On the currency of "theory"

Stephen Kearse, Wild Speculation Isn’t Worth Much. A ‘Theory,’ However..., NYTimes, 12.19.18:

Whatever air of authority attaches to a “theory” is a relatively recent development. Theories have circulated through mathematics, medicine and philosophy without being accorded any particular weight on their own. Charles Hutton, an 18th-century mathematician, contrasted them with application and suggested that mere theory was sometimes incomplete without practice. The 20th-century scholar John A. Scott saw theory as a ruse deployed by unlearned hacks: “They regard a theory of more importance than facts,” he wrote of some of his peers, “for if they can only spin a theory they have no need of facts.” Outside scholarship, theories had even less import. An 1893 Washington Post article, “The Man Who Thinks,” mocked a bar patron who outlined a “theory concerning astral intoxication” — the joke being not just that the man was drunk but that he was drunk enough to think a theory might convince anyone it wasn’t his doing.

At that point, though, science was still relatively disorganized and imprecise. The modern connotations of “theory” are a legacy of the industrialization and professionalism of science, with theory and practice converging in larger labs, bolder experiments, better tools. Scientists began presenting and testing theories with increasing explanatory power and empirical backing, making it possible for them to put forth more penetrating explanations of how the world worked — “generalized” explanations that Albert Einstein called “theories of principle.” Their foundations, he wrote in 1920, were “not hypothetical constituents, but empirically observed general properties of phenomena, principles from which mathematical formulae are deduced of a such a kind that they apply to every case which presents itself.” Such theories weren’t just rigorous or extensive; they explained everything.

An American in Paris on the Ronell affair (remember that?)

Justin Erik Halldór Smith is an American philosopher working in the Continental tradition and living in Paris.

Like top chefs who travel far to ply their trade, Derrida found that the crowds at his distant destinations could not make any distinction between what was inspired in his words, and what was inherited, what was the product of a singular mind, and what the generic template of an earlier acculturation. The most conventional dishes will get French chefs raving reviews if they go and open a restaurant, perhaps calling it ‘Ooh-La-La’, in a strip mall in Orange County (an example drawn from my true memory of a suburban California childhood). That is the whole secret of Derrida’s decades-long mystification of the Anglophone world.

The American right and the ‘classical liberals’ continue to denounce the ‘postmodernism’ of the academic left, as if it were still 1984, as if nothing ever changes. They have not detected the massive upswell in the past few years of what is in crucial respects the exact opposite of postmodernism. Graduate students in the humanities are not deconstructing anything anymore, and are in no doubt about the existence or accessibility of certain basic truths. They are defending the truth of their moral world view, against the falsehood of the world view of their enemies. The dividing line is generational, and nowhere has it been more visible than in the recent revolution of comp-lit graduate students against their elders and ostensible mentors, Butler and Žižek and the others, who for their part, in the wake of the Ronell-Reitman sublimatedly-sexual harassment scandal, insisted in various ways that the human heart is a dark forest, and sometimes the real truth is hard to come by. However wary I am of the stark black-and-white moral realism of the grad students who rose up against Ronell, I am at least happy to see her New York branch of Derrida’s horrible chain finally closing down. I would however wish that the focus were on the food, on the fact that it is no good, while the young people’s principal complaint seems to be that the place is not, as it were, up to code.

H/t 3QD. 

Star struck and broken down: Reflections on the case of Avital Ronell, Nimrod Reitman, and the rest

A new working paper, title above, link, abstract, contents, and introduction below:

Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/37444542/Star_struck_and_broken_down_Reflections_on_the_case_of_Avital_Ronell_Nimrod_Reitman_and_the_rest

Abstract: In the summer of 2018 a scandal broke out at New York University concerning the way a senior literary critic, Avital Ronell, had exploited a graduate student, Nimrod Reitman. This paper examines this scandal in the general context of academic literary criticism as it developed in the third quarter of the 20th century, eventuating in the phenomenon of the “star” critic. Ronell is such a star. Stardom is one thing, however, and is specific to the particular conditions of literary criticism. Abuse is a different phenomenon, tied to personal behavior and informal local norms. The paper includes a close analysis of a short article Ronell wrote on the occasion of the death of Jacques Derrida, her teacher and mentor.

