<< Sentiment and irony | Front Page | A post in which we go from graffiti to meta-graffiti and maybe meta-infinity >>
Monday, October 27, 2008
Academics, Political Scholarship, and Jonah Goldberg
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes)
Over at Acephalous (and at The Edge of the American West), Scott Kaufman has posted the text of Friday’s panel presentation on Jonah Goldberg (Liberal Fascism) and the right-wing version of what we might call “political scholarship,” a genre that (taken loosely) might also include K. C. Johnson’s Until Proven Innocent (which Scott also tackled), and that, interestingly, comes in both cases from the desks of committed bloggers. I write “political scholarship” rather than “political science” because of the deep strain of revisionist history in Goldberg and Johnson’s work.
First of all, as his political posts so often do, this puts Scott once again at the forefront of academic blogging. He is carving out a niche for himself as a defender of liberal fair-mindedness and plain old scholarly integrity.
I am also glad that Brandon Gordon, the UC Irvine grad student who corresponded with Goldberg, refused Goldberg’s Facebook request and that Scott reported it. The creepy pretense of affability that characterized William F. Buckley’s unctuous conservatism will, I hope, go to rest with him in the grave.
Scott raises a valuable question: what role ought academics to play with respect to middlebrow political scholarship of this kind?
Works like Liberal Fascism are riddled with factual errors, an unavoidable side effect of their fundamental biases, and Scott argues that we should respond to them with refutations. In his paper, he gives the specific example of Goldberg’s hasty claims about evolutionary theorist Herbert Spencer, which fly in the face of Scott’s own doctoral research.
For my money, refuting specific factual inaccuracies in these texts is beyond reproach, yet ultimately insufficient. It can end up in the same doldrums as the Gore and Kerry campaigns when they tried to run on reasonableness: we are smarter than Republicans, we understand how to wage the Iraq War better, we have read more documents and juggled more numbers. Barack Obama, by contrast, has foregrounded emotion—faith, hope—and has let his intelligence be something obvious that others praise for him.
Goldberg’s book is mostly an epiphenomenon. Its split platform of villainizing the Left and defending laissez-faire is a re-tread of the persistent and illogical synthesis of social and fiscal conservatism in the Republican Party. For the people who believe that public schools teach atheism, you had them at “Liberal Fascism.” For wealthy conservatives, there’s the appealing idea that expensive social programs can be traced back to Hitler. Because these ideas are so well-worn, they aren’t really dangerous. Furthermore, Goldberg’s timing is bad. In the midst of the current economic crisis, comparing government-led economic initiatives and regulation to Nazism will ensure that the book has a very short lifespan.
In truth, there has been no shortage of similar work on the Left. Whole shelves of books and movies attacking Bush, satirizing Bush, attacking right-wing Christian movements, etc. have appeared, everything from God Is Not Great to Bushwhacked to Al Franken to Michael Moore. Along with this bunch goes the more focused, level-headed works like The Assault on Reason. All of these have more going for them than their counterparts on the Right, but they are all dwarfed by what Obama has done in building a real American political coalition in support of a Democratic candidate.
I do not mean to sing Obama’s praises too highly: like many of my colleagues in academia, I am concerned that his focus on the middle class still leaves the majority of Americans behind. I also realize that most academics recoil with horror from something like Sicko or God Is Not Great, afraid of the alienating and dogmatic style, the guerrilla tactics. But academics are not the more noble for being constantly irritable and restless in their responses to political broadsides: acting like someone stung by a gadfly does not make one a gadfly. Many academics feel themselves to be “to the left” of Obama even though it has been years since the academic mainstream in the States has embraced socialism as a real possibility for the future. Even multiculturalism, for all of its occasional fatuousness and its wayward political consequences, represented a triumphant imaginative leap. Only a vision can compete with visions, even if the competition is wrong in every detail and rotten to the core.
Comments
I should probably just stop commenting on this already—dipwads have already gone from “you think you know so much about politics!” to “you’re scolding Scott!”. But, to re-post what I wrote on Acephalous:
“The problem with treating [academic responses to political scholarship] as a responsibility is that in politics, responsibilities require effects. What effect did your criticism of Goldberg actually have? Has it ever been quoted in an attack on Goldberg? Has Goldberg ever had to bother to defend himself against it? Goldberg is still chugging along, made fun of by everyone, but with none of that mattering to his core political task; demonizing liberalism to the GOP base.
