Spring 2003
Volume 29, Number 3
To restate for the record the main point of my essay, I argued that the alignment of the two cultures with positions on the political spectrum was historically determined but philosophically (or epistemologically) unnecessary, and that the consequence of now asserting that political positions follow necessarily from epistemological orientations has been to prolong needlessly the conflict of the faculties. While Newfield concedes that relations between the sciences and literary and cultural studies ought to be better, and that "better would include relative equality based on mutual respect for the genuine differences between scientific and cultural orders of knowledge," this bow to a possibly irenic relation of difference without opposition turns out to be only a feint. Difference slides quickly into opposition, and opposition into a not-so-subtle claim for the ultimate moral and political superiority of literary and cultural studies:
I'll suggest that improved contact between the humanities and the various sciences, which Guillory rightly seeks, should proceed from heightened rather than reduced differences between them. LCS [literary and cultural studies] grasps many features of the human world that science, for all its strengths, cannot, and improving this work will require independence and confidence in our ways of knowing the world, ways that are interpretive, narratological, identity-based, anti-reductionist, holistic, relational, political--in short, non-scientific and yet accurate, powerful seeings of the otherwise unseen.
Are we not invited to infer from this litany that science is conversely to be regarded as, among other things, reductionist, partial, anti-relational, apolitical? What else can science mean when nonscience is described in these antithetical terms, as the other of science?
Now it was not my intention to minimize the differences between, on the one hand, the natural sciences, and on the other, the literary and cultural disciplines, but rather to argue that disciplines define equally formal modes of producing knowledge about the world at the same time that they employ very different methodologies. I will return toward the end of my rejoinder to the question of these methodological differences, and why I would describe them very differently from Newfield. In the meantime I am more than willing to admit that my recourse to the name of science in order to evoke the formal equality of disciplines obviously incited a certain anxiety of assimilation, or indifference, which had quite the opposite effect of the one I desired. If this nominative choice was a rhetorical misstep--and perhaps it was--it nonetheless revealed more starkly than ever how provocative the name of science is for those of us who work in the humanities, and how much our disciplinary identity remains dependent on a conception of nonscience that implies just those tonally and substantively grandiose items in Newfield's list, culminating in his "powerful seeings of the unseen"--in other words, a "power" intrinsically finer, greater than that of science, a visionary power to which science, with its microscopes and telescopes, can never hope to aspire, a power that calls into question the power that is all too often identified as science, the very power that seems to reign so arrogantly within the university as without.
I remain doubtful, then, that celebrating the humanities as proudly and affirmatively nonscience is really a non-militant alternative to what Newfield believes is the unacceptable choice I would enjoin upon the cultural disciplines between opposition to science and self-recognition as science. If the name of science is so much a sticking point here, I would happily accept an alternative, and lose the element of rhetorical provocation; but I am afraid that the argument of my essay would remain incompatible with Newfield's conception of the cultural disciplines as nonscience, which I believe simply reasserts con allegro the spontaneous philosophy of the critics.1 Newfield rejects the latter concept as nothing but "dissing" literary and cultural studies. As I use the term, however, spontaneous philosophy is not the name of disciplinary practice as such but of the discourse of self-description and legitimation produced alongside practice, even when the terms of this discourse are woven, as they sometimes are, into the text of practice. It is this legitimation discourse I proposed in my essay to analyze and critique, inasmuch as it expresses the misrecognition by cultural critics of what they do, sometimes even when they do it well. My point, then, is not that literary and cultural critics never actually succeed in producing knowledge about their objects of study but that this knowledge is habitually and disastrously redescribed in naively skeptical, antirealist, or relativist terms in contexts of disciplinary self-explanation and defense. The consequences of this redescription are manifest in too many institutional contexts for me to enumerate, but these consequences can be called instantly to mind by anyone who thinks just a little about the status of the humanities in the modern university.
