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Saturday, January 13, 2007
Brian Boyd Blasts Menand, Theory Too
Writing in The American Scholar, Brian Boyd takes aim at Theory. His immediate prompt is an article Louis Menand published in Profession 2005. Menand lamented the apparent lack of “younger people who think that the grownups got it all wrong” while at the same time, according to Boyd, “he rules out anyone challenging the position in which he and his generation have entrenched themselves.” And then Boyd gets nasty:
Until literature departments take into account that humans are not just cultural or textual phenomena but something more complex, English and related disciplines will continue to be the laughingstock of the academic world that they have been for years because of their obscurantist dogmatism and their coddled and preening pseudo-radicalism. Until they listen to searching criticism of their doctrine, rather than dismissing it as the language of the devil, literature will continue to be betrayed in academe, and academic literary departments will continue to lose students and to isolate themselves from the intellectual advances of our time.
Not everything in human lives is culture. There is also biology. Human senses, emotions, and thought existed before language, and as a consequence of biological evolution. Though deeply inflected by language, they are not the product of language. Language, on the contrary, is a product of them: if creatures had not evolved to sense, feel, and think, none would ever have evolved to speak.
But he also offers some positive doctrine. After endorsing Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitinism, Boyd observes:
A biocultural perspective on the human offers the strongest possible reasons to take into account artistic accomplishment in all areas and cultures, and the strongest reasons for considering local difference in terms of a genuinely broad understanding of species-wide commonalities and differences. It is the least likely to fix on an artistic canon within a particular language or region, a particular cultural level (“high” art versus “low,” say), a particular state of civilization. In a biocultural view, the Paleolithic and the present, the hunter-gatherer and the cosmopolitan, orature and opera are all part of our human repertoire.
Michael Robbins of Chicago replies to Boyd, and Boyd to him.
Comments
First of all, this business about “laughingstock” is misleading. In my experience, every academic department (or grouping of every type) gibes and jabs at those a) most like it (narcissism of minor difference) and b) those least like it. Funding situations at different places can change the weight behind some of these punches, but the English Department is not the punchdrunk palooka.
I also question the use of “human” to modify “senses, emotions, and thought.”
It’s one of the more eccentric critiques of Derrida I’ve seen. But I’m all ears about the “animal turn” in humanities (I assume someone’s already made the bestialities joke) that Boyd announces here:
“I have contributed to a forthcoming volume called Knowing Animals (Brill, 2007), edited by Derrida scholar Laurence Simmons and animal studies scholar Philip Armstrong. Introducing the volume, the editors proclaim an “animal turn” during the last two decades “comparable in significance to the ‘linguistic turn’ that revolutionized humanities and social sciences disciplines from the mid-twentieth century onwards.”
Gotta catch the wave. Time for a Valve symposium?
An online parliment of fowls?
The Weblog is way ahead of the blogical curve, as always, with its by now ancient reading group on Agamben’s The Open: Man and Animal.
Also, don’t I remember something in Berube’s book about how English departments aren’t actually losing students?
About the English department losing students thing: I’m almost positive the citation for this comes from an Academe article by Menand (wheels within wheels!). Anyway, Menand cites a report that shows English majors have flagged since about 1960. The 60s being the advent of theory, it’s not too difficult to blame the numbers on the French. The problem with this argument, though, (and Berube points this out somewhere) is that although English majors dipped after 1960, they rebounded in the 70s and 80s. Also, the social sciences took a similar dive during this era. If I remember correctly, Berube speculates that the fall had something to do with the creation of vocational majors like business and engineering.
The animal thing: doesn’t Eric Santner also do this animal stuff? Although I think he works on the Agamben-Heidegger axis, not the biological aestheticism Boyd calls for here.
Indeed Santner does this animal stuff—I am even currently taking a course with him on the topic, believe it or not. (His final loyalty seems to be psychoanalysis rather than Heidegger.)
Interesting. Creaturely Life has now moved a spot or two up the towering stack of books-to-be-read.
I once saw Brian Boyd give possibly the worst talk I have ever seen. And he’s also of the opinion, if I remember right, that the poem in Pale Fire is one of the glories of Western literature. If I were him I’d be careful throwing around the term ‘laughing-stock.’
It’s amazing he can see through all the obscurantist dogmatism and realize it’s all pseudo-radicalism. I tried once, but was too tired to continue.
As for the animal turn, my cat has been saying shit like that for years.
Erstwhile po-co critic (_The Empire Writes Back_, _Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies_) and former colleague Helen Tiffin is writing a book on animals and “the species boundary.”
Greetings, everyone. I’m new (to posting) here.
