Am I Turning Empirical?
Continuing my progressive descent into vulgar materialism (I use the words "progressive" and "vulgar" in positive senses!), I’d like to continue the line of thinking of my previous post, "Reading under Neoliberalism." I will use the questions Joel Burges asks in a comment to guide my reflections here. His questions are too good to cosign to the comments section of my previous post. I will begin with a caveat: everything below is, as with my previous post, provisional and only vaguely sketched. Critical comments will do much to help me sharpen my primitive ideas.
Joel asks whether my approach to literary study, at least the approach I take when I discuss historical changes in reading practice, is marked by an "empirical turn," an "operative assumption that we will know more if we get more empirical -- not just materialist in the sense of assuming that economic conditions lead to cultural elaborations, but in which we turn ourselves into something like sociologists." The short version of my answer is simply yes. Indeed, there is some reason to believe that the academic study of literature more generally is swinging away from the era of theory toward an empirical orientation, if recent studies are any indication. We might recall new work in cognitive science and literature; the rise of evolutionary literary studies; "distant reading" research programs, spearheaded at Stanford by Franco Moretti, and other database-driven forms literary study; Bourdieu-inspired literary sociologies (McGurl, Casanova, Jim English come immediately to mind); the "postpositivist realist" epistemology of Satya Mohanty and, here at Arcade, of Paula Moya; the myriad anti-theoretical children of Walter Benn Michaels (one need merely look at the 20/21 series for excellent criticism in this vein); and so on.
The longer form of my answer comes with numerous necessary caveats and complications.
"Is an empirical turn in literary studies a turn away from theory, from, say, bridging textual analysis and conceptual thinking?"
This question assumes a stronger distinction between the empirical and theoretical that I am comfortable with. After all, isn’t the work of Bourdieu both thoroughly empirical and theoretical? Doesn’t Foucault make all sorts of empirical claims (ranging from claims about prison systems to claims about the history of science to claims about how discourse functions to reproduce power relations)? Isn’t Lacan interested in correcting Freud’s fallacies, relocating psychic processes not in the minds of individuals but in relation to intersubjective processes of recognition and "within" structures of language? Do not Jameson, Žižek, Hardt, Negri, Laclau, Mouffe, and a range of theoretically sophisticated Marxists and post-Marxists all base their arguments, at least in part, of empirical claims about capitalist economies?
Likewise, all empirical studies are, I would argue, necessarily suffused with theoretical abstractions. You correctly identify many of the abstractions I rely on to make my case: "literary market," "reading public," "sophistication," "literary culture," "postwar." There’s no way to study the world apart from our abstractions, theories, and interpretations, even if those interpretations are the translation of photons hitting our optic nerve into terms discernible by our cultivated mental capacities. The question is, What are our best theories? What theories should we reject?
The theory I reject is the notion that we should see in literary form an elaboration of material contexts on the model of homology. The theory I accept is that texts and contexts are dynamically linked together in a greater whole or totality, whose determinants do not necessarily operate according to a logic of homology. Causes do not necessarily look "like" effects. To the degree that “theory” in the academic humanities tends to refer to the former of these two intellectual frameworks, then I do reject theory, though in a partial and highly qualified way. I am more interested in "mechanical causality" than "expressive causality," to use Jameson’s terminology in The Political Unconscious.
"Is an empirical turn in literary studies a turn away from hermeneutics, from, say, textual analysis -- and what would we gain from that?"
I don’t see how we can avoid hermeneutic activities in the classroom as long as we ask our students to read individual texts -- I tend to teach individual texts in much the same way that they were taught to me -- nor do I think that there is some simple empirical practice apart from interpretive, cultural, and historically situated frameworks. That said, I think a lot of self-avowedly materialist criticism and theory today makes large empirical claims without doing the legwork to back up those claims. That’s what I take to be the source of Moretti’s frustration with literary study.
In our monographs and articles we have a habit of sliding between perfectly valid hermeneutic claims and large historical claims, often based on three or four close readings, often without explanation or with vague gestures toward some notion of discourse. This is the academic version of what the journalist Daniel Radosh calls “trend journalism” -- three examples of anything can be selected to argue for a historical trend. If we supplement textual analysis with an empirical orientation, we will possibly learn more about the material determinants of literary history and we will also learn what claims we should not be comfortable making with great confidence. Like Socrates, we will at least know what we don't know.
"Literature departments are... notoriously bad at making the normative and conventional ways in which their members read and write clear to students… So… shouldn't we also examine what knowledge we already transmit, and how we might do it better?"
Yes, I enthusiastically agree that we should study the normative and conventional ways we read and teach. We should understand how and to what effect we transmit knowledge to our students.