The fact that the natural and social sciences seem compelled to identify with a conception of hard science defined by a mathematico-experimental method that does not begin to cover the spectrum of methods in these disciplines, while the humanities seem compelled to identify with an antithetical conception of nonscience, is evidence enough of spontaneous philosophy at work across the disciplines. It was certainly not my suggestion that the humanities now identify with the science that is implied by Newfield's nonscience. I would have thought it impossible, for example, that anyone could conclude from a careful reading of my essay that I am proposing the humanities be remodeled along the lines of the natural or even the social sciences. And yet what else but this reading can produce such dismay upon my pronouncing the name of science in a tone other than the one reserved for jeering at the obvious villain of the story? Newfield speculates that my disposition to favor science might be traced to a longing for the good old days of theory, for a new round of "methodological rigor"; but I believe that I am on record as rather critical of fetishized notions of rigor.2 In any case Newfield is fairly sure that if not a rigorist fantasy, then some version of scientism or positivism lurks at the heart of my argument: "As far as I can tell, Guillory thinks postmodernism and cultural studies have almost completely isolated LCS from an epistemological mainstream comprised of the sanctioned and influential academic methods of the natural and social sciences." It would be tedious indeed for me to rehearse the all too brief and inconclusive account of positivism between Comte and Quine I have already given in my essay (John Guillory, "The Sokal Affair and the History of Criticism," Critical Inquiry 28 [Winter 2002]: 500-8), and which returns with a certain alienated majesty in Newfield's triumphant tale of how classical realism was defeated in the twentieth century; but suffice it to say that I cannot imagine what literary and cultural studies would look like if they were restricted solely to the methods of the natural and social sciences. Such a positivist proscription is certainly not what I meant by complementarity, the notion that different methodologies for producing knowledge are not inherently conflictual or mutually exclusive.3
In a similar way it strikes me as highly ironic that I should be arraigned for purveying binarisms such as realism and antirealism, when it was my hope to put this tired debate to bed for a while, or at least to recover its interest at another level by contextualizing the debate in the history of philosophy.4 To be candid, a virtue conceded to me by Newfield, I would probably not be much interested in what most literary critics have to say about the philosophical problem of realism; the survey Newfield offers of classical realism and its successors only confirms my lack of interest. But what does show itself to be the case from his announcement that such conceptual oppositions as the ones I cite have been decisively surpassed in the post-realism of recent literary and cultural studies (how could I not have heard!) is that self-congratulation is the worst feature of spontaneous philosophy--as it is of discipline formation generally, for spontaneous philosophy is not peculiar to the cultural disciplines.
Let me underscore here that I do not make any particular claims for my own philosophical views on the question of realism. The confusion about whether we are actually talking philosophy here is evident in Newfield's uncertainty about whether I am a realist or an antirealist, whether I am calling for some kind of realism or just performatively contradicting an antirealism my historicist style of argument would seem to endorse. But the truth is that I am not playing this game at all; if I were, I would have written a very different sort of essay. For what it is worth, I do not think that much is to be gained philosophically at this date by staking out a general position either realist or antirealist. My own interests are oriented much more to the kind of work being done by Stephen Toulmin, Charles Taylor, or Ian Hacking, that is, to the project of historicizing the perennial problems of philosophy, not in order to do away with philosophy but in order to unblock certain disciplinary impasses. Realism and antirealism espoused at the highest level of epistemological generality do not seem to me very useful positions to take in advance of specifying some way of talking about categories of objects, along with some particular object about which we would like to know. Consider what it would mean to establish in advance a realism or antirealism that would be equally adequate for all of the following objects: igneous rocks, God, adolescents, the color red, dementia praecox, poverty, a Sidney sonnet, desire, chaos, algorithms, dinosaurs, freedom, disability, status, c sharp minor, capitalism, gamma rays, honor, the Renaissance, democracy, race, menopause, beauty, foreigners, the culture industry, nations, grammar, mitochondria, alienation, global warming, disciplines . . .5
In the case of literary and cultural studies, the obsession with binarisms such as realism and antirealism--an obsession which I do not see as having lost any of its vigor--may lead us to overlook a social rather than philosophical binarism, one that sadly pervades our beleaguered field: us versus them. The long-term crisis of the humanities that ushered cultural criticism back onto the stage (the recovery of this history was the main burden of my essay) has driven us to self-identify as the discipline that critiques all other disciplines.6 This grandiosity, as I tried to show, is the turning-around-into-its-opposite of institutional marginalization. Huddled together in a disciplinary bunker, solidarity has become all important for us, and disciplinary self-critique is excluded by the very conditions of disciplinary self-identification. Any attempt at such critique will be stigmatized as an attack by them, the Lynn Cheneys and the Alan Sokals. You are either with us or against us. I hope that I will be understood when I say that it should not be necessary for me to publicly repudiate Cheney or Sokal, much less the savage horde of right-wing pundits, in order to raise some questions about the wisdom of how literary and cultural studies advertises its project.
