So, get a room!

I couldn’t agree more with these points, Captain Oats. I think our interests align on these issues.

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.

your bloated and tedious response…

I think you’re doing pretty well in the lit. crit. stakes yourself!

You are mistakenly trying to turn my useful generalisations into axioms…. your bloated and tedious response continues to read in all kinds of epistemological/ontological assumptions that I just don’t have. No I don’t think the humanities should answer to the sciences.

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).

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.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/male-bonding-rituals-more-ties-that-blind/2007/08/06/1186252624554.html

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“:

What do literary maps do…first, they are a good way to prepare a text for analysis. You choose a unit – walks, lawsuits, luxury goods, whatever – finds its occurrences, place them in space…or in other words: you reduce the text to a few elements, and abstract them, and construct a new, artificial object. A model. And at this point, you start working at a secondary level, removed from the text: a map, after all, is always a look from afar.— Distant reading, I have called this work elsewhere; where distance is however not an obstacle, but a specific form of knowledge: fewer elements, hence a sharper sense of their overall interconnection. Shapes, relations, structures. Patterns.

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?

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…

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.

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.

Heh.

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?

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.

I agree with everything you’ve said in the last post.

My point is this:

It is practically impossible to enact the same processes, because so many of the processes are imaginative and interpretive.

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.