Star struck and broken down 4: Identity, gossip, and the personal

Continuing on with the “star” system in 1980s and 90s literary criticism and cultural studies, let’s return to David Shumway’s article, The Star System in Literary Studies (PMLA Vol. 112, No. 1, 1997, p. 96):

Because of the widely held notion that one can speak only from one’s own gendered, racial, class, sexual, or professional position, increasing numbers of literary scholars are engaged in describing their positions.

As I remarked earlier, this led to the inclusion of formulaic statements about the critic’s status in the world, race, gender, employment by a university in a capitalist society, that kind of thing. As I’ve seen – note that I’ve not followed that literature at all carefully – the statement was relatively brief, a sentence or three, and would appear either in the main text or in a footnote. I have no idea how prevalent this practice was. In particular, I have no sense of its distribution among stars and ordinary critics.

At the time I figured these assertions were supposed to have some epistemic significance. That is, given that the critic occupies a social status different from the authors of the work they’re examining, the reader can use this confession to calibrate the critic’s remarks. For all I know, that may well have been what these critics had in mind. But I think, in fact, they were simply engaged in what has come to be called virtue signaling.

Let’s continue with Shumway’s statement:

Personal matters, once regarded as extraneous to disciplinary discourse, have become central to it. Queer theory has made the sexual life of the theorist one of its principal preoccupations. It has been argued that “[i]f you can follow the permutations of [Eve] Sedgwick’s identity, an understanding of queer theory is within your grasp” (Begley, “I’s” 57). The discipline has more knowledge about the sexual tastes of Eve Sedgwick than the National Enquirer provides about those of most celebrities. Another queer theory star, Judith Butler, is the subject of what is to my knowledge the only fanzine about an academic star: Judy. Written in the hyperbolic style of movie and fan magazines, Judy is of course a parody of the academic star system, but what better confirmation can one have of the system’s widespread recognition?

I don’t know what to make of these remarks about queer theory, Sedgwick, and Butler. I’ve found two issues of Judy! on the web, and yes, it’s parodic. But I don’t see what generalizations can be made.

Though I’ve heard of Sedgwick, I’ve not read her. I simply don’t know what Shumway means when he says, “Queer theory has made the sexual life of the theorist one of its principal preoccupations.” Oh, I understand the words well enough, but I don’t what’s going on in that critical literature that merits that account. Are queer theorists discussing their private lives? In what level of detail and specificity? Do others comment on those revelations? I have no idea.

I note, however, that I objected when Geoffrey Hartman informed us (The Fate of Reading, 1975, p. 3):

Confession. I have a superiority complex vis-à-vis other critics, and an inferiority complex vis-à-vis art. The interpreter, molded on me, is an overgoer with pen-envy strong enough to compel him into the foolishness of print.

For all I know that may be a widely held sentiment among literary critics, but it is also private and serves no useful purpose as an element of Hartman’s professional persona. I am inclined to think the same of a critic’s sexual life, though I can imagine that in the case of queer theory the counter argument would be more interesting and substantive than Hartman’s justification for his professional vanity. I just don’t see how one can construct a professional intellectual discipline that includes such information – or is something else going on, something that’s not an intellectual discipline in the traditional sense, but that somehow ended up in an academic institution?

Let’s return to an earlier passage from Shumway. He’s just made the point that with thinkers like Derrida or Foucault, “the theorist provides tools of analysis, but the tools are not sufficient without the name that authorizes the procedure.” He then goes on (p. 95):

Foucault observed this phenomenon when he noted that Freud and Marx serve as founders of special formations of knowledge called “discursive practices” to which their names are indispensable:

The initiation of a discursive practice, unlike the founding of a science, overshadows...its later developments and transformations. As a consequence, we define the theoretical validity of a statement with respect to the work of the initiator, whereas in the case of Galileo or Newton, it is based on the structural and intrinsic norms established in cosmology or physics. (134)

Because authority in the natural sciences is rooted in a consensus about such norms, the hierarchies in these fields have not developed into star systems of the sort I have described here. Nobel laureates in the sciences may get more credit than they deserve, in part because their status can make a discipline listen to what it might otherwise discount, but such new knowledge does not continue to be authorized by the laureates’ names, much less by their personalities. By contrast, the field of literary studies is made up of conflicting discursive practices, each of which depends on at least one theory star of greater or lesser magnitude. And knowledge in literary studies is defined not by virtuosity of critical performance or by the accumulation of facts but by the enlisted names of the fathers (and increasingly the mothers, though the stars remain predominantly male). This form of authority both produces the star system and is reproduced by it.

That’s what’s at issue, the nature of the authority supporting the discipline’s knowledge. Is that authority entirely subsumed by shared norms or does it depend in some measure on the charisma, for lack of a better word, of individual thinkers?

For that’s what the star system is about, the charisma of individual thinkers. Anecdotes about one’s personal life find a ready place in the charisma-generating aurora of the star, they may even be essential to it. But they are an irrelevant distraction where intellectual norms govern the field.

* * * * *

The star system is gone. Yes, the stars linger on, like Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, no new one’s have been born. What, if anything, have we learned from this episode?