Indeed, my interest in empirically analyzing postwar literary culture is motivated by explicitly normative concerns. I begin from the premise that certain practices of reading are good and desirable. Reading long, complex novels is salubrious for human wellbeing. Cultivating the attention required to understand and appreciate poetry improves us. Literary reading gives scope and depth to life. These claims are normative -- and not strictly instrumental -- to the degree that they have no foundation. No empirical study will be able to prove to a persistent skeptic that literature matters. No data beyond self-reporting will explicate words like "wellbeing," "improvement," and "scope and depth."
My second assumption -- really, in a longer work, which I fantasize about someday writing, it would be my argument -- is that literary culture is unnatural, in the sense that it isn’t a spontaneous or inevitable development in human affairs and existence. We don't just decide to care about literature; and we don't automatically move from such caring to a society that enriches and supports what we care about. Our reading culture is, instead, the product of considerable investment, education, and political work. Humans may at all times have generated one sort of narrative art or another, but a society where all persons have the opportunity and capacity to appreciate literature requires hard work and years of institution-building.
If our empirical and critical work is grounded in the norm of producing such a "reading public," then we cannot help but self-reflectively understand our own teaching in relation to the broader project of the production of such a public. This doesn't meant that every critic would take or teach sociology and economics classes, but that every critic would understand that when they teach a course on Shakespeare, they are always whether they intend to or not linked to a larger public-producing machine, the University, which itself interlocks with other social spaces -- the book club, the marketplace, little magazines, and institutions of primary education.
Reading under Neoliberalism
This post is a response to a comment made by Andrew Goldstone in a comments thread on Joshua Landy's fascinating Arcade blog post, "Human Minds, Literary Texts, and CD Players." I was originally going to post this as a comment, but the response grew too long and unwieldy, so here it is as a stand-alone blog post. Suffice it to say, you should read Josh's provocative posting, and the comments thread before proceeding.
In his original post, Josh proposes that "[i]f we abandon our efforts to train minds" in the project of reading and appreciating poetry "certain kinds of human pleasure [i.e., poetry reading --LK] will eventually fall forever out of reach," and poetry will come to resemble CDs in a world without CD players. In my original comment, I agreed with this sentiment, and suggested that the source of poetry's public decline can be traced to changes in our educational institutions and reading priorities, which have also eroded the public position of literary fiction. Andrew asks, in response to my comment, about Mark McGurl's claim, in The Program Era, that university creative writing programs have radically enlarged the sphere of "good" writing.
I largely agree with Mark's claim that more good fiction is being produced now than has ever been produced before, though The Program Era reads texts (and careers) in relation to the institutional context of their production, and (understandably) doesn't do the empirical legwork of quantifying this big, provocative claim -- if such quantification is even possible. Still, I am enough of a vulgar materialist to believe that when the R&D-oriented university pours cash into the project of developing good fiction writers, it will yield fruit. It indisputably has.
The question Josh's post got me thinking about is the demand side of the equation, whether this flood of good fiction is connecting with readers, and -- if so -- how. Readers read, as they always have, even in an increasingly complex media environment, but what do they read? How do they read? In what direction is our reading culture heading?
I began thinking about these questions at last year's ACLA, where I was part of a panel called "Master of the Universe: Literature, Culture, and Finance Culture"; the panel organizer, Patrick Gallagher, gave a fascinating paper on the rise of conglomerate-owned publishers and the effect of media conglomeration on literary production. The short version is that midlist authors got killed. In the era of what we could call "neoliberal publishing," every book was now supposed to turn a profit; bestsellers no longer subsidized what editors deemed to be high-quality products. Editors became warier of taking risks "developing" young writers. The results are obvious for all to see. We now live in the era of gigantic-advance-getting celebrity authors. Even literary authors operate on the model of celebrity. These developments occurred alongside other developments, including the rise of creative writing, but I think they had a serious effect.
Literary scholars need to investigate this transformation in literary culture. My unsubstantiated hunch is that the reading public has begun a long-term process of parting ways with literary writers. I think, beyond the rise of the university creative writing program and the conglomeration of publishing, transformations in the broader US economy have had a serious effect on our public literary culture. My very sketchy thesis would go like so: When the American economy experienced its postwar boom -- across-the-board manufacturing-led growth -- readers sought to "sophisticate" themselves. Suburbs expanded, cars were purchased; the population was upwardly mobile on a number of fronts, including in the domain of literary consumption. Sometime around the early seventies, things began to change. Stagflation hit the economy; manufacturing fractured, and the service economy absorbed formerly high-wage upwardly mobile unionized workers; inequality began to increase, leading to social and educational stratification; an increasingly competitive media environment put downward pressure on the low-profit literary marketplace. For the "ambitious" literary writer, the University became appealing because it provided a shelter from the broader economy.
Thus: Time once put Updike on its covers; today, it features Dan Brown. Readers of the New Yorker needn't worry, though; they still enjoy interesting reviews of high literature (whether or not you like James Wood). Mysteriously, though, the copies of the New Yorker sitting open beside me as I type this post have advertisements for BMW, Louis Vuitton, and iPhones.