Since the greatest impediment to the kind of disciplinary self-critique I have undertaken is the perception that this critique is nothing more than a complaint about the politics of humanist academics, let me confront this question now head on. Politics is indeed an ambiguous term, as Newfield declares, perhaps especially so when an accusation is made to the effect that some practice that is supposed to be inherently non-political has been politicized. Let us begin by allowing that if particular practices could really be segregated completely from the domain of political action and meaning, then the charge of politicization would never arise, or would seem ludicrous on the face of it. But insofar as any and every practice has a context that includes the political, then any and every practice stands in some relation to the political. This being so, invoking the political in the course of contextualizing cultural artifacts and practices would be warranted by the very nature of social being, and by the inevitable interrelation of social domains. It has never been my position, in theory or practice, that any reference to the political should be excluded from the domain of interpretation; but setting a work or practice in relation to the political domain depends upon specifying the political; otherwise there is no relation. Newfield's conception of the political goes much farther than an aspect of social context, however; for him the name of politics might just as well stand in for (in whose usage it is not entirely clear) the idea of context itself: "politics also refers to the social, historical, and psychological contexts in which knowledge is generated, and is then little more than an alarmist synonym for human context." Now politics in this sense has no specificity at all, and to say that some practice had been politicized would be meaningless. Obviously I do not mean by politics simply a concern with "human context," since it is impossible to say what could be excluded by the latter concept. For this reason whatever reservation I may have about how the cultural disciplines invoke the name of politics does not amount to an objection to contextualization as such, or to the specification of the political as belonging to the context of any given human work or practice. But let me be even more candid here: it is highly disingenuous for Newfield to suggest that politics or politicization is just the word that some people (like Guillory) use to object to the concern of literary and cultural studies with "human context." I hardly need to demonstrate that the political aims of criticism have been ubiquitously foregrounded in literary and cultural studies of our time; it is rather late now to withdraw this word from circulation within the cultural disciplines, or to pretend that it was never much used by these disciplines anyway. Newfield suggests that I would have done better to refer to "socially-oriented cultural studies," or "context-based cultural studies," and admit that this is what I must be condemning by the term "politically motivated cultural studies"; but is cultural studies itself ready to give up its invocation of the name of the political for the unsexy hyphenations proposed by Newfield?7
Would it not be more honest to admit that politics has indeed come to mean something universal like context in current disciplinary usage without ceasing thereby to express particular bien pensant political motives? The universalization of the category of the political to include any and every aspect of social context is in fact a strategic maneuver of literary and cultural studies, one that permits contextualization of any sort to evoke the political, and thus to serve as the basis for claims about the political efficacy of criticism. By contrast I would wish to preserve different kinds of context in their relative distinction from each other and from a universalized category of the political (so, I imagine, would sociologists, historians, and psychologists!), though not on behalf of some notion of a contextless realm of science, or a contextless realm of culture. It is only within the truth of literary and cultural studies that politics has the status of functional equivalence to a concern with context as such, and only within this truth that the accusation of politicization coming from without can be construed as a "melodramatic epithet for the contextual knowledge that includes virtually all non-reductive knowledge of human affairs." Indeed, so far am I from opposing "contextual knowledge" that I was determined to raise the historical question of how literary and cultural studies came to be invested in the category of the "political" as the name for contextualization as such. (This much I have learned from the "strong program!") My answer to this question was not to lament that "the humanities was overrun by the Left in the 1960s," a misrepresentation that hints darkly at my supposed political motives, but that the foregrounding of the political heralded the return of a version of what was once known as cultural criticism. The history of this discourse demands a sociological mode of analysis in order to make sense of it, precisely because cultural criticism expressed at various historical moments both left and right versions of political opposition to modernity. The foregrounding of the political motive of criticism (or politicization sociologically considered) has been a recurrent strategy of cultural criticism, and this strategy of deliberate foregrounding is what I meant by a "politically motivated cultural studies." The difference between the political in Newfield's universalized sense and the charge of politicization is only the difference between two ways of looking at the same strategy, from within and approvingly versus from without and censoriously. But there is a third way, sociologically, that considers the strategy of politicization in the context of recurrent opposition by cultural critics to aspects of modern society, or to the total system of modern society.8
It was thus disingenuous again to assert that I reduce the epistemological stance of literary and cultural studies to an expression of its politics.9 There is a sense, of course, in which a certain kind of contextualizer might seek to reduce the antirealism of the critics to an expression of their political motives; but that is precisely not the claim I make. I am interested rather in contextualizing the reduction of politics to epistemology, that is, the reduction of specific political positions to the necessary consequences of good or bad epistemology. The way to explain this reduction is certainly not simply to reverse it by claiming that the epistemological orientation of the cultural disciplines must be an expression of its left politics. I was at pains to show that there has been no long-term correlation between epistemological positions and political positions, and therefore, one must conclude, no valid recourse to an analysis that reduces one to the other. Historical sociology posits rather a mode of determination, within which the particular correlation between, say, epistemological and political positions is determined by conditions of a particular time and place.10
It was still more disingenuous to attempt to explain away the current expression of this correlation in the cultural disciplines, the prevalent belief in the necessary political implications of epistemological positions, by asserting that antirealist cultural analysts could not possibly subscribe to this notion, as their antirealism would steer them infallibly to "see contingency where realists see necessity." I understand what Newfield means when he suggests that the very concept of necessity has been banished at the level of valorized terms from the lexicon of literary and cultural studies, but I am not at all convinced that practice within the discipline is so coherent or consistent as to abide by this proscription. Newfield has forgotten here the occasion of the essay, the Sokal affair, and the challenge it posed by reflecting back to cultural criticism an image of itself as a belief system. We should not expect from this doctrinal thought anything like the consistency that Newfield attributes to his post-realists. Hence it should not surprise us that the discipline's spontaneous account of its practice asserts a necessary link between epistemology and politics, when at another level it is nominally committed to the contingency of everything. What else can explain Sokal's success in getting his compendium of postmodernist cliches accredited, if not the hardening into dogma of a theoretical perspective that otherwise saw itself as infinitely nimble, pragmatic, never in the place where its accusers thought it was? The vulnerability of this unselfknowing dogmatism to ironic flattery was, as I noted, the deepest embarrassment of the Sokal affair.
