Employment of English. Michael Berube
of Guillory’s book: does the content of the curriculum signify in a meaningful sociopolitical sense, or is the curriculum primarily a means of marking and enforcing distinctions among our students regardless of whether those distinctions are built on Shakespeare or on Madonna? Robbins writes,
[E]ven if we believe that knowledge of Latin and Greek was no more than an empty diacritical mark differentiating rulers from ruled, it does not follow that either vernacular literature over the past seventy-five years or the content of today’s far more democratically accessible curriculum is equally irrelevant, that these too could serve only to differentiate. And if they are indeed functional, then it would also seem, for example, that the ability to get one’s own experience re-classified as part of cultural capital—which is one description of what multiculturalism is about—should also be classified as a genuine if not necessarily momentous redistribution of power. From the moment when knowledge of rap music or rape statistics or the genealogy of the word “homosexual” is measured on examinations and counts toward a degree, there has been some change, pace Bourdieu, in access to credentials. (373)
Note that neither Robbins nor Guillory is making the obvious (and, by now, quite tired) argument about curriculum change—the demographic argument, which says that new student populations require new course offerings. Both are rightly skeptical of that “representational” logic. Instead, they ask, as I am asking, whether the content of the curriculum in the humanities might have any important relation to the social standing of the humanities (and, as a result, to the health of the humanities in terms of enrollments, job placement, faculty lines, and cultural authority). Can we say that on some level, the profession somehow knows, structurally, that its prestige is not what it once was (for whatever reasons), and is trying to recoup some of its lost authority by redefining its object—not as the study of great works, but as the enhancement of rhetorical techniques of interpretation that can be applied to a vast variety of cultural “texts”? David Simpson, in his recent book The Academic Postmodern and the Rule of Literature, argues that this is exactly what’s going on when English departments start including “cultural studies” in their self-descriptions:
Both in Britain and the United States, humanities intellectuals are particularly vulnerable, because of our association with those very qualities [Thorstein] Veblen attributed to us, qualities of the occult and the liminal. This shared anxiety must be part of any comprehensive explanation of our current turn to cultural criticism, which paradoxically provides us with a rhetoric of referentiality, a posture of speaking about the world, even as we admit that the world is made up largely of representations. Cultural studies, as we now see it, is a form of survivalism, and those who deplore its incursion into the universities would do well to reflect upon the degree to which it ensures their own continued existence. (7)
Cultural studies as survivalism: that, in a nutshell, is both the desire and the fear driving the debates about cultural studies, as far as the near future of English is concerned. In this corner, David Simpson, cautioning us to think that cultural studies might actually be propping us up; in the far corner, George Levine, cautioning us to think that the prop might just deprive us of our public legitimacy as stewards of the aesthetic.
Interestingly, this polarized scenario comes in other versions; more interestingly still, they all lead to the same dystopian conclusion, as I’ll show in a moment. From the Left, especially the British Left most closely identified with cultural studies, there is the well-founded fear that in American universities, “cultural studies” will eventually come to be understood as a rough synonym for “the humanities.” The fact that the term has been appropriated by English departments, anthropology departments, communications and speech departments, and the foreign languages (where it is often seen as very much a survival mechanism that might compensate for the drop in enrollments for advanced language study) is ample evidence, to this wing of the academic Left, that the term “cultural studies” has lost its critical force and has become another name for business as usual on the leafy side of the quad. Conservatives have a similar story to tell. From Alvin Kernan’s book The Death of Literature to the proclamations of the ALCS, the message is pretty much the same: the kids just aren’t reading anymore. They come to college, their heads brimming with Beavis and Butt-Head but without the faintest notion who Chaucer is; and the professors, deserting their posts as educators, have given up trying to offer students the great books of the ages, either because they no longer believe in the concept of great books, or (more cynically) because they no longer believe they can sustain enrollments by professing the faith of the great books. Accordingly, departments of English are gradually becoming places that offer courses on Barbie dolls, rock stars, and the Disney empire, while seekers of truth pine desperately for the courses in Milton and Wordsworth the department no longer offers.
At least in this one respect, both the left and right wings of the culture wars can look at the American academy, hold their heads in their hands, and bewail what cultural studies hath wrought.
The reason Guillory’s theory of cultural capital is so germane to the future of literary study, then, is not that it clarifies matters but that it helps to explain why matters are as cloudy as they are. Depending on how one draws the connections among literary study, cultural capital, and meaningful employment, one can lament the turn to cultural studies and call for the restoration of literature to the central place in the curriculum, on the grounds that this will at once preserve the intellectual legitimacy of English and revive the discipline’s level of public support, or one can applaud the turn to cultural studies as that which will preserve the intellectual legitimacy of English and revive the discipline’s level of public support. And, in turn, each of these options can be cast quite differently, as a blueprint not for the revival of English but for its demise.
In The Western Canon for instance, Harold Bloom has mused that departments of English will gradually be pruned of their faculty who love literature until they are composed of small handfuls of close readers, whereupon they will have roughly the size and influence of departments of classics—which they will resemble in many other antiquarian respects. At the same time, critics of cultural studies who combine George Levine’s sense of the franchise of English with a healthy distrust of contemporary cost-cutting measures in academe claim that if literary study eventually becomes synonymous with cultural study, the department of English will be amalgamated with any number of cognate departments in the humanities, from anthropology and film to communications, rhetoric, and media studies. And then along will come some enterprising dean or provost who will look at all this “duplication,” all this mess of faculty purportedly studying the same thing called “culture,” and we will find our numbers cut in half as the university moves to eliminate or reduce some of its nonrevenue-producing activities like offering degrees in the humanities. Yet alternatively, if literary study follows the Bloom model, remaining literary study and refusing to cave in to the blandishments and temptations of cultural studies, departments of literature will find themselves becoming small, ineffectual side offerings in the general university market. Their faculty will be few and powerless, but proud and noble.
How can it be that both scenarios end in the destruction or evisceration of literary study and the humanities? If English departments embrace cultural studies in an attempt to appeal to the cultural needs of the professional-managerial class, they may be seen as duplicating the knowledges produced in other departments, and downsized or eliminated accordingly. And if English departments abjure cultural studies, they may be seen as irrelevant to the cultural needs of the professional-managerial class, and downsized or eliminated accordingly. Our future begins to sound like the opening of Woody Allen’s parodic commencement speech, in which he writes that mankind faces a crossroads: one path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, and the other leads to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
Actually the choices before us are not two but four: cultural studies and eventual doom-by-duplication; literary studies and eventual doom-byirrelevance; cultural studies and prosperity with the nascent professional-managerial class; literary studies and prosperity with everyone who wants to study the aesthetic uses of language. And the way to decide which of these futures is most likely for literary study is simple: just figure out the exact relations among literary-slash-cultural study, cultural capital, student enrollments, and productive capital, and devise