Whether the parting ways of reader and writer is good or bad remains unclear. If literature has a public mission -- if reading a well-crafted novel (or poetry) affords unique, serious, and vital pleasures for all people -- then we are moving in a bad direction, despite the profusion of good writing in creative writing programs. If long-form prose fiction gives us nothing that an engaging television show doesn't already give us -- and I in no way mean to disparage television; I've watched more than my fair share -- then there's no reason to worry; we can just renew our subscriptions to Netflix.
The truth may live somewhere between those two poles, but I must admit, I am a partisan to the idea that every person ought to have the capacity -- and the desire -- to occasionally sit down and read a long, difficult, rewarding novel. Many, many people still do. But we should not assume that they always will, even if great fiction continues to be produced in great quantities.
Norms, Norms, Norms
I've been rereading Amanda Anderson's fascinating and cogent collection of essays, The Way We Argue Now. Reading through her opening account of the debate between Seyla Benhabib and Judith Butler, a version of the Habermas-Foucault debate in the domain of feminist theory, we find this cogent summary by Anderson of the differences between each thinker's definition of the term "norm":
Paralleling these divergent understandings of autonomy are fundamentally different conceptions of “norms.” For Benhabib, a norm is a rule or principle that provides criteria for evaluating the rightness or wrongness of an action or practice. One might specify such norms as evaluative norms. While Benhabib believes the norms of reciprocity and respect are embedded in communicative practices and reproduced through socialization, she follows Habermas in calling for our selfreflexive justification and extension of such norms. For Butler, by contrast, norms are mechanisms of social reproduction and identity formation internal to hegemonic social structures. One might specify these norms as functional or normalizing norms. Whereas Benhabib would certainly distinguish between these two senses of norm and fully admit the existence of the latter, it is not at all clear that Butler admits a distinction in kind between them. Indeed it would seem for her that all normativity ultimately reduces to normalization. Even more: Butler feels that evaluative norms are insidious precisely insofar as they attempt to mask their normalizing power. (30)
I find this to be a very succinct description of the two senses in which humanities scholars use the term "norm." We either celebrate the aspiration toward a universal system of ethical principles, on the theory that such a system promises human liberation, or we decry the secretly normalizing impact of allegedly universal claims, focusing on who gets necessarily excluded by the project of articulating universalist ethical principles.
I am interested in what seems to me to be a signifiant omission here: a sense of norm I would term "functional norms," a sense quite important to parliamentary procedures, traffic management, etiquette, and narratology. When we drive down a road and keep (in the U.S.) to the right side of the road -- to give the most banal but clearest example -- are we not performing and possibly internalizing norms just as much as when we (as Benhabib would emphasize) condemn a neoNazi from a universalist stance or when we (as Butler would emphasize) accept a pernicious heteronormativity?
Is not most or all literature built around the arguably "functional" norms of typography, bibliographic convention, and tacit understandings of intelligibility (I specifically omit linguistic and syntactic regularities and patterns, because I believe these are less norms in my sense than cognitive capacities)? Does literary theory have adequate terms, tools, and categories to deal with functional norms? Is the idea of a functional norm itself a sort of pernicious obfuscation? Or, as someone like Richard Rorty might argue, are evaluative and normalizing norms really all secretly reducible to functional norms, that is norms are just conventions we let each other get away with?
Life, Art, Life
I remember hearing once that FBI agents who had wiretaps on various mafia operations noted a change in the speaking style of the gangsters they were monitoring after Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather was released in 1972. The real gangsters began imitating the patois of their film counterparts, thoroughly identifying with their brutal ethos.
Today, I found another example of film invading life. Palestinian protesters are reportedly dressing up as Na'vi from James Cameron's 2009 film, Avatar. The AP notes that these activists have compared "their struggle to the intergalactic one portrayed in the film," and are opposing the separation barrier Israel has constructed in the West Bank.
Ignoring the fact that Avatar depicts an interplanetary -- not intergalactic -- struggle, we should ask, What does this mode of activism say about how narrative templates and popular culture shape everyday life and real-world political struggle? Obviously, unlike the case of The Godfather, Palestinians don't think they literally are the Na'vi, but to what degree can digital blue aliens serve as the locus of identity-formation, ethical self-definition, and new conceptualizations of human rights (ironically, or perhaps necessarily, triangulated off of the digital non-human)?
Is this an example of activists cleverly appropriating popular culture, or an example of popular culture even more cleverly appropriating the imagination of activists? Or is this perhaps an example of the desperate lengths to which an activist must go to get our attention -- by flattering our pop cultural vanity? Would I have written a post about Israel and Palestine if these activists had not dressed up like fictional blue aliens in a blockbuster film? The answer is probably no. Is that a problem?