The very same problem troubles the interpretive holism that is the methodological cornerstone of the spontaneous philosophy of the critics. It is not enough to say that "we can restate interpretive holism as the interpretive dimension of knowledge about the world outside the text." Leaving to one side the objection that it might be better to say that the world is not outside the text, nor the text outside the world, I will assert that the unchallenged use of these conventional terms betrays a failure to restrain a universalism that postmodern theory would certainly condemnÑat the level of theory. The happy holism espoused by Fish, for example, would be hard put to find a dimension of knowledge about the world that was not interpretive, and this means much more than saying that there is an "interpretive dimension" even within scientific practice, a proposition it would be foolish to deny. If we do not go on, however, to specify the diverse modes of interpretation, and the diverse ways in which knowledge about the world might be discovered, then we have simply reasserted a universalism that is otherwise denounced as the besetting evil of Enlightenment styles of thought. It hardly seems legitimate to exempt interpretation from the law against conceptual monopoly, any more than it is legitimate to allow politics to stand in for human context as such, that is, for everything. Universalism reappears in this discourse as the unwitting elevation of particular disciplinary techniques for coming to know particular objects in the world into a universal method. I am as opposed to this universalism when it emanates from literary and cultural studies as I am when it emanates from the natural sciences, where spontaneous philosophy descends, as I pointed out, from a debased positivism. In the final section of his response, Newfield sets out an alternative framework for the project of literary and cultural studies, or nonscience. I would like now to look briefly at these remarks, some of which I am in sympathy with, though I will also propose that Newfield's Lyotardian argument is a last-ditch attempt to update the project of cultural criticism. (I make some allowance here for the fact that Newfield's proposals are necessarily sketchy, and beg the reader's indulgence on the same grounds for my counterproposals.) Newfield derives from Lyotard a set of terms that permit him first to reattach the motive of emancipation to science itself, via its sometimes acknowledged and sometimes unacknowledged reliance on this narrative for the purposes of legitimation. Truth itself belongs to an emancipation narrative, at the least as the emancipation of mankind from error. The dual modern liberation from the ancien regime and ancient error are set against the postmodern emphasis on the value of optimization or efficiency, a value that is expressed more openly in the domains of technology and of the economy than in science (as an enterprise concerned with knowledge or truth) or in the humanities (as the inheritor of the old narrative of human emancipation). Newfield argues that Lyotard really opposes the postmodern order because he objects to "the optimization narrative" on behalf of preserving "non-economic ways of knowing." In this account, the two cultures are possible allies in the struggle against the norm of efficiency that emanates from the domains of technology and economy (now of course thoroughly overlapping), and against attempts to subordinate all knowledge work to a crudely economic bottom line.
It would be difficult to disagree with the general line of this argument, and I am thus more than happy to concur that it is tremendously important to recognize and resist the pressure placed upon scientists, scholars, and teachers to justify their labor solely in terms of immediate instrumentality, either as technological payoff or as bureaucratic efficiency in credentializing masses of university students. In fact, I would argue that this is indeed a common ground of the sciences and the humanities in their institutional relations, since it is no more obvious that studying the migratory patterns of monarch butterflies has some technological payoff than studying the development of the sonnet in sixteenth-century England. Knowledge should be defended for its own sake, not solely for its instrumental benefits, because it is the object of a human desire, the desire to know, a desire which ought not to be frustrated any more than any other human desire.