What would actually decrease his ability to do this, given that he will never feel shame, and that the money will never run out? In these cases, I generally think that the person has to be baited into an arena in which they can lose. They can then go back and bluster to their fans that they didn’t lose, but something within them has snapped, and they are never as effective after that. I vaguely remember aspects of the Horowitz / Berube debates as being similar.”
In other words, much as I think that Scott is in the right vis-a-vis Goldberg, being in the right doesn’t do much, as you’ve said. Stopping them requires getting out there in some sense.
K.C. Johnson is a different case. Here I have to disagree with the term “middlebrow”. Johnson writes with the status of an academic historian, and can and must be held to the standards of an academic. In those cases, I think that an academic critique can be devastating. Of course, Johnson’s fellow blogging historians offer a case study in not rocking the boat with regard to a colleague, so I’m not really sure if that really matters either, in the last analysis.
”... refuting specific factual inaccuracies in these texts is beyond reproach, yet ultimately insufficient.”
The view from this side of the pond: I’m not sure. Personally, I agree. Personally Scott’s points all hit home. It does the cause no good, though, to preach to a member of the choir like me. There’s a broader cultural context, and I suspect it underpins the extraordinary (to my mind) successes of the Right over the last few decades.
I’m not sure ‘truthiness’—a brilliant concept, much deeper than its comic-satiric immediate origins—has been properly explored. It seems to me the whole enchelada in these debates. What Scott says is true, but what Goldberg peddles is truthy, and that has more purchase. What for Joe or for me are “specific factual inaccuracies” are for a contemporary functioning democratic majority ‘the details’. It has, unaccountably, become one of the cornerstones of modern leadership theory that a good leader doesn’t sweat the details; doesn’t get bogged down in in the details. Criticising Goldberg’s details will flow smoothly from the oil coating his feathery back, because he is invested—not tacitly, but proudly—in the vision thing. You know who obsesses over details? Nerds. Scientists.
The vision thing at the moment in America is tangled up with God and a very odd and peculiar concept of individual freedom (monetary freedom and the freedom to shoot shit, rather than the Millian freedom to do what you actually want to do provided it doesn’t impinge another’s freedom: you know, fuck people of the same gender, or take drugs). More to the point it is has been dyed thoroughly with fear: the distinctive spin George W. has given the Rebublic vision is to add to it ‘... and be afraid.’ Obama has been canny in peddling an alternate vision: hope.
First of all, as his political posts so often do, this puts Scott once again at the forefront of academic blogging. He is carving out a niche for himself as a defender of liberal fair-mindedness and plain old scholarly integrity.
Oh. Wow. Are you sure you’re being pompous enough here?
A (justified and illuminating) attack on Jonah Goldberg is what it takes to arrive at the forefront of academic blogging these days? Really?
I am also glad that Brandon Gordon, the UC Irvine grad student who corresponded with Goldberg, refused Goldberg’s Facebook request and that Scott reported it. The creepy pretense of affability that characterized William F. Buckley’s unctuous conservatism will, I hope, go to rest with him in the grave.
God, I really hope this is irony, but in the light of the above, it probably isn’t.
Adam,
I agree with everything you’re saying about the contemporary situation, though, with respect to the “vision thing,” I would say—like the kid in the old anti-drug commercial—we learned it from watching you! When I talk about vision, I"m talking about across-the-ponders like Blake, Morris, and Ruskin.
***
Anatoly: “pompous,” “justified,” “illuminating.” Got it. Thank you for sharing your vast knowledge of English adjectives.
I’m not being ironic about Buckley. You can’t call a liberal a fascist and then get together with him for beers, or the Facebook virtual equivalent.
Anatoly: “pompous,” “justified,” “illuminating.” Got it. Thank you for sharing your vast knowledge of English adjectives.
Got some more for you: “sycophantic”, “panegyrical” and “out of touch with reality” (not strictly speaking an adjective, that last one).
I’m not being ironic about Buckley. You can’t call a liberal a fascist and then get together with him for beers, or the Facebook virtual equivalent.
Also, Goldberg probably has cooties! No, you’re right: the bravery of Brandon Gordon, the UC Irvine grad student who could withstand the awful temptation of friending Jonah Goldberg, must be reported. The evil schemes of Goldberg, ever the duplicitous tempter of innocent souls, the peddler of conservatism with a human face, must be resisted.
