’ may describe the conditions of it’s emergence, but is probably not up to scratch for describing it’s current state.
“It is, in fact, a collective term for diverse and often contentious intellectual endeavours that address numerous questions, and consists of many different theoretical and political positions.”
This point I would accept, in that there is a lot of diversity within work that is understood as cultural studies. Part of this stems from its interdisciplinarity.
Gender studies as I understand it comes out of women’s studies programs which have been variously hostile and welcoming of ideas from cultural studies. In some instances the two share departmental homes, in others they are at opposite ends of the humanities.
David, if you take ‘critical’ as merely a dog-whistle for lefties, then I really can’t discuss this any further because I think that is a paranoid position. Personally, I take the term critical in my context as that which takes place only after you recognise the limitations and assumptions of the subversion narrative.
Note, jinmaro, I am not critiquing philosophy as such, but your assertions about the purpose of philosophy in relation to the work of Paglia. I’ll take Mark’s injunction as relatively serious, so I’m not going to enter into further Paglia-related discourse.
Adam, what do you think are the limitations and assumptions of the subversion narrative?
Jinmaro, one of the assumptions is that subversion is somehow the province of a given way of thinking – eg critical academic work in my case. I think there are kinds of subversion and resistance going on everywhere, inside and outside of disciplines, inside and outside of universities. And one of the limits of the academic-as-subversive narrative is that it can elide the institutional position of the academic, their own imbrication in networks of power, their own workplace practices, whatever. These are just two things that spring to mind, I’m sure there’s plenty more.
Is this leading somewhere or am I just going to do exposition on my own thinking more or less indefinitely? With all due respect to both jinmaro and David, who I think have both genuinely challenged some of my assumptions, I’m bailing on the thread.
No, I don’t. I said it *can* work like that. My whole discussion has been premised on a distinction between ‘good’ critical humanities scholars and ‘bad’ ones. I hate how every time you engage somebody in a discussion on these matters you have to spend half the time explaining you didn’t say something. In this thread, I have said:
I have made it clear that some of the finest thought goes on in Arts faculties. I simply said that *some* academics don’t make enough effort to prevent their personal political views from becoming overbearing on the students. I said that people within the humanities shouldn’t completely dismiss the idea that some scholars are problematic in this way.
It’s like the moment you make any criticism people want to distort what you say so they can string you up as some nasty rightwinger.
These kind of over-interpretations and downright false assumptions aren’t a good look when the very criticism literature scholars are trying to refute is that they are over-eager to imagine examples of patriarchy and racism on every second page.
If you don’t think critical is ever used as a proxy for subverting patriarchy etc all I can say is that you mustn’t know your own disciplines very well. People all over the place say that the merits of this or that critical approach are that it is a ‘tool’ or (my personal favourite) a ‘weapon’ in the struggle against something.
I am also frustrated by the influence of people like Spivak – you know, it’s ok to fabricate our own ‘essentialist’ representations when politically expedient, while simultaneously attacking other people for ‘essentialism’. (Most literature scholars’ use of the word ‘essentialist’ is incorrect anyway – it’s kind of professional posturing and over-philosophisation for what the uninitiated would call a “stereotypical generalisation�. Such generalisations don’t actually presuppose epistemological/ontological assumptions…)
It’s been a long time since I’ve read Spivak, but I don’t think that’s fair.
John Greenfield wrote:
David wrote:
I don’t get it. What do you reject here and why?
Agreed, Mark. That’s not Spivak as I understand her work, she does not endorse the ‘noble lie’ through the concept of ’strategic essentialism’, nor is she simplistically anti-essentialist on the other hand. For me Spivak’s primary concern in her most important essays is with the position and assumptions of the intellectual situated in first-world contexts. She does exactly what I think critical work should do by taking radical thought and demonstrating how that in itself enacts certain kinds of elisions, how it skips over the examination of its own position, makes it’s own representational strategies invisible. In ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ the number one target is the way in which Foucault and Deleuze understand representation.
“I simply said that *some* academics don’t make enough effort to prevent their personal political views from becoming overbearing on the students. I said that people within the humanities shouldn’t completely dismiss the idea that some scholars are problematic in this way.”