About this much Newfield and I would, I suspect, agree. So where does the conflict of the faculties come in, or back in? To his credit Newfield does not go all the way with the cultural critics of yesteryear, who would condemn optimization outright, in favor of something more high-minded and resolutely noninstrumental. Here it would be helpful to recall that what Newfield calls optimization has a long prehistory by several other names going back to Bentham's utilitarianism and earlier; likewise resistance to optimization has a precursor in cultural criticism's repudiation of utilitarianism. Postmodernism in this sense would be the triumph of the utilitarian strand of modernity, minus of course the emancipation narrative. Analogously postmodern cultural critics would play a role like that of precursors such as Carlyle or Marx, reasserting the value of the narrative of emancipation (whether defined in cultural or political terms) against the norm of efficiency. While Newfield allows that "there is always much to be said in favor of efficiency," he does not say any of this himself. He does, however, have much to say against this norm, and in favor of those disciplines, specifically literary and cultural studies, he believes are uniquely associated with the values of freedom and creativity that dispose one to resist the narrative (or demand) of optimization: "But LCS is not so susceptible to the subordination to optimization, for optimization depends on a form of creativity that is central to LCS." That is, if I may complete this thought, not so susceptible as some other disciplines. What is it about those other disciplines--can these be any but the sciences?--that makes them more susceptible than the cultural disciplines to the demand for optimization? Further, why is optimization itself paradoxically dependent on a "form of creativity" that is the special province of literary and cultural studies?
There is, I must admit, something obscure to me in the concept of creativity Newfield employs, but its aim is nonetheless fairly clear.11 The creativity upon which the sciences depend in order to produce the new knowledge which in turn renders them "susceptible" to the demand for optimization is the very creativity that in literary and cultural studies somehow "escapes optimization." The cultural disciplines, as the guardians of freedom and creativity, thus become the unacknowledged legislators in the kingdom of knowledge: "There is no new knowledge that does not proceed through emancipation." If this is true, it is indeed mysterious that these same cultural disciplines have been marginalized in relation to the scientific disciplines that secretly depend upon them. But is it really necessary to locate what Newfield calls freedom and creativity in the cultural disciplines as their constitutive principles?
It should be evident now why I would want to call this characterization of the disciplines a version of the old cultural criticism--notwithstanding its invocation of Lyotard--and a renewal of the conflict of the faculties as well.12 Newfield thinks of the cultural disciplines as the curators of creativity. If the humanities achieve their identity by keeping this sacred flame, it follows that they must refrain from putting it to base uses themselves; that is, they must refrain from producing the kind of knowledge that would be "susceptible" to optimization. What kind of knowledge, then, do we in the humanities produce? Although Newfield insists that the cultural disciplines produce "relevant knowledge," it is difficult to determine from his argument the contents of this knowledge. The terms of his analysis give us little alternative but to conclude that this knowledge must be defined chiefly as critique itself, as in the critique of optimization. Hence for Newfield the knowledge content of the cultural disciplines as the critique of optimization converges with their social identity as the disciplines that resist optimization. Because optimization is what critique discovers as the postmodern condition of knowledge, this critical knowledge is the only knowledge truly safe from optimization, and the cultural disciplines are likewise the only disciplines so immune: "Literary and cultural studies provide the standpoint where we are not restricted to the economic narrative of our own existence."
Standing on this point, I would say, the cultural disciplines have a wonderful view but do not command much territory. The reason for this is that the point of view of critique is insufficient in itself to define or constitute a discipline. I shall only pause here over the position I argued more fully in the Sokal paper, that every discipline must produce critique, which should not be the exclusive business of one discipline or group of disciplines. I will conclude by remarking two consequences for the humanistic disciplines of construing the primary knowledge content of these disciplines as critique. Let me preface these remarks by stressing once again that the choice is not between knowledge or critique, science or politics.13 It is always my assumption that the relation between disciplinary knowledge or practice and the political cannot be specified in advance, either by the notion of politicization or conversely by the notion of an ideally apolitical practice.
The first of the two consequences I would like to remark should be very obvious: that the humanistic disciplines are impoverished as discourses of knowledge by defining themselves in primarily critical terms. Literary and cultural studies are not in a good position to defend the integrity of knowledge as an end in itself against the encroachment of market measures, or norms of efficiency and optimization, if they refuse to claim the status of positive knowledge, on the grounds that such knowledge is inherently "susceptible" to optimization. The humanistic disciplines might contribute more directly to the defense of disciplinary knowledge by drawing a closer analogy between scholarship as knowledge and the many examples of scientific knowledge that must be similarly enjoyed as the gratification of a desire to know, without answering necessarily to any further demand. This is why I argue for the coequality of the sciences and the humanities as disciplinary forms for producing knowledge, and against defining the disciplines according to the distinction between knowledge and the critique of knowledge.