Contents

Introduction: Sorting things out 2

How did literary criticism come to this foul pass? [#AvitalRonell] 4

Lit crit stars, real or an illusion? 9

The case of Paul de Man 12

Identity, gossip, and the personal 13

The lure of the esoteric 15

Comments on a short text Avital Ronell wrote to honor and remember Derrida 18

Roshomon redux, the case of Avital Ronell, Nimrod Reitman, and NYU 24

Appendix: The triumph of interpretation (aka “reading”) 28

 

Introduction: Sorting things out

Until several weeks ago Avital Ronell was little more than a name that I associated with Continental thought, I don’t know, maybe I even associated it with deconstruction. Then the scandal broke. I read a tweet Corey Robin posted in mid-August (see p. 4) in which he examined the complaint Reitman had filed against Ronell and NYU. That’s what got me interested in the case. Robin’s point was simple, regardless of what had actually happened between Reitman and Ronell, regardless of Ronell’s star status, it was clear that this relationship took up an enormous amount of Reitman’s time, as though Ronell recognized no boundary between herself and Reitman.

That’s what interested, this lack of boundaries. Why? Because I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about what happened to literary criticism in the 1960s and 1970s. Critics started referring to analytic interpretation as reading, thus eliding a boundary between ordinary reading, which any literate person does, and interpretation, a professional activity normally expressed in written articles or conference papers (see the appendix, p. 28 ff.). Was there some connection here, a connection between boundary loss within critical practice, where interpretation collapses into reading, and in pedagogical practice, where Ronell elided the boundary between herself and her student?

I posed and explored that question in my first post, “How did literary criticism come to this foul pass? [#AvitalRonell]” (pp. 4 ff.), where I also examined a 1997 article David Shumway had published about “stars” in literary theory, which I continued to explore in a second post, “Lit crit stars, real or an illusion?” (pp. 9 ff.). In another post I noted the star status of Paul de Man and the controversy that arose around his anti-semitic journalism during World War II (pp. 12 ff.). A fourth post, “Identity, gossip, and the personal” (pp. 13 ff.) considered the relationship between the critic’s identity and the valence of their critical statements and a fifth looked at the use of often obscure technical terminology, “The lure of the esoteric” (pp. 15 ff.).

The upshot is that, rightly or wrongly, I satisfied myself that there is a relation ship between the collapse of critical interpretation into mere reading in the 1960s and 1970s and the emergence of the literary star in the 1980s and 1990s. We must be careful, however, for, as Shumway was careful to point out, the phenomenon of the star literary critic is a bit different from intellectual prominence in other disciplines. The star critic assumes a status that is, in a way, like that of the canonical authors they study and interpret. The significance of such a critic’s writings is thus dependent on their personal imprimature, their charisma, above and beyond any arguments they may make. Hence the importance of word play and allusion, which have little evidentiary or logical value, but are a vehicle for virtuoso display, for the expression of personal charisma.

And so I undertook an analysis of a short piece by Ronell, “Comments on a short text Avital Ronell wrote to honor and remember Derrida” (pp. 18 ff.). She had been a student of his. In this piece, one of eighteen published in a special section in PMLA in 2005, she rather boldly declares herself to be his intellectual heir and successor. No, she doesn’t say so explicitly, but that is what she DOES, with great virtuosity and wit, and no little vanity, vanity either acceptable to the journal’s editors or simply unrecognized as such.

That leaves us with one more piece, “Roshomon redux, the case of Avital Ronell, Nimrod Reitman, and NYU” (pp. 24 ff.). Here I present statements by six others, without any comment from me: Marjorie Perloff (a senior academic now retired), Andrea Long Chu (a graduate student who had studied with Ronell), William Cheung
 (another graduate student), Bernd Hüppauf (a retired academic who had hired her at NYU), Heidi Haitri (an artist and, I assume, a friend), and Corey Robin (an academic political scientist).

What have I learned from this? That’s hard to say. There’s a lingering sadness, and anger, sadness over the pain and suffering at the heart of this story, anger at the institutional conditions that allowed it to happen. By institutional conditions I mean both the evolution of literary and cultural criticism that eventuated in the star phenomenon and the administrative arrangements that gave Ronell the power to exploit Reitman in this way.