I don’t dismiss the idea, and I’m sure you’re correct about some academics. I don’t see the way in which some scholars might wear their politics on their sleeves as an enormous problem, demanding immediate and decisive action though. I won’t denounce my colleagues who are also activists, because their work and their teaching cannot be reduced to their politics. The idea that anybody rams their political views down students throats is not reflected in the everyday teaching that I am part of and that I have observed.
But what about when activism is defined as the very end of the scholarly goal?
Greenfield, if you want us all to share your own evaluation of your intellect and scholarly achievements, you really are going to have to learn how to spell ‘Presbyterian’.
And I am going to have to remember to change my nom de blog back after I’ve been mucking around with it.
The only think I have to add to the Paglia debate that hasn’t already been said is that no matter how good her intellect, no matter how long her list of publications, nobody is likely to grant tenure in their department to a well-known and monumental pain in the arse if it can possibly be avoided.
Lol, Dr Cat. I think I mentioned abandoning the thread, but I keep getting drawn back in. It’s becoming a problem… need sleep but LP and Facebook have conspired against me.
Pavlov’s Cat,
I agree… And she has said academics were always like “what a bitch”. She has to say everything that enters her mind, which can make for awkward professional relationships.
In general terms (not debating Paglia
)I suppose the problem is that for many reasons ‘not fitting in’ and being viewed as a ‘pain in the arse’ tend to correlate with ideological and intellectual dissidence, which are precisely the drivers of intellectual transformation (see Bourdieu’s Homo Academicus, again). The more system-efficiency factors are taking into consideration, the more you will get cliché-mongers and homogeneity. When it comes to political fields, this seems to me to be a real problem.
“‘not fitting in’ and being viewed as a ‘pain in the arse’ tend to correlate with ideological and intellectual dissidence,”
Yes, I think this is true in at least some cases. ‘Tend to’ might be a bit strong.
Speaking anecdotally, I have observed personal dislike become intellectual dissonance on more than one occasion as well.
A Presbyterian (correctly spelled) is actually a very pleasant classic cocktail for winter, as illustrated in this vodcast:
http://www.lulu.tv/?p=3677
Mmmm… I could use a Presbyterian right now… g’night all!
Night!
Good humanities seminars always end with a drink or two after all!
David, sometimes a pain in the arse is just a pain in the arse.
I think it’s pretty much the other way round, as I stated much earlier in this thread. If you like I can elaborate on why I think you’ve got it the wrong way round.
And in that regard, I notice, David, that you didn’t respond to my questions. They were intended as serious and not merely rhetorical: may I burden you for a response?
You may have come around to this stance, but you’ve also spent a great deal of time trying to make out that this is a structural problem (i.e. a characteristic of a particular set of disciplines) rather than as variable on the basis of all kinds of factors, many of which may be unrelated to those disciplines.
I won’t argue with the idea that a whole set of disciplines and and institutional structures have enabled the formation of a particular kind of intellectual “persona” or “ethos” — one which understands its academic work as straightforwardly and principally “political” (in a very naive and dated sense of the term). What I do find contentious, however, is the claim that this type is ascendent or pervasive in contemporary humanities departments.
The question is thus: what amount and what kind of evidence can you provide to support your claim?
I’m reading Flannery’s “Chasing Kangaroos” at the moment. He writes of the disgraceful situation whereby Oz has only a handful of paleontologists- not even enough to properly examine the collection of marsupial fossils held in our museums.
Yet our humanity luvvies run courses on things like “rave culture”. I say we administer the university humanities departments a giant cleansing enema. Our universities could then put the freed up monies into worthwhile endeavours.
People aren’t interested in becoming palaeontologists therefore there aren’t any. It’s got nothing to do with humanities departments, who are only working within a competitive, demand-sensitive model imposed on them by government. They grow to meet student demand and shrink when that demand wanes. Your real issue is with the federal government, melaleuca.
Adam’s right. The universities are being forced to cut courses with small enrolments because they cost more to staff. Archeology is also a notoriously expensive discipline to pursue because of the fieldwork, and the money just isn’t forthcoming.
If you don’t care for a certain discipline (and I don’t think rave culture sounds all that interesting, personally) then surely you can still support the fundamental value of adding to the sum of knowledge. If not, if you want to rank the claims of different pursuits, then you will find yourself having to make a case for funding paleontology instead of giving all the money to cancer research.