The second consequence will initially seem to be inconsistent with the first, but I do not believe that it is. It can be expressed simply in the statement that the humanistic disciplines need more than anything else right now to legitimize themselves in terms of optimization or, more generously, social benefit. The sciences by and large have been very successful in justifying their disciplines by means of a notion such as performativity or optimization; but if it has become evident that the sciences that live by this justification can also die by it, this does not mean that the legitimation narrative of optimization is altogether tainted and should be discarded. Social benefit can be defined far more broadly than in terms of technological payoff or market measures and without necessarily excluding these terms from that wider definition. The natural and social sciences will have to find their way now in our harsh neoliberal society to a better formulation of social benefit, at the same time that they must not yield any ground on the claim for knowledge as an end in itself. These two legitimation strategies are not incompatible. They simply refer to different aspects of human reality, to the pleasure of knowledge and to its benefit.
The situation in the humanistic disciplines is somewhat more complex, but not entirely dissimilar. Here it is very urgent that we learn to understand and advertise the knowledge we produce in terms of a wider conception of social benefit, not excluding the benefit of that knowledge in the market itself (that is, the market for intellectual labor, the market to which the university most directly relates). The difference of literary and cultural study from natural and social science is the difference specific to its work, and its virtue is relative to its proper work. Knowing how to read shrewdly and write well is no small accomplishment, and is in fact much more valued in the market than we have begun to acknowledge. While we must stand with the sciences in asserting the value of our scholarship as knowledge, regardless of its immediate instrumental benefit, we must also stand for ourselves, and recognize the social value of the specific kinds of knowledge we produce, the knowledge of literary and cultural history, the knowledge of how to use language in the most effective way, along with many other intellectual virtues which are insufficiently dignified by calling them skills. It is an unfortunate consequence of the legitimation narrative current in our field that it should dispose us to undermine our best interests by consistently failing to recommend the very virtues presupposed by the enterprise of critique.
1. Neither the French science, as in les sciences humaines, nor the German Wissenschaft produce the same lexical dilemma as our word knowledge, although having such terms available in English would not in itself be sufficient to overcome the two cultures problem, or its institutionalized form in the system of the disciplines. The absence of a concept between that of science, signifying in ordinary use the natural sciences and secondarily the social sciences, and the concept of knowledge, governing a semantic field inclusive of many non-disciplinary ways of knowing, is more of a condition in the Anglo-American context for the two cultures debate than we perhaps would like to admit. Knowledge is unfortunately inadequate to describe a disciplinary field, without considerable qualification. Social etiquette, for example, is a kind of knowledge, in that one learns and therefore knows a set of behaviors (savoir faire) such as table manners. This knowledge is very different from the knowledge of table manners as object of disciplinary study, in the work of, say, the sociologist Norbert Elias.
2. For my previous comments on fetishized notions of rigor, see John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago, 1993), pp. 231-65.
3. Here I am only seconding a position expressed by many historians and social scientists, for example, Carlo Ginzberg's critique of what he calls the "Galilean Paradigm" (Carlo Ginzberg, "Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm," Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi [Baltimore, 1989], p. 106). For another succinct statement, permit me to quote Isaiah Berlin:
Those are Utopian who place excessive faith in laws and methods derived from alien fields, mostly from the natural sciences, and apply them with great confidence and somewhat mechanically. The arts of life--not least of politics--as well as some among the humane studies turn out to possess their own criteria of success and failure. Utopianism, lack of realism, bad judgement here consist not in failing to apply the methods of natural science, but, on the contrary, in overapplying them. Here failure comes from resisting that which works best in each field. [Isaiah Berlin, The Sense of Reality: Studies in Ideas and their History, ed. Henry Hardy (New York, 1996), pp. 51-52]
It is a wonder to me that this position can be understood either as one I oppose, or as endorsing the spontaneous philosophy of the critics.
4. It was my design, the reader will recall, to replace the debate on realism with an account of positivism, as the organizing term for the conflict of the faculties in the modern era. Positivism cannot of course be equated with classical realism, which may or may not be espoused by avowedly positivist thinkers.