I also learned something more specific. When I started this line of exploration I was looking for a connection between the intellectual conditions of literary theory, on the one hand, and Ronell’s treatment of Reitman on the other. I’ve decided that the connection is not so direct as I had set out to discover. Yes, there is a connection between those intellectual conditions and the phenomenon of the lit crit star, and Ronell was certainly such a star. That is one thing.

But lit crit stars do not necessarily exploit graduate students in the way Ronell exploited Reitman. This is a matter both of individual behavior and local informal norms. I certainly don’t have any general knowledge of the relationship between such stars and their students, though I have known a star or two (before they’d become stars), but I have no reason to believe they all comport themselves like this, though some might. On the other hand, there have been a number of cases abuse and exploitation by prominent and influential academics in other fields, fields that never had stardom in this sense. That is the other thing.

So we have stardom on the one hand, exploitation and abuse on the other. They are separate phenomena which happened to be conjoined in this particular case. In retrospect that seems obvious.

In this particular case it seems to me that much of the reaction to this case is closely tied to widespread animus against postmodern, deconstructionist literary criticism (aka theory) of the kind practiced by Ronell (and many of her defenders). Concern for and about Ronell and Reitman, who after all are strangers to most of us, is secondary. I know that assertion would benefit from a kind of argument that I’ve not really made in this paper. But I offer it as an indication of the atmosphere in which I undertook this work. It’s the smoke in that atmosphere, if you will, that I had to cut though in order to arrive at the otherwise obvious conclusion of the previous paragraph.

Star struck and broken down 7: Comments on a short text Avital Ronell wrote to honor and remember Derrida [#AvitalRonell]

In all this thinking and reading about Ronell I couldn’t help but wonder about her intellectual work. I realize that that’s not directly at issue. What’s at issue is her behavior toward a graduate student, Nimrod Reitman. But her thought is certainly a major component of the shadow cast by those events. She is identified with French Theory, the thinking of Derrida in particular; she studied with him and translated some of his works. Many, likely most, of the luminaries who signed the infamous letter supporting her are students and purveyors of one or another strain of Theory. At least some of the outrage following on her treatment of Reitman is directed at Theory rather than her behavior.

Just how good is she? I’d only just barely heard of her before the Reitman case, but that’s neither here nor there. Though I have some knowledge of, even some training in, French Theory, that’s long ago, the mid-60s into the early 70s. My own thinking has been quite different, though I did spend a fair amount of time working through Bruno Latour and Tim Morton in recent years. I’ve thus got a bit of a feel for these ways of thinking and writing.

And I wanted to see for myself, something at least. I had no intention of reading a whole book, much less a half dozen books, but if there were something short and compact I could read, that would be good. So, I sought and I found.

As you may know, PMLA (Publications of the Modern Language Association) is the oldest academic literary journal in the United States. It is published by the Modern Language Association (MLA), the largest professional society for literary scholars. In 2005 it had a series of short pieces on the work of Derrida. I looked a several of them: Jonathan Culler, because I’ve read his Structuralist Poetics; Geoffrey Hartman, because he was of Derrida’s generation and a colleague at Yale; J. Hillis Miller, because he was also a colleague of Derrida’s, both at Yale and Irvine, and because I studied with him in the 60s; and of course Avital Ronell, because she’s the main event.

Forum: The Legacy of Jacques Derrida, PMLA 120:2 (Mar. 2005) 464-494, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25486172

None of the pieces are long. Some are formal notes, some less formal. Ronell’s is one of the latter. It’s really too short and informal to give me anything like an appreciation for the thinking that garnered her reputation. But perhaps it would at least give me some sense of her mind, the temper and edge of her steel.

An emissary from a foreign land

I’ve inserted bracketed numbers into the following passage. My comments are keyed to those numbers.