Oh, and Joseph? Scott Kaufman didn’t tackle KC Johnson’s Until Proven Innocent; he was explicitly innocent of reading the book and instead targeted Jonhnson’s profiles of academics who signed the Group of 88 statement. Also, your lumping Johnson together with Jonah Goldberg is ridiculous.
what role ought academics to play with respect to middlebrow political scholarship of this kind?
Is there a lit-crit version of this question? There’s a lot of lit-blogging (and reviewing, and publishing) that goes on that disregards or is even openly disdainful of the conventions, contributions, or (dare I say) rigor of academic literary scholarship and criticism. But refuting (or complicating, or qualifying) literary judgments or interpretations is (or is it?) a different kind of game than ‘refuting specific factual inaccuracies’--though factual inaccuracies may sometimes be involved. Maybe these discussions, because they don’t have the same public stakes (not to mention audience) as “political scholarship” like Goldberg’s, should just be left alone--but then, do we professional lit-crit types not think there are better and worse (more or less responsible and legitimate) ways to do our kind of thing as well? Do we have any responsibility to get in the game, then? (I’m thinking, for instance, of a frisson of horror that rippled across some bits of the lit-blogging world when word got out that Dickens had said some scarily racist things in his letters--wholesale condemnation of his novels, including by people who hadn’t read them, was not far behind. There are better and worse ways to have that conversation, right?)
That’s a very good set of questions, Rohan. Has there been any attempt to present the results of academic literary criticism and scholarship to the general public? Sure, Harold Bloom has written about Shakespeare and about the Western canon, but he wasn’t presenting a popular synthesis of scholarship; he was presenting Bloom on those topics. Marjorie Garber has published a big fat book on Shakespeare that’s pretty general in nature, but based on a wide range of scholarship. But that’s one author, albeit, a central one.
Just around the corner from here I have a post presenting J. Hillis Miller’s reflections on how the profession has changed in 50 years. Has anyone attempted to lay out what we’ve learned about literature in the past 50 years? For surely we have learned a lot. And it would take more than one or three books and a dozen magazine articles to set that before the public. And, of course, there’s considerable contention within the profession about what we’ve learned. But that’s OK.
That was an interesting post/talk, Scott. I’d been curious what it took for Goldberg to post a reader e-mail. I was occasionally reading The Corner during the time you write about (which is why I could authoritatively take John Holbo to task over at Crooked Timber for still reading it), and I remember that series of posts by Goldberg about his book and his research. At that time, it seemed like it might just turn out a reasonable project, and I think you have to wonder what other academic responses he did get.
But it seems there’s a natural hierarchy in publishing of academia, then journalism, followed by blogging (not that I necessarily like that); journalists write for a wide but somewhat educated audience, often broadcasting ideas that academics had published in their specialized languages for a restricted audience. And blogging could be said to have transformed that by writing in an ultra-popularized format about ideas that journalists had already dispersed at large. Goldberg seems to accept that blogging or online journalism doesn’t have to meet the same stringent requirements “real” journalism does, but he also tries to get those forms the same respect they would have if they’d been carried out in the traditional way. I don’t think anyone believes his book is authoritative as research—he gets taken seriously to a degree because he’s been anointed as a professional pundit, and as such his words matter.
Bill,
I’d guess most laypeople assume Harold Bloom’s books articulate a scholarly consensus. I don’t think the people who buy books for small public libraries, for example, make it a practice to purchase large numbers of books on important scholarly topics that are actually only the idiosyncratic opinion of one person—if they did, there would be much more variety in the kinds of books you find there. As far as people who don’t think Bloom is correct, they probably assume he’s articulating the consensus of all academics with whose political beliefs they (and presumably you, given your comment) disagree.
Adam,
One stray thought on “truthiness”: it partly consists of one logical fallacy heaped on top of another, i.e. the fallacy of the undistributed middle, as Scott writes. In these cases a little bit of old-fashioned debating probably does help.
Rohan,
In these situations I’ve seen people do a lot of good with close readings, actually; for example, in making her case against the Harry Potter books, A. S. Byatt ends with a beautiful and clearly relevant quotation from Keats. When the matter is primarily literary, the richness of the unexamined texts themselves, properly presented and framed, speaks eloquently in their defense. There are cliched popular ideas about Joyce, Nietzsche, and Plath, among many others, to which I often want to respond by drawing readers’ attention to the “uncharacteristic” portions of their prose and verse.
