That’s a facebook post by Michael Bérubé. There’s a bunch of comments, which you’re welcome to read by scrolling over to Facebook. I’m putting my own comment right here:
I’m of two minds about this whole business, Michael, and by “whole business” I mean not only that report and your response – I’ve only glanced at both – but this whole “woe is the humanities” business. My trouble is that I am not a humanist. Oh, I’ve got a PhD in English from SUNY Buffalo, I’ve published in MLN, Semiotica, PMLA (but only a letter, about how boring deconstruction had become), I’ve even got a page and a half in the volume from that notorious 1966 structuralism conference, but I was kicked out of the club sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s.
There was never an official “drumming out” ceremony, no written reprimand, no detailing of reasons, but it happened nonetheless. And I know why it happened. I took Lévi-Strauss too seriously, deciding that there was more to him than binary oppositions. That led me to cognitive science and – the horror! the horror! – to computational linguistics. Back at Buffalo in the mid 1970s, yes, I was in the English Department, but I also strayed over into Linguistics and studied computational semantics with David Hays. Now at the time it looked like I was venturing into new territory, you know, going boldly etc. and I was. But by the 80s it was clear that I had been walking over a bridge too damn far. And so I left.
As for the current fracas, I understand that it concerns this “ideological monoculture.” Well I can see that, and I do think there is an issue here. I also don’t think it’s as bad as all that.
But the computer and computation, now that’s a deeper issue, and more complicated. There’s been a lot of interesting work in the so-called “digital humanities,” which has been marginalized within the humanities. And the issue is deeper than cultural analytics, a somewhat newer term. The issue is right there in the Centennial Issue of MLN, published as a special issue in 1976. Northrup Fry headlined the issue, but it also had articles by Edward Said, Eugenio Donato, Stanley Fish, Walter Benn Michaels, and others, and me. My article was “Cognitive Networks and Literary Semantics.” It was full of diagrams, those cognitive networks, which I used to analyze Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129. That’s why I was ultimately kicked out, and that’s indicative of the issue the humanities are not at all facing. Oddly enough, it’s not so very far from the issue Susan Sontag raised in perhaps her most famous essay, “Against Interpretation.”
Which is why I tend to think this current business is just a tempest in a teapot. Very important if you’re at the tea party. But if you’ve been kicked out, not so important.
Bérubé: You realize that the report is basically saying "the trans bullies have shut down debate in philosophy" (at a time of extraordinarily peril for trans and gender-nonconforming people) and you're replying with "I was kicked out of the tea party fifty years ago for a completely unrelated thing," right? (And digital humanities are marginalized? Not in this timeline. :))
Me: Yes, I realize that. It's a complicated world we live in. I don't know what's to be done about the culture warriors. Either it gets worse and worse, or it doesn't. Either way this completely unrelated thing remains an issue and the humanities are not doing a very good job of dealing with it. Not sure what future the humanities can have without dealing with this unrelated issue.
Indulge me with a little more, Michael. You're a decade and a half younger than I am. For most purposes and in most contexts that's irrelevant. Not not when it comes to sports, where you've got the advantage, and not in the context of English lit. Those 15 years mean you faced a very different discipline from the one I faced. For you the structuralist moment was a thing of the past, all settled and done. For me it was very different.
I saw an opening into a new way of thinking, whatever it was that Lévi-Strauss was doing with myth. And right around the corner we had Chomsky in linguistics and then the cognitive sciences (the term wasn't coined until 1972). That's what interested me. But the fact of the matter is that by the time I published that essay in MLN, the opening that I'd seen was closing rapidly. Jonathan Culler was touring around on his book, Structuralist Poetics, but that's as far as it got, which is not as far as I'd already gone. And as you know, Culler himself abandoned structuralism for deconstruction.
Well, the type of thinking that I was doing back in the 1970s, that could prove very fruitful in the current intellectual environment. But that has been so thoroughly closed off that, well, I'm wasting my time and yours for even bothering to comment, aren't I? Sorry about that.
Bérubé: No worries, Bill. I'm just saying ... perspective, my friend. Nobody is arguing that there have never been disciplinary orthodoxies in the various disciplines in the humanities, or that people didn't prefer certain lines of inquiry to others. All I'm saying is that the report's account of the Tuvel / Hypatia is wrong-- and a really indefensible way of implying that the trans folk and their allies have shut things down. But is it true that there are people in academe who can't abide the idea that other people think differently from themselves? Why, yes! And Paul Boghossian is apparently one of them.
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