And unfortunately Steve, the government gives funding based on enrolments, so cutting courses doesn’t free up money that the unis can spend elsewhere. It just means that money is withdrawn altogether.
Thanks Laura and Adam.
It appears our university system is overly dominated by market values.
As regards things like rave culture, sure, somebody should be studying them I suppose. But I think it is really something that a thesis student could tackle using the qualitative participant-observer research method. I can’t see how it could be considered profound enough to warrant a stand alone subject.
To be fair, I think it was a ‘rock and rave’ subject. Rave in itself, maybe not, since it hasn’t had the saturating effects – unless you count all electronic dance music under that category, which may, in fact, be the case in that particular course. Dance music is something that literally millions of people participate in at different levels around the world. It’s also something that is proliferating rapidly in some contexts, even in places where a US/UK-centric rock culture never has, so there are other places you could go in a class like that in terms of globalisation and popular culture – if you did it well, you could teach stuff that can be applied in a lot of different areas of inquiry.
I tend to agree with you about palaeontologists – it’s a shame that there are glaring shortfalls in those areas. I also agree with Laura that some areas are more expensive and these suffer under the current system because they will be among the first cut if there are flagging enrolments. I think the problem affects the humanities more than is acknowledged as well: it means the anything involving substantial fieldwork is put under scrutiny because of attendant costs.
It’s also a function of how disciplines are grouped. Archaeology is very expensive to teach and research, but where it’s grouped for Faculty purposes (and thus funding) with humanities and social sciences, it gets no more funding than any other discipline – and Arts disciplines tend to get the lowest level. When I was working at UQ in 2002, there was a push on to alter this, but I suspect it hit a bureaucratic brick wall.
How kind of y’all to provide a perfect segue to a plug:
If anyone in Sydney wishes to make a contribution to funding/supporting the noble and selfless pursuit of archaeology, paleontology etc in Australia and the world they might like to come to the Australian Centre for Egyptology annual conference tomorrow (Sat) at Macquarie University.
http://www.pr.mq.edu.au/events/index.asp?ItemID=3013
I went to a couple of talks by the keynote speaker, Professor Michael Schultz of Göttingen University, last night and they rocked so freakin’ hard. Hence my burning desire today to become a paleopathologist, as recorded on Facebook. All I need is to fit a medical degree in somewhere.
Anyway, seriously. You should come.
Firstly, I haven’t changed my stance at all.
Secondly, I have made the point that the effort to *market* particular approaches is a problem in *political* disciplines. I don’t most people would really care if palaeontologists actively try to get converts to some form of analysis. But when it’s (neo-post)-Marxism, most people do care.
I also think it becomes more of an issue the greater the room for interpretation. If your measuring the amount of something or other in a test tube, it’s (generally) easier to reach consensus. It really doesn’t matter if it’s a group of lefties or fascists doing the measures. Yes I know if you want to get philosophical and historical enough you can find all kinds of contention, but there is a goal of predictive power and replication – to some extent these can constrain responses.
If you’re analysing power in communication, the potential findings can vary almost as much as the politics of the people who do the research.
By the way, seeing you’re all so keen for more evidence, I will present an extended analysis of problems with reference to examples from literature and cultural studies over the weekend.
The central problem, as I have already said, is that it is too easy too twist almost anything into an example of oppression. I think there is a practical knowledge – communicated with tones of voice, subtle comments on papers, etc – that inculcates the appropriate mode of interpretation.
It is viewed with gut legitimacy whenever you analyse a particular situation/text to find the male/white etc person in a position of power. If the case is identical, but positions reversed, there is automatic tendency to think of ways to explain it away. As a last resort, you can simply say that the minority representation must be contextualised within a history of oppression. This functions as a circular and irrefutable way of finding oppression in everything, no matter what happens.
Okay, I need to come out here and it’s not going to be pretty. In the department I was in at the time I was in it (let’s not get too specific), everything David says was true, and it was not the least of the reasons I bailed completely out of academe.