Bill,
In their own ways, both J. Hillis Miller and Harold Bloom have tried to do what you’re talking about, one with a sympathetic eye to deconstruction, the other in deep opposition to it (despite borrowing frequently from its precepts). Zizek has done his best to be a popularizer of Marx, Lenin, Freud, and Lacan.
The problem is that, while new ideas have been introduced by the truckload since 1958, the truth value of all of them remains fairly untried. There is intense and entrenched disagreement about the worth of a given theorist such as Derrida, and even about the stature of a novelist like Toni Morrison.
It seems to me that the problem is more stylistic than syncretic. We need more academics who write in what approximates to everyday English, and fewer who write as though the language of the humanities ought to be as specialized as the language of physics or molecular biology.
The stylistic solution is appealing partly because these ideas should not be dumbed-down; they should be represented lucidly and plainly, but they will remain difficult and complex. That is a hallmark of their power, and it is frankly a shame that the reductive comic book “Introductions” to so-and-so (i.e. “Introduction to Derrida") have become so popular.
Well, you know Joseph, Steven Pinker got started on his roll with a lucid popular exposition of linguistics. To do so he had to simplify a great deal - dumbing things down, as it were - because many of the ideas are complex. And it worked.
Well, if the ideas of contemporary literary studies really are that difficult, and legitimately so, then they do need a sympathetic dumbing down. If there’s nothing worthwhile left in the dumbing down, then perhaps the complexity was really only hot air after all.
”...it is frankly a shame that the reductive comic book ‘Introductions’ to so-and-so (i.e. ‘Introduction to Derrida’) have become so popular.”
Although in fairness, these books were filling a niche that the practicing Lit. Crit. establishment showed no interest in filling themselves. I can remember a time when it was quite common to hear people insist that the ideas and concepts of Theory just plain couldn’t be expressed in less opaque language.
It’s a claim I never found particularly convincing, especially because sometimes the tangled syntax was simply the result of a poor translation rather than a necessary consequence of the ideas.
In a way, those in Lit. Crit. should be pleased that these books exist: clearly there must be a reasonable number of people outside of graduate programs who are curious to know what Derrida, Lacan & etc. are talking about.
But there’s definitely room for something in between comic books and the primary texts. For example, I’m not sure what I think of Zizek’s overall program, but I do appreciate the fact that he translates Lacan into something resembling human speech.
"I’m not being ironic about Buckley. You can’t call a liberal a fascist and then get together with him for beers, or the Facebook virtual equivalent.”
Funny, exactly what Buckley thought, which is why he took such offense at being called a crypto-fascist.
However, Goldberg’s idea of fascism is notoriously capacious. If his shoestring snaps, he thinks it is fascist. So it isn’t as if you can’t facebook with the guy. There are, no doubt, other reasons not to facebook with him, but huffiness about fascism surely can’t be one of them. Besides, he is behind the curve - Obama has gone back to being a communist rather than a fascist. The Rightwing equivalent of wwii new deal culture, which was the response to the invasion of Iraq, has petered out, and the Corner is probably not going to be the go-to place in the coming year for promoting armed secular democratization.
Sorry for being AWOL in this conversation so far. Internet etiquette insists otherwise, but I must admit--I’ve been 20,000 leauges under the weather and am meeting with my advisor to go over my cover letter tomorrow, so I’ve been negligent by necessity. (Especially when you consider my cover letter currently reads: “Am I not awesome? Hire me.")
captcha: (as I don’t even have energy enough to log in) “Saw 78,” coming soon to a theater near you.
Joe: “One stray thought on “truthiness”: it partly consists of one logical fallacy heaped on top of another, i.e. the fallacy of the undistributed middle, as Scott writes. In these cases a little bit of old-fashioned debating probably does help.”
Do you think so? I’d say something rather different: that whist ‘truth’ is a category amenable to rational analysis, ‘truthiness’ is an emotional and instinctual category and isn’t hospitable to rational rebuttal.
I agree that the remarks about SEK’s towering stature among bloggers seemed somewhat over the top, although I wouldn’t have pointed it out if someone else already hadn’t.
The question I want to ponder: is it worse to go a little overboard in the praise of a friend, or to be bitchy to the person praising?
Both are comparatively minor sins. The latter seems to be more typical “internet” behavior, unfortunately. Perhaps we could use a little more “sycophancy” toward people who have no power, such as SEK.