It was August in Berkeley. Most of my colleagues were in Europe or Hawaii, and I was wrapping up endless footnotes for The Telephone Book, the extensive “Yellow Pages.” [1] The phone rang. Someone from the president’s office was asking me if I would host the minister of culture from the Republic of China on behalf of the university. [2] Me? Well, no one else is around, and we ran out of options, I was told. Three days? I don’t know. It seems like a lot, and I’m not prepared. I’d need to do some research. Besides, I [3] have to finish a book and wash my hair. [4] An hour later the minister greeted me. He expressed delight, offering generous expressions of awe, for I was owed, he said, the respect that only a disciple of Confucius could expect. [5] I was the student of Jacques Derrida! [6] At the time, in the mid-eighties, Berkeley itself was not prepared to embrace Derrida, much less a mutant offspring, or what Derrida himself would come to call his own rogue state or territory ([7] he’d link territory with terror and terre, earth, uprooting the concept of nation-state, the voyou Avi—he translated my name as saying “for life,” as in he was stuck with me for life, à vie). For my part, I felt more like an [8] early Christian than a disciple of Confucius. (488)

[1] Not only are we being taken to a particular day in late summer in the 1980s, but we’re now at a specific moment on a specific day. The ring of the phone obviously plays off the title of the book she’s finishing at the time.

[2] Yes, you. And to host an important government official from half way around the world. You! You’re representing the university.

[3] Notice the juxtaposition of two very different kinds of activity, one intellectual and somewhat extended in time, the other severely time-limited and thoroughly physical.

[4] And there he is, an hour after the phone rang, this important Chinese minister greets her, and apparently rather effusively and with great respect. I wonder, how much of that was formulaic politesse?

But – did you have time to wash your hair? Did he notice?

[5] Finally, Papa Derrida! After all, this is supposed to be in his memory, yes, no?

Let us designate “hair” as the key word and assign it a value of 0. Counting rightward through the string, “Jacques Derrida” taken as a single entity is number 38. That’s thirty-seven signifiers from hair to paternity.

[6] I have little or no knowledge of Berkeley in the mid-eighties. I do know that Derrida had little presence in Language, Literature, and Communications at RPI, where I was at the time. But then that was a rather small department spread over three or four disciplines. Not much room for deconstruction.

I do know, however, that in the mid-eighties J. Hillis Miller had been President of the MLA and used his presidential address to lament the waning of deconstruction within the profession [1]. So, when addressing the largest professional association of literary scholars in the country, one luminary at apogee says deconstruction is on the way down while a younger luminary on the rise says it’s not yet arrived. At least not at her university, the one that asked her to meet the Chinese minister of culture.

[7] And now for some deconstructive word play: the terrible nation-state, the enfant terrible, who’s stuck to Derrida à vie. Clever Derrida! Lucky Avi!

[8] That is to say, persecuted. But why a disciple at all, regardless of Christian, Confucius...or Derrida?

Make no mistake, this is a virtuoso performance, exhibiting a high degree of conceptual and linguistic skill. I can see why thinkers of a certain temperament are bedazzled.

Nor, I might add, can I help but to remark on the ontological variety of beings that Ronell has summoned up in this one paragraph of a philosophical text, for she is a philosopher, no? Hawaii, footnotes, phone, Republic of China, hair, awe, Derrida, the list goes on. Has she been channeling Latour, through the back door as it were? I note that We Have Never Been Modern was published in 1991.

Continuing on:

There was a lot of solitude and theory bashing in those days, a lot of intimidation and punishment. [9] Low salaries and mocking colleagues—assuming one managed to get in or on anyone’s payroll. Not only that, but, once inside, Freud was [10a] KO’d at least once a month, Lacan was [10b] spun out of our orbit, and, with the exception of one or two troublemakers, the [10c] theory girrls hadn’t even shown up yet on the boy scanners. I was the [10d] fastest pun in the West, but that was nothing to boast about in those days. The only one who had some holding power was Foucault, cleaned up, straightened out, and identitarian. So the dispatch, the postcard and envoi, [11] came to me from China—the news of the fate of deconstruction. [...] As in a Kafka parable, I received the broadcast of Jacques Derrida’s fate as philosopher from a sentinel who held the secret of a genuinely possible and strongly inflected future. [12] As Derrida has taught us, there are many futures and even more returns. (488)

[9] But were those low salaries reserved for the disciplines of deconstruction, or were they generally low because that’s how academic salaries were/are? Yes, the academic job market was tough then, though not like it is now. It was tough for everyone, not just the devotees of Derrida.

[10 a,b,c,d]. Notice the shifts of register and reference, all within a relatively short span. Mere more virtuosity.