The worst thing was having one’s own interests and skills as a textual critic under-used and devalued, and the second worst thing was the bizarre and oppressive groupthink from one’s colleagues: if one were not reading and teaching texts solely from this ‘tick down the list of oppression boxes and then say smugly why X novel must therefore be cr*p’ POV (teaching texts at all, in fact, had become — and this in an English Dept — quite infra dig by the time I hauled ass out of there) then one must be a raving reactionary.
This despite the fact that I was a feminist critic who loved the cultural studies approach, and thought that, well taught and properly understood, it had some terrific new things to offer in the way of cultural analysis.
One of the things that has completely freaked me out about the blogosphere is that I’d got so used to being constructed by my peers as a traditional liberal humanist (and where I come from that’s next-door to a Nazi and you say it with a sneer) that I was shocked to discover myself being derided as a lefty by RWDB’s, despite the fact that I knew it to be all too true.
Well, I’ll be interested to see the evidence. Please do give details, David, of where you plan to publish the argument.
As I said before, I have no problem with the argument that the kind of intellectual “personaâ€? or “ethosâ€? you’re describing exists. And I also agree that a particular programmatic even mechanistic kind of reading strategy that is “attached to a specific kind of class/gender/race/sexuality critique” counts among the forms of “critique” that are available to humanities academics (hence students).
I disagree that these personas and strategies are pervasive or ascendent in humanities departments today. To the extent that the “critical” reading strategy David’s talking about is observable in contemporary literary and cultural studies departments it is taken far more often than not (IMO and from my experience) as the object of (conceptual) critique than as the means for critique. And that’s not at all surprising, since such strategies or methods remains a part of a heterogeneous disciplinary heritage, and instruction on the history of the discipline (even of the “interdiscipline”) remains a thoroughly conventional component of disciplinary training in most humanities/social sciences disciplines that I’m familiar with.
Now, if this were the late-80s, maybe even the early-90s, then I probably wouldn’t be objecting to David’s argument. But I just don’t see such methods as being so pervasive as David makes out (when he forgets to specify “some academics”): “buzzwords … are usually one-sided in how they are taught” and “usually they seem to function as means to an end of undermining white males’ taken for granted assumptions about the world”; “various oppressions are often taught in a manner where they seem to move from empirical generalisations to some kind of quasi-transcendental law”.
I also have reservations about the assumptions underpinning the particular description of interpretive “openness” or “incompleteness” (for want of better terms) as being a problem for the interpretive disciplines. I agree that this dimension to literary/cultural/textual studies can be characterised as a problem, but David on the one hand uses of the (counter) example of the physical and chemical sciences, thereby evoking ideals of consensus, predictive power and replication, while on the other disparaging the so-called “usual” practices of politicised literary criticism for being utterly predictable, easily replicable and widely approved.
Similarly, I’m unconvinced that the “poetic model” necessarily generates “more idiosyncratic, imaginative” research. But what strikes me most about the value position animating the argument is that it reminds me so much of RS Crane’s lectures on the Two Cultures, yet doesn’t seem to want to engage with the many sophisticated critiques (both conceptual and political) of the assumptions underpinning those lectures.
Perhaps David will engage with those works in his paper. I’ll wait and see.
et tu, Pavlov’s Cat? You were a pain in the arse, too?
*shudders*
Jinmaro, I have no doubt that many thought so.
well, then, stand tall, sister.
“if one were not reading and teaching texts solely from this ‘tick down the list of oppression boxes and then say smugly why X novel must therefore be cr*p’ POV (teaching texts at all, in fact, had become — and this in an English Dept — quite infra dig by the time I hauled ass out of there) then one must be a raving reactionary.”
This is fascinating, because I have heard some perspectives on that dept (if it’s the one I assume it is) from former students involved during the same period (if it’s the period that I think it is), and there was some suggestion that it all got a bit crazy – an overreaction, as it were, to certain assumptions about the department and how ‘conservative’ it was supposed to be to begin with.
I think my work might raise a few objections from some of the perspectives offered so far on this thread, but even I cringe at what you’re describing, Dr Cat. Of course in my current departmental context, the kind of silliness you describe, would simply not be entertained. That is one reason why David’s assertions don’t ring true for me.