Adam Roberts,
I take your point; I would observe that “truthiness” often means the truth is lurking somewhere close by. For example, in the case of Americans against “big government,” the enduring appeal of that rallying cry has everything to do with Americans repressing the fact that big corporations do structure their lives.
Perhaps you have to both provide the logical refutation and a channel for the insistent awareness that something is wrong, something needs reform.
Adam Kotsko,
You know, I’ve been reading academic blogs for several years now. I’ve wandered all over the place, and honestly, Scott is one of my favorite academic bloggers. A lot of people who don’t know him also feel that way. If somebody came to me and asked me where to go to get a feel for academic blogging, I’d also nominate some of the stuff you write. I don’t think the heavy theory blogs produce that much of value, and they aren’t much fun.
My post, as I’m sure is obvious to anyone who actually read past the part about Facebook, expresses reservations about where Scott ends up. Nonetheless his post got me going, which is worth a lot, and I respect the scholarship behind it.
Bill,
The problem here is language about language (e.g. literature). If somebody dumbs down Heisenberg and quantum mechanics enough for me, sure, I can see that the observer cannot be separated from the observed, and I can worry over the death of Schrodinger’s cat. But what I can’t do is important work in the field of quantum mechanics. Whereas that seems to be exactly the desire with synopses of literary criticism and theory: to reduce things down to inarguable truisms or clichés, and then to believe that’s actually preparation for reading in depth.
However, Goldberg’s idea of fascism is notoriously capacious. If his shoestring snaps, he thinks it is fascist. So it isn’t as if you can’t facebook with the guy. There are, no doubt, other reasons not to facebook with him, but huffiness about fascism surely can’t be one of them. Besides, he is behind the curve - Obama has gone back to being a communist rather than a fascist. The Rightwing equivalent of wwii new deal culture, which was the response to the invasion of Iraq, has petered out, and the Corner is probably not going to be the go-to place in the coming year for promoting armed secular democratization.
This is a mixture of complacent and just plain wrong. Obama isn’t a communist. If the Corner now finds it politically inadvisable to continue believing in the Iraq War, that doesn’t undo the evidence of their deep gullibility and shortsightedness. The fact that Goldberg doesn’t understand the term “fascism,” yet felt empowered to write a book about it, is not something we can genially overlook just because it’s well known. It is still appalling, and I can assure you that Goldberg doesn’t think of himself as forgivably wrong—nor, now that his book has sold so nicely, will he ever. At most he’ll just shrug his shoulders, as he does over the bet about whether Americans would ultimately look back fondly on the Iraq War. Oh well! You win some and you lose some! It’s not me getting shipped to Baghdad, my punditry is too important to our nation!
If this is so, then reading “in depth” has no value to anyone but the critics who do it. Might as well be Stanley Fish.
BTW, language about language is built-in to language; Jakobson called it the metalingual function. Literary critics didn’t invent it in the 1960s.
"But what I can’t do is important work in the field of quantum mechanics. Whereas that seems to be exactly the desire with synopses of literary criticism and theory: to reduce things down to inarguable truisms or clichés, and then to believe that’s actually preparation for reading in depth.”
Is this really accurate for the majority of those who seek out “dumbed down” summaries of various theorists and their ideas?
Certainly at their worst synopses will provide lazy students/critics with a lot of buzzwords and pre-packaged position statements with which to fill out uninspired readings of literary texts. But I do think that there are plenty of people who have no intention of actually doing work in literary criticism who are curious about this stuff. Just like plenty of people read Brian Green’s “The Elegant Universe” with no intention of actually working in string theory.
Witness the popularity of M. Berube’s Theory Tuesday’s.
What AcademicLurker said.
"This is a mixture of complacent and just plain wrong. Obama isn’t a communist.”
Joe: I think roger was referring to the new right-wing narrative about Obama, which is that he’s a socialist/communist who wants to “spread the wealth around.” In other words, we liberals can be whatever the right fears most at any given time. (Maybe you were commenting on how this charge, too, is a complete fabrication and should not be shrugged at, and you’d certainly be right.)