[11] This I like, a lot. It really is very clever, and an interesting way to show the geographic and cultural sway of Derrida’s thinking. If you’re at all interested in such things, here’s a post in which I excerpt a recent dialog between J. Hillis Miller and Zhang Jiang, vice president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, “Consult the text, the varieties of criticism”, New Savanna, October 4, 2016, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2016/10/consult-text-varieties-of-criticism.html

[12] And this, this locution, as X has taught us, it’s very annoying. It seems characteristic of Anglophone French Theory – I have no idea about French theory in France, which is a different kettle of fish. It’s signaling to us that these ideas ultimately depend on the charisma and aurora of direct transmission from teacher to student, as though the ideas can’t stand for themselves. And maybe they can’t. If so, that’s problematic, at least for an academic discipline, no?

That’s the first two paragraphs, more or less. It’s rather a self-centered opening for a short article written to remember and honor a thinker who had been one’s teacher. In depicting herself as Berkeley’s proxy before the emissary from China Ronell’s also assuming the role of heir apparent to the Duchy of Deconstruction. Is that how she was perceived within the profession? Is she being presumptuous? Or is she just playing around? Well, certainly, she’s playing around, but what are the rules and bounds? I’m not a member of the club, so I don’t quite know how to read this.

Star struck and broken down 6: The lure of the esoteric

is now a good time to add that I once saw Ronell speak and she made no sense? https://t.co/cKl6D2qyLn

— Katie Fitzpatrick (@katiefitzpat) September 9, 2018

It is possible that Fitzpatrick’s inability to understand Ronell is akin to my inability to understand, say, string theory. I lack the appropriate (mathematical) background. Similarly, while Fitzpatrick does have a PhD in English from Brown University, it might not have prepared her for Ronell's brand of criticism.

Just what background would be appropriate. What does it mean to “understand” a thinker like Ronell? Perhaps grok – a 1960s term coined by Robert Heinlein and appropriated by hippies – is the more appropriate rendering. When you grok something you inhabit it in a way the bypasses understanding.

I think.

* * * * *

In writing about the Ronell/Reitman/NYU affair, Marjorie Perloff noted: “I myself have never met her: I did read The Telephone Book when it was published in 1991, and found it very clever but almost parodically deconstructionist, and somehow I had no desire to read those later books with titles like Crack Wars and Stupidity.” It’s that word “parodically” that gives me pause. If valid, it suggests that Ronell may have become enmeshed in her own words.

Deconstruction is like that.

Jonathan Culler said of her work, “Zeugmatically yoking the slang of pop culture with philosophical analysis, forcing the confrontation of high literature and technology or drug culture, Avital Ronell produces sentences that startle, irritate, illuminate” (diacritics 24.4, p. 27). That word, “Zeugmatically”, gets your attention, doesn’t it? Do you know what it means? Neither did I, so I looked it up. Now I forget. Does Culler need it as a technical term or does he like to flash strange terms? Perhaps both. Really. Don't want to get snared by false binaries.

Deconstruction is like that.

In a biographical sketch of Ronell, Diane Davis tells us:

Avital Ronell's "remarkable" and edge-pushing oeuvre is informed and facilitated by a wide range of (post)philosophers—including, for example, Derrida, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Levinas, Blanchot, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Nancy—but when it comes down to it, as Eduardo Cadava observes, "Ronell's work remains absolutely different." From her first book, Dictations, through her latest one, Stupidity, Ronell calls the established questions into question, zooming in on whatever "withdraws from immediate promises of transparency or meaning" and/or tracking what she calls the "rhetorical unconscious of a text" ("Confessions" 249). As Culler notes above, however, Ronell's works are remarkable—startling, irritating, illuminating—at the level of the sentence, as well. A striking hybrid of high theory and street talk, Ronell's texts come off gutsy, rough, and edgy, but at the same time exceptionally dense and philosophically rigorous. That is, Ronell's texts are remarkable both for what they say and for the extraordinary way in which they say it.