Laura
Your lament for archaelogy brought tears to my eyes. Oh for those halcyon days of taxpayers funding sentences such as this:
Luke, T. (1997) “Museum Pieces: Politics and Knowledge at the American Museum of Natural History.” Australasian Journal of American Studies (December 1997)
Crap. I confused my humanists. I meant, of course, CP Snow’s “Two Cultures”. Still Crane’s lectures on the idea of the humanities are also exemplary of the assumptions that appear to underpin David’s criticism.
Captain Oats
I was going to correct you on CP Snow, but I persumed Pavlov’s Cat would do so.
Still smarting, eh Greensleeves?
Also, that sentence you posted, while I admit it is annoyingly po-faced, makes perfect sense and is actually quite an interesting remark. Don’t embarrass yourself by quoting it with no gloss as though it were self-evident nonsense just because you don’t understand it yourself.
John never misses an opportunity to show off his cut’n'paste skills?
I think you’re making a very weak argument there.
I think the consensus within literature is phony. I think the way people interpret the political underpinning of texts correlates highly with their prior beliefs about politics. To the extent that there is consensus, it is due to political homogeneity among literary scholars. I don’t think you’d find such a political correlation in the natural sciences. In the natural sciences, you rarely get people saying ‘I am using this concept as a ‘weapon’ for a political cause’, ‘I am consciously going about my scholarship in a way that serves as a ‘voice’ for the oppressed’. You do find all of this in literature, suggesting that the interpretations are a merely a function of the politics of the interpreter.
Literary scholarship doesn’t have the commitment to ruling about rival causes that exist within the natural sciences. Pretty much any scientific theory will get people saying ‘oh maybe the links were just spurious’. But if you publish a study in literature that finds gender a significant element in a text, you will rarely get people ‘testing’ your ‘findings’ and saying ‘oh, lets count the number of times men were represented like that in the novel to see if women were *really* differentially represented, or ‘perhaps the differential representation was simply due to chance.’ To do this, you’d really need something quantitative – with controls, significance tests etc etc. But the interpretive element makes it more or less impossible to neatly divide everything up into contained variables like that. That kind of approach just doesn’t seem to work for literature.
It is generally a lot easier to precisely define your method in the natural sciences. People can go and do exactly the same thing, find the same results, and thereby get a genuine consensus. But in literature, a thousand different deconstructionists could go about their “method� in a thousand different ways. It is practically impossible to enact the same processes, because so many of the processes are imaginative and interpretive.
Yes, but any form of literary interpretation is open to similar objections because the nature of the object of study is fundamentally different to those of the natural sciences. Though bounded by the text and its contexts.
Your point?
The point of the above argument was simply to refute what Captain Oats said – that I was being inconsistent in complaining about monotony in literature…
The study of literary texts doesn’t lend itself to quantitative methods – or to the degree that it does, the results are banal. You don’t like the politics of “deconstructionists”. But all methods of literary interpretation have had their politics – including and especially those which pretend to some sort of high culture neutrality – think about what Matthew Arnold was calling for. Nor is suspicion of the “intention of the author” necessarily to be reduced to some sort of postmodernist cliche – it’s just the way language works.
My point is this:
There’s a reason why humanism and humanistic forms of hermeneutic are different from the scientific method. If you think about the epistemology, I don’t think you’re making a valid complaint.
I didn’t read what Captain Oats said. I was responding to what you wrote.
Not that I’m a postmodernist, mind you, nor a fan of unrestrained relativism. But, then, neither was Jacques Derrida.
Mark you have seriously misinterpreted me. What I said about literature wasn’t intended to suggest it should gain more predictive power or become more scientific. Quite the opposite in fact!
I agree with everything you’ve said in the last post.
Ah, sorry, David!
I was defending an imaginative idiosyncratic conception of literature studies (a ‘poetic model’) against the present tendency towards homogenisation.
Captain Oats basically wondered how I could complain about homogenisation within literature and use this as evidence of a one-sidedness at the same time as I suggested that science was to some extent protected from extreme politicisation due to its consensus and predictive power. Captain Oats thought that was inconsistent. The point of what I wrote was to highly the epistemological differences, as you have done. The point of this was to show that it is meaningful to think of reaching consensus in the sciences, but due to the interpretive nature of literature homogeneity is not a great goal.