5. In his recent book, Historical Ontology (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), Ian Hacking argues for reconstructing historical styles of thought before pronouncing on the reality or irreality of objects from some timeless epistemological perspective. Hacking emphasizes that his position is neither an antirealism nor a relativism. It is a much more mundane view of our world and the ways in which we come to know it, which I have attempted to indicate in my epigraph from Aristotle, following Hacking in recognizing Aristotle as a philosopher of mundanity. A historical understanding of philosophical position-taking would restore philosophical debates to their appropriate contexts or objects, as well as their greater or lesser interest or persuasiveness. The attempt to universalize one or the other position in most binarist debates usually marks a forgetting of the historical context of inquiry, or what I am here calling mundanity. Sometimes, it must be allowed, this forgetting is the necessary corollary of a powerful philosophical project, which defers by its brilliance the historical contextualization to which it must eventually submit. But more often rigid adherence to an epistemological position signals a collapse into a disciplinary or communal common sense, a spontaneous philosophy. If spontaneous realism thus reduces every object to a kind of rock, which one repeatedly and stupidly kicks, spontaneous antirealism reduces every object to the status of a god in whose existence (except as a fiction or social construction) one has to say repeatedly one does not believe. Without paying God himself the undue compliment of existence, I think the mistake of making every object into a god-object reveals the antirealist to be a failed ex-realist, a figure whose dilemma is well captured by George Carlin's joke about the definition of an ex-Catholic: someone who believes that God does not exist, and that Mary was his mother. The impossibility of living either the realist or antirealist epistemologies alerts us to the rarified context of this philosophical game, however clever or beautiful the moves one might make within it.
6. Newfield is mostly silent about the two historical narratives that converge in my paper: the reassertion of cultural criticism, and the double genealogy of social construction in science studies and cultural studies. I must conclude from this fairly representative silence on the history of our discipline that it remains easier for debates within criticism to be conducted at the level of a priori abstraction than of historical contextualization, whatever lip service is given to context in the a priorist mode.
7. Newfield himself cannot do without this concept and it returns near the end of his response: "Oddly enough, the humanities will find parity with the sciences, and the basis of mutual respect, only when it stops trying to jettison its 'political freedom' narratives and instead integrates them into its ideals of truth." Despite the scare quotes, it would be hard to substitute "human context" for the "political" in this sentence, since the freedom or emancipation narrative to which Newfield here refers has the obvious semantic duty of specifying the political.
8. It is unfortunate that the concept of politicization has been appropriated by the right as an accusation against the left, not only because the strategy to which it refers has in fact been adopted numerous times over the last two centuries on both the left and the right, but also because this strategy correctly presupposes the existence of ordinarily non-political social practices that, by virtue of this fact, can be politicized. The strategy of politicization, whether by the right or the left, achieves its effects by bringing a given practice into an active relation to the political, even sometimes a relation of subordination. There is thus no point, and indeed it would only confuse the issue, to say that the concept of politicization is a right-wing characterization of a left-wing practice. Let us recall here a counterexample, the Gleichschaltung of the German university in the 1930s, which sought to align the university and university teaching with Nazi ideology. On this subject see Rudiger Safranski's sobering account of Heidegger's term as Rector at the University of Freiburg in his biography, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, trans. Ewald Osers (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), pp. 237-48, 259-75. The note of of cultural criticism in Heidegger's deliberate politicization of the university is unmistakeable in what Safranski describes as his "defense of the [National Socialist] revolution against academic conservatism and bourgeois realpolitik, which was interested solely in the economic and technological usefulness of the universities" (ibid., p. 271), an agenda that resonates as cultural criticism with the terms of the left version of the critique of optimization from Adorno to Bill Readings and Newfield, even if its actual political implications are diametrically opposed to the latter. My sense is that the politicization of literary and cultural studies has been well-intentioned, if also rather less effective than academics would like to believe, in part because so much of the energies generated by this strategy have been siphoned off into the conflict of the faculties. The conditions for politicization at any given moment need to be taken into account, because politicization always entails a risk to the relative autonomy of the practice which is brought into an active relation to the political. It is naive to think that the politicization of a discipline entails no risk of abuse or delegitimation, but it is obviously also difficult to predict what the risk will be in any given context. What must be acknowledged is that the effectiveness of bringing a discipline into direct relation to the political depends upon maintaining the status of that discipline as knowledge in the system of disciplines. When the knowledge capital of a discipline declines, the value of its political capital declines commensurately.
This is why I suggested in my paper that literary critics (I am speaking at this moment only of us) would do better to enter the political field as experts in language, in the history of writing and written forms of communication, and in the pedagogy of reading and writing, than as reanimated versions of the authoritarian culture critics of the nineteenth century. It is simply no longer the case that literarily credentialed academics can enter the public sphere as authoritative commentators on any and every subject, without risking the reduction of their disciplinary knowledge to the status of mere opinion. I do believe that there is a political role for the critic, but it is not criticism in the old sense. Political intervention on the basis of disciplinary expertise would produce a different sort of strategic politicization, one in which those who do literary and cultural studies would be less concerned with claiming the title of organic intellectual for the New Social Movements, and more concerned with questions related, for example, to the use of language and modes of argument in the public sphere, or to the relation between language education in the university and in the system of primary and secondary schools. With regard to the latter subject, I have suggested on many occasions that the relation of university language departments to the education schools and to the secondary schools is the most important political arena for us to enter into today. (Parents of course enter this arena as parents, but should we not enter it as experts?) It is a measure of how thoroughly literary critics misrecognize the real basis of their potential political effectivity that this suggestion for an alternative strategy of politicization usually elicits the blank surprise with which one greets the uninvited guest, in this case an idea that has never before entered into the domain of the discourse.