Ronell's thoroughly postfoundational and (so) posthumanist redescriptions, for example, of the telephone, the writer, and the addict, relentlessly pry open again thinking-zones that had been closed up and covered over. And this is where Ronell's texts remain, in the open-ing, in the coming of open-ness; perpetually deterritorializing without reterritorializing, Ronell's work seems most at home in the unhomey danger zone that it catalyzes, right there where the "ground" is shaking and all the edifices are coming (crashing) down. The reader is asked to enjoy the destruction and disorientation and to risk her/himself (without a hardhat), to join Ronell in this perpetual opening/rupturing, in an affirmative embrace of nonclosure.

You’ll notice there’s a fair bit of word play in those two paragraphs. I believe, as well, that the notion of philosophical rigor has a special meaning. It is more a trope about than an attribute of the discourse.

Deconstruction is like that, no?

Now, crank it up to eleven and toss in some Klingon proverbs. Mama Mia, that's a spicy meatball!

And then there’s that list Heidi Haitri paraded before us in her contemplation of Ronell: “doggedly honest types, a Socrates, a Diogenes, a Jesus, a Bruno, a Nietzsche, a Reich, a Derrida, or a Ronell...” R U serious? Socrates, Jesus, and Ronell, all in the same sentence, phrase, breath, the same soteriological rendezvous. That’s some company Ms. Ronell keeps.

Sacré bleu! aka holy shit!

But then it was predicted, wasn’t it? Geoffrey Hartman called criticism a “minor mode of prophecy” way back in 1975 (The Fate of Reading, p. 267). What’s Hartman doing when he refers to criticism as any kind of prophetic mode whatsoever? Was he troping on Shelley: “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”?

He was troping on something, that’s for sure!

He was troping all over his damned feet!

* * * * *

For most of my career I’ve heard people criticize (at least certain strains of) literary criticism for the use of technical terminology. This complaint is often accompanied by the assertion that critics do this out of science envy. This criticism is often motivated by the belief that literary criticism should be intelligible to anyone who can read literary texts. Literary criticism simply doesn’t require a specialized language; it should be fully intelligible to the educated general reader.

That’s true for certain kinds of criticism. But if by literary criticism one means the general study of literature and literary phenomena – and that’s what the academic discipline is, is it not? – then specialized terms and concepts are legitimate. Literary texts and phenomena are complex. Understanding how they work is not easy. Specialized concepts need to be constructed and deployed.

That is certainly what’s going on in deconstruction and, more generally, in Theory, but also in other modes of literary criticism as well, e.g. narratology, poetics, or that new kid on the block, computational criticism. But is that ALL that’s going on in deconstruction/Theory? What’s with all that word play, all those complex sentences and paragraphs that are elusive even unto the initiated? Has conceptual sophistication become layered over and even displaced by highfalutin’ esoteric horsing around? To the extent that the latter is true, graduate study ceases to be a professional apprenticeship and becomes an initiation into a secret cult.

That way madness lies.

Star struck and broken down 5: Roshomon redux, the case of Avital Ronell, Nimrod Reitman, and NYU

Marjorie Perloff, What the Avital Ronell Affair Says about The State of the Profession, Los Angeles Review of Books. Perloff describes herself as “an 86-year old retired female professor, having held the Sadie Dernham Patek Professorship of Humanities at Stanford University from 1990-2002. Before that, I was Florence R. Scott Professor of English at the University of Southern California; I have taught part time at USC again in recent years and am currently Florence R. Scott Professor Emerita.”

After quoting from a number of Ronell’s emails to Reitman (as quoted in his lawsuit), she observes:

Anyone who finds these comments “playful” “queer coding” must have a very strange sense of humor. Reading these emails, I felt deeply sorry and embarrassed for their author, who had trusted her lover and was being so increasingly put off. It makes no difference at all whether the two actually had sex; the point is that Avital was clearly a woman in love and she was suffering. Not surprisingly, then, she turns on Nimrod and does indeed hurt his job prospects. But he is by no means the innocent victim for, as his own narrative suggests, he partly brought the situation on himself. Why was he so besotted with Avital to begin with? Why was he so eager to study with her, and evidently only with her: he mentions no one else. Why was he originally willing to move into the Paris apartment of a single woman twice his age, even if she was going to be his thesis advisor? And so on.