*Second paragraph, third sentence: ‘the point of what I wrote was to highlight…”
Fair enough, obviously I should have read Captain Oats’ comment before yours! You’ll have to forgive my imaginative and idiosyncratic reading!
Mark
What gas you blow from your gob. Dude, please explain why the pomo wankers had to invent a whole new language to pursue their political agenda?
A “whole new language”, “Dude”?
Heh.
No, Captain Oats made a series of points, the culmination of which was thus: “what strikes me most about the value position animating the argument is that it reminds me so much of RS Crane’s [actually CP Snow's] lectures on the Two Cultures, yet doesn’t seem to want to engage with the many sophisticated critiques (both conceptual and political) of the assumptions underpinning those lectures.”
The point is not so much the “inconsistency” of your valuing of consensus, etc. in one context but not in the other, but rather the mark of division between the contexts and the commitment to a distinct set of values in each context. Your argument seems to be this: methods aspiring to consensus, predictability, repeatability in sciences = good; methods aspiring to consensus, predictability, repeatability in humanities = bad.
So baldly stated, it seems so elemental and prescriptive that one might prefer to find other, more subtle ways of making the point, so I’ll happily listen to any qualifications to it that you might want to present. Nevertheless, taken in this form, here are some preliminary observations that might inform several objections to your argument:
1. Interestingly, in making the point about the (divided) value of ideals of consensus, etc., you make the concomitant point about the value of methods aspiring to imaginativeness and idiosyncrasy in relation only to the humanities (= good). Are methods aspiring to imaginativeness and idiosyncrasy in the sciences bad?
2. What particular forms/conceptions of “imagination”, say, are being deployed in your argument and do they exhaust the possible forms/conceptions of “imaginativeness”? If we allow that methods that aspire to a certain kind of imaginativeness are permissible (even valuable) within the sciences are these forms to be understood as radically different from (hence as requiring vigilant protection from) those forms of imaginativeness, etc., that are permissible (even valuable) in the humanities?
3. If methods that aspire to a certain kind of imaginativeness are, in fact, permissible in the sciences, why is it that methods that aspire to a certain kind of repeatability, etc. are not permissible in the humanities?
4. How can knowledge of literature (e.g.) — even “imaginative” knowledge — be taught or communicated (via publications, etc.) other than as something repeatable to some degree, as something that can be accepted by a community of scholars or whatever as reasonable knowledge? Unless one is committed to the notion that imaginative, idiosyncratic analyses emerge spontaneously from idiot savants who have had no kind of training whatsoever (be it formal or otherwise), one surely believes that “the poetic model” of literary study is communicated or propagated, is reproduced somehow: how does this happen other than via something like exemplary learning, which either takes from examples of analyses what may be generalised from the instance and used as the basis for subsequent performances, or works on refining by practicing an iterable technique?
Given the above points, perhaps it is rather the case that what you’re objecting to, despite your calls to “return” to the poetic model, is something like an extreme version of a particular form of practice. Certainly, your very cliched representations of that form of practice would seem to suggest that it is the more mechanistic “applications” of particular “methods” that bother you the most. In which case, I have to wonder again about the extent of the “problem” (i.e. the empirical problem of the pervasiveness of such conduct, shall we say, rather than the quasi-transcendental problem of the “openness” of literature) and whether calls for the complete exclusion of certain kinds of literary study (hence calls to “return” to what amounts to some other homogeneity) represent the most appropriate or the only way to respond to the (empirical) problem.
5. In any case (and in a sense preceding all the above observations and questions), which kind of knowledge — scientific or humanistic — is (or should?) be called upon to identify the division between the kinds of knowledge, scientific and humanistic?
Your firm commitment to the division between the faculties (as it were) suggests that science, with its certain and certifiable, consensual and repeatable judgements, is the authority on that distinction. Insofar as humanistic research ought, on your argument, remain governed by the terms and values of that division, it would seem that you are arguing that humanistic disciplines answer to the sciences after all, or at least to the “scientific” view of the status of (the divisions of) knowledge.
I’m not happy with letting science, scientific knowledge, scientific models, scientific ideals, etc. dictate — as distinct from inform — what kinds of humanistic knowledge practices, etc., are acceptable. And that is why I continue to object not only to your characterisation of the empirical state of affairs but also to your conclusion regarding the appropriate form of response to the quasi-transcendental problem too.