Looking at this thread, I’m not sure how the subject turned to Hermeneutics for Dummies--if anything, the Jonah Goldbergs of the world seem like a good argument against a simplified manual to literary and cultural studies. (See SEK’s exchange with Goldberg, given in the talk linked above, e.g.) But it seems to me that the chief reason this isn’t a good idea is that it would amplify our cultural misunderstanding of what the humanities are supposed to produce: when are we going to roll up our sleeves and get something done? Bill talks about a book that would “present the results of academic literary criticism,” but obviously literary criticism does not have “results” in the scientific sense, and so a book that pretended that it does would not just be dumbing down the ideas of the field; it would be a complete distortion of the field itself. It’s no surprise that Bill, having evinced this misunderstanding, takes the inviability of such a project as evidence that “reading ‘in depth’ has no value to anyone but the critics who do it.” If you can’t get on the “Featured Nonfiction” table in Borders, it’s not a real field of study. I guess teaching the nation’s youth critical thinking isn’t value enough?
It’s also worth questioning whether the layman’s guides Bill is talking about are in themselves good, or at least not bad. Layman’s works have been successful in fields ranging from neurology (Oliver Sacks) to history (Jared Diamond), but the intellectually successful ones are those that deal with specific cases and theses, whereas those that purport to give a basic understanding of the entire field are successful in the commercial sense only, as they inevitably give off that unmistakable tang of condescending distortion. My experience is that those even moderately familiar with the relevant fields view works by people like Pinker and MIchio Kaku (Hyperspace) as fluffy irrelevancies that reduce complicated and interesting findings to “oh wow” sideshows. These books—like literary studies, apparently—are also of “no value,” except as shallow entertainment. I’m not anxious to bring literary studies up to speed in that regard.
tomemos: if anything, the Jonah Goldbergs of the world seem like a good argument against a simplified manual to literary and cultural studies
I’m not following you. Goldberg attended college in the eighties, which was, I believe, before undergraduates were regularly taught theory even in English departments. Moreover, Goldberg has regularly criticized his alma mater for being “liberal” (and typically so), so your comment makes little sense unless you’re saying teaching confirmed right-wingers liberal ideas just gives them ammunition against liberals—if he knew more about theory, he’d presumably be complaining that today’s professional discussion of literature is illegitimate (which he has not that I have seen, rather posting blanket defenses of “the traditional canon”).
I don’t agree with you about books for laypeople either. Don’t you think they at least serve a purpose in exposing the world of ideas to those who didn’t get exposed to this in college?
tomemos, I’m certainly not agreeing with Bill. But the failure to popularize is an important indicator for a field. My impression is that the people who can’t explain literary studies concepts can’t do so because they themselves don’t understand what they are talking about. (As in the recent Zizek collapse: all of a sudden he became just a little too clear, and his devotees suddenly realized that they understood what he meant, and didn’t agree. Worse yet, they suddenly understood each other.) Certainly any grad student in physics who helps to teach introductory college courses has to learn how tho explain quantum physics, relaativity, cosmology etc. in simple terms so that people with no background can understand the basics. Doing so is a core responsibility of any academic field.
So, no, they don’t have to be surveys or overviews, but there has to be something. Certainly that kind of thing is being done for literary studies in some sense by e.g. Harold Bloom. But the kind of thing he’s interested in is not an especially wide range of literary studies.
The rest of it—that literary studies doesn’t have “results”, or that it teaches critical thinking—is just excuses. Everything teaches critical thinking. And a “result” in literary studies is otherwise known as a reading.
Bianca: Sorry if I wasn’t clear, on both counts. My point about Goldberg wasn’t that we should keep him from discovering the flame of theory; it was the danger of actively disseminating “dumbed-down” versions of our conclusions. My evidence was Scott’s realization (in the post Joe linked to above) that, when Goldberg said he wanted a “Spencer expert,” he meant someone who would confirm for him the pre-packaged ideas that he already had about Spencer anyway, so that he wouldn’t have to read Spencer. Obviously not everyone is so disingenuous, but I do agree with Joe above that presenting “theory” as if there were some consensus would be actively misleading.
To clarify my point about layman’s reading: I greatly appreciate works that can introduce laymen to a field with an in-depth look at some case or aspect of that field. I mentioned Diamond and Sacks as examples, and there are many more. I do think that the “Superficial Introduction to My Entire Field” books tend to be awfully written and do harm rather than good, but I’d welcome counter-examples.
Rich:
Certainly any grad student in physics who helps to teach introductory college courses has to learn how to explain quantum physics, relaativity, cosmology etc. in simple terms so that people with no background can understand the basics. Doing so is a core responsibility of any academic field.
So, no, they don’t have to be surveys or overviews, but there has to be something.
I don’t know where I gave the impression that I was in favor of locking all the freshmen out of the English department. There is a world of difference between opposing all attempts to simplify and clarify, and opposing a “survey or overview,” which I thought is what we were talking about.