The real victim here — and this point has not been sufficiently made although Jon Wiener implies it — is the university — not just NYU but the university at large. When people in other fields and professions open the lengthy complaint, they are given a capsule view of two small departments that share faculty (German and Comp Lit), departments that only takes in a handful of graduate students a year, all of them, incidentally, on fellowship, departments in which a professor has an intimate and obsessive relationship with one particular student, which means making him the teacher’s pet at the expense of all the others. It is a dangerous power trip on her part.

Andrea Long Chu, I Worked With Avital Ronell. I Believe Her Accuser. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Long Chu is no longer a graduate student at NYU; she lives in Brooklyn and is a writer and critic.

Last year I worked as a teaching assistant for Avital Ronell. I hadn’t sought out the appointment; I am a doctoral student in comparative literature at NYU, and that semester I was, per the handbook, guaranteed a teaching job. A few months before the position began, I received an email from one of my professors informing me that Ronell’s other teaching assistants were “all taking her class and working hard to familiarize themselves with her particular methodologies, texts, style, and so on.” I was “encouraged” to do the same. I was told this was “an important part of the process with Prof. Ronell.” After all, there were other students eager to replace me.

This was not abusive, obviously, only irritating. The lightly mobbish tone of the email — “this is a nice job you got here, shame if something happened to it” — was jarring. In theory, at least, teaching assistants are junior colleagues, not employees, and I had thought that my position was guaranteed.

William Cheung
, In Defense of Avital Ronell, The Chronicle of Higher Education. William Cheung is currently a graduate student in the German department at NYU.

Here at NYU German, graduate students share work, food, and anxieties. We get group piercings after slogging through a seminar on Johann Georg Hamann, cry about our breakups at the Cozy Soup & Burger diner, make plans to take the ferry to Rockaway beach, correct each other’s work deep into the night. Sometimes we steal wine from department-hosted events and self-medicate against the stress of writing in light of the non-existent job market. Our faculty are there for us, try their hardest to read our work, and treat us as more than ways to enhance their own prestige.

We care and are cared for. The circumstances that have brought us together are largely Avital’s doing, and the circumstances that have struck her down strike at us all. Most of us graduate students in German are supportive of her, and just about all of us signed a May petition attesting to the superb quality of her mentorship, a petition with 129 student signatories. Imagine my horror then when reading Andrea Long Chu’s piece. Though I deeply respect Andrea and her scholarship, this particular piece is utter tabloid clickbait posing as investigative journalism.

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?

Star struck and broken down 3: The case of Paul de Man

Paul de Man was one of the most important "stars" in the firmament of literary Theory. He was born in Belgium in 1919 and immigrated to New York City in 1948. He became a first generation deconstuctionist in the late 1960s and went to Yale in 1970 where he became one of the so-called "Yale Mafia" of deconstructive critics (Jacques Derrida, J. Hillis Miller, and Geoffrey Hartman were the other three). He died in 1983. In the late 80s, however, a cache of his wartime journalism was discovered, and some of the articles were anti-Semitic. The result was a scandal in the academy. Did this history undermine the validity of his later academic work?

The tweet below, brought to my attention by Amardeep Singh, refers to John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (2013), which I have not read. Note the second sentence: "That scandal reveals...the fact that the charismatic persona of the master theorist is the vehicle for the dissemination of theory; otherwise the status of deconstructive theory could not rise or fall with the reputation of its master." How many literary critics were "stars" in that sense? Is literary criticism, as a discipline, particularly vulnerable to this charisma, to use Guillory's term?

Hey-we-should-all-be-reading-Cultural-Capital-again-take-5343404359 pic.twitter.com/Ybd2mvWXoI

— Merve Emre (@mervatim) August 24, 2018

ADDENDUM (2.21.24): Harold Bloom certainly was a charismatic critical star. Would any variety of criticism fall is some intellectual scandal became attached to him comparable to what happened with de Man? I think not. What does that imply about his status within the academy?

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?

Star struck and broken down: How did literary criticism come to this foul pass? [#AvitalRonell]

Over the weekend the humanities Twitterverse, at least the part of it that I frequent, broke out in a flurry of discussion concerning the Avital Ronell case.

Briefly, Ronell is a very distinguished literary scholar at NYU. In 2017 Nimrod Reitman, a former graduate student, filed a Title IX complaint against her. The university dismissed the sexual assault, stalking, and retaliation charges, but found her responsible for sexual harassment and suspended her for the 2018-2019 academic year. At about that time a group of very senior humanists issued a letter of support, arguing, more or less, that a scholar of such distinction couldn’t possibly be guilty of such behavior.