David, where are you getting this all from? Do you work in a literature department? I do, and I wouldn’t dream of even attempting to characterise the entire discipline in this sweeping style, let alone by using the narrow and desperately old-fashioned terms you have selected. Even the descriptions of English Studies that I’ve read recently (Berube, Graff) have not convinced me that they do more than describe the American scene which as much as it’s internally divided is still quite different to how things are done here or in the UK or in Canada or India.
You say so confidently that there is no qualitative analysis underpinning claims about texts and that impressionism rules. But this is not so. Have you read Franco Moretti? Probably one of the most influential literary scholars working at the moment? And what he urges is that we drop the idea of close reading and exchange it for ‘distant reading’ and data mining. It sounds counterintuitive especially to someone like me trained in close reading but it is actually eminently instructive and (as I am finding this semester) eminently teachable. Here’s a bit from “Graphs, Maps, Trees“:
Another scholar whose influence derives from exactly the kind of work you assert can’t be done in literary studies is Pascale Casanova who uses the principles of economic theory to map the development of literary traditions and the transmission of culture. Have you read her book? How do her project and Moretti’s fit into your description of literary studies?
Oh dear. I think the final word on the “New Humanities” must be made by the Professor for Kentucky Fried Chicken.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/male-bonding-rituals-more-ties-that-blind/2007/08/06/1186252624554.html
Captain Oats,
You are mistakenly trying to turn my useful generalisations into axioms. No I would never say that imagination isn’t “permissible� in science and that replication isn’t “permissible� in literature. The point remains – it is generally harder to get a consensus on a political reading of a text across people of different political perspectives than it is in science. A gradual tendency towards ‘consensus’, therefore, is more likely to mean a gradual tendency towards political homogeneity among scholars. Yet again, your bloated and tedious response continues to read in all kinds of epistemological/ontological assumptions that I just don’t have (this is a common problem in literary critics). No I don’t think the humanities should answer to the sciences.
Laura, I don’t believe I asserted that quantitative analysis *couldn’t* be used in literary studies. But it is not the norm. I do believe, from my experience, that *many* Australian literary academics have a heavily politicised style that is often thin on evidence.
I am aware of the movements to which you are referring. But in most literary departments, I think you will find they distinctly minority.
David
I think you’re doing pretty well in the lit. crit. stakes yourself!
1. You’re welcome to judge your generalisations as useful, though I’d have thought the point of academic discussion was to allow others to cast their own judgements to test your claim. It’s called peer-review and, while it’s not perfect, I would argue it’s worthwhile as a complement to self-evaluation. I may be wrong to think so, but I’m not alone on that point. Perhaps you’ll forgive me then for daring to interrogate your self-evaluation.
2. If I’m turning your generalisations into axioms, I’m only following your lead: “Unfortunately the science model as applied to literature doesn’t produce anything scientific or ‘rigorous’, so we should go back to the poetic model“. Am I wrong to read this as an axiom? If so, I shall dare to recommend that you more carefully reflect on the terms you use to convey what you would or “would never say”. E.g. the terms “model” and “we” here imply to me a distinction between a form of disciplinary practice organised according to a specific set of goals, premised on particular assumptions, etc. (i.e. a model) and the literature department or discipline (i.e. “we”) in which such models may be employed. Your “useful generalisation” thus seems to state that in literature departments only one model should be adopted: the poetic model, and most certainly not the political model.
To that I say (as concisely as I can), bullshit! For starters, I’m not convinced by your delimitation of the discussion to two models, which are easily seen (even if you “would never say” so) as mutually exclusive and opposing rather than as mutually dependent and complementary. Secondly, I take issue with your assumption (you’ve not justified the claim in any way, nor even shown the slightest awareness that your argument requires the claim in order to make sense) that literature departments must be organised according to only one model. If you do not mean to imply that (and I would’ve thought that you shouldn’t, if you do indeed believe that in literature “homogeneity is not a great goal”), then I shall again dare to suggest that you need to be a little more explicit about what you do mean to suggest — even if it risks your argument becoming a tad bloated and tedious.