Theory was pretty much Seventies amd later in the US. The Tel Quel people were doing their work in French in the 60s. Sontag appeared in 1963. At that time theory was structuralism, Adorno, Marcuse, and McCluhan, and it had a buzz but was by no means dominant. A lot of people who got tenure during the 60s and 70s were into theory, and the dominance in undergrad teaching came gradually.
I remember from the 60s some of class-oriented, somewhat populist Marxist 60s research programs which I think mostly withered and died as theory became more important.
Whoops, meant to mention: thanks for the sources on the myth of the disappearing English major, which help in ongoing arguments I have with the likes of Boyd.
First, I still scratch my head wondering just what such an empirically dubious claim is supposed to prove. . . (something foggy about “relevance”?)
Second, that that claim is routinely summoned in “exhortations” to literary scholars to purge themselves of theory—or, more specifically, a narrow variety of French-authored deconstruction (Lacan, Derrida, and the like)—makes little sense. That is, I’m with Michael Robbins, in his assessment of Boyd’s vision of theory as being “frozen” in the 80s. (Am I allowed to indulge in pop culture references here? I was going to write “sometime around Madonna’s second album"). There is no warrant, rhetorically speaking, to relate current English enrollments to that brand of theory. Indeed the only devout acolytes I see of Lacan and Derrida these days are graduate students, having only just read them for the first time, to revel in la jouissance. We’ve moved on (as will the graduate students)—that’s what we do—just as the general demographic of the university has shifted (though not in the ways, or for the reasons, these critics perceive).
In a related vein (though he doesn’t target English professors, just the professoriate as a whole), anyone read that Peter Berkowitz piece on “liberal education”?
Btw, this is Gwynn Dujardin (aka Jardiniere). Didn’t realize my choice of login would appear as my comment tag.
The polemics on both of sides of this seem flawed to me, so I can’t wholeheartedly support either. I will say, though, that what Brian Boyd seems to be getting at is a specifically evolutionary—i.e. science-centered—view of biological influence on culture. That means that any bit of literary theory that addresses animals in some way does not necessarily qualify as being part of what Boyd seems to be writing about.
Michael Robbins’ statement, a classic Theory huff-and-puff over how much Boyd is supposed to have read, doesn’t add much. I suspect that it would be interesting to read Bruno Latour on this issue.
I thought Boyd’s book on Pale Fire was good; and as for glories of western literature, there are many rooms, etc.
On philosophizing about animals and the man/animal divide-that-is-not-one, try Coetzee’s “Elizabeth Costello” (or the mini-book that preceded it, “The Lives of Animals").
Laughingstock is about right. It may be that those who secured tenure before the laughingstock era can deny the state of affairs --they’re invested in doing so for obvious reasons --but the profession to anyone other than the self-dealing sinecurist is obviously in total shambles. It is a laughingstock, if you are even a step removed from it; no one, but no one, takes it seriously, nor should they.
But that’s just, like, your opinion, Steve. English departments aren’t simply cultural and textual phenomena; they’re more complex.
Now if you could somehow show that laughing at English professors is a biologically determined response brought on by our primitive ancestors’ need to identify small, quick-moving animals in the brush of Early Pleistocene forests, you’d have something.
Ah, yes. The species divide indeed.
Maybe English departments should start charging the other departments for the service of attracting unfavorable attention to themselves and away from other departments.
True—chairs could be awarded to those individuals who generate the most, or most negative, symbolic capital. The “Ezra Pound Professorship of Antagonistic Studies” and the like.
In all seriousness, though, the comment is an interesting one for pointing out how English departments *are “taken seriously” inasmuch as they are the focal point, or filter, for “the idea of the University,” in all its vicissitudes.
Steve ("Roger" was so forward, I suppose I will be), could you clarify, from whatever “step” you’re on, what constitutes “total shambles”? To what standard(s) should we hold the English department, and what would you propose we do to rectify our failings in that regard? (that is, if Boyd’s suggestion to talk to the animals doesn’t wash)
It strikes me there’s a connection between this thread, Menand’s piece, and that of John Holbo’s, on Rorty and his Critics, in Eric Lott’s recent book on the “Disappearing Liberal Intellectual” (which takes on Rorty, no?) . . .
Shambles: 4. Archaic A meat market or butcher shop.
[From Middle English shamel, shambil, place where meat is butchered and sold, from Old English sceamol, table, from Latin scabillum, scamillum, diminutive of scamnum, bench, stool.]
Antagonistic Studies? Sign me up.
How funny to read the comments of Stu Burrows commenting on Brian Boyd’s failure to wow him while he was in the audience for a Boyd lecture. How funny because Burrows was, well, in the damn audience. What an easy place from which to sit and throw tomoatoes. Mr. Burrows, I am quite certain, will spend the rest of his natural life in the audience. Can’t wait for that volume of Stu Burrows poetry - I am sure the publishing deal is right around the corner.