It was that support letter, its claim of privilege for one of its own, as much as the case itself, that prompted the weekend’s Twitterverse chatter. Ronell was a “star” in the humanities firmament. What is it about the star system that permits and sustains such behavior? Power, yes. Still, where’d we go wrong? Was there something about humanities practice that contributed to this state of affairs?

I think there is, and that’s what this post is about. But first I want to present a tweet by Cory Robin about the Ronell case, one in a string of ten tweets. Robin read the 56-page lawsuit (PDF) that Reitman had filed against both Ronell and NYU and asks us to set the sexual matters aside. There’s something more fundamental at stake:

On the Avital Ronell/Nimrod Reitman case. Part 3 (of 10). pic.twitter.com/fboANfj2jF

— corey robin (@CoreyRobin) August 19, 2018

It’s as though Ronell recognized no boundary between herself and Reitman. That’s what this post is about, boundaries, how the collapse of boundaries in academic literary criticism created an milieu that favored personal excess and indulgence.

The stars are born

During the weekend’s Twitter activity Ted Underwood pointed to a 1997 article that David Shumway published in PMLA, The Star System in Literary Studies (Vol. 112, No. 1, 1997, 85-100). Shumway argued (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. As we have seen, the rhetoric of literary history denied personal authority; in principle, even Kittredge was just another contributor to the edifice of knowledge. Criticism was able to enter the academy only by claiming objectivity for itself, so academic critics could not revel in personal idiosyncrasy. They developed their own critical perspectives, to be sure, but all the while they continued to appeal to the text as the highest authority. In the past twenty years theory has undermined the authority of the text and of the author and replaced it with the authority of systems, as in the structuralist and poststructuralist privileging of langue over parole or in the mystifying readings of Marxism or psychoanalysis. Sometimes the theory seems to be to eschew all authority, as in some renderings of deconstruction. And yet these claims are belied by the actual functioning of the name of the theorist. It is that name, rather than anonymous systems or the anarchic play of signifiers, to which most theoretical practice appeals.

That’s an interesting set of claims. Let’s start with objectivity and use Northrop Frye’s 1957 Anatomy of Criticism as a touchstone text. In his “Polemical Introduction” Frye observes:

If criticism exists, it must be an examination of literature in terms of a conceptual framework derivable from an inductive survey of the literary field. The word "inductive" suggests some sort of scientific procedure. What if criticism is a science as well as an art? Not a “pure” or “exact” science, of course, but these phrases belong to a nineteenth-century cosmology which is no longer with us. The writing of history is an art, but no one doubts that scientific principles are involved in the historian’s treatment of evidence, and that the presence of this scientific element is what distinguishes history from legend. It may also be a scientific element in criticism which distinguishes it from literary parasitism on the one hand, and the superimposed critical attitude on the other. The presence of science in any subject changes its character from the casual to the causal, from the random and intuitive to the systematic, as well as safeguarding the integrity of that subject from external invasions. However, if there are any readers for whom the word “scientific” conveys emotional overtones of unimaginative barbarism, they may substitute “systematic” or “progressive” instead.

It seems absurd to say that there may be a scientific element in criticism when there are dozens of learned journals based on the assumption that there is, and hundreds of scholars engaged in a scientific procedure related to literary criticism. Evidence is examined scientifically; previous authorities are used scientifically; fields are investigated scientifically; texts are edited scientifically. Prosody is scientific in structure; so is phonetics; so is philology.

There you have it, literary study is a kind of science, not “pure” or “exact” but science nonetheless,. The repetition of morphological variants of science in this passage is quite stunning, as though Frye wanted to club subjectivity to death with word magic. With all that science going on literary criticism had little choice but to yield to objectivity.

But a decade later things weren’t so clear. All these objective critics kept disagreeing about their interpretations. Is there a standard against which interpretations can be measured so as to determine their validity? Strenuous efforts were made to make authorial intention such a standard, but those efforts failed to win the day. Instead the author was bracketed out in favor of systems, the unconscious, signs, social structure, power, whatever. And objectivity was gone, dismissed as a mirage of scientistic desire.