E.g. “I was defending an imaginative idiosyncratic conception of literature studies (a ‘poetic model’) against the present tendency towards homogenisation” states a very different aim from that inscribed in the axiom of “we should go back to the poetic model”. And the two statements depend on different kinds of justification: the first requires an empirical demonstration of the putative tendency towards homogenisation, while the second requires something like practical reasoning, whether it be oriented towards ethical value, political value or pragmatic value or otherwise.
3. You’ve organised your claims around a particular depiction of “the problem” of non-scientific — i.e. non-consensual, non-standardisable — nature of interpretation and regularly appealed to the contrast between science and the humanities in order to explain your argument. To that extent, I think it’s reasonable to raise the question of the epistemological assumptions that enable one to compare activities within the two faculties so as to then insist on their differences, and I’m not alone in raising that question: Mark did too, and you even stressed to Mark that you were seeking to highlight “the epistemological differences” between the faculties. So let me get this straight: you were seeking to highlight the epistemological differences so that I wouldn’t read into your comments a belief on your part that the faculties are epistemologically different?
In any case, if, as you indicated to Adam, you “hate how every time you engage somebody in a discussion on these matters you have to spend half the time explaining you didn’t say something”, I’d dare to suggest that you get used to it; after all, the interpretive element in language use makes it practically impossible to guarantee that your words express everything you mean (and only what you mean).
David
Let’s assume that the above was too bloated and tedious for you to bother reading. Let’s pare it right back to the basics:
As I’ve repeated, I agree with you that “some academics” practice the form of “political critique” that you find objectionable. I also appreciate your attempt to link what you see as a process of homogenisation (i.e. “political critique” becoming ascendent) to institutional structures and market forces. I’m also right up there with you in the attempt to defend “the poetic model” from any attempts to dispel or exclude it from the range of legitimate modes of conducting literary study. And I agree that the “interpretive” dimension to literature, language, culture, etc. constitutes a problem for the humanistic disciplines.
Here’s where, as far as I can tell, we differ:
(1) you see “political critique” as relatively pervasive, at least to the point of tending towards homogenisation of literary studies, whereas I see its “peak” as having well passed, its reach as contracting and its influence as waning. This is an issue for (quasi)empirical investigation and cannot be resolved in this forum. You say you have the evidence, and I’ll just have to wait until you let me know where it will be published.
(2) you seem to think “we should go back to the poetic model”, so as to resist homogenisation, whereas I think the humanities has room for both the poetic model and the political model (not to mention the quasi-scientific model and the sociological model, both of which I think are distinguishable from what you’ve characterised as “political critique”) and who knows what other as yet unimaginable models. Might we not consider for example the poetically political and the politically poetic models, or is that too perverse, too much of “a cliche critical analysis trick”? (How, in the sense of “by which historically available means” but also “ideally”, such a space might be managed or negotiated is yet another question.)
I’m uncertain as to whether you actually do think that “the political model” (or, indeed, any of the other models besides the poetic) has no place whatsoever in the humanities, but if you do, then your stance is meaningless, or at least unconvincing, without the support of an argument justifying the value position (ethical, political, pragmatic) that underpins the stance.
I have no interest in winning an argument for the sake of simply winning the argument. I am interested (1) in ensuring that representations of the current state of the humanities are not grotesquely unfair; and (2) in defending the potential, if necessarily limited, value of many different models of literary study and defending the humanities as a space in which diversity and difference may take hold and may conflict as much as they communicate. That is why I’ve challenged (1) your characterisation of the term “critical” and your representation of what “often” and what “usually” happens in humanities departments; and (2) your characterisation of what forms of scholarly practice “should” be pursued in the humanities.
I hope I’ve not attributed to many “epistemological/ontological assumptions” that you “just don’t have” to your words. Similarly I hope my qualifications haven’t bored or swamped you.
“I am interested (1) in ensuring that representations of the current state of the humanities are not grotesquely unfair; and (2) in defending the potential, if necessarily limited, value of many different models of literary study and defending the humanities as a space in which diversity and difference may take hold and may conflict as much as they communicate.”
I couldn’t agree more with these points, Captain Oats. I think our interests align on these issues.
With all due respect, I think you guys should take it offblog if you want to converse on these matters further. We discourage very long comments, and this thread has strayed a long way from its starting point.
So, get a room!