9. This issue is further confused by Newfield's citation in his notes of scholars who work in other disciplines than literary and cultural studies, such as Sandra Harding and Ruth Hubbard, as exemplary counterexamples to my critique of the correlation between epistemology and politics. Since I was not attacking science studies in the first place, and in fact cited some scholars in the field favorably, it was not necessary for Newfield to defend them. On the subject of science and politics generally, or science and particular social biases, Bourdieu offers a pithy formulation that might be of some use: "In the order of thought, there is, as Nietzsche pointed out, no immaculate conception; but nor is there any original sin--and the discovery that someone who has discovered the truth had an interest in doing so in no way diminishes his discovery" (Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, trans. Richard Nice [Stanford, Calif., 2000], p. 3).
10. This mode of determination is of course only a weak causality, as is causality generally in the domain of history, which we might define for this purpose as all social relations no longer accessible to our agency. This is to say that we can always imagine things having happened otherwise, even if from our retrospective vantage the weight of history presses upon any given moment with a seemingly irresistible force.
11. Newfield seems to be translating Lyotard's concept of performativity consistently as what he calls optimization, and Lyotard's paralogy by what he calls creativity. In the process of this translation he downplays Lyotard's misguided celebration of postmodern science, which aligns the anti-determinist paradigm shift of twentieth-century physics with the turn to antirealist narrative of high modernism, in order to set them both against their Enlightenment or modern precursors, determinist physics and realist fiction. The same opportune ambiguity in the concept of paralogy that permits Lyotard to run together the domains of science and art permits Newfield to declare that the creativity so central to the literary and cultural disciplines is the same creativity upon which the sciences depend, with the proviso that the sciences seem to be ignorant of their dependency on LCS and so vulnerable to being subordinated to the norm of optimization or efficiency. The slight distortion of Lyotard's actual relation to science in Newfield's account permits his enlistment in the otherwise American conflict of the faculties.
12. It is my sense that Newfield's appropriation of Lyotard situates him in closer conformity to the tradition of cultural criticism than he would have liked. Lyotard positions himself against on the one side Marxist critique, especially that of the Frankfurt school, which does belong in some measure to the cultural critical tradition, and on the other side against the affirmative sociology of Niklas Luhmann and systems theory, the latter recollecting if not resurrecting the resolutely pro-modern stance of Herbert Spencer and Talcott Parsons. I do not see Lyotard's polemic as aimed principally in The Postmodern Condition at Habermas (Jameson's view in his preface to the English translation), but much more at Luhmann, whose presence is ubiquitous in Lyotard's argument. Both Habermas and Luhmann, however, can be said to have taken a sociological turn away from cultural criticism, a turn inaugurated by Weber and Durkheim. Lyotard takes a different path, of course, whether or not one thinks of him as a cultural critic.
13. On this subject I still find Weber's position essentially sound, and so I will take the liberty of quoting him: "There is and always will be--and this is the reason that it concerns us--an unbridgeable distinction among (1) those arguments which appeal to our capacity to become enthusiastic about and our feeling for concrete practical aims or cultural forms and values, (2) those arguments in which, once it is a question of the validity of ethical norms, the appeal is directed to our conscience, and finally (3) those arguments which appeal to our capacity and need for analytically ordering empirical reality in a manner which lays claim to validity as empirical truth. This proposition remains correct, despite, as we shall see, the fact that those highest "values" underlying the practical interest are and always will be decisively significant in determining the focus of attention of analytical activity...in the sphere of the cultural sciences." [Max Weber, "'Objectivity' in Social Science and Social Policy," The Methodology of the Social Sciences, trans. and ed. Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch (New York, 1949), p. 58] Weber is distinguishing between practical aims, ethical or political aims, and what I would call "science" within disciplinary practice, without collapsing any of these aims or protocols into one another. This is of course a regulative ideal toward which disciplinary practice should aim, and disciplinary practice is no worse for the tension between these distinct elements. In a footnote such as this it will only be possible to add to Weber's comment, what will fall far short of a proof, the evidence of the intuitive sense one has in reading the best exemplars of cultural scholarship that in such work the author has neither sacrificed a sense of social purpose to the search for truth, nor the search for truth to social purpose.