Star struck and broken down 2: Lit crit stars, real or an illusion?

Is the fabled lit crit star of the 1980s and 90s a real phenomenon, or just an ordinary celebrity academic of the sort on finds in other disciplines? That question has come up in online discussions. Moreover, in a piece for The Chronicle Review, Avital Ronell and the End of the Academic Star, Lee Konstantinou notes the David Shumway piece I’d quoted in my previous post on this subject and counters:

In a persuasive critique of Shumway’s article, Bruce Robbins asked whether we should be so quick to complain about the rise of superstars. The definition of celebrity in such jeremiads was often tellingly vague, Robbins wrote, and usually involved "starting from fame and subtracting something: fame minus merit, or fame minus power." But such distinctions falsely presumed that some pure form of merit might be separated from social forces. "Dig deep enough into any instance of merit," Robbins wrote, "and you will discover social determinants, factors like family and friends, lovers and mentors, identities, interests, and institutions that advantaged some and disadvantaged others."

In fact, Robbins argued, star power represented a form of prestige that in some sense corrected for the failures of the previous old boys’ club, represented by the prior generation of scholars Shumway celebrated. "By supplying an alternative method for distributing cultural capital, the celebrity cult has served (among its other functions) to open up what remains of those tight, all-male professional circles." This was, Robbins claimed, an "improvement."

Konstantinou goes on to observe that the star system is dying, “No new theoretical school has replaced High Theory”.

Konstantinou’s emphasis was on the effects of the old star system on the job prospects of graduate students and of a student’s willingness (Reitman in this case) to tolerate abuse from a star advisor (Ronell) based on the promise of job-securing recommendations.

What IS the star system about, anyhow?

I hadn’t thought of the old boys network, yes, it was/is certainly real, and unfortunate, so I read Robbins piece, Celeb-Reliance: Intellectuals, Celebrity, and Upward Mobility, (Postmodern Culture, Vol. 9, No. 2, 1999), and it is an interesting piece. But, as its title suggests, it is more concerned about the economics of stardom than about the validation of knowledge, which was central to Shumway’s argument. In 2001 the Minnesota Review (numbers 52-54) dedicated a number of articles to Shumway’s article but, alas, the issue is behind a pay wall, so I didn’t have access beyond first pages. I did, however, read the first page of Shumway’s rejoinder, “The Star System Revisited” where he asserted that his critics seem to have missed his main point, which was how “it functions in authorizing knowledge”.

A bit more searching turned up Frank Donoghue, A Look Back at David Shumway’s ‘Star System’, which turned up in a 2011 blog post at The Chronicle of Higher Education. He observed:

Sadly, many people misread Shumway’s essay, zipping past his subtle definition of stardom toward the admittedly unfair income gap between literary studies’ stars and its worker bees. The essay, as I read it, has nothing to do with income, but rather with what the component parts of stardom are and how stardom happens. Stardom, in literary studies or anywhere else, inheres in intangibles: charisma, a distinctive performative style, sex appeal sometimes, in short, an incentive for fans to emulate the star.

Shumway’s pessimistic conclusion is, I think, justifiable: the more we buy into the star system, the less we will responsibly pay attention to our collective activity as literary scholars. That is, the presence or omnipresence of a star (think of Derrida in the 70s or Foucault in the 80s) draws our attention away from the content of what they write, and on to their personalities, and thus scrambles our efforts to do rigorous literary studies. As Shumway puts it in his follow up, “The Star System Revisited”: “instead of putting Lacan or Foucault’s theories to the test, contemporary practice is simply more likely to invoke them as if they were laws.” And that’s a recipe for sloppy scholarship.

So, Donoghue got the key point.

In a subsequent post, Further Reflections on ‘Academostars’, he argues, “the star system in 2011 has been thoroughly commodified. As a result, we still might have a few stars who fit Shumway’s definition, but for the most part we have a lot of research universities with one or more dwarf stars.”

OK. The star system dead, or at least terminally ill. But what about the authorization of knowledge? Was Shumway right about that, or was the system mostly about money and prestige?

Could we test and refine Shumway’s central assertion?

He argued that the star is the irreducible source of intellectual authority, as opposed to the (often informal and implicit) governing conventions of a/the discipline. It’s one thing for a critic to become renowned for their exemplary and original contributions within the disciplinary norms. Stardom is something else. Stars exceed or evade disciplinary norms in one way or another and so establish themselves a reference point.

Let’s go back to his original article (The Star System in Literary Studies, PMLA, Vol. 112, No. 1, 1997, p. 95):

Theory not only gave its most influential practitioners a broad professional audience but also cast them as a new sort of author. Theorists asserted an authority more personal than that of literary historians or even critics. [...] Thus one finds article after article in which Derrida or Foucault or Barthes or Lacan or Žižek or Althusser or Spivak or Fish or Jameson or several of the above are cited as markers of truth. It is common now to hear practitioners speak of “using” Derrida or Foucault or some other theorist to read this or that object; such phrasing may suggest that the theorist provides tools of analysis, but the tools are not sufficient without the name that authorizes the procedure.

That last observation is something we could search for using corpus techniques.

It’s not immediately obvious to me, however, just how to proceed. I suppose we could compile a list of stars and search the literature for in-text references to them and note the specific phrases used. We could then search for those phrases to see if they are also used for non-stars (and perhaps to catch stars we’d missed in our original list).

Suppose we conducted this investigation and it turned out more or less to confirm Shumway’s observation, that stars get this treatment, but others do not. What then? Should we consider Shumway’s thesis confirmed?

I know what my bias is, but I’m not sure I should rest satisfied in having it confirmed. My sense of matters is that such an investigation would be a fair amount of work – what corpus would you use, how many journals and books (for books have an importance in the humanities they don’t have in the social, behavioral, biological, and physical sciences) do you interrogate? I would like to get more from it than mere confirmation.

And just what is it that is confirmed? Was/is the star system really “a recipe for sloppy scholarship”, as Donoghue speculated? Would such confirmation betray a decline from older standards of rigor, or is something else going on? Not decline, but, well, what else could it be? That, perhaps, is still in the (relatively near) future.

I note, that as Konstantinou asserted, there is a general feeling that the star system is over, at least in the sense that no new stars have appeared. That requires an explanation. Has the intellectual landscape of literary criticism, the conditions of knowledge creation and validation, changed in recent years? If so, why?

My guess is that we’re not going to go back to the good old days, that we have in fact learned something from/through Theory. The cultural sphere is not a repository of universal values. Values are specific to time and place, to class and gender, ethnicity, and so on. I don’t think we can or should unlearn that. But how do we carry that lesson forward?