Is there not “something” right now? In fact, literary criticism is publishing its “results"--not just through Bloom, but also through critical biographies, collections of literary essays by Amis, Wood, and others, even straightforwardly successful books by scholars like Stephen Greenblatt. All of those succeed at advancing current ideas of literary studies without dumbing them down. I don’t see that standard being far exceeded in other fields, but maybe someone can correct me.
I happen to agree that many practitioners of criticism and theory have adopted obscurantism as a tactic and a sign of sophistication, and I decry this as much as anyone. That’s different from Bill’s position, which seemed to be that if you can’t wrap a field up in 250 pages, it’s just meaningless verbiage.
Here’s what I said in my first comment:
Has anyone attempted to lay out what we’ve learned about literature in the past 50 years? For surely we have learned a lot. And it would take more than one or three books and a dozen magazine articles to set that before the public. And, of course, there’s considerable contention within the profession about what we’ve learned. But that’s OK.
How did we get from that to tomemos’ guess:
. . . Bill’s position, which seemed to be that if you can’t wrap a field up in 250 pages, it’s just meaningless verbiage.
Bill, I think it happened roughly when you spoke approvingly of “dumbing down” ideas (very different from “simplifying” or “explaining"), or perhaps when you said that, if dumbing down those ideas wouldn’t work, then there’s no point to literary studies.
tomemos, I think that you and I probably disagree on nuances—I’m willing to settle for a greater degree of surveying. But note that the two books that you mention are for a popular audience, but aren’t really popularizations. Diamond, for instance, made a case in his book that is intended to be taken seriously in his field, and that doesn’t seem to be dumbed down from his academic publications. Sacks wrote a book of interesting case histories, if I remember rightly. I’d add Godel, Escher, Bach as a successful popular book of this sort—too idiosyncratic to really be a straightforward popularization of math.
I read Bill’s “sympathetic dumbing down” as basically synonymous with “simplifying” or “explaining”.
Getting back to political scholarship, I don’t think that another of Scott’s collisions, that with Jeff Goldstein, has been mentioned. Goldstein is a frothy right-blogger who justifies himself with regard to an odd, strong form of authorial intention, as when he insisted that if Ayers had ghostwritten Obama’s book, then Ayers “created” Obama in some sense. He’s really the best case study of specifically literary conceits being used for a right-wing agenda. Jonah Goldberg, in contrast, really did nothing more unusual than use shoddy research towards a pre-determined conclusion, which can happen in any field.
For what it’s worth, here’s how I introduced a reveiw-essay of Steven Mithen’s The Singing Neanderthals:
There are at least two reasons why an intellectual specialist writes for a general audience, including intellectual specialists from other disciplines. One is to contribute to civic life by explaining difficult but important subjects in a way that makes them accessible to the citizen who is curious about the world. Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct is a distinguished recent example of such a book. But a specialist in some discipline may also seek a broader canvas than is available within the guiding principles of the specialized journal article or professional monograph. Here I think of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel. When done well, a book of this type has a value for the specialist that the unadorned popularization, no matter how well done, does not have.
There are important problems that cannot be handled within confines of a single intellectual discipline. The origins of humankind is one of these problems. No matter which facet of that problem interests you, you inevitably find yourself looking at everything - or so it seems. Is music an offshoot of language or did a music-like activity evolve prior to language? In principle we could answer this question by traveling back in time and making direct observations. Unfortunately, that particular principle cannot be realized in the world as we know it, so we must instead approach human origins indirectly by gathering evidence from a wide variety of disciplines - archeology, physical and cultural anthropology, cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, and the neurosciences - and piecing it together. Such work entails a level of speculation that is incompatible with the publication demands of the specialist literature. It also demands a breadth of knowledge that is all but impossible. When done well, however, such a book contributes to specialist investigations by establishing a framework within which more detailed work can be done.
I regard my book on music, Beethoven’s Anvil, as being of this second type.
Rich - Sacks has written many books of interesting case histories. The book that put him on the map is Awakenings, which wasn’t a collection of case studies, but, rather, was about how new medication brought a bunch of all but abandoned chronically-ill patients back to the world, at least for awhile. That book was the basis of a motion picture of the same name, with Robin Williams playing the role of Sacks (though that’s not the name used in the movie).
Tomemos, Bill, Rich, bianca, AcademicLurker—thank you so much. This is a terrific conversation, and one I greatly prefer to the intemperate screeds I thought were going to dominate the thread.
Since the issue is a worthy one, and in some ways a tangent from the original post, I’m going to write a new post addressing it. I hope to be able to respond to your comments fully there.
roger, if tomemos is correct that I failed to see implicit quotation marks around your statement about Obama, apologies.
Adam Kotsko,
Surely it’s possible to praise a friend without pompously attributing a ridiculous degree of objective importance to their blog.
tomemos,
Perhaps Brian Greene might serve as an example of a much less “fluffy” writer than Michio Kaku that nevertheless aspires to give a basic understanding of the entire field.
Also, if Jared Diamond is the example to emulate, perhaps we just need more Harold Blooms.
Academic Lurker: Fair enough. I think some of the disagreement may be found in my feelings about Pinker’s book, which I think does “dumb down” the material in the pejorative sense, but I know a lot of people feel differently.
Tomemos, there are nuances to my praise of Pinker’s The Language Instinct. He operates within the broad compass of Chomskyian linguistics, though he prefers a non-Chomsky variant, whereas I long-ago decided that Chomskyian linguistics was deeply flawed. He’s more insistent on the intellectual search for “human nature” than I am and overplays the role of biological adaptedness and, correlatively, underplays cultural influence. These differences are not trivial.
However, I enjoyed The Language Instinct and have no problems recommending it to someone who wants to learn a bit about language. For that limited purpose it don’t see that my differences with Pinker are terribly consequential. Would I prefer that the layman read a book that presented views closer to my own? Sure, but I’m not aware of such a book, though one might well exist.
Would I recomment The Language Instinct to a literary critic who wanted to use linguistics in their professional work? That’s a very different matter. This critic is going to have to have some acquaintance with the technical literature, which means that they’re going to have to choose among competing schools. I’ve made my choice, but it wouldn’t be responsible of me to force that choice on another critic. I could see reading The Language Instinct as a quick and dirty starting point; but beyond that ....
On a different tack, think about writing an article, or a series of articles, or even a book aimed at convincing Pinker that, for example, deconstruction is not high-class nonsense. That is, think of Pinker as your audience for “literature for the layman” materials. To be sure, he’s an academic, and quite sophisticated about language; but he’s not a literary critic and I don’t know how much, if any, literary criticism he knows. It’s one thing to denounce deconstruction and postmodernism based on reading about the Sokol hoax and this that and the other; but has he read any of the best literary criticism that’s come out of those (and other contemporary) schools in the past 30 years? I doubt it.
I’ve been corresponding with him at bit over the last year - a correspondence that started on the Valve - and can almost imagine how one might plausibly approach him on, say, deconstruction. I say almost because, though my intellectual roots are in the the structualism and post-structuralism I learned at Hopkins in the late 1960s, I’d gone over to cognitivism (and other things) by the early 70s. Thus, though I was introduced to deconstruction back in the day, and took it seriously I never really made it mine. I’m quite sure there is an uncanny order there - rather than the chaos imagined by opponents - but I’m certainly not the one to frame that order in terms that would be plausible, if not convincing, to a Steven Pinker. However, if anyone wants to undertake such a task, I do think I’ve softened him up a bit.
Literary scholarship does not lend itself to vast summaries of “50 years of research.” Literary theory does.
This is why you can have decent guides to literary theory. But how can you summarize fifty years of new research on actual literature, across the board, in a single book? The research on Garcia Marquez is going to be different from the research on Chaucer.
So instead we get summaries of approaches (theory), of basic methodological foci. But it won’t tell you what critics think about, say, Kafka.
Incidentally, here’s a problem I do have with popularizations—though this is also an argument in favor of publishing even more of them, so I hope you’ll forgive the inconsistency: Journalists and their editors, like Wikipedia, need to be able to check “facts,” and to do that they need published sources or certified authorities willing to put unequivocal statements on the record. As soon as a popularization comes out, that becomes the truth for their purposes. If this book represents only a partial view of the field—which is probably inevitable—it raises a barrier against everyone else in the field, and also against their students, especially if they haven’t published their own ideas in any reasonably accessible format.
Also, I looked at my earlier comment and realized it could be misread. My statement about blogging was a generalization and I did not intend to imply that you guys write in an “ultra-personalized,” much less a sub-journalistic manner. Academic blogging seems to be a new animal that doesn’t fit the established categories well.